The Wrong Train

by Jeremy de Quidt

  She waited for her mom to answer. It took her a moment to realize that she couldn’t hear the noise of the party anymore. She couldn’t hear anything. She looked at the phone in her hand. The light on it had gone out.

  “No!”

  She slapped the phone against her other hand, but it didn’t come on again.

  The charger was plugged into the socket by the kettle. She put the phone in the cradle. Nothing happened, and only then did she realize that it wouldn’t. She was trying to make it do something—anything—when the security light came on again behind her. This time out of the corner of her eye she saw something move—a shadow passed across the cupboards—as though something had crossed in front of the light. It was there and gone. She turned around quickly and looked.

  The yard was empty.

  Pik.

  The light went out.

  It came on again almost straightaway. She stared. The door in the wall was open just a crack. Had it really been shut before? She couldn’t say now whether it had or not. It could have been like that the whole time and she’d only just noticed.

  Then the light went out, and everything went dark.

  The house was silent.

  There was a pair of curtains on a rail above the patio doors, but Jess never closed them. The edge of the rail was all worn and rough, and the runners caught if she tried. But now she pulled at the curtains in the dark, dragging them across the rail. They snagged and stuck. She gave them a tug, and just as they closed, the light went on again.

  She couldn’t see into the yard at all now—couldn’t see if there was anyone there or not, and suddenly she wasn’t sure if behind the curtains the patio doors were even locked. She pushed her hand through the gap, half fearful that someone would catch hold of it, but the door was locked. She pulled her hand back and stood very still, holding her breath, looking at the light, all pale and translucent through the cloth of the curtains.

  She was waiting for a shadow to move across it.

  Pik.

  The light went out.

  There was a simple explanation—that’s what she told herself. She’d just spooked herself, it was no more than that. Her dad would know what it was. If he were here, her dad would go and get the big flashlight from the garage. That’s all she had to do—just go and get it—only that meant going out into the dark yard.

  Or she could go upstairs and wait. It wouldn’t be long and her mom and dad would be home.

  She felt her way out into the hall, stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and listened. The house was so quiet. She could almost feel the emptiness of it pressing against her skin.

  From the dark of the kitchen she heard a noise—like a tap on the glass of the patio doors. She froze, and listened again. It was just the handle going back into place where she’d tried to turn it.

  But then she heard the sound again, and this time she didn’t wait. She got to the top of the stairs. Stopped and listened.

  The house was silent.

  She climbed fully clothed into her bed and, pulling the duvet up around her, lay there in the dark, eyes wide open, listening to the empty house. Down in the yard the security light flicked on. The spill of brightness lit up her ceiling and the wall above her head. It pulled shadows out of the corners of the room, making monsters of her coat, her bag, her shoes. Then, pik, it went out again.

  She drew her knees up to her chest and made herself as small as she could as the light flicked on and off.

  And then it stopped.

  It went out and didn’t come back on. It was just dark.

  She began to count.

  She’d gotten to one hundred and sixty and still the light hadn’t come back on. She felt a wave of relief fill her, like warmth. Her fingers had been gripping the duvet tight, but now they relaxed, and she lifted her head up and looked at the empty room.

  There was a light beneath the gap under her door.

  The downstairs lights had come back on. She threw the duvet off and went out onto the landing. The stair light was off, but at the bottom of the stairs she could see the hall and the front door—all the downstairs lights were on.

  “Yes!” she said.

  And then something made her stop. Something that was not right.

  There were no other lights on at all. Not on the stairs, not on the landing. Everything was dark. Frowning, she flicked at the switch beside her on the wall. Nothing happened. Through her mom and dad’s open door she could see the big window that looked onto the street. See the silhouetted roofs of dark houses against the lighter dark of the sky.

  There were no lights on anywhere, except downstairs.

  She stood at the top of the stairs and looked again at the carpet in the hall—it was like a photograph she’d never seen before, all bright and sharp in a hard light.

  With a click the downstairs lights went off, and everything below her was dark again.

  She felt her stomach tighten.

  She stood stock-still, straining to hear any sound.

  From somewhere downstairs she heard a noise—small and short, as though something had been knocked against.

  And then another.

  Someone was moving around in the darkness.

  One hand on the wall behind her, Jess began backing away toward her door. As she reached it, she heard from the darkness the creak of the bottom stair. She pulled her door closed as quietly as she could, stood inside gripping the handle shut, her ear pressed against the wood, listening.

  From along the landing, she heard a click as the mirror light in the bathroom turned on and then off.

  Then the landing light clicked on.

  There was not another light in the whole street, but one by one the lights in the rooms along the landing were being turned on and off, each time closer.

  She held her breath.

  As though it was being tested, she felt the handle of her door begin to turn against her grip. She stifled a whimper, and held the handle more tightly. The turning stopped.

  At her feet, light spilled beneath the crack of the door. Then there was the click of the landing switch, and the light went out, leaving only dark.

  She stood, absolutely rigid, listening for the slightest sound from the silence.

  But the sound when it came wasn’t from the landing on the other side of the door; it was from the darkness of the room behind her.

  It was a laugh that wasn’t human—a mocking laugh, full of envy and spite, from the cold, empty soil of a grave.

  She pulled wildly at the door and the handle, but fixed by some force she could not overcome, the door wouldn’t open now—

  wide-eyed, she slowly turned to look behind her,

  and in the dark of her little room, the bedside light clicked on.

  The boy looked uneasily out into a dark that had become railway tracks. Imagined it all being lit by a sudden blaze of light—the bushes and the branches leaping out stark and shadowed then, pik, it all fading to darkness.

  He felt as though the man was waiting for him to say something, maybe waiting for him to say he was frightened. But he wasn’t going to say that.

  “Sorry,” the old man said. “Did you say something?”

  “I think I’ll go and call my dad,” said the boy.

  He got up and walked down the platform away from the man. Beyond the last lamp everything was dark, so he stopped at the farthest edge of the weak pool of light it cast. The air was cold against his face. He could feel it filling the hollows of his clothes.

  He pulled the phone from his pocket, willing the thing to come on when he pressed the button, but it didn’t. Not even the screen lit up this time. He felt stupid having walked down there only to walk back, so he held the phone to his ear all the same and started talking, loudly enough to be heard, as though there was someone at the other end.

  “Yeah,” he said, turning on his heel and looking back down the platform at the bench. “Just waiting for it now.” He pretended to listen. “No, not on my own—there’s an
old man with his dog. Could you put Mom on?”

  He wasn’t sure why he was doing it—it was false comfort—but when he was done, he slipped the phone back into his pocket and stood for a while under the light, but there was only darkness beyond it and that made him think of the little backyard and the darkness that was left when the light went out. So he walked slowly back toward the bench.

  The man looked up.

  “Been for a little constitutional, have you?” he said. “Got to keep warm on a night like this.”

  “I was just talking to my dad.”

  The man looked right at him.

  “You should have given him to me,” he said. “I could have told him I was waiting with you. Call him back,” he said, almost silkily. “Go on, you call him back, and I’ll tell him it’s all right ’cause I’m here. All tickety-boo here.”

  “No,” the boy said.

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “No!”

  The boy said it louder than he’d meant to.

  “No,” he said again, more evenly. “He’s just got to go out.”

  “Suit yourself,” the man said, and he looked at the little dog. “Course,” he said, almost as though it was an afterthought, “I wouldn’t trust one of them things myself. Never trust anything with a battery, that’s what I say.”

  He looked up at the boy and smiled.

  “Never know when they’ll let you down,” he said softly.

  He leaned sideways so that he could get to his other pocket and, fumbling in it, took out a peppermint and popped it into his mouth. The boy could smell the cool warmth of the mint, hear the click of it against his teeth.

  “Want a mint?” the old man said brightly.

  He held out the packet, and the boy took one, sat back down on the bench, and stuffed his hands deep into the warmth of his pockets.

  The boy realized he must have looked so stupid pretending to be on the phone, and that the man had guessed that it wasn’t working. And he didn’t like the thought of that.

  “How old is your little dog?” he said.

  They were words just to move the moment on.

  “What, little Toby?”

  The man looked down at the grubby scruff of fur, and took a long breath in.

  “Ooooh, don’t know that,” he said. “But lucky for you, him and me coming along, wasn’t it? Look at us three, chatting away like old friends—you and me and Toby. Bit of luck that was. I like a nice bit of luck.”

  He settled himself comfortably back against the bench, and when he spoke again, it took the boy a moment to realize that it wasn’t a conversation he was starting.

  It was another story; he could almost see it—a man sitting by a boy in a car.

  Sam and his dad didn’t normally drive that way home.

  “I want to show you something,” said his dad.

  But he wouldn’t say what it was. He just grinned at Sam, the grin getting wider each time Sam asked him. Finally, up by the old factories, he pulled over onto the grass shoulder, grinned at Sam again, turned off the engine, and got out.

  “Come on,” he said. “Come and see.”

  Only there was nothing there to see—just a car parked up by the old wire fencing a bit farther along the scrub of grass.

  A big red car.

  His dad started walking toward it, and then Sam realized that’s what his dad wanted him to see—the car.

  It was a ’59 Cadillac Eldorado—big as a fairground ride, all red paint and polished chrome with tail fins, and lights at the back large as dinner plates. Even the walls of the tires were painted, and they were spotless white. It was the sort of car his dad had always wanted.

  “You don’t get monsters like this anymore,” his dad said as he walked around it. “That’s pure rock and roll, Sam.”

  It was just parked there on the grass at the side of the road.

  “Wasn’t here yesterday,” said his dad. “You have to be quick in this life.”

  Sam put his face to the glass of the window and peered in. It was like a picture from a glossy magazine—the steering wheel all ivory white, and a big chrome radio with dials gleaming in the middle of the dash. The seats were red leather, all creased and worn. The rearview mirror, large as a shoe box. Taped inside the windshield was a piece of paper with a cell phone number and a price in thick felt pen.

  “You like it?” said his dad.

  He grinned again, a really big grin this time, and before Sam could answer, he’d put his hand in his coat pocket and taken out an old key fob, unlocked the door, and gotten in. He pulled the sheet of paper off the windshield and screwed it up.

  Sam stared at him with his mouth open. “What are you doing?” he said.

  “You get a chance like this once in a lifetime, Sam,” his dad said. “I wasn’t going to let it slip me by.”

  He turned the key and hit the starter. The engine coughed, missed as though it were making up its mind whether to start or not, then growled into life.

  “You bought it?”

  “Rock and roll, Sam,” said his dad.

  He leaned across and opened the passenger door.

  “What about the other one?” asked Sam, looking back along the shoulder at their old Fiesta.

  “We’re picking your mom up, dropping her off here, then taking this one to Frank’s. He’s going to have a look at it for me. Give it the once-over.”

  He stroked the ivory-white steering wheel.

  “Rock and roll,” he said again.

  His dad was big on rock and roll.

  Sam got in beside him; it was like being in a small room. The door was big and heavy, and the red leather trim came loose as he closed it. He pushed it back on its studs.

  “Does Mom know?”

  His dad grinned at him.

  “Course she knows.”

  His dad put the car into gear and it rolled forward and sank down, like a big sponge mattress, off the grass and onto the hard tarmac of the road.

  Sam looked around him at the inside of the car. It wasn’t half as nice as it had seemed through the window. The roof lining was all stained and the trim shabby. The leather of the seats was worn and soiled, and the wide-bench backseat had sunk in where people had used it. You could see the shape of where they’d sat. But his dad didn’t seem to notice any of it.

  They picked up his mom from the corner by her work. She was already there, like a kid waiting for a present. She made Sam get in the back, and even though it was cold, she sat in the front with the window down and her hair blowing everywhere, making up stories about the places the car must have been over the years—all the high school proms and the big pink dresses, and the baseball games and the letterman jackets. Shopping malls and gas stations. She loved it. She loved it all.

  She didn’t see the shabbiness of it either—didn’t see the wrongness of it all.

  “Rock and roll!” shouted Sam’s dad, and he turned on the radio loud as it would go, and there was some sixties rock and roll song playing, and his mom and dad stared at each other, then burst out laughing and sang along at the top of their voices, his mom leaning her arm out the window with the wind going through her hair like she was Marilyn Monroe.

  But Sam sat in silence on the backseat looking out the window at the people turning their heads to watch the big red car go by, and he didn’t like it.

  He didn’t like the long, cold, empty seat next to him—it was wide enough for four—and the red leather was all worn and stained. And he didn’t like the chipped chrome buckle and the stained webbing of the seat belt. And most of all, he didn’t like that shape in the seat next to him, because it was like a person was sitting there who he couldn’t see, riding in the car with them.

  There was a smell about it too that he couldn’t place. It was mixed in with the smell of the leather and damp carpet—it was stale and sickly—and he just couldn’t figure it out. It was something that made him think of the shops in town.

  His fingers folded into the crack at the back o
f the seat, and they touched something cold and hard down there, like a coin. He closed his fingers around it and fished it out.

  For a moment he wasn’t sure what it was. It wasn’t a coin. It was covered in muck and fluff. He wiped it clean. It was a little metal horseshoe, like a lucky charm. He held it up to the window. It had words on it in worn green paint—Driver’s Friend Gasoline Corp on one side and Your Lucky Day on the other. They were the same words as on the leather key fob hanging from the ignition beneath the ivory-white steering wheel. He could see now there was a loop at the top of the horseshoe and a torn bit of leather on the fob. It must have come off sometime, which was probably how it had found its way down the back of the seat. He squirmed around in the seat belt and put his fingers back into the crack, but nothing else was there, just dirt and old Hershey bar wrappers.

  He looked again at the Driver’s Friend horseshoe in the palm of his hand. The painted words were chipped and worn, and even as he looked at it he felt a chill come over him.

  He could see his mom and dad laughing and smiling, could hear the radio and his mom singing along, but it was like two cars now and he was in the other one, and everything in that car was cold and still and silent.

  And there was someone else in it.

  He glanced uneasily at the long emptiness of the seat next to him, at the shape like a back pressed deep into the worn leather.

  “I said ‘gas.’ ”

  He looked up.

  His dad was smiling at him in the rearview mirror. The big car was swinging off the road and into a gas station. It sank down on its suspension as it went over the bump of the curb, and then it was next to the pump, and his dad was getting out. For a while Sam’s mom sat in the car with him while his dad filled the tank, then she got out too and stood leaning against the front wing. Sam knew she was pretending to be standing at some station at the side of a freeway.

  He didn’t like being alone in the car. It was disturbingly quiet and cold and still. He could see his mom through the windshield, hear the wash of the gas going into the tank, but it felt like he was in that other car. He started to undo his belt, and as he sat forward, for a moment—no more than a blink—it was as though someone was looking at him out of the rearview mirror—a face he didn’t know. Then it was gone and there was just the cold empty car and the sound of the gas going into the tank. The glove box in the dashboard dropped open all on its own; the sound of it made him jump. He unclipped the belt and got out of the car.