“The belief in immortality rests not very much on the hope of going on. Few of us want to do that, but we would like very much to begin again.” – Heywood Broun, Pieces of Hate
The elderly woman next door was the one who informed us they were still in use. She brushed past introductions, cut right to the chase.
“Have you girls found the tracks?”
We put our last bags down for a rest on the front lawn. Sweat pored from me in late-July heat. The woman, in bright head wrap, peered at us from her lawn. She held a clump of forgotten weeds. Jenny answered her in question.
“Train tracks?”
The woman laughed. “Yes, and nearby! In your basement!”
We assumed the tracks were nonetheless separate from our new place, that this woman was welcoming us with exaggerated tale.
“A man owns and operates ‘em,” she continued. We thought she was fooling.
Once inside our new place, we helped ourselves to the building’s water.
“I guess we’ll have to check out these tracks, eh?” I asked Jenny.
Jenny finished gulping, arose to my suggestion.
“Let’s go!”
We rushed to the basement, Jenny going first. Straining in darkness, the floor appeared to drop. She walked tentative, peering down. I followed suit. Sure as shit. Train tracks. No overgrowth.
“Eeeeeesh…” I shuddered.
We got used to the idea of having tracks in our basement. A year of living together off paychecks from retail work caused us to become like sisters. We had little money to spend on reckless nights outside the little apartment. Instead, we entertained ourselves with thoughts about the tracks. Anytime we needed a real-life “Twilight Zone” episode in our nine-to-five lives, they filled the void.
Jenny, having been reared by traveling parents, said on one occasion, “I bet a train will blow its horn down there someday. We’ll climb onboard, and it will take us to an exciting place.”
“In the words of the great George Moor,” I responded, “’A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.’”
What Jenny said was creeping around my nerves. If a train ever honked, I sure as hell wasn’t going aboard.
Shortly after that, Jenny started waking early in the morning. After too many beers one night, I heard her go into the kitchen then pull up a chair. She sat for an hour or so. The night light which she’d turned on had kept me from continued sleep.
The following morning she padded into the kitchen while I ate. A frown lined her lips.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Oh I’m fine,” said Jenny, but a dismal attitude had replaced a sunny one.
This new attitude was actually Jenny’s rightful owner. Regardless of her normally chirpy tones of candidness, I knew Jenny was frustrated – and had been perhaps for a very long time. Frustrated over living in the same town she grew up in, over her retail job that catered to the wealthy. I suspected Jenny was resigning twenty-nine years of betterment dreaming to our apartment. Many mornings alcohol revolted against her.
All said, Jenny must surely have possessed a wretched sense of misplaced adventure. Internal tracks within my friend awaited something that could never be, not on her salary. In short, Jenny was waiting for opportunity, and had been all her life. My friend was starting to live inside herself. People do this after awhile.
Wise beyond her years, she knew life traditionally trapped.
But once in awhile (to uplift her own spirits), she would remind me, “Not everything settles down.”
In our apartment, I began to share her attitude, mainly to offer friendly misery.
Our “Twilight Zone” stories about the tracks continued.
“Do you think unhappy tenants have ever gone down there and been picked up?” she asked.
“I suppose it’s possible,” I conceded.
What she viewed as our stagnant life was being mimicked. The basement walls were as confining. Jenny confessed once how she came home early one day to stand down there alone, curious something might happen. She’d looked into the pit of blackness that was the tracks and saw something.
One night Jenny and I sat in our tiny kitchen. I had coffee going. She gulped Coors Light. I was confessing a pre-reality journalism dream, was about to muddle over the slight possibility of volunteering for a local paper.
“I wish I knew what I wanted,” she interrupted. “To live somewhere a little more exotic, I think.”
She raised her Coors Light, cheering to my dreams.
“Cheers,” I’d said.
Two nights before she vanished, Jenny’s eyes stared at the door that led into the basement. She went down. What she did when down there, I can only imagine (she had no laundry).
I didn’t appreciate the eeriness.
My own fascination bumped fear anytime I had to go down there to throw in some clothes. Each time, I’d keep my eyes on the tracks, for fear of turning my back on something vile: something that waited to suck people up during moments of weakness. Like clowns coming towards people’s beds in the dead of night. Inappropriate.
The old neighbor had claimed the tracks, ‘though defunct for modern purposes, were owned by a man who couldn’t let them go. Jenny and I had left this fact out of all our “Twilight” stories (truth be scarier than fiction).
That day, our neighbor had recalled something:
“I used to be on town counsel. The man let trains of a private nature ride his tracks, an’ every now and then, a loud train went by ‘neath my very windows! My walls, all dishware, fell in. So I complained. Unfortunately, man has rights to his own tracks. But since then: quiet. Last train actually came by five years ago. Couple of girls like yourselves livin’ in the apartment. Didn’t see much of ‘em after that lousy train disturbed ‘em, ‘course. And guess what was the man’s justification? ‘I’ve been here for nearly a century, doing this. There’s never a shortage of the adventure-deprived! Some need trains.’ I say business has been buildin’ up these parts. Economy’s startin’ to boom. The past five years have been silent because there’s been very FEW adventure-deprived out there.”
She winked, made light by saying, “Kind of like your own private subway, eh!”
Our neighbor’s words now worried me. Was this man crazy? Suppose he came down those tracks looking to see who in this apartment was “adventure-deprived?” And what happened to the “couple of girls” that rented our apartment before us, the ones she “didn’t see much of, after the lousy train disturbed ‘em?”
I dared to ponder the man’s meaning of giving rides to “the adventure-deprived.” Lying down on our couch, I entertained thoughts of spirits, living and dead, meeting in our basement, even on the tracks themselves, waiting.
Lights shone bright in my face. I was on the tracks. How? Something gigantic screamed. Our basement floor was ahead and to the right. I dove for it, blinking from a sprawled position. The lights became brighter. A horn blew. Then, there was no train. And I was sprawled on the couch.
Jenny’s recent stress had finally taken its toll - on me. I sat up. I thought I’d like to move out as soon as possible.
Then a night came when we thought we heard the sound of a distant stop.
“Could have been the dying washing machine,” I said. Why’d I chosen that word?
I stared at Jenny.
“The pipes it’s connected to sputter,” she agreed, but added, “Nope, it’s the train coming to pick us up, and take us anywhere.” She cackled. I didn’t think it was funny.
But Jenny did. And perhaps this had something to do with her vanishing the night her family was due. Jenny wasn’t in the apartment to start the meal with me. By the time her folks arrived, she still wasn’t. We live in a rough neighborhood, and being late wasn’t like her. Eventually, we called the police.
Her parents and the police turned to me.
“Did she say she’d be working late?”
“She just said, ‘See you tonight for dinner’ is all,” I said.
“How’d she say it? Was she upset?” her mom asked.
“She said it matter-of-factly – she was running late for work. That was the main thing on her mind.”
But now, thinking back, Jenny had sort of said it without emotion. It still would have done no good back then to tell her parents Jenny hadn’t jumped with glee over their visit.
At the time, I knew Jenny would be present for her parents no matter what, unless circumstances were extraordinary. A lump entered my throat.
Her mom had become truly shaken.
The policeman spoke in comfort: “M’am, the information we have here is your daughter, as of this morning, intended to be here in the apartment with you. Let’s not get hysterical.”
I had the train tracks in my mind throughout, but was blinded by hope that Jenny might walk in any moment. When it became late, the lump in my throat expanded to my chest. I directed the cops to the basement.
Lights from the officer’s high-powered flashlight were seen walking down the tracks. He searched for an hour but couldn’t get far, knowing there was a chance, ‘though slight, the strange owner who owned them could send a train their way any moment.
Everyone eventually left. I decided to search on my own. I began to walk down the haunted tracks. It was odd walking away from the safety of one’s home yet still remaining within it. I had to feel each track with my feet in the blackness. Getting far was impossible.
“Jenny?” I called.
The night Jenny came down to peer at the tracks, I had wished to the bottom of my core they didn’t exist. If ever there was a place for curses, this was it. I was certain a hand in the darkness waited to suck me in. Or a troubled spirit waited for someone to bump into its dark truth. I had a hard time picturing Jenny not turning back, if she had indeed taken a hike down here. I walked for about a half-hour.
Something punctuated dead silence. Panicked, I jumped each track back toward our basement. The sound became unmistakable. Trying to step quicker onto each track, my right foot fell between two tracks, sticking. A bright light shined behind me.
A train was behind me, my basement to the right. I dove.
Sprawled, I turned to meet the attacker. The train slowed. An image of Jenny’s face looked out at me from a window.
She walked to an open door near me. She stood, looking down.
“Your parents and I were worried,” I panted.
She continued looking down.
“You need to call them,” I urged.
“I can’t,” my friend said. “The man who owns the tracks is not a man. He’s a spirit. In life, he engineered them. When he died, he didn’t want to leave them. Instead of passing on, he remained to give suicidal souls rides into the afterlife. He had the choice of moving on himself or helping others do so. These people’s souls would otherwise be dead soon anyhow, had this train not arrived at the proper moment. I was one of those people. When I came down to the basement tonight, the train awaited me.”
Desperation encircled my throat.
In answer to an unspoken question, Jenny said, “I’m dead for real now. The train ensures that. Don’t blame yourself. You’ve been like a sister.”
The train began whirring. I reached out to touch her hand. Our hands met and held. Then, my best friend vanished in a thick cloud of dust, along with any remnants of the train. To this day, I can see her face where it was when the train made its final parting: in the very first window.
I still live in the apartment. Every so often while sipping my coffee, I think I can hear the train rumbling downstairs.
Sometimes I wonder how the man knew Jenny wanted to leave this life. Yet in the back of my mind, I know sure as night follows day: when a soul’s message of despair is strong enough, it carries far. And when it’s easily conducted, there’s no stopping the results. The man’s tracks had picked up Jenny’s messages and took them to their rightful owner.
This is a good write. I do write within the suspense genre as well but it drives more into horror/crime. They seem to interweave each other in some way. I found your page through the horror section; hope you would not be disappointed by what you see of my work.
While trying to make it big on Broadway, dancer Abby Fouchet finds herself falling in love, falling in rehearsal (!), and trying to outwit a clever killer out to destroy the man she loves.
This cozy murder mystery takes place aboard luxury liner, Queen Elizabeth II, as wealthy couple celebrate their silver wedding anniversary with family and friends.
