The Eternal

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An extract from The Eternal

III

The train rattled on through the night. Annie checked her watch once again. Only half an hour to go and she would see her father waiting at the back of the crowd in the station concourse, the thick, fraying scarf that her mother hated twirled twice around his neck. Then it would be a short drive through the countryside to Riddington and Blackstone Cottage, a log fire, masses of shiny decorations and a Christmas tree draped with so many beads and baubles it was in danger of toppling over. Her mother didn't understand the meaning of the word overkill.

Safety. Security. Escape.

Annie closed her eyes and drifted...

In the darkness behind her eyelids, everything suddenly skewed. The night exploded with sound. She was torn from the warm cocoon by the terrifying rush of unfocussed kinetic energy. In her mind, what happened next was frozen in a thousand individual images and sensations. Rending metal, so loud it hurt her ears.

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Shock snapped her eyes open. The air caught in her lungs.

The carriage magically lifting into the air and a feeling of weightlessness like stepping off the high board at the pool. A window exploding inwards, the glass glittering and spinning through the air in daggers, deadly and beautiful. The face of a man sitting next to it disintegrating into red. A shower of blood, mixing and contrasting with the sparkling glass, up, up, higher, then down. His hands rising. His head pitching forward.

A scream, high-pitched and reedy that wouldn't stop. Another, low and hoarse. Another. And another. And another. The whole carriage screaming as one, and Annie suddenly and bizarrely realising she was screaming too. The weigthlessness disappearing and instead being pressed back into her seat by invisible, monstrous hands.

Metal, ripping and tearing. Noise, louder and louder and louder; the terrible, hoarse scream of disaster. Thrown to one side, then the other, then whiplashed forward.

The carriage turning slowly over on its side, and then faster, hurtling towards the ground. The screaming was all. An old woman freed from gravity, hurtling down the train, her face contorted by fear, her hands out in futile defence against the inevitable.

The jolt exploded through her body. The walls seemed to turn to paper as they smashed and crunched and the noise filled everywhere until she thought her ear-drums were going to burst. She was flung across the seat and up, a rag doll thrown from a car.

And the explosion of pain in her head, her hip, her arm.

And then the darkness.

And the thought: "This is it. I'm going to..."