Ghost Train of Treblinka

by Hubert L. Mullins

  This happened in the span of a heartbeat because as soon as Edmund realized it was groping hands that were holding him fast, he slithered out of the jacket, one of the phones dropping to the snow, and continued to run as fast as he could. A loud, metallic twang blasted behind him and the sparks on his neck meant Otto had been close enough for another swing.

  The enormity of the train dawned on him as he continued to run alongside it, like an ethereal Great Wall of China. Although his mind was too taxed to do the math, forty-nine cars and one engine at around thirty feet each meant he’d parallel it for another five-hundred yards before he’d be able to get around. Edmund wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought the car was on the same side of the train as he was running, so without thinking, he left the leveled hillside and darted back into the rough, uneven forest.

  As he pulled away from it, the voices started to grow faint. Most of them were in Polish, but a few were not. He turned, locked eyes with a ghostly woman who was hanging halfway out of a car, reaching for him and yelling for help in English. Edmund paid her little attention because Otto stepped up, put a hand on her face and pushed her back inside, and then followed him into the forest, regaining his pace in half a heartbeat. Edmund turned and ran, hoping no fallen trees snagged his pants because the moon was the only light he had.

  As he reached the apex of the hill, lungs like storehouses of hot embers, he knew that no such affliction bothered the dead conductor. He was blindly running and wondering if the ghost would chase him until he caught him. Or perhaps it had to stick close to the train. He prayed that was the case.

  He stopped for a minute to get his breath, and it was a good thing he did because as he turned around to see if Otto was closing, he spied the car, about a hundred yards away. He’d come out of the forest a long way from where he’d entered it. Edmund ran a straight line, kicking up snow.

  He was already fishing the key out of his pocket before he even got to the Fiat, which had already accumulated enough snow to blot out the windshield. Edmund ripped open the door and flopped down into the driver’s seat. He put the key in the ignition, did his best to remember the order of the pedals—

  —and lurched forward a few feet before the engine stalled. The dash lit up in angry lights, beckoning him to try again. Just before he turned the key over, Otto emerged from the forest, right behind where Edmund had a few minutes ago. The brute looked around, seeming to have lost his mark for the moment, and somehow not seeing Edmund’s hurried, jagged footprints.

  Edmund just sat in the car, torn between the safety of silence and the riskiness of starting and stalling and alerting the ghost.

  It did not matter, for Otto quickly spied the car sitting on the side of the road and started for it, slowly at first, then running. Edmund frantically turned the key over, held the clutch, eased his shaky foot off and hit the gas—but he stalled again, knowing all sense of timing had gone out the window. Driving this car was an artful balance, and currently he didn’t have the wits for it. Otto had halved the distance.

  Edmund tried again, the car lurched forward, but again it stalled.

  “Shit! No, no, no! C’mon!” he said, punching the wheel. Otto was still running, now only twenty yards out, the alligator wrench held high.

  Edmund was about to get out of the car, to run off and leave it, but then knuckles were knocking on his window and he found himself away from the steering wheel and into the passenger seat, kicking off from the door as if in a swimming pool. The window was foggy, but when the person bent down to look into the car, he felt strangely relieved.

  It was the old woman from Krakus House.

  Edmund reached back across and held the button to lower the window. Her skin was pale, white hair stuffed up in a knitted toboggan. She looked in the car to see if he were alone, then fixed him with that dead eye.

  “Stay in the car,” she said, in English far better than he would have guessed, then she walked off, straight toward the lumbering Otto.

  He was slowing down, as if the sight of the old woman gave him pause. The alligator wrench fell to his side, and he stared at her with a mixture of curiosity and something else . . . could it be fear? Edmund didn’t know. He didn’t know a lot of things tonight.

  It was the first time he noticed headlights behind him, and another person, silhouetted against them. From the small frame he had no doubt it was Lena. She was leaning against the grill of another car, and seemed mildly interested in what her grandmother was doing.

  The old woman stepped in front of the Fiat, the high beams blasting her shadow across the mountain. Edmund fully expected Otto to rip her in half with the jagged teeth of the alligator wrench, but he did not. Instead, it looked like they were talking. He couldn’t hear any words, but by the way they stared, like gunslingers in the old west, he thought for sure this was about to get bloody.

  But were they conversing some other way? Seeing them standing there, stoic, unmoving, Edmund couldn’t help but wonder if something more were happening, as if they had some kind of telepathic link. As absurd as it sounded, it made more sense than the old woman and the ghost having a stare-off.

  The train rushed down the mountain with a great whistle, snapping trees and plowing snow aside. It stopped right behind Otto, a puff of white belching from the smokestack, and it was the first time Edmund noticed a second conductor in the window—his head blown open and one eye completely gone. The trainset snaked through the trees, as if they could turn and pivot in whichever way suited them. The old woman and Otto faced off a few heartbeats longer before he grudgingly climbed aboard the train. She turned back toward Edmund.

  Otto gave the American a scowl before the steam whistle screamed, as if to say, this isn’t finished, and then the train was moving off, the horrible, horrible faces looking down at him until they were gone.

  The door of the Fiat suddenly opened and Lena got behind the wheel. She slammed it and put on her seatbelt just in time to see the headlights behind them back up, then head away.

  “What are you doing?” asked Edmund, feeling like it was a dumb way to start his questions.

  “Taking you back to Krakus House because you obviously can’t drive this car.” She put it into gear and easily pulled away. His cheeks flushed and his eyes fell to his lap.

  “What the hell just happened? What did I just see?” he asked, nose now pressed to the window, wondering if he could catch a glimpse of the train. But it had vanished, returned to wherever it went whenever it wasn’t terrorizing Poland.

  “I told you not to go hunting for it. Didn’t I tell you that?” she said, shaking her head. “If she hadn’t shown up . . .” Lena let that hang in the air.

  “Why didn’t the ghost hurt your grandmother?” he asked.

  “It’s a complicated story. And she will tell you, if she wants to. But I think it would be a good idea for you and your friends to pack up and leave. Things are only going to get worse.”

  “How do you know? Worse how?”

  “Just worse. Trust me. You don’t want to be here for this.” And then as if to herself, “God, it just doesn’t care anymore. Ripped up the whole damned forest back there.”

  “I don’t understand. I don’t get any of this.”

  “How far did you go?” she asked, turning off the 627 and back onto the first dirt road.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How far did you go up the mountain? Did you see the town? Did you go to Polvec? You didn’t climb the fence, did you?”

  “Climb? No. What is Polvec?”

  “Nothing. Don’t go anywhere near that place again.”

  Edmund wondered if she was referring to the squares of light he saw just before the train showed up.

  “You wanted me to come here. You left me the note under the door.”

  Her eyes crinkled at the sides. “You can’t prove that. And let’s not talk about it anymore. Grandma’s furious.”

  “But why would you help me now?”

  “Because we share so
mething. Because I know what it’s like to lose someone. The train took someone from me, too.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. And it’s my fault the train almost got you. It was on the other side of the Bug an hour ago. It’s becoming . . . unpredictable.”

  “How could you possibly know all this?”

  She just looked at him and grinned, but there was something else behind it—sadness? A resigned duty? He didn’t understand how he knew that.

  “The Ghost Train is shrouded in mystery, but my grandmother knows a lot about it.”

  “God, I have so many questions.”

  They had just turned up the hill past the Catholic church. A small garage sat at the foot of Krakus House, unseen by Edmund until now. The old woman was walking up the hill with her head down and hands stuffed into her pockets.

  “She looks so fragile,” said Edmund. “Like if she fell over she’d break into a million pieces.”

  Lena waited for the old woman to kick off the snow from her boots and then let herself in the door before driving the Fiat and parking where it had been before Edmund grew adventurous.

  “Don’t let looks deceive you, American. My grandmother is one of the strongest women in this world. She’s survived a lot to be here today.”

  “She must have if even the Ghost Train won’t hurt her.”

  Inside, the fires crackled but they were dying without the only two employees there to tend them. No, Krakus House had emptied in order to come rescue a dumb American who went looking for trouble.

  Edmund’s eyes fell to the kitchen doorway, which was standing open, and the old woman was inside, stripping down. He wanted to turn away—seeing the backside of a naked, elderly woman was at the bottom of his bucket list, but he couldn’t because of what he saw on her exposed skin.

  Her whole backside, from the nape of her neck, to her back, to her buttocks and thighs, were covered in scars. Little ones, like the remnants of a thousand bug bites that never healed. They were ancient, but also so plentiful that it made her pale, motley skin look like a Picasso.

  “It’s not polite to stare,” said Lena by his ear, so sudden and so close that he recoiled. This brought a snort from the girl that he found far more annoying than endearing.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “You know what all that is?” she asked, nodding forward, indicating the scars.

  “Motorcycle accident,” he said, not sure why he chose a joke at that moment. The old woman shut the door.

  “The doctors would call it scars from body lice. But to those who lived in the ghetto, they call it Typhus scars.”

  Edmund didn’t know much about that, other than lots of the Poles and Jews suffered from it due to being so overcrowded in the ghetto. Lice, fleas, and other vermin spread it rapidly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not sure of what else to say.

  “For what?” she said, her voice slightly playful, an edge that he didn’t like after what he’d just come through.

  “I don’t know. For her trouble, for tonight. I’m sorry. Look, I just want to go to bed. Can we all just forget about this?”

  “Sure,” said Lena, simply enough. “Goodnight.”

  He nodded it back, then mounted the steps. As soon as his boot came down, the old woman opened the door and stepped out, now in a house robe and a brightly colored quilt draped across her shoulders.

  “American, a word,” she said, stepping up to the counter and putting her hands on the surface. Her fingernails were long and yellowed, flesh covered in age spots. But she was steady.

  Edmund turned around, came back down.

  “No more hunting the train, eh?” she said, eyebrow cocked.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said. “I won’t go looking anymore.”

  “Good, good,” she said. She shivered, pulled her quilt tighter. “Because next time, it might come looking for you.”

  ***

  He wasn’t sure how long he slept, only that he’d been so exhausted that the bed came crashing up to meet him before he’d even had time to change. A siren, a weird warble of unfamiliar emergency personnel drew him from sleep, and immediately he rolled over onto his back because something in his front pocket was poking him painfully in the groin.

  It was daylight out, and even thought the single window had its shade drawn and curtains down, the idea that night had passed made him feel a little calmer. Those awful thoughts of the train, of Otto and his swinging wrench swam in the forefront of his brain and wouldn’t let go. He hoped he would never be face to face with something so terrible ever again.

  Edmund reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, tried the only button so that he could see the time, but naturally the device was dead. He was getting worse about charging it. He felt his other pocket for Addey’s phone, and immediately tears burned his eyes, because he knew it was gone, knew he’d dropped it in the scuffle with the train.

  He moved over to his bedside table and plugged his phone into the charger, then stripped down to change. Edmund peered out the window from behind the shade, seeing nothing but countryside, alternating from forest to field and far off, a lake looking as calm as a giant mirror. The snow was starting to melt into a dirty slush.

  His phone read that it was an hour until noon, but the clock was quickly replaced by a missed call alert. He tried to make out the weird number, and it didn’t occur to him that it was local. His addled mind assumed it was a telemarketer. When he placed the phone back onto the nightstand, his wrist brushed his wallet, sending it to the floor where his bank cards, rail pass, and money spilled out like confetti.

  Edmund stooped down, started putting his cards back in their preordained slots, folded the money, inserted the rail pass—and then he opened the flyer that the British investigators had given him the other night at the gas station.

  And just like that, he was back with the train.

  Edmund’s mind raced to something that happened last night, but he was too frazzled then to realize it. All of the Poles and Jews on the train were shouting for him in a language he didn’t know. But there had been one voice that drew him because of all the motley words and cries coming from the car, hers had been the one he understood. It was Katherine Walker, the same face on the flyer as the woman last night on the train. Otto had put a hand against her face and shoved her back in, as if she were one of the very prisoners who’d been riding around for the last eighty years.

  Edmund didn’t know what he would even say, but without even thinking, he’d dialed Brian Harrick’s cellphone. This conversation wouldn’t go well, but Edmund didn’t think he could just sit on this information.

  The phone rang twice, and then a scruff, but recognizable voice picked up on the other side. “’Ello, this is Brian Harrick. Whom am I speaking with?”

  “Uh, hello Brian. This is Edmund. Edmund Riley. We talked a few nights ago in Warsaw?”

  “Ah yes, the American.” There had been music playing in the background—heavy metal that sounded like one of those Scandinavian rock bands Addey listened to in high school. It abruptly ended when Brian recognized him. “What can I do for you Edmund?”

  “This isn’t going to be easy for me to say. I have information on the girl you’re looking for. But you aren’t going to believe it.”

  “Try me,” he said. “We’ve exhausted every lead. We’re actually a few miles north of Poniatowo and contemplating heading straight for Warsaw.”

  “Okay. Here goes. I saw her last night. On the train.”

  Silence.

  Then, someone nearby, most likely his colleague, Marcus, “What’s he saying?”

  “Quiet,” Brian told him. And then, “Edmund? You’re sure?”

  That was a turn he didn’t expect. Edmund fully assumed the man would hang up the phone, the mention of the Ghost Train the icing on the cake of his mound of dead ends and lack of information.

  “I’m sure. I had a run in with the train. I know you don’t believe me. I hardly believe it mysel
f. But I did, and I saw the girl. I saw Katherine Walker. Tell her parents that she’s dead.”

  “It’s a little hard to explain a ghost, mate. Her poppa isn’t the type to roll over at that news. But . . . I believe you.”

  “You believe me? A few days ago you thought I was crazy for thinking the Ghost Train was real.”

  “Yeah? Well a few days in its backyard opened my eyes.”

  “What did you see?” Edmund asked.

  Again, another silence.

  “Enough. That damned thing is cruising around eastern Poland and it doesn’t need a track beneath it. What the hell does it want? You’re the ghost expert, ain’t ya?”

  “I don’t know what it wants. But it’s getting stronger.” Edmund hadn’t really thought about it until now, but that was the truth.

  “How do you mean, mate?”

  “This thing used to only show up a few times every January. There’s been years where it wasn’t even seen at all. And now, it’s taking people almost every week. It’s getting stronger.”

  “That’s a right terrifying thought.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry she’s dead. Katherine, I mean.”

  “Don’t sweat it. It’s just work. Besides, we may be staying longer than we’d anticipated. My firm just texted Marcus here and it seems someone else would like to hire our services while we’re in the area.”

  “Someone else went missing?”

  “Yep. Some zoologist.”

  Edmund told him all he knew of Piotr Galin.

  “Bloody hell! We’re never going to get paid if the damned train takes all the bodies.”

  Something in the way he said it made Edmund’s mind switch gears. He’d never really given any thought to the fact that the ghosts had to transition from the living, and the living left behind bodies.

  “The corpses are out there somewhere,” said Edmund. “Katherine Walker, Piotr Galin, those two people who disappeared a couple weeks ago. They’re all buried somewhere, right?”

  “Buried? Why would the ghosts on the train bother to bury them?” Brian asked.

  “Okay, so maybe not buried. But none of the train’s victims have ever been found. They’re out there somewhere. Hidden.”