Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

Speed, reckless speed. This beast could come off the rails at any time.

The windows were deep dark, as if the outsides were painted – or black-out curtains hung over them. Even if he got close to the cold glass, all he saw was a fish-eye-distorted, darked-up reflection.

They weren’t in a tunnel. They could have been on a trestle stretched through a void, steaming on full-ahead, rails silently coming to pieces behind them. Alone in the night.

He raised his hand and fingertipped the glass, getting five distinct icy shocks. He’d been leery of using his touching, but now was the time.

“Anything?” asked Annie.

He provisionally shook his head, but felt into the glass. It was thick, like crystal, and veined. He felt the judder of pane in frame, and caught the train’s music, a bebop with high notes, warning whistles and a thump of dangerous bass. 3473 had a heartbeat, a pulse.

A shock sparked into his fingers, pain outlining his hand-bones.

He was stuck to the window, palm flat against the glass, fingers splayed. Waves of hurt pulsed into him, jarring his wrist, his arm . . . up to the elbow, up to the shoulder.

Annie sat, mouth open, not moving. Frozen.

No, he felt her gloved fingers on his wrist, pulling. He scented her perfume, close. The brush of her hair, the warmth of her, near him.

But he saw her sitting still, across the table.

It was if his eyes had taken a photograph and kept showing it to him, while his extra-senses kept up with what was really happening. He moved his head: the picture in front of him didn’t change.

Annie was speaking to him, but he couldn’t make it out. Was she talking French? Or Welsh? He had the vile taste of lava bread in his mouth. He heard the train rattle, the music of 3473, louder and louder.

The picture changed. For another still image.

Annie was trying to help, one knee up on the table, both hands round his wrist, face twisted in concentration as she pulled.

But he couldn’t feel her hands any more, couldn’t smell her.

In his eyes, she was with him. But every other sense told him she’d left off.

His vision showed him still images, like slides in a church hall. It was as if he were in a cinema where the projector selected and held random frames every few seconds while the soundtrack ran normally.

A scream joined train noise.

Annie was in the aisle, arms by her sides, hands little fists, mouth open. Dark flurries in the air around her. Birds or bats, moving too fast to be captured by a single exposure.

The scream shut off, but Annie was still posed in her yell. Something broke.

In the next image, she was strewn among place-settings a few booths down, limbs twisted, dress awry. The frosted glass partition was cracked across.

The window let go of him. His hand felt skinless, wet.

Someone, not Annie, was talking, burbling words, scat-singing. No tune he could follow.

He waited for the next picture, to find out who was there. Instead the frame held, fixed and unmoving no matter how he shook his head. He stood and painfully caught his hip on the table-edge. He felt his way into the aisle, still seeing from his sat-by-the-window position. He tried to work out where he was in the picture before him, reaching out for chair-backs to make his way hand-over-hand to Annie, or to where Annie was in his frozen vision.

A heavy thump, and a hissing along with the gabble.

He stood still in the aisle, bobbing with the movement of the train, like the hipsters who didn’t dance but nodded heads to the bop, shoulders and hands in movement, carried by jazz. He guesstimated he was three booths away from his original viewpoint.

Then the lights flared and faded.

The picture turned to sepia, as if there were an even flame behind the paper, and the brown darkened to blackness.

He shut and opened his sightless eyes.

His hands were on chair-backs and he had a better sense of things than when treacherous eyes were letting him down. He heard as acutely as before. The gabbling was a distraction. Just noise, source-less. There was no body to it – nothing displacing air, raising or lowering temperature, smelling of cologne or ciggies. There was one breathing person in the carriage – Annette Amboise, asleep or unconscious. Otherwise, he was alone, inside the beast.

This was different; blindness, with the memory of sight. It was as if there had been white chalk marks around everything, just-erased but held in his mind as guide-lines.

It wasn’t like seeing, but he knew what was where.

Tables, chairs, roses in sconces, windows, connecting doors, the aisle. Under him was carpet. Under that was the floor of the carriage. Under that hungry wheels and old, old rails.

Now there were shapes in the dark. Sitting at the tables. White clouds like human-sized eggs or beans, bent in the middle, limbless, faceless.

He heard the clatter of cutlery, grunts and smacks of swinish eating. In the next carriage, the piano was assaulted. Someone wearing mittens plunked through “Green Grow the Rushes-Oh”, accompanied by a drunken chorus. This wasn’t now. This was before the War.

This was the Scotch Streak of Lord Killpassengers.

How far off was the In-for-Death Bridge?

He couldn’t smell anything. It was worse than being struck blind. He knew he could cope without eyes. He’d made it from Wales to London, once. He had the magic fingers.

Someone called him, from a long way away.

All he could taste was dry, unbuttered lava bread. Butter wasn’t to be had in London, what with rationing – his Mum used some sort of grease that had to be mixed up in a bowl. In Wales, with farms all about, there was all the butter in the world and no questions asked, but Mr and Mrs Jones didn’t believe in it. Like they didn’t believe in hot water. Or sheets – thin blankets of horsehair that scratched like a net of tiny hooks would do. Or music, except the wheezing chapel organ. When Danny drummed his fingers, he’d get a slap across the hand to cure him of the habit. He was not to get up from the table, even if he needed to take the ten steps across the garden to the privy, until he’d cleared his plate and thanked the Good Lord for His Bounty.

Most nights, he’d sit, fighting his bladder and his tongue, struggling to swallow, trying not to have acute taste-buds, ignoring the hurt in his mouth until the lump was solid in his stomach. “There’s lovely,” Mrs Jones would say. “Bless the bread and bless the child.”

In the dining carriage, there was lava bread on every table.

The communicating door opened. The racket rose by decibels, pouring in from the canvas-link between carriages where the din was loudest. A cold draught dashed into his face. Someone entered the dining car, someone who shifted a lot of air. The newcomer moved carefully, like a fat man who knows he’s drunk but has to impress the Lord Mayor. A grey-white shape appeared in the dark and floated towards Danny, scraps of chalk-mark and neon squiggles like those sighted people have inside their eyelids coalescing into a huge belly constrained by vertically striped overalls, an outsize trainman’s hat, a pitted moon-face. Danny saw the wide man as if he were spotlit on a shadowed stage, or cut out of a photograph and pasted on a black background.

He recognised the face.

A huge paw, grimy with engine dirt, stuck out.

“Gilclyde,” boomed the voice, filling his skull. “Lord Kilpartin-ger.”

Not knowing what else to do, Magic Fingers offered his hand to be shaken. Lord Killpassengers enveloped it with his banana-fingered ape-paws and squeezed with nerve-crushing, bone-crushing force.

Agony blotted out all else – he was in the dark again, feeling the vice-grip but not seeing His Lordship dressed up as Casey Jones. Burning pain smothered his hand.