The carriage ahead, Carriage B, promised a welcome sense of occupancy. Several people had stood up and were reaching for their luggage from the overhead racks, down at the far end. Perhaps the train was approaching Torquay, which would mean they were nearing the end of the line. This could all stop and he’d be safe with Mark Fry. Maybe we’d be better off sleeping in the same room tonight.
Seb was just about to punch the green button that would open the sliding door into Carriage B, when he managed to get a better view of the people at the end of that carriage. What he saw made him unwilling to look at them for long.
They seemed in no better physical condition than the thing inside the Quiet Carriage. Those thin arms no longer appeared to be reaching for their luggage, either. Whoever was down there was raising their arms either to indicate distress and a summons for help, or it was some form of mad elation. Perhaps it was both. And for a split second, Seb believed that he had seen something soft and silvery hanging at the waists of what he’d just mistaken for a group of passengers.
He fell away from the door and turned into the stench of faecal sewage. There was a sound of gushing water as if the toilet was flooding from both pan and sink.
In the other direction, whoever he had seen in the Quiet Carriage was on all fours now, and either crawling, or searching for something, on the floor, towards the end of the aisle. Seb saw evidence of what might have been withered legs and a spiny back before he closed his eyes on the world around him.
The door to Carriage B shuddered open.
Seb cried out, ‘Please no,’ in a voice that would have filled him with shame in ordinary circumstances. His entire body flinched with such force that his feet left the floor at the height of a few millimetres. The colour of true terror, he realized uselessly, and the cowardice that it induces, was not yellow after all: it was as white as a bloodless face that could only mutter to itself. And that was the kind of face that he presented to Mark Fry as he came through the door, holding a bottle of Doom Bar and a plastic pint glass.
Mark stepped back. ‘Shit! You jumped me.’
As he took in the panicked statement of a man, pressed against the door of a moving train, as if he wished to get off before the next station, Mark followed this with, ‘You all right, Seb?’
22
Carry Me Softly on Shoeless Feet
‘See it?’ Mark Fry pointed at the top of the gate.
Seb nodded. He’d seen the signage poking through the treeline as they approached the Tor. Reddish iron flaked through paint bubbling off a decorative feature that arched over the gates. The inscription remained clear. ‘Let us go out of ourselves. Let us enlarge.’
Dark ivy re-skinned what was visible of the boundary wall. Nettles, brambles, unkempt shrubs, weeds and long grass encroached over the stone posts and erupted through the bars of the gate. During their passage to the edge of Hunter’s Tor Hall, many other signs of a growing remoteness and wildness had combined to ratchet Seb’s anxiety to the foothills of panic. A feeling that he struggled to quell, even after frequent stops to drink water and urinate behind trees. Delaying the inevitable only made the inevitable worse.
Early that morning, after leaving the A38 between Buckfastleigh and Ivybridge, they’d headed into the interior of Dartmoor until they were moving slowly on B roads. Eventually, the satnav screen was entirely green save for a minor road they’d crawled along in the direction of the Hall. Google Maps on Mark’s tablet and Seb’s smartphone, augmented by Mark’s ten-year-old recollections, had got them as close to the estate as was possible by road. The last of the tarmac scratched a thin line through ten miles of hilly farmland, visible in glimpses through the trees enclosing the lane.
After their frail phone signals had flickered their last, Seb had pulled onto a grassy verge at the side of the lane. From there they had walked for over a mile, on the remnants of a stone-chip path, often forcing their way through the prickly, damp verdure, to arrive at the gates.
Mark swallowed a half-litre bottle of water and gasped. ‘There’s a slope on the other side of this wall that goes up to the house. I’m guessing what’s left of a driveway does too. That’s all I saw last time from higher ground.’ He turned around and pointed. ‘I climbed a hill over there. This house was in the distance, a big white place. And I followed this wall as far as I could in both directions, for about half a mile each way. The bracken was so thick and I didn’t have a ladder so I couldn’t get inside. I ran out of light and time.’ He’d kept up a near-relentless banter ever since they’d left Seb’s house, and Seb had found it a welcome distraction from the successive waves of nauseating anxiety that he’d endured.
There was no need for a ladder at the Tor now. If the gates had been chained shut when Mark was here ten years before, they weren’t any longer. ‘No lock,’ Mark said as they inspected the gate.
‘Because they know I’m coming.’