The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 53

  ‘Kippers later,’ said Richard. ‘After the world-saving.’

  Beyond this dining car was first class. Richard led them past the sleeping compartments. Annette’s door hung open: her night-gown was laid out on the counterpane, like a cast-off silk snakeskin. That was a thump to the heart.

  The decoy couriers snored away. No need to bother them.

  Another expedition was coming down the corridor towards them. Were they so turned around in time they were running into themselves? Or had evil duplicate ghost-finders emerged from the wrong-way-round dimension where knives and forks were right-to-left? No, there was a mirror at the end of the corridor. Score one for eliminating the impossible.

  ‘Where’s the connecting door?’ Richard asked the conductor.

  ‘There’s no need for one, sir,’ said Arnold. ‘Beyond is only the coal tender, and the locomotive. Passengers may not pass beyond this point.’

  The Gecko had managed, though.

  One of the doors flapped, swinging open, banging back. Cold air streamed in, like water through a salmon’s gills.

  Richard pushed the door and leaned out of the carriage, keeping a firm grip on the frame.

  Below, a gravel verge sped by. To the east, the scarlet rim of dawn outlined a black horizon. Up ahead, 3473-S rolled over the rails, pistons pumping, everything oiled and watered and fired.

  An iron girder came up, horribly fast. Richard ducked back in.

  ‘We’re on the bridge,’ he said.

  Before anyone could object, if they were going to, he threw himself out of the door.

  VII.

  Clinging to the side of the carriage, it occurred to Richard that someone else might have volunteered to crawl – essentially one-handed, since shotguns don’t have useful shoulder-slinging straps like field-rifles – along the side of a speeding steam train.

  Harry had seniority and responsibility, but his injured hand disqualified him. Mrs Nickles was too hefty, overage, and a woman besides. And the conductor was not entirely of their party. The Gecko had fitted into him much too snugly. There was more mystery to Arnold – a streak of sneakiness, of evasion, of tragedy. Richard had noticed a spark in his mild eyes as Mrs Nickles was talking about the good old days of the LSIR, about the Shagging Scot and the Headless Fireman and the In-for-Death Run of ’31.

  So, the train-crawling was down to him.

  Once he’d swung out on the door, he eased himself around so he was hanging outside the train, blasted by the air-rush, deafened by the roar. About eight feet of carriage was left before the coupling. That was a mystery – a compartment not accessible to the passengers. No, it wasn’t a mystery – it was a toilet and washroom for the driver and the fireman, reachable by a wide, safe running-board along the side of the coal tender, with guard-rails and hand-holds he would just now have greatly appreciated on this carriage.

  Above him, however, were loops of red chain – the communication cord. Richard grabbed a loop and held tight. The whistle shrilled over the din of the train. Cold chain bit into his palm. He should have put gloves on.

  He dangled one-handed, trusting the chain to take his weight, back against the carriage, and saw glints on the dark waters of Loch Gaer several hundred feet below. Down there were the angry spirits of Jock McGaer’s ‘graysome’ dinners, the drowned Inverdeith Witches and the cut-loose passengers of ’31 – they must all be wrapped up in the Gecko too. Not to mention the “stoon o’ fire spat out frae hell” of 1601. This had all started with that.

  The flimsy-seeming bridge, he reminded himself, was the sturdy structure put up to replace the one that fell down. Girders flashed past, faster and faster. He used the stock of the gun to push himself along, and the barrel caught on a girder. The gun was wrenched out of his hand, twisted into a U-shape, and dropped into the loch. Mrs Sweet had made a special point of telling Arnold to look after her artillery. A stiff complaint would be made to British Rail in the next day or two, providing there was a next day or two.

  With both hands free, it was easier to travel from loop to loop. He’d think about how to deal with the Gecko without a weapon when he got to it. A sound rap on the nose didn’t seem likely to do the trick.

  The door clanged shut behind him. Harry and Mrs Nickles hung out of the open window, fixed expressions of encouragement plastered on anxious faces.

  He fought the harsh wind, cruel gravity, hot spits of steam and cinder, and his own clumsiness. Something shaped like a little girl had done this earlier, he knew. The Gecko could probably stick to the side of the train, like a real lizard.

  Eight feet. A hard eight feet. The skirts of his frock coat lashed his thighs. He had no feeling in his hands, but blood dripped from weals across his palms. He reached out for the next loop, the last, and his fist closed on nothing, then locked. He had to force his hand open and look up, hooking nerveless, perhaps boneless fingers over the loop. He saw his grip, but couldn’t feel it. He didn’t want to let go of the hold he was sure of. But if he didn’t, he was stuck. He reached out his leg, which didn’t quite stretch enough to hook over the guardrail. His boot-sole scraped tarnished brass. His cuff was sodden with his own blood. With a prayer to higher powers, he let go the sure hold, put all his weight on the unsure one, and swung towards the platform.

  He made it and found his feet on a veranda-like platform at the end of the carriage. He shook with fear and weakness and relief. Feeling came back, unwelcome, to his bloodied hand.

  Between the carriage and the locomotive was the big, heavy coupling. Black iron thickened with soot and grease.

  On the coupling squatted the Gecko. Only the braids and oily pyjamas even suggested this was still Vanessa. It was goblin filth on a poison toadstool, a gremlin dismantling an aeroengine in flight, the imp in Fuseli’s Nightmare hovering over a sleeping maiden.

  With stubby-fingered, black hands, it picked at the coupling.

  The Gecko looked up, eyes round, nostrils like slits. It hissed at Richard.

  Blasts of steam came, surrounding them both with scalding fog. The whistle shrieked again.

  In the coal tender, nearly empty this close to the destination, rolled two bodies, the driver and the engineer. They were sooty, with red torn-out throats. No one was at the open throttle.

  Richard shook hot water off his face, which began to sting. He’d be red as a cooked lobster.

  He grabbed the Gecko by the shoulders. He held folds of Vanessa’s pyjama top and pulled.

  It gnawed his wrists.

  Things hadn’t all gone the monster’s way. In 1931, it had unhooked the coupling at this point on the bridge. Now, it was using one little girl’s hands rather than two experienced men’s. The Gecko could give its hosts strengths, ignore their injuries, distort their faces… but it couldn’t increase a handspan, or make tiny fingers work big catches.

  The Gecko tried to take Richard and he shrugged it off.

  They were more than halfway across the bridge.

  ‘No room here,’ he told it. ‘No room anywhere for you. Why not quit?’

  Vanessa slumped in his grip, hands relaxing on the coupling. Richard picked her up, pressed her face to his chest.

  ‘Can’t breathe,’ she said, in her own voice.

  This was too easy.

  In the coal tender, two bodies sat up and began to crawl towards Richard and Vanessa. The Gecko had found experienced railwaymen’s hands. This was where having a shotgun would have been useful – he doubted he could shoot Vanessa, even if he had smashed a plate in her face, but he’d have no compunction about blasting a couple of already-dead fellows.

  The Gecko had no trouble working both corpses at the same time, which meant there was probably still some of it in the child. It had been hatched in the driver’s cabin of 3473, and was at its strongest here.

  The fireman threw a lump of coal, which broke against the carriage behind Richard’s head. The driver clambered off the tender, down to the coupling platform. There was a lever there, its restraints undone.
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  The bridge might not come down, but at this speed and gradient the uncoupled carriages would concertina, come off the rails, break through the girders, fall into the loch.

  There was a lot of dawnlight in the sky now.

  Holding Vanessa close, he felt something in the hankie pocket of her pyjamas. He shifted her weight to his left shoulder, freeing his right hand to pluck out the Go-Codes.

  He held the celluloid up in the rush of air, then let it go, snatched away, up and over the lake, sailing towards Inverdeith. One of the most closely guarded military secrets in the world was tossed into the wind.

  ‘You should have committed the Go-Codes to memory,’ he told the monster.

  The Gecko’s corpse puppets opened throats and yelled, like the whistle. Then, the whistle itself sounded. The Gecko wasn’t only in the driver and the fireman. It clothed itself in the iron of the locomotive, the brass-trim and scabby purple paint. Its fury burned in the furnace. Its frustration built up a seam-splitting head of steam. Its hunger ate up the rails.

  Richard thought he’d saved the world, but not himself.

  ‘What’s keeping you here?’ he asked.

  Dead hands reached the uncoupling lever. Richard slid his cut-throat razor out of his sleeve and flicked it open. He drew the edge swiftly, six or seven times, across greasy, blackened meat, cutting muscle-strings.

  The corpse’s hands hung useless, fingers flopping against the lever like sausages. The corpse was suddenly untenanted, and crumpled, falling over the coupling, arms dangling.

  The Scotch Streak was safely across Inverdeith Bridge.

  VIII.

  The fireman lay dead, empty of the Gecko.

  It was just in the train now. The Scotch Streak’s lamps glowed a wicked red.

  World War Three was off, unless the Gecko could somehow let the Soviets know NATO’s trousers were down. But everyone on the train could still be killed.

  At this speed, slamming into the buffers at Portnacreirann would mean a horrific pile-up. Or the Scotch Streak might plough through the station, and steam down Portnacreirann High Street and over a cliff. Like Colonel Moran, the Gecko was intent on spiteful suicide. It could carry them all with it, in fire and broken metal.

  Richard knew Diogenes Club procedure. Solve the problem, no matter the cost. His father had told him from the first this was a life of service, of sacrifice. Every Member, every Talent, gave up something. Danny and Annette weren’t the first to lose their lives.

  It might be a fair trade.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ Vanessa asked, laying her head on his shoulder. ‘I’m very sleepy.’

  He felt the weight of the child in his arms. He had to carry the fight through. For her. He only had a half-life, snatched from a void. He should have been dead many times over. There was a reason he’d survived his childhood. Maybe it was Vanessa. She had to be saved, not sacrificed.

  ‘There’s one thing left to do,’ he told her. ‘Have you ever wanted to drive a choo-choo train?’

  She laughed at him. ‘Only babies say “choo-choo”!’

  ‘Chuff-chuff, then.’

  Vanessa’s giggle gave him the boost he needed, though he was still terrified. While facing demon-possessed zombies and nuclear holocaust, he’d misplaced his fear. Now, he was in charge of a runaway train, funk seeped back into his stomach. He found he was trembling.

  He set the girl down safely and stepped over the dead driver, climbed the ladder to the coal tender, passed the dead fireman and got to the cabin. The furnace door clanked open. Levers and wheels swayed or rolled with the train’s movement.

  It occurred to him that he didn’t know how to stop a train.

  ‘Can I sound the whistle?’ asked Vanessa. She had followed, monkeying over the coal tender, unfazed by dead folk. She found the whistle-pull, easily.

  Richard absent-mindedly said she could and looked about for switches with useful labels like ‘pull to slow down’ or ‘emergency brakes’. He heard the Gecko’s chuckle in the roll of coal in the furnace. It knew exactly the pickle he was in.

  Vanessa blew the whistle, three long bursts, three short bursts, three long bursts. What every schoolchild knew in Morse code. SOS. Save Our Souls. Help! Mayday. M’aidez! Richard wasn’t sure she even understood it was a distress signal, it was likely the only Morse she knew.

  The sun was almost up. The sky was the colour of blood.

  Ahead, the rails curved across open space, towards Portnacreirann Station.

  ‘I can see the sea,’ shouted Vanessa, from her perch.

  Richard muttered that they might be making rather too close acquaintance with the sea – rather, Loch Linnhe – in a minute or two.

  ‘Here comes someone,’ said Vanessa.

  More trouble, no doubt! He looked back and couldn’t see anything.

  He was reluctant to leave the cabin, though he admitted he was useless at the throttle, but surrendered to an impulse. He was sensitive: he should trust his feelings while he had them. He made his way back past the tender.

  The door to the staff toilet was open and Arnold stood with a fire-axe. He had smashed through the mirror. Mrs Nickles was behind him. And Harry Cutley. Richard kicked himself for not thinking of that, but hadn’t known there was a door beyond the mirrored partition.

  Arnold raised the axe and Richard knew the Gecko had its hook in him, had been reeling him in like trout. Mrs Nickles shouted something. They hadn’t come in response to the SOS.

  Now, in addition to the runaway train, he had an axe-wielding madman to deal with.

  Richard dashed back to the cabin. Arnold leaped across the coupling, treading on his dead colleague, and followed.

  The conductor was the full Gecko now. Richard had a razor against an axe.

  He pulled the first lever that came to hand. Instinct paid off. A burst of steam pushed Arnold back, knocking him to his knees. Richard kicked at the axe-head and wrenched the weapon out of the conductor’s hands. He took hold of the man’s throat and held up his fist, enjoying the look of inhuman panic – the Gecko in terror! – in Arnold’s eyes, then clipped him smartly, bang on the button. This time, fortune was with him. The Gecko’s light went out. Arnold slumped in Richard’s grip, blood creeping from his nose.

  Mrs Nickles had followed Arnold. She clung to the hand-rail.

  ‘It’s Donald,’ she shouted. ‘Donald McRidley. I didn’t recognise the blighter without ’is ’air. ’E were a ruddy woman about his blessed beautiful ’air when ’e were the Shaggin’ Scot, an’ now ’e’s a bald-bonced old git.’

  Arnold’s – Donald’s! – eyes fluttered open.

  So, he wasn’t a navvy. Or not any more. He was back on his train. Unable to get away, Richard supposed. No wonder.

  ‘Driver,’ he shouted. ‘Bring in the Streak!’

  ‘Passengers aren’t allowed in this part of the train, sir,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s against regulations. The company can’t be held responsible for accidents.’

  Richard saw the red glint, the Gecko creeping back. He slapped McRidley, hard. The eyes were clear for a moment.

  ‘Time to stop the train,’ he told the man. ‘Do your duty, at last. Redeem your name.’

  ‘Do it for Elsie, ducks,’ said Mrs Nickles, cooing in McRidley’s ear. ‘Do it for poor Nick. For the LSI-bloody-R.’

  McRidley broke free of the pair of them.

  As if sleepwalking in a hurry, mind somewhere else, he pulled levers, rolled wheels, tapped gauges.

  The station was dead ahead, sunlight flashing on its glass roof.

  Wheels screamed on rails. Vanessa tooted the whistle happily.

  Harry was with them now, arm in a makeshift sling, hair awry. Every boy wanted to be in the cabin of a steam train.

  They all had to hang onto something as McRidley braced himself.

  Sparks showered the platform, startling an early-morning porter. The buffers loomed.

  They did not crash. But there was a heavy jolt.

  IX.


  Donald McRidley, Arnold the conductor, was dead. When the train stopped, so did he – like grandfather and the clock in the song.

  3473-S was decoupled now and shunted into a siding. The Gecko was still nestled in there, but its conduit to the train, to the passengers, was cut. Richard thought it might have been the communication cord, which had to be unhooked – but the monster had also been tied to the lifeline of the once-disgraced, now-redeemed driver.

  ‘’E were an ’andsome devil,’ commented Mrs Nickles, putting her teeth back in. ‘Loved ’is train more than any girl, though.’

  Harry was on the telephone to Edwin Winthrop. He said the entity was in captivity, but Richard knew the Gecko was dying. As the fire went out in 3473’s belly, the monster gasped its last. A bad beast, Danny had called it. The iron shell would just be a trophy. They should hang the cow-catcher in the Diogenes Club.

  The decoy couriers were gone, off to the NATO base. Mrs Sweet was marching down to the baggage car, where a surprise awaited. The terrifying vicar looked even more ghastly in the light of day. Richard had brushed past the man several times, mind open for any ill-omen, to convince himself the Gecko wasn’t sneaking off in this vessel to work its evil anew.

  Police and ambulances were on their way. Edwin would have words in ears, to account for Danny, Annette and the crewmen, not to mention general damage. Richard found Annette rolled under a table, and carried her to her compartment, where he laid her out on her bed, over her night-gown, eyes closed.

  A straight-backed American civilian, with teeth like Burt Lancaster and a chin-dent like Kirk Douglas, scouted along the platform.

  ‘Buddy, have you seen a parcel?’ he said. ‘For Coates?’

  Richard tried to answer, but no words came.

  The American looked further, walking past Vanessa.

  EPILOGUE: PORTNACREIRANN

  The train finally came, as Richard finished telling the story.

  They had been up all night. Cold Saturday dawn had broken.

  Now, they sat in a carriage, not a compartment. Fred settled in, but Richard was restless.

  ‘I used to love trains,’ he said. ‘Even after my Ghost Train ride. It was a nice way to travel. You had time and ease, to read or talk or look out the window. Now, it’s all strikes and delays. This might as well be a motor-coach. She hates trains, you know. Mrs Thatcher. To her, anyone who travels on public transport is a failure, beneath contempt. She’s going to bleed the railways. It’ll be horrid. Like so much else.’