Bentley Little - The Burning

Why had he said that?

Ms. Finch hesitated.

"Just for a second," he promised.

She nodded. "Okay."

"Did you really hear voices?" he asked as they walked over the sunken ground to the fence.

"Yes," she said. "I did."

They didn't say anything after that, and when he peeked over the pickets and saw the gravestones, they looked just as he'd expected them to look: gray and weathered, the words Mother and Daughter etched onto the granite in fancy old-fashioned script.

"Come on," Ms. Finch said. "Let's go." There was a hint of urgency in her voice, and he wanted to believe that it was because she had to get to the restaurant, but he didn't think that was it.

They turned away-

And heard mumbling.

Chills coursed down his body, as fluid as water poured on him from above. The source of the sound was unclear, but the mumbling grew in volume, and he had no doubt that it was coming from beneath the ground. They were words, sentences, but not like any he had ever heard before, a superfast jumble of high-pitched syllables with no apparent pauses.

He thought of that evil face at the window with its beady eyes and malevolent grin.

This was the language of that terrible visage.

"Go!" Ms. Finch ordered, pulling his arm. He offered no resistance but allowed himself to be led away, and the two of them hurried over the sunken ground back to the trail, the babbling growing ever louder behind them.

"What is it?" he asked as they rushed up the path. "Do you think it's real?" He knew it was real, but he wanted to hear from her that it wasn't, wanted the reassurance of an adult telling him that there no monsters, no boogeymen, that there was nothing to worry about.

"It's the same thing I heard before," she told him, and though she wasn't quite as frightened as he was, the fear was still there.

They did not slow down until they reached the buildings and the street.

He wanted to tell Ms. Finch about that face at the bedroom window, wanted her to know that whatever was out in the woods by those graves had reached out to him and his mom after they'd passed by here the last time. But she was striding briskly down the sidewalk toward Mag's Ham Bun, and he definitely got the impression that she did not want to talk about this, a suspicion that was confirmed when she said with false cheer, "Hot today, isn't it? I'll bet that Coke sounds good."

"Yeah," he said. But he wasn't thinking about hot days or cool drinks. He was thinking of that creepy babble coming from those graves, and his skin prickled with the memory of it.

Mother Daughter

He thought of that horrible face he and his mom had seen.

And he wondered what they'd see at the window tonight.

Twelve

Barstow, California

"I'm telling you, no trains have been hijacked. No unauthorized engines are on any tracks anywhere on the grid or have been for the past week."

"I saw it in Colorado, just past Grand Junction. If I hadn't diverted myself onto a siding, I would've been killed and you and the company would've been out a hell of a lot of money."

"I know what you said. I read the report."

"Then?"

"Then what?" Holman scratched his balding head. "Look, Tom, I don't know what happened. Maybe you were tired. Maybe you imagined it, maybe ... maybe it was an optical illusion of some sort. The only thing I'm certain of is that you didn't encounter a rogue engine on that route."

"Or a ghost engine?"

"Now you're just being an asshole."

"I saw it, Pete. From far off, around a curve. It wasn't some quick glimpse of a vague shape. It was a black locomotive. I watched it speed toward me, and it made me take sixteen off on a siding. When it got close, its lights practically blinded me. I saw it!"

Sure you did, Holman wanted to say, but he remained silent. He glanced out the window. In the desert sky, the clouds looked like a herd of miniature tyrannosauruses jumping over a hurdle to attack an oversized dachshund.

This life did things to a man. Holman didn't know if it was the rootlessness or the loneliness or the fact that they had to live with that endless repetitive rhythm hour after hour, day after day, but whatever the reason, railroaders were far more likely to be hypochondriacs, paranoiacs and conspiracy theorists than || your average man on the street.

At least in his experience.

And Tom Miller was exhibit A.

The engineer left his office frustrated and angry, and Holman sighed as he swiveled in his seat and looked out again at the sky. Hell, he was getting squirrelly himself. He'd been in the freight yard office for going on three years now, and he spent more time watching clouds than he did trains. It was the randomness of the clouds that appealed to him, the amorphous ever-changing shapes he enjoyed watching. The herd of miniature tyrannosauruses he'd seen a few minutes back had coalesced into a segmented snake; the giant dachshund was now a sinking Titanic.

Trains never did that. Boxcars were always boxcars, flatcars always flatcars, and, like he was a child, it was only the occasional anachronistic caboose that brightened up his day and gave him any joy at all.

"There!" Tom shouted from the outer office. "There! I told you, you son of a bitch! I told you!"

Holman went out to see what the commotion was and found the engineer sitting in front of the computer, logged on to an amateur site, one maintained by train fanatics who used digital webcams to record specific sections of track in order to capture the scheduled passing of passengers and freights.

This time, they'd caught something else.

Holman stared in shock at the image on-screen.

It was indeed a black locomotive but one unlike any he had ever seen. It was racing down a section of track that the streaming crawl identified as east central Colorado, past a train on a siding that could have been Tom's, could have been someone else's. The strange thing was: the engine had no markings, no detail, not even a recognizable design. It was as if a child's drawing of a locomotive had been granted three-dimensionality and been brought to life. There was about it the same sort of simplistic relationship to reality.

Only ...

Only there was a malevolence to it as well, and a sense of wild fury. The engine looked sinister in its bulky blocky blackness, and the way it sped past that stationary freight on the siding, the speed with which it passed and the sheer volume of smoke that poured out at that moment, bespoke a tremendous anger. Holman had no doubt that if the other train had been on the same track, the locomotive would have smashed right through it and continued on unscathed.

Tom hit a key on the computer and the mystery train repeated its approach and passing.

"I told you!"

"What is it?" Holman wondered, and realized he'd been speaking aloud only when everyone else in the office chimed in with "I don't know" and "You got me" and "I've never seen anything like that before."

Ghost engine, Tom had said. He hadn't been joking, and Holman now understood why. Since his father's day there'd been tales of ghost trains, retellings of the Flying Dutchman story transferred to the rails, knockoffs of other myths concocted by bored conductors or imagined by tired engineers on late-night runs. Neither he nor anyone he'd ever met had believed any of them, but he thought now of the adage that behind every legend was a grain of truth.

He watched the dark engine speed past the webcam.

Or more than a grain.

"What do you think now?" a triumphant Tom demanded.

"I believe you," Holman said simply.

That seemed to throw him. "Then, uh, what do you think it is?"

"I have no idea. But it didn't register on any of our sensors and didn't show up on the grid."