The Reality Express

A GHOST TRAIN is coming to Bradford-on-Avon, thundering down the tracks, puffing smoke and steam. It is coming in the early hours of the morning, long before the dawn, in the hour of the wolf, the hour when most babies are born and most people die, when no train is scheduled to run.

A great black iron train, with hot steam raging in its boiler, avatar of a different age, it fills the night air with dirty smoke and flying cinder flecks, pulling old-fashioned carriages that bear names from companies long since vanished into the mists of history. The heavy black iron of the trains body is scored all over with runes and sigils and names of power. The great wheels are solid silver, striking singing sparks from the steel tracks. The smoke billowing from the tall black stack smells of brimstone, and the whistle is the cry of a damned soul. The train plunges headlong through the night, faster than any train has a right to go, ancient or modern. The carriages shake and sway, rattling along behind, the windows illuminated with the eerie blue glow of underwater grottoes. The Reality Express is coming into town, right on time.

Eager faces press against the shimmering glass of the carriage windows, desperate for a first glance of their destination, excited and fearful at the same time. Not all the faces are human. They have paid for their tickets with everything they had, or might have been, and it is far too late now to change their minds. They are refugees from the magical world of Mysterie, seeking asylum and safe harbor in the cold sanity of Veritie. The Reality Express is a one-way trip, and only the desperate and the truly needy need apply.

The great iron beast hammers down the tracks, as fast as misfortune and as implacable as destiny, sounding its awful whistle as the town of Bradford-on-Avon draws near. And standing quiet and calm in the shadows of the chimney stack on the station’s waiting-room roof is Jimmy Thunder, God For Hire, with his great hammer in its holster on his hip. The only private eye in the magical realms raises his head and smiles as he hears the terrible cry of the dark old train, and looks up the tracks, curious as to what the night will bring. The product of gods and mortals, Jimmy Thunder has a foot in each world and a home in neither—a dangerous man to both.

And somewhere in the dark, waiting for the train’s arrival, two figures stand, scarier than the Reality Express or a God For Hire could ever hope to be.

Jimmy Thunder stood on the sloping tiled roof of the station’s waiting room, leaning casually against the disused chimney stack. There was a cold wind blowing, but he didn’t feel it. He’d chosen the roof for his stakeout because in his experience, people rarely look up, even when they’re expecting unwanted interest. And the shadows were so very deep and comforting tonight, almost as if they knew something. Jimmy pricked up his ears as he caught the exact moment the Reality Express dropped out of Mysterie and into Veritie, its awful cry of the damned Dopplering down into nothing more than the rush of escaping steam. The train would be here soon, disgorging its cargo of the lost and the wretched, and then he would see what he would see.

Jimmy Thunder was a great bull of a man, with long red hair and a jutting red beard. He had a chest like a barrel, muscled arms the size of most men’s thighs, and shoulders so broad he often had to turn sideways to pass through doors. He had legs that could run for miles, and feet that never complained, despite all the standing around his job entailed. He wore black leathers adorned with brightly gleaming chains and studs, and looked every inch what every biker wants to be when he grows up. His eyes were as blue as the sea, and twice as deadly, though he had a charming smile, when he could be bothered. Descended, at many, many removes, from the Norse god Thor, Jimmy was fast and strong and disturbingly powerful—when he put his mind to it. Long-lived, though by no means immortal, he was a god by chance and a private eye by choice. His godliness was diluted by a hell of a lot of generations of mortals, but the power of storms, of thunderclap and lightning strike, was still his. Not many people worshiped him anymore, for which he was quietly grateful. He’d always found it rather embarrassing.

Also his was the ancient mystical hammer Mjolnir, a (mostly) unstoppable force that (sometimes) came back when he threw it. The hammer had once been Thor’s, and in its day had changed the fate of men and nations. It was his only material inheritance. It stirred in its sleep in its holster, snoring quietly. Mjolnir was a good weapon, but it was getting old and forgetful. Forged from stone or crystal or metal at the dawn of Time, or perhaps from some starstuff that no longer existed in the material world, Mjolnir was not what it once was. It was created to be immortal, a weapon that would endure till Ragnarok or Judgment Day; but nothing lasts for ever. Ask Thor, if you can find his body.

Jimmy Thunder was the only private eye in Bradford-on-Avon, in reality or otherwise, and he had a reputation for getting things done, whatever the cost. During his long life he’d investigated many cases, both mundane and bizarre, and his unwavering pursuit of the truth had seen to it that a lot of not very nice people had good reasons for wanting him dead. Just as well he was a god, really. Even if he did have to chase after his hammer sometimes. He poured the last of the hot sweet tea out of his thermos and into the plastic cup, and sipped at it carefully. It was still pleasantly warming, but not nearly bracing enough for the early hours of a very cold morning, so he goosed it up a bit with a tiny lightning bolt from his index finger. The wind had no damn business being so disturbingly cold this deep into summer, but then the weather had been strange of late—whimsical, almost willful. Jimmy was quietly hoping someone would hire him to look into that.

Not that he was complaining about the cold, or the early hour of the morning. Jimmy liked stakeouts, especially when there was a fair chance of a little hurly-burly in the offing. Smiting the ungodly was right up there on his list of favorite things. He lived to the hilt the role he had chosen, and the more he played it, the less like play it was. A god became a private eye, and an old myth became a new. Jimmy believed in progress. It’s always the legends that cannot or will not change that wither and fade away. Faced with being just another minor deity in a long line of godlings, with no fixed role or future in the modern world, Jimmy had cheerfully embraced a different destiny. The first time he saw a private investigator at the cinema, solving impossible crimes and pursuing awful villains, while surrounded by dizzy dames and femmes fatales, he knew that that was what he wanted to be. It helped that his long life gave him plenty of time to learn from his mistakes, while his divine abilities kept him alive while he learned.

Jimmy liked to know things and had an insatiable hunger for the truth. Especially things other people didn’t want him to know. He had no time for subterfuge, always preferring to meet things head-on. He had a fondness for the underdog, and a real weakness for damsels in distress, and if he had a fault, it was his constant determination to follow a case through to the bitter end, revealing every last truth or secret, come what may. He never could bring himself to accept that while his clients always said they wanted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they didn’t always mean it. Not when lies or evasions can be so much more comforting.

Jimmy always got to the bottom of a case, but he wasn’t always thanked for his trouble.

Sometimes cases ended messily. As in the case of Count Dracula’s mandolin, where no one got what they wanted, and everyone got hurt—even him. And sometimes Jimmy went into cases knowing from the start that it was all going to end in tears. The Lord of Thorns still hadn’t forgiven Jimmy for proving his fiancée was a golem. But if he’d made enemies, he’d made friends, too. Even the Vatican owed him a favor.

(A few years back, Jimmy had been called in by the pope to investigate a curious case where all the statues in the Vatican had spontaneously started bleeding from vivid stigmata. They’d had to close everything down and run superhuman damage control to keep it out of the media. All the top-rank exorcists did their best, with gallons of holy water and top-class cross action, and got absolutely nowhere. So Jimmy got the call, on the grounds that while the Vatican certainly wasn’t prepared to accept that he was a god, he could at least be relied on to bring a whole new perspective to the problem. Jimmy had expressed surprise that the Vatican had even heard of him. The Holy Father had smiled and said, “The Vatican has heard of everybody, Mr. Thunder.”

(Jimmy had sorted it out, mostly by asking questions and knowing when he was being lied to. It turned out that the pope had forgotten someone’s birthday. As a reward, Jimmy was allowed access to the Vatican’s secret library for a whole afternoon and an evening, to browse where he pleased. The really dangerous books were kept under lock and key and were chained to the shelves, or in extreme cases immersed in holy water or kept in a vacuum inside a sealed vault, but he still managed to turn up some interesting stuff. Not necessarily useful, but interesting. The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot was a real eye-opener, though the Fourth Prophecy of Fatima turned out to be just what everyone thought it was.

(The one story Jimmy was really interested in remained stubbornly elusive. There were no records, and no one would talk to him about it. Which only convinced him all the more that there had to be something to it. It was common knowledge that Vatican scientists had been experimenting with computers and Artificial Intelligence for over fifty years, though they kept their achievements to themselves. No one would admit that there had been any success in creating an AI, but it was said that deep in the heart of the Vatican there was a room where no one went, where the door was always locked. And that if you could find your way to that abandoned room, and put your ear to that locked door, you would hear the sound of something crying ….

(There are many mysteries inside the Vatican, and only some of them have anything to do with Christianity.)

Jimmy drank the last of the very hot sweet tea, flicked the cup a few times to empty it and then screwed it back onto the thermos. He’d only half filled the thermos, anyway. Bad idea to drink too much on a stakeout, especially when you didn’t know how long you’d have to hold your ground. He put the thermos down on the roof beside him and leaned back against the chimney stack, which shifted slightly under his great weight. Stretched out before him lay the sleeping town, still and quiet now, just an army of streetlights pushing back the darkness. There was the tower and spire of Trinity Church, and beyond it row upon row of terraced houses and cottages, ascending the steep hills that enclosed the town—ordinary people sleeping in their ordinary town, all’s quiet, all’s well. But that was just in Veritie.

In the magical world, every bit as clear to Jimmy Thunder’s semidivine eyes, the town was never quiet. Bradford-on-Avon was an old, old locality, littered with all the remnants of the past. The very old creature that lived Under the Hill stirred restlessly, as though it could feel the thunder god’s gaze, and deeper still, things and shapes and presences out of times past slept and dreamed down among the bones of the town. On the last day, when the earth gives up its dead for judgment, many of those buried in Bradford-on-Avon’s cemeteries will be surprised to find out who some of their neighbors have been.

Old buildings flickered in and out of sight, ghosts of the town that was. Pale figures sat glumly at the base of the old gallows in the Bull Pit, swapping hard-luck stories and old, old claims of innocence, while in the park next to Westbury House, old soldiers guarded the war memorial and made rude comments about the new pale green Millennium Statue in the gardens opposite. From the River Avon came undine songs of unbearable melancholy, sometimes drowned out by the terrible cry of the Howling Thing, still imprisoned in the chapel on the bridge. Powers and Dominations sat at feast in the ghostly remembrance of what had once been a seventeenth-century eating place, The Three Gables, sharing secrets in loud, carrying voices and deciding men’s fates with a laugh and a shrug and a careless quip. King Mob still held sway in the town center, as men and women long dead rioted over the changing fortunes of the cloth trade. And all across the town there were flaring lights and voices in the earth, and unnatural creatures flying on the night winds.

Business as usual, in Bradford-on-Avon, in Mysterie.

Jimmy Thunder looked up at the full moon and nodded hello. He’d always been on good terms with the Moon, unlike some of his predecessors, though her skittish ways made her difficult to understand and dangerous to know. But you never knew when you might need a friend. The town was jumping tonight, and the Reality Express was fast bearing down on the station. Jimmy let his sight slip out of Mysterie and back into Veritie, as the big black train came roaring in, right on time.

The Waking Beauty had hired Jimmy Thunder to investigate the matter of the Reality Express, and Jimmy had nodded politely and said of course he would, no problem, because no one said no to the Waking Beauty if they knew what was good for them; not even a god. She hadn’t offered to pay, and he’d known better than to ask. He was just building up credit that he might someday need to redeem. The Waking Beauty was older than the town, and the town was very old indeed. She hadn’t volunteered why she was suddenly interested in the Reality Express, or what he was supposed to be looking for. A lot of people disapproved of it, for all kinds of reasons, but as yet no one had actually got around to doing anything about it. The trade in refugees between the two worlds wasn’t exactly illegal, but it did tend to undermine the status quo. And a lot of people had a great deal invested in maintaining the status quo. No one had any idea who owned or operated the Reality Express, and those foolish enough to go looking for answers tended not to come back. So it was just there, a service for those who needed it.

Jimmy didn’t even know who drove the damned train.

It irked him that he was working for nothing. Normally he charged all that the traffic could bear, on the grounds that, after all, even gods had to eat; and because he lived in horror of someday being required to get a proper job. His few remaining worshipers would have been only too happy to provide him with everything he might need or desire, but that was a dangerous road to start down. He didn’t want to become dependent on his worshipers. It would have given them a measure of control over him, and Jimmy Thunder took pride in being his own man. Or god.

With a roar and a cry and a blast of escaping steam, the great black train finally slowed to a halt beside the opposite platform. Jimmy stood very still in the deepest of the shadows, but his eyes missed nothing. Steam billowed out onto the narrow platform like low fog, as doors began opening down the length of the carriages, their slamming back sounding loudly on the night like a long roll of applause. People stepped slowly down onto the platform, looking confusedly about them, unsettled to be suddenly only human. They clung together in little groups, all wide eyes and chattering mouths, finding what comfort they could in the familiar proximity of old friends or enemies.

The magical world is like an overlay on the real world, and though the real cannot see the magical, it can sometimes still be affected by it. But there has always been traffic between the two, mostly from Mysterie to Veritie, as beings of various kinds exchange the gaudier joys of magic for the more secure bedrock of reality. And there have always been those with a foot in both worlds, like Jimmy Thunder and the Waking Beauty. Many apparently ordinary people and things cast powerful shadows in Mysterie, and, of course, vice versa.

There are always those willing to leave magic behind so that they might live out normal, finite lives in Veritie. Some come to be free of their responsibilities, some to escape the obligations of their particular natures. But just lately there had been whispers that Something Bad was coming to Mysterie. Something awful and unstoppable, that would put an end to the old familiar dance of magic and reality. Jimmy had heard the rumors, and mostly discounted them. There were always rumors. But still people packed the carriages of the Reality Express and paid their fare with gold and gems, magical artifacts and personal power. They all had their reasons: vampires and werewolves who wanted to be freed from the demands of their curses, or undead who craved to know the sensual pleasures of the living, or just to know the simple joy of daylight. In Veritie, they could be mortal men and women, free from fate or duty or geas. The price was always more than they expected. Some of the newcomers were already shaking and shuddering on the platform, shocked at how much smaller they seemed here, how much more diminished and vulnerable the human condition really was.

Some of them had never even been cold before.

Two figures appeared suddenly out of nowhere to welcome the newcomers, and Jimmy leaned forward just a little for a better look. He was surprised, bordering on astonished, that they’d actually been able to arrive at the station without his noticing. And then he saw who the two were, and understood much. The man in charge of this small welcoming committee, speaking so calmly and graciously and comfortingly to the uncertain refugees, was Nicholas Hob, the Serpent’s Son. Very old, very powerful, and irredeemably evil. Jimmy hadn’t known Hob was back in town. To the best of his knowledge, no one had. It had been a hundred years and more since Nicholas Hob had gifted the town with his poisonous presence.

As always, he looked utterly perfect, in style and manners and everything that counted. He was handsome, elegant, apparently in his late twenties, in great shape and dashing with it. Blond, blue-eyed, and almost overpoweringly masculine, Hitler would have loved him on sight. (And probably had, if some of the rumors were true. There were a lot of rumors about Hob.) His suit was of the very latest cut, and quite clearly the most expensive money could buy. Gold and silver gleamed all over his person, and he was charm personified as he welcomed one and all to their new lives in Veritie. He might have been a politician, a successful businessman or a film star, and had been all of those and more, in his time. But they were only the faces he hid behind, the masks he wore for other people. He was the Serpents Son, cunning and vicious, potent and foul, who walked through lives and destroyed them, just for the hell of it. No one had ever been known to stand against him and live. He was his father’s son, and he could shine like the sun when he chose.

(It was said that flowers and women withered when he smiled on them, and that he left a trail of blood and suffering wherever he walked. Jimmy Thunder was quite prepared to believe it.)

Hob’s companion looked like a woman, but was actually Angel. In her own disturbing way, she was just as powerful and terrifying as Hob. Incredibly tall, impossibly pale and slender, she dressed in black tatters held together with safety pins and lengths of barbed wire. The pins pierced her flesh, and the wire broke it, but she didn’t seem to care. She wore her jet-black hair cropped brutally close to her skull, and her face was coarsely good-looking, sensual rather than beautiful. Her skin was as pale as death, and her mouth and eyes were the same deep, vivid red. She smiled meaninglessly at the new arrivals, and her hands curled impatiently at her sides, as though impatient to be hurting or breaking things. At her belt hung a rosary made from human fingerbones, and a clutch of supernaturally white feathers that came from no material wings. The newcomers avoided her gaze, as though the very sight of her was painful to them. They all knew her name was more than just a name.

She really had been an angel once, descended now from the immaterial to the material world, and though she was much diminished from what she had once been, she was still a force almost beyond reckoning. No one knew what kind of angel she’d been, from Above or from Below, and whether she fell or was pushed, or what terrible, unforgivable thing she’d done, to be sentenced to the mortal miseries of flesh and blood and bone. No one asked; no one dared. She was Angel, and that was all anyone needed to know.

Jimmy hadn’t known she’d allied herself with the Serpent’s Son. And he hadn’t known that either of them were involved in running the Reality Express. It couldn’t help but make him wonder what else was going on, on his own doorstep, that he didn’t know about.

Hob’s calm voice and presence was finally having a soothing effect on the uneasy crowd of the newly human, as long as they didn’t look at Angel, and he was soon bustling among them, smiling and shaking hands and checking names and numbers against a list on his laptop. He’d clearly done this before. At his murmured suggestion, Angel had moved away to lean against the station-house wall, and was idly digging out long curls of mortar from between the stones with a bored fingernail, clearly uninterested in the proceedings. Presumably she was just there to ride shotgun. Jimmy realized with a start that Hob and Angel were the reasons why he was there. The Waking Beauty had wanted their presence confirmed. The train and its passengers were largely irrelevant.

Jimmy studied Angel from the darkest and most concealing shadows he could find on the waiting-room roof. A line from an old song ran through his head, subtly altered: Did you ever see a nightmare walking? I did … Just standing there, with her pale arms now crossed over her small high breasts, she looked as dangerous and malignant as all hell. She hadn’t been in town long, and everyone had been wondering which way she would jump. When God wanted a city leveled, or all the firstborn slaughtered in one night, he sent an angel. They were Heaven’s stormtroopers. Angel’s very presence in Bradford-on-Avon was enough to unsettle any sensible person, man or god.

(Only one other angel had been reduced from the immaterial to the material in present times, and that had been voluntary—supposedly. But the old city of Maggedon was no more, and the angel was still chained to his rock in the cold dark heart of the earth, with nails through his wings. A little humanity can be a dangerous thing.)

Jimmy Thunder let his hand fall to the great hammer at his side. It had been a long time since he had been genuinely frightened.

Perhaps he made a noise, or he’d moved too suddenly; either way, Angels head snapped round, and she looked up and glared right at him with her bloodred eyes, seeing him clearly through the concealing shadows of the chimney stack. She shouted a warning to Hob and ran forward, the crowd scattering before her. She jumped from the platform, across the tracks and up onto the waiting-room roof in one impossible bound, as though borne aloft on invisible wings. Roof slates cracked and exploded under her bare feet as she landed, her long legs barely flexing as they absorbed the impact. She held her hands like claws, and her wide smile could just as easily have been a snarl. Jimmy Thunder drew his hammer from its holster and moved reluctantly forward to face her.

Down below, on the far platform, the newly arrived refugees were panicking. Everyone was shouting and milling about, and trying to get back into the carriages, but the doors wouldn’t open for them. There was pushing and shoving, and some fell to the ground and were trampled underfoot. Hob moved quickly among them, trying to calm them with his voice and his presence, but no one was listening. Newly human, no longer protected by their old natures or powers, the refugees were naked and vulnerable and they knew it. This was a perfect time for old enemies to strike, and pay off old scores and blood feuds. The crowd suddenly seized on the notion of escape, and headed en masse for the only exit, the black iron gate beside the station house. Hob was yelling now at the top of his voice, but no one gave a damn.

Up on the waiting-room roof there was neither time nor space for subtlety. Jimmy and Angel slammed together head-on, like two crashing trains. They exchanged blows that would have killed ordinary mortals, and took no hurt at all. Jimmy ducked one punch, and Angel’s fist went on to shatter the chimney stack behind him. It all but exploded, showering bricks and rubble down the sloping roof and onto the platform below. The two fighters circled each other silently. They had nothing to say. More slates cracked and shattered under their feet as they threw themselves forward again. Jimmy made no attempt to block Angel’s blow, taking it unflinchingly as he raised Mjolnir above his head and brought it down with all his strength. But Angel was still too fast for him. She leaped aside and the hammer came rushing down to strike the sloping roof, which broke open under the impact. The entire roof collapsed, plunging down into the waiting room below, and Jimmy and Angel went down with it, in a roar of disintegrating masonry.

Smoke and debris blew out the waiting room’s windows, while the large oblong room filled with rubble and dust. Jimmy and Angel hit the floor hard, but were immediately back on their feet again, not even out of breath from their fall. They saw each other through the dust-choked air, and surged forward once again. Angel caught Jimmy in the chest with a powerful blow, and he was thrown backwards, knocking a hole through the wall behind him with his semidivine body. It wasn’t enough to damage him, but it still hurt like hell. And in the moment it took him to shrug off the hurt and rise out of the collapsed wall, Angel seized the advantage and went for his throat. Mjolnir leaped to Jimmy’s defense, and lashed out to strike Angel a vicious blow on the right temple. Her head snapped right round under the impact, her neck bones squealing, but her neck held and her skull didn’t break. Jimmy was frankly astonished, but that didn’t stop him lashing out with his other hand, driving her back while she was still off balance. He charged forward, broken masonry falling off him like raindrops, wound up and threw Mjolnir at Angel with all his strength, sure that even a descended angel couldn’t stand against the power and momentum of the legendary hammer that had split mountains in its time. Perhaps Angel wasn’t sure either, and at the very last moment she ducked, and the hammer sailed harmlessly over her head to punch a hole through the wall behind her. Jimmy yelled for the hammer to return to him, but nothing happened. Bloody thing was getting senile. He lurched forward and Angel came to meet him, and for a long time they stood toe to toe, giving and receiving blows of terrible force that could normally shatter anything the mortal world had to offer. Neither of them would give an inch, and they fought on remorselessly as the last of the waiting room collapsed around them.

Hob was still trying to keep his panicking refugees under control, barking orders now in a cold, authoritative voice that as a rule would never be ignored, but no one was listening to him. They’d pressed themselves into a tightly packed crowd before the narrow exit gate, and were all but fighting each other in their need to get away. A few had made it out into the parking lot, and were running wildly in all directions. Hob lost his temper.

He took his ancient aspect upon him, glorious and terrible, and glowed, bright as the sun, brilliant and blinding. A wave of impossible heat blazed out from him, boiling along the platform, and engulfed all the refugees in one moment, even those running in the lot. Men and women burned alive and were gone, their bodies utterly consumed by an unbearable heat. They didn’t even have time to scream before they were nothing more than a few ashes drifting on the night air.

Hob yelled to Angel, and she reluctantly turned away from the stunned thunder god, and vaulted back across the tracks to join her partner. They both disappeared into the parking lot, and a slow, sullen silence fell across what was left of the deserted railway station.

Jimmy Thunder kicked his way through the rubble of what had once been a waiting room, emerged out onto the platform and looked about him. The Reality Express was gone, returned to whatever place or state it called home. There was nothing left of the refugees but a few dark scorch marks on the station-house walls. For a moment it had been as though the sun itself had reached out and touched the earth, but it was Hob’s power, and it touched only what he chose to touch. Jimmy looked back at the building he and Angel had destroyed during their fight, and swore briefly in Old Norse. Early hour of the morning or not, someone had to have heard the noise. He’d better leave before someone official turned up to investigate. Doubtless they’d come up with some real-world explanation—a gas explosion, probably. He stared up the empty tracks, still and silent now. He doubted there’d be any more runs on the Reality Express for the time being. No one would accept Hob’s promises of a new and better life in Veritie anymore; not after he’d roasted his last lot of customers.

Jimmy wondered briefly how he was going to explain all this to the Waking Beauty. It really hadn’t been one of his better showings. He sighed and started searching through the rubble of the destroyed waiting room for his lost hammer, calling to it as to a deaf and rather dim dog.