Every car was packed full of people, men and women from earlier in the day, caught and trapped, then taken away, not to be seen again, until that moment. They’d been in there for hours, travelling God alone knew where, in the dark places under the earth. Driven mad, they had turned on each other. JC and Happy and Melody watched helplessly as the trapped passengers went at each other with their bare hands. Half-naked, clothes torn and tattered, they fought and tore at each other like animals, their faces distorted by savage, primal emotions. They murdered and raped and ate each other, laughing and crying and howling like the damned things they were. Blood and shit and piss, and other liquids from torn-out organs, had been spattered and smeared across the car-windows, but not enough to hide the horror within. The uproar from inside the cars was almost unbearable, a horrible mixture of sounds that should never have come from human mouths.

JC and Happy and Melody saw it all, like glimpses into Hell.

JC grabbed Melody by the shoulders and physically turned her away from the sight, making her concentrate on her instrument panels instead. It helped to steady her, a little. She stopped shuddering and shaking and fought to understand what the readings were telling her. Happy was lying on the platform, curled up into a ball, both hands over his ears, while tears coursed down his face from behind clenched-shut eyes. JC shook Happy’s shoulder hard, and even kicked him a few times, but Happy was beyond reaching. JC reluctantly left him to his misery. There was nothing he could do to help Happy, but he had to believe there was still something he could do for the people trapped in the cars.

He strode over to the nearest doors and tried to force them open; but they wouldn’t budge, no matter how much strength he threw against them. He strained until his fingers cried out with the pain, and his back muscles ached fiercely. None of it did any good. He ran down the whole length of the train, trying door after door, and couldn’t move any of them. The train wasn’t going to give up its prey that easily. JC lurched back up the platform, breathing hard, his face slightly crazed, beating at the car-windows with his fists and shouting hoarsely, trying to reach the people within. To get them to acknowledge his presence, to stop them mutilating each other, if only for a moment. But none of them so much as noticed him, intent on the awful things they were doing and their own torment. JC wasn’t even sure they knew the train had stopped.

He tried the front doors, nearest the engine, struggling to force his aching fingers into the gap between the doors.

“You really think that’s a good idea?” said Melody, raising her voice over the bedlam. “You really want to let those animals loose, out here with us? Listen to them!”

“They’re the victims here!” JC said savagely. “It’s not their fault! They’ve been driven to this. Maybe if we can get them out . . . they’ll be themselves again. We have to try! We have to try to save some of them . . .”

But he couldn’t open the doors. He fell back from the train, breathing harshly, desperate to do . . . something. He spotted Happy still curled up on the platform and lurched over to him. He bent over the telepath, pulled the man’s hands away from his ears, and shook him viciously until Happy’s eyes opened and focused on JC.

“Leave me alone,” Happy said pitifully. “I can’t stand it. I can’t.”

“What are you picking up from the train?” demanded JC.

“Are you mad?” said Happy. “I’m doing all I can to shut it out! But it’s too strong, too powerful . . . my shields are nothing to it! Fear and horror and suffering, that’s what I’m getting! I’m not picking up a single coherent human thought from anyone on the whole bloody train!”

“Can you make them hear you?” said JC.

“They’re beyond that,” Happy said miserably. “They’re trapped in the eternal moment. Damned to a single time and place, forever. Only aware of themselves and each other; and the awful things they’re doing. They don’t even know we’re here.”

JC turned to Melody. “Talk to me! What are your instruments showing? Anything we can use?”

“Massive energy readings,” said Melody, concentrating on her instrument panels so she wouldn’t have to look at the train. Her eyes were wild, and she looked like she might be sick at any moment, but she kept her voice steady. “Definite traces of other-dimensional energies, but not from the train, or the poor bastards inside it. There’s something here in the station with us, deep in the system. In the tunnels, or maybe even underneath them. It’s powering the train, making it possible. It’s responsible for everything that’s happening.”

JC looked back at the long line of cars, packed with blood and horror and endless carnage. Bodies slamming together, teeth and fingers sinking into flesh; men and women driven out of their minds by base and brutal urges and appetites. They clung to life with a terrible tenacity; in the face of murder and rape and cannibalism, they would not lie down and die. Broken and bloodied, with gaping holes in them where flesh and organs had been torn away and eaten, still they fought on. A woman’s screaming face was slammed against the car-window right in front of JC. Slammed again and again and again, till her features disappeared into a pulped and bloody mess. And still she screamed, and struggled . . .

He turned back to Melody, his voice shaking with shock and frustrated rage. “Do something! There must be something you can do! What good are your precious instruments if they can’t do anything! Stop this! At least . . . open a door so I can get to them!”

“I can’t!” Melody yelled back at him. “It’s too big, too powerful! Just by being here, this train is overwhelming all my sensors. Something like this shouldn’t even exist in our dimension. The material plane isn’t strong enough to contain it. I think . . . the train itself is alive, and aware, and gorging itself on the suffering.”

And then the engine revved up, the sound painfully loud, and the cars jerked forward as the hell train pulled out of the station, gathering speed impossibly quickly. Then it disappeared into the far tunnel-mouth and was gone, taking its cargo of the damned with it. That dreadful, downbound train.

Suddenly, the station was still and silent and sane again. Melody slumped over her instruments, sweat running down her face. Happy leaned against the wall, pressing his face against the cool tiles, his eyes wide open because he couldn’t stand to see what he saw when he closed them. JC stood helplessly in the middle of the platform, trying to find something to say, and failing.

Happy tried to pull a bottle of pills out of his pocket, but his hands were shaking too much. He finally jerked the bottle out, only to watch it fall from his hands as he tried and failed to open the child-proofed lid. The plastic bottle hit the platform hard but bounced without breaking and rolled back and forth at his feet. Happy started to cry.

JC moved over and stood close beside him. He knew better than to touch the telepath but did his best to comfort Happy with his presence. JC had finally got his breathing under control, but he still looked like he’d been in a fight, and lost.

“We’re all shaking,” JC said finally. “How about that. We’ve faced worse than this, in our time. I have to say, I thought we were stronger than this.”

“Normally, we are,” said Melody. “But this was different. We deal with hauntings, echoes, memories of the past. We’re not used to dealing with real blood and violence and death, right there in front of us. Most of the things we experience . . . actually happened long ago. Done and finished, years before. There was nothing we could do about them, nothing we could do to save the people involved. We came in afterwards, to clean up the mess they’d left behind.”