suck back, chew; blow out, pop, suck back, chew.
As Beth watched she realised every bubble was identical, and each one was popping exactly the same distance past the girl’s heavily glossed lips.
A thrill of understanding ran through her. They’re all the same bubble, she thought.
She looked around her, and now she could see all of the carriage’s other occupants were also doing one thing, over and over: scratching a nose, crossing their legs, tapping a mobile phone, turning a page. She hadn’t seen it at first in the dim, flickering light, but looking closely, she could see the fraction of a second’s discrepancy as each person reset. As Beth stared, the girl in front of her wavered, faded, until Beth could see the stained fabric of her seat through her stomach, then she was back again, blowing her single perfect bubble.
‘You’re not real, are you?’ Beth said quietly, her whole body thrumming with the strangeness of it. She said it out loud: ‘You aren’t real-’
Are you ghosts? she wondered, with a shudder. Were you trapped here?
But they didn’t seem like ghosts to her. They were more like memories — memories of passengers, a few seconds of their lives, snatched out of time and imprinted within the train, repeating over and over like a scratched CD.
Beth rolled her gaze around the train carriage with its faded fabric seats and peeling panels. She remembered the questioning sound it had made. This was the inner architecture of a living thing. Was she inside its mind? Are they your memories? Is it you, remembering them?
Brakes squealed and hydraulics hissed. The carriage began to sway. Beth felt her stomach plunge. The train was moving.
She ran to the door and hammered the button, but nothing happened. Panic clawed at her and she pressed her face to the window. Through the cracked glass she could see the crosshatched bricks of the tunnel whipping past, faster and faster. She was locked in — and they were speeding up. She reeled away from the door and threw herself at the entrance to the driver’s cab: maybe she could stop it from there? Blue sparks flickered on the teeth of the ghostly passengers, who swayed with the train, unflinching.
The door to the cab was locked, and though Beth wrenched frantically on the handle, it wouldn’t budge.
‘Christ on a bike!’ she yelled, drawing her fist back and slamming it against the door in frustration — and it went straight through the door.
Beth shivered and pulled her arm back. This time she pushed it forward more slowly; it passed through the metal as if it were vapour.
The door, like the bubble-blowing girl, was as insubstantial as a thought.
Beth hesitated, then pushed herself through.
The train exploded from the tunnel.
Beth stared wide-eyed around the cab. There was no driver. Air pummelled her face as though the front of the train wasn’t there. She felt her fear level out, and as she swallowed down her panic, something else, a hot, raw excitement, rose in its place. She reached out and petted the thing’s controls. The engine purred to her. Blue electricity danced around her hand but it didn’t touch her.
The driver’s window seemed to waver. Beth took a deep breath. She leaned forward and the window-pane parted around her like cold mist. She gripped the sides of the control panel and hung out over the train’s insubstantial prow like a figurehead. Regiments of sleepers shot by under her. She tasted the diesel on the wind. She found herself laughing hysterically, and the wind snatched the sound. She uttered a wordless shout of elation and the train’s whistle sounded joyously in response.
A bulky mass squatted low in the distance as they surged onto the vast, rail-matted viaduct leading to Waterloo Station. On each side, houses and billboards and glimmering towers boiled together into a continuous river of darkness and streaks of yellow light. Railway signals burnt red through the autumn mist, suspended from a bridge as black and dark as hangman’s scaffold.
Beth wasn’t just riding the train, she was riding the entire city. The rush of it filled her and she crowed — but the yell of affirmation died in her throat: another pair of lights was coming towards them.
There was another train.
Beth stared. Each second brought the lights closer, and each second made her more and more certain. Excitement turned to horror. She gaped in disbelief, but it was true…
The other train was on their tracks.
‘Stop!’ she yelled to the creature that carried her. ‘Stop, we’re going to hit it!’ But the wind snatched her voice away and her train did not slow, even as the other engine, their lethal mirror-image, came on inexorably towards them. She could make out its shape now: a massive freight train, striped yellow and black like a wasp and armoured in heavy steel. But it wasn’t a natural train either: electricity whirled around it in a constant storm. Its fenders were hooked around like mandibles. The braying of its harsh steamwhistle shivered along her neck like a warcry.
The air felt suddenly thick with electricity. It tasted burnt. Beth turned and ran, plunging back through the driver’s door. She lurching up the gangway between the fidgeting memories Move, Beth, move ‘Too slow,’ she cried out loud, ‘too slow!’
Christ, Beth, you’re too slo Screeeeeeech!
There was a piercing scream of metal and the shudder of impact. The train slammed to a halt, hurling Beth backwards. Her stomach flipped over as she hit the floor hard. The chill mist of the train-thing’s wraith-like front wall coated for a second and she rolled out onto the tracks.
No air! Her lungs clawed at vacuum for a moment, and then she erupted into a hacking cough. Her arms were scraped raw and hot blood was smeared over her brow. She pushed herself up on her elbow — and gazed up at the impossible.
There was no wreckage, no twisted, smoking, white-hot steel. The trains were above her: she was lying on the tracks and they were forty feet above her. Their front carriages were rearing up off the rails like snakes and…
And they were fighting.
They butted and grappled with each other, their fenders interlocked like horns. They emitted hisses and screeches of sheer machine effort. But the freight train was bigger and heavier. Its carriages bunched together like muscle as it hurled her train to the earth. The ground quaked, and Beth quaked with it as the freight train lashed down, cobranimble, chewing at the undercarriage of its enemy with its wheels.
Sparks and something like oily blood gushed from Beth’s engine, and it screamed.
‘ Stop it! ’ Beth yelled, stumbling forward, waving her hands as if she was trying to ward off a wild animal. She was coughing, half-mad with impact and smoke, but she clambered over the ruined body of her train, hollering like an idiot. ‘ Get off it! ’ she screamed again, smoke scratching at her throat until it was fit to bleed. ‘Get away!’
The vast freight train arched backwards, cocooned in blue lightning, ready to strike. It flickered, and blurred, leaving strange after-images: a steam-engine, a squat underground train, a trail of memories, as though it couldn’t remember what it was. Its steam-whistle brayed like a tormented thing.
The cold white beam of its eye fixed on Beth. It snorted steam-breath. She felt its weight over her like a promise.
‘For Thames’ sake — get the crap out of the way! ’
She staggered as something shoved her aside. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a figure: a skinny boy wearing only a pair of filthy ripped jeans. His skin was as grey as concrete and his face was taut with fear.
And then the freight train crashed down, its fender-jaws tearing at the tracks. The shock of it wrenched the world out of focus. The figure vanished. Beth shook her head, trying to clear it, bewildered by the din. Had she imagined-?
No, there he was, on top of the monster, somehow. His ribs pressed through his chest with each heaved breath. He gripped what looked like an iron railing in one hand and as Beth watched he stabbed it down, again and again, into the train-beast’s metal skin. The makeshift weapon punctured the steel like tinfoil, and every time it went in the beast shrieked.
Wheels whirred into motion, squealing against the tracks, and Beth rolled sharply out of their path. Her ears popped as the freight train clattered past her, the grey boy still clinging to its roof. The carriages it dragged behind it faded into insubstantial nothingness as it gathered speed.
