It seemed like Wilbur heard him, but it was difficult to tell forsure, as he was so preoccupied with the pain and the pressure in his neck and his shoulder.
‘Oh yes, oh my goodness,’ said the Ghost. ‘I remember now. This is when I saw us. I saw us standing there.’
Then they saw Josh turn the tractor-mower around and catch sight of Wilbur lying there.
He jumped off and ran, arrow-straight through a flowerbed, to crouch beside him. ‘Wilbur? Wilbur? Mr Budd? Can you hear me?’
He checked his pulse. It was still there. He called for an ambulance. One came. The Ghost and the Dreamer went in the ambulance all the way to the chaos of Accident and Emergency at Bedford Hospital.
The dreaming Wilbur was especially disturbed by events that night, staring at the ECG machine and listening to doctors and nurses mutter things about atrial depolarisation and T-waves over the unconscious body. But even more so when the signals sent from Wilbur’s heart via the electrodes started to stutter and swing wildly, rising to a final crescendo, before falling into ominous stillness as the clock reached a minute after midnight.
The Last Exit
There were two doors at the end of the front carriage.
The Ghost held the handle of one of them, while the Dreamer held the other. Agnes, standing between them, straightened her hat and pulled at her sleeves as if she needed to meet the moment with a sense of smart decorum.
‘You need to go first,’ she told the Ghost, fighting to keep emotion from her face. ‘You have to be gone so he can wake up without you.’
‘But what happens then? The moment I leave?’
‘Well, as I told you before, everything is unpredictable. This was the gamble. We don’t know for sure.’
The Ghost turned to the Dreamer. ‘Listen, I’m sorry. You know, if something goes wrong … I gambled with your future. But, listen, if you –whenyou – wake up, please try to remember all this. And live by what you have learned. And, please, make Maggie happy.’
The Dreamer swallowed his fear and nodded. He knew, if he was given the chance, what he had to do. He knew also that he had potentially been given a great gift. The gift of being able to live life from the perspective of the dead.
‘Thank you. I owe you everything.’
‘Or nothing,’ said the Ghost as he waited a moment. Nerves were getting the better of him. It was one thing to die with the agnostic idea that there might be something else, but quite another to know there was asomething elseand you decided to forego it completely. He felt the strange ache of knowing he was leaving, and the strain of time about to snap.
Agnes sniffed. A tear was dangerously close to forming. She smiled a sad little smile. ‘I always knew. Ever since you turned down a free book in the bookshop, I knew you had your own mind.’
‘For better or worse. This time I hope for better … And you … you will be okay?’
‘Oh yes. One thing I do know with some certainty is I will be safely there in eternity. Don’t worry. Part of me has been there all this time.’
The Ghost braved a smile. ‘Good. You can think me a fool for ever!’
‘Oh, I will.’ Her eyes looked into the distance, as if to her own living past and all the regrets that lay there, as some long-buried emotion returned to her. But then she snapped out of it and inhaled herself back into an upright posture. Straightened her hat again. And gave him a little hug. A warm one, by ghostly standards. And then she let him go.
The Ghost opened the door. Outside, nothing awaited him. Nothing at all. Darkness of a singular kind. No shadows, shapes, lines or gradations. Nothing but nothing. Not pain, not happiness, not hope or memory. A place with no sense of future or the past or the present. A place with no sense of anything. A place with no place.
Just before he took the step he looked behind him. His portrait was now just a blank square.
And then the Ghost took a breath and stepped into the void with something close to a smile on his face.
There was a moment of stillness, once he had gone, but very soon the Midnight Train began to move. It started to shake and judder with extreme violence.
‘Oh no,’ said Agnes as she collided with the wood-panelled wall of the train. ‘You’d better hold on for your life.’
Holding On
The train was bouncing over some kind of rough terrain. It did so with occasional shakes and jolts, one of which caused the carriage they were in to snap entirely in two, the larger part shooting back into darkness.
Agnes and the Dreamer remained, holding onto the brass rail. A second later, Agnes’s hat fell off and she instinctively reached out for it just as her side of the brass rail became detached from the varnished wood panelling. The train tilted at an almost forty-five-degree angle. She fell towards the wildly swinging open door, but the dreaming Wilbur caught her, his hand grabbing her forearm as the train kept speeding and whistling forward on its jagged path.
‘I’ve got you!’ he said, as he held onto her with one hand and, with the other, a brass rail that was also starting to buckle.
