Chapter 4: A Pound of Flesh

Chapter 4: A Pound of Flesh

The train did not pull into Malda station. There was no bustling platform, no call of chai-wallahs, no crowd of waiting relatives. It shuddered to a halt in a place that didn't feel like it belonged to any map, a siding overgrown with thorny weeds where reality seemed thin. The air smelled of rust, ozone, and the coppery mist that still clung to Arjun’s clothes. The world outside the grime-caked window was silent and dark, punctuated by a single, flickering sodium lamp that cast long, distorted shadows.

Arjun barely registered their arrival. His entire universe had contracted to the mangled stump of his father’s arm and the desperate, clumsy pressure he was applying with his own blood-soaked shirt. Bimal was unconscious, his breathing shallow and ragged, his face a waxy, terrifying grey. The small wooden totem he had clutched so fiercely had fallen to the floor, rolling into a corner like a discarded, useless prayer.

"He's going to die," Arjun whispered, the words catching in his throat, thick with unshed tears and the metallic taste of his father’s blood. "You killed him."

"On the contrary," the Conductor’s voice was a smooth balm on a raw wound, utterly incongruous with the scene. He stood beside them, his grin re-formed but visibly strained, like a crack being painted over. "The Line is currently rectifying a severe service failure. We pride ourselves on customer satisfaction, and a breach of the passenger safety Accord is the gravest error we can make."

He spoke with the detached jargon of a corporate manager addressing a faulty product line. It was more horrifying than any monstrous roar.

"Rectifying?" Arjun choked, looking up at the shadowed face. "Look at him! He needs a doctor, a hospital!"

"Precisely," the Conductor said, and with a flick of his wrist, he produced a long, polished wooden box that hadn't been there a second before. It looked like an antique case for a dueling pistol. He laid it flat on the seat opposite them and unlatched the silver clasps. "As per the terms of the breached contract, compensation must be immediate and equivalent. A pound of flesh for a pound of flesh, you might say. The Line provides."

He lifted the lid.

Resting on a bed of crimson velvet was an arm. A human arm, severed cleanly just above the elbow. It was pale and masculine, flecked with dark hairs. A crude tattoo of a scorpion was inked onto the forearm. It was utterly, terrifyingly fresh. There was no blood, no gore; it was presented with the pristine, sterile chill of a butcher's display. For a horrifying moment, Arjun wondered if it had belonged to one of the other passengers, a piece of the fare repurposed as a spare part.

Arjun recoiled, a strangled noise escaping his lips. "What is that? What are you—"

"The replacement," the Conductor stated simply. He closed the box with a soft click. "And we have already arranged for the finest reattachment services. The ambulance is waiting."

As if on cue, the carriage door squelched open, revealing the damp, dark siding and the hulking silhouette of an old-fashioned, black ambulance, its paint chipped and faded. There were no flashing lights, no siren, just two silent men in simple orderly uniforms standing by the open rear doors.

Arjun’s mind screamed. This was insane. This was a fever dream. You couldn’t just reattach a stranger’s arm. But his father was dying. The pool of blood on the floor was growing wider. The logical, modern world he had believed in had been ripped to shreds, and this nightmare was the only hand being offered. Choosing between a guaranteed death and an impossible, monstrous salvation was no choice at all.

"Take him," Arjun croaked, his voice cracking. "Just... help him."

The two orderlies moved with an unnerving efficiency. They lifted Bimal onto a gurney, their faces blank and incurious, their movements practiced. They didn't so much as glance at the horrific wound. Arjun, clutching the heavy wooden box, followed them out of the train and into the back of the ambulance. The doors slammed shut, plunging them into darkness before a dim interior light flickered on.

The Conductor did not follow. As the ambulance pulled away with a lurch, Arjun saw him through the rear window, a tall, black silhouette tipping his hat under the lone sodium lamp before turning and melting back into the train, which was already beginning to dissolve back into the night.

The drive was a blur of disjointed terror. Arjun sat on a bench seat, the cold, heavy box on his lap, his father’s blood drying and cracking on his skin. He stared at his own hands, crimson-stained, and felt a profound sense of unreality. Outside the smeared windows, the mundane lights of Malda town blinked past—shops, houses, streetlights—a normal world operating just inches away from the rolling pocket of madness he was trapped inside.

They didn’t go to the main district hospital. The ambulance turned down a series of narrow, unlit alleys, finally stopping before a discreet, unmarked building of old, grey stone. It might have been a private clinic or a forgotten municipal office. The orderlies wheeled his father inside, into a corridor that was too clean, too white, and too silent. The air smelled sharply of antiseptic, but it failed to cover a faint, underlying scent of ozone and cold meat—the smell of the train.

A nurse greeted them at the reception desk. She had a placid, unnervingly calm face and a smile that was a pale, watery echo of the Conductor’s. It didn't reach her eyes.

"We were expecting you," she said, her voice soft and even. "The Conductor called ahead. The surgeon is prepped and ready."

She looked at Arjun, at his torn, bloody clothes and his wild, terrified eyes, without a flicker of surprise or concern. Her gaze then dropped to the wooden box in his hands. "Ah, the graft. Excellent. If you'll bring it this way."

She led him down the sterile corridor to a set of heavy, steel operating room doors. A man in green scrubs was waiting. He was older, with thinning grey hair and eyes as cold and grey as sterilized steel. His hands, Arjun noted with a shudder, were unnervingly large and steady.

"I am Dr. Ghosh," he said, his voice flat and devoid of any emotion. He took the wooden box from Arjun’s trembling hands as if he were accepting a parcel. "Don't worry, son. We have a great deal of experience with these... attachments."

He opened the box and inspected the severed arm with a professional, dispassionate eye, nodding slightly. "Viable tissue. Good vascular structure. The connection should take." He looked at Arjun, and for the first time, a flicker of something passed through his cold eyes—not sympathy, but a kind of detached, clinical pity. "It's best if you wait out here. The process can be... unsettling for the uninitiated."

The nurse gently guided Arjun to a hard plastic chair against the wall. Before he could protest, before he could demand to know what they were really doing, Dr. Ghosh and the orderlies wheeled his father through the steel doors. They swung shut with a heavy, final thump, the sound sealing his father’s fate.

Arjun was left alone in the silent, white hallway. The antiseptic smell was making him dizzy. He looked down at his hands, at the dried, brown flakes of his father's blood under his fingernails. He had escaped the train, but the horror hadn't ended. It had merely changed its uniform, from a grinning Conductor to a smiling nurse and a surgeon with eyes of stone. He hadn't found a hospital; he had found another carriage on the same damned Line. And he had just willingly handed his father over to it.