Zach snickered. ‘Yeah. Hey, uh—’
‘Lizzie.’
‘Hey, Lizzie—do you know where there are some old train tracks around here?’
Zach left his car in the Town Hall parking lot. He bought a large plastic bottle of water from the drug store, and then marched east down Main Street. Shops gave way to houses, then the houses relinquished greater space between them, and finally lawns gave way to furrowed fields. With the obstructions of town gone, the sun had constant access to Zach’s head and neck; he lamented not retrieving a baseball cap from his car before beginning his sojourn. He tugged at the tail of his shirt to peel it from his back and sweat crawled down his spine. Zach noticed his shadow had grown longer than he was tall. Two cars sped past, one right after the other. Rearing back his head to take another long swig from the water bottle, Zach nearly walked right over the railroad tracks without noticing.
The tracks were completely paved over where they crossed the road. Only a slight hump gave evidence to their former course. But Zach saw them emerging from the obscuring asphalt, off to the side of the road, quickly disappearing again into the overgrowth of weeds and wild wheat. He looked across the road and saw them similarly displayed on the other side.
As he stood trying to decide which direction to follow, he became aware of a sound, so natural and unassuming that it may have been going on for minutes before he’d become aware. Nevertheless, Zach was startled and his heart jumped upon identifying the clear, round reverberations of a churchbell echoing across the countryside. Zach reached into his pocket and retrieved his digital recorder. He recorded for half a minute as the distant, golden peals continued unabated. Then he played back what he’d recorded. He laughed: The sound was there, just as he had heard. He once again considered the idea that a tight-knit community might conspire to play with the occasional interloper for their own amusement. He had a hard time believing any haunting would provide a manifestation so amenable to documentation.
Zach left the road and followed the train tracks to the south. The rails were brown with rust but didn’t flake or crumble when Zach balanced on them. Many of the cross ties were surprisingly intact, though some had rotted, and others that appeared strong cracked under Zach’s weight. The rails and boards suppressed the vegetation somewhat, but it was clear that foot traffic was not infrequent either. Zach was surprised that dislodged spikes still lay strewn beneath the rails. Zach thought the youths who surely traced this path would have long ago collected any available souvenirs.
Zach breathed a sigh of relief as a stand of tall trees came between him and the sun. He lifted his shirt to wipe the sweat from his forehead only to rub the stinging sweat into his eyes. As he blinked away his discomfort, Zach noticed that the trees blocked the sound from the town, as well—and that even if the bell still rang, its sound would be lost among the trills and arpeggios of birdsong.
Ah, he mused, either I’ve passed the municipal limits of the town ‘which no bird will call home’, or the fancy of folklore has given way to reality. Zach scanned the branches to identify the birds responsible for the sudden symphony of whistles and calls, but the trees were thick with summer green and the leaves rustled in a mild breeze, making it impossible to trace any movement in the shadowed recesses among the branches, and the sounds bounced from point to point without discernible source.
Zach blamed an involuntary shudder on the shaded dip in temperature. He tried to remember if he had heard any birds while he had been in town, but found that he could not. Small wonder: It’s easy to ignore the sound of birds singing; we hear it all the time. He reasoned further that even a town as sedate as Pomegrame might produce sufficient sound to drown nature’s background noise. Zach also noted the progression of the day; he thought that animals became more active during the late afternoon and into the early evening as dusk approached. Zach retrieved his recorder and caught the birdsong. He played it back. Well, it’s nice, but he didn’t consider it at all exceptional.
Zach took advantage of the cover to urinate (though he doubted anyone could see him at that point, anyway). He passed beyond the shelter of the shade and back out into the sun. He walked a half mile further. He drank the last of his bottled water. He looked down at the bottom of the empty bottle and wondered:
What the Hell am I doing?
Zach looked around at the fields and at the shimmering orange and green hills rolling away into the distance. He looked up the track and back the way he’d come. He dropped the bottle to the ground as though it were virulent. He growled and frowned. He was confused and annoyed with himself; he didn’t understand what had spurred him to suffer the sun and come out to this lonely place. There was no information here to help understand the origin or the meaning of the song, nothing to lend credence or cast doubt upon the ‘truth’ of the narrative. There was nothing here at all but abandoned tracks and acres of weeds erupting for their short season. What was he doing here? Why was he wasting his time? How did he allow himself to be drawn away?
‘Come on!’
The close air stifled Zach’s shout; no echo returned. Zach didn’t know whom he was challenging, or what he was asking for.
‘Come on!’ he repeated. Zach knew his petulant outburst was useless, but it felt right, somehow—necessary. He was giving voice to his anger; failing to identify the injustice he railed against only made him angrier. ‘Come on!’ A third time, a fourth, ‘Come on!’ until his throat burned from his exertions.
Zach wiped his eyes and looked for some stump or patch of ground where he could sit and be miserable. But his misery was smothered by embarrassment when he noticed he was not alone.
Sixty feet further down and just off to the side of the track stood a young woman. Mouse-brown hair glowed gold in the rays of the setting sun. The breeze stirred several disobedient strands that had gotten loose from her braid. Zach thought she was pretty, though her forehead seemed too sloped, and her upper lip stuck out. She seemed frozen. Zach thought she might have been frightened by his carrying on. He edged towards her slowly.
‘Hey,’ he called softly.
He saw her clothes. The dress was homemade, the colours muted, the collar buttoned up onto her narrow throat.
Zach stopped and considered the impossible.
Eulalie. He wanted to call to her, but the name stuck on his tongue; he couldn’t speak it.
A train whistle blew in the distance. Even through the distance, Zach heard the anachronism of the sound: the whistle didn’t have the clarion blare of a modern train; though forceful, it had a wheezy ‘hoo’ to it, a hollow breathiness.
Instinctively, Zach stepped off the tracks. His legs felt leaden as he tried to move towards the girl. Thistles and wheat brushed his jeans.
The train whistle sounded again, closer. Zach looked in the direction it came from and thought he saw a flicker of light, like the flash of a reflection.
Eulalie stood perfectly still.
She doesn’t look like a ghost. To Zach, the girl seemed as alive as he. In the back of his mind, the possibility that he was still the victim of an elaborate prank nagged at him. He struggled to concentrate on the dilemma in front of him: Even if she was a ghost, she seemed real. It might be possible to interact with her. And if Zach could interact with her, it seemed logical that he should do something. But what could he do? If he called to her, would she hear him? Would he endanger himself if he spoke to her? Zach couldn’t see how she could be in any danger. If this was a hoax, then Zach refused to embarrass himself by acting ‘heroically’. And if it was not a hoax, then what he was about to witness had played out time after time to an inevitable conclusion.
Zach nearly fell backward from the sudden onslaught of sound: The train whistle burst full and clear across the field; the shuddering thunder of the engine followed in its wake. And to Zach’s astonishment, it was there, real. The ground trembled as the black engine surged unalterably onward, growing closer, a hundred machine grunts and hisses matched against each of Zach’s sh
allow breaths. There was no denying the physicality of it; every sense confirmed the imminent arrival of this juggernaut.
Eulalie bowed her head to look at some trifle in her hands that Zach couldn’t see. She dropped her hands to her side and looked towards the field across the track.
Zach managed to say, ‘Oh, God,’ but the last whistle overpowered his entreaty.
Eulalie stepped forward onto the track and the train hit her. She went under in an instant. There was no sticking gore, like a fly on a windshield, no bounce to toss aside a broken rag-doll. She was just gone beneath the beast, flipped down like a target at a carnival booth. The wheels screamed against the rails; Zach screamed with them. Then it was just him alone as the sound of the train echoed thinly and died. The train itself faded and disappeared as it passed by him.
Zach leapt forward into the space where the train had been, and then over to the other side. He jumped back across the tracks again. He whirled about and looked up and down the tracks repeatedly. He ran to where he had seen Eulalie standing but saw nothing there.
Despair rattled through Zach’s body and forced out several choking sobs. It’s stupid, he thought. What was he supposed to have done? If he had shouted something, proclaimed, ‘I love you!’ to the shade of a girl, would that have changed anything?
I’m alive, he reminded himself. I’m not a mangled corpse on the tracks like those others. I did the right thing. I’m alive because I didn’t try to save her.
He sat down and laughed in relief. Sadness squeezed all vitality from his body, but he endured it. By the time the sense of oppression weakened, the sky was dark. Zach became agitated but didn’t feel ready to walk back to the town. He stood up and started pacing back and forth along a small stretch of the tracks. He didn’t keep track of what turns he made, and soon realised he wasn’t even sure what direction he was facing. A tattered blanket of clouds pulled across the sky and blotted out most of the stars. Zach wondered if he should wait until he could see better which way he was supposed to go, or if he should just start walking. Crickets sang. A frog croaked off in the distance. Zach thought he heard an owl.
Steve and Matty Drake walked along the abandoned tracks outside of town one week before school was due to start up again. Matty saw something shiny in the weeds and stopped to pick it up. It was a minute before the two boys were able to identify it as a recording device. Matty held the recorder up to his ear and played it back while Steve threw rocks into the field.
‘Well, anything on it?’ Steve asked his brother.
‘Nothin’,’ was the reply, ‘Whole bunch o’ nothin’.’
A Civil Complaint
‘There’s a strange old house in the middle of the street on which I live.’
The person making the complaint was Bill Middy, 3784 New Overhill Road. He felt compelled to phrase his complaint in that awkwardly formal way because of an earlier interaction with another city official who had taken exception to the implication of ownership in his claim that ‘there’s a strange, old house in the middle of my street’.
The location in which the complaint was made was the neat, cramped, windowless office of Adam Burke, Department of Development, Building Services Division. Though countless binders filled the shelves and stacks of folders buried the desk, not a single dog-eared page dared to rebel against its confines.
Nineteen years in civil service had taught Burke that the first thing to do with civilians is to help them identify for themselves exactly what it was they thought they were complaining about.
This is why Burke asked Middy, ‘Is your complaint regarding the location of the residence in relation to the other residences, or the generalised nature of the residence that you claim to have observed?’
Middy had been prepared to be dismissed as a kook, or re-directed yet again to another office or division; he had not been prepared to be taken seriously, and, in fact, was having difficulty figuring out whether or not he was being taken seriously.
Burke took Middy’s contemplative silence as a cue to elucidate.
‘In an anecdotal sense, one expects strange old houses to be situated at the end of the street, possibly on the corner of an intersection, but more likely at a rather on-the-nose “dead end”. Also appropriate are lonely hollows and the tops of wind-blasted hills, but as neither is found within the city limits, those don’t fall under my purview. I hope you don’t want the city to move the house so as to agree with clichéd aesthetic expectations?’
Middy dropped his jaw and an irresolute moan leaked out.
Burke sighed. ‘What is the number of the house?’
Middy felt confident answering that one. ‘I don’t know.’
Burke rubbed his temples.
Middy was catching up; he anticipated the next question. ‘Oh, I looked, of course. But there are no numbers visible.’
Burke perked up slightly. ‘Well, that is a violation. But not one for Zoning and Permits. That goes to . . .’
‘I live next door.’
Burke frowned. He didn’t like to be interrupted with incongruous information while re-directing a complaint.
Middy became flustered by Burke’s sour expression and almost forgot to include the relevant information. ‘I live at 3784 New Overhill Road. The next numbered house, on the other side of the strange, old house, is 3794 New Overhill Road, and it looks exactly like mine. I mean, it was built by the developers.’
Burke narrowed his gaze. An element of mystery had found its way into the conversation. ‘Clearhaven Estates.’
Middy smiled proudly. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s a new development. A Silver Sky Homes subdivision. None of those houses should be more than . . .’ Burke stared as though the answer was printed in very small type on Middy’s forehead. ‘Six years old,’ he concluded.
Middy snapped the fingers of both hands, a gesture he had never before performed. ‘You see!’ he declared.
Burke, annoyed by the zippy outburst, shrugged. ‘The existence of older residences in close proximity to new developments isn’t unusual. The unusual decision by the developer to build around an older residence is, again, not a concern for this office.’
‘But I called the developer,’ Middy persisted. ‘They don’t remember the house at all.’
‘If the developer’s records are incomplete, the complaint should be referred to—’
‘No, no, you don’t understand—it’s not that they don’t have a record of the house—which they don’t, by the way—but they don’t remember it at all. They didn’t even believe me when I told them it was there—’ Middy paused here as if expecting Burke to make a comment— ‘until they went and saw it for themselves!’
Burke was becoming interested in the enigma despite his disinclination towards the concerns of a ‘walk-in’. Fortunately, as the process of solving a problem used the same deductive reasoning as was necessary to re-direct an inquiry, Burke was able to bring his years of experience to bear.
‘Even so,’ he mused, ‘if the structure is residential, it is compliant with the zoning.’ Burke began to trace small circles around his chin with an index finger. ‘And, if the developers didn’t build it, then there was no failure to secure proper construction permits on their part. You, yourself, note the residence as “old”, which might imply lost records, and may mean exempted construction if it was built prior to the adaptation of several city codes.’ Burke sighed, losing interest. ‘I’m not sure what your complaint regarding the house is, anyway.’
Realising that the first bureaucratic progress he’d made was beginning to erode, Middy panicked and yelled, ‘I just don’t think it should be there!’
Burke looked at the complainant and empathised with the sentiment, at least. ‘Because it’s strange?’
‘Y-yes.’ Middy shrank back into his seat; he knew his admission made him seem unreasonable.
Perhaps that small spark of interest still lingered for Burke; instead of dismissing Middy, he found himself giving the defeated civili
an one last chance. ‘What is the strangest thing you’ve noticed about the house?’
Middy perked up. ‘Ah. Ah. That’s easy. It reversed itself.’
‘I fail to understand.’
‘It reversed itself. What was the back is now the front. Like the house turned around.’
Burke furrowed his brow. ‘You mean that the back of the house now . . . fronts the street?’
Middy smiled. ‘No. No. That’s one thing that was so strange. There wasn’t a door on the house towards the street before. But now there is. But there wasn’t one just put in, you see—I could tell from how the roof changed that the whole structure has been reversed, and now the front of the house is the . . . front of the house.’
Burke’s fist curled shut underneath his chin. ‘The owner did not provide site plan information required for major alterations in 1-family, 2-family and 3-family zoning districts.’ A harsh whisper cut through his teeth, ‘And that is a violation.’
Middy, unfamiliar as he was with recent budget cuts to the city’s children’s literacy programme and the consolidation of resources in the vehicle pool, can be forgiven for his astonishment when Burke leapt up and exclaimed, ‘To the bookmobile!’
Middy pulled his minivan into the wide driveway of his new-built, split-level, brick-veneer-and-vinyl-sided home as Burke pulled up to the curb next to a tethered birch sapling. Burke threw the door open and stepped onto the mixed fescue-and-bluegrass sod. He looked with disdain at the offending house next to Middy’s. Middy joined him on the sidewalk.
‘This can’t be real,’ Burke scoffed. ‘Rough-hewn lumber? Irregular wooden shingles? And look at that clouded glass in the windows!’
‘They seem to look out at you,’ Middy observed timidly.
‘It is a prank, a hoax,’ Burke spat. ‘The state of neglect is artificial. No building as old as this one appears to be could possibly still stand.’
Black Horse and Other Strange Stories Page 11