The Tales of Gehiwian Circle

Family Heirlooms

Off through the doorway to the kitchen, in his late thirties, PC Harold Grange sat in his untidy uniform, partly ready for another day on the job. Thorston watched him take another sip from his mug of hot cocoa as he frowned at yesterday's newspaper. His brown hair still needed combing, but that would wait until he'd finished reading. His jaw was set, lips tight beneath his healed but crooked nose, which had been broken by some would-be train robbers.

Their backdoor burst inwards. A gust of chilling air invaded their home. A figure stumbled through the door, arms flailing and legs uneven. Thorston swung round where he sat, dropping his wooden train.

"Mr Grange!"

"Evan," Harold stood up, chair jolting back over the tiled kitchen floor with a sick scrape.

Thorston covered his ears as his eyes caught Evan's limp, and the dried blood on his head.

"What on earth happened to you?" Harold walked over to him.

"I, I have no idea," Evan walked further into the kitchen.

Harold shut the back door. "Sit down," he instructed, "Let me get the medical kit."

As his dad fished through a kitchen drawer, Thorston scooted closer and listened as Evan reeled off the night's events.

"Thorston, grab the blankets," his father ordered over Evan's ramblings.

Thorston obeyed, grabbing a bundle of blankets from the armchair and carting them to the kitchen. He put them on his dad's seat, and spied some of the old articles on his desk. They were historic, unsolved cases from around Gehiwian Circle. One was on a child worker who vanished in the old mines in the late eighteen hundreds. Another covered the disappearance of a young firelighter from the locomotive sheds in the twenties. The worst, and most famous, was the Gehiwian coastal crash, where a train left the rails and fell into the sea below. A wreckage diver also drowned investigating the crash.

"I don't know how else to explain it," Evan winced as the ice pack pressed on cleaned wound. "I couldn't get out of the coach."

"The doors may have been frozen shut," Harold said matter-of-factly.

"No! The corridors all led back to the same coach! Then everything went wrongside up, and the light all vanished-"

"How hard did you hit your head?" Harold interrupted.

"That wasn't it!" Evan insisted, "Then I saw him."

"Who?" Harold prepared some bandages.

"The Coal Man."

Harold froze mid-action. Thorston watched, his father clasped in some kind of trance. "The Coal Man's an urban legend," he looked at Evan with cold, hard eyes.

"No!" Evan stood up, propping much of his weight on his uninjured leg. "I saw him outside the train, tall enough to stand and look into the carriage. Then I turned away for a moment and he was inside. All the doors were still closed. Look!"

He pulled out his ticket with the black smudge. Harold narrowed his eyes. "That black smudge could've been caused by the guard's puncher, or his fingers."

"The guard never checked it," Evan pressed, exasperated, "It was unpunched until I saw the Coal Man."

Thorston saw his dad's gaze, worried but firm, look to him and then back at Evan. "Go home, rest for a few hours. Then come to the station to make a statement and we'll head down to the yard office to find out what happened last night."

"Okay."

Thorston poured his eyes over his dad's saved news cuttings as he remained in the kitchen. He'd never heard of the Coal Man. Did it have something to do with what his dad was looking at? The mere mention seemed to put him on edge, but he didn't know why.

As Harold continued to talk Mr Clovet down and saw him out, Thorston waited in the kitchen. When his father returned, he asked. "Who's the Coal Man?"

"No one," his father replied, without looking at him. He gathered up his papers and tucked them away in a locked briefcase.

"Is he the man that fills the trains with coal?" Thorston pressed.

His father stopped still again. "Not exactly."

He crouched down to look at Thorston at eye level. "If you ever see anything strange, or anyone that looks unusual, you walk the other way. There's no use getting caught up in it all."

"Okay," Thorston nodded.

"Okay," Harold stood up. "And if you hear any more about this Coal Man, ignore it."

"Okay," Thorston said again. He wasn't sure why, but his father wanted to avoid talking about the Coal Man at all costs.

Little did his father know, it would soon become impossible.

***

11th December, 1990

That exchange, it was the earliest one he could recall. Apple bobbing in his throat, Thorston replayed over and over as the phone sat by his ear.

I'm sorry dad. There's no way I can keep that now.

"-Thorston?-" Rebekah's voice sounded in his ear, "-Can you hear me?-"

"Yeah," Thorston blinked, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"-Are you coming then?-"

"Rebekah, I'm sorry," Thorston shut his eyes, swallowing. He hung the phone back up on the wall, and headed back to the kitchen.