Chapter 96
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 – when you – 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 a something else and 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.’