by Tom Pollock
‘Just try,’ she hissed to herself as she turned the handle.
The sitting room was buried in photographs; they were tacked over every inch of wall space and strewn loose over the carpet like wreckage from a plane crash. Every chair but one was covered in more piles.
A thickset, balding man occupied the remaining chair. He was reading a paperback book; Beth could just make out the title, The Iron Condor Mystery, on the faded spine. He didn’t look up as Beth approached.
Beth’s lungs felt suddenly airless. She’d run this conversation over and over on her way home, trying to make it sound like something they could talk about rationally, but now-?
She looked down at the bald spot on top of her dad’s head and the crumbs scattered on his shirt like an invitation to the birds. All her preparations felt useless. In the end she just blurted out, ‘I’ve been kicked out.’
He turned a page; his eyes narrowed slightly as they followed the print.
The squeezing in the pit of Beth’s stomach grew tighter. ‘Dad, are you listening? Dad, please. I really need you to focus. Social Services could come around, and the police, maybe. Look, I- Dad, I fucked up, seriously. Dad I need hel-’
She broke off as he looked up at her.
One night, three years and some change before, it had been Beth’s mum reading The Iron Condor Mystery. She’d loved old Cold War spy novels, the safely sinister world of Fedoras and secret codes and briefcase-bombs. That night she’d set down the dog-eared paperback with a little regretful sigh, having not quite reached the bit she’d been looking forward to, but happy in the knowledge that it would be waiting for her tomorrow. She kissed her husband gently, turned over and haemhorrhaged while she slept.
Beth’s dad had woken with his arm curled around his wife. She’d been waxy and cold and her limbs were too heavy when he’d tried to move them.
It had been the morning of Beth’s thirteenth birthday.
Ever since that night he’d slept in his chair — Beth knew he was afraid of the bedroom, though she doubted he would ever admit that. Ever since that night he’d read and reread that same book with an almost frantic intensity, until it was all but disintegrating in his hands.
And ever since that night, he’d looked at her like this, with the same desolate, pleading exhaustion in his face.
‘It’s fine,’ Beth stuttered, furious with herself for caving in so easily. ‘I’ll — I’ll find some way to- I’ll sort it.’
He didn’t respond. She realised she couldn’t remember when he had last spoken to her, real words…
She stumbled on her way out, accidentally stepping on the photographs of her mum’s smiling face. Her dad uttered a protective cry and for a moment her anger spilled over, just a little, just enough for her to snap at him, her tone nasty, ‘I left money on the hall stand.’
She felt a shameful little satisfaction when he flinched.
It’s not his fault, she reminded herself forcefully as she grabbed her backpack and plunged back through the hall out into the night. He broke. It’s what people do.
But people also heal, a harsher voice in her piped up: hearts thickened with scar tissue, but they kept beating. Beth’s dad had fallen, that she could understand, but every day he sat in that same bloody chair with that same bloody book was another day he wasn’t getting up. Beth felt her heart plunge every time she looked at him, because even though she didn’t want to admit it, she was teetering on the edge of that same dark hole.
She looked down in surprise at her hand. It was holding her mobile. Her thumb was poised to dial Pen’s number, displayed on the screen: pure muscle memory. She recoiled and hurled the phone away. It clattered onto the pavement. Beth ran down the street as though an army of ghosts marched in her wake.
It had been raining, and the streetlights bled over the pavements like molten copper. Tears blurred her vision and she navigated the streets on instinct.
The chain-link fence alongside the old railway sidings reared up in front of her and she threw herself at it and clambered over, ignoring the rust and the loose wires that snagged her hands. The tracks she dropped onto were disused and inert, part of an old extension no longer served. She stumbled along them, kicking at the crisp packets and rain-melted newspaper that littered the ground. A tunnel entrance opened up in front of her and she ran in.
It was only after Beth had snapped on one of the three powerful torches she kept in the underpass that she finally felt able to be still. She stared around at the walls.
Lithe Chinese dragons chased tiny bi-planes across the brickwork, jesters and skeletons waltzing together in their wake. A massive hand chose from a fruit-bowl full of planets. Octopuses coiled around anchors and wolves reared and snakes fought and cities soared from the strata of dense clouds. This little burrow under the Mile End Road was Beth’s sanctuary: five years of her imagination was sprayed and stencilled onto these walls.
She spread her hands across them, and their texture was like grazed skin. ‘What’m I gonna do, guys?’ Her voice echoed in the tunnel, and she burst out in a strained laugh. She only talked to her paintings when things got bad; it had to be death-of-the-firstborn-bad for her to do it out loud.
Normally she used stencil and aerosol to reshape the city, carving a safe place for herself amid the concrete, room to breathe. Not tonight. Not without Pen to share it with. Tonight she felt shut out of her town.
Pen.
The anger went though her like a spark lighting a gunpowder fuse, leaving her cold in its wake. I fought for you. When did that stop being enough? If you’d only kept quiet, we’d’ve been safe. When had Pen stopped trusting Beth to protect her?
One picture caught her eye: a simple chalk sketch, repeated over and over amongst the more outlandish images: a woman, long-haired, her back turned, glancing over her shoulder as if in invitation.
‘What’m I gonna do?’ Beth asked again, but her mum didn’t answer. She only lived in two places now: in Beth’s mind and on Beth’s bricks, and she wasn’t talking back from either.
Beth pressed her cheek to the cool, rough wall. She stood like that for a moment, and then pressed harder and harder, until hot pain spread from the grazes on her face and hands, as though by sheer force of muscle she could burrow under the city’s skin.
A low sound cut the night, snapping Beth out of her reverie. The sound came again, urgent and familiar. She sniffed her tears back. She was miles from anywhere where she ought to be able to hear that sound.
It came again, echoing off the bricks: the low moan of a train.
Beth felt a sudden heat on her back. She turned and found herself gaping at what she saw.
Two blazing white lights rushed at her from the dark of the tunnel, litter and leaves fluttering alongside them. A bulky shape formed out of the black, all jagged edges and momentum. Blue lightning arced and spat, illuminating clattering wheels. The sound of it crashed in on her ears like close thunder.
Thrum-clatter-clatter Her clothes snapped in a sudden gust of air. She tensed her legs to jump, but it was too late. She screwed her eyes shut.
Thrum-clatter The screech of metal on metal made her shudder. Every muscle in her body locked, but there was no pulverising impact, no shattering of bones…
Barely daring to breathe, Beth opened her eyes.
Headlights, barely inches from her face, blinded her instantly.
She stumbled back in the glare and lost her footing, crumpled and sat on the ground. Her heart was thumping like a pneumatic drill. Slowly her vision dissolved back through the glare. What is it, she thought, a train?
No — not a train, not quite. It was train- like, but more animal, somehow. Its whistle was a howl, it was draped in a pelt of tangled cables and its chassis was scabbed with rust and graffiti. Cataracts of smashed glass covered its windows. Great rents had been torn from its hull as though by massive claws.
The train-thing emitted a hydraulic snort and impatiently shifted its wheels.
Beth wriggled back
on her bum, still staring at it, until she felt the wall behind her. She pulled herself up — and then froze.
The headlights were tracking her like the eyes of a suspicious beast. It sounded again, more quietly this time, and turned up at the end like a question, like it was curious.
What are you? Beth squinted through the glare and stumbled forwards. On an impulse she reached hesitantly up past its wheels and patted its side. A whickering sound emerged from the train-thing, a sound of pleasure.
What am I supposed to do? she thought incredulously. Scratch you behind the ears? Where the hell are your ears, and how am I supposed to scratch ’em? She wondered if this was what a total psychotic break felt like. You’ve snapped, she told herself. This can’t be real.
A sinuous curve of blue electricity danced over the surface of the train-beast and Beth jumped back. For an instant it looked new, its chassis gleaming pristine and bright — but only for an instant, and then the pitted metal skin washed back.
‘What are you?’ Beth said softly to it. ‘What do you want? ’
The train-thing lowed again, as if in answer and the doors of the front carriage hissed open.
Beth steeled herself and thrust a hand inside. She half expected it to burst into blue flame. It didn’t. She felt like she was in a trance, adrift on a tide of total unreality. She placed her hands palm-down on the floor of the carriage, ready to push herself on board.
A cold thought jarred her: What if I can’t get back?
She remembered Gorecastle looking down at her, and her dad staring up, and Pen, most of all Pen, huddled in her wounded fury.
Beth looked over her shoulder. From the wall, her mum looked back. She pulled herself inside.
CHAPTER 6
The doors beeped and slid quietly shut. Beth rolled to her feet and looked around. She wasn’t alone. Dozens of figures crowded together on the seats: men and women dressed in business suits, teens ignoring everything but their flickering phones, an OAP half-buried under plastic bags.
‘Er- Er, excuse me,’ Beth started, forcing a way down the aisle between them, ‘excuse me, but what is this? Where are we?’
No one answered; no one reacted to Beth at all. She approached one girl who looked about the same age as her. She was wearing a posh school uniform and blowing bubble-gum like a manga fantasy. ‘Hey,’ said Beth, ‘what’s going on?’
The girl didn’t look at her but just kept blowing her bubbles, popping them and starting over: blow out, pop, suck back, chew; blow out, pop, suck back, chew.
As Beth watched she realised every bubble was identical, and each one was popping exactly the same distance past the girl’s heavily glossed lips.
A thrill of understanding ran through her. They’re all the same bubble, she thought.
She looked around her, and now she could see all of the carriage’s other occupants were also doing one thing, over and over: scratching a nose, crossing their legs, tapping a mobile phone, turning a page. She hadn’t seen it at first in the dim, flickering light, but looking closely, she could see the fraction of a second’s discrepancy as each person reset. As Beth stared, the girl in front of her wavered, faded, until Beth could see the stained fabric of her seat through her stomach, then she was back again, blowing her single perfect bubble.
‘You’re not real, are you?’ Beth said quietly, her whole body thrumming with the strangeness of it. She said it out loud: ‘You aren’t real-’
Are you ghosts? she wondered, with a shudder. Were you trapped here?
But they didn’t seem like ghosts to her. They were more like memories — memories of passengers, a few seconds of their lives, snatched out of time and imprinted within the train, repeating over and over like a scratched CD.
Beth rolled her gaze around the train carriage with its faded fabric seats and peeling panels. She remembered the questioning sound it had made. This was the inner architecture of a living thing. Was she inside its mind? Are they your memories? Is it you, remembering them?
Brakes squealed and hydraulics hissed. The carriage began to sway. Beth felt her stomach plunge. The train was moving.
She ran to the door and hammered the button, but nothing happened. Panic clawed at her and she pressed her face to the window. Through the cracked glass she could see the crosshatched bricks of the tunnel whipping past, faster and faster. She was locked in — and they were speeding up. She reeled away from the door and threw herself at the entrance to the driver’s cab: maybe she could stop it from there? Blue sparks flickered on the teeth of the ghostly passengers, who swayed with the train, unflinching.
The door to the cab was locked, and though Beth wrenched frantically on the handle, it wouldn’t budge.
‘Christ on a bike!’ she yelled, drawing her fist back and slamming it against the door in frustration — and it went straight through the door.
Beth shivered and pulled her arm back. This time she pushed it forward more slowly; it passed through the metal as if it were vapour.
The door, like the bubble-blowing girl, was as insubstantial as a thought.
Beth hesitated, then pushed herself through.
The train exploded from the tunnel.
Beth stared wide-eyed around the cab. There was no driver. Air pummelled her face as though the front of the train wasn’t there. She felt her fear level out, and as she swallowed down her panic, something else, a hot, raw excitement, rose in its place. She reached out and petted the thing’s controls. The engine purred to her. Blue electricity danced around her hand but it didn’t touch her.
The driver’s window seemed to waver. Beth took a deep breath. She leaned forward and the window-pane parted around her like cold mist. She gripped the sides of the control panel and hung out over the train’s insubstantial prow like a figurehead. Regiments of sleepers shot by under her. She tasted the diesel on the wind. She found herself laughing hysterically, and the wind snatched the sound. She uttered a wordless shout of elation and the train’s whistle sounded joyously in response.
A bulky mass squatted low in the distance as they surged onto the vast, rail-matted viaduct leading to Waterloo Station. On each side, houses and billboards and glimmering towers boiled together into a continuous river of darkness and streaks of yellow light. Railway signals burnt red through the autumn mist, suspended from a bridge as black and dark as hangman’s scaffold.
Beth wasn’t just riding the train, she was riding the entire city. The rush of it filled her and she crowed — but the yell of affirmation died in her throat: another pair of lights was coming towards them.
There was another train.
Beth stared. Each second brought the lights closer, and each second made her more and more certain. Excitement turned to horror. She gaped in disbelief, but it was true…
The other train was on their tracks.
‘Stop!’ she yelled to the creature that carried her. ‘Stop, we’re going to hit it!’ But the wind snatched her voice away and her train did not slow, even as the other engine, their lethal mirror-image, came on inexorably towards them. She could make out its shape now: a massive freight train, striped yellow and black like a wasp and armoured in heavy steel. But it wasn’t a natural train either: electricity whirled around it in a constant storm. Its fenders were hooked around like mandibles. The braying of its harsh steamwhistle shivered along her neck like a warcry.
The air felt suddenly thick with electricity. It tasted burnt. Beth turned and ran, plunging back through the driver’s door. She lurching up the gangway between the fidgeting memories Move, Beth, move ‘Too slow,’ she cried out loud, ‘too slow!’
Christ, Beth, you’re too slo Screeeeeeech!
There was a piercing scream of metal and the shudder of impact. The train slammed to a halt, hurling Beth backwards. Her stomach flipped over as she hit the floor hard. The chill mist of the train-thing’s wraith-like front wall coated for a second and she rolled out onto the tracks.
No air! Her lungs clawed at vacuum for a moment, and then she
erupted into a hacking cough. Her arms were scraped raw and hot blood was smeared over her brow. She pushed herself up on her elbow — and gazed up at the impossible.
There was no wreckage, no twisted, smoking, white-hot steel. The trains were above her: she was lying on the tracks and they were forty feet above her. Their front carriages were rearing up off the rails like snakes and…
And they were fighting.
They butted and grappled with each other, their fenders interlocked like horns. They emitted hisses and screeches of sheer machine effort. But the freight train was bigger and heavier. Its carriages bunched together like muscle as it hurled her train to the earth. The ground quaked, and Beth quaked with it as the freight train lashed down, cobranimble, chewing at the undercarriage of its enemy with its wheels.
Sparks and something like oily blood gushed from Beth’s engine, and it screamed.
‘ Stop it! ’ Beth yelled, stumbling forward, waving her hands as if she was trying to ward off a wild animal. She was coughing, half-mad with impact and smoke, but she clambered over the ruined body of her train, hollering like an idiot. ‘ Get off it! ’ she screamed again, smoke scratching at her throat until it was fit to bleed. ‘Get away!’
The vast freight train arched backwards, cocooned in blue lightning, ready to strike. It flickered, and blurred, leaving strange after-images: a steam-engine, a squat underground train, a trail of memories, as though it couldn’t remember what it was. Its steam-whistle brayed like a tormented thing.
The cold white beam of its eye fixed on Beth. It snorted steam-breath. She felt its weight over her like a promise.
‘For Thames’ sake — get the crap out of the way! ’
She staggered as something shoved her aside. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a figure: a skinny boy wearing only a pair of filthy ripped jeans. His skin was as grey as concrete and his face was taut with fear.