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‘You’re sure you want to go through with this?’
‘If it’s not a trouble. “Some put their trust in chariots …” I’ll put my trust in my luck.’ He gave as pleasant a smile as could be. ‘The luck of the Irish.’
‘Please yourself, certainly.’
He stood to one side, and gestured to the ginger man to approach the cell door at which they had arrived.
A foggy glass spyhole the size of a saucer punctuated the heavy panels of the door. The ginger man applied his eye to it and stared inside. ‘For now we see through a glass darkly,’ he muttered.
The cell was bare and of some dimension, perhaps because it occupied the corner of the building. Such light as it enjoyed came from a small window high in an outer wall. The only furnishing of the cell was a mattress rumpled in a corner like a discarded sack.
A madman sat on the mattress, combing his hair thoughtfully with his nails. He was dressed in a calico shirt, trousers, and braces.
‘This fellow is Renfield by name. He has been with us a while. Murdered his baby son and was caught trying to eat its head. Quite a pleasant fellow in some moods. Some education, I suppose. Came down in the world.’
The ginger man removed his eye from the glass to observe the doctor.
‘Syphilitic?’
‘Tertiary stage. Dangerous if roused.’
The ginger man looked down at his shiny boots.
‘Forgive me if I ask you this, doctor, but I was wondering if you felt pity for your patients?’
‘Pity?’ asked the doctor with some surprise, turning the word over in his mind. ‘Pity? No. None. They have brought their punishment on themselves. That’s obvious enough, isn’t it?’
‘Well, now, you say “punishment”.’ A tug at the beard. ‘But suppose a man was genuinely fond of a woman and did not know she had any disease. And suppose he was in error just once, giving in to his passions …’
‘Ah, that’s the crux of the matter,’ said the doctor, removing his pipe to give a ferocious smile. ‘It’s giving in to the passions that’s at the root of the trouble, isn’t it? Let me in turn pose you a question, sir. Do you not believe in Hellfire?’
The ginger man looked down at his boots again, and shook his head.
‘I don’t know. That’s the truth. I don’t know. I certainly fear Hellfire.’
‘Ah. Most of the inhabitants of this mental institution know the answer well enough. Now, if you’re ready to go in —’
The doctor produced a key, turned it in the lock, slid back two large bolts and gestured to the ginger man to enter.
The madman, Renfield, sat motionless on his mattress, giving no sign. A fly, buzzing aimlessly about like a troubled thought, made the only noise. It spiralled down and landed on a stain on the mattress.
The ginger man took up a position with his back against the wall by the door. After the door closed behind him, he sank slowly down, to balance on his heels. He smiled and nodded at Renfield, but said nothing. The madman said nothing and rolled his eyes. The fly rose up and buzzed against the square of window, through which clear sky could be glimpsed.
‘It’s a lovely day outside,’ said the ginger man. ‘How would you like a walk? I could come with you. We’d talk.’
After a long silence, Renfield spoke in a husky voice. ‘Nobody asked you, kind sir, she said. I’m all alone. There once was ten of us. Now no one knows the where or when of us.’
‘It must be very lonely.’
The madman roused himself, though still without observing his visitor direct.
‘I’m not alone. Don’t think it. There’s someone always watching.’ He raised a finger to the level of his head, pointing to the ceiling. Then, as if catching sight of an alien piece of food, he reached forward quickly and bit the finger till it bled.
The ginger man continued to squat and observe.
‘Do you realize what you’re suffering from?’ he asked softly. ‘The name of the ailment, I mean.’
Renfield did not reply. He began to hum. ‘Ummm. Ummm.’
The bluebottle spiralled down again. He had his eye on it all the way. Directly it landed on his shirt, he grabbed it and thrust it into his mouth.
Only then did he turn and smile at his visitor.
‘Life,’ he said conversationally. ‘You can never get enough of it, don’t you find that, kind sir? It’s eat or be eaten, ain’t it?’
As they advanced along the corridor, it became darker and smokier. Both Bodenland and Clift decided that their chances of survival were thin.
The dimensions of the corridor altered in an alarming fashion. The way ahead twisted like a serpent. It appeared as if infinity stretched before them – grand and in some way elevating, but nevertheless formidable.
And then suddenly at infinity the air curdled, like milk in a thunderstorm, and an atmospheric whirlpool formed. From that whirlpool emerged a terrifying figure, beating its way towards them.
‘Joe!’ yelled Clift. The sound echoed in their ears.
A great leathery winged thing, its vulpine head plumed like something from a Grünewald painting, thrashed towards them. It had an infinite distance to go, yet it moved infinitely fast, despite the wounded slow-motion flap of its pinions. Its eyes were dead. Its mouth blazed. It had scaly claws, like the feet of a giant bird. In those claws it carried a brutal blunt gun of matt metal. It raised this weapon and began firing at the two men as it progressed.
Phantasm though it seemed, the monster’s bullets were real enough. They came in a hail, screaming as they came. Bodenland dived into a shallow guard’s blister to one side of the passage. Clift fell, kicking, with a bullet in his shoulder.
Hardly conscious of what he was doing, Bodenland scrambled halfway to his feet. The blister contained a wheel, perhaps a brake-wheel, and little else – except an emergency glass panel with something inside he could not see for shadow. A hatchet? Swinging his fist, he shattered the glass. Inside the case was nothing more formidable than a torch.
In those few seconds when death was coming upon him, Bodenland’s brain seized on its final chance to function. From its remotest recesses, from below a conscious level, it threw out a picture – clear and chill as if forged of stained glass in some ancient chapel.
The picture was of a great artery stretching through the body of planetary time. And up that artery to the throat of it where Bodenland crouched swam terrible creatures from the very bowels of existence, ravenous, desperate for a new chance at life, stinking from the oblivion that had shrouded them.
This avenging thing on its pterodactyl wings – so the picture depicted it – was no less mythological than real. Alien, yet immediately recognizable. One of its talons screeched against wood as it slowed in the corridor to turn on him. So monstrous was it, it seemed the train could never contain the wooden beat of its wings. They burned with dark flame.
And it keened on a shrill note, cornering its prey.
Clouds of murk rolled with it as it swerved upon the blister. Bodenland had dropped to one knee. With his left arm raised protectively above his head, he held the torch in his right hand and shone it at the predator.
The beam of light pierced through murk to the red eyes of it. Abruptly, its singing note hit a higher pitch, out of control. It began to smoulder inside wreaths of biscuit wrack. It recoiled. The leather wings, fluttering, banged woodenly against imprisoning walls. The immense veined claws opened convulsively, letting drop its weapon, as faster went the beat of the wings.
Just for a moment, in place of horror, a vision of a fair and beautiful woman appeared – dancing naked, shrieking and writhing as if in sexual abandon – couched on gaudy bolsters. Then – dissolved, faded, gone, leaving only the monster again, to sink smoking to the floor.
A great wing came up, fluttered, then broke, to join the crumble of ashes which strewed themselves like a shawl along the train corridor.
Bodenland switched off the torch. He remained for a moment where he was.
Another moment and he forced himself to rise. He placed a hand over his heart as if to still its beating. Then he went to see his friend.
Clift had dragged himself into a sitting position. Blood oozed from under his shirt.
‘You know what it was?’ he gasped.
‘I know it was most ancient and most foul. Are you okay, Bernard? It seemed to dissolve into a – well, into a woman. An illusion. The perspective and everything. Terrifying.’
‘It was a lamia, a female monster. There’s a literature about it.’
‘Fuck the literature. We’ve got to get out of this corridor. Brace yourself, buddy.’
As he dragged Clift to his feet, the latter gasped with pain. But he stood, clutching his shoulder and managing a grin.
‘God knows where we’ve got ourselves, Joe. Maybe I shouldn’t take the name of the Lord in vain …’
‘We’ve got ourselves into more than we bargained for,’ Bodenland said. Half-supporting his friend, he started down the corridor, which had now regained normal dimensions.
Moving steadily, they made it to the cab in the front of the train.
Bodenland propped Clift in the corridor, and made a sudden rush in, where a man in overalls worked in the greyness.
He sat on a swing stool, handling controls. He was shadowy, his age impossible to tell. And when Bodenland jumped in on him, he swivelled round to exclaim in astonishment, ‘No, no – you’re the man with the bomb!’
This stopped Bodenland in his tracks.
But the driver raised his hands, saying, ‘I’m still afraid – don’t attack me.’ He made no attempt to escape.
‘You know who I am?’ Bodenland asked. But even as he spoke, he heard the sound of someone approaching down the corridor. Dreading another monstrous apparition, he snatched the driver’s gun, which the man made no attempt to draw.
As he did so, Clift looked into the cab.
‘Joe, dozens of them. Second line of defence. The gun, quick!’
He grabbed the gun from Bodenland and at once began firing down the corridor. Bullets from the enemy spanged by. There were cries in the corridor, then silence.
Bodenland went out to see. Whoever the assailants were, they had disappeared. Two dead lay a few yards away. Clift lifted himself on one elbow.
Kneeling down by him, Bodenland asked him gently how it was.
‘The grave —’ Clift said, then could speak no more. Bodenland caught him as his head fell, and hauled him up into a more comfortable position. Blood welled from the palaeontologist’s chest. He looked up into Bodenland’s face, smiled, and then his face contorted into a rictus of pain. He struggled furiously as if about to get up, and then dropped back, lifeless. Bodenland looked down at him, speechless. Tears burst from his eyes and splattered Clift’s cheeks.
He dragged his dead friend into the driver’s cabin.
‘I’ll get you bastards if it’s the last thing I do,’ he said.
6 (#ulink_fdc9ed51-7c36-50f0-853e-a1c157e1a3b6)
The little Brazilian-made plane, a vintage Bandierante, winged high above the eroded Utah landscape, and released its passenger from a rear door, like some hypothetical bird of prey launching an embryo into the wind.
Mina floated away from the plane, arms outstretched, knees bent, riding the invisible steed of air, controlling it with her pubic bone, steering it with the muscles of her thighs. This was her element, here was her power, to soar above the mist-stricken earth.
No sell-by dates existed up here. It was neutral territory. Even her snug green cover-all she chose to regard as her skin, making her an alien visitor to the planet.
And if there were aliens on other planets in the galaxy, let them stride their own skies. Let them not discover Earth; let them not, she thought, disclose themselves to the peoples of Earth. It was difficult enough to find meaning to life in a non-religious age; how much more difficult if you knew that there were a myriad other planets choked with living creatures like humans, facing the same day-to-day struggles to survive – to what end?
The image came back to her, as it often did when she steered her way through the atmosphere by her pubis, of herself as a small straggly girl, oldest daughter of a poor family in Montana, when she had gone out at her mother’s behest to hang freshly washed sheets on a clothes line. The wind blew, the sheets tugged, she struggled. At a sudden freak gust, a still wet sheet curled itself round her thin body and carried her, half-sailing, down the hill. Was that when she had first yearned for an accidental freedom?
For her, the zing of high altitude could wash away even memories, including more recent ones. The hollowness she felt encroaching on her life could not reach her here. Nor could thoughts of how things were with Joe.
Now the sheets of the wind were snug about her again. She knew no harm. But Utah was coming closer, tan, intricate, neat. There was no putting off for long the demands of gravity, the human condition.
As he laid Clift’s body down in the cab, Bodenland felt utterly detached from his own body. The conscious part of him floated, as a goldfish might watch from its bowl the activities in the room to which it was confined, while his body went about setting his dead friend out straight, pretending that comfort was a matter of reverent attention to a corpse. The death, the apparition which had attacked him, not to mention the horrific novelty of the vehicle in which he was trapped, had brought about the detachment. The shock of fear had temporarily disembodied him.
He straightened in slow motion and turned towards the driver. The driver stood tense against a wall, hands by his side. His riven face, grey and dusty, trained itself watchfully on Bodenland. He made no attempt to attack or escape. Only his eyes were other than passive. Molten zinc, thought Bodenland, a part of his mind reverting to laboratory experiments.
‘You know me? You recognize me?’
‘No, no.’ The man spoke without moving his head. His jaw hung open after uttering the two syllables, revealing long canines in his upper jaw and a white-coated tongue.
‘You said I was the man with the bomb. What did you mean by that?’
‘No, nothing. Please …’
Bodenland saw his right hand come up and grab the man by his throat. When the hand began to shake him, the driver almost rattled. He put his hands up feebly to protect himself. His skin appeared made of some frowsty old material, as if he were a cunningly stitched rag doll.
‘Tell me what this train is we’re on. Where are we? Who are you?’
When he let go of the creature, the driver sank to his knees. Bodenland had done him more damage than he intended.
‘The Undead – the Undead, sir. I won’t harm you …’
‘You sure won’t.’ He bent over the driver, catching a whiff of his carrion breath as the man panted. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I was an airline pilot in life,’ said the driver faintly. ‘You will become like us. You are travelling on the train of the Undead and our Lord will get you sure enough.’
‘We’ll see about that. Get up and stop this train.’ He wrenched the man to his feet, thrusting him towards the controls. The driver merely stood wretchedly, head bowed.
‘Stop the train. Move, you rat. Where are we? When are we?’
The driver moved. He pulled open his tunic, ripped his shirt in two with sudden strength and turned to face Bodenland.
He pointed to his naked chest. So extreme was its emaciation that rib bones stuck out white as if frosted from their cyanotic covering of skin.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Get an eyeful of this, you fool. Do you see any heartbeat here?’
In disgust, Bodenland stared at the dead barrel of chest. He caught the man a blow across the side of his face, sending him reeling.
‘You can still feel pain? Fear? You’re human in that, at least. I will break open your chest and wrench out that dead heart unless you stop this train.’
Holding his face, the driver said, ‘The next programmed stop is in what you call 2599 AD, the Silent Empire. I’m unable to alter the programming.’
