The Deep Hours of the Night

by Jonathan Schlosser

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “The other side of what?”

  Alan just shrugged, but his gaze was locked on the feather. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe the other side of the air.”

  6

  He was off and running before I could get up. He held the feather in his right hand, clutching it even though it was cutting him, and it looked like a sword. Or a butcher’s knife. He yelled something over his shoulder about needing to find it, needing to find out if there were more, and he was running toward the other boxcar. The one with its door off and sitting in a little groove of sand.

  I got up and went after him, falling once in the loose sand before I could get my feet under me, Rachel was running too, running hard, her hair blowing back behind her. I’d always thought her hair was her best feature, so smooth and brown and perfect, but now it looked like a black spider web wrapped around her scalp. It was tangled and knotted and she didn’t even seem to notice. I ran after her, both because the train was calling me forward and because I didn’t want her to go in alone.

  And Alan, it seemed, was lost to us.

  I could lie and say I knew what was coming. That I was running to protect them because I had my head straight on my shoulders. That I’d read all the signs and figured it out and taken it upon myself to save us. But that wouldn’t get me anywhere because what’s done is done and the past is the past and the dead are dead. So I’ll just say I ran, with my gun on my hip. I ran.

  Alan reached the boxcar ahead of us. One moment he was on the sand, skidding to a stop and digging his own grooves in the desert. Then he was leaping. He’d always been nimble, far more so than I was, and strong. One leap was all it took, and he balanced on the edge for a moment. I heard someone yelling his name, and I thought it was Rachel until I realized it was me. Then he plunged inside and was gone.

  I got there after him, yelling into the dark void. I knew he could hear me, but I wouldn’t hear him even if he was yelling back. Rachel stood beside me, silent, just staring into the boxcar. It was like the last time, only somehow worse. I could see it in her eyes.

  “Rache,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything, but her gun was in her hand. That was enough. I drew my own, then grabbed the edge of the car and hoisted myself up. The metal was solid and thick even after the crash. And this car, unlike so many, wasn’t burning.

  It took a moment. Again, I could lie and say I went right in after him, but I didn’t. I stood there, working up the nerve. I’d jumped from cliffs before, into the ocean, but that had been easier to work myself up for. Even with the gun in hand – what was usually a comforting, reassuring weight – I couldn’t do it.

  Then I looked at Rachel. She wasn’t coming up, couldn’t bring herself to it. Even with the inherent draw of the train, she couldn’t. But she needed someone to, and I was the only one left.

  So I went in.

  7

  It was dark like tar and midnight and moonless desert. It was so dark, and the floor was cold. It wasn’t slanted so badly that I fell, this time, but I staggered forward and it was an effort to keep my feet. I thought about calling out, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. And breath was too hard to get in the car to waste.

  That’s when I heard it, the first noise I’d heard in the car and the only one I would. It was the rustle of feathers rubbing against each other. It was the scrape of a claw against the floor. It was the click of a beak, a huge beak, coming together. Then apart. Then together.

  Eating.

  I tried to move and couldn’t. The skeletal dog was loose and ravaging my gut, but I couldn’t take even a step. I managed to bring the gun up, shaking, and aimed it forward. I couldn’t see a thing, like shooting in a vat of ink, but I aimed all the same. Because sometimes it’s all you can do.

  The scraping came again. Oh so close. It was like a nail being dragged across stone. Like a match trying to strike and failing. Close, it was so close. I heard the feathers rustle again, not two feet from my face, and I felt my bladder let go. The warmth ran down my legs, but I hardly noticed.

  Then it opened, right in front of me. Not off to the side, not in the back of the car, but right in front of me and on level with my head. It was that tall, and when that red eye blinked open, the pupil a huge dot of black the size of my fist, I was staring straight into it.

  I screamed. There was no sound in here – maybe to lull these things to sleep, the same as the draw, the pull, was there to make them stay with the train – but I screamed. The gun was still up and must have been just about in the thing's ribs, and I pulled the trigger. All other light was banished from here, but the gunfire was harsh enough to cut the blackness. And in the flash, I saw it.

  It was a raven, but it was a child. It had that rounded body and the soft features of a young bird, and the wide eye was as curious as it was infuriated. It saw me and wondered what I was and hated me all at once. In that moment of flash, its beak opened and closed once, and I saw it swallow a string of intestines like it was drawing a worm from the earth. A string of blood-soaked guts that had once been inside Alan but were now being sucked from him.

  I fell backward as the gun went off. The bird shrieked, and I could hear that too, even though I couldn’t hear the gunfire. Because this was their world, this train that had come from the other side of something, maybe slipped through the wall accidentally and crashed in the desert. And in their world, they could still be heard. The shriek was huge, coming from everywhere, and I knew I hadn’t killed it. No, I’d only angered it. And, of course, let it know exactly where I was.

  My head slammed into the flooring, and my vision flashed white. I fired again, frantically pushing myself backward but finding no grip. The floor was like ice and it was less forgiving than the ice that had killed my father. I scraped twice, then hit something. Part of me, the rational part, realized it was the bird's claw. The other part didn’t care and just thrust backward.

  That claw came up as I slid, then hammered back down. I felt pain blossom in the side of my leg and I knew I was caught. The talon was through my thigh and now it would pin me and eat me when it was done with Alan. But I was still sliding. I moved the leg, pushed, and found it was just grazed along the edge. I fired the gun again, and the thing's scream alone could have killed me. Then I was tumbling back over the far edge, just like I’d done the first time, and I landed hard in the sand.

  Rachel was saying something, a lot of things, but I couldn’t hear her. I just got up on my hands and knees and crawled. All I could see was Alan’s body, the red rope stretching up from it, and I didn’t want that to be me. The pull of the train was gone now, stripped away by terror. Rachel was next to me, crying under her tangled hair, and I grabbed her arm. Got to my feet. Started to run.

  8

  Two things have stayed with me through the years. The first is that the bird was young, only a baby, not even close to full-grown. The second is what Alan said outside of the first boxcar. The way he’d stood under that wide open sky and said that the rest of the birds, the ones gone from the boxcars, were still out there.

  To Bury the Dead

  1

  Sammy’s wife died giving birth to his second child, who also died. It seemed like a tremendous waste to Sammy, and if he’d lived near enough to town he may have gone to church and asked what end it served in the grand scheme, the big picture, the higher purpose. But as it was, twenty-nine miles out and with no faith that his old truck would make it, he settled for staying home and finishing off the bottle of scotch that he’d started the night before. That had always worked just as well as religion, at least in Sammy’s experience.

  Northern Michigan was cold in November, with plenty of frost on the ground and a bitter taste in the air that was like iron and mint mixed together. They’d even had a bout of heavy snowfall two weeks ago, which had slowly melted until the ground was again bare and brown and dead. On the whole, Sammy preferred the snow. He could feel it coming again, though, building in the atmosphere like a
n electrical charge getting ready to go off. Any day now, Sammy thought as he put his wife’s body in the back shed, where it was cold enough to keep. He laid the body of the child next to her, both of them on a small pallet of hay. The child was wrinkled and gray and its face was scrunched up; the forty seconds of life it had endued had not been to its liking.

  His wife, Sammy couldn’t bring himself to look at. He covered them both in an old sheet and closed the shed. There was no lock, but that hardly mattered. There were no neighbors, either.

  Sammy sat at his kitchen table, staring out into the forest. It was thick after the small yard he’d cleared for them, a wall of trees that spread their arms together and interwove their needles. He’d made a living for the past five years selling logs to the sawmill in town, and he knew the forest as well as he knew the inside of the three-room cabin. That, he’d made from logs he’d cut himself. His wife had lied and said she’d loved it, and then lied and said she loved him. That was back when she could talk, before she was dead.

  He’d brewed a pot of coffee on the stove, and Sammy drank slowly as he smoked a cigarette and thought. He hadn’t smoked in seventeen years, but here he was now. His wife had smoked as long as he’d known her, and this cigarette had been hers. He’d stolen it, but he doubted anyone would catch him, just like they wouldn’t find the bodies.

  The problem was, he didn’t know what to do with them. He’d grown up a Catholic, back in North Dakota and another life, and he figured maybe something religious needed to happen. Why it needed to happen now that they were dead, when it was too late, was beyond him. But the feeling was there, like a scratch on the roof of his mouth or a tickle so far in his ear that he couldn’t reach it. There was something he had to do, some rite or ceremony, and he hadn’t the slightest clue what it was.

  From the shadows in the far corner, Buckner drifted up to the table and called softly. Buckner was a mutt of a cat, all black and brown and white and generally unattractive. But Sammy figured that suited him well enough. He picked Buckner up and set him on the table with a little grunt.

  Buckner mewed again, sniffed the steaming coffee, and looked up at Sammy. The way his head tilted to the side made him look almost comical with curiosity.

  Sammy laughed and scratched Buckner’s neck. “You’re hungry, hey?”

  Buckner arched his back and said nothing.

  “Well, you don’t want that,” Sammy said, looking at the coffee. He walked over to the fridge, pulled out the half-gallon of milk (smelling it to make sure it hadn’t turned) and poured some into a dish. Buckner heard all this, watching from the tabletop with rapt attention. Sammy carried it back over and resumed his seat; Buckner began lapping the milk up with a casual pleasure, as if two of the house’s three inhabitants hadn’t died hours before.

  “I just can’t bury them yet,” Sammy said. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to do it all wrong. And I’m sure I’ll remember what I’m supposed to do in time, you know? Ain’t that always how it works?”

  Buckner, who knew how to get milk, get his back scratched, and get some sleep in the dark parts of the cabin, just lapped away.

  “S’pose I’ll have to drive into town tomorrow,” Sammy said, glancing at the truck. It was huge and red and mostly rust by now, and he didn’t like the looks of it. One tire was so flat it looked like it was resting on the rim. With the road just a two-track for half the distance, shot through with rocks and potholes, that promised to give him anything but a smooth ride.

  But there was a church in town. There was a church and there was a priest, a man named Father Pearson. Sammy had met him before and hadn’t liked him much. He tended to talk down the end of his nose, when his finger wasn’t lodged in it, and he smelled like rotten vegetables. Sammy knew those were rather superficial reasons to dislike someone, especially a man of the cloth, but they were his reasons all the same.

  Sammy sighed. Likeable or not, Pearson would be able to tell him what to do to bury his wife. And, hopefully, the priest could also tell him if he was going to go to hell for being so happy that his wife was dead.

  2

  Night fell, and Sammy didn’t move. He just sat at the table, smoking the entire pack of cigarettes, drinking the entire pot of coffee (chasing down that scotch), and feeding the entire bottle of milk to Buckner. From time to time the cat would become restless and pace in little circles around the top of the table, but mostly he just lay where Sammy could gently scratch his neck or rub his back, and together they thought.

  Sammy had grown up in North Dakota, on a farm, and hated it. He’d moved to Michigan when his parents died, at the age of forty-two, and that was when he’d met Karen. She’d worked downtown, at the hardware store, and their first exchange had been when he’d asked her where the sandpaper was. It had been in the back aisle, low down and still packed in the thin cardboard boxes that it came in, and she’d walked him over there. They’d selected 100 grit as what he needed, and Sammy had left the store.

  That had been the first time, and it hadn’t hit him right off. It hadn’t been love at first sight, there had been no thunder of trumpets, and there had certainly been no beam of light falling golden on her hair and illuminating her face and the red apron with the word ACE across the front. No, there had just been the casual suggestion of something. A bit of attraction, and bit of companionship, a bit of that vibe that seems to color the air but which you can’t quite put your finger on. He’d felt it, and he’d wondered.

  Two days later, he’d gone back for a screwdriver he didn’t need. Then a saw which he already owned. Then a shovel that he really did need, to fix up some of the worst potholes in front of his house. As he was working with it later, the new grip smooth against the calluses on his hands, he knew. He filled in yet another pothole in a sea of them, and he knew he wanted to marry Karen.

  The reason was, her father had money. She’d mentioned it after he bought the saw, and he’d managed to bring it up again while they were admiring the rack of shovels and deciding which one would most appropriately suit his needs. It had felt forced to him, because he knew it was, but Karen had taken it in stride and run with it. Explained to him about the money that was rightfully hers, that her father had set up for her. Sort of an inheritance before he died. It was all hers and it was all stocked away and untouched.

  Sammy had asked her why she didn’t use it. There was enough to live on, easily, without having to work at the hardware. It had seemed to Sammy like a great idea, but Karen had shot it down. She’d said something about not wanting to feel like the prodigal son (daughter, he’d joked, and she’d laughed). Something about not wanting to have so much and have done nothing for it, because she was afraid she’d waste it, squander it, and have to come crawling back. Sammy had never paid much attention to his religion (unless one counted the scotch, to which he paid quite a lot of attention indeed), so most of it was wasted on him. But he got the basic idea down just fine, and that settled it.

  They went out for coffee twice, then they went out for dinner. Then they went back to Karen’s place and Karen got pregnant.

  Sammy smiled and poked Buckner in the ribs. The cat rolled over lazily, full of milk, and eyed him like he was an annoying child that couldn’t quite be gotten rid of.

  “Wasn’t an accident that time, was it?” Sammy asked. Buckner put his head back down on his paws and closed his eyes. “Wasn’t an accident even though that’s what she thought. That’s what I wanted her to think. But oh no. I knew the whole time.”

  He hadn’t been sure it would work, much less on the first try, but Luck had smiled and things had fallen into place. Things that had made Karen sit on the floor, her back against the wall, and sob until her eyes were bloodshot and her throat was raw. Things that had made her angry and scared and frustrated. Things that had made Sammy smile in the night, as he sat at home and drank and waited for her to make up her mind. When she finally had, they’d been married.

  It had been a small ceremony, one worth forgetting, and the child ha
d been stillborn.

  3

  Sammy walked out back to check on the bodies. They were still on the hay, still in the shack, and still dead. The light had gone and he only had a kerosene lantern, but it was enough. The child was small and gray and wrinkled. His wife was small and pinkish-white and smooth. The sweat that had coated her face and darkened the neck of her dress had dried. He’d closed her eyes and she looked peaceful. He wondered how long until she was as gray as the child and didn’t think it would be that long after all. The blood had to be pooling by now, draining toward the low areas. The ankles, maybe. Soon they would be full and bloated, stretching the skin so that it would pop if you poked it. Pop like a blister or a pimple or a water balloon.

  They’d died here. His second child and his wife, who had been trying to have the second child. Trying to have one that was alive. And, for a brief moment, she had. But by then, of course, she had been dead. It was all a tremendous waste, but it could be turned into something good. He grinned and thought about that and left her in the shed.

  4

  The first child had served its purpose, Sammy saw. Looking back it all had a reason, a place where it fit. The first one had died so that his wife wouldn’t trust the doctors and the hospital. It had died so that she’d have a fear of the sterile white halls and the smell of disinfectant. That way, when she got pregnant again these years later, she would tell Sammy that she wanted to have it at the cabin. Just the two of them. She’d read up on how it worked, how to do it, and was confident they could pull it off.

  Sammy had agreed. By now he knew all about how the inheritance worked, and he’d weaseled his way closer to her father every chance he got. He even liked to think of it that way, as weaseling. It made him feel powerful, like he had a plan that no one knew about that he was carrying out to perfection. Which, of course, he did. And he was.