and out of that unnatural light the steam train appeared at last, thundering out of the old tunnel-mouth. It was huge and dark, with gleaming steel and brass, smoke pumping out of its chimney and its whistle screaming like a soul newly damned to the Pit. Strange-coloured sparks rose where its steel wheels met the rusting rails; and then all the wheels screamed and squealed as the brakes slammed on, and the train and its carriages bucked to a shuddering halt, all along the platform of Bradleigh Halt.
Come home, at last.
JC and Happy and Melody stood close together, looking over the steam engine and its seven carriages as they settled to a halt. There was a loud ticking of cooling metal, and great gusts of steam rose on the still, evening air. A thick viscous liquid dripped steadily from every outer surface, bubbling and boiling in reaction to Earth air and Earth conditions. Some alien substance, covering all the train, brought back from the Away place, as though the train had been born again in some strange, alien amniotic fluid. The stuff fell slowly and reluctantly away from the train, dissipating, giving up the ghost, unable to hold itself together in this new kind of world. The whole train smelled like rotting meat, like something that should have been buried long ago.
The steam still issuing in sudden spurts from the cooling engine smelled bad, too; smelled wrong, unearthly, changed. The few sparks still jumping around the great steel wheels were odd and unnatural colours. The weeds that had choked the railway lines for so long, those that hadn’t been chewed up and thrown aside by the train’s return, now curled up and withered from contact with the great steel wheels.
JC beckoned urgently to Laurie, and the old man hurried over to join him. He stared at the old steam-engine with fond, almost worshipful eyes.
“She’s everything my old grand-dad said she was,” said Laurie. “He saw her go into that tunnel, you know, back in the day. He always said she’d find her way home again, eventually.”
“Are all the carriages there?” asked JC. “Is anything missing? Is everything there that should be?”
“Oh yes,” said Laurie. “But look at the state of the engine! All that…stuff, dripping off her! It’s a disgrace… What have they done to you, girl? You were a classic!”
JC looked at Melody. “Any idea where the Ghost Caller might be?”
“All of my instruments are shot, fried, and dead in the water; but if I had to guess, I’d say probably the baggage-car.”
“Look at her,” said Laurie, softly and reverently. “Been away so long everything about her has changed. All the metals and alloys are different now…the wood of the carriages is rotting, corrupt. And what’s inside…makes my skin crawl. There’s more to this train than there should be. As though the whole thing’s alive…How can it be alive?”
“How can you tell all this?” said Happy, staring at him. “I’m a telepath, and I’m not getting half of that!”
“I can feel it,” said Laurie. “Can’t you?”
Happy scowled at the train and said nothing.
“If it is alive, it’s not any kind of life we could hope to understand,” JC said briskly. “Or would want to, probably. Question is—what forms of life might the train have brought back with it?”
“Really not liking the implications of that,” said Happy. He frowned suddenly, his whole face screwing up. “And I’m picking up something really nasty, now. Not a Light or a Voice this time, a feeling…like sticking your hand into a mess of corruption. It’s the carriages, JC! Look at the carriages…Dear God, what’s happened to the passengers?”
They all moved slowly down the platform, peering through the distorted glass of the carriage windows they passed. A strange light blazed through the windows, like the blue-green phosphorescence of underwater grottos. People clustered together inside the carriages, staring out at the world they’d come back to; but they didn’t act like people any more. Their eyes were empty, faces twisted with wild, inhuman emotions. Driven mad, every one of them, or perhaps beyond madness into something else, through being trapped for so many years in a place never meant for humankind. They beat and pattered against the closed windows with flat hands as though they’d forgotten what windows were, or what hands were for. They were all desperate to get out, crawling and swarming over each other like oversized beetles, staring out at a world they no longer recognised, with blank, insect eyes.
“What happened to them?” said Laurie. “What made these people…like this?”
“The Ghost Caller,” said JC. His voice was flat and harsh, with rigidly suppressed rage. “It’s been active, Calling, all the time it was Away. The passengers in the carriages were all killed, either by the abrupt transition to the Other Place or because they couldn’t survive in the alien conditions they found there. But the Ghost Caller wouldn’t let their spirits depart. Their souls have been trapped in their dead bodies all this time, driven insane by horrors the human mind was never meant to cope with. These are dead bodies possessed by mad ghosts.”
“How can you know all that?” said Laurie.
“I seem to feel it,” said JC, a bit dreamily. “Don’t you?”
“We can’t leave them like this,” said Laurie. “It isn’t right.”
“Of course we won’t leave them like this,” said JC, immediately all business again. “Helping the restless dead find peace is all part of our job description. But the only way to free these poor souls is to smash or destroy the Ghost Caller. Then they can pass on to their proper places, in the Hereafter.”
“Hereafter?” said Laurie. “You mean, Heaven and Hell?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Happy. “Way above my pay grade. We have enough trouble coping with the Here and Now.”
“I’m an agnostic,” said Melody. “Mostly in self-defence.”
“What matters is sending these lost souls on,” JC said firmly. “So they can be made whole and sane again.”
“I’m more concerned with what happens if the passengers get out of these carriages,” said Happy. “Those windows don’t look particularly strong, or secure.”
“If they get out?” said JC. “Nothing good, I should imagine. They have enough sense left to know a great wrong has been done them and enough anger to want revenge…”
“You know,” said Melody, “this would be a really good time for you to produce one of those really powerful and utterly forbidden weapons that you carry about your person, the ones that you’re not supposed to have.”
“The Boss made me give them all up, after the last case,” said JC. “In fact, she was most insistent about it. Had me strip-searched, and everything. And you really don’t want to know what the ‘and everything’ involved.”
“She took
“She’s been keeping a very close eye on me,” said JC. “I’ve had to be very careful. I need the Carnacki Institute’s resources to help me search for Kim.”
“Look, do you have any nasty weapons about you or not?” said Melody.
“Not as such,” said JC.
“I want to go home,” said Happy loudly.
“Excuse me,” Laurie said firmly. “But I have to ask…is this a real train or a ghost train? I mean, is it really, physically, here?”
“Good question, Mr. Laurie,” said JC. “To which the official answer is, damned if I know. It certainly seems solid enough…Best to treat it as though it’s real, right up to the point where we decide it’s more useful to treat it as though it isn’t. We are nothing if not flexible in this business, in the face of utter horror.”
“We have to find the machine,” Melody said stubbornly. “The Ghost Caller. We have to shut it down.”
“Dear Melody, practical as ever!” JC said cheerfully. “I love it when a plan comes together, and all the options narrow to a point where decisions become inevitable. And, given that the light blazing out of the rear carriage is so much stranger and soul-numbingly disturbing than all the others, I think we can safely assume that
“I’m quite happy to stay with Mr. Laurie,” said Happy.
“What?” said JC. “And miss all the fun?”
“Fun is overrated.”
“You stand a much better chance of surviving if you stick with me,” said JC.
“Right with you, boss,” said Happy, miserably.
“Go, team!” said Melody.
