A group of American students, including Beverly Putnic, Mary Kohnert, travels to Yugoslavia to meet a local expert and witness a sacred pagan ritual that is performed only once every hundred years. Back in Los Angeles, Beverly’s mother, Victoria Zinny, is tragically beheaded by a construction beam as she drives away from the airport after dropping Beverly off. A telegram intended to tell Beverly about the tragedy is intercepted and destroyed by the professor, withholding the grim news and adding a sense of occult interference to the trip.
The students are ferried by boat to a remote village, where they are crammed into shabby rooms that the villagers seal up in the dark of night, smear with blood, and set aflame. The doors, though, are unstable enough to give the students a chance to escape; all but one manage to flee, while the other perishes in the blaze. The survivors decide to flee the village and board a passenger train, hoping to put distance between themselves and the nightmare. Two students are left behind when they slip from the moving train.
But the nightmare follows them onto the rails. The train appears to be sentient, and it soon becomes a relentless predator bent on dragging the students toward a fate they never imagined. The driver is decapitated by the cowcatcher at the front, the fireman is dragged into the engine’s fiery interior and burned alive, and the conductor is crushed when the engine detaches from the passenger cars and continues on its own. The train devours life with a cold, ruthless momentum. The two students who fell from the train are later found dead in a swamp, having been run over, and yet the train somehow returns to its tracks untouched and unhurried, as if obeying some otherworldly plan.
Officials from the Yugoslav train authority struggle to halt the ominous locomotive, but their efforts fail to slow its course. The possessed train collides with another standing in its path, causing an explosion that leaves the rails unscathed and the train continuing toward a profane altar that is said to decide the destiny of those aboard. The train’s ultimate purpose appears to be delivering Beverly to the altar, for she has carried a birthmark that marks her as Satan’s bride.
Beverly’s fate is complicated when she shares a moment with an 11th-century monk named Marius who is riding the same train. Their encounter makes her temporarily unfit to be Satan’s consort, and Marius—though long dead—vanishes, returning one object: a book that her mother gave her before she departed, a tangible link to the life she left behind. After the tumult, Beverly returns to America, feeling homesick despite the strange, brief odyssey that spanned only a couple of days in foreign lands.
As the journey nears its end, a final, surreal danger looms aboard the plane that carries her home. A desperate, shadowy arm—connected to the dark force she has straddled—snatches at Beverly from the airplane window during a storm. A flight attendant’s routine interruption interrupts the nightmare, and Beverly awakens to the familiar, trying to tell the airline staff that she just wants to go home, signaling that the fight between fear, fate, and longing for normalcy might not be over after all.
