Free The Influence by Ramsey Campbell Page B

made solid. At last it moved, but that didn’t shift his thoughts. He had been hoping that now he didn’t have to phone he would find it easier to think.
    He had to change trains at Hooton. He dodged across the small station and found a newspaper to hide behind. He felt relatively safe all the way to Liverpool, since he had the train almost to himself. But when he changed platforms in the underground station, the platform for the train to Waterloo was deserted.
    He walked to the end where the tunnel closed in and stared along the line. Beyond the point where the rails merged with the dark he saw a lamp surrounded by a cramped dim patch of brick. He felt as if he were hiding from the city of Liverpool overhead, the sounds of a speeding police car, a fire engine, a bottle thrown down an escalator. He leaned against the wall above the slope that led down to the mouth of the dark, and strained his ears for the sound of the train. He’d feel safer once he was bound for Queenie’s house.
    It wasn’t Queenie’s house now, it was Alison’s. He shouldn’t need reminding she was dead when attending her funeral had been so difficult for him, knowing he was being watched whenever he was near Rowan. The family was still suspicious of him. He couldn’t blame them, but shouldn’t they have had their doubts about Queenie too? Nobody seemed to wonder why, if Queenie loathed children, she had made so much of Rowan.
    He gasped as if someone had caught him by the shoulder. That was what he’d meant to say after the funeral. He didn’t know why it was important, but he was sure it was—perhaps important enough to make up for his life. He mustn’t try to think beyond it, or he might lose it. Someone would know what it meant once he spoke up. He was closing his mind around it when he realised he was being watched.
    They had to let him call Alison. He was allowed to make one call. He turned reluctantly, feeling the slowness gather in his skull, threatening to stop his words short of his lips. But there were no policemen. The platform was deserted except for a girl of about Rowan’s age, who was staring at him.
    He could read no expression in her pale eyes, yet when her gaze met his he shrank inside himself. He felt as if she knew all about him—as if she knew that once he would have imagined touching her. Worse still, he felt that part of his imagination stirring. The doctors hadn’t shaken it out of him; they hadn’t even buried it deep enough. A malicious smile was growing on the little girl’s long face, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. Her fingers wriggled as they hung beside her ankle-length white dress, and he was terrified that she was about to pull it up to taunt him. He would have dodged past her and fled, except that he couldn’t bear the thought of touching her. He swung round and pressed his face against the wall, struggling to force his feelings back into the dark and hold on to what he had to tell Alison.
    His ears began to roar with the pressure of blood in his head. The tiles of the wall flattened his forehead, yet they might have been miles away. Even when he clenched his eyes shut he could see the little girl, her long secret legs, her knowing smile. The roaring seemed to flood out of him, obliterating his sense of where he was. He thrust himself away from the wall and turned dizzily. He had to get past her, no matter how.
    His eyes had been so tightly shut that for several seconds he was blind. His vision cleared just as his right foot wavered into empty space. The roaring wasn’t only the sound of his blood. He saw the little girl’s smile widen, a smile of gleeful satisfaction, as he stepped helplessly off the platform in front of the oncoming train.
    He made a grab at the platform as he fell, and the heel of his hand thumped the edge. He felt his wrist break, driving a spike of pain through his arm all the way to his shoulder. But he’d caught himself from sprawling across the tracks; he’d