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

Harry, Richard and Myles backed away from her. Just as she’d known they would. She ticked off the moment, grateful there wasn’t anything more to it.

She was pulling the communication cord .

She suppressed the instincts. The red cord – a chain, actually – still hung above a window, unbothered in its recess. She would ignore it.

Would she pull the cord in the future or was she imagining what it would be like? No way to tell. She saw herself in the dock, being lectured, then paying five one-pound notes to a clerk of the court – but the clerk had no face. That usually meant she was imagining. If this was going to happen, she would see a face, and recognise it later.

Then, her brain buzzed. She couldn’t mistake this for wandering imagination. Before the War, a child psychiatrist labelled Annette’s puzzling malaise as “acute déjà vu” . Catriona Kaye modified the diagnosis and coined the term “ jamais vu” . Annette did not have I-have-been-here-before memories of the present, but I-will-be-here-soon memories of the future.

An open exterior door, night-time countryside rushing past. Someone falling from the train, breaking against a gravel verge. And someone coming for her, from behind .

If that was a few pages ahead, she’d rather fold the corner at the end of this chapter, put the book on her bedside table and never open it again. But that wasn’t how the world worked.

Arnold came with her second gimlet. This one she sipped.

“Perfect,” she told the conductor, suppressing shivers.

II

Annette’s recovery impressed Richard. Two gimlets and a nip to her compartment to fix her face, and she was set. Her strings were notches too tight, but so were anyone else’s. She flirted, presumably on instinct, flitting among her colleagues, seeming to offer equal time. Only Richard noticed he was getting marginally more serious attention than Harry Cutley or Danny Myles. She already knew them but needed to puzzle out the new boy, fix him in her mind the way Harry fixed names, by rolling him around, pinching and fluffing, testing reactions. Which, as ever, were warm and, he thought, horribly obvious.

Harry sourly made shorthand notes in his folder.

The frightening vicar gently enquired as to the lady’s condition. Annette said she was fine, and he retreated, satisfied. Richard still wondered if the man was faking his aura. His killer’s hands seemed made to be gloved in someone else’s blood.

Standing nearby, Annette was carefully not looking at the communication cord. Of course. Anyone who travelled by train knew that imp of the perverse which popped up at the sight of a PENALTY FOR IMPROPER USE – £5.00 notice – pull the chain, see what happens, go on, you know you want to . On the Scotch Streak, the imp was a bullying, nagging elemental.

Annette felt Richard’s lapel between thumb and forefinger.

“Real,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t tell any more.”

He didn’t know where to put his hands.

“Put the boy down, Annie,” said Harry. “Come fill in this Incident Form. Since you’re convinced you were assaulted , we must have a first-person account before memories fade.”

She shuddered and joined Harry. He gave her a sheet of paper and a pencil, which she proceeded to use as if sitting an exam, producing neat, concise notations in the spaces provided.

Danny Myles sat at the piano, fingers tapping the closed lid. His bruises were rising. He smiled, did a little two-finger Gene Krupa solo on the polished wood.

“Me next, you think?” Richard asked.

Myles lifted his shoulders.

“Watch your back, Jack.”

The carriage windows were ebony mirrors. If Richard got close to the glass and strained, he could make out the rushing countryside. A late supper would soon be served in the dining carriage. The train didn’t stop until Edinburgh, at half-past one; then, after a twenty-minute layover, it would continue to Portnacreirann, arriving with the dawn.

The overnight express felt more like an ocean liner than a train. Safe harbour was left behind and they were alone on the vast, deep sea.

Though they had compartments, none of them would sleep.

Richard took out his father’s watch, checked it against the clock above the connecting door. He had ten past nine, the train clock had ten to. He’d wound the watch at Euston, setting the time against the big station clock.

Myles saw what he was doing, rolled his sleeve back and felt a glassless watch – a holdover from his blind days. “Stopped, man,” he said. “Dead on the vine. Seven seven and seven seconds. That’s a panic and a half.”

“I won’t have one of those things,” said Annette, looking up from her form. “Little ticking tyrants.”

“Prof?” Myles prompted Harry.

Harry pulled a travel clock out of a baggy pocket and held it next to his wrist-watch.

“Eight thirty-two. Ten-o’-six.”

“Want to take a stab at which is the real deal?” asked Magic Fingers.

They all looked at the train clock, ticking towards supper time.

“What I thought,” said the jazzman.

Harry Cutley riffled through his folder and dug out more forms. He handed them out. Myles got on with it, turning out a polished paragraph. Richard simply wrote down “WATCH FAST”.

“Perhaps now you’ll stay away from mechanical instruments and rely on people,” said Annette. “You know clocks run irregularly in haunted places, so why do you trust thermometers, barometers, wire-recorders and cameras?”

“People run irregularly too,” said Harry, reasonably. “Even – no, especially – Talents.”

Richard was piqued. His watch was no ordinary timepiece. His father had inherited it from his grandfather, who had sat with Mycroft Holmes on the first Ruling Cabal. Geoffrey Jeperson had carried the watch all through the War. The Major, thinking his business done in a refugee camp, had been checking the time when he and a large-eyed, hollow-bellied child noticed one another. The watch brought them together. The boy who would become Richard Jeperson reached for the bauble, taking it reverentially when the Major, on instinct, trusted it to him. He had solemnly felt its weight, listened to its quiet tick, admired its Victorian intricacy through a panel in the face.

Inside, gears and wheels were tiny fragments of unknown crystal, which sparkled green or blue in certain light. The roman numerals were lost in tiny engravings of bearded satyrs and chubby nymphs.

Those first ticks were where Richard’s memory began. Before now, the watch had never betrayed him.

If Jeperson’s watch wasn’t to be trusted, what else in the life furnished for him by the Diogenes Club was left? The watch wound with a tiny key, which was fixed to the chain – it could also stop the mechanism, and Richard did so. If the watch could not run true, it should not run at all. He felt as if a pet had died, and he’d never had pets. He unhooked the chain and wondered if he’d ever wear it again. He slipped watch and chain into a pocket and handed back the incident form.

Arnold, who obviously had no trouble with his watch – a railway watch, as much a part of the Scotch Streak as the wheels or the windows – announced that supper was served. According to the train clock, it was nine o’clock precisely.

Harry reset his watch and clock against the train time. He made a note in his folder.

“I foresee you’ll be at that all night,” said Annette. “Without using a flicker of Talent. It’s Sod’s Law.”

Harry smiled without humour, not giving her an argument.

It hit Richard that something had gone on between Harry Cutley and Annette Amboise, not just an investigation into a Puma Cult. Harry took teasing from her he wouldn’t from anyone else. He sulked like a boy when she paid attention elsewhere. She’d told Richard not to underestimate the Most Valued Member.