Hell Train

by Christopher Fowler

  He looked down and found that his sleeve was being tugged, as if by invisible hands. ‘What the—?’ He was pushed backwards and out of the compartment. The door slid shut on its own, locking him in the corridor, and the blinds rolled down over the windows.

  ‘Isabella! I can’t open the door,’ he shouted.

  ‘Thomas! You must be strong. It’s you, you’re next!’ called Isabella. ‘You mustn’t weaken!’

  With a great blast of steam, the Arkangel lurched and left the station of Blankenberg. Thomas was pushed along the carriage to whatever fate the train had prepared for him. The Conductor peered at him impassively from his alcove, then turned away.

  Thomas was pushed relentlessly back through the carriage. A sudden squall of rain lashed the train, spattering through the partially open windows. The glass rattled with thunder. In the other compartments, the passengers stared straight ahead, refusing to catch his eye as he passed them.

  ‘You!’ he called to the nearest, a red-faced peasant nursing a piglet in her lap. ‘Please, help me. If you know where we’re going and what will happen to me, I beg you to tell me!’

  The old woman stared at him as if placing a curse. In the next compartment, the two soldiers who had arrested Nicholas drank in sullen silence. As Thomas was forced on through the carriage, he became ever more disturbed. The blank faces watched as he passed, turning their heads in a single movement. But the more he called to them, the more they ignored him.

  The realization hit him like a blow to the stomach. Why had he not seen it before? Everyone else who had boarded the train was dead. Their souls had been taken. The soldiers, the farmers, the townsfolk—he and Isabella alone were intact. The Arkangel was ridden by all those who had gone to Hell. The four of them had embarked on a voyage of the damned—Miranda had already been lost, and who knew what fate might have befallen Nicholas?

  The force that had been dragging at his clothes fell away like dying wind. Thomas righted himself and looked from the rain-spattered window, trying to see out. The raindrops were going backwards up the windowpane, as if time itself was reversing. In the light of passing signals they looked like drops of blood.

  The world seemed to be slowing down. He felt calmer now. He took a deep breath. Perhaps his fears had simply overwhelmed him. For all I know, he thought, I’m still asleep in my comfortable first class compartment, dreaming. Perhaps all four of us are.

  He found he had reached the compartment where the Red Countess sat playing cards with a young peasant girl, a pretty little thing in a black velvet dirndl, with blue ribbons knotted through her blonde hair.

  The Countess glanced up at him through the glass. Her black eyes glittered beneath her crimson veil. She indicated that the girl should turn over her card.

  It was the Queen of Spades.

  The Red Countess reached forward and closed her hand over the girl’s. She spoke softly to her, then rose and briskly took her leave. The girl was indeed lovely, in an unspoiled country way. Thomas stopped to look at the Countess as she swept past him in a rustle of silk, her chin raised high, her attention focused elsewhere.

  A sudden noise brought him back to the girl with the card. She had slumped against the window, her head hitting the glass with a thump. Thomas stepped across the threshold of the compartment and bent down to check on her. He caught a sudden terrible stench of decay. Brushing her hair away from her cheek, he saw with a shock that she had aged years within seconds. Her skin was yellow and papery, as wizened and old as dried leaves. There were crimson pustules around her mouth, and her gums had dried out like old brown apples. She was growing sicker as he watched.

  ‘What is happening to you?’ he whispered, ‘What is wrong?’

  Her hoarse reply, in a Carpathian dialect, meant nothing to him. ‘I don’t understand,’ he told her.

  Carefully trying not to touch her, he loosened her collar and turned to open the window, but while he was trying to get her to some fresh air, she started to choke.

  She fell silent for a moment. He took her pulse, but could not think what else to do. As she turned to look at him, her eyes lost their light and sank back into her head. There came a sound from deep inside her, a bubbling haemorrhage of tearing tissue. She clutched at his arm, screaming, spitting, spraying blood, clutching at his shirt. He tried to push her back down, but the old woman—for she now looked to be eighty, not eighteen—clawed at his eyes, sending him reeling backwards.

  Thomas locked her inside the compartment, but she threw herself at the glass with a bloodcurdling scream, breaking her nails, smashing her nose. He held onto the door and shut his eyes tight, waiting for the dreadful noise to stop. The woman expired gruesomely, her bloody hand leaving a print on the glass.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE SHOWMAN

  ISABELLA COULD NOT stay where she was for another minute. She was sure she had somehow altered Nicholas’s destiny, allowing him to escape the train while his fate was in the process of being decided. What if she could do the same for Thomas? She did not particularly like the little English vicar but that was beside the point. She might save a life.

  Just a few hours ago her world had been static and immutable, unchanged since her childhood. A single rash decision had ended all that. Now her actions had consequences. She was starting to wonder if she might be responsible for changing the destinies of everyone on board.

  She could not unlock the door, so, padding her skirt over her fist, she punched at the window. After the third try it cracked enough to allow her to open the handle from the outside. Bloodied but determined, she set off to find Thomas. She found him in the next corridor in a state of panic.

  ‘Isabella, thank God you’re all right,’ he said, seizing her. ‘You must help me. A young girl has died—what I saw was real, back there...’

  ‘You are being tested,’ she told him firmly. ‘We’ll soon be at Zoribskia. You must hold out until then.’

  ‘No. This is no hallucination—it’s happening throughout the train. There’s a sickness on board. It may be cholera. I’ve seen the signs before. In one of the towns through which Miranda and I travelled, there was a quarantine in place. The priests had locked the infected in their houses and left them to die. The disease is initially caused by drinking infected water, but there are those who act as carriers. Look.’ He led the way and showed her the dead girl in the compartment. ‘She aged and withered beneath the touch of the Red Countess. We have to get off before she infects us all.’

  ‘Some kind of illusion,’ said Isabella. ‘The only way to guarantee our chances of survival is to stay on the train. You know that now.’

  ‘This is no fancy, Isabella. Look at her ravaged face! We cannot spread contagion to Zoribskia.’

  ‘If it’s real and there is plague, then the Red Countess must be a carrier, even though she is unmarked by it herself.’

  ‘I saw her leaving the compartment. She touched the girl. Suppose it can be spread by her touch?’

  Further along the carriage, they found another victim. The passengers were gathered around an ancient man lying across a compartment floor in a state of liquefaction, his body fluids seeping from his eyes, ears and mouth. Suddenly unable to catch his breath, he turned red in the face, thrashing about, the tendons of his throat corded like whips. The crowd looked down impassively.

  ‘Look at this poor wretch,’ said Thomas. ‘What can we possibly do to help him?’

  The victim’s boots were drumming on the floor of the carriage, his muscles knotting and twisting in agony. He fell back with a final gasp, dead.

  ‘The train is a trickster,’ warned Isabella. She looked around at the dead-eyed passengers, mute and moving together with the sway of the train. Being near them made her skin crawl. ‘We cannot trust our senses. We must remember that we still live and breathe, armed with the power of rational thought. We must do what we feel is right, and remain true to ourselves. It is the only way to stay untainted by all of... this.’

  ‘How do yo
u know, Isabella?’ Thomas was sweating with fear. ‘What happened to Nicholas, was that real or his imagination? He was a deserter—that’s a fact. He jumped from the train. How can we tell what’s genuine or false?’

  ‘But that’s how the Devil works, he makes you doubt yourself. He makes you disbelieve the things you see with your own eyes.’

  ‘I was a student of medicine before I was a man of God. I can’t let innocents suffer.’ Thomas knelt and picked up a red lace glove from the floor. The Countess had left behind evidence, daring him to follow.

  ‘Was she here?’ he asked the crowd as he rose. ‘Was the Red Countess just here?’ They stared back in silence.

  ‘They’re damned souls, Thomas, they have no interest in answering or helping you. This dying man has died before and will die again. You must feel no sympathy for him.’

  ‘I cannot allow myself to believe in these superstitions, Isabella.’

  ‘If you believe in God, you must surely believe in the Devil.’

  ‘Yes, but this cannot be how he goes about his business, damning the dead to trick the living! This train will soon arrive in a real station, carrying the disease. I must prevent it from being spread.’ Thomas took the victim’s identity papers from his jacket and examined them. He showed them to Isabella.

  ‘It says here that this... thing is twenty-six! That’s impossible. No disease can age a man eighty years in a matter of seconds. This is her work. You’re right, you can’t help me, and if this is to be my test I must rise to the challenge. Perhaps the Devil is at work, or perhaps it is contagion. Until I can discover the truth, I must face her alone.’

  Thomas pushed away from the gathering and moved on through the train. Ahead, he caught sight of a stately crimson train brushing the floor as the Red Countess retreated to the carriage beyond. As he approached, she paused before another compartment and reached in to touch a sleeping passenger, stroking her face gently.

  The passenger, a city woman in late middle age, convulsed and withered in her sleep. Within moments her skin had dried up, and she had started to bleed. Her eyes rolled back and fell into her head. Her lips thinned, breasts dried, arms turned to little more than winter branches. She was ageing years in seconds. Thomas followed in helpless horror, clutching the glove, an unwilling observer—and yet he was caught in the Red Countess’s wake, repelled but fascinated.

  She reached into another compartment to touch a sleeping child, a little girl with her hair in braids and a rag doll nestled in her arms.

  ‘No!’ he cried, running forward. What if the girl was an innocent who had boarded the train as they had? What if she still possessed her soul?

  The girl awoke and looked up. The Red Countess stayed her ungloved right hand.

  ‘Wait, I beg you. Please.’

  The hand hovered above the little girl’s face, before it pressed down onto her forehead, spreading black rot. The girl began to convulse, but the Red Countess had already grown uninterested and was moving on.

  ‘I have to know who you are,’ said Thomas. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  She turned to study him imperiously.

  ‘Who are you to speak to me? You, a commoner who will not even play cards with a lonely old woman?’ She flipped the train of her gown away and departed to the next carriage.

  This is a problem, thought Thomas. How can I defeat a nemesis who will not even deign to speak honestly to someone she considers beneath her station?

  The Arkangel was slowing down. Thomas could see the station sign, Zoribskia, the last stop before their unnamed destination. He glanced back and saw the Conductor balancing on the step between the carriages, sparks flying around him as the train applied its brakes.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Thomas asked the Conductor.

  ‘You cannot change what must be,’ he replied, noting Thomas’s anguish and feeding on it.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Thomas replied, his resolve strengthening.

  AS THE TRAIN pulled into Zoribskia station, Isabella ran to the window. She longed to disembark, but knew it would be fatal to do so. Perhaps there was another way. A boy was standing nearby on the platform. She called to him.

  ‘I’ll give you these coins if you fetch the stationmaster and ask him to order the passengers from the train.’

  The boy turned away from her. Leaning as far as she dared from the window, she reached out her hand to touch his shoulder. ‘Please, you must help us, take the money!’

  The boy turned back to reveal dark dry holes where his eyes and mouth should have been. Isabella recoiled in horror. She saw now that the station was crowded with the dead, passengers boarding and disembarking, every one of them a damned soul.

  It was all too obvious what their final destination was to be. Had there ever really been any doubt? No wonder it had been torn from every map and erased from every sign. But were there any others like them, passengers who had boarded with their lives and souls intact? Perhaps if they could be identified, their help could be enlisted.

  Or perhaps Isabella and Thomas were alone.

  As the Arkangel built up steam, getting ready to pull out, Isabella called to an alighting passenger, a farmer carrying newspaper parcels.

  ‘Please sir, can you help us?’

  The farmer turned to look at her, but his eyes were blank white balls, as hard and dry as marbles. His mouth opened and the dry stump of his tongue waggled inside it. ‘Get thee to Hell,’ he rasped with some difficulty. It seemed that the train had the power to preserve the dead in a fit state only while they were on board.

  Isabella’s cries were lost in the sound of the carriage doors slamming and the station whistle shrieking as the Arkangel pulled out of the Zoribskia.

  She decided to search the compartments. If there was just one more passenger on board who was still in possession of his soul, she would find him.

  In the second class carriage she spotted a tall box with the yellow painted flag that read: ‘Professor Io’s Marvellous Nightingale.’ It was propped up against a seat like a coffin. The man sitting next to it with the mutton-chop whiskers looked up from his newspaper and smiled, touching the rim of his silk top hat.

  ‘Good day to you, Ma’am.’ His formal politeness marked him as an American. ‘Are you looking for a place to sit? I believe these seats aren’t taken.’

  Isabella was suspicious. She remembered seeing him come aboard at Snerinska. How had he not been touched by the commotion taking place up and down the length of the train? She pushed back the door and gingerly stepped inside.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to speak up a little,’ he all but shouted. ‘I’m as deaf as a coot. I used to work with Barnum and Bailey’s Human Cannonball and the gunpowder did for my eardrums. They could be firing guns out there and I wouldn’t hear a darned thing. Professor Io’s the name. After Phineas Barnum died I travelled the world with my marvels, amazing the populace. At least I used to, before the war robbed me of my audiences.’ He gave her hand a vigorous shake. ‘I’m a showman. Part illusionist, part huckster, I’ll admit, but I always give ’em a darned good show. We Americans are the best showmen in the world.’

  ‘Professor Io,’ said Isabella, unsure where to start, ‘this may seem an odd question, but do you remember where you boarded the train?’

  The Professor thought for a moment, stroking his right sideburn. ‘You know, I’m dashed if I can recall now. It’s on the tip of my tongue. It began with an S but that’s about all—’

  ‘Snerinska.’

  ‘That’s the one, little lady. I had to cut short my tour. The troops were moving in and they weren’t too interested in my little entertainment, I can tell you. I barely got out with my life.’

  ‘Your entertainment—is that it in the box?’

  The professor dug out a cheroot and lit it. ‘In part, yes. I had to leave my performing dogs behind. Would you like to see?’

  Yes, do anything that will show me which side of the divide you exist on, she thought. ‘Please,�
�� she said aloud, and he rose and unclipped the door of the crate, swinging it aside. Reaching in, he pulled something from its protective wrapping of straw.

  ‘She’s my Swedish songbird,’ said the Professor, stepping back to reveal a girl apparently made of porcelain. She was dressed in a gossamer gown of silver thread that stopped high on her thighs, and had long gold hair in braids over her white breasts. Her blue eyes were set in a smooth, featureless china face.

  ‘Allow me to demonstrate.’ He turned the figure around and wound a large tin key in the small of her back. Then he set her facing front once more, steadying her with difficulty against the rocking of the train. A music box began to play a Strauss waltz, and the doll raised its arms in a ballerina pose. Then she opened her tiny mouth and began to sing. The sound that came from her lips was astonishing, as high and pure as mountain air.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ said Isabella, fascinated, stepping closer.

  ‘Isn’t she though? She sings more than twenty melodies. She is my fame and my fortune.’

  Isabella could not help but smile. It was the first pleasing sound she had heard in the last few hours. The song wound down and came to an end.

  ‘Where are you heading?’ asked Isabella.

  ‘To the terminus,’ said the Professor, puffing on his cigar. ‘See, I’ve done this journey before. Would you like to hear another song?’

  ‘Thank you, I must—’

  ‘Aw, come on, just one more.’ He rewound the key, pleased with her reaction. ‘It’s good to have an appreciative audience again, I can tell you. The nightingale once sang for all the children on the train,’

  ‘There were children?’

  ‘Sure, a seaside outing. The maiden voyage. But that was long ago.’

  ‘What do you mean?’