Seven

Joanne had been gone for half an hour when Mark left the house. She was dropping Helen off at school when he descended into the Metro and, by the time she had reached the university, Mark was boarding an underground train bound for the Central Station.

It was a cold, grey morning and Mark was still feeling a little shaky after the vivid horror of his dream. He tried to take some comfort from the crowded bustling of early morning commuters on the platform and the crush of people on the Metro, but as the train pulled into the Central Station underground, he could feel the old fear returning again. It was eating at his insides as he allowed himself to be carried with the crowd moving from the train, onto the platform and up the escalators towards the station above. He gripped the moving rail and could see that his hands looked deathly white, crooked and almost skeletal; they were hands that had once been badly smashed. He looked up at the line of people standing above him as the escalator continued its inexorable ascent. It made him feel, not for the first time, that the same terrible destiny, the same strange urge which drew him to the station, was somehow omnipresent in the very fabric of the station itself. The escalator was alive. It was taking him upwards to his rendezvous. Rendezvous with . . . with what? With what, for Christ’s sake? If only he knew, if only he could find out why the hell he kept coming here, then perhaps the dreams would go.

The escalator arrived at the check-point and as Mark walked with the hundreds of other commuters towards the main line station itself, he felt the loneliest man on the face of the earth.

The station was the same as always. Cold, echoing, grey and lofty. Mark followed the flow of people and fear was gnawing at his stomach as he joined the line at the ticket office. He was glad that it was a long line; it would give him time to think and rationalise. But the old Impulse refused to be rationalised and he suddenly found that he had bought a ticket for Doncaster again.

I’ll try, he thought. Today, I’ll give in to it. I’ll follow those people onto the platform and smash this thing for good.

There was no queue at the platform entrance, just a continuous flow of people handing over their tickets for clipping before moving on. It was easy.

Now, you cowardly bastard. Now!

Mark had given full rein to the Impulse and found himself following closely behind a middle-aged man carrying a briefcase. He concentrated hard on the man’s back as he moved; concentrated everything on a small spot between the shoulder blades in front of him, to counteract the fear which always seemed to lurk in wait for him in the last few yards leading to the ticket barrier.

He could see only the criss-cross weave of the man’s tweed overcoat. The small squares; the inter-connecting lines of the material, the criss-cross lines, just like . . . railway lines.

Mark was standing at the platform entrance. The middle-aged man had shown his ticket and moved on. The ticket inspector was holding out his hand for Mark’s ticket. But the fear had found him again. He had blocked it out from his mind, but his thoughts had betrayed him at the last moment and it had scented him again. Its jaws had clamped shut around his heart; his vital organs; his vocal cords. He had to get away. Something inside his brain, something which was somehow prevented from speaking directly to his conscious mind, was screaming a wordless warning. But the shock waves were enough to tell him what he had to do . . . what he must do:

Get away, get away, get away . . .

Mark knew that he was stumbling like a drunken man, that the inspector was staring at him as he floundered away from the platform entrance. He wanted to scream at the man: All right, yes . . . I’m a bloody madman! But the words would not come to his lips. His breathing came in short, sporadic gasps between clenched teeth as he staggered out of the danger area towards the cafe.

God in heaven, what’s happening to me?