by Clive Barker
His eyes jerked open. His mother vanished. The car was empty and the youth was gone.
How long had he been dozing? He hadn’t remembered the train stopping at West 4th Street. He got up, his head full of slumber, and almost fell over as the train rocked violently. It seemed to have gathered quite a substantial head of speed. Maybe the driver was keen to be home, wrapped up in bed with his wife. They were going at a fair lick; in fact it was bloody terrifying.
There was a blind drawn down over the window between the cars which hadn’t been down before as he remembered. A little concern crept into Kaufman’s sober head. Suppose he’d been sleeping a long while, and the guard had overlooked him in the car. Perhaps they’d passed Far Rockaway and the train was now speeding on its way to wherever they took the trains for the night.
‘Fuck it,’ he said aloud.
Should he go forward and ask the driver? It was such a bloody idiot question to ask: where am I? At this time of night was he likely to get more than a stream of abuse by way of reply?
Then the train began to slow.
A station. Yes, a station. The train emerged from the tunnel and into the dirty light of the station at West 4th Street. He’d missed no stops…
So where had the boy gone?
He’d either ignored the warning on the car wall forbid-ding transfer between the cars while in transit, or else he’d gone into the driver’s cabin up front. Probably between the driver’s legs even now, Kaufman thought, his lip curling. It wasn’t unheard of. This was the Palace of Delights, after all, and everyone had their right to a little love in the dark.
Kaufman shrugged to himself. What did he care where the boy had gone?
The doors closed. Nobody had boarded the train. It shunted off from the station, the lights flickering as it used a surge of power to pick up some speed again.
Kaufman felt the desire for sleep come over him afresh, but the sudden fear of being lost had pumped adrenalin into his system, and his limbs were tingling with nervous energy.
His senses were sharpened too.
Even over the clatter and the rumble of the wheels on the tracks, he heard the sound of tearing cloth coming from the next car. Was someone tearing their shirt off?
He stood up, grasping one of the straps for balance.
The window between the cars was completely curtained off, but he stared at it, frowning, as though he might suddenly discover X-ray vision. The car rocked and rolled. It was really travelling again.
Another ripping sound.
Was it rape?
With no more than a mild voyeuristic urge he moved down the see-sawing car towards the intersecting door, hoping there might be a chink in the curtain. His eyes were still fixed on the window, and he failed to notice the splatters of blood he was treading in. Until — — his heel slipped. He looked down. His stomach almost saw the blood before his brain and the ham on whole-wheat was half-way up his gullet catching in the back of his throat. Blood. He took several large gulps of stale air and looked away — back at the window. His head was saying: blood. Nothing would make the word go away.
There was no more than a yard or two between him and the door now. He had to look. There was blood on his shoe, and a thin trail to the next car, but he still had to look.
He had to.
He took two more steps to the door and scanned the curtain looking for a flaw in the blind: a pulled thread in the weave would be sufficient. There was a tiny hole. He glued his eye to it.
His mind refused to accept what his eyes were seeing beyond the door. It rejected the spectacle as preposterous, as a dreamed sight. His reason said it couldn’t be real, but his flesh knew it was. His body became rigid with terror. His eyes, unblinking, could not close off the appalling scene through the curtain. He stayed at the door while the train rattled on, while his blood drained from his extremities, and his brain reeled from lack of oxygen. Bright spots of light flashed in front of his vision, blotting out the atrocity.
Then he fainted.
He was unconscious when the train reached Jay Street. He was deaf to the driver’s announcement that all travellers beyond that station would have to change trains. Had he heard this he would have questioned the sense of it. No trains disgorged all their passengers at Jay Street; the line ran to Mott Avenue, via the Aqueduct Race Track, past JFK Airport. He would have asked what kind of train this could be. Except that he already knew. The truth was hanging in the next car. It was smiling contentedly to itself from behind a bloody chain-mail apron.
This was the Midnight Meat Train. There’s no accounting for time in a dead faint. It could have been seconds or hours that passed before Kaufman’s eyes flickered open again, and his mind focussed on his new-found situation.
He lay under one of the seats now, sprawled along the vibrating wall of the car, hidden from view. Fate was with him so far he thought: somehow the rocking of the car must have jockeyed his unconscious body out of sight.
He thought of the horror in Car Two, and swallowed back vomit. He was alone. Wherever the guard was (murdered perhaps), there was no way he could call for help. And the driver? Was he dead at his controls? Was the train even now hurtling through an unknown tunnel, a tunnel without a single station to identify it, towards its destruction?
And if there was no crash to be killed in, there was always the Butcher, still hacking away a door’s thickness from where Kaufman lay.
Whichever way he turned, the name on the door was Death.
The noise was deafening, especially lying on the floor. Kaufman’s teeth were shaking in their sockets and his face felt numb with the vibration; even his skull was aching.
Gradually he felt strength seeping back into his exhausted limbs. He cautiously stretched his fingers and clenched his fists, to set the blood flowing there again.
And as the feeling returned, so did the nausea. He kept seeing the grisly brutality of the next car. He’d seen photographs of murder victims before, of course, but these were no common murders. He was in the same train as the Subway Butcher, the monster who strung his victims up by the feet from the straps, hairless and naked.
How long would it be before the killer stepped through that door and claimed him? He was sure that if the slaughterer didn’t finish him, expectation would. He heard movement beyond the door.
Instinct took over. Kaufman thrust himself further under the seat and tucked himself up into a tiny ball, with his sick-white face to the wall. Then he covered his head with his hands and closed his eyes as tightly as any child in terror of the Bogeyman.
The door was slid open. Click. Whoosh. A rush of air up from the rails. It smelt stranger than any Kaufman had smelt before: and colder. This was somehow primal air in his nostrils, hostile and unfathomable air. It made him shudder.
The door closed. Click.
The Butcher was close, Kaufman knew it. He could be standing no more than a matter of inches from where he lay.
Was he even now looking down at Kaufman’s back? Even now bending, knife in hand, to scoop Kaufman out of his hiding place, like a snail hooked from its shell?
Nothing happened. He felt no breath on his neck. His spine was not slit open.
There was simply a clatter of feet close to Kaufman’s head; then that same sound receding.
Kaufman’s breath, held in his lungs ‘til they hurt, was expelled in a rasp between his teeth.
Mahogany was almost disappointed that the sleeping man had alighted at West 4th Street. He was hoping for one more job to do that night, to keep him occupied while they descended. But no: the man had gone. The potential victim hadn’t looked that healthy anyway, he thought to himself, he was an anaemic Jewish accountant probably. The meat wouldn’t have been of any quality. Mahogany walked the length of the car to the driver’s cabin. He’d spend the rest of the journey there.
My Christ, thought Kaufman, he’s going to kill the driver. He heard the cabin door open. Then the voice of the Butcher: low and hoarse.
‘Hi.’
/>
‘Hi.’
They knew each other.
‘All done?’
‘All done.’
Kaufman was shocked by the banality of the exchange. All done? What did that mean: all done?
He missed the next few words as the train hit a particularly noisy section of track.
Kaufman could resist looking no longer. Warily he uncurled himself and glanced over his shoulder down the length of the car. All he could see was the Butcher’s legs, and the bottom of the open cabin door. Damn. He wanted to see the monster’s face again.
There was laughter now.
Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathe-matics of panic. If he remained where he was, sooner or later the Butcher would glance down at him, and he’d be mincemeat. On the other hand, if he were to move from his hiding place he would risk being seen and pursued. Which was worse: stasis, and meeting his death trapped in a hole; or making a break for it and confronting his Maker in the middle of the car?
Kaufman surprised himself with his mettle: he’d move.
Infinitesimally slowly he crawled out from under the seat, watching the Butcher’s back every minute as he did so. Once out, he began to crawl towards the door. Each step he took was a torment, but the Butcher seemed far too engrossed in his conversation to turn round.
Kaufman had reached the door. He began to stand up, trying all the while to prepare himself for the sight he would meet in Car Two. The handle was grasped; and he slid the door open. The noise of the rails increased, and a wave of dank air, stinking of nothing on earth, came up at him. Surely the Butcher must hear, or smell? Surely he must turn —But no. Kaufman skinned his way through the slit he had opened and so through into the bloody chamber beyond.
Relief made him careless. He failed to latch the door properly behind him and it began to slide open with the buffeting of the train. Mahogany put his head out of the cabin and stared down the car towards the door. ‘What the fuck’s that?’ said the driver. ‘Didn’t close the door properly. That’s all.’ Kaufman heard the Butcher walking towards the door. He crouched, a ball of consternation, against the inter-secting wall, suddenly aware of how full his bowels were. The door was pulled closed from the other side, and the footsteps receded again.
Safe, for another breath at least.
Kaufman opened his eyes, steeling himself for the slaughter-pen in front of him.
There was no avoiding it.
It filled every one of his senses: the smell of opened entrails, the sight of the bodies, the feel of fluid on the floor under his fingers, the sound of the straps creaking beneath the weight of the corpses, even the air, tasting salty with blood. He was with death absolutely in that cubby-hole, hurtling through the dark.
But there was no nausea now. There was no feeling left but a casual revulsion. He even found himself peering at the bodies with some curiosity.
The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he’d seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene dance macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly.
Every part of the dead kid’s anatomy was swaying hypnotically. The tongue, hanging from the open mouth. The head, lolling on its slit neck. Even the youth’s penis flapped from side to side on his plucked groin. The head wound and the open jugular still pulsed blood into a black bucket. There was an elegance about the whole sight: the sign of a job well-done.
Beyond that body were the strung-up corpses of two young white women and a darker skinned male. Kaufman turned his head on one side to look at their faces. They were quite blank. One of the girls was a beauty. He decided the male had been Puerto Rican. All were shorn of their head and body hair. In fact the air was still pungent with the smell of the shearing. Kaufman slid up the wall out of the crouching position, and as he did so one of the women’s bodies turned around, presenting a dorsal view.
He was not prepared for this last horror.
The meat of her back had been entirely cleft open from neck to buttock and the muscle had been peeled back to expose the glistening vertebrae. It was the final triumph of the Butcher’s craft. Here they hung, these shaved, bled, slit slabs of humanity, opened up like fish, and ripe for devouring.
Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion, promising a blank indifference to the world.
He began to shake, uncontrollably. He felt his vocal cords trying to form a scream. It was intolerable: and yet to scream was to become in a short while like the creatures in front of him.
‘Fuck it,’ he said, more loudly than he’d intended, then pushing himself off from the wall he began to walk down the car between the swaying corpses, observing the neat piles of clothes and belongings that sat on the seats beside their owners. Under his feet the floor was sticky with drying bile. Even with his eyes closed to cracks he could see the blood in the buckets too clearly: it was thick and heady, flecks of grit turning in it.
He was past the youth now and he could see the door into Car Three ahead. All he had to do was run this gauntlet of atrocities. He urged himself on, trying to ignore the horrors, and concentrate on the door that would lead him back into sanity.
He was past the first woman. A few more yards, he said to himself, ten steps at most, less if he walked with confidence.
Then the lights went out.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.
The train lurched, and Kaufman lost his balance.
In the utter blackness he reached out for support and his flailing arms encompassed the body beside him. Before he could prevent himself he felt his hands sinking into the lukewarm flesh, and his fingers grasping the open edge of muscle on the dead woman’s back, his fingertips touching the bone of her spine. His cheek was laid against the bald flesh of the thigh. He screamed; and even as he screamed, the lights flickered back on.
And as they flickered back on, and his scream died, he heard the noise of the Butcher’s feet approaching down the length of Car One towards the intervening door.
He let go of the body he was embracing. His face was smeared with blood from her leg. He could feel it on his cheek, like war paint.
The scream had cleared Kaufman’s head and he sud-denly felt released into a kind of strength. There would be no pursuit down the train, he knew that: there would be no cowardice, not now. This was going to be a primitive confrontation, two human beings, face to face. And there would be no trick — none — that he couldn’t contemplate using to bring his enemy down. This was a matter of survival, pure and simple.
The door-handle rattled.
Kaufman looked around for a weapon, his eye steady and calculating. His gaze fell on the pile of clothes beside the Puerto Rican’s body. There was a knife there, lying amongst the rhinestone rings and the imitation gold chains. A long-bladed, immaculately clean weapon, probably the man’s pride and joy. Reaching past the well-muscled body, Kaufman plucked the knife from the heap. It felt good in his hand; in fact it felt positively thrilling.
The door was opening, and the face of the slaughterer came into view.
Kaufman looked down the abattoir at Mahogany. He was not terribly fearsome, just another balding, overweight man of fifty. His face was heavy and his eyes deep-set. His mouth was rather small and delicately lipped. In fact he had a woman’s mouth.
Mahogany could not understand where this intruder had appeared from, but he was aware that it was another over-sight, another sign of increasing incompetence. He must dispatch this ragged creature immediately. After all they could not be more than a mile or two from the end of the line. He must cut the little man down and have him hanging up by his heels before they reached their destination.
He moved into Car Two. ‘You were asleep,’ he said, recognizing Kaufman. ‘I saw you.
/> Kaufman said nothing.
‘You should have left the train. What were you trying to do? Hide from me?’ Kaufman still kept his silence.
Mahogany grasped the hand of the cleaver hanging from his well-used leather belt. It was dirty with blood, as was his chain-mail apron, his hammer and his saw.
‘As it is,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to do away with you.’ Kaufman raised the knife. It looked a little small beside the Butcher’s paraphernalia.
‘Fuck it,’ he said.
Mahogany grinned at the little man’s pretensions to defence.
‘You shouldn’t have seen this: it’s not for the likes of you,’ he said, taking another step towards Kaufman. ‘It’s secret.’
Oh, so he’s the divinely-inspired type is he? thought Kaufman. That explains something.
‘Fuck it,’ he said again.
The Butcher frowned. He didn’t like the little man’s indifference to his work, to his reputation.
‘We all have to die some time,’ he said. ‘You should be well pleased: you’re not going to be burnt up like most of them: I can use you. To feed the fathers.’
Kaufman’s only response was a grin. He was past being terrorized by this gross, shambling hulk.
The Butcher unhooked the cleaver from his belt and brandished it.
‘A dirty little Jew like you,’ he said, ‘should be thankful to be useful at all: meat’s the best you can aspire to.’
Without warning, the Butcher swung. The cleaver divided the air at some speed, but Kaufman stepped back. The cleaver sliced his coat-arm and buried itself in the Puerto Rican’s shank. The impact half-severed the leg and the weight of the body opened the gash even further. The exposed meat of the thigh was like prime steak, succulent and appetizing. The Butcher started to drag the cleaver out of the wound, and in that moment Kaufman sprang. The knife sped towards Mahogany’s eye, but an error of judgement buried it instead in his neck. It transfixed the column and appeared in a little gout of gore on the other side. Straight through. In one stroke. Straight through.
