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

Mentally, Richard told Harry not to shoot the woman.

He could tell the Most Valued Member was thinking of it. Firing guns was addictive. The first time, you were afraid, worried about the noise, the danger, the mess. Then, you wanted to do it again. You wanted to do it better .

Didn’t matter if it your finger was on the trigger of a .22 bird-blaster or the launch button of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, the principle was the same. Didn’t even matter what you were aiming at. Pull . . . point and press! Ka-pow !

“Listen to her, Harry,” he said.

Harry didn’t know what Richard meant. Why should he pay attention to some unscientific loon? In Harry Cutley’s parapsychology, cranks like Elsa Nickles were the enemy, dragging the field into disreputability, filler for the Sunday papers.

“Listen to her accent,” Richard insisted.

“Oi don’t know what ’e means,” said Mrs Nickles, indignant.

Class solidarity in Harry. If Richard’s manner got his back up, Elsie’s plain talk – even when spouting nonsense – should soothe him. Of course, she was from London and he was a Northerner. He might hate her just for being Southern, in which case Richard would give up and let the world hang itself.

Harry put the gun down and held up his wonky thumb.

“Cor, that’s shockin’,” said Mrs Nickles. “Let me ’ave a butcher’s. Raised seven kids an’ never seen one of ’em do that to thesselves.”

Harry let the woman examine his hand. She thought for a moment, then took a firm grip on the twisted digit and tugged it into place. Harry yelped, swore, but then flexed his thumb and blurted gratitude.

“That’s better,” said Mrs Nickles.

The pain had cleared Harry’s mind, Richard hoped.

“We’ve met the thing behind the haunting,” he told the Most Valued Member. “It was hiding in the little girl. It tried to possess you, but you fought it off. Do you remember?”

Harry nodded, grimly.

“Continue with the report, Jeperson,” he said.

“It’s some sort of discarnate entity . . .”

“A wicked spirit,” said Mrs Nickles. “A frightful fiend.”

“Not a ghost. Not the remnant of a human personality. Something bigger, nastier, more primal. But clever. It plucks things from inside you. It understands who we are, how we can be got at. It’s simple, though. It does violence. That’s its business. Feeds off pain, I think. Call it ‘the Gecko’. When it’s in people, they move in a lizardy way. Maybe it nestles in that reptile part of the brain, pulls nerve-strings from there. Or maybe it knows we don’t like creepy-crawlies and puts on a horror show.”

“ ‘The Gecko’,” said Harry, trying out the name. “I’ll make a note of that. You found it, Jeperson. You’re entitled to name it.”

“Thank you.”

“Now we know what we’re up against, we should be better able to cage it. I’ll write up the findings and, after a decent interval, we can come back with a larger, more specialist group. We can get your Gecko off the Ghost Train into a spirit box. In captivity, it can be properly studied.”

Richard knew a spirit box wasn’t necessarily of wood or metal. If ‘sealed’ properly, a little girl could be a spirit box.

Looking at Annette, who’d rolled under a table, Richard said, “If it’s all the same, Harry, I’d rather kill it than catch it.”

“We can still learn, Jeperson. How to deal with the next Gecko.”

“Let’s cope with this one first.”

Richard’s attention was called by the train’s rattle. Something had changed.

A whistle-blast sounded. Had there been another ellipsis in time?

“Are we there yet?” asked Harry. “Portnacreirann?”

“Oh no, sir,” said Arnold, who still didn’t acknowledge anything unusual. “We’re slowing to cross Inverdeith Bridge.”

Richard felt the pace of the rattle.

“We’re not slowing,” he said. “We’re speeding up.”

IV

“It was on a night like this, in 1931,” said Mrs Nickles, “Inverdeith Bridge fell . . .”

Richard understood why the Gecko had killed Annette. She’d have seen what was coming next.

“We’re in no position to make a report and act later,” he told Harry. “The Gecko’s going to kill us now . It has what it wants.”

Harry and Mrs Nickles both looked puzzled.

Richard had a familiar sensation, of knowing more than others, of the power that came with intuition. It was warm, seductive, pleasant – he had the urge to flirt with revelation, to hint that he was privy to mysteries beyond normal comprehension, to crow over his elders. No, that was a temptation – had it been left there to dangle by the Gecko, or some other “wicked spirit”? Or was it nestled in the reptile remnant of his own brain, a character trait he should keep in check?

“The Go-Codes,” he said. “It has the number-strings.”

Mrs Nickles nodded, as if she understood – Richard knew she was faking, just to stay in the game. Harry was white, genuinely understanding.

“It was lunacy to send the damned things by train,” said Harry. “Ed advised against it, but the Club was overruled. By the Americans . Bloody Yanks.”

“Bloody us too, though,” said Richard. “This might have happened eventually, but it happened tonight because we were aboard. We pushed the Gecko. Which is what it wants. Us extraordinary people. We notice things, but things notice us too. We give it more fuel. If regular folks are lumps of coal, we’re gallons of jet fuel. Annette, Danny, you, me.”

“Not me,” said Harry.

Richard shrugged, “Maybe not.”

“But her?”

Harry looked at Elsa Nickles.

Richard did too, for the first time really. Psychic Medium. A Talent. But she had something else. Knowledge.

“Why are you on the Streak, Mrs Nickles?” he asked.

“I told you. To ’elp the good spirits and chase off the wicked.”

“Fair enough. But there are many haunted places. Ruins you don’t have to buy a ticket for. Why the Scotch Streak?”

She didn’t want to explain. Harry helped her sit down in a booth. Arnold was eager to fetch her something.

“Gin and tonic, luv,” she said.

The conductor busied himself. Richard hoped the Gecko hadn’t left something in Arnold, to spy on them.

The whole carriage shook, from the speed. Crockery, cutlery, roses, anything not held down, bounced, slid, shifted. Air streamed through the hole in the roof, blasting tablecloths into screwed-up shrouds.

Arnold returned, dignified as a silent movie comedian before a pratfall, drink balanced on a tray balanced on his hand. Mrs Nickles drained the G and T.

“Hits the spot,” she said.

“Why . . . this . . . train?” Richard asked.

“Because they’re ’ere, still. Both of ’em. They’re not what you call ‘the Gecko’, but they made it grow. What they did, what they didn’t do, what they felt. That, and all the passengers who drownded. And all who come after, who were took by the train, bled their spirits into it. That’s your blessed Gecko, all them spirits mixed up together and shook. It weren’t born in ’ell. It were made. On the night when the bridge fell. Somethin’ in the loch woke up, latched onto ’em.”

“Them? Who do you mean?”

“Nick and Don,” she said, a tear dribbling. “Me ’usband and . . . well, not me ’usband.”

“Nick . . . Nickles?”

“Nickles is what you call me pseudernym, ducks. It’s Elsa Bowler, really. I was married to Nick Bowler.”

“The Headless Fireman,” said Harry, snapping his fingers.

Mrs Nickles grimaced as about to collapse in sobs. The reminder of her husband’s suicide was hardly tactful.