Ghost Train

by Stephen Laws

  ‘Yes, they’re going to do something. But we’ve got to begin that exorcism before they do whatever it is they’ve been told to do. They tried to kill Father Daniels, so it’s obvious that they’re a little frightened of what we’ll be able to do ourselves.’

  Father Daniels stood up slowly from his seat.

  ‘Then I had better begin,’ he said.

  Chadderton stood aside from the door as the priest bent to open his briefcase. Mark watched as he took out a small, silver flask and a Bible with a gold-­embroidered cross on its cover. Laying them on one of the seats, the priest next took out two silver candlesticks and a small bowl. The candlesticks were placed on the floor at either side of the sliding door with the small bowl and Bible on the floor between them. Father Daniels knelt creakily in front of them and lit the candles, the flames wavering in the motion of the train. For a short while, he remained there in private prayer and then poured a small quantity of water from the silver flask into the bowl.

  ‘I exorcise thee, O creature of salt. I exorcise thee, O creature of the lines.’

  The priest turned slightly to Mark and motioned that he should come closer. Mark moved across and knelt beside him, feeling familiar pain creeping around his spine. ‘For your protection,’ said Father Daniels and, wetting his thumb in the Holy Water from the bowl, he made the sign of the cross on Mark’s forehead. Mark moved away again as the procedure was repeated with Chadderton.

  As Chadderton stood back, the priest leaned forward and, dipping his fingers in the bowl, rose to his feet again and began splashing the water down the main seal of the sliding door. Mark could feel that something was stirring uneasily.

  ‘God, the Son of God, who by death destroyeth death, grant that by the power entrusted to thy unworthy servant, the tormented lines which traverse this land and all who travel within reach of their seductions may be delivered from all evil spirits, all vain imaginings, projections and phantasms; and all deceits of the evil one . . .’

  Something, somewhere close, seemed to groan as the priest continued. Mark looked at Chadderton to see if he had heard or felt it. He was continuing to watch Father Daniels without a trace of the doubt or bitterness which he had displayed three days ago, even in the face of his own nightmare. But he seemed to have heard nothing as Father Daniels continued with the exorcism.

  Mark hoped that Father Daniels could finish sealing them in their compartment before Azimuth made his move.

  Five

  Now. The Beginning of the End. The Time of Arrival. Now . . .

  Angelina slipped past her mother and father when the Master spoke (at least they had been her mother and father once upon a time) and stepped out into the aisle between the seats. Philip was smiling, Grace was smiling and Angelina was more excited than she could ever remember being in her life. She ignored the pain in her back where the One Who Should be Tasted had hit her with his walking stick. The pain was trivial; it meant nothing compared to the great thing they were about to do. Angelina realised that she was about to do the greatest thing she had ever done in her life. It was the greatest thing all three of them had ever done in their lives. She turned to look at the middle-­aged couple who smiled indulgently at her.

  They are to be the first, she thought, and turned to see Philip and Grace nodding at her in expectation.

  Angelina crossed to them and held out a hand in a childlike gesture of trust. The middle-­aged lady smiled broadly, made a cooing noise and took her small hand. The man smiled too. And then Angelina began walking down the aisle, touching shoulders and arms, stroking hands. And smiling, smiling, smiling her little girl’s smile. She could feel the power in her fingertips as she touched. It was just like being in the schoolyard when they were choosing kids to make up a team. All the kids would stand up against the wall and Angelina would go along, touching the ones she wanted to be on her side. She was always the captain, always the leader. And she made sure that she got her way. None of the other kids dared cross her. If they did, she would make sure that they suffered for it.

  And now, as Angelina moved down the carriage and crossed into the next, she continued to touch hands with people, lightly stroking the knees of smiling adults as she passed. One lady patted her affectionately on the head as she passed. And that was all right, too. Walking and touching, choosing and disregarding, Angelina continued on her way down the length of the train.

  Eeny Meeny Miny Mo . . . Eeny Meeny Miny Mo . . .

  The first-­class carriages were different. They were all sealed off, unlike the open-­plan second-­class compartments. In those, she had to stop and knock. Then, when someone opened the door and asked her what was wrong or whether she was lost, Angelina would touch his arm, look past him into the compartment and say: ‘I just wanted to see what it was like in the first-­class part.’ The grown-­ups would smile indulgently or cluck in impatience before shutting the door. And then Angelina would move down to the next compartment. She had touched. And that was all that mattered. When a rather nervous looking young woman opened the sliding door and looked down at her, Angelina apologised and moved off without touching her. ‘There is much to be tasted there,’ she said in a small voice as she continued on her way.

  Father Daniels had sealed the door and window frames. He turned back to his seat, picked up the Bible and crossed to his briefcase once again.

  ‘There’s someone coming,’ said Chadderton from his vantage point at the door.

  ‘It’s a little kid . . . no . . . it’s the little kid.’

  ‘Get away from the window!’ Mark hissed urgently. Chadderton pulled back as the little girl reached the window and looked in.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed.

  Father Daniels stood back until he was pressed against the glass window on the other side of the compartment, gripping his hands tightly so that his wound throbbed and leaked blood onto the floor. The candles on the floor guttered sharply and blew out.

  The face which looked in on them was of something long dead. Mark had seen something like it in a familiar nightmare not so long ago. The empty eye-­sockets, the writhing worms and straggling hair.

  ‘Let me in,’ said a small, childlike voice through a mouth that had no tongue. ‘Please let me in.’ The corpse moved to the sliding door, pressed close against the glass and leered at them. A skeletal hand came into view, reaching for the handle. Chadderton uttered a cry of disgust and began to move forward. The wound on his arm where the girl had bitten him was throbbing painfully. Mark’s hand suddenly flashed out and closed on his wrist.

  ‘No! Don’t go over there! Father Daniels has sealed the door. It can’t get in!’

  ‘Let me in!’ said the death’s-­head face in a voice filled with childlike petulance and threat that was somehow the most obscene thing Mark had ever heard. ‘Let me in or you’ll be sorry.’

  ‘I command you in the name of God to be gone!’ Father Daniels, eyes staring, had suddenly thrust forward with the Bible and held it towards the abomination on the other side of the glass. A hideous, contorted and mocking laugh echoed in the corridor outside.

  And then the figure was gone.

  Father Daniels sat down heavily next to Mark.

  ‘It’s begun, then,’ said Chadderton.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark, ‘and we may not have much time.’

  Father Daniels struggled to his feet, relit the candles and continued quickly with the exorcism.

  Angelina had known exactly which carriage the Bad Men were in; she had been told. And she knew that the Master had given them all a lesson for trying to stop Him. He had given them a really bad fright. She giggled as she continued on down the train. Touching, brushing. And when she had gone as far as she could, she turned and hurried back the way she had come. When she passed the carriage where the Bad Men were, she ducked down low so that they could not see her. She could hear the priest saying things that she knew her M
aster did not like, and she hated them for it. Hurry­ing on, she finally came to the carriage where Grace and Philip sat waiting for her expectantly. She hurried to them, squeezed in past Grace’s legs and resumed her seat. Breathless, she sat back and began humming the noise that the train was making on the rails beneath them. Kuh-­huh kuh-­huh duh-­diddle duh-­huh. She watched, smiling, as Grace took the second knife out from under her coat. It was one they had found on the kitchen rack in their holiday cottage.

  ‘Now?’ asked Angelina.

  ‘Now,’ said Philip.

  Angelina bared her throat, head hunched back on small shoulders, as Grace leaned over and drew the blade savagely across. A gout of red spilled forwards across the table in front of them. Quickly, Grace handed the knife to Philip. Philip stood up and moved to the middle-­aged couple sitting opposite. The man was reading the paper, the woman looking absently out of the window. She turned to look at him as he drew level, and saw the little girl lolling forward as her life blood gushed over her mother’s lap. She made a small sound and began to scream.

  Philip stabbed the bloodied knife down hard, pinning the woman’s hand to the table top. Her scream snapped off. Her husband reacted first in amazed horror and then lunged at Philip in fear and outrage. But now, his wife had thrust him back into his seat and he just had time to see the insane glittering of her eyes before she plucked the knife from her hand and drove it into his chest with all her strength.

  Philip stood and watched as the chain reaction spread instantaneously down the length of the train. He watched as the One Who had been Chosen turned on the others. He watched as father killed son, mother killed daughter, friend killed friend, wife killed husband. He listened to the sounds of Hell echoing and shrieking down the train. He saw blood spilt as it had never been spilt before. He heard terror as never before; could almost feel the fear like a living, thrashing wild thing.

  A young girl tried to push past him, screaming a man’s name. Philip took the knife from the hands of the woman before him, the knife which she had now used to kill herself, and finished everything for the girl.

  He moved back to his own table as a carriage window shattered somewhere; accepted his wife’s embrace and returned her smile. He drove the knife in hard under Grace’s ribs. Smiling, she slumped from her seat into the aisle. Philip watched her, smiling indulgently all the time. Reversing the knife as his wife’s death spasms began to subside, he plunged it into his stomach and twisted. He bent over and fell to his knees beside Grace as the blood ran freely between his fingers.

  ‘Phil the Tiger,’ he said aloud, blood spilling over his bottom lip as he finally fell forward over the body of his wife. Sounds of pain, terror and death filled his ears. Philip thought of the Great Thing he had done as mists closed over his vision.

  And Azimuth feasted as it had never feasted before.

  Six

  ‘Why the hell did I pull out of the station when there were still people getting on?’ exclaimed George suddenly. Whatever had been stopping him from saying it before, whatever it was that had been using his voice, had suddenly gone.

  ‘George, have you gone completely out of your frigging skull? I’ve been sitting here trying to get some bloody sense out of you ever since we left! That’s what I want to know, damn it!’

  ‘I just pulled out . . . we were way ahead of time . . . we weren’t due to leave for another nine minutes . . .’

  ‘George,’ Joe was speaking to him in a deadly calm voice now. ‘I think you’d better let me take over. I know that you’re the driver but I don’t think you’re well. Do you hear me, George? I don’t think . . .’

  Joe’s voice cut off. Every gauge and dial on the driver’s panel had suddenly gone mad. The blue alarm light above them began to flash.

  ‘Christ!’ exclaimed George.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know! It’s . . . everything.’

  George slammed on the driver’s brake valve. Simultaneous braking would take place throughout the train and grind them eventually to a halt. But nothing happened. The train did not slow down.

  ‘Dear God!’ said Joe. ‘It’s picking up speed!’

  George stabbed at the engine STOP button. Nothing. He twisted at the power control handle; found it loose and useless, became aware that he was muttering, ‘Christ, Christ . . .’ over and over again as his foot stabbed down on the DSD foot pedal which should cut off the power and apply the brakes.

  ‘Nothing’s working!’ he shouted to Joe.

  ‘What do you mean, nothing’s working? That’s impossible!’

  The master fault lights on the driving panel flashed red, yellow, blue, red, yellow, blue. Joe grabbed at the warning horn lever. The horn remained silent as the train sped on, flashing through the station at Durham and leaving potential passengers gaping on the platform.

  ‘Get back into the bird cage and see what the hell’s going on!’ shouted George. Joe bundled to his feet, yanked open the cabin door behind them and wormed his way through into the cramped confines of the engine room behind the cab. It was a tight squeeze into the small corridor which lay alongside the main generator. Even above the noise in the engine room, he could still hear George yelling: ‘It’s impossible for this to happen! It can’t happen!’ He took down a bardic lamp, switched it on and began to scan the gauges. Every single fault light in the engine room was showing, and Joe knew that it was impossible for this to happen. And yet, they were. The gauges showed power failure, even though the locomotive was thundering onwards at an ever increasing speed. High water temperature, faults in the traction motor blowers, the lube oil pressure too low; the fuel gauge did not make any sense at all, the coolant was too low. The whole thing was a massive contradiction. Safety devices which should automatically have ‘tripped’ were not operating. The engine should have shut down. But it had not.

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’ said Joe aloud as he moved on.

  The water header tank gauge recording the level of coolant to the engine showed an impossible reading. Again, automatic shutdown should have occurred. To Joe, it seemed that every single gauge in the engine room was deliberately registering what it should not register. He made his way down the cramped corridor past the release valves and compressors to the boiler room door, shadows chasing shadows as he passed with the bardic lamp held before him. Was that something moving back there? No, just shadows cast by the bardic. He went through into the boiler room and stood beside the Stones Steam Generator, a long coiled tube with a brick firepot. The fuel pump, water pump and combustion air fan also registered impossible readings. The Servo Control Unit which controlled the fuel supply to the burner was fully automatic, as was the steam pressure control acting on the water by-­pass regulator. Being fully automatic, it was fully failsafe. With its present reading, the engine should have shut down immediately. But the engine had not shut down. Safety devices operating throughout the electrical supply itself had just not ‘tripped’. The hot contacts valves were wide open. And Joe knew then that the engine could not still be operating. But it was. The motor overload relay was not working. The steam temperature limit control was well above normal. The safety device had not stopped the motor. Joe tried the reset button to no effect and felt panic starting to swell within him. He had never felt claustrophobic in here before, but all he wanted to do now was get out as fast as he could. What he was seeing was impossible. As George had said: it could not be happening.

  It’s like the whole damned thing’s alive or something, thought Joe as he plunged through the boiler room and down the ­engine room corridor. He felt something drip onto his hand as he moved and instinctively pulled away. In the light of the bardic, he could see that there was a green, slimy substance on it. He looked up. The roof of the locomotive was running with the stuff. From nowhere, the thought sprang into Joe’s mind, with an ever-­increasing impetus of horror and fear, that he was about to b
e swallowed alive by something.

  ‘I’m going to die! I’M GOING TO DIE!’ he shrieked as he plunged forward.

  A shadow moved ahead of him, beside the generator. Joe pulled up sharply, thinking that George had left his place at the panel and followed him into the bird cage. He held up his lamp and had begun to blurt out that everything had gone totally out of control when the light from the lamp spilled across what stood before him. Words froze in his mouth. He felt the scream inside him, but could not give voice to it. When the shape moved towards him, he knew that it was real, that it was alive. The lamp fell from his grasp and shattered on the engine room floor. He clawed his way back towards the boiler room, sobbing as he went, the noise of the generator drowning out every other sound. And then, something seized him by the ankle. He fell heavily against the boiler room door, felt something else snake around his arm, dragging him down to the floor. In amazement and horror, he screamed hoarsely as another length of wiring from the generator itself tore free and wriggled towards him. He tried to back away, kicking at the wiring.

  ‘It’s alive!’ Joe heard himself scream. ‘The fucking train’s alive!’ More wiring wriggled and squirmed free and he knew that a greater horror, somewhere in the darkness, was moving slowly yet inexorably towards him. There was a loud crackling noise above him and a shower of sparks cascaded around his shoulders. He lashed out and tried to rise to his feet. What he had seen back in the bird cage must surely be almost on top of him. ‘OH GOD!’ A cable squirmed around his leg like a living thing, tightening and squeezing. Above him, the cable which had broken free hung live and spitting sparks. Another wire wrapped around his throat and slammed his head back against the generator’s cage. Joe screamed in a high, shrilling falsetto as that which had followed him moved into view in the boiler room doorway. He tried to pull away but the torn, living wiring of the locomotive itself held him secure and fast.