Infinitesimally slowly he crawled out from under the seat, watching the Butcher’s back every minute as he did so. Once out, he began to crawl towards the door. Each step he took was a torment, but the Butcher seemed far too engrossed in his conversation to turn round.
Kaufman had reached the door. He began to stand up, trying all the while to prepare himself for the sight he would meet in Car Two. The handle was grasped; and he slid the door open. The noise of the rails increased, and a wave of dank air, stinking of nothing on earth, came up at him. Surely the Butcher must hear, or smell? Surely he must turn —But no. Kaufman skinned his way through the slit he had opened and so through into the bloody chamber beyond.
Relief made him careless. He failed to latch the door properly behind him and it began to slide open with the buffeting of the train. Mahogany put his head out of the cabin and stared down the car towards the door. ‘What the fuck’s that?’ said the driver. ‘Didn’t close the door properly. That’s all.’ Kaufman heard the Butcher walking towards the door. He crouched, a ball of consternation, against the inter-secting wall, suddenly aware of how full his bowels were. The door was pulled closed from the other side, and the footsteps receded again.
Safe, for another breath at least.
Kaufman opened his eyes, steeling himself for the slaughter-pen in front of him.
There was no avoiding it.
It filled every one of his senses: the smell of opened entrails, the sight of the bodies, the feel of fluid on the floor under his fingers, the sound of the straps creaking beneath the weight of the corpses, even the air, tasting salty with blood. He was with death absolutely in that cubby-hole, hurtling through the dark.
But there was no nausea now. There was no feeling left but a casual revulsion. He even found himself peering at the bodies with some curiosity.
The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he’d seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene dance macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly.
Every part of the dead kid’s anatomy was swaying hypnotically. The tongue, hanging from the open mouth. The head, lolling on its slit neck. Even the youth’s penis flapped from side to side on his plucked groin. The head wound and the open jugular still pulsed blood into a black bucket. There was an elegance about the whole sight: the sign of a job well-done.
Beyond that body were the strung-up corpses of two young white women and a darker skinned male. Kaufman turned his head on one side to look at their faces. They were quite blank. One of the girls was a beauty. He decided the male had been Puerto Rican. All were shorn of their head and body hair. In fact the air was still pungent with the smell of the shearing. Kaufman slid up the wall out of the crouching position, and as he did so one of the women’s bodies turned around, presenting a dorsal view.
He was not prepared for this last horror.
The meat of her back had been entirely cleft open from neck to buttock and the muscle had been peeled back to expose the glistening vertebrae. It was the final triumph of the Butcher’s craft. Here they hung, these shaved, bled, slit slabs of humanity, opened up like fish, and ripe for devouring.
Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion, promising a blank indifference to the world.
He began to shake, uncontrollably. He felt his vocal cords trying to form a scream. It was intolerable: and yet to scream was to become in a short while like the creatures in front of him.
‘Fuck it,’ he said, more loudly than he’d intended, then pushing himself off from the wall he began to walk down the car between the swaying corpses, observing the neat piles of clothes and belongings that sat on the seats beside their owners. Under his feet the floor was sticky with drying bile. Even with his eyes closed to cracks he could see the blood in the buckets too clearly: it was thick and heady, flecks of grit turning in it.
He was past the youth now and he could see the door into Car Three ahead. All he had to do was run this gauntlet of atrocities. He urged himself on, trying to ignore the horrors, and concentrate on the door that would lead him back into sanity.
He was past the first woman. A few more yards, he said to himself, ten steps at most, less if he walked with confidence.
Then the lights went out.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.
The train lurched, and Kaufman lost his balance.
In the utter blackness he reached out for support and his flailing arms encompassed the body beside him. Before he could prevent himself he felt his hands sinking into the lukewarm flesh, and his fingers grasping the open edge of muscle on the dead woman’s back, his fingertips touching the bone of her spine. His cheek was laid against the bald flesh of the thigh. He screamed; and even as he screamed, the lights flickered back on.
And as they flickered back on, and his scream died, he heard the noise of the Butcher’s feet approaching down the length of Car One towards the intervening door.
He let go of the body he was embracing. His face was smeared with blood from her leg. He could feel it on his cheek, like war paint.
The scream had cleared Kaufman’s head and he sud-denly felt released into a kind of strength. There would be no pursuit down the train, he knew that: there would be no cowardice, not now. This was going to be a primitive confrontation, two human beings, face to face. And there would be no trick — none — that he couldn’t contemplate using to bring his enemy down. This was a matter of survival, pure and simple.
The door-handle rattled.
Kaufman looked around for a weapon, his eye steady and calculating. His gaze fell on the pile of clothes beside the Puerto Rican’s body. There was a knife there, lying amongst the rhinestone rings and the imitation gold chains. A long-bladed, immaculately clean weapon, probably the man’s pride and joy. Reaching past the well-muscled body, Kaufman plucked the knife from the heap. It felt good in his hand; in fact it felt positively thrilling.
The door was opening, and the face of the slaughterer came into view.
Kaufman looked down the abattoir at Mahogany. He was not terribly fearsome, just another balding, overweight man of fifty. His face was heavy and his eyes deep-set. His mouth was rather small and delicately lipped. In fact he had a woman’s mouth.
Mahogany could not understand where this intruder had appeared from, but he was aware that it was another over-sight, another sign of increasing incompetence. He must dispatch this ragged creature immediately. After all they could not be more than a mile or two from the end of the line. He must cut the little man down and have him hanging up by his heels before they reached their destination.
He moved into Car Two. ‘You were asleep,’ he said, recognizing Kaufman. ‘I saw you.
Kaufman said nothing.
‘You should have left the train. What were you trying to do? Hide from me?’ Kaufman still kept his silence.
Mahogany grasped the hand of the cleaver hanging from his well-used leather belt. It was dirty with blood, as was his chain-mail apron, his hammer and his saw.
‘As it is,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to do away with you.’ Kaufman raised the knife. It looked a little small beside the Butcher’s paraphernalia.
‘Fuck it,’ he said.
Mahogany grinned at the little man’s pretensions to defence.
‘You shouldn’t have seen this: it’s not for the likes of you,’ he said, taking another step towards Kaufman. ‘It’s secret.’
Oh, so he’s the divinely-inspired type is he? thought Kaufman. That explains something.
‘Fuck it,’ he said again.
The Butcher frowned. He didn’t like the little man’s indifference to his work, to his reputation.
‘We all have to die some time,’ he said. ‘You should be well pleased: you’re not going to be burnt up like most of them: I can use you. To feed the fathers.’