Now it was time to change. The thrill of killing had diminished and each new job brought another worry, fed his growing paranoia that he Stephen Lyle was the next victim. So he had decided to stop. He had enough cash and though an elaborate process that kept his name off the deeds he had bought a house in a respectable Suffolk town. A gentile and mild mannered place, close to the sea, and a million miles from his current life.
Lyle yawned. He was sticky, the sweat had dried on his forehead and his hands felt unclean. He looked to the sign at the end of the carriage, the bathroom was occupied and checking first that his bag was safely stowed, he got out of his seat and walked back down the train, past the travelling public though the cheerless buffet car until he found a vacant sign.
At the washroom door he paused slightly, allowing himself to rock with the sudden jolting motion of the train, his hand anchored on the door handle for a moment before he twisted it open then instantly recoiled, gasping , breathless with shock.
The dead eyes stared out at him from their puffy sockets, accusing, spiteful. Lyle stumbled back, steadying himself on the door’s metal frame.
The body was propped up on the ugly steel toilet. The face was grotesque, purple and bloated as though inflated with foul air. Around the neck a biting ligature of thin wire formed a cruel halo above the semi-clothed torso. Lyle swallowed hard; incredulous he reached forward and almost touched the corpse. His gaze was drawn to the body’s right hand, to the stump, black with congealed blood, which marked the position where a finger had once grown. There could be no doubt: this was the man who a few hours ago had slumped in front of him, whose life Lyle had squeezed away with a twisted wire. The dead man’s shirt had been ripped open revealing a patchwork of tattoos. Pictures of dragon-like reptiles merged with twisting female forms, and in their centre, cut deep into the chest, was a crude pentangle, its lines blurred by darkening blood.
Lyle turned and started to run, back though the carriages past half empty cans and foam-stained plastic glasses, past newspapers vying with cheerful children’s books for space on the narrow tables. He charged though the now desolate buffet car and on past suddenly vacant rows of chairs. Lyle was panicking now, he could feel his chest tighten with fear, and logic failed him, where had all the people gone? They couldn’t have disappeared, it was impossible. Who had placed the body? How had they got hold of it?
He stopped running as he reached his seat, his chest heaving as he sucked air into his lungs his need for oxygen fuelled by the massive surge of adrenalin in his blood. He tried to collect himself, to stem his rising fear. Concentrate, he thought, who has done this? Worry about how later.
Lyle began to calm. His instinct for survival was winning and he was back in control. He surveyed his surroundings: tables as before but no passengers. His coffee had stopped steaming, his bag was unmoved and he noticed that opposite an abandoned laptop’s screen now traced a pattern of complex pipes. He listened. The train sounded faster than before but strangely its movement had become less marked. The familiar rocking of a train at speed was all but gone, as though the train were floating above the rails.
Kneeling on a seat Lyle pressed his face to the window and cupped his eyes, blanking out the fluorescent glare of the carriage lights. It took a few seconds for his eyes to become attuned to the dark but, even when he was sure they must be, he saw nothing. Through the window he stared into an abyss. There was no night sky, no hint of a tunnel wall or even of the train’s own lights radiating into the void, just total blackness.
Lyle stood again and looked up and down the carriage his body now on full alert. His mind began to churn, who could have done this? He had many enemies but this was an extravagant job to pull, surely too elaborate for the thugs that he kept an eye open for. Then suddenly a flicker! He sensed rather than saw it, but something had moved in the next carriage.
Lyle tore his bag from the overhead shelf, fished inside and withdrew a slim-bladed knife. Dropping the bag on his seat he checked the weapon, pulling it halfway from its leather scabbard as though reassuring himself of its lethality. Lyle slipped the knife into his trousers so that the handle lay flat against the small of his back and looked towards the door to the next carriage.
Now that he was alert again his confidence had recovered. His reason was returning. The dead man must have powerful friends, and these contacts would be violent and resourceful people and they had set him up. Lyle could deal with violent people: they were his living.
The door to the next carriage hissed open as Lyle’s foot pressed on the rubber mat. Cautiously he moved into the space between the cars and checked the now vacant toilets, nothing. He looked though the next glass door at the rows of seats ahead of him. To his right, about halfway down the carriage, he was surprised to see the top of a head facing away from him. Someone was sitting in the compartment.
As he entered the carriage Lyle made no attempt to conceal his presence. It had long been his style to intimidate, to attack. He strode up the aisle keeping his eyes fixed on the back of the head. Once he was in striking distance he slowed and removed the knife from its hiding place. The blade blinked in the bright overhead light and Lyle positioned it ahead of him, readying himself for conflict.
The head turned.
The man who met Lyle’s gaze was extraordinary. His face, framed in oil-black hair, was shocking. The skin appeared as if made of wax, or plastic - dead skin. The lips were white and thin, the eyebrows devoid of hair. Lyle’s mouth opened slightly. The man’s eyes connected with his. The eyes were black, each pupil and iris merged into a single dark hole - shark’s eyes. Lyle’s arm involuntarily relaxed and he brought the knife down to hang beside him, it clattered to the floor.
The creature spoke.
“Alea iacta est Mr Lyle! The die is cast.”
Lyle was stunned. The man’s appearance was terrifying, his eyes mesmerising. He tried to speak but his mouth was dry and his throat silent. He looked down from the stranger’s face. The clothes were odd, dark, from another age. His hands were spread out on the table in front of him, the fingers claw like, the nails horny and long. But it was the photographs laid out like cards in front of the hands that caused Lyle’s legs to buckle. Thirty pictures for thirty lives, each as Lyle remembered them, recently dead by his own hand. Some missed a finger or a hand, some were complete, and all were strangled, the evidence still visible, biting into the blackened necks.
“Do you believe in Hell Mr Lyle?” The voice was accented, foreign, somehow ancient.
“Do you believe that choices made in life are rewarded or punished after death?”
The stranger paused fixing Lyle with the macabre dark eyes.
“Running for a train in such an abused body was unwise: a fatal error in fact.”
Lyle stumbled back and began to flee, a raw visceral terror overwhelming him, but as he reached the door there was nothing behind it. The now familiar cloying blackness had replaced the next carriage. He put his hands up to his eyes and half sobbed, half bellowed a cry of anguish and defeat.
He turned back to face the carriage, it was now almost full. In each seat sat a man and all fixed their dead eyes on Lyle, each a victim from the photographs, reanimated and quite real.
The stranger stood in the centre of the aisle and smiled as thirty lengths of glinting wire were raised slowly into the air and one by one the passengers rose to their feet and moved in orderly procession slowly but deliberately towards Stephen Lyle.
Immobile with terror Lyle could do nothing; his usually powerful arms limp as though paralysed. Even as the first metal cord tightened about his neck he could not move, could not fend off his attacker. He could smell the fetid cold breath, hear the broken rasp in the dead man’s throat and feel the icy damp hands as they brushed his skin and tightened the noose. The pain was excruciating. He fought for breath, his lungs burnt, his veins strained against his skin, he waited for the darkness, for the end but it did not come. Death did not come even when the second then third wires tightened, just more pain, a wall of agony, all consuming, firing into every nerve in his body as each individual cell pleaded and grasped for oxygen.
“There is no end to this pain for you Mr Lyle.” The creature whispered, suddenly next to him, the waxy skin almost touching Stephen’s cheek.
The demon looked ruminatively back down the queue, observing each corpse patiently waiting their turn.
“Peace is for the pious.” He breathed the words, they sounded almost like regret, a lament for what might have been.
The forth corpse lurched forward and began to slip the wire over Lyle’s head, the cord catching on his ears, the pungent breath invading his nose. The pain redoubled, a different pain, a catastrophic explosion in his chest, sharp and stabbing, hot needles pushing out though his arms, he blinked and suddenly he was on his back. He could feel cold concrete beneath him, hear concerned voices and as his vision swam he saw yellow clothes, police, bright lights and someone was kneeling over him a metal paddle in each hand. Lyle drew in a huge breath of air, retching and coughing as life flooded back into his body. He was on a platform, paramedics above him, he was not dead!
Stabilised, a drip in his arm and oxygen tubes in his nose, bound in a warm red blanket Lyle lay in the ambulance. He was out of immediate danger and would soon be on his way to a hospital ward and another change of life; he had had his warning sign.
The paramedic checked Lyle’s blood pressure and then stepped out of the ambulance to talk with his colleague. Stephen sighed slightly and closed his eyes.
The icy finger caressed Lyle’s cheek and he opened his eyes to see the creature’s shark like eyes staring into his.
“The die is cast Mr Lyle, I will be waiting and time is nothing to me…”
Stephen Lyle, ruthless killer, hardened criminal and now lost soul began to scream.
The End