Chapter Fourteen

It Speaks

“In half a mile leave the motorway by the first exit.”

The navigator on my phone had the voice of a butler out of Hollywood, and sounded surer of itself than I felt. All around me the flat land that stretched to the horizon beneath an undecided whitish August sky was strewn with clumps of grey stone houses, and I wondered how it had looked to my aunt. What could have brought her here? Perhaps she had already known more about Halfway Halt than I’d managed to discover, which might as well have been nothing at all.

“At the top of the ramp take the first exit onto Sunward Way…” The broad road – four lanes divided in half by a protracted sliver of verge – wound east through grey Yorkshire villages that appeared to be staining the sky beyond them. Each one had a pub and a church, and the succession of ecclesiastical towers put me in mind of a painting of Thelma’s, an early work in which all the spires of an English countryside were linked by horizontal lightning, the bearer of some unspecified mystical message. Had she subsequently found this inspiration too conventional? That didn’t explain how she’d learned about Halfway Halt or anywhere else in her journal.

“In five miles take the second exit onto Northerly Lane…” This was a road just wide enough for two large vehicles to pass each other. Hedges barbed with outsize thorns fended trespassers away from fields and obscured bends that grew progressively sharper. At least I met no traffic, in fact no signs of life on the move except for the delicately jagged flights of butterflies, and once a head that rose over a gate to watch me as best it could while its eyes crawled with insects. It was a cow, but I was glad to leave the spectacle behind, especially when it poked out a considerable tongue onto which flies swarmed at once.

“In three miles turn left on Old Station Road…” Without my artificial helper I might have passed the sign, which was almost engulfed by a hedge. I was just able to distinguish that the first word had been added, although the appended plaque was pretty well as rusty and lichenous as the original pointer. The road it identified was barely wide enough for my car to pass another, and ran straight for no more than a couple of hundred yards at a stretch. Where attempts had been made to create passing places, unrestrained hedges had invaded the space. Once again I saw little evidence of life, though I caught sight of a bovine head beyond a gate. I thought it was watching me until I realised the movement I’d taken for eyes belonged to creatures teeming in the sockets. The head was a cow’s skull on a pole, presumably erected to deter intruders of any kind. Certainly it didn’t leave me anxious to linger.

“In half a mile arrive at your destination…” I thought I would be relieved to see the end of the devious route, but I was wondering how close public transport could bring anybody to the site. How far would Roy and Bella have to walk? Perhaps I should have offered them a lift, but however excessively wary my behaviour might be, I’d wanted to view the place before they did. Perhaps I could drive them there if that wouldn’t risk inhibiting their relationship.

“Arrive at your destination…” My helper couldn’t change his tone – its tone, to be accurate – and yet the direction felt peremptory, an assumption of obedience or of the lack of any choice. Ahead the road ended at a towering metal fence encrusted with rust and quilted with ivy, and I thought the phone had misdirected me until I noticed a gap in the hedge to the left. Though branches bound with ivy were well on their way to closing the gap, it was the entrance to a car park.

The deserted expanse was spread with ragged rugs of moss. Weeds sprouting from cracks in the concrete gestured in a wind that rattled scales of dead ivy on the outer wall of the abandoned railway station, which resembled an elongated single-storey cottage with a steep roof. Holes left by fallen slates honeycombed the roof, which poked three lanky chimneys and their blackened pots at a sky like a reminiscence of their sooty past. I parked near the station entrance, where double doors had lost their hold on the frame, sprawling face down on the concrete. As I slipped my phone into a pocket, having climbed out of the car, I appeared to rouse the navigator. “Arrived,” it said.

“I know that,” I retorted, despite feeling less confident than I tried to sound. Through the exit from the waiting-room beyond the doorless entrance I could see a sign on the further platform. Black lichen or a vandal’s paint spray had covered the name of the station except for the first two letters of each word, so that the sign resembled a joke at the expense of any visitor. I wondered how my aunt had read it, although would it have been in this state when she was here? I didn’t even know how long ago that was. Perhaps I would find some insight in the waiting-room.

The doors to the platform had collapsed, and the windows overlooking it had been thoroughly smashed. At least this let in the daylight, such as it was, enabling me to pick my way around the rubble strewn across the floorboards. Tattered posters clung to the walls, portions of them groping at the shadows as a chilly wind enlivened them. The vintage images advertised holiday resorts, bygone or certainly transformed since. One poster showed a family on a seafront while the other placed a couple with their son and daughter on a beach. Of course they must be different families, but somebody had gouged out every face and the plaster behind them, filling their outlines with wet red brick. The tattered silhouettes were growing restless with a wind, and I was reminded of the kind of seaside sideshow where customers paid to thrust their faces through the holes that grotesque figures had above their necks. Why should I imagine that all the holes in the posters were about to produce the same face? Just now I preferred to leave that kind of fancy to my aunt, and I made my way over to the booking office.

At the foot of the grimy window a low arch gaped in the glass. Heavy wire mesh protected the aperture, putting me in mind of a church confessional I’d once seen in a film, but left a narrow gap above the sill for hands to reach through. Items encased in dusty cobwebs – a ledger, a pen and a chewed stub of pencil, obsolete little machines – lay on the extended sill beyond the window. A fireplace stood in so much gloom that it appeared to lead into a deeper darkness than it should. Between the hearth and the ticket window, a small table bore a teapot divested of its lid. Weeds occupied the pot, though in the dimness they could have been taken for a version of a genie emerging from a lamp. Some sort of growth poked out from the lid beside the pot, as if a hermit creature had appropriated it for a home. I was about to move on when I glimpsed activity around an office chair lying on its back near the hearth. Several thin fingers were fumbling out from underneath, as if an occupant had been squashed flat but was determined to return. The scrawny digits began to crumble, sending particles to swarm in all directions, and even when I realised that spiders were hatching under the chair I found no reason to linger.

I stepped onto the platform under the threat of a storm. Grass grew between the flagstones, twitching in the wind. Rotten lopsided benches stood about in remembrance of commuters, and one knelt on its solitary left leg like a beast about to die. On the opposite platform more than one flagstone had been heaved up by the knotted limbs of an intruder, the roots of trees beyond an insecure brick wall, which the trunks and branches were urging towards collapse. Apart from the sign that suggested a burst of silent mirth, one remnant said WAY ALT, another just A WAY. Perhaps this was the work of vandals, like the words sprayed or scraped on the mossy wall, MAG and GIST and TELL and RUM scattered along its length. No doubt the words meant more to their author than they did to the rest of the world, often the case with graffiti. They only helped to leave me increasingly unsure why I was there at all.

The railway tracks had been removed. If anyone had planned to turn the route into a nature walk, the scheme had been abandoned before they’d taken up the sleepers. The overgrown boards suggested stepping-stones over a medium less solid than the ground they were embedded in. To my right they climbed between grassy banks to follow a ridge that was eventually blocked by fallen trees, while on my left the route descended into a cutting. My aunt had written something about the latter in her journal, and if I was to gain any insight from my visit, presumably it would be there. I made for that end of the platform, where a slippery ramp led down to the remains of the track.

While the sleepers were spaced closely enough to invite my stride, they looked precarious with lichen, and I walked beside the vanished tracks instead. In a few hundred yards the ruddy sandstone walls were higher than my head. I could have fancied I was descending into a past embodied in the strata of the exposed rock, or at least my aunt might have had such an impression. Trees perched on the edges above me, their contorted roots gripping the cracked stone. Patches of the walls bulged with lurid fungi, and other stretches were mottled with moss. About a quarter of a mile ahead a road bridge crossed the cutting, and I was halfway to it when a voice spoke close to me. “In three hundred yards,” it said, “turn left onto Riders Lane.”

The walls must be distorting it, because it sounded untypically shrill. I thought I’d switched it off before pocketing the phone, but I made doubly certain now. Having stowed the phone again, I advanced to the bridge, where the arch was toothed with loose bricks. Its darkness closed over me as I glanced back. There was no sign of the station – just the artificial valley tapering into the distance. Of course the perspective was hiding the platforms, not to mention narrowing the gap between the walls, as if the perilously tilted trees were urging them together. Was this what my aunt had seen? She’d written something of the kind. I should have copied her journal onto my phone, as Roy had. If he and Bella came here they might venture further, and so I should. I was still under the bridge when my companion said “In a quarter of a mile turn left to your destination.”

He sounded shriller than before, no doubt because of the acoustic, and I had the grotesque notion that he was about to change gender. “I’m there already,” I informed him, and a voice that wasn’t his said “Ready” – my echo from the arch. I muted the phone and shoved it in my pocket, and then I set out from the bridge.

Trees leaned out further overhead as the downward slope grew steeper. Would my aunt have seen the blackened sky weighing them down? She might have thought the past represented by the multiplying strata of the walls was drawing us lower still. No doubt she would have appreciated how some of the sets of bracket fungus on the walls resembled pairs of fleshy lips. She could have envisioned the large beads of moisture that clung to the lichen as lidless eyes, their blank stares following me through the gloom. Had I undergone enough of her kind of fancies yet? Although the wind seemed not to reach down here, I kept feeling colder. The trouble was that I had no real idea of how she might have viewed the place or how it might appear to my son. Surely there was nothing he ought to avoid, and why should I have imagined there might be? That was Julia’s attitude, not mine. I was still trudging down the slope when the land above the cutting emitted a moist whisper that progressed into a hiss as it closed in, and the branches overhead began to writhe as if they were struggling to fend off the storm.

The nearest shelter was the bridge I’d left behind. As I sprinted for it, the ground underfoot grew treacherous. It must be soaking up the rain, even if I didn’t yet feel drenched. It felt no more stable than a marsh, and I dodged onto the nearest sleeper and then the next one up. They weren’t quite as close together as I’d assumed, and the slope was steeper than I was anticipating. Wasn’t this often the case when you had to return uphill? I told myself so while deploring the incompetence of the workmen who had laid the line, since the sleepers weren’t evenly spaced – indeed, each pair was a little further apart, and I was having to stride wider. I felt as if I were striving to climb a ladder without being able to use my hands to clamber, and soon I had to jump from board to increasingly slippery board as outsize raindrops plummeted from the trees to thump my scalp. I tried walking on the ground instead, only to slither backwards. I could easily have fancied that I felt the ground shift underfoot, and I retreated onto the sleepers, lurching from one insecure foothold to the next. I’d missed my footing more than once, landing on the restlessly insecure earth, by the time I stumbled under the bridge.

I did my best not to think the shelter felt even slightly like a trap. The downpour must be weighing on the trees, which looked bent on dragging the rock walls together. The prematurely nighted sky appeared to have narrowed the cutting and blocked it in both directions with blackness, closer than the railway station. I stood under the middle of the arch beneath the untravelled road and tried to be soothed by the incessant liquid murmur of the rain, rendered stereophonic by the bridge. I was finding reassurance in the inability of the storm to touch me when I began to hear a voice.

I snatched out my phone, but it stayed mute. For a distracted moment I wondered if I could be hearing an announcement at the railway station. Might someone be listening to a car radio nearby? I strained my ears to make out the voice through the downpour. It sounded almost as thin and as randomly shaped as the rain. Was it whispering “Must” or “Master”? No, there were more than two syllables, although not quite either of those. “Mist tells”? Not that, and I peered down the slope, where the sounds almost indistinguishable from the rush of rain appeared to come from. Perhaps they were just part of the downpour, like the twin globules of water that swarmed down a patch of lichen to lodge above an especially prominent outcrop of fungus, two thick piebald ledges pressed together. The rain was rousing the plump fungoid strips, causing them to twitch apart and extrude a swollen greyish tendril like a relic of a tongue. The spectacle appeared to locate the whisper and lend it substance. “Magister,” I was almost sure it said. “Magister Stellarum.”

I tried to believe that only the rain was shifting the fungus, however allied to the syllables the movements seemed to be. Perhaps the movements were making me hear words where none were to be found. I couldn’t help recoiling when the left-hand globule either lost its hold or burst, streaming down the wall, to be followed at once by its twin. The fungus drooped as though exhausted by its efforts, and then I caught sight of another pair of globules that had come to rest above two lips of fungus, much closer to the bridge. Moisture eased the protrusions apart, and I heard the simulation of a voice. “Magister Stellarum.”

The downpour was abating, and I could no longer mistake the voice for rain. It sounded soft as rotten fungus and similarly liable to collapse. Although the wind had dropped, I was seized by a fierce chill. I couldn’t move or look away from the unnatural activity on the wall until it fell apart, the watchful globules drooling down the lichen as the strips of fungus sagged. Ought I to have felt reassured? Not when I feared the presence was simply moving on and about to reappear.

I held my breath until I had to gasp, but heard nothing beyond belated rainfall from the trees. The cutting had grown almost silent when I sensed movement overhead. My eyes were aching by the time I made out a swollen shape like a bag stuck to the underside of the bridge. I thought its eyes were glinting darkly in the gloom, and other restless parts of it bore some resemblance to lips. Certainly I heard the whisper, amplified by the echo until it sounded as though the bridge was pronouncing the words like a great stone mouth. It paralysed me and my thoughts until a dreadful notion overtook me – that the ill-defined object was about to relinquish its hold on the arch and drop on me like a huge swollen spider. Almost before grasping I’d regained the ability to move, I fled.

The whisper ceased at once, which only left me dreading where it might reappear. I thought I glimpsed unwelcome features starting to take shape here and there on the lichenous walls, which were streaming with the aftermath of the downpour. I fancied I heard attempts to pronounce syllables that had grown entirely too familiar, however meaningless – tentative almost liquid whispering behind if not beside me and once, far worse, ahead. The slope was gentler on this side of the bridge, but whenever I sensed a presence beginning to form close to me I was overcome by a renewed chill, which drained my energy so much that I almost couldn’t lurch from sleeper to uphill sleeper. I had a wholly nightmarish fear that I might never reach the railway station – that somehow there was no longer one at Halfway Halt to reach. Far too belatedly the walls of the cutting gave way to the platforms, and at last I stumbled up the ramp towards the waiting-room.

My footsteps on the bare boards resounded so much that I doubted I would hear a whisper, and the room was too dark for me to make sure it was as empty as it had been. I was heading for the exit to the car park – just a few more determined strides and I would be out beneath the relentlessly black sky – when I hesitated, having been drained of momentum by another sudden chill. In the silence I heard surreptitious movement above me, where I could just make out a discoloured bulge in the plaster of the ceiling. It reminded me far too much of a cocoon even before I heard its contents stir again. They weren’t merely restless, they were mumbling blurred syllables, which I felt helplessly compelled to distinguish. As I peered at the wakeful shape I saw the plaster start to crack, and was terrified that the contents would fall on my face. A convulsive shiver released me from my paralysis, and I dashed close to blindly into the car park.

I didn’t look back even once I was locked in my car. As I swung it around, crushing weeds beneath the wheels, I wasn’t sure whether I saw two outsize raindrops swell bigger still on a patch of moss on the concrete while a thick-ridged slit parted in the vegetation. I drove out of the car park almost faster than I dared, and barely managed to take all the bends of Old Station Road without straying off the greasy rain-washed tarmac into a ditch. I felt close to hysteria, both at having escaped and about the grotesque experience I’d had. If I started laughing it wouldn’t denote mirth, and I suspected I would find it hard to stop. Besides, there was nothing comical in the possibility that my son and his girlfriend might have a similar experience. I ought to prevent it, and I pulled over at once.

As I found my phone it spoke. “Messages,” it seemed to say, and “Tell all them.” Perhaps the mumble sounded so unlike its usual voice because it was still in my pocket, and I might have concluded that I’d inadvertently activated it to pronounce random words on the screen. Just the same, its behaviour revived a chill that made me shake, and I couldn’t help feeling I hadn’t left Halfway Halt far enough behind. I let go of the phone and didn’t stop the car again until I reached Northerly Lane, where I parked on the verge of a straight stretch. The phone kept its peace while I fumbled it out of my pocket, and Roy spoke almost as soon as his phone began to ring. “Dad, we’re a bit busy right now.”

“I won’t keep you. I just wanted to tell you not to bother with Halfway Halt, if you meant to.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know how you’d get there, but it isn’t worth the effort.”

“We already have.”

This made me uneasier than ever. “What did you find?”

“I think Bell’s getting more out of all this than me. If she does that’s what matters.”

“Where are you now?” I had to ask.

“Just walking.”

“Yes, but where?”

As though he shouldn’t have withheld the information Bella said “Darkmarsh.”

“And what are you expecting to turn up there?”

I meant this for Roy, but Bella answered. “We’ll know it when we meet it, Patrick.”

“Talk more soon, dad, okay? It’s getting a bit cold just standing round.”

“I may know what you mean,” I said and was preparing to explain when I realised they’d already gone. I had to resist the urge to call Roy back; at the very least it would irritate him, and I wasn’t even sure he would answer. No doubt they would take a sample from Darkmarsh and had collected one from Halfway Halt. Could their souvenir do any harm? I might have been more qualified to judge if I’d taken one myself, but I was considerably less than eager to go back.

Perhaps I had a source of insight in my hand. I told the phone to search for Magister Stellarum. I thought it might inform me that it didn’t understand, a response that always sounded like a polite rebuke, but a link to a site appeared within seconds – the Sorcerous Atlas of Britain. The link brought up an outline map swarming with tags. One tag was enlarged, and its pointer rested somewhere in the middle of the country, uncomfortably close to my location. The tag said Magister Stellarum.

When I touched it, the tag expanded. Victorian occultist, it added. Real name Harold Lambkin. I tried to find this laughable if not pathetic, but was troubled by the last phrase on the marker: His domain. I used a thumb and forefinger to zoom in on the map, and a border swelled up like a stain around the pointer. As the circle spread from Halfway Halt it appeared to be creeping to catch up with me. I didn’t need to see how close it might come, and I dropped the phone on the seat beside me before starting the car. I’d already seen more places I recognised by name on the map, and one I knew very well indeed.