Night Train Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Night Train

  Praise for the Author

  Also by David Quantick

  Title Page

  Leave us a Review

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Acknowledgments

  PRAISE FOR NIGHT TRAIN

  “I hadn’t planned to read all of Night Train in one sitting, but I found myself doing just that. David Quantick’s novel sets up a vast mystery and barrels deliriously toward a conclusion you’ll never see coming like, I don’t know, some kind of railed vehicle that operates in the dark.”

  DAVID WONG

  “If you’re looking for an escapist, absorbing, full-throttle read, then you need to hop aboard Night Train immediately. Snowpiercer on acid, it’s weird, intriguing, wickedly funny, and wholly entertaining. I loved it and didn’t want the journey to end.”

  SARAH LOTZ

  “A dark, nightmarish journey into a brand new sort of Twilight Zone, David Quantick’s Night Train is breathless, frantic, and creepy as hell. You’ll never see the twists coming.”

  CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

  “Starting a trip on the Night Train is like waking up in a scary game with no rules. I enjoyed trying to work out the parameters of this strange new world with Garland and exploring its ever-more-surreal carriages. When we finally start to discover where we are, we realise there’s no going back. Night Train is pacy, amusing, and gory, and an entertaining companion on a dark journey.”

  LOUIS GREENBERG

  PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

  “David Quantick has a medical condition whereby he literally cannot be unfunny.”

  CAITLIN MORAN

  “David Quantick is one of the best-kept secrets in the world of writing.”

  NEIL GAIMAN

  “If you choose to only live in one alternative reality make sure it’s the one in which you read Sparks by David Quantick.”

  BEN AARONOVITCH

  “Unfolds like The Da Vinci Code, only with a sense of humour and better grammar.”

  THE INDEPENDENT

  “Ingenious, likeable, funny and entertaining.”

  THE SPECTATOR

  Also by David Quantick

  and available from Titan Books

  All My Colors

  LEAVE US A REVIEW

  We hope you enjoy this book – if you did we would really appreciate it if you can write a short review. Your ratings really make a difference for the authors, helping the books you love reach more people.

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  Night Train

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785658594

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658600

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: August 2020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2020 David Quantick

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  To Simon

  “All aboard the night train!”

  ONE

  Night. Blackness, anyway. Darkness. No light. Nothing. Just night.

  Then a thundering crash. A deafening noise, too much to bear. A huge, smashing shock to the ears.

  Everything shaking. Walls, roof, floor.

  Still no light.

  She managed to move, somehow, and tried to stand. At once she was slammed back into the ground. She tried again, but it was as if the floor had its own gravity. This time at least she was thrown across the room. She hit the wall, which means she found the wall. Now she could figure out the borders of her confinement.

  Feeling her way along the wall, as she stumbled to her feet and was thrown down again, she marked the perimeter of the room she found herself in. It was big, at least twice as wide as her length, taller than her – the shaking of the room so violent that she didn’t even think about reaching for the ceiling, let alone trying to touch it – and, as she was beginning to find out, much, much longer.

  She made her way along the wall in pitch blackness. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, but as there was nothing but dark, she still could not see anything. For a moment she touched her eyes to make sure she still had eyes: it was a horrible, lurching moment, but right then anything was possible.

  She found a fingerhold in the wall. The darkness was total, and the noise around her still a random crunching, roaring thunder, as if an ocean were pouring into every room of a house, so she used her remaining senses instead.

  The wall she was touching was not cold. She felt along it with a finger. A snag, like a splinter. It might have been wood.

  She inhaled. The air was metallic, oily, but there were other smells, more animal.

  She decided to take stock of her situation. There were too many thoughts to process, so she started with the basics.

  Where is this?

  What is it?

  How did I get here?

  How do I get out?

  Another question came into her mind. Even though it was her question, it both surprised and frightened her.

  Who am I?

  Remembering things is easy, she thought, you either remember them or you don’t. Nevertheless, she tried to remember, strained as though her memory was a physical thing like a muscle that she could make work. Nothing came. She could only remember the last few minutes. If she tried to rewind her memory back any further than that, she hit a wall.

  Nothing doing, she thought, and decided to concentrate on some other basic questions. Where is this? seemed like a good place to start. She began to concentrate on her surroundings, which was far from easy, as her surroundings did not make it easy to concentrate, might even actually have been designed to make concentration impossible. All this needs is a death metal band playing in the background and it would be perfect, she thought, and then wondered how it was she knew what a death metal band was yet could not remember her own name.

  Maybe whoever I am just really likes death metal, she thought and, to her surprise, actually laughed. The laugh was immediately swallowed up in the hammering noise of the pitch-black room, which was now shaking like a skyscraper at the peak of an earthquake. She lost her grip and slid across the floor, slamming into the wall on the other side.

  She decided to give up on standing up, and instead began to crawl across the floor, sticking close to what felt like planks beneath her body. This was a slow but effective means of movement, and she was able to crawl forwards further than she was thrown backwards.

  The noise, and the blackness, continued. Whatever was causing them did not care, or probably even know, that she was there.

  She made her way towards she didn’t know what, almost flush with the floor now, using the weight of her limbs and the roughness
of her hands to try and grip the floor. Once she was thrown backwards half the length of the room, and once she even slammed sideways into the wall again, but she was making some kind of progress.

  And then, after what seemed like hours, her finger touched the wall at the front of the room. She slipped her fingernails into the cracks between the planks, the nearest she had to a handhold, and raised herself onto her knees. She waited for a moment in case the room threw her back across its floor, and then slowly got to her feet. She began to move sideways crab-fashion across the width of the wall.

  If this is a room, she told herself, it’s got a door. Every room has a door.

  She didn’t actually know if she believed this, but it was a good premise to act on. After a minute or two, she found something on the wall. A raised piece of wood. She felt up and down and confirmed that the wood was vertical. Hardly daring to hope, she reached out to grip the almost-flush post. She had just managed to get a weak grip on what she presumed was a door frame when, with a gigantic crashing sound like a truck being dropped from the top of a building, the room shook and convulsed and she was thrown several metres back again.

  I’m getting angry now, she thought, and was pleased to discover that whoever she may be, she clearly wasn’t the kind of person who gave up easily. Slowly she crept her way back to the front of the room. With great care she got to her feet, and once more felt for the door frame. This time she managed to stand and was even able to reach up on tiptoe and find the top of the frame. Her hands moved hopefully across the wood in the middle of the frame and then – yes! she thought – there was, incredibly, what felt like a handle in the middle of the door.

  She held onto the handle for a minute or two, more for reassurance than anything else. And then, when she felt that the room wasn’t going to once more throw her back, she closed her eyes (why? I can’t see anything) and turned the handle.

  At once she was blinded. A yellow light filled her eyes and rendered them useless. When the blindness faded, she saw that she was in a doorway. She stepped forward, and her foot met cold air. The room was not connected to anything, but led out to –

  Another door. A door shaking like this one in its frame and suspended over something moving.

  She looked down. In the glow of the yellow light, which she now saw was a lamp hanging from the wall in front of her, all she could see below her were metal rails. The rails seemed to be moving at an incredible speed, but of course she knew it wasn’t the rails that were moving but her.

  A train, she thought. I’m on a train.

  She stood there for a few moments, her body crucified in the door frame, swaying in the gap between what she now saw were two carriages. Behind her, blackness. Ahead of her, she had no idea. She was about to reach out for what she hoped was another door into the next carriage when the train lurched, bucked and nearly threw her down (onto the rails, she thought).

  She steadied herself, then something slid abruptly towards her and jarred her heel. Still holding the frame with one hand, she lowered herself, reached down to pick up the object and lifted it up. In the yellow lamplight it was clear what the object was: a set of manacles, its chain broken in half. Unconsciously she felt her wrist, and for the first time noticed that the skin was broken.

  Suddenly horrified, she dropped the manacles. They fell onto the tracks and were gone in seconds. She was filled with a powerful desire to get away from there and nearly stumbled as she stepped over the gap between the two carriages.

  There was a metal handle on the second door and she was forced to hold onto it to avoid falling. She pulled it back, and the door swung open, almost pushing her over. She slammed it shut, thought for a moment and then, holding her breath, opened the door again. As it swung out, she reached round with her free hand and found a handle on the other side. In one sudden move she slid herself around the door and, as it slammed shut again, rolled onto the floor.

  She lay there for a moment, her heart thundering as though it too were part of the train. This carriage was warmer than the first, and quieter too. Compared to what must have been her prison, it was like a womb. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes and got to her feet.

  She was in an ordinary train carriage. There were windows, but they only reflected the lights of the carriage. A thin strip of carpet ran the length of the carriage, and on each side of it seats, with tables. Every seat was occupied. Men and women, on their own, or in pairs, and sometimes even three or four. And every single one of them was dead.

  She walked up and down the carriage, not touching anyone, looking carefully for signs of life. There weren’t any. None of the fifteen dead people – she did a head count – was moving, breathing or showing any indication that they were anything but dead. Without disturbing the corpses, she could not see if they died violent deaths or even (it occurred to her) if they were dead when they were put in the carriage. There were no wounds, no cuts, no signs of disease or even distress. Just fifteen dead people, slumped in their seats like commuters asleep on an early morning train to work.

  The fifteen dead were an unremarkable lot. They wore unremarkable clothes in an unremarkable variety of styles. A young man in a cheap work suit, his tie loosened at the neck. A middle-aged woman in a thick woollen coat, scarf laid neatly in her lap. An old couple, his head on her shoulder, her face turned to the window. A big fat man with a shaven head in a sleeveless T-shirt, prostrate over a table, his huge hands like fleshy books spread flat on either side of his facedown pink skull as though he were praying to some pagan idol. A soldier in combat uniform, kitbag occupying the seat next to his. Two teenage girls in floral tops, mouths open, eyes shut, their mobile phones still close to them.

  She moved the soldier’s kitbag to the floor and sat down next to his body. She remained there for a while, not quite listening, not quite seeing, just letting the situation flow into her. The train continued to bluster its way through the dark. This made her think. She leant over the soldier’s body and, making a tunnel with her cupped hand, peered out of the window.

  It was hard to see anything with the reflection in the glass from the brightly lit carriage, but after a while she was able to distinguish the inside from the outside. Not that there was much to see. Most of the external world was in darkness. She thought she could see smoke, far off, and perhaps light, but with no idea of where she was – high up, in the country, or even a tunnel – it was impossible to gauge. And then she saw, with a start, something explode into brightness. She stared through the glass as a faraway object – or a small one close by – erupted into flame and sparks and smoke, like a volcano going off, or (this thought is less agreeable) a bomb. The explosion, if that was what it had been, was entirely silent.

  From further away to her right there was a second explosion, and then a third. Suddenly the whole landscape was lit up by explosions. It must be a bombing attack, she thought. But now she considered it, the explosions did not look like bombs going off. They seemed to be coming up from the ground, not down from the sky. Like furnaces all triggered to go off at once.

  Then, as quickly as they had burst into existence, the explosions stopped, and she was left in a silent carriage with fifteen dead people.

  She felt the soldier’s kitbag at her feet. Suddenly inspired, she hoisted it up and spilt its contents over the table. A half-drunk bottle of water, a pair of underpants, a T-shirt and a balled-up pair of socks. Trousers, a jersey, two pairs of training shoes. A washbag, containing a toothbrush, a razor (she nearly sliced her fingertip before she saw it) and a tube of facewash.

  And crumpled up in balls inside the training shoes, a newspaper. She pushed it all off the table except for the newspaper, unfolded it and flattened it down on the table. She tried to read it, but none of the words made any sense. Not because they were written in a different alphabet, or even a different language, but because she could not make the component parts of the words link up. The letters just floated there, refusing to join up. It was like being a victim of a mental disorder
that refused to let the brain assemble eyes and ears and a mouth to form a recognisable face.

  After a few seconds looking at the letters on the printed page actually began to hurt, and she had to close her eyes.

  She opened them again and looked at the dead soldier beside her.

  “This isn’t normal,” she told him, and her voice almost squawked from lack of use. “Someone’s done this to me.”

  She picked up the newspaper again and – not looking at the letters – started to tear through the words and around the images, the photographs and maps and even cartoons in the paper.

  I’m not done yet, she thought, as she discarded the printed words and smoothed out her cache of torn-out images. She had no idea what to do with these pictures and photographs, but there is, she believed, no such thing as useless information. She folded the small squares of paper and was about to put them in her pocket when she stopped, and for the first time looked at what she was actually wearing.

  It was a green jumpsuit, the same colour as the dead soldier’s uniform, except that where the soldier’s clothing was rough and cheaply made, the jumpsuit was woven from a more expensive cloth and was well tailored. Clearly whoever made these clothes was working to a sliding scale of equality.

  The jumpsuit had breast pockets and blank epaulettes, and a blouse underneath of a similar, but softer fabric. There were long zip pockets – empty, she checked quickly – and on her feet she was wearing functional but comfortable boots (monkey boots, she knew they were called).

  Above one of the pockets was a thin green script with lettering on it. Looking down on it gave her a headache, so she had to stop, but naturally she could not help wondering what it said. It might be my name, she thought. Someone’s name, anyway.

  She put the tiny pile of photos in one of her pockets and, after a moment’s thought, decided she was thirsty.