Hell Train

by Christopher Fowler

  He wiped his hand across the window and the landscape fell away, to be replaced by blank, silent blackness. ‘Hell exists in no geographical landscape. It cannot be found with compasses. I will show you where Hell is.’ He raised his index finger and touched his forehead. ‘It is inside here, and only you control it. Hell is the sum of your greatest fears. The most precious gift of life is the acknowledgement of your existence. Hell has no memory and nothing to offer except the thought that nobody ever cared about you, or ever will. Hell is an absence, the Hell of men and women who are utterly indifferent. L’Enfer, c’est les autres.’

  ‘Why would people dream of Hell?’ Isabella demanded to know. ‘We want what is good. We don’t wish to suffer.’

  ‘Bless you for your naivety, my little one. How little you know of the world. I only tell you this because you are family. And I would be proud to have you in the family business. Here, have your fantasies of Hell back.’ He passed his hand across the window and the fiery landscape returned.

  ‘The family business.’ Isabella turned the thought over.

  ‘Don’t do it!’ Nicholas shouted, hammering on the window.

  ‘You would really have me?’ Isabella asked, a smile touching her lips.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the Controller.

  ‘Your proposal is something to celebrate.’

  ‘I hoped you might see it that way.’

  ‘I suggest a toast.’ She held her glass high.

  ‘You’re a good sport. To your youth. And to your innocence.’

  The Controller drank noisily. Then he stared at her. A sudden look of unpleasant surprise crossed his features.

  ‘It’s true,’ Isabella admitted, ‘I’m young and have not travelled before. But I’m not that innocent.’

  The Controller appeared to be choking. He opened his mouth and found a pulsing white egg sac on his tongue. Isabella had slipped one of the eggs from Coleoptera Freely into his red wine.

  ‘Try taking your own test,’ she said, slamming his jaw shut with her fist and making him swallow.

  The Controller began to cough and shake. His sweating jowls and stomach wobbled. There was a pop as the egg sac burst open and new-born beetles invaded his guts. Moments later, the hungry new bugs found the softest channels of escape, burrowing out through his eyes and back again, noisily eating his brain.

  The Controller screamed as his head was devoured from the inside. The beetles burst out of his ears and took flight, heading into the corridor, and his headless body fell forward in a spectacular spray of gore, demolishing a bone china tureen filled with pork chops.

  Without a controlling influence, the Dark Angel began to shake itself apart. The walls around Isabella strained and creaked. Steel screamed and timber tore. Isabella rose and ran outside, where Nicholas was fending off a pair of dead blacksmiths with a broom.

  The windows exploded in splinters of glass. Pinned by his eyes, the Conductor’s body swung back and forth. ‘All change! All change!’ he managed to scream before his head came off.

  The floor was buckling as the undercarriage began to break loose and the great wheels bounced about, unmoored. Sparks sprayed all around them. The walls split, and part of the roof was ripped away. The Arkangel was breaking up faster than a ship hitting an iceberg.

  The undead passengers were thrown into a panic and all began to scream. The noise was appalling. The great train lurched and fell like a roller coaster.

  Isabella screamed.

  Nicholas yelled.

  Everybody shrieked.

  With its Conductor speared and its Controller beheaded, the Dark Angel fell back on the tracks, hammered over points and over a vast wooden viaduct, shedding its carriages as it went. Each was whipped away from the last as it dropped toward the empty, soundless void below, a Hell far more frightening because it offered nothing at all, the Hell of non-existence.

  The remaining carriages were tearing themselves to pieces. Isabella clung to Nicholas, recited the Lord’s Prayer and closed her eyes, hanging on for dear life.

  With a final boost of speed, the Dark Angel left the tracks and hurtled toward the end of the line.

  Ahead stood a vast dark terminus, black against black, almost invisible. Beyond them a wall of sound was rising, a cry of terror so dense and discordant that it seemed like one great voice. It broke over the train in waves, splintering into individual human cries, pleading, panicked, fearful, the voices of those who would do anything at all in order to draw one more breath. It was the sound of Hell’s damned, begging to be forgiven for their foolish, sorry, wasted lives.

  Isabella opened her eyes and looked upon the mouth of Hades.

  The terminus glowed with a million crimson pinprick fires, a vast dark landscape animated in hallucinatory hues. It was the antithesis of a starscape, the universe in reverse.

  The buffers and the siding roared up to the train and smashed over it with a thunderous roar.

  The Dark Angel ploughed right through, hurtling across the precipice. Isabella felt the cataclysm shake her bones, and saw the explosion as if from a great distance, as a volcanic flare in the night sky. The deafening grind of metal reverberated through the blackened countryside. The train sounded like a great dying beast.

  And finally, all was quiet.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  THE GAME

  THROUGH BLASTS OF steam and acrid coal-smoke Nicholas saw the nightmare vision roll back and fade like a scene fragmented by migraine.

  When he was finally able to raise his head once more and look from the window, all that remained was the empty plain, the ancient meadowlands, and the approaching forest of silver birches. The sky was clear and cornflower blue. He reached down and touched his breastbone, pushing his fingers beneath the rags of his blood-soaked shirt. There was no wound.

  He watched Isabella sleep on until sunlight dappled her cheeks, causing her eyelids to flutter. The train was still rocking and swaying, but gently now.

  It was dawn, and they were coming into a station. There were buckets of primroses on the platform. The sky was growing brighter by the second.

  The Dark Angel now looked like a rather shabby old train, brought out of engine-shed retirement for one last spin around the map. She had finally come home, to the place where she had been built.

  Isabella yawned and sat up, looking about herself. She stretched and climbed to her feet, opening a window, letting the breeze caress her. Shafts of sunlight fell all around.

  Beside her, Nicholas flexed his aching arms and rose. Squinting and shielding his eyes, he peered out into the brilliant sunshine. The train now looked like any other, patched and tired, grey with dust, its empty corridors scoured with overuse.

  Outside, everything was blue and yellow. Isabella opened the carriage door and stepped blinking into the light. She took stock of her surroundings and liked what she saw. The army had left the town. The platform was covered with flowers. She was home. Back in Chelmsk, where her father and friends were waiting to welcome her.

  Josef approached her shyly and took her in his arms, holding her safe. The men were different versions of themselves now—the good people they should have been, if the foundry had never allowed the committee to conduct its Satanic ritual.

  ‘Isabella. Thank you for coming back to me.’ Josef hugged her close to him. In her lover’s arms, Isabella looked up to Heaven and smiled. She felt that the spirits of Thomas, Miranda and all of the other undead souls who had been trapped on the train were looking down at her.

  Nicholas stepped forward. ‘Thank you, Isabella. Perhaps we’ll meet again in another life.’

  ‘What will you do?’ she asked, knowing he would go.

  ‘Paradise was always here waiting for you,’ he said with a shrug. ‘It’s not my world. My home is among the fine ladies of London. But perhaps I’ll stay for a few more days. I’ll never forget that I owe you my life.’ He blew her a kiss and walked away toward the sunlit lane that led to town.

  THE TRAIN SMASHED a
cross the room, blasting all the furniture to smithereens, then started to shrink, growing smaller and smaller, until it was a toy of battered green tin once more.

  It fell onto its side, smouldering, its engine shorted out. The passenger-pieces had been thrown from the Damnation section of the playing board, hurled from the path appointed by the cards, and had landed instead in Paradise. The train had scorched the board, obliterating the name of its destination.

  It was time to put the damaged pieces away before she got into trouble again. Her mother had come home. The little girl looked down at the outcome and smiled to herself. She was six years old, and her conviction that the Devil did not exist except in silly games would last for just another three weeks, until the day she went to the foundry to look for her uncle.

  ‘Isabella! Isabella!’ called her mother. ‘Wash your hands and come down to lunch right now, or there’ll be hell to pay!’

  Isabella wiped the pieces from the board and returned them to their boxes. Then she replaced the lid and re-knotted the string. On the lid was the picture of the Arkangel, accompanied by the caption: ‘A Century Of Wonders Awaits!’

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  THE DELIVERY

  ‘THANK YOU FOR coming back to me?’ said Emma. ‘That’s a bit rich, nicking the end line from Brief Encounter. That was a flop when it first opened, you know.’ She lay naked on his bed, reading the final pages of the script as rain coursed down the Red Lion’s windows.

  ‘It makes an ideal end,’ said Shane. ‘Besides, Brief Encounter is a train movie, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sure Freddie Francis would love to direct it, but you’ve absolutely blown the budget. Michael will have a heart attack when he sees you’re expecting us to build a vision of Hell. He’ll be thinking, now how can we re-use Dracula’s Castle as Hades? We’re much better at suggestion, a whisp of sulphur here, a touch of brimstone there. It’s cheaper that way. I suppose it could be done with miniatures, but they aren’t our strong point, I’m afraid. We’re terribly good at travelling mattes and glass paintings, though. We could probably cobble something together.’

  ‘Well, don’t sound too enthusiastic, eh?’

  ‘No, your script is exactly the kind of fantastical thing we’d do, but that’s sort of the trouble, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, there we are making these fairy tales starring middle-aged men, Frankenstein and Dracula and what have you, but the only reason the kids go is because they’re gory—and they’re not even that really, it’s mostly red paint and ominous chords, suggestively acted by professionals. The stories aren’t really about anything, are they? I mean, when you look at what’s going on out there in the real world, the teenagers all fighting one another and getting worked up about pop groups, and there we are making films about the concept of good and evil, set in castles in Transylvania. In deadbeat towns across the country, the kids are waging war with their elders. I know we don’t do social realism, you get enough of that on the telly now, but can you imagine anyone remembering any of this stuff in ten years’ time? Oh, I know we’re not creating high art or anything, but sometimes I wish we’d make something with more lasting appeal.’

  ‘Thank you for that.’

  ‘I’m just being honest. I think the writing’s on the wall for us. The Americans are gradually severing ties with the company. It’s getting harder and harder to enthuse our overseas partners. They’re talking about turning television shows into films next, just because audiences will instantly recognise the actors.’

  ‘That’s a cheering thought.’ He gave her a slap on the bottom. ‘Come on, get dressed, we’ve a presentation to get to.’

  They drove back to Bray and prepared for the meeting.

  ‘WELL, GOODNESS ME, you have been busy.’

  Michael Carreras turned over the final page and squared up the sheets. ‘It’s hugely enjoyable, of course. And there are some lovely roles. I can just imagine what Christopher could do with the part of the Conductor. He’s always complaining that we don’t give him enough to do in his films. I don’t think he’s quite forgiven us for making his role virtually mute in Dracula, Prince Of Darkness. And I’m sure Peter would jump at the chance to play both the undertaker and the chap who collects insects. He likes the smaller parts. Terribly self-effacing, for an actor I mean.’

  Shane waited for the but.

  ‘But it’s not cheap. I mean—Hell! Whoosh, there goes the budget right there. And all those undead passengers. I think we rather covered that sort of thing in The Plague Of The Zombies. I can’t see much of a future for zombies, can you?’ He patted the pile of pages. ‘There’s an awful lot of makeup and special effects work. We’d have to do weeks of experimenting with prosthetics. We’ve just done that with an Egyptian head while finishing The Mummy’s Shroud and I’m still not really happy with it. The film will probably go out as the lower half of a double bill, but at least we’ve got the Milk Marketing Board doing a nice tie-in. And then there’s all the soul-searching stuff. Too many abstract speeches. I can see the kids fidgeting about in those bits. So, all in all—’ He patted the script again.

  Shane caught Emma’s eye. He held his breath.

  ‘—I think we’re going to pass. We’re gearing up for another Dracula, a new Quatermass, and something from the black magic chappie, Dennis Wheatley, but I’m glad we took the time to investigate other avenues. I’m sure we can find something in the coffers to recompense you for your time. Emma, can you make sure Mr Carter is paid today? And see if you can’t find him something nice from the wine rack.’

  Shane went to take back the script, but Carreras seemed reluctant to part with it. ‘Could I ask you a favour—as a gentleman—not to take it straight to Amicus? I’m sure they’d balk at the budget, but even so, you understand...’

  ‘Of course. Entirely understood.’

  Carreras breathed a sigh of relief and returned the script. ‘I do hope you don’t think this little exercise has been a waste of your time.’

  ‘On the contrary. I think I learned a lot from it.’ He rose and shook Carreras’ hand. And then he was back in the corridor, heading for the wet green lawns and the countryside once more.

  Emma walked with him to the studio entrance. ‘I’ll send a cheque over to the inn and we’ll sort out the bill there,’ she said. ‘Don’t feel too bad about it. They’re trying to keep the company alive, and they just don’t know what works anymore. What do you think you will do now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Shane admitted. ‘There’s a lot happening in London at the moment. It feels like the place to be. If I stayed here, would you stick around?’

  ‘Of course. It’s my home. I’m like the girl in your script. You have to find Paradise where you can, but there’s nothing like going home.’

  Shane narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Am I missing something? Why do you think Michael turned the script down?’

  ‘I think he probably found it a bit too daunting. The risk was too great.’

  ‘I feel like the guy in those Amicus anthology movies,’ he said. ‘I suppose I should be thankful that Michael didn’t turn out to be the Devil.’

  ‘Maybe he did. If you’d gone to Amicus first, they would probably have hired you for an anthology film. Instead you came to us, and now you’ve promised not to go to them.’ Emma laughed. ‘Actually, Dr Terror didn’t turn out to be the Devil, did he? He was Death. The death of your script.’

  ‘Damn, you’re right. I should have remembered that. I think I’ve been had. In the nicest possible way. Can I ask you something? Were you a part of the deal?’

  She smiled sadly. ‘We had to make sure you produced a script, so that we could stop it. You accepted a paid commission, which makes it our property.’

  ‘I could write another. It was just a story. Characters live and die. They’re saved or damned. All very black and white. No moral, just entertainment value. Not like real life. It’s all so much more complicated out here, isn’t it?’r />
  ‘Not that much, and not from a distance. You’ll look back on this and laugh. Besides, I don’t think you’d have got on with Amicus. They’d have found your script a little too—questioning.’

  ‘I’ll never know now, will I?’

  ‘I can understand that you’re probably feeling a bit angry at the moment. If you ever decide to forgive me, you have my telephone number.’

  ‘I’m not angry, Emma. I think I learned something.’

  He kissed her and left, reluctantly.

  Climbing into the red MG, Shane took one last look back at the girl, the studio, the white crenelated walls closed in by the avenue of dense dark trees.

  SOON AFTER, BRAY shut its doors for good. It was never used as a studio again. Emma had been right. After The Mummy’s Shroud, Hammer left the studio, embarking on a desperate jumble of ill-conceived projects that killed their last hopes of ever regaining their unique position in the film world.

  Less than a decade later, after promises of a rebirth with grand new projects like Nessie and Vampirella, the company crumbled in the harsh light of economic reality and died, and the family of Hammer finally disintegrated. The carpenters and seamstresses, the designers and riggers, the writers, artists, cameramen and producers went their separate ways.

  Hammer’s ashes were blown to the four winds, to await fresh blood and rebirth.

  Pilot Paul Roan is in command of a Boeing 777 involved in a near miss. Nerves shot, he opts for a new life running a B&B in a coastal village with his girlfriend, Tamara. Not long after they arrive, Paul is involved in a serious accident.

  Emerging six months later from a coma, Paul discovers that Tamara is gone and a child killer is haunting the beaches. The villagers, appalled by Paul’s cheating of death, treat him as a sin-eater. They bring him items to dispose of, secrets far too awful to deal with themselves. At least he has local nurse, Ruth, to look after him. And Amy, a damaged soul with a special gift. She befriends Paul and together they unearth clues that might explain the shocking history of the village, and suggest the murders are anything but.