by Ronald Malfi
“Could you maybe ask your friends if they recognize him?” I said.
The man called to his friends from over his shoulder. “Any of you fellas ever see a young kid come in here buying cigarettes?”
A chorus of negatives rumbled from the front of the store.
“There you go,” said the man.
“If you could show them the picture.” I extended the piece of newspaper toward him.
“I told you boys to split,” he said.
We didn’t need further invitation. Without another word, Peter and I shoved out the front door and down the steps.
“Buncha dicks,” Peter murmured.
There was a man leaning against one of the hitching posts, dressed in dingy carpenter’s pants and an unbuttoned chambray shirt with the sleeves cuffed past his elbows. He eyeballed us as we went to our bikes. “Hey, amigos,” he said, his voice like sandpaper.
Peter and I glanced at him as we rolled our bikes across the gravel parking lot.
“You trying to buy cigarettes?” the man said amiably enough. The sun was directly in his eyes, causing his features to scrunch up into a grimace.
Thinking of all the plainclothes policemen hanging around town lately, I feared this might be a setup, even though this guy looked about as far on the other side of the law as one man can get. “No, thanks,” I said.
“How ’bout beer? You amigos want some beer?”
Peter stopped pushing his bike. “Yeah? You got beer?”
The man’s squinty face broadened into a smile. “Oh yeah. I got some I can sell you. Real cheap. Pennies on the dollar.”
“Where is it?” Peter asked. There was no beer anywhere in sight.
The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Behind the store. Lucky don’t like me undercuttin’ his prices, so’s I gotta keep out of eyeshot. Like, do it on the sly, right?” When neither of us moved in his direction, the man added, “They’re nice and cold.”
“Well, how much?” Peter asked.
“I’m a bargaining man. No one ever said I ain’t.” The man headed around the side of the store. His pepper-colored hair was short and arranged in matted whorls at the back. The collar of his chambray shirt was too big, and it hung down his back, exposing a creased, sun-reddened neck beaded with sweat.
Still pushing our bikes, we followed him. There was a second gravel parking lot back here and a large oil tank painted to look like a World War II submarine docked against the siding behind a fence of scraggly, leafless bushes. I relaxed a little when I noticed the six-pack of Coors tucked in the shade of some bushes.
The man stood before the beer, peering down. He had his back toward us, so I didn’t see what he was doing with his hands. Counting money, I assumed. I only had a buck and a half on me.
“You two amigos wanna see something?” said the man, glancing at us from over one shoulder.
Neither Peter nor I said a word. Suddenly, the color of the world changed. Things felt instantly wrong.
The man turned around. The front of his shirt was tucked up under his chin, and his pants were undone. A grayish-brown penis curled over the waistband of his briefs, wreathed in wiry black hair. It jerked upward as if tied to an invisible wire.
Peter and I turned and ran.
“Hey! Amigos! Come back! I was only joking!”
Once we had enough speed, we hopped on our bikes, blasted across the front parking lot, and sped through the trees. For one bloodcurdling moment, I wondered if the pervert might give chase.
“Holy shit,” said Peter. It sounded like he was struggling not to laugh or cry. “Can you believe it?” Then he did laugh, though it came out as a partially stifled squawk.
I kept seeing the pervert’s dick jerk upward, the image flooding me with shame, as if I had somehow caused it to happen. I couldn’t help but think my dad would be disappointed and possibly angry with me if he ever found out. I couldn’t comprehend why I felt this way.
“You think that guy’s the Piper?” I asked.
“I think he’s just a fucking screwball pervert,” Peter opined. “But that whole store looked like it could’ve been filled with serial killers. Those guys were monsters, man.”
“Did you see that guy with the fishhook earrings?” I said as we got back on the deserted blacktop of Farrington Road. The sun was beginning its descent behind the western trees. “Even if the cops went there, those guys wouldn’t have told them a single thing.”
Peter looked toward the north, where Farrington Road narrowed and curved through the trees. “You wanna check out that old train depot?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
We rode until the pavement turned to gravel, then dead-ended on the outskirts of town. A single-story barnlike structure that had been vacant ever since the last train ran through our city in 1950, the railway depot squatted in the center of a gravel pit overgrown with bleached weeds and discarded mounds of garbage. The entire lot was surrounded by dense woodland.
The depot’s windows were veined with cracks and black with gunk, many of them boarded up like the windows of the Werewolf House. The peeling and weather-ruined façade was marred by years of neon graffiti. The sagging roof bristled with falcons’ nests so massive and intricately constructed that they looked like booby traps. There was something akin to a bell tower sans bell in the center of the roof, giving the whole thing a sort of old-time Southern church look.
Even before teenagers started disappearing, I had been forbidden to come out here. Based on the stories I’d heard, there were usually bums lurking about, sometimes whole communes of them, who took great delight in chasing kids who dared to tread on their turf. But that was supposed to be in the winter when the homeless built fires in the discarded oil drums and huddled together to keep warm. Now, in the summer, the place appeared to be desolate.
Peter and I dumped our bikes in the gravel and approached the depot together. Falcons screeched and pinwheeled in the sky. We walked the circumference of the gravel pit, pausing when we reached the ancient blood-colored railroad tracks running along the western side of the depot. They were skeletal and haunted in their years of disuse, and it was nearly possible to sense tetanus radiating from them. Leafless shrubbery exploded between the ties. The tracks stretched out in a perfectly straight line, vanishing at a horizon veiled in darkening trees. As we watched, two deer trotted onto the tracks and began to feed on the sun-bleached grasses.
“The old B&A Line,” Peter said.
“It looks haunted.”
“It is.”
The ghosts of old railway workers were said to roam the grounds. Stories of ghostly lantern lights glimpsed through the trees at night were abundant, and there were even tales of people hearing the old short line chugging along the abandoned tracks.
“We should go in there, look around,” Peter said.
“I don’t think so,” I countered. I reflected on the morning when Adrian and I had hidden in the basement of the Werewolf House, crouching in sewage while Keener and his pals hunted us with a rifle.
“We came out all this way. We might as well.” Peter stomped down the weeds on his way to the massive double doors set into the side of the depot.
Reluctantly, I followed.
I stood on the remains of a platform, and the weathered planks moaned and threatened to break apart beneath my weight. Indeed, some of the planks were busted, leaving ragged, toothy mouths in the flooring. I looked down one of the holes and saw garbage stuffed in there—McDonald’s cups, dusty beer bottles, and cans of Natty Boh.
“Shit,” Peter said, tugging at the massive combination lock on the double doors. “Too bad Sugarland’s not here. He’d get this sucker open.”
Over the side of the platform, I watched a black snake twist through the undergrowth. I hopped down into the tall grass and joined Peter. There were small square windows at either side of the double doors. I wiped an arc of grime from one of the panes. Standing on my toes, I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered inside.
After a moment, my eyes adjusted and shadows coalesced and took on definitive shapes. I made out a row of benches, the hollowed windows of the ticket booths behind a wire-mesh grate, a pyramid of crates stacked in one sun-shafted corner. The shell of an old destination board hung from one wall, though the lettering had been removed. In the center of the ceiling, a gaping black hole spewed curling electrical cables that resembled the tentacles of a giant squid.
“What’s that?” Peter said. He was looking in another window and pointing to a spot on the floor. “Holy shit. It looks like a person.”
I couldn’t see what he was seeing. The floor was covered in debris, which, in turn, was coated in a sheet of grayish dust so thick I had originally mistaken it for carpeting. Tarpaulin was draped over what I assumed to be mounds of junk, and two-by-fours were stacked like firewood indiscriminately about the place. Holes were punched into the drywall, and powder and plaster lay in heaps on the floor beneath them.
“You’re full of shit,” I told him.
“Am I? Come here and look at this.”
I went over and nearly pressed the side of my head against his as I peered through the window. “Where?”
“There.” He pressed one finger against the filthy glass. “See it?”
I squinted, checking out the interior from a slightly different angle now. “What am I . . . ?”
But then I saw it.
Behind the row of benches, a filthy yellow sheet was draped over the undeniable outline of a human being. The longer I stared at it the more clearly I discerned the profile of a skull and a face, the slope of a neck graduating to the rise of a chest, a torso, legs, and finally the twin tombstones of feet pointing toward the ceiling.
My breath, which had been fogging up the windowpane, suddenly seized in my throat. With the heel of my right hand, I swiped another swath of grime from the glass to get a better look. There was no denying it. The shape under the sheet was a human being.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Peter whispered.
“I think . . .” My throat clicked. “Holy shit.”
“What?”
Four fingers were poking out from beneath the yellow sheet. I said as much, tapping the glass. “See ’em? There! Right there! They’re fingers!”
“No fucking way,” Peter said, his lips nearly pressed against the glass.
“Do you see them?”
“Yeah.” There was undeniable reverence to his voice.
“They’re fingers, right?”
“Yeah.” He tried to open the window but it wouldn’t budge. As if shocked by an electrical current, he jerked his hand away. “Damn it!”
“What is it?”
“Goddamn splinter.” He opened his left palm for me to see the reddened mound of flesh speared through the center with a sliver of nasty-looking wood. He attempted to pull it out but somehow only managed to wedge it down more. “The son of a bitch hurts.”
“Let me see.” I grabbed his hand and examined it. “We need a pair of tweezers or a sewing needle or something.”
Peter looked down at the Metallica patch pinned to his T-shirt sleeve. With his good hand he undid the safety pin that held it, stuffing the patch into his pocket and holding the pin up to his face as if to scrutinize it. Then he thrust it at me. “You do it.”
I took the pin, then fished my cigarette lighter from the pocket of my shorts. After sterilizing the head of the pin, I hunched over Peter’s hand and prodded the edge of the splinter to the surface of his flesh. A dollop of blood came with it.
“I’m gonna need shots,” he groaned.
“Hold still,” I cautioned him. It took a couple of minutes, but I managed to remove the splinter. I held the culprit up between us, pinched between my thumb and forefinger, as if we were two homicide detectives who had just located a missing shell casing. It was roughly the size and shape of a pencil point. Peter wrinkled his nose at it, and I tossed it onto the ground.
Peter stared at the depot’s darkened windows. They looked like vortexes into other dimensions. “Man, we really saw that, didn’t we?”
I nodded.
“Should we break in?”
“I guess we could. Though if you got a splinter that bad just from trying to open a window, I can only imagine what we might do to ourselves crawling through a busted window.” Because this place is haunted, I thought. Because it will do what it can to keep us out. In much the same way the Werewolf House lured us in, this place is telling us to leave. We are trespassers. We do not belong.
I didn’t necessarily believe in ghosts, but I did believe in the power a place could hold, could retain, and how the land resonated with echoes of its past. Charles had once told me that sometimes the places where bad things happened would suck up that badness like a sponge sucks up water. The badness gets stuck and rots and becomes like a stain, even if you couldn’t see anything. An invisible stain, like on cop shows on TV, and how even after blood is cleaned up you can still find it with a black light.
Admittedly, the old railway depot projected an aura of badness. I didn’t know what evil had transpired here all those years ago when the station was in use, but it wasn’t hard to imagine a horrific industrial accident or a passenger getting struck by the train. It could have been anything.
It also occurred to me that this was one of the places my father specifically told me to keep away from back in October, the night Courtney Cole’s body was pulled out of the Dead Woods. Stay away from those empty cabins along the Cape and the Shallows and the old railway station at the end of Farrington Road.
Peter nodded, though he still stared at the depot with a determined expression. His forehead and cheeks were becoming sunburned. He winced when he looked at me, the setting sun catching his eyes. “Let’s come back tomorrow with Michael. He could open that lock.”
“We’ll come back with everyone,” I added, thinking there would be safety in numbers. Safety from what? Ghosts? Again, my father’s voice floated through my brain: When you go out, stay with your friends in populated areas, preferably at their houses.
Rustling noises beyond the nearby tree line caused us to freeze. I thought it might be the deer, but when I looked toward the tracks they were already gone. As we listened, it sounded like something big moving around just beyond our line of sight. Very close. An animal?
A person?
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Abandoned Railway Depot (Part Two)
The following day, after I got out of work and Michael got out of summer school, the five of us departed for the abandoned railway depot. We didn’t have much time to waste if we were to make it back home before curfew.
We picked up Farrington Road by cutting through the bike trail behind St. Nonnatus, but we still had a good hour-long bike ride ahead of us. Michael had his army helmet on, and Peter had secured the dynamo-powered radio to his handlebars with bungee cords, so we enjoyed some tunes as we rode. The alternative rock station, still mourning the April suicide of Kurt Cobain, played a block of Nirvana without commercial interruptions.
On my handlebars, Adrian had assumed his rightful position—a masthead tucked into a ball, his head down to allow for better aerodynamics, his hands balled into white fists as they gripped the handlebars.
Halfway down Farrington we stopped to smoke cigarettes while Michael urinated into a thicket of holly bushes. Around us the woods had grown greener seemingly overnight, and the air smelled like sandalwood and pine sap and honeysuckle.
“Whew,” Michael said, coming back out from the trees and shaking one urine-speckled leg of his shorts. “My back teeth were floating.”
Everyone mounted their bikes except me.
“What?” Adrian said.
“Your turn to drive,” I told him.
“Huh?”
“You know how, right?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, good. Just try not to kill me.”
It had been a joke, but I
quickly prayed for my safety once I mounted the handlebars and Adrian started to pedal. He wove like a drunkard and jerked the handlebars back and forth so much I could have sworn he was trying to shake me loose. He seemed timid about going very fast, so he hung back from the others, content in our plodding but safer pace.
“It’ll be easier to balance if you go faster,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said, but he didn’t pick up the pace at all.
“How come you don’t have a bike?”
“I used to.”
“What happened to it? Was it stolen back in Chicago?”
“No. We left it in the garage when we moved away. We never took anything from the garage. Not even the car.”
Because his dad killed himself in there, I thought.
When we arrived at the depot it was already late afternoon, and there was a smear of dark clouds along the horizon. Something about the way the building stood there made me think that perhaps it had been waiting for us to return since yesterday. It looked somehow . . . anticipatory.
“Wow,” Adrian marveled. “That is one scary-looking place.”
We dumped our bikes on the ground and approached the depot together. Our sneakers crushed the white gravel to powder. All around us, insects buzzed and hummed and chirruped in the tall grass, and larger animals moved around deep in the trees. The whole world seemed abuzz with life.
Except for inside, I thought, recalling the sheet draped over the form of a human being, those fingers protruding from beneath it . . .
Peter and I led them around the side of the building where the double doors stood. In the fading daylight, the building was the color of tree bark, its filthy windowpanes like pools of roofing tar. The whole thing looked like one big warning sign. I knew the others could feel it, too. It seemed no one wanted to get any closer to it, and we were all content standing here in the tall grass while crickets ricocheted off our shins.
Eventually, Peter pointed at the doors. “That’s the lock, Michael.”
“If it’s locked,” Scott said, “then how’s the killer getting in and out?”