Three

‘Come on, I’ve told you before. You can’t sleep here . . .’

Martha felt a rough hand on her shoulder, shaking her from deep sleep. And as the luxurious comfort of sleep left her, she became aware again of the aching rheumatics in her bones. The euphoria, the sense of well-being engendered by the bottle of cheap red wine which she had scrounged earlier from a couple of drunken students in the waiting room, and which had led to her impromptu slumber on the station bench, was a distant memory. Only the icy cold of the empty station, the unyielding solidity of the bench and the rough hand on her shoulder were real. Reluctant at first to leave her pleasant dreamland, Martha whimpered and groped blindly at the intruder. But the grip on her shoulder was unrelenting.

‘Come on, you old bag. Before I get the police.’

Martha rose creakily to a sitting position and, as her vision adjusted, saw the ticket collector standing over her. She had seen him before. He was called Eric Morecambe or something. He was a pig. Muttering under her breath, she groped for the two plastic carrier bags on which she had been lying and which contained all her worldly goods. As she staggered to her feet, the empty wine bottle, wrapped in the newspaper she had cadged from the man with the gimpy leg earlier in the day, rolled from the bench and shattered at her feet, eliciting a groan of impatience from the ticket collector.

‘Out!’

‘All right, all right! Bloody stations. Can’t get a bit of peace. Always some bloody little Hitler interfering. Public servants, you’re supposed to be . . .’

‘Get out of it, before I kick your arse all over the station.’

‘Twenty years ago . . .’

‘Yeah? Well, that was twenty years ago.’

Martha shambled towards the main entrance, mumbling curses under her breath. Within seconds of leaving the station, she had forgotten her encounter with the ticket collector. Such occurrences were much too frequent to remain in her memory. They had all merged into one, amorphous argument that seemed to have lasted for years. It might as well have been the same man, the same station, the same argument.

She trudged slowly down the silent, empty street. A forgotten derelict. In her mind’s eye now, she was fifteen years old and reliving an argument she’d had with her stepfather, the old bastard! She’d really told him where to get off that day, she had. That was the day she had finally left home. She would show him, show everyone, that she would make it on her own; be bigger than any of them would ever be. And, in her own mind, she had. Martha had relived that argument over and over again; each shouted phrase, the same words repeated in a random order, improving on it each time. Suddenly, the memory was gone. Locked away in cold storage in another part of her brain.

She suddenly became aware that she was standing beneath the harsh blue light of a street lamp, her breath rising in steaming clouds. She had long since left the town centre, lost in her thoughts, and now stood by a railway embankment wall on the riverside. She knew where she was now. She’d got her bearings. A hundred yards ahead, a section of wall had collapsed, giving a clear view across the River Tyne to Gateshead. And then she remembered where she had left something very important.

She shambled forward until she reached the opening and stopped for an instant to look out across the dark, industrial skyline. The silent river moving sluggishly to the sea: the giant spectres of cranes, keeping a lonely, silent vigil over the waters. She couldn’t be sure, but she was vaguely aware that she’d lived over the river somewhere once upon a time; with a husband and kids. Yes . . . there had been kids. But the memory faded, too elusive to grasp.

A lonely foghorn echoed mutely as she clambered over the fallen stones and started down the steep, grassy slope of the embankment towards the railway lines. Reaching the shallow, gravelled gully which ran alongside the main track, she strained to see across to the other side. The dark blue night was still and silent and, even with her poor eyesight, she had no difficulty in making out the scrapyard sign almost directly opposite. Good! Martha turned to her left and began a slow waddling march, counting out her steps aloud as she moved and cursing when her unsteady feet stumbled on the shifting gravel. Two hundred steps later, she had found the treasure trove. Rummaging through the weeds beside an abandoned bedstead, her numb fingers found what they were looking for: a can of diluted methylated spirit. She looked around suspiciously, sat down painfully in the weeds, unscrewed the rusted can and lifted it awkwardly to her mouth. A dent in the can suddenly straightened out with a hollow, reverberating clank, spilling a liberal amount of the mixture over her chin and down the front of her overcoat. She cast an anxious glance around her, half expecting to see the shambling form of the ragged tramp from whom she had stolen the can. Lifting it to her trembling lips once again, she took a deep swallow. It made her vomit. But that didn’t matter. She always vomited after the first swallow.

And as Martha drank, she became aware of the magic again. She smiled as it became clearer with each swallow, knowing that the magic was her magic and no one else could ever know about it. No one else could hear the sounds that the railway lines made.

Thrum . . . thrum . . . thrum . . .

It was a warm, comforting sound.

After half an hour had passed, Martha was in the same frame of mind that she had been in before falling asleep in the station. But even through her haze, she knew that she must not fall asleep in case they came out of their hiding places and came looking for her. She had seen one when she had first hidden the can. It had been hiding in the long grass watching her. She had thrown half a brick at it and it had scampered away into the darkness. Bloody things! She hated them . . . and feared them. But she knew that as long as she stayed awake they would keep their distance. In the past, she had never seen more than one or two of them at a time. These were the spies, sent to watch for her; waiting for the moment when she fell asleep so that they could summon the others to swarm all over her. She had dreamt once that they had crept up on her while she had been sleeping in the bandstand in the park. They were in her hair, crawling and squirming; in her clothes, trying to bite out her eyes. She woke screaming. But she should have known better. She was safe in the park. They lived down by the railway, by the riverside, and would never venture from there. She was safe on the embankment as long as she stayed awake.

Slowly and painfully, Martha dragged herself to her feet, cradling the can in both arms like a sleeping child. Perhaps she had better leave, just in case she did fall asleep . . .

She began to stumble back down the track in the direction she had come from, crooning a tuneless, wordless song in time to the sloshing of the methylated spirit inside the can. Dimly, she became aware that a wind seemed to have blown up. The grass at the top of the embankment was hissing angrily, but she paid no heed to it. The fact that she could feel no wind on her face and that she did not have to strain forward against its force, did not register with her. Only when she had reached the spot where she had originally descended to the railway line and was moving up the embankment towards the gap in the wall did she notice the ominous, almost stealthy, rustling of the grass. A thrill of warning was trying to fight through her subconscious into her conscious mind, struggling to shake off the effects of the drink. Something at the back of her mind was trying to tell her to get away from this place as quickly as possible. Martha stopped, clutching the can of methylated spirit tightly to her chest and watching the strange, rippling effect of the grass above and beyond. Something was moving along the top of the embankment. Something which had been keeping pace with her as she walked and was now lurking in the deep grass ahead. And with horror mounting steadily in her befuddled brain, Martha realised that there was more than one thing in the grass. There were lots of little things. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of things that squirmed, rustled . . . and squeaked. A high-pitched babble of sound, increasing in intensity and emanating from the shadowed, weaving grass above her. Martha took a faltering step back, watching as the grass thrashed in an ever increasing frenzy. Another step, and another. And then she was back in the gully at the side of the railway track.

‘No, you can’t . . .’ she said in a terrified protest. ‘You can’t. Not while I’m awake.’

At the sound of her voice, the shrill piping and squeaking seemed to intensify, rising and swelling to a fever pitch. An angry, hysterical, hungry shrieking. She could see them now. They were pouring over the rim of the embankment and through the grass towards her in a writhing, twisting mass of fur and teeth.

Martha stumbled on the rough gravel, dropping the can and looking frantically back along the embankment on either side. Oh, Jesus . . . The entire bank was swarming. There were millions of them. And she knew what they wanted.

Martha turned and staggered across the railway tracks, arms flapping at her sides to maintain balance as she stepped over the steel rails. It wasn’t right! It couldn’t be right! But her fear was too real. She could not trick herself into believing that it was all just a bad dream. Her lungs were aching with the strain of her effort, the cold air biting deep into her chest.

Oh my God, my God, my God . . .

Behind her, she could hear the scuttling, rustling sound of thousands of small, clawed feet on the gravel beside the track. They had reached the line and Martha did not have to turn round to know that even now they were swarming over the railway track towards her. Sobbing in exhaustion and terror, she cleared the second railway line and saw the embankment and scrapyard on the other side. Her cry for help choked thickly in her throat as she stumbled against one of the railway lines and nearly fell.

She was almost on the other side now. Only one more track to cross and she would be on the other embankment. Her eyes were streaming with tears, blurring her vision so that the shadows cast by the scrapyard sign on the grass verge seemed to be quivering and weaving before her. A jumble of movement; squirming, writhing and . . .

No, no, no, no . . .

They were on the other side, too. Wriggling and scampering in a dark, formless mass in the gully between the track and the embankment, as far as she could see. They made no attempt to pursue her but, in the darkness, she could see a multitude of small, restless, piercing pinpoints of light. All watching her with a keen and hungry intensity.

Martha whirled around to see that the horde on the other side had swept over the first and second railway tracks towards her like a pulsating, black carpet. But they had stopped fifteen feet from where she stood in the centre of the third track and made no movement towards her.

‘You can’t . . .’ Martha began imploringly, her whispered voice swept away amidst the rustling and squealing. For an instant, she thought of grabbing a handful of gravel and throwing it at the undulating mass. But the frenzied pitch of their cries struck a chord of terror in her soul. She knew that she could not afford to anger them any further. She had killed too many of their number. And now, after all these years, they wanted revenge.

There was only one thing left to do. Martha began to stagger back along the track towards the town centre, gasping a prayer that they would keep their distance.

Please God . . . Please God . . .

They were running along the track on both sides now, keeping pace with her as she ran. When she stopped momentarily to gasp for air, she could see that they had also stopped, squirming and climbing over each other in a frenzy. She started to move again, wondering in spite of her terror why they were keeping their distance. And then she heard the old, familiar noise again. Faintly at first, but growing stronger as she ran. The magic noise which pulsed in the rails. It was pulsing now through the railway lines on either side of her as she ran. Throbbing with invisible power like a heartbeat that only she could hear. And Martha knew that it was the power in the lines which kept her pursuers at bay. They could not . . . would not . . . cross over the lines. It was the old magic. It had returned to protect her.

Sobbing with relief, she realised that if she followed the line it would bring her directly into the Central Station. Perhaps the ticket collector who had thrown her out of the station was still there. He would help her. From somewhere ahead in the darkness, a long way away, she could hear the long, mournful wailing of a train siren. It couldn’t be far now . . .

But now the dark, wriggling hordes on either side of the tracks had split their ranks and were swarming furiously over the lines in front of her. Martha stumbled around as a multitude of sleek, furry bodies repeated the maneuver behind her. Trapped on the railway line and surrounded by the dark, squirming mass, she saw that her old magic had betrayed her. It had lied. It was their magic . . . not hers. And they had been herding her.

The lonely drone which she had heard in the distance became a savage, ululating scream of malice when the train finally hit her . . .