Hell Train (20 page)

But what if she survived her journey on the
Arkangel
and went on to beat the Devil himself? The game she had played as a child had offered her a choice between Hades and Paradise. If she won, could she reset everything?

She had no choice but to try. She was alone on the train with no destination, and only the Devil for company.

No, there was Thomas, too. He had just appeared by her side and seized her arm now, calling her back. In his left hand he held his valise. ‘You feel it as much as I, don’t you?’ he was saying. ‘The lines between what’s real and what’s unreal are blurring the further we travel. I am determined to leave this train, and you must come with me.’

‘We daren’t leave,’ she told him, resisting. ‘You know what will happen if we do. You remember being shut in the coffin, and I saw what happened to Nicholas. We are all a part of this now. We must help each other survive, and see it through.’

‘I’d rather take my chances out there in the dark. If we stay on board we’ll surely die.’

‘No, only if we fail the tests. This way we have a fighting chance.’

‘I am not as strong as you, Isabella. I know I have weaknesses, and I fear the train will chance upon them.’

‘But if you leave, you won’t even have that chance.’

She had a point: the station was forbidding, empty, mist-shrouded. Thomas had been prepared to disembark without her, but perhaps she was right.

‘Nicholas said he failed not because of what he did when confronted by the Brigadier, but because he abandoned his men. But that was only his opinion of himself. He felt himself a failure. I think the train knows the nature of its passengers. It sensed your wife’s selfish heart, God rest her soul. Perhaps it saw a cowardice that had once existed inside Nicholas, or perhaps he happened upon the soldiers by chance. I am only sure of one thing. If we can overcome our weaknesses, we can survive.’

Thomas did not look comfortable with the idea. He guided Isabella back to her compartment and seated himself beside her. ‘But surely all of us have flaws within our natures? If the Devil wishes to test us, how can we ever hope to win?’

‘We have to fight for what is right. That is human nature.’

‘But I am only human, as are you, and I must tell you that I have the capacity to sin.’

‘In what manner, Thomas?’

‘My feelings toward women—’ He looked down at his hands, uncomfortable. ‘They are my burden and my weakness. It is difficult for me to explain.’

‘Then you must find a way to control yourself. I, too, am aware of my faults. I have Pandora’s curse of curiosity. Ever since I was a little girl, it has got me into terrible trouble. No matter how I try, there seems little I can do to control it.’

Thomas fretfully knotted his hands. ‘It is so vexing. I feel as if evil is pressing down on us, trying to invade the very marrow of our bones. I have never felt such a force before. At home in my little parish I preach every Sunday about the Devil. I talk about him all the time from my pulpit without ever really imagining him to be real. But now I see his power all around me, in the faces of the poor passengers whose souls he has snatched. For the first time in my life I am coming to an understanding of how he works.’

He looked down and found that his sleeve was being tugged, as if by invisible hands. ‘What the—?’ He was pushed backwards and out of the compartment. The door slid shut on its own, locking him in the corridor, and the blinds rolled down over the windows.

‘Isabella! I can’t open the door,’ he shouted.

‘Thomas! You must be strong. It’s you, you’re next!’ called Isabella. ‘You mustn’t weaken!’

With a great blast of steam, the
Arkangel
lurched and left the station of Blankenberg. Thomas was pushed along the carriage to whatever fate the train had prepared for him. The Conductor peered at him impassively from his alcove, then turned away.

Thomas was pushed relentlessly back through the carriage. A sudden squall of rain lashed the train, spattering through the partially open windows. The glass rattled with thunder. In the other compartments, the passengers stared straight ahead, refusing to catch his eye as he passed them.

‘You!’ he called to the nearest, a red-faced peasant nursing a piglet in her lap. ‘Please, help me. If you know where we’re going and what will happen to me, I beg you to tell me!’

The old woman stared at him as if placing a curse. In the next compartment, the two soldiers who had arrested Nicholas drank in sullen silence. As Thomas was forced on through the carriage, he became ever more disturbed. The blank faces watched as he passed, turning their heads in a single movement. But the more he called to them, the more they ignored him.

The realization hit him like a blow to the stomach. Why had he not seen it before? Everyone else who had boarded the train was dead. Their souls had been taken. The soldiers, the farmers, the townsfolk—he and Isabella alone were intact. The
Arkangel
was ridden by all those who had gone to Hell. The four of them had embarked on a voyage of the damned—Miranda had already been lost, and who knew what fate might have befallen Nicholas?

The force that had been dragging at his clothes fell away like dying wind. Thomas righted himself and looked from the rain-spattered window, trying to see out. The raindrops were going backwards up the windowpane, as if time itself was reversing. In the light of passing signals they looked like drops of blood.

The world seemed to be slowing down. He felt calmer now. He took a deep breath. Perhaps his fears had simply overwhelmed him.
For all I know,
he thought,
I’m still asleep in my comfortable first class compartment, dreaming. Perhaps all four of us are.

He found he had reached the compartment where the Red Countess sat playing cards with a young peasant girl, a pretty little thing in a black velvet dirndl, with blue ribbons knotted through her blonde hair.

The Countess glanced up at him through the glass. Her black eyes glittered beneath her crimson veil. She indicated that the girl should turn over her card.

It was the Queen of Spades.

The Red Countess reached forward and closed her hand over the girl’s. She spoke softly to her, then rose and briskly took her leave. The girl was indeed lovely, in an unspoiled country way. Thomas stopped to look at the Countess as she swept past him in a rustle of silk, her chin raised high, her attention focused elsewhere.

A sudden noise brought him back to the girl with the card. She had slumped against the window, her head hitting the glass with a thump. Thomas stepped across the threshold of the compartment and bent down to check on her. He caught a sudden terrible stench of decay. Brushing her hair away from her cheek, he saw with a shock that she had aged years within seconds. Her skin was yellow and papery, as wizened and old as dried leaves. There were crimson pustules around her mouth, and her gums had dried out like old brown apples. She was growing sicker as he watched.

‘What is happening to you?’ he whispered, ‘What is wrong?’

Her hoarse reply, in a Carpathian dialect, meant nothing to him. ‘I don’t understand,’ he told her.

Carefully trying not to touch her, he loosened her collar and turned to open the window, but while he was trying to get her to some fresh air, she started to choke.

She fell silent for a moment. He took her pulse, but could not think what else to do. As she turned to look at him, her eyes lost their light and sank back into her head. There came a sound from deep inside her, a bubbling haemorrhage of tearing tissue. She clutched at his arm, screaming, spitting, spraying blood, clutching at his shirt. He tried to push her back down, but the old woman—for she now looked to be eighty, not eighteen—clawed at his eyes, sending him reeling backwards.

Thomas locked her inside the compartment, but she threw herself at the glass with a bloodcurdling scream, breaking her nails, smashing her nose. He held onto the door and shut his eyes tight, waiting for the dreadful noise to stop. The woman expired gruesomely, her bloody hand leaving a print on the glass.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE SHOWMAN

I
SABELLA COULD NOT
stay where she was for another minute. She was sure she had somehow altered Nicholas’s destiny, allowing him to escape the train while his fate was in the process of being decided. What if she could do the same for Thomas? She did not particularly like the little English vicar but that was beside the point. She might save a life.

Just a few hours ago her world had been static and immutable, unchanged since her childhood. A single rash decision had ended all that. Now her actions had consequences. She was starting to wonder if she might be responsible for changing the destinies of everyone on board.

She could not unlock the door, so, padding her skirt over her fist, she punched at the window. After the third try it cracked enough to allow her to open the handle from the outside. Bloodied but determined, she set off to find Thomas. She found him in the next corridor in a state of panic.

‘Isabella, thank God you’re all right,’ he said, seizing her. ‘You must help me. A young girl has died—what I saw was real, back there...’

‘You are being tested,’ she told him firmly. ‘We’ll soon be at Zoribskia. You must hold out until then.’

‘No. This is no hallucination—it’s happening throughout the train. There’s a sickness on board. It may be cholera. I’ve seen the signs before. In one of the towns through which Miranda and I travelled, there was a quarantine in place. The priests had locked the infected in their houses and left them to die. The disease is initially caused by drinking infected water, but there are those who act as carriers. Look.’ He led the way and showed her the dead girl in the compartment. ‘She aged and withered beneath the touch of the Red Countess. We have to get off before she infects us all.’

‘Some kind of illusion,’ said Isabella. ‘The only way to guarantee our chances of survival is to stay on the train. You know that now.’

‘This is no fancy, Isabella. Look at her ravaged face! We cannot spread contagion to Zoribskia.’

‘If it’s real and there is plague, then the Red Countess must be a carrier, even though she is unmarked by it herself.’

‘I saw her leaving the compartment. She touched the girl. Suppose it can be spread by her touch?’

Further along the carriage, they found another victim. The passengers were gathered around an ancient man lying across a compartment floor in a state of liquefaction, his body fluids seeping from his eyes, ears and mouth. Suddenly unable to catch his breath, he turned red in the face, thrashing about, the tendons of his throat corded like whips. The crowd looked down impassively.

‘Look at this poor wretch,’ said Thomas. ‘What can we possibly do to help him?’

The victim’s boots were drumming on the floor of the carriage, his muscles knotting and twisting in agony. He fell back with a final gasp, dead.

‘The train is a trickster,’ warned Isabella. She looked around at the dead-eyed passengers, mute and moving together with the sway of the train. Being near them made her skin crawl. ‘We cannot trust our senses. We must remember that we still live and breathe, armed with the power of rational thought. We must do what we feel is right, and remain true to ourselves. It is the only way to stay untainted by all of... this.’

‘How do you know, Isabella?’ Thomas was sweating with fear. ‘What happened to Nicholas, was that real or his imagination? He was a deserter—that’s a fact. He jumped from the train. How can we tell what’s genuine or false?’

‘But that’s how the Devil works, he makes you doubt yourself. He makes you disbelieve the things you see with your own eyes.’

‘I was a student of medicine before I was a man of God. I can’t let innocents suffer.’ Thomas knelt and picked up a red lace glove from the floor. The Countess had left behind evidence, daring him to follow.

‘Was she here?’ he asked the crowd as he rose. ‘Was the Red Countess just here?’ They stared back in silence.

‘They’re damned souls, Thomas, they have no interest in answering or helping you. This dying man has died before and will die again. You must feel no sympathy for him.’

‘I cannot allow myself to believe in these superstitions, Isabella.’

‘If you believe in God, you must surely believe in the Devil.’

‘Yes, but this cannot be how he goes about his business, damning the dead to trick the living! This train will soon arrive in a real station, carrying the disease. I must prevent it from being spread.’ Thomas took the victim’s identity papers from his jacket and examined them. He showed them to Isabella.

‘It says here that this...
thing
is twenty-six! That’s impossible. No disease can age a man eighty years in a matter of seconds. This is her work. You’re right, you can’t help me, and if this is to be my test I must rise to the challenge. Perhaps the Devil is at work, or perhaps it is contagion. Until I can discover the truth, I must face her alone.’

Thomas pushed away from the gathering and moved on through the train. Ahead, he caught sight of a stately crimson train brushing the floor as the Red Countess retreated to the carriage beyond. As he approached, she paused before another compartment and reached in to touch a sleeping passenger, stroking her face gently.

The passenger, a city woman in late middle age, convulsed and withered in her sleep. Within moments her skin had dried up, and she had started to bleed. Her eyes rolled back and fell into her head. Her lips thinned, breasts dried, arms turned to little more than winter branches. She was ageing years in seconds. Thomas followed in helpless horror, clutching the glove, an unwilling observer—and yet he was caught in the Red Countess’s wake, repelled but fascinated.

She reached into another compartment to touch a sleeping child, a little girl with her hair in braids and a rag doll nestled in her arms.

‘No!’ he cried, running forward. What if the girl was an innocent who had boarded the train as they had? What if she still possessed her soul?

The girl awoke and looked up. The Red Countess stayed her ungloved right hand.