Hell Train (24 page)

‘So you see,’ said the Red Countess, ‘I died aboard the train, and so I was reborn in living death. Doomed to travel on the
Arkangel
for all time, carrying disease in my touch.’

She had edged very close to Thomas. The Red Countess was like a scorpion, unable to prevent herself from striking. ‘When beauty is tainted with cruelty it becomes a curse,’ she explained. ‘I was very beautiful, and very cruel.’

They were almost touching now. Thomas was mesmerized and horrified. He looked down at the backs of his hands, expecting to see the skin break out in pustules.

‘I don’t understand. I am untouched.’

‘But you lost.’ The Red Countess smiled sadly.

‘What does that mean?’

‘You know the cost already. You are dead and damned. You will join us on the train. I will keep you young and make love to you each night. Until I tire of you. My demon lover.’

‘Never—I’d rather...’

‘What? Kill yourself?’ The Red Countess’s girlish laughter turned into the wheezing cackle of an old woman. ‘And how will you do that, exactly?’

‘Damn you.’ Fighting his way out of the suite, Thomas staggered into the corridor.

The Red Countess rose and followed. She seemed to move without walking. As she came for him, she stopped before a compartment that held a sleeping farmhand and reached in, sucking the youth and vitality from him for the fun of it, strengthening herself. The absorption of such innocence restored her so that she became more beautiful with each passing second. Youth and sensuality was returned. She seemed to glow within the gloom of the corridor, lighting it with her presence.

Thomas had reached a deserted section in the first of the second class carriages. Leaning against the wall he stopped to look back, but his eternal suitor was suddenly nowhere in sight.

He was disgusted with himself. He had felt ashamed after visiting the whores of Rotterdam on an ecumenical trip, but this was far worse. Tearing off his shirt, he went to a window and pushed it down, allowing the cleansing rain to splash in on his chest. He watched the storm-lashed forest hurtling by. The train was stifling, unholy, claustrophobic. Every passenger had their own grotesque tale of failure and demise to tell, and each one seemed to lead to another ghastly cascade of events. He leaned out of the carriage to feel the raindrops on his face.

As he raised his eyes, he sensed the Red Countess hovering overhead, on the roof of the carriage, her scarlet silks billowing. She roared down toward him, an avenging scarlet siren. She was outside the train, looking in at him, not subject to the laws of gravity.

‘I am not finished with you yet,’ she yelled. ‘You are not permitted to decide the outcome of your test.’

‘This is witchcraft!’ he screamed. ‘How did I ever stand a chance against you?’

‘You men of the cloth have such vanity,’ she hissed in his ear. Reaching in, she seized him by his shoulders and pulled him upwards, clean out of the carriage and up onto the rain-slick roof.

‘Get away from me, you godless whore!’

‘Oh, it’s always God when it suits you, isn’t it? I’ll show you what I really am.’

As the storm-wind hammered at them and the branches of trees slashed past, her wizened face began to blacken and rot away, strips of her flesh flying off into the night, melting to putrescence until her teeth and her skull shone in the darkness like ivory.

She came at him in all her wild anger, thrusting her rotting hands around his throat, but Thomas was determined not to go down without a fight. His foot found purchase on the train’s steel trim and he fought himself upright as she bore down on him, slicing at his face, knocking him back.

He kicked out at her. He had never hurt a woman physically, but the Countess had not been a woman for a very long time. He crawled along the juddering roof as she clawed her way toward him, her nails shrieking on the metal.

The Red Countess stalked Thomas. Even in her half-flayed form, she remained a regal spectre. She stood tall and magnificent, her red silks flashing about her in the maelstrom of rain and steam.

Coiling, she sprung upon her victim.

As the
Arkangel
raced downhill toward its final destination, the pair fought on the roof of the rushing train, the Red Countess trying to force Thomas over the edge. The rocky slopes flashed by in scalding steam-filled blasts.

Thomas grabbed at her face only to find that the remains came away in his hands like a fleshy dish-cloth, oozing between his fingers, leaving behind a rotten shell.

The Red Countess elegantly stepped out of her silks and her skin as though disrobing before a lover, and became a ragged skeleton, leaving her mortal flesh behind. Her bony arm extended to seize Thomas by the throat. Her leathery tongue thrashed lasciviously about in her skull—reaching forward, she thrust it into Thomas’s mouth, to remind him of his eternal nightly duty.

Just let me die, anything other than this,
thought Thomas. The Red Countess had her eyes closed in ecstasy.

She had not seen that the train was approaching a tunnel.

She embraced her new lover, crushing the life from him, and he held her tight to prevent her from seeing.
Wait,
he told himself,
wait.

At the last possible moment, Thomas shoved her away as the wall of the tunnel approached.

She hit the brick surround and was smashed to smithereens like tinder sticks thrown at a wall, to be dispatched beneath the thundering wheels of the
Arkangel
like so much ghostly offal. Only the train could take her life again.

Exhausted, Thomas dropped hard to the roof and slid, lowering himself back through the window, crashing onto the floor of the carriage. A tumbling card—the Queen of Spades—settled on him, all that remained of the Red Countess.

He felt the floor beneath his body rocking him back and forth. In retrospect, he supposed, the test had been too easy.

After a few minutes, he climbed to his feet and made his way back to try and find Isabella. He found her heading towards him along the corridor.

‘I won!’ he cried excitedly, not entirely believing it himself. ‘I thought I had failed but I defeated her!’

Isabella ran to him and held him tight, grateful to see that he had made it through the ordeal alive. And yet he looked wrong somehow.

‘Are you well?’ she asked, pulling away to study his face, trying to avoid the reek that emanated from him.

Thomas glared back, shaking his soaked head. ‘I am well, but that woman... like all of her kind,’ he spat. ‘How they deceive us.’

‘Thomas, Nicholas is back on board and must undergo an ordeal set by the train. We are approaching the last stop. There must be something we can do. If only we could halt the engine.’

He stared strangely at her. There was a feral glint in his eye. ‘Why should I trust you? Miranda dead, then Nicholas disappears. How do I know you’re not lying? And as for that bitch...’

‘Thomas, you know she was sent to test you.’

He ignored her. ‘Bitches. How I hate them. I’ve always hated them. They’re all the same. It’s always the women. Behind every despot, every tyrant, every politician, every embezzler, every censor, there’s a woman pushing and pushing and pushing. And
you
. It all began with you. This is all your fault.’

‘No, I had to leave the town, Nicholas said he could take me away—’

To her horror, she could see his true character.
The woman hater. The seducer. The cheat. And if I can see it, so can the Arkangel...

When he came at her she thought she would be ready to fight him off, but he was stronger than she imagined. Gripping her tightly by the shoulder, Thomas’s free hand closed around her throat.

Her fingernails caught his lip and tore it clean off his jaw, like ancient meat. Before her horrified eyes, the flesh rippled with putrefaction and fell away from his face, riddled with fat white maggots. His nose fell off. One of his eyes dropped onto his bony cheek. He did not seem to understand what was happening. His ears slid down his head. His skull gleamed through rank flesh like a caramel apple. Still he would not let go.

Screaming, she tried to push herself free of his arms, but they stayed locked around her, even though they no longer seemed to be attached to his body. Thomas’s remaining eye rolled in and he dropped, crumbling into stinking carrion.

Isabella found herself holding the only part of him that had remained intact—his beating, bloody heart.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

THE CAST

S
HANE
C
ARTER TURNED
the card over in his pocket. The Queen of Spades. A good luck charm for the Hammer meeting.

The rain battered the leadlight windows of Bray’s oak-panelled dining hall. He heard creaking trees, the pop and hiss of radiators, someone laughing softly in the hall. He could smell luncheon cooking, the comforting aroma of puddings and pies.

He’d thought it would feel like being summoned to court, but he had been the first to arrive, and instead it felt as if he had called them. If he had been English, he would have been embarrassed about that, but he had an excuse; he was a foreign interloper. Last night after finishing his pages he had tried watching English ‘telly.’ He had found himself faced with two channels that largely consisted of windmills, puppets and pottery wheels, interspersed with elderly men smoking pipes while they discussed Harold Macmillan in Old Etonian accents. It was a world apart, and made very little sense to outsiders.

Floral teacups had been laid out for half a dozen, chairs assigned, as if this was a daily ritual. There were footsteps in the corridor.

First through the door was Michael—impossible to think of him now as Mr Carreras—shadowed by Emma, who was looking more radiant with each passing day. A conceited part of him thought that her wellbeing might have something to do with his own sexual prowess.

Then there were two familiar faces, though for once not painted with light upon a giant screen; Thorley Walters, taller than expected, rotund and merry-faced, Santa in autumn. And Frances Matthews, slender, debonair, in a silky grey suit and cufflinks, every bit the monochrome hero, friendly and sensible.

Freddie Francis had come along, relaxed, chatty, hands in pockets. Technically speaking, he was still working with Amicus, having scored a hit for them with
Dr Terror
, but there seemed to be no bad blood between the two studios. Shane had heard that he still preferred the atmosphere at Hammer. Although the Amicus head, Milton Subotsky, shared the same cinematic ideals of mood and atmosphere that fascinated Francis, Subotsky was famously antagonistic and hard to work with. Amicus was a production house, not a studio, although it poached stars from Hammer and liked to think of itself as equal. But everyone knew that Amicus was the pretender, making lofty artistic promises before always returning to the bottom line of the budget sheet.

Shane rose and shook hands with everyone, feeling increasingly nervous as the group was joined by two more figures who arrived together, an ill-matched duo lost in quiet conversation. Peter Cushing was in his fifties, gaunt and small-boned, but the litheness of his movements suggested surprising youth and fitness. Christopher Lee seemed even taller and grander than he had expected. It was rumoured that Lee was the son of an Italian Countess, that he had aristocratic passions that included fencing and languages, but on screen he often seemed cold and aloof. Did he ever smile with his eyes?

Perhaps that was the secret of his friendship with Cushing. Everybody loved Peter; his warmth and authority lifted the dullest scripts. It made Shane wonder how successful Hammer would have been without the pair of them.

Christopher Lee gravely shook his hand. Peter Cushing smiled at him with great, watery blue eyes. He felt embarrassed by their deference, and nervously fingered the script pages on the table. Emma had sat with him typing until 2:00am, but the last section was still unfinished.

‘Have some tea,’ said Carreras. ‘It’s single estate, high-grown Ceylon. Thought we might break out the good stuff for a change.’

Tea was poured. Cake appeared. Everyone relaxed into their chairs. He realized that Carreras was waiting for him to begin. Shane cleared his throat.

‘I’m aware that Mr Cushing told the press he always wanted to make a film set on a train. And when—Michael—suggested I should write something with the same location, it chimed with my own ideas to develop such a project. I’ve always felt there was a theme at work in the Dracula films, the eternal battle to keep the Devil held at bay. I’m proposing we explore that idea in more detail. I see the train as a great repository of fates and fables, like Chinese boxes. That sounds kind of grand, I know. Let me see if I can simplify it.’

His confidence grew as he outlined the script. The assembly remained silent, only interrupting to concur or add a comment. He couldn’t imagine such a meeting happening like this in Hollywood. The executives would have been making power plays by now, cutting each other’s hearts out.

Lee steepled his long fingers, listening gravely and intently. When Cushing wanted to speak he merely sat forward slightly, and everyone turned to him. ‘I wondered—have you any preference about the roles you’d like us to play?’ He elegantly rolled his Rs. His language was clearer than glass, so that he never needed to raise his voice.

‘Well, I hadn’t really—’

‘Only I rather think I’m a little long in the tooth to play your vicar, although I’m sure Christopher could manage the deserter, Nicholas. Would I not be better suited to play the Brigadier?’

‘I daresay he has me earmarked for the Conductor,’ said Lee, ‘an agent of evil.’ He gave a deep mirthless laugh. Everyone else laughed, just in case they were turned to stone.

‘Certainly that was what I had in mind,’ said Shane.

‘Veronica Carlson would be good for Isabella,’ said Freddie Francis. ‘And Barbara Shelley for Miranda?’

Was this really how films got made in this country? It seemed an extraordinary way to hold a script session. They were already talking about casting without having read a word he’d written. Surely there was a point where the politeness ended?