When he let me off, he scribbled his number on a crumpled fast food receipt. “You call me, day or night, if you need help getting back to the city, yeah?”
“Promise. And thanks. Tell Jerry and those guys that I made it out safe, okay?” I squeezed him in a quick hug.
“Safe”, of course, in a loose interpretation of the word. I prowled the edges of the freight yard, getting the lay of the land, sticking to the shadows. Riding the rails is a tradition about as old as the first-laid tracks, but it’s no more legal now than it ever was, and no less dangerous. It’s a sport for the desperate and the thrill-seekers, and I guess I qualify as a little of both.
The first thing was to find the shack where the bull’s office was located. The bull is a railroad cop whose main job is to arrest people like me. Fortunately, they tend to be underpaid and less than motivated. When I spotted the shack and got to a place where I could peer in the window, I wasn’t at all surprised to see a beefy uniformed guy with his muscles going to flab, sitting with his feet up on a desk, enjoying his air conditioning and the little TV on a nearby shelf. Even better, the AC was an old window unit that made a racket.
Next, I needed to find a yard worker who’d be sympathetic to my cause. Most of the time, crews and yard workers are pretty decent to train hoppers, even helpful. It’s riskier for women traveling alone, of course--nothing says “hey, I’m undefended in the middle of nowhere with nobody to miss me” like train hopping--but that’s where it helps to develop a good sense of people. And yard workers, being on their home turf where they have to show up day after day, are both excellent sources of information as well as being a bit less likely to think they can get away with assaulting a woman than the train crewmen who are just passing through.
I avoided workers in pairs or groups in case it made them more tempted to toe the line and chase me off, and eventually I saw a skinny old guy with very white hair and very dark skin working on a fuse box alone. He wasn’t far from the junction of two sets of train tracks. That combination reminded me of Papa Legba, the lwa of crossroads, gateways, and travel and the remover of obstacles, so that seemed like a good sign. “Hey, man,” I said softly, skirting the side of the building and drawing near. “Hey, sir?”
He glanced over, took me in with one top-to-bottom sweep of his gaze, and went back to his work. “What you want?”
He sounded bored, but not hostile. I was also pretty sure he had my number--I mean, why else would a grungy chick with a backpack be approaching him? “Could you tell me which track the train to North Carolina’ll be on?” I had to get to a yard in Hamlet, NC and then find another train there to Baltimore.
“Dunno,” he said with a vague jerk of one shoulder.
I waited for a moment, but he was done. “Okay...is there any way you could help me find out?”
“It’s not a safe thing to do.” He spared me another once-over. “Specially not for a girl by herself. Tell you what, you just go back on home. This ain’t no amusement park ride. People get hurt.”
Shit. Figures I’d find the guy with integrity. I worried that if I tried to approach someone else, this dude’d go rouse the bull “for my own good”.
I studied him for a moment. “Here’s the thing,” I said at last. “I don’t have a home to go back to. I got kicked out last night. By a bad guy. I slept on a rooftop. But there’s someone I can stay with up north, a good place waiting for me, if I can get to it. Mister, I got no money, no way to get out. The train might not be the safest, but it’s safer than this city for me right now.” That wasn’t quite a lie, right? I tried my hardest to look waifish and forlorn, which would be a lot easier if I were at all short and scrawny. But I’ve got pretty expressive eyes, and I made them as big and sad as I could. “Could you please help me out? I just need to know which track, that’s all, and I’ll get right out of your hair.”
He shut the door to the fuse box hard and sighed; I couldn’t tell for sure if it was exasperation, annoyance, or anger. He stared at it for a moment and then, without a word to me, he stalked off. I slunk back around the corner of the building, feeling exposed and unsure what to do. Was he helping me or calling the bull on me? Had I read him wrong? Should I have bribed him? With what, though? I waited several agonizing long minutes, my whole body tensed and ready to run if needed.
When he came back, he had another guy with him--someone closer to my age, but a whole lot bigger than me. Shit shit fuck he’s turning me in dammit. My heart lurched. They looked around and the older guy spotted me before I could duck back around the corner. “Hey, girl,” he said in a low, irritated voice. “Get back over here. You wanna know, or what?”
They were both looking right in my direction now, so I took a few tentative steps toward them, still keeping a distance although I doubt I could have outrun the second guy. The older guy returned to the fuse box and yanked it open, having lost all interest in me. The younger guy glanced over his shoulder and beckoned to me.
When I got closer to him, he looked around and set off toward a small crumbling cinderblock building that looked like it might be some kind of storage. “You got a watch?” he asked. He had a deep voice with a nice accent, maybe from the islands or something.
That, at least, I had. I held up my wrist and he nodded. He touched my arm and guided me around the building to where there was a pile of rubble and empty crates. He pointed away from it toward the heart of the yards and at each track in turn. “One, two, three, four, five. You see number five? You train gonna be there. Six o’clock maybe. You gonna be ready? It will be here one half hour, just changing out some crews. After that, no more today to North Carolina, so you be sure you ready. Okay?”
“Okay. Thank you so much.”
He gestured back to the pile of rubble. “Wait back there. Sorry there’s no place more comfortable.”
“It’s great,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
He smiled at me, taking me in. He had a nice smile, friendly, but I still tensed as I waited to see whether he was going to try to put my gratitude to the test. He hung around for a moment like he wanted to find an excuse to talk to me some more, but the radio at his belt crackled and he stepped back. He gave me one last lingering look before he unclipped the radio and walked off while he answered it.
The spot he’d indicated was cluttered but shielded from view. My gut said he was harmless. Still, I walked around the back of the building and spotted a stand of trees and weedy high grasses, and decided to settle in there instead. Even if the dude was okay, it couldn’t hurt for none of the yard workers to know exactly where I was.
I was pretty exhausted, and I had a little more than two hours before the train would arrive. I couldn’t be sure I could sleep on the train, so I set the alarm on my watch and settled down in a secluded spot between a couple of trees. I tucked my pack under my head and tried to relax enough to nap. I heard Suze’s voice again. Go to MetamorphosUS.
Whatever the reason, I was on my way.
CHAPTER THREE
It was a fitful sleep--I kept jerking awake and checking my watch, anxious that my alarm wouldn’t go off or that I wouldn’t hear it. My dreams were fractured and strange, and once I woke up muddled and thinking I was back on the island where my soul had lingered after the accident, while I was comatose. Realizing that I wasn’t, becoming aware of where I actually was, a deep intense sadness passed through me. I couldn’t go back to the island, and I longed for that place the way you can only long for something that’s gone. I closed my eyes again, shutting out this hot humid wasteland stinking of asphalt and oil and metal, trying to recapture the sensation of salt-scented breezes and the gentle rustling of abundant greenery.
And trying to recapture him, the one who governed that island, the one who’d taken me in and cared for me. That low, throaty sound of his laughter, giving way to a ringing brightness as his amusement grew, the melody of his speech as his voice rose and fell.
Remembering the sight of him was like beginning one of those puzzles with a thousand pieces. Stormy bright eyes, a stray curl of hair, the enticing hollow of a collarbone, a slightly pointed chin; and yet as much as I struggled to hold them all together, they came apart before I could really see him in my mind. This was what I feared, being left with only these scattered pieces that were too easily lost, until I no longer had enough clear memory left to make a picture at all.
I wondered where he was. I wondered if he, too, closed his eyes to try to reassemble my face out of bits of memory.
Surely there was some way to find my way back to him. Preferably, without the need for another coma. I’d learned how to search for him in the gray place between waking and sleep, but I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I hadn’t gotten the slightest bit closer to the answers I craved.
The tiny piercing sound of my alarm started up. Through the earth, I could feel the slight rumbling of my train’s approach. The sun was out of sight and the shadows were stretching and melting into each other, but there was still a lot of light. I waited in my spot where I’d just barely be able to see the train roll in, so I could scope it out a bit and pick a promising car before I made the trek across the no-man’s-land of the other tracks.
Freight trains have many different kinds of cars, in many states of functional or loaded. I was lucky to have ridden with someone experienced the first time I hopped, and she gave me a detailed rundown of car types and how to choose the safest available place to ride. Depending on the train, though, the safest available place could be relatively comfortable or downright hellish. It was impossible to know until you were there and looking at it.
Fortune was with me today. There was a boxcar, the best kind to ride in, and better yet my yard worker friend was hovering near it, acting casual. I stayed close to the storage building and watched for the crew to get off. When they did, and before the new crew got on, I looked around and back to the car. The yard guy was also looking around. He looked in my direction and made a quick gesture with his arm stiff at his side. I beelined toward him, keeping my eyes fixed on him, walking as fast as I could without running so I wouldn’t attract attention, thinking invisible thoughts.
He pulled back the door a couple of feet and held out a hand. I took it and grabbed the door frame in my other hand and hoisted myself up and in, just as smooth as you please. He glanced around and stuck his head in. “About eleven hours,” he said. “That’s when you get off.”
“Thank you, again,” I said. He half-smiled and shrugged and pushed the door closed but for a gap that’d let me get out.
In my mind, a thought grew huge and popped like a bubble. I poked my head back out and called to him, low. “Hey, mister.”
He glanced back. “Get inside. You gonna get seen.”
“I will. Just, I have to tell you something. ‘She waited for you, but it was the wrong spot.’ I don’t know what that means. Just that you need to know.”
His eyes widened and he stepped back. I held my breath. He jerked his head, one stiff nod. His eyes welled. He gave me a little wave and walked away.
It’d been a while since I felt one of those messages tap me on the brain. When they first started, after the accident, I used to ignore them. After all, just blurting out random things to people--some of them strangers--sounds crazy. But more often than not, the thoughts would overwhelm me, throbbing like a headache, until I offered them to the person they were meant for. Sometimes those people were just confused. Sometimes they would be freaked out or upset. But a lot of the time, it meant something to them, and it seemed like something they’d needed to know.
I was a ball of tension until I felt the train start to move and I knew I was home free for now. I felt around in my pack for my flashlight and shone it around the car. It was empty, just bits of trash here and there from whatever had been in here. I got settled in a corner so I’d be hard to spot if someone opened the door, unrolled my sleeping bag, and got as comfortable as I could. I didn’t want to use up too much of my limited supplies, but I ate a granola bar and took a couple sips of water. Not too much--dehydration would suck, but I didn’t want to have to pee in here. After that, I set my watch alarm again to alert me when we hit North Carolina, and pulled out my metronome.
I’d picked it up at a swap meet somewhere in my travels, after getting a tip from a witch in an occult store who was nice enough to talk to me about using guided meditation to explore my abilities. She’d told me to set it at 220 beats per minute to help me go deep. Screw fancy ritual oils or four-hundred-dollar crystal-tipped wands, this humble little thing had done more for my woo life than any elaborate hand-crafted tool. I set it now and put it beside my sleeping bag.
After all, I had eleven hours to kill, and I was fresh off a nap. I was still thinking about the island and my Beloved there. It was a perfect time to go searching.
I sat with my back against the wall and reached for the key that I wore on a worn leather cord around my neck. My Beloved had given me the key on the island. It was the means of my escape, a token of the bargain he’d struck to save my life. It had been in my hand in the hospital when I woke up from the coma. I pulled it off now and held it, rubbing its simple, old-fashioned shape. It was heavy and black, possibly iron, about the length of my palm. I had discovered that bringing it into my journeys seemed to make them stronger.
I closed my eyes and made my breathing deep and even. The metronome tocked its swift, regular beat.
As always when I was reaching for my Beloved, as I sank into trance I tried to build the island around me. If I could see my soul-self walking around there, I might connect to the actual island and be able to communicate with someone there. Maybe even him. But as always, the pieces collapsed like an unsteady tower of children’s blocks. The best that I could do was to envision the shore I’d walked the day I discovered the guy offering small-craft tours of the coastline. I was aboard the Zephyr with him when a storm swept out of nowhere, crashing the tiny plane and sending me into the turbulent waves.
But here in my mind, it was a beautiful, clear, sunny day with sunlight sparkling on gentle blue-green water. I walked down to the edge of the ocean where foaming breakers reached out to lick at my toes, chilly and swirling. I strained to look out as far as I could, in hopes that I could at least see the island from here. I couldn’t, but I saw a wall of shimmering mist far out to sea. That was new.
I walked out until the water reached my calves and pulled at me, begging me to swim. I clutched my key tight in my hand. “Hello? Is anyone here who’s willing to help me?”
A few moments later, one of the waves crested higher, and a feminine form seemed to ride it and dive in as it crashed. Another wave, and I saw her again. At last another wave rolled closer to me and rose up, and the water spirit emerged from it. Her body was dark and shining, her hair white foam, tiny silver fish darting in her eyes. “I will talk to you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Will you tell me what I should call you?” My own Beloved had advised that asking a spirit for their name was considered intrusive and rude unless they chose to offer it; he’d said it when I’d begged him for his name. Instead, he’d told me each day what he’d like me to call him.
She smiled, approving. “I am Yemaya. What would you know?”
I pointed out to the bank of mist. “Is there an island beyond that mist?”
Her smile faded. She studied me. “No one knows what’s beyond it.”
“I do,” I said. “I think. I was there once. It’s a place for people who linger between life and death. I had to leave to return to life.”
“I see,” she said, and seemed taken aback. Even--impressed? I couldn’t quite tell.
“Are you able to swim there? Could you go to the shore there and carry a message for me? I need to talk to the lord of that island. Or at least to tell him that I’m looking for him.” I squeezed my key tighter.
&
nbsp; She perched on a wave. “I cannot. No one can go there. But it’s no matter, anyway, there’s no one to tell.”
“What?”
“It’s only a rumor,” she amended. I got the impression she thought she shouldn’t have said that much.
“He’s gone?” My heart constricted. “Missing? Or--” I couldn’t finish the thought. Could beings that weren’t human die?
“I don’t know. I only know the mists have thickened, and that they are there to protect what they conceal.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I mumbled thanks and backed up, taking one last longing look at the mist before I turned.
“Wait,” she said. I stopped and looked back at her. She scooped water in cupped hands. “Come here and hold out your hands.”
When I got close to her--the water now almost at my waist--she let the water spill from her hands to mine. “What is this?”
“Tears of the dead,” she said. “They flowed here to carry a message in the hopes that someone will hear it. They flowed toward you.”
I looked into the pool in my hands. So tiny, but it must have contained thousands of tears. They shimmered and rippled, and an image formed in the surface.
Desperate hands reached up. The shadow of a vulture fell across them, and flies began to swarm. The vision faded, and words formed in its place. Stop him. No more victims. Save us.
“Who is us?” I said. “Stop him how? I don’t understand.”
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 3