Ghost Train by Stephen Laws

Author:Stephen Laws
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2019-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Helen knew something bad was happening when everything vanished.

She had been sitting on the edge of the bed, watching as her Daddy and the Other Man came in and rescued them from the Bad Man. She knew that Daddy would come, it was what happened in every fairy story she had read. ‘Here comes the Cavalry’, Daddy would say, with comical inevitability, every time they watched a western on TV. And she also knew that something had happened to her when the Bad Man had hit Mummy. She supposed it was what Mummy called ‘The Bad Shock’ and that the best thing to do was just sit on the edge of the bed and be quiet until her mind told her that it was okay to be normal again. Helen remembered how Tracy Allen had looked that day in the schoolyard when she found out that her sister had been hit by a car. She had gone all white. ‘White as parchment,’ Helen had heard their PE teacher say later that afternoon. And although she didn’t know what parchment was, she guessed that it must be pretty white. Tracy hadn’t spoken a word but her eyes were all glassy and one of the other teachers had taken her home for a long rest. When Helen asked her about it, Mummy had told her about ‘shock’ and how it might take a little while to get better when something really bad like that happened to you. In her own way, Helen understood all of this, even though she had always thought that a ‘shock’ was something you got from seeing something really nasty – like one of the Doctor Who monsters when they crept up behind you and grabbed you. Helen had always thought that you screamed when you got a shock and that it made your hair go all spiky and your eyes pop out on springs, just like the characters in some of the comics she read. But she could grasp the concept, even though she thought the word was wrong. She understood that she was in shock now and wondered whether the sudden darkness had anything to do with it.

Daddy had pressed the tape recorder switch (she didn’t know why, but he seemed to think that it was important) and darkness had suddenly spread from the spools. Just like the purple ink which had spread from Daddy’s splayed fountain pen nib onto the desk blotter on that day she had crept into his study when no one was looking. Except that this darkness just grew and grew and grew. It didn’t stop in a round, purple spot, as it had done on Daddy’s blotter. It had continued to spread and now the room was gone, Daddy and the tape recorder were gone, Mummy was gone, the Other Man was gone.

There was only Helen, sitting on the edge of the bed. And over there, in the same position and splayed out on a purple backdrop, the Bad Man lay crumpled like Helen’s Looby-­Lu doll.

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