Books of Blood (6 page)

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 oversight, 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.’

      Kaufman’s only response was a grin. He was past being terrorized by this gross, shambling hulk.

      The Butcher unhooked the cleaver from his belt and brandished it.

      ‘A dirty little Jew like you,’ he said, ‘should be thankful to be useful at all: meat’s the best you can aspire to.’

      Without warning, the Butcher swung. The cleaver divided the air at some speed, but Kaufman stepped back. The cleaver sliced his coat-arm and buried itself in the Puerto Rican’s shank. The impact half-severed the leg and the weight of the body opened the gash even further. The exposed meat of the thigh was like prime steak, succulent and appetizing.

     
The Butcher started to drag the cleaver out of the wound, and in that moment Kaufman sprang. The knife sped towards Mahogany’s eye, but an error of judgement buried it instead in his neck. It transfixed the column and appeared in a little gout of gore on the other side. Straight through. In one stroke. Straight through.

      Mahogany felt the blade in his neck as a choking sensation, almost as though he had caught a chicken bone in his throat. He made a ridiculous, half-hearted coughing sound. Blood issued from his lips, painting them, like lipstick on his woman’s mouth. The cleaver clattered to the floor.

      Kaufman pulled out the knife. The two wounds spouted little arcs of blood.

      Mahogany collapsed to his knees, staring at the knife that had killed him. The little man was watching him quite passively. He was saying something, but Mahogany’s ears were deaf to the remarks, as though he was under water.

      Mahogany suddenly went blind. He knew with a nostalgia for his senses that he would not see or hear again. This was death: it was on him for certain.

      His hands still felt the weave of his trousers, however, and the hot splashes on his skin. His life seemed to totter on its tiptoes while his fingers grasped at one last sense.

      Then his body collapsed, and his hands, and his life, and his sacred duty folded up under a weight of grey flesh.

      The Butcher was dead.

      Kaufman dragged gulps of stale air into his lungs and grabbed one of the straps to steady his reeling body. Tears blotted out the shambles he stood in. A time passed: he didn’t know how long; he was lost in a dream of victory.

      Then the train began to slow. He felt and heard the brakes being applied. The hanging bodies lurched forward as the careering train slowed, its wheels squealing on rails that were sweating slime.

     
Curiosity overtook Kaufman.

Would the train shunt into the Butcher’s underground slaughterhouse, decorated with the meats he had gathered through his career? And the laughing driver, so indifferent to the massacre, what would he do once the train had stopped? Whatever happened now was academic. He could face anything at all; watch and see.

      The tannoy crackled. The voice of the driver:

      ‘We’re here man. Better take your place eh?’

      Take your place? What did that mean?

      The train had slowed to a snail’s pace. Outside the windows, everything was as dark as ever. The lights flickered, then went out. This time they didn’t come back

on.

      Kaufman was left in total darkness.

      ‘We’ll be out in half-an-hour,’ the tannoy announced, so like any station report.

      The train had come to a stop. The sound of its wheels on the tracks, the rush of its passage, which Kaufman had grown so used to, were suddenly absent. All he could hear was the hum of the tannoy. He could still see nothing at all.

      Then, a hiss. The doors were opening. A smell entered the car, a smell so caustic that Kaufman clapped his hand over his face to shut it out.

      He stood in silence, hand to mouth, for what seemed a lifetime. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.

      Then, there was a flicker of light outside the window. It threw the door frame into silhouette, and it grew stronger by degrees. Soon there was sufficient light in the car for Kaufman to see the crumpled body of the Butcher at his feet, and the sallow sides of meat hanging on every side of him.

      There was a whisper too, from the dark outside the train, a gathering of tiny noises like the voices of beetles. In the

tunnel, shuffling towards the train, were human beings. Kaufman could see their outlines now. Some of them carried torches, which burned with a dead brown light. The noise was perhaps their feet on the damp earth, or perhaps their tongues clicking, or both.

      Kaufman wasn’t as naive as he’d been an hour before. Could there be any doubt as to the intention these things had, coming out of the blackness towards the train? The Butcher had slaughtered the men and women as meat for these cannibals, they were coming, like diners at the dinner-gong, to eat in this restaurant car.

      Kaufman bent down and picked up the cleaver the Butcher had dropped. The noise of the creatures’ approach was louder every moment. He backed down the car away from the open doors, only to find that the doors behind him were also open, and there was the whisper of approach there too.

      He shrank back against one of the seats, and was about to take refuge under them when a hand, thin and frail to the point of transparency appeared around the door.

      He could not look away. Not that terror froze him as it had at the window. He simply wanted to watch.

      The creature stepped into the car. The torches behind it threw its face into shadow, but its outline could be clearly seen.

      There was nothing very remarkable about it.

      It had two arms and two legs as he did; its head was not abnormally shaped. The body was small, and the effort of climbing into the train made its breath coarse. It seemed more geriatric than psychotic; generations of fictional man-eaters had not prepared him for its distressing vulnerability.

      Behind it, similar creatures were appearing out of the darkness, shuffling into the train. In fact they were coming in at every door.

     
Kaufman was trapped. He weighed the cleaver in his hands, getting the balance of it, ready for the battle with these antique monsters. A torch had been brought into the car, and it illuminated the faces of the leaders.

      They were completely bald. The tired flesh of their faces was pulled tight over their skulls, so that it shone with tension. There were stains of decay and disease on their skin, and in places the muscle had withered to a black pus, through which the bone of cheek or temple was showing. Some of them were naked as babies, their pulpy, syphilitic bodies scarcely sexed. What had been breasts were leathery bags hanging off the torso, the genitalia shrunken away.

      Worse sights than the naked amongst them were those who wore a veil of clothes. It soon dawned on Kaufman that the rotting fabric slung around their shoulders, or knotted about their midriffs was made of human skins. Not one, but a dozen or more, heaped haphazardly on top of each other, like pathetic trophies.

      The leaders of this grotesque meal-line had reached the bodies now, and the gracile hands were laid upon the shanks of meat, and were running up and down the shaved flesh in a manner that suggested sensual pleasure. Tongues were dancing out of mouths, flecks of spittle landing on the meat. The eyes of the monsters were flickering back and forth with hunger and excitement.

      Eventually one of them saw Kaufman.

      Its eyes stopped flickering for a moment, and fixed on him. A look of enquiry came over the face, making a parody of puzzlement.

      ‘You,’ it said. The voice was as wasted as the lips it came from.

      Kaufman raised the cleaver a little, calculating his chances. There were perhaps thirty of them in the car and many more outside. But they looked so weak, and they had no weapons, but their skin and bones.

     
The monster spoke again, its voice quite well modulated, when it found itself, the piping of a once-cultured, once-charming man.

      ‘You came after the other, yes?’

      It glanced down at the body of Mahogany. It had clearly taken in the situation very quickly.

      ‘Old anyway,’ it said, its watery eyes back on Kaufman, studying him with care.

      ‘Fuck you,’ said Kaufman.

      The creature attempted a wry smile, but it had almost forgotten the technique and the result was a grimace which exposed a mouthful of teeth that had been systematically filed into points.

      ‘You must now do this for us,’ it said through the bestial grin.

      ‘We cannot survive without food.’

      The hand patted the rump of human flesh. Kaufman had no reply to the idea. He just stared in disgust as the fingernails slid between the cleft in the buttocks, feeling the swell of tender muscle.

      ‘It disgusts us no less than you,’ said the creature. ‘But we’re bound to eat this meat, or we die. God knows, I have no appetite for it.’

      The thing was drooling nevertheless.

      Kaufman found his voice. It was small, more with a confusion of feelings than with fear.

      ‘What are you?’ He remembered the bearded man in the Deli.

      ‘Are you accidents of some kind?’

      ‘We are the City fathers,’ the thing said. ‘And mothers, and daughters and sons. The builders, the law-makers. We made this city.’

      ‘New York?’ said Kaufman. The Palace of Delights? ‘Before you were born, before anyone living was born.’ As it spoke the creature’s fingernails were running up under the skin of the split body, and were peeling the thin elastic layer off the luscious brawn. Behind Kaufman, the

other creatures had begun to unhook the bodies from the straps, their hands laid in that same delighting manner on the smooth breasts and flanks of flesh. These too had begun skinning the meat.

      ‘You will bring us more,’ the father said. ‘More meat for us. The other one was weak.’

      Kaufman stared in disbelief.

      ‘Me?’ he said. ‘Feed you? What do you think I am?’

      ‘You must do it for us, and for those older than us. For those born before the city was thought of, when America was a timberland and desert.’

      The fragile hand gestured out of the train.

      Kaufman’s gaze followed the pointing finger into the gloom. There was something else outside the train which he’d failed to see before; much bigger than anything human.

      The pack of creatures parted to let Kaufman through so that he could inspect more closely whatever it was that stood outside, but his feet would not move.

      ‘Go on,’ said the father.

      Kaufman thought of the city he’d loved. Were these really its ancients, its philosophers, its creators? He had to believe it. Perhaps there were people on the surface —bureaucrats, politicians, authorities of every kind — who knew this horrible secret and whose lives were dedicated to preserving these abominations, feeding them, as savages feed lambs to their gods. There was a horrible familiarity about this ritual. It rang a bell — not in Kaufman’s conscious mind, but in his deeper, older self.

      His feet, no longer obeying his mind, but his instinct to worship, moved. He walked through the corridor of bodies and stepped out of the train.

      The light of the torches scarcely began to illuminate the limitless darkness outside. The air seemed solid, it was so thick with the smell of ancient earth. But Kaufman smelt