Ricky weaved his way across the platform, trying to remember just how much he’d had to drink. He squinted at the station sign, willing it to come in to focus. Where was he? Angmering? How had he got there?
“Let’s back up.” He said to the deserted station, feeling a need to fill the silence with noise. “I was in Worthing, definitely in Worthing. Then, Dave’s mate said there was a party. Did I go to a party? I don’t remember a party.”
Ricky scratched his head and winced, there was a really tender spot right on top of his head. Had he banged it on something?
He checked his watch, but found it missing. That was seriously annoying, it had been his Grandad’s. He always took good care of it. He began to check his pockets, thinking he must have taken it off for protection, he did that sometimes when he was doing things that could damage it. He found the watch in his jacket inside pocket, the face was smashed and it had stopped.
“I’m an idiot.” He told the quiet, uncaring station.
Second option, check his phone for the time. That was where it should be, but the screen was cracked on it as well and it wouldn’t turn on. No way to know if he’d broke it completely or if the battery was just dead, he’d have to wait to plug it in to find out.
“So, on a deserted platform at who knows what time. Watch, knackered. Phone, useless. Temperature, cold as balls. Head injury of some kind. Drunkenness, starting to wear off. Possibly.” He tried to balance on one leg and immediately lost balance, forcing him to put his other foot down to steady himself. Even then he staggered uncomfortably close to the edge of the platform. “Possibly not.”
The wind started to pick up, pushing a chill through his thin top. He shivered and decided he definitely wasn’t as drunk as he had been earlier. He now washed for the comforting embrace of a beer coat, even if it did cause him to do whatever idiotic thing had smashed his phone and Granddad’s watch.
Why had Dave decided a party was the thing to do? He knew what he got like.
Now he remembered. A house full of twenty somethings, feeling old, out of place. Making fo the kitchen, finding the beer.
Then what?
Embarrassed at Dave trying to get off with some girl twenty years younger than them, uncomfortable with being here at all. Some young guy who was a little prickly.
He’d had a fight, hadn’t he?
Ricky wondered if he had won or not.
“The train not approaching platform two is now not arriving.” The announcement proclaimed.
Ricky squinted at the electronic board, wondering if his drunkenness was fluctuating. He couldn’t have heard that right.
In bright orange letters the board proclaimed “There is no train.”
“There is no spoon.” Ricky said in his best Keanu Reeves voice and started kung fu chopping the air.
He tried to do a flying kick at an imaginary Agent Smith and landed right on his hip. The pain was a bolt of lightning, sobering too.
“Ow.” He moaned.
Rolling to his knees, Ricky hissed at the pain. He could do with another drink about now, bit of cheap anaesthetic. Stumbling up to his feet, he threw a half hearted chop at the air, then gave up.
Looking around at the deserted station, he as suddenly glad to be alone. It meant no-one had seen his idiotic moves. He had half a suspicion that he had been caught on camera though.
“Please don’t let me end up on YouTube.” He begged the empty night.
In response a squeal of brakes cut through the air.
Ricky looked at the tracks.
There was no train.
But he had definitely heard one stop.
“Air must be really clear.” He mumbled, certain that the sound must have carried from the next station up or down the line.
When was his train due anyway? The board still said there was no train.
He carefully limped to the platform edge and leaned forward to see if he could see an approaching light.
Ricky’s head bounced painfully off something hard that wasn’t there.
“Ouch.” He said.
Reaching out gingerly, Ricky discovered that something was on the tracks in front of him. Very solid, made of metal by the feel. He just couldn’t see it.
“Did someone slip me something?” He thought, while slowly feeling his way down this invisible thing. That could explain this, maybe it even explained the fight he didn’t really remember.
No, if he had a fight, that was completely in character for him, he knew.
Whatever was on the tracks, it was big It stretched up higher than he could reach and he was a tall lad. Not completely smooth though. He would swear he felt bumps and edges that were definitely riveted joints.
A slight dip and a different texture now, smoother, cooler. Glass?
“It’s a tree trunk, it’s an elephant’s leg.” He muttered.
Now, here was a shorter length of the smoother part. Ricky moved his hand down, expecting and not expecting to find the protrusion that he did.
“This can not be happening.”
But it was, the protrusion was cool to the touch, metal, shaped like a thin egg. Ricky twisted what he knew to be a handle, pushed and the section of the thing in front of him moved forward.
“This is ridiculous.” He told the empty world.
It was strangely quiet, no sounds of cars passing, no noise of the wind.
“Back away.” He commanded himself.
Instead he lifted a foot and gingerly felt for the solid step he expected to find. He foot touched down, holding its place in the air.
“Let go. Foot on the ground. Go sit on the bench.” His voice was quiet and he wasn’t sure if he had even spoken or just thought it to himself.
Ricky placed all of his weight on the foot hovering in the air and was not shocked to find it supported him. He stepped forward, keeping a grip on the twisted object in his hand.
“Well done. You’ve levitated. Leave now. Let go. Go away. Walk home. Don’t do this. Do some other stupid thing. Don’t do this.” This time it was definitely a voice in his head and not from his mouth. He knew that because his mouth said “No bloody way.”
Taking another step forward, Ricky looked down. He was floating above the tracks.
With a flick of his hand, he pushed the object in it towards the platform and heard the loud and familiar clunk. A noise he hadn’t heard for, what, fifteen years? No since they changed all of the rolling stock.
Reaching to his left, he felt a soft, rough thing. Coarse fibres under his fingers.
He couldn’t help it, he laughed aloud.
The ground moved under his feet and he lost balance, falling sideways, he landed on something hard, but softer than the ground would have been.
His eyes were drawn down as the tracks started to move beneath him.
No.
They weren’t moving, he was.
He was flying, slowly at first but gradually picking up speed. The last vestiges of alcohol started to play with his balance centres and he felt his stomach start to churn.
Ricky closed his eyes, focusing on the feel of the seat underneath him. He ran his hand across the hard fabric, picturing the blue and, was it a green colour? Yellow? His mind worked hard to picture the seats in the trains he had taken to college in the late nineties .
His breathing slowed, the bile taste at the back of his throat slipped disgustingly down and back into his stomach. It burned as it went.
Ricky kept his eyes closed.
He was too old to do this any more. Too old to be out drinking like this. This was a punishment from whatever was watching him. A message, wasn’t it? Shit like this didn’t happen for no reason.
Turning his face up, thinking that if he could only see the sky, the relative normality of the stars and the lack of objects passing by was less likely to make him throw up.
He cracked open one eye and shut it immediately, suddenly blinded by light.
Turning his face to the seat, he risked opening his eyes again.
He could see the seat.
It was a blue-green with yellowing stripes.
But he could see it.
Slowly turning his head, not sure if sitting on a seat flying through nothing would be better than flying without one to see. The train carriage around him was visible. Lit by the fluorescent lights in the roof.
Ricky sat up straighter, finding comfort in the solid realness of what he saw. The fact that it had not been there moments before didn’t faze him. It had been there, he supposed, it had just not been visible. He wondered why that would have changed before deciding that it didn’t really matter.
Automatically he looked to the electronic sign above the connecting door to see what the next station would be and had a moments surprise that there wasn’t one. He chuckled to himself, this train was too old, they had never had them. He would have to wait for an announcement.
That gave him pause,
Would there be an announcement? Was there anyone else on this train?
He stood up, using his hand on the back of the seat to steady himself.
The carriage was empty, but looked used. He could see the detritus of life around, crumbs and crisps on seats.
“Hello?” He called out.
Silence answered him.
A dilemma then, to stay where he was or go to find out if he truly was alone.
He began to whistle Should I Say or Should I Go, tapping his foot in time to the beat.
Still whistling, Ricky tried to see where he was through the window but the interior light turned the glass into a mirror, he could make nothing out. That wasn’t too concerning, yet. Lots of fields around here, not much in the way of housing to throw out light he would see. Hell, they could be two minutes outside of Littlehampton and be completely surrounded by cow fields, it wasn’t the first time he’d made this trip with no idea of where he was.
First time you’ve done it on an invisible train though, his fear said to him.
Yeah, but that’s awesome, his residual drunk brain retorted. He thought he could hear his fear slinking away to think of a new attack.
Whistling and humming the chorus over and over, Ricky made a decision, he would explore the train. He didn’t even know how far from the back or the front of it he was.
Turning left would take him forwards, right would be towards the back of the train. Which way would a conductor be? Didn’t they used to be at the rear? He couldn’t remember.
Left, head towards the front. There had to be a driver up there. Usually they were locked away and maybe he couldn’t talk to them, but it was the one place he knew there had to be a person.
Definitely left.
Decision made, Ricky walked to the connecting door, opened it and saw the open tracks in front of him.
“Oh, come on.” He complained.
Gingerly, he placed a foot down. Slowly it went lower.
Lower.
Too low, surely?
Ricky had just convinced himself that there was only once carriage to this train when his foot touched down.
Explosively expelling the unintended held breath that burned his lungs, Ricky felt himself go lightheaded for a moment.
The other connecting door, the one from the next carriage began to fade in before his eyes, he risked a look behind him and saw his carriage starting to fade away.
“Nope. I don’t like that.” He told the train, reaching forward for the handle and letting himself into the next carriage.
Where the last carriage had been fading away from the rear, vanishing as it crept towards him, this one was slowly fading in from the ground up. It was like a swimming pool, slowly filing with water. First the floor faded in, then the seats and the walls started to become real.`
Ricky felt his stomach churn as he was slowly encased in the carriage, the real world disappearing from view. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about.” He told his guts “You can’t even see this.”
This carriage was devoid of life as well.
Ricky sat down on the nearest seat, thinking about whether he wanted to go through that agin. He wasn’t certain whether he could continue to keep what he had eaten and drunk today down if it kept happening.
He decided to give himself five minutes, to see if the train reached a station. Promising himself that as interesting as this had been, he was getting off at the first available point.
He checked his wrist for the time. His granddad’s watch wasn’t there. Of course not, it was broken and in his pocket. So was his smashed phone.
“Well done, dickhead.”
Ricky started to count seconds instead. Or at least, he tried, but found he couldn’t be sure if he was going too fast or too slow.
On the count of eighty five, he gave up, stood and headed for the next carriage.
This one faded in from the roof down, enclosing him even as he could still see the tracks flying past underneath.
This time he did vomit, just a bit on the back of a chair that wasn’t visible yet. He watched the thin, chunk filled bile run down in the empty space, pooling a few feet above the ground.
He forced himself to avert his eyes and marched straight on to the next connecting door, yanked it open and shrieked as he came face to face with a man in a black uniform, holding a pen and clipboard.
The man yelled.
Ricky screamed.
The man screamed.
Ricky threw up on the man.
The man quieted, stared, then threw up on Ricky’s shoes.
Ricky watched the vomit fly out of the man’s mouth, hit his shoes and vanish.
Ricky looked up into the sunken, dark grey eyes of the man and said “Fuck this.”
He turned on his heels and sprinted for the connecting door at the ear of the carriage.
“Oi!” Yelled the man.
Ricky ignored him, yanked open the door and tried to run through the carriage fading in in front of him.
Unfortunately for him, it was harder to run in a dead straight line when there was nothing to guide you. He banged his injured hip off one of the invisible chairs, screamed in renewed pain, twisted, tangled his feet and smashed down face first into one of the seats.
He was struggling to his feet, his hip in agony and face aching when the man caught up with him.
“What are you doing here? You ain’t on my list.” The man demanded.
Ricky looked up to see the man standing over him. His hair was white, his eyebrows black, his long moustache was white and his mouth was set in that pinched up look of a jobsworth who has discovered something they can’t fit into a neat box.
He was dressed in a black uniform, on his left breast was a silver name badge that read R. Codser 3rd Class.
Opening his mouth to speak, Ricky found he had no words, a rare occurrence for him.
“Come on, show me your ticket.” R. Codser demanded.
Ricky fumbled the small piece of card out of his wallet and handed it to the man, who was clearly the train conductor, even if he was dressed strangely.
R. Codser took the ticket, looking confused “What’s this?” His eyes widened in shock “This is a train ticket!’
“Well, yeah.” Now Ricky was confused, what else had the man wanted?
“A train ticket, for a train. For a train train. To take you places where you do stuff. To take you home and away again?” His voice was panicky, making Ricky feel genuine fear for the first time.
“Yeah. What ticket should I have? We’re on a train?” Even as he said it, Ricky knew he was just wasting time. This was no ordinary train.
“Shit shit shit.” Said the man.
“I was just going home from a party.”
“Shit shit shit.”
“I think I got into a fight, I’m not sure. I was pretty drunk.”
The man’s eyes sparkled “A fight? Did you get badly hurt? Are you sure you left the party?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I walked out in a strop.”
“Shit shit shit.”
Ricky rubbed the tender part of his head, which picked this moment to remind him it still existed “Think someone clocked me a good ‘un, though.”
“Head injury?”
Ricky shrugged “Minor one.”
R. Codser nodded “Could explain it.” He paused “Shit.”
Ricky watched the man thinking. He pulled a book from his jacket pocket, flicked through the pages until he found the one he wanted. He unfolded the page, once, twice, until it was the size of an A3 sheet of paper. Grunting disappointedly, he unfolded it some more until he was completely hidden from view.
Ricky pulled himself up to sit on the seat, watching the page rustle and hearing annoyed grunts and muttering coming from the other side.
“Right, yes.” R. Codser said.
There was a lot of paper rustling and the page was folded back up and the book closed.
“I’ll get the driver to stop at Ford.”
Ford? That was miles from home.
“I’m going to Chichester.”
R. Codser glared at him “You get off at Ford, son. You don’t want to ride this any further than absolutely necessary.”
Ricky wanted to protest more, but the other man pulled a radio with a hand crank on the side out of a pocket. He spun the handle around, making the whizzing sound Ricky associated with the wind up torch he had at home.
“Got to stop at Ford, Guv. Got a fare dodger.”
Ricky started to object to that description when a deep voice spoke from the radio, it chilled him and made him shut up.
“A fare dodger? How did that happen? I’ve never had one on my ride in two thousand years.”
“Where did you get on?” R. Codser hissed.
“Angmering.”
“He must have got on while we were having that problem with Verna Fisher. I told you she was going to cause us problems.”
There was a long pause, Ricky saw the expression on the other man’s face change into something that he didn’t like.
“Set the hound on him.” Said the voice over the radio.
“Guv, that’s cruel.” R. Codser sounded shocked.
Ricky didn’t like the sound of the hound.
“We stop at Ford in three minutes. If he dodges the hound for that long, he can get off.”
“What if he doesn’t avoid the hound?”
“Then he gets his ticket to ride.”
This wasn’t good, at all. Ricky didn’t know what the hound was, but the voice on the radio sounded confident that he wasn’t going to get past it.
“Can I speak to your governor?” Ricky asked, his hand out for the radio.
“I don’t think he’ll talk to you.”
“Can I try, quickly?”
R. Codser sighed and passed over the radio.
“Hi there. Can I ask you a question before you set the hound loose?”
“Hello there, fare dodger. You have time for one.”
“Ok, well its a two part question really.”
Ricky thought he could hear the eye roll over the radio.
“Very well, be quick.”
“If the hound caches me, I guess I die and stay on the train, yes?”
“Correct.”
“Right. So if I’m on the train, what’s going to stop me making my way up to you and taking revenge for killing me?”
Silence.
“You think you can hurt me?” The voice finally said, amusement in it.
“Don’t know. Do you think I can’t make your life a thousand times harder or more annoying? Even if I can’t hurt you, I’m sure I can ruin your days.”
R. Codser was staring at him, eyes wide.
There was a longer patch of silence before laughter echoed through the carriage, not coming from the radio, instead it came from everywhere. The sound surrounded them, enveloped them.
“I like you, fare dodger. I’ll wait for your appointed time. Codser, keep the hound back. But tell him when he is due back.”
“Hey, wait.” Ricky protested, knowing what he was going to hear.
Codser pulled the book back out and began flicking through it. Ricky tried to knock it out of his hands, but the book was insubstantial to his touch.
Codser found the page, looked at Ricky and winked.
“Lalalalalala.” Ricky sang, desperately.
“Amanda Ferguson’s forty ninth birthday.” Codser said, his voice bypassing Ricky’s ears.
Ricky stopped singing.
“You what now?”
“That is your day.”
“Who’s Amanda Ferguson? How old is she now?” Ricky demanded.
The old man just winked at him.
The train began to slow, the brakes screeching.
When it came to a stop, Codser escorted him to the door “I’ll be seeing you. Maybe I’ll even be second class by then.” The man held out his hand.
Ricky shook it, surprised he could actually touch it “Yeah. Er, good luck on the promotion.”
Codser beamed “Thank you.”
Ricky stepped off the train and watched the old man pull the door shut with a smile.
The engine grew loud an the train started to move again. Ricky realised he could see the whole train now, it stretched all the way down the track in booth directions. He could not see either end. Looking in the windows as it pulled away, he saw that every seat was filled. Faces noticed him and pointed him out to their companions. People stood to share at him. Their clothes were all different. There a skater kid stood next to a roman legionary. A British soldier stood by a woman in scuba gear.
Ricky waved to them, what else was there to do?
A monocled man waved back.
A kid with curled hair and a thin tunic stuck their tongue out.
Peasant rags, the finest tailored outfits. All mingled together. There was no distinction in class or seating. One train for all.
The train still had carriages to come, but they were fading.
Fading away and less people noticed him.
Faces stopped looking for him.
Conversations were had between the high and low.
Long before the train ran out of carriages, it had faded away completely, leaving only the sound of its passing.
That too was soon gone.
Ricky stood alone on the two platform station. Following the exit signs, he found himself by a country road with few street lights. Closed businesses lined one side of the road down from the level crossing.
The night was silent.
“So,” he called out “how am I supposed to get home from here?”
© Robert Spalding 2020
Ghost Stories by Robert Spalding 