Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

“TEN HOURS, GUV’NOR,” said Fred Regent. “That’s what the time-table says. Way this half-holiday is going, next train mightn’t come for ten months .”

Richard Jeperson shrugged. A cheek-muscle twitched.

Pink-and-grey-streaked autumn skies hung over wet fields. Fred had scouted around. No one home. Typical British Rail. He only knew Culler’s Halt was in use because of the uncollected rubbish. Lumpy plastic sacks were piled on the station forecourt like wartime sandbags. The bin-men’s strike was settled, but maybe word hadn’t reached these parts. A signpost claimed CULLER 3m. If there were a village at the end of the lane, it showed no lamps at the fag-end of this drab afternoon.

Fred wasn’t even sure which country Culler was in.

On the platform, Richard stood by their luggage, peering at the dying sunlight through green-tinted granny glasses. He wore a floor-length mauve travel coat with brocade frogging, shiny PVC bondage trousers (a concession to the new decade) and a curly-brimmed purple top hat.

Fred knew the Man From the Diogenes Club was worried about Vanessa. When a sensitive worried about someone who could famously take care of herself, it was probably time to panic.

At dawn, they’d been far South, after a nasty night’s work in Cornwall. They had been saddled with Alastair Garnett, a civil servant carrying out a time-and-motion study. In a funk, the man from the ministry had the bad habit of giving orders. If the local cops had listened to Richard rather than the “advisor”, there’d have been fewer deaths. The hacked-off body parts found inside a stone circle had to be sorted into two piles – goats and teenagers. An isolated family, twisted by decades of servitude to breakfast food corporations, had invented their own dark religion. Ceremonially masked in cornflakes packets with cut-out eyeholes, the Penrithwick Clan made hideous sacrifice to the goblins Snap, Crackle and Pop.

Bloody wastage like that put Richard in one of his moods, and no wonder. Fred would happily have booted Garnett up his pin-striped arse, but saw the way things were going in the 1980s.

Trudging back to seaside lodgings in Mevagissey, hardly up for cooked breakfast and sworn off cereal for life, they were met by the landlady and handed Vanessa’s telegram, an urgent summons to Scotland.

Abandoning the Penrithwick shambles to Garnett, Richard and Fred took a fast train to Paddington. They crossed London by taxi without even stopping off at homes in Chelsea and Soho for a change of clothes or a hello to the girlfriends – who would of course be ticked off by that familiar development – and rattled out of Euston in a slam-door diesel.

The train stank of decades’ worth of Benson & Hedges. Since giving up, Fred couldn’t be in a fuggy train or pub without feeling queasily envious. At first, they shared their first-class compartment with a clear-complexioned girl whose T-shirt (sporting the word “GASH”, with an Anarchy Symbol for the A) was safety-pinned together like a disassembled torso stitched up after autopsy. She quietly leafed through Bunty and The Lady , chain-smoking with a casual pleasure that made Fred wish a cartoon anvil would fall from the luggage rack onto her pink punk hairdo. At Peterborough, she was collected by a middle-aged gent with a Range Rover. Fred and Richard had the compartment to themselves.

Outside Lincoln, something mechanical got thrown. The train slowed to a snail’s pace, overtaken by ancient cyclists, jeered at by small boys (“Get off and milk it!”), inching through miles-long tunnels. This went on for agonising hours. Scheduled connections were missed. The only alternative route the conductor could offer involved getting off at York, a stopping train to Culler’s Halt, then a service to Inverdeith, changing there for Portnacreirann. In theory, it was doable. In practice, they were marooned. The conductor had been working from a time-table good only until September the 1st of last year . No one else had got off at Culler’s Halt.

Beyond the rail-bed was a panoramic advertising hoarding. A once-glossy, now-weatherworn poster showed a lengthy dole queue and the slogan LABOUR ISN’T WORKING – VOTE CONSERVATIVE. Over this was daubed NO FUTURE. A mimeographed sheet, wrinkled in the fly-posting, showed the Queen with a pin through her nose.

“There’s something wrong, Frederick,” said Richard.

“The country’s going down the drain, and everyone’s pulling the flush.”

“Not just that. Think about it: ‘God Save the Queen’ came out for the Silver Jubilee, two years before the election. So why are ads for the single pasted over the Tory poster?”

“This is the wilds, guv. Can’t expect them to be up with pop charts.”

Richard shrugged again. The mystery wasn’t significant enough to be worth considered thought.

They had more pressing troubles. Chiefly, Vanessa.

Their friend and colleague wasn’t a panicky soul. She wouldn’t have sent the telegram unless things were serious. A night’s delay, and they might be too late.

“I’m not happy with this, Frederick,” said Richard.

“Me neither, guv.”

Richard chewed his moustache and looked at the time-table Fred had already checked. Always gaunt, he was starting to seem haggard. Deep shadow gathered in the seams under his eyes

“As you say, ten hours,” said Richard. “ If the train’s on time.”

“Might as well kip in the waiting room,” suggested Fred. “Take shifts.”

There were hard benches and a couple of chairs chained to pipes. A table was piled with magazines and comics from years ago: Patrick Mower grinned on the cover of Tit-Bits; Robot Archie was in the jungle in Lion. A tiny bookshelf was stocked with paperbacks: Jaws, Mandingo, Sexploits of a Meter Maid, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , Guy N. Smith’s The Sucking Pit . Richard toggled a light-switch and nothing happened. Fred found a two-bar electric fire in working order and turned it on, raising the whiff of singed dust. As night set in, the contraption provided an orange glow but no appreciable heat.

Fred huddled in his pea-coat and scarf. Richard stretched out on a bench like a fakir on a bed of nails.

The new government wasn’t mad keen on the Diogenes Club. Commissions of Inquiry empowered the likes of Alastair Garnett to take a watching brief. Number Ten was asking for “blue skies suggestions” as to what, if anything, might replace this “hold-over from an era when British intelligence was run by enthusiastic amateurs”. Richard said the 1980s “would not be a comfortable decade for a feeling person”. His chief asset was sensitivity, but when his nerves frayed he looked like a cuckoo with peacock feathers. Called up before a Select Committee, he made a bad impression.

Fred knew Richard was right to be paranoid. Wheels were grinding and the team was being broken up. He had been strongly advised to report back to New Scotland Yard, take a promotion to Detective Inspector and get on with “real police work”. Rioters, terrorists and scroungers needed clouting. Task Forces and Patrol Groups were up and running. If he played along with the boot boys, he could have his own command, be a Professional. The decision couldn’t be put off much longer.

He’d assumed Vanessa would stay with the Club, though. Richard could chair the Ruling Cabal, planning and feeling . She would handle field-work, training up new folk to tackle whatever crept from the lengthening shadows.

Now, he wasn’t sure. If they didn’t get to Vanessa in time . . .

“There used to be a through train to Portnacreirann,” mused Richard. “The Scotch Streak. A sleeper. Steam until 1962, then diesel, then . . . well, helicopters took over.”