The kids had been issued water bottles before the hike, and nearly all of them had drained their bottles dry, which meant there was a long line for the very primitive bathrooms when they returned. Scott heard a lot of giggling and a lot of jokes about how bad the bathrooms smelled. After checking to make sure each boy and girl had washed his or her hands, the teacher accompanied the children to the playground while the parents packed up the remaining food, drinks and supplies, taking any leftover items they’d brought back to their respective cars.
An hour later, as everyone was saying goodbye and getting ready to leave, there came a click-clack…click-clack from the area beyond the playground. Vincent recognized the sound instantly. “Train!” he shouted. “Daddy! It’s a train!”
Sure enough, a small train, with four open cars and a diminutive engine on which an adult engineer sat scrunched at the controls, pulled up on the supposedly disused tracks in front of the little depot.
“Can we go on it, Daddy?” Vincent was practically jumping up and down with excitement. Most of the other boys were as well.
Miss Mike laughed as she headed off to her car. “You’re on your own, daddies.” She waved to the children. “See you tomorrow!” she called.
“Goodbye, Miss Mike!” they yelled, too loud, in unison.
All of the boys and most of the girls were holding their parents’ hands and looking up into their faces, begging to ride the train, but when the dust settled, only Scott and Vincent, along with one other dad and his son opted to stay. The rest of the parents led their whining and disappointed kids to their cars.
“We’ll see how much it costs,” Scott told Vincent, making no promises.
“But if it’s cheap, we’ll go, right?”
Scott laughed. “If it’s cheap, we’ll go.”
They hurried through the playground with the other boy and his dad, trying to reach the depot before the train left.
There were no prices posted anywhere on the depot or the train itself, so Scott walked up to the engineer, who was standing on the platform next to the narrow tracks, stretching his legs. “Excuse me,” he said. “How much is it to ride the train?”
“Buck apiece.” The engineer seemed bored and disengaged. He took the money perfunctorily when Scott paid and motioned indifferently toward the open cars behind him.
Vincent was bouncing excitedly. “I want to sit by the engine!”
“Sure,” Scott said, and opened the gate of the first car, where the two of them sat next to each other on a hard, low bench. The other boy wanted to sit in the caboose, so he and his dad went to the opposite end of the train.
There were clearly no other riders, but the engineer stood there for another ten minutes, staring blandly out at the playground. Maybe he was due a break or maybe the train was supposed to leave at a specific time, but Scott had the feeling that the man was procrastinating on purpose, just to annoy the parents and frustrate the kids.
Scott was annoyed, but Vincent wasn’t frustrated. He remained excited, and he chattered away about where the train might go, and about trains in general.
Eventually, the man wandered back, took his place in the cramped confines of the engine and started up the train. With a sad, tired whistle, the train began moving.
Click-clack…click-clack…click-clack…
The sound of the wheels on the rails grated on him for some reason, and Scott tried to shut out the noise as the train slowly pulled away from the little station. They gained a little speed but not much, and ended up traveling at walking speed between two small hills and into the backcountry of the wilderness park.
Scott had to admit that the scenery was impressive. Orange County was so overdeveloped these days that it was sometimes hard to remember that the region had once looked like this. They passed eroded boulders honeycombed with Swiss cheese-like holes, chugged through a grove of hardy oak trees, their leaves green even though the surrounding grasses were dead and brown. Moments after leaving the depot, there was no sign of civilization, and though he had never been here before, Scott was glad that this area had been protected. This was nice.
Click-clack…click-clack…click-clack…
Although the noise of the train itself was pretty irritating.
The engineer pulled a cord, and there was another anemic whistle as the train rounded a bend.
Vincent grinned up at him. “Isn’t this great, Daddy?”
Scott put his arm around his son’s shoulder and smiled. “It sure is.”
They passed through a narrow gulch. Dry grasses the pale color of a file folder grew high on both sides. With a metallic screech of brakes, the train began to slow. He thought at first that there was something on the tracks ahead, something blocking the train, an animal perhaps, but as the engine decelerated, he saw that the engineer was slowing to allow them to look at a model town that had been built on a small section of man-made hills. It was an Old West mining town, with buildings the size of shoeboxes. In the center of one of the hills was the mine itself, a mini mining car piled high with gold ore sitting at the entrance to the tunnel, tracks winding down the hillside to an assaying office at the bottom. Along the main street of the town were several saloons, a blacksmith’s shop, a hotel, a general store, some buildings of indeterminate function and, at the end of the street, a white-steepled church. Between, on the sides of and on top of the other hills were various ranch houses.
Someone had put a lot of work into making this little community. It was incredibly detailed, and he understood why the train stopped here.
But he didn’t like the miniature town.
They had stopped in front of a tiny two-story bordello. The crudely painted sign above the veranda read: CAT HOUSE.
“What’s a cat house?” Vincent asked. “Is that like a vet?”
Scott nodded. “Yeah,” he lied.
In the last car, the other dad was using his cell phone to take pictures. Scott was glad Vincent wasn’t asking him to photograph the town because the last thing he wanted to do was preserve an image of this place so they could study it at their leisure. Something about it made him feel uneasy, and he wished the train would move on.
His eye was drawn to a series of rundown cottages and lean-tos on a dirt road behind the bordello.
Was that a face peering out from the front window of one of the miniature shacks?
It was gone before he was even sure that he’d seen it, but the impression lingered, and it was all he could do not to yell at the engineer to start the train and get out of here. He was not just uneasy now, he was frightened, and he quickly scanned the windows of the other buildings, looking for signs of movement. He saw nothing, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to be seen.
Scott turned to see the reaction of the other dad in the rear car, but the man did not seem to have noticed anything out of the ordinary.
With a mechanical lurch, the train started up again.
Click-clack…click-clack…
The sound not only grated on him, but, more than that, was beginning to unnerve him. It made absolutely no sense, yet he felt it in his bones, a deep distaste that made him feel more than a little unsettled. He wished he had left the park when the other parents had and that he had not taken Vincent on the train.
They passed by a dead tree with a frayed noose hanging from one of its top branches.
“Daddy!” Vincent said excitedly. “Look! A tunnel!”
Sure enough, the tracks ahead disappeared into an arched black hole in the hillside before them.
Something like panic overtook him. He did not want to go into that tunnel. He was about to call out to the engineer and ask him to stop or back up, but then they were inside, engulfed in darkness.
Click-clack…click-clack…
The sound of metal wheels on track grew even louder in the lightless shaft, and the rhythm took on an offensive syncopation that put Scott in mind of the slaughterhouse machinery he’d encountered the one time he’d toured the processing plant where h
is father worked.
“It’s long!” Vincent said. “You can’t even see the end!”
The air was warm and stifling; Scott was finding it difficult to breathe. He was holding tightly to Vincent’s hand, afraid that if he did not, he would lose his son. The fear was irrational but none the less real for that, and when he sensed a lightening of the tunnel ahead, he was grateful.
It was not the exit, however, and there was no sign of daylight. There was only a cheap diorama in the center of the tunnel, dusty yellowish lightbulbs illuminating a primitive scene in which three-foot high lumberjack mannequins were at a sort of party in the woods, the trees represented by branches that had been affixed to the floor. Once again, the train slowed, then stopped, so they could look. Examined more carefully, it looked like a scene out of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, because there were women here as well.
Only…
Only something was wrong with the women. One had a freakishly thick leg, as though she were suffering from elephantiasis. Another, posed as if dancing with a bearded lumberjack, had shaved half of her head and wore an expression of unbridled insanity. Still another had two tiny doll arms and only one eye. All of the mannequins, the men and the women, were still, their positions fixed and unmoving.
Except one.
Scott shivered and held Vincent’s hand even tighter as he saw a blond woman in a blue chiffon dress peeking out from behind one of the trees, smiling broadly at him, her eyebrows wiggling up and down.
With a jerk, the train started moving again. Behind the diorama, Scott noticed for the first time, was a mirrored wall. He supposed it was meant to make the forest look bigger, but the train was visible in the glass above the trees, and when he saw his own reflection, he was surprised at how frightened he looked.
They exited the tunnel a moment later, and Scott turned to look behind him at the dad and his son in the other car. Both seemed somewhat subdued, although Vincent was still animated and enthusiastic, leaning his head out of the car to see where the track was headed, chattering away happily. He seemed unfazed by anything he had seen, unaware of how genuinely strange things seemed to have gotten, and for that Scott was glad.
There were so many bushes in this post-tunnel area that it was impossible to tell in which direction they were headed. He remembered the map of the park, and on it, the train loop hadn’t looked that big. Unless the map had been drawn incorrectly, they had to be on the return leg of the trip by now.
“Look!” Vincent said, pointing.
ZOO, read a small hand-painted sign by the side of the tracks, and immediately after, they saw the first of a series of “animals,” a wooden deer made from a sawhorse and some sanded pieces of lumber. That was followed by a metal pipe sculpture designed to look like a giraffe, and a chicken-wire-framed lion.
There were sixteen or seventeen “animals” altogether, but the last was the only one Scott found unsettling.
It was a dog made out of meat.
The dog was life-sized, and he wasn’t sure how, but various cuts and types of meat had been molded together and attached to form a remarkable likeness of a German shepherd. A chicken breast snout with a cut rib-eye nose was connected to a face of sculpted hamburger. Lambchops and pork tenderloins were somehow meat-welded to hot dogs and steaks in order to form the astoundingly realistic body.
How had this been made? Scott wondered. And when? It had to have been today, maybe within the hour, because the meat looked fresh. If it had been out in the sun for any length of time, it would have started to turn. This close, they would have been able to smell the beginning of rot.
Who had made it?
That was the question that most concerned him. Because if there was a person roaming the back regions of the wilderness park making models of dogs out of meat, Scott did not want to meet him.
He decided to ask the engineer. The man kept stopping at various sites, so it was clear he was supposed to be some sort of tour guide. Maybe he would have some answers.
“Excuse me!” Scott said loudly.
The engineer did not turn around. He probably couldn’t hear over the noise of the engine and the sound of the wheels on the tracks.
Click-clack…click-clack…
Scott tried again, shouting this time. “Excuse me! Sir?”
The man continued to face forward but shook his head in obvious response.
“I just want to—”
Another, firmer head shake.
“I don’t think he’s supposed to talk while he’s driving,” Vincent confided. “I think it’s a train rule.”
Scott patted his son’s head and nodded, though he knew that wasn’t the case. He had no alternate explanation, however, and those he could come up with were unsatisfactory.
Click-clack…click-clack…
He had come to dread that sound.
He looked back to see how the other passengers were holding up.
The other dad and his son were no longer in the last car.
His heart seemed to skip a beat. Where were they? They could not have gotten off because the train had not stopped since he’d last looked over at them. Were they lying on the floor? Had they, for some reason, jumped off the train? It wasn’t going very fast, so that would probably be easy to do, though he’d neither seen nor heard any such thing.
His mind was searching for a logical reason for their disappearance, but deep down he was afraid that there was no such rational explanation.
Maybe they were on the floor of their car, he thought.
Maybe they were dead.
Why would he even think such a thing? He didn’t know, but it did not seem out of the realm of possibility.
Scott took out his phone, switching it on. He actually wasn’t sure who to call, but he wanted to hear another adult voice, a normal person, someone outside of the park. His impulse was to call 911, though he knew he had no concrete reason to do so.
As he’d feared, as he’d somehow known, there was no reception here. He was not able to dial out or call anyone, and a cold fear settled over him. He was suddenly gripped by the certainty that he would never see Violet again.
Why had he taken this damn train?
Because Vincent wanted to. And his son was still excited by the trip somehow, excitedly awaiting whatever was beyond the next turn, seemingly unaware of everything that Scott found so disturbing.
The train passed under a curved trellis supporting a tangle of green vines. Past the trellis, on a stick, was a sign:
BYE!
The engineer spoke for the first time, using a microphone in the engine to deliver a laconic announcement that was broadcast through a scratchy speaker located in the wall of the car: “We’re coming up on the station, folks. Hope you all enjoyed your trip.”
Scott was filled with an unaccountable feeling of dread. He didn’t know why—he should have been happy the ride was over—but some sixth sense was telling him that it wasn’t over.
They pulled in front of the depot. Stopped.
This was not where they had started.
“Again, Daddy!” Vincent said excitedly. “Again!”
“Again?” the engineer asked, walking over.
Scott looked into the man’s bored, disinterested face and saw something there he didn’t like and didn’t quite understand. But when he looked toward where the parking lot was supposed to be and saw instead a pond, when his eyes finally found the parking lot in the location where the picnic tables should have been, and there were no cars in the lot, he nodded numbly and took two dollars out of his wallet, placing the bills in the engineer’s rough hand.
“Again,” he said.
A RANDOM THOUGHT
FROM GOD’S DAY
(2017)
That stupid football player is kneeling down in front of everyone to thank ME because he made a touchdown? He actually thinks I care whether or not he caught a ball and ran over a chalk line on a patch of grass? That arrogant little pissant. When he dies, I’m sending him straight
to hell.
Straight.
To.
Hell.
Thank you for downloading this eBook.
* * *
All the books totally free of charge, if you like to receive our books on the next time, please Subscribe and join our free books group.
Subscribe
Walking Alone Page 28
