by JL Bryan
The impossibly sharp turn probably wouldn’t have affected Kroeller’s ghost at all if he hadn’t been clinging so tightly to me. He dropped off the train with me, his cold, soft weight pressed against my back. I hoped separating Kroeller from the train would give all the ghosts onboard their chance to escape his control forever.
As we fell, I had time to see the ghost train transform upon reaching the steel tracks, shifting into something like a mirage of fire, a locomotive and cars sculpted entirely of thin, transparent sheets of pure flame.
Then it rocketed away along the track, streaking north like a comet, melting into a shapeless cloud of flame that instantly vanished into the distance.
I had about half a second to appreciate my good fortune in escaping the train before that had happened. Then I belly-flopped into the gravel railbed with Kroeller’s immense clammy weight on my back, and everything went dark.
Chapter Twenty-Four
My eyes opened. I found myself sitting in a softly upholstered seat, gently rocking from side to side, sunlight warm on my skin.
I occupied a seat near the middle of an oak-paneled passenger car, which looked almost luxurious, the wooden seat frames intricately carved with little floral designs. All the wood was polished and gleaming, the deeply piled red carpet below my feet completely spotless. I didn’t see a grain of dirt or dust anywhere, not even motes dancing in the generous shafts of sunlight pouring in through the windows.
Nobody else was there. As I got moving, standing and stepping out into the parquet-floored aisle, I noticed the accumulated aches, pains, bruises, and burns from all that I’d suffered in the past few days had vanished. I felt healed, revitalized, light as a feather and full of happy energy. I should have been covered in coal dust, but it was as if I’d had a long soak in the tub. My hair was clean and brushed, there wasn’t a speck of dirt on my skin or even under my fingernails, and even my clothes looked as if they’d been washed, dried, and ironed, though I’m not somebody who typically irons her jeans or her denim jacket.
“Hello?” I asked the empty car, as if I expected somebody to pop up between the vacant rows and explain where I was, how I’d arrived there, and what I should do next.
I walked down the aisle toward the door at the back. My polished boots clicked on polished wood. The situation seemed beyond surreal, but I didn’t feel like I was dreaming. I pushed open the door and stepped through into the next car.
It looked like the one I’d just left, but several scattered passengers occupied the seats. I saw the man in the top hat with his wife, both of them having tea and cookies and gazing out the window. The wife glanced at me and smiled. All their injuries were gone, and they appeared to be brimming with good health and cheer.
Then I saw the two sisters, no longer burned or injured, clad in lovely dresses and traveling hats piled with feathers. The young man who worked for the pecan concern in Albany gave me a languid smile as I passed him. He was also fully restored.
I found Sophia a few rows ahead, sitting alone. She no longer looked like a suffering burn victim nor a pale and weeping banshee. She was a healthy, vibrant little girl in a white dress and a matching hat adorned with a bouquet of colorful cloth flowers, held in place by a lace chinstrap. Her black hair had been gathered up in little coils. She smiled at me, radiant in the sunlight from the window.
“Don’t you look pretty?” I sat down beside her.
“Thank you,” she replied. “You look pretty, too.”
I laughed. I’d felt on the verge of laughing since my eyes had opened, as if the happy feelings bubbling up from inside me just had to be given expression.
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Do you know where this train’s going?”
“It’s taking us home,” she said. “I can’t wait to see my mother and father again. I miss them so much.”
“I miss mine, too.”
“They’ll be waiting for you at the station.” She stated this with supreme confidence and another big smile. “They’ll be pleased to see you.”
I wanted to cry with happiness. At the same time, I was starting to feel uneasy. Something was not right.
“I think I’m on the wrong train,” I said. Outside the window, the landscape was unfamiliar but beautiful, with gently rolling grass hills dotted with wildflowers. Shimmering streams ran between the hills, collecting in sparkling blue ponds in the little valleys.
Iridescent lights swirled in the sky, like a glowing daytime aurora from horizon to horizon. I couldn’t see the sun, but every inch of the sky was radiant.
The uneasy feeling nagged at me again. As marvelous as everything around me seemed, I didn’t want to be here.
“I have to go back,” I told Sophia.
She squeezed my hand as if to comfort me, in a very mature gesture for a little girl. I ran to the back of the car, which led me into the apple-red caboose. The middle-aged conductor sat at his desk, poring over a ledger. He tipped his hat at me.
I glanced up the ladder to the small second level of the caboose, the cupola, where the tall blond brakeman sat in his chair, surrounded by windows glowing with golden light, keeping his watch over the train.
Then I reached the caboose’s rear platform. The gleaming rails stretched away through the idyllic pastoral landscape, a pair of unswerving straight lines that vanished out of sight at the horizon, where the green grass and gentle streams met the prismatic sky. I despaired at the long distance we’d already traveled.
“It’s so hard to let go,” a voice said beside me. Maggie Fannon had appeared on the platform, looking fully restored and revitalized like the others, her red hair styled in what looked like some very labor-intensive looped braids. Her red dress fluttered in the warm wind, which was redolent with the scent of blooming flowers. I noticed a sound like chimes ringing in the background. They seemed to originate from the rippling colors in the sky above.
“I can’t. I still have so much work to do,” I said. I looked down at the polished ironwood railroad ties whisking away at high speed from beneath the train, nestled in spotless white gravel. The gravel, on closer inspection, actually appeared to be made of tens of thousand of white seashells, not one of them broken.
“If you choose to return, be careful,” she said. “There are others trying to deceive you.”
“I know,” I said, and it felt like I understood exactly what she meant, though I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“May I ask one favor?” She took my hand as if we were old friends.
“Of course.”
“Be lenient with James McCoyle,” she said, and I remembered she’d fallen for the train robber in the course of deceiving him. “His soul is tarnished, but not lost.”
“I can do that.” I stepped to the very edge of the platform, between the rails and looked downward. I took a deep breath, which made me aware that I hadn’t actually been breathing at all. I didn’t seem to need it.
Very reluctantly, I leaned out over the blur of the railroad ties, holding onto a railing with each hand.
Then, with an act of will, I released the railings and let myself fall, towards the pain and suffering waiting below.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The pain was everywhere. I gradually became aware that my battered, beaten, scalded body was being dragged over rough earth. Rocks. Gravel. Everything was dark.
My head struck a solid metal rail. Beefy, clammy fingers lifted my head and set it down on the strip of cold metal, as if I were meant to use it as a pillow.
In the distance, a light pierced the darkness. It swelled, growing closer. The steel rail beneath my head trembled and hummed.
Gradually, my aching, slow-moving brain put these pieces together and sorted out that I was lying on railroad tracks with a train roaring toward me through the night.
As soon as I tried to move, I discovered that coils of wire bound my hands and feet, the copper wire Michael had used to connect the old tracks with the new. Something as heavy as a bear, but wit
h a less pleasant odor, pressed down on me from above, squishing me into place under its weight. Its breath reeked like rotten eggs.
Kroeller. He’d tied me up, and now he would hold me here until the oncoming train splattered me across the tracks.
“Please,” I whispered. “Let me go.”
I could feel his body jiggle on top of mine, and he panted and snorted, as if laughing under his breath. The headlamp of the locomotive swelled as it charged toward me. The engineer should have seen me by now, should have applied his brakes or at least blown his horn. Kroeller was somehow hiding me, making me hard to see.
“Come on,” I urged. “I can’t die like this. Not in a silent-movie cliché.”
Kroeller had no response to that. He’d almost certainly never seen a movie in his life, and so had no idea that the mustache-twirling melodrama villain tying a girl to the train tracks had already been done to death. He probably thought he was being quite original by killing me this way.
“Ellie!” a voice shouted. Michael. The hero arriving just in time to save the girl, I hoped.
“Over here,” I rasped out as loud as I could, which wasn’t very loud at all. His footsteps rushed toward me, though.
“You have to get up!” he shouted.
“Oh, wow, I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “Help me!”
His hands were already on me, trying to raise me from the rails. He let out a grunt.
“You’re too heavy,” he said, which I thought was a little less than chivalrous, but I didn’t have time to snark at the moment. The train showed no signs of slowing as it rolled toward my face. The headlight lit the area around us like a football stadium on game night, but the engineer apparently saw nothing at all.
In that bright light, I saw Michael’s face as he leaned over me. One eye was swollen shut and purple, and the cheek below it was bruised. I felt awful for him. Whatever he’d suffered was completely my fault. He could have been at home tonight, repairing one of his antique automaton clocks, or out playing tennis or basketball with his sister (they’re both very aggressive about sports, which is a little hilarious but can also get old...). Instead, I’d asked him for a favor and he’d gotten his face bashed in for it. I tend to have that effect on people around me. It’s why I don’t have many friends. I usually don’t ask them to help me with my work, of course, but sometimes evil things follow me home. And mostly people think I’m crazy if I tell them too much about what I do. I’ve tried being vague and pretending my PI work is all boring insurance-related stuff, but then they learn the truth and just think I’m crazy and a liar. You can’t win.
The train bore down on me, the tracks shuddering hard beneath my head as the metal wheel, the one that was on its way to crush my skull, loomed larger and larger.
“Michael,” I said. “My iPod.”
Fortunately, he knew me well enough to understand. He found the device mounted on my belt next to the little portable speaker. I hoped they hadn’t been broken by my adventures tonight.
The last song I’d queued up, “Oh Happy Day” performed by Aretha Franklin, blasted out from my waistline.
When weaponizing holy music, no matter from what tradition, it’s always best to crop out the slow parts. Facing a horde of angry and murderous ghosts, you can’t afford to wait for build-up or interludes. You have to skip right to the crescendos.
So it was a soaring choir of voices that blasted from the speaker, creating a cone of bright, energized sound that, hopefully, would weaken Kroeller’s hold on me for a moment.
The weight vanished. Kroeller stood in the gravel between the northbound and southbound lines, glaring. Michael lifted me from the tracks and carried me back and away, getting us off to the side of the tracks just before the freight train reached me. An enormous gust of wind sent us staggering backward, but he kept his balance.
Michael lowered me to my feet, keeping an arm around my waist to support me. He said something as I looked up at him, but I had no hope of hearing over the train thundering past us a few feet away.
I touched his face, showing concern for his injury. He kissed my fingers, then he untied my hands and feet, carefully not to cut me with the copper wire.
Kroeller remained standing on the other side of the train—I glimpsed him in the gaps between cars and over the occasional empty flatbed. His hatred for me was plain on his face. I’d helped uncover his secrets, released his captives, left him with nothing.
Michael pointed away down the tracks. We could start toward his car, probably parked by the same Chet’s Discount Grocery where I’d left the van the other night, and get ourselves a head start on Kroeller in case he decided to come after us. He was a wounded and angry predator now.
I shook my head. I wasn’t sure how I’d get rid of Kroeller now, but running away and giving him time to recover wasn’t going to help.
We stood our ground and waited as the train passed us by.
As it rolled away, Kroeller continued to stare at us, as if he wasn’t completely sure what to do next, either.
“Let it go, Kroeller,” I said. “You have no secrets left. You can move on. You don’t belong here anymore.”
Kroeller looked at me for a long moment...then his face twisted into a hoggish snarl, and he advanced, balling his hands into fists.
Michael edged in front of me, ready to take one on the chin for my honor. I drew my flashlight. It was all I had. The music blaring from my speaker wasn’t stopping him now.
The moment Kroeller stepped onto the tracks in order to cross over them, a deep rumbling sounded from farther up the line.
Darkness spread toward us from the north, blotting out stars, trees, and earth, turning everything around it solid black. The ground trembled as the darkness rushed toward us like a low stormcloud, or the shadow of the moon across the land as it eclipses the sun.
The tracks on which Kroeller stood seemed to change in the moonlight. The rails appeared to me as if they were made of the long bones of a gigantic primordial creature, laid end to end and bolted together. The ties, too, resembled the ribs of some great animal sunken one after another in the railbed, where the gravel had turned to smoldering coal. Taken together, the rails and ties seemed like the backbone of some unimaginably huge beast, its flesh having long since been burned to ash by the long bed of coals in which it lay.
As the darkness fell over us, I had only a quick impression of an immense mass racing by, scooping up Kroeller in its jaws. There was iron and smoke, but also pebbled gray skin heavy with soot, a spider-like row of black eyes, and plates and horns evoking a Jurassic monster. I could not tell you the overall shape of the thing, only that it was huge, far bigger than the train that had nearly flattened me, casting everything around it into deep shadow.
I am glad I didn’t get a closer look at it. The horror might have been too much for a mortal brain to handle.
Then the shadowy thing was away down the tracks, moving the wrong way, southward on a northbound line. The steel tracks in its wake looked normal again, as if the great bones had only been a nightmarish mirage.
Kroeller was gone.
“Did you see that?” I whispered.
“I saw him disappear,” Michael said. “Where did he go?”
“I don’t know, but the trip there looks like hell,” I said. “What happened to you? You look hurt.”
“There was the debris from the exploding gate.” Michael pointed at his swollen-shut eye. “I’m pretty sure I got sucker-punched by an invisible man, too. I never saw him coming.”
“I’m so sorry I dragged you into this.” I hugged, leaning against him—but lightly, in case he had more injuries. “I won’t do it again.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“I’ll try not to do it again.”
“You look pretty banged up yourself.”
“I should’ve chosen a safer line of work,” I said. “Like cage-fighting with rabid hyenas.”
I heard footsteps in the woods as somethi
ng approached at high speed. I drew my flashlight and turned to look.
Stacey emerged at the end of tracks, panting, having sprinted half a mile to catch up with me.
“Hey,” she said, catching her breath. She looked at the destroyed gate and fence, then at Michael and me with all our new injuries. “What did I miss?’
Chapter Twenty-Six
I spent that night at Michael’s place. I didn’t want to go home and lie alone in the dark for the rest of the night. I don’t like that under the best of circumstances—I’d much rather sleep in the day, because I’ve encountered far too many spirits who prefer to do their harassing at night. I managed to kiss him a little before passing out, his muscular arm wrapped around me like a barrier to shield against all the evils of the world. It was a nice illusion.
The next day, after one of my too-frequent medical visits to make sure I hadn’t sustained anything that was likely to kill me or require immediate surgery, I headed over to the office to speak with Calvin. I’d given Stacey the day off since we didn’t have another client waiting for our help at the moment, unfortunately.
I started by letting him know we’d wrapped up the case, though I held back just a couple of details that I didn’t feel comfortable sharing with anyone, like my time on the happy train with the ghosts. I’d been unconscious and having a bizarre dream, I told myself.
Calvin didn’t bring up Paranormal Systems, Inc. at all, which I took as a bad sign—surely if he’d decided to dismiss their offer, he wouldn’t mind telling me. So I had to ask him about it.
“You’re not really going to sell the agency, are you?” I asked.
“I’ve looked into them,” he said, sighing. “If we don’t sell, they’ll open a competing office somewhere nearby. Maybe Atlanta or Charleston, maybe right here in Savannah.”
“So you’re just going to give up without a fight? That doesn’t sound like you. What aren’t you telling me, Calvin?”
