Joey Graham was seven years old and had always loved trains. He spent hours playing next to the train tracks which ran behind his parents small house, and was always getting into strife for it. His mother would scream and yell at him to get off those damn rails. Joey hated it when his mother used those bad words at him. He didn't often step onto the rails themselves, anyway - he kept for the most part to the gravelly edges of the tracks, where the best stones could be collected, and he could play 'jungle' in the weeds overhanging the trainline.

Today was Sunday, his favourite play day, and he was busily playing army commander when the whispers came. Joey stopped, his right hand clutching a stone, poised ready to throw it at the 'enemy' on the other side of the rails. He listened, but heard nothing. Shrugging, he threw the stone and yelled heartily, running down a few feet to collect more projectiles. Suddenly the noise came again - a low murmur, rising up from the tracks a few metres further down and overcome with curiosity, the boy dropped the stones and slowly approached the strange sound. The whispers became louder, and Joey could just make out the sound of his own name.

"Hello?" he asked tentatively, kneeling down to get closer to the sound. At his voice the whispers abruptly stopped, and Joey put his ear to the gravel between the sleepers, straining to hear, his mind full of images of fairies and gremlins he'd heard about at school, the things his mother told him were 'rubbish'. The sounds of the traffic on the nearby road, a dog barking and the twittering of the birds seemed to fade as Joey concentrated on listening for the whispers. They came again, low and soothing, a mixture of children and adults, persuasive and friendly, and he lay down on the tracks, stretching out to get his ear as close to the ground as he could. The little boy's concentration was broken by the sound of his mother's voice, swearing at him to get off the tracks this minute, and get home. His head jerked up, and he rubbed the side of it, blinking in the light. The sounds of the birds and traffic flooded back, and he wondered why everything was so loud, so bright!

His mother called out to him again, and Joey ran back down to the broken-down fence which separated his backyard and the train tracks, and climbed over.

Janet Martin watched the little boy play on the tracks from her seat on the train station. She smiled at his antics despite the unease she felt at the possible danger he was in. She was puzzled by his interest in one spot on the ground, in between the tracks, where he remained motionless, listening to the ground, for several minutes. The boy's wavy blond hair reminded her of her own son. David had been her only child, and was ten when he died. He'd been playing, much like this boy had, on these very same tracks when he was struck and killed by an express train. The grief proved too much of a strain, and Janet's husband Peter left a few months after their son's death. Janet applied for a job at a local brewery, working night-shift, leaving late at night and arriving home just after dawn. It was difficult, physically demanding work, and very different to being a house wife, but the busier she kept herself the less she thought about David. Janet didn't think of Joey again that day as she went to the market to pick up the weekly groceries. Her day was uneventful, and she returned to the small flat, ate and retired for the night.

David looked up at her and smiled. Janet could see the gentle blue pools of his eyes glinting in the bright sunlight as he waved to her. She screamed at him to come to her, but no sound escaped her lips. Her son waved back at her, and pointed to the ground. He shouted something about people under the ground - and then the train came. It hurtled past in front of her eyes, and suddenly Janet could no longer see her son. The roar of the train was ear-splitting and she screamed again, covering her ears with her hands. As suddenly as it arrived, the train disappeared, taking its terrifying noise with it. Silence fell across the tracks, and she moved forward, afraid to look but unable to stop herself. The gravel was stained black with her son's blood, and a few tiny pieces of flesh and fabric were scattered on the ground. Her eyes fixed to the earth, Janet followed the tracks and the trail of gore, until she came across her son's tiny arm, which had been pulled from its socket by the impact of the train.

To Janet it seemed that it still held its pose in an obscene wave, and next to it was a large pool of blood. As she watched, the pool slowly drained into the gravel, but didn't seep out into the surrounding ground, instead it seemed to pour deep into the earth under the train tracks. Janet turned, and was about to walk away, when a whisper from behind caught her attention. She turned back in time to see a pale hand appear from beneath the tracks, pushing gravel aside as it strained upwards. It took hold of her son's severed arm, and Janet woke in a cold sweat, shivering with fear. She'd suffered from nightmares for almost a year after David's death, and had thought that they'd finally stopped.

Seeing the little boy on the tracks that morning had triggered her grief again, and she lay for many hours, hugging herself and crying quiet, painful tears. If only Peter had stayed - at least they could have dealt with the grief together. Janet was a strong woman, but losing both a son and a husband had taken their inevitable toll on her, physically and emotionally. She'd lost a considerable amount of weight and her previously lustrous and thick blond hair now lay limp and straggly down her back.

The next night, exhausted from lack of sleep, Janet travelled to work. She dozed for several minutes, when she was suddenly jerked awake by a noise. It had sounded just like David's voice - but that was ridiculous, she scolded herself. She shook her head, and put it down to an echo of the nightmare she'd suffered the day before. The train reached its destination and Janet stepped out into the crowd of other late-night commuters and shift workers. She shuffled up to the bored ticket collector and was about to give him her ticket, when the whispers came again. Startled, she whipped round, to see only a sea of puzzled faces waiting for her to pass through the turnstile. Confused and embarrassed, she turned back to the ticket collector, gave him her ticket and rushed off the platform.

During that night, Janet was haunted again by the whispers and the vision of her son. While eating her lunch, she drifted off into a daydream about him. David was standing on the railway tracks, waving to her again. She screamed for him to run to her, as she had done in the nightmare, and this time he heard her, and ran to her side just before the train rushed past. She hugged him tightly, and smiled to herself.

"Mummy?"

"Yes, David?" she replied, opening her eyes to find herself once more in the empty lunchroom. She stared down at her sandwich, trembling, her appetite gone. Why was this happening? Her son's voice had sounded so lifelike, and so close. Had she fallen asleep? Distracted and upset, she went back to work, but couldn't get the sound of David's voice out of her mind.

The whispers and nightmares became much more frequent over the following week. Janet stopped eating almost completely, and couldn't sleep for more than two or three hours each night. Her nervous and unpredictable behaviour began to disturb her workmates, and after several complaints and comments her foreman was forced to tell her to take a few days off. Janet didn't understand what was happening, and protested, claiming that a good night's sleep would be enough to set her to rights again. She finished the shift, and visited her local doctor. He looked at her for a full minute after she finished telling him about the hallucinations and nightmares, and silently began to write out a prescription. The tranquillisers were strong, and she took one as soon as she returned home, and slept for nearly twelve hours.

The next few days were uneventful, as Janet pottered around the flat, catching up on house work and letter writing. She went for long walks and spent many hours napping. On that weekend, however, the whispers returned. She was watching television in the evening when they came, a constant murmur under the inane babble of the TV show. She curled up on the couch, her hands over her ears, shaking her head to try to make them go away, but they crept inside, and she began to cry. Eventually they subsided, and she took another tranquilliser, but to no avail. The whispers returned later that night, and this time she understood snatches of what they were saying. The voices were telling her to go back to the trainline, to join her son and Janet finally fell asleep, deciding that the next day she would go back to the tracks.

Sunday was a warm, sunny day, and Janet enjoyed her walk to the tracks. She half expected to see the child she'd watched the previous weekend playing games beside the rails again, but the area was deserted. She stared down at the shiny steel lines, and the cracked wooden sleepers between them, remembering the blood and gore from the nightmare to appear before her eyes. She checked up and down the line for trains, and stepped between the rails. She thought about her son, his smiling face and blond hair, as if trying to conjure up his ghost. Janet waited for the whispers to start, but they didn't. She waited for almost half an hour, pacing up and down the tracks. Finally she gave up, and turned to leave when the whispers started up again, a low murmur rising from beneath the tracks. Janet turned back, knelt down, and put her ear to the ground. She could hear her son calling her, along with a mixture of other voices, both adult and child, and listened there, motionless for several minutes.

She was so engrossed in the voices that she didn't hear the express train approaching. The driver, unable to stop in time, blew the train's horn several times in a desperate attempt to alert the form that was hunched in the middle of the tracks. Janet was killed instantly, her body shattered by the impact.

****** The people under the ground were talking to Joey Graham again. He loved to sit on the tracks and listen to them chatter while he played in the gravel between the sleepers. They told him wonderful things, and he became their friend. They told him they were lonely, and wanted him to keep visiting them every day. Janet held David's hand as they whispered up to the small boy sitting on the tracks above their heads. She was finally with her boy, and with others like herself.