Rendered speechless, Hanlon let go of the gate. It swung wide and Shem’s intended paramour lunged for the opening.
I am positive that Hanlon only meant to deter the animal from pursuing his potential concubine. To stall him. (I think, if he’d gotten loose, he would have hurtled at full speed towards Otis Clanton and that Otis would not have survived the attack). Hanlon underestimated her own strength.
She brained him.
He went down like a sack of potatoes, his skull caved in.
Crazy as it seems, what with the amount of turmoil being generated, we went unnoticed. The neighborhood continued on its normal pace. The rubbish men tooled into view. A handful of customers were patronizing the various business establishments. Cars went by. The stopped bus discharged a passenger. At this juncture Mrs Norman Houston drove into my parking lot and began backing and hauling her station wagon into one of the narrow spaces.
The Houstons were a mainstay. They had four golden retrievers who, like all goldens, were roamers. They always returned, having garnered ticks and fleas and worms and bowel problems and, occasionally, buck shot and snake bite, plus a generous supplement of playboy exhaustion.
Kate Houston loved them dearly, forgave them their sins, called them “my bad boys” and brought them to me. All four goldens were in the station wagon and the unmistakable scent of skunk had begun to filter through the air.
I decided Hanlon and Otis could settle their differences themselves. Hanlon had dropped her weapon and, riddled with horror at what she had done, was the picture of woe, wringing her hands, her adrenalin about to kick down the barn door. Otis was Otis. Impossible to decipher.
The reeking goldens were the equivalent of manna from heaven.
I salvaged my doorstop and headed for the clinic. I doubt if either Otis or Hanlon noted my defection.
When I closed up at the end of the day the dead dog remained where it had fallen. Flies were in evidence and one hind leg had begun to rise slightly from the carcass. If not interred soon the body would begin to advertise its presence. I couldn’t have that. Not with my clinic so near.
As I hesitated there, my eyes came to rest on a shovel that had been thrust into the earth on my side of the fence. Attached to the handle was a torn scrap of paper.
The message scrawled thereon read: You bury him.
I buried him, beside the first two.
I hoped Hanlon would reconsider. That we could patch things up. Make peace. Continue on as before. A hopeless hope. She didn’t even come back to collect the week’s worth of salary owed her.
So, I crossed Hanlon off and prevailed upon a phlegmatic ex-nurse, whose listless canary was a sporadic patient, to take her place.
In the interim Otis had acquired a fifth dog. A sturdy foursquare bitch of questionable lineage. I surmised from the attendant paraphernalia (the choke, the addition of a clinking, unchewable leash, and Otis Clanton’s bandaged thumb) that she was hard to control and was ill pleased with her owner. I remember thinking: She’ll learn.
My next encounter, if you can call a fleeting glimpse an “encounter”, confirmed my conjecture. There was a subtle difference in her demeanor. She was learning. I made no attempt to establish contact. “Let sleeping dogs lie” isn’t a bad motto.
Today Otis broke this thin barrier with a return visit late in the afternoon as I was about to close. He went straight to the point. I must buy, or relinquish, the strip of land which he owns and I occupy.
I leaped at the offer. Buy! Yes, yes, yes. I’ll buy!
I am to bring him the entire sum tomorrow at day’s end. He will not be available before. Nor afterwards.
“In cash,” he said. “I don’t hold with banks.”
He gave me his price, turned on his heel and clomped off, leaving me standing there with visions of sugarplums beginning to dance in my head. The handwriting was on the wall. His funds were ebbing. I had been his backlog.
After I’d locked up I moseyed across to Sam’s Deli to tell Sam of my great good fortune and to ask him if he would co-sign a bank loan tomorrow morning. His signature would be a flawless guarantee and would minimize a lot of hemming and hawing at the bank where my credit was becoming stretched due to some necessary big ticket expenditures.
Over a slice of “epple pie” I laid it out flat. The sum Otis wanted, while high, was not too unreasonable, except that I did not have that much cash available. If he, Sam, would be my co-signer fine and dandy. If not, no hard feelings. Perhaps the bank would oblige. If they balked, Wilson at Acme Loan would come through without a fuss. The interest would be higher, but what the hell. This was my chance to –
“I don’t hold with benks either,” Sam chimed in. “Loan comp’ny’s worse. You begin monkeying with loan comp’nys you gonna wind up sorry.” He pushed himself from the table. Said, “Don’t go away.” Gained his feet and waddled off.
I think I knew what he was going to do before he ambled back, sat down and handed me a long envelope.
“For Otis,” he said. “In thousand dolla bills. The benk and Acme Loan can go tek a leak.”
He dismissed my attempt to express . . . well . . . a large amount of gratitude tinged with surprise that he kept this much moolah loose on the premises.
“Safer than in benk,” he said. “Nobody embizzle it. Nobody sneak in and steal it because nobody find where I kip it. How could I lose? Unless you tek it and run.” He leaned across the table and gave me a punch on the shoulder to show he was kidding. “You kip Queenie going,” he said. “I kip you going.” He gave the table top a conclusive smack and changed the subject.
While I finished my pie we discussed this and that, in the course of which he inquired about Hanlon. “If you count in Billy Williams,” he said, “she’s the fifth one to schlep off in less than a year.”
He named them. Simon and Jason Clanton. Otis Clanton’s child bride. Billy. And, now, Hanlon. Mebbe was somep’n Otis was slipping in the drinking water, ha ha ha.
I relayed the circumstances surrounding Hanlon’s desertion, including the fact that she had brained Otis Clanton’s big red dog in defense of Shem, the little one, who had dashed off during the goings-on and hadn’t been seen since.
He listened, sort of, not truly interested, but at the allusion to “Shem” he asked why “for heaven sake” would somebody name a dog after “a old wife’s tale”.
Come again?
Sam explained that his babushka grandmother had doted on shems. He chuckled, patted his belly and said he’d been sickly as a youngster. Skinny as a rail. Pecky at table. His grandmother had sought to enliven his appetite and improve his health with a daily saucer of peeled grapes. She encouraged his consumption of these slimy morsels by telling him “a old wife’s tale” about the power of a magic shem which, when eaten, transformed the eater into whatever he wished to be. Who could tell? A shem could very well be hid among the grapes. Why glory be! He might find what he thought was a grape was a shem. Oh ho! Mebbe he would like to play the futball? Mek the touchdown? Is possible. Eat!
“I eat them peeled grapes like my life was in jeppardy,” Sam said. Again he chuckled. “Who can say? Mebbe I get one. Except I turn into a fat man whose marinated herrings is best of anybody’s.”
The impact of his account didn’t hit me until I was pillowed in bed, hands behind my head, happily reviewing my windfall and the eventual realization of The Southeastern Veterinarian Clinic, with a parking lot that stretched from here to there.
In the midst of my happy musings I suddenly sat bolt upright.
“What if . . .” I heard myself say in a hoarse voice. I emitted a strangled, “Good God!”
So here I am, at midnight, committing my hideous speculations to paper.
The Clantons, obviously, were familiar with the word “shem”. The connection between a “shem” and the name “Shem” is indisputable. And, there was Otis Clanton’s flickering smile as he pronounced it . . . and his subsequent penetrating look at Hanlon when her telling comments accident
ally hit the nail on the head.
Were Simon and Jason volunteers in an experiment involving some kind of an old world “shem”? Do the first two dogs, buried in Otis Clanton’s backyard have abnormalities similar to those of Simon and Jason? A twisted neck? A humped back? I know that the third dog had a crooked toe on a hind paw because I noticed it when I consigned him to his hole . . . and there was that hairy red coat . . .
Would Billy have entered Otis Clanton’s house?
He might have put aside his dislikes, if Otis had offered him a drink to toast the completion of a job-well-done. Billy liked applause, and he wasn’t one to turn down a free shot of booze, or a second, or third, or fourth . . . one of which contained a liquid “shem”? Had the food bowl Otis was holding contained a liberal lacing of whiskey . . . to keep his latest acquisition under wraps until he simmered down? Was that the cause of the big dog’s staggering gait?
And how about Lady and Queenie? Transported willy-nilly into Clanton Territory they had acted totally out of character. Gentle, ladylike Lady had become frenetic. Placid, purring Queenie had done her hissing, clawing utmost to make a getaway from Sam’s constraining arms.
And hadn’t Muriel Sims glimpsed a laboratory? And described Otis Clanton’s wife’s punctured arms? And observed that she was “blinky”. And hadn’t I given Otis an ointment for his third dog’s watery eyes? Hanlon had insisted the little animal was in tears. Dogs cry? Regardless, she had been highly vociferous. Had she been trying, desperately, to tell us something . . . until the thwack from Otis had silenced her?
Now he has his fifth dog. A strapping, robust bitch that, come to think of it, reminds me of Hanlon.
A mental picture of Hanlon arises, in replay. She stands there stunned. Riddled with horror at what she has done . . . the brick falling from her grasp to lie beside the dead dog . . . beginning to wring her hands . . . her adrenaline soaring . . .
Could Hanlon, unaware that she had probably saved Otis Clanton’s life, have trailed him into his house and, in the tearful course of events, have blindly accepted a “restorative”? Had that same enigmatic smile flickered across Otis Clanton’s lips as he proffered the glass?
What could be his purpose????? To engineer a race of . . . of . . . mutants?
Manimals!
Well, I’ve read what I’ve written and, already, Collins’ sage advice has paid off. The whole thing is too absurd to entertain seriously. To plop the puny likes of Otis Clanton into the gargantuan shoes of Dr Frankenstein is downright silly.
The outlook is rosy. One of these days, when he is totally strapped, his property will be for sale. I might even be able to pick it up for taxes!
I’m aware that I haven’t come out of this unscathed. I am not a noble soul. I also am not a wimp. Tomorrow, after I slap the CLOSED sign in place, I am going to high tail it over to Otis Clanton’s and get this whoop-de-do opportunity signed, sealed, and delivered before he can change his mind.
Yea!
TERRY DOWLING
Scaring the Train
TERRY DOWLING IS one of Australia’s leading writers of the fantastic. He is the author of Rynosseros, Blue Tyson and Twilight Beach (his award-winning Tom Rynosseros saga), Wormwood, The Man Who Lost Red and co-editor (with Dr Van Ikin) of Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF and senior editor of The Essential Ellison.
His stories have appeared in the anthologies The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Terror Australis: The Best of Australian Horror and The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories, and in such magazines as Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Eidolon, Strange Plasma, Australian Short Stories, Aurealis and Omega Science Fiction.
A songwriter and musician (with more than eight years on ABC-TV’s Mr Squiggle & Friends), a communications instructor and genre reviewer for The Australian newspaper, Dowling has won a number of awards for his fiction, the most recent being the Aurealis Award for An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, a collection of linked horror stories from Aphelion Publications which concludes with the tale published here.
“I think of how stories form,” explains the author. “ ‘Scaring the Train’ began with the title in 1988 and a chilling realization six years later that had me working backwards to resolve the various opening lines in an appropriately disturbing fashion.” He gives other sources of inspiration as the William Stoneman cover for the May 1982 The Twilight Zone Magazine, the distinctive artwork of Paul Delvaux and Joseph Mugnaini, Ted Rand’s illustrations for The Ghost-Eye Tree by Bill Martin, Jr and John Archambault, plus a visit as a teenager to the Blue Mountains railway stations mentioned here and an unforgettable walk along the tracks well after midnight with a group of college friends.
All aboard now, for a train ride to terror . . .
Because for us, something might appear in the heart of the day that would not be the day, something in an atmosphere of light and limpidity that would represent the shiver of fear out of which the day came?
– Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation
I Portobello 1962
EVERY SUMMER DURING our childhood holidays at Portobello, Maximillian and I would spend an hour every third day scaring the train. Every third day meant twenty-one days before we’d duplicate a day, which seemed clever at the time, neither of us realizing that it made its own pattern.
It never took more than a few exhilarating moments, of course, the scaring itself, but the hour gave preparation time, let us prepare our chosen section of track, the particular sheltered stretch or cutting, never using the same one twice in a week unless that became part of the strategy.
It gave us time to avoid the local constabulary (and, naturally, the frightened drivers, firemen and concerned locals did get the police onto us, though never with any luck). When Constables Pike and Harlow came on their bicycles, or now and then with Sergeant Jeffers in the district’s single squad car, we were crouching down behind the long grass, peering through greenery, never seen, or were miles away with relatives and friends, secure in our alibis.
The scaring itself? It was anything from running to a spot on the track moments before the locomotive reached it, to doing an oh-shock-horror!, freeze-frame, hands up, wide-eyed terror reaction or a classy matador flourish before leaping aside. Twice Max did his damsel-in-distress routine, lying across the line; we even did up a chicken wire and papier-mâché boulder, though by then the engineers knew to call our bluff. With a scream of the steam whistle, the great engine plunged upon it, making us wish the boulder had been real.
We countered with the old dressed-up store dummy, its arm severed and painted with “blood”. The engineers barely flinched. They had our measure right enough, had made their private decisions and adjustments. They would have driven through a massacre on that stretch of track after what we’d given them over four golden summers.
The whole thing entered a new phase when Sergeant Jeffers, rather belatedly, put two and two together and realized – at probably the same time we did – that since these “reckless and dangerous pranks” (as he had the Portobello Weekly Mail put it in one front-page write-up) happened only in the summer, it might well be the kids of families visiting from out of town.
Max and I weren’t to be outdone. We made sure of our alibis, both with adults and the kids we hung out with, and took to using disguises more and more often – jumpers and caps, even wigs bought in home-town thrift shops and theatrical supply stores, taking pains to throw suspicion on local kids we didn’t especially like.
Planning and timing became perfect; each scaring was a precisely calculated masterpiece and more exciting than ever. Of necessity, we had grown to be masters of those rare things in 13-year-old boys, restraint and patience. One evening, while I was conspicuously at a local party with my folks, Max put the first empty four-gallon drum on the left side of Hank’s Creek cutting. It took him twenty-six minutes, there and back, riding without a light. Two nights later, I added the one on the right and linked them with multiple strands of heavy-gauge fishing-lin
e souvenired from fifteen-year-old, ace-bully Rusty Cramer’s fishing basket (an exploit in itself!).
Max and I didn’t need to be there for the outcome but snatched thirty minutes from a Sunday family picnic to pedal furiously to Manton’s Hill, there used our borrowed binoculars (birdwatching, right?) to observe the 10.58 from Madrigal plunging over the Hank’s Creek bridge, the drums crashing down, bouncing off to the side – kaboom! kaboom! – clear as the bells of doom in the morning quiet (so we imagined; the train’s own sound swallowed it all, perhaps even for the engineers, though they would have seen the drums plunging down; possibly did hear them pounding against the sides of the cab).
Max turned to me when it was over, eyes flashing. “We could’ve derailed that train if we’d wanted to, y’know, Paul.”
“Reckon. Or blown up the bridge. Stolen dynamite.”
“I’m serious.”
He was, but on that hot quiet morning the talk went no further, for Max had his binoculars turned on the cutting.
“Hey, look!”
I raised Dad’s glasses, swept my gaze in two big coins of dislocation suddenly made one across trees, fences and sunny fields till I found the place, saw the solitary figure standing by the tracks at this end of the cutting. Almost a mile away, no clear features, but someone in a thoughtful stance it seemed, not Jeffers or Pike or Harlow, no one I knew, just some stranger drawn by Maximillian Sefti and Paul Danner’s double booms of fate. He seemed to be looking down at the tracks, perhaps at the crumpled, dented drums and their trailing, incriminating lengths of line.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“No idea,” Max said. But then, though it was a mile or more, though there were trees and fields and we were down on our bellies out of sight in the tree-shadow, our bikes back in the long grass so nothing glinted, nothing, the man looked directly out at us, directly at us. We couldn’t see the smile or the nod though we imagined them well enough, but we both gasped when he raised an arm and waved, acknowledging us, someone, anyone who might be watching across all that bright sunny air.
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