Shivers 7 (23 page)

“Don’t they know about it? The Vietnamese government?”

Sean heard the Frenchman’s smile. “Of course they do. They fed you to it, just like all the other ‘undesirables.’ Last night, you picked up a local girl in a bar and humiliated her, caused trouble for her family. And you’re an American. This train is, shall we say, like a bastard step-child they don’t know how to rid themselves of. It just keeps coming round. So they use it to throw away their trash. The old, the diseased, the foreign trouble-makers. Power takes its due. And there is
always
a higher power. Every time I ride this train, I must give up some of my cargo, a tribute, shall we say. But it is a fair trade, no?”

“Where’s this train going? How do you get off?”

“Ah, my young friend, that is part of the deal. My friends and I are getting off at Nha Trang. But this train doesn’t stop, you see. It, too, must give up its due at the last stop.”

“To what? Where?”

“To even darker powers, of course.”

“Just let us go! Just me and Phil and her. Please.”

“Why on earth would I do that?”

“Because you’re a human being, right? This train is full of dead people now. Isn’t it… full?”

“It doesn’t work that way, you see. Your fate was sealed from the moment you set foot on board. I don’t make the rules.” Sean sensed his crocodile smile. “I just take advantage of them.”

“Just me and Phil and her. We don’t matter to your plans. We can’t stop you.”

“My young friend, you’re dead already! And I don’t think getting off is an option for your friend any longer.”

A flashlight beam shattered the darkness, and Sean blinked away tears. The Frenchman shined his pen light toward the towering warrior a few steps behind Sean. The machete in the warrior’s tattooed fist dripped dark crimson.

Sean lunged toward the Frenchman. The flashlight tumbled to the floor, and in the dancing beam he caught a glimpse of a surprised expression wiping away the smirk on the Frenchman’s dry lips. Sean was surprised at how easily the point of switchblade went into the soft, perfumed throat. A choked gurgle, and Sean shoved in the point until it jammed against skull and spine, then he ripped backward and tore out the Frenchman’s throat like he was cutting a bundle of cords.

The women shrieked and dragged themselves away as the warmth spattered over them.

He felt the weight of the warrior bearing toward him, imagined the machete upraised to take his head.

As the Frenchman’s body fell like a sack of fresh meat, lungs spewing blood from the front of his throat, Sean felt the hard bulge of a pistol in a shoulder holster under the jacket. Sean followed it down, snatching at the butt of the pistol.

The pen light spun in place on the floor. He seized it and shined the dazzling white beam full in the face of the looming brute. The warrior flinched and blinked for a moment, shielding his eyes. Then Sean switched off the light, jerked the pistol free of its holster and slid away into the darkness away from the Frenchman’s body. Spots danced in his vision. The butt of the pistol was warm and hard in his hand. He traced the steel lines with his fingers. An automatic, 9mm or .45. Thanks, Dad. His thumb found the safety, and he eased the bolt back to chamber a round.

The machete blade whistled through empty air four paces away as the warrior flailed for Sean’s head.

Sean raised the pistol, popped the flashlight beam on, bathing the warrior like a deer in the headlights. He squeezed the trigger, and the pistol bucked with white thunder. The warrior staggered once, then lunged toward the light. The pistol exploded into a white-hot hail of bullets, and the warrior’s head exploded into wet gobbets strobing in the muzzle flash.

Sean didn’t know how long he stood there, gasping for breath, trying to ignore the overpowering coppery taste of his own blood.

Until the train whistled, a long, screeching howl.

“Let us go!” Sean screamed at darkness. “You have your due! Let us go!” He broke into a fit of wet coughing.

A rhythmic shiver ghosted up his spine, like cold fingers playing a tune on a dead keyboard, a cacophonic vibration like a thousand violins grating in unison. And suddenly he knew it all,
felt
it all. The train, the scores of dead souls, being digested on their way to their final destination.

He walked over to where Phil lay dead on the floor, his throat slashed to the spine, his head surrounded by a pool of blood. “I’m sorry, buddy.” Somehow the pool of blood was shrinking, not spreading. He spotted movement at the edges of the body and looked closer. Hundreds of bluish-purple tendrils like slimy worms as thick as fingers writhed raw from the steel floor and burrowed into the body, pulsing, sucking, throbbing. Sean stepped away.

Yes, the train would let him go, would let Ngao go and all the other girls, just as it had agreed with the Frenchman. And Sean could live as well. There was only a small price.

Morning light suddenly shone through one of the unpainted windows. The girls staggered to their feet, whispering among themselves, glancing at Sean, rubbing circulation back into their wrists and trying to cover their nakedness.

They looked at him in the feeble, grayish-golden glow, and the train began to slow.

He went through his bag, dug out handfuls of clothes, and threw them to the girls. He did not know what the Frenchman had done with their clothes, and probably neither did they. “Put these on.”

By the time they were dressed, the train was nearly stopped. Ngao looked striking in his yellow Hawaiian shirt, and her eyes were big and confused. The train ground to a halt, and the door to the baggage car slid open, revealing a small, lonesome train platform, little more than a deserted slab of concrete beside the tracks in the middle of the jungle. But the lone, rusting tin sign was written in Vietnamese, not Khmer.

“Go,” he told them, “Get out.”

They did, shuffling, sniffling, limping away as he stood in the open door. Ngao only looked over her shoulder once.

Then the baggage car door slid closed.

He was starting to feel better. Perhaps if he could enjoy himself in Phnom Penh for a few days, he might be able to forget the things he had agreed to do.

Beholder

Graham Masterton

“Once upon a time in a faraway land a princess was born who was so beautiful that nobody was allowed to look at her for fear that they would be so jealous that they would try to harm her.

“She was so beautiful, in fact, that nobody could paint her portrait because the paints would burst into flames as soon as they were applied to the canvas, and no mirrors could be hung in the palace because they would shatter into a thousand thousand pieces if she were to look into them.

“The beautiful princess had many servants, but they were all blinded before they were allowed into her presence by having their eyes spooned out of their sockets.”

Mummy had read Fiona that story so many times that Fiona knew every word of it by heart, and her lips used to move in silent accompaniment whenever Mummy read it. She loved it, because it made sense of her life. She would sit cross-legged on the end of her bed with the windows open, her eyes closed, feeling the sun on her face and listening to the chirruping of sparrows in the garden below. The garden into which she was never allowed to go further than the patio, in case one of the neighbors saw her, and were so envious of her beauty that they climbed over the fence and tried to disfigure her, or even kill her.

Mummy closed the book. It wasn’t a proper printed book, but an exercise book with a purple marbled cover and the story of the beautiful princess had been written by hand. Fiona thought that Mummy was beautiful, although she knew that she herself was even more beautiful. At least Mummy could go out and meet other people, without them shouting at her or chasing her down the street or throwing acid in her face, which Fiona knew would happen to her, if
she
ventured beyond the front door.

It was a warm morning in the middle of May, and Mummy came into Fiona’s room and said, “Why don’t you take Rapunzel into the garden, Fee-fee? I have to go to the shops and it’s such a nice day.”

Rapunzel was Fiona’s doll, which Mummy had made for her. Rapunzel had a completely blank face, with no eyes or nose or mouth, but she had very long fair hair, like Rapunzel in the fairy-story, who had been locked up in a tower by an evil enchantress. When she had first given Rapunzel to her, Fiona had asked why she didn’t have a face, and Mummy had said, “You don’t need a beautiful face to be beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

“Who’s The Beholder?” Fiona asked her.

“Anyone who looks at you. Anyone at all. They’re all beholders.”

* * *

Mummy called out, “‘Bye, darling, won’t be long!” and Fiona heard her close the front door behind her.

Fiona picked up Rapunzel from her pillow, where she had been lying between Paddington Bear and Barbie. She went downstairs and out through the kitchen door, onto the York stone patio. The sun had moved around behind the horse-chestnut trees at the end of the garden, so the patio was in shadow now, but the stone was still warm. There was a low wall around it, with steps in the middle that led down to the lawn, and on either side of the steps stood two square pillars, with geraniums growing in them. Fiona thought that they looked like the towers of a fairy-tale castle, so she always knelt down and perched Rapunzel on top of one of them, amongst the geranium stems.

A breeze was rustling through the trees, as if they were whispering to each other, and she could hear the children next door laughing as they ran around their garden. Fiona sometimes wondered what it would be like if she hadn’t been born so beautiful, and could play with them. She knew that the boy was called Robin and the girl was called Caroline, because she had heard them calling out to each other, but that was all. She had never seen them, even from her bedroom window, but she imagined that they were probably quite plain. Ugly, even.

“Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair!” she repeated, in a creaky voice that was supposed to sound like the evil enchantress. In the story, there had been no door in the tower where Rapunzel was imprisoned, and no steps that led up to her room, so the only way in which the evil enchantress had been able to visit her was by climbing up Rapunzel’s twenty-foot tresses.

Fiona took the hair-grips out of Rapunzel’s silky blonde braid and hung it down the side of the pillar. Then she started to make her fingers crawl up it, spider-like, to represent the evil enchantress. But her fingers were less than halfway up to the top when a yellow tennis-ball came flying over the fence from the next-door garden, and bounced in the middle of the lawn.

She heard Caroline saying, “
Now
look what you’ve done, stupid! You’ll have to go round and get it back!”

But then Robin said, “There’s somebody there…that girl we never see. I heard her.”

Fiona stopped her fingers from climbing Rapunzel’s hair. She knelt up very straight, listening. She could hear Robin approaching the fence, and then he called out, “Hey! Can you throw our ball back, please?”

Fiona stayed where she was, hardly daring to breathe. She knew that she couldn’t go down the steps and onto the lawn to pick up the tennis-ball because then Robin and Caroline would be able to see her, and realize how beautiful she was. Before she knew it they would be clambering over the fence with kitchen knives or broken bottles or bleach or who could only guess what, to ruin her face.

Very, very carefully she stood up, lifting Rapunzel out of her flowery tower. Then she tip-toed backward toward the open kitchen door.

“Hey! Can you hear me?” Robin shouted. “Can we have our
ball
back, please?”

“There’s nobody
there
,” said Caroline, impatiently.

“Yes, there is, I heard her. All she has to do is throw it back.”

“She’s probably gone inside. You’ll have to go round and knock on the door.”

Just as Fiona was stepping back into the kitchen and closing the door behind her, she heard Robin shouting out one more time, “Ex-
cuse
me! Deaf ears! Can you throw our ball back?”

Fiona locked the kitchen door and went through to the hallway. Over the front door there was a semi-circular stained-glass window, so that the hallway was lit up with green and red and yellow light, like a small chapel.

“Mummy!” she cried out. “Mummy, are you back yet?”

Silence. Fiona held Rapunzel tighter. “Mummy?”

At that moment, the doorbell rang, one of those jangly rings that left a salty taste in Fiona’s mouth. It must be the boy from next door, Robin, wanting his tennis-ball back. What if she opened the door and he saw how beautiful she was and attacked her? She stood in the hallway for a moment, clutching Rapunzel, not knowing what she should do, but then he rang the doorbell again and she ran quickly and quietly upstairs.

“Mummy!”

She stood on the landing outside Mummy’s bedroom. The doorbell rang again and she was so frightened that she wet herself, a little bit.

“
Mummy
!”

“I can
hear
you!” said Robin. “I know you’re in there! We only want our ball back!”

Mummy always locked her bedroom door, when she went out, but all the same Fiona pulled down the handle, and to her relief, it opened. Mummy must have come home and perhaps she’d gone to the toilet and hadn’t heard her.

“Mummy?” she said, stepping cautiously into her bedroom. There was still no reply. Mummy wasn’t here, in the bedroom, and the door of her en-suite bathroom was open. She wasn’t in there, either.

Fiona made her way around the bed, with its pink satin quilt and its array of lacy cushions. On the left-hand nightstand stood a gilt-framed photograph of Daddy, with his hair receding, but smiling all the same. Daddy had died when Fiona was only nine months old, although Mummy never said why he had passed away so young. There was a smell of talcum powder in the room, mingled with that distinctive dustiness of people who live on their own.

The doorbell rang yet again, but in Mummy’s bedroom Fiona didn’t feel afraid any more. She touched the quilt, which felt so cool and silky, and she went to the window and looked out, and saw the street outside, with its neat front gardens and cars parked in everybody’s driveway. She felt like Rapunzel in her tower—not imprisoned by an evil enchantress, but by the beauty with which she had been blessed as an accident of birth. She was sure that one day a handsome prince would come to rescue her, just like the prince in Rapunzel.

In the story, the prince had tumbled from the top of the tower into the thicket of thorn-bushes that surrounded it, and both of his eyeballs had been pierced, so that he had been blinded. Perhaps Rapunzel had been too beautiful for anybody to look at, too.

She went over to Mummy’s built-in closet. Even with the doors closed, it smelled of Mummy’s perfume and Mummy’s clothes. Mummy had never let her look in her closet before, at all of her lovely clothes. She was sure, however, that Mummy wouldn’t be cross if she had a quick peek. She needn’t even tell her.

She turned the little key and opened the right-hand closet door. Hanging neatly inside were Mummy’s dresses, in order of color, and Mummy’s skirts, and on the shelves were all of Mummy’s jumpers and cardigans, neatly folded. On the floor of the closet were Mummy’s shoes, her sandals and her court shoes and the high heels she never seemed to wear these days.

Then Fiona opened the left-hand door. Immediately she gasped in shock, and jumped back, almost stumbling over. Standing in front of her was a girl, wearing exactly the same pink gingham dress as Fiona, and with her blonde hair tied up with two pink ribbons, exactly the same as Fiona’s hair.

This girl, however, had a hideously distorted face, with a bulging forehead and eyes as wide apart as a flatfish. Her nose was not much more than a small knot of flesh with two holes in it, and her mouth was dragged down as if she were moaning.

Fiona was about to demand what this monstrous girl was doing, hiding in Mummy’s closet. But when the girl raised her hand in exactly the same way that Fiona was raising her hand, Fiona began to realize, with a growing sense of horror, who she actually was. On the back of the left-hand door there was a mirror, and the girl with the hideously distorted face was
her
.

She touched the surface of the mirror, and the girl with the hideously distorted face did the same, so that their fingertips met.

“But I’m beautiful,” she whispered, and the girl with the hideously distorted face whispered it, too. “I’m so beautiful that nobody can look at me, because they’ll be too jealous.

“I’m
beautiful
.”

It was then, however, that everything started to make sense. The reason why she could never go out, and meet other people. The things Mummy said to her.
Beauty is in the eye of the
beholder.
She hadn’t really understood what that meant, but now she did. She
was
beautiful. She was very, very beautiful. But too many beholders had looked at her, and every one of them had stolen a little bit of her beauty away.

Her beauty was still there, but now it was inside their eyes. Somehow she had to find a way of getting it back.

She took one more long look at herself and then she closed the closet doors and locked them. Her heart was beating very fast and she was breathing quickly, too, as if she had waded chest-high into an icy-cold swimming pool.

What could she do to get her beauty back? Mummy always kept her protected, inside the house, in case any more beholders saw her, and made her look even more hideously distorted than she was already. But had Mummy ever tried to confront those beholders, and demand that they return her daughter’s looks? Perhaps she didn’t know who the beholders were, or if she did, perhaps she was afraid to ask them. Anybody who would deliberately steal a young girl’s beauty would probably be very selfish and vicious.

Fiona went downstairs, and as she did so the front door opened and Mummy came in, carrying a bag of shopping.

“Why aren’t you out in the garden?” Mummy asked her. “It’s so lovely out there.”

“The boy from next door threw his ball over the fence and he came to the door to ask for it back.”

Mummy put down her shopping-bag. “You didn’t open it, did you?”

Fiona shook her head, and now she was conscious of how loose and wobbly her lips were. “I went upstairs to see if you were there, but you weren’t.”

“Well, I’m here now. I’ll throw his ball back over for him. Would you like some lunch? I can make you some sandwiches, and you can eat them outside, like a picnic.”

“Mummy—” Fiona began. She wanted to ask her about the beholders, and how Mummy had allowed them to take her beauty away, but then she thought better of it. Mummy always took such good care of her. She had probably done everything she could to keep the beholders away, and Fiona didn’t want to upset her or make he feel guilty about something that she had been powerless to prevent.

There were many times when Fiona had heard Mummy sobbing in the middle of the night, or she had come downstairs late in the evening for a glass of water and Mummy had quickly torn off a sheet of kitchen towel to wipe her eyes.

They went outside. Mummy picked up the tennis-ball in the middle of the lawn and threw it back over the fence. There was no reply from next door. Robin and Caroline must be inside, having their lunch, too. Fiona knelt down on the patio and put Rapunzel back on top of her tower.

“Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair!”

As she said that, she saw a large brown snail creeping across the patio, leaving a silvery trail behind it. It had only one pair of tentacles sticking out from the top of its head, and she knew from her children’s encyclopedia that the shorter tentacle was for feeling its way around, while only the longer tentacle had an eye on the end of it. All the same, that single eye was definitely looking at
her
.

She hesitated for a moment, and then she stood up and went back into the kitchen.

“Won’t be long, darling,” said Mummy, spreading butter on four slices of bread. “Would you like tomato in your cheese sandwich, or brown pickle?”

“Brown pickle, please.”