MARK SAMUELS IS THE author of four short story collections: The White Hands and Other Weird Tales, Black Altars, Glyphotech & Other Macabre Processes and The Man Who Collected Machen (recently reprinted by Chômu Press), as well as the short novel The Face of Twilight. “Losnef Express” is the sixth of his tales to have appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
About the story, Samuels explains: “I think most fans of horror will recognise at once the late, great American author upon whom the central character of this tale is based (or, perhaps more accurately, filtered through my imagination).
We never met, although I did once catch sight of him across a room at the 1988 World Fantasy Convention in London and, prompted by curiosity, took a hasty, half-obscured photograph.
“A number of my friends knew him well, and I regret I myself never had the chance to do so. Sadly, I only discovered his brilliant work years after his untimely death.”
THE TOWN OF STRASGOL is situated in a corner of Eastern Europe forgotten by all but nationalistic Poles and Ukrainians. Their governments have squabbled over this tiny piece of territory for decades. Since neither claim has received international recognition, and its aged, insular citizens have scarcely any interest in politics, it has been allowed to fall into a state of decay. Its cobbled streets are mossy. Its mixture of architectural styles, ranging from Neo-Classical to Art Deco, has been disfigured by the state of near dereliction into which its buildings have fallen. Windows are sooty, with cracked panes, and once-elegant balconies now rot on lichen-crusted facades. At night scarcely half of the street lamps light up, due to either a lack of sufficient electrical power or their not being kept in a state of proper repair. In daytime the sky is invariably leaden, and low thick clouds hang heavy just above Strasgol. The myriad bell towers and spires of the town disappear upwards into the mist as if only half-constructed.
What had brought Eddie Charles Knox to the town had been an incorrigible wanderlust and a desire to escape from his commitments by retreat into an alcoholic haze. He had been looking for an unknown quarter of the continent where Americans were absent; such was his desire to escape from every trace of their pernicious worldwide influence. His only means of communication with people in this part of the globe was via the foreign language phrasebooks he carried with him, and by hand signals. He wanted nothing more by way of interaction.
Like the buildings of Strasgol, Knox was derelict. Only forty-eight, he had managed to destroy his liver. With his mottled face, broken capillaries and beer gut, he had long since ceased to draw attention from the young women at whom he stared and over whom he dreamed and wove impossible romantic fantasies as he sat in the Zacharas Café nursing a glass and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
Being a true son of Tennessee, he had a thirst for Old No. 7 whiskey. And had done for the last thirty years.
Back in the USA, devotees of supernatural fiction in mass-market paperback called Eddie Knox the “Berserker of Horror”. His heavy bulk, the flaming mane of red hair and beard, the mirror shades, had all added to the legend that had grown up around him. Only the incongruous Harris Tweed jacket with the worn elbows distorted the overall image. But he couldn’t bring himself to do away with it. Each ink blot, each smear of lipstick, each booze or ingrained powder stain on the fabric, recalled a precious memory he did not care to forget. First drafts in longhand with his trusty Waterman, drinking alcoholic English editors under the table at conventions, educating groupie nymphs in seedy hotel rooms, the acrid tang of cocaine as it hit the sinuses and the back of the throat after being snorted in toilets on first-class transatlantic flights and in stretch limos. Now those glories were of the past and had faded away like ripples, like echoes, like the dying of the light.
Eddie Knox chuckled to himself grimly. He took another swig of Jack Daniel’s from his personal shot glass engraved with a Confederate flag and looked around the Zacharas Café. Black humour with your choice of poison, Fortunato? But of course, Knox replied to himself, emptying his glass and making a silent toast; “The South will Rise”. Another toast – “to Edgar A. Poe”. Not “Allan” and certainly never “Allen”. America was an ignorant Yankee Military-Industrial Complex, and traditional southern gentlemen were not required. The bastards had got to Poe in the end. Banged him on the head in Baltimore. Damn the Freemasons!
Knox wished he could drown his sense of self-contempt. Sure, it was delightful to be here in the Zacharas Café, with its intimate booths for private intellectual conversation, with its rococo plaster ceiling, its air of 1920s European decadence, pre-war cabaret, and engraved windows of dazzling green glass. But it was dirty money that got him here. And he believed he wasn’t even worthy of raising a fellow author’s silent toast to the likes of Poe.
Knox felt like a fake. It wasn’t his tales of horror that seemed cheap; sure, they were hard to find but when found were nevertheless rightly lauded for their authenticity. No, it was the endless novels he’d written detailing the pulp adventures of Mungo the Barbarian and the sexual shenanigans of Mother Superior Lucia Vulva that had paid the bills and that had given respectability to the bank account. Those were what felt like cheating. When he was talking with fellow professionals, he laughed off any other objective than making big bucks. He was only a working writer. Fuck the pretentious snobs amongst us. But when he was alone, the compromise hit him hard. He wanted to be remembered as an artist. Nothing else really mattered in the end. There was no other form of survival after death. In the final analysis, all writers find out this hard truth. Whether or not they admit to it is a different matter.
Knox loved Europe. He adored its sense of history and slow decay. He wanted to be absorbed into its fabric and leave behind every single last trace of the obnoxiously optimistic and bogus “American Dream”. He’d lived and fulfilled that dream; and found it as nightmarish as an endlessly repeated TV advert for fast food, as a “you’re worth it” fixed smile with oh-so-perfect white teeth. And so he stopped dreaming, and crashed headlong into a sea of reality he couldn’t bear, but which suited him better. He preferred to drown quickly than die via a suicide stretched out across years.
He downed another dose of Jack Daniel’s from his shot glass and stared across the expanse of the Zacharas Café. It was sparsely occupied. There were one or two eastern European businessmen in sharp suits nursing beers, a couple arguing quietly in a corner, and, behind him, a fat man slouched back into a booth with his face lost in shadow. Knox had turned around once, pricked by the sensation of being watched, and, although he could not make out the man’s face clearly enough to tell, he had the distinct impression this person was staring fixedly at him. Maybe, Knox thought, he’s one of the natives who hates tourists just as much as I, another tourist, do. The way the lights were arranged in that part of the bar meant the fat man was visible only as a shadowy bulk, except for his gnarled powerful hands. These were resting on the table, in a pool of light cast by a shaded lamp. They were every inch as large and impressive as Knox’s own.
After a couple more shots, Knox’s agitation increased. He tried to resist the impulse to glance behind him, but it was impossible. Each time he had the impression the fat man was not only staring at him with a malicious contempt, but also with a sneer about his lips. There was no way he could be sure of this, for the shadow over the stranger’s face masked it, but he felt certain, on some primal, instinctive level, it was true. Finally, with enough booze in his gut to overcome any sense of restraint, and with his bill settled by the US banknote he left behind, he stood up abruptly, spun round and made directly for the booth containing the fat man in order to confront him.
But the stranger was no longer seated there. The booth was empty.
Knox cast his gaze around and saw the fat man outside, through one of the café windows. He was making his way into the fog and the back of his bulk was only visible for a moment before it was swallowed up entirely.
Knox decided to go after him. Had he been sober, the idea would have seemed ridiculous. Chase after someone in the fog, in a foreign city, for the offence of having apparently stared at you with contempt? But he was not sober. He was drunk. Moreover, he was drunk and he was sick of everything. And the stranger had become a symbol of that “everything” in his mind. Knox did not know what he would do when he confronted the fat man, but he didn’t think the outcome would be pleasant. Back in Tennessee, Knox used to shoot snakes on his porch.
Outside, the air was cold, clammy and thick. The shock of it made Knox gasp for breath momentarily. For a second he thought of returning to the café and forgetting about the whole thing. But he pressed on instead, accompanied by the sound of his heels clattering across the slippery cobblestones. He could see only a short distance ahead, and the street lamps burned like spectral pools of light in the gloom. Knox knew he could not have kept pace with a younger, slimmer, fitter man, and it was only the fact that his quarry was as overweight as Knox that made the chase a contest. He had no idea if the stranger even knew he was being followed along the series of narrow alleyways and claustrophobic courtyards, although from the circuitous route taken, it seemed likely.
The streets became a delirium of images, of skeletal trees, arched passageways and tendrils of fog.
Just as Knox had reached the point of breathless collapse and could not continue, he found that the stranger’s stamina had also given out only moments before. He saw the fat man’s bulk leant up against railings, hunched over and gasping for air. Knox summoned his last reserves of energy and hurled himself towards the fat man before he could land a first blow.
All the hatred, rage and disappointment he had ever felt in life seemed to well up inside him and demanded vengeance upon this individual. Knox could not even bring himself to say anything to the fat man, but found his hands fumbling madly towards the stranger’s throat. The fog fortuitously closed in around them in order to hide Knox’s crime. The blood seemed to boil in his veins, and he squeezed and squeezed the fat man’s fl eshly throat, choking him to death. Knox heard a voice, its accent indistinguishable, croak out the words I waited for you, or what sounded like them, before a gurgling sound and then final silence.
Impossible that he had not seen his tormentor’s – his victim’s – face. But it was true. And Knox realised that, had the fog not closed in, he would have deliberately avoided looking at it, because he was unaccountably terrified of what he would see. He was grateful to have been spared the sight of the dead stranger’s face at the end, since he had pulled out the jack-knife he always carried in his breast pocket, the one with the corkscrew at one end and the blade at the other, and slashed madly at the countenance of the corpse, tearing through flesh and scratching against the bone of the skull. He used the weapon to slice and hack until his hands were dripping, and the cuffs of his Harris Tweed jacket soaked with blood.
But the deed had not been carried out silently. The sounds of the struggle, and of his victim’s cries, had been heard. Knox heard the noise of advancing footsteps racing across the cobblestones behind him. There was more than one person closing in. Knox was sure no one could have seen him commit the murder, for the darkness and all-encompassing fog had been his ally, but he had to flee now and flee quickly.
A return to his hotel in order to collect his meagre luggage seemed out of the question, for haste was of the essence, and Knox resolved to make his way to Strasgol Station, which he recalled was close by. He would board the first available train; clean himself up immediately in one of the compartment toilets and travel as far away from the town as he was able. As he stumbled through the narrow alleyways that weaved between the mouldering buildings, he thought to check his wallet. He’d cashed some traveller’s cheques yesterday, and had a sudden fear he might have lost it in the struggle with the fat man. Nothing was missing.
Knox heard no sound of pursuit and, after walking for some ten minutes, arrived at the ill-lit and rundown concourse of the train station. A few passengers milled around inside under grimy fluorescent strip lighting, but it was late at night, and, in order to hide the blood on his hands and on the cuffs of his jacket, he stuffed his hands deep into his pockets. The ticket office had closed, and a sign on the notice board indicated that payment should be made to the conductor on the train. Also pinned to the notice board was a timetable. The final service, at eleven fifty, was scheduled to depart in five minutes, and was the express to Losenef.
Knox kept his head down as he joined the other seven passengers who were making their way onto the platform. The train was already waiting for them. It consisted of six coaches painted with olive livery and a driving cab, marked PKP SN-61. The passengers climbed aboard, hauling their luggage into the compartments, and Knox waited until the other seven travellers had chosen seats before he joined the service. He wanted to find a seat where he could not easily be seen by anyone else, at least until he had managed to clean himself up. The very last compartment of the rear coach was completely unoccupied and so Knox chose this one for his purposes, climbing inside only as the platform guard blew his whistle and the train actually began to move.
Once he was seated and the train picked up speed, leaving Strasgol Station behind, he removed his jacket with the bloodied cuffs and rolled up his shirtsleeves in order to conceal the blood that had soaked through. He folded his jacket so that its arms were hidden beneath folds, and nestled the garment under his arm. Then he left his compartment and looked along the narrow, rubbish-strewn corridor that ran along the length of the coach. It was deserted. At the end was the door to the toilet, and Knox was relieved to see, as he approached, that the indicator above the handle was green; it was unoccupied.
The inside was tiny and dirty. There was not even enough room to stretch one’s arms out to their full extent. A light bulb had been screwed into a socket on the low ceiling and provided a urine yellow glare by way of illumination. The lid of the squat plastic toilet was down, and for this mercy Knox was grateful, for he could detect the lingering stench of unfl ushed excrement. Above the crack-webbed washbasin was a round mirror about six inches in diameter. Its surface was coated with a thin layer of silvery-white residue, making it appear to be filled with mist. Knox turned on the tap above the sink, put the bloodied cuffs of his jacket underneath the dribble of cold running water and rubbed them vigorously with a token sliver of hand soap. After a few minutes of work, the cuffs turned from crimson to pink. No further change seemed likely, and the soap had been used up, so Knox ceased his labours. He looked up from the sink into the recesses of the small mirror.
At first he saw his own haggard face staring back at him, the eyes haunted, but then the image lost focus, and it dissolved into something else. He discerned a smear of red and black, until at last the vision gained form, and Knox stared at the ravaged features of the man whose face he had obliterated with his knife. The mutilated reflection in the mirror gazed back at him with Knox’s eyes. Its lipless grinning mouth breathed out a single sentence in a gloating whisper; I still await. For one terrifying instant it even seemed to Knox that he had switched bodies with the revenant in the mirror and was looking out from it through a cloud of mist at his own face. He raised his hands and covered his eyes to block out the sight, and when he lowered them, it had vanished. His hands were trembling and his nerves were shredded. He needed a drink to calm himself down. No, he needed much more than that; enough to blot out the night journey until morning came, and he was hundreds of miles away from Strasgol and the scene of the senseless murder he had committed.
He cupped water from the tap in his hands and splashed it across his forehead, his cheeks and his beard. He looked again in the mirror, and to his relief, saw only his own face and the background of the toilet, but nothing more.
He passed along the corridor to the next carriage and found the buffet cabin situated in a small section at the end. The metal shutter in front of the counter was down, and Knox knocked on it, hoping to draw the attention of a recalcitrant railway staff member. The possibility that the buffet was closed on this service was one he did not wish to entertain; such was the desire he had for the relief only alcohol could provide. There had been no initial response to his knocking and so Knox tried again, more forcefully this time, using his fist, until he felt someone tap him on the shoulder. Knox turned and saw the train conductor. This individual was muffled up against the cold and had wrapped a scarf high above his neck and just beneath his nose. He wore a tatty railway-issue greatcoat, with the collar turned up and it seemed, from its condition, the garment had seen many years of service. His dark green cap was pulled down low across his forehead, its brim resting on the top of thick-lensed and impenetrable eyeglasses.
“Ticket, sir?” the conductor said, his voice hollow and his English heavy with an Eastern European inflexion.
Knox rummaged in the pockets of his jacket, turning over loose scraps of paper, until he remembered he had no ticket and had intended to pay his fare on the train.
“I have no ticket,” Knox said, “can’t I buy one from you now?”
“More money. Two hundred zlotys,” he said.
“I see,” Knox replied, irked that the conductor had immediately marked him out as an American tourist, and was prepared to take financial advantage accordingly. Still, Knox thought, perhaps the man could be useful.
“How much extra would it cost to get a bottle of something warming to drink from the buffet? How about a discount for US dollars?” he asked, pulling out his wallet from the inner recesses of his tweed jacket with the pinkish cuffs.
“Buffet is closed. No buffet. No drink. Unless you pay maybe,” the conductor said, as his head nodded towards the notes Knox had drawn out and held in his hand.
The conductor flashed a set of keys attached to a chain that he drew from the pocket of his greatcoat and rattled them ostentatiously. He unlocked the door of the buffet cabin, disappeared inside and then emerged a few moments later bearing a half litre glass bottle and a plastic cup.
Knox handed over twenty dollars in denominations of five each. He was not at all sure whether this amount would cover both the cost of the ticket and the unknown booze provided by the conductor, but the man looked at the notes, held them up to the lamplight above their heads and grunted something unintelligible Knox took as a sign of satisfaction.
For his part, Knox was busy examining the bottle he’d just purchased. It contained a cloudy green liquid. The label gave no clue, at least in English, as to its contents. It was decorated with an obscure design, something five-pointed and akin to a swastika. Certainly, at least, the legend “85% vol” inspired confidence.
“It’s good,” the conductor said, as if aware an American would not be familiar with the brand. “It is the Nepenthe drink.”
“A brand of absinthe?” Knox asked.
“Better. You drink. Have a good trip.” He laughed and then shuffled off, making his way along the length of the corridor, swaying with the motion of the train.
Knox went in the opposite direction, back towards the coach in which he’d boarded the train. He wanted to lose himself in the strange green liquid as quickly as possible and feel it coursing down his throat, filling his stomach with warmth and turning his brains into a soothing grey mush. He noticed that his fellow passengers appeared to be as uninterested in mingling with one another as was he; they sat as far apart from one another as they could, in individual compartments where possible, or at the opposite ends of seating where a compartment was already occupied. They slumped in their places as if they had already travelled for hours and hours. Some were either already drunk or else in a dull confused state between sleep and waking. One could not easily tell which.
He pulled open the door to the unoccupied compartment at the rear where he’d boarded and sat down on the edge of the seat, gazing at the liquid in the bottle finding its level as the train rattled over points on the track. It had a screw top, for which he was grateful; since his hands still trembled to the extent he was not confident about working a cork free with his jack-knife (say rather, he thought, grimly, murder weapon). As it was, he still fumbled with the plastic cup whilst pouring out a large measure, and almost spilt its contents. He knocked back the fi rst dose swiftly, coughing as the liquid passed down into his insides. Christ, he thought, what is this stuff? It felt as if someone had kicked him in the head. He leant forward, feeling a wave of nausea, and was momentarily afraid he would vomit. But after the second shot, taken as quickly as the first, all the unpleasant sensations passed and he was overcome with a deadening numbness. He could not feel the ends of his fingers and toes, his anxiety ebbed away, the tide of fear was at last drawing out, and he exhaled what seemed to be an eternal breath. He slumped back into the long seat and nestled the bottle on his lap, watching the green liquid inside tumble like a captured ocean wave.
The darkness outside made it seem, from within, as if the train were stationary. Knox flopped along the length of the seat towards the carriage window and peered out through the glass into the gloom. He saw vague shapes and branches of trees that had not been sufficiently cut back – their sharp ends scraped along the sides and roof of the train.
His eyes refocused and instead of looking through the glass, he now saw his own reflection on the surface of the window. His gaze was filled with hatred. There was a sneer on his lips. Knox was terrified the reflection would reach across the divide and strangle him. He backed away from the sight, afraid of its taking on the appearance of the torn and bloodied revenant he’d seen earlier. He heard a voice in his head, the same voice as before, but this time the words it spoke were different: “you come closer,” it said, “you draw close to me”.
Knox pulled down the blinds on all the windows and poured himself another dose of the potent bad medicine. His head was swimming, and he heard the sound of his teeth chattering in his mouth. The compartment around him blurred, the overhead luggage racks, the electric lamps and the advertisements on the walls faded from view and he passed out.
When he awoke it must have been hours later. His watch had stopped, so he had no precise way of telling just how long it had been. But he knew he still travelled by night for it was dark outside; he had lifted the blind a little to see if it were daylight yet. His mouth was dry and his lips were encrusted with the scum of dried saliva.
The half-drunk bottle of booze had wedged itself between the cushions of the long seat. Alongside it was the remains of the plastic cup, crushed by the weight of Knox’s body where he had lain slumped after having passed out. The light from the compartment’s electric lamps hurt his eyes and so he took out his mirror shades from the glasses case he kept in the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, and put them on. The hangover was so bad he felt he would never recover from it. He took a swig from the bottle,but the taste made the bile rise in his throat. He decided to go in search of the train conductor in order to find out how much further it was to Losenef.
As he passed the compartment adjacent to his own he heard a groaning from within and stopped to look inside. A solitary passenger was sprawled across the floor, face down and motionless. The man was dressed in a badly crumpled light grey suit covered with dark brown stains. He had a foul odour about him, of eggs that had turned rotten. Knox considered, for a moment, ignoring him but then the groan came again and this time it was louder and more prolonged than before. The man in the grey suit had, like Knox, been drinking the green spirit. An empty bottle of it lay just outside his reach.
Knox knelt down, pinching his nose and covering his mouth with one hand to guard against the stench and, with the other, he grabbed the shoulder of the man’s jacket and turned his body over.
His face was a grisly ruin. Half of it had been eaten away by the maggots that writhed and burrowed through yellowish flesh. There was nothing at all left of the eyes; only vacant sockets remained. And then the corpse groaned for a third time, a hollow and despairing groan that issued from unimaginable depths of suffering. Something conscious existed within the shell.
Knox backed away, leaving the hideous cadaver face-upright. And still it continued to issue its uncanny cries.
The next compartment along contained a similar horror. The occupant, a woman with long dusty blonde hair, faced the wall with her hands reached out as if clutching at it for support. She made heartrending sobbing and snuffling noises. But she was dead. The skin on her hands was flaking away like paint on a weather-beaten wall, and Knox was glad he was spared the sight of her face, for the malformed sound of sobbing could only emanate from a deformed mouth.
The litany of terror was repeated throughout the whole of the carriage and, so too, throughout the next. All the passengers were dead but not one was silent.
Knox took a deep breath and leant with his back to the wall behind him. He took off his mirror shades, rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, and spat on the floor. This was junk, he thought. He’d written stories worse than this in his time. He didn’t believe any of it. He must have bashed his head on something whilst he was sozzled, causing him to hallucinate. He had impacted his skull, affecting the brain, resulting in a wild bout of concussion. The more he thought of it, the more the idea fitted. He was having a psychotic episode. Nothing more. He had killed no one back in Strasgol; he’d only imagined he had. All this business on the train was brought on by a bump to the head. He put his shades back on and grinned. Then he ran his fingers over the entirety of his skull, working through the mass of red hair that covered it. His grin evaporated. There was no damage to his skull.
The train began to slow down and finally drew to a halt amidst a grinding screech. From further along the corridor, out of the buffet cabin, the conductor emerged. He’d removed the long scarf he had wound around the lower half of his face. Now Knox could see why it had been covered up. There was no lower half of his face. Where there should have been a bottom jaw there was instead a gaping bloody hollow. The conductor’s voice issued from a vacuum, and without tongue or lips should have been impossible to form. Yet the sound was as real as when he had spoken previously.
“Last stop, sir,” the conductor breathed, “Losenef.”
What was odd was that, after disembarking from the train, Knox found Losenef to be an exact duplicate of Strasgol and, moreover, he had arrived an hour earlier than he departed. It was only in the Zacharas Café, having spotted the duplicate of himself drinking Jack Daniel’s, that he realised the truth. He’d wait a little longer and then try yet again to take his revenge. Eventually, he hoped, he would succeed.