be to make himself vulnerable to the demons that waited there. He had forgotten about breathing, no clean in-and-out now, just that feeling of paralysis in the lungs again, a muscular tightening that made it difficult to inhale. He wondered if anyone had ever suffocated to death from fear, had been so afraid to breathe that he’d passed out and died.
The door between cars began to slide shut. Just before it closed, the wolf in the Manchester United tracksuit turned his snout toward the ceiling and uttered a derisive howl.
Saunders backed from the door. He had buried both his parents, and his sister, too, who had died unexpectedly, when she was just twenty-nine, of meningitis; he had been to a dozen stockholder funerals; he had seen a man collapse and die of a heart attack at a Jets game once. But he had never seen anything like guts on the floor, a whole battered train car painted with blood. Yet he did not feel any nausea and did not make a sound, not a single peep. The only physical reaction he was aware of was that his hands had 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