Chapter 14: Are You A Wizard?
“Are you sure you have the right person?” I had to ask, because really, what could I say to that? “I’m a lawyer, there’s not much magic about my job, despite what Suits might make you believe.”
“Magical potential exists, whether or not you ever received training in the arts,” the Waiter retorted. “Training is much harder to come by, these days, two world wars and a gradual, global tilt towards science have thinned the magical community dramatically. But you must have potential, and plenty of it as well, otherwise you’d have died from reading the final page of his journal, like I did. A nasty curse like that, you can’t survive without either specialised training or a lot of raw power.”
“So you are dead,” I exclaimed. “I was wondering, with the glow up and all. You’re pretty solid for a ghost, I have to say.”
“It took me years to learn how to do even this much. I still can’t leave the train, but being able to possess members of staff made the tedium easier to bear, as did the development of personal entertainment devices. Undeath is much easier now than when I died in the fifties, back when you were lucky if the train had an onboard radio that worked half the time. That said, I’d still rather be done with it all: the dead aren’t meant to linger in the world like this. That’s why I’m breaking cover now, you see; your continued persistence gives us both an opportunity to get out. The Chef might have interfered with that, so I got rid of him.”
“I’m afraid I still don’t quite follow,” I frowned, feeling remarkably out of my depth, albeit no longer in quite so much fear for my life. “Why act now, of all times?”
“There’s only a narrow window of time when He can manifest, to absorb the life force of the passengers. Half an hour, before the final stop, that’s as much as he can manage. The fog comes first, to guarantee that everyone is asleep; only then does He emerge, only then will He be vulnerable.”
“That’s the part I don’t understand,” I complained. “Everything else makes sense: an old geezer died on this line ages ago, he curses the line, and is trying to use the passengers to crawl back to life. But that part that isn’t explained at all, is why I keep looping back to the start, or whatever passes for it in each loop.”
“I might have an idea as to why that’s happening,” the Waiter sounded strained, and if I didn’t know better I’d think he was holding back laughter. “Probably best not to mention it until we’re free, however.”
“Sounds good to me,” I agreed after a moment, reining in my curiosity in favour of more immediate concerns. “Sounds like you have some ideas for that? If so, I’m all ears.”
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The Waiter tossed his meat cleaver into the sink, beckoning me into the kitchen. Once I was inside, and the door locked behind me, he leaned over and whispered the plan into my ear.
—
My knuckles rapped against the wooden door, as for the second time, I was going from cabin to cabin like an old school door-to-door salesman. I had the old journal in my other hand, thumb placed strategically as a bookmark, ready to flip open the final page at a moment’s notice. Nobody answered me at first, but I heard the rustling inside that confirmed the presence of someone in bed, and the Waiter had told me this cabin was occupied as well. So, I kept at it, varying the intensity and frequency of my knocking as I went, keeping to an absence of any particular rhythm in a way that I knew to be extremely aggravating, from being on the other side of it. Sure enough, I soon heard muffled cursing in another language, followed by a man getting up from bed, and trudging however reluctantly to the door.
“What do you want?” The old man from before asked gruffly, his eyes examining me from top to bottom before focusing first on my backpack, and then on the old journal in my hand. “No proselytising, I’m already a man of faith, so save your breath.”
I ignored him, and flipped open the journal, giving him a full face blast of the final page. Just five seconds was enough for him to start foaming at the mouth, at which point I closed the book again, just in time to watch him fall, unconscious, until the Waiter’s grasp. In hindsight, I’m not sure why I neglected the potential of the journal as a weapon until he suggested it: God knows it had a painful effect on me, the one time I read it. That was an inexcusable lapse, really, one I could only attribute to either an innate desire to avoid touching the journal again, due to my own experience with it, or alternatively towards an unconscious bias towards more familiar, mundane weapons.
“That’s the last of them,” the Waiter informed me, piling the unconscious old man haphazardly against the side wall of the Club Car.
The other passengers were already there: a pair of white-haired retirees, the two students who shared a room, along with over a dozen others I only vaguely recognised from seeing them during mealtime. The Waiter had explained that when the time came, the old physician would first appear next to one of his targets: the problem was, we had no way of determining which would be first, and he’d grow progressively stronger with every passenger drained. As such, by gathering everyone together, we hoped to surprise him upon first arrival, to quickly subdue him before he gained momentum. It wasn’t a perfect plan, not by a long shot, but it was the best we could think of.
“Positions?” I asked, putting the journal back into my bag, as it wouldn’t affect the man who originally wrote it, and pulling out the biggest carving knife in the kitchen.
“Positions,” the Waiter agreed, moving to the back of the Club Car, and setting the final piece of our plan into motion.
With a mighty groan, he did something I couldn’t see, and the sleeper carriage detached. No longer benefiting from the power of the locomotive, it swiftly vanished behind us, and soon pulled out of sight. With that, the remote chance of a manifestation in the empty carriage was averted. I checked my phone again out of habit: half past nine exactly, which meant it was showtime.