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

It was a bad break. At the end of his wrist hung a limp, tangled dust-rag.

Then he felt nothing – no pain. No sound. No smell. No taste. No feeling.

For the first time in his life, he was completely cut off.

VI

Even beyond the usual assumption that quiet English children were aliens, there was something about Vanessa.

She made Richard feel the way grown-ups, even those inside the Diogenes Club, felt around him when he was a boy, the way a lot of people still felt when he was in the room. At first, they were on their guard because he dressed like the sort of youth the Daily Mail reckoned would smash your face in – though, in his experience, teds were as sweet or sour as anyone else, and the worst beatings he’d personally taken came from impeccably-uniformed school prefects. Once past that, people just got spooked – because he felt things, saw things, knew things.

Now he knew about Vanessa.

He was almost afraid of her. And this from someone who accepted the impossible without question.

Sherlock Holmes, brother of the Club’s founder, said: “When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth.” Less frequently quoted was Mycroft’s addendum, “And when you can not eliminate the impossible, refer the matter to the Diogenes Club.” It was recorded in the Club’s archives, though not in the writings of John Watson, that the Great Detective several times found himself stumped, and fielded the case to his contemporary Carnacki the Ghost-Finder.

It was barely possible that a gigantic conjuring trick could rearrange, or seem to rearrange, the carriages while the train was steaming through the darkened countryside. The archives weren’t short of locked-room mysteries and like conundra. For some reason, especially from the 1920s and early ’30s. The Scotch Streak dated from then, so it could have been built to allow baffling disappearances. However, an uncanny explanation required less of a stretch of belief. Richard couldn’t see a point to the carriage substitution, and pointlessness was a frequent symptom of the supernatural. Haunted houses often had “treacherous” doors, opening to different rooms at different times. It should have been expected, by know-it-all Harry Cutley for instance, that a haunted train would have something along these lines. However, the switcheroo wasn’t on the train’s list of previously recorded phenomena.

Where was everybody? Harry was downwind, last seen heading towards Second and Third Class. Annette and Myles were in the misplaced dining car. Arnold the Conductor, omnipresent earlier, was nowhere to be seen.

Were the other passengers where they should be? Though it was easy to get distracted by fireworks, this investigation was supposed to be about protecting the American couriers.

Three compartments had blinds drawn and DO NOT DISTURB signs hung. One was Annette’s and she wasn’t there. Another was Vanessa’s and she was with him.

That was a puzzle. Besides the couriers, Mrs Sweet and the sinister vicar (one of whom must be a spy) should be here. They couldn’t all be crammed into one compartment playing whist with nuclear missiles. In theory, the British Government had other agents to deal with that sort of mess, kitted out with exploding cufflinks and licences to kill. In a pinch, Richard could muddle in. The Club had been dabbling in “ordinary” espionage since the Great Game of Victoria’s reign. Edwin had served as an Intelligence Officer in the RFC during the First World War (“No, I didn’t shoot down the Bloody Red Baron; what I shot was a lot of photographs from the back of a two-seater – if it matters, each exposure got more Huns killed than all the so-called flying aces put together.”) before taking over Carnacki’s ghost-finding practice.

“Have you seen any Americans?” he asked the child.

She solemnly shook her head and stuck out her lower lip. She wanted more attention paid to her.

He looked again at her label.

“Who is Lieutenant-Commander Coates?”

She gave a “don’t know” shrug.

“Not your Dad, you said. Where are your parents?”

Another shrug.

“Lot of that about,” he said, feeling it deeply. “Where do you live, usually?”

A small sound, inaudible – as if the girl weren’t used to speech, like a well-bred, upper-middle-class Kaspar Hauser in spaceman pyjamas.

“Come again, love?”

“Can’t remember,” she said.

Richard had a chill, born of kinship. But he was also wary. This was too close to where he came from. If the train could come up with Worst Things to get under Annette’s or Harry’s skin, it could sidle up close to him and bite too.

“Vanessa What?”

Another “can’t remember”.

“It must be Vanessa Something. Not Coates, but Something.”

She shook her head, braids whipping.

“Just Vanessa, then. It’ll have to do. Nothing wrong with ‘Vanessa’. Not a saint’s name, so far. Not forged in antiquity and refined through passage from language to language like mine. Richard, from the Germanic for ‘Rule-Hard’, also ‘Ricardo’, ‘Rickard’, ‘Dick’, ‘Dickie’, ‘Dickon’, ‘Rich’, ‘Richie’, ‘Clever Dick’, ‘Dick-Be-Quick’, ‘Crookback Dick’. Your name – like ‘Pamela’, ‘Wendy’ and ‘Una’ – was invented within recorded history. By Jonathan Swift, as it happens. Do you know who he was?”

“He wrote Gulliver’s Travels .”

So she remembered some things.

“Yes. He coined the name ‘Vanessa’ as a contraction – like ‘Dick’ for ‘Richard’ – for an Irish girl called ‘Esther Vanhomrigh’.”

“Who was she?”

“Ah, she was a fan of Dean Swift, you know, like girls today might be fans of Tommy Steele.”

“Don’t like Tommy Steele.”

“Elvis Presley?”

Vanessa was keener on Elvis.

“Miss Vanhomrigh was Swift’s biggest fan, so he invented a name for her. He preferred another woman called Esther, Esther Johnson, whom he called ‘Stella’. I expect he made up the names so as not to get them mixed up. Stella and Vanessa didn’t like each other.”

“Did they fight?”

“In a way. They competed for Swift’s attention.”

“Did Vanessa win?”

“Not really, love. Both died before they could settle who got him, and he wasn’t entirely in the business of being got.”

Best not to mention the author might have married Stella.

How did they get into this? He didn’t set out to be a lecturer, but he was recounting things he didn’t think he remembered to this inquisitive, reticent child. Talking to her calmed him.

“Are we being got?” she asked.

“I’m afraid we might be.”

“Please don’t let me be got.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Vanessa smiled up at him. Richard worried he had just given his word in the middle of a great unknown. He might not be in a position to keep his promise.

But he knew it was important.

Vanessa must not be got.

They were by the compartment with the DO NOT DISTURB sign. He saw a THROUGH TO PORTNACREIRANN notation. The blind wasn’t pulled all the way down, and a spill of light wavered on the compartment floor. In that, Richard saw a pale hand dangling from the lower berth, thin chain fixed to the handle of a briefcase on the floor. It was one of the couriers.

At least they were safe.

Vanessa put her eye up to the gap and looked in, for a long while.

“Come away,” he said. “Let the nice Americans sleep.”

She turned and looked up at him. “Are you sure they’re nice?”

“No, but they’re important. And it’s best to leave them alone. There are other people I want to find first.”