Hell train, p.10
Hell Train, page 10
Clip had to move down the aisle and join Xavi to get a better look at what he was staring at. Just as he had said, Eric’s body was gone.
Clip placed a hand on Xavi’s lower back. He was shivering. “Hopefully he’s gone to wherever Pat went to,” she said.
He looked at her. “You believe they’re in Heaven? You?”
“I wouldn’t have believed such a place existed when I woke up this morning, but now… Maybe the train crashed and we’re all bleeding out, one by one. This could be the place between life and death.”
“This isn’t a Stephen King novel, Clip. You sound insane.”
“Right now, I would take insane. Wouldn’t you?”
Paul came to join them both. “Every time the lights go off, something happens. First the man who died of a heart attack, then Pat… I think the darkness is when our spider visits. We need to take note of that.”
Clip nodded. She couldn’t think straight right now, but she trusted Paul – and his calm mind. If anyone could keep a mental journal of the pertinent facts, it was him. Their very own special forces soldier.
Clip sniffed and looked once again at Xavi. “I’m not insane. In fact, it’s the opposite. I am perfectly sane, while the world has gone mad.”
Xavi nodded. “Or maybe this is some kind of group psychosis.”
“That happens in cults, or dysfunctional relationships. There’s no way it could happen to a bunch of strangers, not unless they were influenced somehow.”
Paul frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I suppose I’m just saying the only way a group of strangers could theoretically share a delusion is if they were drugged or hypnotised, and then a matching version of events was fed to them via psychological manipulation.”
“You mean like an experiment?”
“Maybe. Look, I’m not an expert. I have less than one year’s study at university. Most of the experiments I’ve read about were done with rats and monkeys.”
Paul scratched at the scar on his chin. “Well, let’s keep your theory in mind, in case it holds weight.”
“What? That we’re all intoxicated and being manipulated?”
“Yeah. That.”
“Three people are dead,” said Dan, rubbing at his face with both hands. “When will it end?”
“As soon as we deal with him,” said Xavi, pointing at Mudz. “Eric is dead because of him. Nothing supernatural, just cold-blooded murder.”
“Allow it.” said Mudz. “Man didn’t mean to shank the old boy. Was an accident, innit?”
Paul folded his arms and turned towards the back of the carriage. “Accident or not, you’re responsible. You killed Eric because your answer to everything is pulling out a knife.”
Mudz sucked his teeth. “Man is serious. Serious man needs a knife.”
“Then we have a problem,” said Paul, “because I’m not risking you stabbing anyone else. You either give me that knife or I’ll take it from you.”
Mudz moved into the aisle, fists clenched at his sides. “Try it, bruv. For real.”
Kyle cleared his throat. “You can have my knife. I don’t want it.”
Mudz glared at him. “Shut your mouth, blud.”
“Nah, man. This shit has got way too serious. We need to work together.”
“Too late for that, fam. Like man said, shit is bare serious now. Ride or die, you get me?”
Clip looked at Kyle. “Will you let me have your knife?”
Kyle fumbled inside his hoodie and produced his blade. He chucked it over the top of the seat in front of him and it landed on the cushion. “Take it.”
Clip marched over and took the knife. It was heavier than expected. “Good move. I’m getting rid of it. Nobody else is getting stabbed aboard this train.”
Mudz leant over the seats and mumbled something in Kyle’s ear that caused his face to drop.
Clip took the knife, holding it out in front of her, and went over to one of the windows in the middle of the aisle. She cracked a horizontal pane open and tossed the knife out into the endless void. It zipped away, as if the train were going a hundred miles an hour. All Clip saw was darkness.
And a face.
Her first instinct was to scream, but something held her in place and kept her quiet. The woman’s green eyes were magnetic. Blood and grime streaked her muddy face, and her tangled hair was crusted with mud and dirt, but her eyes were clear and vibrant. Her head was encased inside a rusty metal cage with twisted iron bars.
Clip felt like a wax figure standing beside a raging fire, her soul dripping away.
The lights went out.
This time, Clip screamed until her throat hurt.
The lights came back only a few seconds later.
A frantic whispering filled the carriage.
Then all hell broke loose.
A ghastly figure stood at the end of the carriage, ankles clamped using two rotten planks of wood. The woman was pregnant, her belly swollen beneath a filthy, old-fashioned nightgown.
“What the fuck!” cried Kyle, and he clambered over the seats to get away from her. “What the fuck!”
Jay tripped and stumbled down the aisle in his haste to flee. Mudz and Grant leapt over him. Xavi froze in place by the doors where Eric had died and disappeared. Everyone screamed in terror. The carriage sounded like an aviary full of squawking hens.
The caged woman swayed back and forth in the aisle, gazing at them each in turn. Her mouth moved silently, blood staining her lips and teeth. Her green eyes turned as black as the void outside the windows.
“What does she want?” Harley cried out, covering his eyes and stamping his feet. “What does she want?”
“Bitch wants us,” said Mudz, holding his knife out in front of him as if it were a sword.
Clip took a step towards the woman, desperate for answers – so desperate that she was willing to ignore the upside-down feeling telling her to collapse and scream in terror. “Who are you? W-What do you want?”
The woman bolted forward down the aisle, her clamped ankles waggling back and forth in a horrifying manner. At the same time, she let out a screech so loud that everyone covered their ears in agony.
Clip closed her eyes and pressed at her temples, her skull suddenly pounding. There was a flash of light and colour in her mind, a memory being played back vividly against her will.
But it wasn’t her memory.
Clip was in another place – inside someone else’s head. She was staring out at a wet, gloomy road made of dirt and pebbles. The air smelled of sweat and damp soil. The sky above was dark grey, almost night. She felt exhaustion and despair. Pain. Her skin felt sore, rubbed raw and festering. Despite it being a foreign memory in her mind, she was able to look down. Her ankles were clamped inside two rotten wooden boards. Her bare feet bled in the wet mud.
Behind her, she heard the voices of men and strange words she could not understand. When she turned her head, she saw the monstrous faces of beasts. Bearded men covered in dirt and blood, armour and furs. They sneered at Clip – spat and jeered. One of them punched her in the spine to keep her moving forward. She was a slave.
Clip opened her eyes and gasped. For a second, she didn’t know where she was, but then she saw the woman racing towards her, dirty, overgrown fingernails reaching for her face.
The lights flickered, and so did the woman – fading in and out of existence.
And then she was gone in the blink of an eye.
Clip wanted to scream, but her lungs were empty. She felt moisture in her underwear where her bladder had almost released itself. Her soul trembled. “What… What did I…?”
Kyle immediately started freaking out. He yanked down his hoodie and pulled at strawberry blonde hair hanging down past his ears. He was surprisingly handsome. “We’re all gonna die,” he yelled. “All the shit I done, man… the drugs, the stealing, the beatdowns. She’s gonna drag me to Hell. I’m gonna burn.”
“Calm down, fam.” Mudz clutched his broken nose, shaking his head. “That coke must have been spiked, yo. You’re having a bad trip.”
“I buy only the best,” said Grant quickly, almost like it was a rote response. His expression was vacant.
“I’m hallucinating,” said Gina. “This can’t be real.”
“We all saw that thing,” said Paul. He was rubbing at his mangled wrist and wincing. “I don’t think it was a hallucination. This is… I don’t know what this is, but I think that woman is the reason we’re all trapped here.”
Clip collapsed onto the seats, unable to wipe the vision of the woman’s wretched face from her mind. She was struggling to catch her breath, her lungs feeling like they were full of ice. “Wh-Who was she? I… saw something.”
“Fantasma,” said Xavi, hand across his mouth. “A ghost.”
“Ghosts aren’t real,” said Harley. “They’re made up to scare us.”
“Then what the hell was that, kid?” Kyle was still freaking out, still pulling at his hair. Now he was pacing back and forth in the aisle. “She’s the devil.”
Paul put a hand on Kyle’s back. “Easy, kid. We’re all here. We’re all together.”
Kyle shrugged him off. “We’re all fucking fucked. That woman is gonna eat us all. Her head was in a cage, man. A goddamn cage!”
Harley covered his ears and rocked back and forth. Gina wrapped her arms around him and glared at Kyle. Paul kept trying to restrain the youth, but he kept pushing him away.
“This is messed up, yo,” said Mudz. “This is some bare supernatural bullshit.”
“Please, everybody,” said Dan. “Just stay calm.”
Mudz stormed down the aisle. He still held the knife in his hand, Eric’s blood staining the metal, but he seemed to have forgotten about it. “Stay calm? Bruv, is you mad? Man is being fucked with by the goddamn Blair Witch. Woman will murder us all, one by one.”
“The only person who has murdered anyone is you,” said Xavi, moving up the aisle. “You think we’re all going to forget you stabbed an old man to death?”
Clip groaned. “Leave it, Xavi. For God’s sake.”
“Man was aiming for you,” said Mudz. “Been over this.”
“Well, man missed me.”
“Man can always try again.”
“Stop your bickering,” Paul shouted. “Do you think this is a game? Unless we work together, we’re never getting out of this.”
“We don’t even know what this is, darling,” said Grant. “I just wish I had some more drugs because this is getting rather boring.”
“True that,” said Mudz. “Yo, Kyle, man got any more skunk?”
“That’s not going to help,” said Paul. “Let’s keep our wits about us.”
“Shut your mouth,” said Mudz. “Man thinks he’s boss, but man ain’t shit.”
“For real,” said Kyle.
Jay grunted irritably. “Chill out, bro. Both of you.”
Kyle sneered. “Being calm ain’t gonna get us out of this, bruv, is it? That’s all I’ve been hearing. Stay calm. Chill out. It ain’t working.”
“Look,” said Jay, “I remember my bibi once telling me that all ghosts are trapped in the moment of their deaths. Whatever drives them, whatever it is they want… it all has to do with what killed them and how.”
“Okay,” said Paul, leaning against a seat and rubbing the back of his neck. “How does that help us?”
Jay shrugged. “I’m just throwing some stuff out there, bro, to see if anything sticks. But, if we can find out what the mad sister wants, maybe we can figure out a way to give it to her.”
“And you think that will save us?” asked Clip. “That she’ll let us go?”
Jay shrugged.
“I saw something,” said Clip. “When she came towards me. I saw her suffering. It was a long time ago. I think she was a slave or something.”
Xavi looked at her. “You saw something?”
“Yeah. It was like a memory. One of her memories. I think she wanted me to see what happened to her.”
“Like a psychic projection?” said Xavi.
Clip nodded.
Paul chuckled. “I would say you were talking nonsense, but I suppose there’s no reason not to believe you.”
“Maybe she’s trapped,” said Harley. “Maybe she’s stuck on this train, same as us.”
Kyle grunted. “Thought you didn’t believe in ghosts, kid?”
“I’m just helping.”
Gina rubbed his arm. “You are, sweetie.”
“Yeah,” said Clip, smiling. “It’s a good thought. Maybe the woman is stuck, and we need to free her.”
Dan cleared his throat. “Hate to burst your bubble, folks, but this train has been running back and forth for over two decades. There’s never been any reports of it being haunted. Nor any train that I know of.”
“So what’s different about today, then?” asked Paul. His wrist was a mess of bloody holes where the dog had bitten him, and he cradled it against his ribs as he spoke. “We entered a tunnel, right? So is it the tunnel that’s haunted?”
“Again, not to my knowledge. Although…”
Clip frowned at Dan. “What?”
He put a palm to his forehead and groaned. “I don’t know why I haven’t thought about it until now. There were dead animals all over the track right before we entered Ronchurch. It couldn’t have been a fox, because the bodies were arranged in a perfect line. I think a person put them there. Then, after we left the station, I saw something hanging from the mouth of the tunnel. Some kind of effigy. A circle with a cow’s head in the middle. Actually, no, it might have been a bull. It had these small horns.”
Clip groaned. “Not sure I’ve ever seen a cow’s skull, but would you say it’s roughly a triangular shape?”
“I suppose it was a bit like a triangle.”
“You’re thinking about the symbol we saw on the back of the seat?” said Xavi to Clip. “A circle with a triangle inside.”
She nodded. “Doesn’t seem like a coincidence, does it?”
“So the witch trapped us in the tunnel,” said Harley. His fear had ebbed away, and he now seemed eager, like he was solving a puzzle. “It’s like a ritual or something?”
“What do you know about rituals?” Gina asked him disapprovingly.
He shrugged. “Videogames and stuff.”
“I don’t think she’s a witch,” said Jay. “Witches don’t blink in and out of existence. No, I think we were right when we called her a ghost. Maybe she was a real woman once.”
“This is bare bullshit,” said Mudz. “Chatting about ghosts and shit…”
“We’re trying to figure it out,” said Xavi. “So shut your stupid mouth.”
“Don’t even talk to me, bruv. Man is going to react.”
“Then react, idiota. Give me an excuse.”
Clip shouted. “Hey. Stop it. Both of you.”
“Yes,” said Paul. “You two are getting on my last nerve.”
“He needs dealing with,” Xavi complained. “Before he hurts somebody else.”
“Man is going to hurt you, Pedro. Got no reason not to now, innit?”
“Give it your best shot, bitch. I’ll make—”
Mudz launched down the aisle and collided with Xavi. There was an almighty thud and Xavi let out a gasp. There was a flash of metal between the two of them, followed by another thud as Mudz buried his blade into Xavi’s ribs a second time.
Clip screamed and rushed to her boyfriend’s aid, but by the time she reached him, Mudz had already stabbed Xavi a third time. “Get off him,” she yelled, and she beat Mudz away with her fists. “Leave him alone!”
Xavi collapsed into her arms, but he was too heavy for her to hold up, so the two of them sank to the floor. Gina screamed hysterically in the background. Paul yelled threats.
Mudz held his bloody knife out in front of him, ready to stab anyone who got too close. “Kyle, with me,” he ordered, but Kyle seemed hesitant to back him up.
“This is fucked up, mate. Why did you do that?”
“Because man was a thorn in my side. I already shanked the old boy, so shit don’t even matter now.”
Clip looked up at Kyle, tears blurring her eyes. “Don’t do what he says. He’s a monster.”
Kyle looked like he was about to puke. In fact, he looked on the edge of a nervous breakdown. “I… I…”
Mudz barked at him. “Fam, what is you doing? You know what happens to traitors.”
“This is so fucked up, mate.”
“Is man with the Quinton Crew or not? Or is he a traitor?”
Kyle looked at Clip, wavering. “Don’t,” she told him. “Don’t do it.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Pathetic.”
Kyle pulled out a knife, revealing he had been hiding a second just like Mudz. Giving up his weapon earlier had been a ruse.
“You’re making a big mistake,” said Paul. “It’s moments like these when a man decides who he is.”
“Man is Quinton Crew for life.” Kyle moved down the aisle and joined Mudz. “Man don’t even know you people.”
“You’re throwing your life away,” said Clip, still cradling Xavi in her arms, “and for what? To get a street rep? Nobody cares. You’re just a messed-up kid who thinks he’s a gangster. Both of you are pathetic.”
“Man will show you how gangster he is, woman,” said Mudz, grabbing his crotch.
“You’re just a…” Clip noticed Dan sneaking up behind Kyle. She tried not to give him away by staring. “You’re not even worth it.”
Dan was clearly planning to grab the knife, but his approach was clumsy, and his shuffling feet made too much noise. Kyle turned and spotted him before he managed to make a move. He turned and thrust the knife out at him. “Step back, bruv, or man will shank you.”
Dan put a hand out. “Just give me the knife, Kyle. You’re not responsible for anything yet. You can still do the right thing.”
“Yo, back up, bruv!”
Dan grabbed for the knife.
Kyle dodged sideways.
And planted the knife right in Dan’s neck.
Blood jetted into the air. Dan’s eyes rolled back in his head. He collapsed sideways, clutching his neck, and he hit the floor in a tangle of his own limbs. A crimson pool spread out around him.
