The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

picking up instead one of Alexei’s penny-dreadfuls from the flea-market in Moscow, and preparing to lose herself in the story of the pirate queen and the sea monsters. She moves the lamp closer, and startles as the shadows in the far corners of the roof space waver. “Don’t be fanciful,” she mutters. “Fanciful thoughts lead to dangerous thoughts,” they are told on the train. But she turns the lamp up higher, anyway, against the darkness. —And the darkness moves, quiet as a whisper. Weiwei freezes. The seconds pass. Perhaps she imagined it. This is what the first night can do—unsettle the mind, unleash its worst fears. You cannot trust yourself on the first night. It is not good to be alone. She starts to let herself uncoil. And the darkness turns, and turns into a face, pale and framed by a deeper darkness. Two inky eyes stare, unblinking. “Who’s there?” she calls out, feeling foolish, poised for a kitchen boy to jump out at her, shrieking with laughter before running back to tell the others how he made the child of the train scream. She has done enough hiding and pouncing herself to know that among the younger crew you are measured by the steadiness of your nerves, your ability to meet a sudden, hideous, masked face with a blank, unimpressed “Good evening”; to not cry out if your bare feet should touch something crawling and damp in your bunk. So she stays still, stares back. A long moment stretches out, congeals. Her breathing sounds unnaturally loud and there is a ringin...