Night Train

by David Quantick

  As the noise got louder, Garland saw that the lights seemed to be getting bigger, or nearer, she wasn’t sure which. Now the noise was so loud that Banks was also screaming, whether in distress or physical pain she couldn’t say. The lights were flashing pools of colour: whatever they were made by was all around now, wave after wave of exploding splashes of illumination that reminded Garland, crazily, more of jellyfish than stars.

  She barely had time to marvel that she could remember what a jellyfish was when, with a firework’s fizz, one of the lights exploded right outside the window. Banks screamed and clenched himself into a tight mass as ball of light after ball of light slammed against the windows. The screeching now was a high-pitched intolerable whine as the balls of light increased in size and frequency, until soon the carriage was drenched in a constant unceasing barrage of light and sound. Garland closed her eyes and tried to block her ears, but still the noise and light got in. She could feel Banks shaking next to her, and she was about to risk her own sight and hearing and put her arms round him when, as abruptly as it had started, everything stopped.

  * * *

  They sat for a while, not moving, not sure if it was going to start again. The carriage lights came back on, accompanied by the faint hum of the refrigerated cabinet. Whatever it was, thought Garland, must have generated a field that stopped the power to the carriage.

  Slowly, Banks stopped shaking.

  “Are you OK?” she asked him.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said.

  * * *

  Banks insisted on returning to the dead compartment. He returned with the soldier’s kitbag, which he filled with cans.

  “You need to kick that habit,” Garland said.

  Banks shook his head

  “Cans are everything,” he replied, and hoisted the kitbag over his shoulder.

  Garland looked around to see if there was anything else worth taking. She found a drawer in the counter which contained some paper clips, a few pens and a small pad of paper covered in figures.

  “Looks like this was a real train at some point,” she said. “These must be price calculations.”

  “Interesting,” said Banks. “What’s that?”

  Garland looked down. Something had rolled out from the back of the drawer. It was a keyring. On it were a couple of small keys and a miniature torch. She flicked the switch.

  “It works,” she said, and put it in her pocket.

  * * *

  Banks led the way to the end of the carriage. Garland looked at the door. “Onwards, I guess,” she said.

  Banks gripped the door handle.

  “Ready to leave home?” she said.

  “No,” said Banks, and opened the door.

  * * *

  As they stepped into the next carriage, they were met by a gust of cold air. Banks and Garland moved forward with difficulty, because the windows of the carriage had been either removed or stove in, and a freezing wind buffeted them from either side.

  But this was not what made them hurry. The carriage was empty, and there were no signs of life present. There was nothing at all there, in fact, save for a large cage in the middle of the carriage. It was made of steel, with thin, strong bars and a door from which hung a broken padlock. Inside the cage (not that they went in) there was a heap of discoloured straw.

  Garland and Banks only had time for a brief look at the cage before passing it as quickly as possible and finding the door to the next carriage.

  * * *

  This door opened easily, and the reason for this was not hard to see, as the handle had been wrenched off. There was a deep jagged track where the handle once was, and the door itself was barely on its hinges.

  Banks and Garland stopped for a moment.

  “Whatever did that to the door might be through there,” said Banks.

  “Whatever did that is gone,” Garland replied. She pointed down at the gap between the two coaches. The same track was gouged into the metal footplate with a dark stain beside it.

  “I’d say it got out and in its hurry to escape it fell between the carriages,” said Garland. It was more what she wanted to believe than what she actually believed, but still.

  “If you say so,” said Banks, clearly just as keen to be convinced as she was. “This door looks OK.”

  The next door did look OK. There were no scratches on it and no blood. Banks turned the handle and they went in.

  * * *

  The next carriage, to their relief, was completely ordinary. It was just a carriage. There were seats, tables, luggage racks and windows with glass in them.

  “Wait here,” said Banks, who seemed to have appointed himself as a kind of forward scout. He searched the carriage with such a serious expression that Garland found herself suppressing laughter again.

  After Banks had stood on his tiptoes and run his fingers across the luggage racks, and come up with nothing but dust, he nodded at Garland.

  “Clear,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she replied, forcing back a smile.

  Banks sat down at a table and opened the kitbag.

  “You want a juice?” he asked.

  Garland joined him.

  “What kind you got?” she said.

  Banks gave her a look.

  “Apple and plum, what else?”

  “Just testing,” she said. “I thought you might have changed the choices.”

  Banks gave her an apple juice and took a plum juice for himself. She stabbed the straw into the carton, drank some and looked at her reflection in the window.

  “What did you think you’d look like?” said Banks.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Before you knew what you did look like,” Banks said. “After you… woke up, but before you saw your face in a mirror. What did you think you’d look like?”

  Garland considered this for a moment.

  “You first,” she said.

  “All right,” said Banks. He turned his face to the window and raised his hands to his reflection.

  “Before – I don’t know really,” he said. “I’m just me, you know. That’s how I saw myself, if I saw myself at all. When I woke up – after, you know, after the panic… when I’d calmed down I had a lot to think about, like where was I and –”

  “We’ve been through this,” said Garland, and was surprised at how hard she sounded.

  “Another word I remember from before,” Banks said sharply, “is empathy. You know that one?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Garland, and she was. “Go on.”

  “All right,” Banks said. “After I’d gone through the first confusion, and I’d worked out I wasn’t, you know, dead, I found the cans.”

  “I bet that was a big deal for you,” said Garland.

  “I like the cans,” Banks said defensively. “The cans kept me going. This is, what, your first day?”

  “Maybe,” she said. Now it was her turn to sound defensive. “Hard to know what a day is, here.”

  “You’ll know,” he said. “A day is when you’re awake. Night is when you sleep. Doesn’t matter if it’s an hour or six hours, night is when you sleep and day is when you don’t.”

  “I’ll remember that,” she said. “So – how many days have you been here?”

  “It’s hard to be precise,” said Banks.

  “Don’t be precise, then,” she said. “Sorry, forgot. Empathy.”

  “Right,” he said. “I would say – given I wasn’t counting at first, then I thought it might be good to count, so –”

  He looked down at his enormous hands, and for a moment Garland wondered if he was counting on his fingers.

  “How many then?” she said. “Six? Seven?”

  “More than that,” said Banks. “About fifty.”

  There was silence in the carriage for a moment or two, and then Garland said, “Fuck. Off.”

  * * *

  She leaned over towards him, not conscious she was doing it.

  “You’ve been here for
fifty days?”

  Banks shrugged.

  “Like I say, it’s hard to count. And the days aren’t exactly –”

  “I thought you were going to say a week or something.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “More than a week.”

  “Wow,” said Garland. “No wonder there’s hardly any cans left.”

  She drank some juice.

  “The first time I saw my face,” Banks said, “was in one of those –” and he pointed to a glass divider by the luggage shelf of the compartment. “I remember because it was also the first time the lights went out.”

  “The lights have gone out before?” said Garland.

  “This really is your first day,” Banks said. “Yeah. The lights go out for a few seconds most days, sometimes a few minutes. Never more than that. You learn how to sleep with them on.”

  “I used to sleep with the light on as a kid,” said Garland, and wondered again how she knew that.

  “This really isn’t the same thing. Strip lights are different to a night light by your bed. You have to find stuff to cover your eyes with. Here…”

  Banks reached into his pocket and pulled out a creased strip of cardboard.

  “Made a sleep mask,” he explained. “From a box.”

  She looked at it. It was just a piece of card, with dents torn out presumably to fit Banks’s ears.

  “Pretty good,” she said.

  “Not really,” Banks replied, and put it away. “I’m thinking of using something more flexible. Like socks.”

  “I feel we’ve strayed,” said Garland. “Tell me about seeing your face some more.”

  In the empty carriage, under the strip lights, on a train hurling itself through endless night, talking to this bony, bald giant, Garland found she was almost at ease. It was a strange feeling, but these days, what wasn’t?

  “The lights went off,” Banks continued, “and I felt scared. I was alone, I was lost, and I hadn’t found the cans yet.”

  “Pretty bad,” Garland agreed.

  “I remember I just stood there. I didn’t even get the chance to adjust my eyes to the darkness before there was this flash from outside –”

  “Yeah, what are those things?” said Garland.

  “I have theories,” said Banks. “Anyway, there I was, in the glass. I saw my face, for the first time.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What did I do? You’ve seen my face. What do you think I did?”

  Banks looked at her.

  “I screamed.”

  He put his juice down.

  “For about a minute. I stood there looking at my reflection and I just screamed.”

  “It’s not such a bad face. First time I saw it, it was shouting at me and its owner was trying to hurt me and I didn’t think, yeesh, look at that face.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re different,” Banks said.

  “How so?”

  “When I… met you, you were just leaving a carriage full of dead people. Whose clothes and bags you had just gone through. And when I attacked you, you just lay there and laughed.”

  Garland felt uneasy.

  “Shock. That’s all it was,” she said, knotting her plastic drink straw.

  “You’re not in shock,” Banks said. “I know what shock is. I saw it in my own face. I didn’t see it in yours.”

  “I think you’re overreacting. About your face, I mean. It’s unusual, I give you that. But it’s your face. It suits you, your body. If you had, I don’t know, a cute heart-shaped boy face, you’d look wrong.” Garland was aware she was overdoing it a bit, but she meant what she was saying.

  “No.”

  “Yes. I’m just saying, it suits you because it’s your face.”

  “That’s it, though,” Banks said. “It’s not my face.”

  Garland turned to an imaginary waiter.

  “Can we get the check, please? I suddenly have to go.”

  Banks looked puzzled.

  “Who are you talking to?” he asked.

  “I was just making a joke,” she said.

  “To the person who isn’t there?”

  “To myself,” she said.

  “Why would you do that?”

  Banks seemed genuinely concerned.

  “OK,” she said. “I have empathy issues, you have humour issues. Looks like we’re a great team.”

  Garland finished her drink with a definitive slurp.

  “I really, really don’t want to ask this,” she said. “But when you said –”

  “– about my face not being my face?” Banks finished for her. “It’s true. This –” he indicated his face with a long bony finger. “It’s not my face.”

  She sat back, and laughed.

  “Is this another joke to yourself?” said Banks.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve just realised you set me up. This whole conversation was just you softening me up for the whole ‘this isn’t my face’ business.”

  “It’s a difficult thing,” said Banks.

  “Yeah,” agreed Garland. “I certainly wouldn’t open with it. How do you know it isn’t your face?”

  “I just do,” Banks said.

  “Good reasoning,” Garland said. “Convincing.”

  “I know it’s not logical,” said Banks, “but I know this isn’t my face.”

  “Wait, this isn’t like body dysmorphia?”

  “What’s that?”

  “When you think your leg or something isn’t yours so you try and get it amputated.”

  “No,” Banks said. “I don’t want to lose my face. I don’t have another one to replace it.”

  “So if this isn’t your face, what happened to your old one?”

  “I can’t remember,” Banks said. “All I know is this isn’t it.”

  There was a period of silence then. Garland found it hard to think of more things to ask Banks about his face.

  She said, “When I saw my face – earlier, in the bathroom back there – I was surprised.”

  “How?” Banks said. “Was it not your face?”

  She smiled. “No, it’s my face all right.”

  “How do you know?” Banks asked, tight-lipped.

  “I don’t,” she said. “I just looked at my reflection and I thought, oh, OK, there you are. Like I wasn’t expecting to see someone I know, but when I did, it wasn’t a surprise. You know?”

  “Not really,” said Banks. “Like I said, not my face.”

  Garland ignored this. “I think I remember my face being less tired, but that makes sense, because I am tired. And I was wearing make-up, and I was clean, but, you know, circumstances. The only thing…” and now she frowned.

  “Yes?” said Banks. “What’s wrong? You look upset,” he explained.

  Garland was upset. When she finally spoke, she said, “When I looked at my face – the thing I remembered about it that was different, really different, was…”

  “Was what?”

  “It was younger,” Garland said. “I was younger.”

  * * *

  Now Banks was silent.

  “How much younger?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Not a lot. I mean, not like twenty years, or like I was a kid. But there were, last time I remember seeing it, fewer lines, and things like that.”

  “OK,” said Banks. “So you’re old and I have someone else’s face. Great.”

  Garland looked at him.

  “I didn’t say I was old,” she said.

  Banks wasn’t listening.

  “Hey,” she said, “I said –”

  “Be quiet,” Banks said.

  “What?”

  “Be quiet.”

  Banks was listening to something.

  “I can’t hear anything.”

  “That’s because you’re talking.”

  “What is it?”

  “Listen.”

  She listened, and then she heard it. Faint, fuzzy, rhythmic.

  “It’s music,” she said. For some reason,
this was the strangest thing yet.

  “It’s coming from up there,” said Banks. He stood up, head cocked to one side.

  “Here,” he said, indicating a small round grille in the ceiling.

  “It’s a speaker,” said Garland. She stood on the seat and put her ear to the grille. Barely audible drums fizzed out and she could hear a voice.

  “Miami, Florida… Atlanta, Georgia…”

  “What is it?” asked Banks.

  “It’s a song,” she said. “Or a list. Or both.”

  “Baltimore… Philadelphia…”

  “Do you know these places?”

  “New York City…”

  “I think so,” said Garland. “I’m not sure.”

  They listened to the voice for a few more minutes, then –

  “And don’t –”

  The music stopped, mid-phrase.

  “What was that?” Garland said.

  “Like you said.” Banks shrugged. “Music. Not what I’d call music.”

  “What do you call music?”

  “No idea,” admitted Banks. “But not like that.”

  “I liked it,” said Garland.

  If Banks had something more to add, she never found out. At that moment the train seemed to fly into the air.

  With a grinding lurch, the carriage rose up and leapt. They couldn’t see outside for the dark, but they could tell by the shift in gravity and the position of the flaring lights outside that something had dramatically changed.

  “Hold onto something!” Banks shouted.

  Garland gripped the back of a seat as the train rattled and then, gut-sickeningly, started to race downwards.

  “What’s happening?” she shouted. “Are we falling?”

  Banks, his fingers curled round the rim of the luggage rack, shook his head.

  “I don’t think so,” he shouted. “It’s some kind of run.”

  “What? What do you mean, run?”

  Then she understood what he meant. The train was somehow trying to gather momentum, first climbing – could it be? – some sort of steep ramp, and then throwing itself down a different, even steeper ramp.

  “Here it comes,” shouted Banks. “Are you scared of heights?”

  She shrugged. “I have no idea!”

  At that moment, the train shot down its presumed ramp and they were surrounded by fire.

  No, not surrounded, she thought. The fire wasn’t around them, but below. It was bright enough to illuminate the night outside them for a few metres in all directions. She ran to the window.