Night-Train

by Thomas F Monteleone

  “What about the trains, Mr. Frieter? Did he ever tell you about a train that was supposedly lost in the subways?”

  “Hell, yeah! You mean Train 93?! He used to tell me that story when I was a little kid, sometimes when he was putting me to bed.”

  Lya’s pulse had jumped when Frieter mentioned the number of the train. He spoke the words with an almost reverent intonation, the way one might mention the Wabash Cannonball, as though everyone was intimately familiar with the number. Frieter was indeed her first real lead into the story. “Yes,” she said. “That’s the one. What do you remember about Train 93?”

  Richard Frieter leaned forward in his chair, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and lighted one with a Zippo which he closed with a clank upon his knee. “Well, let’s see, Miss Marsden … I think it was in 1915, not too long after the BMT line was running. Train 93 pulled out of Astor Place station, heading south toward the old Bowling Green terminal, and it just never showed up at the next stop. They say it had ten or twelve passengers on board, and the motorman. Nobody ever seen any of ‘em again. Funny, ain’t it?”

  “Mr. Frieter, is it really possible to simply lose an entire subway train?” Lya smiled gently, trying to get him to elaborate on the tale.

  “Well, first thing you got to realize is the trains weren’t as big or as long as they are now. Back then they only ran one or two cars, but it still would have been hard to misplace a whole train.”

  “Are there any theories or ideas about what might have happened to it?”

  Frieter leaned forward. “Oh, there’s lots of ideas. When I started on the line back in the thirties, there was lots of old-timers that still talked about old Number 93. Some said that the Devil decided he needed some new souls real fast that day, and he just came up and grabbed that train as it was running through the tunnel. That sounds kind of way-out, though, don’t you think? My father said that there was a wreck the day 93 disappeared, and that all the trains had to be rerouted below Astor Place, and that’s probably when the train got lost.”

  “Are the original lines that were used back then still in service?”

  “Hard to say. Some parts might be, but you know they’ve been expanding and changing and rebuilding so many parts of the line, it’s hard to tell.” Frieter paused to inhale on his cigarette. “You see, there’s so many tunnels under the streets nowadays that the average guy on the sidewalk wouldn’t believe you if you told him what it’s like down there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like them little puzzles where you roll the BB around in all them spaces, you know? Tunnels goin’ everywhere, Miss Marsden!”

  “Do you know your way around underground pretty well?” Frieter laughed heartily, and his dentures slipped loose. He pushed them back into place with a practiced thumb. “Hell, no, Miss Marsden! Hell, no. I bet there isn’t anybody down at Transit that knows all the tunnels and bypasses and the walkways between the tunnels. It’s a mess down there, you see?”

  “I’m getting that idea, yes,” said Lya. She decided to try a different tack. “You say you’re a motorman now, Mr. Frieter?”

  “Nope. I’m a conductor now. That is, till next month— then I’ll be retired with full benefits and a pension you wouldn’t believe. That and Social Security and the sale of this place, even if I have to give it to the city, and I’ll have enough to get out of this damned place. Goin’ to Florida or Arizona or someplace where it’s warm all the time, you know?”

  “Yes, that sounds very nice.” Lya paused and smiled at him. She had to phrase her next question just right, or Frieter might go off on a tangent. “Tell me, Mr. Frieter, in all your years in the subways, did you ever see or hear anything … anything strange? Or did you ever hear any of your coworkers mention anything odd or out of the ordinary?”

  “That’s a funny question. What exactly do you mean?” Frieter stubbed out his cigarette in a conch shell souvenir ashtray, gazing past her at the faded wallpaper.

  Lya decided that the best way to explain was to relate her own experience in the subway several nights before—how she had thought she saw something. Something that was not part of the ordinary.

  After hearing her brief story, Frieter rolled his eyes upward and exhaled slowly. “Well, young lady, it’s funny that you tell me that …”

  A small shiver ran down Lya’s spine. There was something about the way he spoke that was unsettling. A small part of her mind recalled a host of bad movies in which Frieter would begin to be transfigured at this point—shoulders hunching, hands becoming bony claws, a malefic expression turning his skullish face into a hideous mask—stop it, she told herself sternly.

  Richard Frieter did not change. He sat there staring at Lya with a small smile lingering on his face, his eyes distant as if he was recalling some specific memory. He seemed almost startled when she spoke to him.

  “Why is it funny, Mr. Frieter? Have you seen anything like what I saw? Or like what I thought I saw?”

  “Oh yes, Miss Lya, many times,” he said simply.

  Lya’s pulse jumped again. She had the feeling that she was touching upon some secret, something no one else had ever uncovered. It was rather scary.

  “Many times? What do you mean by that?”

  Frieter leaned forward in his chair, and his expression became more serious. He lighted another cigarette with his clanking Zippo and stared at Lya with suddenly dark eyes. “Listen, Miss Lya, I’m going to tell you something I don’t normally talk about. Maybe because you’ll understand ‘cause you’ve seen it, too. Maybe ‘cause I think you won’t laugh. I don’t know.”

  “I certainly won’t laugh, Mr. Frieter.”

  “No, I don’t think you will. You see, there’s a lot of things in this world that we think we understand, but it’s all bullcrap, if you’ll pardon the expression. We don’t know crap about lots of things. I’ve seen some things down in them tunnels that I don’t tell nobody about. Never did talk about ‘em, even to my wife when she was still livin’.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Sometimes when I would be walkin’ down the tracks or in the side tunnels, I would hear things. Like voices speakin’ to one another—only it was in some foreign language, you know? It was more like whisperin’ or prayin’ really. Years back, when 1 was too young to realize, I asked some of the old-timers about the voices—to see if they’d ever heard ‘em, you see—and those guys would just look at me like I was nuts and shake their heads. But I’ll tell you something: I knew they didn’t think I was nuts! No, sir, I could tell by the looks in their eyes that they’d heard that stuff, too, but they didn’t want to talk about it. So after a while I learned to keep my mouth shut, you know? It was better just to keep anything like that to myself. That’s the way all the guys thought, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I think I do,” said Lya. She wanted to keep him going on the subject. Questions filled her mind, but she didn’t want to sound hurried or anxious. “Did you ever see anything?”

  Frieter nodded. “Lots of times. I’d be walkin’ down the tracks and all of a sudden I’d see a funny light up ahead. Not directly in front of me, but around a bend in the tracks. A kind of glow, like from a lightnin’ bug. But as soon as I’d get close to it, it would disappear, or sometimes it would keep moving down the tunnel just ahead of me so I’d never catch up with it. It was weird, you know?”

  Lya could tell by the way Frieter was looking at her that he was sincere, that he was not spinning a yam. “Yes, I know exactly what you mean, Mr. Frieter. Is there anything else?” He scratched his head, studied the floral designs on the walls again, then looked directly into her eyes once more. “Well, there’s some of the more usual stuff…”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, there was more than a few times I found some old rum-bum curled up in one of the jump-holes, and he would—”

  “‘Jump-holes’?”

  “Oh, they’re just cutouts in the tunnel walls every so often, s
o that if a trackman is walkin’ down the tunnel and a train’s comin’ up on him, he can jump into one of them holes and hang on till the train goes by. It’s a safety feature, I guess you’d call it.”

  “Oh, I see. I’m sorry I interrupted … you were saying something about finding something there?”

  “Yeah, every once in a while, you’d find some old rum-bum layin’ up in one of our jump-holes, and he’d be deader than shi—deader than a doornail. Wintertimes they would go down in the tunnels to keep warm, but sometimes they’d just freeze to death down there. I remember one time, it was spring, and I found a guy inside a toolshed down off one of the spurs. He must’ve been there since the winter, cause there wasn’t much left of him! I smelled him ‘fore I seen him, I can tell you that!”

  “That must have been awful,” said Lya, truly at a loss for words.

  “That wasn’t the worst part of it. I’ll never forget the way that guy was in that shed—all hunched up in the corner like he was hidin’ from somethin’, or tryin’ to get away from somethin’, you know? And his face … well, what was left of it, really, it looked like he’d seen a ghost or somethin’ worse and died right in the middle of his scream.”

  Lya shuddered as her mind conjured up an all-too-vivid image of a skeletal figure cowering in a corner, its eyeless sockets staring into eternity, its slack, bony jaws locked in an endless, silent scream. “When did you say this happened, Mr. Frieter?”

  “Oh, I can’t remember exactly. But it’s been about twenty years, at least. And then there’s always the mess when some poor fool falls off the platform when a tram’s comin’ in. That’s never pretty!”

  “How often does something like that happen?”

  “Not very. Once in a while somebody gets pushed off, though. I remember once there was a bunch of punks on the F line—out to Coney Island, you know—and they were pushin’ people off the platforms for a week or two till they got caught. That was a terrible thing.” Frieter shook his head as though recalling some of the grisly aftermaths.

  Fearing that they were getting off base, Lya steered him back to what she was mainly interested in. “Let me go back to that missing train for a minute, Train 93?”

  “Oh, sure. Say, you sure you wouldn’t want some tea?”

  “No, thank you, really. What I’d like to ask you, Mr. Frieter, is whether you know about any efforts that were made to find the train? Or if there was much about it in the newspapers?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. You gotta realize that it was even before my time on the line, and I’m just tellin’ you what my father told me, you understand.”

  “I see,” said Lya, pausing to turn off her cassette recorder. “Well, let me put it this way … suppose I told you that there are some people who are interested in finding that train, or at least discovering what really happened to it. Would you be willing to help these people?”

  “Help ‘em? How do you mean?”

  “Well, with your years of experience, perhaps you could serve as a guide through the tunnels, or something like that?”

  “Oh, gee, I don’t know about that. I’d have to get special permission to be takin’ topsiders down into the tunnels. I don’t know about that … Why, what’s goin’ on?” He sat up straighter and a suddenly suspicious expression crossed his face.

  “Well, nothing yet. That’s why I’m investigating the story, you see. I’m just wondering, if things get more concrete, whether we might be able to count on you for your help.”

  Frieter relaxed a bit, leaned back in his chair, and fired up another cigarette. “Well, I’ll have to see. I’m almost ready to retire … and I can’t imagine what help an old man like me would be.”

  Lya smiled disarmingly. “Oh, Mr. Frieter, you’ve already been a great help to me. Your stories are fascinating.”

  “So you think you can use some of them on your TV show?”

  “Definitely.”

  This seemed to please him, and he smiled, his dentures flashing.

  Lya thanked him and rose to leave, gathering her things and putting them into her bag. Frieter followed her to the door and said good-bye, once more offering his assistance in anything else that she might need to know. Running down the steps to the street, Lya ignored the stares of the children playing nearby and the few neighbors who were sitting out on their steps despite the coolness in the air. She wanted to make a phone call, but quickly decided that it would be better to use a booth in the more comfortable confines of midtown rather than in the South Bronx.

  She walked back to the D Train station and checked her watch as she descended to the incredibly filthy platform. It was already after 1 P.M., and, damn, she had run out of extra tokens and would have to buy more. The woman behind the glass cage pushed the tokens out to Lya with studied indifference, and Lya wondered if it was the tedium of the job that made the token changers so devoid of life, or whether it was something else about being under the streets all the time.

  Walking down to the platform, she quickly scanned the area to see who else was awaiting the next southbound train. A young man, dressed in denims and carrying a large artist’s portfolio; an older Puerto Rican woman with two small children in tow; and three teenage boys of fairly dark complexion, all wearing knitted watch caps and Levi jackets with a club emblem across the back. This check was a habit Lya had long ago adopted in the subways, and it was one most other train riders indulged, also. If somebody was going to get you down here, at least you wanted to know who they were.

  Lya looked down the tunnel into the darkness, as though daring the underground to do something to scare her. Face your fears. That was the key. And almost on cue, she heard the rumble of an approaching train, saw its faint light as it climbed a gradual incline in the black distance. With a terrible clatter, it arrived in the station and threw open its doors. Lya boarded and sat in a seat near the door, noticing that the car was only about half full. There would be one stop before it plunged beneath the river and then roared under some of the worst neighborhoods in Manhattan. You never knew who was going to be boarding trains north of Central Park.

  The ride south, back to “civilization,” was mercifully uneventful, and Lya disembarked at the Rockefeller Center station. On Sixth Avenue (she hated calling it the “Avenue of the Americas”), she had lunch at a deli and then phoned Sergeant Oliver to see if he had found anything in the Transit Authority records about the “lost” train.

  Oliver was blunt and very matter-of-fact: he had found nothing. Lya was certain that he was lying by the tone of his voice. She told him that the train was called Number 93 and that the incident had taken place around 1915. He said that that was “helpful” information, and that he would check again and call her back if he found anything new. Then he hung up.

  Hanging up the phone, Lya decided to walk down to 42nd Street to the public library and do some checking up on her own.

  The massive building guarded by the famous lions out front was an intimidating place for newcomers, with its high, vaulted ceilings and its imposing Georgian architecture, but to Lya it was welcoming and familiar. She had used the library’s rich facilities so often that many of the librarians in the reference rooms were on a first-name basis with her.

  Seated at a microfiche reader, Lya checked a subject index for the New York Times for the entire year of 1915. There were more than thirty-five citations for subways and another twenty-eight under the heading of trains, and she intended to check them all. If the year 1915 yielded no results, she would expand her search to include 1914 and 1916. Be thorough, and don’t give up without a good fight—the watchwords of all journalists.

  The time passed quickly as she sat before the screen, but her doggedness finally paid off. On page two of the October 8 edition of the Times, a headline leaped out at her:

  STRANGE SUBWAY MISHAP

  NEAR EAST VILLAGE

  Yesterday morning, between the hours of ten and eleven o’clock, officials of the IRT subway system were confronted with a double calamity
. A southbound train, Number 86, controlled by motorman Nathaniel Thornton, suddenly derailed in the tunnel connecting the stations of Astor Place and Bleecker Street. The accident was of minor consequence, and none of Thornton’s twenty-eight passengers were injured. The Bates, however, were not so kind to Train 93, in the charge of Motorman Nicholas Creedon. Following the same path as Train 86, Train 93 was detoured around the disabled train into the northbound tunnel. It was at this point that disaster raised its ugly head.

  Motorman Creedon, after mistakenly throwing an improper switch, hurtled his train down a spur-line tunnel and crashed his three cars into a dead-end. There followed a tumultuous explosion and a fire, causing the motorman and his twenty-one passengers to expire in a most horrible fashion.

  Fire-fighting squads from both the Eighth Street and Second Avenue Stations were called to the scene, but to no avail. The IRT Offices report that identification of the casualties is so far impossible because of the deplorable condition of the remains.

  Oscar Davenport, an official for the IRT, while expressing his sincere regrets for the accident, claims that it was a “one in a million” event, and does not ever foresee such a terrible accident in the future. Mr. Davenport adds that he hopes the news of this mishap does not dissuade New Yorkers from continuing their patronage of the wondrous underground rail system.

  Although somewhat amused by the purplish prose of the Times staffer, Lya was shocked to read the account of what seemed to be nothing more than a train crash. But immediately several questions came to her mind. If nothing more than a crash had befallen Train 93, why was there no trace of it in Sergeant Oliver’s records? Also, why would an almost mythical tale arise from the event, a legend passed along from one IRT employee to another about the train being lost?