 | I was barely 18, a slip of a lad, and on my first visit to the big smoke. On the late train from Lime Street, racing 'cross field and dale, I looked out of the window, avoiding the eye of a drunken Scotsman (Kenny Dalglish) who belched and grumbled in the adjacent berth, until the darkness started to draw in and swaddled my view in a cloak of black, smudged occasionally with my breath, a ghost on the cool glass.
Some 45 minutes into my journey, the train had pulled out from Stafford in a cacophony of creaks, hisses and thuds, and carried me onward through the darkness, picking up speed toward Euston. I looked around at my fellow passengers. The Scotsman had thankfully fallen asleep against the seat in front. A businessman leafed distractedly through a magazine. A pale woman sat bolt upright, fingering a rosary. Others were scattered down the carriage; I could see the backs of their heads dotted throughout. I turned back to the black glass, unable to see anything but the occasional lights, and my own youthful reflection looking back.
Well, reader, I must have dropped off, or entered some dim reverie, for I felt a sensation akin to awaking with a violent start. I looked around me and found the carriage empty. The Scotsman had gone. The pale woman. The businessman.
It was just me, dreadfully, definitively alone. The blank and mournful yellow strip lights hung over deserted seats, the jagged teeth of some dread shark. I also realised that everything was quite still. Muffled even, as though the entire carriage had stopped in some snow-drift or in the very middle of a long tunnel. I arose from my seat and walked warily down the aisle, seeking some sign of occupation. There was a feeling of "wrongness" - of being utterly misplaced - that was so heavy and all-pervading that it was all I could do not to run. I moved only for I felt I should, because I had given up any hope of finding companionship or any sign of my fellow passengers who had mysteriously decamped. To the left of the wagon, with a sudden-ness that sickened me, a lightning bolt cracked the sky, and spinning, for a split second, I saw a flat, featureless landscape where familiar fields, hills and hedgerows should have been. Disbelieving my eyes, I pressed my face against the window, and waited... barely heeding the quite brutal thunder that occurred not soon after. A sudden squall of rain battered the glass, and I gathered that the storm was oncoming. My eyes agog, I waited, again, for the lightning that might give me some clue as to my whereabouts for a fleeting moment.
I had not long to wait. A ferocious bolt scored the sky, and lit the entire vista up long enough for me to take stock. The featureless wastes I saw were in fact nothing less, than an endless, terrible sea. An expanse of water that stretched forever into the distance. Shuddering, I fell backward, with a scream that split the silence much like that illuminating fork of electricity. With trembling hands, I pulled myself upright, as the carriage began to lurch, slowly, and as water seeped up around my ankles, ice cold and inexorable.
I ran with great splashing bounds to the very end of the carriage, and found myself near the door. I yanked down the window without thinking, plunging my hand into the massed blackness and freeing myself from the carriage that would soon sink. I had to get to the roof. Lashed with rain, my grip treacherous, I swung the door outward until it crashed into the outside of the structure of the carriage, and hauled myself up by my fingertips, over the doorframe, onto the roof. The heavens opened on me, and the water below me became a terrible, broiling tomb that I must escape at all costs. Spinning on my heel, I looked to the other horizon, desperate to find surcease for my terror - some spit or peninsula I could cling to and weather this squall. As I did so, the sky was lit up with a third, and most spectacularly violent, bolt of lightning.
My eyes, reddened from rain now had new horror to countenance. Falling to my knees, I looked directly into the face of what I was quite sure was my own doom, my addled brain writhing for a foothold to find dignity in a certain death, a certain death that defied sanity, sense or reason. For silhouetted in the sky, lurching un-naturally over the listing carcass of the train, was a crab of horrendous, un-natural proportions. Rearing on it's hind legs, brandishing its sickening pincers at the sky, mouth frothing with crustacean hatred. With one deft move, a claw cut the train in two, like a pair of demonic pliers slicing through a brittle twig. Its black eyes lolled in mute triumph as it turned toward me, now adrift on the sinking remains of the 21.45 from Lime Street. As the pincer neared my drenched frame, I whispered a silent prayer and tumbled from the roof, backwards, falling, falling... falling....
"Tickets please".
I awoke with a start, to the re-assuring rattle of the tracks, and wheels. To the rustle of the businessman's papers. To gentle muttering of the sleeping tramp. To the clack-clack-clack of rosary beads.
"Oh... of course..." I murmured, flustered and rendered dull by my impromptu unconsciousness.
I produced my ticket, and the inspector scrutinised it carefully. He looked at me, from under a peaked cap that shadowed his eyes. "Not long now lad".
"Y..yes, I'm afraid I must have fallen asleep."
"I suspect you must have", he countered.
Slowly, but with no great ceremony, he punched my ticket, and sidled away. A mundane footnote to an extraordinary dream.
It was only much later that I took in what happened between us. For the punch was no ordinary tool. With hindsight, I recalled vividly its appearance. It was serrated. And a brick red colour. And curved. An organic curve of horrible familiarity.
For my ticket had been punched by the claw of a crab. |
