What happened at the Railway Hotel?

[Short story, Part I]

I woke up in my room over the saloon bar at the Railway Hotel, W_______ H___. How I got there I knew not – I checked my watch, it said ten. Nonsense! Ten? It felt like eight. I jumped out of bed, feeling unusually bright and full of energy. I glanced across at the electric clock going tsyck.. tsyck.. tsyck on the mantelpiece. It also said ten. Ten a.m.! It seemed... quite wrong.

Pulling back the curtains, I surveyed an overcast day, terraced houses on either side of a B-road, the wind rattling in from the west, steam from a goods train in the distance. Grey.

What had I been doing? My head felt fine – this morning no hangover, no aches. I sat down on the edge of the bed, covered in a lilac-coloured candlewick bedspread and pondered. I had no recollection whatsoever of the previous evening – none.

Come to think of it, the whole of the previous day was a blank.

I remember arriving by train at W_______ _____ on Tuesday evening, the 2nd of November, and I remember my first day here – visiting the railway motive-power depot and the marshalling yards, talking to the manager about the installation of new signalling equipment.

But yesterday? Wednesday... What happened yesterday... ? I sat there for a while, sorted through my things. I switched on the wireless on the dressing table, BBC Light Programme, Northern Dance Orchestra playing some Duke Ellington tune. Yesterday? What happened then? I made the bed, tidied the room a bit, then had a wash and a shave using the small basin in the room; it would soon be opening time downstairs. I made my way along the landing then down the creaking wooden staircase,  straightening my tie, and came across the landlady getting the bar ready.

“Good morning, Mr Langdale!”

“Good morning, Mrs Frobisher.”

“How did you sleep? It was a most unusual night last night – did you... see – anything?” asked the landlady.

"No, I slept unusually soundly," I said with note of curiosity in my voice that she must have discerned.

Mrs Frobisher seemed agitated, concerned.

“D'you know, I woke at around three – the dogs were unsettled, the light-switch in the bathroom was broken, I went downstairs – none of the lights were working – so I went back up and looked out of my bedroom window and I couldn't see any street lights – just the whole village in the moonlight. Very unusual; I felt troubled – anxious, didn't know why.”

Mrs Frobisher running up and down the house in her nightie... it was a pleasant enough conceit.

I replied. “I slept right through the whole night, unusual dreams, puzzling dreams, I couldn't make sense of them... But I've also got something strange to relate. Tell me please, what had I been doing yesterday evening, Mrs Frobisher? D'you know, I – I don't remember. I remember, well – I remember breakfast yesterday morning, but that's about it, really, nothing afterwards! A complete blank...”

I felt silly admitting to her that I'd lost my memory of much of the previous day, but felt that only by doing so would I come to find out what had happened.

“Well, you weren't overdoing it or anything – it's not as though you got terribly intoxicated," she giggled. "You were with those two people, remember, brother and sister I guess – they looked Norwegian or Icelandic or something, very tall, wearing cagoules;" she paused,  "Nice, polite people – I could hear them clearly – you sat with them over there in the snug all lunchtime – she drank orange juice with soda water, he drank light and bitter, like you did, two pints. I served you with cheese and pickle sandwiches, you ordered some pork pies and a packet of crisps, then, after closing time, you said you'd go for a walk – and you came back together just as I was opening the bar for the evening. You ordered exactly the same as you'd had at lunchtime, and sat there with them, all evening, chatting calmly – then some apprentices came in from the depot and had a rather rowdy game of skittles in the games room, but they didn't bother anyone, last orders, they went, your guests went their way, you retired to your room – that was it.”

Who were those two people? Blimey. 

Why couldn't I remember? 

According to Mrs Frobisher, I'd spent the best past of 12 hours with them, including a two-hour walk. Four pints of light and bitter. A man and a woman – brother and sister? – Scandinavian in appearance – I knew no one like that. Why would I be spending time with them here? I felt a strange blend of emotions – I was perplexed and yet there was a consistent familiarity in what she was saying. It rang true. But details... I had no details.

“You said you could hear us talking – do you remember what we were talking about?”

“Yes – just snippets, you know – you were talking about nature mostly – jungles, deserts, the planet,  icebergs, very clearly spoken, slight accents – nice polite well-spoken people...”

The more she related of this meeting, the more frustrated I felt. Yes and no – it felt to me like something that happened many, many years ago; like a film I watched in my youth, of which I remember hardly anything about the plot or the actors, yet I know I'd seen it – and here was an event that had happened just yesterday and – this blankness.

The minute hand of the large clock over the bar showed that it would soon to time to slide back the bolts on the doors and pull the towels off the taps. A middle-aged regular in flat cap turned up, on cue. A nod of acknowledgement; Mrs Frobisher poured him a pint, the beer spluttering and hissing reluctantly at first.

"Did you see it, love?” he asked. “Comet or something, meteor – maybe a Russian rocket, lit up the whole valley for a second or two, then it disappeared over towards Daventry.”

“Didn't see that, but we were without electricity for a while, and the dogs were behaving strangely, still, all was fine this morning,” replied the landlady.

"Bit early for Guy Fawlkes," I joked.

“Oh it's you,” said the man turning to me. “Them foreigners left, have they? Here all day they were. Been wondering who they were.” “They were here on holiday, walkers,” I said trying to elicit more information.

“Oh.” And then: “Well, they're gone now. Anyway, seemed nice enough people. Not like the student rabble from the Polytechnic.”

And that was that. Nothing more to be said on the subject. For God's sake - why couldn't I remember anything more?

I ordered a ham sandwich and a pot of tea, settled up with Mrs Frobisher bidding her goodbye, and then I set off to the railway depot, a short walk past rows of terraced houses. As I did so, I became conscious of that tickling you get at in the roof of the mouth, where the palate meets the sinuses, that I usually associate with the start of a heavy cold.

“We'd thought you'd gone back to London yesterday, only you hadn't signed out, sir,” said the foreman sat at the desk by the front gate. He got up to poke around in the coal fire warming the small room.

 “Well, I'm here to do just that, then I'll be on my way,” I replied. He pointed towards the book, I signed it in the right place.

“Everything went well?”

“Yes – we'd finished up over there, all done!”

“Did you have a power cut overnight, sir? Rest of the village did. The night watchman reported a short power outage, they fixed it really quick, before he'd had time to light an oil lamp, he said. Also said he saw a shooting star around that time. Odd that was – d'you know, my dogs wouldn't stop yapping half the night?”

I signed the paperwork with the foreman, said my goodbyes, and set off to W_______ H____ station to catch the 13:05 to Marylebone.

The wind whipped up. I shivered. Surely it's not that cold, I pondered. Dark clouds scudded by as I stood on the 'up' platform, holding on to my hat, collar turned up against the weather. Heavy drops of rain began to fall. In the distance I fancied I could see a plume of smoke blown sideways by the wind; my train to town. It was indeed. Hauled by a grubby engine that hadn't been washed in years. The whistle, it was on its way puffing down the line. I got on, double-checking my travel warrant – indeed, I was permitted to sit in first class all the way to London. I found an empty compartment and took my seat. On it, an early copy of the Warwickshire edition of the Coventry Evening Telegraph.

There was a delay up ahead, semaphore was against us, the train sat there while I scoured the paper looking for any mention of odd goings-on overnight. Nothing. Not a paragraph. While I was turning the pages, a northbound train pulled in heading for Rugby. I gave it a cursory glance – and there in the window was a pair of blond heads – a man and a woman, around 30, 35, I'd guess; they both looked up and across at me in unison. Benign faces, not smiling, but projecting a sense of goodwill towards me. For a second or two they held their hands up, palms facing me, fingers together – then both engines simultaneously whistled and jolted forward in opposite directions, steam hissing.

[For conclusion of this story, click here...]

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