The Best New Horror 7 by Stephen Jones

Author:Stephen Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781472113634
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TERRY DOWLING

Scaring the Train

TERRY DOWLING IS one of Australia’s leading writers of the fantastic. He is the author of Rynosseros, Blue Tyson and Twilight Beach (his award-winning Tom Rynosseros saga), Wormwood, The Man Who Lost Red and co-editor (with Dr Van Ikin) of Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF and senior editor of The Essential Ellison.

His stories have appeared in the anthologies The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Terror Australis: The Best of Australian Horror and The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories, and in such magazines as Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Eidolon, Strange Plasma, Australian Short Stories, Aurealis and Omega Science Fiction.

A songwriter and musician (with more than eight years on ABC-TV’s Mr Squiggle & Friends), a communications instructor and genre reviewer for The Australian newspaper, Dowling has won a number of awards for his fiction, the most recent being the Aurealis Award for An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, a collection of linked horror stories from Aphelion Publications which concludes with the tale published here.

“I think of how stories form,” explains the author. “ ‘Scaring the Train’ began with the title in 1988 and a chilling realization six years later that had me working backwards to resolve the various opening lines in an appropriately disturbing fashion.” He gives other sources of inspiration as the William Stoneman cover for the May 1982 The Twilight Zone Magazine, the distinctive artwork of Paul Delvaux and Joseph Mugnaini, Ted Rand’s illustrations for The Ghost-Eye Tree by Bill Martin, Jr and John Archambault, plus a visit as a teenager to the Blue Mountains railway stations mentioned here and an unforgettable walk along the tracks well after midnight with a group of college friends.

All aboard now, for a train ride to terror . . .

Because for us, something might appear in the heart of the day that would not be the day, something in an atmosphere of light and limpidity that would represent the shiver of fear out of which the day came?

– Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

I Portobello 1962

EVERY SUMMER DURING our childhood holidays at Portobello, Maximillian and I would spend an hour every third day scaring the train. Every third day meant twenty-one days before we’d duplicate a day, which seemed clever at the time, neither of us realizing that it made its own pattern.

It never took more than a few exhilarating moments, of course, the scaring itself, but the hour gave preparation time, let us prepare our chosen section of track, the particular sheltered stretch or cutting, never using the same one twice in a week unless that became part of the strategy.

It gave us time to avoid the local constabulary (and, naturally, the frightened drivers, firemen and concerned locals did get the police onto us, though never with any luck). When Constables Pike and Harlow came on their bicycles, or now and then with Sergeant Jeffers in the district’s single squad car, we were crouching down behind the long grass, peering through greenery, never seen, or were miles away with relatives and friends, secure in our alibis.

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