He shrank back against one of the seats, and was about to take refuge under them when a hand, thin and frail to the point of transparency appeared around the door.
He could not look away. Not that terror froze him as it had at the window. He simply wanted to watch.
The creature stepped into the car. The torches behind it threw its face into shadow, but its outline could be clearly seen.
There was nothing very remarkable about it.
It had two arms and two legs as he did; its head was not abnormally shaped. The body was small, and the effort of climbing into the train made its breath coarse. It seemed more geriatric than psychotic; generations of fictional man-eaters had not prepared him for its distressing vulnerability.
Behind it, similar creatures were appearing out of the darkness, shuffling into the train. In fact they were coming in at every door.
Kaufman was trapped. He weighed the cleaver in his hands, getting the balance of it, ready for the battle with these antique monsters. A torch had been brought into the car, and it illuminated the faces of the leaders.
They were completely bald. The tired flesh of their faces was pulled tight over their skulls, so that it shone with tension. There were stains of decay and disease on their skin, and in places the muscle had withered to a black pus, through which the bone of cheek or temple was showing. Some of them were naked as babies, their pulpy, syphilitic bodies scarcely sexed. What had been breasts were leathery bags hanging off the torso, the genitalia shrunken away.
Worse sights than the naked amongst them were those who wore a veil of clothes. It soon dawned on Kaufman that the rotting fabric slung around their shoulders, or knotted about their midriffs was made of human skins. Not one, but a dozen or more, heaped haphazardly on top of each other, like pathetic trophies.
The leaders of this grotesque meal-line had reached the bodies now, and the gracile hands were laid upon the shanks of meat, and were running up and down the shaved flesh in a manner that suggested sensual pleasure. Tongues were dancing out of mouths, flecks of spittle landing on the meat. The eyes of the monsters were flickering back and forth with hunger and excitement.
Eventually one of them saw Kaufman.
Its eyes stopped flickering for a moment, and fixed on him. A look of enquiry came over the face, making a parody of puzzlement.
‘You,’ it said. The voice was as wasted as the lips it came from.
Kaufman raised the cleaver a little, calculating his chances. There were perhaps thirty of them in the car and many more outside. But they looked so weak, and they had no weapons, but their skin and bones.
The monster spoke again, its voice quite well modulated, when it found itself, the piping of a once-cultured, once-charming man.
‘You came after the other, yes?’
It glanced down at the body of Mahogany. It had clearly taken in the situation very quickly.
‘Old anyway,’ it said, its watery eyes back on Kaufman, studying him with care.
‘Fuck you,’ said Kaufman.
The creature attempted a wry smile, but it had almost forgotten the technique and the result was a grimace which exposed a mouthful of teeth that had been systematically filed into points.
‘You must now do this for us,’ it said through the bestial grin.
‘We cannot survive without food.’
The hand patted the rump of human flesh. Kaufman had no reply to the idea. He just stared in disgust as the fingernails slid between the cleft in the buttocks, feeling the swell of tender muscle.
‘It disgusts us no less than you,’ said the creature. ‘But we’re bound to eat this meat, or we die. God knows, I have no appetite for it.’
The thing was drooling nevertheless.
Kaufman found his voice. It was small, more with a confusion of feelings than with fear.
‘What are you?’ He remembered the bearded man in the Deli.
‘Are you accidents of some kind?’
‘We are the City fathers,’ the thing said. ‘And mothers, and daughters and sons. The builders, the law-makers. We made this city.’