Making cookies with Allan and me.
The pavement game.
The Shadowless Man.
Grabbing my finger, the day she was born. It felt as if she would never let go.
And then with a final effort, she wrote:
I’ll never forget her. Whatever it costs. I saw her, asleep in the bluebells. I’ll find her, and I’ll bring her back. My plaid shall not be blown away.
At the back of her mind, the inner voice gave a kind of defeated sigh. Fay smiled and kept on writing. These stories had power. She knew that now. She found herself singing as she wrote:
My plaid away, my plaid away,
My plaid shall not be blown away.
Two
Time passes at a different pace in the path of the river Dream. Fay tried to work out how long she had been waiting on the platform, but her phone had run out of battery, and her Fitbit was telling her that it was six in the morning, midnight and ten minutes past five on 8 April, 3 June and 19 December simultaneously.
She put the Fitbit into her pack, next to the blanket and the dead phone. The light from the station roof had not changed since she had woken up, and there was no way of telling if it was daylight up there, or some other form of illumination. When will the train arrive? she thought. How will I get on board? She had no money to speak of: besides, she guessed that her currency would have no value in this world. So what did she have to offer? Tales and songs are his currency, Mabs had told her in London Beneath. Well, Fay knew plenty of both, she thought, but what kind of story would summon the Train? Once more she thought of the travelling girl; the tiger; Alberon and his people. All had shared versions of that same song – a song that told the mysterious tale of a knight whose horn could summon the winds…
The elphin knight sits on yon hill,
Bay, bay, lily, bay.
He blows his horn both loud and shrill,
The wind hath blown my plaid away.
My plaid away, my plaid away,
And o’er the hill and far away,
And o’er the sea to Norroway,
My plaid shall not be blown away.
Her voice was a little uncertain, but it rang across the platform. And couldn’t she feel a distant response – a subtle resonance – that gilded the air like pollen and lifted the fine hairs on her arms?
Fay stood up and looked at the red-light signal. It showed no sign of changing: it shone as bright as the sun on a winter rose. What kind of stories had Mabs meant? Was this another riddle?
For a moment her mind went back to the tale of King Orfeo and the Oracle. The King had rescued his wife, and yet, robbed of her shadow, she had been unable to remember her life, or rekindle her love for him. Like the knight in the song, the Oracle had given the King three riddles to solve before he and his wife could be together again.
When you can make me a cambric shirt…
Without any seam or needlework—
There must be a solution, she knew. But a shirt without seams or needlework? Even allowing for poetic licence, how was that possible?
Just then, Fay noticed something perched on the flap of her backpack. Looking closer, she saw that it was one of the tailor bees that had helped weave her gown the previous night. It was alive, but barely: for the air of Nethermost London was cold, and there were no flowers to be seen anywhere in the station.
Fay held the tiny bee in the palm of her hand. It looked so out of place in this world. She wished she could help it, somehow. And then she thought of the red rose, and taking it out of her backpack again, she set the tailor bee down gently onto the scarlet petals. Maybe it would find nourishment there. The bee crawled into the heart of the rose and Fay heard it begin to buzz contentedly. She gently replaced the rose and the bee into the pack’s side pocket.
And then she realized that she knew the first part of the riddle. ‘The answer is bees,’ she said aloud. ‘The first part of the riddle is bees.’
Fay looked at the signal-light again. The light had dimmed, she was certain of it. Her head felt suddenly as light as after a dose of madcap. At the time she’d assumed it was the madcap smoke that had shown her the vision of Daisy, but could it have been the song itself that had opened the crack in the pavement?
The signal light was definitely a little dimmer than before. Fay searched in her mind for the words of the song, fearing she had forgotten them, but there they were, and the melody too, as clear as a childhood memory. She stepped up to the platform edge, clutching her pack like a lost child, and raising her voice, she let it rise like a cloud of butterflies:
My plaid away, my plaid away
And o’er the hill and far away…
The signal was visibly darkening, changing slowly from red to green, and now Fay could hear a roaring sound, like an approaching hurricane, like a tide of floodwater running along the railway tracks, like a swarm of wild bees, although there was still no train in sight—
She raised her voice, feeling it soar, sweet and powerful and strong:
And o’er the sea to Norroway…
Now she could feel the slipstream dragging at her hair, her clothes, but still there was no train in sight, and no change but for the signal light that now shone green as springtime. The easiest way to board the Night Train is to die, she thought. What if all this was a mistake? What if the inner voice was right, and the Night Train would not accept her fare?
She took a breath. The air was sweet as honeycomb.
‘My plaid shall not be blown away,’ she said firmly and, closing her eyes, her pack still held tightly against her body, she stepped right off the station platform and into the path of the Night Train.
Three
For a moment Fay was in darkness. Her head was filled with tumbling stars; her heart raced like an engine. Then she opened her eyes to find herself lying on a carpeted floor, a floor that thrummed and shuddered.
For a few terrifying seconds, Fay had no idea where she was. What was she doing? What was this place? Then her outstretched hand touched her pack, and her memory returned. She was on another train, she saw: a train that seemed to be travelling through a tunnel – the stutter of lights through the windows was the only illumination.
She struggled to her feet, keeping hold of her backpack as she did so. Now she remembered the travelling girl; the station and the Night Train. She remembered Mabs and Alberon, and the hellride into London Beneath, and waking up on the platform at last, dressed in nothing but spider silk and her dead husband’s hoodie. A light came on in the carriage now; it was yellow and intermittent, but it gave her the chance to look around and take in her surroundings. The seats were of ancient velvet, the carriage windows milky with age. And in the seats were passengers, looking wanly through the glass, their dead and expressionless faces livid in the corpse-light.
‘Excuse me?’ said Fay.
No one replied. Her fellow travellers sat and stared, unblinking, through the windows.
‘Is there anyone in charge?’ called Fay, but her voice sounded dead and exhausted in the velvet-lined interior. She found a vacant seat and sat down. From outside came a blur of light as the train flashed through a station. Fay read a sign on the white tile wall: ELPHAME. And then they were back in the hurt-ling dark, and she watched the tunnel lights strobing. Sometimes she caught glimpses of their surroundings, flashing by at the speed of Dream. Sometimes they seemed to be underground, sometimes high above the clouds; sometimes running through desert sands, sometimes underwater. And the signs flashing by said: TIR NA NOG, THE LAND OF ROAST BEEF, or FAERIE, or ALFHEIM, or XANADU, or ATLANTIS. But however intently she looked, she saw nothing that looked like the place she had seen through the cracks in the pavement; and even if she did, she thought, how would she stop the train?