That was the version he gave anyway: Rusty catching us at it, tripping during a scuffle, being hit; our arranging things so he was implicated, but all an accident. Just a terrible accident.
Max added a detail then that sent a chill through me in that sunny corner of the Refectory.
“Paul, something happened while I was re-tying the rope round Rusty’s waist . . .”
“You saw the guy!” I blurted it out. The bits of fear had all connected up. The far-off reality was real again, finally, not pushed aside, not hidden away.
“No. No, I didn’t.” His tone gave me the “but” before he said it. “But I looked for him, you know? I’d knelt on something sharp and just looked up. Expected to see the guy – like in that Charles Dickens story.”
“But nothing?”
“Nothing. Just a feeling, you know. It was a really bad moment. I was fumbling with the rope, trying to get it under Rusty’s body and tied before the cops arrived. I was breathless from running from the phone, my knee was hurting from whatever I’d knelt on, you were lying there covered in blood. I had Rusty’s blood all over me. It was pretty awful.”
I made myself ask it. “So what about the autopsy reports, Max? They were messed up you said.”
“I did? Oh yes. Right. On the phone that night. The Mail had a bit on it. The train driver died of a heart attack but the autopsy for cause of death said the blood had changed.”
“Changed? What do you mean, changed?”
“Just that. Changed. Altered somehow. It didn’t say. But the Cramer kid had the same thing. His blood had gone funny.”
“But what does that mean?”
People at other tables were giving us looks.
“Paul, it didn’t say. Just that the lab people had stuffed up.”
I calmed myself. “But you sensed the guy?”
“Something. I went back to the station the next day. You were over in Madrigal, still on the critical list, still in a coma. They had already operated to relieve pressure on your brain, to get out the bone fragments too smashed up to leave there, they told us.”
It was frustrating. He was talking for the others.
“See anything?”
“Just where it all happened. The post was actually bent where Rusty hit it. They hadn’t sanded over the blood stains properly yet. I saw the nail I’d knelt on before getting the feeling. It was just – eerie, you know?”
“But no sign of the guy?”
“Uh uh. But it was like he was there, you know? I kept looking up expecting to see him.”
Lucian spoke then, the first words I’d heard him say that morning but for monosyllables.
“It’s convergent energy. How you think of a thing makes a thing. How you name a thing defines a thing.”
Thanks, Lucian, if that’s your real name. I’d only known him by sight before today but that was his kind of patter, all Plato and Socrates, Sufis and Sophistry, Castaneda and Sergeant Pepper’s.
Max looked from him to me and back. “Say again.”
“You probably haunted yourself,” Lucian said. “We all do it. Set up expectations. Rope the unconscious into it – all that energy.”
“Uh uh,” Max said. “I meant the other bit.”
“Power of names. Naming gives shape. Summons. Bestows power. All part of primitive people’s singing up the land, re-naming things, re-making things. The Navajo . . .”
“Yeah, right.” Max had heard enough.
But Lucian continued, and just as well. “It’s like these scarings. At what point did they become rituals?”
“Rituals?” I showed my annoyance now.
But Max was intrigued. “Did become?”
“All right. Do become, though I suspect they already have. And, yeah, rituals because we always do more than we know. Simple acts become metaphor, symbolic, representational as well as just themselves. We’re left to find what they really mean.”
Who’s your friend? Max said in a look, but was interested in spite of himself.
Lucian probably read that look. “You have to admit it, Max. You were both pretty fixated. The blood and death and all. That man you saw. Lots of fertile stuff there. Of course there are going to be ramifications. All that emotion and psychic force; both of you looking for answers.”
“Maybe.” Max was yielding, plainly needed something of the reassurance dark assured Lucian seemed to be providing. “What do you suggest?”
“Suggest?” Lucian managed to look both surprised and confident all at once. “Why, re-stage the event – with us along as unbiased controls.” He already had that good scientific word. “See what you get.”
“A scaring? Here?”
Becky liked the idea. “Why not? It’d be fun.”
“We’ve got trains,” Janice said. “Lots of stations.”
Now I was the one with the doubts. “Too crowded. Doesn’t feel right.”
“Okay,” Lucian said. “I should be able to borrow a holiday house at Glenbrook. That’s in the Blue Mountains if you don’t know, about two hours away. Term vacation’s, what, in two weeks? We could go up for a few days. Lots of little stations. Springwood. Blackheath. Medlow Bath. Hazelbrook. Wentworth Falls. Just pick one.”
Max turned to me. “Paul? What do you think?”
“Yes,” I said, connecting up the years, feeling relieved, reprieved somehow, giving all that had occurred its due place in my life, its correct perspective and proportion, getting another chance at – just something important. “Yes, I want to.”
My certainty surprised me.
“What do you say?” Lucian asked Max diplomatically.
Max, so suddenly here, so dramatically in my life again just by being here, frowned, murmured: “Hmm”, then said: “Yeah. Okay. Why not?”
I believe he thought he was doing it for me: allowing a psychotherapy, completing an equation, but deep down I knew he needed something out of this too: perhaps as elusive as redemption, expiation for harm done, control lost, perhaps as simple as nostalgia for what had been.
Our only days.
III Glenbrook 1967
Late Monday afternoon was it. The five of us set out from the small wooden house in Glenbrook and drove through the Blue Mountains towns in Lucian’s Holden. We had a rather tense and silent afternoon tea at the Paragon in Katoomba, then continued out to Mount Victoria, only to re-trace our route, stopping and looking, stopping and looking, till we finally found a suitable station sufficiently hidden away from the road.
All things considered, we should have known better than to go ahead with it that particular evening; everything about the last hour of the day felt wrong. Rain was due and there was that low mean sideways light coming at us below an overcast, and a cool breeze hugging the land, moving the trees and grasses but leaving low clouds locked in place, wrinkled and bellying down.
Strange weather, the light sliding in from the edge of the world like that, giving us a disturbing overlit quality so we glowed like tricked-up idealizations of ourselves, figures in some garish Symbolist painting.
Even as we went down the steps into the shadow of the platform, something of that quality remained – silvering, gilding, flaring in the sunset edges of the trees and waving grasses, each leaf and blade picked out, detailed, each whorl and valance of the locked and threatening sky.
“This is weird,” Janice said, perfect bathos, typical Janice, and the rest of us laughed; it was so beyond words.
“Elemental, dear Janice,” said Lucian, which she didn’t get, but it was probably the right word: we were elemental on that lowering, fading, fateful evening, in one of those moments of incidental framing reality where every commonplace surprises you.
I know, I’m overdoing this, but that’s how it was for me, and the others too, I felt. Some days, some evenings, night just happens as a background to other things, but here it was, being made, perceptibly forming out of cracks and corners, the blackness of the short tunnel pushing out, flowing up, as if prying itself loose, all of it h
eightened by the dramatic closing light we had just now left behind, shed from ourselves in return for discrete shadows, the self-same drab as the clouds overhead.
There were people, just a few, waiting for the next commuter train up from Sydney to take them on to nearby Mountains stops and beyond, or the express to take them down to the Emu Plains and out to the coast.
We stayed just long enough to work out the details, which side to use (left-hand facing west – the train would plunge straight into the quick darkness of the tunnel – blink, blink – did we imagine that?), how to make an easy getaway through the shallow tunnel itself. We stayed until the 5.50 from Sydney had dropped off its passengers and moved on, waited till they had vanished into the night and the lone ticket collector had gone back in out of the wind, then made our way to the car, headed back to Katoomba.
“I’m not sure about this,” Max said as we were driving along.
Lucian must have expected it; he was clearly our motivating force now and still the perfect diplomat. “I know what you mean, Max. It’s been a weird afternoon. What about you, Paul?”
Again I surprised myself. “Might as well go ahead with it now.” Something about the quality of the light back at the station had fascinated me, given me a sense of imminence, something. But I didn’t speak it, and must have even sounded a bit indifferent.
Lucian pulled over, turned to face us in the back seat. “Listen, you two,” he said, but carefully, caringly. “Five years ago you got close to something really important for you. It affected you in all sorts of ways, I can tell. We don’t have to do this. We can call it off. But it needs a bit of enthusiasm, okay? If we go ahead.”
Janice grinned at him. “I’m enthusiastic.”
“Right,” Max said, to Janice or Lucian, you couldn’t tell. “It was just so” – dramatic? frightening? vivid? I wondered what he’d say – “incomplete.”
“So we’re doing this now. Completing it.” Lucian spoke as if he understood it completely, and maybe he did. “Next question. If we do it, your call, who leans out?”
I spoke first. “Me!”
“I will!” Max said.
“Toss for it!”
“My turn!”
Lucian, captain of the car, the whole night, decided. “Maybe it should be Paul, Max. He needs to do this. Okay?”
Max nodded. “You up to it, Paul?”
“I’m fine.”
So we drove on, took in a movie in Katoomba, got back to our chosen spot at 11.02, in plenty of time for the 11.40 freight. Since we figured the train would probably sound its whistle when the scaring took place, we left the car half a mile from the station and walked there, not wanting disturbed locals to see us driving away afterwards. Our plan was to walk along the tracks and cut up to the highway.
The night had closed in, chill and windy, and though the overcast stole the starlight, the rain had held off. As we moved down to the platform, the wind soughed in the power lines, whistled round the stanchions, gusted in the trees. Grass bent low on the embankments. The dark hole of the tunnel seemed thicker, deeper, seemed to pull at us, pull then push in distinct night rhythms. I wasn’t the only one to imagine it; the others made comments too, seemed to find it eerie, but then we were all oversensitive to such things.
The platform itself was deserted as we expected, with just a few lights showing in either direction, the four double lamp-posts, the two sets of signal lights showing their comforting red and green. The waiting room was lit too and cosily warm. A fire had been left in the generous hearth, with wood to one side. The honour system prevailed and, despite our mission, we fed it for anyone who might arrive during the long night that would follow.
It took moments to fasten the rope first to the westernmost lamp-post just before the tunnel, then to my waist, less than a minute or two to let me reprise my long-ago act of leaning out over the left-hand line, feet on the lip, Lucian and Max hauling me back a few times on Max’s call. All straightforward, an anticlimax if anything after the build-up of our boyhood scarings, something almost pointless and foolish, stripped of context.
But Lucian was clearly excited and Max was becoming so. We were all on edge; any lingering sense of anticlimax was kept at bay by the night itself, so vivid and powerful, the constant, unsettling keening of the wind, the shuddering grasses above the cutting, the tossing trees, so many inexplicable sudden sounds. The darkness of the tunnel seemed even deeper – pushed, pulled, waiting.
This wasn’t Portobello in the warm summer night of 1962. This was a small Australian mountain station racked by a chill, late-autumn sou’easter. This was a consummation somehow, a fitting resolve. Some kind of redemption.
Max knew it; dark-eyed Lucian did. Becky no doubt. Janice said she was cold and became in a moment persona non grata forevermore in all our minds.
The time drew near. The girls hid; I leant out; Lucian and Max took their places, gripped the lifeline double-handed.
No one came. No hint of the stranger. No Rusty Cramer this time (though, paradox, I did wish it could be so, generous in my need). The wind blew and blew; the rails shone by any light they could steal – found firelight, lamplight, stole light from our eyes to keep the silver there in that heaving autumn dark.
Train came impressed on that fragile darkness, a roar below, behind, above the wind, suddenly there in smouldering running lights, in the headlight beating out, a great diesel bearing down.
I stretched out my arms, waved, waved frantically, pinned in the hideous, devouring glare. The whistle screamed, screamed where it had never screamed before, at an hour when it never should.
I waved in the terror-rushing-darkness. How many heart attacks this time? How many? All fall down! Everyone!
Was hauled back, ricocheted as the raw and angry train ran by and was swallowed by the frame of the tunnel, swallowed whole, gulped in carriage by ratcheting, sliding, angrily snapping bogie, vertebra by vertebra as its dark spine was sucked in, gone.
Max and Lucian had both caught me. There was a moment of exhilaration, of sheer delight at what we’d done, all our earlier fear turned into that. Becky was smiling, Janice too, though she still looked scared. Would we be caught? Would we?
But we didn’t wait for some curious local to call in a complaint, or a lone patrol car wandering through these towns to investigate why a through freight would shatter sleep around midnight this way.
Max untied the rope and coiled it ready for throwing aside later, then we helped one another down onto the tracks and began our retreat, following the double lines to the shallow tunnel.
Max couldn’t restrain his delight. “It worked, Paul! It worked!”
“Smooth as clockwork,” Lucian said, sounding pleased too, then added: “We need to listen though. For vibrations in the rails.”
“Could a train come?” Janice asked, first time of four or five.
Perversely I said, “Sure could.” Scaring the Janice. Hating her insensitivity to this, her finding only the bogeyman when it was so much more.
The tunnel was only twenty or so paces long, and a train-wind pushed at us all the way, though it was just the sou’easter finding a way through. But when we came out the other side we noticed the changes at once. The trees still blew above us on the embankments, the grasses still leaned in waves; the wind was sounding, hitting at us, but it was as if stillness had been imposed on all that – those things drawn off, suspended somehow, changed.
And more. It was as if one of those heavily shadowed, cliff-locked, deep-tunnelled coastal stations south of Sydney – Otford, Stanwell Tops, Helensburg, I wasn’t sure of the names – had been superimposed on this one. The tunnel had been too deep; now the sides of the cutting seemed way too high. Details were wrong, out of place.
Perhaps it was adrenaline rush, nerves firing with the excitement, all that noise and light replaced by the compressed dark of the tunnel and the windy silence, but we all noticed it, showed it by the looks we gave, though nothing was said, not even when we saw that
there was fog in the cutting ahead.
Fog on a windy overcast night! It snatched the streetlight too, gave some to the tracks so they ran as quicksilver glint, drawn off and lost in the silvery pall.
But fog?
The next surprise: the line branched ahead. Branched! We were not even fifty metres from the tunnel and the left-hand westbound track we were following had a line running silver and fogbound into a cutting, steep-sided and not on any of the maps Lucian said he had studied.
This wasn’t the stranger of summers gone, not Rusty Cramer bouncing pinball ricochet off the midnight freight to Madrigal. This was the world gone wrong.
“We go back now,” Lucian said, and echoed that key word. “This is wrong.”
“Something’s there!” Janice cried.
locomotive!
We all heard it. A shuffle, snuffle, muttered, stolen back.
“Run!” Max said, and we did, not up, it was too steep, not ahead to cross that branch-line, but back.
locomotive! locomotive!
Unmistakable. Something waited in the old, new, different cutting. Something.
We ran on and on, entered the tunnel again, found it long, long, far longer, deeper than it had been moments ago, ran on, panting, breathing hard, Janice giving off a wail that never quite made it to a scream.
locomotive! locomotive! locomotive!
Pursued by the night, we fled, felt the train-wind at our backs, were pinned in headlight, light made from darkness, rail silver, stolen streetlamps, window-shine and eye glitter, dazzling, numbing, chilling light.
“Against the wall!” someone cried, Max, Lucian, I couldn’t tell. “On the other side! On the other side!” And I ran with the others, trusting that somone had indeed calculated which track would carry the – locomotive! locomotive! – presently at the tunnel’s mouth. Train. As if that covered it.
We rushed, clattered and stumbled to the tunnel wall, that wrong, south-coast tunnel wall, flattened ourselves against the slick, damp bricks, cold, so cold, too cold, tried to push into the hard wet surface, air coursing over us, smelling of train friction, metal on metal, ozone, dried blood, night-bitter, blood-bitter, locomotive! locomotive!
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