The Beast on the Tracks

by Amy Cross

  “Where is she?” I stammer, as soon as I'm close enough for her to hear me. “Milly? Where's Jennifer?”

  She stares at me with tear-filled eyes.

  “Where is she?” I yell. “Milly! What did you do with her?”

  “I took her away from here,” she replies, her voice faltering slightly. “I made sure that she won't suffer anymore.”

  “What did you do?” I ask again.

  I wait, but it's as if she doesn't dare tell me.

  “Milly, talk to me,” I say, taking a few more steps toward her. “This is important. I'm not mad, but I need to know where Jennifer is. It's so cold, Milly, she won't survive long out here. Where is she?”

  “No-one can hurt her now.”

  “Where is she, Milly?”

  Tears are running down her cheeks now.

  Looking past her, I see her footprints in the snow. It's been several hours since I last saw her, so she's had plenty of time to get out there and leave Jennifer somewhere. Even if I follow the footprints, I might be too late to save her, but I have to try. Realizing that Milly's in no position to answer me right now, I step around her and look out at the vast stretches of snow. For a moment I feel utterly hopeless, but then I tell myself that there's still a chance. Wherever Milly left her, it must have been somewhere sheltered, and I'm going to find her.

  I take a step forward.

  “They seemed like a nice family,” Milly says.

  I stop and turn to her.

  “There's a road, a few miles down that way,” she continues. “I don't know if you ever noticed it, but I've seen the lights in the distance once or twice. Not many people use the road, mainly just people going to one of the resorts.” She pauses, and now she has a kind of faraway look in her eyes as more tears roll down her cheeks. “I'm sorry, Richard,” she adds finally, “but it was the only way I could think of to get her away from here.”

  “What did you do?” I ask, even though I think I already understand.

  “She wasn't out there for long,” she replies. “I set her down near a light, so that nobody could miss her. We were lucky, a car came along almost immediately and... They looked so nice, Richard. I swear, it was a man and a woman, they were about our age, maybe slightly older. They stopped and found her. They called out, but I was hidden behind some bushes. Eventually... I mean, what else could they have done? They couldn't leave a baby out there in the snow, so they took her. I'm sure they'll go to the authorities and do the right thing, there'll be investigations and questions, but the important thing is that Jennifer's going to be looked after now. Someone will take care of her.”

  “You gave her away?” I whisper.

  “The tracks won't be able to reach her anymore,” she says. “Don't you understand? I had a vision, I saw -”

  “I had the same vision,” I reply, interrupting her. “You're right, we had to get her away.”

  “I just hope it's not too late,” she says. “Even if the tracks had already got into her head, taking her far away will help, won't it? She won't remember anything. She won't remember...”

  Her voice trails off again for a moment.

  “She won't remember us,” she adds finally, sniffing back more tears.

  “There should have been another way,” I tell her.

  “Do you think the tracks would have let us just leave?”

  I hesitate for a moment, before shaking my head.

  “What about the people you went to fetch?” she asks. “Richard, I only just noticed, you look... injured.”

  “It's a long story,” I reply. “I came back empty-handed.”

  “I don't think there's much to be done for us now,” she says. “I finally figured it all out, Richard. The tracks offered us peace and calm, they made the craziness in our heads go away, but in return we had to serve something that's evil. Or, at best, malign.”

  “You don't know that for sure,” I point out. “There's so much -”

  “And I'm not doing it anymore,” she adds.

  “Let's go inside and talk,” I reply. “Now that Jennifer's safe, we can think more clearly. Show me all the notes and ideas you've got, and maybe we can figure out a plan.”

  “You don't think the tracks can hear you right now, while you're talking?”

  “I think -”

  “It's a miracle I got away with Jennifer, but maybe that's a good thing, maybe it means the tracks didn't consider her to be so important. Yet.” She pauses, as a faint light begins to show in the distance, along the railroad. “Or maybe hunger got the better of the track's better judgment. Maybe it wouldn't ordinarily have let me free Jennifer, but it understood that in the process it'd get to feed sooner. I think the track is really starving right now, Richard.”

  “What are you...”

  Before I can finish, I realize that the light is getting brighter and the railroad is rumbling slightly beneath my feet.

  “We have to get off the tracks right now,” I say, hurrying to Milly and grabbing her hand. “Come on, move!”

  I try to pull her away, but she resists.

  “We need to talk, but not here!” I say firmly.

  “We'd just convince ourselves to keep going,” she replies, as tears glisten on her cheeks. “That's what always happened before.”

  “We'll come up with a plan,” I tell her, “I promise!”

  “I'm so tired, Richard.”

  I can see the train now, hurtling this way. I open my mouth to tell Milly again that we have to move, but then I hesitate as I realize that something's not right here. Why would the train be coming, unless someone was being sacrificed? I look around, and then finally I look down and see that Milly has used ropes from the shack to tie her own ankles to the rails.

  “You have no idea how tired I am,” she says, as I crouch down and start frantically trying to get her free. “Aren't you tired too?”

  “What have you done?” I gasp, looking past her and seeing that the train is still hurtling toward us.

  “This is the only way to end it,” she replies, and now the rails are humming as the train approaches. “I just hope that one day someone finds a way to stop this thing forever. I've been thinking about it, Richard, about ways that might work. It's too late for us to do anything, but one day the train will be stopped. It has to be stopped.”

  “Milly, how have you tied this?” I shout. “They're too tight!”

  “I love you,” she sobs, as the light from the train fills the air all around us and the ground shakes. “I'll wait for you by the -”

  Before she can finish, the train hits us with all its thunder and rage, and an immense force crashes against me and cracks pain straight through my body.

  I scream as I feel my left arm being crushed under the train's wheels. Slumping down against the ground at the side of the tracks, I look up just in time to see Milly's body being ripped apart, and blood sprays all around. The train's wheels are racing past just a few inches from my face, and I stare up in stunned silence as I see the underside of the engine.

  There are faces. Terrible, anguished, pale faces screaming as the train roars past. I can hear their groans, and it's as if they're crying out to be released. For a moment I can only watch, and then the train passes and I'm left flat on my back with blood everywhere, and with more blood gushing from my shoulder. I look around for Milly, hoping that by some miracle she might have survived, and then I try to get up, only to crash back down as I try to support myself on my left arm. My face bumps the shuddering metal rail, and I let out a pained gasp.

  There's blood smeared all along the metal.

  As a sudden, loud shrieking sound fills the air, I sit up. I look at my left arm and see that it's gone, ripped from my shoulder. There's pain, of course, but somehow it's in the background as I look around for Milly. I see her almost immediately, but at first I don't want to admit that it's her. Torn chunks of meat have been cast far and wide, and some of them are wearing scraps of the dress that Milly was wearing just a few seconds ago.
A larger chunk looks to be her torso, and a moment later I spot her face staring at me from a patch of bloodied snow.

  “Milly!” I stammer, as the shrieking sound begins to die down. I scramble over to her, only to find that her severed head is staring up toward the sky.

  I reach out to her with my remaining hand, and I touch the side of her moonlit face, but then I pull back. Her left cheek has been shattered, and the impact from the train has pushed her left eye somehow up into her forehead. It's her, though, but somehow deep down I refuse to believe that she's dead. There has to be some way to get her back, after all the madness we've been through there has to be some kind of loophole or trick we can try.

  A little further along the tracks, there's a brief, loud metallic clunking sound.

  I open my mouth to tell Milly that everything's going to be alright, but no words come from my lips. I think back to the very first night I met her, when we were at that party ten years ago, and somehow the whole of the past decade seems to fill my mind at once. I'm briefly overcome by the fear that I might already be forgetting things, that parts of our life together might have slipped away, and then this is replaced by a sense of rage. Why didn't I save her? Last night I had Milly and Jennifer, and now they're both gone. Why did I let that happen?

  As tears stream from my eyes, I slump down onto my side in the snow. I'm pretty sure I'm bleeding to death, but that doesn't even matter right now. I stare at Milly's ravaged face, and then I reach out and try to press her left eye back down into its socket. Nothing moves, however, so I'm left simply looking at her. She's still so beautiful, and all I want is to follow her to wherever she's gone. There's absolutely no way I can continue without her, and I just wish that my blood could hurry up and finish leaving my body. I'm shivering in the cold snow, just waiting to die, and waiting to see Milly again.

  Suddenly filled with hope, I sit up and start looking around for her, for some vision of her standing in the snow and waiting for me. In my mind's eye, I imagine her watching me from nearby, smiling as she glows in the snowstorm, appearing as some image of perfection. After all, if I could experience such a terrible vision of Jennifer's future, why can't I now be granted a vision of Milly's ghostly form? Yet as I look all around, I see nothing but snow and a few branches and the railroad, and then I turn the other way.

  And that's when I see the train.

  In all the horror of the past few minutes, I just assumed that the train had roared away into the distance. After all, that's what it always does. This time, however, I see that it's come to a halt just a couple of hundred meters further along the line. I must have seen this train a hundred times, but never once before has it stopped.

  I wait for a moment, and then slowly I get to my feet. I'm broken, I'm bruised, I have cracked ribs and other injuries from the explosion, and blood is still running freely from my severed arm, but somehow I manage to start shuffling along the tracks, heading toward the rear of the train.

  Once I'm there, I look up with a mixture of fear and awe at the engine's cold metal side. I reach out and touch one of the panels, and I immediately wince as I feel the freezing metal against my skin. It's strange, but I think I half expected my hand to merely pass through the train, to find that it's not as solid as it looks. As snow falls more heavily than ever, I look along the train, toward the front, and I spot a ladder around the halfway point. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm delirious from losing so much blood, but somehow deep down I feel as if I'm being drawn to that ladder, so I start limping along the edge of the track.

  This train has ruined my entire life.

  As I get closer to the ladder, I see that it leads up to a metal door. Before I can put my hand on the rails and start climbing, however, I realize that I can hear a series of whispering sounds coming from somewhere below. I look down toward the train's wheels, and sure enough there seem to be various voices coming from beneath the train itself. Even above the sound of the howling wind, I can hear all the voices calling up to me as if they're lost.

  “Help me,” one of the groans. “Please, you have to end this torture.”

  “Save me!” another voice gasps. “This isn't right! What did I ever do to deserve this fate?”

  For a moment, I think back to the night when Milly's friend Debs lay dying on the rails. She talked about seeing faces under the train. A few seconds later, as if perhaps stirred by being thought of, I hear Debs' voice calling out to me.

  “I'm so cold!” she sobs. “Get me out of here!”

  I hesitate, before getting down onto my knees and peering under the train. There's so little light, of course, so at first I can't see anything. As my eyes adjust, however, I realize I can see things moving between the wheels. Finally I spot a few faint gray shapes, each with holes for eyes and a mouth, clad like barnacles to the train's metal underside. They're all shifting and twisting, as if they're trying to wriggle free from their prison, and I realize that somehow this must be a collection of all the souls that have been taken by the train over the years. And there are more than just hundreds of them. There must be at least a thousand.

  “I can see you!” Debs says, her voice sounding a little closer. I instinctively pull back, but I'm not sure which of the faces belongs to her. “You put me here. Can't you get me out? I'll do anything, but you have to save me!”

  I open my mouth to tell her that I'll try, but deep down I know that there's nothing I can say or do. I don't want to give her false hope, not after all this time.

  “Milly?” I say finally, as I realize that she might have joined all the dead souls under the train. “Are you there?”

  I wait, but all I hear are the other voices.

  “Milly, can you hear me?” I continue. I honestly don't know whether or not I want to hear her reply. If she's caught under the train now, how do I get her out? And if she's not there, then where is she? Still, I have to know. “Milly, it's me. If you can hear me, just... say something.”

  “Milly's not here,” Debs replies. “We saw her, just a moment ago. We went over her, but she hasn't joined us, not yet. Why don't you free us all? Then we can help you look.”

  “I don't know how,” I say, before slowly getting to my feet. “I have to find Milly.”

  “Where are you going?” she cries, and the other voices call after me too. “You can't leave us here! It's so cold!”

  I grab the ladder and start climbing up.

  “Come back!” several of the voices moan. “Don't leave us here!”

  Reaching the top of the ladder, I step onto the platform and reach out to touch the door. Again, the metal feels so very cold, but I can already see that there's a faint warm glow coming from inside. I hesitate, scared of what I might find, and then I open the door and step into the train. The first thing I see, when I look toward the front end, is the silhouette of a man sitting in a seat.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Richard

  In all the years, I never really got a clear look at anyone driving this train. I assumed that there must be someone, but whenever I tried to look at the windows I only saw a blur. Once or twice I thought that maybe I made out a hint of a face, although it was never enough for me to be sure. Sometimes I figured that the train just had a mind of its own, that it hurtled through the night without anyone at the controls.

  Now I see that there was someone driving the cursed thing all along.

  I wait, but the figure shows no sign that he even knows I'm here. As wind and snow continue to howl all around, I take a step forward, and my right foot causes a metal plate to creak slightly.

  “Come closer,” the man says, not turning to me. His voice sounds frail, as if he hasn't spoken for a very long time.

  “I -”

  “Come closer.”

  I hesitate, before taking a step forward. Behind me, the snowstorm howls beyond the open door.

  “Leave that open,” the man continues. “Sometimes it can get so stuffy in here. Almost airless. It's nice to feel fresh air again.”


  “Who are you?” I ask.

  His head turns slightly, but not all the way. I can see the side of his face now, silhouetted against the snow that's falling beyond the window.

  “Who are you?” he replies.

  “I asked first,” I point out. “I'm looking for Milly.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl you just ran over!”

  “Oh.” He pauses. “She'll be with the others, I imagine. A few fail to stick, and those are always deeply disappointing. Most get trapped, though, and then they come along with us for the ride.”

  “Who are you?” I ask again.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Tell me!” I snap angrily.

  He hesitates again, and then slowly he gets to his feet, causing the chair to squeak a little. Then, as the man turns and takes a couple of steps toward me, I see that he's older than me, perhaps in his late forties or early fifties. He has a tired, lined face, and there's a kind of sadness in his eyes.

  “I remember you,” he says, with a faint, unnerving smile. “Yes, it was a long time ago, but I remember. You were in that town, the one with the cemetery. I used to see you out there, watching as we sped past. You brought offerings to the train, you fed us. We were so grateful.”

  “Who are you?” I ask firmly. “What's your name?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “What's your name?” I shout.

  “Stephen,” he replies after a brief pause. “Stephen Armitage. Does that make you feel any better? Why, what's your name?”

  “Richard.”

  “Richard what?”

  “Richard Archer.”

  “Well, Richard Archer, it would seem that you've been a good and faithful servant to the beast on the tracks. That's the nickname for this train, by the way. The beast. I'm sure you've figured the whole situation out by now, it's really very simple once you accept certain possibilities.”

  “Where's Milly?” I ask.

  “This train, on this railroad, soaked up so much blood over the years,” he continues, “and took so many souls. At first, it was all just an accident. A series of coincidences. As time passed, however, the blood and the souls began to collect, and the train and the tracks became accustomed to them. So when the line was decommissioned, there was a kind of hunger that got left behind. The train was supposed to rust away in some yard somewhere, but it was starving, so it spoke to the tracks and they came up with a plan. The train's driver was persuaded to help it escape, to get it back to the line that it loved so much. The rest, as they say, is history.”