by Alison Stine
I touched one of the white heaps. It was a canvas bag, stuffed full of something. I stuck my arm in, my fingers grasping at hard little corners. One of the corners stung my skin, and I pulled my hand out. I had a paper cut on my thumb.
It was mail in the bags.
I held in my hand a fistful of envelopes, all different colors, all different sizes. I knelt on the floor of the train car, and spread them out. I didn’t recognize any of the addressee names, and many of the stamps were strange to me. I chose a pale-blue envelope addressed to Annabelle James. I turned it over, then hesitated. This was breaking a law, opening someone’s mail.
But my mother had said to remember the mail. My mother. And this letter was on a ghost train. No one else was ever going to read it, not in this lifetime.
I slipped my finger under the blue flap and tore.
The handwriting on the envelope, like on all of the envelopes, looked old-fashioned, spidery and cramped. My eyes narrowed, adjusting to the cursive and the dim lighting in the car, and then I began to read. Dearest Annabelle, the letter read. It has been a week since I saw you. In that time, my heart has grown heavy, and the loss of you echoes. My cough is worse …
I scanned the rest. None of it made any sense to me. The letter writer missed this girl, Annabelle, was sorry they couldn’t be together, and hoped his illness would end soon.
I knew it wouldn’t.
I put the letter aside, and picked up another. This one was full of false-sounding optimism and reassurances to a friend about a fever spreading through a family. I read it quickly, and set it down. I had just opened a third letter and was reading about a ship, how strong the ship was, and how soon they expected to reach the end of their journey, when I felt the first wet drop.
A word blurred on the letter, the ink smudged.
Another drop marred the letter. I looked up. There was no dripping pipe on the ceiling, no leak. I looked back to the letter. It was damp with drops, the paper softening, folding over in my hands. The ink began to run, a blue pool.
The water was coming from the letter itself, I realized, beading up from the paper. And all the words were running together, the ink melting. The letter was drowning.
I heard a crackling. I looked down at the pile of mail to see a small orange flame burst from another letter, the one about the fever. The letter was on fire.
The letter in my hands was sopping and starting to fall to pieces. I threw it at the burning letter, but it did nothing to put out the flames. I stood and stamped out the burning letter with my foot.
But when I raised my shoe, there was nothing there on the floor of the train car. No ashes. No charred remains. Nothing left of the letter.
I turned to the others, dumping the mail sack out onto the floor. Dozens of letters spilled out. Hundreds. And they were all moving. The handwriting was moving. The addresses on the front were erasing themselves, un-writing themselves, the loops and crosses and dots scrubbed out.
The letters had been written by the dead. And the work of the dead was undoing itself as I watched, helpless.
“No,” I said. “No. No. No.” I snatched a letter, but it turned to blank paper in my hand. I dumped out a second mailbag, then a third one. They were blank. All the letters were blank, the words gone, the messages erased. It had happened too fast.
I had failed my mother. I couldn’t put out the mail. I couldn’t even read it.
There was a lurch. The floor beneath my feet slid forward, and I lost my balance, stumbling into the wall. The ghost train began to move.
“Tom!” I said. I didn’t know if he had woken up, if the others had. I steadied myself and leaned out the open doorway. “Tom, the train!” My face was pushed out into thick black smoke. I fell back into the car, coughing, as the train chugged forward.
But I had seen something before the smoke cloud engulfed me: the bag of mail hanging on the post. The burlap mailbag was full.
I steadied myself. I hung onto the doorway, and lunged into the steam, my other arm swiping, reaching out for the bag, and meeting only empty air. My eyes burned. I tried to call for Tom, but my throat was parched with ash. I swung out my arm again, connecting with nothing.
The ghost train was starting to move, the wheels sparking on the tracks. But we were still too far from the mailbag. On my third swipe for the bag, my hand hit something, attached to the outside of the train.
It was a long piece of metal secured to the car. Maybe I could wrench it free, and use it to knock down the mailbag as we passed? I reached for the metal thing and pulled. It felt stuck, then the joints moved and it snapped into position. The piece had two ends. One stuck straight out like a lance.
The other end was a hook.
CHAPTER 21:
Great-granddaughter
The pole with the mailbag loomed into view, and the hook simply snatched it as the train passed, just tore the bag from its perch. It was the perfect length. It had been designed for just this purpose: picking up the mail, without even stopping the train. I stared at the hook in wonder, then looked behind me toward the station. Mr. Black lay on the ground, struggling to get up. Tom and Clara had already risen.
“Tom,” I shouted.
He seemed very far away. And the train was moving fast. Tom’s lips mouthed something, but I couldn’t read the words. Maybe I’ll find you. Maybe I’m fine. Maybe nothing at all.
I watched until he disappeared, the train shuddering around a curve. I thought he motioned to Mr. Black and Clara. I thought they started to run after me.
I turned to the mail, the bag swinging on the end of the hook on the outside of the train. I yanked the bag up and off of the hook. The bag was surprisingly heavy, and the weight unbalanced me. I swung forward. My stomach lurched as the fingers of my free hand felt behind me for the doorframe and missed. I felt the wind, cold but threaded with ash. The tracks flashed by in strips of gravel and steel.
I was falling, falling out of the doorway, falling off the train.
I felt something on the back of my neck: a hand lifting me by the collar of my shirt, like the hook had grasped the mailbag. I was hauled back into the train. I fell onto my knees on the floor of the car, then scrambled quickly to my feet, holding the mailbag before me like a shield.
A man stood in the car. He wore heavy pants, a work shirt, and a wide-brimmed hat, all blackened with dirt. His hands trembled. He took off his hat, and his hands began to work it, fumbling around the brim, kneading it like dough. He had rescued me. He was staring at me. But that was not the strangest thing about him.
He was Chinese.
He said something to me, and I sighed. Fear left my body, replaced by regret and embarrassment. I couldn’t understand him. I wouldn’t be able to. He was a ghost, obviously. He wanted something from me, of course.
But I wouldn’t be able to help him. And I wouldn’t be able to tell him why.
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
His eyes widened. He spoke more adamantly. “Zengsunnü,” he said.
That same word, a word I didn’t know.
My grandmother had known the language as a child—and forgotten. My mother wanted to learn, but by the time she was old enough to ask, my grandmother didn’t know many words anymore; she had lost her first language. We avoided Chinatown in New York, walking quickly past the supermarkets smelling of dried fish, the pink dragon fruit and pebbled brown lychee fruit in stalls; wanting to prevent this, just this: a stranger speaking to us in kindness, in a language we did not know.
“Zengsunnü,” the man said again.
The train rustled around a curve. We both lost our balance, me and the ghost, swaying on the rattling floor. As the train turned, envelopes shot out from the cupboards and landed across the car—blank letters, all of them.
I tightened my grip on the mailbag. Did the letters inside still have any words? Had they unwritten themselves already? “Listen,” I said to the man. “I can see you and hear you, but I can’t speak to you. I can�
�t understand you.”
“Zengsunnü,” the man repeated desperately. “Zengsunnü.”
“I can’t understand you,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
He stepped forward, releasing his hat with one hand to grab my wrist.
I gasped. His grip was strong. His eyes were dark, looking straight into mine. They looked familiar. And his English was accented, but clear. “Great-granddaughter,” he said. “Be brave.”
A jolt. The train whipped around a corner so hard, I was thrown from my feet. I slammed against the wall, the mailbag slipping from my hand and falling open. Letters scattered over the floor. They were blank, like all the others, or quickly becoming blank, the addresses shrinking, the messages dissolving. Then a gust of smoke swept through the open train door, lifting the letters. A stream of them was sucked out the open door, into the night air.
“No!” I shouted. I struggled to my feet.
The train hissed and screamed. When I looked out the doorway, I saw sparks mixing with smoke. The letters were cast down the tracks like snow. When I looked back into the car, my great-grandfather was gone. With a gear screech, we stopped.
“Tom,” I said.
I jumped down from the train and started running. I passed empty train cars. I passed the letters, running over them, not going back. Tom had stopped the train again—the ghosts had—I knew it.
But when I reached the back of the train, the smoke-blackened caboose, there was no one there. I squinted at the tracks stretching on in the distance. No Clara. No Mr. Black. No Tom. Where were they? A letter had drifted under my shoe. As I bent to pick it up, I heard whistling.
I froze, bent down to the gravel, one hand on the letter. The white of the paper seemed to waver and swim before my eyes. The whole world was white, and then it wasn’t. A shadow fell over the letter.
I swerved to avoid the lantern, falling to my knees and rolling. I heard the collision of metal striking metal as the lantern hit the tracks.
“Get away from me!” I screamed.
I rolled to the edge of the rails. And then I stood and ran.
On the other side of the tracks was a forest, strange to me. I had no idea where the train had stopped. I had never come this far, even with Tom. But I plunged through the trees, branches slapping my arms and stinging my legs. All I saw in the darkness was the next black trunk looming up in front of me. All I heard was my own ragged breathing.
I became aware that I was going uphill. The forest floor rose. Soon it was so steep, I had to grab onto saplings for support. A branch sliced my leg, but I didn’t look down. I launched across the top of the hill, yanking on branches and pulling myself along, then diving through the trees on the other side—more trees, only trees.
And then the trees thinned. I could see light up ahead. I slowed a bit. Maybe it was a car. Maybe I had reached the highway. But when I broke through the trees, I saw it was just a clearing, a circular meadow. The grass was high and mossy. It was only the moon I had seen, reflected off the grass, not the highway at all. The moon was the light.
And there were objects bouncing back the light, tall shapes in the grass, white and luminous. The meadow had a hush to it, as quiet as snow.
I remembered, strangely, my grandmother’s garden, the only garden she had ever attempted. Most of the land around the house was barren, rocky and overgrown, but once, when I was a child and lived with her, she had cleared a patch and planted flowers. Or tried to plant flowers. All white ones.
A place to sit in at night, she had said. She had strung mirrors on the barn. To reflect the moon, she had said.
The Firecracker had rolled her eyes, and slammed the door to her room. I did too, listening to my sister mutter, “Who sits in a garden at night? Freak!” through the walls. But later I had crept to my window and peeked out to see our grandmother, sitting alone in the darkness in her moon garden, white shadows all around her.
Like ghosts, I had thought.
They reminded me of the moon garden—these stones in the clearing, glowing against the purple grass. But they weren’t just stones. Even from the edge of the clearing, I could tell that they had names. They were tombstones: plain graves, with a name and date only. Some had no names, only RIP. Some of the letters had worn away. I felt pulled to the stones, pulled by the names. When I read the first one, I saw why.
WONG.
I read my own last name.
“Rail man’s graveyard.” The Stationmaster stepped into the clearing, lantern swinging at his side. I backed up until the tombstone was between us, though it barely came up to my waist.
“Dangerous work,” the Stationmaster said, “what we did. Did you know that, little girl? It was hard, working for the railroad. A man could get killed. A man could get maimed. A man could lose his legs. A man could lose his arms, and bleed to death, right there on the track before help came.” He nodded at the stone. “That’s what happened to your great-grandpappy.”
I felt the blood in my body freeze. I felt the old burns on my hand turn to ice. “What do you mean?”
“He didn’t make it,” the Stationmaster said. “Because he couldn’t listen. Couldn’t hear the order to Get up, get out of the way. Train’s coming!” He waved his hat, grinning. “Because he didn’t know English, you see. He didn’t understand. Learn English, little girl. That’s your first lesson in manners.”
I stared at him steadily. “I’m American.”
“Lesson two: don’t speak until spoken to.” He raked the lantern across my great-grandfather’s tombstone, dragging the rusted metal over the stone with a slow, teeth-jarring scratch.
I winced. I became aware of a presence beside me, someone not quite touching my shoulders: ribbons, white-blond hair. Clara. A presence, a feeling, on the other side of me too. Mr. Black.
“Where’s Tom?” I whispered.
Clara shook her head.
“The Stationmaster doesn’t want you,” I said to her. “You don’t have to be here. He wants me.”
“I want you to behave,” the Stationmaster said. “I want you to be better. I will make you be better.”
“Run!” Clara said.
“No,” I resisted. “You all can’t keep saving me.”
There was a tearing sound, and the unmistakable smell of sulfur; the Stationmaster had lit a match on his shoe. He held the flame up, flickering, let it burn down to his fingers. He flicked the blackened match away, then struck another.
Clara flinched.
“Right,” Mr. Black said to her. “You stay out of this then.”
The Stationmaster struck a third match. One of them would ignite the grass, I knew. One of them would light the fire to kill Clara, kill her again.
I said the only question to him I could think of, the one I had asked a dozen times now. “What do you want?”
The Stationmaster laughed.
“How many kids have you killed?”
He lit a fourth match, and stared at me, the red glow bloodying his face. “Enough to like it.”
Mr. Black leapt toward the Stationmaster, pushing me out of the way. I was shoved against the tombstone of my ancestor, my breath knocked from my lungs. Clara cried out, and I turned to see the last match setting the grass on fire.
The fire spread quickly, dry grass rustling as it blazed. I crawled on my hands and knees to Clara, slumped with her back against a tombstone. Across the clearing, Mr. Black fought with the Stationmaster.
“He does this to me,” Clara said. “He provokes me. He made me set the fire in the house. He wanted me to.”
“I know, I know,” I said. I put my arm around her shoulder. She was shaking, so small. How had I never noticed how small she was? She was younger than me, I reminded myself. She was—and always would be—a child.
I crouched, keeping Clara close to me, and the two of us crept behind the tombstones. I could hear shouting and clanging as the lantern struck stone. The fire burned red and fast around the Stationmaster and Mr. Black. Clara and I stumbled out of the grav
eyard, into the cover of the trees. Clara was as limp and docile as a doll, but once we made it into the woods, she shook off my arm and broke away from me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My death,” she said. “I want it.”
“You can’t go back there.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Clara!” I said.
But she was already gone, thrashing through the trees, back to the clearing. Smoke threaded through the forest. My eyes stung, my lungs constricting. Then I heard a whistle.
Not the Stationmaster. The train.
Remember the mail, I heard my mother say. Why wouldn’t she tell me something that would protect me that would save me?
I heard the whistle again. That meant it was close. The train whistled like that—even the ghost train—as a warning when it pulled into a station.
Or a tunnel.
I followed the sound. I began to run, not feeling the branches as they whipped my limbs and face, not smelling the smoke. My whole world filled with the sound of the whistle, until with a lunge, I broke through the trees.
The tunnel stood ahead, to my left, the tunnel where Tom had taken me; I recognized the high, vandalized walls. I followed them, running alongside the tracks. I could hear the train, but couldn’t see it. I began to worry that I was too late, that I had missed it.
Something was in the tunnel, though.
Someone.
I ran into the mouth. It was black outside, night, but it was blacker within the closed walls of the tunnel. As my eyes adjusted, I saw the figure I had seen come into focus: long arms, legs balanced, neck extended.
My mother.
My mother danced in the train tunnel again.
My eyes filled with tears.
In the dreams—or visions or hauntings—she had never looked at me. Not once. She closed her eyes, concentrating, as she did in all the pictures I had seen of her dancing. She seemed to see no one, to be aware of nothing but the dance. Like my grandmother, listening for the dead. I didn’t expect anything different from this dream, this vision, this haunt. But still I walked toward her onto the tracks.
