by Kim Newman
Didn’t matter if your finger was on the trigger of a .22 bird-blaster or the launch button of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, the principle was the same. Didn’t even matter what you were aiming at. Pull… point and press! Ka-pow!
‘Listen to her, Harry,’ he said.
Harry didn’t know what Richard meant. Why should he pay attention to some unscientific loon? In Harry Cutley’s parapsychology, cranks like Elsa Nickles were the enemy, dragging the field into disreputability, filler for the Sunday papers.
‘Listen to her accent,’ Richard insisted.
‘Oi don’t know what ’e means,’ said Mrs Nickles, indignant.
Class solidarity in Harry. If Richard’s manner got his back up, Elsie’s plain talk – even when spouting nonsense – should soothe him. Of course, she was from London and he was a Northerner. He might hate her just for being Southern, in which case Richard would give up and let the world hang itself.
Harry put the gun down and held up his wonky thumb.
‘Cor, that’s shockin’,’ said Mrs Nickles. ‘Let me ’ave a butchers. Been a school nurse for twenty years an’ never seen a kiddie do that to hisself.’
Harry let the woman examine his hand. She thought for a moment, then took a firm grip on the twisted digit and tugged it into place. Harry yelped, swore, but then flexed his thumb and blurted gratitude.
‘That’s better,’ said Mrs Nickles.
The pain had cleared Harry’s mind, Richard hoped.
‘We’ve met the thing behind the haunting,’ he told the Most Valued Member. ‘It was hiding in the little girl. It tried to possess you, but you fought it off. Do you remember?’
Harry nodded, grimly.
‘Continue with the report, Jeperson,’ he said.
‘It’s some sort of discarnate entity…’
‘A wicked spirit,’ said Mrs Nickles. ‘A frightful fiend.’
‘Not a ghost. Not the remnant of a human personality. Something bigger, nastier, more primal. But clever. It plucks things from inside you. It understands who we are, how we can be got at. It’s simple, though. It does violence. That’s its business. Feeds off pain, I think. Call it “the Gecko”. When it’s in people, they move in a lizardy way. Maybe it nestles in that reptile part of the brain, pulls nerve-strings from there. Or maybe it knows we don’t like creepy-crawlies and puts on a horror show.’
‘The Gecko,’ said Harry, trying out the name. ‘I’ll make a note of that. You found it, Jeperson. You’re entitled to name it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Now we know what we’re up against, we should be better able to cage it. I’ll write up the findings and, after a decent interval, we can come back with a larger, more specialist group. We can get your Gecko off the Ghost Train into a spirit box. In captivity, it can be properly studied.’
Richard knew a spirit box wasn’t necessarily of wood or metal. If ‘sealed’ properly, a little girl could be a spirit box.
Looking at Annette, who’d rolled under a table, Richard said, ‘If it’s all the same, Harry, I’d rather kill it than catch it.’
‘We can still learn, Jeperson. How to deal with the next Gecko.’
‘Let’s cope with this one first.’
Richard’s attention was called by the train’s rattle. Something had changed.
A whistle-blast sounded. Had there been another ellipsis in time?
‘Are we there yet?’ asked Harry. ‘Portnacreirann?’
‘Oh no, sir,’ said Arnold, who still didn’t acknowledge anything unusual. ‘We’re slowing to cross Inverdeith Bridge.’
Richard felt the pace of the rattle.
‘We’re not slowing,’ he said. ‘We’re speeding up.’
IV.
‘It was on a night like this, in 1931,’ said Mrs Nickles, ‘Inverdeith Bridge fell.’
Richard understood why the Gecko had killed Annette. She’d have seen what was coming next.
‘We’re in no position to make a report and act later,’ he told Harry. ‘The Gecko’s going to kill us now. It has what it wants.’
Harry and Mrs Nickles both looked puzzled.
Richard had a familiar sensation, of knowing more than others, of the power that came with intuition. It was warm, seductive, pleasant – he had the urge to flirt with revelation, to hint that he was privy to mysteries beyond normal comprehension, to crow over his elders. No, that was a temptation – had it been left there to dangle by the Gecko, or some other ‘wicked spirit’? Or was it nestled in the reptile remnant of his own brain, a character trait he should keep in check?
‘The Go-Codes,’ he said. ‘It has the number-strings.’
Mrs Nickles nodded, as if she understood – Richard knew she was faking, just to stay in the game. Harry was white, genuinely understanding.
‘It was lunacy to send the damned things by train,’ said Harry. ‘Ed advised against it, but the Club was overruled. By the Americans. Bloody Yanks.’
‘Bloody us too, though,’ said Richard. ‘This might have happened eventually, but it happened tonight because we were aboard. We pushed the Gecko. Which is what it wants. Us extraordinary people. We notice things, but things notice us too. We give it more fuel. If regular folks are lumps of coal, we’re gallons of jet fuel. Annette, Danny, you, me.’
‘Not me,’ said Harry.
Richard shrugged. ‘Maybe not.’
‘But her?’
Harry looked at Elsa Nickles.
Richard did too, for the first time really. Psychic Medium. A Talent. But she had something else. Knowledge.
‘Why are you on the Streak, Mrs Nickles?’ he asked.
‘I told you. To ’elp the good spirits and chase off the wicked.’
‘Fair enough. But there are many haunted places. Ruins you don’t have to buy a ticket for. Why the Scotch Streak?’
She didn’t want to explain. Harry helped her sit down in a booth. Arnold was eager to fetch her something.
‘Gin and tonic, luv,’ she said.
The conductor busied himself. Richard hoped the Gecko hadn’t left something in Arnold, to spy on them.
The whole carriage shook, from the speed. Crockery, cutlery, roses, anything not held down, bounced, slid, shifted. Air streamed through the hole in the roof, blasting tablecloths into screwed-up shrouds.
Arnold returned, dignified as a silent-movie comedian before a pratfall, drink balanced on a tray balanced on his hand. Mrs Nickles drained the g and t.
‘Hits the spot,’ she said.
‘Why… this… train?’ Richard asked.
‘Because they’re ’ere, still. Both of ’em. They’re not what you call “the Gecko”, but they made it grow. What they did, what they didn’t do, what they felt. That, and all the passengers who drownded. And all who come after, who were took by the train, bled their spirits into it. That’s your blessed Gecko, all them spirits mixed up together and shook. It weren’t born in ’Ell. It were made. On the night when the bridge fell. Somethin’ in the loch woke up, latched onto ’em.’
‘Them? Who do you mean?’
‘Nick and Don,’ she said, a tear dribbling. ‘Me ’usband and… well, not me ’usband.’
‘Nick… Nickles?’
‘Nickles is what you call me pseudernym, ducks. It’s Elsa Bowler, really. I was married to Nick Bowler.’
‘The Headless Fireman,’ said Harry, snapping his fingers.
Mrs Nickles grimaced as about to collapse in sobs. The reminder of her husband’s suicide was hardly tactful.
‘Don would be the driver, Donald McRidley?’ he prompted.
Arnold almost crossed himself at that disgraced name. The conductor fitted into this story somewhere. He looked at Mrs Nickles as if he were a human being with real feelings, rather than an emotionless, efficient messenger of the railway gods.
‘Donald,’ spat Mrs Nickles. ‘Yes, blast ’is ’ide. The Shaggin’ Scot, they used to call him. The girls in the canteen. We were all on the railways, on the LSIR. I was there
when they named the Scotch Streak, serving drinks. I was Assistant Manager of the staff canteen in ’31. Up the end of the line, in Portnacreirann. Don and Nick weren’t usually on shift together, but someone was off sick. They were both speedin’ towards me that night. I think it came out, while they were togevver in the cabin. About me. The bridge was comin’ down, no matter what. But somethin’ was goin’ on in between Don and Nick. Afterwards, Don scarpered and Nick… well, Nick did what he did, poor lamb. So we’ll never know. Don was a right basket. Don’t know how I got in with him, though I was a stupid tart in them days and no mistake. Don weren’t the only bloke who wasn’t me ’usband. Even after all the mess. If you want to call anyone the Gecko’s mum, it’s me.’
‘The driver and the fireman were arguing? Over you?’
Mrs Nickles nodded. Her false teeth jounced, distorting her mouth. Richard’s fillings shook. Harry’s face rippled. It was as if the Streak were breaking the sound barrier.
The train was going too fast!
‘What about the uncoupling?’
‘That! No human hand did that. It was your Gecko, come out of the loch and the fires in the ’earts of Don and Nick, reachin’ out, like a baby after a first suck of milk. It killed all them passengers, let the carriages loose to go down with the bridge. That was a big meal for it, best it’s ever had, gave it strength to live through its first hours. I’ve lost three kiddies, in hospital. That happened in them days. All the bloody time. One was Don’s, I reckon. That little mite’s in the Gecko too. It sucked in all the bad feelin’, all the spirits, and it’s still suckin’.’
Richard understood.
But he saw where Mrs Nickles was lying. ‘No human hand.’ Maybe the Gecko was partly poltergeist. Using the shake, rattle and rock of the train to nudge inanimate objects. The piano-lid snapping at Danny was classic polter-pestering. But for the big things, the fork-stabbings and grabbing the Go-Codes, it needed human hands, a host, a body or bodies.
‘It was both of them,’ he said. ‘It took them both. It made them do it, made them uncouple the train.’
He saw it, vividly. Two men, in vintage LSIR uniform, crawling past the coal-tender, leaving the cabin unmanned, gripping like lizards, inhumanly tenacious. Four hands on the coupling, tugging the stiff lever which ought not be thrown while the train was in motion, disabling the inhibitor devices that should prevent this very act. Hands bleeding and nails torn, the hosts’ pain receptors shut off by the new-made, already cunning, already murderous Gecko.
The coupling unlatched. A gap growing. Between engine and carriages. The awful noise of the bridge giving way. The train screaming as it plunged. Carriages coming apart among clanging girders and rails. Bursts of instantly extinguished flame. Sparks falling to black waters. Breaking waves on the loch shores.
An outpouring of shock and agony. Gecko food.
‘Jeperson,’ said Harry, snapping his fingers in front of his nose.
‘I know what it did,’ he told the Most Valued Member. ‘What it wants to do. How it plans to do it. Another Inverdeith disaster, all of our deaths, and it can get off the train. Free of the iron of the Scotch Streak, it’ll be strong enough to possess living, grown-up bodies. It can piggyback, get to the base, play pass the parcel between hosts, handing the Go-Codes on to itself. It can sit at a modified typewriter keyboard and use the numbers. It’s a hophead, needing bigger and bigger fixes. The deaths of dozens don’t cut it any more, so it needs to shoot up World War Three!’
Harry swore.
‘We’ve got to stop the little girl,’ said Richard. ‘Pass me that shotgun.’
V.
At the connecting door, ready to barge after the Gecko, Richard caught himself.
‘Fooled me once, shame on you, fooled me twice, shame on me.’
He turned and walked deliberately to the other end of the dining carriage, past Harry, Mrs Nickles and Arnold.
‘That’s the wrong way, Jeperson.’
‘Is it?’
‘I came from that way. Back there is, ah, second and third class. And the baggage car.’
Harry held up the other shotgun, left-handed.
‘Things change. Haven’t you noticed?’
Harry wasn’t stupid or inexperienced. ‘Dislocation phenomena? Escher space?’
‘Topsy-turvy,’ Richard said.
‘How do you know the configuration won’t switch back? The Gecko could keep us off balance, charging back and forth, always the wrong way? At Wroxley Parsonage in ’52, there was a corridor like that, a man-trap. The MVM before me lost two of his group in it.’
Jeperson was given pause.
He looked up through the hole in the ceiling, at telephone wires, clouds, the sky. He could tell which way the train was travelling but lost that certainty if he stepped too far away from the hole. The windows were no help. They might have been painted over or gooed on. A rifle-stock blow rattled but did not break the glass.
‘There’s a spirit ’ere ’oo wants to speak,’ said Mrs Nickles.
Harry was impatient. ‘There are too many spirits here.’
‘This is a new one, mate. I’m gettin’… ah… fingers?’
‘Magic Fingers?’ said Harry, suddenly taking the woman seriously. ‘Danny Myles? What’s happened to him?’
‘Lost, Harry,’ said Richard. This was news to the Most Valued Member.
‘Damn.’
‘’E says, don’t think, feel… Does that make sense?’
To Richard, it did. He shut his eyes and in the dark inside his head sensed Danny, or something left behind by Danny. He stopped trying to work out which way the train was speeding, just let his body become aware of the movement, the rattle, the shifting. He had little thrills, like tugging hooks or pointing arrows.
‘Spin me round,’ he said.
‘Like the party game?’ asked Mrs Nickles.
He nodded. Big hands took him and spun him. He went up on the points of his shoes, remembering two weeks of ballet training, and revolved like a human top.
He came to a stop without falling.
He knew which way to charge and did so, opening his eyes on the way. He didn’t even know which end of the carriage he was exiting from. He opened the communication door and plunged on, as if Mrs Sweet’s gun were a divining rod.
The others followed.
VI.
Richard knew Danny was tied here, along with many others. Magic Fingers was fresh enough to have some independence, but soon he’d be sucked in and become another head of a collective pain-eating hydra. The Scotch Streak was home to a Bad Thing. Haunting a house, or a lonely road or public toilet or whatever, seldom meant more than floating sheets or clammy invisible touches. The worst haunters, the Bad Things, were monsters with ambition. They wanted to be free of the anchors that kept them earth-bound, not to ascend to a higher sphere or rest in peace or go into the light… but to wreak harm. Plague-and-Great-Fire-of-London harm. Japanese-Radioactive-Dinosaur-Movie harm. End-of-all-Things harm.
He was in a carriage he hadn’t seen before but didn’t doubt he was on the track of the Gecko.
There were no windows, not even black glass. Hunting trophies on shields – antlers and heads of antlered animals – stuck out of panelled walls, protruding as if bone were growing like wood, making the aisle as difficult to penetrate as a thick thorn forest. There were rhino-horns and elephant tusks, even what looked like a sabre-tooth tiger-head with still-angry eyes. Low-slung leather armchairs were spaced at intervals, between foot-high side-tables where dust-filled brandy snifter glasses were abandoned next to ashtrays with fat cigar grooves. Potent, manly musk stung Richard’s nostrils.
‘What’s this?’ he asked Arnold, appalled.
‘The Club Car, sir. Reserved for friends of the Director, Lord Kilpartinger. It’s not usually part of the rolling stock.’
In one chair slumped a whiskered skeleton wearing a bullet-bandolier, Sam Browne belt and puttees. It gripped a rifle-barrel with both hands, a loose toe-bone stuck i
n the trigger-guard, gun-mouth jammed between blasted-wide skull-jaws, the cranium exploded away.
‘Any idea who that was?’ asked Richard.
‘He’s in Catriona’s pamphlet,’ put in Harry. ‘“Basher” Moran, 1935. Some aged, leftover Victorian colonel. Big-game hunter and gambling fiend. Stalked anything and everything, put holes in it and dragged hide, head or horns home to stick on the wall. Mixed up in extensive crookery, according to Catriona, wriggled out of a hanging more than once. He’s here because he won his final bet. One of his jolly old pals wagered he couldn’t find anything in the world he hadn’t shot before. He proved his friend wrong, there and then.’
An upturned pith-helmet several feet away contained bone and dum-dum fragments.
‘Case closed.’
‘Too true. They made a film about Moran and the train, Terror By Night.’
Richard advanced carefully, between trophies, tapping too-persistent horns out of the way with the gun-barrel.
‘Could do with a machete,’ he commented. ‘Careful of barbs.’
The train took a series of snake-curve turns, swinging alarmingly from side to side. A narwhal horn dimpled Richard’s velvet shoulder.
Richard heard Harry ouch as he speared himself on an antler-point.
‘Just a scratch,’ he reported. ‘Doesn’t hurt as much as my bloody hand.’
‘Shouldn’t ought to be allowed,’ said Mrs Nickles. ‘Shootin’ poor animals as never did no one no harm.’
‘I rather agree with you,’ said Richard. ‘Hunting should be saved for man-killers.’
Gingerly, they got through the club car without further casualties.
The next carriage was the dining car, again. Harry wanted to give up, but Richard pressed on.
‘Table-settings here are the other way round,’ he said. ‘It’s not the same.’
‘There ain’t no bleedin’ great ’ole in the roof neither,’ observed Mrs Nickles.
‘That too.’
‘We shall be pleased to serve a light breakfast after Inverdeith,’ announced Arnold. ‘For those who wish to arrive at Portnacreirann refreshed and invigorated.’
