“Good. I’m good. Let’s just get dinner to the boys. We kept them waiting.”
The words had barely left her lips when she caught her shoe on something hanging out of one of the berths on the left. Violet stumbled and fell to her hands and knees, and Alfie barked as he nearly tripped over her. The plates slid on the tray, but he managed to keep it from all toppling out of his grasp.
“What happened?” he asked.
Violet stared at the arm dangling from inside the curtains of that lower berth. At the dark streak on bare skin. The last thing she wanted to do was open that curtain, and she knew if she hesitated at all, she wouldn’t be able to do it.
She swept the curtain aside.
The white-haired man inside wore rumpled pajamas, stained with blood. The front of the pajama top had been ripped open, as had the chest beneath the cotton.
Alfie dropped the tray. Plates shattered, metal covers clattered. Violet was too horrified to scream, but she found she could not draw a complete breath. She stood, backing up against the berth behind her.
With the first breath she managed, she realized all the clatter had drawn no attention.
She glanced up and down the sleeper car. Not a single berth had been disturbed. Many were still in the dining car or the lounge, but surely this old man hadn’t been the only one already turned in?
On an upper berth, farther forward, the curtain hung partly torn. Something dripped over the edge, fat drops falling to the floor of the corridor.
“Violet,” Alfie whispered. “Keep going. Fast and quiet.”
He sounded frightened, and that terrified her.
Heart quickening, breath shallow, she marched forward as if nothing at all was amiss. Only that was a lie, wasn’t it? If nothing had been amiss, she would not have been striding so quickly, fighting the urge to break into a run, trapped by indecision between holding her breath and screaming.
A moan came from a lower berth on her right. Her shoe squelched in sticky liquid on the floor, and she could smell it then, the metallic stink of blood. If she’d slowed down, Alfie would have propelled her forward, but Violet did not need further encouragement. The end of the car might have been thirty feet ahead. She glanced side to side but not back—no need to get a better look at what they’d already passed.
The train shook.
A curtain rattled open, drawn back by those same long, thin fingers. The second-to-last upper berth. An arm extended from within, too long, too thin, bits of what looked like thin tree branches growing out of flesh the hue of poison mushrooms. The thing in that berth began to unfold from within, one leg sliding out.
Violet screamed. She reached back for Alfie, only to find he’d stopped short, staring at the face of the thing that skirted to the edge of the berth. Despite what he’d said, she knew that he wanted to turn and run the other direction, and maybe she would have wanted to do the same—might even have done it—but Malcolm waited in the baggage car. Every muscle in her body wanted to run the other way—all but one. Her heart drove her onward.
She grabbed Alfie’s wrist and yanked him after her. They stumbled forward, then ran. The thing on that upper berth caught her hair, tangled its fingers, dragged her close. Alfie shouted, grabbed its wrist, and began to smash its arm against the edge of the berth. Its fingers opened, and Violet reeled backward and crashed against the berth behind her.
No one emerged. No curtains drew back. She understood this was because the thing in the upper berth had killed them all.
Just before she bolted, she caught a glimpse of it, and saw that the thing wasn’t alone. It had only reached out with its left arm. In its right arm, the thing cradled a young boy in stained overalls. Benjy, he’d said his name was. The boy had streaks of blood on his face and a vacant look, as if he slept with his eyes open. He huddled against the grotesque thing’s pale, narrow chest, his thumb in his mouth like an infant.
Violet couldn’t breathe. Tears filled her eyes.
Alfie grabbed her around the waist and half carried her toward the door to the baggage car. He muttered to himself, words so fast and breathless they were hard to make out.
They sounded like a prayer.
19
Malcolm had never been so lost for words. The smell wafting off his brother made his guts roil in rebellion, but he couldn’t tell if it came from the strips of flesh that curled back from his body like paint peeling off a house, or from the layer of pulsing blue-gray skin beneath. He’d loved his brother once, and the fraternal bond had lingered despite years of rejection and resentment. Watching the way Elias had treated Violet, and Malcolm’s own love for her growing, he’d realized what a bastard his brother truly was. But this…
“Cat got your tongue?” Elias asked, his voice thick and gruff. Changing. “I asked you a question, Mal.”
Are you fucking my wife, brother?
Laughter bubbled up in Malcolm’s chest. A bit of madness. What was he meant to say in the midst of this?Just the once, brother.Once upon a time, perhaps, but any love or bitterness from the past meant nothing now. Elias seemed almost to be dying, rotting, right in front of him, and yet he spoke as if he didn’t even realize it.
“Elias…”
Sadness washed over him. He felt no guilt for falling in love with Violet—Elias had been cruel and cavalier—but hate and disdain bled out of him as he watched his brother stagger toward him. Malcolm covered his nose and mouth, wincing at the stink, and took a step backward. Part of him thought he should try to find a doctor on the train, but nobody could have looked at Elias and believed a doctor could save him.
