The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(7)

‘Off we go,’ smiled Agnes.

He waited tentatively to see what would happen when the train left the platform and went into the nothingness.

And what happened was that it moved into a kind of swirling darkness, where the occasional strand of light wound through the black like strands of cotton.

Wilbur then noticed his reflection.

It was a shock.

He really was a young man again. His face was smooth apart from the broad sideburns. His hair was to his shoulders. And chestnut-brown, not grey. And it had a bit of its old bounce to it. He had good posture. He looked like 1974. Healthy in a mildly hippyish way. He had never liked his looks at the time but he now realised that, back then, he was really not a bad-looking man. He stood up a bit taller.

‘Steady,’ he muttered as the train juddered, quite violently, for a few seconds. This caused him to fall back onto a seat.

‘You are the age at which you came closest to your true self,’ said Agnes. ‘That’s a small quirk of ghosts and a rather appealing one, I feel. Call me sentimental.’

Wilbur glanced down at his own short-sleeved shirt and his flared jeans. He remembered them from photographs.

‘Venice,’ he said. His first time abroad. ‘I am the age I was when I was on my honeymoon. I am twenty-nine years old.’

‘Yes, so that means that was when you were, well, most you.’

He turned to the window again. It was like looking out on an unusual kind of Impressionist painting.

There was a slightly uncanny yellow, jaundiced sky. In the background, an indecipherable blur of people and objects. But in the foreground, things were a little clearer.

Buildings that didn’t seem quite fixed, slightly bobbing around, more like boats in the sea than structures solidly attached to land.

‘So where are we? Where is this train going?’

‘Not where, Wilbur,’ she said, with a mirthless chuckle. ‘When?’





True Self


It wasn’t night, but it wasn’t day, and nor was it anything in between.

The sky, Wilbur would soon realise, was like memory itself. It could contain everything at once.

A war plane tilted at a dangerous angle.

‘That’s your father’s plane … the one he tried to navigate through enemy fire.’

Wilbur stared up at the old Hurricane. ‘What? How do you know that?’

‘I told you. I am the universe. I don’t mean to sound immodest but I know everything about your past, even before it was your past … And what we are seeing now are the memories you never lived but which are inside you, facts pressed deep into you from before you even heard them.’

The plane exploded into the sky and disappeared. Wilbur searched for it but it was gone and he felt its absence like a grief reborn. He had imagined the event a thousand times over, had spent countless hours as a child staring up to the clouds and thinking about it, wondering what his father had thought in his final moments. It was a strange thing, to grieve someone he had never known. The man who died a hero months before he was born. To see the ripples in a pond but never the heavy stone that caused them. And it was even stranger, now, to see how quick his father’s death had been, given how long he had spent thinking about it.

He felt a tight panic in his chest. An overwhelming, gasping grief as if it had only just happened.

Instinctively, he closed his eyes.

Agnes spoke to him.

‘It’s a lot to absorb, admittedly. I understand that. But you must look out of the window where possible. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but the whole point of a life flashing before your eyes is that you see it.’

So Wilbur forced himself to look.

Outside, things were getting a little more real. The shape of a city was emerging. Low roofs of terraced houses. A distant steeple. The clock tower of a town hall. Wilbur noted the landscape was no longer bobbing about.

And then, with a mechanical sigh and wheeze, the train came to a halt.

‘So what happens now?’ Wilbur asked, his heart still racing from witnessing his father’s death in the sky.

‘You get off the train. And then, when you hear it again, you get back on. It’s really very simple.’

Outside the window he saw a broken wall and an expanse of rubble. At first, he saw nothing much else.

Agnes smiled, like an apprehensive parent at the school gates. ‘Off you go, Old Bean. Your past is waiting. But promise me one thing: you get back on the train when it arrives. Promise?’

Wilbur didn’t have a reason not to return to the train. He didn’t want to miss eternity, after all. ‘I promise.’

And then he walked to the door at the front of the carriage, ready to step off.





The Time Traveller


He opened the carriage door.

He was now somewhere quite light.

Sunshine and pretty cotton-wool clouds. He looked around and saw the rubble. Acres of dust and bricks. Fragments of walls, like lost pieces of a giant jigsaw.

There was a billboard on one wall, still mostly intact. An old-fashioned advert. An elaborate illustration of a swan standing on a box of matches.

It was all distantly familiar, but he couldn’t place it until he caught sight of the row of Victorian houses.

He knew this street. It was Glossop Road. In his hometown. Sheffield.