Advent

  After a long while they came to another station. He thought about faking sleep again, but the woman opposite had pulled a book out of her handbag by now, some sort of nature guide, and was safely absorbed in it. More people left the carriage than joined. Gavin knew from the maps that he was reaching the point where England began to taper out, thinning into the sea.

  And there it was: the sea. It took him by surprise. It was suddenly right by the tracks. There was a narrow strand of beach, where a few well-wrapped people had stopped their walk to watch the train go past, and beyond that, nothing: a huge, calm, open plain of emptiness mirroring the underside of pencil-grey clouds. On the other side of the train, cliffs the colour of grimy brick rose like walls.

  For the first time since he’d been on the train, he thought about having to make the return journey, in just a week’s time; having to go back to it all.

  The train swooshed into a tunnel and, abruptly, Gavin was staring at the inside of the carriage in the window. He’d been captivated by the sea, his guard was down, and he realised too late that his eyes were accidentally directed straight at the reflection of the woman opposite, and hers, reflected, were directed back at him.

  ‘It always makes me jump,’ she said.

  He cursed inwardly. He’d made it this far without getting trapped in some pointless conversation with a stranger and didn’t want to spoil the rest of his precious time on his own by starting one now.

  ‘Mmm.’ He didn’t know what she was talking about and didn’t care. He looked down at his lap.

  ‘It’s the best bit of the journey, though. The sea and all the tunnels. I always remember thinking that once you got past here you were properly in the southwest.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ He made himself sound as uninterested as possible and reached across into his bag to fiddle ostentatiously with his phone, but it didn’t stop her.

  ‘I used to love those journeys on my own when I was a girl. Just watching out of the window. There was nothing worse than when some old bore opposite wanted to talk.’

  He reddened, more angry than embarrassed. ‘Hah,’ he grunted, with a forced smile.

  ‘Are you going to Cornwall?’

  A direct question. No way he could brush it off.

  ‘Truro, yeah.’

  ‘Ah! My stop too.’

  Great. ‘Oh right.’ He was stuck with her the whole way. He opened a game on his phone, in the hope of demonstrating that he had better things to do than listen to her chatter, but it made no difference. She pulled a tube of mints out of her handbag and picked off the foil.

  ‘Are you on your way home, then? Polo?’

  ‘Er, no, thanks. Nah, I live in London.’ He cursed himself again. That might have been his last chance to cut this conversation off before it really got going and he’d said more than he needed to. He’d blown it.

  ‘Hmm. It hasn’t been home for me since I was a girl, but I suppose it is now. I’m going native, as you see.’ She tapped the cover of her book. It was called A Field Guide to Cornwall’s Wildlife. He didn’t understand and didn’t want to. ‘You’ve been before? Family in Truro?’

  If she’d obviously just been making small talk, he might have kept on grunting rudely and then clammed up, but there was a patient curiosity in her questions that he couldn’t seem to escape. ‘Nah, not properly. When I was a baby, once. Think we went to a beach somewhere.’

  ‘Oh well, this is better really. Summer has its uses, but a beach is a beach is a beach. I always try to come back in autumn or winter. The wind and the rain. It’s not the holidays yet, though, is it?’

  The possibility of a reprieve flashed in front of him. Perhaps the truth would do the trick and put her off. He met her eyes and tried to look belligerent.

  ‘Not yet. I got kicked out of school.’

  For a moment it looked as if he’d succeeded. ‘Oh,’ she said, looking down and up quickly. Then she sat back with a huge smile. ‘How funny! Me too.’

  He must have gawped. She leaned forward, right across the table, grinning a grin that belonged on the face of a conspiratorial teenager. ‘Never mind. I’ll shut up now. Good luck to you.’ She patted the back of his hand and, still smiling, picked up her book and sucked her mint.

  He looked around the carriage, wondering about switching to another seat. She didn’t look like a crazy person. Quite the opposite, in fact: there was a brightness in her expression that made her look younger than the rest of her appearance suggested she was, and an air of subdued amusement that reminded him slightly of Mr Bushy, who was the cleverest person Gav knew. Maybe that was what stopped him from getting up and moving, though he told himself he was being an idiot, that she might start up again at any moment. But there weren’t lots of empty seats. He might end up stuck next to someone just as bad.

  He’d just about managed to relax again when she blinked up from her book and looked out at the hills, frowning slightly.

  ‘We’re still a while from Plymouth, aren’t we?’ she said, apparently to herself.

  Taking no chances, Gavin slumped right back in his seat and half closed his eyes.

  She craned her neck to peer up and down the line. ‘I’m sure I haven’t seen Ivybridge go by . . .’

  The train was slowing; that was what had bothered her. As it braked to a crawl, the noise of its passage grew suddenly louder, and the windows went black. They eased deeper into the tunnel and stopped.

  A group of kids at the far end of the carriage did a mock-spooky wail, ‘Oooo-ooooo.’ Gav turned up the volume on his music.

  He didn’t hear the details of the driver’s apologetic announcement. Something about a temporary electrical problem. The kids groaned in chorus.

  Abruptly the lights in the carriage all went out. At the same instant the music in Gav’s ears stopped dead.

  There was an instant of complete darkness and silence, and then the carriage filled with little shrieks and giggles and conversations starting up too loudly. There was no light at all, not the slightest glimmer. Gav felt across to his bag, wondering if his earphones had come unplugged. They hadn’t. He pulled them out of his ears. His hands felt sweaty.

  A hideous cry erupted out of the dark.

  Otototoi!

  Gavin cringed, his raised arms invisible in front of his face. The scream had been right on top of him.

  Otototoi! Otototoi! Popoi! Popoi!

  He was nauseous with terror. The hum of nervous chatter in the carriage continued, though the appalling shouts ought to have crushed it. He jammed his hands over his ears and cowered. At that moment someone further down the carriage switched on a torch. There was a mass Ahhhh as the wobbly white light appeared.

  The woman opposite was staring at him, her face in shadow.

  In the seat next to her another woman was sitting, and Gavin knew at once that it was Miss Grey. He knew her by the silhouette of her tangled hair and by the shape of her cloaked shoulders and her thin arms braced on the table in front of her. He knew her by something else as well, the intimacy of fifteen years; he felt her close to him like his own reflection. But he’d never seen her indoors before, and beyond his dreams he had never seen a word come out of her mouth, barely even a breath, let alone the full-throated inhuman howl of madness that she threw out again.

  ‘Otototoi!’

  Gavin couldn’t stop himself flinching. He was acutely aware of the eyes of the woman opposite. Shame burned him. He tried to shift round in his seat and fold his arms, as if all he’d been doing was getting comfortable. It was plain that no one else had heard Miss Grey’s deranged howling. No one but him was haunted; no one but him was cursed. He had no idea what he’d done to earn this new punishment, or why she now had the power to pursue him inside and scream in his ear. He glimpsed a terrible future in which she wouldn’t stop until she’d driven him out of his mind, properly crazy, as Mr Bushy obviously thought he already was.

  He hugged himself tight and screwed his eyes shut.

  The carriage lights came on. />
  Gavin tried to focus on his breathing. Don’t look up, don’t say anything, don’t meet anyone’s eyes. He was afraid that if the nosy woman asked him what was wrong, he might slap her.

  ‘Ladies’n’gennlmun,’ began an announcement, ‘thizzizr driver speakin, we dopologise for ’zshor’delay, uh faulznowbin fixt’n’ we’ll beyonrway veryshor’y than’you.’

  The train crept into motion.

  ‘Come.’

  It was Miss Grey’s voice. He recognised it from his dreams and yet he’d never properly heard it before, not the actual sound, the disturbance of the air. ‘Come.’ A woman’s voice, as rough and grey as she was, yet with a strength to it, the way her stillness always seemed alarmingly strong. It wanted to prise his eyelids open.

  ‘He comes. They come.’

  Oh God, he thought. Not now, not here. Don’t look up, he told himself, clenching his teeth. Just don’t look.

  ‘The feasters gather.’

  He didn’t dare move or scream. He was sitting at one end of a train carriage with people all around him, ordinary people, the other kind. There was nothing he could do.

  ‘The destroyer and his gift. It has begun.’ The words sounded like they were being spat out of her throat. As the train picked up speed, they seemed to rhyme with the clackety-clack of the rails, insistent drumming gibberish. ‘An open door. A closed circle. The sky is open. Drop down, drop down. His mother’s sister is flown. His mother’s sister is gone. His father is named destroyer. He will bear no child. He will bear my burden. It hurts. It hurts! Otototoi!’ Now it was not a rattling scream, but part of the babble. ‘He comes, he comes. The gift, the burden. Truth hurts. Iew, iew, ohh ohh kakka. Come. Come.’

  There was a clumsy rustle opposite. The irritating woman was getting up. Gavin stole a look to be sure and out of the corner of his eye saw her squeezing past the seat in which Miss Grey had appeared. Miss Grey pulled her knees up out of the way, under her cloak. No one was looking at him. Gav raised his eyes cautiously and saw that the woman’s eyes were red and her face drained of colour. She stumbled past the luggage racks and out of the carriage.

  Miss Grey stared at him, arms round her shins, mouth open but emptied of its freight of meaningless words.

  ‘Come,’ she said.

  He couldn’t make himself accept that he was seeing her here, under bland electric light, her calloused and filthy bare feet perched on the edge of an upholstered seat. She looked like an escaped extra from a mediaeval costume drama. Under her dark grey cloak she wore shapeless rags. Her bird’s-nest hair was grimy, soot-black. Only in her face was there something vividly, terribly actual, something unfeigned.

  ‘Come,’ she said again.

  Gav glanced around. No one seemed to be looking his way. The couple across the aisle were absorbed in a crossword. He leaned across the table.

  ‘Go away,’ he said, between his teeth. His cheeks were burning.

  ‘Come,’ she repeated. She was like a bird. Her eyes had that opaque glitter. The word sounded meaningless when she uttered it: just a squawk.

  ‘Please,’ he said. He stared into her face, between the shrouding curtains of her hair. He was afraid he was going to cry. ‘Leave me alone. I can’t take it.’

  Her head jutted forward. ‘You must take it,’ she said. ‘You must take it. Come to me. Take it.’

  The sliding door hissed. Without taking her eyes off him, Miss Grey leaned right back and pulled her knees tight, and the nosy woman wriggled back across in front of her to the window seat.

  Gavin didn’t know where to look. For a moment he’d been sure Miss Grey really had been talking to him, telling him something, when he’d least expected it. In his turmoil of stifled misery he’d barely taken in the words. He turned to the window, cradling his head in his hands, and saw dismal terraced suburbs beginning to appear on the lower slopes of the hills. Get a grip, he told himself. Get a grip.

  The train was slowing again, coming into a larger town. A few people stood up and began putting on coats, gathering by the end of the carriage. Their chatter and commotion made him feel fractionally safer and he risked a glance around. To his surprise and relief, he saw Miss Grey getting up from her seat.

  ‘He comes,’ he heard her murmur. ‘He comes. They gather. This night you go free.’

  She eased among the small crowd waiting to get off. The train pulled in. He watched as the press of people carried her out of the carriage. No one was aware of her; she slipped like water into the spaces among them. He pressed his face to the glass to see if he could spot her coming out onto the platform, but she’d disappeared.

  He felt himself calming down.

  The carriage was much emptier as they left the station behind. Outside, daylight was fading. There couldn’t be too much more of the journey to go. It occurred to Gav that he could probably find a pair of seats to himself now, where he could sit alone and try to get himself back together.

  He was just about to act on this thought when he felt fingers on his wrist. The middle-aged woman had leaned across close to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I know I said I wouldn’t bother you, but there’s a little thing I feel I should do and it ought to have a witness. It’s rather embarrassing. I’m not usually this batty, I promise.’

  He was too dumbfounded to answer at all.

  ‘It has to be just here, as we go over the bridge. It’ll only take a second.’

  He looked out of the window, helplessly following her gaze. They were riding on a viaduct above the streets, leaving the station behind. The winter afternoon, already dim, was darkening fast. Clouds had sunk and were becoming a fog.

  ‘I’d like you to hear a promise I’m going to make myself. It makes it more official. Bad luck for you that I happened to take this particular seat, hmm? Or something.’ She was talking too rapidly for him to agree to this aloud. ‘Anyway, I hope you don’t mind. I really will shut up after this.’ She extracted a small bottle from her pocket, unscrewing it as she spoke, and poured a little of something that smelled almost but not quite like whisky into the upturned cap. ‘Ah, here we are.’ The town fell away and the train began passing between bulbous steel girders. Gav saw a broad river far below. ‘Right. Here goes. Are you listening?’

  He couldn’t think of anything to do but nod.

  ‘Right. Good. I, Hester Lightfoot, earnestly and solemnly swear never to cross back over this river again so long as I live.’ She swigged the contents of the cap. ‘On pain of death. There, that should do it. Thank you. If you ever happen to see me east of here again, please feel free to . . . oh I don’t know, push me under a bus or something. Would you like a sip?’

  The train began to pick up speed, burrowing through the fog.

  ‘No . . . thanks.’

  She screwed the cap back on. ‘Thank you for putting up with that. That was the Tamar. That river. West of it is all Cornwall. I’m coming home, you see, so I thought I’d make it ceremonial.’ She tapped the open page of the book in her lap. ‘Like the choughs. We’re coming back, for good. I’m Hester, by the way, obviously enough.’ She stuck out her hand.

  The chuffs? Now Gavin was certain he was sitting at the same table as a lunatic. Grab your bag and move, he told himself, but with her hand right there in front of him he couldn’t.

  ‘Gavin,’ he said, shaking, furious with himself.

  ‘Nice to meet you. They say King Arthur’s soul went into a chough after he died.’ She lifted the book onto the table and pointed. ‘For a long time they left. I think people assumed they were gone for ever, but they returned to Cornwall a few years ago. I’m taking them as a good omen.’

  Gavin looked down. His vision swam.

  The picture Hester had her finger on showed a black bird with a beak the colour of embers and legs of the same vivid ruddy orange. He felt suddenly dizzy. The image was an echo of his dreams, the terrible ones of darkness spotted and streaked with fire and alive with battering wings, a piece of his night world torn out of him
and thrust under his eyes. Hester’s words rang weirdly in his head: Good omen, good omen.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She had closed the book. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes.

  ‘Yeah, fine.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I—’

  ‘’s OK. Forget it.’

  She studied him with disconcertingly steady interest. ‘All right, then. And now no more madwoman business. I promise.’ She put one finger to her lips and leaned back in her seat.

  Gavin wasn’t sure how far he could trust that promise, so he closed his eyes, inwardly swearing all the while that if ever he was blessed enough to find himself on another long journey by himself, he’d take a fat book to bury his head in. She was as good as her word, though, which was fortunate, because he found it hard to do a convincing impression of going to sleep. He was so afraid Miss Grey might reappear on the train while his eyes were closed that he couldn’t relax at all. After a while he stopped trying. His phone appeared to have run out of power, like his watch, though he’d charged it that morning. There was nothing to do but gaze out of the window, nowhere else to look.

  Tight valleys ghosted past in the darkening fog. They stopped at stations that seemed almost abandoned, platforms sunk down in a bank of wet slates and brambles or overlooked by the backs of dreary houses. After a while he heard the announcement that Truro would be the next stop. Most of the few remaining people in the carriage were gathering up belongings. He took his bag and went to stand by the door. Someone had pushed the window down. The wheels hissed loudly and the chill air smelled of wet bark. There was almost no light left in the sky.

  He saw Hester Lightfoot join the queue by the door, but she seemed to have lost interest in him. In fact, there was an oddly blank look on her face, as if she’d lost interest in everything. Her lips moved a little; she was talking to herself soundlessly. When the train stopped with a slight jerk, she nearly fell over, muttering as she grabbed the luggage rack.

  Gavin stepped down to the platform, looking around quickly for Auntie Gwen. The station clock showed they were only a couple of minutes late. People hurried, mostly silently, towards the exit, on their way to somewhere more welcoming. He didn’t see his aunt, so he followed the flow out through a ticket hall to the street.