by Dia Reeves
After the fireworks show, Cado and Patricia left the square and strolled past businesses still open, past people chatting under awnings and on the cathedral steps and on benches, in no hurry to be anywhere.
The night was warm but Patricia was cool on his arm. Cado had never seen her break a sweat. The knowledge that she’d never done a hard day’s work—unlike the women in his family who worked on a pig farm—secretly pleased him.
“Why didn’t you want to hang out with my friends?” she asked, curious instead of upset.
“It’s getting late.”
“You wanna go home?”
“No.” They went up a short flight of steps to a part of the street that held more homes than businesses and so was correspondingly quieter. “I wanna find that trolley stop.”
“That joke stopped being funny two hours ago.”
“It’s not a joke.”
Patricia stopped walking, and so Cado left her behind. The stop was just a few yards down the street, bathed in the warm glow from the windows of the skinny brick homes that stood in a row behind it.
Patricia ran after him and then blocked his way. “You are not getting on that trolley.”
“Sure I am,” said Cado, lifting her out of his path. “It’ll be good for me. The kind of experience that’ll put my whole life into perspective.”
“Or kill you!”
“Either way.” He sat on the blue bench next to the brown and white trolley stop sign. “Death is an answer.”
“Death is a question. The ultimate question.” Patricia tugged at him, but didn’t have the muscle to move him off the bench.
The more frantic she became, the calmer Cado felt, happy even. She wasn’t laughing at or pitying him now.
Patricia gave up her attempts to haul him bodily from the trolley stop, and instead sat beside him. She took his face in her hands, forcing him to look at her. “Only one person ever came back. One person. Who gave birth to many, many babies. With many, many legs.”
“Obviously I’m not giving birth to anything,” said Cado amused.
“It was a guy who came back,” Patricia said, stabbing Cado’s amusement in the back. “And his babies ate him alive; he smiled the whole time.” She didn’t see what she wanted in his face, so she released him and stared out into the street. “They killed all the babies, of course, but there’s one on display in the museum.”
“Bullshit!” Cado said before he could stop himself. Before he remembered that Patricia wasn’t a bullshitter.
“I’d show you if it wasn’t closed. The trolley—the regular trolley—is part of the museum. A rolling exhibit. They started work on it in the 1800s, but they ran out of money. So it doesn’t go anywhere. Tourists get on from the museum, and it takes them around the square and that’s it. Except not really. Sometimes people travel a lot further than they ever intended.
“This town is full of doors. Crawlspaces. Jagged little holes that you never see until you step through them. That’s why we have things like cacklers and blood grackles and the night trolley.
“The man who had the babies? He said the trolley took him to the dark side of the moon, only it wasn’t dark at all, but filled with a light so pure and holy that he couldn’t stop smiling. The things he gave birth too, though, were neither pure nor holy.”
Cado saw it then, the gulf between them—he never had before. He stared at her, the way she’d stared at his daylilies: like she was an alien. That inexplicable awareness screamed from her face, as loud as language.
“When you shine a light into the dark places,” Patricia continued, “you see the world as it really is. The rats peeing on your toothbrush, the roaches laying eggs in your shoes, the Bogeyman salivating as he watches you sleep. You don’t want to see those things.”
“Sure I do.”
“You do not!” Her voice scared a pigeon into flight. “You don’t even want to face the truth—that you’d rather die than be looked down on for being a candyass flutist!”
Cado knew that the truth hurt, but he’d never felt its jagged claws rip into him before.
He fished out his cell and pressed the number three nine times. When Patricia realized what he was doing, she tried to bat the phone out of his hands, shocked that he even knew what to dial.
“Wait!” She grabbed his wrist before he could press send. “This isn’t a game, Cado. Why can’t you understand that? Sometimes people prank call that number, just to see what will happen, and then they don’t show up to take the ride. So the trolley pulls up in front of their homes and gets them.”
Cado knew that Porterenes were scared of the night trolley, but to see that fear on Patricia’s face frightened him in a way all her talk had not.
“If you call,” she said, her icy fingers digging into his flesh, “it will come for you.”
“And take me to another world? You said I could make it in any world. I believe you. Even if you don’t believe in me.”
He pressed send.
Patricia’s hands flew to her mouth, as if to stopper a scream.
“Night Trolley.” The bored, sexless voice was decidedly unfrightening.
“This is Cado McCoy.” He took a deep breath. “I need a ride.”
“It’s a dollar one-way.”
Cado said, firmly, “This’ll be round trip.”
“This stop, three a.m.,” said the voice. “Don’t be late.”
After he put his phone away, Patricia said, “Do you realize what you’ve done?” She couldn’t look at him, her hands still covering the lower half of her face.
“I’m not afraid—”
“Because you’re an idiot!”
“Of the trolley,” Cado continued calmly. “But knowing you don’t have any more faith in me than I do”—he touched Patricia’s face—“now that’s scary.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Cado had meant to rest before his otherworldly appointment, but it was impossible. Mr. Markham kept coming in to check that he was still in the guest room and not lolling sexily in Patricia’s bed. When the door opened for the fifth time, Cado threw his pillow at it. “Dammit, Mr. Markham, I’m—”
But it wasn’t him.
Patricia snuggled next to Cado, her gown soft, but not as soft as her body through the gown. Her feet curled around his ankles. She must tiptoe across the backs of geese and the tops of clouds to keep such velvet skin.
“If I were nicer,” she whispered, “you wouldn’t be doing this, would you?”
He brushed his thumb over the tip of her nose. “You’re the nicest girl I know.”
“I’m not nice! I wish I had a dungeon so that I could throw you into it and chain you up until this madness leaves you.”
“Would it be weird if I said that sounds like fun?”
His alarm went off, and he had to leave Patricia’s embrace to shut it off. He turned on the lamp and got dressed.
Patricia threw back the covers and held out her arms. “Come back to bed.” Her nightie wasn’t black, but sunset-colored, like the daylilies she hadn’t wanted. Her toes sparkled at him.
“I refuse to be distracted by your body right now,” Cado said, lacing his Chucks. “But feel free to distract me with it tomorrow.”
“What tomorrow?” she said bitterly, and then with an equally bitter resolve, climbed out of bed. “I’m coming with you.”
“No way.”
“Why not? We’re the Bonnie and Clyde of the classical music world, and they died together in a car—we’ll die together on a trolley. I’d prefer a private jet or a yacht, but I’ll take what I can get.”
“It doesn’t count if I bring a brave kickass girl to hide behind. I have to do this on my own.”
“You’re taking your flute?” Patricia asked, when he grabbed his case.
Cado stroked the cracked black leather. “Turns out I don’t need your magic purse after all. I got my own right here.”
“A flute case?” she said, in a voice too shrill for two a.m. “You think you’re one of the Har
dy Boys or Harry Potter? That if you’re clever and plucky you can play a tune and save the day with the power of music?”
“I know what I’m doing,” he reassured her. “And it doesn’t involve pretending to be the Pied Piper.”
“What does it involve?” she asked, not in the least reassured.
“What’s going on?”
Mr. Markham’s robed appearance in the doorway barely registered, Cado and Patricia too busy staring into each other’s eyes as if for the last time.
“Nothing,” said Cado, finally looking away. “I was just leaving.”
“Where do you think you’re going at this hour?”
“To learn about fear,” he said, his mind already on the adventure ahead. “About real fear.”
But instead of walking out the door, he looked back at Patricia and immediately wished he hadn’t. She seemed bruised somehow, as if he had struck her. That’s how she would look at his funeral. Of course she wouldn’t stand over his grave and laugh at him. Cado was amazed he had ever thought such a thing.
“I wish I had kept those flowers,” she said. “Looks like they were a good symbol after all.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “At least kiss me goodbye?”
Cado kissed her between the eyes and once on each cheek.
Patricia made a tsk of impatience. “That’s not good enough!”
“That’s because it wasn’t a goodbye kiss. Just, you know, a see you later kiss. I’ll kiss you for real when I get back.”
“What is going on around here?” Mr. Markham asked as Cado escaped downstairs.
Patricia answered but her tears distorted the words. Her father’s response, however, was as clear as arsenic:
“You should have kissed him goodbye.”
✽ ✽ ✽
St. Teresa Avenue was within walking distance of the Markhams’ home, so it didn’t take long to reach. Cado had the town all to himself, the shops now closed and the street empty. His steps echoed like a giant’s. The purple-tinged fairy glow beneath the lampposts only illustrated the absence of light.
Cado went up the steps that beveled the sidewalk and stumbled over an indistinct lump. No. Not a lump. A person.
A bum?
A stroke victim?
“Hey, you okay?” Cado grabbed what felt like an arm and pulled the person beneath the lamppost a few feet away. The weak light illuminated a woman in black sweats with long pale hair and no face. It had been peeled neatly away from hairline to chin like the skin from an apple.
Cado scrambled away and fetched up against the blue bench at the trolley stop. After winning the struggle to free his phone from his pocket, he sat and dialed the sheriff’s office with fingers that had gone numb and spoke with a voice he hadn’t used since he was thirteen.
“A woman without a face?” the deputy was saying, uninterested. “Another one? We’ll get someone out there as soon as we can, miss.”
Miss? Cado looked down at himself then quickly away. If he looked too long, he might grow breasts. Or if he looked directly at the dead woman his own face might peel away for no reason. The world felt dangerously malleable.
He called Patricia.
“Cado? Is it over already?” The hope in her voice was painful to hear. “Cado?”
“Am I awake?”
A long pause. “You were when you left,” she said, all hope gone. “You sound weird. I’d tell you to come back, but it’s in God’s hands now. God’s or whoever’s. Why aren’t you saying anything? Cado!”
“There’s a dead woman on the sidewalk,” he whispered. “Her face—”
The line went dead.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the dead woman prop herself against the lamppost, giggling facelessly.
The phone cracked in his fist; otherwise Cado didn’t react. If he ignored the dead woman, surely she would remember she was supposed to be dead and shut up.
A thick tearing split the air. Like whatever had stolen the dead woman’s face had decided to rip it in half. Only nothing so small as a face—this was vast. Mountainous. The sound of the world clawing itself open so violently the force of it snuffed out the scant halos of light beneath the lampposts.
The cathedral bells chimed but distantly, as if they were miles away instead of down the street. As the third bell chimed, the trolley appeared.
Cado squinted against the sudden light it brought. The single burning headlight and the interior lights all cast a feverish glow. Even the trolley itself was the yellow of something spat up from a diseased lung.
The doors accordioned open when Cado stood. For several moments his legs refused to move forward, but once he took the first step, it became easier.
Cado noticed an animal stink as soon as he boarded, like the inside of an iguana cage. The odor emanated from the motorman crammed into the driver’s seat, too tall for the space if the awkward jut of his knees was any indication. The motorman had no eyelashes, and his lids made a gummy smack when he blinked.
“One dollar.” It was the same sexless voice Cado had heard earlier, but it didn’t belong to the motorman. It came from a speaker on the control panel. A recording.
Cado put two Sacajawea coins into the cashbox. “I told you,” he said, proud that he no longer sounded like a girl. “Round trip.”
He turned to take a seat, and a sharp pain stabbed through the base of his skull just before the doors banged shut.
✽ ✽ ✽
Cado grabbed the back of his head and whipped around in time to see a stinger retreat into the motorman’s palm as he grabbed the lever and set the trolley in motion.
“What did you do to me?”
The motorman punched a button on the control panel, and the voice hissed once again from the speaker. “Sit.”
Cado realized, just as he had with the cackler, that he was in the presence of something inhuman. Not just smelly and misshapen, but inhuman. Something he might have been tempted on any other day to stomp beneath his shoe, but today he did as he was told. He went to the back of the trolley and sat on the hard wooden seat. The sting hadn’t hurt him, simply made everything floaty and pleasant.
Above the windows but below the arced roof were old-timey ads for stuff like Dictaphones and athletic trusses and nerve food, whatever that was. The ad didn’t show what nerve food looked like, only a woman holding her head in agony, and a bunch of words he wasn’t close enough to read. He wondered if nerve food was good for what ailed him.
Cado touched the sore spot on the back of his head and his finger came away bloody. The motorman had stabbed him in the brain or maybe the spinal cord. Both? Either way, Cado should have been dead. Or paralyzed. Or at least worried. But the only thing he felt was the trolley propelling him through town. And then out of town.
Cado no longer recognized the landscape. East Texas, where he and Patricia lived, was thick with piney forest, but the passing trees were massive, big enough to tunnel through, which the trolley frequently did. After a few moments, it began a steep ascent, and the giant trees fell away as a city rose before him.
It was what Cado imagined New York City must be like only with buildings so tall they were wreathed in clouds. The tracks twined about the mile-high, artfully sculpted towers like ribbon unspooling from a beautifully wrapped gift.
At the height of track, the trolley paused and Cado’s window aligned with the top window of one of the skyscrapers. A woman sat inside at a vanity applying mascara to the third eye in her forehead. That third eye winked at Cado just before the trolley plunged into freefall. Into darkness.
The track leveled off seconds later, and after Cado’s stomach had settled back into place, he realized the lights had shorted out, maybe damaged by the rapid descent. Outside, however, glowing pink corkscrews of light spiraled down in the dark like fancy New Year’s Eve confetti.
After a few moments it began to get lighter inside the trolley, not the same feverlight as before, but bluish and intense. Cado could see again, the motorman hunched at the front,
the handstraps hanging like nooses, the ads. The nerve food woman was still holding her head, but now she was laughing. Even though her body was peppered with almost comically large bite marks.
Cado tittered nervously and turned away, but the strange light had destroyed the exterior view. He could only see his own reflection, half asleep like a boy daydreaming in class. Or nightmaring. Waiting for a rap on the knuckles to snap him out of it. But there was only the motorman who had stabbed his brain and robbed him of his fear, which was fortunate because he realized he could see inside his head.
The blue light shone through him like radiation, his brain barely visible, obscured by a thick whitish soup. Like whatever the motorman had shot into his head had turned it into a giant zit. Without thinking, Cado put his hands over his ears and squeezed. Patricia would have done it if he had allowed her to come. He could no longer remember why he’d been so against it.
Fluid gushed out of the hole at the base of his skull and splatted against the back window. He could see his brain now, clean and clear. Everything was clear. And so bright. Not just in the trolley. He could see past his own reflection to a moon as big as the Himalayas crowding the horizon so closely Cado could see its pockmarked texture. The light it cast fell on him like a weight and killed even the possibility of shadows.
The gleaming stretch of track skated over swirls of rock, valleys of ice, but his view of the terrain was eclipsed by a horde of creatures that mobbed the trolley, scuttling alongside like fans chasing a pop star’s limo. But these fans, like the motorman, weren’t human.
The creatures were small. Half Cado’s size. Children, really, from the waist up, but from the waist down they had too many legs. Too many to count. So many they were able to easily keep up with the trolley, which had begun to slow down.
They peered at Cado, their gummy eyelids smacksmacksmacking at him. Interested in him. Waiting for him.
After the trolley came to a complete stop, the motorman unfolded from his seat and faced Cado. The sick moonlight shone through him, revealing an unfamiliar grouping of organs, a swish of pale blood, and the motorman’s legs—his real ones—unfurling wetly up the walls to make room.
