The Clock is Ticketing

The ticket machine chimed as it printed out, on the tell-tale small piece of paper, the ticket to the 5.15 Perth-bound train. Reece Chambers picked up the train ticket, making sure that it read 16 FEB 02 ZONE 1-3 5:15. He was on his way to the Perth Entertainment Centre, there to watch the Perth Wildcats play the Brisbane Bullets. He would meet his friend, Devik, at the Perth Train Station, from where they would shop around before the game.

From the ticket barrier he proceeded downstairs to the station area and sat down on a bench. It was still 4:15, so he pulled a book out of his bag, Demon Lord of Karanda by David Eddings, and began to read as Belgarion, at the House of Ashaba, swathed through the ranks of the sorcerer Urvon’s servants. Slowly, Reece’s eyes began to droop, and his head fell onto his shoulder.

***

He woke with a start, and opened his eyes to squint around the staging area.

It was deserted.

Suddenly Reece was wide awake. The sky above him was dark. The silence was ominous. It was almost as though the darkness sought to close him in. He jerked out of his bench as it began to vibrate. It was nighttime.

He heard the sound of an approaching train.

As it whistled into the platform, the train slowed down. It shuddered to a halt beside Reece. Picking up his bag, he warily came closer to the train. As he did, he felt a rustling in his pocket. He reached into it and took out his train ticket.

Squinting in the darkness, his eyes were drawn to the patch where the date and details of the ticket were printed. Only the patch was empty. In its place he read:

ONE HOUR THE CLOCK IS TICKING.

Reece darted up to the ticket area. All the barriers were closed. The area was deserted, and the lights were off. He was locked in.

With no other option, he reluctantly went back to the staging area. Slowly, cautiously, he stepped closer to the open doors. The train was lighted, yet no one was inside. Reece entered the train.

Behind him, the doors slammed shut.

With an abrupt jerk, the train hurtled forward.

Reece was shunted forward and against the seat on the other side of the train. He painfully picked himself up and, leaning against the rail on the side of the train, he looked around. The train was small, and so was this compartment. He counted just twenty blue plastic seats plastered on the side of the train. The whitewashed ceiling was covered with spitballs. The sides of the train were pink and stinky.

Slowly Reece slid into one of the seats which he hoped would heal his moderately wounded back, but a moment later he cringed away, horrified, when he felt fungus on the surface of the seat. He backed away from the seat into the opposite wall.

Even though Reece was preoccupied – and understandably so – the train driver (if there was one – Reece was beginning to doubt his own sanity in this living hell) took no notice of his predicament, or otherwise didn’t seem to care. The train sped onwards.

And then the train was plunged into darkness as it entered a tunnel.

At that precise moment all the overhead lights in all the train compartments winked out. Reece could see through the transparent door deparating the compartments that the train was in complete darkness.

An unsettling gloom slid uneasily into the pit of Reece’s stomach. What was he doing here? Why had he even boarded the train in the first place? Hadn’t the absence of other people in the train staging area – or in the train itself for that matter – alerted him to the fact that something was seriously wrong? And then he remembered the locked doors at the exits of the train station, how the ticketing turnstiles had been deserted.

Ticketing turnstiles ...

Abruptly Reece remembered the eerie message printed on his train ticket. He reached into his pocked and took out the ticket, remembering as he did so that he was in utter darkness and wouldn’t even be able to read the thing. Even as he removed the ticket he started to put it back, and would have if he hadn’t noticed that a patch on the ticket seemed to be glowing. The patch slowly twisted bizarrely, as if trying to transfigure itself into something it couldn’t, and then Reece read the words:

TEN MINUTES THE CLOCK TICKS REECE.

For a moment he just stared at the ticket in disbelief. This couldn’t be happening. It just couldn’t be. Not to him. Not to Reece Chambers, who despite numerous shortcomings was a good guy.

He thought about that for a moment. Then he thought about what he was thinking about. Why was he dwelling on his faults? It surely wasn’t his fault that he was trapped on this train, was it?

Then, almost as if answer, Reece saw, from the opposite end of the compartment, a glowing nimbus surrounding a hauntingly familiar person – yet it couldn’t be ...

‘Yes, it can’t be, can it?’ the creature within the nimbus drawled. ‘You’re seeing things, aren’t you? Can’t be Peter, can it?’

And Reece recognised the human within the light. It was Peter Johnson. Johnson, the smart kid at school who got straight A’s. Johnson whose innocence had always annoyed Reece. Annoyed him so much that he teased him at every opportunity, calling him the ‘Squid’. The train rumbled as it sped onward.

‘Who’s the squid now, eh?’ the figure breathed. ‘Who’s legs have turned to jelly, spine starting to quiver, brain melting within him – not that you ever had much of a brain, Chambers ... ’

‘Shut up,’ Reece spat suddenly. He felt himself shaking, and desperately hoped he was doing so with suppressed rage, and not with fright. ‘You’re not real. You can’t be. This is all a trick, and you don’t scare me.’

‘Don’t scare you, eh?’ Johnson purred almost insinuatingly. ‘Don’t frighten the cool, “brave” Reece Chambers?’

Reece broke out in a cold sweat. He felt it trickle down his forehead and slither down his cheek like a snake. The compartment was suddenly stuffy. He was trembling all over.

The glowing figure approached him. Even as it raised a pale, lighted hand, it grinned evilly. Reece desperately raised his own hand. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he almost begged.

The sweat was crawling down his chest, his legs shaking madly. Johnson came closer. He was only a metre away. His smile widened. He reached out further with his outstretched hand, and Reece, for the first time in his life since he was five years old, screamed.

‘AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!’

And the figure vanished.

Reece was alone once more.

For a moment he just stood there, blinking unseeingly. Then, as if emerging from a deep sleep, he jerked convulsively, crawled to a nearby seat, and retched violently, his body trembling.

A few minutes later he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and got up. He almost fell back down as the combination of his quivering and the train’s jerky motion threatened to pull him down.

It took all of his reduced strength to stand. A thought occurred to him, and he reached into his pocked and pulled out his ticket. It now read:

TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES TICKETH THE CLOCK.

He wanted to scream in frustration, to bellow curses at this incomprehensible unreality, but he knew he would be wasting his breath. A rare flash of intuition crossed his mind: he would have to wait this – whatever it was – out. He lowered himself onto a seat, then cringed and bolted up when his buttocks touched the slimy fungus on the seat. Shuddering, he sat on the floor to await whatever would come.

By now Reece had made some deductions. He had deduced that his nightmare was some kind of punishment. Presumably it was due to the fact that he was not averse to bullying. For some reason, he was being shown horrors to persuade him not to bully anymore. On that basis, he realised, this dreamworld (was it a dream? It was so real) was something on the order of a movie he’d seen in childhood, called Mickey's Christmas Carol or something like that. In the movie, a money-hoarder named Scrooge refused to take joy in anything but his work and the money it brought, thereby forcing his employees – one of them being Mickey Mouse – to work the whole year, even on Christmas Day. The night before Christmas one year, he was visited by three ghosts from the past, present and future, who showed him such things that persuaded Scrooge to become more gracious overnight. Reece had always been impressed by Disney's originality in coming up with such a premise.

Was this what was happening to Reece? Did someone want to scare him into stopping his bullying? If so, they coudln’t expect such dramatic results as in the movie. Reece wasn’t scared that easily.

Then he remembered the way that the cold tendril of fear had crept upon his heart when he was visited by the ghostly spectre of Peter Johnson, how the sweat had run in thin rivulets down his head and chest, how his legs were throbbing spasmodically ...

Mentally he shook himself firmly. What was he doing, going all to pieces like he was?

Abruptly the train slowed down. Reece hesitantly glanced at the ticket.

FIFTY-TWO MINUTES LOOK TO THE TICKING FOR THE CLOCK.

And then a new sound intruded upon his awareness.

Tick, tock, tick, tock ...

The noise was coming from just above the transparent door separating the compartment Reece was in from the next one. He traversed the area above the door closely with his eyes. And, slowly, the area shimmered, then coalesced into the image of a train ticket.

It was identical to the one in Reece’s hand, only it had twelve numbers around the rim in Roman numerals from 1 to 12. Reece did a double take. It was a clock.

A clock with one hand.

At the moment it was pointing somewhere halfway between the X and the XI. Reece watched, paralysed, as the hand painstakingly moved toward the XI with inexonerable purpose. The train itself had slowed to the point where a person could almost walk beside it.

Abruptly, the train stopped, and Reece was thrown forward on his face to the floor. He came up spitting blood and teeth.

The train shuddered. Silence for a moment.

Then, as if inflamed by a neon light, the seat nearest to Reece flared green.

The next seat flared.

And the next one.

Soon, all seats in the compartment were glowing brightly. And Reece, squinting into the greenish haze, saw it was actually the fungus that was alight.

Slowly, tendrils of fungus extended outward. At first it was almost negligible, then he saw that all the fungus on all the seats were extending as well.

Reece rushed to the door of the compartment and tried to jerk it open using the silver handles on the inside of the door. They remained closed.

Unwillingly, he raised his eyes to the ticket-clock as his hands dropped uselessly. The hand pointed between XI and XII. Below the hand he read:

FIFTY-SEVEN AND A HALF MINUTES. FUNGI; TICKET; CLOCK.

Suddenly he felt a cord of some kind close around his chest. At the same time another cord tensed around his neck. The fungi were attacking him!

Gasping for breath, Reece fell to the floor, his hands trying to loosen the death-grip around his neck. Dimly he was aware that now his whole body was covered with fungi. It snaked around his face, binding him. His legs locked together, his arms pinned to his sides like a mummy, spots began appearing in front of his as-yet uncovered eyes.

The fungi itself turned him around to face the ticket-clock.

FIFTY-NINE MINUTES. SORRY REECE.

Wriggling, struggling, wheezing for breath, encaptured, snared, caught; Reece knew there was no escape. He gagged and fell to the floor, and he swam into darkness ...

***

He woke with a start, and opened his eyes to squint around.

He was back at the staging area, and it was full of people.

A train was just pulling into the station. Reece’s head jerked up as he unstuck his mouth from a page of his book. Still bent, he glanced at the floor.

His ticket lay there.

It read:

16 FEB 02 ZONE 1-3 5:15

ONE HOUR

Reece fled the station, screaming.