The Monster Trilogy. Brian Aldiss

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       4

      In the night that enveloped Utah, Larry was half-drunk. ‘This chopper’s easier to fly ’n one of my model planes,’ he called to Bodenland.

      Neither Bodenland nor Clift made any response, if they heard.

      ‘I’ve got a World War Two Boeing I just made,’ Larry shouted. ‘A beauty. Fifteen feet wing-span. You should see it. Goes faster than the real thing!’ He roared with laughter.

      Beneath them went the rushing phantom of the ghost train, its eerie luminance shining from the roof as from its sides.

      Bodenland lowered himself cautiously, with Bernard Clift just behind, his boots almost touching Bodenland’s helmeted head. When Bodenland gave the Thumbs Up signal, Larry switched on the improvised inertial beam. It shone down, vividly blue, encompassing the two men and the top of the train. From Larry’s careering viewpoint, they disappeared.

      ‘You’ve gone!’ he yelled to the rushing air. ‘Gone! The invisible men … That’s you and Kylie – both gone!’ The train was getting away from him. Cursing, he tried to kick more power from the labouring engines, but it was not there.

      The train pulled away ahead, and he gave up trying. When he switched off the inertial beam, the wire rope was empty. Bodenland and Clift had indeed gone. He wound in the rope.

      Larry’s feelings were mixed. He had had no opportunity to say anything about the quarrel with Kylie. His father had been too absorbed in this venture. His arrival had been taken for granted, to Larry’s mixed relief and disappointment. He had found Old John surrounded by vehicles and uniformed personnel from Bodenland Enterprises. The students were gone. Now the site of the two graves more resembled an armed camp than a dig.

      Only now, as he headed back alone to the camp and another drink did it occur to Larry that perhaps his mother was feeling the same kind of anger with Joe as Kylie felt for him.

      ‘Ah, I’ll phone her in the morning, damn her,’ he said. He sensed Joe’s warmth for Kylie, and dreaded his rebuke.

      Directly the beam was off them, the outside world disappeared. They clung to the train roof, and edged themselves carefully through an inspection hatch, to drop down into a small compartment.

      Neither Bodenland nor Clift had any notions of what to expect. Such vague anticipations as they held were shaped by the fact that they were boarding what they had casually christened a ghost train.

      There was no way in which they could have anticipated the horrific scene in which they found themselves. It defied the imagination – that is, the everyday imagination of waking life: yet it some way resembled a nightmare scene out of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Something in some horrible way prepared for.

      They had lowered themselves into a claustrophobic little den lined with numbers of iron instruments carefully stowed in cabinets behind glass doors. Separately, scarcely a one would have been recognized for what it was by an innocent eye. Ranked together, they presented a meaning it was impossible to mistake. They were torture instruments – torture instruments of a primitive and brutal kind. Saws, presses, screws and spikes bristled behind their panes of glass, which gave back a melancholy reflection of the subdued light.

      Most of the compartment was filled by a heavily scarred wooden table. Pressed against the top of the table by a complex system of bars was a naked man. Instinctively, the two men backed away from this terrifying prisoner.

      His limbs were distorted by the pressure of the bars cutting into his flesh. The gag in his mouth was kept in place by a metal rod, against which his yellowed and fanglike teeth had closed.

      His whole body colour was that of a drowned man. The limbs – where not flattened or swollen – were pallid, almost green, his cheeks and lips a livid white. Beyond the imprisoned wrists curled broken and bloody fingers.

      His head had been shaved and was scarred, as by a carelessly wielded open razor. A purple line had been drawn round the equator of his head, above his eyebrows.

      Bodenland and Clift took a moment to realize that the prisoner was living still. Dull though his eyes were, he made a stir, the fangs in the flattened mouth clicked as if ravenous against their containing bar, the limbs trembled, one oedematous foot twitched.

      Clift started to retch.

      ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘We should never have come.’

      Bodenland would say nothing. They edged round the table. The fish gaze of the victim on the table followed them, eyeballs palely bulging.

      Twisting an unfamiliar type of latch on the door, they moved out into a corridor. Bodenland covered his eyes and face with a broad hand.

      ‘I’m sorry I got you into this, Bernie.’

      The corridor was even darker than the torture compartment. No sense of movement reached them, though every now and again the corridor swerved, challenging their balance, as if it was rounding a bend at speed.

      No windows gave to the outside world. At intervals, glass doors led to compartments set on the left of the corridor as they progressed.

      Inside these compartments, dark and dreary, sat immobile figures, their bodies half embedded in moulded seating. The whole ambience was of something antique and underground, such as a long forgotten Egyptian tomb, in which the spirits of the dead were confined. The mouldings of the heavy wooden doors, the elaborate panelling, all suggested another age: yet the tenebrous scene was interspersed by tiny glitters at every doorway, where a panel of indicators kept up a code of information.

      The men moved down the corridor, and came to an unoccupied compartment, into which they hastened with some relief. They shut themselves in, but could find no lock for the door.

      ‘We didn’t come armed,’ Bodenland said, with regret.

      When their eyes had adjusted to the dimness, they saw plush mummy-shaped recesses in which to sit. Once seated, they had in front of them a control touch-panel СКАЧАТЬ