Night Train

When his species was young, man sought refuge in caves to escape exposure and death, and the terrible vastness of the world. A cave could keep a man safe, and sometimes sated. If he had fire, the cave contained its light, and the light held back the night and the things within it. Life was nasty, brutish, and short, as the man once said. But how much nastier, and how much shorter, without the rude cave and its cool embrace? Later, much later, man returned to the caves that once kept him; only now he made the caves himself. He made them with shovels and dynamite and his heart’s own blood. He tunneled into the earth and laid tracks there, and invented carriages to speed his kind across the whole of dominion. He looked at the metro he had made and saw that it was good. But little he dreamed, when his shovel first bit into the earth, of the lines that already lay there. Not tunnels but traceries: veins coursing with energy, thrumming with the spirit of the earth itself. Invisible lines making crosses in the land, pooling power at every interstice. Power to be harnessed by the last remaining members of a blasphemous sect. Power to awaken dead gods. Power to make a bridge between our world and others, and to allow passage between them. Across such a bridge came unnameable things: not human, not merciful, only hungry, hungry. They came from worlds glimpsed only in campfire stories and premodern songs. They came into our Earth, and into New York City, and below it where tunnels ran into tunnels, and the light of the sun was rarely seen. And this was good for them. But it was not good for the morsels who, in their millions, came out of the sunlight and into the dark, descending from city streets to ride the trains; and to be uncomfortable perhaps, or bored, or harried, but never afraid. What should they fear, after all? And why should they suppose that this ride would be the last one they’d ever take? Night Train is Thomas F. Monteleone's tale of subterranean terror. In a richly textured narrative featuring multiple points of view, Monteleone delves into the lives of ordinary people united against an extraordinary evil: a reporter, a professor; two streetwise cops who figured, wrongly, that they'd seen the worst their city could spawn. An unlikely band, a too-thin thread of humanity—and all that separates us from annihilation. With reference to the works of Harlan Ellison, Mervyn Peake, and Fritz Leiber, Monteleone creates in Night Train a shared universe in which danger is not limited to one beast but to the bestiaries of weird fiction's finest.