Ghost Train

by Stephen Laws

  ‘Feeding on fear.’ Mark took over from Chadderton, feeling the impulse, feeling the truth like a new heartbeat inside him. ‘It’s been feeding on fear, just like I told you before. And getting stronger all the time. In my dreams, I saw those people being killed, people with their lips sewn together. Chadderton, their lips were sewn together because those maniacs didn’t want them to scream. They didn’t want them to give voice to their fear by screaming. Because all the time, it was their fear of death that Azimuth was feeding on, not the death itself, not the actual spilling of blood. It’s feeding all the time, Chadderton. When it’s well fed and strong it’s been able to venture off the track for short periods. Very soon, it’s not going to be held on the line any more . . .’

  Mark’s head was beginning to spin. Mentally, he realised that he must pull away. He was keyed in to something that could burn out his mind. It was too dangerous to submit to these impulses for too long. But there was something very, very important in the back of his mind that he had to grasp now. His vision began to blur, there was an aching throb behind his eyes and the room began to tilt crazily. Dimly, he was aware that Chadderton was rising from his seat, that he had grabbed his arm and was shouting: ‘Davies! Come on, Davies! Pull out of it . . .’

  And then Mark was back. His eyes felt as if they were pulsing. Chadderton was looming over him.

  ‘We’re too late, Chadderton. Azimuth has put itself into three people who were travelling on that train. They’ve got off, they’re free to go wherever they want. It’s using them as catalysts for some terrible plan it’s got in mind. I can’t touch whatever it’s going to do. But it’s almost free of the line! And it’s got three people in its possession, they’ll do whatever it wants. It’s going to use them in some way to free it from the line completely.’

  ‘How long have we got?’

  Mark thought of Joanne and Helen lying in hospital beds; thought of that tall, ragged madman looming over his daughter with a metal railing held high. He thought of the secret, unknown horror which had claimed him on the King’s Cross train.

  ‘Days,’ said Mark.

  Nineteen

  The dull, heavy feeling in the pit of Chadderton’s stomach, which he had felt on that first evening at Davies’ house, had never left him. It had negated any real craving he might have for alcohol. He was quite unaware that this was the first time in five months that he had gone for forty-­eight hours without getting slewed out of his mind.

  He and Mark were travelling along the motorway in Chadderton’s car. It was 3.15 in the afternoon, Chadderton was driving and he gripped the steering wheel in front of him tightly to prevent the trembling he could feel in his fingers. He believed that it was fear making him do this; hadn’t thought that it also might have something to do with withdrawal symptoms. It was both. Mark sat next to him, staring silently out of the window. They had not spoken for over two hours, ever since they had been back to the hospital. Chadderton had sat in the car while Mark went in to see his wife and daughter. Helen was still asleep – the doctors had carefully avoided words like ‘comatose’ – and Joanne was recovering well. Whatever words had been exchanged between Davies and his wife, he had not mentioned them to Chadderton on his return. Davies’ face looked white and bloodless, the skin drawn tightly across his face. Chadderton wondered just how much he could be relied on.

  It was beginning to rain again. Twenty minutes later, Chadderton turned off the main highway and into a side road. Mark looked at him, puzzled.

  ‘This isn’t the way to . . .’ he began.

  Before he could finish, Chadderton had pulled up sharply on a grass verge at the side of the road, away from passing traffic. They were in the middle of nowhere, only a couple of trees at the top of the embankment breaking the monotony of a dull, grey sky. Chadderton kicked open the driver’s door, clambered out and slammed it behind him with such force that the entire car rocked. Mark struggled out too, feeling his legs’ reluctance to do their job, feeling sharp pain in his hip as he braced himself with the walking stick and looked over the top of the car at Chadderton who was pacing back and forth, growling under his breath.

  ‘What the hell . . . ?’ Mark began again.

  ‘This is crazy!’ yelled Chadderton at the top of his voice. ‘Absolutely bloody crazy! Magic and possession! In-­bloody-­visible demons riding across the countryside in bloody railway trains . . .’ He continued to pace back and forth between the car and the embankment, his voice shaking with rage. An articulated truck passed by, momentarily drowning his words. Mark watched in puzzlement as Chadderton snarled something unheard in his direction, waved a clenched fist. The truck passed on and his voice became audible again: ‘. . . must have some hang-­ups if you can even send your own bloody psychiatrist out of his frigging mind! The whole damned thing is bloody mad! Trafford . . . Trafford, I wish you could see me now! I wish you could see what’s going on here . . .’

  Chadderton sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping as his head dropped and he stared at the ground. He began to take deep breaths.

  ‘Chadderton . . .’ Mark began; and was silenced as, without raising his head, Chadderton held out a hand towards him in a gesture that demanded silence. He sighed deeply again, as if expelling something bad from his guts. And then, suddenly, he was moving back towards the car.

  ‘Okay. I’m all right now.’

  Mark’s look of incomprehension slowly dissolved. He began to laugh, slowly at first, but building inside him, at the utterly bizarre sight he had just witnessed. And even as he laughed, he knew that his wife and daughter were in hospital, his own life was in ruins, the prospect of a world-­shaking horror was imminent. He knew all these things and yet he laughed. He was still laughing as the car pulled away from the embankment and back to the main road.

  Twenty

  The evening mid-­week services at St Christopher’s were never particularly well attended. And although Parish Mass on Sunday was occasionally a different matter, Father Daniels always felt saddened that such a large, beautiful church should stand empty so often. There were perhaps fifteen people present that evening. Old Mrs Cavendish, who had seven sons and three daughters, all of them living away from home and none of them in contact with her. Her living room was a silent gallery of frozen, faded photographs of children grown into uncaring adulthood. Mr Phillips and his wife – both so quiet that he had never been able to find out what kind of people they really were.

  It was almost sunset and large shafts of golden light were spearing downwards through the stained-­glass windows. Light was shining directly into his eyes as Father Daniels began the service. Consequently, it was some time before he first noticed the two men sitting at the back of the church, silent and unmoving. He continued, noticing that they did not sing after he announced the hymn numbers. During prayer, they did not kneel like the other parishioners. They did not recite the Creed. And when the time came for Communion and the parishioners moved forward to the altar rail, the two silent men remained in their seats. Father Daniels realised that they were disturbing his concentration, that he was allowing them to let his thoughts wander. It wasn’t fair to the other parishioners. He put the two mysterious figures out of his mind and steadfastly continued.

  The angled shafts of sunlight had crept further across the church walls by the time the service had ended. As Father Daniels processed with his two altar boys down the aisle and into the vestry, he deliberately did not examine the two men as he passed them. In the vestry itself, he listened to the parishioners’ final hymn as he removed his robes and resumed an earlier conversation with Johnny Fallup about the outrageous interest charge on the hire purchase instalments on his new motorcycle. But at the back of his mind, he still wondered about the two silent men in the back seats.

  The time for private prayer after the final hymn always passed quickly and Father Daniels, now clad in his sombre black cassock, moved out of the vestry to talk t
o the parishioners individually before they left. His suspicions about the men were confirmed. They remained sitting, facing front. He knew that they were waiting for everyone to leave. That they were waiting to talk to him.

  Mrs Cavendish was, as always, full of praise for her sons and daughters and told him a family tale that he had heard many times before. Smiling, he listened and felt sad. Mr and Mrs Phillips thanked him quietly and left. He decided that he must pay a social call on them in the next week or so and find out what they were really like.

  ‘Well, gentlemen,’ said the priest, as his last parishioner vanished through the doors of the church into the gathering night, ‘I’m Father Daniels. How can I help you?’ He turned to face them as they rose from the back seats and came towards him.

  ‘My name’s Mark Davies,’ said the tall, thin man with the walking stick. There were dark circles under his eyes, as if he had been sleeping badly. Father Daniels could see a livid scar on his forehead, just below the hairline. ‘This is Insp . . . This is Les Chadderton.’

  The other man was perhaps Father Daniels’ age. He had stone-­grey hair and did not seem to have shaved for a couple of days. His words were tight and clipped when he spoke: ‘We need to talk to you, Father. Is there somewhere we can go?’

  Father Daniels looked at his watch. It was late and he and his wife had been invited to dinner at the home of a close friend. Tonight was one of his relatively free nights and he had promised Sheila faithfully that he would meet her there promptly.

  ‘There’s a nice warm fire in the vestry,’ he said. ‘We can go in there, if you like.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the tall, thin man called Davies as they moved through the connecting door at the side of the font. The church was echoing and lofty. It reminded Mark of the Central Station.

  A wind had begun to gust outside. Mark and Chadderton slumped into the two seats proffered by Father Daniels. Mark tried to suppress a groan as he sat. It had been cold in the church and his joints had seized up again after sitting for an hour in the same position. Father Daniels could not help but think that they had the look of two guilty men about to make confession.

  The room was fairly spacious. An ancient bookcase standing against one wall housed numerous theological volumes. A large gas fire hissed angrily as its grille began to glow orange. Father Daniels plugged a battered kettle into a socket above a small bench, took three cups from a nearby cupboard and arranged them by a teapot before sitting down heavily in an upholstered armchair that looked as if it had been there for a hundred years.

  ‘This is all very mysterious, Mr Davies. What can I do for you?’

  The wind moaned softly beyond the wide windows above the bookcase. A flurry of crisp brown leaves rattled across the glass and was gone.

  ‘I don’t quite know how to begin,’ said Mark, looking across at Chadderton. The priest noticed how the man called Chadderton kept his head down and stared at the carpet, his hands clenching and unclenching.

  ‘Try,’ said Father Daniels.

  ‘Do you believe in evil?’

  Father Daniels sat back, looking reflectively from Mark to Chadderton, elbows resting on the heavily padded arms of the chair and holding his hands before him in a kind of cat’s cradle of fingers. After a while, he said: ‘That’s not a bad try, young man. And quite a question to ask a priest, I might add. Is there a purpose behind your question or are you both here simply for a moral debate?’

  ‘There’s a purpose, Father,’ said Mark.

  ‘I’m a priest. Of course I believe in evil. Are you Anglo-­Catholic?’

  ‘No,’ said Mark; and then quickly: ‘I’m not talking in abstract forms. By “evil” I mean an outside, independently active, intelligent force.’

  ‘My answer again is “yes”. But it’s not quite as simple as that, as I’m sure you must really appreciate. You say you aren’t Anglo-­Catholic. Are you a Christian?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark, ‘I believe I am.’

  Father Daniels looked across at Chadderton.

  ‘No . . .’ he replied to the unasked question. ‘Listen, Davies. Rather than get into a debate on good and evil and little pink fairies, I think we’d better just tell him everything that’s happened.’ Chadderton fumbled in his inside pocket, produced his police identification card and handed it to the priest. ‘I’m an ex-­police Inspector. I haven’t been . . . operational. . . as they say, for about two months. You may well have read something in the news­papers about Mark Davies . . .’

  ‘Mark Davies . . .’ said Father Daniels as he rose creakily to his feet and crossed to the small bench. ‘Davies . . . yes . . . wait a minute . . . something to do with a train accident, I think.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mark. ‘There was a large-­scale investigation after I was thrown from the King’s Cross train. Inspector Chadderton was in charge of it. I was in a coma . . .’

  ‘That’s right!’ exclaimed Father Daniels as memory of the incident flooded back. ‘A coma. What a terrible thing to happen to you, my boy.’

  The panes of glass in the window were rattling now as the wind increased in force. Its moaning was louder and harsher as Father Daniels leaned over the bookcase to pull the curtains closed.

  ‘But, you’re recovered now, of course. You look . . . very well,’ he lied as he dragged the right-­hand curtain across.

  And then all hell was let loose in the vestry.

  In that instant, the windows exploded into the room in a whirlwind of glass and shattered wooden frame. The curtains billowed monstrously like huge wings as Father Daniels was flung across the room like a rag doll. Mark’s hand instinctively flew to his face as glass shards sprayed him. Chadderton tipped from his seat to the floor. And all around was the shrieking, banshee howling of the great wind which had preceded the explosion. Books flew through the air, ripped pages flapped and fluttered angrily in the maelstrom. Father Daniels lay on the carpet, mouth working soundlessly in the raging, howling wind that plucked his voice away.

  Something Else had come into the vestry.

  Mark knew it immediately and instinctively. He had shared an unknown, hideously intimate fourteen months with it. Host and parasite. An almost symbiotic, nightmare existence. His mind could smell it. It was a touch of crawling snakes. It was the face of the gorgon seen reflected in a mirror. And it was here again. Now.

  ‘God in heaven, help me!’ Mark found himself shouting as the dark wings of night flapped about him. Sight, sound and sensibility buffeted and whirled. He clawed across the vestry, lashing out with his walking stick at the raging wind that tore at his body. His feet connected with something soft on the floor. He groped downwards, felt an arm and saw Chadderton’s face for a brief instant before it was obscured by his flapping raincoat. Something screamed and snapped at Mark’s face like a wild, invisible animal as he seized Chadderton’s collar and heaved him into a sitting position. Chadderton pulled loose, stumbled to his feet and began clawing and snatching at the air around his head as if he were being attacked by a swarm of hornets. There was the sound of screaming again and Mark lunged around to the right where he knew Father Daniels lay. There was a loud, hollow clunking noise behind him, followed by a cry of pain; the kettle had whirled through the air and collided with Chadderton’s leg, scalding him. Mark stumbled across the priest, groped downwards again and began to pull him to his feet. Father Daniels’ face pressed closely to his own, and Mark knew that the priest was seeing his own worst nightmare. Mark tried to lift him, slapping his face, trying to make him not see. Chadderton was suddenly beside them, resisting the whispering in his head, seizing the priest’s arm and pulling it roughly over his shoulder. Gripping part of the priest’s robe, Mark lunged through the whirlwind, pulling them both after him like blind men. Over the raging of the wind, he could hear Chadderton yelling: ‘Where? Where?’ And, instinctively again, Mark knew where. The door between the church and the vestry lo
omed large and solid in front of them and, for an instant, Mark feared that Azimuth had locked it. He tugged at the handle and gave vent to a hoarse, deep cry when it would not open. Somewhere behind the storm, he could hear something that Chadderton had said to him earlier that morning: Some of the sites were destroyed, standing stones pulled down. Churches were built on some of the sites . . .

  Oh God, is this church built on a ley line?

  Chadderton was beside him again, the priest sagging semiconscious from his shoulder. With his free hand, he grasped the handle and wrenched hard. The door was not locked. The force of the whirlwind had been keeping it shut. Grudgingly, it pulled open.

  In the next instant, the three men fell through the vestry door and into the church itself. The cold, unyielding marble floor slammed Mark’s breath from his body. He felt sharp agony in his knees as the priest fell across his legs. Mark dragged himself away from the door frame, hand still clenched in the priest’s robe, trying as hard as he could to drag him as far away from the vestry as possible. Here in the church, there was no wind, only cool, clear air. Mark twisted round to look back at the vestry door which stood wide against the wall. Beyond the threshold, the howling, shrieking wind continued to devastate the room. A snowstorm of paper whirled maniacally. The bookcase tipped forward and shattered on the floor. The curtain rail snapped and the curtains danced wildly in the air.

  Azimuth raged invisibly on the threshold between the vestry and the church. But Mark knew now that it could not pass through into the church itself. And, as it raged, he looked quickly at Chadderton. He lay sprawled on the cold floor, his face buried in his hands. He had seen Hell before and he did not want to see it again. Father Daniels gazed openmouthed at the doorway, a look of absolute horror frozen on his face. Mark tugged at the priest’s arm, tried to tell him not to look, but his words were lost in the tumult.