The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  “Damn.”

  “’E says, don’t think, feel . . . Does that make sense?”

  To Richard, it did. He shut his eyes and in the dark inside his head sensed Danny, or something left behind by Danny. He stopped trying to work out which way the train was speeding, just let his body become aware of the movement, the rattle, the shifting. He had little thrills, like tugging hooks or pointing arrows.

  “Spin me round,” he said.

  “Like the party game?” asked Mrs Nickles.

  He nodded. Big hands took him and spun him. He went up on the points of his shoes, remembering two weeks of ballet training, and revolved like a human top.

  He came to a stop without falling.

  He knew which way to charge and did so, opening his eyes on the way. He didn’t even know which end of the carriage he was exiting from. He opened the communication door and plunged on, as if Mrs Sweet’s gun were a divining rod.

  The others followed.

  VI

  Richard knew Danny was tied here, along with many others. Magic Fingers was fresh enough to have some independence, but soon he’d be sucked in and become another head of a collective pain-eating hydra. The Scotch Streak was home to a Bad Thing. Haunting a house, or a lonely road or public toilet or whatever, seldom meant more than floating sheets or clammy invisible touches. The worst haunters, the Bad Things, were monsters with ambition. They wanted to be free of the anchors that kept them earth-bound, not to ascend to a higher sphere or rest in peace or go into the light . . . but to wreak harm. Plague-and-Great-Fire-of-London harm. Japanese Radioactive Dinosaur Movie harm. End of all Things harm.

  He was in a carriage he hadn’t seen before but didn’t doubt he was on the track of the Gecko.

  There were no windows, not even black glass. Hunting trophies on shields – antlers and heads of antlered animals – stuck out of panelled walls, protruding as if bone were growing like wood, making the aisle as difficult to penetrate as a thick thorn forest. There were rhino-horns and elephant tusks, even what looked like a sabre-tooth tiger-head with still-angry eyes. Low-slung leather armchairs were spaced at intervals, between foot-high side-tables where dust-filled brandy snifter glasses were abandoned next to ashtrays with fat cigar grooves. Potent, manly musk stung Richard’s nostrils.

  “What’s this?” he asked Arnold, appalled.

  “The Club Car, sir. Reserved for friends of the Director, Lord Kilpartinger. It’s not usually part of the rolling stock.”

  In one chair slumped a whiskered skeleton wearing a bullet-bandoleer, Sam Browne belt and puttees. It gripped a rifle-barrel with both hands, a loose toe-bone stuck in the trigger-guard, gun-mouth jammed between blasted-wide skull-jaws, the cranium exploded away.

  “Any idea who that was?” Richard.

  “He’s in Catriona’s pamphlet,” put in Harry. “ ‘Basher’ Moran, 1935. Some aged, leftover Victorian Colonel. Big-game hunter and gambling fiend. Stalked anything and everything, put holes in it and dragged hide, head or horns home to stick on the wall. Mixed up in extensive crookery, according to Catriona, wriggled out of a hanging more than once. He’s here because he won his final bet. One of his jolly old pals wagered he couldn’t find anything in the world he hadn’t shot before. He proved his friend wrong, there and then.”

  An upturned pith helmet several feet away contained bone and dum-dum fragments.

  “Case closed.”

  “Too true. They made a film about Moran and the train, Terror by Night.”

  Richard advanced carefully, between trophies, tapping too-persistent horns out of the way with the gun-barrel.

  “Could do with a machete,” he commented. “Careful of barbs.”

  The train took a series of snake-curve turns, swinging alarmingly from side to side. A narwhal horn dimpled Richard’s velvet shoulder.

  Richard heard Harry ouch as he speared himself on an antler-point.

  “Just a scratch,” he reported. “Doesn’t hurt as much as my bloody hand.”

  “Shouldn’t ought to be allowed,” said Mrs Nickles. “Shootin’ poor animals as never did no-one no harm.”

  “I rather agree with you,” said Richard. “Hunting should be saved for man-killers.”

  Gingerly, they got through the club car without further casualties.

  The next carriage was the dining car, again. Harry wanted to give up, but Richard pressed on.

  “Table-settings here are the other way round,” he said. “It’s not the same.”

  “There ain’t no bleedin’ great ’ole in the roof neither,” observed Mrs Nickles.

  “That too.”

  “We shall be pleased to serve a light breakfast after Inverdeith,” announced Arnold. “For those who wish to arrive at Portnacreirann refreshed and invigorated.”

  “Kippers later,” said Richard. “After the world-saving.”

  Beyond this dining car was First Class. Richard led them past the sleeping compartments. Annette’s door hung open: her night-gown was laid out on the counterpane, like a cast-off silk snakeskin. That was a thump to the heart.

  The decoy couriers snored away. No need to bother them.

  Another expedition was coming down the corridor towards them. Were they so turned around in time they were running into themselves? Or had evil duplicate ghost-finders emerged from the wrong-way-round dimension where knives and forks were right-to-left? No, there was a mirror at the end of the corridor. Score one for eliminating the impossible.

  “Where’s the connecting door?” Richard asked the Conductor.

  “There’s no need for one, sir,” said Arnold. “Beyond is only the coal tender, and the locomotive. Passengers may not pass beyond this point.”

  The Gecko had managed, though.

  One of the doors flapped, swinging open, banging back. Cold air streamed in, like water through a salmon’s gills.

  Richard pushed the door and leaned out of the carriage, keeping a firm grip on the frame.

  Below, a gravel verge sped by. To the East, the scarlet rim of dawn outlined a black horizon. Up ahead, 3473-S rolled over the rails, pistons pumping, everything oiled and watered and fired.

  An iron girder came up, horribly fast. Richard ducked back in.

  “We’re on the bridge,” he said.

  Before anyone could object, if they were going to, he threw himself out of the door.

  VII

  Clinging to the side of the carriage, it occurred to Richard that someone else might have volunteered to crawl – essentially one-handed, since shotguns don’t have useful shoulder-slinging straps like field-rifles – along the side of a speeding steam train.

  Harry had seniority and responsibility, but his injured hand disqualified him. Mrs Nickles was too hefty, overage and a woman besides. And the conductor was not entirely of their party. The Gecko had fit into him much too snugly. There was more mystery to

  Arnold – a streak of sneakiness, of evasion, of tragedy. Richard had noticed a spark in his mild eyes as Mrs Nickles was talking about the good old days of the LSIR, about the Shagging Scot and the Headless Fireman and the In-for-Death Run of ’31.

  So, the train-crawling was down to him.

  Once he’d swung out on the door, he eased himself around so he was hanging outside the train, blasted by the air-rush, deafened by the roar. About eight feet of carriage was left before the coupling. That was a mystery – a compartment not accessible to the passengers. No, it wasn’t a mystery – it was a toilet and washroom for the driver and the fireman, reachable by a wide, safe running-board along the side of the coal tender, with guard-rails and hand-holds he would just now have greatly appreciated on this carriage.

  Above him, however, were loops of red chain – the communication cord. Richard grabbed a loop and held tight. The whistle shrilled over the din of the train. Cold chain bit into his palm. He should have put gloves on.

  He dangled one-handed, trusting the chain to take his weight, back against the carriage, and saw glints on the dark waters of
Loch Gaer several hundred feet below. Down there were the angry spirits of Jock McGaer’s “graysome” dinners, the drowned Inverdeith Witches and the cut-loose passengers of ’31 – they must all be wrapped up in the Gecko too. Not to mention the “stoon o’ fire spat out frae hell” of 1601. This had all started with that.

  The flimsy-seeming bridge, he reminded himself, was the sturdy structure put up to replace the one that fell down. Girders flashed past, faster and faster. He used the stock of the gun to push himself along, and the barrel caught on a girder. The gun was wrenched out of his hand, twisted into a U-shape, and dropped into the loch. Mrs Sweet had made a special point of telling Arnold to look after her artillery. A stiff complaint would be made to British Rail in the next day or two, providing there was a next day or two.

  With both hands free, it was easier to travel from loop to loop. He’d think about how to deal with the Gecko without a weapon when he got to it. A sound rap on the nose didn’t seem likely to do the trick.

  The door clanged shut behind him. Harry and Mrs Nickles hung out of the open window, fixed expressions of encouragement plastered on anxious faces.

  He fought the harsh wind, cruel gravity, hot spits of steam and cinder, and his own clumsiness. Something shaped like a little girl had done this earlier, he knew. The Gecko could probably stick to the side of the train, like a real lizard.

  Eight feet. A hard eight feet. The skirts of his frock coat lashed his thighs. He had no feeling in his hands, but blood dripped from weals across his palms. He reached out for the next loop, the last, and his fist closed on nothing, then locked. He had to force his hand open and look up, hooking nerveless, perhaps boneless fingers over the loop. He saw his grip, but couldn’t feel it. He didn’t want to let go of the hold he was sure of. But if he didn’t, he was stuck. He reached out his leg, which didn’t quite stretch enough to hook over the guard-rail. His boot-sole scraped tarnished brass. His cuff was sodden with his own blood. With a prayer to higher powers, he let go the sure hold, put all his weight on the unsure one, and swung towards the platform.

  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.

  The door to the staff toilet was open and Arnold stood with a fire-axe. He had smashed through the mirror. Mrs Nickles was behind him. And Harry Cutley. Richard kicked himself for not thinking of that, but hadn’t known there was a door beyond the mirrored partition.

  Arnold raised the axe and Richard knew the Gecko had its hook in him, had been reeling him in like trout. Mrs Nickles shouted something. They hadn’t come in response to the SOS.