The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

Christopher Fowler Learning to Let Go

Everyone has a story to tell, he reminded himself.

Whether it really happened, to them or to someone else, is irrelevant. What’s important is that they believe some part of it, no matter how small. The most ludicrous and unlikely narrative might yield a telling detail that could lodge in a person’s mind forever.

Harold Masters smiled at the thought and was nearly killed as he stepped off the kerb on the corner of Museum Street. The passing van bounced across a crevice in the tarmac and soaked his trousers, but the doctor barely noticed. He raised his umbrella enough to see a few feet ahead and launched himself perilously into the homegoing traffic, his head clouded with doubts and dreams. Why were his pupils so inattentive? Was he a poor storyteller? How could he be bad at the one thing he loved? Perhaps he lacked the showmanship to keep their interest alive. Why could they create no histories for themselves, even false ones?

Fact and fiction, fiction and fact.

What was the old Hollywood maxim? Nobody knows anything. Not strictly true, he thought. Everyone has some practical knowledge, how to replace a lightbulb, how to fill a tank with petrol. But it was true that most information came second-hand, even with the much-vaunted advent of electronic global communication. You couldn’t believe what you saw on the news or read in the papers, not entirely, because it was written with a subtle political, commercial or demographic slant, so why, he wondered, should you believe what you read in a washing machine manual or see on a computer screen? A taxi hooted as he hailed it, the vehicle’s wing mirror catching at his coat as he jumped up on to the opposite kerb.

Dr Harold Masters, at the end of the twentieth century:

Insect-spindled, grey, dry, disillusioned, unsatisfied, argumentative (especially with his wife, whom he was due to meet on the 18:40 p.m. train from Paddington this evening), hopeful, childish, academic, isolated, impatient, forty-four years old and losing touch with the world outside, especially students (he and Jane had two of their own — Lara, currently at Exeter University, and Tyler, currently no more than a series of puzzling postcards from Nepal).

Dr Harold Masters, collector of tales, fables, legends, limericks, jokes and ghost stories, Professor of Oral History, off to the coast with his wife and best friend to deliver a lecture on fact and fiction, was firmly convinced that he could persuade anyone to tell a story. Not just something prosaic and blunted with repetition, how granny lost the cat or the time the car broke down, but a fantastic tale spun from the air, plotted in the mouth and shaped by hand gestures. All it took, he told himself and his pupils, was a little imagination and a willingness to suspend belief. Peregrine Summerfield disagreed with him, of course, but then the art historian was a disagreeable man at the best of times, and had grown worse since his girlfriend had left him. He made an interesting conversational adversary, though, and Masters looked forward to seeing him tonight.

Thank God we persuaded him to come out and spend the weekend with us, he thought as he left his taxi and walked on to the concourse at Paddington Station. Peregrine had suggested cooking dinner for the doctor and his wife this weekend, but his house doubled as his studio and was cluttered with half-filled tubes of paint, brushes glued into cups of turpentine, bits of old newspaper, pots of cloudy water and stacks of unfinished canvasses. Besides, they were bound to argue about something in the course of the evening, and at least this way they would be on neutral ground. Or rather, running over it, for they had arranged to meet in the dining car of the train.

Masters spent too long in the station bookshop quizzing one of the shelf stackers on her reading habits, and nearly forgot to keep an eye on the time. Luckily the dining carriage was situated right at the platform entrance, and he was able to climb aboard without having to gallop down the platform.

“Darling, how nice of you to be on time for once.” Jane, his wife, kissed him carefully. “I felt sure you’d miss it again. Perry’s not made it yet, either. I bribed the waiter to open up the bar and got you a sherry. God, you’re soaked. I thought you were going to get a taxi. Do you want me to put that down for you?” She pointed to his dripping briefcase.

“Um, no, actually, I’ve something to show you.” Masters seated himself and dug inside, removing a handful of yellowed pages sealed in a clear plastic envelope. “Thought you’d be interested in seeing this. I might include it in the lecture.”

Jane had hoped for a little social interaction with her husband before he plunged back into his ink-and-paper world. Concealing her disappointment, she accepted the package and slipped the pages from their cover. She was good at masking her emotions. She’d had plenty of practice. “What’s it supposed to be?”

“It was found in a desk drawer in a Dublin newspaper office when they were clearing out the building. Miles passed it to me for verification.”

With practised ease, Jane slipped the yellow pills into her cupped hand and washed them down with her sherry. “You really want me to look at this now?”

“Go on, before Perry gets here,” pleaded Masters. He was like an irritating schoolboy sometimes; he would hover over her, driving her mad if she didn’t read it straightaway. Reluctantly, she perused the battered pages.

“Obviously it’s meant to be a missing chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, revealing the fate of Jonathan Harker. But if it was real, it would have to be part of an earlier draft.” Jane tapped the pages level. “The quality of the writing is different, too coarse. It wouldn’t fit with the finished version of the book at all.” She studied the pages again. “It’s a fake. I think it’s pretty unlikely that Bram Stoker would write about oral sex, don’t you? The ink and the paper look convincingly old, though.”

“Damn.” Masters accepted the pages back. “You saw through it without even reading it properly. Miles went to the trouble of using genuine hundred-year-old ink, too. It’s his entry for a new course we’re starting called ‘Hidden Histories’.”

“Did you really expect me to believe it was the genuine article?”

“Well, I suppose so,” he admitted sheepishly.

“Honestly, you and Miles are as bad as each other.”

“Well, I believed it,” he moped. “But then, I always believe the stories I’m told.”

Jane smiled across the top of her glass. “Of course you do. Remember how convinced you were that the Hitler diaries were real?”

“I wanted them to be real. To learn about the inside of that man’s brain, didn’t you?”

“No, Harold, I didn’t.” She looked out of the window. “We’re moving. I hope Perry got on board.”

“Jesus, that was close thing. I wasn’t expecting it to leave on time.” Peregrine Summerfield was standing beside them, attempting to tug his wet tweed jacket away from his body while a waiter pulled ineffectually at a sleeve.

“Perry, you’re getting water over everything.”

“I was trying to choose a paperback. Nearly missed it. On Hallowe’en, too, that would have been an omen, eh? It’s pissing down outside. Hallo, darling.” He kissed Jane. “The tube smelled like an animal sanctuary, all wet hair and coats. Anyone ordered me a drink? What have you got there?” He pointed at the plastic-coated pages on the table as he sat down beside Masters’ wife.

“Something for my lecture on fact and fiction.”

“Oh?” Summerfield thudded down into his chair and eagerly accepted a drink from Jane, carefully guiding the sherry glass over his beard.

“Yes, it purports to be — well, it’s actually — ”

“Jane, you’re looking bloody gorgeous, as ever,” Summerfield interrupted, “beats me how you do it on a shitty night like this. What’s on the menu apart from their god-awful watery vegetables, I wonder? Let’s see if we can get one of these pimply louts to open some wine, shall we?”

He made a beckoning gesture at Masters. “Come on, then, I know you’re dying to tell someone about your talk tomorrow. What have you got planned for these poor students?”

“I thought I’d talk about how fact and fiction have switched places since the war.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you have to look at the history of storytelling. For me, one of the most important dates in the last century was the 28th of December, eighteen hundred and eighty-one.”

Summerfield gave a shrug. “Why?”

“On that day the first public building was illuminated with electricity for the first time ever, at the Savoy Theatre.” Masters leaned forward conspiratorially. “Just think of it. With the click of a switch, twelve hundred electric lamps cast darkness from the room. The myths and mysteries of the past were thrown aside by the bright, cold light of scientific reason. No more shadows. No more hidden fears. No more cautionary tales of bogeymen and ghouls. And in the week of the winter solstice! As if man was determined to prove the dominance of light over darkness!

“Fiction once involved the telling of tales by candlelight. With electricity to help us separate fact from fiction, everything was clearly designated. Before the advent of television life was simpler. You went to work, you came home, you listened to the radio, you read a book; it was hard to mix your home life with your fantasy life. Now, through, the lines are blurred. People have phoney job titles and meaningless career descriptions. They spend their days lying to each other about what they do for a living, trying to make their work sound more interesting than it is, then they go home and watch gritty, realistic soap operas on TV. No wonder their kids are confused about what’s real and what isn’t. People write to soap stars as if they were real characters. And with so many companies spoon-feeding us entertainment, no wonder we’re losing the power to create our own fantasies. No wonder that we’re not believed even when we’ve achieved the fantastic. Inexplicable mysteries occur every day, in every life. It’s how we choose to read them that defines us as individuals.”

“Oh please,” Summerfield exploded, “you might as well ask me to believe in Roswell, Area 51, crop circles, Nessie and all that Fortean stuff. You want to believe in the paranormal because you secretly think there has to be something more to the world than just this.” He pointed out of the window. It had grown dark outside. They had already left the suburbs. A glimmer of buttery light showed above the brow of a passing hill.

“Perhaps I do, but that’s not the point. It’s important to keep an open mind.”

“Then you’ll never make any decisions in your life. You’ll be like a child forever.”

“Wait a minute, let’s simmer down a little.” Jane Masters held up her hand for peace. The table was becoming rowdy earlier than usual. A pair of diners in black plastic witch-hats were staring at them. “Where are we?”

“I’m not sure. It’s too dark to see.”

“Besides,” Summerfield ploughed on, “getting someone to believe in something is simply a matter of theatricality and good presentation. If I wanted you to believe a strange story, I could easily make you do it. Especially on a night like tonight, of all nights.” He emptied the wine bottle. At this rate, thought Masters, we’ll be crocked before we reach the coast. The air pressure in the carriage altered as they entered a tunnel, sucking out the flame from the little orange pumpkin-candle the waiter had placed on their table.

Summerfield turned to the others, his command of the table absolute, and raised his hands. For the next few minutes he told a tale, the odd affair of a businessman who became imprisoned within an ancient London building. At the conclusion he sat back and drained his glass. He looked from Jane to Harold Masters and permitted himself a satisfied smile.

“Well?” he asked. “You do believe me, don’t you? I hope you do, because Jonathan Laine is an old friend of mine, and the story came from his own lips. He couldn’t live with the guilt of his secret, and subsequently killed himself. They found him at the bottom of the Thames, somewhere down at the Dartford estuary. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it.”

They broke the conversation as their starters arrived. The train seemed to be travelling at an unusually laborious pace, and was lumbering through the flat open countryside toward the lights of a distant town. Heavy rain began to thrash the sides of the carriage. It was as if they had entered a car wash. Toward the end of the meal, Masters raised his glass. “I’d like to propose a toast, seeing as it’s Hallowe’en and the perfect time for creepy stories. Jane, perhaps you’d like to tell one.”

“Oh no, Harold, I’d rather not,” begged Jane, throwing a desperate glance at Summerfield.

“Don’t tell me all these years of hearing my stories hasn’t rubbed off on you just a little bit.” Masters gave a pantomime wink.

“I can’t help you, Jane,” said Summerfield. “Go on, join in the spirit of the thing. Show us what being with Harold has taught you.”

Jane shot him a look of betrayal that had the force to knock over a large piece of furniture.

“All right, then,” she conceded, “I’ll tell you a story I first heard many years ago. I was a young girl, impatient to become an adult. It taught me something about the nature of time.”

As the train crept on through the rain she began her story, about a powerful sultan and the winding of a thousand clocks. By the time she had finished, she looked close to tears. “I always liked exotic stories,” she explained, blowing her nose. “They let you forget mundane things for a while.” Harold had already lost interest, and was looking over at the next table. She followed his eyeline and saw three students, a pale-faced girl and two boys, staring at them as if they were mad. “Godby, is that you? And Saunders?” asked Masters.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good God, lad, am I to have no privacy? As if I don’t see enough of you during term. How many more of you are there?”

The first of the group spoke up. His accent was American. “Just me and Kallie, sir. And this is Claire.” A bony, whey-faced girl seated between them gave an awkward smile.

That’s all we needed, thought Jane with a sinking heart, to be stuck with Harold’s students for the rest of the journey. They were doomed never to have time to themselves. These days it seemed that there were always other people in the room all talking at once, colleagues from the museum, hyperactive pupils, aged academics, never any of her friends, never any special private moments together, no wonder she -

“Are you going to tell any more stories?”

“I can’t believe it,” Masters announced to the rest of the group, “surely we’re not in the presence of students displaying an interest? They don’t noticeably do so in any of my lectures. Yes, we may well tell more stories,” he replied, “but you can only join in if you bring a tale of your own to the table.”

“Preferably a true one,” added Summerfield, just being awkward. He did not enjoy the company of the young; they tired him with their fatuous observations, and made him feel fat and old and unattractive. “And you must present it in the form of a proper story, with voices and acting and everything. And most important of all, you have to bring your own wine.”

Outside, sheet lightning illuminated the fields, like someone momentarily flicking on a light. “We’re drinking cider,” the first student replied, holding out his hand. “I’m Ben. From Colorado originally, but I’m studying here now.” The introductions continued around the table. “I’ve got a story from my creative writing course. It’s based on something I read in an old newspaper.” Ben dug into his backpack and pulled out a folder filled with scissored articles. “Here’s the original clipping.” He held it up for everyone to see. “ ‘Human civilisation, it seems, has flourished during a 10,000 year climactic ceasefire. Hostilities may be about to resume. - Independent On Sunday, 18th February 1996.’ We had to develop a story from a factual starting point, and this is what I came up with.”

“All right, but you have to convince us that it might really be true,” warned Masters. “Let’s hear what today’s youth have to offer in the way of narrative ability. The floor of the carriage is yours.”

Ben cleared his throat.

“You could have warned me it was set in the future,” complained Harold Masters after he had finished. “That counts as science fiction and I don’t like science fiction.” The student sheepishly returned the clippings to his bag.

“So you didn’t like the story, Harold?” asked Summerfield, surprising himself with his decision to defend the boy.

“I didn’t say that. It’s just that it can’t be true because it hasn’t happened yet.”

“But it’s a possible future, one of many. Who knows what will happen to us? And who’s to say it isn’t happening right now in a parallel universe?”

“Well, I liked it,” said Jane, refilling her glass. “Although I think the wine has gone to my head a little. Maybe that’s making me more susceptible.”

“Perhaps.” Summerfield checked his watch. “It’s getting late. We should all be growing susceptible. The floodgates to the supernatural world are open tonight, remember. What time do we get to the coast?”

“A little after eleven,” Jane replied. “I informed the hotel of our arrival time. They weren’t terribly happy about it.” She turned to the students. “Where are you three off to?”

“Hallowe’en party. We have friends who rent a house on the edge of Dartmoor.”

“I bet your pals have some interesting tales to tell about mysterious goings-on on the moors, eh?” said Summerfield.

“No.” Claire grimaced as though the idea was the stupidest she had ever heard. “They just smoke dope all day and play video games.”

“Couldn’t you revive the tradition of oral history and get them to make up some stories?” asked Masters.

“Oh for God’s sake, Harold,” Jane exploded, “that’s not what young people want to do with their time.”

“As the father of two children, Jane, I think I can safely say that I know how the juvenile mind operates.”

“Do you? I find that hard to believe. Our offspring are certainly not children, they’re not even teenagers any more, and not only do I not know who Lara has been seeing lately or where Tyler is, I’m not entirely sure I would recognise either of them if they sent me recent photographs.” She was referring to the snapshot their son had mailed from Nepal earlier in the year. The emaciated young man with the shaved head and the wispy beard seemed to bear no resemblance to the thoughtful child who used to sit beside her at night writing endless fantastic stories in his school exercise book.

“I’m working on a story at the moment,” said Kallie.

“It’s not set in the future, is it?” asked Masters cautiously.

“No, London Docklands, in the present day. I read about electromagnetic pollution somewhere. Microwaves can create hot spots, areas rippling with forcefields stronger than the most powerful ocean cross-currents. The story’s about a corporation that accidentally creates them in its offices.”

“Sounds a bit far-fetched.” Summerfield wrestled another wine bottle away from the concerned waiter and overfilled everyone’s glasses as the train hammered over a set of points.

“Big business as the evil bogeyman, it’s an ever-popular target for student paranoia,” complained Masters, unimpressed. “There’s no human dimension in the stories of the young. Too many issue-led morality tales, the sort they have on American television shows, nothing from direct experience.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” snapped Jane, “people can only reflect the times in which they live. There are no traditional heroes left, no explorers, no captains, no warriors. I don’t know why you expect so much from others. One thing that years of listening to you has taught me is that you’re incapable of telling a decent story. It’s a talent you singularly lack, because you have no perception. You’re best off leaving it to other people.”

Shocked by her own honesty, she stopped herself from saying any more. An uncomfortable atmosphere settled on the table. Stung, Masters stared out into the rainswept darkness, avoiding his wife’s angry gaze.

“Come on, chaps, let’s not get personal.” Summerfield clapped his hands together and startled Jane, who was gazing glumly into her wine, hypnotised by the steady movement of the train. Most of the carriage was deserted now. Even the guard was dozing in an end seat, his head lolling on his shoulder. It was as though they had been freed from the shackles of time and place, the coordinates that underpinned their lives slipping quietly away into the night.

Claire shifted across the aisle to the opposite seat and faced them. “I’ve got a story,” she said mischievously. “About some friends of mine who got locked in a pub.” And she told it, although it didn’t sound true.

“Well.” Jane cleared her throat at the end, slightly flummoxed. “That was certainly frank. Although I’m not sure it’s really a fit subject to turn into a dramatic piece.”

“Some people are uncomfortable around the subject of sexuality,” mumbled Claire, meaning older people, meaning her. The senior members of the group were a little embarrassed by the girl’s intensity, although it obviously did not bother Kallie or Ben. Jane drained her glass and pushed back into her seat, unsettled by what she had heard. Masters cleared a spot on the window and peered out. “My watch has stopped. I thought we’d be able to see the sea by now. Doesn’t the train run along the coast for the last hour?”

“There’s not much of a moon.”

“Even so, you should be able to see something.”

The carriage shifted across a set of uneven points, and the overhead lights flickered. Electricity crackled somewhere beneath their feet.

“Maybe we’re on the Hallowe’en train to hell.” Summerfield looked around. Jane was half asleep. Suddenly the train lurched hard and shuddered to a hard halt, its brakes squealing. Wine bottles and glasses toppled on tables, and several pieces of luggage bounced down from the overhead racks.

“What on earth. ”

Jane blearily pulled herself upright. “Are we there?”

“God knows where we are.” The doctor pressed his forehead against the window. “It’s pitch black out there. I can’t see a thing.”

Ben retrieved his backpack from beneath his seat. “I’m going to ask someone.”

“You needn’t bother asking the guard,” said Masters, pointing. “He seems to have wandered off.”

“Maybe he’s dead,” Summerfield stage-whispered, “drugged, shot with a poison dart, a minor character in an Agatha Christie play, someone whose Rosencrantz-like role exists simply to fulfil a duty to the plot.”

“Now who’s muddling fact and fiction?” Masters asked uncomfortably. He turned to his wife. “Are you warm enough?”

“You’ve noticed it too, then.” The heating had gone off. They could hear the steady tick of the radiators cooling all along the carriage. Jane sensed that there was something wrong, as if the world had slipped a notch deeper into darkness. Panic was descending on her like a cold veil of rain. She dug into her purse for the tablets Dr Colson had prescribed, but could not find them. She had taken two earlier. What had she done with the rest of the packet? When she turned to her husband, she found that he was making his way along the aisle toward the exit.

There was something wrong. She needed the tablets to stop her from worrying. She dumped the purse out on to the table and began scrabbling through the contents. The foil sheet glittered between her fingers as she popped out two of the yellow capsules. Claire pulled a mobile phone from her bag and checked it. “No reception,” she said casually. “Anyone else?”

“Wait.” Jane retrieved a small black square from her coat and flipped it open. “None here either. The service isn’t reliable in heavily wooded areas.”

At the front of the carriage, Masters pushed down the train window and peered out into the darkness, his breath condensing in the invading night air. He looked back along the curving track, but could see nothing until the moon cleared the clouds.

When the lunar light finally unveiled the landscape, he saw that there were no other carriages behind them. Theirs had been uncoupled from the main body of the train, and released into what he could only assume was a siding. It sat by itself on a gravelled incline, with low hills rolling away on either side. The sea was not in sight, not where it should have been.

He tried to see ahead in the other direction, and could make out a vague dark shape beside the track, a large, squat building of some sort. Clearly there had been a mistake, some kind of accident. He decided to head back and give a cautious report to the others.

“Well, we have no power to move by ourselves,” said Summerfield, when the situation had been explained. “As I see it, we have two choices. We can stay here and freeze our nuts off, hoping that somebody finds us, or we can head for the building you saw and try to find a telephone that works.”

“I don’t understand how this could have happened.” Jane looked over at the students, annoyed that they could be so calm and still, and by the way they sat apart, implying some kind of private pact of solidarity that did not exist among their elders. “Isn’t anyone worried at all?”

“There’s not really much to worry about,” said Summerfield. “This sort of thing happens all the time. You always read about trains overshooting their stations and passengers having to walk down the track in the dark.”

“I’m not walking along the track — we could be electrocuted!”

“I’m not saying we all do, but someone should. This looks like an old branch line. Suppose a connection came loose and we got separated when we went over the points back there? It could happen, even with advanced information systems. Perhaps nobody will be aware that there’s a carriage missing until the train reaches its destination. Maybe not even then.”

“Harold, I think your imagination is bypassing your common sense,” Summerfield admonished. “Let’s face it, you’ve never been much good in a crisis. Let’s try and be logical about this. The carriage coupling must have made a noise when it disconnected. Doesn’t anyone remember hearing it?”

Masters looked around. “And what happened to the guard? When I last saw him he was asleep in the end seat there.”

They searched the carriage, not that there were any places where someone could be concealed. The toilet was empty. The six of them were the only passengers left on board. Kallie pulled his coat down from the overhead rack. The others began donning their top coats. As they were doing so, the lights began to dim to a misty yellow. Jane released a miserable moan.

“I was going to stay in tonight,” said Claire, checking her hair in the window. “There was a weepie on TV. But I decided to join these two. Right now I could be snuggled up indoors with a tub of ice cream watching Bette Davis going blind.”

“Was Dark Victory on tonight?” asked Kallie. “I love that film.”

“Yeah, but I think it was sandwiched between Curse of the Demon and Tarantula.”

“How can you people just chatter on as if nothing is wrong?” Jane snapped.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Claire agreed, “let’s all panic instead. What exactly is in those little pills you’re taking, by the way?”

“I also suggest we make for the building further along the line,” said Masters. “Unless anybody wants to stay here.”

“I’ve got a torch in my bag,” Kallie offered.

“Well, I’m not stepping foot outside of this carriage.” Jane dropped back into her seat just as the overhead lights faded completely. “Oh, great.”

“Jane, you cannot stay here.”

“Can’t I? Watch me.”

“I just don’t think we should split up, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” Claire cut in, “look what happens when they do that in movies. Somebody gets a spear through them.”

“Please, Jane, you’re making things awkward.”

“Do whatever you want,” snapped Jane. “I’m staying here. You can make your own decision for once in your damned life.”

“Then I say we go,” said Masters, hurt.

“You can’t leave your wife here by herself,” Summerfield protested.

“You’re right, Peregrine. Would you mind staying with her? We shouldn’t be gone too long.”

“But I was going to come with you.” He looked hopelessly at Jane, who was clearly anxious for him to stay. “Oh, all right. We’ll wait for you to return.”

“Okay, who else is coming?” asked Masters. The students already had their bags on their backs. “Are you sure you’ll be all right, darling?”

“I’ll be fine, I’ll settle once you go — ”

“This is Southern England in autumn, Harold, not Greenland in January,” said Summerfield. “Go on, piss off the lot of you, and come back with a decent explanation for all of this.”

The four of them made their way to the end of the carriage, leaving behind Jane Masters and Peregrine Summerfield, who layered themselves in sweaters and nestled beneath an orange car blanket that made them look like a pair of urbanised Buddhist monks.

It was lighter outside. The moon gave the surrounding wooded hills a pallid phosphorescence. A loamy, wooded scent of fungus and decayed leaves hung in the air. The track appeared as a luminous man-made trail in the chaotic natural landscape. They saw that the carriage must have rolled by itself for at least half a mile before coming to a stop at the bottom of the incline. The grass around them was heavily waterlogged, so they stayed in the centre of the track. Kallie kept his torch trained a few feet ahead.

“How far do you think it is?” he asked, pointing to the distant black oblong beside the track.

“I don’t know. Half a mile, not much more.”

“We could have a sing-song,” said Masters. “Claire, what kind of music do you like?”

“Trance techno and hard house,” Claire replied. “You don’t ‘sing’ it.”

“Anyone else know any songs?”

“Please,” she begged, “the first person to start singing gets a rock thrown at them. Ben, tell another story, just a short one.”

“Okay,” said Ben. “The woman it happened to is a friend of my mother’s, and she’s not nuts or anything. At least,” he added darkly, “she wasn’t until this happened.” And he told the tale of the lottery demon.

“Sounds to me like her boyfriend left her and she couldn’t handle it,” said Masters.

Claire gave a scornful hoot. “Typical middle-aged male viewpoint.”

“So what are we saying here, that for every positive action there is a reaction?” asked Kallie, “like you can’t win without making someone else suffer? Thanks for the morality play.”

“No,” said Ben defensively, “just that luck works in both directions. Look at tonight. If we hadn’t booked the dining car and then stayed late over our meals, if we hadn’t joined your table, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess now.”

Something hooted in the rustling hillside at their backs. The black bulk loomed a few hundred yards ahead. Masters was freezing. His left shoe was taking in water. He hated leaving Jane, but knew she was not strong enough to walk through unknown terrain in the dark. “Don’t worry, there will be a logical explanation for this,” he assured the others. “There always is.”

They reached a concrete ramp and began to climb. “It’s a station,” said Ben, shining his torch ahead. “Milford. Ever heard of it?”

They climbed on to the platform and approached the low brick box that functioned as the main building. Masters tried the door of the waiting room, but it was locked.

“Do you think it still operates?” asked Claire. “It’s unmodernised. They’ve got wooden slat benches instead of those curved red steel ones with the little holes. And look at the lights. They’ve got tin shades.”

“It can’t still be used,” said Ben, shining his torch through the window of the ticket hall. “Take a look at this.” The others crowded around in the halo of light. The ticket machines inside had been vandalised. The timetables were heavy with mildew and drooped down like rolls of badly-hung wallpaper. Several of the floorboards were rotten and had fallen through.

“Can you see a phone?” asked Claire.

“You’re joking. If there is one, it’s going to be out of service. Try your mobile again.”

A silence. Only the sound of their breath and the wind in the trees while Claire tried to get a service signal. She tipped the device to the light. “Still nothing.”

“We should at least try to work out where we are. Did anyone see if we passed Exeter?”

“I don’t know, Ben,” Kallie suddenly shouted, surprising everyone. “This was your idea, remember? I’m from the city, I don’t visit places with trees unless they’re the indoor kind in big pots, like the ones you get in malls. If you told me to expect rabid fruit-bats and rats the size of Shetland ponies I’d believe you because I don’t know about outdoor stuff, this is not me, all right?”

“You might have told us before you decided to tag along,” said Claire. “I’m freezing. What are we going to do?”

“I guess we either walk back to the carriage or pass the night here,” Masters replied.

“I’m not walking all the way back. Anyway, there’s no more heat or light in the carriage than there is here. Oh shit, listen to that.” From above came the sound of rain on slates.

“That does it, we all spend the rest of the night in the waiting room,” said Ben firmly. “It makes the most sense.”

“Oh, you get to decide what’s good for everyone, do you?” Claire snapped. “Of course, you’re American.”

“Just what is that supposed to mean?”

“Just that you always boss people about.”

“Only if we know what’s best for them.”

“You’re trying to make up for being beaten in Vietnam and the Gulf by telling everyone else what to do.”

“At least we’re capable of making life-decisions, which is more than you guys. I suggest you try it sometime.”

“Great advice coming from a country where people eat with their fingers and send money to TV evangelists.”

“Now you’re being offensive.”

“Come on, you two, give it a rest.” Kallie pushed between them and led the way back to the waiting room. They had to break the lock to get the door open, but found a dry fireplace with dusty bundles of wood stacked beside it.

“I read that bird-watchers use places like these as hides,” said Masters, digging out his lighter. Outside, the rain began pounding the roof. It took a few minutes for the wood to catch, but soon they had a moderate amount of light and heat. Paint hung in strips from the ceiling, but the floor appeared to have been recently swept.

“I’m going to use the john,” said Ben, rising from the corner where he had been seated glaring balefully at Claire. “If you hear a crash it’s me kicking the lock off, okay? Give me your flashlight.” He pulled the waiting room door open. “Hey, listen to that rain.”

“This is like the station inBrief Encounter.” Claire hunched down inside her overcoat. Kallie had already fallen asleep. “I’ve seen it dozens of times on TV and I always want the ending to be different.”

“I’m surprised you like it at all,” said Masters. “Surely your generation prefers more recent stuff. You’d rewrite the ending, then?”

“Only in my head. Don’t you ever do that, change the endings of things?”

“All the time, Claire.”

Kallie fell asleep in front of the fire. The rain was still pounding the platform roof. “Ben’s been a long time. Do you think we should go and look for him?”

“No, it’s okay, I’ll go,” said Masters, forcing his aching limbs into action. He checked his watch but condensation clouded the face. As he picked his way along the dark platform, he tried to imagine what had been responsible for stranding them here. The carriage had been coupled at both ends. There had been a guard in the carriage with them. None of them had been paying much attention — they’d been too busy grandstanding each other with crazy stories. Perhaps they’d missed some kind of emergency announcement. But didn’t the staff always come around and check the carriages if there was a problem? In this day and age surely people were protected from accidents of fate? Wet leaves plastered the backs of his legs as he walked. He reached the door of the ladies’ toilet, but found that it was still locked. There was no sign that Ben had ever reached this far.

He turned slowly around and studied the dim forms about him. No sound but for wind and rain. But there was a faint glimmer of light, no more than a pencil beam, from somewhere near the far end of the platform. As he reached it, he realised that it had to be from Ben’s torch, and it was coming from the underpass to the other platform. Wary of slipping on the wet steps, he descended.

“They’ve probably found a telephone by now and called someone,” said Summerfield vaguely. “There’s really nothing to worry about.” He and Jane sat side by side in the pitch-black carriage, protected from moonlight by the hill behind them, as the art historian emptied the last of the wine into his glass. At least she had stopped crying now.

“I want to know why this is happening,” she said finally.

“That’s like trying to explain the moon, or the course of people’s lives.”

“It’s all so random, and it shouldn’t be. We’ve been telling each other stories all night, but they’re not like life because they have plots. Nothing is left to chance. All this — there’s no plot here, just a stupid accident, someone not doing their job properly.” She wiped her nose with a tissue. “I don’t want to be worried all my life. I’m tired of always thinking of others. When the children were ill, when my mother died, when Harold had his breakdown I was always the strong one. I had the answers and the energy to go on. It seems like there was never a moment in my life when I wasn’t prepared to face disappointment. I feel like a fictional cliché, the academic’s neurotic wife, and only I know that I’m not in someone else’s story, that I’m real. Well, I don’t want to be like that any more. I want someone else to take care of the worrying for a while. I want to go away somewhere warm and quiet. Where could I go, Peregrine?”

“I know a story about a special place,” he whispered.

“Is it real, though?”

“No, of course not. I don’t know anything about real places.”

“But you must do. You’re so much more practical than Harold.”

“Darling, I’m not real, any more than you are. In your heart you must know that.” And she knew he was right, for she remembered nothing before boarding the train.

Masters reached the bottom of the dripping tunnel and peered ahead. He could see nothing but the glare of the flashlight. “Ben?” he called, and the reverberation of his voice was lost in the falling rain.

The torch lay in a shallow puddle. He picked it up and allowed the beam to cross the walls. There was no sign that anyone had been here. He continued through the underpass to the other side, but a rusted iron trellis barred the way to the opposite platform, so he made his way back.

When he reached the waiting room once more, he found it deserted. The fire burned low in the grate. Kallie’s jacket was still lying across one of the benches, but the three students had disappeared as completely as if they had never existed. Masters was a rational man. He tried to remember their faces, but found he could no longer conjure their features in his mind. Shocked, he dropped down into the nearest seat and tried to understand what was happening.

They had been on a train, and the carriage had become separated, and they had walked to the station. Jane and Peregrine were still waiting for him, that much he remembered. He had just decided to walk back to them when he heard a distant pinging of the lines. Impossible, of course, but it sounded as though a train was coming. He ran out on to the platform and peered into the murky night as the sound grew louder.

Now he saw the bright, empty carriages swaying around the bend ahead, heard the squeal of brakes as the locomotive pulled into the station and came to a sudden stop before him. The green-painted carriage threw yellow rectangles of light on the platform. It bore the initials GWR on its doors. The compartments were separate and lined with colourful prints of British holiday resorts. The seats had antimacassars on their backs. The train was a flawless reproduction of one from his childhood, but why? And how? And surely it occupied the same line as their poor stalled carriage?

He had barely managed to climb inside and shut the door before it lurched off once more, running to its timetable as surely as Alice’s white rabbit, and as Masters fell back into the seat he thought; this is a memory, an idealised moment from the past, correct in the details down to the curious acrid smell of such carriages and the itchy bristles of the seat, but not something that’s really happening now — merely a culmination of fragments seen and experienced, not fact but fiction, someone else’s fiction.

He pushed down the window and leaned from it, searching the track ahead. Where the stalled carriage should have been was nothing at all, no carriage, no track, no hills or sea, no night or day, just nothing.

And he thought; I’ve fallen asleep like one of my students, that’s all it is. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s simply that I’ve lost the ability to tell reality and fantasy apart. Right now it seems I’m fictional but I know I’m real, for I have real memories. He thought hard and tried to recall something, a moment so exact and specific to his life that it would prove he was real, so that the fiction would break up around him like an unfinished short story. He tried to think of Jane and Peregrine, whom he knew had been having an affair for nearly two years, but could not conjure a single past memory from either of them. He thought about this evening, and the way it conformed to the most absurd conventions of a typical Hallowe’en short story; the stormy night, the train ride, the mystery destination, the tale-telling guests. Stay calm, he told himself, and remember, remember, he repeated as the train hurtled toward a stomach-dropping oblivion, remember something real and true, remember the last time you were truly happy.

And then a real moment came to him.

A dead, hot day in mid-July. The air is countrified, dandelion spores rising gently on warm thermals, the lazy drone of a beetle alighting on dust-dulled hedge leaves. A suburban summertime, where the South London solstice settles in a sleepy yellow blanket over still front gardens.

Westerdale Road has its characters; the bad-tempered widow who appears in her doorway at the sound of a football being kicked against a wall, the deaf old couple whose pond freezes over every winter, so that they have to thaw their goldfish from a block of ice in a tin bath beside the fire. Some of the houses have Anderson shelters in their gardens, converted to tool-sheds in time of peace. Others still keep chickens, a distinctive sound and smell that excites the neighbourhood cats. Further along the street is a “simple” man who sits on his front step smiling inanely in the bright sunlight.

Masters forced himself to remember, to stop himself from ceasing to exist. These weren’t his memories, he realised with a shock, they belonged to someone else entirely. What were they doing in his head?

Many street names conjure pastoral imagery, “Combedale Road”, “Mycenae Road”, “ Westcombe Hill”. At noon the silent sunlight scorches the streets. Housewives stay deep within the little terraced houses, polishing sideboards, making jellies, listening to wirelesses in cool shadowed rooms. Their men are at work, mopping their brows in council offices, patrolling machine-room floors, filling out paperwork in dusty bank chambers. Their children are all at school, reciting their tables, catching beanbags, and in the break following lunch there is a special treat; the teacher unlocks a paddock behind the playground of Invicta Infants, and here is a haven from the hot concrete, a small square meadow of close-cropped emerald grass hemmed in with chicken-wire. Here we are allowed to lie on our stomachs reading comics, passing them between each other. It is peaceful, warm and quiet (the teachers do not tolerate the vulgarity of noise) and although we are in a suburban street, it feels like the heart of the countryside. And here is the heart of all remembered happiness.

Confused, Masters began crying as the carriages dissolved around him and tumbled away through the night sky, the foundations of his life evaporating as he fought to recall anything at all that made him human.

What was it about this area, what did it possess to make it so special, so irreplaceable and precious? A few roads, a pond behind a wall where sticklebacks were trapped in jars and dragonflies skimmed the oily water, a railway line with a narrow pedestrian tunnel beneath it, a station of nicotine-coloured wood and rows of green tin lamps along the platform. Some odd shops; a perpetually deserted furniture showroom, damp and dark, its proprietor standing ever-hopefully at the door, a model railway centre, a tobacconist selling sweets from large jars, a rack of Ellisdons Jokes on a stand, none of them living up to their packet descriptions, a chemist with apothecary bottles filled with coloured water and a scale machine, green and chrome with a wicker weighing basket, a bakery window filled with pink and white sugar mice, iced rounds, meringues and Battenburg cake. An advertisement painted on a wall, for varnish remover of some kind, depicting a housewife happily pouring boiling water from a kettle on to a shiny dining room table. Cinema posters under wire. A hardware shop with tin baths hanging either side of the door.

This confluence of roads and railway lines is bordered by an iron bridge and an embankment filled with white trumpet-flowered vines, and populated by families with forgotten children’s names-, Laurence, Percy, Pauline, Albert, Wendy, Sidney. No ambitions and aspirations here, just the stillness of summer, the faint drone of insects, bees landing on flowerbeds in the police station garden, tortoises and chickens sheltering from the heat beneath bushes, cats asleep in shop windows with yellow acetate sunscreens, and life being lived, a dull, sensible kind of life, unfolding like a flower, the day loosening as slowly as a clock spring — an implacable state which children thought would never change, but which is now lost so totally, so far beyond reach that it might have occurred before Isis ruled the Nile.

The lecturer had no memories of his own because he did not truly exist. Just like any flesh and blood human being, the creation that was Harold Masters reached his time unexpectedly and without resolution, and so dissolved into a tumble of threadbare tissues. With no plot momentum to drive him and no memories of his own, just borrowings from the mind of his creator, he turned over and over into nothing and was gone. And in that moment, he was the most real.

The storyteller in the mind’s eye of Harold Masters sits at his chipped writing desk staring up at shelves of books, his eye alighting on an old 78 rpm record, and it dawns on him that he took Masters’ name from the label, which features a dog and a gramophone. He wonders how many other characters’ names came from spines of books and recollections of friends. A video of Brief Encounter, a copy ofDracula, a photograph of New York, a lottery ticket, a drawing of a phoenix, a brandy bottle, a hotel brochure, a dog’s collar, an Arsenal scarf, childhood notes. He looks for the patterns that shape his own life and finds only tarmac, concrete and steel, the dead carapace of something lost to all but his mind’s eye.

His own past is as dead as his — and Masters’ — recollection of it.

Dr Beeching closed the branch lines, road planners cut the streets in half, smashed down the houses, constructed swathes of concrete through the hills, the roads, the railways, the gardens, and like a bush cut through at the root, everything familiar died. The shops of his childhood were boarded up, homes falling to the wrecking ball, friends divided, families relocated. Now oil-drenched vibrations pulse the once-still air. A bright patch of pavement remains where once he stood with his face to the sun, free as the sky.

That was his reality.

Everything now is fiction.

They feel different, he notes, fact and fantasy. The former rooted in observation and experience, the latter bound by publishers’ conventions. Sitting in the small cold study, the storyteller determines to leave behind his outmoded world of locked-room mysteries and vampire soaps in search of something real. But how hard will it be to leave such a cosy niche for a place with endless horizons and no parameters? Even letting go has a learning process.

He pushes back his chair and goes to the open window, inventing as hard and as fast as he can. It is a beautiful spring morning, and the breeze causes his eyelids to flutter. There is brine in the air. He looks down from the window-ledge at the thin white clouds racing far beneath, then loosens his belt and steps out of his trousers. It only takes a moment to remove his T-shirt, pants and socks. Drawing a deep breath, he walks confidently out on to the rope-covered surface of the springboard, determined not to show that he is scared.

How the releasing of shackles makes his body feel lighter than air.

Poor old Harold Masters, not being allowed to finish his story. It was so obvious to see where his tale was going that there was simply no reason for the author to finish it himself, not when his readers could put together the clues and do the job for him. The burden is always on the author to rediscover ways of surprising his audience, and that task has been fulfilled, albeit in a rather unorthodox manner.

It’s good to be standing at the edge, he tells himself, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. There’s a new world ahead. As the old century closes, he can leave behind his plots and characters. There are some excellent practitioners of the art who seem more than happy to close up the store behind him. There will always be the attraction of lies.

His body is pale and unused to such exposure. The clouds below appear as if seen from an airplane window. He moves further to the end of the board and gives a few experimental bounces. Then he bends his knees, jumps into the air, comes down on to the board and straightens his legs. The tension released in the board springs him high into the air, so high he feels he could punch a hole in the sky. For a brief moment it seems as if he could stay like this forever.

And for those who are left back on the ground, blinking in the sharp sunlight, those who are all too familiar with where they have been, the question for them now is how not to look back, how not to look down, but where to begin.

Where to begin.

And the answer, of course, is right — here.