Wolverton Station Read Online Free

gone to sleep, the fingers cold, tingling with pins and needles. He wanted to sit down.
    The door to the bathroom was on his left. He stared at it in a blank, thoughtless kind of way, then pressed the button, popped the door open. An eye-­watering smell hit him, a disheartening human reek. The last person through hadn’t bothered to flush. Wet, filthy toilet paper stuck to the floor, and the little trash can next to the sink was overflowing. He considered going in there and bolting the door shut. He didn’t move, though, and when the bathroom door closed on its own, he was still in the first-­class aisle.
    That little bathroom was a coffin—­a coffin that stank. If he went in there, he understood he would never come out, that he would die in there. Torn apart by the wolves while he sat on the toilet, screaming for help that wasn’t going to come. A terrible, lonely, squalid ending, in which he would be separated not just from his life but his dignity. He had no rational explanation for this certainty—­how could they get the door open if it was locked?—­it was just a thing he knew, the way he knew his birthday or his phone number.
    His phone. The thing to do was to call someone, let somebody know ( I am on a train with wolfmen? ) he was in trouble. His cold, dead hands sank to the pockets of his slacks, already knowing that the phone wasn’t there. And it wasn’t. His phone was in the pocket of his eight-­hundred-­dollar overcoat—­a London Fog overcoat, actually. Everything, even clothing, had, in the last few moments, taken on heightened meaning, seemed significant. His phone was lost in a London Fog. To get to it, he would have to return to his seat and squirm past the businesswolf, something even more impossible than hiding in the bathroom.
    There was nothing in his pockets he could use: a few twenty-­pound notes, his ticket, a map of the train line. The woodcutter was alone in the deep, dark forest without his ax, without even a Swiss Army knife, not that a Swiss Army knife would do him any good. Saunders was seized by an image of himself knocked flat on his back, the wolf in the scally cap pinning him down, his wretched breath in Saunders’s face, and Saunders raking at him frantically with the dull, ridiculous, inch-­and-­a-­half-­long blade of a Swiss Army knife. He felt a laugh rise in his throat and choked it back, understood he was quivering on the edge not of hilarity but of panic. Empty pockets, empty head—­ No. Wait. The map. He jerked the map out of his pocket and unfolded it. It took an effort of will to focus his eyes . . . but whatever his other flaws, Saunders had always had will to spare. He looked for the Liverpool line and began to follow it north from London, wondering about the stop after Wolverton Station, how far it might be.
    He spotted Wolverton Station about two-­thirds of the way to Liverpool. Only it wasn’t Wolverton Station on the map, it was Wolverhampton. He blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear some grit out of his eyes. He supposed it was possible that he had misread the sign at the last stop and that it had always been Wolverhampton. Which made the next stop Foxham. Maybe there would be foxes waiting on the platform there. He felt another dangerous, panicky laugh rise in his throat—­like bile—­and swallowed it down. Laughing now would be as bad as screaming.
    He had to insist to himself there would be ­people in Foxham, that if he could get off the train, there was a chance he might live. And on his map, Foxham was barely a quarter inch from the Wolverhampton stop. The train might be almost there, had been rushing along at a hundred-­plus miles an hour for at least fifteen minutes ( No. Try three minutes, said a silky, bemused voice in his mind. It’s only been three minutes since you noticed that the man sitting beside you wasn’t a man at all but some kind of werewolf, and Foxham is still half an hour away. Your body will be room temperature by