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

He made it and found his feet on a veranda-like platform at the end of the carriage. He shook with fear and weakness and relief. Feeling came back, unwelcome, to his bloodied hand.

Between the carriage and the locomotive was the big, heavy coupling. Black iron thickened with soot and grease.

On the coupling squatted the Gecko. Only the braids and oily pyjamas even suggested this was still Vanessa. It was goblin filth on a poison toadstool, a gremlin dismantling an aero-engine in flight, the imp in Fuseli’s Nightmare hovering over a sleeping maiden.

With stubby-fingered, black hands, it picked at the coupling.

The Gecko looked up, eyes round, nostrils like slits. It hissed at Richard.

Blasts of steam came, surrounding them both with scalding fog. The whistle shrieked again.

In the coal tender, nearly empty this close to the destination, rolled two bodies, the driver and the engineer. They were sooty, with red torn-out throats. No one was at the open throttle.

Richard shook hot water off his face, which began to sting. He’d be red as a cooked lobster.

He grabbed the Gecko by the shoulders. He held folds of Vanessa’s pyjama top and pulled.

It gnawed his wrists.

Things hadn’t all gone the monster’s way. In 1931, it had unhooked the coupling at this point on the bridge. Now, it was using one little girl’s hands rather than two experienced men’s. The Gecko could give its hosts strengths, ignore their injuries, distort their faces . . . but it couldn’t increase a hand-span, or make tiny fingers work big catches.

The Gecko tried to take Richard and he shrugged it off.

They were more than halfway across the bridge.

“No room here,” he told it. “No room anywhere for you. Why not quit?”

Vanessa slumped in his grip, hands relaxing on the coupling. Richard picked her up, pressed her face to his chest.

“Can’t breathe,” she said, in her own voice.

This was too easy.

In the coal tender, two bodies sat up and began to crawl towards Richard and Vanessa. The Gecko had found experienced railway-men’s hands. This was where having a shotgun would have been useful – he doubted he could shoot Vanessa, even if he had smashed a plate in her face, but he’d have no compunction about blasting a couple of already dead fellows.

The Gecko had no trouble working both corpses at the same time, which meant there was probably still some of it in the child. It had been hatched in the driver’s cabin of 3473, and was at its strongest here.

The fireman threw a lump of coal, which broke against the carriage behind Richard’s head. The driver clambered off the tender, down to the coupling platform. There was a lever there, its restraints undone.

The bridge might not come down, but at this speed and gradient the uncoupled carriages would concertina, come off the rails, break through the girders, fall into the loch.

There was a lot of dawnlight in the sky now.

Holding Vanessa close, he felt something in the hankie pocket of her pyjamas. He shifted her weight to his left shoulder, freeing his right hand to pluck out the Go-Codes.

He held the celluloid up in the rush of air, then let it go, snatched away, up and over the lake, sailing towards Inverdeith. One of the most closely-guarded military secrets in the world was tossed into the wind.

“You should have committed the Go-Codes to memory,” he told the monster.

The Gecko’s corpse puppets opened throats and yelled, like the whistle. Then, the whistle itself sounded. The Gecko wasn’t only in the driver and the fireman. It clothed itself in the iron of the locomotive, the brass-trim and scabby purple paint. Its fury burned in the furnace. Its frustration built up a seam-splitting head of steam. Its hunger ate up the rails.

Richard thought he’d saved the world, but not himself.

“What’s keeping you here?” he asked.

Dead hands reached the uncoupling lever. Richard slid his cutthroat razor out of his sleeve and flicked it open. He drew the edge swiftly, six or seven times, across greasy, blackened meat, cutting muscle-strings.

The corpse’s hands hung useless, fingers flopping against the lever like sausages. The corpse was suddenly untenanted, and crumpled, falling over the coupling, arms dangling.

The Scotch Streak was safely across Inverdeith Bridge.

VIII

The fireman lay dead, empty of the Gecko.

It was just in the train now. The Scotch Streak’s lamps glowed a wicked red.

World War III was off, unless the Gecko could somehow let the Soviets know NATO’s trousers were down. But everyone on the train could still be killed.

At this speed, slamming into the buffers at Portnacreirann would mean a horrific pile-up. Or the Scotch Streak might plough through the station, and steam down Portnacreirann High Street and over a cliff. Like Colonel Moran, the Gecko was intent on spiteful suicide. It could carry them all with it, in fire and broken metal.

Richard knew Diogenes Club procedure. Solve the problem, no matter the cost. His father had told him from the first this was a life of service, of sacrifice. Every Member, every Talent, gave up something. Danny and Annette weren’t the first to lose their lives.

It might be a fair trade.

“Are we nearly there?” Vanessa asked, laying her head on his shoulder. “I’m very sleepy.”

He felt the weight of the child in his arms. He had to carry the fight through. For her. He only had a half-life, snatched from a void. He should have been dead many times over. There was a reason he’d survived his childhood. Maybe it was Vanessa. She had to be saved, not sacrificed.

“There’s one thing left to do,” he told her. “Have you ever wanted to drive a choo-choo train?”

She laughed at him. “Only babies say ‘choo-choo’!”

“Chuff-chuff, then.”

Vanessa’s giggle gave him the boost he needed, though he was still terrified. While facing demon-possessed zombies and nuclear holocaust, he’d misplaced his fear. Now, he was in charge of a runaway train, funk seeped back into his stomach. He found he was trembling.

He set the girl down safely and stepped over the dead driver, climbed the ladder to the coal tender, passed the dead fireman and got to the cabin. The furnace door clanked open. Levers and wheels swayed or rolled with the train’s movement.

It occurred to him that he didn’t know how to stop a train.

“Can I sound the whistle?” asked Vanessa. She had followed, monkeying over the coal tender, unfazed by dead folk. She found the whistle-pull, easily.

Richard absent-mindedly said she could and looked about for switches with useful labels like PULL TO SLOW DOWN or EMERGENCY BRAKES. He heard the Gecko’s chuckle in the roll of coal in the furnace. It knew exactly the pickle he was in.

Vanessa blew the whistle, three long bursts, three short bursts, three long bursts. What every schoolchild knew in Morse code. SOS. Save Our Souls. Help! Mayday. M’aidez! Richard wasn’t sure she even understood it was a distress signal, it was likely only Morse she knew.

The sun was almost up. The sky was the colour of blood.

Ahead, the rails curved across open space, towards Portnacreirann Station.

“I can see the sea,” shouted Vanessa, from her perch.

Richard muttered that they might be making rather too close acquaintance with the sea – rather, Loch Linnhe – in a minute or two.

“Here comes someone,” said Vanessa.

More trouble, no doubt! He looked back and couldn’t see anything.

He was reluctant to leave the cabin, though he admitted he was useless at the throttle, but surrendered to an impulse. He was sensitive: he should trust his feelings while he had them. He made his way back past the tender.