by Andy Conway
Rachel jolted to her feet. The chair fell back with a clatter. She walked to the door without saying a word.
Deirdre glanced up with surprise.
Don’t explain anything to her. Don’t say anything.
She stepped out onto the freezing platform wearing Deirdre’s jacket. This was the only way. Deirdre would step out in thirty seconds and try to throw herself in front of the nuclear train. Rachel could hold her, stop her.
Twelve minutes past. The signal box somewhere down the line ding-dinged and she felt the vibration, the lines humming in expectation.
The nuclear train was roaring towards them from somewhere inside that dense fog.
The brass door handle turned. Deirdre was walking out. All Rachel had to do was step forward and block her way and this would all end.
A hand covered her mouth and she was yanked back, losing her footing. Someone gripped her, pulled her back. She tried to scream. The stench of stale breath and gin, like chloroform.
The man. The whistling man.
Deirdre walked out of the café and strode through fog to the platform’s edge.
She didn’t see Rachel writhing in the arms of the man in the bowler hat.
She didn’t see the train that was hurtling towards her.
She jumped into the white.
Rachel heard the sickening thud of the train hit Deirdre’s body, smash it, crush it, wipe it out in a second. The engine screamed and the brakes squealed and before it had slowed to a halt, Rachel fell into blackness.
— 11 —
SHE STRUGGLED, ARMS flapping, clawing at air in blind panic, stumbled to the side and almost fell out of bed.
Her room. She was safe. She sat up propped on an elbow and gasped for air, trembling violently, trying to calm herself.
She was lying on her bed in her chartreuse summer dress. Evening sunlight through the window and a blackbird singing in the back garden. A beautiful summer’s evening.
She sat up, her bare feet touching the rug and hugged herself, rocking to and fro.
She rushed to her dressing table and peered at her face in the mirror. Pale but for the red welt of pressure around her mouth where he’d held her.
This is not a dream, she thought. This is more than a dream. She knew it now. You do not dream of a man gagging you and wake up with his hand still imprinted on your face. She shuddered. Her legs and arms were still cold with the unmistakable burn of frost.
No dream carried on like this, time after time, night after night, every time you fell asleep. It was more than a dream. It was the key to something. She knew it now. Whatever this waking dream of Kings Heath station was, she knew she couldn’t escape it — that it was waiting for her every time she slept. She knew now that she had to stop Deirdre Foster throwing herself under that train.
Feeling her gorge rising, she rushed to her tin waste paper bin and retched. The sight of the train crushing Deirdre’s body on impact. Nothing came up. Choking, coughing, gasping for air. No, she hadn’t seen it. Only heard it. Deirdre leaping into white air, like an angel, disappearing into the roar of the train.
She dragged herself up and looked out of the window.
Olive was in the garden below, on her knees, planting a begonia in the flowerbed. Martyn dozed in a striped deck chair, newspaper folded on his lap and crossword half done.
It was a beautiful summer’s evening and everything was normal and safe and perfect. She was home.
She wondered what had happened and how she’d got here. She’d fallen asleep on the train with Danny and now she was here in her room.
She rummaged in her handbag and found her address book and flicked through the alphabetized tabs to find Danny’s name and a phone number scribbled next to it. She skipped barefoot down the carpeted stairs to the red Bakelite phone that sat on the hall table and dialled his number.
He answered, reciting the telephone number.
“Danny?”
“Hey, Rachel. How are you?”
“I’m... okay. I think. I just woke up.”
“You poor thing. You took quite a turn.”
She could hear a radio in the background playing a familiar tune and someone rattling about in the kitchen. He lived with Jessica, she remembered, and was it Stacy too? A vague memory of them all in a giant Victorian town house converted to student flats in Moseley on Chantry Road. Or was that only in her time travel dream?
“I don’t remember getting home. What happened on the train?”
A silence. She heard Jessica shout out something in the background.
“Jessica says hello and she hopes you’re okay.”
“That’s nice.”
“What train do you mean, Rachel?”
“You took me home on the train this afternoon, didn’t you?”
Silence again. The kitchen clatter stopped.
“I didn’t take you on the train, Rachel. There’s no train to your house.”
He was right. There was no train to her house. There had been a train line through Moseley and Kings Heath years ago but they had closed it during the war.
Had that whole afternoon train journey been an illusion: part of her dream?
“I think I’m going crazy,” she whispered.
“Hey, Rachel,” he said. “You’ve not been yourself all week. Not since this nightmare you had.”
“So what happened? There was a demonstration at the Uni, wasn’t there?”
“Oh yeah, of course there was. And you had a sort of panic attack—”
“Was there a woman, a redhead?”
“Yes, you seemed scared of her,” he said. “Something about seeing her in a dream with me in 1966. She works at the Central Library or something.”
There was something in his voice that made her feel safe. She wanted to run over to him right now and be held by him.
“But no train?”
“I called a cab and dropped you home. You said you were going to have a lie down.”
She could see the scene in her mind but knew it wasn’t a memory. There was nothing.
“I’m definitely going crazy,” she said.
“Listen,” he said. “We should tell Fenwick about it.”
Why would she tell her lecturer about this craziness?
“I know, I know,” he said. “But he’s a great guy and, well, even though he’s a History lecturer, he’s also researching some kind of thesis on time travel. You know, anomalies, timeslips, that kind of thing.”
“But all of that was a stupid dream.”
“Well, yeah, or an illusion,” he said, “but maybe that’s what all time travel experiences are. Maybe he can help you make sense of it. Have a think about it.”
“Okay, I will,” she said. “Thank you. It’s good talking to you.”
“Hey, I’m here any time you need me.”
She could hear his smile through the crackle and it made her smile too. She said goodnight and put the phone down and walked out to the back garden to sit in the last of the evening sun. She felt tired and knew that despite sleeping all day she would soon be asleep again and back on a foggy platform trying to stop a suicide.
— 12 —
SHE COULD HEAR HIM whistling, even before she felt the cold.
She’d gone to bed in a thick peacoat, calling herself stupid because it couldn’t possibly make a difference, and what she’d been wearing the first few times hadn’t affected what she wore in the dream. But when she’d fallen asleep on the train yesterday in her chartreuse summer dress it had. So it was worth a try. She would take anything now that might give her the edge to control this delusion.
Still dark. Still a thick, white fog.
His whistling slid down the platform like a snake. Up there somewhere at the top end of the platform. She could almost smell the gin on him and the carbolic soap on his fingers again. Whoever he was, he wanted Deirdre to kill herself and would do his best to prevent Rachel from interfering. There was a cloud of evil around him like bad aftershave.
A fierce gust of wind blew and she caught a glimpse of the opposite platform. A policeman stood there, big silver buttons on his uniform reflecting the light from the café windows.
“Oy! Put that light out!” he yelled.
The fog formed a wall again and he was gone. Something familiar about his face.
The whistling had ceased. Was he coming closer? She walked down the platform as fast as she could and began to spy the grey outline of a footbridge over the tracks. She broke into a run and skipped up the icy wooden steps. The policeman on the other platform might help her, or at least scare the whistling man away. Her footsteps clattering over the wooden bridge echoed in the station’s valley. She skipped down onto the opposite platform as quietly as she could. No sound of footsteps following her.
The other platform was empty. The policeman had gone. She groaned and stamped her feet. This was hopeless. Deirdre Foster would come walking down the slope to the station soon, go into the rest room, fuel her courage with a brandy and jump into the oncoming nuclear train. And even if Rachel ran back over the other side to stop her, the man in the bowler hat would see to it that she failed.
A square of dull yellow floated in the fog.
She edged towards it.
A window. A window with a light. Was this where the policeman had disappeared?
She walked right up to it and the letters above the door coalesced into the words STATIONMASTER.
The signal box chimed. A train was coming. Not the nuclear train, surely? It sounded slower. She stood frozen as it edged into the station and stopped on the opposite platform with a great hiss. Doors clattered and she heard footsteps hurrying off into the night before a whistle and the train groaning onwards again.
Her train. The one she’d got off yesterday. The nuclear train was coming in ten minutes or less and so was Deirdre Foster.
She knocked the Station Master’s door and pushed through, slamming the door shut behind her.
The light was dim inside, almost as if the fog had followed her in.
“Hello?”
Footsteps from the far end of the room. Another door back there. A man appeared through the gloom, gliding towards her like a ghost. He wore a pillbox cap and a waxed moustache.
“Good evening, miss.”
There was something familiar about his face and she tried to remember where she’d seen it before, but it avoided her like the memory of a good dream.
“You’re the station master,” she said.
“I’m afraid so.”
“So you can stop the train.”
“You’ve just missed it. There’ll be another one along at twenty-past.”
“No, not that one,” she said. “The nuclear train.”
“Nuclear train?” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, madam.”
“The freight train,” she said. “The freight train that’s coming through at twelve minutes past.”
“Now why would I want to stop that, Miss?”
What could she say? How to explain this to him? He had the power to stop the train flying through the station by pressing a few buttons, but how could she make him?
“There’s going to be an accident. A terrible accident.”
“Good lord,” he said. “Where’s this accident happened?”
“It hasn’t happened yet,” she mumbled. “It’s going to happen.”
The stationmaster looked at her for a long time, quite blankly, as if he hadn’t heard and was still waiting for her to answer him.
“In the future?” he asked, finally.
“Look, I know this sounds strange, but there’s a girl who’s going to throw herself in front of that train. You’ve got to stop it!”
“How do you know this?”
This was impossible. Deirdre was probably already sitting in the rest room across the tracks, sipping her last brandy and looking at the clock.
“Oh, please. You have to believe me!”
Her cry was drowned by a terrible shriek.
The station master shuffled over to the side where a kettle was boiling on top of a wood-burning stove. He removed it and the keening cry died.
“Now you sit down and tell me all about it while I make a cup of tea,” he said. “You look a little bit lost to me.”
She wanted to cry. All the energy, urgency and fear left her body and she felt tired, defeated.
“I am lost,” she said. “Sort of.”
“Well, it happens to a lot of people in bad weather like this. Fog and snow and ice. Accidents. It can all get to feel like the end of the world.”
He put a mug of tea in her hand and ushered her to a wooden chair. She found herself sitting as if in a trance. She was suddenly very drowsy. No, it was nausea. The sickening, hopeless knowledge that it was all going to happen again. Fate rushing towards them like that train and there was no way to stop it.
“It’s going to happen again,” she said.
“Oh really? It’s happened before?”
“Yes,” she said. “In the future.”
He sat and sipped his tea and smiled at her, as if she’d made total sense.
“That’s all right, Miss. Perhaps you’ll be able to stop it happening next time. This thing that’s already happened. In the future.”
She put her tea aside. She had to get out of here. It was twelve minutes past and the nuclear train was coming. She had time to run across the footbridge and stop Deirdre jumping. But it was like moving through heavy water, trying to run in the swimming pool as a child. She reached through the gloom for the door handle.
“They all end up here eventually,” he said.
She turned back to him. “What did you say?”
He sipped his tea and rocked back and forth in his chair.
“They all end up stuck here. Trying to find a way out. Not realizing how easy it is.”
She ran out, suddenly scared of him. What was he saying? What did he know?
She stumbled out into the fog.
Straight into the whistling man.
She choked. His fingers around her throat. Squeezing the life out of her.
His eyes. Insane. Staring.
She choked for breath. Couldn’t find it.
The floor sank beneath her and she melted through it, only just hearing the faint rumble of the nuclear train approaching before a black stain flooded her vision.
— 13 —
“IT’S SUCH A DETAILED...”
“Delusion? You can say it.”
Nick Fenwick smiled kindly and looked up from the notes on his lap. He was the type of good looking young lecturer that all the girls hated in their first few weeks of Uni, then one by one would all admit that they were a little bit in love with him. She’d seen it happen, even felt it herself. Or had that been in her dream?
“I didn’t want to use that word.”
She stared up at his ceiling. The whole idea of consulting him about this had seemed stupid and she’d resisted Danny’s urging, but once she’d begun telling him about her dreams from the comfort of the sofa in the corner of his office, it had felt so easy. The whole story had gushed out of her: 1912, the Blitz, everything. Her anxieties had fallen from her like autumn leaves.
“It’s okay,” said Rachel. “It feels like a delusion. I don’t know what’s real any more. I don’t even know if you’re real, if this is real: me lying here in your office, my hand in front of my face right here, you in your chair. How can I know?”
“To me it’s obvious,” he said, “that in this recurring train station dream, you’re including characters from your previous highly detailed time travel dreams.”
“In what way?”
“You said there was a policeman on the platform who shouted at you to put a light out.”
“Yes, that was weird.”
“Why would he want you to put a light out?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t have a light on anyway. It was the rest room behind me. Sometimes dreams don’t make sense.”
She thought hard and it hit her. She could almost smell the cinders. “The Blitz.”
“Didn’t you encounter a policeman in your dream about the Blitz?”
“Yes. What was his name? He died when the police station was bombed.”
Fenwick ruffled his pages again. “Sergeant Webster. Was it the same man?”
She recalled his face from the dream and blended it with the man on the platform and watched as they coalesced into a single face.
“Yes. It was him.”
“He died in your 1940 dream and you brought him back to life in your 1959 dream.”
“I suppose I did.”
“Can you see how these time travel dreams aren’t real? How you’re creating them, rewriting them?”
“But they feel so vivid.”
“It’s a talent, Rachel. You’re actually being very creative.”
“It doesn’t feel like a talent,” she said, folding her arms and turning away from him slightly. “Anyway, you said characters. Plural.”
“Yes. The man in the bowler hat. The one who whistles.”
She shuddered. “He creeps me out. He’s so evil.”
Fenwick flipped a page, his pen tapping on the foolscap pad. “But he sounds remarkably like this man, Mr Parker, the Edwardian father in your 1912 dream. The one who tries to kill his daughter.”
She realized it now. The smell of gin on his breath, carbolic soap on his fingers, the cloud of evil swarming around him. It was Richard Parker, haunting her dreams.
“Didn’t he try to push his daughter under a tram? And weren’t you trying to make sure that actually happened?”
She felt guilty, embarrassed. But it was only a stupid dream. “I was. But it was because changing the past might have terrible consequences. Which it did. I wasn’t born because of that. Well... in my dream, anyway.”
“Yes, yes, but don’t you see? You have a highly detailed dream about wanting this Edwardian man to push a girl under a tram, and now you’re having a recurring dream about trying to prevent a girl dying under a train, and this same man is trying to stop you. Are you not perhaps overcompensating a little for your previous dream?”