by Jay Sigler
Chapter 15
In my dream, the train was deserted, empty except for Sheila, Neil, and me. I began to panic. I knew where this was headed and I wanted to stop it before it started. Sheila looked around from left to right as if she had just woken up without a clue that she was on a train in the first place. I looked around from left to right and saw we were surrounded by white. Outside, everything everywhere was white. Snow covered the ground as far as the eye could see and there was not a building, a tree, or even a twig anywhere. It was as if a giant artist had placed the train in the middle of a blank canvas; we were all that existed because the world around us hadn’t been created yet. Sheila got up to exit the train.
“Where are…” I started to ask, trying to make contact with her, with either of them. I stood up but was pushed back into my seat by an unseen force. My voice was torn from me like a syringe ripped from an addict’s arm. Something wanted me to observe, not to take part.
“There’s got to be a place with a phone around here somewhere,” she said to Neil.
“Look around us, sweetheart. There’s nothing there. I say we stay on the train.”
“Well, I have to get out of here. I’m scared. And I don’t think it’s safe on this train anymore.” Her eyes flickered up to the top rows where I sat as she spoke. Looking back to Neil, she said, “Come with me.” Without waiting for a reply, she made her way towards the door. I looked through my glass window and saw that her footprints sank deeply into the snow as she walked. She wasn’t moving fast, pulling each foot up and over the snow before thrusting it forward to take the next step.
I looked down at Neil. He sat, arms crossed, rubbing his triceps. He closed his eyes and let out an audible sigh. He said, to no one in particular, “I warned her.” Then he dozed off. I got up and exited the train.
I followed the deep holes Sheila had made in the sea of white like a connect-the-dots puzzle. A few feet away from the train, I turned around and noticed I was not making any footprints. I turned back and saw Sheila tromping up ahead towards more whiteness. She still grasped the greasy bag of fast food in her right hand, and it swung forward in a wide arc with each struggling step, her left hand swinging back for balance.
It began to snow. The sharp little flakes plummeted down like hail, stinging my skin and obfuscating everything. The once contrasting image of white ground against a gray horizon was now just a solid block of white, as pure as Neil’s hair. It became difficult to follow Sheila with the hundreds of tiny cold daggers stabbing me from above, cutting both my visibility and my face. I slowly made my way forward by bending over to sweep the snow in front of me with my hand, as if I was looking for mines. Any pit in the snow would be an indication of a recent step.
I continued on this way until my outstretched hands connected with what felt like stone. Hard crusted ice ran the entire length of an upside-down parabola, a frown in the middle of nowhere. The entrance to the cave was the first three-dimensional object I had seen out in this white field. I walked slightly hunched over into the mouth of the cave and the blinding snow stopped stabbing my face. The wall of solid white behind me gave no indication as to how far I had walked.
The mouth of the cave was solid rock, slimy and wet to the touch, and smelled as musty as an opened catacomb after years of decay. As I felt my way deeper inside, shadows danced on the walls, projected by a flickering light from up ahead. Between the shadows, pictures had been drawn on the wall depicting the sacrifice of a small child. I didn't want to know what was used for ink. In the first picture, two figures forcibly carried a smaller figure to a fire surrounded by an audience. In the next picture, remnants of the smaller figure laid smoldering in the fire, while the remaining figures sat around the fire eating. Two-dimensional life lessons from a different time, minus the laugh track.
I felt my way farther back into the cave until it opened up to an enormous domed room. I was in a stone igloo. The ceiling was spiked with stalactites, threatening to pierce anyone unlucky enough to be underneath if one should happen to fall. In the middle of the room, Sheila sat Indian-style in front of the small fire that provided the only available light. She stared into the fire like a woman possessed, pretty eyes unblinking, hypnotized by the dancing flames.
“I’m so hungry and so cold,” she said to the fire, as if it was listening to her. The steady tone in her voice enhanced the hypnotic look in her eyes. The rippling waves of light made the shadow of her body dance between the stone spikes overhead. She reached into the greasy bag at her side and gorged on hash browns and Egg McMuffins. She never looked up from the fire as she consumed mouthful after mouthful of food. When she finished, she fed the bag to the fire, which flared up once it lapped up the grease. Burning to nothing, the bag emitted black smoke that rose straight up into the air. But the smoke did not disperse. It stayed concentrated in one mass, and that mass started to take shape. I could make out a thin brim of a hat in the haze. The smoke was becoming Shawn. I tried to scream out a warning, but my voice and body were frozen in place. I was forced to watch, helpless to do anything.
The smoke hovered by her head as if it were whispering to her. She nodded in her trance, not quite hearing, but definitely understanding. She untied her shoes and slipped them off. Her socks came off next. She folded them into a tight ball and pushed them down into her left shoe. She sat barefoot on the floor of packed snow, her eyes never losing contact with the fire. Her breathing quickened to the point that she was almost grunting, and then with one last inhale she stopped. She paused for just a moment, exhaled forcibly, and stuck her right foot into the fire. There was no expression of pain on her face while she sat watching the flames first lick her foot and then engulf it. Her eyes widened in pleasure and a smile crept across her face. The skin of her foot blistered, bubbled, and then turned black. Moments later, hunks of charred flesh slid off her foot into the fire and disappeared with a sizzle, leaving only the muscle and bone underneath. The smell was sickening, greasy fried chicken mixed with a twinge of sweet barbeque. I got a dry, gagging feeling in the back of my throat.
When Sheila felt that her right foot had had enough, she took it out of the fire and placed it on the snow. What remained of her smoldering ruined appendage sank down into the frozen ground, creating steam. She rocked slightly back and brought the charred foot to her mouth, biting into what remained of the arch between the ball and heel. Her eyes flickered back into the fire as she tore out a chunk of cooked meat with her teeth and chewed it. Through a mouth full of herself, she garbled the word “Stanford” as coagulated blood dribbled down her chin.
I still couldn't move, but I had to look away so I concentrated my focus on Shawn. He was no longer black smoke, he had become a man, or at least a solid form that looked like a man. Looking up from Sheila, his eyes met mine, daring me to do something, but knowing damn well that I couldn’t do anything. He gave me a slight nod and the entire cave started shaking. Sheila just sat there staring into the fire and chewing, unaware that anything else was going on. The sharp rocks started falling down from the ceiling all around us. Some spikes stuck into the ground where they fell, while others exploded into pebbles and dust upon impact. Shawn smiled. More and more spikes fell, faster and faster. More and more dust built up in the cave, making it harder to see through the already smoky haze. Sheila put her other foot into the fire. As she did this, Shawn plucked an unbroken spike from the floor and walked up behind her.
The stone spear exited her face just under the right eye. A jagged imperfection on the spike jutted up just enough to pierce her kind, green eye and force it out. The momentum caused her torso to follow her eye face-first into the fire, pinning it there as the tip of the stalactite stuck into the red glowing coals. Her single eye sat independent of her body for just a moment before popping like an overheated bean in a microwaved bowl of chili. The smell of burnt hair added to the stench of cooked human meat. Skin from her face, neck, and chest melted off into the fire, hitting the coals with the sound of frying bacon. Th
ere were no screams. I hoped to god that she was dead from the initial blow and not from the fire eating her.
“Still haven’t figured it out?” Shawn asked me directly. His hand was still wrapped around the other end of the spike sticking out of Sheila’s head, like a hiker on a nature trail. Instead of a stone stalactite, I saw that it was the wooden staff. Figured what out? I thought.
Sheila was still cooking in the fire when I was finally able to move again. I tried to run out of there as fast as I could, but visibility was so poor from the smoke and dust that I ran face-first into a wall. I saw stars and dropped to the ground, barely maintaining consciousness. Under the layer of thick black smoke filling the cave, I saw that Sheila’s chest was nothing more than an empty cavity of ribs as her smoldering intestines slid out into the fire, like sausages off of a grill.
Chapter 16
I was awakened by a loud clanking sound. The conductor was banging his ticket-puncher against the metal railing. “End of the line, buddy!” he yelled, and I couldn’t have agreed more. “You gotta get off here,” he continued. While I was asleep, they had apparently fixed the train and I was now in the city. No one else was on the train.
“Why’d you stay on the train, pal? Don’t you gotta be anywhere today?” he asked. I told him I was a heavy sleeper and missed the announcement. I exited the train, silently answering the second part of his question: I didn’t have anywhere to be. My plan to follow Shawn had failed miserably and I wasted an entire day calling in sick to work. I walked to the nearest liquor store and bought a fifth of Ketel One vodka. They were out of Stoli, but I didn't really care. I walked around the city and thought more about Sheila and my dream. I could only assume that she was gone now, too. I had to figure out what to do about the murderous fuck that was killing my friends.
I sat down on a park bench overlooking the lake and twisted the cap off of my bottle. I attempted to think logically about the situation. Sip. My friends no longer showed up on a train they’d consistently taken for as long as I could remember. Sip. They went missing after I had atrocious dreams about them being murdered. Sip. In each dream, the same person had done the killing. Sip. That person was Shawn. Sip. Even in waking moments, he taunted me with remnants from these murders. His words: “They’re not coming back.” The Converse shoes. The last thing he asked me: “Still haven’t figured it out?” Sip, sip, sip. What did that mean? What was I supposed to figure out? I couldn’t make a connection. Dreams, murder, looking, searching, thinking, drinking, paranoia, alone, dead, Vicky, suicide, notebook, reaching out, arm reaching out.
In the first dream I had in the desert, Vicky’s arm had reached out and grabbed my ankle. I had been frightened at the time of the dream, but maybe it was a sign, like the one I had asked her for when I held our picture at the park. Her arm had transformed from the wooden staff I used to try to kill that hideous rat; the same wooden staff had appeared in every dream since. I didn’t associate the dream after Vicky’s funeral with the more recent dreams about my friends, but the wooden staff did seem to be a link between them. I analyzed this in my head for a few minutes. If the wooden staff from my first dream was Vicky’s way of reaching out to me from beyond, could it also be a message sent in the dreams about the deaths of my train friends? Shawn had used that wooden staff to kill my friends in each dream. Maybe it wasn't only used to kill my train friends; maybe it had also been used to kill Vicky.
It fit. It felt right. I paused at this revelation, surprised at how calm I was. I think on some level I had always known I would come to the conclusion that Shawn was the one responsible for all of this. Responsible for killing not only my friends but also my wife. Responsible for all of my pain, all of my misery in its entirety. I stood up to breathe in the lake air and clear my head a bit and realized how drunk I had gotten just sitting there on the bench. The skyline appeared to move on its own. I sat back down and looked at my watch. It was barely noon. I lifted the bottle up to my eyes and saw the lake through it, half blurry, half clear. That meant I had half a bottle left. I decided to go get something to eat.
Stumbling through the city, I got completely turned around and lost. I walked aimlessly for about five more blocks before I finally stopped to get a gyro from some place I had never seen before and will never see again. I was in an unfamiliar part of the city and my immediate goal after eating was to get back to the train station and go home. People on the street stared at me like I had just slapped their mothers. I would have been more intimidated if I hadn’t been full of liquid courage. About a third of my bottle remained and I wanted to save it for the ride home.
At some corner, I tried asking directions from what looked to be a Hispanic mother of three watching her kids play near a sewer. She wore a torn button-down shirt opened enough to reveal a sweat stained white t-shirt underneath. Tight neon green Spandex shorts clung to her body making her look like an overstuffed bag of marshmallows. She sat on the corner in a cheap vinyl lawn chair, smoking from a half-empty pack of Marlboro Reds.
“Where’s tha..,” I paused to catch myself from stumbling over the curb into her chair. I tried again. “Where’s tha train stay shun?” I blurted at her, slurring my separated syllables.
“Watch you talk about, mista?” she asked in a heavy accent.
“I need t' get... to catch my train.” I put a fist to my mouth, muffling a belch that tasted like vodka mixed with stomach acid.
“You gimme twenty bucks. I tell you.”
I cocked my head at her. “You kidding me? I jus’ need some fuggin' direc shuns, lady.” My voice was leaving my mouth in slow motion. I swiveled my head from left and right, looking around for anyone else to help. I saw no one. The street had become void of all people and the bright day had rapidly clouded over. Time had slipped away from me again.
“No one here to help you, chico. Gimme twenty bucks and I show you where da train is,” she said. I saw from her bloodshot eyes that the money would mean she could get high tonight.
I was getting pissed off. “Screw thish shit, lady, screw't,” I said, throwing up my arms to shoo her away. I turned to leave. I’d find the train on my own. It couldn’t have been that hard, I’d just retrace my steps. Once I’d remembered them.
“What you say to me, mutha fucka?” She stood up and turned to her kids. “Juan, take your hermanos to the casa, por favor, 'kay? Mommy’ll be there in un momento.” The seriousness of her tone indicated that something bad was about to happen. The kids whispered to each other, then took off running down the street, giggling at whatever joke they just made.
I wanted this to end before it started. “Listen, miss. I’m tired. N’ drunk. I jus’ want to go to mi casa, comprendes? So sorry if I.....”
“Shut the fuck up, mista. You ain’t going shit anywhere without givin' me some fucking money... Comprendes?” She took two steps towards me and with a click, a switchblade knife was suddenly pointed straight at my stomach. I looked around, terrified. I wondered where everyone had gone. I wondered how it had gotten so dark so quick.
“Now you gimme your whole fucking wallet, compadre. Now,” she said with small stabbing actions towards me. “You betta do it or you never fucking see your fucking train again.”
Something took over me. Maybe it was instinct, maybe self-defense, or maybe the culmination of all the shit in my life building up looking for a release, but something snapped. It wasn’t fair that my wife had been ripped from my life. It wasn’t fair that my friends had disappeared. It wasn’t fair that I was a lonesome drunk while the person that murdered them all was out running free. It wasn’t fair that now I was the one getting threatened and robbed when all I wanted was some help. I had had enough. My body started trembling and I was aware of two things: the hot tears that ran down my cheeks and the increasing tightness with which I gripped the neck of my bottle.
Fuck it. I swung.
My one-third full bottle of Ketel One slammed against her head with a dull thud. It didn’t break. There was no tinkling crash of gl
ass shattering into a million pieces like television had trained me to expect. The woman didn’t struggle through the blow and try to retaliate, which had also been the expected behavior from television’s life lessons. Instead, she dropped to the sidewalk like the heap of trash that she was. She had fallen onto her side and a small trickle of blood ran out of her ear, making its way across her cheek and down under her nose before dripping into a pool on the ground. Her eyes were closed but fluttered behind the lids like an REM cycle on speed. Her breathing was heavy and snoring sounds escaped from deep within her nasal cavity. At least I knew she was alive. For a moment, I felt the desire to keep hitting her, to punish her for everything bad in my life. For that one second, everything was her fault. I lifted my foot to stomp on her and I saw a tarnished ring on her left ring finger. She was married to someone. It didn’t matter that she was a violent junkie. She had people in her life that depended on her. And I couldn’t take that away, not even from her. I stopped mid-step and looked around, saw no one, and ran.
I ran until my legs were rubber and my lungs begged me to stop. Gasping for air, I ducked into an alley to finish the rest of the bottle. I was shaking all over from what I had just done and what I had almost done. The soothing medicine hit my throat and I started to calm down. Out of the corner of my eye, a child’s discarded plastic Barbie stuck out of a trash bag, buried in the muck. I finished the entire third of the bottle in one long pull. The effect was immediate and I blacked out.
