The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 18

Looking down now, Selkirk watched the tide reach the tips of his boots again. How much time had he wasted during his dock-working years imagining – hoping – that Amalia might be hidden behind some stack of crates or in a nearby alley, having sought him out after leaving Winsett?

Angry now, Selkirk picked his way between rocks to the foot of the tower. A surge of whitewater caught him off guard and pasted his trousers to his legs, and the wind promptly froze them with a gust.

Up close, the tower looked even worse. Most of the bricks had crumbled and whitened, the salt air creating blotchy lesions like leper spots all over them. The main building still stood straight enough, but even from below, with the wind whipping the murky winter light around, Selkirk could see filth filming the windows that surrounded the lantern room, and cracks in the glass.

The keeper’s quarters squatted to the left of the light tower, and looked, if possible, even more disheveled. Along the base, lime had taken hold, sprouting up the wooden walls like algae. Or maybe it was algae. This would not be somewhere the Service salvaged. Cape Roby Light would have to come down, or simply be abandoned to the sea.

Selkirk rapped hard on the heavy oak door of the tower. For answer, he got a blast of wind nearly powerful enough to tip him off the rocks. Grunting, he rapped harder. Behind him, the water gurgled, the way spermaceti oil sometimes did as it bubbled, and though he knew it wasn’t possible, Selkirk would have sworn he could smell it, that faint but nauseating reek his uncle swore was imaginary, because that was the glory of spermaceti oil, the whole goddamn point: it had no significant odor. Every day of that dismal fall, though, Selkirk’s nostrils had filled anyway. Blood, whale brain, desiccated fish. He began to pound.

Just before the door opened, he became aware of movement behind it, the slap of shoed feet descending stone steps. But he didn’t stop knocking until the oak swung away from him, the light rushing not out from the lighthouse but in from the air.

He knew right away this was her, though he’d never actually seen her. Her black hair twisted over her shoulders and down her back in tangled strands like vines, just as Amalia had described. He’d expected a wild, white-haired, wind-ravaged thing, bent with age and the grief she could not shake. But of course, if Amalia’s story had been accurate, this woman had been all of 20 during Selkirk’s year here, and so barely over 18 when she’d been widowed. She gazed at him now through royal blue eyes that seemed set into the darkness behind her like the last sunlit patches in a blackening sky.

“Mrs Marchant,” he said. “I’m Robert Selkirk from the Lighthouse Service. May I come in?”

For a moment, he thought she might shut the door in his face. Instead, she hovered, both arms lifting slightly from her sides, as though she were considering taking wing. Her skirt was long, her blouse pale yellow, clinging to her square and powerful shoulders.

“Selkirk,” she said. “From Winsett?”

Astonished, Selkirk started to raise his hand. Then he shook his head. “From the lighthouse service. But yes, I was nephew to the Winsett Selkirks.”

“Well,” she said, the Portuguese tilt to her words stirring memories of the Blubber Pike whalers, the smoke and the smell in there. Abruptly, she grinned. “Then you’re welcome here.”

“You may not feel that way in a few minutes, Mrs Marchant. I’m afraid I’ve come to . . .”

But she’d stepped away from the door, starting back up the stairs and beckoning him without turning around. Over her shoulder, he heard her say, “You must be frozen. I have tea.”

In he went, and stood still in the entryway, listening to the whistling in the walls, feeling drafts rushing at him from all directions. If it weren’t for the roof, the place would hardly qualify as a dwelling anymore, let alone a lifesaving beacon and refuge. He started after the woman up the twisting stairs.

Inside, too, the walls had begun to flake and mold, and the air flapped overhead, as though the whole place were full of nesting birds. Four steps from the platform surrounding the lantern room, just at the edge of the spill of yellow candlelight from up there, Selkirk slowed, then stopped. His gaze swung to his right and down toward his feet.

Sitting against the wall with her little porcelain ankles sticking out of the bottom of her habit and crossed at the ankle, sat a doll of a nun. From beneath the hood of the doll’s black veil, disconcertingly blue eyes peered from under long lashes. A silver crucifix lay in the doll’s lap, and miniature rosary beads trailed back down the steps, winking pale yellow and pink in the flickering light like seashells underwater. And in fact, they were bits of shell.

Glancing behind him, Selkirk spotted the other dolls he’d somehow missed. One for every other stair, on alternating walls. These were made mostly from shell, as far as he could tell. Two of them were standing, while a third sat with her legs folded underneath her and a stone tucked against her ear, as though she were listening. At the top of the steps, still another nun dangled from her curved, seashell hands on the decaying wooden banister. Not only were her eyes blue, but she was grinning like a little girl. Momentarily baffled to silence, Selkirk stumbled the rest of the way up to the lantern room. This time, he froze completely.

Even on this dark day, even through the dust and salt that caked the window glass inside and out, light flooded the chamber. None of it came from the big lamp, which of course lay unlit. Assuming it still worked at all. Across the platform, a pair of white wicker chairs sat side by side, aimed out to sea. Over their backs, the keeper had draped blankets of bright red wool, and beneath them lay a rug of similar red. And on the rug stood a house.

Like most of the dolls, it had been assembled entirely from shells and seaweed and sand. From its peaked roof, tassels of purple flowers hung like feathers, and all around the eves, gull feathers hung like the decorative flourishes on some outrageous society woman’s hat. On the rug – clearly, it served as a yard – tiny nuns prowled like cats. Some lay on their backs with their arms folded across their crucifixes, soaking up the light. One was climbing the leg of one of the wicker chairs. And a group – at least five – stood at the base of the window, staring out to sea.

And that is what reminded Selkirk of his purpose, and brought him at least part way back to himself. He glanced around the rest of the room, noting half a dozen round wooden tables evenly spaced around the perimeter. On each, yellow beeswax candles blazed in their candlesticks, lending the air a misleading tint of yellow and promising more heat than actually existed here. Mostly, the tables held doll-making things. Tiny silver crosses, multi-colored rocks, thousands of shells. The table directly to Selkirk’s right had a single place setting laid out neatly upon it. Clean white plate, fork, spoon, one chipped teacup decorated with paintings of leaping silver fish.

Selkirk realised he was staring at a crude sort of living sundial. Each day, Mrs Marchant began with her tea and breakfast, proceeded around the platform to assemble and place her nuns, spent far too long sitting in one or the other of the wicker chairs and staring at the place where it had all happened, and eventually retired, to do it all over again when daybreak came. In spite of himself, he felt a surprisingly strong twinge of pity.

“That hat can’t have helped you much,” Mrs Marchant said, straightening from a bureau near her dining table where she apparently kept her tea things. The cup she brought matched the one on her breakfast table, flying fish, chips and all, and chattered lightly on its saucer as she handed it to him.

More grateful for its warmth than he realised, Selkirk rushed the cup to his mouth and winced as the hot liquid scalded his tongue. The woman stood a little too close to him. Loose strands of her hair almost tickled the back of his hand like the fringe on a shawl. Her blue eyes flicked over his face. Then she started laughing.

“What?” Selkirk took an uncertain half-step back.

“The fish,” she said. When he stared, she laughed again and gestured at the cup. “When you drank, it looked like they were going to leap right into your teeth.”

Selkirk glanced at the side of the cup, then back to the woman’s laughing face. Judging by the layout and contents of this room, he couldn’t imagine her venturing anywhere near town, but she clearly got outside to collect supplies. As a result, her skin had retained its dusky continental coloration. A beautiful creature, and no mistake.

“I am sorry,” she said, meeting his eyes. “It’s been a long time since anyone drank from my china but me. It’s an unfamiliar sight. Come.” She started around the left side of the platform. Selkirk watched, then took the opposite route, past the seaweed table, and met the woman in the center of the seaward side of the platform, at the wicker chairs. Without waiting for him, she bent, lifted a tiny nun whose bandeau hid most of her face like a bandit’s mask off the rug, and settled in the right-hand chair. The nun wound up tucked against her hip like a rabbit.

For whom, Selkirk wondered, was the left-hand chair meant, on ordinary days? The obvious answer chilled and also saddened him, and he saw no point in wasting further time.

“Mrs Marchant—”

“Manners, Mr Selkirk,” the woman said, and for the second time smiled at him. “The sisters do not approve of being lectured to.”

It took him a moment to understand she was teasing him. And not like Amalia had, or not exactly like. Teasing him hadn’t made Amalia any happier. He sat.

“Mrs Marchant, I have bad news. Actually, it isn’t really bad news, but it may feel that way at first. I know – that is, I really think I have a sense – of what this place must mean to you. I did live in town here once, and I do know your story. But it’s not good for you, staying here. And there are more important considerations than you or your grief here, anyway, aren’t there? There are the sailors still out there braving the seas, and . . .”

Mrs Marchant cocked her head, and her eyes trailed over his face so slowly that he almost thought he could feel them, faintly, like the moisture in the air but warmer.

“Would you remove your hat, Mr Selkirk?”

Was she teasing now? She wasn’t smiling at the moment. Increasingly flustered, Selkirk settled the teacup on the floor at his feet and pulled his sopping hat from his head. Instantly, his poodle’s ruff of curls spilled onto his forehead and over his ears.

Mrs Marchant sat very still. “I’d forgotten,” she finally said. “Isn’t that funny?”

“Ma’am?”

Sighing, she leaned back. “Men’s hair by daylight.” Then she winked at him, and whispered, “The nuns are scandalised.”

“Mrs Marchant. The time has come. The Lighthouse Service – perhaps you’ve heard of it – needs to—”

“We had a dog, then,” Mrs Marchant said, and her eyes swung toward the windows.

Selkirk closed his eyes, feeling the warmth of the tea unfurling in his guts, hearing the longing underneath the play in the keeper’s voice. When he opened his eyes again, he found Mrs Marchant still staring toward the horizon.

“We named the dog Luis. For my father, who died at sea while my mother and I were on our way here from Lisbon. Charlie gave him to me.”

After that, Selkirk hardly moved. It wasn’t the story, which Amalia had told him, and which he hadn’t forgotten. It was the way this woman said her husband’s name.

“He didn’t have to work, you know. Charlie. His family built half the boats that ever left this place. He said he just wanted to make certain his friends got home. Also, I think he liked living in the lighthouse. Especially alone with me. And my girls.”

“Smart fellow,” Selkirk murmured, realised to his amazement that he’d said it aloud, and blushed.

But the keeper simply nodded. “Yes. He was. Also reckless, in a way. No, that is wrong. He liked . . . playing at recklessness. In storms, he used to lash himself to the railing out there.” She gestured toward the thin band of metal that encircled the platform outside the windows. “Then he would lean into the rain. He said it was like sailing without having to hunt. And without leaving me.”

“Was he religious like you?” Selkirk hadn’t meant to ask anything. And Mrs Marchant looked completely baffled. “The . . .” Selkirk muttered, and gestured at the rug, the house. Sand-convent. Whatever it was.

“Oh,” she said. “It is a habit, only.” Again, she grinned, but unlike Amalia, she waited until she was certain he’d gotten the joke. Then she went on. “While my father lived here, my mother and I earned extra money making dolls for the Sacred Heart of Mary. They gave them to poor girls. Poorer than we were.”

The glow from Mrs Marchant’s eyes intensified on his cheek, as though he’d leaned nearer to a candle flame. Somehow, the feeling annoyed him, made him nervous.

“But he did leave you,” he said, more harshly than he intended. “Your husband.”

Mrs Marchant’s lips flattened slowly. “He meant to take me. The Kendall brothers – Kit was his best and oldest friend, and he’d known Kevin since the day Kevin was born – wanted us both to come sail with them, on the only beautiful January weekend I have ever experienced here. 1837. The air was so warm, Mr Selkirk, and the whales gone for the winter. I didn’t realise until then that Charlie had never once, in his whole life, been to sea. I’d never known until that weekend that he wanted to go. Of course I said yes. Then Luis twisted his foreleg in the rocks out there, and I stayed to be with him. And I made Charlie go anyway. He was blonde like you. Did you know that?”

Shifting in his seat, Selkirk stared over the water. The sky hung heavy and low, its color an unbroken blackish grey, so that he no longer had any idea what time it was. After noon, surely. If he failed to conclude his business here soon, he’d never make it out of Winsett before nightfall, horse or no. At his feet, the nuns watched the water.

“Mrs Marchant.”

“He wasn’t as tall as you are, of course. Happier, though.”

Selkirk swung his head toward the woman. She took no notice.

“Of course, why wouldn’t he be? He had so much luck in his short life. More than anyone deserves or has any right to expect. The Sacred Heart of Mary sisters always taught that it was bad luck to consort with the lucky. What do you make of that, Mr Selkirk?”

It took Selkirk several seconds to sort the question, and as he sat, Mrs Marchant stood abruptly and put her open palm on the window. For a crazy second, just because of the stillness of her posture and the oddly misdirected tilt of her head – toward land, away from the sea – Selkirk wondered if she were blind, like her dolls.

“I guess I’ve never been around enough luck to say,” Selkirk finally said.

She’d been looking down the coast, but now she turned to him, beaming once more. “The sisters find you an honest man, sir. They invite you to more tea.”

Returning to the bureau with his cup, she refilled it, then sat back down beside him. She’d left the nun she’d had before on the bureau, balancing in the center of a white plate like a tiny ice skater.

“The morning after they set sail,” she said, “Luis woke me up.” In the window, her eyes reflected against the grey. “He’d gotten better all through the day, and he’d been out all night. He loved to be. I often didn’t see him until I came outside to hang the wash or do the chores. But that day, he scratched and whined against the door. I thought he’d fallen or hurt himself again and hurried to let him in. But when I did, he raced straight past me up the stairs. I hurried after, and found him whimpering against the light there. I was so worried that I didn’t even look at the window for the longest time. And when I did . . .”

All the while, Mrs Marchant had kept her hands pressed together in the folds of her dress, but now she opened them. Selkirk half-expected a nun to flap free of them on starfish wings, but they were empty. “So much whiteness, Mr Selkirk. And yet it was dark. You wouldn’t think that would be possible, would you?”

“I’ve lived by the sea all my life,” Selkirk said.

“Well, then. That’s what it was like. A wall of white that shed no light at all. I couldn’t even see the water. I had the lamp lit, of course, but all that did was emphasise the difference between in here and out there.”

Selkirk stood. If he were Charlie Marchant, he thought, he would never have left the Convent, as he’d begun to think of the whole place. Not to go to sea. Not even to town. He found himself remembering the letters he’d sent Amalia during his dock-working years. Pathetic, clumsy things. She’d never responded to those, either. Maybe she’d been trying, in her way, to be kind.

“I’ve often wondered if Luis somehow sensed the ship coming,” Mrs Marchant said. “We’d trained him to bark in the fog, in case a passing captain could hear but not see us. But maybe that day Luis was just barking at the whiteness.

“The sound was unmistakable when it came. I heard wood splintering. Sails collapsing. A mast smashing into the water. But there wasn’t any screaming. And I thought . . .”

“You thought maybe the crew had escaped to the lifeboats,” Selkirk said, when it was clear Mrs Marchant was not going to finish her sentence.

For the first time in several minutes, Mrs Marchant turned her gaze on him. Abruptly, that luminous smile crept over her lips. “You would make the most marvelous stuffed giraffe,” she said.

Selkirk stiffened. Was he going to have to carry this poor, gently raving woman out of here? “Mrs Marchant, it’s already late. We need to be starting for town soon.”

If she understood what he meant, she gave no sign. “I knew what ship it was.” She sank back into her wicker chair, the smile gone, and crossed her legs. “What other vessel would be out there in the middle of winter? I started screaming, pounding the glass. It didn’t take me long to realise they wouldn’t have gone to the rowboats. In all likelihood, they’d had no idea where they were. The Kendall boys were experienced seamen, excellent sailors, Mr Selkirk. But that fog had dropped straight out of the heart of the sky, or maybe it had risen from the dead sea bottom, and it was solid as stone.

“And then – as if it were the fogbank itself, and not Charlie’s boat, that had run aground on the sandbar out there – all that whiteness just shattered. The whole wall cracked apart into whistling, flying fragments. Just like that, the blizzard blew in. How does that happen, Mr Selkirk? How does the sea change its mind like that?”

Selkirk didn’t answer. But for the first time, he thought he understood why the sailors in the Blubber Pike referred to those teasing, far-off flickers of light the way they did.

“I rushed downstairs, thinking I’d get the rowboat and haul myself out there and save them. But the waves . . . they were snarling and snapping all over themselves, and I knew I’d have to wait. My tears were freezing on my face. I was wearing only a dressing gown, and the wind whipped right through me. The door to the lighthouse was banging because I hadn’t shut it properly, and I was so full of fury and panic I was ready to start screaming again. I looked out to sea, and all but fell to my knees in gratitude.

“It was there, Mr Selkirk. I could see the ship. Some of it, anyway. Enough, perhaps. I could just make it out. The prow, part of the foredeck, a stump of mast. I turned around and raced back inside for my clothes.

“Then I ran all the way to town. We never kept a horse here, Charlie didn’t like them. The strangest thing was this sensation I kept having, this feeling that I’d gotten lost. It was impossible; that path out there was well-traveled in those days, and even now, you had no trouble, did you? But I couldn’t feel my skin. Or . . . it was as though I had come out of it. There was snow and sand flying all around, wind in the dunes. So cold. My Charlie out there. I remember thinking, This is what the Bruxsa feels like. This is why she torments travelers. This is why she feeds. You know, at some point, I thought maybe I’d become her.”

Pursing his lips, Selkirk stirred from the daze that had settled over him. “Brucka?”

“Bruxsa. It is like . . . a banshee? Do you know the word? A ghost, but not of anyone. A horrid thing all its own.”

Was it his imagination, or had the dark outside deepened toward evening? If he didn’t get this finished, neither one of them would make it out of here tonight. “Mrs Marchant, perhaps we could continue this on the way back to town.”

Finally, as though he’d slapped her, Mrs Marchant blinked. “What?”

“Mrs Marchant, surely you understand the reason for my coming. We’ll send for your things. You don’t have to leave today, but wouldn’t that be easiest? I’ll walk with you. I’ll make certain—”

“When I finally reached Winsett,” Mrs Marchant said, her stare returning as that peculiar, distant smiled played across her mouth, “I went straight for the first lit window I saw. Selkirk’s. The candle-maker. Your uncle.”

Selkirk cringed, remembering those hard, overheated hands smashing against the side of his skull.

“He was so kind,” she said, and his mouth quivered and fell open as she went on. “He rushed me inside. It was warm in his shop. At the time, it literally felt as though he’d saved my life. Returned me to my body. I sat by his fire, and he raced all over town through the blizzard and came back with whalers, sailing men. Charlie’s father, and the Kendalls’ older brother. There were fifteen of them, at least. Most set out immediately on horseback for the point. Your uncle wrapped me in two additional sweaters and an overcoat, and he walked all the way back out here with me, telling me it would be all right. By the time we reached the lighthouse, he said, the sailors would already have figured a way to get the boys off that sandbar and home.”

To Selkirk, it seemed this woman had reached into his memories and daubed them with colors he knew couldn’t have been there. His uncle had been kind to no one. His uncle had hardly spoken except to complete business. The very idea of his using his shop fire to warm somebody, risking himself to rouse the town to some wealthy playboy’s rescue . . .

But of course, by the time Selkirk had come here, the town was well on its way to failing, and his aunt had died in some awful, silent way no one spoke about. Maybe his uncle had been different, before. Or maybe, he thought with a sick quivering deep in his stomach, he was just an old lecher, on top of being a drunk.

“By the time we got back here, it was nearly dusk,” Mrs Marchant said. “The older Kendall and four of the sailors had already tried four different times to get the rowboat away from shore and into the waves. They were all tucked inside my house, now, trying to stave off pneumonia.

“ ‘Tomorrow,’ one of the sailors told me. ‘Tomorrow, please God, if they can just hold on. We’ll find a way to them.’

“And right then, Mr Selkirk. Right as the light went out of that awful day for good, the snow cleared. For one moment. And there they were.”

A single tear crept from the lashes of her right eye. She was almost whispering, now. “It was like a gift. Like a glimpse of him in heaven. I raced back outside, called out, leapt up and down, we all did, but of course they couldn’t hear, and weren’t paying attention. They were scrambling all over the deck. I knew right away which was Charlie. He was in the bow, all bundled up in a hat that wasn’t his and what looked like three or four coats. He looked like one of my nuns, Mr Selkirk.” She grinned again. “The one with the bandeau that hides her face? I was holding her in my lap before. I made her in memory of this one moment.”

Selkirk stared. Was the woman actually celebrating this story?

“I could also see the Kendall boys’ hair as they worked amidships. So red, like twin suns burning off the overcast.

“ ‘Bailing,’ Charlie’s father told me. ‘The ship must be taking on water. They’re trying to keep her where she is.’ ”

Again, Mrs Marchant’s smile slid, but didn’t vanish entirely. “I asked how long they could keep doing that. But what I really wondered was how long they’d already been at it. Those poor, beautiful boys.

“Our glimpse lasted two minutes. Maybe even less. I could see new clouds rising behind them. Like a sea-monster rearing right out of the waves. But at the last, just before the snow and the dark obliterated our sight of them, they all stopped as one, and turned around. I’m sorry, Mr Selkirk.”

She didn’t wipe her face, and there weren’t any tears Selkirk could see. She simply sat in her chair, breathing softly. Selkirk watched her with some relief.

“I remember the older Kendall boy standing beside me,” she finally said. “He was whispering. ‘Aw, come on boys. Get your gear on: The Kendalls, you see . . . they’d removed their coats. And I finally realised what it meant, that I could see their hair. They hadn’t bothered with their hats, even though they’d kept at the bailing. Remember, I’ve been around sailors all my life, Mr Selkirk. All the men in my family were sailors, long before they came to this country. My father had been whaling here when he sent for us. So I knew what I was seeing.”

“And what was that?”

“The Kendalls had given up. Less than 100 yards from shore, they’d given up. Or decided that they weren’t going to make it through the night. Either rescue would come before dawn, or it would no longer matter. The ship would not hold. Or the cold would overwhelm them. So they were hastening the end, one way or another.

“But not Charlie. Not my Charlie. He didn’t jump in the air. He just slumped against the railing. But I know he saw me, Mr Selkirk. I could feel him. Even under all those hats. I could always feel him. Then the snow came back. And night fell.

“The next time we saw them, they were in the rigging.”

Silently, Selkirk gave up the idea of escaping Winsett until morning. The network of functioning lights and functional keepers the Service had been toiling so hard to establish could wait one more winter evening.

“This was midday, the second day. That storm was a freak of nature. Or perhaps not natural at all. How can that much wind blow a storm nowhere? It was as though the blizzard itself had locked jaws on those boys – on my boy – and would not let go. The men who weren’t already racked by coughs and fever made another five attempts with the rowboat, and never got more than fifteen feet from shore. The ice in the air was like arrows raining down.

“Not long after the last attempt, when almost everyone was indoors and I was rushing about making tea and caring for the sick and trying to shush Luis, who had been barking since dawn, I heard Charlie’s father cry out and hurried outside.

“I’d never seen light like that, Mr Selkirk, and I haven’t since. Neither snow nor wind had eased one bit, and the clouds hadn’t lifted. But there was the ship again, and there were our boys. Up in the ropes, now. The Kendalls had their hats back on and their coats around them, tucked up tight together with their arms through the lines. Charlie had gone even higher, crouching by himself, looking down at the brothers or maybe the deck. I hoped they were talking to each other, or singing, anything to keep their spirits up and their breath in them. Because the ship . . . have you ever seen quicksand, Mr Selkirk? It was almost like that. This glimpse lasted a minute, maybe less. But in that time, the hull dropped what looked like another full foot underwater. And that was the only thing we saw move.”

“I don’t understand,” Selkirk said. “The sandbar was right there. It’s what they hit, right? Or the rocks right around it? Why not just climb down?”

“If they’d so much as put their feet in that water, after all they’d been exposed to, they would have frozen on the spot. All they could do was cling to the ropes.

“So they clung. The last healthy men came out behind Charlie’s father and me to watch. And somehow, just the clear sight of the ship out there inspired us all. And the way the mast was tilting toward the surface got us all angry and active again.

“We got close once, just at dark. The snow hadn’t cleared, but the wind had eased. It had been in our ears so long, I’m not sure we even realised it at first. The sickest men, including the older Kendall boy, had been run back to town on horseback, and we hoped other Winsett whalers might be rigging up a brig in the harbor to try reaching Charlie’s ship from the sea-side, rather than from land, the moment the weather permitted. I kept thinking I’d heard new sounds out there, caught a glimpse of the mast of a rescue vessel. But of course it was too soon, and we couldn’t really hear or see anything but the storm, anyway. And in the midst of another round of crazy, useless running about, Charlie’s father grabbed my wrist and whirled me around to face the water and said, ‘Stop. Listen.’

“And I understood finally that I heard nothing. Sweet, beautiful nothing. Right away I imagined that I should be able to hear Charlie and the Kendalls through the quiet. Before anyone could stop me, I was racing for the shore, my feet flying into the frozen water and my dress freezing against my legs, but I could hardly feel it. I was already so cold, so numb. We all were. I started screaming my husband’s name. It was too shadowy and snowy to see. But I went right on screaming, and everyone else that was left with us held still.

“But I got no answer. If it weren’t for the swirling around my feet, I might have thought even the water had had its voice sucked from it.

“And then.”

Finally, for the first time, Mrs Marchant’s voice broke. In a horrible way, Selkirk realised he envied her this experience. No single hour, let alone day, had ever impressed itself on him the way these days had on her, except perhaps for those few fleeting, sleet-drenched moments with Amalia. And those had cast an uglier, darker shadow.

When Mrs Marchant continued, the quaver had gone, as though she’d swallowed it. “It was to be the last time I heard his real voice, Mr Selkirk. I think I already knew that. And when I remember it now, I’m not even certain I really did hear it. How could I have? It was a croak, barely even a whisper. But it was Charlie’s voice. I’d still swear to it, in spite of everything, even though he said just the one word. ‘Hurry.’

“The last two remaining men from Winsett needed no further encouragement. In an instant, they had the rowboat in the water. Charlie’s dad and I shoved off while they pulled with all their might against the crush of the surf. For a minute, no more, they hung up in that same spot that had devilled all our efforts for the past thirty-six hours, caught in waves that beat them back and back. Then they just sprung free. All of a sudden, they were in open water, heaving with all their might toward the sandbar. We were too exhausted to clap or cheer. But my heart leapt so hard in my chest I thought it might break my ribs.

“As soon as they were twenty feet from shore, we lost sight of them, and later, they said all they saw was blackness and water and snow, so none of us knows how close they actually got. They were gone six, maybe seven minutes. Then, as if a dyke had collapsed, sound came rushing over us. The wind roared in and brought a new, hard sleet. There was a one last, terrible pause that none of us mistook for calm. The water had simply risen up, you see, Mr Selkirk. It lifted our rescue rowboat in one giant black wave and hurled it halfway up the beach. The two men in the boat got slammed to the sand. Fortunately – miraculously, really – the wave hadn’t crested until it was nearly on top of the shore, so neither man drowned. One broke both wrists, the other his nose and teeth. Meanwhile, the water poured up the beach, soaked us all, and retreated as instantaneously as it had come.”

For the first time, Selkirk realised that the story he was hearing no longer quite matched the one Amalia had told him. Even more startling, Amalia’s had been less cruel. No rescues had been attempted because none had been possible. No real hope had ever emerged. The ship had simply slid off the sandbar, and all aboard had drowned.

“Waves don’t just rise up,” he said.

Mrs Marchant tilted her head. “No? My father used to come home from half a year at sea and tell us stories. Waves riding the ghost of a wind two years gone and two thousand leagues distant, roaming alone like great, rogue beasts, devouring everything they encounter. Not an uncommon occurrence on the open ocean.”

“But this isn’t the open ocean.”

“And you think the ocean knows, or cares? Though I will admit to you, Mr Selkirk. At the time, it seemed like the sea just didn’t want us out there.

“By now, the only two healthy people at Cape Roby Point were Charlie’s father and me. And when that new sleet kept coming and coming . . . well. We didn’t talk about it. We made our wounded rowers as comfortable as we could by the fire on the rugs inside. Then we set about washing bedding, setting out candles. I began making this little sister here—” as she spoke, she toed the doll with the white bandeau, which leaned against her feet “—to keep him company in his coffin. Although both of us knew, I’m sure, that we weren’t even likely to get the bodies back.

“My God, the sounds of that night. I can still hear the sleet drumming on the roof. The wind coiling around the tower. All I could think about was Charlie out there, clinging to the ropes for hope of reaching me. I knew he would be gone by morning. Around 2:00 a.m., Charlie’s father fell asleep leaning against a wall, and I eased him into a chair and sank down on the floor beside him. I must have been so exhausted, so overwhelmed, that I slept, too, without meaning to, right there at his feet.

“And when I woke . . .”

The Kendalls, Selkirk thought, as he watched the woman purse her mouth and hold still. Had he known them? It seemed to him he’d at least known who they were. At that time, though, he’d had eyes only for Amalia. And after that, he’d kept to himself, and left everyone else alone.

“When I woke,” Mrs Marchant murmured, “there was sunlight. I didn’t wait to make sense of what I was seeing. I didn’t think about what I’d find. I didn’t wake Charlie’s father, but he came roaring after me as I sprinted from the house.

“We didn’t even know if our rowboat would float. We made straight for it anyway. I didn’t look at the sandbar. Do you find that strange? I didn’t want to see. Not yet. I looked at the dunes, and they were gold, Mr Selkirk. Even with the blown grass and seaweed strewn all over them, they looked newly born.

“The rowboat had landed on its side. The wood had begun to split all down one side, but Charlie’s father thought it would hold. Anyway, it was all we had, our last chance. Without a word, we righted it and dragged it to the water, which was like glass. Absolutely flat, barely rolling over to touch the beach. Charlie’s father wasn’t waiting for me. He’d already got into the boat and begun to pull. But when I caught the back and dragged myself in, he held position just long enough, still not saying a single thing. Then he started rowing for all he was worth.

“For a few seconds longer, I kept my head down. I wanted to pray, but I couldn’t. My mother was a Catholic, and we’d worked for the nuns. But somehow, making the dolls had turned God doll-like, for me. Does that make sense? I found it impossible to have faith in anything that took the face we made for it. I wanted some other face than the one I knew, then. So I closed my eyes and listened to the seagulls squealing around, skimming the surface for dead fish. Nothing came to me, except how badly I wanted Charlie back. Finally, I lifted my head.

“I didn’t gasp, or cry out. I don’t think I even felt anything.

“First off, there were only two of them. The highest was Charlie. He’d climbed almost to the very top of the main mast, which had tilted over so far that it couldn’t have been more than twenty-five feet above the water. Even with that overcoat engulfing him and the hat pulled all the way down over his ears, I could tell by the arms and legs snarled in the rigging that it was him.

“ ‘Is he moving, girl?’ Charlie’s father asked, and I realised he hadn’t been able to bring himself to look, either. We lurched closer.

“Then I did gasp, Mr Selkirk. Just once. Because he was moving. Or I thought he was. He seemed to be settling . . . resettling . . . I can’t explain it. He was winding his arms and legs through the ropes, like a child trying to fit into a hiding place as you come for him. As if he’d just come back there. Or maybe the movement was wind. Even now, I don’t know.

“Charlie’s father swore at me and snarled his question again. When I didn’t answer, he turned around. ‘Lord Jesus,’ I heard him say. After that, he just put his head down and rowed. And I kept my eyes on Charlie, and the empty blue sky beyond him. Anywhere but down the mast, where the other Kendall boy hung.

“By his ankles, Mr Selkirk. His ankles, and nothing more. God only knows what held him there. The wind had torn his clothes right off him. He had his eyes and his mouth open. He looked so pale, so thin, nothing like he had in life. His body had red slashes all over it, as though the storm had literally tried to rip him open. Just a boy, Mr Selkirk. His fingertips all but dancing on the water.

“Charlie’s father gave one last heave, and our little boat knocked against the last showing bit of the Kendalls’ ship’s hull. The masts above us groaned, and I thought the whole thing was going to crash down on top of us. Charlie’s father tried to wedge an oar in the wood, get us in close, and finally he just rowed around the ship and ran us aground on the sandbar. I leapt out after him, thinking I should be the one to climb the mast. I was lighter, less likely to sink the whole thing once and for all. Our home, our lighthouse, was so close it seemed I could have waded over and grabbed it. I probably could have. I leaned back, looked up again, and this time I was certain I saw Charlie move.

“His father saw it, too, and he started screaming. He wasn’t even making words, but I was. I had my arms wide open, and I was calling my husband. ‘Come down. Come home, my love.’ I saw his arms disentangle themselves, his legs slide free. The ship sagged beneath him. If he so much as touched that water, I thought, it would be too much. The cold would have him at the last. He halted, and his father stopped screaming, and I went silent. He hung there so long I thought he’d died after all, now that he’d heard our voices one last time. Then, hand over hand, so painfully slowly, like a spider crawling down a web, he began to edge upside-down over the ropes. He reached the Kendall boy’s poor, naked body and bumped it with his hip. It swung out and back, out and back. Charlie never even looked, and he didn’t slow or alter his path. He kept coming.

“I don’t even remember how he got over the rail. As he reached the deck, he disappeared a moment from our sight. We were trying to figure how to get up there to him. Then he just climbed over the edge and fell to the sand at our feet. The momentum from his body gave the wreck a final push, and it slid off the sandbar into the water and sank, taking the Kendall boy’s body with it.

“The effort of getting down had taken everything Charlie had. His eyes were closed. His breaths were shallow, and he didn’t respond when we shook him. So Charlie’s father lifted him and dropped him in the rowboat. I hopped in the bow with my back to the shore, and Charlie’s father began to pull desperately for the mainland. I was sitting calf-deep in water, cradling my husband’s head facedown in my lap. I stroked his cheeks, and they were so cold. Impossibly cold, and bristly, and hard. Like rock. All my thoughts, all my energy, all the heat I had I was willing into my fingers, and I was cooing like a dove. Charlie’s father had his back to us, pulling for everything he was worth. He never turned around. And so he didn’t . . .”

Once more, Mrs Marchant’s voice trailed away. Out the filthy windows, in the grey that had definitely darkened into full-blown dusk now, Selkirk could see a single trail of yellow-red, right at the horizon, like the glimpse of eye underneath a cat’s closed lid. Tomorrow the weather would clear. And he would be gone, on his way home. Maybe he would stay there this time. Find somebody he didn’t have to pay to keep him company.

“It’s a brave thing you’ve done, Mrs Marchant,” he said, and before he could think about what he was doing, he slid forward and took her chilly hand in his. He meant nothing by it but comfort, and was surprised to discover the sweet, transitory sadness of another person’s fingers curled in his. A devil’s smile of a feeling, if ever there was one. “He was a good man, your husband. You have mourned him properly and well.”

“Just a boy,” she whispered.

“A good boy, then. And he loved you. You have paid him the tribute he deserved, and more. And now it’s time to do him the honor of living again. Come back to town. I’ll see you somewhere safe and warm. I’ll see you there myself, if you’ll let me.”

Very slowly, without removing her fingers, Mrs Marchant raised her eyes to his, and her mouth came open. “You . . . you silly man. You think . . . But you said you knew the story.”

Confused, Selkirk squeezed her hand. “I know it now.”

“You believe I have stayed here, cut off from all that is good in the world, shut up with my nuns all these years like an abbess, for love? For grief?”

Now Selkirk let go, watching as Mrs Marchant’s hand fluttered before settling in her lap like a blown leaf. “There’s no crime in that, surely. But now—”

“I’ve always wondered how the rowboat flipped,” she said, in a completely new, expressionless tone devoid of all her half-sung tones, as he stuttered to silence. “All the times I’ve gone through it and over it, and I can’t get it straight. I can’t see how it happened.”

Unsure what to do with his hands, Selkirk finally settled them on his knees. “The rowboat?”

“Dead calm. No ghost wave this time. We were twenty yards from shore. Less. We could have hopped out and walked. I was still cooing. Still stroking my husband’s cheeks. But I knew already. And I think his father knew, too. Charlie had died before we even got him in the boat. He wasn’t breathing. Wasn’t moving. He hadn’t during the whole, silent trip back to shore. I turned toward land to see exactly how close we were. And just like that I was in the water.

“If you had three men and were trying, you couldn’t flip a boat that quickly. One of the oars banged me on the head. I don’t know if it was that or the cold that stunned me. But I couldn’t think. For a second, I had no idea which way was up, even in three feet of water, and then my feet found bottom, and I stood and staggered toward shore. The oar had caught me right on the scalp, and a stream of blood kept pouring into my eyes. I wasn’t thinking about Charlie. I wasn’t thinking anything except that I needed to be out of the cold before I became it. I could feel it in my bloodstream. I got to the beach, collapsed in the sun, remembered where I was and what I’d been doing, and spun around.

“There was the boat, floating right-side up, as though it hadn’t flipped it all. Oars neatly shipped, like arms folded across a chest. Water still as a lagoon beneath it. And neither my husband nor his father anywhere.

“I almost laughed. It was impossible. Ridiculous. So cruel. I didn’t scream. I waited, scanning the water, ready to lunge in and save Charlie’s dad if I could only see him. But there was nothing. No trace. I sat down and stared at the horizon and didn’t weep. It seemed perfectly possible that I might freeze to death right there, complete the event. I even opened the throat of my dress, thinking of the Kendall boys shedding their coats that first day. That’s what I was doing when Charlie crawled out of the water.”

Selkirk stood up. “But you said—”

“He’d lost his hat. And his coat had come open. He crawled right up the beach, sidewise, like a crab. Just the way he had down the rigging. Of course, my arms opened to him, and the cold dove down my dress. I was laughing, Mr Selkirk. Weeping and laughing and cooing, and his head swung up, and I saw.”

With a single, determined wriggle of her shoulders, Mrs Marchant went completely still. She didn’t speak again for several minutes. Helpless, Selkirk sat back down.

“The only question I had in the end, Mr Selkirk, was when it had happened.”

For no reason he could name, Selkirk experienced a flash of Amalia’s cruel, haunted face, and tried for the thousandth time to imagine where she’d gone. Then he thought of the dead town behind him, the debris disappearing piece by piece and bone by bone into the dunes, his aunt’s silent death. His uncle. He’d never made any effort to determine what had happened to his uncle after Amalia vanished.

“I still think about those boys, you know,” Mrs Marchant murmured. “Every day. The one suspended in the ropes, exposed like that, all torn up. And the one that disappeared. Do you think he jumped to get away, Mr Selkirk? I think he might have. I would have.”

“What on earth are you—?”

“Even the dead’s eyes reflect light,” she said, turning her bright and living ones on him. “Did you know that? But Charlie’s eyes . . . Of course, it wasn’t really Charlie, but . . .”

Selkirk almost leapt to his feet again, wanted to, wished he could hurtle downstairs, flee into the dusk. And simultaneously he found that he couldn’t.

“What do you mean?”

For answer, Mrs Marchant cocked her head at him, and the ghost of her smile hovered over her mouth and evaporated. “What do I mean? How do I know? Was it a ghost? Do you know how many hundreds of sailors have died within five miles of this point? Surely one or two of them might have been angry about it.”

“Are you actually saying—?”

“Or maybe that’s silly. Maybe ghosts are like gods, no? Familiar faces we have clamped on what comes for us? Maybe it was the sea. I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that there was no Charlie in the face before me, Mr Selkirk. None. I had no doubt. No question. My only hope was that whatever it was had come for him after he was gone, the way a hermit crab climbs inside a shell. Please God, whatever that is, let it be the wind and the cold that took him.”

Staggering upright, Selkirk shook his head. “You said he was dead.”

“So he was.”

“You were mistaken.”

“It killed the Kendall boy, Mr Selkirk. It crawled down and tore him to shreds. I’m fairly certain it killed its own father as well. Charlie’s father, I mean. Luis took one look at him and vanished into the dunes. I never saw the dog again.”

“Of course it was him. You’re not yourself, Mrs Marchant. All these years alone . . . It spared you, didn’t it? Didn’t he?”

Mrs Marchant smiled one more time and broke down weeping, silently. “It had just eaten,” she whispered. “Or whatever it is it does. Or maybe I had just lost my last loved ones, and stank of the sea, and appeared as dead to it as it did to me.”

“Listen to me,” Selkirk said, and on impulse he dropped to one knee and took her hands once more. God, but they were cold. So many years in this cold, with this weight on her shoulders. “That day was so full of tragedy. Whatever you think you . . .”

Very slowly, Selkirk stopped. His mind retreated down the stairs, out the lighthouse door to the mainland, over the disappearing path he’d walked between the dunes, and all the way back into Winsett. He saw anew the shuttered boarding houses and empty taverns, the grim smile of the stable-boy. He saw the street where his uncle’s cabin had been. What had happened to his uncle? His aunt? Amalia? Where had they all gone? Just how long had it taken Winsett to die? His mind scrambled farther, out of town, up the track he had taken, between the discarded pots and decaying whale-bones toward the other silent, deserted towns all along this blasted section of the Cape.

“Mrs Marchant,” he whispered, his hands tightening around hers, having finally understood why she had stayed. “Mrs Marchant, please. Where is Charlie now?”

She stood, then, and twined one gentle finger through the tops of his curls as she wiped at her tears. The gesture felt dispassionate, almost maternal, something a mother might do to a son who has just awoken. He looked up and found her gazing again not out to sea but over the dunes at the dark streaming inland.

“It’s going to get even colder,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

KIM NEWMAN

The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train

KIM NEWMAN IS A NOVELIST, critic and broadcaster. His published fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories, Dead Travel Fast, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne), Where the Bodies Are Buried, Doctor Who: Time and Relative, The Man from the Diogenes Club and Secret Files of the Diogenes Club under his own name, and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as “Jack Yeovil”.

His non-fiction books include Nightmare Movies, Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who.

He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines and has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics. His short story “Week Woman” was adapted for the TV series The Hunger and he has directed and written a tiny short film, Missing Girl.

Newman has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Critics Award, the British Science Fiction Award and the British Fantasy Award. He was born in Brixton (London), grew up in the West Country, went to University near Brighton and now lives in Islington (London).

As the author reveals: “ ‘The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train’ was written for my collection The Man from the Diogenes Club – mostly to fill in background for Richard Jeperson, the hero of those stories (while keeping a few mysteries back for later).

“Also, I happen to like stories set on trains and wanted to do one. I dimly remember being taken with a British TV Sexton Blake serial in the 1960s set on a train, and I make a connection here with Terror by Night, a 1946 Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film that follows a similar route.

“In Throw Momma from the Train, Billy Crystal’s character claims ‘Every great mystery or romance has a train in it somewhere’.”

Culler’s Halt

“TEN HOURS, GUV’NOR,” said Fred Regent. “That’s what the time-table says. Way this half-holiday is going, next train mightn’t come for ten months.”

Richard Jeperson shrugged. A cheek-muscle twitched.

Pink-and-grey-streaked autumn skies hung over wet fields. Fred had scouted around. No one home. Typical British Rail. He only knew Culler’s Halt was in use because of the uncollected rubbish. Lumpy plastic sacks were piled on the station forecourt like wartime sandbags. The bin-men’s strike was settled, but maybe word hadn’t reached these parts. A signpost claimed CULLER 3m. If there were a village at the end of the lane, it showed no lamps at the fag-end of this drab afternoon.

Fred wasn’t even sure which country Culler was in.

On the platform, Richard stood by their luggage, peering at the dying sunlight through green-tinted granny glasses. He wore a floor-length mauve travel coat with brocade frogging, shiny PVC bondage trousers (a concession to the new decade) and a curly-brimmed purple top hat.

Fred knew the Man From the Diogenes Club was worried about Vanessa. When a sensitive worried about someone who could famously take care of herself, it was probably time to panic.

At dawn, they’d been far South, after a nasty night’s work in Cornwall. They had been saddled with Alastair Garnett, a civil servant carrying out a time-and-motion study. In a funk, the man from the ministry had the bad habit of giving orders. If the local cops had listened to Richard rather than the “advisor”, there’d have been fewer deaths. The hacked-off body parts found inside a stone circle had to be sorted into two piles – goats and teenagers. An isolated family, twisted by decades of servitude to breakfast food corporations, had invented their own dark religion. Ceremonially masked in cornflakes packets with cut-out eyeholes, the Penrithwick Clan made hideous sacrifice to the goblins Snap, Crackle and Pop.

Bloody wastage like that put Richard in one of his moods, and no wonder. Fred would happily have booted Garnett up his pin-striped arse, but saw the way things were going in the 1980s.

Trudging back to seaside lodgings in Mevagissey, hardly up for cooked breakfast and sworn off cereal for life, they were met by the landlady and handed Vanessa’s telegram, an urgent summons to Scotland.

Abandoning the Penrithwick shambles to Garnett, Richard and Fred took a fast train to Paddington. They crossed London by taxi without even stopping off at homes in Chelsea and Soho for a change of clothes or a hello to the girlfriends – who would of course be ticked off by that familiar development – and rattled out of Euston in a slam-door diesel.

The train stank of decades’ worth of Benson & Hedges. Since giving up, Fred couldn’t be in a fuggy train or pub without feeling queasily envious. At first, they shared their first-class compartment with a clear-complexioned girl whose T-shirt (sporting the word “GASH”, with an Anarchy Symbol for the A) was safety-pinned together like a disassembled torso stitched up after autopsy. She quietly leafed through Bunty and The Lady, chain-smoking with a casual pleasure that made Fred wish a cartoon anvil would fall from the luggage rack onto her pink punk hairdo. At Peterborough, she was collected by a middle-aged gent with a Range Rover. Fred and Richard had the compartment to themselves.

Outside Lincoln, something mechanical got thrown. The train slowed to a snail’s pace, overtaken by ancient cyclists, jeered at by small boys (“Get off and milk it!”), inching through miles-long tunnels. This went on for agonising hours. Scheduled connections were missed. The only alternative route the conductor could offer involved getting off at York, a stopping train to Culler’s Halt, then a service to Inverdeith, changing there for Portnacreirann. In theory, it was doable. In practice, they were marooned. The conductor had been working from a time-table good only until September the 1st of last year. No one else had got off at Culler’s Halt.

Beyond the rail-bed was a panoramic advertising hoarding. A once-glossy, now-weatherworn poster showed a lengthy dole queue and the slogan LABOUR ISN’T WORKING – VOTE CONSERVATIVE. Over this was daubed NO FUTURE. A mimeographed sheet, wrinkled in the fly-posting, showed the Queen with a pin through her nose.

“There’s something wrong, Frederick,” said Richard.

“The country’s going down the drain, and everyone’s pulling the flush.”

“Not just that. Think about it: ‘God Save the Queen’ came out for the Silver Jubilee, two years before the election. So why are ads for the single pasted over the Tory poster?”

“This is the wilds, guv. Can’t expect them to be up with pop charts.”

Richard shrugged again. The mystery wasn’t significant enough to be worth considered thought.

They had more pressing troubles. Chiefly, Vanessa.

Their friend and colleague wasn’t a panicky soul. She wouldn’t have sent the telegram unless things were serious. A night’s delay, and they might be too late.

“I’m not happy with this, Frederick,” said Richard.

“Me neither, guv.”

Richard chewed his moustache and looked at the time-table Fred had already checked. Always gaunt, he was starting to seem haggard. Deep shadow gathered in the seams under his eyes

“As you say, ten hours,” said Richard. “If the train’s on time.”

“Might as well kip in the waiting room,” suggested Fred. “Take shifts.”

There were hard benches and a couple of chairs chained to pipes. A table was piled with magazines and comics from years ago: Patrick Mower grinned on the cover of Tit-Bits; Robot Archie was in the jungle in Lion. A tiny bookshelf was stocked with paperbacks: Jaws, Mandingo, Sexploits of a Meter Maid, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Guy N. Smith’s The Sucking Pit. Richard toggled a light-switch and nothing happened. Fred found a two-bar electric fire in working order and turned it on, raising the whiff of singed dust. As night set in, the contraption provided an orange glow but no appreciable heat.

Fred huddled in his pea-coat and scarf. Richard stretched out on a bench like a fakir on a bed of nails.

The new government wasn’t mad keen on the Diogenes Club. Commissions of Inquiry empowered the likes of Alastair Garnett to take a watching brief. Number Ten was asking for “blue skies suggestions” as to what, if anything, might replace this “hold-over from an era when British intelligence was run by enthusiastic amateurs”. Richard said the 1980s “would not be a comfortable decade for a feeling person”. His chief asset was sensitivity, but when his nerves frayed he looked like a cuckoo with peacock feathers. Called up before a Select Committee, he made a bad impression.

Fred knew Richard was right to be paranoid. Wheels were grinding and the team was being broken up. He had been strongly advised to report back to New Scotland Yard, take a promotion to Detective Inspector and get on with “real police work”. Rioters, terrorists and scroungers needed clouting. Task Forces and Patrol Groups were up and running. If he played along with the boot boys, he could have his own command, be a Professional. The decision couldn’t be put off much longer.

He’d assumed Vanessa would stay with the Club, though. Richard could chair the Ruling Cabal, planning and feeling. She would handle field-work, training up new folk to tackle whatever crept from the lengthening shadows.

Now, he wasn’t sure. If they didn’t get to Vanessa in time . . .

“There used to be a through train to Portnacreirann,” mused Richard. “The Scotch Streak. A sleeper. Steam until 1962, then diesel, then . . . well, helicopters took over.”

“Helicopter?” queried Fred, distracted. “Who commutes by helicopter?”

“NATO. Defence considerations kept the Scotch Streak running long after its natural lifetime. Then they didn’t. March of bloody progress.”

Richard sat up. He took off and folded his glasses, then tucked them in his top pocket behind an emerald explosion of display handkerchief.

“It’s where I started, Frederick,” he said. “On the Scotch Streak. Everyone has a first time . . .”

“Not ’arf,” Fred smiled.

Richard smiled too, perhaps ruefully. “As you so eloquently put it, ‘not ‘arf. For you, it was that bad business at the end of the pier, in Seamouth. For your lovely Zarana, it was the Soho Golem. For Professor Corri it was the Curse of The Northern Barstows. For me, it was the Scotch Streak . . . the Ghost Train.”

Fred’s interest pricked. He’d worked with Richard Jeperson for more than ten years, but knew only scattered pieces about the man’s earlier years. Richard himself didn’t know about a swathe of his childhood. A foundling of war, he’d been pulled out of a refugee camp by Major Jeperson, a British officer who saw his sensitivity. Richard had been raised as much by the Diogenes Club as his adoptive father. He had no memory of any life before the camps. Even the tattoo on his arm was a mystery. The Nazis were appallingly meticulous about record-keeping, but Richard’s serial number didn’t match any name on lists of the interned or to-be-exterminated. The numbers weren’t even in a configuration like those of other Holocaust survivors or known victims. Suspicion was that the Germans had seen the boy’s qualities too and tried to make use of him in a facility destroyed, along with its records and presumably other inmates, before it could fall into Allied hands. The lad had slipped through the clean-up operation, scathed but alive. Major Geoffrey Jeperson named him Richard, after Richard Riddle – a boy detective who was his own childhood hero.

Of Richard’s doings between the War and the Seamouth Case, Fred knew not much. After Geoffrey’s death in 1954, Richard’s sponsors at the Club had been Edwin Winthrop, now dead but well-remembered, and Sir Giles Gallant, now retired and semi-disgraced. Vanessa came into the picture well before the Seamouth Case. She had Richard’s habit of being evasive without making a fuss about it. All Fred knew was that her first meeting with their patron was another horror story. Whenever it came up, she’d touch the almost-invisible scar through her eyebrow and change the subject with a shudder.

“Now we’re near the end of the line,” said Richard, “perhaps you should hear the tale.”

They were here for the night. Time enough for a ghost story.

“Frederick,” said Richard, “it was 195–, and I was down from Oxford . . .”

Act I: London Euston

I

. . . it was 195– and Richard Jeperson was down from Oxford. And the LSE. And Cambridge. And Manchester Poly. And RADA. And Harrow School of Art. And . . . well, suffice to say, many fine institutions, none of which felt obliged to award him any formal qualification.

Geoffrey Jeperson had sent him to St Cuthbert’s, his old school. Richard hadn’t lasted at “St Custard’s”, setting an unhappy precedent insofar as not lasting at schools went. After the Major’s death, Edwin Winthrop took over in loco parentis. He encouraged Richard to regard schooling as a cold buffet, picking at whatever took his fancy. Winthrop called himself a graduate of Flanders and the Somme, though as it happened he had a Double First in Classics and Natural Philosophy from All Souls. Since Richard was known for his instincts – his sensitivities, everyone said – he was allowed to follow his nose. He became a “New Elizabethan renaissance man”, though teachers tended to tut-tut as he acquired unsystematic tranches of unrelated expertise then got on with something else before he was properly finished.

Though the Diogenes Club supported him with a generous allowance, he took on jobs of work. He assisted with digs and explorations. He sleuthed through Europe in search of his past, and drew suspicious blanks – which persuaded him to pay more attention to his present. He spent a summer in a biscuit factory in Barnsley, making tea and enduring harassment from the female staff. He was a film extra in Italy, climbing out of the horse in Helen of Troy. He couriered documents between British Embassies in South America. He studied magic – stage magic, not yet the other stuff – with a veteran illusionist in Baltimore. He dug ditches, modelled for catalogues, worked fishing boats, wrote articles for manly magazines, and the like.

Between education and honest toil, he did his National Service. He was in the RAF but never saw an aeroplane. The Club placed him in a system of bunkers under the New Forest. He fetched and carried for boffins working on an oscillating wave device. After eighteen months, a coded message instructed him to sabotage an apparently routine experiment. Though he liked the backroom boys and had worked up enthusiasm for the project, he followed orders. The procedure failed and – he was later given to understand – an invasion of our plane of existence by malign extra-dimensional entities was prevented. That was how the Club worked under Edwin Winthrop: pre-emptive, unilateral, cutting out weeds before they sprouted, habitually secretive, pragmatically ruthless. A lid was kept on, though who knew whether the pot really had been boiling over?

After the RAF, Richard spear-carried for a season at the Old Vic, and played saxophone with The Frigidaires. The doo-wop group was on the point of signing with promoter Larry Parnes – of “parnes, shillings and pence” fame – when the girl singer married a quantity surveyor for the security. Though her rendition of ‘Lipstick on Your Collar’, lately a hit for Connie Francis, was acceptable, Richard couldn’t really argue with her. Frankly, the Frigidaires were never very good.

Richard only knew within a year or so how old he actually was, but must be out of his teens. Edwin felt it was time the boy knuckled down and got on with the work for which he had been prepared. Richard moved into a Georgian house in Chelsea which was in the gift of the Club, occasionally looked after by an Irish housekeeper who kept going home to have more children. He meditated, never missed Hancock’s Half Hour on the wireless and read William Morris and Hank Jansen. Edwin told him to wait for a summons to action.

Richard dressed in the “Edwardian” or “teddy boy” manner: scarlet velvet frock coat with midnight black lapels (straight-razor slipped into a special compartment in the sleeve), crepe-soled suede zip-up boots with winkle-picker toe-points, a conjurer’s waistcoat with seventeen secret pockets, his father’s watch and chain, bootlace tie with silver tips, navy-blue drainpipe jeans tighter than paint on his skinny legs. His thin moustache was only just established enough not to need augmentation with eyebrow pencil. A Brylcreem pompadour rose above his pale forehead like a constructivist sculpture in black candyfloss.

If he took his life to have begun when his memory did, his experience was limited. He had never seen a woman naked, except in Health & Efficiency magazine. He could not drive a car, though he intended to take lessons. He had never killed anything important. He had never had a broken bone. He had never eaten an avocado.

Within a year, all that would change.

One morning, a special messenger arrived on a motorbike, with instructions that he give himself over to a side-car and be conveyed to the Diogenes Club. This, he knew, was to be his debut.

The retired Royal Marine Sergeant who kept Door in the Mall went beet-coloured as Richard waltzed past his post. Outlandish folk must come and go from the Diogenes Club, but Richard’s clothes and hair were red rag to a bull for anyone over twenty-five – especially a uniformed middle-aged man with a short back and sides and medal ribbons. There was talk about playwrights and poets who were “angry young men”, but the older generation would not easily yield a monopoly on sputtering indignation.

He rather admired himself in the polished black marble of the hallway pillars. The whole look took hours to achieve. His face no longer erupted as it had done a few years earlier, but the odd plague-rose blemish surfaced, requiring attention.

Escorted by a silk-jacketed servant beyond the famously noiseless public rooms of the Club, he puffed with pride. Ordinary Members mimed harrumphs, seconding the Doorman’s opinion of him. The servant opened an Inner Door, and stood aside to let Richard pass. He had not been this deep into the building since childhood. Then, he had almost been a possession, shown off by his father. Now, he was entitled to pass on his own merit. He could walk the corridors, consult the archives, visit the private collections, accept commissions. He was not merely a Life Member, inheriting that status from Major Jeperson, but an Asset, whose Talent suited him to act for the Club in Certain Circumstances.

He was treading in the footsteps of giants. Mycroft Holmes, the mid-Victorian civil servant who was instrumental in founding what was ostensibly a “club for the unclubbable” but actually an auxiliary extraordinary to British intelligence and the police. Charles Beauregard, the first Most Valued Member – the great puzzle-chaser of the 1880s and ’90s and visionary chairman of the Ruling Cabal through the middle-years of the current century. Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. Several terrifying individuals who operated covertly under the goggles of “Doctor Shade”. Adam Llewellyn de Vere Adamant, the adventurer whose disappearance in 1903 remained listed on the books as an active, unsolved case. Catriona Kaye, Winthrop’s life-long companion, the first woman to accept full membership in the Club. Flaxman Low. Sir Henry Merrivale. Robert Baldick. Cursitor Doom.

He was ushered upstairs. In an underlit Ante-Room, his coat was taken by a turbaned orderly. He had a moment before a two-way mirror to be awed by the great tradition, the honour to which he would ascend in the presence of the Ruling Cabal. He patted his pockets, checked his fly and adjusted his tie. The weight of the razor was gone from his sleeve. Somewhere between the street and the Ante-Room, he had been frisked and defanged.

A baize door opened, and a tiny shove from the silent Sikh was necessary to propel him along a short dark corridor. One door shut behind him and another opened in front. Richard stepped into the windowless Star Chamber of the Ruling Cabal.

“Good Gravy, Edwin,” said someone sour, “is this what it’s come to? A bloody teddy boy!”

Some of Richard’s puff leaked out.

“I think he’s sweet,” purred a woman with a whisky-and-cigarettes voice, like Joan Greenwood or Fenella Fielding. “Winner of the Fourth Form fancy dress.”

The last of his self-esteem pooled on the floor.

“Cool, man,” said another commentator, snapping his fingers. “Straight from the fridge.”

He didn’t feel any better.

Edwin Winthrop sat at the big table that had been Mycroft’s desk, occupying one of three places. He had slightly hooded eyes and an iron-grey moustache. Even if Richard weren’t attuned to “vibrations”, he’d have had no doubt who was in charge. Next to him was Catriona Kaye, a compact, pretty woman as old as the century. She wore a dove-grey dress and pearls. The only one of the Inner Circle who had treated him as a little boy, she was now the only one who treated him as a grown-up. She was the heart and conscience of the Diogenes Club. Edwin recognised his own tendency to high-handedness, and kept Catriona close – she was the reason why he wasn’t a monster. To Edwin’s right was an empty chair. Sir Giles Gallant, make-weight on the Ruling Cabal, was absent.

“If we’ve finished twitting the new boy,” said Edwin, impatiently, “perhaps we can get on. Richard, welcome and all that. This is the group . . .”

Edwin introduced everyone. Richard put faces to names and resumés he already knew.

Dr Harry Cutley, the pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed scowler held a chair of Physics at a provincial redbrick university. He had unexpectedly come under the Club’s remit, as Quantum Mechanics led him to Parapsychology. When Edwin vacated the post of Most Valued Member to run the Ruling Cabal, Sir Giles recruited Cutley to fill his roomy shoes. The academic finally had funds and resources to mount the research programme of his dreams, but was sworn not to share findings with his peers, turning his papers over instead to the Cabal. They then had to root out others capable of understanding Cutley’s work and determining what should leak onto the intellectual open market and what the world was not yet ready to know. In practice, Cutley had exchanged one set of grumbling resentments for another. He knew things no-one else on the planet did, but colleagues in the real world wrote him off as a dead-ended time-server whose students didn’t like him and whose ex-wife slept with other faculty members. Cutley had a boozer’s red-veined eyes, hair at all angles and a pulsing, hostile aura – the plainest Richard had ever sensed, as if inner thoughts were written on comic strip bubbles.

The husky-voiced blonde in the black leotard and pink chiffon scarf was Annette Amboise, of Fitzrovia and the Left Bank. She wore no lipstick but a lot of eye make-up and had hair cropped like Jean Seberg as Joan of Arc. She smoked Gauloises in a long, enamel holder. Of Anglo-French parentage, she’d spent her mid-teens in Vichy France, running messages for the Resistance and Allied Intelligence. She came to the Club’s notice after an unprecedented run of good fortune, which is to say she outlived all other agents in her district several times over. Catriona diagnosed an inbuilt ability to intuit random factors and predict immediate danger. Annette thought in knight moves – two hops forward, then a kink to the side. Since the War, she’d been doing other things. A retired interpretive dancer, past thirty with too many pulled muscles, she was authoress of a slim volume, Ectoplasm and Existentialism. Knowing what would probably happen next gave her a peculiarly cheerful fatalism. She had no accent, but showed an extremely French side in occasional “ça va” shrugs.

The tall, thin hipster was Danny Myles, whom Richard recognised as “Magic Fingers Myles”, piano-player in a modern jazz combo famous for making “I Can’t Get Started With You” last an entire set at Ronnie Scott’s. He wore a green polo-neck and chinos, and had a neatly-trimmed goatee. His fingers continually moved as if on an infinite keyboard or reading a racy novel in Braille. Born blind, Myles developed extra senses as a child. Gaining sight in his teens, Myles found himself in a new visual world but retained other sharpnesses. Besides his acute ear, he had “the Touch”. Richard and Annette took the psychic temperature of a room with invisible antennae (Catriona called them “mentacles”), but Myles had to lay hands on something to intuit its history, associations or true nature. The Magic Fingers Touch worked best on inanimate objects.

“This is Geoffrey’s boy,” explained Edwin. “We expect great things from him.”

From Magic Fingers, Richard gathered non-verbal information: he understood how everyone related to each other, where the frictions were, whom he could trust to come through, when he’d be on his own. Cutley was like a football manager required to play a board member’s nephew in goal. He hated “spook stuff” and wanted to haul paraphenomena back to measurable realities. Annette was emotionally off on another plane, but mildly amused. She had vague, not-related-by-blood auntie feelings for Richard and a nagging concern about his short-term future that did little for his confidence. Richard thanked Myles with a nod no one else noticed.

This is what it was like: Richard knew things most people had to guess at. A problem growing up, which he was not quite done with, was that he rarely appreciated few others felt and understood as he did. His first thought was that English people were too polite to mention things that were glaringly obvious to him. That had not gone down well at St Custard’s. If he hadn’t been able to a chuck a cricket ball with a degree of devious accuracy, he’d likely have been burned at the stake behind the Prefects’ Hut.

“Now we’re acquainted,” said Edwin, “let’s get to why you’ve been brought together. Who’s heard of the Scotch Streak?”

“It’s a train, man,” said Myles. “Euston to Edinburgh, overnight.”

“Yes,” said Edwin. “In point of fact, the service, which leaves London at seven o’clock every other evening, does not terminate in Edinburgh. It continues to Portnacreirann, on Loch Linnhe.”

“Is this one of those railway mysteries?” asked Annette, squeezing her palms together. “I adore those.”

Edwin nodded, and passed the conch to Catriona.

II

“In 1923, Locomotive Number 3473-S rolled out of foundry sheds in Egham,” began Catriona Kaye, the Club’s collector of ghost stories. “It was an Al Atlantic Class engine. To the non-trainspotters among us, that means a shiny new chuff-chuff with all the bells and whistles. It was bred for speed, among the first British trains to break the hundred-mile-an-hour barrier. The London, Scotland and Isles Railway Company presented the debutante at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924, and christened ‘the Scotch Streak’. A bottle of champagne was wasted on the cow-catcher by the odious Lady Lucinda Tregellis-d’Aulney. She mercifully passes out of the narrative. The LSIR got wind of a scheme by a rival to run a non-stop from London to Edinburgh, and added a further leg to their express, across Scotland to Portnacreirann. This sort of one-upmanship happened often before the railways were taken into public ownership. The Streak’s original colours were royal purple and gold. Even in an era of ostentation in high-speed transport, it was considered showoffy.

“The Scotch Streak was quickly popular with drones who wanted to get sozzled in Piccadilly, have a wee small hours dram in Edinburgh, then walk off the hangover in Glen Wherever while shooting at something feathery or antlered. All very jolly, no doubt. Until the disaster of 1931.

“There are stories about Inverdeith. In the 18th century, fishermen on Loch Gaer often netted human bones. After some decades, this led to the capture of the cannibal crofter famed in song as ‘Graysome Jock McGaer’. He was torn apart by a mob on his way to the scaffold. During the interregnum, the Scots God-botherer Samuel Druchan, fed up because England’s Matthew Hopkins was hogging the headlines, presided over a mass witch-drowning. As you know, proper witches float when “swum”, so the Druchan took the trouble to sew iron weights to his beldames’ skirts. In 1601, a local diarist recorded that a ‘stoon o’ fire spat out frae hell’ plopped into the waters with a mighty hiss. However, the railway bridge disaster really put Inverdeith on the tragedy map.

“What exactly happened remains a mystery, but . . . early one foggy morning in November, the Scotch Streak was crossing Inverdeith Bridge when – through human agency, gremlins, faulty iron or sheer ill-chance – 3473-S was decoupled from the rest of the train. The locomotive pulled away and steamed safely to the far side. The bridge collapsed, taking eight passenger carriages and a mail car with it. The rolling stock sank to the bottom of Loch Gaer with the loss of all hands, except one lucky little girl who floated.

“A board of inquiry exonerated Donald McRidley, the engine driver, though many thought he’d committed the unforgivable sin of cutting his passengers loose to save his own hide. Only Nicholas Bowler, the fireman, knew for sure. Rather than give testimony, Bowler laid on the tracks and was beheaded by an ordinary suburban service. McRidley was finished as an engineer. Some say that, like T. E. Lawrence re-enlisting as Aircraftman Ross, McRidley changed his name and became a navvy, working all weathers on a maintenance gang, looking over his shoulder at dusk, dreading the reproachful tread of the Headless Fireman.

“Whatever he might or might not have done, McRidley couldn’t be blamed for the ‘In-for-Death Bridge’. All manner of Scots legal inquiries boiled down to an unlovely squabble between Inverdeith Council and the LSIR. One set of lawyers claimed the sound structure wouldn’t have collapsed were it not for the Scotch Streak rattling over it at speeds in excess of the recommendation. Another pack counter-claimed eighty-nine people wouldn’t be dead if the bridge wasn’t a rickety structure liable to be knocked down by a stiff breeze. This dragged on. A newspaperman dug up a local legend that one of Druchan’s witches cursed her weights as she drowned, swearing no iron would ever safely span the loch. ‘Local legend’ is a Fleet Street synonym for ‘something I’ve just made up’.

“The Streak ran only from London to Edinburgh until 1934, when a new bridge was erected and safety-tested. A fuss was made about the amount of steel used in the construction. Witches have nothing against steel, apparently. Then, full service to Portnacreirann resumed.

“Memories being what they were, folks who didn’t have a financial interest in the venture were reluctant to board the ‘In-for-Death Express’. Only grimly smiling directors and their perspiring wives and children were aboard for the accident-free re-inaugural run. You can imagine the sighs of relief when Inverdeith Bridge was safely behind them.

“Controlling interest in the LSIR was held by Douglas Gilclyde of Kilpartinger, who horsewhipped a secretary he thought misreferred to him as ‘Lord Killpassengers’. It was a point of pride for His Lordship, a parvenu ennobled by Lloyd George, to make the Scotch Streak a roaring success again. He tarted 3473 up with a fresh coat of purple and replaced the gold trim with his own newly minted tartan – which the unkind said made the engine look like a novelty box of oatcakes.

“Kilpartinger lured back the hunting set by trading speed records for social cachet. From 1934, the Scotch Streak became famously, indeed appallingly, luxurious. Padding on padding, Carrera marble sinks, minions in Gilclyde kilts servicing every whim. The train gained a reputation as a social event on rails. 3473 pulled a ballroom carriage, a bar to rival the Criterion and sleeping cars with compartments like rooms at the Savoy. In addition to tweedy fowl-blasters, the Streak gained a following among the ‘fast’ crowd. Debutantes on the prowl booked up and down services for months on end, in the hope of snaring a suitable fiancé. One or two even got married before they were raped. When his disgusted pater kicked him out of the family pile, Viscount St John ‘Buzzy’ Maltrincham took a permanent lease on a compartment and made the Scotch Streak his address – until a pregnant Windmill Girl cut his throat somewhere between the Trossachs and Clianlarich.

“He wasn’t the only casualty. The Streak’s Incident Book ran to several spine-tingling volumes. People threw themselves under the train, got up on top and were swept off in tunnels, were decapitated when they disregarded DO NOT LEAN OUT OF THE WINDOW notices, opened doors and flung themselves across the landscape. Naturally, a number of fatalities occurred around Inverdeith. There was a craze for booking the up service on the Streak, naturally not bothering with the return. The procedure was to put a particular record on the wind-up Victrola as the train crossed the bridge, then take a graceful suicide leap as Bing Crosby crooned ‘a golden goodbye’. Mistime it, and you smashed into a strut and rained down in pieces.

“Kilpartinger played up the Streak’s glamour by engaging the likes of Noel Coward, Elsie and Doris Waters, Jessie Matthews and Gracie Fields to entertain through the night. A discreet doctor prescribed pick-me-ups to keep the audience, and not a few performers, awake and sparkling. Houdini’s less-famous brother escaped from a locked trunk in the mail van and popped out of the coal tender. The Palladium-on-Rails business soured when a popular ventriloquist was institutionalised after an argument with his dummy. His act started off with the usual banter, then the dummy began making passes at women in the carriage. The vent was besieged. His dummy jeered him as he was beaten up by angry escorts. He snatched a hatchet and chopped at the dummy’s mocking head, taking off three of his own fingers.

“Of course, there were whispers. Among railwaymen, the Streak picked up a new nickname, ‘the Ghost Train’. In 1938, I drafted a pamphlet for inclusion in my series, Haunted High-Ways. I got a look at the Incident Book. I conducted tactful interviews with passengers. They expressed a vague, unformed sense of wrongness. They saw things, felt things. Anecdotes piled up. The dirty dummy and the throat-cut bounder were the least of it. Several regulars dreaded trips on the Streak, but were unable to resist making them — as if afraid of what 3473 would do if they abandoned it. Real addicts use the serial number, never the name. Lord Kilpartinger issued writs and threats, then invited me to tea at Fortnum & Mason. With some justification, he pointed out that any train that carried as many passengers over as many years must collect horror stories and that I might as well investigate tragedies associated with the 5:12 from Paddington to Swindon. Besides, he had just bought a controlling interest in my publisher and wondered if I wouldn’t rather write books on flower-arrangement or how to host a dinner party.

“As I left, in something approaching high dudgeon, His Lordship tried to reassure me about the train. After all, he said, he’d travelled more miles on the Streak than anyone else with no obvious ill-effects. A month later, for some anniversary run or other, he boarded at Euston, posing cheerfully in his tartan cummerbund for the newspapers, clouds of steam billowing all around. After retiring to his compartment, he disappeared and did not pop out of the coal tender. He didn’t get off at Edinburgh or Portnacreirann. The general consensus was that he had contrived a fabulous exit to avoid the bankruptcy proceedings which, it turned out, were about to bring down the LSIR.

“Maybe Kilpartinger became another anonymous navvy on his beloved line, swinging a hammer next to the disgraced McRidley. Or perhaps he dissolved into a Scotch mist and seeped into the upholstery. If you run across him, give him my best.

“With the LSIR in ruins, it seemed likely the Streak had made its last run. It was saved by the War. Luxury took a back seat to pulling together, but the Streak was classified an essential service, supporting the Royal Navy Special Contingencies School at Portnacreirann. The Diogenes Club was busy on other fronts, but spared a young parapsychologist with a plum-bob and an anemometer to make a routine inspection. He ruled the train, the tracks and Inverdeith Bridge were perhaps slightly haunted. Had the Ruling Cabal listened to me rather than that bright lad, we would perhaps not be in this current pickle, but there’s no use squalling about it now.

“Soon, there was another strange story about. Take the Streak to your Special Contingencies course, and you’d win a medal. I went over the records last week – an enormously tedious job – and can confirm this was, in fact, true. ‘Special Contingencies’, as you might guess, is a euphemism for ‘Dirty Fighting’, which goes a long way towards explaining things. Nevertheless, a high proportion of the Streak’s sailors proved aggressive, valiant and effective in battle. A high proportion of that high proportion got their gongs posthumously. The more often a man rode the Scotch Streak, the more extreme his conduct. We don’t publicise the British servicemen tried for war crimes, but out of fewer than a dozen bad apples in World War II, five were Streak regulars. Americans rode the Ghost Train too. We don’t have official access to their records, but they have Alexanders and Caligulas too.

“After the War, the railways were nationalised. In Thomas the Tank Engine, the Fat Director became the Fat Controller. The LSIR was swallowed by British Rail. 3473-S steams still, purple faded to the colour of a weak Ribena, tartan trim buried under a coat of dull dun. No Noel, no Gert and Daisy, no Archie Andrews. Providing you don’t mind changing trains at Edinburgh, there are cheaper, faster ways of getting to Loch Linnhe. But the Scotch Streak clings to its ‘essential service’ classification. Which saves it from the unsentimental axe taken to unprofitable branch-lines and quaint countryside stations.

“The haunting never stopped.”

III

“We’ve reams of anecdotal evidence for ab-natural activity,” said Edwin, taking over from Catriona. “Apparitions, apports, biloca-tion, sourceless sound, poltergeist nuisance, echoes from deep time, fits of precognition, possession, spontaneous combustion, disembodied clutching hands, phantoms, phantasms, pixies, nipsies, revelations, revenants, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Few sleep well on the sleeper.

“A typical toff thinks he’s slightly train-sick and decides to spend his next day out murdering English foxes rather than Scottish grouse. A percentage have much nastier turns. Outcomes range from severe ill-health and mental breakdown to disappearance and, well, death.”

“What about the staff, Ed?” asked Cutley, who had been taking notes.

Richard saw Edwin calculate how to keep aces in his hole while seeming to lay his cards on the table. It was habitual in these circles.

“BR have trouble keeping guards, waiters and porters,” Edwin admitted. “Even then, one see-no-evil conductor who’s been on the Streak for yonks swears the shudder stories are all hogwash. Presumably, he’s the opposite of sensitive.”

“Why now?” asked Annette, pluming smoke. She drew a question mark in the air with her burning cigarette-end.

“That’s the thing, Annie,” said Edwin. “With fewer souls riding the Streak, the haunting isn’t as noticeable as when Cat was on the case. But the Americans have expressed a concern. HM Government is under diplomatic pressure to sort things out, and you know where Ministers of the Crown call when ghoulies and ghosties rattle chains without permission.”

Edwin opened his hands, indicating the whole room.

Richard had paid close attention to Catriona Kaye’s story. Something in it jogged his mind.

“We’ve Miss Kaye’s manuscript and the wartime report,” said Harry Cutley, as if giving a tutorial. “Everyone is to read them by Thursday, then we’ll start fresh. Those of you who were with me on the Edgley Vale Puma Cult know how I like things done. Those of you who weren’t will find out soon enough. Annette, visit the newspaper library and go over all the cuttings on the Scotch Streak since the boiler was cast. Magic Fingers, get out in the yards, talk to railwaymen, choo-choo bores . . . pick up any more stories for the collection. You . . . ah, sorry . . . the Jeperson boy . . .”

Cutley knew very well what his name was, but waited for the prompt.

“Richard.”

The Most Valued Member flashed a joyless smile.

“Thank you. I will remember. Not Greasy Herbert, but Richard. Richard Jeperson. Dick the Lad. Rickie the Roll-and-Rocker. Fixed in the mind’s file, now. Anyway, Richard, you get your haircut down to Euston, trying not to slash cinema seats or terrorise old ladies en route, and book us on Thursday’s Streak. Get me and Annette First Class sleeping compartments, a berth in Second for Magic Fingers, and the railway equivalent of steerage for you. We have to cover the whole train.”

“I’ll ride the mail car if you think it’s a good idea.”

Cutley considered it.

“The Club can spring for four compartments,” put in Edwin, airily. “If you’re all in First Class, no one will mind if you wander. With any other tickets, Richard and Danny wouldn’t be allowed where interesting business might be going on.”

“Whatever you think best,” said Cutley. “If money’s no object, we might as well all get the gold toilet seats and mints on the pillows. Dickie will qualify for a half-fare anyway.”

The academic was used to working on the cheap, in fear of a redbrick budget review. He also wasn’t happy to be given command of a group then undercut in front of them. Edwin had made Cutley “Most Valued Member”, but was prone to step out from behind the desk and upstage his successor. Catriona laid a hand on Edwin’s elbow, chiding with a gesture only the recipient and Richard noticed.

“Keep all the chits,” said Cutley. “Bus tickets, and so forth. My procedure is big on chits, comprenons-oui?”

Now, Cutley was needling Richard because he couldn’t afford to prick back at Edwin. Richard was getting a headache with the politics.

“This is a haunted house on wheels,” Cutley told them. “There are boring procedures for haunted houses, which will be followed. Background check, on-the-spot investigation, listing of observable phenomena and effects. Once that’s over, I will assess findings and make recommendations. If the haunting can be dispelled through scientific or spiritual efforts, no one will complain. Annette, I’d appreciate a run-down of possible rituals of exorcism or dispellment. Bell, book and railwayman’s lamp? Of course, we can always advise the train be taken out of service and the line abandoned. If there are no passengers to be haunted, it doesn’t matter if spectres drag their sorry shrouds along the rails.”

Richard put his hand up, as if in class.

Cutley, annoyed, noticed. “What is it, boy?”

“A thought, sir. If the train could be put out of service, it already would have been. There must be a reason to keep it running.”

Richard looked at Edwin. So did everyone else. Catriona massaged his arm.

At length, Edwin responded. “No use trying to keep secrets in a roomful of Talents, obviously.”

Danny Myles whistled.

“What is it?” asked Cutley, catching up.

“The Scotch Streak must stay in service. The Special Contingencies School is now a submarine base. A vital component in our national deterrent.”

“The gun we have to their heads while theirs is stuck into our tummy,” put in Catriona.

“Cat goes on Aldermaston marches and wants to ban the Bomb,” Edwin explained. “As a private individual, it is within her rights to hold such a position. In this Club, we do not decide government policy and can only advise . . .”

Annette almost snorted. She obviously knew Edwin Winthrop better.

“Every forty-eight hours,” Edwin continued, “mathematicians convene in Washington DC and use a computer to generate number-strings which are fed into an electronic communications network accessible only from secure locations at the Pentagon and our own Ministry of War. There’s another terminal in Paris, but it’s a dummy – the French can fiddle all they want, but can’t alter the workings of the big machine. We wouldn’t want them getting offended by the creeping use of terms like ‘le week-end’ and kicking off World War Three in a fit of haughty pique. Annie, the French half of you didn’t hear that.

“Once the numbers are in the net, they have to be conveyed to the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and selected officers on the front-lines of the Western Alliance. We don’t use telephone, telegraph, telegram or passenger pigeon – we send couriers. The number-strings are known as the ‘Go-Codes’. Unless they are keyed properly on special typewriters, orders cannot be given to arm a warhead, launch a missile or drop a bomb. Without the Go-Codes, we have no nuclear weapons.”

“And with them, we can end the world,” put in Catriona.

“So,” said Myles, waving his hands for emphasis, “we’ve B-52s zooming over the Arctic, nuclear subs cruising the seven seas, ranks of computers the size of Jodrell Bank, and brave soldier boys in the trenches ready to respond to any dire threat from the godless commie horde . . . but it all depends on some git catching a seven o’clock steam train from Euston every other evening?”

“That’s it, exactly,” said Edwin

“Crazy, man,” said Myles, snapping his fingers.

“As I said, matters of defence policy are beyond our remit. You understand now why governments are in a lather. If the Streak isn’t secure, NATO wobbles. Quite apart from the haunting, they’re worried about spies. One reason the Go-Codes are still carried by train is that our fiendish intelligence friends think the Russkies don’t believe we’d really entrust so vital a duty to a couple of junior ratings on an overnight puff-puff.”

“I hope I meet a spy,” said Annette, posing languidly. “I always saw myself as Mata Hari. Can I lure young lieutenants to their doom?”

“Leave them alone, Annie,” said Edwin. “They’ve enough on their plates, what with World Peace in their pockets. There’s been a high turnover on that detail. One nervous collapse, one self-inflicted gunshot wound, one sudden convert off in a monastery somewhere. Do not let it be known outside this room, but in the past year there have been four separate blocks of up to eighteen hours when our defences were compromised because the Go-Codes didn’t arrive without incident.

“Consider the poor general whose burdensome duty it is to inform the President of this situation, let alone the possibility the Other Side might get wind of a first-strike opportunity. If we do hold a gun to their head, they’d best not find out the firing pin is wonky.”

Richard felt sickness in the pit of his stomach, as if he had washed down a half-pint of salted cockles with a strawberry milkshake. Despite Cutley’s “boring procedures for haunted houses”, this was a bigger deal than pottering around Borley Rectory feeling out cold spots. The nausea passed and, to his embarrassment, he found he was physically in a state of high excitement. He gathered this was common in the corridors of power – though, since his voice broke, it seemed the minutes of the day when he wasn’t sporting a raging erection were more noteworthy. Tight trousers did not make him any more comfortable. He blushed as Annette, perhaps peeping indelicately into his immediate future, smiled at him.

“Will the Yanks know we’re aboard?” asked Cutley.

“In theory, at the highest level. The boys on the train don’t know anything. They’ve been encouraged to believe they’re a decoy, and that their envelopes are to do with an inter-services gambling ring organised by a motor pool sergeant in Fort Baxter, Kansas. Spot the couriers if you must, but don’t get too close. Come back with concrete intelligence about whatever threats are gathering in the dark. I’ve always wanted to end a briefing by saying ‘this mission could shorten the War by six months’. The next best thing is ‘the fate of the free world depends on you’, which, I am sorry to say, it does. I’m sure you’ll do us proud, Harry.”

The lecturer shot glances at his group. Richard knew what Cutley thought of Annette, Magic Fingers and him. Two beatniks and a ted, not an elbow-patch between them, just the sorts Hard-Luck Harry hoped to get away from, bloody students!

“We’ll make the best of it, Ed,” said Cutley.

IV

Richard walked under the Doric arches of Euston Station at five o’clock, two hours before the Scotch Streak was due to depart. He was among crowds, streaming from city offices to commuter trains.

“Star, News and Standard!” shouted competing 60-year-old “boys”, hawking the evening papers. Kruschev was in the headlines, shoe-banging at the UN. The Premier wouldn’t be such a growling bear if he knew Uncle Sam’s pants were down for up to 18 hours at a time. If his Sputnik spied a gap in the curtain, Old Nikita might well lob a couple of experimental hot ones just to see what happened.

“Don’t even think about it, kiddo,” said a voice close to his ear. “World’s safe till midnight, at least. After that, it gets blurry . . . but Madame Amboise sees all. Worry not your pretty little head.”

He recognised Annette from her perfume, Givenchy mingled with Gauloise, before he heard or saw her. She spun him round and kissed both his cheeks, not formally. Her wet little tongue dabbed the corners of his mouth.

For the trip, she had turned out in a black cocktail dress, elbow-length evening gloves, a shiny black hat with a folded-aside veil and a white fox-fur wrap with sewn-shut eyes. This evening, she wore lipstick – thin lines of severe scarlet. She posed like Audrey Hepburn, soliciting his approval, which was certainly forthcoming.

“That’s the spirit,” she said, patting his cheek.

He had a mental image of Annette in her underclothes – black, French and elaborate. It flustered him, and she giggled.

“I’m doing that,” she said. “It’s a trick.”

She slipped off her shoulder strap to show black lace.

“And it’s accurate,” she added. “Sorry, I mustn’t tease. You’re so easy to get a rise out of. I don’t get to play with anyone in the know very often.”

She tapped the side of her head and made spooky conjuring gestures.

Under her brittle flirtatiousness, she ran a few degrees high, trying to shake off a case of the scareds. That, in turn, worried him. Annette Amboise might come on like the Other Woman in a West End farce, but in the Diogenes Club’s trade – not to mention actual war – she was a battle-proved veteran. All he’d ever done was switch some wires. If she knew enough to be frightened, he ought to be terrified.

“Aren’t the arches magnificent?” she said. “They’ll be knocked down in a year or two. By idiots and philistines.”

“You’re seeing the future?”

“I’m reading the papers, darling. But I do see the future sometimes. The possible future.”

“What about . . . ?”

She puffed and opened a fist as if blowing a dandelion clock. “Boom? Not this week, I think. Not if we have anything to do with it. Of course, that’d bring down the arches too.”

She touched the stone with a gloved hand, and shrugged.

“Nada, my love,” she said. “Of course, that’s Magic Fingers’ speciality, not mine. Laying on of hands. The Touch That Means So Much.”

Annette took him by the arm and steered him into the station. A porter followed, shoving a trolley laden with a brassbound trunk, matching pink suitcases, a vanity case and a hat-box. Richard had one item of luggage, a Gladstone bag he’d found in a cupboard.

“There’s our leader,” said Annette, pointing.

Harry Cutley sat at a pie-stall, drinking tea. His own personal cloud hung overhead. Richard wondered whether Edwin would show up to see them off, then thought he probably wouldn’t.

Annette stopped and held Richard back.

“Darling, promise me you’ll be kind to Harry,” she said, pouting, adjusting his tie as if he were a present done up with a bow.

Richard shrugged. “I didn’t have other plans.”

“You don’t need plans to be unkind. You’re like me, a feeler. Try to be a thinker too. Heaven knows, I won’t be. You and Harry aren’t a match, but a mix. Don’t be so quick to write him off. Now, let’s go and be nice.”

Harry looked up and saw them coming. He waved his folded newspaper.

“Where’s Myles?” he asked.

Neither Richard nor Annette knew. Harry tutted, “Probably puffing ‘tea’ in some jive dive.”

“Tea would be lovely, thanks,” said Annette.

Harry looked at the mug in his hand.

“Not this muck,” he said, sourly. The woman behind the counter heard but didn’t care.

“Supper on the train, then?” said Annette. “Sample that famous Scotch Streak luxury?”

“Just make sure to keep the chits,” cautioned Harry.

“Don’t be such a grumpy goose,” said Annette, leaning close and kissing the lecturer, who didn’t flinch. “This will be a great adventure.”

“Like last time?”

“Well, let’s hope not that great an adventure.”

Harry pulled back the sleeve of his tweed jacket and showed a line of red weals leading into his cuff.

“Puma Cults,” commented Annette, “miaou.”

Richard gathered Harry and Annette had both come off the Edgley Vale case with scars. The Most Valued Member had put that successfully to bed. An Away Win for the Diogenes Club. No points for the Forces of Evil. Harry even smiled for a fraction of a second as Annette purred and stretched satirically.

At once, Richard understood the difference between his Talent and Annette’s. He received, she sent. He picked up what others were feeling; she could make them feel what she felt. A useful knack, if she was in an “up” moment. Otherwise, she was a canary in a mineshaft.

Suddenly, Myles was there.

“Hey, cats,” he said, raising an eyebrow as that set Annette off on more miaous. “Ready to locomote?”

“If we must,” said Harry.

Magic Fingers dressed like a cartoon burglar – black jeans, tight jersey, beret, capacious carpet-bag. All he needed was a mask.

Passengers travelling First Class on the Scotch Streak had their own waiting room, adjacent to the platform where the train was readied. On presenting tickets, the party was admitted by a small, cherubic, bald, uniformed Scotsman.

“Good evening, lady and gentlemen,” he said, like a head-waiter. “I’m Arnold, the Conductor. If there is any way I can be of service, please summon me at once.”

“Arnold, the Conductor,” said Harry, fixing the name in his mind.

Annette made arrangements to have her extensive luggage, and their three underweight bags, stowed on the train.

No extra-normal energies poured off Arnold, just polite deference. Considering his age and Richard’s style, that was unusual. In the conductor’s view, purchase of a First Class Sleeping Compartment ensured admission to the ranks of the elect. The passenger was always right, no matter what gaudy finery he wore or what gunk was slathered on his hair. Richard realised Arnold was the see-no-evil fellow Edwin had mentioned. The man who was not haunted. The conductor might be immune to ghosts, the way some people didn’t catch colds. Or he could be a very, very good dissembler.

The waiting room wanted a thorough clean, but a residue of former glory remained. While Second and Third Class passengers made do with benches on the platform, First Class oiks could plump posteriors on divans upholstered in the Streak’s “weeping bruise” purple. Complimentary tea was served from a hissing urn – which made Cutley mutter about wasting threepence (and collecting a chit) at the pie-stall.

Framed photographs hung like family portraits, commemorating the naming ceremony (there was that Lady Lucinda who Catriona disliked), the inaugural runs of 1928 and 1934 (Lord Kilpartinger in an engineer’s hat) and broken speed records. Nothing about Inver-deith Bridge, of course.

Other passengers arrived. Two young men might as well have had “Secret Courier” stitched to their hankie pockets. They had adult-approved US navy crew-cuts and wore well-fitting civilian suits which didn’t yet bend with their bodies. Matching leather briefcases must contain the vital envelopes. Annette cast a critical eye over the talent; one nudged the other, who cracked a toothy smile that dimpled in his corn-fed American cheek.

“So, where’s the spy?” whispered Annette.

“We’re the spies,” said Richard. “Remember? Mata Hari.”

Three sailors in whites looked like refugees from a road company of On the Town; one very drunk, his mates alert for the Shore Patrol. They’d be through for Portnacreirann too, though it would be a surprise if they really were travelling First Class. An allied uniform counted with Arnold. Mrs Sweet, an elderly lady in a checked ulster, was particular about her gun-cases. She issued Arnold with lengthy instructions for their storage. A clergyman swept in and Richard’s first thought was that he was a disguised Chicago gangster. His ravaged cheeks and slicked-down widow’s peak irresistibly suggested a rod in his armpit and brass knucks up his sleeve. However, he radiated saintly benevolence. Richard ought to know not to judge by appearances.

A fuss erupted at the door. Arnold and a guard were overwhelmed by a large, middle-aged woman. She wore a floral print dress and a hat rimmed with wax grapes and dry, dead roses.

“I’ve got me ticket somewhere, ducks,” she said. “Give us a mo. Here we are. Me ticket, and me card.”

The woman had a Bow Bells accent and one of those voices that could crack crystal. Something about her alerted Richard. Annette and Myles had the same reaction. Psychic alarm bells.

“What is it?” asked Harry, noticing his group’s ears all pricked up at once.

“Calm,” said Annette.

Richard realised his heart was racing. He breathed deliberately and it slowed. Myles let out a whistle.

“Me card,” repeated the woman. “Elsa Nickles, Missus, Psychic Medium. I’m here to ’elp the spirits. The ones tevvered to this plane. The ones who cannot find the rest they need. The ones trapped on your Ghost Train.”

Arnold was less interested in the woman’s card than her ticket, which turned out to be Third Class. Not a sleeping compartment, but a seat in the carriage next to the baggage car. A trained contortionist with no feeling at all in her back or lower limbs might stretch out and snooze.

The conductor told her this waiting room was First Class only. She wasn’t offended.

“I don’t want to go in, ducks. Just wants a butcher’s. The vibrations are strong in the room. No wonder your train’s got so many presences.”

The “Psychic Medium” craned over Arnold’s head and scanned the room, more obviously than Richard had done. She frankly stared at everyone in turn.

“Evenin’, vicar,” she said to the saturnine clergyman, who smiled, showing rotten teeth. “Should have those fixed,” she advised. “Pull ’em all on the National Health and get porcelain choppers, like me.”

She grinned widely, showing a black hollow rim around her plates.

The vicar wasn’t offended, though he looked even more terrifying when assembling a smile.

Mrs Nickles didn’t give Harry, Richard or the US Navy a second glance, but fluttered around Annette – “Cor, wish I had the figure for that frock, girl” – and was taken with Magic Fingers.

“You’ve got the Gift, laddie. I can always tell. You see beyond the Visible Sphere.”

Myles didn’t contradict her.

“I sense a troubled soul ’em, or soon to be ’em,” she announced. “Never mind, I can make it well. It’s all we can do, ducks, make things well.”

Mrs Sweet hid behind her Times and rigidly ignored everything.

Harry muttered, unnoticed by Mrs Nickles.

The woman was a complication, not accounted for in Harry’s “boring procedures”. Richard sensed the Most Valued Member wonder idly if Mrs Nickles might step under rather than onto the train.

The first time he’d “eavesdropped” on a musing like that, he’d picked up a clear vision from the Latin master; the Third Form mowed down by a machine gun barrage. He’d been horrified and torn: keep quiet and share in the guilt, speak out and be reckoned a maniac. Even if he prevented slaughter, no one would ever know. For two days, he’d wrestled the problem, close to losing bowel control whenever he saw the master round the quad with an apparently distracted smile and mass murder in mind. Then, Richard picked up a similar stray thought, as the Captain of the Second Eleven contemplated the violent bludgeoning of a persistent catch-dropper. With nervy relief, he realised everyone contemplated atrocities on a daily basis. So far, he hadn’t come across anyone who really meant it. Indeed, imagined violence seemed to take an edge off the homicidal urge – folks who didn’t think about murder were more likely to commit one.

“Ahh, bless,” said Mrs Nickles, standing aside so someone with a proper ticket could be let into the room.

A solemn child, very sleepy, had been entrusted by a guardian into the care of the Scotch Streak. She wore a blue, hooded coat and must be eight or nine. Richard, who had little experience with infants, hoped the girl wouldn’t be too near on the long trip. Children were like time bombs, set to go off.

“What’s your name?” asked Annette, bending over.

The girl said something inaudible and hid deeper in her hood.

“Don’t know? That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Mrs Nickles and Annette were both smitten. Richard intuited neither woman had living children. If Mrs Nickles really was a medium, that was no surprise. Kids were attention sponges and sucked it all up – a lot of Talents faded when there was a pram in the house.

Annette found a large label, stiff brown paper, fastened around the girl’s neck.

“Property of Lieut-Cdr Alexander Coates, RN,” she read. “Is this your Daddy?”

The little girl shook her head. Only her freckled nose could be seen. In the hooded coat, she looked more like a dwarf than a child.

“Are you a parcel then?”

The hooded head nodded. Annette smiled.

“But you aren’t for the baggage car?”

Another shake.

Arnold announced that the train was ready for boarding.

The Americans jammed around the door as the British passengers formed an orderly queue. Annette took the little girl’s hand.

The Coates Parcel looked up and Richard saw the child’s face. She had striking eyes – huge, emerald-green, ageless. The rest of her face hadn’t fully grown around her eyes yet. A bar of freckles crossed her nose like Apache war paint. Two red braids snaked out of her hood and hung on her chest like bell-pulls.

“My name is Vanessa,” she said, directly to him. “What’s yours?”

The child was strange. He couldn’t read her at all.

“This is Richard,” said Annette. “Don’t mind the way he looks. I’m sure you’ll be chums.”

Vanessa stuck out her little paw, which Richard found himself shaking.

“Good evening, Richard,” she said. “I can say that in French. Bon soir, Rishar. And German. Guten Abend, Richard.”

“Good evening to you, Vanessa.”

She curtseyed, then hugged his waist, pressing her head against his middle. It was disconcerting – he was hugged like a pony, a pillow or a tree rather than a person.

“You’ve got a fan, man,” said Magic Fingers. “Congrats.”

Vanessa held onto him, for comfort. He still didn’t know what to make of her.

Annette rescued him, detaching the girl.

“Try not to pick up waifs and strays, lad,” said Harry.

Richard watched Annette lead Vanessa out of the waiting room. As the little girl held up her ticket to be clipped by Arnold, she looked back.

Those eyes!

V

Richard was last to get his ticket clipped. Everyone found their proper carriages. Mrs Nickles strode down the platform to Third Class, trailed by sailors.

He took in 3473-S. At a first impression, the engine was a powerful, massive presence. A huge contraption of working iron. Then, he saw it was weathered, once-proud purple marred and blotched, brass trim blackened and pitted. The great funnel belched mushroom clouds. He smelled coal, fire, grease, oil. Pressure built up in the boiler and heat radiated. A gush of steam was expelled, wet-blasting the platform.

“Bad beast, man,” said Myles, fingertips to metal.

As Annette said, his talent was to read inanimate, or supposedly inanimate, objects. He was qualified to evaluate the locomotive.

“Got a Jones in it, like a circus cat that’s tasted blood, digs it, wants more.”

“That’s a comfort.”

Myles clapped his shoulder, magic fingers lingering a moment. Briefly, Richard felt a chill. Myles took his hand away, carefully.

“Don’t fret, man. I’ve known Number 73 buses go kill-crazy. Most machines are just two steps from the jungle. No wonder witches don’t dig iron. Come on, Rich. ‘All aboard for the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe . . .’ ”

Arnold blew his whistle, a shrill night-bird screech. It was answered by a dinosaurian bellow from the locomotive. The steam-whoop rattled teeth and scattered a flock of pigeons roosting in the Euston arches.

“The train now standing at Platform 14,” said an announcer over the Tannoy, sounding like a BBC newsreader fresh from an elocution lesson, “is the Scotch Streak, for Edinburgh, and Portnacreirann. It is due to depart at seven o’clock precisely.”

Richard and Myles stepped up, into their carriage. The wide, plush-carpeted corridor afforded access to a row of sleeping compartments.

“You’re next to me, Richard,” said Annette, who had been installing Vanessa nearby. “How cosy.”

He looked at Magic Fingers, who shrugged in sympathy – with a twinge of envy – and went to find his place.

Richard checked out his compartment. It was like a constricted hotel room, with built-in single bed, fixed desk (with complimentary stationery and inkwell) and chair, a cocktail cabinet with bottles cradled in metal clasps, wardrobe-sized en-suite “bathroom” with a sink (yes, marble) and toilet (no gold seat). A second bed could be pulled down from an upper shelf, but was presently stowed. From murder mysteries set on trains, he knew the upper berth was mostly used for hiding bodies. Richard’s Gladstone bag rested at the foot of the bed like a faithful dog. His towel and toiletries were stowed in the bathroom.

At first look, everything in First Class was first class, then the starched white sheets showed a little fray, and that greyish, too-often-washed tinge; the blue-veined sink had orange, rusty splotches in the basin and a broken plug-chain; cigarette-burns pocked the cistern. KINDLY REFRAIN FROM USING THE WATER CLOSET WHILE THE TRAIN IS STANDING IN THE STATION said a framed card positioned above the toilet. In an elegant hand, someone had added TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

Richard thought he saw something in the mirror above the sink, and had to fight an instinct to turn. He knew there would be nothing there. He looked deeper into the mirror, peering past his pushed-out face, ignoring a fresh-ish blotch on his forehead, searching for patches where the silvering was thin. He exhaled, misting the mirror. Rune-like letters, written in reverse, stood out briefly. He deciphered DANGER, WARNING and FELL SPIRIT, then a heart, several Xs and a sigil with two “A”s hooked together.

“Made you look,” said Annette, from the corridor. She giggled.

He couldn’t help grinning. She was hatless now, languidly arranged against the doorframe, dress riding up a few inches to show a black stocking-top, shoulders back to display her fall of silky hair. She drew her “AA” in the air with her cigarette end, and puffed a perfect smoke ring.

She drew him along the corridor. They joined Harry and Myles in the next carriage. The ballroom in Lord Kilpartinger’s day, it was now designated the First Class Lounge.

Magic Fingers found a piano, and extemporised on “The Runaway Train”, which Annette found hilarious. She curled up in a scuttle-like leather seat.

At the far end of the carriage sat the vicar – probably working on a sermon, though his expression suggested he was writing death threats to be posted through the letter-boxes of nervous elderly ladies.

Arnold passed through the carriage, and informed them the bar would be open as soon as they were underway.

“Hoo-ray,” said Annette. “Mine’s a gimlet.”

She screwed a fresh cigarette into her holder.

Arnold smiled indulgently and didn’t tell Myles not to tinkle the ivories. They were First Class and could swing from the chandeliers – which were missing a few bulbs, but still glinted glamorously – if they wanted.

“Impressions?” asked Harry, who had a fresh folder open and a ball-point pen in his hand.

“All clear here,” said Annette. “We’ll live past Peterborough.”

“This box has had its guts battered,” said Magic Fingers, stuttering through a phrase, forcing the notes out, “but we’re making friends, and I think he’ll tell me the stories. ‘The runaway train came over the hill, and she ble-e-ew . . .’ ”

Harry looked at him and prompted, “Jeperson? Anything to add?”

Richard thought about the little girl’s ageless eyes.

“No, Harry. Nothing.”

Harry bit the top of his pen. The plastic cap was already chewed.

“I hope this isn’t a wasted journey,” said the Most Valued Member. “Just smoke and mirror stories.”

“It won’t be that,” said Annette. “I can tell.”

The whistle gave out another long shriek, a Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan yell from the throat of a castrated giant.

“ ‘. . . and she ble-ew-ew-ew-ew

Without even a lurch, as smooth as slipping into a stream, the Scotch Streak moved out of the station. The train rapidly picked up speed. Richard sensed pistons working, big wheels turning, couplings stretching, the irresistible pull . . .

He had a thrill of anticipation. All boys loved trains. Every great mystery, romance or adventure must have a train in it.

“ ‘. . . the engineer said the train must halt, he said it was all the fireman’s—!’ ”

Myles’s piano-playing was shut off by a crash. The lid had snapped shut like a bear-trap.

The jazzman swore and pulled back his hands. His knuckles were scraped. He flapped them about.

“Pain city, man,” he yelped.

“First blood,” said Annette.

“The beast’s impatient,” said Myles. “Antsy, itchy-pantsy. Out to get us, out to show who’s top hand. Means to kill.”

Harry examined the piano, lifting and dropping the lid. A catch should have held it open.

“Catch was caught, Haroldo,” said Magic Fingers, pre-empting the accusing question. “No doubt about it.”

Harry said the lid could easily have been jarred loose by the train in motion. Which was true. He did not make an entry in his folder.

Annette thought it was an attack.

“It knows we’re here,” she said. “It knows who we are.”

They were on their way. Outside the window, dark shapes rushed by, lights in the distance. The train flashed through a suburban station, affording a glimpse of envious, pale-faced crowds. They were only waiting for a diesel to haul them home to “villas” in Hitchin or Haslemere and an evening with the wireless, but all must wish they were aboard the brightly-lit, fast-running, steam-puffing Streak. Bound for Scotland – mystery, romance and adventure!

Richard found he was shaking.

Act II: On the Scotch Streak

I

Over the train-rattle, Annette Amboise heard herself scream.

She was in the corridor. The lights were out. One of her heels was broken, and her ankle turned.

The train was being searched, papers demanded, faces slapped, children made to cry, bags opened, possessions strewn. She’d soon be caught and questioned. Then, hours of agony culminating in shameful release. She’d hold off as long as she could. But, in the end, she’d break.

She knew she’d talk.

Fingers slithered around her neck. A barbed thumb pressed into the soft flesh under her jaw.

Her scream shut off. She couldn’t swallow her own spit. Air couldn’t reach her lungs.

The grip lifted her off her feet. Her back pressed against a window that felt like an ice-sheet. She was wrung out, couldn’t even kick.

She smelled foul breath, but saw only dark.

The train passed a searchlight. Bleaching light filled the corridor. Uniform highlights flashed: twin lightning-strike insignia, broken cross armband, jewel-eyed skull-badge, polished cap-peak like the bill of a carrion bird. No face under the cap, not even eyes. A featureless bone-white curve.

The boche had her!

She tried to forget things carried in her head. Names, code phrases, responses, locations, times, number-strings. But everything she knew glowed red, ready for the plucking.

Her captor held up his free hand, showing her a black, wet Luger. The barrel, cold as a scalpel, pressed to her cheek.

The light passed.

The pistol was pushed into her face. The gunsight tore her skin. Her cheek burst open like a peach. The barrel wormed between her teeth. Bitter metal filled her mouth.

The grip around her throat relaxed, a contemptuous signal.

She drew in breath and began to talk.

“Annie,” said Harry Cutley, open hand cupped by her stinging cheek, “come back.”

She had been slapped.

She was talking, giving up old names, old codes. “Dr Lachasse, Mady Holm, Moulin Vielle, La Vache, H-360 . . .”

She choked on her words.

Harry was bent over her. She was on a divan in the lounge carriage. Myles and Richard crowded around. Arnold the Conductor attended, white towel over his arm, bearing cocktails. Hers, she remembered, was a gimlet.

“Where were you?” asked Harry. “The War?”

She admitted it. Harry had been holding her down, as if she were throwing a fit. Suddenly self-conscious, he let her go and stood away. Annette sat up and tugged at her dress, fitting it properly. Nothing was torn, which was a mercy. She wondered about her face.

Her heart thumped. She could still feel the icy hand, taste oily gunmetal. When she blinked, SS scratches danced in the dark.

“Can we get you anything?” asked Harry. “Water? Tea?”

“I believe that’s mine,” she said, reaching out for her cocktail. She tossed it back at a single draught. Her head cleared at once. She replaced the empty glass on Arnold’s tray. “Another would be greatly appreciated.”

Arnold nodded. Everyone else had to take their drinks from the tray before he could see to her request. They sorted it out – a screwdriver for Myles, whisky and water for Harry, a virgin mary for Richard. Arnold, passing no comment on her funny turn, withdrew to mix a fresh gimlet.

“Case of the horrors?” diagnosed Myles.

She held her forehead. “In spades.”

“A bad dream,” said Harry, disappointed. His pen hovered over a blank sheet in his folder. “Hardly a manifestation.”

“To dream, wouldn’t she have to be asleep?” put in Richard. “She went into it standing up.”

“A fugue, then. A fit.”

Harry erred on the side of rational explanation. Normally, Annette admired that. Harry kept an investigation in balance, stopped her – and the rest of the spooks – from running off with themselves. Usually, ghosts were only smugglers in glow-in-the-dark skeleton masks. Flying saucers were weather balloons. Reanimated mummies were rag week medical students swathed in mouldy bandages. Now, his thinking was just blinkered. There were angry spirits on the Scotch Streak. And, for all she knew, little green Martians and leg-dragging Ancient Egyptians.

“Have you had fits before?” asked Richard.

“No, Richard,” she said patiently. “I have not.”

“But you do get, ah, ‘visions’?”

“Not like this,” she said. “This was a new experience. Not a nice one. Trust me. It reached out and hit me.”

“ ‘It’?” said Harry, frowning. “Please try to be more scientific, Annie! You must specify. What ‘it’? Why an ‘it’ and not a ‘them’?”

Her heartbeat was normal now. She knew what Harry – irritating man! – meant. She tried to be helpful.

“Just because it’s an ‘it’ doesn’t mean there’s no ‘them’? An army is an ‘it’, but has many soldiers, a ‘them’.”

Harry angry, at something Richard called him.

“What came for me wasn’t one of my usuals,” she continued. “I see what might happen. And not in ‘visions’, as Richard put it. I don’t hear ‘voices’ either. I just know what’s coming, or might be coming. As if I’d skipped ahead a few pages and skim-read what happens next.”

Harry, Richard and Myles backing away from her. No, they were still close – they wouldn’t back away for a few minutes.

“I see round corners. Into the future. This was from somewhere else.”

“The past?” prompted Richard. “A ghost?”

“The past? Yes. A ghost? Not in the traditional sense. More like an incarnation, an embodiment. Not a personality. My idea of the Worst Thing. It reached into me, found out what my Worst Thing was, and played on it. But there was still the train. I was on the train. It lives here. The Worst Thing. The Worst Thing Ever. The Worst Thing in the World.”

“Dramatic, Annie, but not terribly helpful.”

Harry put the top back on his biro.

“Listen to her,” said Richard, slipping an arm around her shoulder – a mature gesture for such a youth. “She’s not hysterical. She’s not imagining. She is giving you a report. Write down what she’s said.”

Harry was not inclined to pay attention to the Jeperson Boy.

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s static. It’ll cloud the issue. We need observable phenomena. Incidents that can be measured. Traced back to a source. I’ll get the instruments.”

“We have instruments,” said Richard. “Better attuned than your doodads, Daddy-O. We have Annette and Magic Fingers.”

He didn’t include himself, but should have.

A burst of indignant fury belched from Harry as Richard called him “Daddy-O”. She flinched at the psychic outpouring, but less than she would if she hadn’t known it was coming.

The lad was pushing with Harry. He couldn’t help himself.

Myles laid a hand on her forehead, nodded.

“Something’s been at her,” he said. She didn’t like the sound of that. “Left clawmarks.”

“Will everybody please stop talking as if this were my autopsy,” she said. “I have been attacked, affronted, shaken. But I am not a fragile flower you need to protect. I can take care of myself.”

Like she did in the War.

The curve under the SS cap came back to her. If questioned, she would have talked. Everyone did, eventually. It had never come to it, because of her trick, her way of putting her feet right, of avoiding situations. Others – the names that had come back to her – had been less fortunate. As far as she knew, they were dead or damaged beyond repair. Most had been caught – talking made no difference in the end, they were still killed.

Ever since, she had been putting her feet right. Walking near peril, not into it. Here, she was on a train – a row of linked boxes on wheels. There might be no right steps here. There might only be danger. Her gift was often knowing where not to be. Here, knowing where not to be did not mean she could avoid being there.

She trusted her instincts. Now, they were shouting: pull the communication cord! She could afford the fine for misusing the emergency stop signal. One swift tug, and brakes would be thrown. The Scotch Streak would scream to a halt. She could jump onto the tracks, head off over the fields.

Harry, Richard and Myles backed away from her. Just as she’d known they would. She ticked off the moment, grateful there wasn’t anything more to it.

She was pulling the communication cord.

She suppressed the instincts. The red cord – a chain, actually – still hung above a window, unbothered in its recess. She would ignore it.

Would she pull the cord in the future or was she imagining what it would be like? No way to tell. She saw herself in the dock, being lectured, then paying five one-pound notes to a clerk of the court – but the clerk had no face. That usually meant she was imagining. If this was going to happen, she would see a face, and recognise it later.

Then, her brain buzzed. She couldn’t mistake this for wandering imagination. Before the War, a child psychiatrist labelled Annette’s puzzling malaise as “acute déjà vu”. Catriona Kaye modified the diagnosis and coined the term “jamais vu”. Annette did not have I-have-been-here-before memories of the present, but I-will-be-here-soon memories of the future.

An open exterior door, night-time countryside rushing past. Someone falling from the train, breaking against a gravel verge. And someone coming for her, from behind.

If that was a few pages ahead, she’d rather fold the corner at the end of this chapter, put the book on her bedside table and never open it again. But that wasn’t how the world worked.

Arnold came with her second gimlet. This one she sipped.

“Perfect,” she told the conductor, suppressing shivers.

II

Annette’s recovery impressed Richard. Two gimlets and a nip to her compartment to fix her face, and she was set. Her strings were notches too tight, but so were anyone else’s. She flirted, presumably on instinct, flitting among her colleagues, seeming to offer equal time. Only Richard noticed he was getting marginally more serious attention than Harry Cutley or Danny Myles. She already knew them but needed to puzzle out the new boy, fix him in her mind the way Harry fixed names, by rolling him around, pinching and fluffing, testing reactions. Which, as ever, were warm and, he thought, horribly obvious.

Harry sourly made shorthand notes in his folder.

The frightening vicar gently enquired as to the lady’s condition. Annette said she was fine, and he retreated, satisfied. Richard still wondered if the man was faking his aura. His killer’s hands seemed made to be gloved in someone else’s blood.

Standing nearby, Annette was carefully not looking at the communication cord. Of course. Anyone who travelled by train knew that imp of the perverse which popped up at the sight of a PENALTY FOR IMPROPER USE – £5.00 notice – pull the chain, see what happens, go on, you know you want to. On the Scotch Streak, the imp was a bullying, nagging elemental.

Annette felt Richard’s lapel between thumb and forefinger.

“Real,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t tell any more.”

He didn’t know where to put his hands.

“Put the boy down, Annie,” said Harry. “Come fill in this Incident Form. Since you’re convinced you were assaulted, we must have a first-person account before memories fade.”

She shuddered and joined Harry. He gave her a sheet of paper and a pencil, which she proceeded to use as if sitting an exam, producing neat, concise notations in the spaces provided.

Danny Myles sat at the piano, fingers tapping the closed lid. His bruises were rising. He smiled, did a little two-finger Gene Krupa solo on the polished wood.

“Me next, you think?” Richard asked.

Myles lifted his shoulders.

“Watch your back, Jack.”

The carriage windows were ebony mirrors. If Richard got close to the glass and strained, he could make out the rushing countryside. A late supper would soon be served in the dining carriage. The train didn’t stop until Edinburgh, at half-past one; then, after a twenty-minute layover, it would continue to Portnacreirann, arriving with the dawn.

The overnight express felt more like an ocean liner than a train. Safe harbour was left behind and they were alone on the vast, deep sea.

Though they had compartments, none of them would sleep.

Richard took out his father’s watch, checked it against the clock above the connecting door. He had ten past nine, the train clock had ten to. He’d wound the watch at Euston, setting the time against the big station clock.

Myles saw what he was doing, rolled his sleeve back and felt a glassless watch – a holdover from his blind days. “Stopped, man,” he said. “Dead on the vine. Seven seven and seven seconds. That’s a panic and a half.”

“I won’t have one of those things,” said Annette, looking up from her form. “Little ticking tyrants.”

“Prof?” Myles prompted Harry.

Harry pulled a travel clock out of a baggy pocket and held it next to his wrist-watch.

“Eight thirty-two. Ten-o’-six.”

“Want to take a stab at which is the real deal?” asked Magic Fingers.

They all looked at the train clock, ticking towards supper time.

“What I thought,” said the jazzman.

Harry Cutley riffled through his folder and dug out more forms. He handed them out. Myles got on with it, turning out a polished paragraph. Richard simply wrote down “WATCH FAST”.

“Perhaps now you’ll stay away from mechanical instruments and rely on people,” said Annette. “You know clocks run irregularly in haunted places, so why do you trust thermometers, barometers, wire-recorders and cameras?”

“People run irregularly too,” said Harry, reasonably. “Even – no, especially – Talents.”

Richard was piqued. His watch was no ordinary timepiece. His father had inherited it from his grandfather, who had sat with Mycroft Holmes on the first Ruling Cabal. Geoffrey Jeperson had carried the watch all through the War. The Major, thinking his business done in a refugee camp, had been checking the time when he and a large-eyed, hollow-bellied child noticed one another. The watch brought them together. The boy who would become Richard Jeperson reached for the bauble, taking it reverentially when the Major, on instinct, trusted it to him. He had solemnly felt its weight, listened to its quiet tick, admired its Victorian intricacy through a panel in the face.

Inside, gears and wheels were tiny fragments of unknown crystal, which sparkled green or blue in certain light. The roman numerals were lost in tiny engravings of bearded satyrs and chubby nymphs.

Those first ticks were where Richard’s memory began. Before now, the watch had never betrayed him.

If Jeperson’s watch wasn’t to be trusted, what else in the life furnished for him by the Diogenes Club was left? The watch wound with a tiny key, which was fixed to the chain – it could also stop the mechanism, and Richard did so. If the watch could not run true, it should not run at all. He felt as if a pet had died, and he’d never had pets. He unhooked the chain and wondered if he’d ever wear it again. He slipped watch and chain into a pocket and handed back the incident form.

Arnold, who obviously had no trouble with his watch – a railway watch, as much a part of the Scotch Streak as the wheels or the windows – announced that supper was served. According to the train clock, it was nine o’clock precisely.

Harry reset his watch and clock against the train time. He made a note in his folder.

“I foresee you’ll be at that all night,” said Annette. “Without using a flicker of Talent. It’s Sod’s Law.”

Harry smiled without humour, not giving her an argument.

It hit Richard that something had gone on between Harry Cutley and Annette Amboise, not just an investigation into a Puma Cult. Harry took teasing from her he wouldn’t from anyone else. He sulked like a boy when she paid attention elsewhere. She’d told Richard not to underestimate the Most Valued Member.

Now, in a way that annoyed him, he was jealous.

“Should we sample the Scotch Streak fare?” said Annette. “In Kilpartinger’s day, the cuisine was on a par with the finest continental restaurants.”

“I doubt British Rail have kept up,” said Harry. “It’ll be beef and two veg, pie and chips or prehistoric bacon sarnies.”

“Yum,” said Magic Fingers. “My favourite.”

“Come on, boys. Be brave. We can face angry spirits, fire demons, Druid curses and homicidal lunatics. A British Rail sandwich should hold no horrors for us. Besides, I’ve seen the menu. I rather fancy the quail’s eggs.”

Annette led them to the dining carriage. Wood-panel and frosted glass partitions made booths. Tables were laid for two or four.

As he passed under the lounge clock, Richard looked up. For a definite moment, he saw a face behind the glass, studded with bleeding numbers, clockhands nailed to a flattened nose, cheeks distended, eyes wide, clockmaker’s name tattooed on stretched lips.

“That’s where you’ve got to,” he mused, recognising Douglas Gilclyde. “Lord Killpassengers himself.”

The face was gone. Richard thought he should mention the apparition, then realised he’d only have to fill in another form and opted to keep stum. There’d be plenty more where that came from.

III

They were all laughing at him, the bastards!

Harold Cutley tasted ash, bile and British Rail pork pie. He wanted to tell the bastards to shut up. The only noise he produced was a huffing bark that made the bastards laugh all the more.

“Gone down the wrong tube,” said the insufferable Jeperson Boy.

The French tart slapped him on the back, not to clear the blockage – taking an excuse to give him a nasty thump.

“Get Prof a form to fill in,” snarked the beatnik. “See how he likes it.”

Cutley stood and staggered away from the table. He honked and breathed again. He could talk if so inclined. As it happened, he bloody well wasn’t.

He knew they’d all gang up on him!

That was how it always was. At Brichester, no one understood his work and he was written off as “the Looney”. Muriel hadn’t helped, betraying him with all of them. Even Head of Physics, Cox-Foxe. Even bloody students! He was with the Diogenes Club toffs on the sufferance of Ed Winthrop, who habitually overruled and sidelined and superseded. Ed had saddled Harry with this shower so he couldn’t get anywhere, would never have any findings to call his own.

No one was coming after him. He shot a glance back at the booth, where Annette was canoodling with the teddy boy. The bitch, the bastard! Magic Fingers was tapping the table, probably hopped up on “sneaky pete”. If there were results to be had, he’d have to find them on his own.

He would show them. He would have to.

The conductor – what was his name? Why hadn’t he fixed it? – was in his way, blocking the narrow aisle. Cutley got past the man, shrinking to avoid touching him, and strode towards the dark at the end of the carriage.

“Well, really,” said the frumpy bat who was the only other diner, the old girl with the guns. She’d spilled claret on her gammon and pineapple and was going to blame Harold Cutley. “I must say. I never did.”

Cutley thought of something devastating to snap back at the pinch-faced trout, but words got mixed up between his brain and his pie-and-bile-snarled tongue and came out as spittle and grunts.

The woman ignored him and forked a thin slice of reddened meat into her mouth.

He looked back. The carriage had stretched. The rest of his so-called group were dozens of booths away, in a pool of light, smiling and fondling, relieved he was gone, already forgetting he’d ever been there. The bastarding bastards! They had the only bright light. The rest of the carriage was dim.

Now there were other diners, in black and white and silent. One or two to every fifth or sixth booth. Shadows on frosted glass partitions. Starched collars and blurry faces. Some were missing eyes or mouths, some had too many.

Muriel was here somewhere, having her usual high old time while someone else brought home the bacon.

Bitch!

“May I see your ticket?”

It was the conductor. Or was it another official? This one looked the same, but the tone of voice was not so unctuous. He sounded deeper, stronger, potentially brutal. More like a prison warder than a servant.

What was the name again? Albert? Alfred? Angus? Ronald? Donald?

Arnold – like Matthew Arnold, Thomas Arnold, Arnie, Arnoldo, Arnold. That was it. Arnold.

“What is it, Arnold?” he snapped.

“Your ticket,” he insisted. His collar insignia, like a police constable’s, was a metal badge. LSIR. That was wrong, out of date. “You must have your ticket with you at all times and be prepared to surrender it for inspection.”

“You clipped mine at Euston,” said Cutley, patting his pockets.

Cutley searched himself. He found his bus ticket from Essex Road to Euston, a cinema stub (1s, 9d, Naked as Nature Intended, the Essoldo), a slip pinned inside his jacket since it was last dry-cleaned three years ago, a sheaf of shorthand notes for a lecture he’d never given, an invitation to Cox-Foxe’s thirty-years-service sit-down dinner, a page torn out of the Book of Common Prayer with theorems pencilled in the margin, a linked chain of magician’s handkerchiefs some bastard must have planted on him as a funny, a Hanged Man tarot card that had been slipped to him as a warning by that blasted Puma Cult, his primary school report card (FAIR ONLY), an expired ration book, a French postcard Muriel had once sent him, his divorce papers, a signed photograph of Sabrina, a Turkish bank-note, a card with spare buttons sewn onto it, a leaf torn out of a desk calendar for next week, and a first edition of Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall he had once taken out of Brichester University Library and not got around to returning but which he could’ve sworn he’d left behind in the house Muriel had somehow wound up keeping when she walked out on him. But no ticket.

“Would this be yours?” said Arnold, holding up a strip of card.

Cutley was more annoyed. This was ridiculous.

“If you had it all the time, why didn’t you say so, man?”

“We have to be sure of these things.”

Cutley noticed that the conductor wasn’t “sirring” him any more. Before he could take the proffered ticket, he had to return his various discoveries to his pockets. Even if he piled up the things he could afford to throw away, it was a devil of a job to fit everything back into his jacket, which was baggier and heavier by the minute.

Arnold watched, still holding out the ticket.

Beyond the conductor, the dining car was nearly empty again. Jeperson, Annette and Magic Fingers were in the far distance, merrily tucking into knickerbocker glory or some other elaborate, sickly-sweet pud. None of that on his old ration book, he remembered with a bitter twinge.

He was sorted out. Except he had put the Peacock with the used bus and cinema tickets. He slid the book into his side-pocket, tearing a seam with a loud rip. He had a paper of buttons but no needle and thread. Muriel always had a needle, ready threaded, pinned about her in case of emergencies. She wasn’t in the dining carriage now – probably off in some fellow’s compartment, on her knees, gagging for it, the cow, the harlot!

“Why are you still here?” he asked Arnold, snatching his ticket.

“To make sure,” said the conductor. “This isn’t your place. This is for First Class Passengers only.”

Bloody typical! These jumped-up little Hitlers put on a blue serge uniform that looked a bit like a policeman’s and thought they could order everyone else about, put them all in their proper and bloody places. One look at Harry Cutley was enough to tell them he didn’t belong with silver cutlery and long-stemmed roses at every table. All the knickerbocker glory a fat girl could eat conveyed with the compliments of the chef to the table in crawling, grovelling deference! Only, just this once, Harry Cutley did belong. Baggy, torn, patched jacket and all, Cutley was in First Class. He had a First Class ticket, not bought with his own money, but his all the same. With angry pride, he brandished it at the conductor’s nose.

“What does this say, my good man?”

“I beg your pardon,” responded Arnold, with a tone Cutley didn’t like at all. “What does what say?”

“This ticket, you bastard. What does this ticket say?”

“Third Class,” said the conductor. “Which is where you should be, if you don’t mind my saying. This is not the place for you. You would not be comfortable here. You would be conscious of your, ah, shortcomings.”

Cutley looked at his ticket. It must be some sort of funny.

“This isn’t mine,” he said.

“You said it was. You recognised it. You would not want to make a scene in the First Class Dining Carriage.”

“First Class! I don’t call a stale pork pie first class dining!”

“The fare in Third Class might be more suited to your palate. More your taste. Rolls are available. Hard-tack biscuits. Powdered eggs, snoek, spam. Now, move along, there’s a good fellow.”

Arnold, seeming bigger, stood between him and the booth where the others were downing champagne cocktails. Cutley tried to get their attention but Arnold swayed and swelled to block him from their sight. Cutley tried to barge past. The conductor laid hands on him.

“I must ask you to go back to your place.”

“Bastard,” spat Cutley into the man’s bland face.

Arnold had a two-handed grip on Cutley’s lapels. So where did the fist that sank into Cutley’s stomach come from?

Cutley reeled, hearing another long rip as a lapel tore in the conductor’s hand. His gut clenched around pain. He knew when he was beaten. He slunk off, towards the connecting door. Beyond was Second Class, not his place either. He was supposed to be at the back of the train, with the baggage and the mail, probably with live chickens and families of untouchables sat on suitcases tied with string, lost in the crowd, one of the masses, trodden under by bastards and bitches. In his place.

There were things back there which he could use. He knew where they were. He had overheard, at Euston. He remembered the long cases.

Guns!

He limped out of the dining carriage, into the dark.

IV

“What’s up with Harry?” Richard asked.

“Gyppy tummy?” suggested Magic Fingers.

“I should go after him,” said Annette, folding her napkin. “We shouldn’t be separated.”

Richard touched her arm. His instincts tingled. So, he knew at once, did hers.

Harry had stumbled past Arnold, who was briefly bewildered, and charged out of the carriage.

“You stay here,” said Richard. “I’ll go.”

He stood. Annette was supposed to admire his manly resolve. She radiated a certain mumsy pride as if he were a schoolboy striding to the crease to face the demon bowler of the Upper Sixth. Not quite what he intended.

Harry Cutley had been seized in the middle of a mouthful of pie. Not necessarily a phenomenon worth an Incident Form. Something in his eyes as he veered off, trying to staunch coughing, suggested he wasn’t seeing what Richard was. The man had been touched. Attacked, even.

“Your friend, sir,” said Arnold, with concern. “He seems taken poorly.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing repeatable, sir.”

“I’ll see to him, thank you, Arnold.”

“Very good, sir.”

Every time he spoke with Arnold, Richard had to quash an impulse to tip him. At the end of the journey, was it the done thing to palm a ten-bob note and pass it over with a handshake?

He walked the length of the carriage, rolling with the movement of the train. He had become accustomed to the Scotch Streak. He had to concentrate to hear the rattle of wheels, the chuff-chuff of the engine, the small clinkings of cutlery and crockery. Almost comforting. Catriona Kaye said the most dangerous haunted houses always feel like home.

Harry had barged past Mrs Sweet. Richard thought of talking with her, but she glared as he walked towards her. He was a duck’s-arse-quiffed affront to everything she believed. Real killers wore respectable suits from Burton’s and had faces like trustworthy babies. That was how they got close. Richard had a pang of worry that Mrs Sweet might have an extra gun about her – a hold-out derringer in her stocking-top or a pepperpot in her reticule – in case a wounded grouse flapped close enough to need its head dissolving with a single, deadly-accurate shot. This train gave people funny ideas. She might easily pot him on the offchance.

He got by Mrs Sweet unshot, looked over his shoulder at Annette and Myles, and stepped through the connecting door into the Second Class carriage. He checked the lavatory and didn’t find Harry – though he caught sight of a cracked mirror and started, shocked at a glimpse of an antlered, fox-faced quarry with a target marked on his forehead in dribbling blood. How others see us.

The carriage was empty. The corridor was unlit. Second Class did not have sleeping berths, but there were regular compartments, suitable comfortably for six, which could take ten in a pinch. The dark made it easier to see out of the windows. This stretch of track ran though ancient forest. Branches twisted close, leaves reaching for the passing express.

Richard made his way down the carriage, checking each compartment. None of the privacy blinds were down. One seat supported a huddle of old clothes that might have been a sleeping Second Class passenger – though it was early to turn in for the night. On a second look, no one was there. He knew better than be caught out that way, and looked again. Whatever had been huddled was gone back to its hole. He trusted it would stay there.

It couldn’t be the throat-cut spectre of “Buzzy” Maltrincham. The vicious Viscount wouldn’t have been caught dead in Second Class. 3473 had many more ghosts than him. Would Lord Kilpartinger show up again? Disgraced old Donald McRidley – assuming he was dead. The Headless Fireman? The passengers of ’31? The waterlogged witches of Loch Gaer?

It got darker as he proceeded. Turning back, he saw the glass of the connecting door was now opaque – had someone drawn a blind? – and the dining carriage cut off from view.

“Harry?” he called out, feeling foolish.

Something pattered, near the toilet cubicle. Fast and light. Not clumsy Harry Cutley. It might be a large cat. They had railway cats, didn’t they? There was one in Old Mother Possum’s. But usually on stations, not on trains.

Another of Catriona Kaye’s sayings was that sometimes observers brought their own ghosts and the haunted place merely fleshed them out. Was there a puma person still after Harry? Hadn’t Annette been bothered by something from the War? Her “it”, her Worst Thing? Some entities fished out your worst nightmare – your worst memory, your darkest secret – and threw it at you. But nothing dug for your happiest moments, your fondest wishes, your most thrilling dreams and wrapped them up as a present. What had Magic Fingers called it, Sod’s Law?

Richard remembered his father’s advice about how to see off a tiger if you were unarmed. Knock sharply on its snout, as if rapping on a front door. Just the once. Serve notice you are not to be bothered. The big cat would bolt like a doused kitten, leaving rending, clawing and devouring for another day. Pumas are just weedy imitation tigers, so the Major Jeperson treatment should send one chasing its tail. Of course, his father never claimed to have used his tiger-defying technique in the wild. It was wisdom passed down in the family – untested, but comforting.

“Harry?”

Now, Richard felt like an idiot. Plainly, lightfeet wasn’t Harry Cutley.

He walked back, past the compartments – that huddle was still absent, thank you very much – towards the toilet and the connecting door. He moved with casual ease, controlling an urge to scream and run. The puma was Harry’s Worst Thing. Not Richard Jeperson’s.

The area between cubicle and door was untenanted. He thought. He held the door-handle, torn. He couldn’t return to Annette and Myles with no news of Harry, but didn’t want to venture further into the train without reporting back, even if he raised a fuss. Harry, technically, was in charge. He should have left instructions – not that Richard would have felt obliged to follow them. If it had been Edwin Winthrop, maybe. Catriona Kaye, certainly – though she never instructed. She provided useful information and a delicate nudge towards the wisest course.

The nagging imp came again – he was just a kid, he wasn’t ready for this, he wasn’t sure what this was. None of that nonsense, he told himself, sternly, trying to sound like Edwin or his father. You’re a Diogenes Club man. Inner Sanctum material. Most Valued Member potential. Bred to it, sensitive, a Talent.

Click. He’d tell Annette that Harry had gone far afield, then co-opt Arnold and make a thorough search. This was a train, it was impossible to go missing (Lord Kilpartinger did) and Harry was simply puking his pie, not held by the Headless Fireman and clawed by a Phantom Puma.

He opened the connecting door.

And wasn’t in the dining carriage, but the First Class Sleeping Compartments. Discreet overhead lights flickered.

At the end of the corridor, by an open compartment-door, stood a small figure in blue pyjamas decorated with space-rockets, satellites, moons and stars. Her label was tied loosely around her neck. Her unbound red hair fell to her waist, almost covering her face. Her single exposed eye fixed on him.

What was the girl’s name? He was as bad as Harry.

“Vanessa?” it came to him. “Why are you up?”

Setting aside the Mystery of the Vanishing Carriage, he went to the child, and knelt, sweeping hair away from her face. She wasn’t crying but something was wrong. He recognised emptiness in her, an absence he knew well – for he had it himself. He made a smile-face and she didn’t cringe. At least she didn’t see him as a werebeast whose head would fit the space over the mantelpiece. She also didn’t laugh, no matter how he twisted his mouth and rolled his eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

“Dreams,” she said, hugging him around the neck, surprisingly heavy, lips close to his ear, “bad dreams.”

V

“. . . and then, chicklet, there were two.”

Magic Fingers wished the Scotch Streak’s famous facilities stretched to an espresso machine. He could use a Java jolt to electrify the old grey sponge, get his extra-senses acting extra-sensible. Like most night-birds, he ran on coffee.

Annie pursed her lips at him and looked at the doorway through which Hard Luck Harry and now the Kid had disappeared.

“You said we shouldn’t split the band and you were on the button,” he told her. “We should have drawn the wagons in a circle.”

“You’re not helping,” she said.

Was he picking up jitters from her? When Annie was discombo-bulated, everyone in the house came down with the sweats. It was a downside of her Talent.

“Chill, tomato, chill,” he said. “Put some ice on it.”

She nodded, knowing what he meant, and tried hard. There was a switch in her brain, which turned off the receptors in her fright centre. Otherwise she’d never have made it through the War.

Danny Myles had been blind during the War, evacuated from the East End to the wilds of Wales. He had learned his way around the sound-smell-touch-tastescape of Streatham in his first twelve years, but found the different environment – all cold wind-blasts, tongue-twisting language and lava bread – of Bedgellert a disorienting nightmare. He had run away from Mr and Mrs Jones the Farmers on his own, and felt his way back across two countries, turning up in his street to find it wasn’t there any more and Mum was with Auntie Brid in Brixton. Lots of cockney kids ran away from yokels they were packed off to during the Blitz – some from exploitation or abuse far beyond lava bread every evening and tuneless chapel most of the weekend – but they weren’t usually blind. It was a nine days’ wonder. Mum wasn’t sure whether to send him back to the Jones’, with a label round his neck like that chick who took a shine to the Kid, or keep him in London, sheltering in the Underground during the raids.

Born without sight, it was hard for Danny to get his head around the idea of blindness or realise his extra-senses were out of the ordinary. Then, the switch in his brain was thrown. No miracle operation, no bump on the bonce, no faith healer – it was just like a door suddenly swinging open. There was a black-out, so there wasn’t even much to see – until the sun came up. He didn’t stop whooping for a week. At first, the bright new world in his eyes blotted out the patterns of sound and touch he had made do with, but when things settled, his ears were sharper than ever. Soon, he could channel music through anything with eighty-eight keys, really earning his “Magic Fingers” handle. Then Edwin Winthrop came into the scene and the Diogenes Club took an interest, labelling him a Talent.

He’d been doing these gigs for years. In ’53, he’d unmasked the Phantom of the Festival of Britain. Then, he’d busted the Insane Gang. Defused the last of Goebbels’ Psychic Propaganda Bombs. Rid London Zoo of the Ghost Gorilla and his Ape Armada. It was a sideline. Also, he knew, an addiction. Some jazzmen popped pills, mainlined horse, bombed out on booze, chased skirts – he went after spooks. Not just any old sheet-wearers, but haints which could turn about and bite. Heart-eaters. Like 3473-S. This was a bad one, worse than the Phantom, worse than the Ghost Gorilla. He knew it. Annie and the Kid knew it too, but they hadn’t his extra-senses. They didn’t know enough to be properly wary. Hell, not wary – terrified.

“You’re doing it again,” Annie chided him.

He realised he’d been drumming his fingers. “Stella By Starlight”. A song about a ghost. He stopped.

His hands hurt. That snap from the piano-lid was coolly calculated to show him who was boss. The sides of his thumbs were numb. His knuckles were purple and blobby. He spread his fingers on the tablecloth.

“Like, ouch, man,” he said.

Annie giggled.

“It hurts, y’know. How’d you like it if your face fell off?”

She was shocked for a moment.

“Not a lot,” she said.

“These hands are my fortune, ought to be wrapped in cotton wool every night. If I could spring for payments, I’d insure them for lotsa lettuce. This . . . this train went for them, like a bird goes for the eyes. Dig?”

“The Worst Thing in the World.”

“On the button, Mama.”

“Less of the ‘Mama’. I’m not that much older than you.”

The Kid ought to be back by now. But he was a no-show. And Harry Cutley was far out there, drowning.

Magic Fingers cast his peepers over the dining car. There’d been an elderly frail strapping on the feed-bag down the way. She’d skedaddled, though he didn’t recall her getting up. Arnold – the conductor-waiter-majordomo-high priest – was gonesville also. He and Annie were alone.

Man, the rattle and shake of the train was fraying his nerves with bring-down city jazz! It was syncopation without representation! All bum notes and missed melodies.

At first, movement had been smooth, like skimming over a glassy lake. Now, the waters were choppy. Knives and forks hopped on the tables. Windows thrummed in their frames. The cloth slid by fractions of an inch and had to be held down, lest it drag plates over the edge and into the aisle.

He felt it in his teeth, in his water, in his guts, in the back of his throat.

Speed, reckless speed. This beast could come off the rails at any time.

The windows were deep dark, as if the outsides were painted – or black-out curtains hung over them. Even if he got close to the cold glass, all he saw was a fish-eye-distorted, darked-up reflection.

They weren’t in a tunnel. They could have been on a trestle stretched through a void, steaming on full-ahead, rails silently coming to pieces behind them. Alone in the night.

He raised his hand and fingertipped the glass, getting five distinct icy shocks. He’d been leery of using his touching, but now was the time.

“Anything?” asked Annie.

He provisionally shook his head, but felt into the glass. It was thick, like crystal, and veined. He felt the judder of pane in frame, and caught the train’s music, a bebop with high notes, warning whistles and a thump of dangerous bass. 3473 had a heartbeat, a pulse.

A shock sparked into his fingers, pain outlining his hand-bones.

He was stuck to the window, palm flat against the glass, fingers splayed. Waves of hurt pulsed into him, jarring his wrist, his arm . . . up to the elbow, up to the shoulder.

Annie sat, mouth open, not moving. Frozen.

No, he felt her gloved fingers on his wrist, pulling. He scented her perfume, close. The brush of her hair, the warmth of her, near him.

But he saw her sitting still, across the table.

It was if his eyes had taken a photograph and kept showing it to him, while his extra-senses kept up with what was really happening. He moved his head: the picture in front of him didn’t change.

Annie was speaking to him, but he couldn’t make it out. Was she talking French? Or Welsh? He had the vile taste of lava bread in his mouth. He heard the train rattle, the music of 3473, louder and louder.

The picture changed. For another still image.

Annie was trying to help, one knee up on the table, both hands round his wrist, face twisted in concentration as she pulled.

But he couldn’t feel her hands any more, couldn’t smell her.

In his eyes, she was with him. But every other sense told him she’d left off.

His vision showed him still images, like slides in a church hall. It was as if he were in a cinema where the projector selected and held random frames every few seconds while the soundtrack ran normally.

A scream joined train noise.

Annie was in the aisle, arms by her sides, hands little fists, mouth open. Dark flurries in the air around her. Birds or bats, moving too fast to be captured by a single exposure.

The scream shut off, but Annie was still posed in her yell. Something broke.

In the next image, she was strewn among place-settings a few booths down, limbs twisted, dress awry. The frosted glass partition was cracked across.

The window let go of him. His hand felt skinless, wet.

Someone, not Annie, was talking, burbling words, scat-singing. No tune he could follow.

He waited for the next picture, to find out who was there. Instead the frame held, fixed and unmoving no matter how he shook his head. He stood and painfully caught his hip on the table-edge. He felt his way into the aisle, still seeing from his sat-by-the-window position. He tried to work out where he was in the picture before him, reaching out for chair-backs to make his way hand-over-hand to Annie, or to where Annie was in his frozen vision.

A heavy thump, and a hissing along with the gabble.

He stood still in the aisle, bobbing with the movement of the train, like the hipsters who didn’t dance but nodded heads to the bop, shoulders and hands in movement, carried by jazz. He guesstimated he was three booths away from his original viewpoint.

Then the lights flared and faded.

The picture turned to sepia, as if there were an even flame behind the paper, and the brown darkened to blackness.

He shut and opened his sightless eyes.

His hands were on chair-backs and he had a better sense of things than when treacherous eyes were letting him down. He heard as acutely as before. The gabbling was a distraction. Just noise, source-less. There was no body to it – nothing displacing air, raising or lowering temperature, smelling of cologne or ciggies. There was one breathing person in the carriage – Annette Amboise, asleep or unconscious. Otherwise, he was alone, inside the beast.

This was different; blindness, with the memory of sight. It was as if there had been white chalk marks around everything, just-erased but held in his mind as guide-lines.

It wasn’t like seeing, but he knew what was where.

Tables, chairs, roses in sconces, windows, connecting doors, the aisle. Under him was carpet. Under that was the floor of the carriage. Under that hungry wheels and old, old rails.

Now there were shapes in the dark. Sitting at the tables. White clouds like human-sized eggs or beans, bent in the middle, limbless, faceless.

He heard the clatter of cutlery, grunts and smacks of swinish eating. In the next carriage, the piano was assaulted. Someone wearing mittens plunked through “Green Grow the Rushes-Oh”, accompanied by a drunken chorus. This wasn’t now. This was before the War.

This was the Scotch Streak of Lord Killpassengers.

How far off was the In-for-Death Bridge?

He couldn’t smell anything. It was worse than being struck blind. He knew he could cope without eyes. He’d made it from Wales to London, once. He had the magic fingers.

Someone called him, from a long way away.

All he could taste was dry, unbuttered lava bread. Butter wasn’t to be had in London, what with rationing – his Mum used some sort of grease that had to be mixed up in a bowl. In Wales, with farms all about, there was all the butter in the world and no questions asked, but Mr and Mrs Jones didn’t believe in it. Like they didn’t believe in hot water. Or sheets – thin blankets of horsehair that scratched like a net of tiny hooks would do. Or music, except the wheezing chapel organ. When Danny drummed his fingers, he’d get a slap across the hand to cure him of the habit. He was not to get up from the table, even if he needed to take the ten steps across the garden to the privy, until he’d cleared his plate and thanked the Good Lord for His Bounty.

Most nights, he’d sit, fighting his bladder and his tongue, struggling to swallow, trying not to have acute taste-buds, ignoring the hurt in his mouth until the lump was solid in his stomach. “There’s lovely,” Mrs Jones would say. “Bless the bread and bless the child.”

In the dining carriage, there was lava bread on every table.

The communicating door opened. The racket rose by decibels, pouring in from the canvas-link between carriages where the din was loudest. A cold draught dashed into his face. Someone entered the dining car, someone who shifted a lot of air. The newcomer moved carefully, like a fat man who knows he’s drunk but has to impress the Lord Mayor. A grey-white shape appeared in the dark and floated towards Danny, scraps of chalk-mark and neon squiggles like those sighted people have inside their eyelids coalescing into a huge belly constrained by vertically striped overalls, an outsize trainman’s hat, a pitted moon-face. Danny saw the wide man as if he were spotlit on a shadowed stage, or cut out of a photograph and pasted on a black background.

He recognised the face.

A huge paw, grimy with engine dirt, stuck out.

“Gilclyde,” boomed the voice, filling his skull. “Lord Kilpartin-ger.”

Not knowing what else to do, Magic Fingers offered his hand to be shaken. Lord Killpassengers enveloped it with his banana-fingered ape-paws and squeezed with nerve-crushing, bone-crushing force.

Agony blotted out all else – he was in the dark again, feeling the vice-grip but not seeing His Lordship dressed up as Casey Jones. Burning pain smothered his hand.

It was a bad break. At the end of his wrist hung a limp, tangled dust-rag.

Then he felt nothing – no pain. No sound. No smell. No taste. No feeling.

For the first time in his life, he was completely cut off.

VI

Even beyond the usual assumption that quiet English children were aliens, there was something about Vanessa.

She made Richard feel the way grown-ups, even those inside the Diogenes Club, felt around him when he was a boy, the way a lot of people still felt when he was in the room. At first, they were on their guard because he dressed like the sort of youth the Daily Mail reckoned would smash your face in – though, in his experience, teds were as sweet or sour as anyone else, and the worst beatings he’d personally taken came from impeccably-uniformed school prefects. Once past that, people just got spooked – because he felt things, saw things, knew things.

Now he knew about Vanessa.

He was almost afraid of her. And this from someone who accepted the impossible without question.

Sherlock Holmes, brother of the Club’s founder, said: “When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth.” Less frequently quoted was Mycroft’s addendum, “And when you can not eliminate the impossible, refer the matter to the Diogenes Club.” It was recorded in the Club’s archives, though not in the writings of John Watson, that the Great Detective several times found himself stumped, and fielded the case to his contemporary Carnacki the Ghost-Finder.

It was barely possible that a gigantic conjuring trick could rearrange, or seem to rearrange, the carriages while the train was steaming through the darkened countryside. The archives weren’t short of locked-room mysteries and like conundra. For some reason, especially from the 1920s and early ’30s. The Scotch Streak dated from then, so it could have been built to allow baffling disappearances. However, an uncanny explanation required less of a stretch of belief. Richard couldn’t see a point to the carriage substitution, and pointlessness was a frequent symptom of the supernatural. Haunted houses often had “treacherous” doors, opening to different rooms at different times. It should have been expected, by know-it-all Harry Cutley for instance, that a haunted train would have something along these lines. However, the switcheroo wasn’t on the train’s list of previously recorded phenomena.

Where was everybody? Harry was downwind, last seen heading towards Second and Third Class. Annette and Myles were in the misplaced dining car. Arnold the Conductor, omnipresent earlier, was nowhere to be seen.

Were the other passengers where they should be? Though it was easy to get distracted by fireworks, this investigation was supposed to be about protecting the American couriers.

Three compartments had blinds drawn and DO NOT DISTURB signs hung. One was Annette’s and she wasn’t there. Another was Vanessa’s and she was with him.

That was a puzzle. Besides the couriers, Mrs Sweet and the sinister vicar (one of whom must be a spy) should be here. They couldn’t all be crammed into one compartment playing whist with nuclear missiles. In theory, the British Government had other agents to deal with that sort of mess, kitted out with exploding cufflinks and licences to kill. In a pinch, Richard could muddle in. The Club had been dabbling in “ordinary” espionage since the Great Game of Victoria’s reign. Edwin had served as an Intelligence Officer in the RFC during the First World War (“No, I didn’t shoot down the Bloody Red Baron; what I shot was a lot of photographs from the back of a two-seater – if it matters, each exposure got more Huns killed than all the so-called flying aces put together.”) before taking over Carnacki’s ghost-finding practice.

“Have you seen any Americans?” he asked the child.

She solemnly shook her head and stuck out her lower lip. She wanted more attention paid to her.

He looked again at her label.

“Who is Lieutenant-Commander Coates?”

She gave a “don’t know” shrug.

“Not your Dad, you said. Where are your parents?”

Another shrug.

“Lot of that about,” he said, feeling it deeply. “Where do you live, usually?”

A small sound, inaudible – as if the girl weren’t used to speech, like a well-bred, upper-middle-class Kaspar Hauser in spaceman pyjamas.

“Come again, love?”

“Can’t remember,” she said.

Richard had a chill, born of kinship. But he was also wary. This was too close to where he came from. If the train could come up with Worst Things to get under Annette’s or Harry’s skin, it could sidle up close to him and bite too.

“Vanessa What?”

Another “can’t remember”.

“It must be Vanessa Something. Not Coates, but Something.”

She shook her head, braids whipping.

“Just Vanessa, then. It’ll have to do. Nothing wrong with ‘Vanessa’. Not a saint’s name, so far. Not forged in antiquity and refined through passage from language to language like mine. Richard, from the Germanic for ‘Rule-Hard’, also ‘Ricardo’, ‘Rickard’, ‘Dick’, ‘Dickie’, ‘Dickon’, ‘Rich’, ‘Richie’, ‘Clever Dick’, ‘Dick-Be-Quick’, ‘Crookback Dick’. Your name – like ‘Pamela’, ‘Wendy’ and ‘Una’ – was invented within recorded history. By Jonathan Swift, as it happens. Do you know who he was?”

“He wrote Gulliver’s Travels.”

So she remembered some things.

“Yes. He coined the name ‘Vanessa’ as a contraction – like ‘Dick’ for ‘Richard’ – for an Irish girl called ‘Esther Vanhomrigh’.”

“Who was she?”

“Ah, she was a fan of Dean Swift, you know, like girls today might be fans of Tommy Steele.”

“Don’t like Tommy Steele.”

“Elvis Presley?”

Vanessa was keener on Elvis.

“Miss Vanhomrigh was Swift’s biggest fan, so he invented a name for her. He preferred another woman called Esther, Esther Johnson, whom he called ‘Stella’. I expect he made up the names so as not to get them mixed up. Stella and Vanessa didn’t like each other.”

“Did they fight?”

“In a way. They competed for Swift’s attention.”

“Did Vanessa win?”

“Not really, love. Both died before they could settle who got him, and he wasn’t entirely in the business of being got.”

Best not to mention the author might have married Stella.

How did they get into this? He didn’t set out to be a lecturer, but he was recounting things he didn’t think he remembered to this inquisitive, reticent child. Talking to her calmed him.

“Are we being got?” she asked.

“I’m afraid we might be.”

“Please don’t let me be got.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Vanessa smiled up at him. Richard worried he had just given his word in the middle of a great unknown. He might not be in a position to keep his promise.

But he knew it was important.

Vanessa must not be got.

They were by the compartment with the DO NOT DISTURB sign. He saw a THROUGH TO PORTNACREIRANN notation. The blind wasn’t pulled all the way down, and a spill of light wavered on the compartment floor. In that, Richard saw a pale hand dangling from the lower berth, thin chain fixed to the handle of a briefcase on the floor. It was one of the couriers.

At least they were safe.

Vanessa put her eye up to the gap and looked in, for a long while.

“Come away,” he said. “Let the nice Americans sleep.”

She turned and looked up at him. “Are you sure they’re nice?”

“No, but they’re important. And it’s best to leave them alone. There are other people I want to find first.”

“Your friends? The pretty lady. The scowly man. The blind person.”

“Danny’s not blind. Well, not now. How did you know he’d been blind?”

She shrugged.

“Just sensitive, I suppose,” he prompted. “And, yes, them. I left them in the restaurant but I, ah, seem to have mislaid the carriage. It used to be there” – pointing at the connecting door – “but now it isn’t.”

“Silly,” she said. “A restaurant can’t get lost.”

“You’ve got a lot to learn.”

“No, I haven’t,” she declared, sticking up her freckled nose. “I’ve learned quite enough already.”

Richard was slightly irked by her tone. He might have said Vanessa’s education could hardly be considered complete since she’d omitted to learn her own full name. But that would be cruel. He understood too well how these situations came about.

“The supper carriage is through that door,” she said. “I peeked, earlier.”

She led him by the hand, back towards the connecting door.

“We should be careful,” he said.

“Silly silly,” she said. “Come on, Mr Richard, don’t be scared . . .”

When anyone – even a little girl – told him not to be scared, his natural instinct was to wonder what there was not to be scared of, then whether the person giving the advice was as well up on the potential scariness or otherwise of the situation or entity in question as they might be.

The subdued lamps in the train corridor had dimmed to the point when everything seemed moonlit. The glass in the connecting door was black – he had a nasty thought that the carriages could have shifted about again, and there might be cold night air and a nasty fall to the tracks beyond.

He let Vanessa’s hand go, and looked – trying to show more confidence than he felt – towards the door. He was over twice the girl’s age, and should take the lead; then again, twice a single figure wasn’t that much. He didn’t really know how old he was, let alone how old he should act.

He hesitated. She gave him a little push.

The train noise was louder near the door, the floor shakier.

Richard told himself he was opening the door. Then he found he actually was.

Beyond was . . .

VII

Something had given her an almighty thump. And had got to Danny Myles.

Annette came to on a table. Forks were driven through her shoulder-straps, pinning her to Formica. She couldn’t sit without ruining her Coco Chanel. Obviously, this was the work of a fiend from Hell. Or a jealous wife.

The table rattled. Was the Scotch Streak shaking to pieces?

A length of something spiny, like over-boiled stringy asparagus with teeth, stretched across her mouth. She clamped down, tasted bitter sap, and spat it away. It was the long-stemmed rose from the place-setting.

She carefully detached the forks, trying to inflict no more damage to her dress, and sat up. Wet, sticky blood pooled on the tablecloth. Then she noticed a paring-knife sticking out of her right thigh. Her stocking was torn. She gripped the handle, surprised not to feel anything but slight stiffness. Upon pulling out the knife, a gush of jagged pain came. She ignored it, and improvised a battlefield dressing – another useful trade learned in the War – with a napkin and cocktail sticks.

Sliding off the table, she looked up and down the dining carriage.

Danny Myles was backed into a space between the last booth and the door to the galley, hugging his knees, face hidden. He trembled, but she couldn’t tell if it was with silent sobbing or the movement of the train.

She saw no one else, which didn’t mean no one else was there.

Someone had forked and knifed her. The skewering had been too deliberate, too mocking, to be the result of a directionless phenomenon like the common-or-garden poltergeist. Something with a personality had skewered her. Something that thought itself a comedian. The worst kind of spook, in her opinion. Or maybe she’d been pinned by a mean person who wasn’t here any more. Never neglect human agency. People could be wretched enough on their own, without calling in ghosts.

There were ghosts here, though.

“Danny,” she said.

He didn’t hear her. That tinkled a warning – Danny heard everything, even when you didn’t want him to. He could probably smell or taste what was whispered in the next building in a room with taps running.

“Danny,” she said, louder.

She went to him, feeling stabbed again with every step.

He wasn’t dead, she saw, but in shock, crawled back into his shell. He looked up and around, seeing nothing.

Danny “Magic Fingers” Myles held up useless hands.

“Busted,” he said. “Gone.”

She knelt by him and examined his hands. No bones were broken. She found no wound of any kind. But they were dead, like sand-filled gloves.

“Salauds bodies,” she swore. Nazi bastards!

She knew what the Worst Thing was for Danny Myles.

His head jerked and he flinched, as if he were being flapped at by a cloud of bats. He knew someone was near, but not that it was her. All his senses were gone. He was locked in his skull.

She took his arms and stood him up. He didn’t fight her. She tried to reach him – not by talking or even touching, but with her inside self. She projected past the bony shields around his mind, to reassure, to promise help . . .

She didn’t know if the damage was permanent – but she squashed the thought, screwing it into a tiny speck. He mustn’t get that, mustn’t catch despair from her, to compound his own.

It’s Annie . . .

Because it was her way, she tried kissing him, but just smeared her lipstick. She held him tight, her forehead against his.

He wriggled, escaping from her. The napkin bandage came loose and her leg gave out. For support, she grabbed a tall trolley with shelves of dessert. It rolled down the aisle, dragging her. She bumped her head against the silvered frame. Cream and jam smeared the side of her face, matting in her hair. The trolley got away, and she was left, tottering, reaching out for something fixed . . .

Danny walked like a puppet, jerked past the galley, pulled towards the end of the carriage. Annette had seen people like that before, in shock or under the ’fluence.

“Danny!” she called out, frustrated. Nothing reached him.

She repaired her bandage. How much blood had she lost? Her foot was a mass of needles and pins. She wasn’t sure her knee was working properly. Her fingers weren’t managing too well knotting the napkin.

Danny was at the end of the carriage. The door slid open, not through his agency – the train had tilted to slam it aside. He vanished into shadow beyond, and fell down. She saw his trouser-cuffs and shoes slither into darkness as he pulled himself – or was pulled – out of the dining car.

This had gone far enough.

She reached out, slipped her hand into the alcove, and took a firm hold on the communication cord.

She had felt this coming. Now, here it was.

“ ‘Penalty for improper use – five pounds’,” she read aloud. “Cheap at half the price.”

She pulled, with her whole body. There was no resistance. She sprawled on the carpet. The red-painted metal chain was loose. Lengths rattled out of the alcove, yards falling in coils around her.

No whistle, no grinding of brakes, no sudden halt.

Nothing. The cord hadn’t been fixed to anything. It was a con, like pictures of life-belts painted on the side of a ship.

The Scotch Streak streaked on.

If anything, the din was more terrific. Cold wind blew, riffling Annette’s sticky hair.

Between the carriages, one of the exterior doors was open.

Another earlier flash-forward came back to her. An open door. Someone falling. Breaking.

“Danny!” she yelled.

She scrabbled, tripping over the bloody useless chain, got to her feet, one heel snapped. That had been in her Worst Thing vision. Slipping free of her pumps, she ran towards the end of the carriage, as light flared in the passage beyond. She saw the open door, had an impression of hedgerows flashing by, greenery turned grey in the scatter of light from the train. Danny Myles hung in the doorway, wrists against the frame, body flapping like a flag.

She grabbed for him. Her fingers brushed his jersey.

Then he was gone. She leaned out of the train, wind hammering her eyes, and saw him collide with a gravel incline. He bounced several times, then tangled with a fence-post, wrapping around it like a discarded scarecrow.

The train curved the wrong way and she couldn’t see him. Magic Fingers was left behind.

Tears forced from her, she wrenched herself back into the train, pulling closed the door. It was as if she had taken several sudden punches in the gut, the prelude to questioning, to loosen up the prisoner.

She found herself sitting down, crying her heart out. For a long time.

“Why is your friend bawling?” asked a small voice.

Smearing tears out of her eyes with her wrist, Annette looked up.

Richard was back – from the wrong direction, she realised – with Vanessa. The little girl held out a handkerchief with an embroidered “V”. Annette took it, wiped her eyes, and found she needed to blow her nose. Vanessa didn’t mind.

“Danny’s gone,” she told Richard. “It got him.”

She looked up at her colleague, the boy Edwin Winthrop had confidence in, the youth she’d entertained fantasies about. Recruited at an early age, educated and trained and brought up to become a Most Valued Member. Richard Jeperson was supposed to take care of things like this. Harry Cutley lead this group, but insiders tipped Richard as the man to take over, to defy the worst the dark had to offer.

She saw Richard had no idea what to do next. She saw only a black barrier in the future. And she swooned.

Act III: Inverdeith

I

He had nothing.

Annette was out cold. Harry was missing in action. Danny was finished. He was no use to them, they were no help to him.

Richard was at the sharp end, with no more to give.

Vanessa tugged his sleeve, insistent. She needed him, needed comfort, needed saving.

Nearby, in one of these shifting carriages, the NATO couriers slept. And others – Arnold the Conductor, the scary vicar, Mrs Sweet, that cockney medium, more passengers, the driver and fireman sealed off from the rest of the train in the cabin of the locomotive. Even if they didn’t know it, they all counted on him. With the Go-Codes up for grabs, the whole world was on the table and the big dice rattled for the last throw.

The Diogenes Club expected him to do his duty.

He had the girl fetch chilled water in a jug from the galley, and sprinkled it on Annette’s brow. The woman murmured, but stayed under. He looked at Vanessa, who shrugged and made a pouring motion. Richard resisted the notion – it seemed disrespectful to treat a grown-up lady like a comedy sidekick. Vanessa urged him, smiling as any child would at the idea of an adult getting a slosh in the face. With some delicacy, Richard tipped the jug, dripping fat bullets of water onto Annette’s forehead. Her eyes fluttered and he tipped further. Ice-cubes bounced. Annette sat up, drenched and sputtering.

“Welcome back.”

She looked at him as if she were about to faint again, but didn’t. He shook her shoulders, to keep her attention.

“Yes, I understand,” she said. “Now don’t overdo it. And get me a napkin.”

Like the perfect waiter – and where was Arnold? – he had one to hand. She dabbed her face dry and ran fingers through her short hair. She’d like to spend fifteen minutes on her make-up, but was willing to sacrifice for the Cause.

“You’re lovely as you are,” he said.

She shrugged it off, secretly pleased. She let him help her to her feet and slid into one of the booths. Vanessa monkeyed up and sat opposite. The child began to play, tracing scratch-lines on the tablecloth with a long-tined fork.

“I tried the communication cord,” she said. “No joy.”

He got up, found the loose loop of cord, examined it, sought out the next alcove, pulled experimentally. No effect whatsoever.

“Told you so,” she said.

“Independent confirmation. Harry Cutley would approve. It counts as a finding if we fill in the forms properly.”

Richard sat next to the little girl and looked at Annette, reaching out to catch a drip she had missed.

“Harry’s gone?” she asked.

Richard thought about it. He calmed, reaching into his centre, and tried to feel out, along the length of the train.

“Not like Danny’s gone,” he concluded. “Harry’s on board.”

“What’s he doing when he goes quiet like that?” Vanessa asked, interested. “Saying his prayers?”

“Being sensitive,” said Annette.

“Is that like being polite, minding his ‘P’s and ‘Q’s?”

Richard broke off and paid attention to the people immediately around him.

“Something missing,” he said. “Something’s been taken.”

“Time, for a start,” said Annette. “How long have we been aboard?”

Richard reached for his watch-pocket, then remembered he’d retired the timepiece. There was a clock above the connecting door. The one in the ballroom carriage seemed to keep the right time when all others failed. The face of this clock was black – not painted over, but opaque glass. It still ticked.