She turned to the nearest passenger, a woman in her twenties, wearing jeans and a pink sleeveless top and a vinyl necklace. In another kind of light she might have been pretty, but in the intermittent gleam of the Night Train’s exhausted cells, she looked as dead as the rest of them. Fay put out a hand to touch her bare arm. The young woman did not respond.
‘Talk to me. Please. Am I still alive? Is this the Night Train?’
Still the woman said nothing.
Fay reached out to touch the woman’s necklace. The name MAISIE had been laser-cut out of a piece of black vinyl, and studded with little crystal stars. ‘Maisie? Is that your name?’ she said. ‘Maisie, please. Talk to me.’
At the sound of her name, the young woman’s eyes finally quickened into a kind of awareness. She turned her head slightly, parted her lips and whispered:
‘A named thing is a tamed thing. I speak as I must, and cannot lie.’
Fay’s heart gave a leap, and she took the young woman’s hand in hers. ‘How do I find the Hallowe’en King? Where do I ask the Night Train to stop?’
Maisie gave a weary sigh. ‘The Night Train never stops,’ she said. ‘I speak as I must, and cannot lie.’
‘But it has to stop!’ said Fay. ‘The Hallowe’en King has my daughter.’
‘The Hallowe’en King takes his due. I speak as I must, and cannot lie.’
Fay struggled with the urge to cry from sheer frustration and fatigue. But she had not come so far simply to give up now. ‘The Train will stop for me,’ she said. ‘All I need to know is where.’
Maisie sighed again, and said: ‘Dream is a river that runs to the sea. I speak as I must, and—’
‘So tell me!’ said Fay. ‘How do I get to the Hallowe’en King? How do I make him give Daisy back?’
Maisie gave a final sigh. Her voice, faint from the start, had grown almost inaudible. ‘If you can find me an acre of land between the salt water and the sea sand,’ she whispered, her eyes beginning to close. ‘Then, and only then…’ Her whispering voice fell silent once more. The fleeting life in her features was gone. And Fay was alone on the Night Train, with only the dead for company.
Four
For a time, Fay travelled in silence, looking out at the scenery. Sometimes they travelled in darkness: sometimes through a field of stars; sometimes underwater or across bright meadows of sunflowers. The stations were places from legend and dream; cities long vanished; deserts unknown. Some had names that she recognized; others were written in foreign script, hieroglyphics or ancient runes.
Inside the carriage, nothing moved. The passengers – even Maisie – were impossible to rouse. Fay wondered how she had managed to communicate with the young woman at all. Perhaps only because she had known her name – after all, hadn’t Maisie said: A named thing is a tamed thing?
Was that another riddle? It had not escaped Fay’s notice that Maisie’s reply to her last question had been very like the riddle the Oracle had given King Orfeo. And the words with which she punctuated each answer was similar, too: I speak as I must, and cannot lie. It could hardly be by chance: that story, thought Fay, was linked to hers in ways that could not be coincidental. Bees had been the first clue, and Fay had managed to solve it, and buy her passage on the Night Train. But… a land between the shore and the sea? A man without a shadow? Surely these were simply ways of asking the impossible?
And yet a riddle had brought her on board. Perhaps another could direct her where she needed to go? And so she raised her voice and sang to her audience of the dead:
Who can find me an acre of land,
Bay, bay, lily, bay
Between the salt water and the sea sand?
The wind hath blown my plaid away.
For a time nothing happened. Fay’s voice sounded strange and flat inside the crowded carriage. But then she began to become aware of a change in the sound of the engines; a slowing of the scenes outside as they passed through the alien countryside. Until finally, in a long squeal of brakes, the Night Train stopped at a platform by the side of a long grey beach, with no sign of habitation but a hand-lettered sign that read:
NORROWA.
Norrowa
≈
‘I have an aiker of good ley-land,
Which lyeth low by yon sea-strand.’
Child Ballad no. 2:
The Elphin Knight
One
Fay stepped out onto the platform, still carrying her backpack. The air was mild and smelt of the sea, and of the salt of the sandy dunes that lined the deserted platform. There was no sign of any kind of human habitation: no road; no buildings; nothing but the dunes, and the path to the beach, and beyond it, the gleaming grey ocean. A few blue thistles lined the boards; otherwise, the platform was bare. Fay took off her running shoes and stepped barefoot onto the sandy path. She turned – and saw that during those moments, the platform, the rails, the hand-lettered sign and the Night Train itself had all vanished, leaving nothing but dune and grass, and the long, bare, bleak expanse of the beach, shining in the sunlight. The shadows were long, the sun low, and there was nothing to hear but the keening sound of the wind and the waves on the sand. Where was she? Her head felt strangely light, and looking for her shadow, she saw that it was unusually faint against the mica-speckled sand.
A phrase from a song came back to her: The wind hath blown my plaid away. What was the song? The memory seemed very distant, and yet it felt somehow significant. She closed her eyes and tried to recall why it had been so important to leave the train. What had she been looking for? She looked down at her backpack and for a moment could not recall who it belonged to, or where it was from: then she saw the corner of Daisy’s blanket poking out from under the flap, and remembered why her shadow was dim –
I accepted a ride on the Night Train. I forced one of the dead to speak. And I accepted the challenge that Lord Death gave to King Orfeo.
Fay’s heart seemed to tighten with dread. How much of her memory had she lost? She opened the backpack and laid out the contents onto the sand. The blanket of stars; the tailor bee; the rose; her phone, the first-aid kit and the key ring, with the tiny notebook attached. She opened the book and read aloud the words she had written the night before, but none of them seemed like memories. She still remembered Daisy, of course, and the terrible grief of losing her, but the memories she had written down – the sandcastle, the birthday cake – seemed as remote as the Night Train now, with all its silent passengers. There was no recognition, no spark: no light behind the images. She thought of a Polaroid photograph, fading out of existence. That was all that remained of them now. The words were only a story.
She picked up the tiny pencil and wrote:
I am still losing my memories. Payment for the progress I’ve made. Mabs warned me to keep my plaid close. I have to remember Daisy.
And then she wrote:
Daisy’s princess dress, all white, embroidered with silver stars. She wanted to wear it all the time. With a sword, of course: because why shouldn’t princesses have swords?
A cherry strudel, on a bench, at a Christmas market.
The first time she went on an aeroplane, and how she said she could see the clouds from the top of the sky.