Ghost Stories by Lorna Bradbury

Author:Lorna Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Published: 2010-03-19T10:00:00+00:00

Gimme Shelter

Pat Black

As the freezing fog came down, Emma headed to the shelter. it was an instinctive move, as there was something chilly about the prospect of being isolated in the dirty white glow.

She shivered as she strode along the train platform, the mist barely showing the lights of the closed-up station house. Somewhere further down the track, a red light was barely visible through the fog.

The shelter was one of the older ones, built to last, but not lasting well. Paint peeled off the brick-work in the rare spots that hadn’t been covered in jagged graffiti, and an ancient stench fouled the air despite the two open doorways. Rickety benches ran along the inside, but Emma didn’t want to sit down on them with just her tights covering her legs. Standing in the doorway, she paced and stamped her feet to generate warmth.

She heard footsteps coming down the platform long before she saw whom they belonged to; a workman in an orange boiler suit materialised from the fog. he seemed to get a fright when he noticed her.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hello.’

‘Hi. Do you know when the trains are coming back on?’

‘Oh, might be a while yet, love. were you on the diverted train?’

Emma nodded. ‘They told me this was the best station to wait for a connection.’

The engineer shook his head. ‘Silly. The points are out on this line, now. You’d have been as well getting it back to Central. You’d have been warm in there. They’d probably put some taxis on.’

‘They said it would be another twenty minutes, tops. That was’ – she glanced at her watch – ‘forty-five minutes ago.’

The engineer looked pained. ‘Look, i’ve got ten minutes spare. I can give you a lift as far as a taxi rank, if you like. I know that sounds a bit odd, but this station’s a funny wee place. You get some rough kids going around here.’

‘No thank you.’

He smiled sadly, then was lost to the fog.

Emma sent some text messages to friends and family, but no one was about for a lift. Jed, who she’d arranged to meet that night, offered to come out and meet her in a taxi, but she said the train would be on its way soon. She was beginning to wonder if she’d been too hasty in dismissing the engineer’s offer when someone coughed behind her in the shelter.

She’d heard no one approach, and was sure that no one had been sitting there when she first took shelter. a young man was on the benches, a military-style khaki backpack in his lap. he wore glasses and had greasy black hair, unfashionably cut, with a dark anorak zipped to the neck. he might have been anywhere between those awkward signposts of seven-teen and twenty-one, like Emma.

He coughed nervously. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.’

Emma smiled at him and turned back to the tracks. She could barely see into the petrified winter foliage beyond the tracks. Eyes glittered amid the stones laid beside the tracks now and again, the eerie yellow fox-glow she recognised from where she lived.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.