It was a location—close by.
Edmund raced to pull his phone off charge, simultaneously accessing his EarthTrotter app. He used his finger to find the intersection of coordinates—the latitude and longitude, then punched in the numbers, separating them by a coma.
Immediately the app showed a globe, and upon it, a little blue dagger that represented Edmund’s location. Then, the globe was spinning, a tiny turn, not even enough to jump continents—not even enough to jump countries. The coordinates he input only moved the globe a millimeter, for the location that Lena had marked on the map was but a mile away.
It was just north of the Treblinka camp.
After all that back and forth downstairs, Lena was showing him where Addey fell.
***
After dressing, he grabbed both phones, his IR camera, and the spare key to the car that the good people at Nomad gave him. It was currently half an hour past midnight, but that didn’t matter in a place like this, with a chill in the air and snow on the ground. Edmund wagered that even in warmer months, the dead of night was still just as empty.
Out in the hall, he lingered for a moment by Bill and Sophie’s room, listening to someone (he didn’t know which) snore softly. Going out alone was a bad idea, but he’d rather see the spot where Addey fell by himself, rather than drag his friends along. He’d done enough to ruin their trip already.
The logical part of him said to wait until morning, but the logical part of Edmund Riley was often like a train itself, and these days it always pulled away from the station just as an important decision was to be made. Tonight would be no different, and should things pan out, he’d go there, snap a few pictures, and come back in the morning with his friends but armed with more information.
Down in the common room the fireplaces were on the wane, but central heat cleverly hidden behind brown-painted faceplates kept the room reasonably warm. The army of figurines had been returned to their curio cabinet and Lena was nowhere to be found. Her chair at the table was pushed in. But just as Edmund was about to let himself out the door, the sound of the small counter television caught his ear, and he turned to look at it.
The old woman was propped in front of it, a blanket covering her legs. She wasn’t watching the bygone black and white show—she had her head turned back, and she squinted at Edmund, as if trying to figure out if she’d ever seen him before. He didn’t like her stare one bit—in fact he compared it to the narrator in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, completely vexed by the eye. But rather than chop her up and stow her beneath the floorboards, he gave a curt nod—it was his only way to get through difficult pretext—and headed out into the blistery cold night.
As he slid into the driver’s seat of the Fiat for the very first time, a conundrum stopped his quest in its tracks. Sophie had done all of the driving in Poland, as he nor Bill had any idea how to operate a manual transmission. He’d seen her do it many times, had even seen his dad all those years ago when Edmund got to ride along in various construction vehicles on equally varied construction jobs. How hard could it be?
He learned rather quickly to try further down the hill, as the noise of the constantly stalled engine was sure to bring the whole of Krakus House out to see what was happening. When the ground leveled out, he held the clutch down, moved into first gear, then started to let it up just as he pumped the gas. Edmund didn’t need to go far, and he didn’t need to go fast, so he didn’t bother trying to move to a higher gear. Every few yards, the car was stalling out and he found himself having to turn the key all over again.
Just like any other night, the street was deserted, only tonight it was so cold that even the tealights weren’t lit around the Catholic church. Edmund had his phone sitting on the dash, the EarthTrotter app telling him that he would be at his destination in only two minutes.
It was near impossible to stay on the road, and he only hoped his silver arrow on the app was accurate to where it said he should be. Even without a soft blanket of untouched snow, the dirt paths would be hard to see at night since there were very few lights out this way. He was just happy that somehow, his phone was getting service.
For a brief moment he touched industry, an overlap of passing traffic near Poniatowo as he turned onto the 627 and off it again only half a mile down the road. Now, he was on yet another dirt path—snow covered, of course—and was only another mile from the stone arch that would lead into the Treblinka Memorial.
He’d come to the end of the road on the EarthTrotter app—if he wanted to continue, it would look like his car was floating in a virtual, green void. But that was for the best, because as far as Edmund could see, the road in front of his high beams was growing rough, and most likely wasn’t even there after a few more feet. No, this was where the beaten path ended and the Polish wilds began.
Edmund pulled over to the side, felt the wheels disappear from the road and land on crunchy dirt, and killed the engine. He circled to the passenger’s seat and pulled out his backpack, then turned on his phone’s flashlight.
Currently, he was standing in the middle of nowhere. The sound of the highway could be heard far off, but only because the snow muted all local noises. It was dark out, but the moon was up there, playing peekaboo with the thick clouds as they dumped snow. He could hear his breath, could hear his own heart beating in his ears. The Fiat made little popping sounds as the engine settled but for all intents and purposes—it was silent. For the first time in all his years of hunting ghosts, he was unnerved.
He leaned against the car and pulled out Addey’s phone and watched the video. His eyes had to focus each time he looked up from the bright, unnatural light of the blue screen. There weren’t many identifiers in the video, and if there were, they didn’t look much as they did tonight, with a sheen of confusing snow covering everything.
Without having much to go on, he turned to his own phone, where the spot highlighted on the map lay waiting a hundred yards or so up the hill. That was a good start since Addey seemed to be scaling a hill in the video.
He kept his light trained on the ground, careful to watch for fallen logs or jagged rocks. Remembering one of his first thoughts upon coming to this area—it wouldn’t do to be injured. If he fell and broke a leg or punctured a lung, there’s a good chance he’d just have to bleed out right then and there.
Edmund Riley’s third rule of travel: Don’t die in the Polish wilderness.
The sound of the highway was lost as he entered the woods, replaced by the crunch of his boots on the snow. Somewhere to his right, far off, a dog howled, and then to his left, two more of them joined in. There were birds in the trees, angrily braying, unsettling snow as he walked beneath. He sucked in air, cold and frigid, and his lungs burned.
That red checkmark on his map suddenly separated from the top corner of the screen and now shared space with Edmund’s current location. He was getting close, but how accurate could a circle on a printout be? As he neared the spot, he stopped long enough to consult Addey’s video and did his best to line up a shot. It wasn’t perfect, but he thought just up ahead was where Addey’s video began. Edmund looked back and could no longer see the car, between the curvature of the hill and swirling snow.
This was the right way—an abnormally thick tree amongst a throng of skinny ones was standing just to the right in the video and Edmund was able to match it because of the way the hill slanted off to the left. It pained Edmund to think that he was walking the same path his friend had, just before falling into a coma.
He nearly dropped his phone when the EarthTrotter app spoke, telling him that he’d arrived at his destination. Edmund did a full circle, looking at the ground where his friend must have fallen, as if a ghostly apparition of Adlai should still be prone against the snow. There was nothing here, but then again Edmund wasn’t expecting anything. This wasn’t the only spot shown on the video—Addey had continued on for several yards before being confronted with the train and turning around to run, so Edmund pressed forward, feeling the c
hill run down his spine.
The dogs’ howls turned to barks and then to shrieks so suddenly that Edmund stopped and listened, expecting to hear them fighting. Were there bears in these woods? He didn’t know. But just as his feet started to shuffle forward again, the dogs began to whimper, running off down the mountain and away from him.
He came to the apex of the hill, the place in the video where Addey confronted the train. Standing there, looking down the decline, Edmund saw nothing special. There were no tracks, but of course he didn’t expect there would be—the Ghost Train didn’t need them. The ground leveled out, however, so he supposed there could have been tracks there at some point.
His whole body shivered, and not because of the cold. It was disconcerting knowing that he was standing where Addey stood when his friend saw it. The train. The reaching ghosts. Otto Herzog with the alligator wrench. On a night like this, the train had appeared.
In his mind, or perhaps not, he heard the distant whistle of a steam engine.
Edmund did a full circle, juggling the two cellphones as he did. The world was on mute. There were no train whistles, not even a dog anymore. The only thing he heard was his heart beating in his ears and the adrenaline to go with it. Part of him wanted to go back to the car, and the smartest thing he could do would be just that, but the ghost hunter in him, now over the perfunctory jump-scare, pressed on.
Since the train’s engine was facing the left in the video, Edmund took the logical step and began walking that way, hoping that he didn’t lose track of himself in the woods and that he would be able to find the car should he take too many turns. As he’d thought earlier, this part of the hillside was relatively flat, so he followed along, trying to put logic behind a ghost sighting.
If the train was headed this way, where would it go? Perhaps it had no destination. Perhaps it simply rode in circles, terrorizing all that it came across. As long as Edmund had his wits about him, didn’t see people who weren’t there, didn’t hear offers from the train, he knew he’d be safe.
He’d walked over a hundred yards along the flat part of the hillside, had considered turning back because all he saw ahead was more trees and not much else, but his boot kicked something hard. The way it felt against his toe made him think it wasn’t a rock, certainly not dirt. Edmund turned his phone to the ground and almost didn’t see it until he used his heel to clear some of the snow and mud away. It was metal, that much was certain in the red-tinged rust along the smooth, curved top that protruded from the ground.
Edmund used his fingers to dig it up—cold metal for sure—and when he pulled it from its grave and held it up for the light to fall across it, his jaw went slack because there was no logical reason why this should have existed here.
It was an old, rusty railroad spike.
A railroad spike from a train track that was no longer here. Edmund remembered how all the railroad spurs leading to death camps were dismantled. But Treblinka was in the opposite direction. Why had this one been taken up? The only logical answer was because whatever lay at the end of the tracks needed to remain hidden.
Just then he had a thought, so he stuffed the phones into his pockets and pulled out his IR camera and waited for the boot screen to disappear so he could switch over to heat mode. He was using his ghost hunter instincts—the callback to the Nun Hunter days when he knew he needed to look at things from a different perspective.
He held up the camera, moving it back and forth but saw nothing because this was a frigid land with nothing at all giving off heat. For a moment he caught sight of something high up, but it could have been a glitch in the lens as much as it could have been a bird.
Just when he was about to turn it off, he lowered it toward the ground—and found two streaks of red, moving off ahead of him. Two streaks—like railroad tracks, only there weren’t any here. Edmund bent down with his knee in the snow, still using the IR camera to look at the heat signature. But when he touched the spot that should have certainly been warm, if not hot, his fingers didn’t detect even the smallest trace of heat.
Edmund walked a little longer, his mind hearing a steam engine, somewhere far off. The part of his brain that didn’t believe in ghosts told him that it was simply a trick of the mind, or perhaps it really was a steam engine—weren’t those still used from time to time? Surely they were, in a backwater country like Poland, where there was barely any Wi-Fi, no people, and the only car you could find was of the three-pedal variety.
Another hundred feet past the railroad spike and the hill started to move upward. Still, he could follow the eerie, red lines of a train track that was no longer there. Although it was dark out and the snow was swirling about his head and through the trees, he was sure that the mountain was growing much steeper because the stars were gone, as were the clouds. Far ahead, perhaps another hundred feet, the mountain moved up, and he squinted to make out what he saw toward the top.
Could it be lights? He wasn’t sure. As he stood there in the snow, his heart raced because he was nervous—and unnerved, not to mention he was tired after such a trek. But Edmund squinted his eyes, and through the snow and darkness he made out several squares of golden lights. Could it be a house? No, the squares were too spread out to be one house. Maybe a town? That seemed more plausible, but he didn’t remember seeing any sort of town this close to Treblinka, with the exception of Poniatowo and Ozelki. Even through the camera’s lens, and even zoomed in, he couldn’t tell what he was seeing.
That’s when he noticed the chain link fence directly in front of him, veering off to the left and right and eaten by the darkness. It blocked his path and aiming the IR camera high, he saw there’d be no going over it either. This fence rose at least ten feet and was tipped in barbed wire. A thick, knobby mass sat atop the post in front of him, probably a surveillance camera.
The red streaks on the ground disappeared abruptly, as if the train, not so long ago, had pulled to the fence and then stalled.
He wondered if the IR camera was glitching—it did that once a long time ago, during a ghost hunt near Williamson. It was an older model and he probably should have replaced it, but such things were expensive. Edmund wanted to test it out on himself, so he turned it around, held it out at arm’s length to snap a selfie, then looked at the photo.
It was a mash of all reds and yellows in the form of his face, the heat signature from an IR camera that, despite what he originally thought, was not glitchy. It only made him look like a bloodied monster of light.
But there was also a train in the background, just behind him.
He whirled around, dropping the railroad spike but somehow, miraculously holding the IR camera. The night was still dark, the train sitting directly in front of him gave off a muted, ethereal glow that shimmered with mist, but he could see every single car as it stretched out behind the engine, like a long, dreadful snake.
The engine faced him, the heat coming off its metal pilot shimmering against the cold air. Edmund fell to the ground, crawling back a few steps by its sudden appearance. A hush washed across the hillside, and in the next moment, it was filled with an assortment of awful noises.
The steel wheels, as if connected to steel rails, screeched so loudly that snow fell from tree branches. Each of the cars sitting on the invisible track rocked back and forth as those inside clambered to get out. Ice filled his veins—he was more afraid than he’d ever been in his life.
But that fear only expanded when Otto Herzog, as substantial as any living man, hopped out of the engine, landing solidly in the snowy grass. His eyes, dead and milky orbs of light, found Edmund, but this apparition’s glare was so much more awful than the old woman’s could ever be. In his hand was the long, jagged alligator wrench, bent slightly to the right. Otto was a mountain of a man, and the video on Addey’s phone hardly did his size justice. Slowly, he was approaching, snow crunching and mist swirling beneath his boots.
Edmund didn’t know if ghosts could hurt the living—all of the pseudo-science suggest
ed that they could only be viewed, just noncorporeal beings. This whole notion went up in flames the moment the brute swung the wrench, just where Edmund had been before rolling aside, sending up tufts of grass into the air. A wide, yet deep divot remained.
Again, he swung, the wrench coming inches from Edmund’s throat with such force that if the ghost had managed to connect, it would have ripped his head clean off. It took the third swipe, a deep slash against a great oak that left a foot-long trench in its bark, to get Edmund to his feet and running away.
When Otto drove the wrench across the tree, he turned his back, and in that brief moment Edmund hurtled past him, running alongside the train because the hillside was level enough for him to gain speed. For a flicker of a second he threw his head back to see if the man had recovered, only to find him giving chase, and closing fast, like a steam engine himself, running at full speed. The wrench was held high, the little jagged teeth catching glimpses of the moon.
Edmund veered off course as he quickly turned back around, smacking into the train—it was as much metal as any ordinary trainset, but when he collided, he became entangled. At first he thought the train held some sort of cosmic power to adhere the living to it, but there were dead, awful faces, and dead awful limbs pawing at him, holding his jacket, pleading for him to let them out.
They reminded Edmund of his little sister’s dolls—the rubber ones meant to look like real babies. When you pushed on their foreheads, the whole thing collapsed. That’s what he was seeing now—ghostly men and women with heads that had been crushed. Some were missing eyes, some were missing teeth. Many had brains, pulpy and pink, running down their faces. Still, they grabbed at him and still they cried out in a language he didn’t understand.
Ghost Train of Treblinka Page 11