by Stephen Laws
‘What’s up then, George?’ asked Joe. ‘You know fine well we’re too bloody early.’
‘Light’s on green.’
‘Yeah, I can see that. But the published time’s 15.33. We’re supposed to stick to that, otherwise it’s going to send all the other traffic to cock.’
‘Light’s on green,’ said George again faintly, as if he was in a dream.
The guard’s van communicator sounded. George ignored it. It sounded again and Joe waited for him to say something. But George continued to stare ahead, a vacant sort of look on his face. Joe picked up the receiver. Charlie Watts was on the other end.
‘What the bloody hell’s going on, George? You pulled off when people were still getting on, for Christ’s sake! People were still getting on!’
Joe looked across at George, unable to say anything.
Three
Wednesday 25th September, 8.00 am
Mark leafed through his reports as the Metro train flashed on towards the Central Station, wishing that he had had more time to study them. His attendance at the meeting in Doncaster had been a last-minute affair. George Anderson had originally been scheduled for the committee but had phoned in sick three days earlier. As second-in-charge, Mark had found himself pressed into service.
When the Metro finally pulled into the Central Station and passengers spilled out onto the platform, bustling ahead and up the escalators, Mark deliberately strolled casually behind. He had lots of time to spare before his train was due. His seat was booked first class, so he knew that there would be no rush and struggle to find a suitable seat where he could sit comfortably and study his papers as the train journeyed on to Doncaster, down the King’s Cross line.
As usual, the station was a hive of activity. Thoughts of departmental priorities and the best way to present his reports were still occupying Mark’s thoughts as he bought a newspaper and headed for the station buffet. After a cup of coffee, he made his way back towards the ticket barrier. He handed over his ticket. An inspector punched it and handed it back, and Mark, his thoughts still on the reports, passed casually through and over the ramp bridging the King’s Cross line. There were fewer passengers on Platform Nine than he had anticipated: a gaggle of football fans with brightly coloured scarves and holdalls containing, no doubt, a beer simply that would last them to wherever they were going. Families going on or returning from holiday. A few students. At the bottom end of the platform, a group of old age pensioners, obviously on a day’s outing – probably York, to visit the Minster – and enjoying every minute of it, come rain or shine. The rush and bustle of the Metro passengers had obviously been mostly local commuters to the city centre.
The King’s Cross train rushed into Platform Nine five minutes later, like some huge juggernaut. Curiously, Mark found himself thinking of Moby Dick, the great white whale, as the sleek, blank locomotive cabin slid past him with its slit-glass eyes fixed ahead on its ultimate destination. The train itself was like an enormous, incredibly fast and powerful animal. ‘Thar she blows!’ thought Mark humorously as the train finally halted and he began walking along the platform towards the first-class compartments. Carriage ‘C’ was relatively deserted when he finally clambered aboard. After a short walk along the corridor, he found his compartment. It was empty. Grateful for this chance of seclusion and an opportunity to spread himself out a little, he took off his coat, laid his briefcase on the seat next to him and in five minutes was once again totally engrossed in his papers, pausing only to watch as the train eventually pulled out of the station and across the River Tyne. He never failed to enjoy the view of the river as the train passed over. He wondered how many other passengers had looked down to the Quayside and wondered about the old buildings that still existed there. Bessie Surtees House, the Cooperage. And how many people had gazed up wondering about the trains? He thought of the Newcastle Quayside prints on his living room wall at home. Warehouses and businesses had now taken the place of what had once been a teeming huddle of tumbledown houses and cobbled streets filled with pedlars and ragged kids. He returned to his work as the train crossed the river into Gateshead and headed south.
Mark had no idea that he had fallen asleep. He jerked awake, knowing that he had emerged from a particularly unpleasant dream which he could not remember. In panic, he thought that he had slept past his stop, but a quick glance at his watch assured him that there was still some time to go before they arrived at his destination.
‘What the hell . . . ?’ He rubbed his face, puzzled. He remembered being absorbed in his notes, but couldn’t remember nodding off. He hadn’t even been tired. His sleep the previous night had been untroubled and refreshing. ‘I must be getting old,’ he thought, taking a mint from his pocket and popping it into his mouth to get rid of the sour taste. He felt curiously unsettled, and realised that it must have been his dream. He tried hard to remember, but all that remained was a series of fleeting images: a deep, sepulchral voice speaking obscene words in darkness; something to do with crawling snakes; and the feeling that he had been trying to resist what the words were telling him. He seemed to have clawed himself awake just as he had done in earlier days, when he suffered from those terrible dreams as a kid. Mark thought of the Ghost Train Man, and then put remembrance firmly to the back of his mind.
He stood up and stretched, groaning aloud. He moved to the carriage window and looked out. Warehouses and factories flashed past; barren stretches of British Rail land smothered in weeds and rusted outbuildings. He had no real idea where they were. He moved back to his seat, tidied his papers and slipped them into his briefcase, wondering if he should make his way down to the buffet car and get a cup of coffee before the next stop. He tucked his briefcase on the rack above him; the last thing he wanted was for some yob to stroll in while he was gone and pinch his papers. Perversely, he prided himself that if that did happen, he would now quite relish the opportunity to get up in the committee room and speak without any aide-memoire. It should come as second nature to him to deliver a spectacular presentation and have his own department’s recommendations accepted. Mark harrumphed at his own lack of modesty and stepped out into the corridor. He slid the door shut and turned away.
And then slammed himself backwards against the door in alarm, even before he had grasped what he saw before him.
The train corridor was clogged and smothered for as far as he could see in a cloying white, silken substance. Walls, ceiling and floor had almost been obliterated by a thick mantle of spiralling whiteness which stretched from Mark’s compartment door and away down the corridor towards the rear of the train. He looked along the corridor in the other direction, towards the front of the train. It remained unchanged. Everything up there looked normal enough. He moved backwards, away from the tangled white shrouds, looking into the compartment next to him to see if there was anyone there with whom he could confirm this strange sight. It was empty. Mark’s first thought was that a fire extinguisher had somehow been triggered and had produced the effect. Maybe by one of the football fans, tanked up on cans of lager. But surely the noise would have woken him? The smothering whiteness also reminded him of something else. And the likeness conjured up a childhood dread of Mark’s that he had somehow never quite got over. It looked like a web. Just like the spider’s webs that were spun between the cracks on a dilapidated garden wall. A whorling spiral of web, stretching way back into a fissure. He remembered once poking a twig into one such crack, knowing that there was a spider in there somewhere. And when the ugly brute had finally been coaxed out, he remembered how frightened and nauseous he had felt. And now, this mass of web-like stuff brought back his childhood fear of spiders.
For a second, he thought of pulling the communication handle. After all, there might have been some kind of accident. It was impossible to see down the corridor beyond the whiteness. Anything could have happened. In the centre of it all, where the corridor should have led, was only a smo
thering blackness. Just like the blackness in a spider’s web, hiding that horrible eight-eyed face, waiting for a fly . . . Stop it! thought Mark. But the train was still moving. There was no sign of a fire. Even so, all this stuff everywhere . . .
He slid back into the compartment, trying to avoid looking into the white mass as he moved. He crossed to the emergency handle, reached up and pulled it.
Nothing happened.
He pulled again, and again. But the train continued to move. The handle had no effect.
The bloody thing must be broken, thought Mark. Well done, British Rail! You’ve got a useless communication handle, and if the whole compartment was on fire, I couldn’t do anything about it!
He stepped back into the corridor, keeping to the corridor walls and window where the white stuff was not compacted too tightly. Silk-like fronds swayed gently in the rattling motion of the train. He began to walk back down the corridor, passing the empty compartment in favour of the next compartment along, which might contain a fellow passenger.
. . . Just like the time you poked the twig into the hole and that eight-legged horror came out to look at you. And you knew, you just knew, that if it was big enough it would have no hesitation in eating you as well. Because it was small, it had to eat flies . . . But if it was big . . . as big as a man . . . why, then it would much prefer . . . Shut up! Mark told himself firmly. Shut up and stop making such a child of yourself.
He reached the compartment, caught a glimpse of someone inside in a flowing white dress, and slid open the door.
‘Excuse me, but I wonder if I might . . .’
And then he realised that what he had glimpsed was not a dress at all. Something that had once been human sat in the seat next to the window: a shrivelled corpse, swathed from head to foot like a mummy in a smothering tangle of web. The cocoon had been webbed firmly downwards into the seat and Mark could see, before he staggered away from the doorway retching, that part of the sunken face was just visible through its abominable shroud. The life juices had been sucked out of the body leaving a brittle, empty husk. And even though the face was less than human now, he could still see there the expression of shock and agony of someone who had first been paralysed and then eaten alive.
Eaten alive.
He twisted round to look at the vortex of web. Both the child and the adult within him knew it now for what it was. He began to pull himself backwards along the corridor wall, hand over hand, watching the tangle of whiteness for any sign of movement. Just as he had watched all those years ago, when he was a small boy. He shouted, in a cracked voice: ‘Someone . . . help!’ And as he shouted, the sound of his voice seemed to twitch the white mass. Somewhere, deep in the blackness, something was moving. A frenzied scrabble of movement. Something blacker than black. Now, it was frozen and immobile; still hidden in the centre of the tunnelled web. Watching. Again, a nightmarishly fast, twitching movement.
Mark turned to run, to get away, as something behind him burst out of the web and scrabbled down the corridor after him. Mark heard the dry scrape of clawed, spiny legs on the floor; a sibilant hissing and gobbling made by something that had come straight from Hell. He screamed. In that instant, he saw himself being caught in an embrace that defied the worst dreams of anyone who had ever known nightmare. He would be insane before those slavering fangs sank deeply into his body, pumping paralysing venom. He would be able to do nothing but watch as it ate him alive, sucking the fluids from his body.
He saw the emergency door at the end of the corridor. There could be no choice. An angry, insane rattling sounded from right behind him as he felt something sharp and covered in coarse fur scrape his neck. There could be no choice.
He flung himself at the door, pulled the handle and hurtled out into space. He had a glimpse of a telegraph pole looming towards him, saw the railway lines streaking past and then blue, cloudless sky. A roaring, whirling sound filled his head.
And then, only blackness.
Four
Dimly, George was aware that young Joe was talking to him, asking him what was going on. Another voice was reassuring Joe, telling him that everything was okay. He had been a driver for thirty-five years and he knew exactly what he was doing. Curiously, George realised that the voice talking to Joe was his own. Joe was saying something about the guard being on the blower, playing blue bloody murder with him. The guard had said that George had pulled away from the station when people were still getting on. Again, something that was using George’s voice was telling Joe that Charlie Watts couldn’t tell his arse from his elbow. George tried to say: What’s the matter with me! But he didn’t have a voice any more. His own voice belonged to something else. He knew fine well that they had moved off too early. It was unheard of; he had flagrantly ignored everything he had ever learned. Why in God’s name had he done it? Why couldn’t he speak to young Joe? Why did he remain seated at the driving panel, staring ahead at the track lurching out before him while that other voice (which was also somehow his voice) continued to placate his second man? What on earth could have possessed him to pull away from the station like that?
Philip, Grace and Angelina sat in the second carriage from the rear of the train. No one in the second-class section had seen or heard the commotion on the platform. Curious faces had looked up from newspapers and magazines as they had bundled on board, Philip carrying Angelina.
‘Had to run,’ said Philip by way of explanation. ‘Thought we were going to miss the train.’ He smiled a blank smile. Grace laughed and tossed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes.
‘You’re all right,’ said an elderly gentleman with horn-rimmed spectacles, beaming up at them. ‘The train’s not due to pull out of here for ten minutes . . .’ Someone had slammed the carriage door shut with unnecessary force, cutting the old man off in mid-sentence. And then the train was beginning to move away. The old man gaped in incredulity as the Gascoynes found a seat behind him. Angelina stifled her snivelling at last. The train slid out of the station past shocked and angry faces. The old man craned his neck to look out of the window, now joined by his wife, exchanging puzzled glances with the middle-aged couple who sat opposite them.
Grace had been hiding her hand under her coat. Checking to make sure that no one was watching, she took a box of paper handkerchiefs from her handbag with her free hand, plucking out a handful and wiping her other hand. The dark, blood-red paper was discarded on the floor.
Soon . . .
Philip, Grace and Angelina smiled again. A tear glinted in Philip’s eye and he thanked the Master for His love and mercy.
Mark’s trembling had ceased. The horror of his recalled experience was vivid in his mind. But he felt a completeness now that he had not experienced since the ‘accident’. The missing part of his shattered jigsaw was in place. Now he knew what had happened; his presence on the train at last, together with the new power which had formed in his brain because of Azimuth’s use of his mind, had finally unlocked the last secret of his nightmare.
Chadderton listened in silence as Mark talked. Father Daniels looked at him as if he had gone insane, as if Mark was now something of which to be afraid. Blood dripped from his fingertips to the carriage floor.
‘It made me see things that weren’t there. I know that now. While I slept, it got into my mind, got into my dreams and dredged up that childhood fear.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Chadderton. ‘And all the other poor sods who’ve been riding this train . . .’
‘Azimuth conjured up a pretty drastic kind of fantasy for me. That’s unusual, I think. I’ve a feeling that most of the other people he’s fed from didn’t go through the same kind of horror. He worked on their phobias and neuroses over a period of time – say a couple of hours, as they travelled on the train. But he plumbed right into my brain while I was asleep and had all that ready for me when I woke up.’ Mark gave a sharp, cynical laugh before continuing:
‘He must have been hungrier than usual . . . It would have caught me, Chadderton. It would have eaten me alive . . . at least in my mind’s eye I would have been eaten alive. It wanted to taste my fear and revel in my horror. By the time I’d got off that train, I would have been completely insane. Then it would have acted through me.’
‘And like you said before,’ continued Chadderton, ‘when we were talking about this whole thing being some kind of disease: you lay in a coma for eight months with this Azimuth thing still in your mind. In that state, you weren’t any use to it. You couldn’t do what it wanted. So it pulled out – it wasn’t strong enough to stay with you. It had to return to the line, just ■as it’s done with all its other victims.’
‘It left a psychic trace in me. That’s why I had the dreams; that’s why I saw things that weren’t there. And the trace that it left in me was compelling me to board the train again so that it could have another go at me. A small trace feeding from my nightmares all that time.’
‘It’s horrible,’ said Father Daniels.
Chadderton moved quickly back to the sliding door. ‘You said that those three . . .’
‘Catalysts,’ said Mark. ‘That’s what Azimuth calls them.’
‘Catalysts . . . yeah . . . You say they’re going to do something to get Azimuth off the line altogether and set it free?’
