Thieving Fear

Darkness engulfed the carriage. It was the shadow of the station, and the door alarm began to shrill. Nobody visible was boarding – nobody at all – but Glen said 'What did somebody set off?'

'It's just the doors,' Charlotte told him.

'You're getting out of what is it, a train?'

'Not getting out,' she had to say.

The beeping addressed her a second time, and then the train crept forwards. As sunlight and a ghost of mud coated the window afresh Glen said 'Sounds like you know about him.'

'I looked him up,' Ellen said. 'I didn't read it all.'

'What did you read?'

'Wouldn't it be easier to email her the link?' Charlotte said as Ellen failed to speak.

'I could do that, except when's it going to reach her?'

'Not till I get home. I don't know when that'll be.'

'I'm the same,' said Charlotte. 'I mean, I've got no access here.'

'Hey, don't sound so pleased about it. How about the guy who isn't speaking?'

Hugh's gaze darted about as if he wondered where the person referred to might be, and then he worked on producing a laugh. 'I haven't even got a computer.'

'You must like living in the past. Maybe I should read some of this in case you want to think about it, Ellen.'

'That couldn't have been his real name, could it?'

'Pendemon? I'd say not. The guy who runs this site has some fun with that, well, with the whole thing. Seems like he doesn't believe in any kind of magic.'

Charlotte sensed that Ellen had been seeking some kind of reassurance, but Hugh had a question for Glen. 'Do you?'

'If it pays you bet I do.'

'Is he Mumbo someone,' Ellen said, 'your man with no beliefs?'

'Jumbjoe, that's his byline. Maybe he's not the sceptic he wants us all to think or he wouldn't write so much about it. You're right, he figures Pendemon's a fake name. Nothing to do with penning demons either.'

Did Glen mean to lighten the mood? He seemed to have achieved the opposite. The air trapped by the unopenable windows felt heavy with resentment thick as earth, stale as old breath. 'I thought it was trying to sound like Pendragon,' Hugh said.

'Pen means head, doesn't it?' said Ellen.

'Head demon, huh? I don't think he got that job. Let's see what you don't know.'

Charlotte had a thought she was far from relishing. 'We'll be coming to a tunnel soon.'

'I'd better make this fast, then. Did you see he got into a fight with another magician, Ellen?'

'Something Grace, wasn't it?'

'Amazing,' Hugh said and looked painfully out of place.

'You got it, Ellen. Peter Grace. I don't believe in that name either.'

Charlotte thought the rush of the train had grown hollow ahead, but the tunnel didn't appear. Perhaps the sound suggestive of the gaping of a pit had been on the loudspeaker, although it didn't affect Glen's voice when he asked 'Did you see what your guy tried to send Grace?'

'I don't know. I didn't get that far.'

Ellen's hands began to writhe on either side of her face as if to ward the information off. Charlotte leaned across the phone on the seat to stroke her cousin's arm, but Ellen snatched it out of reach as Charlotte said 'Glen, I think you'd better –'

'He collected nightmares.'

Charlotte felt as if a pit were indeed yawning beneath her, even if it had yet to swallow Glen's voice. She straightened up hastily, only to fear that Ellen might think she'd recoiled from her. By this time Hugh seemed to feel nervously driven to ask 'How?'

'This isn't a site that'll give you his method. It does quote things he's meant to have said.'

'I saw some of those,' Ellen intervened.

Charlotte thought she might be trying to hush Glen, but he retorted 'At the core of all men is darkness and terror?'

'Something like that.'

'These are what he's supposed to have told his followers, not that he ever had too many of those. They all ran off when he tried to use them,' Glen said. 'The essence of each man is the infant he once was, at the mercy of the dark?'

'No,' Ellen said forcefully enough to be denying the idea.

'The hidden child shall serve the adept, and its terror shall become its weapon?'

'No.'

'The husk shall return to the world and carry on its mundane mummery, having yielded up its substance to the sorcerer?'

Ellen's lips were opening yet again, plumply audible before she spoke, when Hugh demanded 'What's all that meant to mean?'

'Like I said, he collected people's nightmares. I'm not saying I believe it any more than this site does. You don't have to either, Ellen. Just use it if you can.'

She'd closed her mouth by now, though her lips were continuing to shift. 'What's kind of interesting,' Glen said, 'is he's supposed to have made a couple of mistakes.'

'What?' Hugh said with an urgency Charlotte found disconcerting.

'That last quote I gave you sounds as if he thought he took the nightmares out of people, doesn't it? Or maybe he didn't care. The people he's supposed to have lured to his house, they went away with nightmares some of them didn't even know they had. Of course that could just have been they were scared of the place because they knew his reputation.'

Hugh's gaze was dodging about so wildly it looked helpless, and Ellen seemed equally uncertain where to rest her wriggling fingers. As for Charlotte, she'd grown too breathless to speak, and so Hugh asked the question. 'What was the other mistake?'

'I guess he thought nobody could get at his own nightmares. You could say he did it to himself by being so obsessed with other people's, or maybe it makes for a better story if Grace turns Pendemon's own nightmare on him after one of his followers joined up with Grace and told him what it was. Or it could just have been a coincidence, but that's not the kind of book your cousin's writing.'

Again it was Hugh's question that broke the stale constricted breathless silence. 'What was?'

'He was scared of being buried alive,' Glen said before a rush of blackness engulfed his voice. The train had entered the tunnel at last. For an instant Charlotte was glad that it had quieted him, and then she seemed to taste the dark that clogged her mouth and stole her breath.

TWENTY-THREE

As Ellen saw blackness racing towards her she had time to hope that it would blot her out. Extinguishing the lights would do, but it only closed around the train, displaying her on either side. Even if she stared resolutely ahead she was still aware of the loathsome bloated pallid shapes that flanked her like guards conducting her to some inevitable fate. She saw Charlotte grab the mobile and switch off the silenced call before shutting her eyes tight, while Hugh made it plain that he had no idea where to look. It had been kind of them to pretend they could bear the sight of Ellen, and she couldn't blame them for giving up. Charlotte ought to be proud of Ellen's developing vocabulary, of the number of words she had found for herself: bulky, bulging, puffy, inflated, pasty, revolting, disgusting, foul, fetid, noisome, emetic, vomitive . . . She was going down the list that filled her head when Hugh spoke, barely audible above the hollow uproar of the train. 'Is it him?'

Charlotte raised her head as if to search but kept her eyes shut, presumably for fear of glimpsing Ellen. 'Is who what?'

'Pendemon,' Hugh mumbled and turned his gaze away from the window beside her, only to find the view across the aisle as unwelcome. 'Has he done something?'

Ellen's fingers writhed, not just because she could scarcely bear how they felt whenever they rubbed flabbily together. She was remembering the buried object that she'd taken for a bunch of twisted roots until it had seemed to grope for her hand. 'Can we leave him alone for now?'