Danuta Reah - Only Darkness

She reached the main road and waited for the lights. It was raining too hard to see clearly if any cars were coming. The air smelt unusually clean. Normally, there was a miasma of car fumes at this junction, but the rain seemed to have cleaned them away. The green man lit up, and she hurried across the road, towards the bridge. She might just do it. As she crossed the bridge, she could hear the river rushing against the narrow banks, swollen by the rain.

Another gust of wind caught her, and she heard the sound of glass shattering. Some insurance jobs tomorrow, she thought, reminding herself to check for fallen roof tiles in the morning. She splashed through the puddle outside the station, and was under cover.

The ticket office was a blank face requesting her to buy her ticket on the train. The screen showing arrivals was a black and white blur – another storm victim. She began to run towards the platform in case her train was in. She hurried down the covered ramp, and then, seeing that there was no train on the platform, slowed down. Had she missed it, or was it late?

The platform was empty, and she began to realize that there was something wrong with the light. It was yellow and flickering, not bright enough. The shadows in the corners were larger and darker, and the waiting room was black. She tried the door. Locked. The opposite platform – the only other platform – was in darkness, and the fair-haired young woman who sometimes shared Debbie’s evening wait on the other side of the rails wasn’t there. There was no one there, so the Doncaster train must have gone.

I didn’t mean to think about Doncaster.

The wind caught the platform sign and sent it rattling on its chain against the pipe work. The rain splashed on the rails, and then stopped. The light flickered again, the strange, yellow light, and then there was silence.

Uneasy, Debbie stood at the edge of the platform looking to see if the train was coming. Her feet crunched in something. She looked down. Glass, broken glass. She remembered the noise of glass breaking as she came over the bridge, and looked round. Up. The glass over the light was broken, and the tube was hanging loose, giving off that dull, flickering light.

That wasn’t the wind. Someone broke that. Someone broke that just as I crossed the bridge. No one came out of the station.

She looked back up the ramp towards the only exit. Her mouth went dry. Someone was standing there at the top of the ramp, not moving, just looking towards her on the platform. She couldn’t see him – it must be a him, he was so big – clearly. The light was behind him. Her sensible brain said, It’s a passenger, don’t be stupid, but the hairs were standing up on her arms, and her heart was thumping. The figure began to move towards her down the ramp.

There’s no way out!

Just then, the sound of the train came up the track. She waited in suspense for its lights in the dark. Her legs felt shaky and she wanted to grab the train door as it went past her, slowing. She pressed the door-open button without waiting for the light, and when the door finally slid open almost fell into the carriage. Then she felt like a fool, and looked out of the window to see what her alarming fellow passenger was doing.

But there was nobody there.

By the time Debbie got home, it was late. She closed her umbrella, shaking it as she did so, and hurried down the passage that led on to the back of the row of small terraced houses. She went in through the kitchen, dumping her coat and umbrella behind the back door, and quickly through to the living room, turned on the gas fire and stood there for a few minutes soaking up the heat. Debbie’s dream was to come back to a warm and welcoming house, but she didn’t have central heating yet, and Debbie couldn’t see when she would be able to afford it. The salary of a young further-education lecturer didn’t allow for luxuries.

The room was starting to warm up now. Debbie looked round it with some pride. She’d bought the house eighteen months ago. It had been, in estate agents’ jargon, in need of modernization. She hadn’t been able to afford rent and a mortgage, so she lived in the house, keeping one room more or less habitable, while the rewiring, plumbing and plastering went on around her. Now it was gradually starting to look the way she wanted it to, and this room was almost finished. Fitted carpets had been beyond her pocket but her mother had offered her the Persian rug from the little-used front room of the house Debbie had grown up in. Debbie accepted the rug, sanded, varnished and sealed the boards herself, and the rug glowed in the middle of the floor. She had changed her mind about a fitted carpet when she had seen how it looked. There was very little furniture in the small room – two easy chairs and a polished table in between. Bookshelves ran up each side of the chimney breast. There were pictures on the walls – a drawing of the woods outside Goldthorpe, and a framed poster for the Monet exhibition that Debbie had seen at the Royal Academy a few years ago. The only other ornaments were a group of photographs on the table.

The photographs were strictly family – her father with a younger Debbie, looking proudly at his daughter as she smiled toothily and waved a trophy. What was that for? The junior swimming gala? Her mother looking unaccustomedly serious in her Open University graduation gown. She’d insisted on having an official photograph taken. I’ve waited long enough for this, she’d told Debbie and her husband. A later picture of her father, taken about a year before he died.

The cat flap sounded its snick-snack rattle, and Debbie’s cat came urgently into the room, tail up, with breathless mews of excitement. She picked it up and went into the kitchen, looking for the tin opener. The cat nibbled her ear and clawed impatiently at her shoulder. She put it on the floor, where it wove in and out between her feet, tripping her up as she filled a dish with food. When the dish was on the floor, the cat single-mindedly put its head down and ate. Debbie hadn’t meant to get a cat. She was out a lot, she needed to go away, it just wasn’t convenient, but when a bedraggled kitten had turned up cowering behind the old shed in the garden, she couldn’t turn it away. It had taken her a week to coax the little animal closer and nearly a week more before she could touch it. After that it began to come in the house. Two weeks later, it was turning its nose up at cheap cat food and ambushing Debbie’s ankles as she went past. She called it Buttercup, because of its yellow tabby coat.

She remembered her wet mac in the kitchen, so she took it into the hall and hung it on a hook. If it didn’t dry in time, she’d just have to wear her jacket tomorrow. She was reluctant to sit down and be quiet. Usually after an evening class, she spent maybe half an hour just winding down, having a glass of wine or maybe a beer, listening to music; and then she would take another glass of wine into the bathroom and run a hot deep bath – setting the water heater to come on early on Thursdays was one of her extravagances – then lie there sipping wine and relaxing. When she felt sleepy, she went to bed, and usually fell asleep in minutes, not waking again until the alarm went off at eight.

She poured herself a glass of wine, went back into the living room and sat down in front of the fire. The memory of that encounter at the station lingered and she couldn’t settle. When she closed her eyes, she could see that strange light. The drumming of the rain on her window became the drumming of the rain on the station canopy. The figure on the platform began to walk towards her and her legs were heavy and she couldn’t move. She tried to call out but her voice was too weak to make any sound. She looked for the train coming in, but the line was gone and a fast-flowing river, smooth and dangerous, ran beside her. She looked at the ground and the river was running underneath her feet. The thin lattice she was standing on began to crumble away. The dark figure was behind her, but she couldn’t see it.