Then the train began to slow.
A station. Yes, a station. The train emerged from the tunnel and into the dirty light of the station at West 4th Street. He’d missed no stops…
So where had the boy gone?
He’d either ignored the warning on the car wall forbid-ding transfer between the cars while in transit, or else he’d gone into the driver’s cabin up front. Probably between the driver’s legs even now, Kaufman thought, his lip curling. It wasn’t unheard of. This was the Palace of Delights, after all, and everyone had their right to a little love in the dark.
Kaufman shrugged to himself. What did he care where the boy had gone?
The doors closed. Nobody had boarded the train. It shunted off from the station, the lights flickering as it used a surge of power to pick up some speed again.
Kaufman felt the desire for sleep come over him afresh, but the sudden fear of being lost had pumped adrenalin into his system, and his limbs were tingling with nervous energy.
His senses were sharpened too.
Even over the clatter and the rumble of the wheels on the tracks, he heard the sound of tearing cloth coming from the next car. Was someone tearing their shirt off?
He stood up, grasping one of the straps for balance.
The window between the cars was completely curtained off, but he stared at it, frowning, as though he might suddenly discover X-ray vision. The car rocked and rolled. It was really travelling again.
Another ripping sound.
Was it rape?
With no more than a mild voyeuristic urge he moved down the see-sawing car towards the intersecting door, hoping there might be a chink in the curtain. His eyes were still fixed on the window, and he failed to notice the splatters of blood he was treading in. Until — — his heel slipped. He looked down. His stomach almost saw the blood before his brain and the ham on whole-wheat was half-way up his gullet catching in the back of his throat. Blood. He took several large gulps of stale air and looked away — back at the window. His head was saying: blood. Nothing would make the word go away.
There was no more than a yard or two between him and the door now. He had to look. There was blood on his shoe, and a thin trail to the next car, but he still had to look.
He had to.
He took two more steps to the door and scanned the curtain looking for a flaw in the blind: a pulled thread in the weave would be sufficient. There was a tiny hole. He glued his eye to it.
His mind refused to accept what his eyes were seeing beyond the door. It rejected the spectacle as preposterous, as a dreamed sight. His reason said it couldn’t be real, but his flesh knew it was. His body became rigid with terror. His eyes, unblinking, could not close off the appalling scene through the curtain. He stayed at the door while the train rattled on, while his blood drained from his extremities, and his brain reeled from lack of oxygen. Bright spots of light flashed in front of his vision, blotting out the atrocity.
Then he fainted.
He was unconscious when the train reached Jay Street. He was deaf to the driver’s announcement that all travellers beyond that station would have to change trains. Had he heard this he would have questioned the sense of it. No trains disgorged all their passengers at Jay Street; the line ran to Mott Avenue, via the Aqueduct Race Track, past JFK Airport. He would have asked what kind of train this could be. Except that he already knew. The truth was hanging in the next car. It was smiling contentedly to itself from behind a bloody chain-mail apron.
This was the Midnight Meat Train. There’s no accounting for time in a dead faint. It could have been seconds or hours that passed before Kaufman’s eyes flickered open again, and his mind focussed on his new-found situation.
He lay under one of the seats now, sprawled along the vibrating wall of the car, hidden from view. Fate was with him so far he thought: somehow the rocking of the car must have jockeyed his unconscious body out of sight.
He thought of the horror in Car Two, and swallowed back vomit. He was alone. Wherever the guard was (murdered perhaps), there was no way he could call for help. And the driver? Was he dead at his controls? Was the train even now hurtling through an unknown tunnel, a tunnel without a single station to identify it, towards its destruction?
And if there was no crash to be killed in, there was always the Butcher, still hacking away a door’s thickness from where Kaufman lay.
Whichever way he turned, the name on the door was Death.
The noise was deafening, especially lying on the floor. Kaufman’s teeth were shaking in their sockets and his face felt numb with the vibration; even his skull was aching.
Gradually he felt strength seeping back into his exhausted limbs. He cautiously stretched his fingers and clenched his fists, to set the blood flowing there again.
And as the feeling returned, so did the nausea. He kept seeing the grisly brutality of the next car. He’d seen photographs of murder victims before, of course, but these were no common murders. He was in the same train as the Subway Butcher, the monster who strung his victims up by the feet from the straps, hairless and naked.
How long would it be before the killer stepped through that door and claimed him? He was sure that if the slaughterer didn’t finish him, expectation would. He heard movement beyond the door.
Instinct took over. Kaufman thrust himself further under the seat and tucked himself up into a tiny ball, with his sick-white face to the wall. Then he covered his head with his hands and closed his eyes as tightly as any child in terror of the Bogeyman.
The door was slid open. Click. Whoosh. A rush of air up from the rails. It smelt stranger than any Kaufman had smelt before: and colder. This was somehow primal air in his nostrils, hostile and unfathomable air. It made him shudder.
The door closed. Click.
The Butcher was close, Kaufman knew it. He could be standing no more than a matter of inches from where he lay.
Was he even now looking down at Kaufman’s back? Even now bending, knife in hand, to scoop Kaufman out of his hiding place, like a snail hooked from its shell?
Nothing happened. He felt no breath on his neck. His spine was not slit open.
There was simply a clatter of feet close to Kaufman’s head; then that same sound receding.
Kaufman’s breath, held in his lungs ‘til they hurt, was expelled in a rasp between his teeth.
Mahogany was almost disappointed that the sleeping man had alighted at West 4th Street. He was hoping for one more job to do that night, to keep him occupied while they descended. But no: the man had gone. The potential victim hadn’t looked that healthy anyway, he thought to himself, he was an anaemic Jewish accountant probably. The meat wouldn’t have been of any quality. Mahogany walked the length of the car to the driver’s cabin. He’d spend the rest of the journey there.
My Christ, thought Kaufman, he’s going to kill the driver. He heard the cabin door open. Then the voice of the Butcher: low and hoarse.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
They knew each other.
‘All done?’
‘All done.’
Kaufman was shocked by the banality of the exchange. All done? What did that mean: all done?
He missed the next few words as the train hit a particularly noisy section of track.
Kaufman could resist looking no longer. Warily he uncurled himself and glanced over his shoulder down the length of the car. All he could see was the Butcher’s legs, and the bottom of the open cabin door. Damn. He wanted to see the monster’s face again.
There was laughter now.
Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathe-matics of panic. If he remained where he was, sooner or later the Butcher would glance down at him, and he’d be mincemeat. On the other hand, if he were to move from his hiding place he would risk being seen and pursued. Which was worse: stasis, and meeting his death trapped in a hole; or making a break for it and confronting his Maker in the middle of the car?
Kaufman surprised himself with his mettle: he’d move.