Mahogany felt the blade in his neck as a choking sensation, almost as though he had caught a chicken bone in his throat. He made a ridiculous, half-hearted coughing sound. Blood issued from his lips, painting them, like lipstick on his woman’s mouth. The cleaver clattered to the floor.
Kaufman pulled out the knife. The two wounds spouted little arcs of blood.
Mahogany collapsed to his knees, staring at the knife that had killed him. The little man was watching him quite passively. He was saying something, but Mahogany’s ears were deaf to the remarks, as though he was under water.
Mahogany suddenly went blind. He knew with a nostalgia for his senses that he would not see or hear again. This was death: it was on him for certain.
His hands still felt the weave of his trousers, however, and the hot splashes on his skin. His life seemed to totter on its tiptoes while his fingers grasped at one last sense.
Then his body collapsed, and his hands, and his life, and his sacred duty folded up under a weight of grey flesh.
The Butcher was dead.
Kaufman dragged gulps of stale air into his lungs and grabbed one of the straps to steady his reeling body. Tears blotted out the shambles he stood in. A time passed: he didn’t know how long; he was lost in a dream of victory.
Then the train began to slow. He felt and heard the brakes being applied. The hanging bodies lurched forward as the careering train slowed, its wheels squealing on rails that were sweating slime.
Curiosity overtook Kaufman.
Would the train shunt into the Butcher’s underground slaughterhouse, decorated with the meats he had gathered through his career? And the laughing driver, so indifferent to the massacre, what would he do once the train had stopped? Whatever happened now was academic. He could face anything at all; watch and see.
The tannoy crackled. The voice of the driver:
‘We’re here man. Better take your place eh?’
Take your place? What did that mean?
The train had slowed to a snail’s pace. Outside the windows, everything was as dark as ever. The lights flickered, then went out. This time they didn’t come back
on.
Kaufman was left in total darkness.
‘We’ll be out in half-an-hour,’ the tannoy announced, so like any station report.
The train had come to a stop. The sound of its wheels on the tracks, the rush of its passage, which Kaufman had grown so used to, were suddenly absent. All he could hear was the hum of the tannoy. He could still see nothing at all.
Then, a hiss. The doors were opening. A smell entered the car, a smell so caustic that Kaufman clapped his hand over his face to shut it out.
He stood in silence, hand to mouth, for what seemed a lifetime. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.
Then, there was a flicker of light outside the window. It threw the door frame into silhouette, and it grew stronger by degrees. Soon there was sufficient light in the car for Kaufman to see the crumpled body of the Butcher at his feet, and the sallow sides of meat hanging on every side of him.
There was a whisper too, from the dark outside the train, a gathering of tiny noises like the voices of beetles. In the
tunnel, shuffling towards the train, were human beings. Kaufman could see their outlines now. Some of them carried torches, which burned with a dead brown light. The noise was perhaps their feet on the damp earth, or perhaps their tongues clicking, or both.
Kaufman wasn’t as naive as he’d been an hour before. Could there be any doubt as to the intention these things had, coming out of the blackness towards the train? The Butcher had slaughtered the men and women as meat for these cannibals, they were coming, like diners at the dinner-gong, to eat in this restaurant car.
Kaufman bent down and picked up the cleaver the Butcher had dropped. The noise of the creatures’ approach was louder every moment. He backed down the car away from the open doors, only to find that the doors behind him were also open, and there was the whisper of approach there too.