by JL Bryan
Behind me, the rest of my team was still sloshing through the water as I reached the top of the bank next to the bridge. Luckily, a big chunk of the muddy earth under my left boot suddenly gave away with slurping sound. I went facefirst into the weeds and began to slide back toward the creek.
My hands made desperate grabs to break my fall. My right found a clump of weeds, which pulled loose at the roots under my weight. My left found a mushy cross-piece of the trestle bridge itself. It creaked a warning, but held.
“Uh, watch your step up here,” I called down to the rest of the group.
“You okay?” Michael asked, arriving at the edge of the water and illuminating me with his flashlight.
“You’ve got serious mudface,” Stacey said, joining him. I could feel the gooey mess of wet earth clinging to my skin.
I turned away and pulled myself upward, using the rotten bridge for leverage. I swear I could feel the whole thing shifting, as if the trestle would collapse under the strain of even partially supporting my weight. I really should have had a lighter breakfast.
I kept climbing. At the top, I grabbed onto the iron rail of the track for support as I hauled myself toward the knobby old pines at the top of the bank.
Looking back on it, grabbing that rusty old rail with my bare hand was a huge mistake.
First, the rail was like a solid strip of dry ice, painfully cold as if freezing my skin on contact. Second, it jolted me, like I’d touched a live wire or the third rail of a subway.
I hissed in pain and let go, grabbing onto another clump of weeds I couldn’t even see, as if the jolt had momentarily blinded me or the fog had grown so thick there was no light at all.
Kicking and struggling, I regained my balance and my purchase on the steep bank, then pushed myself up to the top, lying on my belly in weeds and brambles, which wasn’t all that comfortable.
I stood up, brushing off twigs and mud, and most likely ticks and other little nasties, but I didn’t want to think about that. The fog seemed colder and heavier now. I could just discern the branches of a nearby tree. I could hear the creek’s slow, sedate gurgle below.
“Okay,” I said. “If I can do it, y’all can do it.”
Nobody answered.
“Come on.” I stepped cautiously toward the bank, but my flashlight only revealed a few weeds through the fog. “Michael? Stacey? Jacob?”
A hand shot up through the weeds and grabbed my ankle.
I screamed and tried to kick and pull away, but its hold was so solid that I ended up toppling backwards, landing on some nice knobby pine roots that jabbed me in the lower back.
Only then did the hand release. A broad-shouldered male figure rose up in the fog, climbing over the bank.
“Michael!” I said. “You scared me half to death. Three-quarters of the way, even.” I turned my flashlight on him, right in his face.
It wasn’t Michael.
The figure climbing over the bank at my feet was male, dressed in a tattered black suit and a partially burned white shirt. His entire face was charred. His eyes were pinpoints of light staring out at me from deep black sockets.
His jaw dropped open in a loose, lifeless manner. A little hiss escaped, as if he hated my flashlight...and then he grabbed for me again, his strong, cold fingers pressing into my calf. A pale tongue lolled out of his mouth. He looked like a hungry dog.
I managed to scramble backwards. I pushed myself up along a pine trunk, standing to face him while he rose the rest of the way up from the steep bank.
He moved toward me, extending one burned hand toward my chest, a moan boiling from his wide-open mouth.
I wanted to scream for the others to come help me, but my throat was closed tight, my heart beating fast. My friends should have been here by now, anyway. Unless something had grabbed them along the way. I couldn’t hear their voices at all.
My own fear held me in place, serving as an accomplice to the approaching ghost. It seemed pretty clear the entity intended to feed on me, or worse.
Move, I told myself. It doesn’t matter where, just start moving.
My body reluctantly obeyed, turning and lurching over the pine roots into the fog, toward the unseen railroad tracks.
I took another step, and two more pale figures emerged from the fog, blocking my way to the tracks. They were women, their Victorian dresses burned to pieces and clinging to their scorched bodies. They didn’t seem entirely solid, as if made of the fog around them, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hurt me. Not at all.
Their dark eye sockets fixed themselves on my face. Their hands reached out—one of them had the burned remains of lace gloves between her fingers.
I could smell fire and ashes in the air.
All three ghosts closed in around me, their cold fingers prodding at my arms, my stomach, my chest, my face.
If I didn’t do something, I was going to be ghost kibble.
Since my light wasn’t driving them off, I reached for the iPod on my belt. I thought I’d hit them with something strong and holy, maybe Aretha Franklin performing “Oh Happy Day.”
Then a blast of sound tore through the night, rattling me to the bones. A piercing train whistle called out its lonely cry in the darkness.
The ghosts turned toward it, like parishioners summoned by a church bell. They shuffled away from me, in the direction of the tracks.
I followed, pointing my light toward the ground ahead. If they were done attacking me, I needed to learn more about them.
More shadowy figures passed through the fog around me, all of them slowly approaching the tracks.
I heard the whistle again. A light emerged from the fog-shrouded bridge, burning through the dense fog, high in the air above the tracks.
As it approached, I saw it was mounted on the front of what looked like the skeletal remains of an old locomotive. It could have been the same one Grant had pointed out to us, the steam engine that had been robbed and dynamited in 1902, but there were huge gaps in its frame, through which I could see the fog on the other side. The rusty shaft of the connecting rod had come loose from some of the wheels along the side and repeatedly stabbed forward as the locomotive rolled, as if to spear anyone standing too close to the tracks.
The ghosts approached anyway, standing right at the edge.
I tried to catch a glimpse of the conductor through the soot-coated windows of the locomotive cab, but it was too dark within. I could smell burning coal. The engine, and the broken shells of the cars it towed, did not make a sound as they trundled past me.
The train wasn’t moving at top speed, maybe twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. It blasted its shrieking whistle again as the shadowy ghosts closed in from the fog.
Some of the figures reached out their hands beseechingly, as if begging the train for a favor. A couple of others tried to latch onto the side of the train, but were batted back by its motion, unable to hold on.
One figure, wrapped in a pale sheet or dress, rose from the fog and latched onto the side of a ruined boxcar. The boxcar’s big sliding door and a portion of its wall were missing, and near the back it was just a bare frame with no roof or walls.
The ghostly figure, a girl or small woman, clung to a ladder on the side.
From the empty space where the door should have been, a tall, solid shadow of a man emerged. It seemed to be dressed in a derby hat and a coat, based on its silhouette.
The man seized the girl and flung her away from the train. She landed in a bank of fog among the gnarled roots of an old oak tree, and I ran to her.
She looked up at me, her face a grim white mask, her hair hanging black and limp. She was seven or eight years old, her dress patched and singed black at the edges.
Her eyes were a colorless pale, and she glared back at me.
I felt cold to my core, as if all the heat had drained from my body. A dark sadness settled in around me, a feeling of hopelessness and loss.
My banshee.
She sat up and reached for me as
the other ghosts had, hungrily, as if she meant to feed.
With all my attention on her, I jumped with surprise and renewed fear as hands grabbed me from behind, rough and strong, squeezing and shaking me.
“Ellie?” its voice said.
I turned to see Michael, gripping my arms in his hands. Stacey and Jacob stood on either side of him, shining their flashlights on me.
“Huh?” I said, quite articulately. I looked down at the ground, but the girl had vanished, like all the other spirits. “What?” I added, for clarification.
“You spaced out,” Stacey out. “Are you still spaced out?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been wandering around like a catatonic,” Michael said. “Or a sleepwalker.”
“What did you see?” Jacob asked me, a reversal of our usual roles.
“The train,” I said. “They were all here, waiting for it. It was like they were trying to get on but something wouldn’t let them.”
Jacob nodded. “I felt it move through here, and the anticipation climbing among the ghosts. Then the let-down after it passed. They’re moving back now, into the woods or down the track...”
“Are you okay, Ellie?” Michael had his arm around me, and there wasn’t much reason to resist that.
“Yeah, good. I just got a glimpse of their world. Wouldn’t want to be stuck there. By the way, everyone should avoid touching the old rails. They’re loaded with bad juju.”
“I don’t have my unabridged ghost hunter’s scientific dictionary with me,” Michael said.
“They’re conductors,” I said. “They’re rusty, but they’re conductive enough for ghostly energy. You said the ghosts were free to move along the rails?”
“But not far from them,” Jacob replied, nodding.
“What are you seeing, Jacob?”
“They’re drawing back,” he said. “I think they’re aware of us, and they don’t trust us. We’re intruders.”
“We should intrude further,” I said. “Come on.”
We continued down the rails, walking alongside them rather than between them. I didn’t want to risk touching them again.
The night remained unnaturally cool, but the freezing temperatures had gone away. The fog had thinned but not vanished. The dark woods around us felt alive, full of hidden eyes, watching us make our way through the low, mossy tunnel.
Since I was in the lead, I was the first to see the red light beside the tracks, floating along like a hot ember or a will-o’-the-wisp.
Chapter Fifteen
I stood in place and held up my hand. I guess we’d all seen enough movies, because the others stopped behind me. I motioned at Stacey, then pointed at the red light.
She came up beside me, taking video of it. It moved like a stray flame on the wind, blowing alongside the track, except there was no wind at the moment. It glowed red, but not brightly enough to shed any light on the tunnel around it.
We watched it make its slow, bobbing retreat until we lost sight of it, either around a bend ahead or because of the feebleness of its glow. Or maybe it had vanished altogether.
We followed it silently, and caught sight of it ahead, drifting its slow but steady way along.
It was moving in the same direction we were planning to go, so we continued following behind it, saying nothing. Moving as quietly as I could, I opened my backpack and drew on my thermal goggles.
The same blue shape carried the light, which again looked extra-cold on the thermals, not radiant at all. The shape appeared female, clad in a long dress, her back to us as she walked along the tracks, waving her red light.
I thought of what Grant had said, that someone had stopped the train with a red lantern, signaling an emergency. There had been a female member of the gang of bandits. All things being equal, wouldn’t a train conductor be more likely to stop for a woman in distress than a rough-looking man?
Maybe she’d hailed down the train for the robbers. Now she repeated that criminal act, initiating the robbery that had led to murder, night after night, doomed to walk the earth with her cursed light like the original jack-o’-lantern guy.
In time, we passed the hole in the undergrowth Stacey had cut with her shears, revealing the narrow path through the woods toward our clients’ house.
“I wonder how Ember’s doing?” I whispered to Stacey. My phone showed no calls or messages from them, but it also had only one blinking bar’s worth of signal. Reception can be spotty in any haunted place. Being in the woods next to a wildlife preserve didn’t help.
“Are we talking now?” Stacey whispered back.
“I don’t think we’ll disturb Jill O’ Lantern if we stay quiet,” I said. “She’s pretty far ahead.”
“I’m picking up some strays,” Jacob whispered.
“Cats?” Stacey asked.
“Souls,” he said. He knelt and held his hand over the rail.
“Don’t touch it,” I reminded him.
“Don’t have to.” He closed his eyes. “There are spirits...apparently...who roam free on the railroads. Not rooted to a spot, but haunting the tracks themselves. Drifters from earlier times who loved the freedom of the rails, back when they were new. A few of them drifted down this way and got trapped somehow.”
“Maybe when they severed this line from the main one,” I said.
Jacob nodded. “Mostly male, with a wild, restless look...”
“Hobo ghosts?” Stacey asked.
“Basically.”
“Then that explains...stuff,” Stacey said, probably remembering not to give the psychic too much leading information. It certainly made casual conversation difficult.
We continued on, following the distant red glow along the tracks.
Gradually, the air began to reek of sulfur and sour fumes.
“Does anybody smell cookies baking?” Jacob asked.
“It’s the stench of Hell,” Michael said. “I knew these tracks would lead us there.”
“Paper mill,” Stacey said. “South of here, past those pines, is an industrial strip along the river. Everything north of us is wildlife preservation. So are these old tracks, actually, and the plantation ruins ahead. They just haven’t gotten around to bulldozing it. Or maybe they’re just letting the forest reclaim it all.”
“That would be cheaper,” I said.
We had to stop when we reached a high chain-link fence built across the tracks, totally blocking our way. Through it, I could still see the distant red ember drifting its way along.
“That’s inconvenient,” Jacob mentioned, touching the fence. “Tell me we don’t have to climb it.”
“We don’t,” I said. “Let’s find a gate. I don’t want to be trapped inside there and have to climb out in a hurry if something goes wrong.”
Working our way around through the dense trees, we finally found a gate. It was wide enough for a car, facing a rutted dirt road that more or less led back the way we’d come. Chains and an old padlock held the gate shut. The signs on the fence welcomed us with greetings like NO TRESPASSING and CONDEMNED.
“Stacey, light.” I knelt by the gate and removed my lock picks from my backpack. She held her flashlight above me while I went to work on the padlock.
“Before we get arrested,” Jacob said, “I’m a little curious about what we’re breaking into here. Just as a conversation-starter with my boss when he fires me.”
“Ruins,” Stacey told him. “The security shouldn’t be too serious. The fence is probably just to keep out kids, vandals, and weirdos.”
“Which one are we?” Jacob asked.
I popped open the lock. The gate pulled open with a rusty squeal, moving reluctantly, as if nobody had come to visit in a very long time.
“I’m feeling weird about this place,” Jacob added.
“We must be on the right track, then.” My light revealed crumbling chunks of old buildings, most of them not much more than weedy heaps of brick and brambles. Silkgrove had been a large plantation, cultivating m
ulberries for silkworms, then rice, then cotton, but there wasn’t much left of it now.
We found the tracks, now reduced to twin iron lines sunken in moss and wild grass. The moist air and earth near the river must have devoured the ties a little faster, because there wasn’t much sign of them.
Beyond the rails lay the crooked remains of old chimneys among a few ancient rotten timbers. Slave cabins, maybe. They were located on the other side of the tracks from the mansion ruins up ahead.
The rails led us closer to the river, where two rubble-filled brick walls sat proudly on a hill overlooking the water. The rails ran in the shadow of the hill, to the collapsed and overgrown ruins of long-fallen structures by the water. Mossy, half-sunken pilings remained at the edge of the water where the plantation’s docks had presumably been. Its owner had dreamed of a rail and river transportation nexus here, but instead there was nothing but nesting sites for migrating waterfowl.
We followed the rusty rails to the bitter end, where they rose briefly on the collapsed remnant of pilings and support posts and ended at the bank of the wide, dark Savannah River flowing several feet below, the rotten remnants of the last tie still clinging to the sheared-off tips of the rails.
“I vote we stop following the tracks now,” Stacey said, as we reached the lip of the steep bank.
“We did it,” I said. I turned to shine my light among the ruins. “Anything else, Jacob?”
“Yeah, what happened to Jill-o’-the-wisp?” Stacey asked.
“I thought we were going with Jill-o’-lantern,” I said.
“Thumb wrestle you for it!” Stacey offered.
“There’s something here,” Jacob said, turning back from the water to the ruins. “I don’t think she’s left.”
I looked into the shadowy heaps of the old bricks and crumbling timber around us, trying to glimpse any hint of the red light we’d been following.
“Everybody turn off your lights,” I said, clicking mine dark and holstering it.