Ghost Train

by Stephen Laws

  For a while, there was silence. Then came the sounds of struggling as someone was dragged into the burial chamber.

  God in heaven, I don’t want to see this again! Please let me wake up!

  The two seated men raised their heads in unison and Mark could see that their features had taken on the hideously grimacing cast of the Blue Man. Two of those who had gone out returned, dragging a struggling figure into the pulsing blue light of the chamber. It was a young naked man, his face striped with blue woad. He was lashing and twisting as he struggled to free himself, giving vent to a strange muffled grunting and bracing his feet against the ground; but the men who held him were too strong and in a matter of seconds he had been forced to his knees in front of the Blue Man who now turned to face his prisoner.

  Mark did not have to look at the young man’s face to know that his lips had been crudely sewn together.

  The two seated men rose stiffly and moved forward, each taking one of the prisoner’s arms as the original captors shrank fearfully away and disappeared into the blackness.

  Stop this! Wake up!

  A broad, flint knife seemed to have appeared from nowhere in the Blue Man’s hand. He moved forward and seized the young man’s hair.

  Stop this! For God’s sake, stop!

  The knife moved quickly and brutally. The young man began to scream. Mark remained frozen, head turned to watch as the two chosen men pulled their captive down, still struggling frantically, onto the chalk bed next to his. The pulsing of the limestone block had grown stronger now. It seemed to glow hungrily. Greedily.

  The Blue Man knelt down beside the screaming man. He began his work with the flint knife.

  The dream went on and on, with Mark an unwilling observer of the three nightmare faces revelling in their abominable act of torture. The screaming seemed to last forever.

  Stop . . . stop . . . stop . . .

  After an eternity, the purple fog began to seep up through the burial chamber floor and swirl around the terrible figures. The young man was barely alive and Mark prayed for his death as the scene of horror was swept away. But when the mists cleared yet again he was still in the burial chamber.

  When will this ever end?

  Much time, he knew, had passed. The night sky above was beginning to soften into the grey of morning.

  He was lying among a pile of tortured, mutilated bodies. The Blue Man and his two servants sat cross-legged amidst the carnage. The blue stone’s pulsing was slow and measured. Content. With revulsion sweeping over him, Mark could see that various internal organs had been laid reverently across the stone.

  The Blue Man raised a hand. The two servants raised their heads and smiled ghoulish, cracked smiles. The Blue Man held out the bloodied knife and the nearest man took it gratefully, turning to his fellow, who now leaned forward eagerly, eyes glinting. The flint knife was jerked up swiftly to the hilt under the man’s chin. He juddered violently, smiled, and rolled backwards in a welter of his own blood.

  The Blue Man nodded, placed his hands on his knees and stared up at the aperture. The remaining servant slumped forward once more and remained for a short while with head bowed. Then, suddenly, he looked up and Mark could see that the demonic cast which had disfigured his face had now gone. He blinked, swayed unsteadily where he sat and surveyed his surroundings as if for the first time. Behind him, the limestone block suddenly ceased pulsing. The Blue Man remained seated, staring at the sky. Quickly, the man stood up, swayed again before regaining full control and turned to the limestone block. Carefully, he lifted it from the ground, turned once to look at the Blue Man and then hurried out, leaving only the Blue Man, the rows of corpses and Mark, himself as immobile as one of the butchered bodies beside him.

  Mark’s senses began to reel. The purple mists were rolling over the rim of the aperture. Once again, there was blue light in the burial chamber; a blue light which crackled and spread. Mark did not have to look to know what was happening.

  Somehow, the Blue Man was burning. His body was engulfed in a living blue flame, consuming his entire body. Greasy black smoke swirled and eddied, mingling with the purple mist which now engulfed the chamber. The stench of burning flesh made Mark gag. Time lost its meaning as the fire burned to its peak, crumbled and collapsed into ash. Vaguely, Mark was aware that the fire had gone out; that disembodied hands were scooping up handfuls of the Blue Man’s remains and putting the ashes into a large, crude earthenware container. He could hear the familiar chanting and see that the hands were making small doll-like effigies, smearing them with blood. The invisible force turned his head to look upwards and he could see that there was activity on the rim of the chamber aperture.

  Oh, God . . . no . . . no . . .

  Suddenly, there was soil on his face. Soil was being thrown into the chamber, covering it over. The sky had vanished, the purple mists floated against a backdrop of blackness. Everything vanished from sight and Mark was once again in suffocating darkness. He knew that he was being buried in this ritual chamber along with all the other corpses. That terrible weight was on his chest again, soil caked his face, cloyed in his mouth. He tried to scream and something slimy wriggled into his throat. The pressure was too great. His heart must burst. Mark knew that he must die in his sleep. He could almost hear the post-mortem verdict: heart failure.

  Then the pressure had gone and he was floating. Drifting away from that horrible place. For an instant, the purple curtain parted so that he could see he was rising through the burial chamber and flying like a bird above it. He could see the humped mound of the ancient barrow below. The countryside was wilder than anything he had ever seen in Britain. There was no sign of any habitation. Curiously, the landscape began to change. It was undulating, shifting and changing like the sea. Hills were levelled, new hills arose. The colouring of the long, earthen barrow began to change to a darker, denser and overgrown hue. As he whirled, Mark thought that he could make out pylons. And then the purple mist had closed in again. He knew that he had seen the burial chamber as it was many thousands of years ago and then as it was today. Drained, sickened and with his heart pounding, he felt the invisible force release him. He was falling.

  Shouting hoarsely, he found himself sitting bolt upright in bed, covered in sweat, with Joanne shaking him desperately by the shoulders.

  Six

  ‘How are you feeling this morning?’

  Mark finished his coffee and smiled up at his wife. The smile was weak and he knew it; but there was little he could do about that.

  ‘Leg’s a bit stiff, as usual,’ he replied.

  ‘Do you want to talk?’ Joanne took Mark’s coffee cup from the breakfast table, moved to the kitchen bench and began to refill it. Mark could see early morning light creeping in through the slats of the kitchen window blind behind her. He watched for a long time as she poured. She was wearing her red dressing gown, knotted in the middle. Her blonde hair was tied tightly up in a bun behind her head and the sleep still hadn’t quite left her eyes. Even after all their time together, she still looked great.

  ‘The dream?’ he said at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was just a dream, Jo.’

  ‘Just a dream? You nearly brought the house down. Was it the same as the others?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  Joanne waited for him to continue. When he did not, she did not press him. He was having a bad time and it wasn’t fair to put any pressure on him. She brought his coffee back to the table, put it down in front of him and sat, staring at him with both fists clenched underneath her chin. He looked worn out this morning.

  A strand of hair had fallen across Joanne’s brow and Mark leaned across, stroking it back into position. ‘Is Helen all right?’ he asked.

  ‘She seems all right now.’

  ‘Poor kid.’ Mark rubbed his face roughly with his hand, as if trying to wipe away a memory. ‘What
a hell of a way to be woken up. Her father screaming like a maniac . . .’

  ‘What time is your appointment with Dr Aynsley?’

  ‘Two o’clock.’

  ‘Will you tell him about the dream . . . whatever it was?’

  Mark smiled, cupped her face in his hand. ‘Yes, Mrs Davies. I shall be the model patient. I’ll lie on that black leather couch and give a full and lucid description of just how I’m turning into a stark, staring, grade-one loonie.’

  Joanne returned his smile, taking his hand in both of hers and pressing it tightly to her cheek. Mark hoped that his bitterness wasn’t showing through his words. He was putting on a brave face for Joanne’s benefit and could not allow himself to tell her everything: how desperately worried he really was about the dreams he had been having every night since the accident; how increasingly vivid and realistic they were. The best thing he could do about it at the moment was to persuade Joanne that he was treating the whole business lightly. She had been through too much in the past fourteen months for him to expect her to endure more.

  ‘And when’s your physio?’

  ‘Four o’clock.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve got a full afternoon. Want me to pick up anything in town for you today?’

  ‘How about a new pair of legs, a right arm and a backbone?’

  For an instant, there was a flicker of doubt in Joanne’s blue eyes and Mark realised that his voice sounded humourless and strained. He drank more coffee as she stood up and began clearing the breakfast things from the table.

  ‘Mark,’ she began, with her back to him, her voice tensed. Eddie Roberts was on the telephone last night. He wanted to know if you fancied Thursday night out on the town. Like the old days. There’ll be a few others from the Ministry, as well.’

  Mark sighed in resignation. ‘I can’t, Jo. I just can’t. I know what you’re getting at. I shouldn’t isolate myself like this. But honestly, love, it’s like . . . well, I know it sounds self-pitying . . . but it reminds me of how I was before the accident. It reminds me of the things I can’t do, the places I can’t go . . .’

  ‘You’re right. It does sound self-pitying. It’s negative thinking, Mark.’

  ‘I know it. You know it. Dr Aynsley knows it. But I can’t do anything about it. Not yet. Believe me, I’ve tried. I just can’t help the way I feel. That last night out with Harry Johnson . . . and Ted . . . it was a disaster. They kept trying to say the right things and I ended up making them feel uncomfortable. They were bloody glad to get away at closing time. And I can’t say I blame them . . .’

  Helen’s small voice drifted downstairs, finishing any further conversation on the subject. Joanne turned to go but Mark was already rising stiffly from his seat, reaching for the walking stick which was hanging by its crook from the kitchen table. Joanne could read two kinds of pain on Mark’s face and didn’t know which was worse: the emotional pain or the physical pain. When the walking stick clattered to the floor, she moved forward quickly to retrieve it.

  ‘Leave it!’ Mark’s tone was savagely sharp and Joanne flinched back at his words. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, regretful and thick with emotion. ‘. . . Leave it, Jo.’

  Slowly and stiffly, Mark knelt down on one knee, groping forward for the walking stick until his fingers closed around it. Bracing it in front of him, he rose slowly to his feet, too ashamed to look into Joanne’s eyes.

  ‘I’ll go to her.’

  As Mark left the kitchen, Joanne gave in to the tears which had been welling up inside her. She turned her back on the doorway and buried her face in her hands. Her tears were the silent tears which she had learnt to weep so well these past fourteen months.

  Seven

  Joanne had been gone for half an hour when Mark left the house. She was dropping Helen off at school when he descended into the Metro and, by the time she had reached the university, Mark was boarding an underground train bound for the Central Station.

  It was a cold, grey morning and Mark was still feeling a little shaky after the vivid horror of his dream. He tried to take some comfort from the crowded bustling of early morning commuters on the platform and the crush of people on the Metro, but as the train pulled into the Central Station underground, he could feel the old fear returning again. It was eating at his insides as he allowed himself to be carried with the crowd moving from the train, onto the platform and up the escalators towards the station above. He gripped the moving rail and could see that his hands looked deathly white, crooked and almost skeletal; they were hands that had once been badly smashed. He looked up at the line of people standing above him as the escalator continued its inexorable ascent. It made him feel, not for the first time, that the same terrible destiny, the same strange urge which drew him to the station, was somehow omnipresent in the very fabric of the station itself. The escalator was alive. It was taking him upwards to his rendezvous. Rendezvous with . . . with what? With what, for Christ’s sake? If only he knew, if only he could find out why the hell he kept coming here, then perhaps the dreams would go.

  The escalator arrived at the check-point and as Mark walked with the hundreds of other commuters towards the main line station itself, he felt the loneliest man on the face of the earth.

  The station was the same as always. Cold, echoing, grey and lofty. Mark followed the flow of people and fear was gnawing at his stomach as he joined the line at the ticket office. He was glad that it was a long line; it would give him time to think and rationalise. But the old Impulse refused to be rationalised and he suddenly found that he had bought a ticket for Doncaster again.

  I’ll try, he thought. Today, I’ll give in to it. I’ll follow those people onto the platform and smash this thing for good.

  There was no queue at the platform entrance, just a continuous flow of people handing over their tickets for clipping before moving on. It was easy.

  Now, you cowardly bastard. Now!

  Mark had given full rein to the Impulse and found himself following closely behind a middle-aged man carrying a briefcase. He concentrated hard on the man’s back as he moved; concentrated everything on a small spot between the shoulder blades in front of him, to counteract the fear which always seemed to lurk in wait for him in the last few yards leading to the ticket barrier.

  He could see only the criss-cross weave of the man’s tweed overcoat. The small squares; the inter-connecting lines of the material, the criss-cross lines, just like . . . railway lines.

  Mark was standing at the platform entrance. The middle-aged man had shown his ticket and moved on. The ticket inspector was holding out his hand for Mark’s ticket. But the fear had found him again. He had blocked it out from his mind, but his thoughts had betrayed him at the last moment and it had scented him again. Its jaws had clamped shut around his heart; his vital organs; his vocal cords. He had to get away. Something inside his brain, something which was somehow prevented from speaking directly to his conscious mind, was screaming a wordless warning. But the shock waves were enough to tell him what he had to do . . . what he must do:

  Get away, get away, get away . . .

  Mark knew that he was stumbling like a drunken man, that the inspector was staring at him as he floundered away from the platform entrance. He wanted to scream at the man: All right, yes . . . I’m a bloody madman! But the words would not come to his lips. His breathing came in short, sporadic gasps between clenched teeth as he staggered out of the danger area towards the cafe.

  God in heaven, what’s happening to me?

  Eight

  Monica bought a newspaper and a paperback romance from the stand in King’s Cross Station before crossing through the ticket barrier. As she walked up the platform past the first carriages of the Edinburgh train, she could still hear her mother’s words: Always the romantic, that’s my Monica.

  Jack was always telling her that, too.

  She smile
d as she walked down towards the second-class carriages. They had been married for thirty-five years and enjoyed the kind of simple, loving relationship which many people did not believe possible outside the realms of the romantic fiction on which Monica doted. Oh, she knew that life wasn’t all sweetness and light. They had seen their fair share of rough patches in thirty-­five years. The worst had been finding out that they couldn’t have children. But they had weathered their own storms and come through smiling.

  Jack was a long-­distance truck driver; a job which he had held for over twenty years. Very soon now, he could look forward to retirement. Monica often wondered if the brief spells apart due to his job actually served to fuel their relationship and keep it strong. Maybe that was why they enjoyed their time together so much? She had once read in a woman’s magazine that seeing too much of your spouse could actually spoil a relationship.

  They had met at a dance in Barnes when Jack was on a bus trip with friends from the factory where he worked in Edinburgh and she had fancied him from the very beginning. He was a good looking man and could have picked any of the women there, she was sure. But he had picked Monica and so had begun a long-­distance love affair as Monica commuted between Edinburgh and Barnes, and Jack did the same. Monica came from a large family; she had three brothers and four sisters and her widowed mother lived with the youngest daughter and her family. So she had no worries about leaving to live in Edinburgh when Jack asked her to marry him. She respected his own family ties in Scotland and was glad that she had made the move. She loved Edinburgh. She loved Scotland in general and had even acquired a Scottish ‘twang’ in her accent which amused her mother considerably.

  Monica had promised her mother that she and Jack would stay in Barnes over the weekend for her eightieth birthday. But, at the last moment, Jack had been forced to undertake a long haul and Monica had had to make the trip alone. Jack had insisted that she go. The ‘old lady’ was looking forward to seeing her eldest daughter. It wasn’t fair to disappoint her.