Hell Train

by Christopher Fowler

She watched in horror as the lump beneath her clothes continued moving upward. Carefully and quietly, with the minimum of movement, as one would when faced with a nest of hornets, she unbuttoned her outer skirt and dropped her petticoats.

  ‘Don’t kill it!’ cried Mr Freely, throwing out his hands in protest. They watched as it burrowed about in the undergarments, but before the etymologist could seize the lump it shot out, back into the corridor.

  Running after it in her underwear, Isabella realized they had reached the train’s observation platform at the rear, where Nicholas was sitting talking to a large-eyed child who looked remarkably like him. Neither of them appeared to notice Isabella. It was as if they inhabited a different sphere of existence.

  The bug was hovering above the railing, darting and buzzing beside them.

  ‘It won’t leave the train,’ said Mr Freely with assurance. ‘It has a food source now.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Isabella, puzzled, her attention torn between the beetle and the man who had come back for her.

  ‘I’m rather afraid that’s my fault. I think I gave it the taste.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The bug swerved and turned, heading back toward them.

  ‘I fed it,’ said Mr Freely apologetically.

  ‘What did you feed it?’

  ‘I fed it my wife.’

  The bug flew straight at Isabella. Mr Freely was watching in great excitement. For him it was obviously another chance to witness the creature’s feeding rituals at close range. The bug dived right at Isabella’s open mouth. She clapped her hands over it as it diverted towards her eyes. Its legs scratched crimson lines on her palms and wrists as she fought to hold it away from her face.

  The insect’s force was incredible. It remained inches from her eyes, its mandibles snapping crazily. No-one had ever grabbed it before. She fought to keep its wings from opening wide and allowing it to reach full power. The beetle hovered above her and tipped its carapace to unfurl a curved crimson stinger, bloated with poison. It whipped the stinger at her, but could not quite reach her face. She recoiled in revulsion, wondering what kind of entity could create such a creature.

  Isabella flung the Coleoptera Freely aside as hard as she could. It hit the rear wall of the observation deck and dropped to the ground.

  ‘No, you mustn’t hurt her!’ Mr Freely yelled. He dropped to his knees, looking for the bug.

  It came flying back up with an angry drone and hit Mr Freely hard in his surprised face, ploughing straight through his right eye. He rose and turned to Isabella, spraying her in blood. The bug flew out and burrowed back in. Then out, and in again, stitching a bloody pattern through Mr Freely, who shook violently as he was riddled with passages. ‘She wants to lay eggs!’ he cried, ‘I’m to be her nest!’ He sounded thrilled at the prospect, then dropped onto all fours and fell on his face.

  Isabella could hear the bug buzzing inside him. She bent over him with the cage held open above his head, expecting the bug to come roaring out of the top of his skull. But as she listened, the whirring died away.

  Tracing the insect as it moved down through Mr Freely’s body, she flinched as it came tearing out of his rear end. The bug flew straight into the cage held in Isabella’s hands, but was travelling so fast that it smashed the wooden prison to smithereens.

  Isabella found to her disgust that she was covered in the less savoury parts of Mr Freely. Shocked, she looked back at Mr Freely, who was still convulsing violently.

  ‘Mr Freely?’

  Suddenly the entomologist’s body jerked upright as if attached to strings, and he vomited egg sacs over Isabella. A gourmet might have suggested that they looked like ravioli in oyster sauce. Covered in egg-sac slime, Isabella screamed and stamped them into the ground. The cage lay shattered on the floor. The bug was still free.

  She understood instinctively that she had to kill it in order to survive, but how? She had no weapons, nothing with which to lure it except the scent of her own body.

  But that, it seemed, was enough. The beetle appeared from the darkness and roared after her once more. She could only leave the deck, where Nicholas and the boy had failed to notice her plight, and run as fast as the swaying carriage permitted her. She knew that the insect would be closing in behind.

  Fool! she thought as she ran, fool! You mentioned Pandora aloud and the train presented you with a box that should not be opened! Could you not have withheld your curiosity for once in your life? Always causing upset as a child, and still you have not learned a thing!

  Diving into the nearest compartment, she slammed its door but the bug came right through it, shattering glass and scattering oak splinters in her hair. Isabella screamed, and the train’s whistle magnified her terror, echoing it into the dark hillside.

  The Arkangel’s wheels turned ever faster as the stoker shovelled coal into the boiler, readying it to receive a soul.

  As Isabella hurtled through the train, pursued by the bug, she began to realise just how many passengers had died during the course of the Arkangel’s journeys. And then she had reached the engine, and there was nowhere else to run.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  THE DECISION

  ‘CHOOSE,’ SAID JEAN-GUY. ‘It is time to make your choice.’ He sounded deeply regretful about having to force the matter.

  ‘Very well,’ said Nicholas, still dumbfounded. In the last few moments there seemed to have been some kind of commotion in the air of the observation carriage, but he could not see what had caused it. ‘May I ask you one final question?’

  ‘Very well,’ said the boy gravely.‘But you must be quick.’

  Whoever had set the tests for the Arkangel had done so very cleverly. They had sent a boy this time, someone without the guile to lie, so there could be no accusations of cheating. ‘Tell me,’ said Nicholas, ‘how did your mother look when you last saw her?’

  Jean-Guy thought for a minute. ‘She was very sad. She was crying.’

  Nicholas raised the knife and watched as the carriage lights slithered down the blade. ‘And where were you?’

  ‘I was in her arms.’

  ‘And how did you feel?’

  ‘I was hot, then I was cold.’

  The questions were getting him nowhere. He realised now that he would have to save his son. It would mean leaving Isabella to fend for herself, but he had a feeling she could manage well enough without him. In the last few hours, her independence had been born and was growing fast. It was time to make amends for his misdeeds, to do what was right.

  There was no time for any further thought. Turning the tip of the knife toward his chest, Nicholas took a final deep breath and pushed the blade deep between his ribs, into his beating heart. There was surprisingly little blood. He felt nothing, just an icy numbness.

  The boy did not appear surprised at his action. He began to jerk strangely, then was still. He fell gently and soundlessly to the deck.

  As his surroundings began to fade, Nicholas realised his terrible mistake. Hot and cold, the boy had said. The cholera outbreak in Nice had killed his son. That was how they had been able to bring him here. The boy had to be dead to be summoned.

  Nicholas fell beside Jean-Guy. He watched as the boy’s body began to sparkle with errant electricity, then fizzle away into the cool rushing air, his spirit returning to the grave.

  Nicholas drew his hand away from his chest in a red glove. Dying now, he left the observation deck, but not before he had shed a tear. He had failed, and had been granted a glimpse of the life he had chosen not to share, and this hurt more than losing ever could.

  AS HE SHOVELLED coals into the boiler, the stoker saw what was coming and wisely jumped out of the way. The bug hovered in the engine room, its shadow thrown onto the wall so that it appeared enormous. Trapped against the caboose, Isabella watched in horror as Coleoptera Freely prepared for the kill.

  The stoker stared, mesmerised. Isabella stepped in front of the boiler and turned to him. ‘Open th
e door.’

  ‘But Miss, the heat—’

  ‘Open it!’

  As soon as he did so, the flames at her back ignited the laces on her corset. She knew the furnace would burn her alive if she continued to stand there, but she dared not move.

  ‘So you want somewhere warm,’ she told the creature, waving her arms at it. As the beetle dived, she dropped sharply to the floor and it roared straight into the boiler. Isabella kicked the door shut. There was a belch of flame around the door’s edges as the beetle’s body expanded and exploded. Isabella rolled in the coal-dust to extinguish her petticoat.

  Burned, bloodied and bruised, stripped to her brassiere and knickers, she rose unsteadily and attempted to leave the engine room with the tatters of her dignity as the stoker looked on in amazement.

  The Arkangel went faster still, approaching its final halt. Isabella turned to the stoker, who was still staring at her in surprise. ‘If you stop the train and I get off, what happens?’

  ‘The train will take you,’ said the stoker. He grinned at her, blocking access to the emergency brakes.

  ‘So the train wins.’

  ‘The train always wins.’

  ‘You let Nicholas escape.’

  ‘He came back, didn’t he?’

  Picking up the glowing coal shovel he had just set aside, she held it before his face. ‘You must know a way to get us out of here.’

  ‘If I did, why would I tell you?’ He advanced on her, taking pleasure in her growing fear.

  Isabella shut her eyes and punched the burning shovel into the stoker’s throat.

  He looked down in some surprise, then pushed it from his seared flesh, with a grunt of vague annoyance. He grinned at her. ‘You can’t kill what’s already dead, my lovely.’

  ‘But I’m not dead. I am the victor. What do I get?’

  ‘I bear you no malice. In fact, I rather admire you, but I am just the stoker, so no-one cares what I think. I’ll tell you this, though. No-one has ever got so far before. You must approach the Conductor and ask him what happens now.’

  ‘Where will I find him?’

  The stoker touched his weeping red throat, feeling for a scar. ‘Why, he’s where he always is.’

  With no other plan left in mind, she made her way unsteadily to the Conductor. He was standing in his alcove, where he had remained for the most part of the journey, as immobile as a votive god in a Roman household, to be touched for luck in times of crisis. He seemed to be expecting her and raised an eyebrow, waiting.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘It is done,’ she replied. ‘We have each been tested in turn, and I have passed your test. We have a deal, I believe, and I demand some answers.’

  ‘You chose to board the Arkangel.’

  ‘I had no choice.’

  ‘There is always a choice. This is not my concern. But perhaps you have earned the right to ask. We have entered unknown territory here.’

  ‘What has happened to Nicholas? Has he survived with his soul?’

  ‘I will answer that question in due course.’ The Conductor considered how to proceed. ‘First, though, I think it is time you were told the secret history of the Arkangel.’

  CHAPTER FORTY

  THE SATANIC RITUAL

  THE CONDUCTOR HAD a faraway look in his eyes, as if remembering an unimaginably distant past.

  ‘The rivets were white gold,’ he said, turning to look at a photograph of the train on the wall of his alcove, flying in all its former glory. The caption read: Maiden Voyage Of The Arkangel August 16th 1887.

  ‘A day to remember, it was. I was there, of course. But I’d been there long before that. Right back at the start, when the first weld was made, when the first bolt found its place.’ He held his hand before Isabella’s face. ‘Come, child, remember with me.’

  She felt her eyelids growing heavy. When she closed them, she saw a familiar foundry with an engine shed attached, and recognized it at once as the factory from her home town of Chelmsk. Inside, white-hot metal steamed and shrieked as it was plunged into vats of bubbling water. The clanging and hissing; forging and annealing. Iron plate and tempered steel, rods and bolts and blood red fire.

  ‘The world of the engines was always like this,’ said the Conductor.

  Hammers rose and fell in unison, a hot steel choir. The engine shed was filled with the town’s workmen—there were no women here, and never had been. They stayed at home behind closed doors, washing and baking and raising children. Here in the foundry, strange rituals bound the men together as ancient symbols were pressed into the pliable metal.

  ‘The whole town built trains,’ said the Conductor. ‘Men lived and died at the forges. Even before the Arkangel was finished, it had claimed its first victim.’

  She watched in horror as one of the workmen dropped a rivet and fished for it between two great slabs of sizzling metal. Squeezed her eyes shut as he rolled up his sleeve and went deep in the way of the coupling, trying to grab it. Tried to blot the sound of his screaming as the engine’s coupling joint closed, neatly shearing away the four fingers of his right hand, the heat cauterising the wounds so that he could not bleed to death. Screaming, he was carried off by men who had lived with such accidents all their working lives.

  Behind this hellish scene, watching in silence from the gantry above them, shadowy figures smoked cigars, overseeing the construction. Well-fed men who wore crimson tabards decorated with masonic pentagrams and other ancient guild symbols. At the centre of their circle was the most corpulent of their number, the bloated Controller, in his stovepipe hat, embroidered silk waistcoat and chains of office. Isabella gasped in recognition of her uncle’s silhouette. His face remained in shadow, as if light could not touch it.

  The group had gathered around him in the great engine shed. Now he placed his meaty fists on the gantry rail and addressed everyone in the foundry. ‘We are men of dark vision,’ he called to them. ‘It has taken us thirteen long years to complete construction of this mechanical marvel. And now our task is complete.’

  Isabella watched as four engineers bolted the steel nameplate to the front of the train.

  ‘The name is a reminder that Satan was once an angel of God,’ said the Controller, looking proudly on.

  Isabella saw that the name had originally appeared in a different form. The plate read The Dark Angel. The men looked up to their bosses with expectation. They had never been interested in the reasons for the train’s construction. They were only concerned with the engineering problems it presented. If the train ran well, then others would be ordered and the foundry would remain in business. And if the foundry was busy, the town would become prosperous once more.

  Outside, watching through a crack in the engine shed wall, was a little girl who saw everything. She recognised her uncle among the industrialists, and also the Conductor, as pale and straight-backed as he appeared now, but a young man of around seventeen summers. She watched through the splintered wood as engineers fussed around the locomotive, adding its final touches.

  ‘Our train is a thing of cruel beauty,’ said the Controller. ‘The triumph of mechanical might over the human spirit.’

  The Arkangel’s symbol, a V folded inside a circle to represent fury contained, had been pressed on a brand, and was being heated up in the foundry’s largest forge. The members of the inner circle descended the gantry and passed before it, unflinchingly accepting the white-hot iron on the bare skin of their right forearms.

  ‘I surrendered my life for the Angel,’ intoned the Conductor. ‘I was but a boy.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’ asked Isabella, who now remembered what she had for so long tried to erase from her mind, what was about to happen.

  The Conductor could not bring himself to answer. The smoke-filled foundry. The impassive men. The great green engine on its turntable. The young apprentice being placed in a strange device of curved and oiled brass tracks some fifteen feet in diameter. The whole thing was shaped like the train’s symb
ol, and lay angled on the factory floor. The clamps that pinned him down by ankles and wrists made it seem as if he was an extension of the train itself, conjoined in the creation of its spirit.

  Nobody moved from their places, but heads slowly turned towards the doors. Stony eyes followed a sleeping girl as she was carried into the engine shed by half a dozen middle-aged men. The only female ever to be admitted to the foundry in the last thirteen years. Many recognized her as the flirtatious dairymaid who had been long promised to Ivan. Where was her fiancé in her hour of need? Lying dead drunk in the inn run by Isabella’s father, where he had been plied with powerful liquor.

  The locomotive shed was laid with tracks that crossed each other. The engine stood at its centre, completing a pentagram in shining steel.

  The girl had been dressed in a robe of rough white linen, symbolising purity. Her hair had been woven with tiny blue cornflowers. She was carried to the head of the train and set down before it. The men who had carried her in took their leave. They were not foundry workers, and this was no sight for them.

  Incantations were made. The Devil was invoked in hushed tones, as if raised voices might incur his wrath. The girl was lovingly stripped and tied naked to the track. Her clothes were thoughtfully folded in a neat square pile.

  The brass mechanism that held the compliant young Conductor was powered by steam. It began to saw at the pale insides of his wrists. Gashes appeared, and blood spilled into bored-out channels, down into the machinery, turning it.

  The rails on which the girl had been placed rotated until they were arranged before the engine of the train. The workmen watched in silence. None dared turn away.

  ‘Tonight,’ said the controller, ‘we witness the baptism of the Dark Angel.’

  The young Conductor raised his eyes to the great roof of the engine shed, where pigeons shat and fluttered on the shadowed crossbeams. He cared only for the glory of his role in bringing the Arkangel to life. As he was drained of blood, the train’s brass cross-rods began to move. The great wheels turned, and the girl was drawn into the churning machinery.