FIRST EDITION
Beyond The Door © 2011 by Jeffrey Thomas
Cover Artwork © 2011 by Zach McCain
All Rights Reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DELIRIUM BOOKS
P.O. Box 338
North Webster, IN 46555
Join The Delirium Novella Book Club
Boston’s South Station was a nexus. From here one might catch a Greyhound, Peter Pan or MBTA bus, and on the lower level a Red Line subway train…or a Silver Line subway train that could take one to that other nexus point, Logan Airport. Behind the great building with its curved old façade facing onto Dewy Square, one might board an Amtrak train for Maine, or at the same platform a commuter rail train to other cities in Massachusetts. South Station was the terminus of the Framingham/Worcester Line, among others. Trains that arrived here had to travel backwards the way they had come, like a snake with two heads and no tail.
It was from the Framingham/Worcester Line that Ware disembarked at South Station. Like the others hurrying from the train to the glass-faced rear of the building, he tucked his head into his collar against the fast-falling, stinging blizzard that had turned the city’s towers into uncertain looming outlines. Around him poured interchangeable, hard-faced men and women on their way to work or on business trips, carrying briefcases or pulling luggage with rattling wheels. They and the others like them who flowed through this city in buses and subways, in cars and taxis and on foot, were like sullen, distracted nerve impulses being transmitted in some titanic and complex network of neurons and synapses.
Ware was grateful for the relative warmth once he was inside the station, with its high ceiling from which hung huge banners advertising some new phone device. Each banner featured a figure who was only a silhouette, with this gadget in hand—either prancing, dancing or cavorting in glee at being able to converse with the blank-faced silhouettes on neighboring banners.
The moment he entered the station, Ware heard the old woman ranting in a loud, slurred, phlegmy voice. She was standing by the huge glass windows facing onto the row of train platforms, bundled in a filthy coat, her long gray hair like a tangle of cobwebs and rags, her face flushed red and flecked with open sores. She was addressing the people streaming in through the door that Ware used, pointing at the glass with one hand and shouting, “You think it’s cold now, but a fire is coming! A fire that will burn this city to ash, and every one of you will be burned to a pillar of salt! The fire will come first on a train—a train will bring the fire here and the blaze will spread, and the people through this door when that happens will be screaming and pulling out their hair and their eyes will be melting in their heads!”
Her babbling meant nothing to Ware, who dismissed it as a sad combination of religion/alcohol/dementia, and he kept his eyes turned away lest she meet his gaze and address him in particular…but when he had passed the old woman he heard her continue, “You think the last stop on that train is Worcester, Union Station, huh? Well it’s not! There’s another stop, the true last stop they don’t want you to know about! I know…I came back from there last night! I was there! I fell asleep and missed my stop at Union Station, and when I woke up I was alone except for the conductor—and I found him dead in another car! I think he died from a heart attack so he couldn’t make me get off at Union Station!”
This part of her rant was more interesting to Ware, and he stopped to look back at the madwoman, but she didn’t notice him as she went on yelling at the people flowing through the door. “I was sixteen when I got on that train just two weeks ago, and look at me now! Two weeks later and look at me now!”
An attractive young couple who looked like college students laughed together at this last comment, and the old woman focused on them, pointing her other hand at them as she continued pointing out the windows, and barking, “You can’t believe what I had to go through to get back here—you can’t believe it!”
She turned then, as if she had suddenly sensed his stare, and locked eyes with Ware directly. And when she turned, through the open front of her coat he saw her T-shirt and soiled blue jeans. Her T-shirt bore the image of a popular young music group.
Ware broke his eyes away, making a pretense of checking his watch as he put more distance between himself and the madwoman. This was the morning’s first train into South Station from the Framingham/Worcester line—6:31 AM. How exact, that time. Not 6:30, but 6:31. How precise a system, with no time or patience for deviance, the unexpected.
He knew the towns on that inbound line from the folded train schedule he’d acquired. Worcester, Grafton, Westborough, Southborough, Ashland (what a dismal name; it sounded like the aftermath of the apocalypse the madwoman predicted), Framingham, West Natick, Natick, Wellesley Square, Wellesley Hills, Wellesley Farms, Auburndale, West Newton, Newtonville, Yawkey, Back Bay …and South Station . The end of the line. But also, a hub from which so many other directions and destinations might be taken.
Behind him, on the giant train information board hanging from the ceiling, the departure and arrival times changed with a tikka-tikka-tikka-tikka sound. He didn’t look up at this information, instead focused on his immediate desire to empty his bladder of the coffee he’d finished before picking up the train. But as he neared the entrance to the restrooms, on the left side of the station along with most of the food services, he saw that a heavy stream of people who had just arrived on his train and others had the same desire as he. Not one for crowds, especially in a men’s room, he decided to wait a little for the traffic to thin. Anyway, his need wasn’t so great, and he wasn’t pressed for time, so he switched his attention to perhaps acquiring himself a new cup of coffee. His eyes swept the station, with its various restaurants and food stands. There were counters for burgers, pizza, and what passed for Chinese food to the average American, but of course his best option was an Au Bon Pain (what did that mean in French, “A Good Pain”?) situated out on the open floor of the station, an island of enticing warm aromas. He waited in line here, bought a serviceable large hazelnut with cream and sugar, then stood off to one side (there were many small tables scattered across the station’s glossy floor, but right now he spotted none available) tentatively sipping at his scalding coffee and observing the bustle of people all around him. Particularly women. Their bodies were padded thickly against the cold, but he considered himself a “face man” anyway. And his taste in faces was eclectic. Black women, Asians, Latinos, white…close to his age, or (preferably) much younger. His covetous gaze hijacked a ride on this woman, then that, jumping from one to another like a thirsty flea. Again, most of these faces were set in dour, distracted expressions, but the fine snow in the hair and on the shoulders of the newly arrived lent them a glittering glamour. When the ephemeral glamour quickly dissolved, however, it would leave them damp and smelly like wet dogs.
As he again surveyed the constellation of small circular tables—more to continue his feast of faces than to find a chair for himself—Ware saw that the madwoman had seated herself at one of them, unwrapping a portion of hamburger she had salvaged from a trash barrel. With crumbs of bread and meat on her lips, spitting more of the same as she spoke, she looked up at no one in particular and growled, “You think I wanted to stay there in Gosston? With that eye in the sky like the fucking Goodyear blimp? It found me wherever I went—I couldn’t hide! It looked right into my mind! You think it’s a fucking picnic in Gosston? Don’t fall asleep on the train to Worcester! Don’t fall asleep if your conductor drops dead!”
Gosston , Ware’s mind echoed. He knew it wasn’t on his train schedule. He wanted to go to the woman then, hand her some money, but he refrained. He turned away, noted the bookstall called Barbara’s Bestsellers , considered browsing a bit, but then a glance told him that the flow into the restrooms seemed to have slowed to a trickle. Seeing this as his chance, before another train could disgorge its passengers, he strode in that direction. Ah, but what to do with his coffee? It was too hot to drink, too full to trash. He decided to take it with him, set it down somewhere—on the sinks counter or the top of a urinal, if it could rest there without toppling.
But when he entered the men’s restroom, he discovered that it was still very much occupied. Men stood before the row of urinals opposite the sinks, and around the bend, at every other urinal besides. Ware suffered from bashful bladder, in any case—on occasion, elbow to elbow with other men planted before urinals, had even had to abandon the attempt, zip up and leave a men’s room uncomfortably unrelieved—so it was the toilet stalls he turned to. He saw a pair of feet planted under the partition of the first stall, and a man was just entering the third in the row. Thus, it was the second door he reached out to. He found it unlatched, and opened it wide—only to be met with the sight of a man’s bare legs, his trousers and boxer shorts bunched in folds around his ankles. Oddly, Ware noted that the man’s red-white-and-blue striped boxers resembled a pair he himself owned, even as he quickly shut the door again. He could understand it not occurring to a child to latch the door to a public toilet stall, but he was swept with irritation and embarrassment, and before he could think to restrain these emotions he remarked aloud, “Where I come from, people lock the toilet stall door.”
A voice on the other side of the metal door, with its scratched and blistered enamel paint, responded, “Well where I come from, people knock on the door before they open it.”
If Ware had been irritated before, this terse response to his remark doubled the feeling, and he rejoined, “Well where I come from, people don’t need to knock, call through the door, or get down on hands and knees and look under it to see if someone’s using the toilet or not.” (Had he not been so close when he tried the handle, he might have seen the other man’s feet under the door without the need for stooping.)
“Well, where I come from,” said that voice on the other side of the door, “men who like to look at other men defecating don’t make a lot of excuses for it—they just go to the internet for that.”
The door to the first stall opened and an elderly man emerged, still straightening his belt, leaving that stall available—but Ware wasn’t done giving this unseen stranger a piece of his mind. In a voice that shook with his effort to control it, he said, “Where I come from we don’t make insulting speculations about people we don’t know.”
“Well where I come from,” the stranger retorted, his voice a bit hollow as if he were crouched down hiding in a metal box, “we don’t get so homophobic and frazzled if we accidentally see another guy sitting on the john.”
Ware hardly wanted to end up coming to blows with a man over an unlatched toilet stall door; if this stranger wasn’t going to back down, maybe it was best he swallow his pride a bit? One of them had to remain civilized. Besides…what the man in the stall had just said about Ware overreacting to catching a partial glimpse of him stirred a memory from Ware’s youth, which might very well have inspired such a strong reaction in him.
In a calmer voice, in a tone of concession, Ware said, “Where I come from, there’s a low income part of town, a slum pretty much, of old rundown houses—I lived around the corner from there growing up. People that made me nervous walked its streets: foreigners from countries I couldn’t guess at, raving derelicts and shabby prostitutes, though I didn’t really know what they were back then. I had a classmate who lived in this slum, and one year he and his brother set up a kind of ghost train ride…well, a walkthrough ghost train ride, through their garage and a work shed in their backyard. They even incorporated the house next door, which had sat vacant since its elderly owner had gone to live with a relative.
I went through the brothers’ haunted attraction once—I guess I was eleven or twelve at that time. I had to pay a quarter admission. Some kids went through together in little groups, but I was the only customer that day, and the brothers said they’d be waiting for me in their home. I didn’t believe them, of course, not the way they were grinning…I knew they’d be somewhere along the way, waiting to jump out and startle me. Their grins made me nervous. Living in that bad part of town as they did, they were a little beyond mischievous.
I started the haunted walk by entering their garage through a side door—the garage door itself was closed, and its little windows had been taped over with cardboard or such. There were a few scattered candles, but they threw little light; one found their way through the attraction by following a yellow cord that had been strung throughout. I held onto it with one hand, like a lifeline, as if I were walking the deck of a ship on treacherous seas and I was afraid that deck would suddenly list radically, and throw me off into cold drowning waves.
Behind a stack of boxes, a crude manikin—a scarecrow really, with a black hood over its head—was bound like a prisoner to a rocking chair, which was rocking somehow…maybe a string was tied to it. The manikin sat in front of a TV set, which was running but showing only static. The TV’s light was reflected brightly in the manikin’s eyes. I don’t know what was behind the eyeholes in that black hood…bits of mirror, I think.
There were more creepy props. Nothing too creepy. Then the folding garage door lifted up just a little, making me jump, and a voice outside growled, ‘Escape! Escape while you still can!’ I saw that the yellow cord ran across the floor there, under the garage door, so I got down on hands and knees and crawled under it…back outside. Then I got to my feet and followed the cord from tree to tree—another hooded manikin was hanging by a noose from one of them—until I reached the work shed in the back yard.
More scariness in the work shed, but again, nothing too scary…until a third hooded manikin lying on the floor with a knife in its chest leapt to its feet and chased me outside. My heart was pounding now and I wasn’t having much fun, but I didn’t want to look like a coward and back down in front of these tough kids…so I followed that yellow cord to the dilapidated old house of their former neighbor, which I entered through the back door.
It was filthy inside, and I could picture an elderly woman who had owned too many cats or dogs and allowed them to defecate and urinate everywhere. The linoleum floor tiles in the kitchen were peeling up or worn away entirely, and wallpaper had sloughed away in long ragged sheets like decaying skin. The ceilings were water stained and cracked, and real cobwebs hung down from them in greasy loops. Again, most of the windows had been covered over and the only light came from candles here and there.
A disgusting meal had been laid out on the dining room table—I didn’t want to know where the brothers had acquired the animal skull, a dog’s maybe, that served as its centerpiece. Rotten fruit, moldy bread, glasses filled with water dyed to simulate blood, and some hooded manikins sitting around this feast. I was all tensed up inside, reluctant to turn my back on them as I waited for one of them to jump up at me…but none did, and I continued running my hand along the strung yellow rope into another room.
Here, in the front hallway, a touch of cold gray light entered the derelict house through a window that had been shattered. Shards of glass were scattered on the floor, stained with blood, as were the fangs of glass still remaining in the frame. Now, a thick trail of dripped blood ran up a staircase along with the yellow cord, and I followed both up the creaking steps to the second floor.
Even before I reached the upper landing, I heard an eerie sound. It was a wet, rumbling growl, rising and falling…dying away only to come back again with a sudden, violent surge.
On the landing, the yellow cord ran to the right, presumably toward some bedrooms…but the trail of blood continued on to the left. Ahh…clever, I remember thinking: they knew my curiosity would compel me to leave the trail. Then some figure would spring out, no doubt, and boom at me that I had violated the rules and I would become one of the black-hooded prisoners myself if I didn’t flee immediately.
But I followed the trail of sticky, drying blood down the dark hallway anyway, until I found myself standing in front of a closed door.
From under the bottom edge of this door, a pool of blood had spread across the hallway’s old floorboards. That gravelly, wet, rising and falling growling sound came from behind the closed door. It sounded like someone retching, vomiting…yes, it was vomiting, because I heard the fluid splash on the floor. Between bursts of this vomiting was a terrible, thin wheezing. It was very realistic and unsettling. Maybe I was reminded too much of occasions that my father had been out drinking, and came home staggering drunk, only to vomit up all that whiskey and beer in the bathroom sink. An unpleasant association.
The vomiting ghoul behind the door didn’t throw the door open and lunge out at me as I expected, even when I finally turned away and again picked up the trail of the yellow cord. I followed it into a bedroom, where yet another scarecrow figure lay lashed to the bedposts with kitchen knives stuck through both eyeholes of its hood. This was the climactic scene, but the manikin didn’t stir and it seemed anticlimactic after that vomiting stranger behind the closed door. The ragged end of the yellow cord was nailed to the wall, where a big red question mark was painted. It just terminated, the way the trains terminate at this station so that you have to go backwards the way you came. So I turned and followed the yellow cord back down the stairs to the front hallway. Suddenly, when I reached the foot of the stairs, the front door flew open and two black-hooded figures seized hold of me and dragged me roughly outside. They wrestled me to the ground, though I didn’t fight back, and one held me down while the other leaned over me with a knife in its hand. But then this figure pulled its hood off, and there of course was the grinning face of my classmate. His brother let go of me and removed his hood as well, and they both helped me back to my feet.
‘So,’ asked my friend, ‘how was it?’
‘Neat,’ I told him, panting a little. To be honest, I was relieved to be outside in the relative brightness of the cold afternoon sky, rather than in that gloomy hallway listening to the retching behind the closed door, that sounded uncomfortably like my drunken father. I didn’t mention my father to the brothers, but I did say, ‘The scariest part was definitely that vomiting thing, with all the blood coming under the closed door.’
A look of confusion came over my classmate’s face—his brother’s, too. He said, ‘What vomiting thing?’
‘Blood under a door?’ said the brother.
I laughed and punched my friend’s arm (not too hard, lest he punch me back). ‘Come on, stop joking—the show’s over. You know what I mean…the trail of blood from the broken window, up the stairs…then the blood under the door, and someone pretending to vomit on the other side. Very funny, fellas, very funny. You almost made me lose my lunch, too.’
My classmate rapped his knuckles on my forehead, then, and said, ‘Hello? Hello? Are we okay in there? I don’t know what the heck you’re going on about…what broken window? What trail of blood?’
‘Show me,’ the brother demanded.
‘Okay,’ I sighed, ‘I can see the show’s not over, then. Follow me.’ So I led them back inside, expecting that while they had distracted me some third accomplice would have cleaned up the fake blood, maybe even the broken glass, and upstairs the door to that closed room would be open and no one would be inside. A better climax than the manikin lashed to the bed, after all.
But the blood and broken glass in the front hall were still there, and my classmate said, ‘What the hell?’ His brother and I followed him up the stairs, and down the hallway to the closed door and the pool of blood that had spread under it. But there were no more violent vomiting sounds on the other side. My friend took hold of the knob…and threw the door open.
It was a bathroom, and on the closed toilet lid a man was slumped over. He was a young man, but in filthy clothes and unshaven. He must have been an addict, high on drugs and in an addled state of mind. He must have broken into the house to steal money or something he could sell to buy more drugs, or perhaps simply for shelter. And crawling through that broken window sometime earlier, unknown to my two friends, he must have cut himself badly on the remnants of glass in the frame—because it wasn’t bile or a recent meal that he’d been vomiting up, but his own ingested blood. A long wound in the side of his neck gaped open, and the entire front of his clothing was saturated with his blood. Blood entirely covered the bathroom floor, spreading to the hallway floor under the bottom of the door.
Somewhere in the mere minutes between the time I had stood outside this room listening to him vomit up that blood, and the time my friends had dragged me outside, the last dregs of life had bled out of the young addict sitting there on that closed toilet seat.”
Ware went silent then, his story completed, waiting for the other man’s response. Maybe the stranger would accept this confession as a kind of apology…would understand why, maybe, Ware—who normally hated confrontation of any sort—had reacted with such hostility. The stranger was silent, too, for a long minute, as if lost in thought or debating how to respond.
When at last the man on the other side of the closed metal door spoke, it was in a similarly more subdued voice than he’d used previously. He said, “Where I come from, in Eastborough, Massachusetts –”
Ware cut him off there. “Where I come from I’ve never heard of any Eastborough, Massachusetts. Northborough, South-borough, Westborough—yes. But Eastborough…”
“Where I come from we don’t have a train stop, so it wouldn’t be on your commuter route, would it? Anyway, can I go on? Okay…in my hometown of Eastborough, there was a racetrack on Route 9 when I was a kid—called the Eastborough Speedway, in fact—and on summer nights even from my yard you could hear the distant car engines rumbling. In my lush, overgrown yard, on a humid summer’s night, I liked to pretend I was listening to the growls of dinosaurs. My father always told me I had an excess of imagination. I thought I just had a keen sense of wonder. I think that’s essential in a child. It may be the only time in our lives when we aren’t blind.
Dinosaurs. Fitting, really. The speedway has long since been a shopping plaza, and I never did see even one of its races, but for a week every summer its grounds were host to an attraction that interested me far more. It was a traveling carnival, the particular name of which—if it ever had one—I never knew.
Was it every summer? No...I recall now that some years it was a week in spring. Sometimes the carnival would stay for a couple of weeks. Some years, to my great disappointment, it didn’t come at all.
When it did come, my father never failed to bring me, and usually his brother would accompany us—along with my cousin Bill, who was two years younger than me. The men tended to leave us to pursue their own pleasures, though. There was a beer garden, and a girlie show. That was something I never caught even one time, either.
But Bill and I would steal looks at this midway strip show from a distance, not really understanding what went on inside, not yet understanding the dirty-feeling curiosity that drew us to its outer orbit. One time, one of the scantily clad ladies up on the bally—as the little stage outside the sideshow tents was called—caught my eye over the balding heads of my own and other kids’ fathers, and winked at me. My heart’s clapper rang against its sides. She wasn’t a sleazy performer to my ten-year-old mind, but a princess on a pedestal in her 60’s big bleached hair and her boa-lined red negligee.
Talk about a sense of wonder. Even before ten I was under the disorienting, the distorting spell of the fairer sex. I remember betting my sister’s friends that I was strong enough to pick them up. Talk about a pick-up line. Well, it was as good a way as any for an eight-year-old to get his arms around a beguiling twelve-year-old older woman. A precursor, though I didn’t know it then, to the amorous exertions of adulthood. But would women ever again be as magical to me as they had been back then?
The same year the woman in red negligee winked at me, Bill and I saw another female carnival worker die. In a way.
There was a trapeze act—a modest setup, outside of any tent. A placard posted the times the aerialists would perform. During the afternoon, Bill and I saw them performing from afar, and we’d meant to catch a later show but then forgot until it was too late to claim a good vantage point. By the time we did approach the act, brightly lit under night’s black sky, there was already a crowd so thick we could barely penetrate its edge. Standing on tiptoes and craning our necks did little to improve our view. Had we not been close to the setup earlier, between acts, we wouldn’t have known that there was no safety net stretched below the trapeze framework.
Off to the side there was a trailer, and from it emerged the acrobats the crowd had gathered for. I had a less obscured view of the trailer, and so I could see the performers clearly before they approached the trapeze rig. There was a youngish, good-looking man who bounded ahead of the other two trapeze artists to start things off with some solo work. I watched him for a few minutes before my attention was drawn back to the other two. There was an older man who was balding but obviously still in good shape, and a young woman. They wore silvery, glittery outfits, the woman’s like a one-piece swimsuit that bared her strong, shapely legs up to the hip. She had honey blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Though to my youthful eye she seemed a full-fledged woman, in retrospect I know she must have only been twenty or so, if not younger.
Was she the balding man’s daughter? I didn’t think so. He had his arm around her while he smoked a cigarette and watched his companion’s act, but his embrace didn’t seem paternal to me. Not the way his hand curled around one of her rounded hips, sliding up and down its curve. I should hope he wasn’t her father, anyway.
There was discomfort on the young woman’s fresh, lovely face as she too watched the younger man perform. It looked almost like fear. But whether it was fear of performing, or of the balding man’s affection, I couldn’t say even now. Maybe, she was having a sense of foreboding about both situations.
The young woman was so beautiful, she put the earlier goddess out of my mind altogether. That other was more carnal; this woman was ethereal. In her shimmering silver, an angel soon to take flight. She and the balding man now sprang toward the trapeze, the man with a hand on her back as if to push her...to plunge her forward.
They commenced their routine, and I was captivated by the woman’s grace, her legs held together and streaming behind her like a comet’s tail as she shot through the air. The older man, his legs hooked over his rung, reached upside-down to catch her. He swung her outward, and on the return arc she spun like a ballerina pivoting on thin air, reaching out for her own bar as it swung back to her. She caught it, whooshed outward...far outward.
And then, a snapping sound. I suppose a bolt had been loose, because one of the two cords supporting the bar the woman gripped came free. The angel fell—plummeted from view, behind the clustered audience. Over their screams and cries, I swear I heard a heavy thud.
‘Oh my God!’ my cousin Bill said. ‘Is she dead? Is she dead?’ He grabbed hold of my arm.
‘I don’t know!’ I said, shaking off his grip.
We couldn’t get near the scene. The crowd had surged forward. Other carnival workers came running. I stood back and waited to see if the woman would be carried back to her trailer. As I lingered there, feeling sick with dread, a hand clamped onto my shoulder. Startled, I looked around to see my father standing behind me, my uncle beside him. My father’s familiar scents of cigarettes and beer wafted over me, grounding me. ‘What happened—somebody fell?’
‘Yes...a girl,’ I said.
‘Oh no,’ said my uncle.
‘Come on,’ my father steered me away, ‘you don’t want to see this.’
‘I want to know if she’s okay,’ I protested, looking back over my shoulder.
‘She’ll be okay,’ he assured me. ‘That’s not like a big circus trapeze. I’m sure she’s fine.’
The trapeze looked high enough to me, but I tried to take heart in my father’s words. That is, until a middle-aged woman pushed her way out of the audience, doubled over and vomited onto the dirt…
A year later, the carnival never showed up in the summer, but it did come unannounced—and for only a single day—in autumn. On October 31st.
The word of it spread through school like a wild rumor, whispered lest too much talk disperse the reality into mist. On the ride to school, several kids had seen the carnival being erected on the speedway grounds. It created a real quandary—if we were to go to the carnival that night, we would have to forego trick-or-treating. Well, it wasn’t really that much of a dilemma. I’m sure many homeowners ended up with a lot of extra candy on their hands that night, perplexed by the scanty showing of ghouls in the streets. Most of the kids in Eastborough hounded their parents to let them go to the carnival, instead.
My father took me, as usual, though his brother and Bill—who lived out of town—didn’t accompany us, it still being a weeknight. As usual, though, father parked himself in the beer pavilion to chat and smoke with other fathers. Like most of the kids who attended the carnival that night, I opted to wear my Halloween costume, the holiday’s magic still being in the crisp, chilly air. Maybe the magic was even heightened beyond the norm. This year, I wore a cheap, brittle plastic glow-in-the-dark skull mask fastened to my head with a rubber band.
The carnival, I found, was decked out for the holiday, too: the aisles of the midway were festooned with strings of fat orange bulbs. Cotton cobwebs were stretched between the trailers and food stands, blown leaves snared in them like the husks of giant spiders.
My favorite attraction was always the haunted house ride, but this year when I approached it I hesitated, as a flurry of teary specters came running out of its exit in a panic, screaming into their bewildered parents’ arms. Though I was now eleven years old, I couldn’t will myself to join the increasingly skittish line to go inside.
Another favorite ride of mine was a double Ferris wheel, the two wheels of which would rotate around each other like the gears of some titan machine. But I saw that it had jammed, moving only a little bit with ear-piercing screeches before it jarred to a halt again, shuddered and shook with futile effort. It was full of people, children wailing on high, their voices ghostly and drifting with the leaves. I didn’t know if this were truly accidental, or another enhancement in honor of the season.
Cheated of two of my favorite rides, I drifted on until I saw a gaggle of people gathered around an outdoors live act. I was able to negotiate my way close to the inner barrier this time. It was a knife throwing routine. A man, all in black, and wearing a black mask over his eyes like the Lone Ranger, had already pitched a number of balanced blades toward a woman who stood with her back against a much-perforated wooden board. As he readied for his next throw, the man—who was losing his hair—clamped a cigarette between his thin lips.
I looked toward the woman, and flinched when the knife thunked into the wood above her head and quivered there, continuing an outline of her body. She was a young woman, with long straight blond hair and dreamy-lidded eyes, reminding me of an actress I had a crush on at that time: Peggy Lipton in The Mod Squad . Her arms were by her sides, her body rigid...except, oddly, she held her head cocked at a slight angle, giving her a quizzical aspect. Around her throat she wore a black velvet ribbon. Her knife thrower assistant’s costume consisted of a one-piece outfit like a bathing suit, scintillating and silver.
My heart jammed to a halt in my chest, shuddered and shook like the double Ferris wheel as it fought to regain its proper rhythm. It couldn’t be the same girl I had seen fall from the trapeze a year ago, could it? That girl had had her hair tied back in a ponytail, but if she had let it fall free, wouldn’t she have looked like this girl? So, had my father been right after all, and she had survived the accident? If that were the case, maybe she had been grounded ever since, consigned to acts like this one instead. Her face was composed, almost waxen, those sexy dreamy eyes unblinking as they stared back at the knife thrower. Or through him.
Suddenly, as he wound up for another throw, the equally silent knife thrower looked familiar to me, too.
I wasn’t sure how it happened. Did a kid call out to his friend too loudly? Did the knife thrower see something distracting out of the corner of his eye? A gust of chilly breeze picked up just then; did it send a shiver through his body at that crucial moment?
Whatever the case, his next throw went wild. The knife thunked home, but this time in the hollow between his mute assistant’s collarbones.
Screams. Cries. The girl fell back against the board and slumped down it, her hands fluttering helplessly as if she were too drugged to respond otherwise.
Other carnival workers rushed in, blocked my view for several minutes. The girl’s limp body was slung into the air and carried to a nearby trailer.
In a daze, shuffling mindlessly like a zombie in my skull mask, I somehow found my way to my father in the beer garden, and stammered to him what I’d seen. He pushed my muffling mask up on my head and asked me to repeat myself.
‘Oh, come on,’ he said, clapping me on the arm. ‘I’m sure that was all staged, just to scare kids like you on Halloween. I’ve seen all kinds of weird things going on here tonight.’
I could hardly argue with that statement, at least.
My father took a new job in Worcester, Massachusetts, so my family moved from Eastborough to that city, to a small house on hilly Orient Street. We stopped going to the carnival in Eastborough. Anyway, it didn’t arrive that next year—in spring, summer or autumn—and though it did come around the following year, I was now thirteen and my father must have thought it wouldn’t be of the same interest to me.
I didn’t attend the carnival again until I was seventeen-years-old. I had my driver’s license now, and my father had bought me a four-year-old 1970 Javelin. Better than that, I had my first girlfriend—Debbie, a short pretty classmate who strongly resembled Maureen McCormick of The Brady Bunch . Oh, but I felt like the luckiest man in Worcester. I decided to take my very own goddess to the carnival in Eastborough that summer, the summer that we both graduated from high school, on one of our first dates.
The double Ferris wheel was functioning properly this time, and at its very summit I put my arm around Debbie’s shoulders, drew her against me and planted a kiss on her lips. She giggled and pushed me away. ‘Hey!’ she scolded, but she was grinning. Did she feel as exhilarated as I did, up there with the carnival’s constellations of lights spread out below us?
And this year, no one appeared to be fleeing from the haunted house ride in tears. (Well, there was always one or two.) I thought this might be another opportunity for a kiss, a longer kiss, so I pulled Debbie toward it. She kept protesting, shrinking against my body at the gravelly, distorted roars and howls coming from the attraction’s loudspeakers, but this only encouraged me more. Even before our car started into motion, Debbie had already shrunk down into her seat against me. It made me grin like the skull mask I’d worn six years earlier.
As our car began to crank along its track to the attraction’s entrance, I took note of its operator for the first time. He wore a black hooded cloak, and the glimpse I had of his shadowed face unsettled me for some reason.
I saw the cigarette dangling from the man’s mouth for only a second, and then our car banged its nose through the black-painted hinged double doors. It took an immediate jolting left, and we lurched straight into the realm of dark magic. Dark magic as rendered by dry ice, strobe lights and fluorescent paint. Debbie yelped and buried her head into my shoulder as one garish demon after another shot up from behind a gravestone, sat up in a coffin, or dropped down from a hangman’s noose. If they were to be dragged outside, their papier-mâché forms would look as pitiful and harmless as vampires desiccated in the sun’s light. But here, in their own domain, they had power.
Our car banged into another room, and air blasted our faces as a recorded voice cackled maniacally. Debbie was too scrunched down for me to kiss, but at least I had my arm tightly around her. I looked down at her and laughed, and when I looked up again a spotlight came on to illuminate a ghoul just in front of us. It was a female manikin seated in a moving rocking chair. This figure was far more realistic than the papier-mâché fiends, perhaps a retired department store manikin reduced to this less glamorous profession. The figure wore a long white nightgown, the low-cut V of its neckline revealing a large, oddly shaped knife jutting out of her upper chest. There was no blood, though. The figure looked weirdly virginal, like a sacrifice.
Long blond hair framed her vacant, beautiful face, a black ribbon fastened around her throat. Her head was cocked off to one side, almost resting on her shoulder.
Then the spotlight went out, the car took a hard right, and we burst through another set of double doors into the night air.
As we stumbled away from the haunted house, and as I cast glances back at the cloaked operator, Debbie took my arm and laughed. ‘Look at you!’ she teased me. ‘You look even more shaken up than I am!’
After that year, the speedway shut down and stores began to sprout up from its lot.
I married young. Not Debbie, but an attractive young woman named Paula I met at the University of Lowell. We divorced young, too.
Between wives at twenty-four—the year being 1981—and feeling rather lonely as Christmas neared, I decided to accept my cousin Bill’s invitation to spend the holiday with his family. Following his own career move, Bill had settled way up in Ellsworth, Maine.
Maybe not the best time to take a long drive to Maine, though. Snow was beginning to fall across an already snowy landscape, the sky weighing heavily above me like a ceiling of solid white stone. I kept myself cozy, though, with frequent stops for hot coffee and an endless stream of Christmas music on the radio.
Radio stations would fade in and out, however, as I passed across the New England states, and maybe...maybe...this accounted for what occurred when my car entered a terrain of forested hills—misty through the falling snow—and wide open hollows. I crested one gradual rise to find a long, low dip in the land spread before me. Nat King Cole was drowned out in a sudden wash of static. And through the crackling disruption, distantly, I heard other music. It was very faint, but it almost sounded like the music of a calliope.
And it was as my car started descending into that broad lowland that I spotted the double Ferris wheel, looming above a fringe of evergreens on the horizon.
The bulbs that bejeweled the Ferris wheel glowed through the mist, and even from here I could tell the wheels were turning against the sky, like a machine wringing the snow from the air.
A carnival...in winter? Up here in a lonely space between small, far-flung Maine towns?
And...could it be that one? But surely there was more than one carnival that featured a double Ferris wheel.
Despite the heat turned high in my car, I shivered. I had the uncanny feeling that, unconsciously, I had been following the carnival across the land. Across the years.
Even more uncanny was the feeling that maybe the carnival was following me .
The road snaked between hills, through long corridors of trees. When I ascended a rise on the opposite side of the wide basin, I expected to have a better view of the Ferris wheel, and probably more of the carnival.
Instead, I had lost sight of it altogether.
I was tempted to turn off, to turn back, and try to find it again. Find the right path to reach it. But for what? Why?
The snow was beginning to pick up, threatening a real blizzard, and afternoon was wearing on. I knew I couldn’t afford any such detour.
The calliope music had faded, and so did the static a few moments later, Gene Autry taking its place.
On my drive back home to Massachusetts, a few days later, I watched for the carnival to reappear.
It did not.
I am fifty-two now. I remarried at twenty-six, found happiness with a woman who maybe wasn’t any goddess, but who loved me and gave me a daughter—who has in turn given me a grandson. Maybe we weren’t so happy that our then nineteen-year-old daughter gave us this grandson so early, but I can’t complain about my best buddy in the world.
Gerry is a precocious first grader, better on the computer than I am. He loves video games, too, scary ones that make me start and flinch to watch. Movie monster toy figures, all that cool boy stuff. Maybe he’s a little morbid, but it may be the times.
I took my best buddy out with me on the flimsiest of excuses, everywhere on my errands. On this particular evening I was returning him to my daughter’s apartment in Milford—I myself having moved back to Eastborough from Worcester before I met her mother—and sharing between us the last of an order of large fries from our stop for some burgers, when from the corner of my eye I saw something like a constellation in the shape of a giant hourglass, glowing against the slate gray November sky. When I looked over that way directly, my heart launched itself against the inside of my sternum as if our car had crashed into a wall.
It was a double Ferris wheel, towering above the intervening buildings and trees.
‘Gerry,’ I said, without looking over at him, ‘want to go to the carnival?’
‘Huh?’ He sat up higher in his seat beside me. ‘What carnival?’ But then he spotted it, too. ‘Oh wow! Yeah! But...won’t Mom be mad if we don’t come home now? Maybe we should call her.’
‘I’m sure she’ll understand,’ I muttered, already turning my car onto another street, to take me toward that galaxy of lights slowly rotating against the sky.
Gerry didn’t protest again; I was the adult and the onus was on me. I could have called my daughter, and in all likelihood would have gotten her blessing, but I didn’t want to chance it lest she say no. And I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow. It might not be here tomorrow.
As I followed the Ferris wheel lights, like a beacon, I was doubly confused. For one, how could a carnival have gone up in my hometown, practically right under my nose, without me having seen or heard something before this moment? And I was also confused as to where precisely the carnival could be situated. Somewhere not too far from Eastborough’s center, yet I couldn’t think of a space in this built-up little town that might accommodate it. But shortly before I reached that space I had figured it out. The carnival had been erected on the former site of a company called Odyllic—former because a few years ago, the whole complex of factory structures, warehouses and offices had been swept by a fire of suspicious, or at least unknown, origin. I remembered there had been concerns about toxic materials remaining after the fire—though I couldn’t recall ever learning just what exactly they had produced or manufactured at Odyllic—but the buildings had all been torn down by now. As far as I knew the property had not yet found a buyer, despite the prime location right here off the ever-growing town’s center.
We parked on an adjoining street, and walked with the throngs that approached the carnival, mesmerized as we were by the lights, the smells, the sounds. One of these sounds, in the background, was calliope music...and I shuddered.
I bought a block of tickets from a gray-faced old woman with one white, blind eye seated in a booth that reeked of her body odor, and then Gerry was bolting to join the queue in front of a ride that made me nauseous just watching its insane spinning and gyrations. Its operator, a burly young man with a shaved head and spirals tattooed all over his face like a Maori warrior, saw me watching him and ran his tongue over his lips. I looked away quickly.
So was this the same carnival, then? I couldn’t be sure. Some features, like the Ferris wheel, the merry-go-round, looked all too familiar, but there were so many newer rides and attractions, updated trailers from which food was sold or out of which games were played. Gerry survived his dizzying ride, though he wove like a drunken man as he walked toward me—grinning drunkenly, too. We continued exploring, Gerry somehow finding room in his little belly for all manner of junk food despite our recent fast food excursion. More and more I suspected this was indeed the same carnival I remembered...transfigured, mutated by the years, but the same under its patched and repainted surface. Perhaps in the interest of political correctness, but more likely due to stricter laws, I found no beer garden or girly shows.
I did find a number of sideshow tents, however, some so distinctive, so familiar that I no longer held any doubts. But there was one such tent that I didn’t recall ever having encountered before in all the years I had attended. The main sign outside read: HEADLESS WOMAN—STILL ALIVE! Another sign showed a woman with a clean, bloodless stump for a neck, dressed in a long white gown and seated on a chair. Above this, the words: SEE HER LIVING BODY—WITHOUT A HEAD!
‘Cool!’ Gerry exclaimed, now having noticed the signs, too. We drew closer, near enough to read a placard that purported to give the woman’s story. It was in the form of a newspaper article, even including a blown-up photo of a car wreck, supposedly dated June, 1981. It read:
‘PROM QUEEN DECAPITATED IN FREAK CAR ACCIDENT.
ELLSWORTH, MAINE. On her ride home from Ellsworth High School’s prom last night, prom queen Mary DeAngelo was involved in a tragic accident when the car she was riding in rear-ended a tractor trailer truck that had come to an unexpected stop. The driver, Mary’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend John Harlequin, was killed instantly, but Mary’s body was rushed to Maine Coast Memorial Hospital, where in a revolutionary procedure doctors managed to maintain Mary’s vital processes...even after having to remove her ruined and mostly severed head. Though her headless body continues being sustained by a variety of experimental life support systems, doctors admit they can offer little more for her than a form of living death.’
Gerry read the whole story, and repeated, ‘Cool!’ He looked up at me, tugging my hand. ‘Let’s check it out, Grampy!’
I stared at the crude painting of the woman seated in her chair, shapely and weirdly alluring despite her ghastly state, then tried to look into the tent itself, but of course my view was impeded by a canvas partition and the line of bodies streaming in to have a look. I said, ‘I’ve heard of this kind of thing, Gerry...it’s just a rip-off. It’s a trick they do with mirrors.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. You see the story, Grampy? Experimental stuff! Come on, come on!’ More tugging at my hand.
I turned to the man collecting money for the attraction, handed over the fee and got in line. It wasn’t until we were at the mouth of the tent that for some odd, niggling reason I glanced back at the man. Though elderly, he appeared to have once been in good physical condition. Except for a fringe of white hair, he was bald, a cigarette hanging from his lips.
‘Come on, Grampy!’ Gerry pulled at me, made me realize I was lagging at the entrance though it was our turn to enter. I tore my gaze from the old man, and entered the tent.
And there, across the room, she sat...the Headless Woman. As in the painting, she sat up straight in a wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap, wearing a long white gown. A barrier of velvet ropes held back the rubes who filed slowly past her, as if past Lenin or Ho Chi Minh in their glass cases, giggling and making witty wisecracks the woman would have heard a thousand times, if she’d had ears.
‘Wow,’ Gerry whispered, pressing against my leg as we edged closer to her in the line.
Over a crackling intercom, a warbling recorded voice (was this the voice of the old man outside?) kept up an ongoing spiel. Most of it reiterated what was presented in the phony newspaper article outside, but there was also this: ‘She is not a mannequin. She is not a dummy. She is alive ...the devices that circulate her vital fluids also preserving her youthful body, while her head has long since vanished from this earth...’
Not a mannequin. I thought of a long ago year that I had visited this carnival...the haunted house ride...
Eight tubes, like tentacles, sprouted up from the center of the woman’s neck stump, supported by the arms of an apparatus like that from which an IV bag would hang, before most of them snaked down into a contraption resting beside her chair—covered in gauges, toggles and glowing red lights. One tube connected with a tank of oxygen, though, while two others ran into bottles of bubbling fluid set atop the contraption, one containing a yellowish fluid and the other fluid dark red. There was an electronic humming sound, a gurgling of the liquids circulating through those two bottles, and another sound that—as I got closer—I realized was a subdued wheezing.
As my eyes took her in—her young woman’s curves evident through that shroud-like gown with its low V neckline—I saw the woman’s primly folded hands suddenly twitch and flutter for several seconds before they settled down again.
‘Shit!’ Gerry hissed.
‘Gerry,’ I scolded him distractedly. We were directly opposite the woman now, but people were pressing behind us, urging us not to linger too long.
Even still, it was long enough for me to notice the vertical white scar in the hollow above the woman’s collarbones.
‘It’s real, isn’t it, Grampy?’
I stepped out of the line. Right up to the velvet rope that was all that separated the girl and myself. I leaned my body across the rope, reached out and took hold of the woman’s left hand.
‘Hey, man,’ said someone behind me, ‘you shouldn’t be doing that.’
I squeezed her hand. And after a moment, it squeezed back. The hand was warm, alive. Like the sign outside advertised...STILL ALIVE.
‘Grampy, come on!’ Gerry pulled at my other hand. ‘Come on, before you get in trouble!’
I allowed him to pull me away. The girl’s small hand slipped out of mine. I saw it fold across her right hand again, resting on her thighs.
I glanced back at her one last time as Gerry and I moved toward the tent’s exit.
‘Hey, don’t cry, Grampy,’ my grandson told me gently. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t feel anything.’
‘I hope not, Gerry,’ I said. ‘I hope not.’
Under a now black and crystalline sky, we walked away from the sideshow tent, and I threw a look back at the silent old man, oblivious to me as he accepted more money, more offerings for his debased goddess. Was she under his spell...or, in a way, might he be under hers?
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s get home before your mom gets too worried.’
We walked back to our car against the flow of more curious, bewildered people finding their way to the unannounced carnival.
The Ferris wheel receded in my rearview mirror.
The carnival was gone the next day.
And it hasn’t returned to Eastborough since.”
Ware waited a little for more, but the man on the other side of the door had obviously finished. Ware nodded and grunted to himself. So, it was the mysterious that intrigued this stranger…the unexplained or unexplainable he liked to discuss. Well, he had his own story to relate, which involved yet another paid attraction for those who sought secret wonders beyond life’s dreary façade—though whether his desire, or need, to share his experiences with a stranger was born of a sense of communion or rivalry, he couldn’t say.
Ignoring the fact that the necessity to relieve himself had rather intensified, as the morning’s first coffee had completed its own ghost train ride through his system, while also ignoring the fact that the restroom traffic had reached a radical between-trains lull—even most of the urinals unmanned—Ware took a sip of the new (if now tepid) coffee he still held in his hand, cleared his throat and started.
“Where I come from there used to be a museum…the Amos House of Oddities & Curiosities, the sign outside called it, for it was just that—a person’s house, that person being a man named Jasper Amos. Amos was a chemical engineer, for a large company in town called Amalgamated Concoctions or some such; it was closed down decades ago. He was well paid at his company, but he had also inherited money from his late wife, an attractive heiress who was killed when her car mysteriously caught fire while she was on her way to visit a sick friend; some even said she spontaneously combusted. In any case, Jasper Amos held an interest in biology, anthropology, and just about every other branch of science beyond the field of chemistry, and over the years had amassed quite a weird collection of items, as the name of his museum would indicate. His wife had not wanted the general public traipsing through her home, but after her death Amos opened his doors to anyone willing to pay a small fee to view his collection. He did this for the sheer pleasure of sharing his enthusiasms, because he certainly didn’t need the proceeds from his museum in order to survive.
I remember my mother took me there the first time when I was maybe eleven years old, but afterwards I would come with friends or even alone, once or twice a year, for the five or six years that the Amos House of Oddities & Curiosities remained open—for I too have always had a keen interest in all branches of science, and in oddities and curiosities of every sort. The odder and more curious, the better.
The first visit to any special place is always the most wonderful; every other time you return is simply an attempt to recapture a bit of that initial magic. I recall how fascinated, how utterly entranced I was to walk the long carpeted hallways and vast rooms of the monstrous old mansion that first time, hardly noticing my mother beside me at all. The house was filled not only with treasures of the natural world, but paintings both classical and abstract, art both religious and sacrilegious, furnishings and décor from around the world—everything from suits of armor to manikins wearing gorgeously embroidered ceremonial robes, from huge masses of colorful crystal in glass showcases to pressurized aquariums of ghastly deep sea fish, and terrariums containing two-headed snakes and albino turtles.
One of my favorite displays was a large diorama, housed in an alcove and contained behind a glass wall, of about a half dozen preserved human bodies…most standing but with two or three crouching around a mock campfire, the background being a crude painted scene of a prairie at twilight. A hidden tape recorder played cricket sounds, the crackling of a fire and distant strange tribal chants. According to a plaque beside the exhibit, these grotesque mummies were the remains of a rare and obscure tribe of natives who predated the arrival of the white man, and thus were garbed in buckskin and headbands decorated with beads and feathers. What made them so rare was that each member of this little tribe shared a congenital deformity due to inbreeding, and that was that their noses were upside-down. Whether this were authentically the case or the result of clever taxidermy, one could plainly see on the leathery shellacked faces of these primitive tribesmen that the bridge of the nose lay just above the upper lip, while the nostrils were inverted and situated almost between the eyebrows. A card at the feet of each figure purported to give their tribal names, and the translations of those names. I remember some of these translated names being “RAIN SNORTER”…“SNEEZE-IN-EYES”…“STARE-AT-SNOT.”
But the attraction that Amos was best known for, and my own favorite as well, was his flea circus. Now, I had seen a flea circus on TV once…fleas harnessed to and pulling miniature rickshaws and chariots, fleas twirling in miniature carousels, swinging on tiny trapezes or walking a tightrope. But this was something else, something surprisingly less exotic. The fleas were inside little terrariums, dioramas with scenes that resembled the kitchens or living rooms of ordinary houses—nothing so extravagant as the mansion of Jasper Amos—and magnifying glasses were set up here and there so you could lean in and observe the creatures more closely…though the lenses seemed poor or the angles were askew, so that the creatures appeared rather blurry, less than focused. In any case, Amos’ troupe of fleas were engaged in quite mundane tasks, such rocking in a rocking chair in front of a tiny toy TV, or standing upright at a sink filled with cotton to look like soap suds, wearing an apron and washing dishes—you could even see the elbows moving as the arms worked within those bogus soap suds. A flea seeming to clack away at a miniscule typewriter in a matchbox office cubicle, or two flea shapes jumping around under a blanket on a diminutive bed. (That one I didn’t understand the first time I saw it, until I was twelve and blundered in on my parents one time and— ahhh! )
Every time I visited that house of anomalies and wonders, at some point I would turn and Jasper Amos himself—a balding man with dark but uncannily bright eyes—would be there peering out from behind a drape or from a doorway, and smiling directly at me… me …as if all this had been created especially and only for me, and every other guest was merely incidental. It was a rewarding, and unsettling, sensation.
But not everyone was so beguiled by Jasper Amos’ personal museum. My town was then, and still is, governed by a board of five selectmen. This board, at that time, consisted of several colorful and distinct persons. One of them was Missy Willard, who always wore a large flowery sun hat even in winter. Another was Tobias Phelps, who wore a red bowtie and a suit too small and tight for his rotund form, and Fred Chalk who was a troop leader in the Youth Scouts and thus always sported his beige uniform of shorts and a shirt brimming with pins and badges. This board of selectmen was decidedly not entertained by the museum of Jasper Amos, because his monstrous mansion was not zoned for business, and perhaps because the town was not benefitting financially from the proceeds the museum took in—and so, after it had only been operating for about a year following the demise of Mrs. Amos, the selectmen ordained that the museum should be shut down, the doors to the monstrous mansion closed. This was done, and for a short time the museum was no more, Amos’ collection enjoyed only by himself.
But I say a short time, because within mere months of the board’s decision, one by one the members disappeared. Some theorized that Missy Willard and Fred Chalk had run away with each other, but what of the other three? They were never heard from again—all five of them gone within a matter of several weeks.
About a month after the disappearance of the last selectman, the town had a new board of selectmen. And not only that, but the Amos House of Oddities & Curiosities once more opened to the general public. In a show of good faith, on the first day of its reopening all five members of the new board of selectmen made a show of visiting the museum themselves, even grinning for photographers from local newspapers.
And so the museum remained open for several years more…until, when I was just about to graduate from high school, tragedy struck. Another strange fire, this time in what seems to have been a basement laboratory in Amos’ mansion that no one had previously suspected the existence of. Whatever research or experiment the chemist might have been conducting outside of work was never ascertained, and all that was discovered of the man himself was a stick figure made of cinder. Amos and his wife had had no children, and so it was left to the authorities to go over such belongings of his that had survived the conflagration. Much of the mansion and its collection were lost, but there was one odd artifact discovered in the attic of the structure.
This artifact was a cigar box, inside of which were pinned a number of fleas, apparently former performers from Amos’ flea circus. These specimens wore intricately made, unthinkably miniscule costumes, as his fleas always did—but the more the town police and fire department examined these fleas, the more familiar their particular garments became. Of the five fleas impaled with a pin in that box, one wore a flowery sun hat…one, a red bowtie and awkward-looking suit…and one a beige uniform of shorts and a shirt made colorful with a nearly microscopic array of ribbons and badges.
Magnifying glasses were fetched, so that the investigators might study the fleas more closely, and to their horror they realized that these tiny, twisted dark bodies were not insects at all, but human remains—impossibly, horribly reduced in size via some unknown process…dehydrated or shrunken down into dry, gnarled husks that retained almost nothing of their human aspect aside from their aforementioned garb. Surely no human could survive such a process!
And yet, with Jasper Amos’ flea circus destroyed and beyond examination, much speculation and rumor circulated. Wild theories, terrible suggestions…that maybe those other fleas that had for years entertained us by rocking in chairs, washing dishes or frolicking in bed had not really been fleas, either.”
Ware found his throat had gone dry from talking, so while he allowed his one man audience to absorb his story’s ending he drank from his tall paper cup of coffee, though it had now gone cold and his bladder was unhappy with him. During his story, men and boys had surged in and out of the restroom like rising and falling tides, though there was always at least a trickle. Aside from the quiet listener on the other side of the door, Ware had been ignored by the others around him, as if he or they were only a figment of the other’s imagination, seen from the corner of one’s eye.
Then Ware had a realization: that he wasn’t merely being quiet to let the man on the other side of the door digest his story…he was also waiting for the man to return with another story of his own. Not only anticipating, he was surprised to find, but desiring another story. Surprising indeed. Not only he, but all men seemed very disinclined to enter into any conversation with a stranger in a men’s room, be it in the next stall or at the next urinal. Homophobia was part of it (one’s pants down or opened, the most private of privates exposed and vulnerable), but also, society was not designed for such interaction. Toilet stalls and office cubicles, cars to enclose one in a bubble of moving space, telephones and email and chat rooms with which to communicate with anyone in the world while at the same time keeping others at bay. Privacy was another name for isolation. And Ware was more reclusive, he knew, even than most people. True, he and this man were not face to face, still separated by that dividing wall, but they were talking through it…in spite of it, as if defying it. Yes, Ware was waiting, hoping, even anxious for more interaction.
Knowing this, or anxious himself, his unseen partner in conversation obliged him.
“Where I come from, in Eastborough,” the man sitting on the toilet said, “there was a teacher named Mrs. McClary—I don’t recall ever having heard her first name—who taught science at the high school for decades. I had her myself, and so did my daughter! When the old woman finally retired, she spent much time in her garden and tending to other hobbies of hers, one of which was her collection of insects. She didn’t do this when I was her student, but my daughter told me Mrs. McClary would sometimes bring them to class, seemingly more for the pleasure of shocking her students than educating them. My daughter has an intense fear of spiders, and she told me how Mrs. McClary once placed a terrarium containing a goliath bird-eating spider, at eleven inches across the world’s largest spider, directly in front of my daughter on her desk. ‘She had this weird little smile on her face,’ my daughter told me. ‘And when I screamed, she grinned.’
My daughter once complained to me, ‘You know those crazy old cat ladies every town has, Dad? Well, Mrs. McClary is a crazy old bug lady instead. If she did have a cat, she’d probably feed it to her giant spider.’
Another time Mrs. McClary brought some caterpillars to school, and said they belonged to a genus of moths called Hyposmocoma , which live in Hawaiian rainforests. Apparently because of the isolation of these islands, she explained, the caterpillars have evolved into carnivores…that is, they use their silk to ensnare snails, sort of like spiders themselves, and then they enter the snail’s shell and eat them while they’re still alive.
Well, one day Mrs. McClary not only didn’t bring any of her bugs to school, but didn’t bring herself to school. My daughter said, ‘We just sat there talking and talking and waiting for her, until we realized that she wasn’t coming. That was just fine by me, but one of the kids finally went to the front office to ask about her. It turns out Mrs. McClary hadn’t taken a day off or called in sick, and she didn’t answer calls to her house. Her husband passed away like ten years earlier, and she never had any children of her own.’
And so the police were ultimately asked to swing by Mrs. McClary’s residence, to look into the elderly woman’s wellbeing.
A youngish police officer named Penn was the one sent to McClary’s house, and as Penn related the story later, he first rang the front doorbell and when that didn’t work, pounded on the door instead. Again there was no response, so he tried the knob to see if it was unlocked. It was, and he let himself inside.
It was obvious right away that things were out of the ordinary; Penn found that the front hallway looked like it had been done up for Halloween with those fake, cotton cobwebs people stretch across their front porches and put plastic spiders in. But these webs, which made a kind of tunnel of the front hall, were not imitation. Though repulsed, Penn even had to use his hands to tear through a few sheets of the sticky webbing that obstructed his way.
Penn ventured into the gloomy interior of the house, and found that the dining room was similarly draped in cobwebs. They covered the walls, hung from the ceiling, shrouded the dining room chairs like sheets thrown over the furniture in an abandoned house.
It appeared that Mrs. McClary hadn’t used her dining room to entertain guests for a long time. Instead, across the long table were placed a good number of terrariums large and small. Whether there was anything still living inside them, though, Penn couldn’t tell—buried as they were under thick veils of silken web.
Penn called out for Mrs. McClary, moving next into the living room to find it in an identical state. On side tables and the coffee table, along with a good number of plants, were more terrariums…but when Penn peered into them as best he could through the layers of web, they appeared to be empty. Had their former contents escaped…or been eaten?
Whereas the front rooms had been very dark, with the window shades down, the curtains drawn and webs covering the walls almost entirely, Penn found the kitchen to be brighter. For one, the webs were less extensive in here, plus the back door of the house stood open, letting in the morning sun. Penn moved to the back door, stood on its threshold and looked out at the sizable back yard, with its colorful flower beds and neat rows of tomato plants.
And finally he saw her—Mrs. McClary—toward the back of her garden where a wooden fence separated her yard from a neighbor’s, wearing a gaudy flower-patterned muumuu. She appeared to be kneeling down at the foot of a big Yellow Forsythia bush that grew beside the fence, maybe digging up weeds, but then Penn became concerned when he realized it looked more like the old woman had collapsed onto her belly, maybe the victim of a stroke. It looked like she was crawling slowly on the ground, partly under the Forsythia bush. As Penn jumped down the back steps and started striding across the yard toward her, he hoped Mrs. McClary was simply trying to reach for something under the bush…but when he called out to her she didn’t look back at him or respond.
It was a bit shadowy back there, in the shade of the fence and a big bordering spruce tree, but as he got closer Penn could see the woman’s heavy, shapeless body inching along at a snail’s pace…sort of undulating on her belly as if she didn’t have the strength to crawl on her hands and knees. In fact, he saw that she was dragging her legs behind her, limp in their compression stockings.
When he got close to the old science teacher, though, he noted that her swollen legs in the flesh-colored stockings looked very odd, very unnatural. Pulpy, like bags full of spaghetti…and was it just his imagination that her flesh appeared to be subtly squirming and shifting under that thick hosiery?
‘Mrs. McClary?’ he said once more, bending down over her, the teacher’s upper body hidden from him under the pretty Forsythia shrub. ‘Are you OK?’
That was when he noticed that her whole body, under her muumuu, was rippling and squirming like the flesh of her legs inside her stockings. And that was when he noticed that Mrs. McClary had no arms.
Apparently, no head as well.
Officer Penn might have done two things just then. Some might have backed off in revulsion, and gotten on the shoulder mic attached to their uniform. But Penn, impulsively, bent down lower, took hold of the hem of Mrs. McClary’s muumuu in both hands, and with one strong pull dragged her out from under the Forsythia bush.
As he dragged her, the muumuu came away from her body, as if he were pulling a sheet off a draped piece of furniture…or pulling the skin off a giant, rotting fruit. And the body that was revealed beneath the muumuu, lying there on Mrs. McClary’s neatly cut grass, was only partly human…a reduced, gelatinous mass of masticated flesh and dissolving bone. Most of that glistening, writhing bulk was instead made up of caterpillars…thousands upon thousands of caterpillars.
Whether she had bred them or they had multiplied on their own, no one could say, but later they were identified as a previously unknown offshoot of Hyposmocoma —the carnivorous caterpillars of Hawaii.”
Every town had such stories, Ware reflected. Not that the incidents they had shared thus far were universal, by any means, but stories of unique interest, stories of abnormalities, deviances from the cicada drone of the mundane that blanked the mind of most…the subconscious-yet-deafening buzz that drowned out the imagination and soothed the inner robot. For a more sensitive soul, however, a brightly inquisitive mind, that ceaseless drone of mediocrity might drive one mad were it not for accounts of frogs falling from the sky, an unidentifiable blob washing up on a beach, demonic claw marks spontaneously appearing on a troubled girl’s tender flesh.
Well, Ware considered, perhaps he was being a tad too self-congratulatory. Most people held some degree of interest in unknown wonders, but it seldom extended beyond the superficiality of tabloid diversion (unless one counted religion—that predigested unknown wonder). But there were those like himself, Ware liked to think, who took a keener interest in the unknown, who had an affinity and an attunement…who embraced strange tales, and collected them as treasure.
Ware was only too happy to share another such tale with this kindred soul. He considered it a returned favor. They had entered a volleyball match of such favors, and with this next story he felt he might “spike” the ball.
“Where I come from,” he said, “there was a very respected family called the Larsons, who lived on Pine Lane. They were an affluent family, a model family, all of them attractive right down to their red-haired dog. Mr. Larson was a successful sales executive, Mrs. Larson was involved in various social groups and charity organizations, the twelve-year-old son was a straight-A student…even the dog had won ribbons in several dog shows.
One year the town set about to digging up and replacing quite a lot of its old, lead water pipes—the streets were a mess for months. Heaps of dirt impinged on people’s front lawns, great lengths of temporary, flexible water pipes ran alongside the sidewalks, excavation tied up traffic. Even pretty little Pine Lane was excavated, and in front of the home of the Larson family an odd piece of plumbing was unearthed. It was about ten-feet-long and very thick around, as crusty with green corrosion as if it had lain at the bottom of the ocean for centuries. Whatever other pipelines it might once have been connected to, those connections were lost now and the odd piece was a discrete unit. The oddest thing about it—other than the fact that those who unearthed it couldn’t agree on its original function, some suggesting it was part of a pump, while others guessed a filtration system—was that it had a circular glass porthole, or such, riveted into its flank. The workers described viewing a murky green fluid inside the pipe through that glass, and when they rolled the heavy pipe onto the front lawn of the Larson home they could hear the sloshing liquid that was trapped inside.
They left the length of pipe—if a pipe it truly was—on the lawn of the Larson home over the weekend…and when they returned to work a few days later, the porthole in the side of the thing had shattered and all its contents drained away. The foul-smelling interior was now empty. Maybe internal gas pressure had burst the glass? Whatever the case, the unusual, corroded old shell was loaded onto a truck and borne away.
That day, Mr. Larson didn’t show up for work, nor his son for school. Mrs. Larson missed a meeting of one of her social groups. Several more days passed, and still no one saw or heard from the Larson family. Mr. Larson didn’t call in sick at work, nor was the son’s absence reported to the school. As in your story of Mrs. McClary, soon the concern was such that the authorities were contacted—and policemen sent to the house on Pine Lane.
From what I gather, there swiftly followed an emergency meeting of the town’s board of selectmen. At the meeting were also a number of school officials, a representative of one of the town’s social groups, and various other citizens.
A day after that, there was a meeting of the management at Mr. Larson’s place of business, and the teaching staff at the son’s school.
And a few days after that , Mr. Larson finally returned to work, the mother to her social gatherings, the son to school. But the Larsons were not quite as they had been before.
Most noticeable was the physical change. Though their hair seemingly remained unaffected, their faces had become smooth hard surfaces, curved and glossy like the side of a glazed vase. Applied somehow to the flat surface of their new faces—if faces they could be called—were photographic representations of their former faces: Mr. Larson smiling brightly, his wife and child the same. It was as though these immobile, two-dimensional images were meant to fool people into thinking that nothing was amiss.
The mother could once again be seen visiting the local supermarket, shopping weekly just as she always had, except now a typical cart of groceries unloaded at the checkout line might consist of ten bottles of bleach, a dozen packages of aluminum foil, three cheese graters and a bottle of Maraschino cherries.
The son arduously bent over his desk at every class, filling notebook after notebook, but when teachers peeked over his shoulder at the pages they were always covered with gibberish and strange symbols, with disturbing little sketches in the margins.
And Mr. Larson resumed attending sales meetings, would even get up from the table to address the others and point to notes projected on a screen…but the notes were gibberish, strange symbols and disturbing sketches, and more disturbing was the manner in which Mr. Larson spoke. Because the hard bony face would split open vertically down the middle—there was a barely perceptible fissure there on all three family members—and the two hinged halves would open and close as a series of phlegmy-sounding coughs and barks were emitted. His presentation finished, Mr. Larson’s face would seal shut again—the bisected photo of his smiling former face restored—and the others would trade nervous glances and clap appreciatively.
The son’s oral reports, and the mother’s contributions at her gatherings, were met with similar twitchy smiles and forced applause.
The town did its best, mostly through a silent agreement, an instinctual understanding, to make the Larsons feel at home…not to question, trouble or provoke them in any way.
Then, one summer night there was a particularly violent lightning storm. Still, no one thought too much of it at first—until it was noticed that Mr. Larson did not come in to work the following morning. The mother missed her weekly shopping excursion.
This time the police were more reluctant to venture into their home to check on their welfare, but they did so. However, the Larson family were gone. All that could be found was their clothing, strewn upon the livingroom carpet. Amongst the clothing were found three realistic wigs made from actual human hair.
And the ribbon-winning dog? Well, after the initial absence of the Larson family, it had never been seen again…but the day after that severe electrical storm, the remains of a strange animal were discovered by the side of the road on Pine Lane. They were badly burnt, appearing as if a lightning bolt might even have struck the beast. It was an exceedingly thin, four-legged creature with what seemed to be an insect-like exoskeleton—and its face consisted of two featureless bony plates, gaping open vertically in death.”
“Okay,” the man behind the door jumped right in—as if, as the stories grew shorter, or more concise, so too must the time in between them, “well, where I come from, after a severe lightning storm people in Eastborough started seeing UFOs—but a couple of witnesses who saw them up close over Eastborough Swamp said they were actually giant floating jellyfish creatures, maybe shifted here from another dimension.”
“Well where I come from,” Ware returned, “many people have witnessed a phenomenon they call the Ephemeral Eye, which appears in the sky like a floating, green-glowing eye the size of a dirigible, and often the people who see it are left psychically scarred.”
“Where I come from,” said the stranger from Eastborough, “multiple people have encountered the ghost of a Native American woman who haunts a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant near the lake where she drowned hundreds of years ago.”
“Where I come from, there was a plant that manufactured pain ointment but it caused terrible side effects, and so forty years ago the place was demolished, but a ghostly afterimage of the building remains on the same spot and glows in the night.”
“Well where I come from…” said the man in the toilet stall.
They went on this way for some time.
The restroom was unoccupied except for the two of them, and beyond its threshold the station had gone unnaturally silent, as if the wild blizzard had broken in through the windows and filled the great hall—burying the coffee and book stands out in the middle of its floor, rising to the feet of the silhouettes stranded on the advertising banners hanging from the ceiling, and blocking the restroom doorway just around the corner from them. Or had that apocalyptic fire swept in, the fire the madwoman had warned would arrive first on a train, turning all to ash except for the two of them, safe in this unlikely shelter?
Ware knew it was, instead, that the hour had grown very late—past the time of the last inbound commuter train, which would have arrived in Boston at 1:30 AM. Another inbound train wouldn’t embark from Worcester’s Union Station, the first city on his pocket schedule, until 4:45 AM. He had never been to South Station at this hour before. If a security guard or policeman should come in here and find them, would they be in trouble? Be evicted? Or was it permissible for one to remain in this public place in the lonely purgatory of in-between hours?
During their long exchange, Ware had found he could no longer bear the now considerable discomfort in his bladder, but he had been reluctant to leave his spot and use one of the urinals lest the cadence of their conversation be broken. Finally he had come upon the solution of drinking down the last cold dregs of his coffee, unzipping his pants right there and relieving himself in the paper cup (which he was grateful had been of large size). No one came into the restroom to witness this, and if the man on the other side of the door suspected he didn’t let on. Ware then returned the lid to the cup and set it down by his foot, never once breaking the rhythm of his own rapid-fire anecdotes.
Ware had been hesitant, all this time, to relate the story of the house of Edwin Cronos—or had he only been saving it up? But what was he to do now, to follow his unseen companion’s one sentence tease about a stone graveyard cherub that had been accidentally struck by a worker’s snow plow, and repaid him for it by climbing up the side of his house and grinning in at him through his bedroom window? And so…
“Where I come from, long before I was born, there was a man named Edwin Cronos…said to be a striking figure, thin and darkly handsome, both magnetic and oddly repellent. What makes him notable, however, is that Cronos dreamed of constructing a machine that might bridge the distances of time, space, and dimension. Yet sometimes the mind of the dreamer isn’t enough to achieve its goal. In order to realize his dream, Edwin Cronos had to make use of the minds of others.
But how did the brainchild of this controversial inventor come about? Raised as he was by parents who ran a sanitarium—parents whose experimental methods of dealing with the insane involved lobotomies and electric shocks—his childhood influenced his adult obsessions. In correspondence with a friend, dated 1910, Cronos wrote—and I quote:
‘We lived in the same building that housed the inmates, those wailing, weeping, cackling lost souls who were in a perverse way like an extension of our family. And did not the energies of their tormented minds fill those rooms, seep into the very walls, until the house was like a great battery alive with maniacal power? Could a building, then, be designed in such a way that it not only absorbed the mental energies of its tenants, but harnessed them, amplified them, and directed those energies to whatever purpose one might desire?’
One can deduce that Cronos planned to use these hypothetical energies in his efforts to move through time, to pass into other dimensions. Cronos’ obsession was to see beyond our mundane reality, to cross the boundaries that limit human understanding.
When Cronos’ parents were only in their fifties, they mysteriously died within two months of each other, leaving the sanitarium to their son. With the funds that he also inherited, Cronos then commenced a strange construction project, altering the sanitarium in unusual ways. He brought in mechanics, electricians, workers in many fields to execute his vision. And while he was executing his vision, townspeople claimed he was also executing the sanitarium’s patients...for within a span of a single year, every one of the 29 inmates had died off. These people had been indigents, and were buried in a potter’s field. Later, though, when their coffins were disinterred for a belated investigation, eleven of them were found to be empty. The authorities had no answers, but rumors abounded...
Rumors that Cronos had removed the brain of every inmate.
Rumors that glass tanks had been installed throughout the house—some in the basement, others secreted inside the walls—in which those brains were preserved. And further, that the brains were in some way still alive...somehow powering the huge contraption that Cronos’ home had become.
Some suggested that the eleven missing inmates, even with their brains removed, were kept alive within that house as undead guinea pigs.
Some suggested that in his explorations into alien realms, Cronos captured a host of unearthly beings, and confined them in his home for study.
Only one thing is for certain.
On 11/29, 1912, Edwin Cronos’ fellow townspeople woke up to find that his entire house had vanished, leaving only a gaping foundation—like the skull of a man with his brain removed.”
“Hm!” said the man on the other side of the door. “Where I come from, in Eastborough we had someone called Edward Kronos, now that you remind me…not Edwin, because I’d remember that—it was my grandfather’s name, and my middle name is Edwin in honor of him. Anyway, this Edward Kronos, if I recall his name correctly, moved into town in the early 80s…maybe this was in 1981, too, the year I drove to Maine for Christmas. I know I had already moved back to town from Worcester.
The townspeople took notice of Kronos, because he bought a little old train station that had been boarded up since before I was born. This station was right off the center of town, perched up on an embankment where the tracks crossed an old rusty railroad bridge, which many cars would drive under every day to approach Eastborough center. My mother said she used to catch the train to Boston at this station, but as I say Eastborough doesn’t have a train stop anymore.
In any case, the town sold Kronos the old station, and I can’t remember what it was he said he wanted to do there—if we were ever told. I think it was supposed to be some kind of private clinic or rehab center or something. We thought this, because we’d see some of Kronos’ patients around there sometimes…standing outside on the old train platform, watching the occasional freight train go by, or else facing down the embankment toward the street and staring at the traffic for hours. Even in the rain. Kronos didn’t seem to know they were out there sometimes—he’d appear in the door and shout at them, scold them, go and grab them by the arm and drag them back inside. I remember feeling sorry for the people I saw, whatever their condition was.
I saw him myself, one time, when he snatched the arm of a young woman who appeared to be heavily medicated, spun her around and walked her back into the building. He was a dapper looking kind of guy—tall and thin, with dark hair. He seemed to make direct eye contact with me, and for no good reason I remember shivering. Not that at such a distance, in my car on my way to work, I could really have discerned the expression on his face.
Kronos was the victim of a mysterious fire himself, and his clinic or whatever it was inside that old station burned so badly that no one could tell which of the various bodies discovered inside was his. If any of them. His patients were never identified—if patients they were.
For years later, one of the Eastborough firefighters who responded to the scene blathered stories when he had too many beers in him…having his listeners believe that when the burned bodies were examined, they were found to be only charred skeletons—and very old skeletons at that. Some of those who heard these stories, and didn’t dismiss them outright, suggested that the old bones hadn’t belonged to any of his patients, then, but to anatomical or archeological specimens of some kind…perhaps used by Kronos for study or research.
But there was no disputing that the fire was a bad one—witnesses claimed they saw a huge ball of blue flame erupt into the sky in an explosion that rattled windows halfway across the town. And as fate would have it, at that moment a train was rushing past the station, and it caught on fire too. Thank God it was a freight train, not a passenger train, or the loss of life would have been much greater. Witnesses described the train roaring off to disappear into the night, all on fire and trailing those blue flames into the sky. A gas fire, maybe—I suppose that might explain the eerie blue color of the flames…
But how can you explain the fact that the freight train that caught fire and continued on into the night never arrived at its destination…and was never discovered? Not intact, not as a wreck; not a nut or bolt from that train ever turned up, let alone the couple of men aboard it—and its fate remains one of Eastborough’s most provocative mysteries.”
Ahh, thought Ware. Had the train’s alchemical flames caused it to plunge into another realm…and when it came time for it to emerge—maybe right here at South Station—would it bring the fires that would burn away the world? Or at least, burn away this world? If so, Ware hoped the doomsday train would be a long time coming. He visited this reality fairly often, and was fond of it.
He contemplated, now, whether to tell the stranger the rest about the house of Edwin Cronos…and in so doing, divulge personal information about himself. Himself, and where he came from. Well, they had become intimate now, hadn’t they? Even if they hadn’t revealed too much about themselves—such as their names—wasn’t it revealing a lot to share the things one took interest in, those things preserved in jars of alcohol in one’s own internal museum of curiosities?
Ware wondered about the other man’s identity. Perhaps the stranger would pull the door open at last to unveil a thin, dapper-looking man with sleeked dark hair, sitting there on the toilet like a magician in his conjuror’s box, who would grin up at Ware and intone, “But you see, my dear fellow…I am Edwin Cronos!”
Or, would Ware push the door open, his curiosity turned to impatience, and find that the stall was actually empty? That he had been talking with a ghost all this time?
Or, recalling his glimpse of the man’s red-white-and-blue striped boxer shorts that matched a pair he owned, might he look again into the stall and find himself seated there—an alternate version, a doppelganger of himself, who dwelt in this reality and whose existence he had never suspected until this day?
But maybe the man’s identity was nothing so intriguing or bizarre as any of those possibilities; just another seemingly undistinguished traveler, like himself.
Ware found that for some reason, he didn’t really want to learn the man’s name or particulars. Wasn’t it an anonymous reader that novelists wrote for? If only for a friend or family member, wasn’t the storytelling less rewarding?
Be that as it may, he made the decision to go on about Edwin Cronos, and thus about himself—a little about himself, anyway. And so, Ware began, “Where I come from, there is one more station on the Framingham/Worcester Line. It’s the very first station, before Worcester…or the last stop, depending on which direction you’re going. That station is in my hometown, which is called Gosston. Not many people here know about the Gosston stop—but then, not many Gosstonians know about this place, either. Some few authorities in your world, and some in mine, permit a limited degree of travel between the two, on an irregular schedule. Some people have occasionally slipped through from my reality to yours, and from yours to mine, accidentally or surreptitiously, but I am one of the few agents afforded the liberty of sanctioned travel. My employers have business dealings in your realm—in Boston, usually, though I have been to other cities. This particular trip, however, was simply for pleasure—a little bit of leisure time.
You may well wonder, no doubt wonder—and rightly so—how this travel from one reality to another, alternate reality can be possible. Well, it wasn’t always possible. We have Edwin Cronos, in fact, to thank for changing all that.
As I say, nearly a hundred years ago Cronos’ house vanished, leaving only a raw pit—even the basement floor had gone. The police were summoned, then workers for what we would now call the town highway department, who were to investigate possible causes, such as a gas explosion (though no one in the town had heard anything of the sort). The pit was steaming with mist in the chilly November air, and so the crew couldn’t see into it very well…were thus reluctant to venture into the hole. Perhaps they experienced an intuition, a sense of foreboding. One worker, however, was bolder than the others—a big burly sort who had been in prison before, and bore a variety of crude tattoos, including a blue teardrop on one cheek. He clambered down into the earthen foundation, slipping into the churning fog contained in that crater.
The others called down to him after long minutes had passed. As you may guess, there was no reply. The man had disappeared.
No one dared descend into the pit again. It was filled in, covered over. The government took possession of the property, and fenced it off. Some other men, more cautious, more learned, came to study that covered spot and the various anomalous phenomena said to occur there. But it wasn’t for another fifty years, or so, that the town built a train station there. A train station that was not open to the general citizens of Gosston.
The transitional zone between our two realms is a long tunnel, and I’ve heard whispered stories of what the workers experienced when they laid down the tracks that pass through it. Another disappearance, one man disemboweled, one man with his eyes clawed out (by a beast, or by himself to stop his eyes from seeing something terrible?). Two men committed to asylums. Finally they had to use prisoners to complete the work—no one else was willing.
Usually the journey back and forth between our respective realms is uneventful, but sometimes there are glitches, snafus. As fate would have it, one such problem occurred on my own very first journey on the train, from Gosston to Worcester and beyond to Boston.
I couldn’t help but shudder the first time I saw the tunnel, a very short distance from the train station. That yawning black maw. There were no lights in its leviathan’s throat, and when the train passed inside it was as though we had rocketed into outer space—but space as it would be after the very last star had gone cold.
Utter blackness, the train rushing…rattling…me swaying in my seat, both fists clenching the handle of my briefcase. My reflection was very sharply defined in my window, and with my eyes pooled black in my pallid face I was almost too afraid to gaze upon my own seemingly transfigured visage.
Then, apparently the train’s operator spotted something obstructing the tracks, and the train had to be brought to a halt. This made me rather anxious, I must confess. I leaned closer to my window, trying my best to make out at least some feature out there. I was alone in my car, and at that point had seen no one who might explain why we had stopped.
As I was staring out the window again, after having glanced about fruitlessly for a conductor, a flash of lightning briefly lit the sky. The sky? When had we emerged from the tunnel? I hadn’t noticed, for the landscape outside was as absolutely black as had been the tunnel’s interior—and yet we had embarked only a brief time ago, in the brightness of early morning! But I had been told it would also be morning on the other side!
The strobe flash of lightning had, for an instant, illuminated a house in the distance, large and antiquated. It was the only feature I had made out on the flat plain that seemed to lay outside; there had been no hills visible in the distance, no trees alongside the tracks or the house…no neighboring houses, either.
At last the conductor entered my car, causing me to whip around in my seat, startled. He is a red-haired man named Barney whom you yourself may have met on the Framingham/Worcester Line. Should you meet him again, you mustn’t broach that I revealed to you that Barney is a Gosstonian, like myself. This was my own first encounter with him, though we are long acquainted with each other by now.
‘Sorry, sir,’ he reported, ‘but there’s been a temporary delay…we should be back on our journey shortly.’
‘But what is it?’ I asked him.
‘Something on the tracks, sir…we’re just waiting for our way to be clear again.’
Perhaps it was only some debris needing to be removed by the train’s personnel. But later I wondered if it had been something else, something sentient, that needed to clear itself off the tracks before we could continue.
‘Are we on the far side now?’ I asked the conductor. ‘This is what it looks like—night?’
Barney replied, ‘We haven’t yet left the tunnel, sir.’
‘Haven’t left the tunnel? What?’ Confused, I turned to once more gaze through my reflection at the scene beyond. At first I discerned nothing in that inkiness, until another lightning flash illuminated that house again. The house appeared larger to me this time, but then my glimpses of it had been so brief.
‘I shouldn’t look outside if I were you, sir,’ Barney advised. ‘Perhaps you should rest your eyes for a bit until we’re underway again. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must see to the other passengers.’
I hadn’t seen any other passengers, but I supposed they had their own cars to themselves, as did I. I didn’t protest as Barney continued on his way, and left me alone once more.
But I didn’t heed his advice, and immediately turned to the window again. Within seconds, yet another fluttering blue flash, followed by a low rumble that seemed to roll slowly toward the train like an ocean wave, but dissipated before reaching it.
Outside, that rambling old house—but this time, I was surprised to realize that the reason it had seemed larger on my second glimpse was because we had drawn closer to it…and were now closer still. The train had been making creeping progress, then, hadn’t stopped completely—and yet I had felt no movement. Normally, the rattling vibrations of the train in motion were quite distinct.
No …no, I was certain. Even as the sky lit up once again, and I saw that the huge house with its many dark windows now almost filled my view, I intuitively grasped the truth. The train had stopped. It was the house that was moving…closer and closer to the train.
And it wasn’t just a house. It was the former sanitarium owned and run by the parents of Edwin Cronos. It had disappeared many, many years before my birth, so of course I had never seen it, but I knew …
I looked around wildly for the conductor again, though I knew he was not there beside me. When I looked back outside the window, the blackness was so pure that I felt surely, surely the house could not be looming so near!
And yet, the lightning revealed that it was—even nearer —so near I thought that if it should continue, the house would soon be resting flank-to-flank against the train. And then what? Would it push the train over? Trample and crush it, with me trapped inside?
The former asylum had shifted so close, in fact, that I could plainly see a figure framed in one of its windows, face and palms pressed up against the glass—peering out at me just as I peered out at it. I saw much in that flare of lightning—and the image remains imprinted on my mind forever.
The figure’s expression was blank, its eyes glazed and dead, but its mouth worked soundlessly. It was nude, its head shaved bald—which made it quite evident that a surgical scar completely encircled that head, as if the top of its skull had been sawed off and then reaffixed.
The figure was a man, once apparently of a large and sturdy frame but now with his flesh drooping on his bones. He was not old, however. As distressing as his appearance was, I would never have believed him to be over a hundred years old—had the lightning not picked out the crude tattoos on his body, including a blue teardrop tattooed on the man’s cheek.
Just then the train jolted into movement once again, pitching me in my seat, and I seized hold of the back of the seat ahead of me to steady myself. My fingers nearly tore into the upholstery.
The prolonged, flickering lightning flash had faded. Only a black void outside, as we continued on our way. When another lightning burst came a minute or two later, there was no longer a house visible, near or far. Not a single feature on that flat, enigmatic plain between planes…and it remained that way, until we emerged out the other side of the tunnel, into the bright morning air of your world.
I have traveled through the transitional zone numerous times since, and thankfully have never encountered the house of Edwin Cronos again. But on each and every occasion, I look out through my own reflection warily…wondering if this time, another interdimensional storm will brew, and reveal that which should remain in darkness.”
The man whom Ware had been speaking with through the door let out a sigh. But it didn’t sound like a sigh of impatience or derision; rather, more like a sigh of appreciation, even contentment. Through the door, the stranger said, “Where I come from, not many people would believe that story—but somehow I do. Every word.”
Ware smiled. “Where I come from we know how to thank someone for a compliment like that.”
Then, he was startled and turned as a man stepped into the restroom behind him—followed quickly by an influx of other men. His own story of the transitional tunnel had made him jumpy, but he realized that this group of men pouring in had just disembarked from the first train or trains of the new morning. Once more, the nexus that was South Station would be swarming with bodies, humming with their voices.
Out of the blue, the man in the toilet stall said, “Sorry, but I really have to go now.”
“Oh,” said Ware, thrown by the rather abrupt shift in the approach to their discourse. He looked at his wristwatch, a jumble of arrival and departure times—uncertainly recalled and thus incoherent—tumbling through his mind. “Is your train coming?”
“No…I mean, I really have to do my business on the toilet now. I feel a little funny about it with you standing just outside the door.”
“Oh!” Ware chuckled uncomfortably, embarrassed. “Of course. Excuse me…I’ll, ah...I’ll go take care of my own business.” He bent to retrieve his paper cup of urine (it had grown cool, as had his coffee hours earlier), then turned and dropped it into a trash container. He crowded in beside others at the sink counter, washed his hands, then turned toward the dryers and held his hands under one of them. Over the roar of the device’s hot wind, to his right he heard several toilets flush in close succession…but it was a commonplace sound, a peripheral awareness, and he didn’t think anything of it at first. When he’d finished drying his hands and the hot wind died down it finally hit him, and he glanced sharply toward the row of toilet stalls. He caught a glimpse of a heavyset black man entering into the stall outside of which he had been standing for so many hours.
Ware looked toward the entrance to the restroom, the flow of traffic pouring in and out. Was one of those men now leaving the man with whom he had conversed all through the previous day and night? Maybe that one, seen from the back…he was balding, graying a little—might be fifty-two, the age the man behind the door had given him. But that man, too, could be that age. Or that one. How could he say? They had never seen each other’s face.
None of the men exiting the restroom against the current of those entering the restroom glanced back at him. If the man behind the door had looked in his direction as he vacated the toilet stall, how would he know that Ware was standing at the hand dryers instead of at a urinal? How could he tell whether or not Ware had already passed outside? If he had seen Ware as he left the stall, he never would have known that this was the stranger—the friend—with whom he had connected for those long hours. For that brief and transient time.
Smiling to himself, Ware exited the restroom and found that Boston’s South Station was not filled with snow halfway to its ceiling. Was not a burnt ruin in the wake of apocalyptic flames. The great hall was as it had been yesterday when he had entered the restroom, as if all that had transpired had taken place within mere minutes. Or as if the entire episode had been a dream.
Ware had never learned where his friend was going—whether venturing into Boston, or on his way out of the city. Whatever his destination, Ware wished him Godspeed.
He himself now had to wait until the last outbound train headed to Worcester’s Union Station—leaving South Station at 10:20 PM, arriving in Worcester at 11:56 PM. There was a later train out of South Station, leaving at 11:25, but it didn’t go beyond Framingham. It wouldn’t take him on past Worcester’s Union Station, on past the train schedule he carried in his pocket, to his home of Gosston.
Presumably he would be the only passenger riding from Worcester to Gosston tonight, but one never knew. Perhaps he would meet the madwoman, returning to the only place where she might now feel she belonged. Or perhaps he’d even meet his friend…his curiosity peaked by Ware’s stories, and wanting to explore the city for himself. That was a nice thought, wasn’t it?
In the meantime, Ware had quite a bit of time to kill, and he was here merely as a tourist today so he thought he would visit the New England Aquarium, the Museum of Fine Arts or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Oh yes, and the wonderful Museum of Science—it had been a while since last he had gone there. Of course, these places were not really the same kind of experience as encountering the elusive home of Edwin Cronos, visiting the Amos House of Oddities & Curiosities, or touring a ghost train attraction created by two neighborhood boys…but they would have to do.
Ware crossed the broad glossy floor of the station, passed the entrance to the subway, approached the glass doors that opened onto Atlantic Avenue. Through those doors, he could see that the wild snow had stopped falling sometime during the previous day or night, and it had been cleared from sidewalk and street. Through the doors, he saw the bustle of cars, buses, pedestrians.
Smiling to himself once more, Ware reached out and pushed one of those doors open—and passed through.
About The Author
Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such novels as Deadstock , Blue War , The Fall Of Hades , Letters From Hades and A Nightmare On Elm Street: The Dream Dealers , and collections such as Punktown , Voices From Hades , Aaaiiieee!!! and Thirteen Specimens . He has written about Gosston before, in his collection Nocturnal Emissions , and about the fictitious town of Eastborough, Massachusetts in numerous stories. He lives somewhere to the west of Eastborough. Visit his blog at: http://punktalk.punktowner.com .