'Maybe just that I'm worth listening to.'

'You know you are. When has anybody ever said you weren't?'

'Let's talk, then,' Charlotte muttered. 'We need to.'

The train clattered at length through the dark before Hugh said 'Do you remember what we talked about last time we were there?'

By leaving Thurstaston unnamed he rendered the memory of the twisted object that had stirred under the earth more ominous, and Charlotte didn't help by saying 'Remind us.'

'We were saying what we dreamed the night we slept there.'

Ellen hadn't mentioned her dream, and didn't want to recall it now, even if it was no worse than her present state. 'I don't see anything unusual about that,' Charlotte said, shutting her eyes tighter. 'Everyone dreams.'

'Yes, but how many dreams do you remember all these years later? Was it just that one?'

'It still is.'

'Then mustn't that mean it wasn't an ordinary dream?'

'It was pretty ordinary,' Charlotte said, and Ellen wondered if this was meant to fend off the memory. 'I wouldn't make any great claims for it.'

'What was it, though?'

'Just some kind of cellar. I was going to be pulled down into it if I hadn't woken up.'

'Anything else you remember? Where a'

'I'd rather not discuss it here.' Charlotte's eyelids trembled as though she were equally nervous of keeping them closed or opening them. 'Or maybe anywhere,' she admitted, mostly to herself.

'Sorry, I should've realised.' Hugh's gaze dodged about so wildly that it might have been searching for an intruder before fastening on Ellen. 'What about you?'

Did his scrutiny explain why she felt spied upon, her every word a.n.a.lysed in case it went too far? She couldn't resist glancing around, but n.o.body appeared to be lurking behind any of the seats; the darkness had brought nothing dreadful into the carriage except her reflections. She understood Hugh's question all too well, which was why she retreated from giving the answer. 'I should have,' she tried telling him instead.

'No, I mean did you dream something? What did you dream?'

'I'm going to be like Charlotte,' Ellen said, wishing that she were. For an instant she'd glimpsed an underground room that surrounded her with her hideous self. 'I want to save it,' she said, only to find this didn't rea.s.sure her at all.

'I thought we wanted to talk.'

'n.o.body's preventing you,' Charlotte said, how encouragingly Ellen couldn't judge.

'You already know what I dreamed.'

Charlotte's mouth opened and closed as if she were struggling to breathe, unless she was reluctant to speak. With her eyes closed she might almost have been trying to talk in her sleep. Eventually she said 'Tell us again.'

'I couldn't find my way, and now I can't.' More resentfully than Ellen had ever heard him sound he added 'I said once.'

'You don't need a nightmare to explain that,' Charlotte protested. 'Life's enough of one too much of the time.'

'Not this much.'

Charlotte lowered her head and folded her arms hard. If she hadn't spoken Ellen might have had to ask 'What do you mean?'

'Not this much of a nightmare.' Hugh faltered, and Ellen tried not to think he was letting the darkness or something in it creep closer. 'All right, I didn't tell you everything,' he mumbled. 'I can't find my way anywhere at all.'

'Oh, Hugh.' With a visible effort Charlotte opened her eyes to peer at him. 'There's no need to go looking for a nightmare to explain it, surely,' she said. 'Didn't it start with all your stress at work?'

'Maybe that was part of it.'

Ellen felt dismayingly unable to help, as incompetent as the tribunal's verdict had made her feel. 'You need to see a doctor,' she urged.

'I couldn't find my way there either.'

His attempt at a laugh was too perfunctory to invite an echo, but Ellen imagined she'd heard one, m.u.f.fled by the buried thunder of the train. 'We a' she began and then was afraid to promise. 'Someone will take you,' she said.

'You're forgetting about Rory.'

'I mean after we've visited. Or no, I'm being stupid. You could see a doctor at the hospital.'

'No, I'm saying you're forgetting what he dreamed.'

Charlotte closed her eyes as though to exclude the remark. 'What has that to do with anything?'

'It was about not being able to see, wasn't it? And now he can't. Don't you think an artist's nightmare has to be losing all his senses?'

Charlotte turned her face to him without opening her eyes. 'I'm sorry, Hugh, but I think Ellen was spot on.'

Ellen didn't understand this any more than Hugh appeared to. 'What are you saying I did?'

'You said he was trying to prove something. This isn't the time or the place, Hugh. We never said you had no imagination, so don't work so hard at convincing us you have. It's getting out of hand and not in the best of taste.'

'You're just upset about Rory, aren't you?' Ellen told him in the hope that would stop his gaze from jerking back and forth. 'You want to find something to blame besides yourself. Don't blame yourself and then you won't need to do this.'

Had she embarra.s.sed him into silence? She was looking away from him, which showed her the door at the end of the aisle twitching as if someone hidden in the dark between the carriages were about to put in an appearance, when he said 'What's wrong with her?'

Ellen didn't know if she was being referred to or addressed. A sidelong glance at Charlotte offered her no clue, nor did Hugh's agitated gaze, even when he raised his hands on either side of it like blinkers. Charlotte took it on herself to answer, almost inaudibly. 'I'm claustrophobic.'

Hugh kept his hands up to direct his gaze at her, although the pose was beginning to put Ellen in mind of someone under threat. 'Since when?' he said.

'Hugh,' Ellen objected. 'Now you're going too far in the other direction.'

His fingers bent clawlike towards his eyes. 'How am I?'

'We aren't saying don't use your imagination at all.' She nodded at Charlotte, which made her face feel even more repulsively unstable, and leaned towards him to whisper 'Since we've been in here, of course.'

She sensed that he was struggling not to recoil from her, and so she straightened up before she'd finished speaking. His gaze left her at once, darting along the aisle. 'I didn't get that,' he complained and shut his eyes.

Ellen didn't need to be reminded yet again how unbearable he and Charlotte must find the sight of her. Perhaps he also disliked the restive jerking of the door as much as she did. She couldn't touch him to persuade him to look at her, she could only speak up. 'Since we came in the tunnel.'

'How long have we been in it?'

'I'm not looking,' Charlotte breathed. 'I can't say.'

'How long have we been talking? It feels like, I don't know a'

Charlotte cried out. It wasn't much of a cry; it was the kind of enfeebled wordless protest she might have uttered in her sleep while fighting to break out of a nightmare. Nevertheless it appeared to bring a response. The door at the end of the carriage slid swiftly yet noiselessly wide, and a thin blackened shape that might have been scaly or in some sense ragged sprang into the carriage.

It dodged behind the nearest seat, dropping low as it vanished, and Ellen threw her hands out to clutch at her companions. Barely in time not to subject them to her touch, she realised what she'd seen. The door hadn't opened. Only sunlight had prised the darkness wide, incidentally throwing the shadow of some object that had pa.s.sed before Ellen could locate it. Although the sounds of the train had grown more s.p.a.cious, they and the light seemed to fall short of Charlotte's awareness; she might still have been shut in a dream. At least Hugh's eyes were open, even if he looked less than rea.s.sured by the choice of views. 'We're out,' Ellen said, hoping this might release Charlotte from her panic a and then she wondered whether, in some sense she preferred not to grasp, they were nothing of the kind.

TWENTY-FOUR.

Charlotte was first off the train. Before a signboard had identified Leeds Station she'd crouched forwards like an athlete impatient to begin a race. She stood at the door all the way along the platform and only just waited for the alarm to acknowledge that the train had stopped. Hugh watched her jab the b.u.t.ton and dart onto the platform. He would have dashed to keep up except for Ellen, who hesitated as a thin figure, mostly covered in black and otherwise alarmingly pale, appeared outside the window. Although he was only a teenager, his approach seemed to startle Charlotte. 'Come on, you two,' she said without owning up to nervousness. 'Bring each other.'

He couldn't advance until Ellen did, or he might be lost. As soon as she took a few reluctant steps he was at her heels. When she looked back he was afraid she would tell him to overtake her, but she was peering beyond him as if she fancied someone else wanted to pa.s.s, not a pleasant fancy to judge by the expression on her starved slack face. Twisting around showed him the aisle was deserted, and once he grasped which way to turn he saw Charlotte losing patience with his and Ellen's antics. 'Nearly there,' she urged.

He felt she was blaming him for the delay a blaming him for having imagined too much aloud. If it had all been his imagination, why didn't she climb aboard to help instead of directing operations from the safety of the platform? She watched Ellen until her cousin ventured forwards, glancing both ways as she left the cover the train provided. Hugh stayed close while an escalator raised them all to a walkway considerably more than wide enough for them to progress abreast, where Charlotte looked over her shoulder to see why he wasn't beside her and Ellen. Was she about to tell him to keep up? Even if he was the youngest, he wasn't going to be treated like a child, and he couldn't help demanding 'Why did you make that noise, then?'

The question appeared to render Ellen nervous of the muddle of sounds beneath the vast arch of the roof. 'What did you hear?'

'I don't mean now. In the, you know where.' He felt inconsiderate for being forced to add 'The tunnel.'

Charlotte frowned at a queue of commuters within earshot at a cash dispenser. 'Not here, Hugh.'

'Where, then?'

'Preferably nowhere,' she said and stepped on a downward escalator.

As he followed his cousins Ellen's ma.s.s of perfume struck him in the face, and he retreated a metal step. Her uneasy question had heightened his awareness of the noises of the station, so that he heard somebody without very much to them scuttling after him. He clutched at the unstable rubber banister as he swung around to see that the escalator above him was empty. Some object must have caught between the treads, but it was no longer audible, never mind visible. 'Careful you don't fall,' Ellen told him.

Had her attention been drawn by the sound? He had no chance to ask as they descended, and by the time they reached the ticket barriers it seemed too late and too trivial. Beyond was a vaulted hall full of benches and echoes. 'How far is it to the hospital, do we know?' Charlotte said.

'The taxi will,' said Hugh.

'Maybe it's close enough to walk to. We could see if there are any clothes shops on the way.'

'We don't want to waste time getting to Rory,' Ellen objected. 'We aren't here to shop.'

Charlotte visibly thought better of responding. Hugh would have supported her if she'd suggested Ellen ought to buy something else to wear, but he couldn't raise the subject, especially while he was distracted by an echo surely too thin to be actual footsteps behind him. At least they fell short of pursuing him out of the station to a taxi rank, where Charlotte was asking 'Could we go to the hospital?'

The maternally plump driver looked sympathetically at Ellen. 'Which one, love?'

'We're visiting our cousin,' Ellen said, not without resentment. 'He was in an accident.'

Hugh felt provoked to establish that Rory was his brother, but said only 'He's in a coma.'

'You'll want the General,' the driver said, still gazing at Ellen.

Hugh could have said so at the outset if he hadn't hung back, and wondered whether Ellen was rounding on him because of it. Perhaps she was taking a sly revenge by enquiring 'Which way do you want to go, Hugh?'

'How do I know?'

Her starved face sagged at his tone. 'I mean which way do you want to sit.'

'Sorry. I thought a' He made to touch her arm until he sensed how little she would welcome that. 'Can I face the way we're going?' he said and felt childish.

'I will too if n.o.body minds.'

'I don't,' Charlotte said.

She stepped back while Hugh followed Ellen into the vehicle, and then she seemed to reconsider ducking under the low roof. Hugh was expecting her to propose to walk by the time she took a loud deep breath and climbed in to sit opposite him. 'Is that everyone?' the driver said.

Charlotte twisted around to stare at her. 'Who else is there going to be?'

'I thought there was someone behind you.'

Hugh felt as if the interior had grown smaller and darker, unless he was sharing Charlotte's discomfort. 'That was me,' he said in the hope that it would end the misunderstanding and let him feel less nervous, but everyone gazed at him a even the driver, using her mirror a as if he had no idea where he was. 'If you say so,' the driver said and sent the taxi up a ramp.

As a green light released the vehicle into the traffic she lowered her window. In a few hundred yards the taxi veered into a cross street and then another, by which point Hugh had already lost the way back to the station. A shadow flexed its thin limbs on the seat beside Charlotte a only a shadow. It wasn't plucking at the sleeve of her black Cougar T-shirt to make her and her cousins look; that was just a breeze through the driver's window. In a moment Hugh realised why the driver had left it open, and was afraid Ellen would think even less of herself. His gaze dodged about in search of any subject he could mention and lit upon a pa.s.sing Chinese restaurant. 'That looks like a good place to eat,' he said wildly.

'Do you want to know the best restaurants?' the driver said.

'We might, mightn't we, Ellen?'

'I can't speak for you.' She inched away from him as if she had to manoeuvre a ponderous burden. 'And you shouldn't for me,' she said.

'Don't be like that with us. We're your cousins. I was only trying a'

To his further dismay, it was Charlotte who interrupted. 'Not in here.'

Did she mean because of the s.p.a.ce or because of the driver? Surely the woman at the wheel couldn't be delighted by their struggles to communicate a she didn't look the type a but n.o.body else was to be seen. 'Shall I tell you when we come to them?' she said.

'I'd really rather you didn't,' said Ellen.

Hugh was afraid this might provoke the driver to turn hostile if not personal. 'I shouldn't think any of us will want to eat till we've seen how Rory is,' he said.

He was tempted to inform the driver that his brother was an artist, but suppose that let her identify him from the news and she detested his work? Hugh didn't want to be responsible for any more awkwardness, and so he joined in the silence, although it made Rory into yet another subject n.o.body was anxious to mention. He was reduced to wondering where it was safe to look: not at the streets challenging him to grasp the route, nor at Ellen as he sensed her shrinking away from him or herself, nor at Charlotte's determination to keep her eyes wide as if closing them might plunge her into a nightmare, unless she was struggling to cope with one she could see. The driver couldn't be watching all or indeed any of this a she was intent on the road a and yet Hugh felt somebody was, and revelling in Hugh's plight as well. Were his cousins suffering the same experience? He couldn't refer to it while the driver might hear, but he was barely able to contain it until the taxi executed yet another turn that brought them to the hospital. At least this gave him an excuse to speak. 'I'll pay,' he said at once.

His cousins climbed out while he handed the driver a ten-pound note, and Ellen was shutting her door when she stiffened. Apparently the sight of Hugh with a hand through the aperture in the security grille didn't appeal to her. The driver was reaching for change, but he had a sudden notion that somebody else was about to clutch at his hand. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it away and backed out of the taxi, thumping his skull on the underside of the roof, to accept the change through the driver's window. He was afraid his cousins might ask why he'd behaved like that, but they only insisted on giving him money before Ellen said 'Let's find him.'

'He's in Intensive Care,' Hugh said, which felt for a moment like knowing where to go. He dogged his cousins past a gathering of smokers, more than one of whom gave Ellen a concerned look, and through the entrance to the lobby, where a receptionist directed them to the first floor. Not too far, Hugh thought, and the lift was just around a corner, whichever way that led. The large featureless grey box took its time over closing, and he fancied that Charlotte was urging it to get the process over with while Ellen hoped n.o.body would join them. As the doors came within an inch of meeting he imagined that somebody was about to squeeze between them without pushing them further apart. Or might that happen when the lift reached the first floor? He felt as if it were weighed down by several kinds of apprehension. Certainly it was in no hurry to arrive, and he thought he wasn't alone in tensing when it did.