Ghost Train

by Stephen Laws

  Mark sighed and sat back, waiting for Chadderton to fulfil his part of the bargain.

  ‘And when you crossed through the ticket barrier, what happened then?’

  ‘Come on. You said you would explain . . .’

  ‘Listen to me, Davies! This is important. It’s very important that you tell me just exactly what happened to you when you walked down onto the platform. I’ll tell you absolutely everything that there is to tell, if you’ll just say what happened.’

  I can tell him. I know I can tell him. He’s right, it is important . . .

  Angrily, Mark explained, baring his soul to a complete stranger for no other reason than that an inner conviction told him it was right to do so: ‘I gave in to the Impulse today. I followed through with it. And when I went through the barrier, it was as if something. . . took possession of my body. I wasn’t in control any more. Something else was wearing my skin. I walked down to the platform as the train came in’ – the pounding in the lines . . . the Ghost Train . . . no, I can’t tell him that or he really will think I’m crazy – ‘I just didn’t have control over my body. Something was talking to me in my head . . . except talking isn’t the right word . . . and it told me to throw myself under the train. I know it sounds as if I’ve gone totally loonytunes. For a long time I thought I was a schizo myself. But now I know that it wasn’t true. I didn’t try to kill myself. Something wanted me dead.’

  Mark’s words had flowed straight from him in a pure emotive surge. He felt breathless, a little drained, and as if he had just prostrated himself across a chopping block. Now he feared that Chadderton would throw him out, having finally received confirmation that he was a raving lunatic.

  Chadderton had sat impassively through it all after his initial outburst; the same penetrating thrust in his eyes while Mark spoke. As Mark finished, there was a pause that seemed to hang timelessly in infinity while he waited for Chadderton’s reaction; waited for the axe of sanity and reason to fall. All right, you maniac. Get out before you spew your guts all over me again!

  Chadderton sat back in his chair and turned his eyes up to the ceiling, exhaling air. He looked limp, and when he turned to Mark again, he smiled in a hopelessly careworn sort of way.

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘No . . . no . . . thanks. I’ve had enough to knock me out, already.’

  ‘Okay.’ Chadderton nodded, groaned and rubbed his face roughly with one calloused hand, as if he had just woken up. He leaned forward and poured another drink, Mark still waiting apprehensively for his response. He drank deeply, stood up slowly and moved across to the picture windows looking out across the city.

  ‘Nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live here. Do you know how many commuters use the King’s Cross train between London and Newcastle in a year? Or between London and Edinburgh? No? Neither do I. Must be hundreds of thousands . . .’ Chadderton’s voice faded as he scanned the city skyline.

  The afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen and Mark could feel a rising irritation at the deliberately oblique way in which the man seemed to approach everything.

  ‘The team that was investigating your high-­diving performance,’ began Chadderton again, ‘wasn’t specifically set up for that purpose, Mr Davies. In fact, it had been in existence for just over five years before you hit the embankment and the headlines. You aren’t so special, I’m afraid – you’re a statistic. You could have been special because you’re alive. But your memory’s gone, so you’re no good to us at all.’

  ‘For God’s sake, will you just tell me straight!’

  Chadderton harrumphed, a laugh with no trace of humor. He moved back across the room and sat down again. For the first time, Mark realised that he had a two days’ growth of beard.

  ‘Five years ago, my team was established to examine a number of unexplained deaths . . . murders . . . all related in some way to the King’s Cross train. All absolutely motiveless, all involving ordinary people using the train who boarded at one end, disembarked at the other and committed some terrible atrocity . . . or committed suicide. Some of these incidents we were able to link immediately to the fact that the person or persons involved had recently travelled on the King’s Cross train. But as our inquiries led us further afield, we began to look into other incidents which had remained either unexplained or unresolved; cases which had already been dealt with.

  ‘We found that, in a considerable number of instances, people involved in some pretty bizarre incidents had travelled on the King’s Cross train within a 24-­hour period. In fact, there have been one hundred and fifty identified incidents since the team was set up. And that doesn’t take account of the deaths we haven’t identified yet. In every single case, they’ve been ordinary people leading ordinary lives who have suddenly gone out of their minds after riding on that line. For no logical reason at all. One of our boys made the connection with the train journeys by mere coincidence. When we examined it more closely we couldn’t believe what we’d stumbled onto.

  ‘The whole pattern is insane – there’s no logic to any of it. In ’71 a middle-­aged businessman clinches a big business deal in Northallerton. He gets on a train to King’s Cross, gets off, goes home, shotguns his wife and kids, then sits calmly down on a kitchen seat and methodically gouges out his eyes with an apple corer. Two kids on a camping holiday in ’65 wave their folks goodbye at the station. We found the girl dead in Doncaster. She’d been force-­fed with a bottle of paraquat. The boy slit his throat in London. We found him lying in rubbish bins just off Piccadilly Circus. Forensic proved that he’d killed the girl. We’ve identified one hundred and fifty cases . . . and we haven’t even begun to delve into the whole thing fully yet. I had someone do a perfunctory exercise on incidents prior to 1960 – there’s God knows how many similar incidents stretching way way back to 1852. Eighteen-­bloody-­fifty-­two!’

  1852 . . . 1852 . . . The date seemed to register in Mark’s mind. A memory from school, perhaps? No, it was somehow more significant than that . . .

  ‘Needless to say, the whole damned thing is the country’s best kept secret. It’s too bloody disturbing, too insane, for the Government to let it be made public. The most incredible thing about it is that the Ministry of Defence just don’t want to know.’

  ‘And me? What about me?’

  ‘We believed that you were possibly thrown from the train by someone who was . . .’

  ‘Infected?’ said Mark, and wondered how the word had sprung so readily to his lips.

  ‘Infected . . . yes, that’s an interesting word for it. Something happens to certain people on board that train, on that particular stretch of line. And in five years, we’ve come up with nothing.’

  ‘What about other railway lines in other parts of the country?’

  ‘It’s only the King’s Cross line. The major line of the entire railway system.’

  ‘What about people who’ve been . . . involved, in some way? What’s happened to those people who’ve survived?’

  ‘It varies. Some of them have become irrevocably insane. Others recover, but just don’t remember anything. You’re a case in point. We keep a watching brief on as many as we can, bearing in mind our limited manpower. We’re working under cover, Davies, because the top brass think that if it gets out, it will be worse than a loss of confidence in the police force – it might mean a panic.’ Chadderton sipped at his whisky and looked as if he had finished talking.

  ‘What do you think it is?’ asked Mark quietly.

  Chadderton shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We’ve been through every possible permutation: mass hysteria; insanity induced by some electro-­magnetic, atmospheric, or chemical imbalance. Some kind of unknown disease that infects brain cells, is undetectable by conventional scientific means and has a brief but virulent effect on certain selected individuals. But in the end, we just don’t know. All we know for certain is that a person boards a train at
any given point on the line – it doesn’t seem to matter where – and gets off at his destination, by which time he’s dangerously psychopathic.’ Chadderton drank again. His capacity for whisky seemed enormous.

  ‘What about biological warfare? Aren’t there some forms of nerve gas that induce psychotic behaviour?’

  ‘Yes, there are. But don’t think we haven’t considered that one, either. I know what you’re thinking – what if there’s a canister of the stuff gone astray, or been stolen? What if it’s lying under a track somewhere with a slow puncture? Or some guy’s riding the train, giving everybody a squirt? The point is – this has been going on for some time. It’s been going on for over one hundred and thirty years. One hundred and thirty years. And they just didn’t have nerve gas in 1852.’

  ‘What if there is some kind of communicable mental disease? Has any research been done on that?’

  ‘Continually. But there’s still no evidence. That’s why it was so important that I find out whether you wanted to kill yourself on that station platform. Perhaps you weren’t thrown from that train. Perhaps you were a victim yourself.’

  ‘Yes . . . a natural disease that perhaps hasn’t been identified.’

  ‘What you’ve told me today could have an important bearing. Tell me again. You said the . . . Impulse, was it? . . . yeah, the Impulse sort of took you over and you couldn’t help yourself. You felt compelled to kill yourself.’

  ‘That’s right. It was as if something had been . . . trying to get into my mind all along . . . and today, I let it in. And when it was in, it just took control.’

  ‘If it is a disease, it’s got a peculiar pathology. And for such an apparently virulent disease, it seems to confine itself to passengers on one particular stretch of line. If it’s communicable, why hasn’t it spread to the rest of the country? Why haven’t we had a spate of nationwide mass murder? I’ve got to be honest with you, Davies. I don’t know whether you’re a nutter or not. I don’t know whether what you’ve described to me are the symptoms of some killer disease or whether you’ve just had some kind of breakdown. Perhaps you’ve been suffering from the disease all along, contaminated by whoever threw you from that train, perhaps not. But I want you to come back with me to London and submit to examinations by experts. They should never have cancelled their watch on you. But they might find something now.’

  ‘You haven’t explained why you’re not in the force, why you’re no longer in charge of this special team.’

  A dark cloud appeared to have spread across Chadderton’s face. For an instant, he seemed to be reliving some terrible event from his past. ‘I was relieved of duty because of something that happened to my wife while I was wrapped up investigating your case . . .’

  Two

  Chadderton had spent all day in the Operations Room reading reports and comparing information on three of the most recent incidents compiled by his Second-­in-­Command, Hughie Simmonds. He remembered sitting back after another unsuccessful attempt to link the three together, looking around him at the hive of activity and, for an instant, feeling slightly detached. (Perhaps he had been concentrating too hard.) Simmonds was in heated conversation on the telephone; a new red marker indicating the latest incident was being placed on the glass map of Britain which occupied one full wall of the office – a thick red swathe stretching from King’s Cross to Edinburgh like some horrible gash across the countryside. All the other team members seemed particularly intense today. Eight were out in the field, the remaining ten pored over paperwork or crouched over computers as the latest information was assimilated.

  And then the thought had struck Chadderton forcibly: All these deaths. All this work, all this investigation, all the paper – and we still don’t know a thing. Not a bloody thing. It was a basic, inescapable truth which depressed and angered him. It depressed him for the obvious reasons, angered him because of the top brass’s refusal to admit that the situation was a serious crisis. Then and there, Chadderton made up his mind that he could no longer continue the operation in this form. The government would have to take responsibility. It was time that the Ministry of Defence were directly involved. He would make them do it or he would blow the whole damned gaff wide open. It was the only way. He could not go on. They could not go on.

  Chadderton’s Ford Capri pulled up outside his detached bungalow a little earlier than usual that night. It had just turned six as he climbed out of the car. There was a smell of burning in the air. Someone was burning rubbish in a garden; or someone’s barbecue had gone disastrously wrong. The smell was acrid and made him a little nauseous. He felt hollow as he made his way up the garden path, like an empty gourd. He had taken off his jacket and pulled his tie loose from around his neck even before he let himself into the house. He threw his jacket over a chair in the living room, went into the kitchen and took a can of beer from the fridge. He knew that Joyce would not be home for an hour or so yet. She had promised to take the Cortina when she visited her sister. He remembered how puzzled she had been by his insistence that she take the car rather than go by train. He realised how it must have sounded to her.

  But you know I don’t like driving long distances, Les . . .

  I know that, Joyce, love. But I would rather you took the car.

  All it’s going to take is an hour on the King’s Cross train.

  I don’t want you to use that train! Look . . . I’m sorry, love. But please, for me, will you promise to take the car? I know it sounds crazy but there’s a very good reason for it that I can’t tell you at the moment. Please?

  And then she had smiled that ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with you’ smile and he had kissed her.

  Chadderton moved back into the living room and sat down heavily in a padded armchair, kicking his shoes off and taking a deep gulp of beer. He could still smell that stink of burning even inside the living room. It was a thick, cloying smell. He took another sip of beer and struggled to his feet again, moving into the kitchen to make a sandwich. The garage door at the far side of the kitchen was wide open to the wall. Chadderton walked over and pushed it shut with the heel of his hand, at the same time turning back to the refrigerator. And then he stopped in mid-­turn. Something had registered in the corner of his eye. He had seen a flash of blue as the door was swinging shut. He moved quickly back to the door and pulled it open.

  Joyce’s blue Ford Cortina was still in the garage.

  Oh, Jesus . . .

  Chadderton burst into the garage, examining the Cortina as if it were just a mirage, not solid reality. The smell of burning was dense in here – thick, smothering and oppressive. Chadderton could see that the sliding door giving access to the back garden had been raised. Thick, oily clouds were billowing across the neatly mown lawn and he could hear the crackling of flames as he blundered across the garage, knocking a watering can from a shelf with an echoing clatter. Something dreadful was whispering in his ear as he came out of the garage and followed the angle of the house which blocked whatever was burning from his line of vision. When he first saw it, he thought:

  What the Christ is she burning a sack of rubbish on the lawn for?

  And then he saw the can of gas lying beside the burning bundle. In a curiously objective way, his mind was telling him that he had seen something like this before, of course. Something on TV. It was newsreel footage of a priest who had doused himself with petrol somewhere in Asia and had sat cross-­legged in the middle of the street and struck a match. And while he burned, he sat unmoving, bolt upright in the centre of billowing orange flame and greasy black smoke. Chadderton could see that it looked just like that; the bundle even looked human shaped, cross-­legged with hands placed calmly on knees. God yes, he thought, it does look like a human being. He could see a shred of pink material fluttering at the base of the pyre. It looked just like the fabric of Joyce’s favourite dress . . . the dress she had worn that morning when she had waved him off to w
ork . . . and the Cortina was still in the garage.

  He was crying out now, a long-­drawn-­out howl of anguish as he blundered forward, still refusing to believe what his eyes told him. No, this isn’t happening, he thought. It’s a cruel trick.

  In a dream, he saw himself clawing at a bath mat hanging from the washing line which stretched across the small garden to the shed. He was flapping it around the shoulders of the bundle now, like a shawl, beating and smothering the orange flame. He clawed at the flame with his bare hands as the figure toppled stiffly backwards. His hair was burning, he realised vaguely, his shirt sleeves were shrivelling and disintegrating as he watched himself beating at the fire. But there was no pain. Everything seemed to be taking place from a distance. He was an outside observer watching himself as he thrashed wildly at the burning figure. Suddenly the fire was out and the blackened shape was lost in an enveloping billow of black smoke. Now he watched himself stagger back like a puppet, his shirt blazing. You’re burning, he told himself. Move! You’re burning . . . And he forced his body to walk stiff-­legged to the small ornamental pool, ordered it to plunge face first into the icy water. Suddenly back inside his body again, he slapped at the shrivelled remains of his shirt and turned to look back at the charred mass in the middle of the lawn. It had broken into two pieces. When he saw the frizzled hand sticking up out of the ashes – the black, clutching hand with a dull metal band on one of the fingers – Chadderton’s insides had turned over and out as he vomited onto the neatly cut lawn . . .

  ‘. . . I began to drink. They said my judgement was being impaired by her death . . . by the drink . . .’ Mark could see that Chadderton’s hands were shaking. ‘In a way, I’m just as much a cripple as you are, Davies. But I can’t let this thing go. I know that what happened to my wife was more than a coincidence. The bastards tried to make out that she was disturbed to begin with; that maybe my involvement in the investigation had been responsible in part for putting more pressure on her, leading to her final breakdown.’