The Influence by Ramsey Campbell

kept his balance with one foot on either side of the rail nearest the platform. He clutched his broken wrist to his chest with his other hand, imagining how much pain he would be suffering by the time he was taken to the hospital, and stumbled backward splay-legged as the train screeched toward him.
    The brakes would save him, he told himself. The thought seemed as clear as his pain. He could see from the strain that dragged the driver’s shocked face taut how hard he must be applying the brakes. Even when the front of the train towered over him like the collapsing wall of a house, Lance thought he could outdistance it. When the buffer shoved at his chest it seemed firm but surprisingly gentle, nuzzling him into the tunnel at a speed his feet could match. Then a sleeper caught his heel, and he fell backward, his spine on the rail. Before he could heave himself aside, the wheel of the train pinned him and split him open to the top of his head.
    It let him out of his body at once, but the agony of it came with him. He felt as if he’d turned into a wound that would never finish widening, growing rawer as it gaped. But he was retreating into the dark, and as the mouth of the tunnel dwindled, the agony began to fade. He would leave his secret thoughts behind with his body that lay at the mouth of the tunnel, he realised: he would be at peace. Then, just before the light rushed away from him and went out, the little girl leaned into the tunnel and stared pitilessly at him, reminding him of his worst fancies and the guilt they bred, leaving him alone with them in the dark.

Chapter Nine
    A three-year-old was crying because she couldn’t scratch her arm through the plaster cast when Derek phoned the ward. “The Southport job’s a bugger. I won’t be home until nine at least. Jo says she’ll take Rowan home from school.”
    “All right, love,” Alison said as the three-year-old began to cry harder. “Would you like to see what’s wrong?” she suggested to the student nurses who were sharing a surreptitious cigarette in the corridor.
    Both of them stared at her. “It’ll be the same as last time,” Libby said. “She’ll have to get used to being here without her mam.”
    Alison took her time about replacing the receiver, but couldn’t think of anything to say. A kind of indifference was part of the process you had to go through in order to work as a nurse, growing used to suffering even when it wasn’t yours—if you felt everything the children felt you would be in no state to help them—but Libby and Jasmine seemed less detached than apathetic. She knew that even if they qualified they might well find themselves back on the dole, but how could they be so uncaring? Admittedly the ward sister wasn’t much of a model, trying out her tetchiness and indolence for when she retired in five years, glad to have parents stay with their children so that they could look after other children in the ward. At least the nursing auxiliaries had children themselves and tried to treat the patients like their own, but if Rowan ever had to go into the hospital, Alison hoped the child wouldn’t be in this ward.
    You had to take care that the system didn’t infect you with its coldness, that the size of the hospital and the meagreness of its staff didn’t overwhelm you. The ideals you had when you started work gave way to reality, but surely that was preferable to Queenie’s way, withdrawing from the world so as to compliment yourself on preserving your ideals. You mightn’t be able to change the world, but you couldn’t tell how much of the world just doing your best might reach.
    One of the auxiliaries was quieting the three-year-old by reading her a story. Alison made her way through the ward, writing on clipboards, holding small hands, listening to confidences, murmuring reassurances. She kept her widest smile for the little boy whose parents had locked him in their flat with a television that had caught fire while they were