Sam looked with disgust as a hand that was mutilated and missing fingers clawed at old, papery skin on the good wrist, and watched as a face that spoke of abuse and waste looked back at him with sagging bloodshot eyes. Sam’s lip curled involuntarily, but in his heart something was singing like a wire in wind. It was singing that this was no vision. No swirling black pilot drove its form. It was as the old man said, flesh. When Sam spoke, it was almost in the voice of a child.

‘Calvin?’

The old man shut his eyes, his mouth moving slightly. Sam slumped to his knees, his legs no longer able to support his weight. He lifted an arm and pointed at the old figure, a painted saint naming the heretic. Sam’s head was shaking, denying what his eyes told him. ‘No. Not Calvin. You liar.’

Calvin’s eyes opened and gazed at him with love. ‘Why would I lie, Sam? Who would make the pretence of being Calvin Bitterhand? Only a fool would pretend to be that which no man would gladly be.’

Sam let his arm fall, and as the two men stared at each other for an age, the distant trumpeting horn of the freight train broke the silence, and the last light of the dark grey evening started to drain from the sky as if in response.

Tendrils of smoke swirled in the dark and were sucked into the deeper black of the tunnel, as the orange flames made the rough rock walls dance with life. Cracks and crevices waved crazily, making shadows against the untidy surface, the stone that hands had hewn, the living rock. Sam sat with his arms circling his knees, staring dumbly at the fire. Wasn’t it round such a fire that he had last seen Calvin? But that had been twenty long years ago, in the sweet summer woods with the scent of sap and pollen on the air. This was ten feet into the mouth of the upper Corkscrew Tunnel, a miserable fire at the side of the track giving little heat to combat the ferocity of the cold. Both fires however, two decades apart, were hosts to misery.

Calvin poked at the embers with a wet branch and flicked his eyes up to Sam’s iron face. He knew what the younger man was thinking. Knew what memories would be stirring in his heart, and he lowered his eyes to the flames again in his shame. Sam had said nothing. A silent figure allowing Calvin to build a fire and settle a camp in an unspoken agreement of co-operation, almost as if Sam had decided this were a dream in which action was useless.

So when Sam finally spoke, it startled Calvin. His voice echoed in the tunnel, joining the dripping rock in making the only sounds in this man-made cave lonely and empty things.

‘Why have you come?’