Hell Train

by Christopher Fowler

  Nicholas saw Thomas appear at the end of the carriage, but knew there was nothing the little vicar could do. The Brigadier grabbed Nicholas once more and hurled him along the corridor, but Nicholas swung back, charging the Brigadier with his makeshift spear.

  The splinter caught at the officer’s neck, snagging his skin and eliciting a scream of pain. The Brigadier pulled the splinter free, but was unable to resist the smell of his own blood. Nicholas watched in horror as he thrust his bony fingers into the wound and sucked them. ‘I told you, you soon get a taste for it,’ he explained with the apologetic air of an addict. Then he came after Nicholas once more.

  They burst from the end of the carriage, into the rushing gap between the cars. Blood-fed, the Brigadier was faster and stronger. He quickly closed the distance, then tackled Nicholas, slamming his head against the door of the next carriage.

  Nicholas tried to keep his balance, but the train was lurching. He fell backwards into the space between the doors, and for a moment felt sure he would be crushed beneath the thundering wheels. He managed to clamber up, but became stuck between the two carriages. His arms were not strong enough to lift him further. The Brigadier towered above him, triumphant.

  ‘You’re insane,’ Nicholas shouted.

  ‘All the greatest leaders are insane.’ The Brigadier stepped down onto the carriage truck and raised his boot, pushing on Nicholas’s chest. Beneath him, the sleepers raced past in a blur.

  ‘I’m leaving the Arkangel at the next stop,’ said the Brigadier. ‘My work in the world is just beginning.’

  ‘If you leave me alive, I’ll hunt you down.’

  ‘All of us?’ The Brigadier gave a hoarse laugh. ‘In times of war, men like me multiply. But this, old chap, this is where you divide.’ Reaching down, he yanked open the release lever between the two carriages, and the coupling began to part. Nicholas felt himself slipping. He would fall to his death any second now. Nicholas sank lower as the coupling separated. I must have a fighting chance, he thought. The train would never have allowed me to break the door if it only wanted me to lose.

  He swung his fist, still attached to the fragment of door, but missed. His arm fell back, the wooden spear trailing and fracturing against the tracks. The Brigadier heard the noise and leaned forward to see if his quarry had lost an arm. Mustering all his strength, Nicholas swung again and this time lodged the door-sliver deep into the Brigadier’s chest, staking him.

  Nicholas grabbed the Brigadier’s boots, pulling himself up, and used the momentum to kick in the stake, then again until it burst out of the Brigadier’s back.

  As the train started to brake, he grabbed the collapsing Brigadier by his ears and shoved his head between the closing coupling, keeping his foot on it. The carriages slammed back together, shattering the Brigadier’s pate with a sound like someone shooting a melon with an elephant gun. There was a shower of brains and skull-shell, and the wrecked body slumped.

  As Nicholas rose to his feet and climbed back inside the carriage, he was immediately seized by his fellow soldiers.

  ‘That’s the one,’ said the first, dragging him to another compartment and handcuffing his right hand to a fresh door-handle. ‘Deserted his own men,’ the private told his comrade. ‘Left them to die. Couldn’t take the war. I’ve heard about men going mad at the Front. Look at him, fairly covered in the stuff.’ He relocked the handcuffs firmly around Nicholas’s wrist. ‘Don’t worry, pal. You won’t get away this time.’

  Nicholas looked down at his gore-spattered body, then at the handcuffs. He started to giggle, and the giggle became a laugh, and he found he could not stop. Behind him lay the bodies of the Major and the headless Brigadier. Isabella was crying, held back by Thomas.

  Behind them, the Conductor stood watching on impassively.

  Nicholas realised how it must have looked, but he also knew it was time to admit something else. ‘It’s true, Isabella,’ he called hoarsely to her from his prison, resigned to honesty. ‘I told you I was an adventurer, but before that I was a soldier. Three weeks of shelling, day and night, I couldn’t take it anymore. Our senior officers were all dead. The last few men left alive were looking to me to get them out. Instead, I ran and left my men to die. I’m a deserter.’

  ‘But you saved these men by slaying a madman,’ said Isabella. ‘You’ve done a good thing. This isn’t your life, it’s just the train trying you. Remember who you really are.’

  ‘I think I had already failed my test before I boarded the train.’ He gave a weary shrug. ‘The Arkangel found my flaw and exposed it, just as it did with the vicar’s wife.’ He turned to the arresting soldiers. Neither of them was a day over nineteen. ‘Listen lads, a court marshal is one thing, but a murder charge will drag you both away from the war. You’ll be required as witnesses. Let me loose and I’ll take the right way out, I promise you. I’m still a man of honour. You saw what happened. You must judge for yourselves.’

  ‘No, Nicholas.’ Isabella cried out. ‘Please.’

  The soldiers discussed the matter, then fell to arguing, before finally reaching a decision. One of them came forward and opened the handcuffs.

  Nicholas rubbed his bleeding wrist. ‘I’m so sorry, Isabella. Don’t you see? I failed because I failed you.’ He walked to the carriage door and opened it, preparing to leap into the rushing night.

  And suddenly the Conductor was calling from the end of the corridor. ‘The next stop is Blankenberg. Blankenberg, next stop.’

  The privates realized what was happening and went to grab Nicholas, but were too slow. As the train started to brake and the station hove into sight, he threw the door wide and was gone, wheeling away into the darkness.

  Isabella tried to see where he had fallen, but had no way of telling if he had survived. When the train finally heaved to a stop in Blankenberg station there was no sign of him. She could only pray that he had made his escape.

  It seemed unlikely that she would ever see him again. Had Nicholas failed his test or passed it, though? Had he lost his soul or survived? He had surely won the challenge, but what if leaving the train had cancelled out his victory? She wished she understood more clearly how the train ruled his fate, for she felt certain it must change everything in her own life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE STUDIO

  SHANE TURNED THE handcuffs over, feeling their weight. Emma told him that they had come from the set of Frankenstein Created Woman. A scene in which the female lead, the stunningly beautiful Susan Denberg, was to chain a lover to the end of her bed, had been cut in the anticipation of censorship problems.

  ‘The British Board of Film Censors have quite a bee in their bonnet about the linking of sex and horror,’ said Emma. ‘But in such an obscurely defined way that nobody is quite sure how to deal with it. You should see some of the letters that go back and forth, two seconds of heaving breast traded for a one-second splash of blood. Blood on breasts, their biggest bugbear—quite ridiculous in my opinion. We all know the supernatural’s not real. The stories are fables.’

  ‘But they explore real states of morality,’ said Shane. ‘They have the logic of dreams.’

  ‘Dream logic—yes, I like that.’ Emma was showing him around the stage set, an Eastern European tavern with a bar, a fireplace and part of a staircase. It had been cleared of furniture and was due to be struck the following morning. The tavern windows looked out onto a village and a forest respectively, both beautifully painted cycloramas. ‘The carpenters are due to move in tomorrow and rebuild this as part of the set for The Mummy’s Shroud,’ she explained. ‘Bavaria will be transformed into Cairo. Or was it Mayfair? I think we’re still undecided.’

  ‘I’ve always loved being on an empty film set,’ said Shane. ‘There’s something magical about walking across it after the crew’s packed up and gone home, knowing a drama has unfolded just a short while before. I guess at close quarters the fakeness kind of takes on its own reality.’

  He was looking for inspiration. E
mma had to go home tonight and get fresh clothes. She lived in Henley, and her sister was visiting, passing through on her way to Bristol University, so he resolved to return to the pub later and keep working at the script. But it was Tuesday evening and Carreras had thrown him by asking—very politely—if it was at all possible for him to have the script early on Friday morning, so that he could talk to the others about it. ‘The others’ apparently included Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Andre Morell and a number of possible Hammer Glamour girls who could be relied upon to spice up any screenplay with ample displays of cleavage and the requisite amount of screaming.

  Shane was convinced that his script would need a strong female lead. Hammer had relegated their women to shriek-and-faint roles for too long and, after all, this was 1966, not the 1950s. He knew he would need a few of Hammer’s traditional ‘creature-carrying-girl-in-nightdress’ poses to sell the picture, but he wanted his leading ladies to be as indelible as the men.

  Seating himself in a chair before the artificial fireplace, he tried to imagine himself in rural Eastern Europe in the late summer of 1916. He would probably end up using a fictitious country in the script. Carpathia was the popular choice, but if there was a real-life equivalent it would have been Romania.

  ‘I want to get the setting right,’ he told Emma. ‘Imagine the fear that must have infected the entire nation during the war in Europe. The uncertainly, the inability to trust anyone. Romania’s careful neutrality lasted for the first couple of years, then ended in mass slaughter. Its population tried to flee the onslaught of soldiers from Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria.’

  ‘It’s not a history lesson, it’s a horror film,’ Emma reminded him. ‘The audience doesn’t care if it’s Transylvania or Siberia. Hammer films are really about England and the English, anyway. Not the jolly old England you’ve probably been brought up with in America, but something I daresay you’ll find a lot stranger.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Our films are about human weakness, cruelty, sex and death. All the sort of subjects we find amusing.’

  ‘You’re right, that’s pretty strange.

  ‘What you don’t understand,’ she said, seating herself on the edge of the bar and swinging her long legs, ‘is that in this society horror movies get to the heart of a particularly cruel type of English personality. I think our films succeed because they’re made in a morally hypocritical country. The supernatural is turned into something unwholesome and sensual, and that’s linked to the growing freedom of our times. It’s a subject that’s guaranteed to make the Old Guard start yelling about the nation’s social fabric being undermined, and that’s always a good thing; it gets the column inches. We hit on a formula that surprised everyone, most of all ourselves. It’s a paradox, isn’t it?’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Well, the grand sets, the classical theatre acting, real performances from Peter and Christopher, and yet all that graphic gore, you’d think it wouldn’t fit together. But it does, perfectly. This country is still riven by class problems. We capture the callous attitude of the English upper classes in a way that no-one else has ever managed to. It’s just a subtext, but it’s always there. But of course if you try to talk to Michael about any of this, he’ll act like he doesn’t understand.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Understand how we hit on the magical formula? I think so. But I’m not so sure he knows why our fortunes are falling.’

  ‘One more horror film isn’t going to change that.’

  ‘I know, darling. If you ask me, the cycle’s just coming to a natural end. Nobody gets to ride the crest of the wave forever.’

  ‘So I arrived here at the wrong time. Story of my life.’

  ‘One last big hurrah, though. Wouldn’t that be nice?’ She smiled at the thought. ‘You and your script could take us out on a B-movie high.’

  ‘There’s a thought.’

  ‘You could combine the portmanteau approach with a traditional script, and add a wraparound framework, set in the present day. You know, get all the major audience types in. The marketing boys never really think about things like that.’

  ‘You could be right. You know, I can’t help thinking you’re a bit too smart for this job. And there’s a correlation between the present-day and the script. Imagine, during the Great War everything was so uncertain—people had no idea what tracks their lives would follow. And now we’re in the sixties and the old guard is ending, and the future is just as unknown.’ Pulling out a hipflask and filling his cup with malt whisky, he toasted her.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll do us all proud,’ said Emma, taking the cup from him.

  Later, settled once more in his cosy, over-floral room at the top of the Red Lion, he sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, and returned to the thundering decks of the Arkangel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE DEAD

  IN THE SCORCHING heat of the engine room, the stoker paused before the open doors of the boiler, listening for the soul of Nicholas as it crackled and popped in the flames. But he heard nothing. He frowned at the Conductor, who shrugged.

  ‘Not my fault,’ said the Conductor. ‘It wasn’t his time.’

  ‘What do you mean, it wasn’t his time?’

  ‘Passenger Castleford had the misfortune to bump into some of his old regiment,’ the Conductor explained. ‘Everything that happened to him was their doing, not the train’s. It had nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Then what the hell were the soldiers doing on board?’

  ‘They must have died nearby. I try to keep an eye on everyone who boards, but some slip through the net.’

  ‘But Castleford left the Arkangel—he forfeits.’

  ‘Only if he fled the train as an escape from his test. He clearly did not do so. I don’t make the rules. I’m afraid we lost one.’

  The Conductor strode back through the carriages, checking his silver pocket watch. ‘Train now arriving at Blankenberg,’ he called as the Arkangel came to a halt.

  COUGHING AND STAGGERING to her feet from where she had been flung by the Brigadier, Isabella steadied herself. She wondered how much of what she had seen was truth, and how much was fantasy. She was hurt that Nicholas had left without her, but could also see that he’d had no choice in the matter. She suddenly wanted to be home in Chelmsk, nestled with Josef in her father’s inn, but she knew it was no longer possible. The soldiers would have overrun the town by now. The foundry would have been requisitioned for the manufacture of weapons. Sides would have been chosen, troops garrisoned in the tavern, women endangered, the townsfolk made prisoners in their own homes. The world had been turned upside down and given a thorough shaking. Nothing could go back to being as it had once been.

  But what if she survived her journey on the Arkangel and went on to beat the Devil himself? The game she had played as a child had offered her a choice between Hades and Paradise. If she won, could she reset everything?

  She had no choice but to try. She was alone on the train with no destination, and only the Devil for company.

  No, there was Thomas, too. He had just appeared by her side and seized her arm now, calling her back. In his left hand he held his valise. ‘You feel it as much as I, don’t you?’ he was saying. ‘The lines between what’s real and what’s unreal are blurring the further we travel. I am determined to leave this train, and you must come with me.’

  ‘We daren’t leave,’ she told him, resisting. ‘You know what will happen if we do. You remember being shut in the coffin, and I saw what happened to Nicholas. We are all a part of this now. We must help each other survive, and see it through.’

  ‘I’d rather take my chances out there in the dark. If we stay on board we’ll surely die.’

  ‘No, only if we fail the tests. This way we have a fighting chance.’

  ‘I am not as strong as you, Isabella. I know I have weaknesses, and I fear the train will chance upon them.’

  ‘But if you leave, you won’t even have that
chance.’

  She had a point: the station was forbidding, empty, mist-shrouded. Thomas had been prepared to disembark without her, but perhaps she was right.

  ‘Nicholas said he failed not because of what he did when confronted by the Brigadier, but because he abandoned his men. But that was only his opinion of himself. He felt himself a failure. I think the train knows the nature of its passengers. It sensed your wife’s selfish heart, God rest her soul. Perhaps it saw a cowardice that had once existed inside Nicholas, or perhaps he happened upon the soldiers by chance. I am only sure of one thing. If we can overcome our weaknesses, we can survive.’

  Thomas did not look comfortable with the idea. He guided Isabella back to her compartment and seated himself beside her. ‘But surely all of us have flaws within our natures? If the Devil wishes to test us, how can we ever hope to win?’

  ‘We have to fight for what is right. That is human nature.’

  ‘But I am only human, as are you, and I must tell you that I have the capacity to sin.’

  ‘In what manner, Thomas?’

  ‘My feelings toward women—’ He looked down at his hands, uncomfortable. ‘They are my burden and my weakness. It is difficult for me to explain.’

  ‘Then you must find a way to control yourself. I, too, am aware of my faults. I have Pandora’s curse of curiosity. Ever since I was a little girl, it has got me into terrible trouble. No matter how I try, there seems little I can do to control it.’

  Thomas fretfully knotted his hands. ‘It is so vexing. I feel as if evil is pressing down on us, trying to invade the very marrow of our bones. I have never felt such a force before. At home in my little parish I preach every Sunday about the Devil. I talk about him all the time from my pulpit without ever really imagining him to be real. But now I see his power all around me, in the faces of the poor passengers whose souls he has snatched. For the first time in my life I am coming to an understanding of how he works.’