Read Reality Bites for Free Online Page A

or “stupid mode” as Tamar called it, he tried to open the door it was locked, as train doors are during journeys.  Had it been a real emergency such as the train being on fire this could have been a problem but apparently nobody had thought of this.
    The automatic locking is presumably to prevent children, stupid people and the suicidal from leaping off a moving train. If you want to kill yourself, you will just have to jump off a bridge like normal people, just as long as you do not disrupt the trains.  (Of course if you really want to die by rail travel you could always risk the buffet car.)
    He heard someone coming. ‘Oh hell!’ He fumbled and managed to open the window and scramble through; it was a bloody good job he was so thin, he thought.  He landed on the tracks and cut his leg and his hand. ‘I am not having a good day,’ he thought, and he ran, or rather limped quickly, back down the tunnel. 
    After about twenty minutes, he realised that he was still in the dark. ‘This is a bloody long tunnel,’ he thought.  Perhaps he was going the wrong way.  The train had only just entered the tunnel before it had stopped, he was sure. S urely he should have been out by now.
    He heard voices behind him; he turned and the voices stopped.  He carried on limping, and the voices started again, and underneath them, now that he was listening, he could hear footsteps.  He stopped and turned again, silence fell again.  One more episode of this and Denny lost his temper; he squared up to the shadows behind him.
    ‘Okay,’ he snapped, ‘who the hell are you?  I’ve had a bloody awful day so far, and it’s still only half past six in the morning. I’m just not in the mood to play “Grandmother’ s footsteps” in the dark.  So what do you want?’
    He said all this with hardly a quaver in his voice. (His acting skills were really coming along.)  The only response was a gust of silvery laughter and a blast of cold wind.
    Ghosts ? He wondered and shrugged; Tamar had taught him to be unafraid of the ethereal.
    ‘If you’re going to be afraid of something’ she had said, ‘be afraid of the thing that’s solid enough to bash you over the head with a big stick.  A spirit can’t hurt you and mostly they don’t want to.’
    He had taken her word for it; she ought to know he reasoned and wasn’t the world full of enough dangers to worry about.  It was nice to know there were some things he did not have to fear.
    There was anyway, the – to Denny’s mind – far more pressing problem of where the hell he was.  Since he had not hit daylight yet and he was certain that he should have by now, clearly something had gone very wrong – par for the course really.  But he still had to work out what he had done; he was having that strange feeling of destiny again, as if he was being manipulated. The only thing he could do was carry on following the tracks. He looked down; the tracks were gone – Well, of course they were!  He would have been far more surprised if they had still been there. 
    ‘Oh well,’ he thought resignedly, and headed off in what he hoped was the right direction.  Since he now had no idea where he was trying to get to this made navigation a bit redundant.
    He trudged on; the voices were still behind him murmuring constantly.  It was annoying, like listening to someone else’s Walkman on a bus.  He wondered if this were another nightmare; it had that same feeling and the nightmares had been so real.  He closed his eyes and tried to open them again in a futile attempt to wake himself up, which is impossible, when you are not, in fact, asleep.  It occurred to him that the only time you think you’re dreaming is when you’re not.   Apart from the voices (he wondered what would happen if he just turned round and charged at them) he felt strangely calm now; bored even.  The nightmarish feeling was ebbing, as was his frantic anxiety about Tamar.  He was almost sleepwalking. A cloud of