She thinks this only until she revisits the bad. Until the train shows her a slideshow of her decline. Then, she remembers. Every instance of the bad, in all its monstrousness. The bad men and the bad women who were her associates. The back-against-a-corner choices and the manipulation to undo them, only to make them again. If Lauren keeps going back, all the way back, she’ll be back on a train that she came very close to never getting off of.
Perhaps a woman writhes in pain
And listens—listens for the train!
The train, that like an angel sings,
The train, with healing on its wings.
This stanza comes to Lauren from thin air, as if spoken over the train’s loudspeaker. Lauren had believed she was healed, redeemed even, but here on this train, she feels like a ghost. Despite a front row seat to a silent movie of her past, she cannot reconcile the troubled girl from seven years ago with the woman she is today. That girl of skin and bones, who smelled always of sweat and chemicals, who wanted but one thing, is gone.
Where did my cell phone go? Lauren thinks. She doesn’t see it, plunges her hand between the cushions again, and this time is rewarded. Her fingers clasp the cold plastic and she unearths the device. At first, Lauren thinks she’s found someone else’s phone, another traveler’s lost-and-found. But then she recognizes it. This was her phone, seven years ago. It’s an IPhone 3GS, the screen cracked from when she dropped it, drunk, outside the redbrick bar on the corner of Salem Street, the cobalt blue case scratched and scuffed. Lauren’s fingers are so cold she fears they’ll stick to the case like wet digits to an ice cube.
She types in her old passcode and the phone unlocks. Thumbing the contacts app open, she sees the last person she called, on August 5, 2009; the same as the last person she texted. The photos saved in the phone are snapshots from that humid summer morning in a city liquefying from the heat. Her hair is frizzy and her eyes are huge and glassy. In one sequence of photos, the strap of Lauren’s tank top slips further and further down her shoulder in each shot. In another, Lauren has her arm around a man with haunted, disinterested eyes. Lauren throws the phone as if it’s the bloodstained beak of a bird of prey, poised to peck her.
She hears a giggle and whips around. The woman and her daughter have returned. The little girl peeks out from behind her mother’s skirts, feigning timidity. Over the woman’s shoulder, Lauren sees a building that was demolished, more than five years ago, go whirring by, standing erect and reaching for the heavy clouds triumphantly.
“The engineer has rerouted us,” the woman says.
“Who’s the engineer?” Lauren asks. She tries not to let the fear creep into her voice but thinks maybe it does.
“The engineer steers the train,” the woman says. She does not say anything else.
Lauren stands, wobbling on the wedged heels of her shoes after sitting for too long. She walks. Each car she passes through is dark and empty, but through the windows ahead, she sees a hazy, brassy light, as if they are coming up on an early morning horizon rather than driving straight into midnight. The empty cars wait to be filled, call out for passengers who are not there. Who will never be there.
Lauren crosses the threshold into the next car. The ceiling here feels too low and the ground is uneven. The walls of the train have been liberated from the laws of physics; they shiver and shake like trapped air beneath a downed parachute. Shadows darken the corners of Lauren’s vision. Each time she turns her head to catch them, they move further away. Above these amorphous walls, the overhead racks are packed tight with luggage. Lauren reaches for the closest one and pulls. It clatters against an armrest before plummeting to the floor.
The sound of the zipper unzipping fills her with an obscure kind of dread. There are things in the suitcase, things she might have expected. Stolen things, from the past. Stolen things that have always been stolen. Money and razors, pistols and pocketknives, powders and pharmaceuticals, potions and poisons.
Lauren abandons the telltale suitcase. At the head of the car, someone has mounted the engineer’s route on the wall. It’s a huge map, the lines too big, the key too small. She follows the route with her finger, follows… follows… follows… The line glows menacingly, as if somewhere behind the map is a heat source of unpredictable power. As her finger traces the line to the end, the train lurches on its tracks. Lauren shudders and closes her eyes. Braces herself against the nebulous wall. Feels it shift beneath her hands. When she opens her eyes, she’s standing in a steel room. Four walls, a ceiling, and floor of metal, gleaming like the end of a knife.
Lauren closes her eyes again and when she opens them, her steel prison is gone. She stands in a new car, one car back from where the engineer steers the train. Up ahead, she can see the silhouette of the engineer’s hat bobbing to the motion of the train on its sparking tracks. A voice comes from behind her and Lauren lets out a cry.
The woman’s daughter says, “My father drove our train into a cliff.”
The flickering light casts shadows on her face so that Lauren can’t quite tell what the girl is. Or isn’t.
The woman says:
And smile, because she knows the train
Has brought her children back again.
We carry people home—and so
God speeds us, wheresoe'er we go.
Lauren watches shadows play across both of their faces now, turning them into animals or abstract paintings.
The little girl says, “My father was the engineer.”
Lauren walks forward without consciously moving her feet.
The woman says, “The End of the Line is the last stop.”
Lauren puts her hands over her ears. She does not want to go into the engineer’s car, but when she concentrates all her efforts on stopping her feet from moving, the walls of the train move past her anyway. She is on a conveyor belt to Hell, but when Lauren arrives in the engineer’s car, she finds there is no one there. The Devil is out to lunch.
A noise behind her.
“You’re the engineer now,” the woman shrieks and pushes Lauren onto the seat.
Lauren looks through a windshield marred by a thousand spider web cracks and sees the ruin. Sees the demolished wasteland. Sees the wreck of The End of the Line. She looks down for a key or a gearshift, but there’s nothing. Only smooth, gleaming metal. When she looks up, the train is moving backwards, its wheels spinning at breakneck speeds.
“Where is this train going?” Lauren asks, her voice the quaking chirp of a sparrow, one that’s flown headlong into latent glass. She trips on her long dress as she stands, rights herself, manages to take two tentative steps forward. “Why are we going backwards?”
“This train goes where I take it,” the engineer says from Lauren’s right. He sits in his engineer car at his engineer seat and tips her his engineer hat.
Lauren screams.
The train whistles.
Lauren begins to run.
The pattern of the carpet in the aisles shifts. It makes her dizzy. When she’s lost count of the number of cars she’s run through, Lauren slows. She looks up. The convex mirror, the other lidless eye of the monster who’s been watching her travel through time, shows her who is sitting in the engineer’s seat. It’s her. Her emerald-amber eyes now the grey of twisted, smoking metal, and she’s smiling a wicked smile at herself from under the brim of the engineer’s hat.
Her hat.
When Lauren stops to think about it, she realizes that if she were to get off The End of the Line, it would somehow be seven years ago. She would either be getting off in the custody of police, doomed to repeat the familiar misery, a sentence as torturous as death itself. Or, she’d be getting off in a body bag. She hears the coroner zip the zipper. She feels the sensation of plastic against sweating skin, the sweat already beginning to cool.
“All passengers for Mysticism,” the conductor calls from somewhere unseen. “All for Mysticism!”
Lauren peers down the car to the exit. The woman steps into the ais
le to block her view.
“You cannot get off,” the woman says. “He needs you. He relies on you to navigate this train. We all need you now, to steer us along The End of the Line.”
“To steer us along The End of the Line!” the little girl echoes. Her little girl lips are very red.
From somewhere on the train, someone laughs. Lauren thinks she sees the shadow of the engineer.
Lauren turns to the front of the train—or is it the back?
She begins to run.
THE ONE WHO ANSWERS THE DOOR
Harley reached for Zombie-Elsa’s long blonde braid and tugged, her smile impish.
“Quit it.” Zombie-Elsa adjusted her wig in the mirror. “You’re on Mom’s bad side for your slutty costume, so don’t push your luck.”
“It’s not slutty,” Harley Quinn said, surveying her appearance. “It’s true to the comic. You’re just jealous I picked it first.”
The undead snow queen ignored this. “Hurry up. We’re supposed to meet them in ten minutes. It’ll take longer just to walk there.”
Zombie-Elsa grabbed the icicle purse her sister had helped her splatter with fake blood the night before. They did not stop to say goodbye to their mother. Eleven and thirteen were too old to ask permission to go trick-or-treating.
They opened the door on the biting autumn air. The sun had succumbed to its washed-out cousin and the timing of its lunar phase meant a moon that hung low and large on the evening of All Hallows’.
The wind blew up tornadoes of leaves around their feet. Zombie-Elsa practiced her lumber, and giggled at her sister’s attempts to execute a sexy slink. The sound was cut short by a scream.
A figure rushed Harley from the bushes. Harley gasped and jerked out of her attacker’s reach, but the cape had already been lowered to reveal the grin beneath the eye mask.
“Gotcha!” Batgirl said. “You should have seen your face.”
“There wasn’t anything to see. You didn’t scare me for shit,” Harley countered.
“Just because you’re wearing a disguise, doesn’t mean you can swear.” The voice was Zombie-Elsa’s, but the words were their mother’s.
“Hush up,” Harley said. “Hey, where’s—?”
“Carrie, the pyrotechnic prom queen?” came a voice from the shadows. A thin girl bathed in blood stepped out onto the road. “Right here.”
“Cool costume,” Zombie-Elsa said.
“Thanks,” Carrie replied. She pinched a roll of non-existent fat under her bloody prom dress. “I can’t wait to eat oodles of candy. I’ve been dieting for weeks so I can cheat tonight. The houses in town better be ready to offer up the goods.”
“We’re skipping the houses in town tonight,” Batgirl said.
“Why would we do that?” Harley asked.
“To trick-or-treat in Riverbend.”
“What?” Zombie-Elsa squealed.
Harley held up her hand to silence her sister. She turned to Batgirl. “Why would we go to River’s End?” she asked. Zombie-Elsa couldn’t help but notice that she used the nickname the high school kids did when talking about the ‘bend.
Batgirl shrugged. “The boys did it last year. They couldn’t get Old Man Teasdale to open up his door to them. Bobby dared us to try this Halloween. We can’t let those losers show us up. Although, I shouldn’t call Bobby a loser since you totally have a crush on him. Unless…” Batgirl paused for emphasis. “You’re too scared to go yourself.”
“I’m not scared.” Harley twirled a pigtail, defiance written between the white, blue, and pink lines of her carefully-applied makeup.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Batgirl asked, starting in the direction of Riverbend. Harley quickly followed, and Carrie fell in line without comment. Zombie-Elsa hurried to catch up with her sister, bombarding Harley with frantic questions.
“Shh,” Harley hissed. “If you don’t want to come, then go home.”
Harley had also done a skillful job with Zombie-Elsa’s makeup, and beneath the white grease paint and black-red lipstick, Zombie-Elsa’s frown was a grimace. She trotted behind her sister, wishing she’d worn sneakers under the long dress rather than the uncomfortable shoes that’d come with the costume.
A dense mist thickened the air, clinging to the foils and fabrics of the girls’ costumes. By the time they’d walked beneath the archway marking the entrance to Riverbend, Zombie-Elsa’s teeth were chattering. Her cape seemed little more than condensation-dampened saran wrap that would no longer stick. Batgirl led them deep into the ‘bend. Zombie-Elsa saw Harley trying not to look at the residents’ dwellings as they passed.
They walked without speaking. The only sound in the mist-muted night came from the leaves rustling in the trees. Batgirl stopped in front of a row of stone abodes and gestured at the first in the line. “This one. Miss Johnston’s. Carrie, you knock first.”
Carrie looked like someone had interrupted her prom queen acceptance speech with a cruel practical joke, but Batgirl’s glare goaded her into action. She rapped three times, attempting to belie her apprehension with an indifferent smirk.
Seconds passed. A cloud smothered the moon.
“Looks like nobody’s home,” Batgirl chirped. Her eyes darted between slits of a mask that made her look more cunning raccoon than daring superhero. “Elsa, you’re next. Susannah Pratchett’s place.”
“It’s Zombie-Elsa. And no.”
“No?”
“I don’t want to.”
“You have to,” Batgirl said. “Otherwise, your sister has to knock on two.”
Zombie-Elsa saw Harley’s pale face grow paler. Perhaps thirteen wasn’t so grownup after all.
“Fine,” she said, approaching the intricately patterned door. She knocked a timid rat-a-tat-tat.
When no one answered, she breathed out a sigh she hadn’t realized she’d been holding prisoner. I wonder if these edifices hold other things prisoner. She shook the thought from her head and gave Batgirl a triumphant look.
“My turn,” Batgirl said, unimpressed. She strode up to the fortress at the top of a steep stone staircase and banged on the door loud enough to wake the dead.
They waited.
For one dread-filled moment, Zombie-Elsa thought she heard the grating sound of scraping stone. She tensed, fearing the worst.
The door remained closed.
Batgirl tried to hide her relief, but the fingers that clutched the straps of her bag were white-knuckled, and shook ever-so-slightly.
Batgirl turned on Harley, hands on hips, regaining her earlier arrogance. “Last one,” she said, moving down the dirt path. She pointed to the largest structure and grinned, a wide-mouthed, Jack-o-lantern grin. “There. Old Man Teasdale.”
Everyone knew the story of how Old Man Teasdale had come by such a foreboding residence. According to the legend, the farmer had grown tired of providing for his family and banished them from his property at the start of a bitter, snowy winter. Only one of the relatives survived, Teasdale’s daughter, and when the day finally came on which she could exact her revenge, she had her father removed from the farm and exiled to the stone house in Riverbend.
The dwelling was designed to keep in what shouldn’t be allowed out. Granite vines crawled up the walls, and weatherworn pillars encircled the property like road signs for a neighborhood in the land of the dead. Fiendish angels held vigil at either side of the ivy-choked doorway and granite vases of desiccated flowers bookended the leaf-littered stoop.
Zombie-Elsa watched as Harley pursed her lips and stepped forward. She wanted to stop her, wanted to take her sister’s hand and run all the way home, locking the door behind them. There would be other dares, she wanted to tell her. Other boys to impress. But Zombie-Elsa could tell that Bobby was the furthest thing from Harley’s mind as she approached that terrible, waiting door. It stretched up, yawning before her. Zombie-Elsa imagined vampiric teeth springing from its hinges to bite her sister’s fingers.
Harley Quinn reached a trembling hand t
oward the door. She knocked once, twice, three times, on the stone panel. The echoes continued on, like the beating of the Tell-Tale Heart.
The crypt door swung open.
FLOWERS FROM AMARYLLIS
You step onto the ward with your densely-bandaged wrists and your hollow, haunted gaze and you don’t look into a single friendly face upon being introduced. Your hair was once the color of wheat beneath a noon-day sun, but has faded to a brown the shade of timid rabbits in a shadowed thicket. As soon as you’re able, you retreat into the room you’ve been assigned, and don’t come out for the rest of that night, the next day, or the following evening. At almost midnight on what will be your third day on the ward, you pitter-pat out in your hospital garb and tangled hair, and you shake and sob and tell the nightshift nurse that there’s someone in your room.
“Of course there’s someone in your room. Two someones to be exact,” the nurse says. “Your roommates, Olive and Lauren.”
You are inconsolable, and the nurse softens, offers you something to help you sleep. You place your Elavil and your substantial dose of Valium upon your tongue, and on the way back in to make bargains with the Sandman, you mutter something that sounds like, please let it be gone.
On your fifth day on the ward, your former foster parents try to visit, but you deny them entry (why won’t they cut you off, the way Imogene has?), and the staff has no choice but to obey your wishes. Outside the locked doors, in the cramped anteroom where an ancient elevator chimes regardless of whether or not the call button has been pressed, the woman who did all she could to mother you after your parents were killed stands, crying and pleading to be able to see you.
The mental health clinician, Lisa, a patient woman who elicits understanding from even the most distressed of visitors, convinces Sheila Gonzalez that you are being well-taken care of, and that if there’s anything she’d like to leave for you—clothes or candy, books or playing cards—she can do so, and you’ll have access to it as soon as it undergoes the requisite contraband check. Sheila visibly brightens, turns to Ray Gonzalez, slight and silent at the corner of the anteroom, and gestures for him to give her what he holds between his hands.
Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked Page 17
