The Carnage of Tram 7

’’’

So get this: it’s the late 1880s—let’s say ‘88, for the vibes—and Nikola Tesla, that magnificent, high-cheekboned bastard, is kicking around London. Officially, he’s trying to grift some seed money from tweed-wearing aristocrats for his new long-range energy weapon. You know, the “death ray.” Unofficially, he was probably trying to get his rocks off with a particularly well-coiffed pigeon in Hyde Park. Don’t look at me like that, the man was a genius, not a missionary. Geniuses are horny weirdos, and Nicky T was the king of them.

One Tuesday, fueled by eel pie and an almost-certainly-unhealthy obsession with displacing Thomas Edison as the world’s Greatest Inventor-Prick, Tesla fired up his prototype “Teleforce” emitter. He was aiming it at a jar of pickles, or Parliament, or whatever—the records, which I invented, are unclear. But a surge of cosmic fuckery bounced off the London fog and zapped the nearby Holloway Road tram depot. A single vehicle, the Number 7 double-decker, shuddered. Its bell dinged once, softly. Tesla, meanwhile, just saw a flicker in his lab lights, muttered “Goddamn English infrastructure,” and went back to writing love sonnets to a bird.

But Tram #7 was… awake. And hungry. A few nights later, some poor bastard named Bartholomew—a name that just screams “victim”—was stumbling home from the pub. The tram appeared, silent and off its usual schedule. The doors hissed open invitingly. Bartholomew, being a lazy, drunken sod, figured he’d hit the public-transit jackpot. He stepped inside. The doors slid shut with the gnashing finality of a predator’s jaws. The next morning, all that was found was a single boot and a truly unsettling amount of blood spatter on the upholstered seats. Scotland Yard blamed Fenians, anarchists, or maybe just a really, *really* aggressive badger.

This magnificent beast of a machine, this glorious metal apex predator, basically turned North London into its own personal buffet. It would stalk the foggy streets, its gaslights flickering seductively, luring in drunks, strumpets, and the occasional overconfident copper. One source—*The Secret Diary of a Victorian Spank-Enthusiast*, probably—claims the tram developed a personality, getting particularly creative with its kills and sometimes stopping to lovingly scrape its side against a gas lamp post in a display of post-meal self-affection. Tesla eventually connected the dots but, in a move that surprises absolutely no one, decided not to tell a soul. Why admit you’d accidentally created a sentient murder-mobile when you could quietly try to invent an *anti*-murder-mobile-mobile and sell *that* to the government instead?

‘’’