The Monster Trilogy. Brian Aldiss
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that perhaps his mother was feeling the same kind of anger with Joe as Kylie felt for him.
‘Ah, I’ll phone her in the morning, damn her,’ he said. He sensed Joe’s warmth for Kylie, and dreaded his rebuke.
Directly the beam was off them, the outside world disappeared. They clung to the train roof, and edged themselves carefully through an inspection hatch, to drop down into a small compartment.
Neither Bodenland nor Clift had any notions of what to expect. Such vague anticipations as they held were shaped by the fact that they were boarding what they had casually christened a ghost train.
There was no way in which they could have anticipated the horrific scene in which they found themselves. It defied the imagination – that is, the everyday imagination of waking life: yet it some way resembled a nightmare scene out of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Something in some horrible way prepared for.
They had lowered themselves into a claustrophobic little den lined with numbers of iron instruments carefully stowed in cabinets behind glass doors. Separately, scarcely a one would have been recognized for what it was by an innocent eye. Ranked together, they presented a meaning it was impossible to mistake. They were torture instruments – torture instruments of a primitive and brutal kind. Saws, presses, screws and spikes bristled behind their panes of glass, which gave back a melancholy reflection of the subdued light.
Most of the compartment was filled by a heavily scarred wooden table. Pressed against the top of the table by a complex system of bars was a naked man. Instinctively, the two men backed away from this terrifying prisoner.
His limbs were distorted by the pressure of the bars cutting into his flesh. The gag in his mouth was kept in place by a metal rod, against which his yellowed and fanglike teeth had closed.
His whole body colour was that of a drowned man. The limbs – where not flattened or swollen – were pallid, almost green, his cheeks and lips a livid white. Beyond the imprisoned wrists curled broken and bloody fingers.
His head had been shaved and was scarred, as by a carelessly wielded open razor. A purple line had been drawn round the equator of his head, above his eyebrows.
Bodenland and Clift took a moment to realize that the prisoner was living still. Dull though his eyes were, he made a stir, the fangs in the flattened mouth clicked as if ravenous against their containing bar, the limbs trembled, one oedematous foot twitched.
Clift started to retch.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘We should never have come.’
Bodenland would say nothing. They edged round the table. The fish gaze of the victim on the table followed them, eyeballs palely bulging.
Twisting an unfamiliar type of latch on the door, they moved out into a corridor. Bodenland covered his eyes and face with a broad hand.
‘I’m sorry I got you into this, Bernie.’
The corridor was even darker than the torture compartment. No sense of movement reached them, though every now and again the corridor swerved, challenging their balance, as if it was rounding a bend at speed.
No windows gave to the outside world. At intervals, glass doors led to compartments set on the left of the corridor as they progressed.
Inside these compartments, dark and dreary, sat immobile figures, their bodies half embedded in moulded seating. The whole ambience was of something antique and underground, such as a long forgotten Egyptian tomb, in which the spirits of the dead were confined. The mouldings of the heavy wooden doors, the elaborate panelling, all suggested another age: yet the tenebrous scene was interspersed by tiny glitters at every doorway, where a panel of indicators kept up a code of information.
The men moved down the corridor, and came to an unoccupied compartment, into which they hastened with some relief. They shut themselves in, but could find no lock for the door.
‘We didn’t come armed,’ Bodenland said, with regret.
When their eyes had adjusted to the dimness, they saw plush mummy-shaped recesses in which to sit. Once seated, they had in front of them a control touch-panel – electronic but clearly of another age, and made from a material fatty in appearance. Bodenland started to fiddle with the controls.
‘Joe – suppose you summon someone …’
‘We can’t just sit around like passengers.’
He began to stab systematically with his middle finger.
A lid shot up like an eyelid on the wall facing them, and a VDU lit. Colours flowed hectically, then a male face snapped into view, a heavy aquiline face that looked as if it had been kept in deep freeze. Seeming to press its nose against the glass screen, it opened its mouth and said, ‘Agents of Group 16, prepare to leave for —— Agents of Group 16.’
‘Where did he say?’ asked Clift.
‘Never heard of the place. How come we can’t see through this window?’ Bodenland ran his hand over a series of pressure plates. The window on his left hand turned transparent. It was barred, but permitted a distorted view of the outside world in tones of grey. With this view, a sense of movement returned; they could see what looked like uncultivated prairie flashing by.
And at the same time, phantasmal figures, looking much attenuated, drifted from the train, to land on a grass mound they were passing.
‘There go the agents of Group 16,’ commented Bodenland. ‘Whoever the hell they are.’
The train then appeared to gather speed again.
More investigation of the control panel brought forth from its socket a small terrestrial globe. A thread-thin trace light revealed what they could only believe was their course, heading north-west. But the continents were subtly changed. Florida had extended itself to enclose the Caribbean. Hudson Bay did not exist. Indications were that the train was now crossing what should have been the waters of Hudson Bay; all that could be seen were forests and undulating savannah lands.
Numerals flashed across the VDU. Clift pointed to them with some excitement. He seemed to have recovered from his shock of fear.
‘Read those figures, Joe. They could be calibrated in millions of years. They certainly aren’t speeds or latitudes.’
‘You think that’s where we are – or when we are? Not simply moving through distance, but some time before Hudson Bay was formed …’
‘Before Hudson Bay … and when the climate was milder … In a forgotten epoch of some early inter-glacial … Is it possible?’
Bodenland said, ‘So we’re travelling on – a time train! Bernard, what wonderful luck!’
Clift looked at him in surprise. ‘Luck? Who knows where we’re heading? More to the point, who controls the train?’
‘We’ll have to control the train, Bernie, old sport, that’s who.’
As he rose, a last group of zombie figures could be seen to leave the train, drifting like gossamer with outspread arms, to land safely among tall grasses and fade into night.
At which point, the train swerved suddenly eastwards, throwing Bodenland back into his seat. The thread indicator also turned eastwards, maintaining latitude. The electronic numbers on the screen diminished rapidly.
‘Well, that’s something,’ Clift said. ‘We’re coming nearer to the present instead of disappearing into the far past. If our theory’s right.’
‘Let’s move. There must be a cab or similar up front.’
As they rose, the aquiline face returned to their VDU.
‘Enemy agents boarded the train at Point 656. They must be terminated. Believed only two in number. They must be terminated. Group 3 also organize death-strikes against their nearest and dearest.’
‘Hell,’ said Clift. ‘You heard that. We have to get off this