by Max McCoy
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” she said. “It just seems so strange, dealing with spirits in such a dollars and cents way. You have done this a lot since the Russian girl?”
“More than a few times,” I said. “Yours would be Revenant No. 15.”
“These cases were successes?”
“For the most part,” I said. “Many common noisy ghosts, with no mystery to be solved. One will-o’-the-wisp. The murder of a drover by his partner, and the resulting haunting of said partner. Three ghosts with family secrets to convey. Another unhappy that his grave remained unmarked after six months. They all crossed over quickly, once their business was finished.”
“Are you occupied tomorrow night?”
“I am now,” I said.
Molly Howart opened her clutch and counted out twenty dollars in single greenbacks. She placed the pile of notes carefully on the desk, atop the ink-stained manuscript.
I stared at the money.
“Isn’t that the correct sum?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s perfect,” I said.
I could feel myself blush, a warm feeling that spread across my neck and cheeks and settled burning in my earlobes. Slowly, I pushed the money back across the table.
“I’m sorry, it slipped my mind that my partner, Mister Calder, has the books with him just now, so I am unable to write you a receipt. Do you mind holding my fee until, well, later?”
She nodded and returned the money to her clutch.
“May I ask a final question?”
I said it would be all right.
“Where do we go when we die?”
“I don’t know where we go when we die,” I said, “but I know how we get there, because I saw it last night in my dreams. We take the train.”
3
It’s a scorching night in midsummer, the sky is shot with stars, and I’m standing on the depot platform at Dodge City in what might be a wedding dress. I can see the headlight of a train as it shimmies up the tracks far to the east, but I don’t hear the familiar locomotive rumble.
There is no sound from the train at all.
This is when I notice the platform is deserted and the depot windows are dark. I have no bags, not even a valise, and I’m vaguely confused because Eddie isn’t on my shoulder and I don’t see his cage anywhere. At this point, I suspect I’m dreaming, but if there’s a reason to wake myself up, I am unable to articulate the thought.
I glance back to the city, and North Front Street is roaring like a prairie fire, with Texans and other wildlife stampeding from one watering hole to the next. There’s the plink of pianos and the cry of fiddles punctuated by drunken laughter. I look up at my corner room at the Dodge House, Room 217, but the windows are dark and the curtains drawn.
As the train nears, sparks fountain from the stack and the firebox casts a hellish light on the railway bed. The engine is short and squat, and the headlight is mounted off center, a design I’ve never seen before, but which seems familiar still. The train has seven cars, including a baggage car, and a mysterious car draped in black at the end instead of a caboose.
The spectral train comes to a silent stop, with clouds of steam enveloping the platform. I’m standing now in front of the first passenger car, and I can see the inside is filled with an unearthly blue light. I want to climb inside the car, but I’m afraid. I glance down the platform and see dark figures wheeling up a baggage cart to the side of the express car.
A coffin is lifted into the car by shadowy hands.
“All aboard, miss.”
The conductor beckons from the steps of the passenger car. He is a kindly old gentleman, of a type often found in books for children, and he wears a blue uniform with gold buttons and a smart-looking cap.
“I don’t have a ticket,” I say.
“Oh, you don’t need one. Your passage has already been arranged.”
The conductor offers a gloved hand and helps me into the car. As soon as I’m inside, the train begins to glide away from the station.
“Where are we going?”
“The end of the line, of course,” the conductor says.
“How far is that?”
“Really can’t say.”
The train is picking up some speed now. The dark prairie rushes past the windows, and I can see the glint of starlight from water.
“Is that the Arkansas River?”
“No,” the conductor says. “It’s the Acheron.”
“I’m in hell, then.”
“We haven’t crossed it yet.”
I ask if we will cross, and the conductor demurs.
“If I don’t know where I’m bound, what am I doing here?”
The conductor produces a ticket from his vest pocket and hands it to me. It is like a standard railway ticket, but has the number 000. There is printing on the ticket, but as usual in dreams, I can’t read it.
“What is this?”
“Your temporary pass,” the conductor says. “Regular passengers are assigned consecutively numbered tickets. Special guests are given these unnumbered ones. Mind that you don’t lose it.”
I clutch the ticket tightly in my hand.
“You’d better hurry, miss,” he says, pointing to the back of the train. “You are expected.”
I start down the aisle, passing a decidedly democratic collection of humanity in the seats along either side. There are men and women of all ages, and children, and their clothing ranges from that of wretches to the upper classes, but the majority appear to be working, or working poor. There seem a disproportionate number of babies on board, but none is crying.
As I step between the cars, I am made dizzy by the rush of the wind. I grasp the rail to steady myself but make the mistake of looking down. We are crossing a rugged canyon on an improbably high bridge, and for a moment I am frozen with fear. It’s not that I’m afraid I’m going to fall.
I’m afraid I’ll jump.
“What’s wrong with you, Ophelia?”
It’s a familiar voice, and I look up to see Jack Calder standing in the vestibule of the next car.
“Oh, Jack,” I say. “What are you doing here?”
Calder dismisses my question with a laugh. Then he reaches out and grabs my right wrist and pulls me roughly into the car—and tightly against him. He’s wearing his favorite blue shirt and a leather vest, but there’s no heavy gun belt between us.
“Are you dead, too?” I ask.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Calder says. “I’m going to hell, for the things I’ve done on the Vigilance Committee, but it’s not my time yet. When it is, you’ll know it.”
Then Calder is gone, and I have suddenly passed through all of the passenger cars to what I thought was the baggage car, but now I see that it is a kind of railway hearse, with racks on each side hung with funeral drapery. There’s twenty-four coffins and caskets (I can always count and decipher numbers in dreams, but never words), and as I pass among them I come to the plain wooden coffin I saw being loaded at Dodge.
Shadows flit around the coffin, implike figures that have the substance of smoke. One of the things has a very solid-looking carpenter’s brace and bit, and is quickly removing the screws securing the coffin lid. I flinch as the top falls away, half-expecting to see myself in the box.
The imps laugh and point at me.
Inside the coffin is a stranger, a man of middle age with a purple face and a rope around his neck. As the imps begin to tug at the knot to loosen the rope, the dead man’s eyes open.
I walk on.
Then I pass into the last car, a richly appointed private car fit for, well, a Commodore Vanderbilt. Everything that isn’t walnut is black or purple. There are plush chairs everywhere, and silver table service, and crystal decanters filled with expensive-looking liquor. There are even pieces of art. There is a marble bust of Alexander the Great, the Waterhouse painting of the Lady of Shalott, and a frightening gold and ebony statue of jackal-headed Anubis.
It’s all so rich that I wouldn’t b
e surprised to meet dead old Cornelius himself, considering he left a hundred million dollars behind when he went. But instead of a randy old man with wild hair, I encounter instead a strange figure dressed in black.
The figure stands behind an officious desk piled with newspaper obituaries, and next to the desk is a gold-plated telegraph machine that suddenly emits a burst of noisome clicks. The figure listens to the chatter, then leans over to make notes in a ledger with a gold-nibbed pen.
“Sit, please.” A British accent.
I take a seat and examine my host. Skin as white as Alexander and eyes black like Anubis. Bald as poor Yorick. A heavy black robe is gathered at the waist by a gold sash.
“Are you a demon?”
“Of course not,” he says impatiently.
I am uncertain of its gender, but for convenience I will use the masculine.
“Where’s Eddie?”
“I think it strange that you have a raven for a companion,” he says. “All this Poe business is overdone, don’t you think? If birds could talk, don’t you think they’d make better conversation? But then, you were raised by books. Byron and the rest of that Romantic trash.”
He puts the pen in the well and rubs a hand across those black eyes with no pupils. I notice also that he has no eyebrows, which is oddly even more disconcerting.
“The bird is not here,” he says. “Animals have their own line, over which I have no power.”
“What about those things in the coffin car?”
“Subordinates,” he says.
“They look like imps. Death imps.”
“They certainly aren’t imps, which are malevolent and chaotically disruptive,” he says, clearly annoyed. “We call them widdershins, and they are helpful, if a bit disorganized.”
“Widdershins?”
“Yes, for they are sinister to human eyes, portends of grave misfortune or disaster, a shadow that is glimpsed from the corner of a mortal’s eye, but always moving to the left, always out of sight. It’s all in the staff manual.”
He taps the ledger.
“More books,” I say. “Suddenly, I’m drowning in books. You used the plural. Who else does ‘we’ refer to?”
He holds up a hand.
“Questions! Such questions,” he says. “Why are you so curious? Special passengers are typically quite docile.”
“Why?”
“They are asleep, of course.”
“I’ve had some practice at this sort of thing.”
“Ah, that’s what I want to discuss with you,” he says.
He comes around the desk and drags a chair up to mine. Our knees are nearly touching. He leans forward, makes a tent of his fingers, and stares deeply into my face. Then he nods, as if he has solved some mystery, and flings himself back in the seat.
“You can see the type of operation we have here,” he says, motioning about. “We perform a necessary service and things run smoothly, as a rule. It would be unfortunate if you were allowed to interfere with that. The company greatly appreciates your cooperation in this matter.”
He smiles.
“Thank you, that’s all.”
“You’re Death, then.”
Death smiles.
“I prefer the term superintendent. We’ve had a pleasant chat, haven’t we? Now, off with you. There’s a good woman.”
His voice is so soothing that I stand and smile and am about to thank him for his time when a growing sense of unfairness makes me turn and wag my finger in Death’s face.
“How, exactly, am I interfering?”
Death folds his marble hands over his stomach.
“You communicate with the dead.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“You’re infringing on my territory.”
“It is what I’m meant to do,” I say.
“We have an entire department assigned to it,” Death says. “Do you think the spiritual telegraph was invented yesterday? Why, name just about any evidence of high concept of other-worldly communication, from Jacob’s ladder to the sewing machine, and that’s our work.”
“The sewing machine?”
“Came to Elias Howe in a dream. Changed everything.”
“All of that is very unlike what I do,” I say. “I don’t dream inventions for others, I don’t deliver prophecies, I claim no market on revealed truth. I listen to the dead and help them cross over, when I can. That’s it.”
Death shakes his head.
“These things never turn out well,” he says. “The Greeks and all that. Too much of a temptation to meddle. Most human beings find it slightly distasteful, at any rate. The age of the Nekromanteion is over. Why should the living have any truck with the dead, anyway? I’m sure you’ll be happier being a normal sort of person.”
“Now there’s something to think about.”
“Yes, normal.”
“No, I meant happy. Is it possible?”
“Well, as I understand it, for some.”
“For normal sorts.”
“Well, yes.”
“If I were the normal sort, would I be here talking to you?”
“Point taken, Miss Wylde.”
“I’m just as mad as the Sky Pilot, aren’t I?”
“All human beings are mad,” Death says. “But the man you refer to as the Sky Pilot is merely ill, a variant of the well-known Jerusalem syndrome. There’s something about deserts and other empty spaces that can trigger religious mania in some. There isn’t a name for his malady as yet, but I hear the authorities are leaning toward Prairie Passion. Personally, I find the alliteration unfortunate, and would prefer something else. Kansas Fever, perhaps. John Brown and all that . . .”
“Will he get better?”
“His name is Martin.”
“Truly?”
“You really must stop asking questions,” he says.
“You’re Death,” I say. “Don’t you have the power to stop me?”
“That would violate the free will clause of the charter.”
I laugh.
“Is any of this real?”
“It is uniquely real,” Death says. “The mode of transportation changes every now and again, but never the method. Personally, I’m glad we’re done with boats. And horses. What a mess! Oh, some of our branch offices still use horse-drawn hearses, but everything is up to date here at transportation headquarters. For you and millions of others, a train will carry you over to your final destination. In your case . . . well, this is the actual train.”
“Not a ghost train.”
“Well, it is in spectral form now, of course,” Death says, pride growing in his voice. “And this business of describing our operation is couched in terms you will find familiar. But this is the train, outfitted the way you will see it when your time comes.”
4
Then I woke, before dawn on the day after Molly Howart came to see me, with my heart pounding and in a knot of damp sheets. Who really wants to know when they’re going to die? I asked myself.
Apparently, I did.
It was still dark and I untangled myself from the sheets and crawled out of bed and stood for a moment, so frightened that I was shaking. My throat was dry and my head ached. I went to the dressing table and felt for the pitcher and nearly knocked it over, but caught it before it spilled, and used both hands to bring it to my mouth and drank desperately. Eddie, disturbed by my clanking and slurping, made a weak cry of protest.
“Sorry,” I said. “Nighttime is for sleeping.”
Then I heard laughing.
I had forgotten to throw a sheet over the mirror on the table before going to sleep. A greenish glow emanated from inside the glass, where a ghostly face regarded me with amusement.
“Shut up, Hank,” I said.
“You shot up like a jack-in-the-box. It was funny.”
The apparition’s name was Horrible Hank and he’d been with me, more or less, since childhood. He’d been a mud clerk on the steamboat Pennsylvania and had sustain
ed a fatal wound when its boiler exploded, when the steamer was just below Memphis, in 1858. He had formed some odd affection for me because of some small kindness I showed him and his distraught brother as he lay near death, which might explain why I was the only one who could see him. He wasn’t a usual ghost, but more of a type of noisy ghost that had attached himself to me alone, and one of the few other worldly things I could have a two-way conversation with.
“It wasn’t funny to me, Hank,” I said, annoyed. “Why aren’t you ready to cross over?”
Hank shrugged. His hair and clothing were blasted by some gale-force wind on his side of the mirror.
“Guess I’m having too much fun here.”
“Well, you’re disturbing,” I said. “Someday, I’m going to find a way to get rid of you.”
“You’d miss me, sweetheart,” he said.
“I’d like to try that theory out. I’m thinking of getting rid of all my mirrors.”
“With that tangle you call a head of hair, I wouldn’t advise it,” he said. “Besides, you can’t get rid of all reflections. There’s windowpanes, glasses of water, polished metal . . .”
“Hank, do you think dreams are real?”
“How should I know?” he asked. “My world is a bit . . . limited.”
“Just once, I wish you could give me some useful piece of information. Do you know anything about ghost trains?”
“No.”
“What about a red book?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Is that something my brother has written?”
“No,” I said. “Just something from my dreams.”
“Hey, I’ve got a joke about dreams for you.”
“Please, no.”
“One day a little boy woke up and told his mother that he had dreamed that his grandfather had died and, lo and behold, that afternoon the family received word that the poor old man had indeed shuffled the mortal coil.”