The Glas s Town Game

Charlotte rolled her eyes. What difference did it make who walked in front? Branwell could go home at the end of all this and she could not. Didn’t that prove Papa loved him better? Didn’t it show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world was his and not hers? Shouldn’t that make the little piker happy enough?

She gave up. “All right, Bran. I bow to your authority, my Lord.” Charlotte spoke sourly and bowed grandly, sweeping one hand out to the side like she imagined the Duke of Wellington did. “You have the helm. What shall we do with our last hour and fifteen minutes of freedom?”

“I like the bowing,” Branwell said brightly. “Though you oughtn’t do it like a man. And when you call me ‘my Lord,’ you ought to at least try to mean it.”

“Can we go to Mrs. Reed’s shop?” asked Anne, who, though very sad for her sisters, had distinctly heard her aunt promise one hard toffee, and she’d clung to that hard toffee all the way along. The toffee would fix her up. The toffee would make everything else all right.

“No, we can not,” answered Bran imperiously. He couldn’t help it. He knew he ought to just sit under a tree with his sisters and do a lot of hugging and blubbering and quoting dreadful soggy old poems or something, but he couldn’t help it. The train was so close. He could almost taste the coal smoke. “We are going to do something amazing. We are going to do something fantastically exciting and modern. We are going to do something none of us has done before, something that will make us all so cheerful that we’ll be thirty before we cry again! We are going to see the train!”

Branwell had imagined the train station would look just like a magazine illustration of a train station: full of bustle and industry and men in important-looking suits and even more important-looking hats, all running to catch the 7:15 or the 9:20 or waiting virtuously, all talking loudly at the same time about only the most important things. But Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine only ever printed pictures of Piccadilly or Waverley Station. This was Keighley, and the three of them were as much alike as two wolves and a lapdog.

Branwell felt utterly cheated.

Though it had only just got built, somehow the station looked tired and worn down already. A single, rather shabby sign announcing KEIGHLEY STATION swung in the unhappy January wind. A few men and ladies wandered aimlessly along the roofed platform. Waiting, yes, but waiting without purpose, without that energy, without that importance Bran longed for. There was one with a small mustache cleaning his nails. Another had a big mustache, and he was picking his teeth. A Lady leaned on his arm in a dress duller than even Tabitha would be caught dead in, patting at her hair, as though anything could be done for her at this point. A great, round, dingy, white clock ticked down at them with all the sparkle and spirit of a dinner plate. Though the clo

ck couldn’t have been more than a year old, Branwell could already see a family of spiders, living undisturbed and undusted in the shadow of the numeral 6.

The grubby old stationmaster with muttonchops like angry squirrel tails glared at them from his booth with deep suspicion.

“I don’t know what you expected, Bran,” sniffed Charlotte. “It’s only freight in Keighley. Though Blackwood’s says that Liverpool is getting passenger service soon. The train’s probably been and gone already.”

Charlotte didn’t think she’d ever hated anyone as much as she hated Keighley just then. Look at it! Just squatting in the moors, lording it over all the other nearby towns just because it had a train station and they did not. Trains only did one thing. They took you away. Ever so much quicker than a carriage, and you couldn’t even turn around if you changed your mind. Why would anyone want such a thing?

No! Branwell simply would not accept it. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his fists against this extremely unsatisfactory reality. He whispered through clenched teeth: “What if someone came while we weren’t looking and swapped the real Keighley for a false one and all the handsome, important people for a great lot of badgers groomed up to look like people and . . .”

Anne skipped along ahead and turned round so that she could practice walking backward while talking and not looking behind her once. “AND the newspaper shop for a monster who looks just like a newspaper shop and the bricks in the platform for bars of gold only painted to look like bricks, and . . .”

Emily smiled faintly. She had been seriously considering simply running away, across the platform and to . . . where? Nowhere, of course. Her stomach twisted over itself and threatened to bolt, but she couldn’t help taking up the game. “AND the songbirds for miniature girls in songbird costumes and the moors for a patchwork quilt and the winter for summer and the sun for the moon and, and . . . and . . .”

“And the train for a pirate ship to sail us all away over the edge of the wild earth,” finished Charlotte. A long, low whistle broke the fog into a hundred pieces. “Only no one did any swapping. This is Keighley, the real Keighley, and that is a real train come at last.”

A deep, rhythmic thumping began in the distance. So deep that it seemed to growl up from inside their own chests. The platform roof began to tremble. The thump thumped again, and then again, picking up speed. All four of their hearts rattled in time with the strange sounds. None of them could move. Nothing in the world could sound like that. Like a monster and a parade and a thunderstorm and a lion and the end of the world all at once. Fear sizzled through their skin to the tips of their hair. Fear, and a wonderful, eager, starving curiosity.

Someone shouted behind them—a man’s shout, the sort you had to listen to or else get a punishing. Charlotte startled out of her trance, expecting to be scolded for standing too close to the edge. Anne clutched her oldest sister’s skirts as she hadn’t done in years. Emily stood fast. Branwell puffed up his chest, determined not to be frightened for at least the next minute. After that, he told himself, he could crumple, if he really needed to.

But they were not to be scolded. The shout came from a hugely fat man running across the road to catch the train. His cheeks were quite flushed and he had his collar turned up against the cold. But his collar was not a collar: It was a fine, glossy page from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, crisply creased. His waistcoat was fashioned from stacks of London newspapers. He had parchment for hair, pulled back into old-fashioned rolls, and a neat, small ponytail. His greatcoat was a special edition of the Leeds Intelligencer and his cravat was a penny dreadful folded over many times. The enormous belly that bulged beneath his coat was the carved ebony knob of an ancient scroll. Queerest of all, his enormous head was an open book longer than the Bible itself. A pair of glasses perched upon huge, decorated capital letters: two handsome Os that seemed to be his eyes, for they blinked furiously as he ran. The lower parts of the pages formed a mustache, and his nose crowned it all: a long, blood-scarlet ribbonmark, the sort used as a bookmark in old Bibles.

Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne looked around at the men with big and small mustaches and the Lady with the hopeless hair. None of them seemed to see the Magazine Man stumbling and jogging across the meadow on the other side of the platform. None of them seemed in the least concerned that a man made entirely of books was bearing down on Keighley Station with rather terrifying speed.

“I say,” droned the one with the small mustache and very clean nails. “The train’s running late today.”

“It will happen,” nodded the one with the big mustache and very clean teeth. “From time to time.”

The Magazine Man hurled himself at the ledge of the platform. He didn’t quite make it, grunting like a rhinoceros as he crashed into the thing. He hauled up his tremendous weight with beefy arms made from back issues of the Quarterly Review. Charlotte recognized it from Papa’s subscriptions immediately. The man’s cheeks flushed with red ink and great effort until, at last, the impossible fellow heaved himself over into the station and lay on his back, puffing mightily, exhausted.

“Quite the kind of a weather we’re having,” said the Lady in the dull dress to neither of the men particularly. The Magazine Man lay sprawled at her feet. She stepped daintily round his head.

“Don’t they see him?” asked Anne wonderingly. “He’s right there.” The train’s mournful, owly whistle broke the fog once more.

After a moment of shock in which no one breathed and everyone clutched hands as tight as murder, all four children burst out of their stillness and tumbled toward the creature. They called out to him and demanded his name, his family, his business. He tried to scramble up and run from them, wheezy breaths whistling fearfully through the hundred thousand pages of his body. But the Magazine Man was as stuck as a turtle on his back, and forced to roll wretchedly from side to side in order to get on his feet. Once up, he towered over everyone, even the tallest of the Keighley businessmen.

“Go away!” the Magazine Man shouted finally, puffing and wheezing. He bent over with his paper hands on his newsprint knees. “Leave me be!”

All of them spoke at once:

“Who are you?” demanded Charlotte.

“Why did you climb over the ledge instead of coming through the station like a sensible fellow?” asked Emily.