Sciron

by David Rashleigh

  “I have interviewed several people in this area, and your name seems to crop up more than anybody else. Apparently you were quite active in the movement. Could I possibly call round to speak to you? When would suit?” Dissimulation did not come easy to Jack, and keeping his tenor even was proving a strain.

  “I’m not going anywhere. Come round now, if you want.” His mood had obviously lightened at the thought that he might still be remembered on the railway. It had never occurred to him that people might not have even slightly positive memories of him: he was too sure of his own righteousness for that.

  “Thank you, I will. See you in about half an hour.” Jack hung up.

  Thirty-five minutes later he was standing outside George Williams’ front door, feeling very nervous. Swallowing hard, he rapped loudly on the wooden panel and took a step back. For what seemed like an eternity, he waited for the door to open. When it finally did, the old man before him did an immediate double-take. His rheumy eyes narrowed, and he gave Jack a look that conveyed both hostility and fear at the same time.

  “Who are you?” he growled, and, without waiting for an answer, started to close the door.

  Jack managed to get his foot in the door before it slammed, causing him to grit his teeth in pain. “Mr Williams, it’s Jack Melling. I phoned you just before. Please let me in!”

  “Melling, you say? I know a Melling, a young fella. You look like someone else.” There was uncertainty in the old man’s words, and he opened the door again. “You look just like somebody I used to know. Was your father a railwayman?”

  “As a matter of fact, he was. Could we talk about it inside?” George reluctantly stepped back and gestured for him to enter. Jack did so, trying not to limp too obviously despite the throbbing from his foot. Pausing in the hallway, he waited for George to lead the way into his front room. The older man sat heavily in his chair and waved vaguely towards the other seat where Kevin Anderson had sat previously.

  “Yes,” said Jack, summoning up all the courage that he could muster.”My father was a signalman, his name was Jack Rimmer, and I think that you killed him.”

  ***

  Mike Simpson was back at work, once again employing his new-found talent for looking busy whilst cogitating over his next move. The lack of nocturnal visits from, well, whoever it was, suggested that he must be on the right lines. He had spent some time the previous evening looking at the Penwortham Triangle, or what remained of it, on Google Earth. He had been struck by the revelation that disused railways stand out on aerial photographs as well as, if not better than, existing ones; he had also noticed that one point of the triangle had been replaced by a small housing estate. But it still didn’t tell him what he was supposed to do. Without really knowing why, he had used another website to print a map of the area and a route from the railway station. He had also checked train times to Preston: the journey was a long one but at least there were direct trains. Mike was not an experienced traveller and the prospect of having to change trains, even once, put him off attempting most journeys.

  One of his co-workers, a plain and somewhat overweight girl of nineteen, came over to where he was absent-mindedly polishing the same table that had been the object of his attention for the past five minutes.

  “Mike, can you help me in the back? There’s a funny smell and I can’t figure out what it is.” She pushed her over-sized glasses up her nose as she spoke. She was very short-sighted, and the glasses made her eyes look large and slightly out of focus.

  “Err...OK. I’ll be there in a moment” said Mike, trying, with reasonable success, to hide his annoyance at being disturbed.

  Walking to the back of the shop, a familiar odour wafted into his nostrils. A clammy, humid ambience, just like in his bedroom during one of the visitations, hung in the air. The feeling of hatred that had accompanied the appearance of the spectres was there too: diminished, but still palpable.

  “I think it might be the drain back here” he shouted over his shoulder. “I’ll see to it. You cover the shop.” The girl, like Mike not the most diligent of employees, was happy to leave the job to him and pulled the door closed as she fixed the next customer with her slightly odd stare.

  Mike realised that he was trembling slightly. Looking around the room, he sensed a presence but couldn’t see anything. Just then, a shadow flickered in the corner of his right eye, the movement attracting his attention. He snapped his head to the right, but there was nothing to be seen.

  “Are you there?” he hissed in a hoarse whisper, immediately feeling somewhat foolish.

  You must go there.

  Mike’s head turned left and right, his frantic gaze hunting for the shadowy figure that he knew was there but that evaded his searching.

  He is approaching.

  “What do you want me to do? I don’t know anything about this!” whispered Mike, not knowing in which direction to address his words.

  Just be there. You will know what to do.

  ***

  Katie Melling was having a bad day. She had slept poorly; a combination of her unborn child’s constant squirming, Steve’s snoring and the fear created by “the others” had conspired to prevent what passed for a restful night in her present condition. Joshua, as if sensing her tiredness and determined to exploit it to the full, had been a recalcitrant handful. He had refused to eat his breakfast, then fought her when she tried to dress him. He clung to her every step, constantly crying and begging to be picked up.

  Her nerves frayed beyond reason, Katie tried once again to calm him down, but to no avail. His little face was a picture of anguish, the effect comically mitigated by the constant stream from his nose. Several soggy tissues were strewn around the flat as his mother vainly sought to stem the flow. The final straw had been the orange juice. Demanding a drink, Joshua had insisted on sitting on her knee in the living room as he lifted the plastic beaker: when he spilled the bulk of the contents they had poured down himself, Katie's last clean maternity dress and thence on to the carpet, where it formed a sticky damp patch.

  Katie could take no more. Bursting into tears of frustration herself, she reached for the phone to call her mother. To add insult to injury, there was no reply: her mother used Katie's day off work to do her main shopping and Katie wept all the more with the realisation of that fact.

  After a moment, she realised that Joshua had stopped crying. Instead, he was sat, transfixed, his eyes wide.

  “Mummy, don’t like,” he virtually whimpered the words. “Make nasty people go away, Mummy!” With that, he buried his head in her bosom and clutched at her dress, pulling himself tight against her. Katie soon realised why: the ghost was returning, and he was not alone. The familiar feeling of misery was swamped by bitterness, menace and hatred so intense that it made the blood drain from her face.

  Wrapping her arms around her son, Katie looked left and right, unable to see the apparition. Terror gripped her very being in a way that even the first appearance of Jack Rimmer Senior had not achieved. Again, she looked around her, the rapid movement of her head making her pony tail swing around on to Joshua’s head. He stayed stock still, despite the uncontrolled trembling of his mother.

  “Jack! Where are you?” screamed Katie, near to hysteria.”Show yourself, please! What is happening?”

  Tears were streaming down her face now, her fear multiplying with the escalating sensation of danger and loathing that was now permeating the air. The musty, damp smell had returned, incongruously reminding Katie of the beach holidays in North Wales she had enjoyed with her parents before the untimely death of her father. Why can’t he haunt me, she thought, at least he would never frighten me this way.

  The uninvited memories of her father added residual grief to the dread that she felt. She was about to cry out again when a bright light filled the hallway beyond the living room door. Silhouetted in the doorway was the figure of the elder Rimmer, his back to her and his arms held wide.

  The one that you seek is not here...leave her.
..she can help you.

  With this, the spectre turned to face Katie. As he did so, she could see behind him the outlines of other people and could hear them babbling incoherently.

  You must bring him to us...the time of reckoning is close...bring the one that condemned us to walk the earth...only he can give us peace.

  “Who are you talking about?” pleaded Katie. “Tell me, who is he? What do you want with him?”

  Vengeance!

  Wednesday Afternoon

  Above the southern Labrador Sea, an unseasonably deep depression was wrapping active weather fronts around its centre. The warm front, marked by lowering cloud and gradually increasing rainfall, was being chased by a cold front which had already formed towering cumulus clouds that brought sharp deluges interspersed with deceptive sunny spells. On the weather charts at the Meteorological Office, the tightly packed isobars, lines of equal atmospheric pressure, told a tale of gale force winds. Reports from ships in the area told of falling barometers: the winds were set to increase to storm force. Warned by long-wave radio reports, vessels in the North Atlantic were scurrying for shelter, running from the towering waves, driven ever higher by the howling tempest.

  Higher still, the Jet stream, the ribbon of winds blowing at up to two hundred miles per hour, steered the maelstrom eastwards, towards Iceland and the British Isles.

  These facts, completely unbeknown to Janice Forsyth, would not have helped the ennui that was accompanied by cramp in her left foot and a dull ache that was spreading upwards from the small of her back. The journey was an endless miasma of tarmac and concrete, broken only by a single stop at a service station for expensive coffee and over-priced petrol. Hours had passed: the M1 had given way to the M6 virtually unnoticed. As the miles clocked by, the atmosphere in the car became more strained. Cedric had sat, silent, staring out of the windscreen, occasionally speaking only to criticise his daughter’s driving.

  Janice had tried switching on the radio, only to have her father crossly turn it off again without so much as a word. That had been somewhere near Coventry; now, having negotiated the permanent tailback past Birmingham, they were moving at a reasonable speed once more through Staffordshire and into Cheshire. It seemed that the further north they travelled, the more her father’s mood blackened. Finally, a full seven hours after leaving Sussex, she espied a sign giving fifty-five miles to Preston. Less than an hour to go: her relief was palpable. She mentioned as much to Cedric, only to be met with little more than a grunt.

  Janice could not help but feel a little frisson of excitement at her proximity to Jack. Once again, she attempted to curb her enthusiasm by reminding herself that Jack had shown no outward sign of interest in her; once again, she smiled inwardly at the thought of being close to him once more.

  The last hour of the journey seemed interminable. Another traffic jam leading up to the Thelwall Viaduct had merged with yet another caused by an accident further north, delaying them by an additional twenty minutes. Finally, the junction that they were seeking came into view, Cedric guided her using Jack’s directions, and just a few moments later they were parked outside the hotel.

  Janice extracted herself from the car, straightening up slowly as her back protested at the abuse. Finally achieving an upright posture, she noticed that her father was still sitting in the car.

  “Come on. Dad,” she pleaded, trying to keep a note of exasperation out of her voice. “We’re here. Let’s get inside.”

  Moving to the back of the car, she lifted the hatch to retrieve their luggage. Taking the two bags out and slamming the lid closed, she was angered by her father’s lack of movement. Dropping the bags, she strode to the passenger door and yanked it open.

  “Dad, stop messing about and...” her words caught in her mouth. Cedric was sat, still staring forward, but tears were streaming from his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, my dear, but I’m afraid that I’m going to be an awful disappointment to you.”

  ***

  “My name’s Rimmer, not Melling. My father, as I said, was Jack Rimmer. Ring any bells?”

  Jack fixed the older man with what he hoped was an icy glare, despite the fear he felt inside. George Williams was stunned into silence for a moment, his mouth half open but his eyes blazing. His face flushed and he began to struggle to his feet, making it half way out of the chair before stopping momentarily then collapsing back into it. When he spoke, his voice was soft; sorrowful instead of the anger that Jack was expecting.

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “But I have it on good authority...” Jack was bluffing, but George brusquely cut him off.

  “It wasn’t me! Shut up and listen! I’ve been waiting sixty-five years to tell this story, so just keep quiet!” He paused for a moment to gather his thoughts. Jack remained silent, but surreptitiously slipped his right hand into his jacket pocket and, feeling with his thumb for the appropriate switch, set his digital recorder to capture the story.

  “There were four of us. Me, Bill Farebrother and George Peters were railwaymen and the other one was, well, he was a spy. Never knew his name: he called himself Sky-something.”

  “Sciron, by any chance?” interrupted Jack, gently.

  “That’s him. How did you...oh, never mind. Anyway, we were all Communists. I still am, as it happens. We decided that since the Germans and the Soviets were allies, we would do whatever we could to disrupt the war effort. We hated Hitler, of course, but we trusted Comrade Stalin. Sciron started turning up at union and Party meetings, and after a few weeks he asked me whether I would help with some more direct action, as he put it.

  “I asked him what he meant, and he told me to meet him in a pub down by the docks the next night. There, he told me that the British government were going to send arms and ammunition to Finland, to spark off another war with the Soviet Union, and did I want to help stop it? Well, of course I did. I had no loyalty to the capitalist bourgeoisie of England, did I? Anyway, there was a ship coming into Preston docks, and a train load of ammunition was supposed to meet it. We knew that we couldn’t get anywhere near the docks, they were too well guarded. So we decided to blow up the railway to the docks. Sciron has a suitcase full of explosives, and between the three of us railwaymen, we knew where they would work best.

  “So we took them to the mouth of the tunnel where the line comes down from Preston station. We set the charges on the track and in the tunnel, then disappeared, sharpish. The explosives worked fine: the line was blocked for a week. Trouble was, there was another Preston station in those days, much closer to the docks, at the bottom of Fishergate Hill. It was the old West Lancashire Railway terminus, and had been closed to passengers for about ten years by then. I found out that the train that we had stopped was going to that station instead, to be unloaded by soldiers on to trucks.

  “I called round at Bill and George’s houses, told them, and we sat by the river trying to think what we could do next. It was Bill’s idea, I think, to derail the train before it could get to the station, so we arranged to meet up after I finished my shift in Penwortham Junction signal box, down at the old Middleforth Junction. There was a bridge there, over Stricklands Lane. We didn’t have much time before the train was due, so I went up the pole route to cut the block lines.”

  “I’m sorry, the what lines? What’s a pole route?” Jack interjected, not having the faintest idea what George was talking about.

  George sighed heavily. “Ever wondered why a train has a red light on the back? Well, in the old mechanical signal boxes, we kept the trains apart using a system called Absolute Block. In simple terms, we wouldn’t let a train on to the bit of line between the signal boxes unless we had seen the tail lamp of the train before go past us. That way we knew that the train was complete when it had passed and hadn’t left a wagon or carriage blocking the line. With me so far?”

  Jack nodded, hoping that his recorder was getting all this.

  “So, rather than ring the next signal box each time we wanted to pass a train t
hrough, we used a device called a block instrument, which had a Morse key on it to make bell signals, a switch so that we could say that our bit of line was clear or had a train in it, and an indicator to give us the same information from the next box. These devices were connected by wires than ran between telegraph poles, called the pole route. So, I climbed one of the telegraph poles to cut the wires between the signal boxes. Now do you understand?”

  “Yes...yes, I think so. But why did my father leave his signal box?”

  “Probably because I cut the wrong wires. I realised when I had climbed down, but I hadn’t cut the block wires at all. I’m not sure to this day what I did cut, but I do know that it was enough to get Jack walking down towards us. I was still up the pole when he arrived, but the others were loosening rails. Sciron had turned up: he must have been following us.”

  “So, if you were up the pole, who killed my father?” demanded Jack, failing to keep a rising nervousness, verging on desperation, out of his voice.