J. H. Sked (6 page)

The punk was gone, only a sticky damp place and a silver stud left on the material of the seat. After a few moments of the passengers staring at each other, the elderly man stood up and shuffled cautiously over to where the boy had sat.

As he bent over the material and gingerly dabbed a finger at it, the train loped easily through the next station without hesitating at the platform.

Charlie had a vague impression of puzzled faces that blurred past in a wash of fluorescent tubing and dirty white walls.

“This is blood,” the man in the skullcap whispered. His voice was soft and whispery, but
blood
in that voice still sounded like the dull, leaden thud of crumpling metal to Charlie, who gasped and clapped his hand over his ears.

The teenagers had fallen silent instantly, clutching each other and huddling together like terrified doves.

“It can’t be.” The woman in the red suit sat upright and peered at him accusingly, as the lights began to flicker and hum once more.

“There is something seriously wrong here,” the man continued in that papery soft voice, holding his scarlet-smeared fingers towards them as the shadows behind him shivered and coalesced.

Charlie started to weep as he watched the copper sparks float in the dimness behind the old man.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and the red woman jerked around to glare at him.

“What –“ she began, and the carriage shuddered violently and flung the man in the skullcap against the beating yellow vessel of the central pole. He slid down it gracelessly, one arm out flung like a drunken ballerina, and the girls, still clutching each, other, began to shriek in unpretty scales of terror.

He touched the floor and was gone, melting into the surface like a puddle of aging human snow.

The carriage belched explosively and raced on.

The red woman staggered to her feet, cawing speechlessly.

She dropped her handbag, still open, onto the floor; the tortoiseshell compact spilled out and shattered shards of pattern across the hideous lipstick, the coins, the used, crumpled tissue dappled with make-up and middle-aged snot.

She stumbled and fell heavily to her knees, crawling the short length of passageway between the seats. As she brushed against the legs of the girls, they flinched away from her and redoubled the volume of shrieking.

The lights flickered and hummed like a million flies.

Charlie fumbled the torch out of Donald’s back and hit the switch as the lights dimmed away once more, in time to see the red lady crawl head first into Danny’s knees.

He lifted her easily to her feet, patted her gently on the shoulder, and carved an extra smile with his thumbnail below the trembling efforts of her own lips before flopping her bonelessly into a waiting seat.

Charlie felt his throat shut and his bladder open, and scrambled once more inside Donald for the ugly saviour of gas and plastic.

The first pinpricks of oxygen starvation flared across his eyeballs; little stars of light that burned across his eyes and exploded into lethal beauty.

In his haste he dropped the torch from rapidly numbing fingers, the falling flare enough to see Danny loom up before the sobbing teenage girls and slam their skulls together with brisk efficiency. The torch landed with a sickening crunch on the floor of the carriage and died forever.

Charlie wheezed and forced the last of the gas in the inhaler down his throat, panting and gasping and sobbing as the swollen tissue finally subsided.

The lights flared back on, bright as the desert sun. The bodies were gone.

Danny was sitting cross-legged on the seat opposite him, smiling. The copper rounds that had pierced his eyes gleamed and winked obscenely as the train screamed through the tunnels, a mortar on the final arc of descent.

Charlie felt his chest crushed in a vice grip. Nerveless fingers dropped the empty, useless grey tube to the floor.

“Hey Charlie,” Danny whispered, leaning forward and bringing the scent of open bowels and over-ripe meat with him. “Want to play a game?”

As the train howled and farted towards the next stop, the lights buzzed and hummed and let the darkness in once more.

This time, it stayed for quite a while.

Pushing Janey

One

P
han saw her for the first time at Piccadilly Station, waiting to cram into the can with the rest of the sardines at five o’clock.

Like dozens of others, she stood scanning a book, nibbling on a strand of blonde hair, glancing up every so often at passers by.

Usually, he dropped his eyes when someone looked up, but he was slow today – it had been a long eight hours in the ledgers and his mind had been wandering over irreconcilable figures.

When he realized she was looking back at him, he started, looking hastily away. She lowered her head back to the page, the few freckles on her broad curved cheekbones fading as the colour swept over them.

As the train hissed into the station with an exhalation of dry hot breath, she glanced up at him once more, then smiled.

Phan boarded the car behind her. He spent the rest of the commute staring into his folded hands, replaying the vivid flash of indigo eyes.

Back home, grandfather had cooked, a hamburger each with a bottle of soda gathering dew in the fridge.

“After forty years,” Phan said, shaking his head, “You’d think you’d get over this infatuation with junk food?”

Grandfather cackled.“I’ll get over junk food when you get over your fixation with blondes!”

Phan rose to stack the dishes in the sink. The old man watched the boy-child he had raised move gracefully around the cramped space.

“Did you talk to this one, then?”

Phan plunged his hands into the steaming water, watching them redden in the heat., “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he hissed.

Grandfather opened his mouth, but Phan held up a hand.

“Nor do I want to.” His tone making the other subside silently into his chair.

Grandfather regarded Phan’s hand. The golden flesh ended abruptly at the wrist, became an angry red glove steamed by the water.

‘
Too much like your heart, my little one.’

But he said no more.

Two

P
han saw her several times over the next few weeks, always in the evening press of homeward-bound office drones.

Although he could never bring himself to speak, they’d nod towards each other as they waited in the dankness of the station platform. Usually, she smiled at him with her indigo eyes, her red-blonde hair.

He wept when he first saw her face in the paper.

Her name had been Emily Jane Ramsey, Janey to her friends. Single, not quite twenty-three, working as an office clerk.

Phan went through the rest of the day an animated puppet, stiff and jerky as he tried to equate the girl who had smiled at him on the Piccadilly platform with the headline above her photograph:
THIRD SUICIDE ON MAJOR LINE THIS YEAR.

No,
he thought.
No
and,
no
and,
no.

Three

A
week later, he stood on the platform, the urge to glance at people - even absently - gone.

A glimpse of red-blonde made his stomach whimper. He turned away from her, not wishing to see the way she nibbled hair as she turned a page.

Yet, he slowly turned back towards her; his mind turning to ice.

Janey lifted her head and smiled at him. Closing her book, she began to walk towards him.

He could hear her heels clicking on the tiles.

He raised his hands, unseen by the press jostling around him as the train approached. Someone pushed by him as the metal tube belched explosively into view. When he regained his balance she was gone.

That was Monday.

The next two nights passed without a sign of her – not that Phan searched the platform too hard. He would stand, his nose pressed stubbornly against the sheet of newsprint held like a shield.

If he felt eyes on him, he ignored them grimly, applying himself to the lines of senseless print until the blessed rocket hurtled him away from the station.

On Wednesday he was proceeding onto the platform when he saw her. He halted in mid-step, forcing a large, middle-aged woman to skip daintily around him.

She had her back to him, the ever-present book tucked beneath one arm. There were strange marks on the back of her light blue dress, just above her waist.

Is she looking for me?

Phan felt the ice gather low in his belly once more. The woman in blue began to turn, and he sprinted back up the steps, taking them two at a time.

He went and stood at the bus stop, shaking.

No, and no, and no!

Four

T
here are ways to travel around London without using the tube, if you don’t mind adding at least an hour to your time by riding the bus, or by spending a small fortune on taxis.

It took weeks to realize he could catch a bus to the station just before Piccadilly. It added fifteen minutes to his commute, but that was better time than an hour.

As the blur through the windows resolved into Piccadilly Station, he caught himself sidling away from the windows, staring out of the dirty glass, and immediately he felt his gut lurch.

There she was there, in her blue dress, slender fingers tapping anxiously against her book. Beside her stood a plump, middle-aged lady with a home perm.

Phan groaned and passed a shaking hand over his eyes. When he looked again, Janey was staring directly at him, indigo eyes trailing wet diamonds that clung briefly to her lashes before rolling slowly down her face.

.

The middle-aged woman turned and looked reproachfully in his direction, placing a hand upon Janey’s shoulder, even as she tucked an oddly streaked jacket under her free arm.

Phan sank against the seat as the doors hissed shut and train sped up.

A contemptuous snort caused him to look up. A cocoa-skinned teenager with dreadlocks shook his head slowly at him, strands of hair swinging across features almost too pretty to be male.

A dirty smudge on the shirt, looking like a deformed starfish, obscured an image of Bob Marley.

Phan stared, feeling the stirrings of something. His mind was trying to make a connection, groping for a light switch in a blacked-out room.

…this boy, the plump woman with the perm, Janey…

“Are you getting this yet, bro?” The boy eyed him. The carriage lights flickered, and buzzed irritably, and then went out completely.

“What?” Phan stammered. “What?”

When the lights flicked back on, the boy was gone.

Five

I
t was Phan’s turn to cook. He edged into the flat and placed the Macdonald’s bag on the counter.

“Bribery, then?”

Phan grunted, prodding his bun unenthusiastically.

“Are you going to eat that, or ask me what you want to know?” Grandfather’s empty container slid back towards him.

Phan pushed his own untouched food towards the other man. He rose and wandered over to the window, resting his forehead against the glass. It was cool against the heat of his face.

“I’m being haunted.” His words misting against the window.

There was a snort from behind him. “And this is news?”

“I’m serious, damn it!”

“So am I.”

Phan turned to glare at his grandfather. The wall lamp caught the grey stubble around his mouth, the age-wattles that creased his neck and face like a carelessly bunched napkin.

“What do you mean?”

Grandfather sighed.“What I mean, is that you are the most haunted man I know - and I’ve known a few. You are haunted by her every moment you are awake, and most nights when you should be dreaming.”

For a moment Phan thought he meant Janey. He stiffened as the truth sank in. But the old man carried on, knowing that he would be unable to unsay what he was about to finally put in words after eight years.

“When was the last time you put on a shirt, without wondering if she would’ve liked it, or bought a book she would not have borrowed from you? You do not cook what she would not have approved of; you fear changing the job you worked when you met her.”

Grandfather shook his head, feeling the first tear on his cheek. “You do not walk down the street without your dead wife beside you, holding your hand. If you are seeing ghosts, my child, it is because you have become one yourself.”

Six

P
han wobbled down the steps at Piccadilly Station.

At just past six o’clock, London stirred, a restless corpse, a vampire suffering from nightmares. Phan’s movements were jerky, uncoordinated. The tapping heels echoing as loudly as the old man’s voice in his head.