John Irving - The Cider House Rules

Thus it was not unusual for him to be awakened in a night terror by a vision of coffins levitating from a picture-perfect garden-the prize-winning vegetables taking flight with the corpses. There was one catalogue devoted entirely to fishing equipment; the stationmaster's cadavers were often seen, in waders or carrying rods and nets; and then there were the undergarment catalogues, advertising bras and girdles. The flying dead in bras and girdles especially frightened the stationmaster.

The most particularly crackpot aspect of the mailorder religion was its insistence on the presence of the growing numbers of the restless, homeless, unsaved dead; in areas of the world more populated than St. {208} Cloud's, the stationmaster imagined that these luckless souls were crowding the sky. The arrival of Dr. Larch's 'Clara' fitted ominously into the stationmaster's pattern of night terrors and contributed to his especially stricken appearance upon the arrival of every new train- although Larch had assured the moron that there would be no new bodies arriving for at least a year or two.

To the stationmaster, the notion of Judgment Day was as tangible as the weather. He hated the first train of the morning the most. It was the milk train; and in any weather, the heavy cans were covered with a cold sweat. The empty cans, which were put on the train, produced a kind of death knell, a hollow bonging noise, as they tapped the wooden station platform or were handed up the iron stairs. The first train of the morning was the mail train, too; although the stationmaster was eager for new catalogues, he never lost his fear of the mail-of what might be coming his way: if not another cadaver, sloshing in embalming fluid, then the monthly warning from the mail-order religion that Judgment Day was at hand (always sooner than it was last expected, and always with more terrifying verve). The stationmaster lived to be shocked.

A hole in a tomato could cause him to escalate his predawn bouts of feverish prayer; dead animals (of whatever cause) made him tremble-he believed the creatures' souls clogged the air he needed to breathe or were capable of invading his body. (They were certainly capable of contributing to his sleeplessness, for the stationmaster was as veteran an insomniac as Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells and was without the benefit of ether, youth, or education.)

This time it was the wind that awakened him, he was sure; something like a bat was blown off-course and struck his house. He was convinced that a flying animal had died violently against his wall and that its rabid soul was circling around outside, seeking entry. Then the wind made a moaning sound as it funneled through the {209} spokes of the stationmaster's bicycle. A sudden gust knocked the bicycle off its kick-stand; it clattered on the brick path, its little thumb bell dinging feebly-as if one of the world's restless souls had failed in an attempt to steal it. The stationmaster sat up in bed and screamed.

He had been advised in the monthly mail-order religious publication that screaming was of some, if not certain, protection against homeless souls. Indeed, the stationmaster's scream was not without effect; its shrillness dislodged a pigeon from the eaves of the house, and (since no pigeon desires to fly at night) (.he bird hopped and scrabbled its way noisily across the stationmaster's roof looking for a quieter corner. The stationmaster lay on his back, staring straight up at his roof; he expected the wandering soul to descend at any moment upon him. The pigeon's coo was the; cry of another tortured sinner, the stationmaster was sure. He got up and stared out of his bedroom window, his nightlight weakly illuminating the small plot he had recently tilled for his vegetable garden. The freshly turned earth shocked him; he mistook it for a ready grave. It gave him such a turn that he quickly dressed himself and tramped outside.

Another thing he had learned from his mail-order religion was that the souls of the dead cannot invade an active body. You mustn't be caught sleeping, or even standing still; that was the main thing. And so the stationmaster boldly set out for a brisk walk through St. Cloud's. He muttered threateningly at the would-be ghosts he saw everywhere. 'Go away,' he growled-at this building, at that sound, at every unclear shadow. A dog barked in one house. The stationmaster surprised a raccoon busy with someone's garbage, but live animals didn't bother him; he hissed at the coon and appeared satisfied when the coon hissed back. He chose to stay away from the abandoned buildings where, he remembered, that fat nightmare of a girl from the orphanage {210} had caused so much damage. He knew that in those buildings the lost souls were both numerous and fierce.

He felt safer around the orphanage. Though he was frightened of Dr. Larch, the stationmaster became fairly aggressive in the presence of children and their imagined souls. Like most easily frightened people, the stationmaster was something of a bully when he perceived that he had the upper hand. 'Damn kids,' he muttered, passing the girls' division. He had trouble thinking of the girls' division without imagining doing terrible things with that great big ruffian-girl-the destroyer, he called her. He'd had more than one night terror regarding her; she was often the model of the many bras and girdles in his dreams. He paused only briefly by the girls' division, sniffing deeply-he thought he might catch some scent of Melony, the building wrecker-but the wind was too strong; the wind was everywhere. It is a Judgment Day wind! he thought, and walked quickly on. He was not going to stand still long enough for some terrible soul to enter him.

He was on the wrong side of the boys' division to see the lighted window in Nurse Angela's office, but he could look over the building, up the hillside, and see the light from the window illuminating the eroded, unplanted hill. He couldn't see where the light was coming from and this disquieted him; it seemed eerie how a light from nowhere was making the stripped hill glow all the way into the black edge of the woods.

The stationmaster could have wept at his own timidity, but he cursed himself instead; so much of his sleep was lost to fear, and the first train of the morning was such an early train. For most of the year, the train arrived when it was still dark. And those women who were on it, sometimes…the stationmaster shuddered. Those women in the loose clothes, always asking where the orphanage was-some of them back the same evening, their faces like ash, the color of so many of the faces in the stationmaster's night terrors. Very nearly, he {211} thought, the color of Clara's face, though the stationmaster didn't know her name. His one look at Clara had been so brief that it was unfair he should be doomed to see her so many times since; and each time, he saw more of her-in his dreams.

When the stationmaster heard what he thought were voices, he looked over the boys' division at the lit hillside above St. Cloud's, and that was when he saw the towering shadows of Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells- stretching, in the case of one, to the woods' dark edge and, in the case of the other, stretching into the sky. The two giant figures flapped their huge, hill-spanning arms; whipped by the wind, the stationmaster caught the word 'sorcerer!' It was then he knew that he could walk, or even run, all night-but he would not escape, not this time. The last thought that the stationmaster had was that the time for him, and for all the world, had come.

The next morning, the sea breeze still stirred St. Cloud's. Even Melony noticed it; her usual grouchiness was suspended -she had trouble waking up, although she'd passed a wakeful night. She'd had the impression that all night an animal was prowling the grounds of the girls' division, probably getting into the trash. And she'd been able to observe the two women walking up the hill from the train station in the predawn glow. The women were not speaking to each other-they probably didn't know each other; they had certainly guessed each other's circumstances. The women walked head down. They were both overdressed for the spring; Melony watched the wind press their baggy winter coats against the women's bodies. They don't look pregnant, Melony observed; she reminded herself to be on hand, at her favorite window, to watch the women heading down the hill for the evening train. With what they were giving up, Melony thought, one might expect their returning stepis to be lighter; and, after all, they were heading downhill. But every time, the women walked more heavily down the 212 hill than they had walked up it-it appeared they'd been given something to carry away with them. Their gait was quite the contrary from what one might expect in the gait of women who'd been, truly, scraped clean.