Follow You Home

by Mark Edwards

way. The couple I’d seen running for the train almost fell into our carriage, panting, the man laughing while his female companion looked pissed off. They were carrying overnight bags, which they hefted into the baggage rack before taking the seats across the aisle from Laura and me. I smiled at them, then averted my eyes. Although we had befriended a number of couples on our trip around Europe in a transient way, exchanging email addresses and Twitter usernames, I preferred to observe someone first, make sure they weren’t crazy before engaging in conversation.

Gooooood

Great!!!

I took Laura’s hand and gave it a quick squeeze. I knew she would be feeling embarrassed so I said, ‘Let’s change the subject.’ ‘Good idea,’ Ion said. ‘So what do you guys do? When you’re not travelling?’ ‘Laura works in marketing,’ I said. ‘For a children’s charity.’ ‘Interesting.’ ‘It’s really not,’ said my girlfriend. ‘But you’re doing something good.’ Laura sipped her beer. As the biggest lightweight I’d ever met, she would be tipsy by the time she’d finished. ‘It’s better than selling Coke,’ she said. Ion widened his eyes. ‘I mean Coca-Cola.’

Added!!!

After they’d gone and I’d put our passports and tickets back in my backpack, Laura whispered in my ear, ‘That guy was staring at me again.’ ‘What?’ ‘He’s looking at my reflection in the window.’ ‘Are you sure you’re not being paranoid?’ ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ She flexed her shoulders and arched her neck. ‘I’m so tired.’ ‘I know. Me too.’ I yawned.

Gooood!!!!!!!!!!

Alina protested and he pushed her, propelling her along the corridor. She kept trying to turn back, still arguing, but he put his hand between her shoulder blades and shoved her. ‘What’s happening?’ I said, following behind. ‘Alina?’ She didn’t reply, just continued to pour forth a stream of Romanian. ‘The train’s slowing,’ Laura said in a hushed voice. She was right. We were slowing down as if we were coming into a station, the brakes squeaking. The guard yanked open the door that led into the area between the carriages, and pushed Alina through, ordering ‘Come, come,’ to Laura and me. The train continued to slow, and the vast blackness outside was punctuated by a few weak lights. The train slowed and halted, brakes emitting a high-pitched whine, and I rocked back, banging my shoulder on the wall. The train came to a standstill and the doors hissed and slid open. I looked out past the guard and Alina at a small, open-air station, the platform a foot below where we stood.

In the other direction the ground was flat and covered in thick forest which stretched for miles. In the far distance, beyond the forest, another row of jagged mountains formed the horizon. A number of silent birds, black in the dim light, rose from the trees on the forest’s edge before swooping and vanishing again. During the day, with the sun shining, it would no doubt be beautiful. But not now. Not on a night like this. The station was tiny, with just two platforms which were connected by a narrow footbridge. There were no lights; the station appeared to be out of use. There was a small, wooden building with weathered, flaking paintwork that would have once been the ticket office, I guessed. I turned in a slow circle. There were a few dark, similarly abandoned-looking buildings nearby. It looked like a village, a settlement really, that had died at some point in the not-too-distant past.

‘Come on, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Put it on.’ She looked at me with wide eyes, jerking her head round at a movement in a tree overhead. A bird, its silhouette just visible among the black branches. ‘We’re going to be OK,’ I said, but I sounded like I was trying to reassure myself more than her. In fact, she seemed to be recovering from the shock more quickly than me, as she cracked a weak joke: ‘When I said I wanted to go off the beaten track, I didn’t mean this far off it.’ Alina stood a few feet away, gazing along the tracks, seemingly in a trance. ‘Do you know where we are?’ I asked. She didn’t reply. ‘Alina?’ I went up to her and, finally, she snapped out of it. I repeated my question. She looked around and shook her head. ‘What the fuck just happened?’ I asked. ‘Where was Ion? And why didn’t you wake us like you said you would?’ She rubbed her eyes, shook herself awake. ‘I . . . I fell asleep.’

We both turned around. Laura was still hugging herself, her eyes as round and wide as the sun that had burned so brightly on the first part of our trip. The beaches of Italy and Spain seemed a very long way away now. I tried to hug her again but this time she flinched away. ‘If you’d booked us into a sleeper carriage in the first place, hadn’t been so bloody tight.’ I protested. ‘We might still have been robbed.’ ‘No. No, we wouldn’t.’ She raked her hands through her hair and sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have agreed to go into the sleeper carriage. I knew it was a bad idea.’ ‘I thought it would be OK . . .’ I trailed off. ‘I’m sorry.’ Alina turned away to give us privacy and produced a crumpled packet of cigarettes from her pocket. She lit one, sucked on it hungrily, then looked over her shoulder. ‘At least you guys still have your stuff. All mine is still on

She knelt and rummaged through the backpack, then raised her face to the sky. ‘It’s not there. They must have stolen it along with the other stuff.’ I swore. ‘Someone must have looked into the compartment, seen us asleep, decided to try their luck. Hey, maybe it was that guy. The one who kept staring at you. Did you see him, Alina? Did he leave the carriage?’ ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see.’ She took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ said Laura. ‘It’s all gone. We’ll never know who it was.’ She looked around. ‘I don’t like this place. It feels . . . haunted. In a bad way.’ Alina raised an eyebrow. ‘Haunted? You believe in ghosts?’

I stood beside her at the window. Laura came over to look too. An A2-sized map showing what I assumed to be the local area hung on the wall opposite the window. It was just possible to make out a red arrow, indicating where we were, but in the half-light I couldn’t discern any of the place names. ‘Can you read it?’ I asked Alina. ‘Kind of . . . I think that green area there is the Apuseni Natural Park. So we’re in that area of forest just below it.’ She squinted. ‘There’s a town, not too far.’ I scrutinised the black dot she was referring to. The name was short but I couldn’t read it. Not that it really mattered. All we needed to know was that it was a town. People. Civilisation. ‘Did you notice if we went through a town on the train, before we got here?’ I asked. ‘I think so. Yes, I’m pretty sure we did.’ We all turned and looked at the tracks, leading back the way we’d travelled. Whoever had built the railway had cut a wide path through the trees, slicing the forest in two. It was wide enough for two tracks, with another two metres of clear ground either side of the rails. Only the first few metres of this path were visible. Beyond, pitch darkness. ‘How far do you think it is?’

‘I don’t know,’ Alina said. ‘You can see here, on the map: the train track runs straight to the town. The road also goes into the forest, but is much longer.’ As she said that, a noise came from the blackness at the far end of the platform. Laura’s grip on my arm tightened, her fingertips digging into my flesh. ‘What the fuck was that?’ she said, her voice escalating a pitch. Something growled. Alina took a few tentative steps along the platform towards the noise. ‘It’s a dog,’ she said quietly. The growl came again and the dog came into view to our left, at the end of the platform, the mountains behind it. Then, as Alina backed away, another appeared. Two black dogs. They looked a little like Dobermanns, but slightly smaller and completely black. They stared at us, silent now, but with drawn-back lips that displayed two sets of sharp, yellowish teeth.

have bruises the next day. One of the dogs took a step forward and growled again, low and menacing. A word popped into my head. Rabies. With it came images of foaming mouths, thrashing bodies, heat and pain and death. ‘I think,’ Alina whispered, ‘I would rather walk to the nearest town than stay here with them. If we walk along the edge of the tracks it should only take a couple of hours.’ ‘What time is it?’ Laura asked. I checked my watch. ‘Just after three.’ ‘Then we’ll be there in time for breakfast,’ Alina said. I nodded. ‘Laura, are you OK with this plan?’ She looked at the dogs, then turned her head to look along the tracks. ‘It’s too dark. How the hell are we supposed to find our way?’

‘OK,’ Laura said, her voice just audible above the growling of the two dogs. We backed slowly away from the dogs, careful not to make any sudden movements. I bent and picked up the two backpacks, passing Laura’s to her, and we slung them onto our backs, but not before I’d retrieved the torch, which I switched on, relieved to find that it worked. We walked to the end of the platform, passing beneath the footbridge. Someone had graffitied a crude image of a man with huge genitals which were pointed at a smaller female figure. Next to that was a drawing of a devil, its face contorted into a scream. Averting my eyes, hoping my girlfriend hadn’t seen the graffiti, I followed Alina down onto the tracks, taking care to stay away from the rails in case they were live. I held Laura’s hand and we began to walk towards the trees, onto the track that cut through the forest.

We walked along beside the rails, the forest to our left, tracks to our right. The trees formed a wall beside us, as still as sentries. In some places the taller trees bent forward to create a threadbare canopy, their tips touching the tops of their counterparts across the tracks, as if they were reaching out, trying to fill the gap that had been ripped through them. I tried not to look at them too much, concentrating on the ground beneath my feet, the few metres ahead that were illuminated by the torch. The flat space between the forest edge and the rails was dry and crunchy, seed pods and leaves scattered around, along with the occasional sign of human life: a rusted beer can or crisp packet that had been thrown from a passing train. Alina lit another cigarette which, when finished, she paused to tread out.