The Tunnel

THE TUNNEL by Cassy Allen

The cubicle was empty.  But what Tate saw froze the breath in his lungs.

 

There was something wrong with the toilet wall opposite the  train door.  The metal fabric and grimy window seemed insubstantial and somehow gel-like - he couldn’t describe it in any other way.  He felt it could tear or melt at the slightest touch.  And there was a smell.  Something more than the usual stale urine stench of a very public toilet.  A vaguely putrid meatiness that made Tate take an involuntary step backwards.  He paused, though, and made himself go forward into the loo - just what the hell was that wall made of?  A jelly wall in a train?  What in hell’s teeth was going on?

 

Tate was trembling as he reached out his forefinger to touch the window.  It bent outwards as he poked it, and his finger came away glutinous with sticky jollop which he smeared down the leg of his trousers.  It glistened, and he immediately felt a freezing chill on his leg as it soaked the slacks.

 

“This is too weird for me,” thought Tate and turned to leave the cubicle.  Shock forced his mouth open in a silent scream as he saw the reason for the stench hanging grotesquely from the door hook.  Garotte still obscenely constricting the flesh exactly as Tate had left it - the body he thought he’d left behind before climbing on the train, was glaring at him through bulging eyeballs.  Tate thought he felt the opposable thumb in his pocket kick towards the serrated space where he had hacked it from the victim’s right hand.

 

Now a real scream did emerge from Tate’s throat - most uncharacteristically, since he prided himself on his complete lack of fear when faced with a death - especially one he had planned and topped himself.  He swung open the unnaturally heavy door wondering why he hadn't noticed the body weight on the way in.  Leaning against the normal corridor bulkhead outside, he tried to pull himself together.  He needed to find other people, for God’s sake.  Someone was bound to have an explanation, surely.

 

He walked quickly back the way he had come, but now he could almost feel the silence.  There was no clattering of points, no heavy engine whine, no crying toddlers, no click of laptop keys, no turning pages. Just hush.  A thickly cloying quiet.  Except for one thing.  A bloody mobile phone was jangling its musical clarion.  Why the hell didn’t the owner come back to it? 

 

“No point in going back”, thought Tate, “I’ll have to go past that bog from hell again and see if I can find people in the buffet - or even the guard if they have such people on trains these days.” 

 

Not a soul was about though.  As he passed a sky blue mobile, it jingled a message warning, and on impulse, Tate went back and clicked on ‘Open’.  The text spread across the small LCD screen:  Terribilis est locus iste.

 

Tate dropped the phone.  He passed another lavatory and paused undecided, but then went onward, black pitch denseness hugging the graffiti etched windows in a tight embracing tube. 

 

With relief he saw the stainless steel countertop of the buffet car through the next sliding door.  Worryingly he couldn’t see any of the people from his own compartment.  In fact, there was no-one from any part of the train.  Even the buffet car attendant who had dispensed coffee earlier was not in evidence, although her two thermos jugs steamed lazily, and the only sound was the occasional clink of her food cart as it swung against the steel cupboard housing in time to the movement of the speeding train.

 

Tate felt his own blood beginning to drain from his face now.  This had been his main hope.  He wanted to get off.  Now.  He decided to find the guard, but on reaching the gloomy lair of the guard’s cubicle, the wire door to the post sacks and parcels lay open, and his slashed pseudo-leather seat was empty, although indented by the recent weight it had held.

 

Tate was now at the front of the train.  A blank door prevented further progress.  His inhibitions gone, he banged on the door to alert the driver, but nothing stirred either on his side or the other.  The only remaining option was the second toilet, although the hairs on the back of his scalp prickled at the thought of what he might find.

 

His walk was more hesitant as he pushed back along the swaying corridors to the glowing ‘Vacant’ sign.  Tentatively he placed a hand on the door, and it opened at his push.  This time though, the smell was of fresh lily of the valley, and in a way this was even more of a shock than than the foetid smell of the other loo.  Hardly daring to think what this exploration might reveal, he walked inside and was pleasantly surprised to see rose petals on the floor, and a small posy on the cistern handle.  Fresh soaps added their own perfume to the sweetness of the room, and the whole ambience was warm and - he couldn't quite believe it - quite happy?  “This is too ludicrous”, he puzzled, “how could a train toilet be so welcoming and nice?”  He almost didn’t want to leave it.  He looked away from the posies and checked out the external carriage wall, and with less amazement this time, noticed that this was also gel-like and tender.  Unlike the first toilet though, it had a faint pink tinge, and looked like a dry gel.  He did the finger experiment and bent the wall.  It was smooth and warm but not sticky. 

 

Suddenly, beyond the gel, he noticed movement.

 

There was the balding chap from his carriage.  He seemed to be seated on a sumptuous couch in a paradisiacal garden - a glowing figure was approaching him with a golden chalice.  Tate leaned forward and banged on the gel wall.  The barrier absorbed the sound and bent outwards a little, but there was no sign that anyone had heard him in the garden.  And look, wasn’t that the younger lad whose mobile phone had been so persistent?  Good grief, wouldn’t Tate like to be in his shoes, just look at the gorgeous nymphs running transparent fingers over his body.  In fact, what were those things?  They seemed to have little budding wings on their tender backs.. why this could be a scene from heaven - he started a wry smile of incredulity, which suddenly froze when he remembered the ghastly, sickening horror of the toilet down the corridor.

 

He backed out of the cosy little vestibule, not sure what he should do next.  He was alone on the train, of that he was certain.  The other travellers appeared to have somehow moved across the gel wall into the garden.  Could he do the same?  The train showed no sign of slowing down, and the dense blackness of the tunnel envelope allowed no possibility of escape by opening a conventional train door. 

 

Tate decided to try and make a call on a mobile - transport police would surely be able to stop the train and rescue him, he reasoned.  Could you get Network Rail bobbies on 999?  He walked back to his own carriage, and couldn’t believe that the boy’s phone was still jangling away on the table top next to the discarded earphones. 

 

Hesitantly, Tate picked it up.  The caller identity was listed on the screen as Raphael.  As much to kill the irritation at the noise as to speak to the caller, Tate pressed ‘Answer’.

 

A compassionate, musical voice filled his mind as he put the handset to his ear.  “Your life is lived you son of man” the tender words confirmed what he was fast beginning to fear.  “You had free will for all your time on earth, you had reason, choice, opportunity, and you alone selected the path you wanted to take.” 

 

Tate tried to stop the voice, to ask a question, to protest it had been circumstance, fate and not free will that had put him on the path to assassination, but the voice continued regardless.

 

“Now my child, the choice is no longer yours to make.  The train will never stop.  You can take as long as you like but there is only one door to eternity that will open for you.  Go through, and reap exactly the crop that you have sown.”  The mobile went silent, and then made Tate jump by bleeping that the battery was low.

 

In disbelief, Tate realised he was helpless.  Unless that is he could get through the gel wall in the heavenly toilet.  The grisly sticky gel didn’t even bear thinking about.  He saw a plastic knife near the sandwiches discarded by the young woman who had been so intent at her laptop project until only an hour ago. 

 

Once again he approached the doorway to heaven, and this time he pushed against the gel with all his might.  It remained bendy but intact.  He kicked at it with his foot but it was surprisingly strong and thick, and his ankle twisted unpleasantly at the impact.  The plastic knife made no impression, nor the metal towel rail which he wrenched from the wall to beat frenziedly against the idyllic scene so tantalisingly in front of him.

 

His own fingers and thumbs were bloodied after an hour of trying.  After a day of getting nowhere, he was reluctantly beginning to think that he should check out the gruesome bog just to see if he could identify what the difference in the gel was, or even if by applying some of the sticky stuff to the pink gel, it might melt a doorway for him where repeated sawing had failed miserably.  He didn’t want to enter the stinking hell hole again, but what choice had he?  Ruefully, he remembered:  none. 

 

It was just as bad as his memory told him - in fact worse, because the body on the door was now seeping greenish unidentifiable fluids onto the flooring which made him retch as he stepped into the gore to reach the bluish gel in front of him.  As he raised his hand to scoop the gelatinous gloop onto a paper towel, he suddenly saw people moving on the other side of this gel wall too.  There seemed to be yellowing, skeletal bodies. Rabid, slobbering animals too.  Raging, steaming red rivers, thick with detritus. Grey moulding food which was actually being eaten by slavering, starving demons, and yet, in this devils' scene, there was also someone he knew.  It couldn’t be the woman with the laptop, could it?  The one who’d smiled at him so sweetly when he’d been so blissfully dozing between earth and eternity?  He looked at her again.  The smile wasn’t inviting now.  He shivered as her lips leered in a rictal parody of a grin.  She flicked out a blue coloured tongue and obnoxious drool dribbled down her chin as the tongue flickered obscenely towards his genitals. 

 

Horrified he clutched the blue gel on the soaking, sticky tissue. He simply must get in through the pink gel.  With a racing heart, he pushed the sticky gel onto a portion of rigid gel in the toilet which smelt of heaven.  What he hoped to see was some sort of acidic reaction as the blue gel ate a doorway through to paradise beyond.  What he actually saw was the pink gel absorb the blue gel and become rigidly bendy but unyielding once again.

 

He had no choice.

 

The train continued through the tunnel.  For twelve long years it continued ever onwards.  Indeed, it could have travelled for all eternity.  Instead it took just twelve years of understanding that there really was no choice before the single remaining passenger made his.