Train Thoughts

by Jay Sigler

  I looked around for the bottle I had dropped when I fainted. I found it, picked it up, and holding it at arm’s length, looked through it. In double vision, once from the vodka in my system and twice from the alcohol still in the bottle, I saw the rough outline of a rectangle near the ground. I dropped the bottle to my side, shook away the buzzing in my head, and looked again. My vision somewhat cleared and I saw the rectangle was actually a window into Shawn’s basement. Two dark panes of glass stared at me, like eyes of a face buried in the ground. The window itself was framed in wood, aged by the many years it spent watching the neighborhood, learning and keeping its secrets while it rotted away. Looking closer on my hands and knees, I saw it was locked by only a small metal hook screwed into the frame. Without a sound, I pushed on the darkened glass and the screw easily slid out while the window opened in.

  I lowered myself feet-first into the basement, sliding backwards on my stomach. My toes wavered in the air, searching for a floor some distance below me. Holding on to the rickety frame with my hands, my feet finally touched down. I looked out the window once more to ensure no one had seen my little maneuver. Almost as an afterthought, I grabbed the vodka bottle from the ground and dragged it in behind me.

  I turned and faced a dark, cool room. The rock walls reminded me of the cave I had last seen Sheila in, damp and reeking of death. The floor was cement, broken up by cracks spider webbing from one wall to another. As quiet as I could be, I walked over to a large stainless steel freezer that sat by two by fours framing the stairs leading up to the rest of the house. The floor around the freezer was stacked with too many shoes for one person to have. I thought of the single drop of blood stained onto Shawn’s sock and my stomach lurched. I didn’t want to look in the freezer. I knew what was in there.

  Directly across from the freezer against a cement wall, was an old dentist chair stained with what looked like dark oil but I knew wasn’t. It sat under a single can light clamped to a pipe in the unfinished ceiling. An orange extension cord hung down and ran out of the room. I'd never heard of a dentist practicing his craft in the comfort of his own dirty basement. A shelf lining the wall above the chair was filled with bottles of chloroform and jars of teeth. There must have been ten jars total. I assumed at least four jars were new.

  The pipe holding the can light shook as water flowed through it from the kitchen sink above. He was cleaning up after dinner and if his life truly resembled mine, he would soon be going to bed. I decided the best thing to do was to wait until he went to sleep for the night. I waited for ten minutes by counting to six hundred as calmly and controlled as I could after the crack of light disappeared from beneath the door at the top of the stairs. It would have been plenty of time for him to get into bed and fall asleep.

  I walked up the stairs, holding the bottle of vodka by the neck, to use as a hammer in case I miscalculated what the lights going out meant. The basement door had not been shut all the way, so I only had to push it open and hope it didn’t squeak. It didn’t. I stepped into the kitchen and smelled the lingering aroma of something like greasy fried chicken mixed with a twinge of sweet barbeque. It hung in the air like a tangible fog. I took a drink from my bottle just to get the taste of it out of my mouth. I felt my way around the kitchen using my memory of what I had seen from the outside. The dim yellow glow from the street lights didn’t help at all.

  With my back against the wall for support, my fingertips slid across the wall and arrived at a set of stairs leading to the second floor. I figured it would be best to crawl, rather than walk, up the stairs to decrease the chances of falling down them in my inebriated state, so I got on all fours and began my ascent. As I crawled like a dog, it dawned on me that I was lucky Shawn didn’t have any pets that would have alerted him to my presence. I continued until I got to the second floor landing. Out of the three doorways there, only one of them was closed, presumably because it was his room. I panicked for a moment when I imagined that he locked his door. But I didn’t lock my doors when I was home alone so it was reasonable to assume he didn’t either. When I turned the knob, the door opened. I silently sighed in relief.

  The door swung open with a long slow creak that left me frozen where I stood. There was no disruption in his breathing pattern. The mound of blankets over him rose and fell in a constant rhythm with the breaths he took. I walked in slow motion over to the side of the bed and stood over him. I looked down into his face. There he was. The man that changed my life forever. The man that killed my wife and four other innocent people. The man that took everything from me and left me with nothing. He was the reason I had become a lonely, suicidal, drunk, depressed, worthless piece of shit. And now I wanted to murder him.

  My grip on the bottle tightened. As I swung it down, I thought of the woman who had tried to rob me in the alley. I expected that he would take the hit and remain unconscious. I was wrong. Different people have different reactions to getting hit in the head with heavy glass objects. Plus, my blunt weapon did not strike where I wanted it to. I aimed for the left temple, but what I hit was the top of his left ear.

  “OW! What the heck?” he yelled. He jolted straight up in his bed, cradling his ear with both hands. “What, what, who… Oh my god, who are you and wha… wha… wha…”

  Instinct took over. Without even thinking, I backhanded the bottle across the unprotected side of his face. This time, the hit felt solid and heavy, like a bowling ball had been dropped from a roof onto hard packed dirt. And the aim was dead on. His glazed eyes looked past me into some other world and rolled up into their sockets. His unconscious body withered snakelike back into his bed and he began to snore loudly. To make sure he was really out, I started slapping his face with my hands as hard as I could. It felt good.

  “You mother fucker,” I spat at him. “I'm going to end your fucking life, you piece of fucking shit.” Slap, slap, slap.

  I lost track of time. Seeing the dark red blood stream out from his ears onto the sheets, I forced myself to stop.

  The room spun and I gasped for air to catch my breath. I stared at his limp body, and between long drinks I tried to recollect the past few minutes. The details already seemed hazy and fading with each passing second. Concentrating on a table lamp to stop the room from spinning, I stood over this unconscious, bleeding person as I held the weapon in my hand. I had to get out of there. I wanted to abandon the plan and run, but he had seen me. Even if it was dark and he had just woken up, I couldn’t take any chances. I had come too far to turn back now.

  I thought about keeping him tied up here but didn’t know if someone would come to check in on him. Maids, family, lovers. I figured by the time anyone called him it would all be over, one way or another. However, if I kept him here I would have to constantly travel back and forth. I finally decided my house was the best place to bring him. It was not lost on me that my house was also the very place this had all started.

  I wrapped him up in his own bedding, then half rolled and half threw him down the stairs. A brainless “Ugh” escaped his body as it hit the floor. I stood there, the bottle tensed in my hand in case the fall had awakened him, but he remained still. The sound had just been the air forced out of his lungs from the impact. The trepidation of him stirring reminded me to grab some chloroform from the shelf in the basement next to the teeth. I couldn’t very well have this asshole waking up in my house and screaming bloody murder.

  I pushed, pulled, and kicked him out the door and into the trunk of my car. I was fairly confident that no one had seen me. It was the middle of the night with only the basement windows keeping watch. And they weren't going to tell.

  Chapter 23

  I woke up the next morning in my own bed, exhausted and initially unsure of what actually happened the previous night. I might have had another dream. My head pounded and it felt like a hard chunk of sand had replaced my tongue. I was late for work and rushed through my morning routine so I could get to the train on time. Through the grogginess of a massive hangover, I ag
ain remembered things in flashes as I got ready. Brushed my teeth. Followed Shawn. Took a piss. Watched him eat. Showered. Sneaked in the basement window. As I tied my shoes, the rest came back to me. I had a house guest in my basement. I ran downstairs to double check. Shawn was still there and still knocked out. His appearance there was surreal, like I was watching a movie. In that movie, I had held a washcloth soaked in chloroform over his face for a few minutes. From what I had researched, that would keep him sedated anywhere from six to eight hours or possibly forever. I left for work, not really believing that actually happened.

  I saw Neil and no longer felt sorry for him. I felt happiness. Or maybe it was redemption. Either way, I knew that I had saved at least one person from the maniac in my basement. Neil had survived; he was safe. I arrived at work in a better mood than I had been in for months. I sat down to hammer through some equations when Julie came in and tried to ruin my day.

  “We’re so excited about coming over Friday night. Are you sure you don’t want us to bring anything?”

  Fuck. Fuck. FUCK. I had forgotten that I had invited Julie and whatshisname over for dinner on Friday. I had been alone for so long and all of a sudden I was Mr. Fucking Popular. I quickly tried to think of a believable excuse to get out of it.

  She must have seen me thinking. “Don’t even try to bail on this. You need this. We’re coming.” Busted.

  “No, not at all. We’re still on. Seven o’clock sharp.” It actually might have been a blessing in disguise. All I had to do was keep Shawn quiet in the basement during dinner and I would have my alibi in case the cops ever started sniffing around trying to associate me with Shawn’s disappearance. Not that it would ever happen, but it would be best to have one just in case.

  “You know it.” Her smile was so wide it almost split her face in two.

  “OK. I’ll see you then.” I wanted to split her face in two.

  As the day wore on, I thought about what I had done. Being at work, removed from the situation, put the whole ordeal into perspective. I had a moment of clarity, an insight into reality. Suddenly, I dreaded going home. I had kidnapped someone and planned to kill him. What if I got caught? What if someone saw me take his body from his house? What if the cops were waiting for me when I got home? I reached for the bottle I had hidden in my desk drawer and took a long swallow, trying to answer all of these questions. Perhaps the answers were at the bottom of the bottle this time. By the time I was able to see they weren’t, my morals had disappeared. My mind flashed the picture from Yosemite where Vicky and I had tried to find the restroom. One of the best pictures we’ve ever taken together. Fury swept in and consumed my body like someone had shot a bullet of hate directly into my heart. Fuck Shawn. I could do this. I would do this.

  In addition to that bottle of booze filling me with liquid courage, it also gave me enough focus to get some work done. I alternated between solving equations and referencing my notebook that I had created precisely for this situation. I took sips of alcohol each time I flipped between the two.

  Swing a sock full of rocks at his face. Drink.

  Solve for X. Drink.

  Slice off ears and feed them to him. Drink.

  Find derivative of Y. Drink.

  Remove his teeth with a rusty nail and hammer. Drink.

  I multitasked myself into a good buzz by five o’clock and then it was time to go home. I was ready. I had hardened myself to do what was needed. I was a rock. I would have no mercy for this mother fucker. Tired from the night before, I ended up nodding off on the train.

  And that’s when I lost Neil.

  Chapter 24

  This dream picked up where Frank’s death had left off. I was back at the pier next to the wooden shack I had hidden behind before getting on Neil’s death boat. I turned around just in time to see the boat sinking into the black water, surrounded by rotting shark corpses. Frank’s impaled head was pointed straight up towards the gray sky. The suction of the boat sliding backwards into the depths of the water was also taking a few lifeless husks with it, forever to be buried with Frank. I walked into the shack and saw Neil next to the trap door, huddled under some of the paint-stained tarps with his face sticking out. For a split second he appeared to see me.

  He looked directly at me and said, “He’s not going away. And I’m next.” He stated this in a calm tone, like he just told me that he drank a glass of water or something as equally insignificant. After this brief glance into my face he seemed to look through me, like I no longer existed. I didn’t even know for sure if he was talking to me or just stating his thoughts out loud. I tried answering him but he couldn’t hear me. I tried waving my arms in front of his face but he couldn’t see me. I was gone from this reality; I was a ghost. A ghost that knew what was going to happen but was helpless to prevent it.

  I glanced back at the water through the shack’s dusty window and saw one black glove and then another appear at the end of the pier. The fingers rose straight into the air and slowly curled forward. They grasped the pier and hoisted the rest of the body up. It was Shawn. He was completely dry, despite coming directly out of the thick, tainted dirty water, and he was headed towards the little shack. I concentrated all of my mental effort to Neil, telepathically telling him to open the trap door in the middle of the shack’s floor. But he just sat there. And Shawn was getting closer.

  Finally, Neil must have either heard me or sensed something on his own and he darted out from his hiding place to the middle of the room. He yanked hard on the thick, round metal ring serving as the handle to the trap door. Under the square wooden door was a perfect circle; a round cylinder heading into the ground, similar to the entrance of a sewer. The slick looking cement was a birth canal into blackness. Down one side of the tube was a row of handles, each one coated with moss or mud, I couldn’t tell. Neil seemed hesitant about climbing down into the black, but it only took one look out the window at Shawn approaching to get him going. Neil stepped onto the ladder and began climbing down. Just as his head was about to disappear from sight, he climbed back out, grabbed a flashlight from a shelf, and after making sure it worked, practically dove back into the opening.

  The trap door slammed down just as Shawn reached the front wall of the shack. He kicked open the door and stepped into the room, stopping right next to the trap door. Standing there, legs spread, arms down by his hips, he gave me his best impersonation of an old-time gunslinger. Beneath the brim of his hat, the cocky smirk on one side of his mouth parted and he said, “You watchin’?” He snapped to attention like a soldier, heels clicking together, arms at his side, back straight, and started spinning in place, faster and faster, until he was a blur. Like a drill, his body sunk down into the earth. He kept sinking down until he was gone and I was alone in the shack.

  I ripped open the trap door and climbed down as fast as I could. He was going after Neil. Whether I could help or not, I was for damn sure going to try. When I was fully immersed into the cement tube, the trap door slammed shut on top of me, blocking out whatever sunlight was coming in through the dusty smeared panes of the shack. I felt like a spitball inside of a straw as I began to climb down the slimy metal handles. After what seemed like hours of descending, the soles of my shoes finally hit the ground. I let go of the handles and felt for my surroundings like a blind person. There was a tunnel heading off in one direction and if I had my bearings right, it extended out under the lake.

  I walked forward through the blackness, arms flailing in front of me to prevent running into anything. I imagined the tunnel walls closing in on me, like someone rolling a sheet of paper tighter and tighter until it collapsed into itself. It was a physical manifestation of the panic that had haunted me these past few months. So I went faster. I was in such a frenzy that I was running at almost full speed when I hit a wall. The tips of my outstretched fingers brushed against the gritty cement a split second before, but I wasn’t able to stop. I had just enough time to twist my right shoulder into the wall, forcing it to take most of
the blow. Upon impact, I crumbled to the ground in a heap of pain.

  To my right, about halfway down the cool cement wall, another tunnel presented itself. I was a mouse in a maze. I crouched down and continued on all fours. This tunnel was considerably shorter, and came to an end right behind what appeared to be a heating vent that looked into an old wooden barn. The roof of the barn was in bad condition, judging by the spaces between the slats of wood where a starlit night peered down. The walls were framed out in two by fours with scrap pieces of wood nailed in place to cover gaping holes. The ground was hard packed dirt, with a giant stack of hay blocks in the corner.

  Above the haystack, a single can light was turned to face the center of the barn, creating a giant ellipse on the floor. The orange extension cord to the light ran out of a window and I wondered if it was the same light from Shawn’s basement. The rest of the barn was a wide open empty room; no tools, no tables, nothing. The only door to the barn was padlocked with a heavy chain, so this had to be where Neil had ended up. That meant Shawn was also here. But I couldn’t see either of them.

  I crawled out of the vent, stood up, and brushed myself off. I placed both of my hands on the small of my lower back to hold it in place while I leaned back and popped the joints that had tightened from my crawling. As my back made a sound like bubble wrap twisted in an eager child’s hand, I glanced up at the wall I just crawled out of. Since I couldn’t see the face of this wall from within the vent, I hadn’t noticed how completely different it was from the others. This wall was finished and painted bright yellow, and the color made it look even more out of place than it did just by being finished.