The little girl huddled in the corner, covering her face. She was truly afraid and the Entity loved it, even though she tasted like poison. Those three deaths were but an hors d’oeuvre, as the French called them, barely enough to make his nonexistent mouth water. Klaus’s Beretta was trained on the child, his arm shaking so bad that he had to steady it with his other. This hesitation infuriated the Entity.
“I can’t do this!” he said. Klaus had tears streaming down his face, arms growing heavy. How the Entity wished to be corporeal, so that he could simply pull the trigger himself.
Your superiors want this. You know they do. Why, if you fail, they will leave at once for Cologne and do far worse to Ingrida, Gisela, and Gertrude.
Traveling so far was beyond his current abilities but the Entity thought for sure that threatening Klaus’s wife and girls would usher him to act. How could a man, as evil-hearted as Klaus, hesitate after so easily killing three others? The Germans, after the last ten years, had been taught from birth that these people weren’t really people at all, that they were nothing more than diseased cattle.
“He’s lying to you,” said the little girl, her sobs stopping only long enough to utter those four words. Klaus couldn’t understand her—he’d only learned a handful of useful words in Polish, mainly directional because that’s the only interaction he ever had with them. But somehow this child had heard, and was understanding, what the Entity was saying. After all, it wasn’t really a language, it was a projection. Yet this mere girl had intercepted it.
Klaus was crying profusely now and that’s when the Entity understood. He wasn’t fighting the influence. The Entity simply didn’t have the power to make him kill this girl. She was some sort of light for the world, and no matter how much power he possessed, no matter if the bombs decimated all of Europe, would he be any more able to convince Klaus to pull the trigger.
In the end, he did pull it.
Klaus turned the gun up, placed the barrel under his chin and showered the ninety-one people huddling in the back with his brains. As the body dropped to the floor the Entity floated back, feeling his rage build like never before. He peeked into the minds of several others, willing them, bargaining with them, and finally begging them, to simply reach a hand out and snap the little girl’s neck. None would touch her.
And somehow, within that power, was the ability to undo him. This was the weakest he’d been in six-thousand years. If he fell back asleep, so be it. He always woke, leapfrogging through the years until a calamity fell upon mankind with such fervor that he couldn’t slumber through the deaths.
He traveled to the engine and found Otto, and whispered a suggestion into his ear.
A moment later, the man cried out, “God, Klaus, no!” upon entering the train and finding a bloody mess. He was starting to get his wits about him, which was bad. The Entity wanted to keep the train here, hidden, with a group of people already dying who would steadily feed him, bolster his strength enough to leave the lair. How that child had weakened him . . .
The longer the child stayed so close, the more his energy would leave. Perhaps he couldn’t kill her. Perhaps he couldn’t coax anyone else to do it, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still orchestrate her death. As he always said, nature was a far better killer than man.
Otto moved Klaus aside, then took the girl by the hand. It was no small wonder that the man could even touch the child’s flesh. The Entity was sure that if Otto tried to harm her, he would stall, magically unable to do so. The conductor pulled the screaming girl so that she stood in the darkness of the cave.
It was almost dusk by the time the Entity launched the plan of taking her off the train. From this end, only five cars total from the mouth of the tunnel, the sun cast enough guiding light to the outside.
This was the first time the Entity was able to look upon her, despite how it hurt his eyes, like that dreaded creature from the Stoker novel. She was small, even for her age. Her face was dirty and sunken like all those who were currently competing for scraps. Somehow, after all this time, she still held a doll which was nothing more than a wad of straw surrounded by a polka-dotted dress. Eyes rimmed red looked out toward the light, and she blinked back tears.
“Go!” said Otto. When the girl just stared up at him with a frown, he repeated it again. “Go!” This time he gave her a heavy shove in the direction of the light. The child couldn’t understand his words, but she understood his meaning, so she tightened her hold on the doll and started following the tracks out of the tunnel. It was the first time the Entity noticed she didn’t have on shoes.
Every so often she would slow, turn back around, then start walking again. Most likely she was leaving family aboard the train. Such was the case of all these Jews. Watching her become nothing more than a silhouette against the circle of light did his proverbial heart good. Already he was feeling more powerful, but he wished he could follow the child out into the coming night to witness her death.
And how death would come for her on swift wheels.
She was a Polish child in German-occupied Poland. It was January. She was hungry, thirsty, tired, barefoot and without a coat. This part of the world was untamed, and on any given night the countryside of Poland was plagued with roving packs of wild dogs. The odds were stacked against her. Something would kill that little girl before the sun came up tomorrow.
The Entity had to eat. He turned, nearly staggered, and brought the full brunt of his malice to Otto, flooding the man with suggestions.
You have sixty rounds to go along with the Mauser on your hip. Klaus’s Beretta is by his corpse, and another forty rounds are on his hip. You know what needs to be done.
“I shouldn’t do this. I am supposed to take them to the camp. Oh, God . . . Klaus.”
They would die in the camp either way. Look at them. They are cattle, they are an affront to everything you stand for.
“I don’t have enough bullets,” said Otto, probably feeling as if he’d lost his mind because after all, this whole battle was being fought there.
No. You don’t.
Otto had started to walk off, to actually do the awful, awful thing the voice in his head had ordered. But the magnitude of logic outweighed the otherworldly suggestion.
“But . . . we loaded over four-thousand of them.” He just gazed down the dark tunnel, to where forty-nine cars sat quietly.
A moment passed as the silence had returned to the cave, and it was the last time it would be silent until the awfulness was done.
There is that big, metal alligator wrench under the seat in the engine .
Warsaw
January 9th, 2019
Edmund woke to the sound of fists beating on the door. When he finally stirred enough to find his wits, he knew he’d overslept—that much was apparent by the light pouring in through the window that he’d failed to shade last night. He was wearing only his boxers and the t-shirt he’d worn all day yesterday when he flipped back the quilts and bounded across the room to crack open the door.
“You want breakfast?” asked Bill. “Eliasz told Sophie there’s a little place around the corner that serves American food. Can you imagine?” She was standing behind Bill, rocking back and forth on her heels. Both were fully dressed.
“Yeah, sure,” said Edmund. “Um, let me get dressed. The Pierogi didn’t sit well last night.” He made an exaggerated, sickly face by blowing out his cheeks.
“We’ll be downstairs,” said Bill, then led his girlfriend down the hall.
Edmund threw on his clothes and stuffed his wallet and money into his pocket. While he was fastening his wristwatch, he took notice of Addey’s phone. The screen was off, but that was as normal for a powered-up battery as a dead one if it was left inactive for too long.
He pressed the button on the side, overjoyed when Addey’s lock screen, a large, gnarled tree with an autumn backdrop, flared to life. Edmund had been so worried that getting it charged would be the first obstacle, and that next he’d have to contend wit
h figuring out a passcode. But when he slid his thumb, revealing the sea of Addey’s little square apps, he knew the phone was his to peruse.
Wasting no time to navigate to pictures, Edmund noticed that his friend cared little for memories. Comparatively, Edmund had at least six-thousand photos on his own phone, whereas Addey only had thirty-six. Looking at their timestamps, either Addey only decided to start taking pictures two months ago or that’s when he bought the phone.
A few photos were simply scenery and sunsets. One was a close-up of an old man pulling a handcart with a pair of goats following behind him. Edmund thumbed past most of these, feeling they were uninteresting, and of absolutely no use in helping to understand why Addey was comatose.
The last six photos, and one video, were taken on the same night. Edmund paused at each one, trying to study for hints that probably weren’t there. Most were too dark to make out, but he’d snapped a shot at the mountainside, a thicket of brush and dead, skeletal trees. The problem with taking pictures outside in the dark was that there was nothing for the flash to bounce from, so there were very few details.
Another picture showed an old, overgrown train track, the metal so rusted that it blended in with the gravel floor. Was it a tunnel? A few of the pictures were of green buildings, painted to match the trees and forest floor. Men were walking around, and although Edmund couldn’t be sure, he thought he saw one brandishing a rifle. Poland was home to many animals—roe deer, wild boar—and hunters probably weren’t so rare.
The last photo was the oddest of the bunch, and was taken with a blurry table in the foreground, as if he’d been crouching behind it when he snapped the picture. Edmund pinched the screen to zoom in on various parts, noticing strange things like a row of microscopes, a man wearing a hazmat suit, and a bank of computer monitors. This reminded him of the biology department back at King’s Cross.
Edmund didn’t understand any of it, and he didn’t care once he swiped over to the video. It intrigued him before it even began because the info along the bottom claimed that it ran for a staggering two hours and twelve minutes.
He watched it. The first six minutes, anyway, because after that there wasn’t much to see. And when Bill and Sophie knocked on his door an hour later, then worriedly let themselves in, he was still sitting there watching it, pulling the timeline back to the beginning and letting it play until there was no more. And when Sophie and Bill sat down beside him, the three watched together, and had more questions than ever before.
***
It started with Addey running through the woods in the dark.
The three Americans huddling around the tiny screen could tell that it had been frigid that night, and that a storm was settled directly over Addey. He held the camera up, and it made Edmund dizzy to watch the choppy footage as his friend panted, running at a full gait toward a hill covered in skeletal, frosted brush.
“What’s that noise?” asked Sophie.
“Shhh,” Edmund said. “Watch.”
Addey was yelling something in Polish, his voice heartbreakingly rough. He sounded sick, sad, hurt, all of the things that made Edmund’s worry surge. Still, Addey ran, the camera so shaky that just about anything could be in front of the lens.
“Dziadek babcia! Dziadek babcia!” he kept repeating. He was near the top of the hill, and as the trees began to thin, the three watching could see it . . .
As fast as a bullet, as silent as a whisper, through the mesh of trees, hurtled the train. It seemed normal, albeit old fashioned, like those trains back in America that took kids on the Polar Express tours through the Appalachian Mountains, but something about this one didn’t look right. When it moved, it left smoky contrails in its wake, as if it were a giant loaf of bread straight from the oven. The video was too grainy, too shaky to make out details, but it was undeniably a train.
As Addey made it to the top of the hill, the train’s whistle screamed, a thick blanket of steam heading skyward, and he stopped in his tracks—because the train was doing the same thing. For a split second, the camera swept across it, revealing so many cars that it would be impossible to count, but then settled on the engine. That’s when the three Americans watching the video—and Addey—saw a man hop down into the dusting of snow and turn his eyes toward the one filming.
Edmund could sense Addey’s hand start to shake, could feel his own shaking knowing that this was the very phone that had captured the sight of the conductor stepping off. For a moment the man stood there, a span of fifty feet away, eyes that couldn’t be seen yet boring down on Addey just the same. He was holding something in his hand, but it was hard to see so far off with so much shaking.
Then, the figure was rushing to Addey.
Sophie made a gasp and put hands over her mouth. Addey screamed something in Polish, then turned to run. The camera was shaking as he headed past the train—he ran alongside it for just a moment, long enough to film a few outstretched hands, and then he was veering off to the right, back into the forest. Addey ran for another thirty seconds and then the phone clattered to the ground. The camera was still facing up, filming the snow. If not for the heavy wind, it would’ve covered the lens. Addey screamed out once, but it was far off, meaning he didn’t collapse alongside his phone, just as the nurse had said.
“Is that all of it?” asked Bill.
“I’ve watched an hour of it, but it just films the sky,” said Edmund. “I guess until either the memory was full or the battery died.”
They let it play, saying nothing, just listening to the sounds of the woods. There was some sort of chatter in the distance, but that could be anything. None of them knew specifically where this was filmed. For all Edmund knew, an entire city could be just behind the mountain. More than once it sounded like someone stepped in the grass close to the phone, lingered a moment, then started walking off.
“I want to go here, guys,” said Edmund, watching as the snowflakes continued to fall around the camera. He didn’t see Sophie or Bill look at each other, but knew they wanted to go, as well.
“We can call the car rental place, pay for an extension, then head on over today,” said Bill.
“I’d like that,” Edmund said. He was about to mention the men he’d met at the gas station last night when a figure suddenly appeared onscreen, looking very much like a giant from the camera’s position on the ground. He lingered only for a moment, but it was enough to startle the three sitting there, and Edmund quickly scrubbed the video back.
“Who is he?” asked Bill.
It was a large man, his face in the shadows. By the shape of the hat, Edmund was sure it was the conductor, the man who’d stepped off the train and started to chase Addey. He didn’t see the camera, probably wouldn’t even know what such a device was because Edmund was fairly certain Addey’s cell had just captured a ghost.
“He’s SS,” said Bill. “Look at his collar and his armband.” He scrubbed the video back a third time and hit pause, just as the brute came into frame, and sure enough saw the SS pin on his collar and the Swastika on his arm.
“What’s he holding?” asked Sophie. Now it was her turn to move the video back. They’d watched this man’s three-second step-in and step-out of frame at least ten times.
“A club,” said Edmund. “Blackjack, rather. They carried them and beat the prisoners who got out of line.”
“It doesn’t look like a club,” said Sophie. “The bottom is . . . weird.”
Bill managed to pause it just right so that when the man was about to walk out of frame, he lifted the weapon at an angle that let them study it a little better.
“I know what that is,” said Edmund. “When dad worked at Trans Continental Railways back in Lynchburg, he’d help uncouple the cars. You know, the really old coal and gravel cars that were falling apart. Anyway, dad used one of those things to break the rust before grabbing hold of the lugs.”
“What’s it called?” asked Sophie.
“He always called it an alligator wrench.”
Later that afternoon, they paid Eliasz for an additional day because of his hospitality, and he thanked them by preparing a lunch that looked like beans but smelled like bacon. He was a very gracious host while they’d been staying, and Edmund hoped that the rest of Poland was as accommodating, especially since they’d need another bed and breakfast later tonight.
As the temperature dropped and the sun started to weaken, they put Warsaw to their taillights and headed east. Most of Poland’s countryside existed in fits and starts—rolling fields and windmill farms in one moment and traffic jams the next. If not for their GPS, Sophie probably would’ve gotten them lost because all of the names on the signs looked the same. Many were written so small that Edmund could barely see them because so many letters—ungodly long words—were scribbled on the metal.
“So I had a little convo with Eliasz while you boys were loading up,” said Sophie. “I asked him about the Ghost Train.”
“Oh yeah?” said Edmund, eating his to-go bag of weird bacon-smelling beans.
“Said his sister’s neighbor’s son went missing in the eighties. They blame it on the train.”
Edmund said, “Seems a lot of people have gone missing over the years. The superstitious ones always blame the train.”
“Then the naysayers should watch Addey’s video,” said Bill.
Sophie shook her head. “People would still disbelieve it. I mean, how do we know that’s what it was? It looked like a normal train, didn’t it? Aren’t ghosts supposed to be, I dunno, white and see-through?”
“You’ve seen too many cartoons,” said Edmund, although he didn’t really have a counter argument. How did that old rule go? The one used to explain away strange occurrences? The most logical, simplest reason was usually the correct one. Maybe it was a real train. Maybe there were no ghosts. Maybe the man with the alligator wrench was just a lunatic who terrorized the Polish countryside.
But that didn’t account for how the train could come and go. It was many cars long, as evidenced in Addey’s video, so where could such a long, snaking, physical thing like that hide? There were so many questions at the moment, and Edmund didn’t feel like confronting any of them until he could see the spot where Addey had fallen.
Ghost Train of Treblinka Page 6
