by JL Bryan
“Get off my line,” he said. His voice was powerfully clear for an auditory apparition. Usually they’re incoherent, or low and scratchy like McCoyle’s three words had been. His voice was almost human.
“You can let it go, Kroeller,” I said. “Everybody knows the truth. You killed everyone. You were the mastermind of the robbery. You wanted revenge against McCoyle, because he escaped your custody on the way to Chicago, humiliated you and got you fired. Why not make some cash along the way? You could pin the crime on the man who wrecked your career, then kill him and his whole gang to cover it up.”
Kroeller’s small, angry eyes glared at me from their sooty pockets of flab.
“Kroeller, there’ s one thing I don’t understand. Why kill so many innocent people? Just a little added fun?”
His lips peeled back, revealing crooked yellow teeth.
Then he punched me in the nose.
It was a classic straight punch, his body squaring up in a practiced boxing stance. The crack of the impact echoed in my skull, and my head rocked back on my neck.
I dropped my head forward to face him again, and blood ran from left nostril into my lips. I stared at him in a confused haze of pain. The apparition was blurry—no way to tell whether he was losing focus or I was.
“Really?” I managed to say. “You just punch a girl like that? No preamble, no—”
He hit me again, and I felt blood gush from my other nostril as I staggered backward. My boot heel caught on a railroad tie, sending me off-balance. I stumbled and tried not to fall, while Kroeller advanced on me through the smoke.
“Quit.” That low, striking-match voice was beyond creepy, but right now I welcomed McCoyle’s ghost like a guardian angel. Okay, I still would have preferred an actual guardian angel, but I don’t have the phone numbers of any.
Shadows emerged from the smoke, surrounding Kroeller—three men with their dark hat brims pulled low, pale rags hiding their faces. I could almost hear a steel guitar lick in the background as the bandits arrived.
Thick, acrid smoke made me close my eyes, but I heard the muttering, and then the shouting.
It occurred to me that right next to this fight was not the ideal place to stand, so I hurried off the tracks and went to join Stacey by the stamper. The smoke grew thinner as I walked away from the train, but I was coughing pretty badly. It felt like I was breathing in the rancid dark fumes of a tire fire.
“What happened?” Stacey touched my face, looking at the twin streams of blood from my nose.
“I sneezed too hard,” I said.
“Look.” She pointed at the train cars, which I hadn’t been able to see behind the smoking, burning locomotive.
Among the shreds and hulls of the damaged cars, illuminated by our array of red lights, I could see pale shapes. I thought I recognized Maggie, and Sophia, too, in a blurry white dress and hat. Maggie had switched off her lantern. She didn’t need it now that the train had, at last, stopped and allowed them to board. I could no longer see Kroeller or the three robbers anywhere.
“It would be pretty convenient if the train pulled away now,” I said.
“Let’s do it.” Stacey threw the switches on her remote controls, and all the red floodlights died. We could still see by the light of the greasy fires that burned here and there on the locomotive, and also by the red glow from its partially ruptured coal-car, where some of the stored coal was smoldering.
I pointed a tactical flashlight at the locomotive cab. A small gel on the lens turned the white light into a cool, glowing green beam. I moved it up and down in a vertical line, the signal for “go.”
The train did not go.
“Come on, Dumont,” I muttered, waving the light more frantically at the cab. “Come on.”
The train led out a metallic shudder and lurched as the brakes released.
“Yes,” I whispered, urging him on. “Yes, yes....”
The train shrieked out a loud, piercing whistle as it began to roll forward, a little faster than honey dripping from a cold jar. I winced. I would’ve preferred if the engineer hadn’t gone out of his way to alert Kroeller that the train was moving again.
I radioed Michael and told him to proceed.
Stacey and I watched the train inch forward, very gradually gaining speed, smoke drifting out all around it. All the pale apparitions who’d boarded seemed to stir in response to the movement.
The stamper let out its unmistakable pneumatic hiss, followed by the thunk of the trap lid slamming into place. Something had tripped the automatic sensors.
“What the hay? We didn’t even light that yet,” Stacey said, stepping over to inspect it.
“Check the others,” I said. I looked into one of the three open cylindrical traps standing in a row near the stamper. The sensors on the inside indicated that the temperature was ten degrees lower than the ambient outdoor temperature, and the EMF meter was spiking between four and five milligaus.
Even without the candles lit to lure the ghosts, something had found its way into the trap and was currently wallowing in the loose leaves of old money piled at the bottom. If this trap had been loaded into a stamper, it would have closed automatically, too.
I slammed the lid in place by hand and smacked it with my fist a few times, making sure it was sealed tight. Stacey was doing the same thing next to me.
We both looked into the single remaining trap. Forty-eight degrees, the same as the temperature outside it, at least since the arrival of the train had burned away some of the deep freeze caused by the presence of so many ghosts. No electromagnetic activity.
“Three out of four ain’t bad,” Stacey said.
“It depends on which three we caught,”
“Maybe the brothers are sharing a trap?”
“I don’t think so.” I glanced up at the tracks and immediately grabbed Stacey’s arm, probably digging a little too hard with my fingers. “Look,” I whispered.
The rusty, smoking skeleton of the train chugged away down the tunnel, its loose wheels rattling as it gained more speed. The fire-stained caboose, its ceiling steeply dented and partially collapsed, was almost out of sight.
That wasn’t the problem.
In the middle of the tracks, where I’d just been standing, the soot-stained figure of Angus Kroeller glared after the train as it rolled away.
He turned toward us, his small eye sockets black and smoking, literally smoldering with anger. Then he turned back toward the train and vanished.
“What?” Stacey whispered. “Where is he?”
At the retreating tail of the train, oil lanterns cast a dull red glow, the equivalent of tail lights for the benefit of other trains, I supposed.
Kroeller stood on the platform at the back of the caboose, his hands in his pockets, looking back at us as the train pulled out of sight. I couldn’t see his face, but I could imagine his sooty, piggish smirk.
I took off after the train, following the fading red lights westward through the leafy tunnel.
“Ellie!” Stacey shouted. “What are you doing?”
“I have to catch that train!” I shouted without looking back. I ran along the center of the tracks, stepping high and trying not to stumble in the thick weeds.
“I thought we wanted the train to take the ghosts...Ellie!”
I didn’t slow down a bit, because the train was still picking up speed. I had it in sight again, but I couldn’t spare another second. Kroeller was already gone from the caboose platform, away inside the train.
I put on speed, sprinting as fast as my non-jogger legs could carry me, my lips curling into a determined snarl. I drew close to the rusty, rattling grab rail at the back of the caboose. It looked like it was missing a critical support bolt or three, but I didn’t see any other options.
The train whistled and put on another blast of speed just as I leaped for the railing. I grabbed on, but the railing let out a terrible, rusty squawk and wobbled under my weight, on the verge of breaking loose and dropping me onto th
e wooden rail ties rushing by below.
I managed to climb up onto the platform without dying, though. Stacey jogged along behind the train, but it was really building up steam now, and the gap between us widened until she was lost in the smoke and darkness. My tiny head start had made all the difference.
The caboose’s rear door was missing. My flashlight revealed the ruins of the caboose, but the partially collapsed roof blocked most of my view ahead. The remains of the second-story cupola, from which the brakeman keeps watch over the train, had fallen inside along with the roof.
I ducked around and under it, and I smelled fire, never a comforting scent to me. I emerged from around the twisted metal in a hunched, wobbling position that made me feel vulnerable.
In the front corner of the car, a tall figure knelt at a wood-burning stove bolted into the wall. I could see him in profile, his hair long, blond, and wispy, his colorless eyes entranced by the flames as he fed more wood into stove. I recognized him as the brakeman from Maggie’s memory.
He didn’t immediately react to me, so I crept around him, hoping to reach the forward platform of the caboose without any incident.
As I reached the empty doorway at the front of the caboose, the tall blond man flickered into place in front of me, blocking my path. I could see the gaping bullet wound in the center of his forehead, the rivulets of blood dried into veins of black crust all over his face.
“Lars Olsen,” I said, recalling the brakeman’s name. “Don’t engage the rear brakes, no matter what they tell you.”
“I do as the engineer says,” he replied, his voice a flat monotone, as if reciting memorized text.
“Just don’t. Hey, your stove’s spilling hot coals everywhere.” I pointed, and when he turned, I darted out through the door. I hopped the gap to the next car, where the rear door was loose, swinging from one hinge. I pushed my way in, bracing for a fight.
I was also trying to do the math in my head. If a train leaves point A heading west at thirty or forty miles an hour and climbing, and the tracks end in half a mile, how long until Ellie gets splattered? What if the train is a ghostly apparition that could disappear at any moment, leaving its sole living passenger hurtling through the air until she lands on a rusty iron rail? Show your work.
I figured I had no more than one or two minutes to stop Kroeller before he reached the engineer in the locomotive. Then he would order the train stopped, evict all the unwanted passengers who’d boarded, and we’d be right back where we began, the ghosts trapped along this old length of track and feeding on our clients and their neighbors. We’d never get rid of the banshee before Ember’s baby was born.
The door opened onto a strange scene lit by an oil lantern on a corner hook. The car was made of weathered old boards, though it hadn’t looked that way from the outside. The furniture—a round table, two wooden chairs, and a single bed—was not bolted down, so it was scattered in disarray around the car.
I hurried toward the far door of the railroad car, which was closed and blocked by the bed, as if someone had meant to leave the furniture in my way.
Someone lay on the bed. I slowed as I saw Maggie in her red dress, her skin bleach-white, her glassy eyes staring up at the ceiling. She lay cold and stiff with rigor mortis, her fingers clenched around the unlit red-glassed lantern hanging over the edge of the bed beside her, swaying with the motion of the train.
Maggie’s ghost was reenacting her death. Maybe Kroeller’s ghost had encountered her and “killed” her again, restaging the murder.
The bed was heavy, and I had to lean against the headboard and shove with all the strength in my legs and back to move it away from the door. Time was running out fast. I didn’t even have time to try and do the algebra.
I heaved the bed across the warped wooden floorboards, which seemed like they belonged in an old building, maybe the boarding house where Maggie had died a hundred years ago. As soon as it was clear of the door, I pushed my way out, flashlight drawn.
The next car was the ruins of a boxcar—only one side of it still remained, full of holes and rust, with remnants of metal roof still clinging to it along the top.
Sophia sat in the shadows here, her knees against her chest, her white dress filthy with soot. Her face and arm were badly charred. She rocked slowly, weeping to herself. I wished I had time to stay and try to comfort her, but I kept moving.
Next was a passenger car, very probably a replica of the one where the dynamite went off, judging by the rows of blackened seats and the floor-to-ceiling rupture in one side of the car. All the windows were shattered. An acrid smell hung in the air, as if I’d just missed the explosion.
My flashlight found the bodies of a man in a top hat and a woman in a puffy-sleeved dress sitting in one row, both of them cut by shrapnel and burned. Like Maggie, they looked like they’d been dead for at least a day or two, their corpses stiff and their blood dried. I passed more bodies, one man sitting alone, two women badly burned and unrecognizable, who I assumed were the two sisters that had been traveling together.
A hand seized my arm as I passed them. The closer of the two sisters, the one in the aisle seat, had grabbed me. Her charred head turned toward me, creaking on dried and shriveled muscles and tendons, and her empty sockets seemed to stare me in the eyes. A few long strands of brown hair clung to the sides of her head, brushing against the singed shreds of her traveling dress, through which I could see bone and scorched flesh.
She opened her jaws, leaning closer, and I shined my flashlight into her face. It didn’t seem to deter her.
“How long until we reach Charleston?” she asked, her voice low and smoky. “We’ve been waiting a long time.”
“Uh, soon,” I said, pulling away from her with a strong shake of my arm.
I ran out the next door. An empty flatbed car lay ahead. At the far end of it, Kroeller jumped onto the ladder to the coal car ahead, which sat just behind the locomotive. He was almost to the engineer, who would no doubt stop the train at his command.
If I survived all of this, I thought, I was going to take McCoyle’s ghost out of his trap and do my best to give him a good thrashing. If the bandits had done their job, Kroeller’s ghost would be defeated, not running wild and ruining my night. Never trust a gang of thieves, dead or alive.
I bolted across the platform as Kroeller went over the top. He walked right onto the heap of smoldering coal in the ruptured coal car.
The ladder was unpleasantly warm to the touch and grew hotter as I ascended. By the time I reached the top, it was blistering hot. Kroeller crossed the bed of smoking coals as if the heat and smoke didn’t bother him at all.
From this vantage, I could see where the tracks ended just a few feet ahead.
Michael had clamped a copper wire at the end of each rail, then run them under the old wooden gate and out to the modern steel line. I’d needed somebody to sit out there and wait until the last possible minute to connect the wires. Jacob had said that certain spirits roamed freely around the railways, so I was worried that plugging our isolated little track into the continental rail system might bring in all kinds of unknown entities and energies to interfere with our work.
Those wires were meant to serve as paths for the ghosts’ energy to follow, allowing them to escape the haunted stretch of track and move out into the world, and hopefully even to move on to the next one.
If the wires didn’t work, then I supposed we were all about to come to a crashing halt.
“Kroeller!” I shouted, since that seemed like the best way to distract him, but the dead railroad cop didn’t look back. He just kept strolling across the smoldering heap of coal. I jabbed my flashlight at him, but the beam wasn’t much of a weapon with all the smoke and soot in the air. It can’t stop a powerful and determined ghost from doing what he wants, anyway, if his intention is strong enough.
I did the only thing I could think of, and it was stupid: I shot off to a running start over the smoking coal, my boots hissing in the heat, and
then I jumped on him.
This is rarely a good idea, because while ghosts may look solid, they usually aren’t. They’re made of energy, and they can hit, bite, and scratch all they want, while all you can do is punch and kick at empty air.
Still, I’d encountered a couple of ghosts who became dense enough to fight, and certainly the apparition of the train itself was so strong I could walk on it. I thought there was a small chance that this time, in this situation, the ghost I was attacking might have a solid form, too.
I was wrong. I passed right through and sprawled across smoldering black coal, howling in pain at the heat. It was awful, but I’m not sure this ghost coal was quite as hot as actual burning coal, or I might have been incinerated fairly quickly.
I pushed up onto my hands and knees just before Kroeller’s beefy arm locked around my throat, choking me with the crook of his elbow. His coat sleeve was scratchy, stiff wool against my skin. He had a sulfurous smell, like rotten eggs, and it was so strong I probably would have gagged if I were able to breathe at all.
His other arm locked around my waist, and his heavy gut rested on the small of my back, his lifeless weight pinning me in place. His flesh was corpse-cold, and he wasn’t breathing at all.
“You’re mine,” he whispered. His thick, clammy lips brushed my ear.
The locomotive reached the end of the line, and chunks of wood rained down as we bashed through the old gate and fence. The entire train slung from side to side, writhing like a snake, but it managed to keep rolling forward on the copper conducting wires. We broke free of the woods and hurtled toward the bright steel tracks gleaming under the moonlight.
I struggled enough to make Kroeller tighten his grip on me. I wanted to make sure he forgot about reaching the locomotive and stopping the train, at least for a few more seconds.
The locomotive reached the steel rails and made a ninety-degree turn that would have been impossible for a real train to execute. The coal car whipped around after it, and the sudden lateral shearing motion sent me flying out through the ruptured side of the car, high into the space above the two sets of steel tracks, the northbound line and the southbound line.
