Wolverton Station (2 page)

At the same moment, Saunders heard the door of first class open behind him with a smooth, steely clack.

Well—­that’s him,
he thought, with a certain grim satisfaction. The protester. Saunders didn’t look back to confirm it and didn’t need to. When he glanced sidelong at the window across the aisle, he could see the dim, blurred reflection of the guy: tall fella with the pointed ears of a German shepherd. Saunders lowered his gaze, fixed it on his newspaper, and pretended to read. Anybody who dressed in a getup like that did it because he wanted to be noticed, was hoping for a reaction. Saunders had no intention of giving him one.

The new arrival in first class started down the aisle, his breathing loud and strained, what you would expect from a man stuck in a rubber mask. At the last moment, it came to Saunders that it was a mistake to be occupying the window seat. The chair to his left was open and empty, a kind of invitation. He thought of moving, shifting his ass over to the aisle seat. But no, the protester would relish the fear that such a move indicated. Saunders stayed where he was.

Sure enough, the protester took the empty seat beside him, heaving himself down with a heavy sigh of satisfaction. Saunders willed himself not to look over, but his peripheral vision filled in a few details: a wolf mask that covered the entire head, furry gloves, and a bushy tail that was apparently controlled by a hidden wire, because it swung to one side when he sat. Saunders exhaled a thin breath through bared teeth and realized for the first time that he was grinning. It was something he did automatically when he was in for a fight and knew it. His first wife said it made him look like Jack Nicholson with the ax in that movie. She had called Saunders “The Woodcutter,” too—­initially with coy affection, later when she was being bitchy.

The protester shifted around, getting comfortable, and one hairy-gloved hand brushed Saunders’s arm. That casual touch was enough to throw the switch on Saunders’s well-­practiced rage. He snapped down one corner of the newspaper and opened his mouth to tell Lon fucking Chaney to keep his paws to himself—­and then his breath caught in his chest. His lungs seemed to bunch up. He stared. He saw but couldn’t make sense of what he was looking at. He tried to see a protester as hard as he could, a protester in a rubber wolf mask and a tan overcoat. He
insisted
on it to himself for a few desperate moments, trying to make the perfectly reasonable notion in his head match the perfectly unreasonable reality beside him. But it wasn’t a protester. All the wishing in the world wouldn’t make it a protester.

A wolf sat on the seat next to him.

Or if not a wolf, then a creature more wolf than man. He had the body, roughly, of a man, with a broad, wedge-­shaped chest that swept down to a sunken stomach and a narrow waist. But he had paws, not hands, wiry gray hair on them. He held a copy of the
Financial Times
himself, and his hooked yellow nails made audible scratching noises as he turned the pages. His nose was literally buried in the paper, a long, bony snout that ended in a wet, black nose. Old, stained fangs protruded over his lower lip. His ears were proud, furry, stiff, his scally cap shoved back between them. One of those ears swiveled toward Saunders, like a satellite dish revolving to lock in a signal.

Saunders looked back at his own paper. It was the only thing he could think to do.

The wolf didn’t look at him directly—­he remained behind his paper—­but he did lean into him and speak in a gravelly bass. “I hope they bring the dinner trolley through. I could do with a bite. Course, on this line they’ll charge you two quid for a plate of lukewarm dog food without blinking.”

His breath stank; it was dog breath. Sweat prickled on Saunders’s brow and in his armpits, a hot, strange, disagreeable sweat, not at all like the perspiration he worked up jogging on the treadmill. He imagined this sweat as yellow and chemical, a burning carbolic crawling down his sides.

The wolf’s snout shriveled, and his black lips wrinkled to show the hooked rows of his teeth. He yawned, and a surprisingly bright red tongue lolled from the opening, and if there had been any doubt in Saunders’s mind—­there hadn’t been, really—­that was all for it. In the next moment, he fought with himself, a desperate, terrible struggle, not to issue a soft sob of fear. It was like fighting a sneeze. Sometimes you could hold it in, sometimes you couldn’t. Saunders held it in.

“Are you an American?” asked the wolf.

Don’t answer. Don’t talk!
Saunders thought, in a voice he didn’t recognize—­it was the shrill, piping voice of panic. But then he did answer, and his tone was his own: level and certain. He even heard himself laugh. “Hah. Got me. ’Scuse, do you mind if I use the bathroom?” As he spoke, he half rose to his feet. He and the wolf were in chairs that faced a spotted Formica table, and he couldn’t quite stand all the way up.

“Right,” said the wolf. He said it
“Ro-­ight,”
had a bit of a Liverpoolian accent.
Liverpudlian,
Saunders corrected himself mentally, randomly.
No, Scouse.
They called it Scouse, which sounded like a disease, something you might die from after being bitten by a wild animal.

The businesswolf turned sideways to allow Saunders by.

Saunders edged past him toward the aisle, leaving behind his briefcase and his eight-­hundred-­dollar overcoat. He wanted to avoid making contact with the thing, and of course that was impossible—­there wasn’t enough space to get by without his knees brushing the wolf’s. Their legs touched. Saunders’s reaction was involuntary, an all-­body twitch. He flashed to a memory of sixth-­grade biology, prodding the inside of a dead frog with tweezers, touching the nerves and watching the feet kick. It was like that, a steel edge pressed right to the nerves. He could keep the fear out of his voice, but not his body. Saunders believed that one atavistic reaction would be met by another, and the wolf in the suit would lunge, responding to his terror by grabbing him around the waist with his paws, opening his jaws to sink his fangs into Saunders’s belly, hollowing him out like a skinned pumpkin:
Trick-­or-­treat, motherfucker.

But the wolf in the suit only grunted, low in his throat, and twisted even more to the side to let Saunders past.

Then Saunders was in the aisle. He turned left and began to walk—­
walk,
not run—­for coach. The first part of his plan was to get to other ­people. He hadn’t worked out the second part of the plan yet. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead and focused on his breathing, just exactly as he’d been taught in Kashmir, way back down the long and winding road. A smooth
in,
drawn through parted lips. A clean
out,
puffed through his nostrils.
I am not going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train,
he thought, quite clearly. Like the Beatles, he had gone to India as a young man to get himself a mantra and had come home without one. On an unconscious level, though, he supposed he had never stopped yearning to find one, a single statement that resonated with power, hope, and meaning. Now, at sixty-­one, he had a mantra he could live by at last:
I am not going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train.

In and out went his breath, and with every step the door to coach was closer. In eight steps he was there, and he pressed the button that opened the door to the next car. The lights around the button turned from yellow to green, and the door slid back.

He stood looking into coach. The first thing he saw was the blood. A red handprint had been planted in the center of one window and then dragged, to leave a long, muddy-­ocher streak across the Plexiglas. A mess of other red smears and splashes made a Jackson Pollock out of a window directly across the aisle. There was a red swipe dragged impossibly down almost the full length of the ceiling.

Saunders saw the blood before he saw the wolves—­four in all, sitting in two pairs.

One pair was on the right, in the back. The wolf who sat on the aisle wore a black tracksuit with blue stripes, honoring a soccer team. Saunders thought it might’ve been Manchester United. The wolf who sat by the window sported a worn white T-­shirt advertising an album:
WOLFGANG AMAD
EUS PHOENIX
. They were passing something wrapped in a napkin, something brown and circular. A chocolate doughnut, Saunders decided, because that was what he wanted it to be.

The other pair of wolves was on the left, and much closer, only a ­couple yards from where Saunders stood. They were businesswolves, but less well dressed than the gray wolf in first class. These two wore sagging, wrinkled black suits and standard-­issue red ties. One of them was looking at a newspaper, not a
Financial Times
but the
Daily Mail.
His great black furry paws left red prints on the cheap paper. The fur around his mouth was stained red, blood streaked back almost to his eyes.

“Sez Kate Winslet ’as broke up with that bloke of ’ers wot made
American Beyootie,
” said the one with the paper.

“Don’t look at me,” said the other businesswolf. “I didn’t ’ave nuthink to do with it.”

And they both yapped—­playful, puppylike yips.

There was a fifth passenger in the car, a woman, a
human
woman, not a wolf. She was sprawled on her side across one of the seats, so all he could see was her right leg, sticking into the aisle. She wore black stockings, a very bad run in the one that Saunders could see. It was a nice leg, a handsome leg, a young girl’s leg. He couldn’t see her face and didn’t want to. She had lost her heel—­it had dropped into the heap of her entrails that were piled in the center of the aisle. Saunders saw those entrails last, a glistening pile of fatty white coils, lightly basted with blood. A string of gut stretched back out of sight in the direction of her abdomen. One of the woman’s high heels rested on that mound of intestines, set there like a single black candle on a grotesque birthday cake. He remembered how they had seemed to wait at Wolverton Station forever, the way the train shook now and then as if something were being forcibly loaded into coach. He remembered hearing a woman’s sob of laughter and a man yelling orders
, Stop! Stop it!
He had heard it the way he wanted to hear it. He had known what he had wanted to know. Maybe it was always that way for almost everyone.

The businesswolves hadn’t noticed him, but the two louts in the back had. The one in the rock T-­shirt elbowed Manchester United, and they rolled their eyes meaningfully at each other and lifted their snouts to the air. Tasting the scent of him, Saunders thought.

One of them, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, called out. “ ’Ey. ’Ey there, mate. Comin’ to sit with the lower classes? Goin’ to roost with the plebes?”

Manchester United made a choked sound of laughter. He had just had a bite of that glistening chocolate doughnut that he held in the white napkin, and his mouth was full. Only it wasn’t a napkin, and it wasn’t a doughnut. Saunders was determined to see and hear things as they were, not as he wanted them to be. His life depended on it now. So. See it and know it: It was a piece of liver in a bloodstained hankie. A woman’s hankie—­he could see the lace trimming at the edges.

Saunders stood in first class, fixed in place, unable to take another step. As if he were a sorcerer who stood within a magical pentagram and to cross the line into coach would be to make himself vulnerable to the demons that waited there. He had forgotten about breathing, no clean in-­and-­out now, just that feeling of paralysis in the lungs again, a muscular tightening that made it difficult to inhale. He wondered if anyone had ever suffocated to death from fear, had been so afraid to breathe that he’d passed out and died.

The door between cars began to slide shut. Just before it closed, the wolf in the Manchester United tracksuit turned his snout toward the ceiling and uttered a derisive howl.

Saunders backed from the door. He had buried both his parents, and his sister, too, who had died unexpectedly, when she was just twenty-­nine, of meningitis; he had been to a dozen stockholder funerals; he had seen a man collapse and die of a heart attack at a Jets game once. But he had never seen anything like guts on the floor, a whole battered train car painted with blood. Yet he did not feel any nausea and did not make a sound, not a single peep. The only physical reaction he was aware of was that his hands had gone to sleep, the fingers cold, tingling with pins and needles. He wanted to sit down.

The door to the bathroom was on his left. He stared at it in a blank, thoughtless kind of way, then pressed the button, popped the door open. An eye-­watering smell hit him, a disheartening human reek. The last person through hadn’t bothered to flush. Wet, filthy toilet paper stuck to the floor, and the little trash can next to the sink was overflowing. He considered going in there and bolting the door shut. He didn’t move, though, and when the bathroom door closed on its own, he was still in the first-­class aisle.

That little bathroom was a coffin—­a coffin that stank. If he went in there, he understood he would never come out, that he would die in there. Torn apart by the wolves while he sat on the toilet, screaming for help that wasn’t going to come. A terrible, lonely, squalid ending, in which he would be separated not just from his life but his dignity. He had no rational explanation for this certainty—­how could they get the door open if it was locked?—­it was just a thing he knew, the way he knew his birthday or his phone number.

His phone. The thing to do was to call someone, let somebody know (
I am on a train with wolfmen?
) he was in trouble. His cold, dead hands sank to the pockets of his slacks, already knowing that the phone wasn’t there. And it wasn’t. His phone was in the pocket of his eight-­hundred-­dollar overcoat—­a London Fog overcoat, actually. Everything, even clothing, had, in the last few moments, taken on heightened meaning, seemed significant. His phone was lost in a London Fog. To get to it, he would have to return to his seat and squirm past the businesswolf, something even more impossible than hiding in the bathroom.