EQMM, September-October 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "He lives alone, does he?” Quincannon asked.

  "Yep. Keeps to himself, don't have much truck with any of the rest of us. Only been living in Carville a couple of weeks or so. Squatter, unless I miss my guess. I can spot ‘em, the ones just move in all of a sudden and take over a car without paying for the privilege."

  "What does he do for a living?"

  "He never said. Mr. Meeker's boy Jared says he's a construction worker, but seems to me he don't go nowhere much during the day."

  "Jared Meeker knows him, then."

  "To pass the time of day with. Seen ‘em doing that once."

  Quincannon finished his coffee, declined a refill, and went out to the rented buggy. The branch lane that led to the Meekers’ home was two hundred rods further south. The buggy alternately bounced and slogged along the sandy surface; once, a hidden rut lifted Quincannon off the seat and made him pull back hard enough on the reins to nearly jerk the horse's head through the martingale loops. Neither this nor the cold wind nor the bleakness dampened his spirits. A few minor discomforts were a small price to pay for a fifteen-hundred-dollar fee.

  The lane led in among the dunes, dipped down into a hollow where it split into two forks. A driftwood sign mounted on a pole there bore the name Meeker and an arrow pointing along the right fork. In that direction Quinncannon could see a group of four traction cars, two set end to end, the others at a right and a left angle at the far ends, like an arrangement of dominoes; mist-diffused lamplight showed faintly behind curtained windows in one of the two middle cars. A ways down the left fork stood a single car canted slightly against the dune behind it; some distance beyond, eight or nine abandoned cars were jumbled together among the sand hills as if tossed there by a giant's hand. Thick tendrils of fog gave them an insubstantial, almost ethereal aspect, one that would be enhanced by darkness and imagination. A ghost's lair, indeed.

  Quincannon left the buggy at the intersection of the two lanes, ground-hitched the horse, and trudged through drifted sand along the left-hand fork. No lights or chimney smoke showed in the single canted car; he bypassed it and continued on to the jumble.

  From the outside there was nothing about any of the abandoned cars to catch the eye. They were or had been painted in various colors, according to which transit company owned them; half had been there long enough for the colors to fade entirely and the metal and glass surfaces to become sand-pitted. Three had belonged to the Market Street Railway, four to the Ferries and Cliff House Railway, the remaining two to the California Street Cable Railroad.

  Quincannon wound his way among them. No one had prowled here recently; the sand was wind-scoured to a smoothness that bore no footprints or anything other than tufts of saw grass. He trudged back to the nearest one, stepped up and inside. All the seats had been removed; he had a brief and unpleasant feeling of standing inside a giant steel coffin. There was nothing in it other than a dusting of sand that had blown in through the open doorway. And no signs that anyone had been inside since it was discarded.

  He investigated a second car, then a third. These, too, had had their seats removed. Only the second contained anything to take his attention: faint scuff marks in the drifted sand, the fresh claw-like scratches on walls and floor that Barnaby Meeker had alluded to. The source and meaning of the scratches defied accurate guessing. He stepped outside, with the intention of entering the next nearest car—and a man appeared suddenly from around the end of the car, stood glowering with his hands fisted on his hips and his legs spread, and demanded, “Who are you? What're you doing here?"

  Without replying, Quincannon took his measure. He was some shy of forty, heavily black-whiskered but bald on top, with thick arms and hips broader than his shoulders. The staring eyes were the size and color of blackberries. The man seemed edgy as well as suspicious. None of this was as arresting as the fact that he wore a holstered revolver, the tail of his coat swept back and his hand on the weapon's gnarled butt—a large-bore Bisley Colt, judging from its size.

  "Mister, I asked you who you are and what you're doing here."

  "Having a look around. My name's Quincannon. And you, I expect, would be Artemus Crabb."

  "How the devil d'you know my name?"

  "Barnaby Meeker mentioned it."

  "Is that so? Meeker a friend of yours?"

  "Business acquaintance."

  "That still don't explain what you're doing poking around these cars."

  "I'm thinking of buying some of them,” Quincannon lied glibly.

  "Why?"

  "For the same reason you and Meeker bought yours. You did buy yours, didn't you?"

  Crabb's glower deepened. “Who says I didn't?"

  "A curious question, my friend, that's all."

  "You're damn curious about everything, ain't you?"

  "It's my nature.” Quincannon smiled. “Ghosts and goblins,” he said then.

  "What?” Crabb jerked as if he'd been struck. The hand hovering above the holstered Bisley shook visibly. “What're you talking about?"

  "Why, I understand these cars are haunted. Fascinating, if true."

  "It ain't true! Ain't no such things as ghosts!"

  "It has been my experience that there are. Oh, the tales I could tell you of the spirit world and its evil manifestations—"

  "I don't want to hear it, I don't believe none of it,” Crabb said, but it was plain that he did. And that the prospect frightened him as much as Caleb Potter had indicated.

  "Mr. Meeker tells me you've seen the apparition that inhabits these cars. Dancing lights, a glowing shape that races across the tops of dunes and then vanishes, poof, without a trace—"

  "I ain't gonna talk about that. No, I ain't!"

  "I find the subject intriguing,” Quincannon said. “As a matter of fact, I'm hoping there is a ghost and that it occupies the very car I purchase. I'd welcome the company on a dark winter's night."

  Crabb said something that sounded like “Gah!” and turned abruptly and scurried away. At the end of the car he stopped, looked over his shoulder, and called out, “You know what's good for you, you stay away from those cars. Stay away!” Then he was gone into the swirling mist.

  Quincannon finished his canvass of the remaining cars. Two others showed faint footprints and scratch marks on the walls and floor. In the second, his keen eye picked out something half-buried in drifted sand in one corner—a small but heavy piece of metal with a tiny ring soldered onto one end. After several turns in his hand, he identified it as a fisherman's lead sinker. He studied it for a few seconds longer, then pocketed it and left the car.

  Before he quit the area, he climbed up to the top of the nearby line of dunes. Thick salt grass and stubby patches of gorse grew on the crests; the sand there was windswept to a tawny smoothness, without marks of any kind except for the imprint of Quincannon's boots as he moved along. From this vantage point, through intermittent tears in the curtain of fog, he could see the whitecapped ocean in the distance, the long beach and line of surf that edged it. The distant roar of breakers was muted by the wind's wail.

  He walked for some ways, examining the surfaces. There was nothing up here to take his eye. No prints, no mashing of the grass or gorse to indicate passage. The steep slopes that fell away on both sides were likewise smoothly scoured, barren but for occasional bits of driftwood.

  Wryly he thought: Whither thou, ghost?

  * * * *

  The Meeker property was larger than it had seemed from a distance. In addition to the domino-styled home, there was a covered woodpile, a cistern, a small corral and lean-to built with its back to the wind, and on the other side of the cars, a dune-protected privy. As Quincannon drove the buggy up the lane, Barnaby Meeker came out to stand waiting on a railed and slanted walkway fronting the two center cars. A thin woman wearing a woolen cape soon joined him. Meeker gestured to the lean-to and corral, where an unhitched wagon and a roan horse were picketed and where there was room for the rented buggy and livery plug. Quincannon debouc
hed there, decided he would deal with the animal's needs later, and went to join Meeker and the woman.

  She was his wife, it developed, given name Lucretia. Her handshake was as firm as a man's, her eyes bird-bright. She might have been comely in her early years, but she seemed to have pinched and soured as she aged; her expression was that of someone who had eaten one too many sacks full of lemons. And she was not pleased to meet him.

  "A detective, of all things,” she said. “My husband can be foolishly impulsive at times."

  "Now, Lucretia,” Meeker said mildly.

  "Don't deny it. What can a detective do to lay a ghost?"

  "If it is a ghost, nothing. If it isn't, Mr. Quincannon will find out what's behind these ... will-o'-the-wisps."

  "Will-o'-the-wisps? On foggy nights with no moon?"

  "Whatever they are, then."

  "Your neighbor believes it's a genuine ghost,” Quincannon said. “If you'll pardon the expression, the incidents have him badly spooked."

  "You saw Mr. Crabb, did you?” Meeker asked.

  "I did. Unfriendly gent. He warned me away from the abandoned cars."

  "Good-for-nothing, if you ask me,” Mrs. Meeker said.

  "Indeed? What makes you think so?"

  "He's a squatter, for one thing. And he has no profession, for another. No licit profession, I'll warrant."

  "According to the counterman at the coffee saloon, Crabb told your son he was in construction work."

  "Jared, you mean?” Her mouth turned even more lemony. “Another good-for-nothing."

  "Now, Lucretia,” Meeker said, not so mildly.

  "Well? Do you deny it?"

  "I do. He's yet to prove himself, that's all."

  "Never will, I say."

  The Meekers glared at each other. Mrs. Meeker was victorious in the game of staredown—as she would be most times they played it, Quincannon thought. Her husband averted his gaze and said to Quincannon, “Come inside. It's nippy out here."

  The end walls where the two cars were joined had been removed to create one long room. It seemed too warm after the outside chill; a potbellied stove glowed cherry red in one corner. Quincannon accepted the offer of a cup of tea and Mrs. Meeker went to pour it from a pot resting atop the stove. He managed to maintain a poker face as he surveyed the surroundings. The car was a combination parlor, kitchen, and dining area, but it was like none other he had ever seen or hoped to see. The contents were an amazing hodgepodge of heavy Victorian furniture and decorations that included numerous framed photographs and daguerreotypes, gewgaws, gimcracks, and what was surely flotsam that had been collected from the beaches—pieces of driftwood, odd-shaped bottles, glass fisherman's floats, a section of draped netting like a moldy spiderweb. The effect was more that of a junkshop display than a comfortable habitation.

  "Your son isn't home, I take it,” Quincannon said. The tufted red-velvet chair he perched on was as uncomfortable as it looked.

  "Thomas is a sergeant in the United States Army,” Mrs. Meeker said. “Stationed at Fort Huachuca. We haven't seen him in two years, to my sorrow."

  Meeker said, “Thomas is our eldest son,” and added wryly, “my wife's favorite, as you may have surmised."

  "And why shouldn't he be? He's the only one who has amounted or will amount to anything."

  "Now, Lucretia,” with bite in the words this time. “The way you malign Jared is annoying, to say the least. He may be a bit wild and irresponsible, but he—"

  "A bit wild and irresponsible? A bit!” The teacup rattled in its saucer, spilling hot liquid that Quincannon barely managed to avoid, as she handed him the crockery. “He's a young scamp and you know it—worse today than when he was a kiting youngster. Up and quit the only decent job he ever held just last week, after less than a month's honest labor."

  Quincannon cocked a questioning eyebrow at his employer.

  "It was a clerk's job downtown, and poorly paid,” Meeker said. “He's a bright lad, he'll find a more suitable position one day..."

  "You won't live long enough to see the day and neither will I."

  "That's enough, Lucretia."

  "Oh, go dance up a rope,” she said, surprising Quincannon if not her husband.

  Meeker performed his puffing-toad imitation and started to say something, but at that moment the door burst open and the wind blew in a young man swathed in a greatcoat, scarf, gloves, and stocking cap. His lean, clean-shaven face—weak-chinned and thin-lipped—was ruddy from the cold. Jared Meeker, in the flesh.

  His parents might have been two sticks of furniture for all he had to say to them. It wasn't until he opened his coat and yanked off his cap, revealing a mop of ginger-colored hair, that he noticed Quincannon. “Well, a visitor. And a stranger at that."

  "His name is John Quincannon,” Mrs. Meeker said. “He's a detective."

  The last word caused Jared's eyes to narrow. “A detective? What kind of detective? What's he doing here?"

  "Your father hired him to investigate the supernatural. Of all things."

  "...Ah. The ghost, you mean?"

  "Whatever it is we've seen these past two nights, yes,” Meeker said.

  Jared relaxed into an indolent posture as he shed his coat. Then he laughed, a thin barking sound like that of an adenoidal seal. “A detective to investigate a ghost. Hah! That's rich, that is."

  Quincannon said, “I have had stranger cases, and brought them to a satisfactory conclusion. Are you a believer or a sceptic, lad?"

  "I believe what I see with my own eyes. What about you?"

  "I have an open mind on the subject,” he lied.

  "Well, it's a real ghost, all right. Likely of a man who died in one of the cars, or in a railway accident. Couldn't be anything else, no matter what anybody thinks. You may well see it for yourself, if you're planning to spend the night."

  "I am."

  "If it does reappear, you'll be a believer too."

  "We'll see about that."

  Jared grinned and loosed another bark. “A detective. Hah!"

  * * * *

  Alone in the parlor, Quincannon smoked his stubby briar and waited for the hands on his stemwinder to point to 11:30. The Meekers had all retired to their respective bedrooms in the end cars some time earlier, at his insistence; he preferred to maintain a solitary vigil. He also preferred silence to desultory and pointless conversation. There were ominous rumblings in his digestive tract as well, the result of the bland chicken dish and boiled potatoes and carrots Mrs. Meeker had seen fit to serve for supper.

  The car was no longer overheated, now that the fire in the stove had banked. Cooling, the stove metal made little pinging sounds that punctuated the snicking of wind-flung sand against the car's windows and sides. As 11:30 approached, he checked the loads in his Navy Colt. Not that he expected to need the weapon—the Carville ghost seemed to have no malevolent intention, and no one had ever succeeded in plugging a spook, in any case—but he had learned long ago to exercise caution in all situations.

  It was time. He holstered the Navy, donned his greatcoat, cap, scarf, and gloves, and slipped out into the night.

  Icy, fog-wet wind and blowing sand buffeted him as he came down off the walkway. The night was not quite black as tar but close to it; he could barely make out the shed and corral nearby. The distant jumble of abandoned cars was invisible except for brief rents in the wall of fog, and then discernible only as faint lumpish shapes among the dunes.

  He slogged into the shelter of the lean-to. The two horses, both blanketed against the cold, stirred, and one nickered softly at his passage. He removed his dark lantern from beneath the seat of the rented buggy, lighted it, closed the shutter, and then went to the side wall and probed along it until he found a gap between boards. Another brief tear in the fog permitted him to fix the proper angle for viewing the cars. He dragged over two bales of hay, piled one atop the other, and perched on the makeshift seat. By bending forward slightly, his eyes were on a level with the gap. He settled down to w
ait.

  He had learned patience in situations such as this by ruminating on matters of business and pleasure. Sabina occupied his mind for a considerable time. Then he sighed and shifted his thoughts to the other cases currently under investigation. The missing Devereaux heiress should be easy enough to locate; like as not she had gone off for an extended dalliance with one of her swains, since no ransom demand had been received by the family. Sabina needed no help from him in yaffling the pickpocket at the Chutes amusement park. The Wells Fargo robbery was more his type of case, and a challenging one since city bluecoats and rival detective agencies were also on the hunt for the two masked bandits who had escaped with twenty-five thousand in cash. He had to admit that he'd made little enough headway over the past two weeks, but the same was true of his competitors for the reward Wells Fargo was offering—

  Light. A faint shimmery glow through the mist.

  He strained forward, squinting closer to the gap. Gray-black for a few seconds, then the fog lifted somewhat and he spied the eerie radiance again, shifting about behind the windows in one of the cars. More than just a glow—an ectoplasmic shape, an unearthly face.

  He snatched up the dark lantern, hopped off the hay bales, and stepped out around the corner of the lean-to. The thing continued to drift around inside the car, held stationary for a few seconds, moved again. Quincannon was moving himself by then, over into the shadow of the cistern. Beyond there, flattish sand fields stretched for thirty or forty rods on three sides; there was no cover anywhere on its expanse, no quick way to get to the cars, even by circling around, without crossing open space.

  He waited for a thickening of the fog, then stepped out in a low crouch and ran toward the car. He was halfway there when the radiance vanished.

  Immediately he veered to his right, toward the line of dunes behind the cars. But he couldn't generate any speed; in the wet darkness and loose sand he felt as if he were churning heavy-legged through a dream. There were no sounds except for the wind, the distant pound of surf, the rasp of his breathing.