Simon Green - Ghost of a Chance

“Is it coming here?” said JC. “To this platform?”

Melody looked quickly across her sensor readings. “Coming right at us, JC. Damn, it’s moving fast.”

Happy stepped reluctantly away from the others, as though drawn to the dark tunnel-mouth. He moved slowly forward, step by step, listening rather than looking. JC gestured for Melody to be quiet. Happy stopped at the very end of the platform, a few feet short of the gaping darkness.

“It’s almost here. I can see a light, coming this way. The rail tracks are vibrating. I’d say this is almost certainly a real train. But it . . . feels wrong.”

“Then get the hell back here with the rest of us!” said JC.

Happy seemed to suddenly realise where he was. He sprinted back down the platform, not stopping until he was safely past JC and Melody, and had put the rack of instruments between him and the on-coming train. “Sorry about that,” he said breathlessly. “You can’t take as many pills as I do to make you brave and fearless without losing some of your self-preservation instincts. And they turn your piss orange.”

He broke off as the sound of the train grew suddenly louder—painfully, deafeningly loud. It filled their heads and shuddered in their bones, a far louder sound than any train should ever make. Like the roar of a great beast, it filled the station, harsh and threatening. JC realised he could feel it as much as hear it, a terrible presence that triggered a recognition in the darkest and most primitive levels of his mind, where the lizard brain had never forgotten how it felt to be hunted, to be prey. The whole platform shook, as though it was afraid of what was coming.

JC stuck his head right next to Melody’s and shouted in her ear. “Is this real ? Is that a real train coming, or some kind of psychic projection?”

“Are you crazy?” she yelled back. “Listen to it! Doesn’t it sound real?”

“It’s too loud! It’s too loud, and I don’t trust it! What do your instruments say? Is it real ?”

Melody checked her instruments, clinging to them for support. “It’s real enough! It’s showing up on all the sensors as a real moving physical object!”

“Of course it’s real!” yelled Happy, glaring at the tunnel-mouth. “I can hear screaming! I can feel real pain and horror and death! It’s real! It’s real! God help us all, it’s real!”

A burst of compressed air slammed out of the tunnel-mouth ahead of the on-coming train, sweeping through the station, hitting the three ghost finders like a blow in the face. They all rocked back on their feet as the air wave hit them, then the train roared into the station at impossible speed, brakes squealing painfully as the cars shuddered and skidded to a halt. Clouds of steam billowed up around the train and its long row of cars, thick creamy steam that stank of brimstone and blood, spoiled meat and sour milk. JC turned his head away from it. Melody bent over her instruments as though she could protect them with her body. Happy gazed into the slowly dispersing cloud of steam with an awful fascination, his face twisted with horror and disgust. JC made himself look back at the train. The steam died away, revealing a line of cars that stretched the whole length of the platform.

Every car was packed full of people, men and women from earlier in the day, caught and trapped, then taken away, not to be seen again, until that moment. They’d been in there for hours, travelling God alone knew where, in the dark places under the earth. Driven mad, they had turned on each other. JC and Happy and Melody watched helplessly as the trapped passengers went at each other with their bare hands. Half-naked, clothes torn and tattered, they fought and tore at each other like animals, their faces distorted by savage, primal emotions. They murdered and raped and ate each other, laughing and crying and howling like the damned things they were. Blood and shit and piss, and other liquids from torn-out organs, had been spattered and smeared across the car-windows, but not enough to hide the horror within. The uproar from inside the cars was almost unbearable, a horrible mixture of sounds that should never have come from human mouths.

JC and Happy and Melody saw it all, like glimpses into Hell.

JC grabbed Melody by the shoulders and physically turned her away from the sight, making her concentrate on her instrument panels instead. It helped to steady her, a little. She stopped shuddering and shaking and fought to understand what the readings were telling her. Happy was lying on the platform, curled up into a ball, both hands over his ears, while tears coursed down his face from behind clenched-shut eyes. JC shook Happy’s shoulder hard, and even kicked him a few times, but Happy was beyond reaching. JC reluctantly left him to his misery. There was nothing he could do to help Happy, but he had to believe there was still something he could do for the people trapped in the cars.

He strode over to the nearest doors and tried to force them open; but they wouldn’t budge, no matter how much strength he threw against them. He strained until his fingers cried out with the pain, and his back muscles ached fiercely. None of it did any good. He ran down the whole length of the train, trying door after door, and couldn’t move any of them. The train wasn’t going to give up its prey that easily. JC lurched back up the platform, breathing hard, his face slightly crazed, beating at the car-windows with his fists and shouting hoarsely, trying to reach the people within. To get them to acknowledge his presence, to stop them mutilating each other, if only for a moment. But none of them so much as noticed him, intent on the awful things they were doing and their own torment. JC wasn’t even sure they knew the train had stopped.

He tried the front doors, nearest the engine, struggling to force his aching fingers into the gap between the doors.

“You really think that’s a good idea?” said Melody, raising her voice over the bedlam. “You really want to let those animals loose, out here with us? Listen to them!”

“They’re the victims here!” JC said savagely. “It’s not their fault! They’ve been driven to this. Maybe if we can get them out . . . they’ll be themselves again. We have to try! We have to try to save some of them . . .”

But he couldn’t open the doors. He fell back from the train, breathing harshly, desperate to do . . . something. He spotted Happy still curled up on the platform and lurched over to him. He bent over the telepath, pulled the man’s hands away from his ears, and shook him viciously until Happy’s eyes opened and focused on JC.

“Leave me alone,” Happy said pitifully. “I can’t stand it. I can’t.”

“What are you picking up from the train?” demanded JC.

“Are you mad?” said Happy. “I’m doing all I can to shut it out! But it’s too strong, too powerful . . . my shields are nothing to it! Fear and horror and suffering, that’s what I’m getting! I’m not picking up a single coherent human thought from anyone on the whole bloody train!”

“Can you make them hear you?” said JC.

“They’re beyond that,” Happy said miserably. “They’re trapped in the eternal moment. Damned to a single time and place, forever. Only aware of themselves and each other; and the awful things they’re doing. They don’t even know we’re here.”

JC turned to Melody. “Talk to me! What are your instruments showing? Anything we can use?”

“Massive energy readings,” said Melody, concentrating on her instrument panels so she wouldn’t have to look at the train. Her eyes were wild, and she looked like she might be sick at any moment, but she kept her voice steady. “Definite traces of other-dimensional energies, but not from the train, or the poor bastards inside it. There’s something here in the station with us, deep in the system. In the tunnels, or maybe even underneath them. It’s powering the train, making it possible. It’s responsible for everything that’s happening.”