Captain Quad

by Sean Costello

  "What's up?" Kelly said, alarmed. She and Marti had been sitting on the couch, leafing through an Eaton's catalog, when suddenly Marti gasped and leapt to her feet.

  Now she sat down again, shaking her head. "Thought I saw something at the window."

  Kelly looked but saw nothing. "It must've been Chainsaw. He's forever sticking his mug in the windows and scaring the life out of me."

  "Maybe," Marti said. "And maybe it was some pervert with his joint in his hand."

  Kelly laughed, secretly pitying any pervert who decided to take on Marti Stone. "He'd freeze it off tonight."

  "Good for him."

  "Come on," Kelly said. "Back to business." They'd picked out the wedding dresses they wanted, white lace with veils and elegant trains, and were now involved in the happy task of selecting gowns for the bridesmaids. "The peach or the fuchsia."

  "I think we should run with the Naugahyde."

  "All right," Kelly said, closing the catalog. She'd seen the last of Marti's concentration for tonight. "Let's watch a movie."

  "Yeah!" Marti agreed. "First Blood." She chuckled. "Sounds like a health ed film for a bunch of prepubescent girls."

  "You, Marti Stone," Kelly said, "are a sicko."

  She got up and switched on the VCR. They'd rented a couple of films at National Video: The Man Who Would Be King for Kelly and First Blood for Marti. She was really just killing time until Will got home. She hated it when he worked the night shift like this. She worried about him out there on that slag train.

  Kelly glanced at her watch as she fed the tape into the machine. Four more hours, she thought impatiently. Just four more hours and he'll be home.

  Sam couldn't think. When he entered the apartment, the first thing he did was turn on the reel-to-reel. He listened to a few scratchy bars, then switched the damned thing off.

  God help me, he thought, madness nipping at his heels. I'm turning into my mother. The next thing you know I'll be drowning in a whiskey bottle.

  He turned the TV on loud. A fat woman wearing Buddy Holly glasses and a baggy Vuarnet T-shirt spun the wheel of fortune with a dimpled fist. The clack of the wheel stalked Sam as he wandered through the apartment. He stopped at the piano—and plucked a memory out of the air before it could flit away on him.

  He sat on the bench, lifted the fallboard and examined the precise rank of keys. "Middle C," he could hear Peter saying in his tutor's voice. "If you can remember that, the rest is a cinch."

  Middle C. . . where is it? Sam wondered, recalling with fondness Peter's vain attempts at teaching him music. He'd been about ten at the time. He plunked a white key near the center of the keyboard. It sounded right.

  "'Chopsticks,' kid," Peter said through a cold mist of years, and Sam could almost feel his brother's arm around his skinny, ten-year-old shoulders. "It's the easiest tune in the world. Play this for that little redhead I've seen you eyeballing across the street and you'll have her knickers off in no time. . .”

  Recalling the simple melody, Sam hunched over the keys. He aligned his index fingers like rigid soldiers, and tried to play "Chopsticks."

  Wrong.

  He shifted his fingers one key to the right and tried again.

  Wrong!

  "Come on, asshole," Sam cursed himself. "Can't you do anything right?"

  He shifted two keys to the left and speared them savagely.

  Wrong! Shit! Wrong!

  On the TV behind him the local news came on. The lead story made Sam twist around on the bench, his breath snagging hotly in his throat.

  "Two Sudbury men were found dead today by a Kukagami area trapper," the newsman said impassively. "A third, listed as missing, is also presumed dead. Provincial police are withholding the details, but sources indicate that foul play was likely a factor. From what could be pieced together at the scene, the three men were ice fishing when one of them went berserk. . .”

  The camera cut to three faded photographs. Sam recognized Rhett's from his ninth-grade yearbook.

  No. . .

  Clammy with shock, Sam stumbled out to the kitchen, grabbed the phone book, and began flipping through the pages, tearing some of them as he went. He found "Wheeler" and scanned the entries; there were six of them. Kelly's number was unlisted. He found her folks' number, started to punch it in, then got a better idea.

  He hit 411.

  In the other room the announcer continued his news break: "Police divers will resume their efforts to recover the third man's body at first light. . .”

  "Information."

  "Have you got a new listing for Kelly Wheeler?"

  There was a pause; then a recorded voice recited the number. As he jotted it down, Sam thumbed the cutoff button. When he had a dial tone again, he punched in the number. It rang.

  "Hello?" a cheerful voice said.

  And Sam fell mute. It was insane. All of it. She'd think he'd lost his marbles. And hadn't he?

  There had to be some sane explanation. Somehow Peter had gotten wind of what had happened to Kiley and the others and had built it into his fantasies. That was all it was.

  No! It's for real! Your brother is a killer!

  "Hello? Who is this?"

  Sam glanced at the TV. There was a detergent commercial on now.

  He hung up the phone.

  It was too crazy even to contemplate.

  Over the next five weeks things settled down to a state that Sam came to think of as normal. It meant ignoring his fears, but this seemed a small price to pay for the peace of mind. Peter seemed more like his old self—by turns moody and bright, reading novels again and speaking fondly of old times—and this calm period lulled Sam into a wary breed of contentment. His injuries were mending nicely; there would be a permanent scar below his right eye, and the appliance the orthodontist had fitted him with was driving him batty, but his ribs didn't catch him anymore, and his limp was almost gone. He had even suited up for a game toward the middle of February, though the coach hadn't played him. There was a change for the better in the weather, too, and this lent credence to the illusion of peace. Kiley and his friends had indeed come to an untimely end, but the question of how Peter had known about it began to fade in importance with time. After all, he was Peter, and Peter had always been an exceptional person. Even Sam's secret, carnal longings for Kelly seemed to diminish a little.

  For a time he felt almost content.

  Peter used the time wisely, honing his powers and recording his thoughts, but also biding his time. Let her dwell in her girlish fantasies. Let the monkey she'd taken up with lead her into a cloud of stupid bliss. She'd be more vulnerable then. Her grief would cripple her, and then he could take her. Take her to the light.

  Then she would understand.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  What're you grinnin' at?" Dave Sully said as Will climbed aboard the idling locomotive. Sully was the conductor and switchman. He and Will had been workmates for the past eight years, and tonight was just another of the many night shifts they had shared. "You get your doughnut dunked before coming to work?"

  Will just beamed, and for Sully that was answer enough. He clapped Will on the back, seized his lunch pail—he always did that, from the very first shift they'd shared, snatching Will's lunch pail and rudely inspecting its contents—then took his seat by the rear controls.

  "You gonna eat this Twinkie?" Sully said, already unwrapping the sweet brown cake.

  "It's yours if you shove it up your ass," Will said, and then laughed as he always did as Sully puckered his lips into what passed for the most appalling-looking anal margin Will could imagine and then crammed the Twinkle in through it. "You hog!"

  Once these nightly amenities were observed, the two men set about inspecting the slag train. Will, in his capacity as engineer, checked the controls for function, cranking levers and eyeballing gauges, testing the pressurized brakes. Sully, meanwhile, hopped down to inspect the railcars, making sure that each of the eight helmet-shaped pots was securely locked in the upright po
sition. A single pot had a twenty-five-ton capacity, which meant that, fully loaded, the train lugged about two hundred tons of molten rock. The temperature of freshly skimmed slag ran in the vicinity of 2,400°F. A single drop splashed onto an unprotected arm would bore a sizzling tunnel all the way through before its owner got a chance to scream. It was not a substance to be toyed with.

  Satisfied all was in order, Sully climbed back aboard. "Let's get this old whore rollin'," he said.

  "I hear that," Will agreed, and sounded the whistle. Cranking a lever, he eased the train toward the long brick smelter a quarter mile distant.

  In the west, the sun sank slowly into peach-colored mist.

  Their first run went like clockwork. They picked up a fresh load of slag at number three furnace, then propelled the eight sloshing pots along the two miles of track to the dump, stopping only once at the halfway point while Sully threw a switch. Ranged out in clattering succession ahead of them, the lime-whitened vats resembled a crude rank of cribs containing the infant offspring of the sun. The heat shimmer rose ten feet into the air, distorting the objects in its path.

  At the top of the run, where the east face of the embankment flattened out, Will stopped the train and gave a short, sharp blast on the whistle. Thirty yards away, the door to the dumper's trailer swung open and Jack Miller lumbered out. Jack, a dull-minded chap with the most amazing beer gut Will had ever seen, spent the time between dumps napping like a baby in his chair. The whistle blast was meant to get him moving.

  As he always did, Sully jumped down to watch the slag spills glow in the twilight.

  Left alone, Will leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. His thoughts were with Kelly, of course, and a contented smile played on his lips. Winning her back had been like the magical replacement of a missing limb, and he made a silent vow before the sinking sun never to let go of her again. When Sully climbed back aboard twenty minutes later, Will failed to notice the scowl on his face and the apparent blackening of his mood. He exchanged waves with the dumper, who had made his way back to his trailer, then began reversing the train down the grade. Had his thoughts not been elsewhere, Will might have been alarmed at the change in his partner, at the way his typically smiling blue eyes had darkened, and at how they had settled, cold and sullen, on Will's unprotected back.

  He eased the train back toward the smelter, unbothered by the two-hundred-foot slope of the embankment, which plunged away on either side.

  As sometimes happened, the next batch of pots had not yet been loaded, and the trainmen got a few minutes' break. As Will backed the locomotive into the loading bay, Sully hopped down and stalked grimly off toward the line shack. In serious need of a leak, Will strolled into the smelter to use the facilities.

  Shortcutting across the roaring aisle—a narrow twelve-hundred-foot corridor in which the raw ore was refined—Will was struck yet again by the dark magnificence of the place. To the uninitiated, it must seem a vision of Hell's own foundry, a sweltering subterranean chamber of horrors in which the damned sweated and toiled through eternity, the nature of their sins long forgotten in the blistering extravagance of their punishment. Enormous cylindrical converters, in whose bellies molten ore boiled, spewed fiery vomit from mouths that were fanged with cooling rock. Amid the whir of turbines and the crackle of electrical panels, Satan's trustees strutted in bone-white helmets and goggly black gas masks, untormented on their high catwalks by the sulphury fumes that parched the throats of the damned. And above it all, like ghostly conning towers, the cranes hummed infinitely by, immense hot-metal ladles suspended from huge iron hooks, the whole sliding nearly between walls of crisscrossing beams painted danger yellow and the black of slow dissolution. All too easy to imagine that bubbling cargo consuming the naked bodies of the damned, only to spill them out whole again at the end of the line, magically restored, to be crisped in agony once more.

  Aren't you a morbid son of a bitch, Will thought uneasily, feeling suddenly, unaccountably disturbed.

  Forgetting his full bladder, he hurried back out to the train.

  In the few minutes Will had been inside, night had fallen like a seamless curtain, and now the shadow-hung plant seemed to sigh, as if wearied by the prospect of yet another night of obligatory wakefulness. Approaching his locomotive, Will thought he could feel that sigh, and the heartbeat that sustained it, a dull, thudding tremor in the earth beneath his feet.

  Will's earlier unease came oiling back, beading him in a rank, unpleasant sweat, which the night instantly chilled. For no apparent reason, he found himself wanting to leave the plant. Just pack it in. Never mind punching out or changing back into his civvies or saying good-bye to Sully. Just go. So strong was this impulse, he was twenty yards past the train before he could arrest his own urgent stride.

  He turned and looked back at the smelter, now a bulking silhouette against the purple night sky, and his formless apprehension fell away. There was no heartbeat here but the thrum of buried turbines, no sigh but the steady vent of steam. His dark vision was doubtless inspired by some unbidden trace memory of life without Kelly, for more and more in the void of her absence he had viewed it as no life at all. There was nothing sentient in this sleepless factory, save the men who peopled it.

  Nothing. . . evil.

  "Let's get this old whore rollin'," Sully said, gliding out of the dark like a wraith.

  "Jesus, man," Will cried in alarm. "Don't do that."

  But Sully had already boarded the train.

  * * *

  The trip to the dump was routine. At the base of the last long climb, as always, Will idled the locomotive while Sully hopped down to throw a switch, said switch being designed to prevent a runaway from barreling back into the smelter, diverting it instead into the shallow basin of the railyard, where its deadly momentum would be exhausted in a series of harmless back-and-forth runs. It was full dark now, and Sully's frame was quickly consumed by the night. His return was uncommonly prompt—Sully had never been one to rush on company time—and when he climbed back aboard, Will commented on it.

  "That was quick," he said conversationally.

  But Sully just glowered at him, and Will decided to leave him be. Though customarily jovial, Sully was a private person. If he wanted Will to know what was eating him, he'd say so in his own good time. Maybe he'd called home from the line shack during their break and had gotten into a tiff with his wife. Will didn't know. All he knew was that it was good to be back out in the open. For some strange reason the smelter had given him the creeps, and he was glad to be out and away from it.

  Two more runs, he thought delightedly. Two more runs and he'd be heading for Kelly's warm bed.

  He threw the locomotive into gear, wincing at the wheeze of pistons as the engine battled inertia. After a few lagging moments the rig began to chug forward, bumping the cars ahead of it, slag slopping over the rims. Lulled by the steady clack-a-clack-a of the rails, Will settled back in his seat for the ten-minute ride to the top. The grade was gradual but constant.

  At the dump site, Will gave his customary blast on the whistle. A gusty breeze had picked up, and when Jack Miller stepped down from the trailer his silver asbestos greatcoat belled out behind him. He yawned hugely, then slouched off toward the nearest railcar.

  "Think I'll go join him," Sully mumbled, jumping down before Will could reply.

  Debarking himself, Will stepped off the train and unzipped his fly. His bladder had inched its way up to his navel, and he stood there pissing forever. When he was done, he climbed back aboard and settled into his seat to wait.

  "'Evenin', Jack," Sully said as he strolled past the dumper.

  Jack grunted and twisted a flywheel. In response, a system of gears began to grind and the first of the pots tilted forward. This was followed by a huge splashing sound and an intense rush of heat as tons of molten slag slopped down the embankment on the opposite side. Tugged by the breeze, a bank of noxious blue smoke swirled up, breaking over Sully's body and sending sulfurou
s tendrils up his nose. Though long accustomed to the gas, Sully felt his windpipe cramp down to the bore of a drinking straw. He angled his face away until the worst of it had passed, then turned and watched the river of slag.

  Lighting up the night in an orangey Halloween glow, it coursed down the slope in divergent streams before coalescing into a steaming, crackling pool a hundred yards out on the flat. Roosting gulls flapped up in alarm, and a bright, baking heat threw the night sky into shriveling waves.

  There was a fresh whine of gears, and then the still-glowing empty straightened up, the rime of cooling slag that lined it tinkling like shattered glass. Heat belched out of the pot's fiery interior in a surge. From his vantage ten feet away, Sully could feel it roasting his skin.

  Then he moved.

  Without ceremony Jack shifted to the next pot in line and began working a new set of gears. The pot tilted forward, its payload gushing out—then a hand flicked across the coupling and laid hold of Jack's arm. With a fierce yank it dragged him across the coupling. On the way past, Jack's head clipped the side of the overturned pot, the impact numbing him to the pain and the stench of his own scorching hair. He caught a dream glimpse of Sully's baked face, brick red and utterly blank, then went airborne over the embankment. He landed on his back in the lava flow, suddenly hellishly alert and screaming.

  In his seat on the idling locomotive, eyes gently closed in a catnap, Will heard nothing save the fitful whicker of the wind.

  Jack rode the torrent down the slope, twirling like a kid on a water slide. For the first several seconds his asbestos greatcoat spared him, but the slag quickly scorched its way through. From the side of the train above, Sully watched him go. He seemed to melt, like a lump of butter on a tilted skillet. By the time he reached bottom, there was nothing left of Jack Miller but a puddle of grease and a pair of smoking workboots.