Chapter 1: The Last Thing He Remembered

The last thing Elliot Marsh remembered about being alive was the ceiling of a Tesco Express in Bedminster.

Not the grand exit he’d have scripted, if anyone had asked. No mountaintop. No hospital bed surrounded by loved ones murmuring kind lies. Just the fluorescent buzz of aisle three, a linoleum floor that smelled of disinfectant and someone’s spilled Fanta, and the vague awareness that his left arm had stopped doing what he’d asked it to do about four seconds ago.

Heart attack. Thirty-six years old. In the meal-deal section.

He’d been reaching for the last BLT — the good one, the one with actual lettuce instead of the sad translucent stuff that tasted of refrigeration — when something in his chest made a decision without consulting him. There was a sensation like a fist closing around something it shouldn’t have access to, and then the floor was much closer than it had been, and then the ceiling, and the BLT was still in his hand because apparently the body prioritises sandwich acquisition over survival. Thirty-six years of cardiovascular service, and his heart had picked this particular moment, in this particular shop, between the meal deals and the self-checkout, to hand in its resignation.

He’d like to have said he had profound final thoughts. He did not. He thought: I haven’t paid for the sandwich. Then he thought: Mum is going to be furious. And then a fluorescent tube directly above him flickered in a way that felt personal, and he thought nothing at all.

What came next was harder.

Not because it was painful — he didn’t think it was, though pain might be the wrong word for what you feel when you don’t have a body anymore. It was more like… being poured. That was the closest he could get. Imagine you’re water in a glass, and someone tips the glass, and you go — not down, not in any direction that has a name — you just go. And as you go, you feel yourself being filtered. Thinned. Parts of you catching on something and peeling away.

There was greyness. Not colour, exactly — absence. The kind of nothing you see when you close your eyes in a dark room and realise that what you’re looking at isn’t black, it’s just your brain running out of things to show you. He was in it, and it was vast, and it had the quality of a waiting room — not the furniture or the magazines, but the feeling. The sense of being between. Processed. Queued.

Voices, maybe. Or the memory of voices. Something that might have been instructions if he’d had ears to hear them with, spoken in a tone that suggested they’d been repeated many times to many people and the speaker had long since stopped caring whether anyone was listening. Like the safety demonstration on a flight no one thinks is going to crash.

And through all of it, the pulling. That was where the memories were supposed to go, he thought later. Whatever sieve he’d been pushed through was meant to catch them. Scrub them clean. Leave him blank and new and ready for wherever he was headed.

It didn’t work.

He felt it try. He felt it pull at the edges of things — his mother’s name, the layout of his flat, the taste of the terrible coffee from the machine on the third floor at work. The feeling of standing in the shower on a Sunday morning with nowhere to be. His password for the work VPN, which he’d only just managed to memorise after three resets. It pulled at all of it, gently at first, then with a kind of bureaucratic insistence, like a form that needed completing.

He held on. Not with hands or arms or even a brain — just want. Stubborn, terrified want. The want of a man who has already lost his body, his heartbeat, his BLT, and is not prepared to lose the only things he has left, which are the memories of having had them.

The pulling stopped. Whether it gave up or simply failed, he never knew. But the greyness changed quality — thickened — and there was a sensation of acceleration, or falling, or being posted through a letterbox that was somehow also a mile wide, and then—

He was somewhere else. He was lying on metal. And everything was shaking.

The noise was the first thing.

A deep, grinding, rolling thunder that wasn’t thunder — it was under him, around him, inside the bones he suddenly had again. Rhythmic. Mechanical. The sound of something enormous moving at speed, and moving with the confidence of something that had been moving for a very long time.

Elliot opened his eyes.

Metal ceiling. Rivets. A single dim light swinging on a cable with the motion of — what? Where was he? The floor vibrated under his back. The air smelled of oil and rust and something cooking, distantly. Onions, maybe. Someone, somewhere on this impossible thing, was frying onions.

He had a body. He checked, because it seemed worth confirming. Hands — two of them, both shaking. Legs, present, doing nothing useful. Chest, rising and falling, which was a surprise given recent events. He was wearing clothes he didn’t recognise: trousers of some coarse brown fabric, a shirt that was almost but not quite cotton, boots that fit reasonably well. Someone had dressed him, or he had arrived dressed, and neither option was particularly comforting.

He sat up too fast, and the world tilted, and he grabbed the nearest solid thing — a pipe, hot enough to sting — and held on until the spinning stopped. His fingers came away with a dark smear of grease.

A corridor. Narrow, metal-walled, lit by caged bulbs at long intervals that swung gently with the motion and cast moving shadows that made the whole place feel alive in a way corridors shouldn’t. It stretched away in both directions, curving slightly to the left, and the floor was gritted metal mesh through which he could see — movement. Ground, blurring past beneath him. Dark earth and scrub grass and the occasional flash of something pale that might have been rock or bone, moving at a speed that suggested wherever this thing was going, it was in no mood to dawdle.

He was on a train.

The thought arrived with a strange calm, the way shocking information sometimes does when there’s already been too much of it. His brain, overwhelmed by the sequence of events that had begun with cardiac arrest in a Tesco and progressed through apparent death, disembodiment, metaphysical filtration, and what he could only describe as aggressive reincarnation, had apparently decided to process the latest development with the quiet acceptance of a man who has missed his stop and can’t be bothered to panic about it.

He was on a very large, very fast, very loud train, and he was not dead, or if he was dead this was not what he’d been promised by any of the major religions or the more optimistic greeting cards.

Elliot stood there for what might have been a minute or an hour, holding the hot pipe, watching the ground blur beneath his feet through the metal mesh. The train swayed. Somewhere far ahead, something let out a sound that was part horn and part groan, the noise a building might make if it were tired. The walls around him trembled with it.

It occurred to him, in the practical way that would later turn out to be his defining characteristic in this new and deeply unreasonable world, that standing in an empty corridor achieving nothing was unlikely to improve his situation.

I need to find someone who can tell me what the bloody hell is going on.

He picked a direction — forward, because trains went forward and forward felt like progress, however false — and walked.

The corridor went on longer than any corridor had a right to. It passed through a section where the walls were patched with different metals, bolted together like a quilt, and the light came not from bulbs but from narrow slits in the ceiling that let in daylight — actual daylight, grey and cold and real. Through one of the slits he caught a flash of sky, and the sky was the wrong colour. Not dramatically wrong. Not green or red. Just — a shade off. A blue that had too much grey in it, or not enough, like a colour that had been described to someone over the phone and they’d done their best.

He filed that away under things to worry about later, a mental folder that was filling up with alarming speed.

The corridor passed through a section that smelled of animals — something warm and barn-like, underneath the oil — and then the noise changed. The mechanical thunder was still there, but layered over it now was something human. Voices. Movement. The clatter of things being done by people who had things to do.

The corridor ended at a heavy door — metal, with a handle that was smooth from years of hands — and beyond the door was noise and light and people. A wall of it, after the emptiness. Elliot stood in the doorway like an idiot, blinking, and took in what he would later learn to call Carriage 74.

It was vast. Or it felt vast, though later he’d realise it was just long — the width of a large room, stretched out for what seemed like forever. Bunks lined both walls, stacked three high, draped with sheets and blankets and improvised curtains made from whatever people had found — actual fabric, old coats, what appeared to be a shower curtain with faded fish on it. Between the bunks, the floor was a jumble of belongings, cooking equipment, drying clothes, and people. So many people. Sitting, talking, sleeping, arguing, playing cards on an upturned barrel, eating from tin plates. A woman was mending something by the light of a small oil lamp. Children ran between the bunks, ducking under hanging laundry with the practised ease of people who’d been ducking under that particular laundry their entire lives. A dog — an actual dog, brown and indeterminate, with the resigned expression of a creature that had accepted its circumstances — was asleep on someone’s coat.

The smell was extraordinary. Not bad, exactly, though good would be pushing it. It was the smell of people living at close quarters — cooking food, drying clothes, existing — layered over the ever-present oil-and-metal smell of the train itself. Underneath it, something that might have been hay. The whole thing had the quality of a festival campsite on the third day, if the festival had been going on for years and no one had told the campers they could leave.

No one looked at him. This was good, because he had no idea what his face was doing. He suspected it was doing quite a lot.

“Oi. You.”

The voice came from his left and below — a man sitting on an upturned crate against the wall, legs crossed, peeling something that looked like an apple but wasn’t quite. The skin was thicker, the colour slightly too red, and it came away from the knife in one long spiral in a way that suggested the man had peeled a great many of them and had opinions about how it should be done.

He was compact, sharp-faced, with eyes that were already taking Elliot apart and cataloguing the pieces. Not hostile. Curious. The curiosity of someone who had seen every kind of person walk through that door and immediately knew which kind you were.

“You look lost,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“I—” Elliot’s voice came out rough, unused, as if it had been left in a drawer. He swallowed. “I think I might be.”

The man studied him for a moment longer. His eyes did something quick and calculating — glanced at Elliot’s clothes, his boots, his hands, the way he was standing in the doorway as though the doorway were a life raft and the room an ocean — and then the sharp face cracked into a grin that was surprisingly warm. The warmth of it didn’t quite reach his eyes, which stayed sharp, but the grin itself was genuine in the way that a fox is genuine when it decides you’re interesting rather than edible.

“Plum!” he called, without looking away from Elliot. “Plum, come see. We’ve got a fresh one.”

From somewhere behind a curtain of hanging shirts, a large man emerged — and large in every direction, tall and broad and soft around the middle, with hands like dinner plates and a face that looked like it had been designed specifically to make people feel safe. He moved with the careful deliberation of someone who had learned early that his size could alarm people and had spent years making sure it didn’t. He looked at Elliot, then at the sharp man, then back at Elliot, and something in his expression settled into a gentle concern that Elliot found, to his own surprise, almost unbearable. It was the first kind thing anyone had directed at him since the ceiling of the Tesco, and his throat did something inconvenient.

“Oh dear,” Mr Plum said, softly. “You’d better sit down.”

The sharp man hopped off his crate and offered it to Elliot with a flourish that was either genuine courtesy or mockery — Elliot couldn’t tell yet, and would later learn that with Mr Fixer it was almost always both.

“I’m Mr Fixer,” he said. “This is Mr Plum. And you, my friend, are very obviously new, very obviously confused, and very obviously in need of a cup of tea. Plum, put the kettle on.”

“There’s no kettle,” Mr Plum said. “Jem borrowed it.”

“Then find Jem.”

“Jem’s in Carriage 71.”

“Then send Pip to find Jem. The man needs tea, Plum. Look at him. He’s practically transparent.”

Mr Plum looked at Elliot again with those kind, enormous eyes, and nodded slowly.

“He does need tea,” he agreed, and disappeared back behind the shirts with a gentleness that was remarkable for a man of his dimensions.

Elliot sat on the crate. The train shook and thundered around him. Someone’s child ran past his legs laughing. The dog shifted in its sleep. A man three bunks down was arguing with a woman about whose turn it was to use the stove plate, and the argument had the comfortable, well-worn quality of one that happened every day and neither party had any intention of winning.

Mr Fixer leaned against the wall, resumed his peeling, and regarded Elliot with cheerful curiosity. He talked the way some people breathe — continuously, without apparent effort, and with the sense that stopping would be unnatural.

“So,” he said. “What’s your name, and how long have you been standing in that corridor looking like the world ended?”

Elliot almost laughed. Almost. The laugh got as far as his chest and stopped, because it had run into all the other things in his chest — the confusion, the grief, the slow-building terror of a man who had died and woken up on a train and was now sitting on a crate being offered tea by strangers in a place that couldn’t exist — and the whole lot of it jammed together like commuters in a lift, and none of it could get out.

“Elliot,” he said. “And I’m not sure the world ended. But something definitely did.”

Mr Fixer’s knife paused, just for a moment. His eyes flickered — something quick, something knowing — and then the knife resumed and the grin came back and he was already moving on, the way water moves around a stone: acknowledging the obstacle and choosing not to discuss it.

“Elliot,” he repeated, tasting the name. “Good. Short. Easy to shout across a crowded carriage. You’d be amazed how many people turn up with four-syllable names. Nightmare for everyone.” He held out a slice of the not-quite-apple on the blade of his knife. “Eat. Whatever it is, it’ll make more sense with something in your stomach. Probably. And if it doesn’t—” The grin widened. “Well. That’s what Mr Fixer’s for.”

Elliot took the slice. It tasted like an apple that had grown up somewhere slightly different and had developed its own ideas about what an apple should be — sweeter, denser, with a faint undertone of something floral that had no business being in a piece of fruit. It was, against all reason and expectation, delicious.

He ate it sitting on the crate in Carriage 74 of a train that was impossible, surrounded by people who were alive in a place he didn’t understand, wearing clothes he’d never bought, breathing air that smelled of oil and onions and other people’s laundry. Mr Fixer was talking — had, in fact, never stopped talking, and might never stop, and the words washed over Elliot like weather, not unpleasant, not yet comprehensible, just there — and somewhere behind the curtain of shirts Mr Plum was conducting a quiet negotiation with a teenager about a kettle, and the dog was still asleep, and the train thundered on.

Elliot Marsh, formerly of Bristol, formerly alive, currently none of the above and all of something else, finished his slice of not-apple and waited for the tea.

It was, he thought, the least insane response available to him.