She shook the last drops of water from the glass and put it upside down on the shelf, then went back down the hall to her room. But it still didn’t feel right. She got into bed and sent a few messages on her phone, but no one else was awake and that only made things feel worse—made her feel more alone. She didn’t know when it was she finally fell asleep, but her light was still on in the morning when her mom came in with a mug of coffee and shook her awake.
She was so tired.
She propped herself up on her pillow, drank the coffee, and read the answers to the messages she’d sent in the night—but no one had said anything about the changing room. She opened her photos to look at that picture again, to see if she could figure out how it had been done and who’d done it. She swiped through the day before—the walkway, the classroom, the changing room … and then she stopped, because there was another picture—a new one.
She couldn’t believe what she was looking at. The mug of coffee slipped through her fingers, spilled all over her duvet—soaked straight through—but she didn’t even notice. That picture was all she could see.
It was of her, in the night.
She was holding a glass of water, standing in front of the mirror in the dark bathroom in her big bedtime T-shirt—the one she was still wearing. The picture was of her reflection. She could see the outline of the empty bath behind her, and the towels and the wall, and there was a man with a camera standing against the wall. He was all grainy and gray in the dark and had the camera up to his eye, so she couldn’t see his face, just the impression of his jacket in the dark—it was one of those 1950s blazers old men wear with an embroidered badge on the pocket, like they’ve been in the army.
Her mom heard her shriek. She came up the stairs, and Sammie was beside herself, but her mom couldn’t get a word of sense out of her. Just something about a photo on her phone—only Sammie had dropped the phone and they couldn’t find it in the bed, and when they did, it wouldn’t switch on, and when it did switch on—or there weren’t any pictures on it.
None like she’d said.
No walkway, no classroom, no changing room, no bathroom.
None of them.
It wasn’t that her mom didn’t believe her, but how can you believe something that isn’t there?
“You had a dream, Sammie. You had a broken night.”
That’s what her mom said.
There was no telling her otherwise. Sammie tried, but her mom just got more short with her. In the end her mom told her to stop it, get herself sorted out, and go to school—like she used to when Sammie was pretending she had a cold—and there was nothing else Sammie could do.
But when she sat on the bus, opened her phone, and looked again, the pictures were there. None of her friends caught that bus, and she didn’t know what to do. She could smell stale aftershave, like someone was wearing it on the seat behind her, and she turned and looked, but the seat was empty and the rest of the bus was just the people she saw every day.
All her teachers said that she didn’t look well. They asked if something was wrong at home—they had to do that nowadays—but how could she explain? She tried. She told the people who mattered, and they said “show us,” and when she showed them, there weren’t any pictures on her phone. They were only there when she looked at it alone.
* * *
On the bus home there were two new pictures. One was of Sammie in the line in the school cafeteria. She was reaching forward for an apple—she remembered she hadn’t wanted to eat anything, and when she got it, the apple had tasted like the smell of stale aftershave, so she’d thrown it away.
But the second picture, that made no sense at all.
It had been taken inside the supermarket in town. It took her a moment to figure out whereabouts in the shop it was, but she got it—it was on the aisle where the cookies were stacked. A group of people were standing looking at something on the ground. Sammie was the only one who was looking at the camera. She’d been caught in the moment of turning around, and her face was so frightened—eyes wide, mouth open—just like the old lady in the album.
She could hear that sound in her head again as she looked at the picture.
Only nothing like this had ever happened. Sammie hadn’t been in the supermarket for at least a week and she’d have remembered this. She stared at the photo.
She wanted to show her mom the pictures of the old lady in the album when she got home, but when she tried, they couldn’t find the album. It wasn’t until it was dark and Sammie went to bed that she found it. It was poked under her clothes on the floor, and all the clothes smelled of stale, cheap aftershave like someone had touched them.
She had another broken night.
There was no new photo the next morning.
Nor the morning after that.
But Sammie knew it would happen again. She just knew it. She felt crawling-sick inside all the time.
She wouldn’t go into the bathroom on her own either. Her mom had to stand by the open door. Her mom didn’t want to. When her dad came home from work, she heard her mom whispering to him about it in the kitchen, but she stopped when Sammie came in.
Later in the evening her dad gave her a big hug and wanted to know if everything was all right at school, and she tried to tell him too, but there were no photos on her phone when she did, and she saw the look he gave her mom.
She couldn’t sleep that night. She sat up with her light on—she looked like a ghost by the morning. Pale and frightened.
But her mom said she had to go to school. So she did.
She wouldn’t have gone to the supermarket, but when she got to the bus station, her friend Mill was waiting for her and she wanted to get something for lunch. Mill just dragged Sammie with her. She wouldn’t let her say no.
The strip lights in the store were hard and bright, and the checkout lanes were morning empty. Mill got her drink, got some rolls, and then she said she wanted some cookies from the cookie aisle. They came around the corner and there was a group of people standing with their backs to them.
An old man was on the ground—his glasses had come off and he’d dropped all his shopping, it was everywhere on the floor—and a store employee was holding his hand.
And Sammie felt the world stop.
She turned quickly around to look behind her—eyes wide, mouth open—knowing that this was the moment the picture of her was taken—only there was no one there to take it. The aisle was empty.
She tried to show Mill the picture of the supermarket on her phone, show her the others too, but there were no pictures there—none of them—and the more she tried, the less Mill believed her. Mill just laughed and said Sammie was “being weird” and then Sammie cried and cried.
Mill put her arm around her and walked her into school, still crying.
The school couldn’t get hold of her mom straightaway, so Sammie sat in the nurse’s office until they did. But the whole time she knew someone was there watching her. She could feel it. She asked the nurse to look at her phone, but there were no pictures on it, and then Sammie didn’t know if they’d even been there at all, and she cried again.
Finally, they got hold of her mom. She came and took Sammie home. She said they’d get her an appointment with the doctor in the afternoon, but they couldn’t get one until the next day, so Sammie lay on the sofa with her duvet over her while her mom did things around the house. She didn’t want to be upstairs on her own. Her phone kept pinging, and she knew it was people at school, messaging to see if she was all right, but she didn’t want to answer. Didn’t want to touch her phone.
But she couldn’t help wanting to know if there was another picture. If there wasn’t, then maybe she had imagined it all, and everything would be all right. That’s why she looked.
Her mom had put the phone to the side, out of harm’s way. It had caused enough trouble already, she’d said. So Sammie waited until her mom had gone upstairs. She crept off the sofa and took it from the table.
The
phone smelled of stale, cheap aftershave. It was warm to the touch, as though someone had just been holding it the moment before, or it had been in their pocket.
She opened the photos.
They were all there, every one of them—changing room, bathroom, cafeteria, supermarket—and there was a new one too.
In that picture, Sammie was wearing the cardigan her mom had given her for her last birthday, only it was all stretched now, and she was wearing it half on her shoulders and half off, as though she didn’t care. She was sitting in a large airy room that she knew she’d never been in. A woman in a blue uniform and slacks was pushing a tea tray full of cups and saucers toward the door behind her, and there were balloons pinned up and long tables with people sitting at them in Christmas sweaters. Sammie’s face was gaunt and pale and frightened. She looked so lost.
She was the only person in the whole room looking at the camera.
The man didn’t look at the boy. He just held the leash and tapped his shoes on the platform.
The boy got up and walked away, right down to the end where the platform sloped into darkness. He wanted to be on his own, as far away from the man as he could get, but he felt as though someone had walked down there in the darkness with him, only that was stupid because it was just the story, and it was far better to be standing there than sitting next to that old man.
The air smelled cold and clean, not of anything perfumed, but he shivered nonetheless.
Looking back along the platform, he could see the three pools of light cast by the lamps on the poles, and the bench with the old man and the lantern on the ground between his feet.
He was just sitting there.
The boy wondered how long it would be before the train came, tried listening for the sound in the rails, but there was nothing. He started to count—give it twenty and the train would come.
Give it sixty.
One hundred.
Only there was no train, just the damp, cold dark and a silence that was thick and heavy as velvet.
He didn’t know what the real time was, he’d lost all sense of that, but it seemed like an age, and there was no way of him knowing. Maybe the old man had a watch—maybe he could sneak a look at it on his wrist if he went back and sat next to him, but he didn’t want to go back, and he didn’t want to sit next to him.
He made himself count to one hundred.
One hundred and sixty.
But there was no train.
The man was still sitting on the bench, and that at least made the boy feel better. He could just stand here until the train came, only it was dark and he wished he could stop thinking about those stories, because it was as though each one of them had happened right in front of him, and whenever he looked out into the flat empty darkness he saw them like shapes, heard them like whispers.
He looked at his phone again, but it didn’t work. He thought of his dad and his mom and how worried they’d be.
It was only then he realized that the little dog was standing next to him, his leash lying on the cold ground. He hadn’t heard him coming, didn’t know how long the dog had been there. The dog turned his scruffy little head up toward him and wagged his tail, then looked from him back down the platform to the man and the lantern. The man was still sitting on the bench. He hadn’t moved at all.
Wasn’t moving at all. Was quite motionless.
“Oh, no,” the boy whispered.
He picked up the leash and hesitantly, almost holding his breath, started to walk back. The dog trotted along next to him. It stopped to sniff at the concrete wall.
“No, come on,” he said, and tugged at the leash.
The man was unnaturally still, almost slumped on the bench. As the boy got closer he could see his hands in his lap. His eyes were open, but he didn’t turn to look at him—he just stared blankly ahead.
His skin was sallow in the pale light. In those last couple of steps the boy could see the frayed collar and not quite straight tie. See the white tufts of bristle on the man’s chin where he’d missed them shaving, like old men do. But the man didn’t move.
The boy stood looking at him, not knowing what to do.
Then, suddenly, the man turned his head and looked straight at him.
“You had a little walk, then?” he said cheerfully.
The boy gave a start and stepped back.
“Oh, you brought Toby back—you needn’t have bothered. He goes wandering off. Never goes far, though.”
“I thought you were—”
“Dead?” the man said.
“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” said the boy. “Is that your ‘game’—make me think you’re dead, scare the life out of me? Well, it’s not bloody funny!”
“Language.”
“And you can have your bloody dog back!”
He threw the leash at the man.
Unperturbed, the man bent forward and picked it up.
“What made you think I was dead, son?” he said.
“You weren’t moving.”
“I was just sitting still! Person can sit still, can’t they? I was just sitting, thinking about that brother of yours.”
The boy could see the man’s eyes again now—watery eyes, that somehow didn’t seem to fit in that face. They were hard, like shards of dark glass, and the boy didn’t want him to be thinking about his brother. Didn’t like the thought of that at all.
“Old, is it, your house?” the man said. “ ’Cause I’ve got a story about a little boy and an old house.”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
“Well, I’ve got to tell it, haven’t I? Can’t not tell it if we’re to play my game.”
It was an old house—new to them, but an old house all the same. It hadn’t been a month since they’d moved in, and they hadn’t gotten used to the noises it made yet—the way it settled and creaked at night, or the way the water pipes knocked whenever a tap was turned on. There was nothing scary in them, though, nothing harmful. It was a bit of a joke, really.
And now Sara stood with her ear pressed against her little brother’s bedroom wall. He had his ear pressed to the wall as well. He’d found a new noise.
“Can you hear that?” he said.
She listened carefully.
“That!” he said again.
Her eyes widened, and he could see that she’d heard it.
“It’s not the noise the pipes make,” he said. “They go ‘lumpa-lumpa-lumpa-lumpa.’ ”
He was only five—younger by ten years than she was. His name was Chris.
She stood back and looked at the wall, followed the line of it to the shelved alcoves on either side. The wall was covered in faded paper, all stripes and flowers and stained with the passing of years. The paper was going to come off soon enough and be covered instead with rockets and superheroes.
“I think this was a chimney,” she said. “There’d have been a fireplace here once.” She looked down at Chris. “Maybe it’s a bird’s nest?”
They put their ears to the wall and listened again. As if in answer to their curiosity—as if whatever had been making the sound had been waiting for them to come back—it started again.
Tap.
Tap, tap.
“Or rats?” She pulled a face. Neither of them liked the thought of rats very much, so she went and fetched their dad.
They stood, all three of them, listening at the wall. Then they went down the stairs and out into the summer garden and looked up at the clear blue sky and the line of tall chimney pots that divided their roof from the house next door. Their little dog sat by them and looked too.
“There’s probably a nest at the top,” said their dad. “A chick’s fallen out of it.”
“How will it get back up?” asked Sara.
Her dad shook his head.
“I’m not sure it will, honey,” he said.
They stood staring at the roof and the line of pots.
“In the old days they used to send little boys up to clean chimne
ys like that,” he said. “They got stuck sometimes.”
He put his hand on Chris’s head.
“Fancy going up, Chrissy? Put you in at the bottom, pull you out at the top?”
Chris pushed his dad’s hand away, and looked at the chimney again.
“It’s not fair,” he said. “I want it to get out.”
* * *
The little bird in the chimney clouded the day for them. They knew that when they couldn’t hear it scratching anymore, it would be because it had died—all alone in the tight, narrow dark. Chris kept going back into his room just to check on it, to make sure it was still alive. He whispered little words of encouragement to it through the wall.
They could still hear it when Chris went to bed—the noise of it kept him awake. In the middle of the night he came into Sara’s room and woke her up, led her down the hall to his door. She could hear it still, tapping from inside the chimney. Louder than before.
It was still there when they put their ears to the wall in the morning.
The thought of just leaving it to die in the dark chimney became intolerable. Their dad said if it had lasted the whole night, then it deserved its chance—and they were going to decorate the room anyway, so what would it matter if they made a mess now?
They cleared Chris’s things away and, putting down an old decorating sheet, they began peeling the paper off the wall. It came away like dry, dusty lengths of old skin—layer on layer of it. The very last of it was stuck onto Victorian newspapers that had been used as lining. The newspapers came away too. Sara sat on the floor and read the scraps of print.
When she looked up again, her dad had gotten right down to the bare plaster.
Sara could see now where the old fireplace had been bricked in. But above that, higher up the chimney breast, another hole had been filled in too—as if someone had needed to get at something there once before, and had plastered over it when they were done.
“If we get the bird out, can we keep it?” said Chris.
“If it’s small, we’ll look after it,” said their dad, “but when it’s ready, we’ll let it go. Understand?”
The Wrong Train Page 8