by Mark Teppo
She had said as much when they had repaired the electric engine and placed her key assembly in it. It was life enough.
“Maybe I was wrong about that,” Henry said.
Olyphant sighed and ran his hand along the train’s flank again. “Maybe,” he said softly.
“Are you supposed to retire me too?” Henry asked.
Olyphant shrugged, but Henry noticed he didn’t remove his hand from the train. “Maybe,” he said eventually. “Maybe not. And maybe we’ve all been wrong, about a great many things. Do you think that if we’re wrong enough times that eventually we’ll get something right?”
“It’s possible.”
Olyphant smiled. “Anything is, I suppose.”
“They shouldn’t have sent you,” Henry said.
Olyphant nodded and raised his face to look at Henry. “No, they shouldn’t have.”
“Will you carry a message for me?” Henry asked.
“Of course.”
“Tell the Director that I’ve done my own cost analysis. I can say, with a great deal of assurance, that it will be prohibitively expensive for them to retrieve a key they don’t know still exists. Tell them whatever else you like, my old friend, but let them know that you are my messenger. If they send anyone else, I cannot guarantee them the same safe passage.”
“I will let the Director know,” Olyphant said after a pause. He looked down the dark tunnel, his gaze softening.
Henry knew what he was hearing. The old whistling scream, the one that never quite faded, no matter how many years or miles of rail passed by. The memory of the first one never died out completely.
“Would you like to ride her?” Henry asked. “Before you go?”
Olyphant laughed. “Do you know how long it has been since I’ve ridden, just for the joy of it?”
“I do,” Henry said as his old howl faded, disappearing into the depth of his heart. “I think I do.” He leaned forward, stretching out his hand. “We’ll go as long as you want.” His shoulder didn’t ache when Olyphant clasped his arm and climbed into the cab of the train.
Beneath them, the wheels began to sing against the rail.
HAUNTVINE
Common Name: Haunt Vine (also known as Ghostroot and Spirit Creeper)
Class, Order: c. Magnoliopsida o. Solanales
Family, genus: f. Convolvulaceae g. Ipomoea Umbris
Appearance: Adolescent Haunt Vines have been mistaken for mushrooms with their knobbed crown and mottled trunks; however, mis-identification only occurs in the few months before the first stalk grows. The rounded pileus of the Haunt Vine trunk is honeycombed to trap ambient water moisture. This fluid is distributed through narrow channels within the dermal layer of the trunk and the stalks, which take on a dark magenta color. Like most of the ipomoea genus, the Haunt Vine thrives from nutrients gathered by its tuberous tap root that extends nearly three meters underground. The stalks of the Haunt Vine grow approximately 20 centimeters a year. Adult vines have from six to eight stalks. After a year of growth, buds—pearly white like the pileus—will sprout. Reminiscent of a melted conch shell, the bud is a pair of hard petals pressed together. A delicate array of orange and brown dots stipple the seam.
Ecology: The blossoms of the Haunt Vine open in the fall, usually within twelve hours of the first seasonal rain. Remaining open throughout the winter and spring, they close when the soil begins to dry. The ripe blossom will sing after nightfall. The Haunt Vine is affected by the composition of its soil. When planted in cemeteries, over burial plots, or fertilized with the ashes from a crematorium, the auditory song of the plant takes on a spectral quality. In much the same way that species of parrot mimic human speech, the Haunt Vine mimics the inflections and tonality of the dead buried beneath it. In the early 20th century, mature vines were used by Eastern European mediums and soothsayers during séances. Usually hidden from sight, their ghostly sibilance would lend verisimilitude to the medium's reading.
Life Cycle: It is unknown how the Haunt Vine propagates itself in the wild as documented experiments show a blossom must be cut and buried in order for a new plant to be grown. A severed blossom will bleed for several days before shriving into a hard black nut. Dependent upon local moisture content, maturation of the nut can take a full year.
Notes: In their historical monograph on Cabinets of Curiosity, Trouette and MacIlles speak anecdotally of a Haunt Vine being presented to Frederick III of Denmark in 1652 for inclusion in his Kunstkammer. He refused the gift, believing the plant was a fake, nothing more than a bloody squid planted in a pot of soil.
In 1876, a trio of Haunt Vines was found in the abandoned ruin of a schoolyard in the Hegyvidék neighborhood of Budapest. For many years the school was believed to be haunted; the residents claiming the voices were the cries of the children who died during a tragic fire during the revolution of 1849. A young naturalist named József Haar realized the source of the sounds tormenting the local population. His discovery terrified an already superstitious neighborhood, and the entire schoolyard was burned and the ground was salted. Attempting to preserve the plants, Haar was mortally injured. His notes were fragmentary and incomplete.
It is said that famed French Surrealist André Breton was buried with Haunt Vine blossoms in his trouser pockets. His final and purest expression of "psychic automatism," they were intended to be his ever-volatile legacy. The seeds never sprouted, or they were stolen from the corpse before the fall rains arrived.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The incomplete journal of Dr. Ehirllimbal, famed ethnobotanist and pioneering oneiromancer contains the following entry (dated September 12th, 1955), referencing the haunt vine.
The haunt vine has bloomed. It is comforting to hear its voice after nightfall, and I will occasionally sit nearby and engage it in conversation. It doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know, but it is nice to hear a voice speaking English after so long.
It is just a strange little plant, like nothing more than a pale squid buried halfway in the dirt. Though it is certainly not the strangest plant I have encountered over the last year. There are acres of singing grass surrounding this garden, though none of its vines dare breach the inner ring. In some of the natural pools, there are nightmare lotuses and clickweed, and I have been tempted by the tangle of Queen Victoria’s Bloomers that sway in the mud along the banks. I have even found what I believe to be a specimen of Atlantis Mandrake, and while I have considered experimenting with its fruit and the sap of the blackleaf, I am cognizant of the mortal dangers inherent in that mixture.
I am, after all, still such a child in comparison to those who have come to the garden before me. Still, what I have learned over this last year is more than I would have gained in a lifetime of working in a Western pharmacological laboratory. What I have seen while under the influence of the sap has shown me the path—the path I suspected, but barely understood. I must go back to the States soon, and begin the next phase of my journey.
I know it is just a plant, and I know that its speech is just an imitation of Mr. Gaultier, but I sense a sadness in its voice when I tell it I must go. In many ways, Mr. Gaultier’s corpse has been my only friend and companion these last ten months.
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
A haven for raconteurs and fabulists, the Alibi Room was a velvet-lined sanctuary where suggestion and persuasion were the watchwords and truth was such a devalued coin that it couldn’t purchase a condom from the dispenser in the men’s room. Once through the unassuming door and the voluminous coat check where racks of costumes, disguise and false uniforms waited, the patrons redrafted their pasts and invented possible futures. The promise of altered company meant that everyone—the regulars slouched on the narrow stools at the mahogany bar, the graceful and discrete staff, the liars grouped around lacquered tables or sprawled on plush couches—everyone could pretend the world beyond the rust-colored brick and the old growth timber was the fantasy. The only reality that mattered was the invented one wrapped in velvet drapery and limned wit
h orange light.
The Alibi, with its womb darkness and ambient embrace, held Colby tight. Whispering gently to him with the forgotten white noise susurration of his mother’s bloodstream, the Alibi cared. The accounting analysis he did for Empire Financial Services had merit. His study on corporate paper waste was important; his solution, an aggressive recycling program coupled with a carefully calculated ratio of premium bond paper for external communications to recycled pulp for daily consumption. The savings to the company would never be significant—barely two-thirds the salary of one accountant—but the paper reclamation would save several hundred acres every year. That won’t be ignored, the Alibi said to him. Someone would notice, someone would call down to the Fifth floor where the bean counters and money handlers worked their precarious magic. Someone would—
“Hey, Colby. Your turn.”
Colby roused himself. “What?”
Jack waved at the waitress, a slender girl with short pigtails and a Celtic tattoo curling around her wrist. “Pay Jennie and tell us a story.”
Slowly extricating himself from the Alibi’s grip, Colby fumbled for his wallet. Thumbing through his cash like he was trying to separate blades of glass, he tried to think of a good lie. This was the way their game worked: buy a round, tell a story—the others would be a receptive audience, alternately fueling the liar’s tale or expressing mock outrage, false as everything else at the Alibi. Colby tried to compose something as he fumbled a twenty out of his wallet but all that he could think of was dead trees.
Jennie smiled at him, an ivory gleam in the midnight of the room, and took his drunkenly offered bill. She spun around, her pigtails whipping against her lean neck, and smartly marched off to the infinitely distant bar.
He stared at his wallet, his thumb and forefinger rubbing the corner of a second twenty dollar bill. He couldn’t think of a decent story—other than the one whispering in his ear. Your report will be a catalyst. The voice was a lover’s mistral, a persuasive wind that cajoled and seduced, telling him what his yearning heart wanted to hear. Like an organic infection that spreads to each tree—transferred through root and branch—the impact of the document would spread throughout the entire system. One branch, one nut, one sprout: eventually the whole forest is changed.
Deeper in his body, somewhere in the region of his gall bladder and the poison collecting in his liver, a different story was taking hold. No one cares. There was no short-term shareholder value in long-term ecological stewardship.
*
On the tourist maps, the rounded hillock at the center of Windward Park was labeled “Gloriana’s Uprising.” The name was an abandoned epitaph for a matriarch no one remembered, a truncated geological marker christened by a scientist who knew stone and rock but not history. Glory—as the name was abbreviated by the locals—was a rounded mound: verdantly carpeted with wildflowers in the spring, a naked dome with splintered bones of ragged stone poking through in the winter. Stone lion heads—half-buried, their mouths choked with long liana dotted with red flowers—ringed the base of the dome.
In the previous spring, something broke beneath the uprising. Prosaically, it was a ruptured pipe, one of the heavy conduits that ran water from the recirculation plants along the coast near Sweetlow to the downtown corridor and Ludtown to the south beyond the industrial flats of Harbor Island. But, at the Alibi Room, “prosaic” is unsustainable.
Ancient wells, capped centuries ago when the land was barren of hand-tooled stone and shaped steel, had broken open in the wake of the latest seismic tremors that periodically rattled the silverware and dishes. Artesian waters, freed, sought a way out of the their earthen prison. That spring, said the whispers at the Alibi, the lions began to drool.
By mid-summer, the heads were vomiting. And the waters, long preserved beneath the scarred and tormented surface, were so pure they caused the plant life at the center of the park to eruct.
The floral eruption spawned such a cloud of pollen and miasma of rotting fruit that strange creatures were drawn to the wild park, lured out of their hidden demesnes and secret valleys by the redolent paradise’s scent. By the time creeping honeysuckle began to grip the paint-flecked sign of the old Rialto Theater at the corner of Glacier and 17th, anecdotal sightings were part of the pub-speak at the Alibi. Cats the size of Huskies and as black as a starless night. Flying monkeys that clustered like ravens on the broken fire escape railings. Rabbits and gophers that walked upright. Hypnotic serpents, exothermic lizards, slick-skinned nereids, birds that molted gold leaf: the stories grew more fanciful with each passing week, just as the green crept further and further into the houses and streets ringing the traditional boundary of the park.
Winter froze the spread of the trees and vines, arresting their invasion of the brick and stone. The moon floated low over Glory during the cold months, its icy gaze layering rime and ice on the rounded hump. Pathways to the heart of the park became blocked and redirected, hiding the frozen paradise so that it became a sanctuary for the strange creatures that had been drawn to the city.
When the unicorn’s side was pricked, it fled back to the hidden heart of Glory. Bloody spatter, stark and black against the frosted ground, was the precious trail that led the hunters through the icy maze of Windward Park.
*
David knelt and touched the red smear on the whitened ground. His face knotted with disbelief and uncertainty, he showed his stained glove to the others. “It’s blood,” he said.
Jack grunted as he reset his crossbow. “I told you I winged it.” He fished another metal bolt out of the nylon pouch on his belt and slipped it into the groove of the stock.
“Winged what?” David asked. “There was nothing . . .” His voice faltered as he smeared the blood between two fingertips, feeling the sticky lubricant slide between his gloved fingers.
“It was standing right here,” Jack said, pointing at the ground. “Colby saw it too.”
Colby hunched his shoulders as David looked at him. “I saw something,” he muttered. “Looked like—”
“A fucking unicorn,” Jack interrupted. “Come on. Say it. You saw it.” He mimed the presence of a protrusion from his forehead. “You saw the horn.”
“I don’t know what I saw, Jack,” Colby said. “I mean, you were shooting at it before I could really be sure what it was.”
“Oh, that’s such bullshit.” Jack scuffed the ground, throwing up a spray of ice slivers. He turned to the fourth man for support. “Did you see it Hurley?”
Hurley, his gaze focused on the David’s stained gloves, swallowed heavily and shook his head. Colby noticed his hands were tight on the stock of his crossbow and his breathing was shallow and quick.
Jack shook his head. “I know what I saw. It was all white, and its mane was like glass. It was standing right here.”
Colby looked at his feet instead of meeting Jack’s fervent gaze. His eyes ached, and his tongue was thick and heavy. Words seemed like bricks, too unwieldy to shift with his fat tongue.
“You wanted this too, Colby.” Jack’s face had the feral gleam again, that focused rush of the adrenaline talking. He crouched beside David and swiped his fingers through the spray of blood. He smeared unicorn blood across his forehead and down his cheeks. “We could have come without you, but you’re the one that wanted something more than just a made-up story for the Alibi. You wanted something real.” He stalked away, following an irregular path of crimson dots that led deeper into the park.
David’s eyes followed Jack, and Colby saw him register the irregular spatter that Jack was following. “I didn’t see anything,” he said to Colby, his voice low enough that Jack couldn’t hear it. “Nothing but shadows.”
“Shadows don’t bleed,” Hurley said, stepping close to the other two as if engaging them in a conspiracy. “There was something there, wasn’t there Colby?”
Colby touched his throat, rubbed his gloved hand across the cold skin of his neck as if he was trying to massage out the stuck words.
Colby nodded, still reluctant to speak of what he had seen. The unicorn had been nearly invisible against the backdrop of frosted tree trunks. But once Colby had been able to distinguish the difference between unicorn horn and tree branch, once he realized the distinction between ice-bleached bark and sleek hide, he had been able to see the creature without any difficulty.
Jack’s crossbow bolt had caught it high on the right hip. Colby had watched it rear, moonlight twisting its pearlescent horn, and he had almost closed his eyes. As if such a denial would undo what he had witnessed.
*
Hurley arrived in time to pay for the next round of drinks. He gave a credit card to Jennie and then stared at the rocking motion of her backside as she walked away. “Man, it’s like clockwork,” he said, making a ‘tick-tock’ noise with his mouth. “I never get tired of watching that.”
Jack and David laughed, an eager audience response to the “Laugh Now!” marquee powered by Hurley’s ego and wit. A gregarious salesman, he was well on his way to becoming a florid man; his ready smile and loosely hinged jaw spread his features out toward his ears. His hands were large, engorged so as to stretch around the gravid circumference of his stomach, and his reach was like the open wingspan of a heron.