Dreams The Ragman (5 page)

I hadn’t spoken to him since, but those words still haunted me. Something in the way he said them chilled me to the bone, then and now, and although I wasn’t sure if they had actual meaning or if it was just another of his drugged-out tirades, my marriage was imploding; I couldn’t focus on Caleb’s problems. So I dismissed the entire thing as more of his usual dramatics and crawled back into my own despair.

But who was I to dismiss him or his problems, his fears, his pain and terror?

My heart was broken. He was dying.

The rain kept on, whispering its secrets through blurred glass, tapping them out in code as if on the other side of that black window the Ragman was drumming his bloody fingers against the pane.

Maybe he really was out there somewhere.

I headed back down to the bar. A few shots weren’t going to get it done.

Not tonight.

* * * *

Listen to that rain
.
Can you hear it?

I hear it, Grandpa.

Then tell me what you hear. Listen real good and you’ll hear it whispering to you.

The rain doesn’t whisper to people, Grandpa.

You’re just a little boy, you don’t know nothing yet. But one day you will.

What does the rain say?

It tells you things you need to know. You can’t just see and hear the rain. You got to
feel
it. There’s more there. Things behind the rain…inside it...

Like monsters? Mommy and Grandma said there’s no such thing as monsters.

And what do you think?

I don’t believe in monsters, either.

Sometimes I think that’s all I believe in.

I don’t understand, Grandpa.

I know, son. I don’t either. I never have.

I vaguely remembered wearily climbing the stairs back to my room, and had even blurrier memories of sitting down in the bar drinking with Maggie until the wee hours of the morning. I know at one point she’d told me to go to bed and that she’d be crashing in her apartment out back, but I couldn’t remember much of what we’d talked about. Ironically, older memories were much clearer that night, fresher somehow, flooding my mind and senses the same way my grandfather’s stories once had.

After kicking my shoes off and collapsing on the bed, I closed my eyes a moment but promised myself because it was too dangerous to be vulnerable in a place like this, I wouldn’t sleep. But then, I’d also promised myself I wouldn’t drink to excess, so what was one more broken promise on a night of lies where creeping devils from the darkest nightmares of my childhood had returned? Perhaps they’d never really left, but like the secrets in the rain my grandfather spoke of, had been there all along.

Maybe I’d only begun to hear them again because I was listening closely enough.

Whispers in my mind assured me all I needed was a little rest.

I never meant to sleep, never meant to dream.

But when that rainy night reached out and touched me, I did both.

SEVEN

When I was seven I had a friend named Adam who loved trains. His father had transformed his entire cellar into another world, a magical place where numerous trains slithered along foot after foot of plastic track. An entire town, various stations, people and cars, grass and hills and parks and tunnels all resided there, the tracks winding through all of it, from one corner of the basement to the next. While I’d never been a train fanatic myself, I quickly became one. In my brief seven years, his trains were without question the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I longed to have something similar, so when Christmas rolled around I asked for a train set. Santa Claus got me one, but all the hard work of his elves went to waste because it never made it out of the box. My grandfather had promised to set it up for me but never did, and it all slipped away, forgotten in time. And then Adam and his family moved out of state. As I stood in our yard the morning they left, waving goodbye to my best friend, I was certain I’d never again see anything as magnificent as Adam’s world of trains. In time, my interest diminished, but trains continued to hold a certain appeal to me—the power, size, the sound and motion—and I always made it a point to take notice of the real trains that moved through town on a regular basis. They were mostly trash trains, of course, but I imagined they were something far more romantic and exciting, and when you’re a child, imagining makes it so. Imagining is enough.

Years later, as a jaded teenager, I found myself in a field one afternoon with Caleb, waiting on a train. Like train robbers, we crouched in the untamed, waist-high grass, listening and watching for a train we knew would eventually cross our path. But the train wasn’t our main focus. We were more concerned with who else might be waiting on that train.

In my drunken slumber, I dreamed of the trains that night. Out cold in my seedy little room above an empty barroom, I rode the trains with Caleb the same way we had all those years before. Running, the wind blowing, the train rumbling down on us like an angry beast, we latched on and pulled ourselves up, climbing the footholds along the side of the boxcars to the top, adrenaline and fear surging through us, our nervous though triumphant laughter muffled by the deafening whistle blasts as the train barreled closer to downtown.

I remembered hanging on for dear life and looking over at Caleb. He looked back with a wide smile and big eyes, more alive and free than I’d ever seen him before or since. We were like superheroes, gods capable of anything, and to us, hopping trains proved it. My grandfather had only been dead a few months, and while I knew he’d have never approved of our behavior, it was the first time since his death I’d felt happy, up there on top of that train, risking my life and loving every minute of it.

Within a few weeks, Caleb and I had become quite proficient at train hopping, and did so nearly every day. Sometimes we’d ride the rails all the way up to the yards in Boston, and then hang around until we found one headed back toward Cape Cod. But normally we’d ride for a short while, maybe until we were a few towns away, then jump off first chance we got.

And all the while, we kept a lookout for The Ragman, the hobo killer.

We never did see him.

“I don’t even like trains,” Caleb told me one night while we lay in that same field waiting on a train and gazing up at the starry skies above. “At least not this kind, I mean, maybe something romantic and classy like in old black-and-white movies where people are crossing Europe or something and there’s spies and all sorts of dashing characters all over the place. But these old trash trains are loud, brutish and inelegant, if you ask me. Just the same, when we’re there, up top, it’s so exhilarating! And just the possibility that The Ragman could be there too, hidden nearby…”

“Do you think he knows who we are?”

“I don’t know. But if he’s still around and still riding these rails, it’s only a matter of time before he does.”

“And then what?”

Caleb never did answer me that night.

The dreams shifted from trains and happier times, when this all seemed like fantasy, an escape from the harsh realities of our everyday lives, to something more sinister and disturbing.

My father…standing in a dark empty room, largely concealed in shadows and what appears to be fog of some kind…his head bowed. He glances up at me but says nothing. His face is so full of sorrow he looks as if he may cry. “I never wanted this for you, son. It should’ve been me.”

I don’t remember his voice. I don’t remember him. “Grandpa said—”

“Stay away from him.”

“He’s dead.”

“All the more reason.”

“Grandpa would never hurt me.”

“No, he wouldn’t. But there were others, son…” He clenches shut his eyes. Somewhere behind him, in the shadows, water drips in a slow but steady stream. “Go home and forget all this as best you can. Go home, Derrick. Run.”

“But Caleb, he—”

“Caleb’s doomed.”

“He’s my friend.”

“Yes, he is. More than you’ll ever know. He saved you.”

“From what?”

“Destiny.” My father opens his eyes, and at first I think he’s crying. Only it isn’t tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. It’s blood. “The Ragman can’t be stopped.”

“He’s just a nightmare.”

“He’s forged by nightmares. There’s more than one kingdom, son.” He slowly raises his arms, holds them up and out to either side, like a victim of crucifixion. When he speaks again, blood pours from his mouth as well, slurring his speech, spattering the cold cement floor and drowning out the sounds of distant running water. “And like all the others, his kingdom comes…his will be done.”

I don’t want to see my father like this, but I can’t look away.

“Run,” he says again, his mouth coated in crimson. “Run.”

“I can’t abandon Caleb. I won’t.”

He looks to the floor, to the mess, disillusioned and defeated. The fog slowly wraps around him like a cloak. Behind him, I see the silhouette of a man kneeling next to what was once a human body, his hand clutching a bloody cleaver, swinging down into flesh and hitting bone with a sickening hacking sound. “Then you’ll die screaming.”

* * * *

From darkness, I clawed my way up, out, and into dawn’s dim light. As I drifted toward consciousness, the night-ghosts let me go, but the echoes of my father and his nightmares continued to claw at me.

I woke up feeling like someone was trying to kick their way out of my skull. What began as a dull ache in the back of my head became a sharp stabbing pain by the time it reached my eyes. My stomach was sour, my mouth dry as bone, and my muscles throbbed as if I’d spent the few hours I’d slept breaking rocks with a sledgehammer. I staggered from bed to the bathroom at the end of the hall, splashed some cold water on my face, brushed my teeth and did my business. By the time I’d returned to the room, the daylight had grown stronger, though it was still struggling to break through the cover of clouds and what had become a drizzling rain. Rather than focus on what might be coming, I changed my clothes, packed my bag and headed downstairs. It was still an hour or so from the agreed upon time I was supposed to retrieve Caleb, but I needed to get outside, back to my car and into town before my fears became too powerful.

The bar was quiet, dark. Maggie was undoubtedly still passed out, and though I regretted leaving without saying goodbye, there was a good chance I’d be back, because as much as Barney Fife wanted us gone, we couldn’t simply leave town. Not right away anyway. There were dragons to slay.

The strip was eerie in early morning, deserted, deathly silent and wrapped in a creeping fog reminiscent of my dreams. I couldn’t see the ocean any more than I could the demons slowly circling me, but I could smell it, alive and in motion. A pack of ravenous wolves surrounding their quarry but not yet ready to strike, to take it down, to bleed it and tear it limb-from-limb, the forces of darkness were so close I could feel them. Powerful beyond anything I could ever hope to understand, much less conquer, they left me drowning in primal, innate fear and I suddenly felt like I was standing frozen on those old tracks back home, unable to move and watching helplessly as a runaway train headed straight for me.

Nothing was open, so I walked to the parking lot, got my car, and headed for town. Within a few short miles the woods gradually transformed into areas more populated, and I eventually reached a picturesque little downtown area that looked like something conjured in the mind of a greeting card artist. The town proper may have only been a couple miles from the beach, but it was a world away. It was difficult to imagine violence and darkness existing in such a quaint little burg, or that someone like Ben Gleck could flourish here. But then maybe that was the point. Evil loved to conceal itself behind façades of so-called ‘traditional’ values, false morality and alleged righteousness. The cloak of piety has always been evil’s favorite place to hide.

I came across a little pastry shop, so I ducked in and ordered a coffee from a young woman behind the counter. But for us, the place was empty. When I asked for directions to the police station she became a bit guarded but gave them to me anyway. I was only a block away. I thanked her and headed back out into the gentle rain.

I don’t know what I’d expected, but what turned out to be the Sheppard Beach police station wasn’t it. A fairly modern building that at first glance just as easily could’ve been a restaurant or a bank, it sat on a large corner lot at the very edge of the downtown district. Bookended by forest, with its manicured lawn, paved circular drive and professionally landscaped shrubs, it was literally the last stop in town before rural hamlet became state highway.

Two cruisers and a police van occupied the spaces out front, so I pulled into a modest adjacent lot marked
VISITORS
and parked. Beyond a heavy duty chain-link fence which ran across the rear of the property, a steady procession of cars droned along the nearby thoroughfare, in odd contrast to what was otherwise a bucolic setting. It all felt staged somehow, as if the whole presentation was just for me, a snare designed to lure me closer. I sat in the car a moment and watched the station through the rain. Windshield wipers squealed on glass like the tortured cries of unseen animals, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many real screams had emanated from this place in the past few days. Deep within those walls, far from the protect-and-serve bullshit exterior, how many times had Caleb cried for mercy? I remembered Gleck’s smirk when he described ‘questioning’ Caleb, and although I knew I’d be relatively safe once inside (I wasn’t a homeless junkie few would miss and even fewer would care about), being behind closed doors on his turf still made me nervous.

Inside the station I was met with a burst of forced hot air and the smell of disinfectant often found in institutions and places such as this. Everything was painted either white or royal blue, bulletproof glass and fluorescent lights everywhere, the floors high-gloss tiles and the furniture in the waiting area straight out of a dentist’s office. A rotund female officer with a brush cut sat in a box-like reception area encased in glass. The security monitor on her desk had alerted her to my arrival before I’d made my way through the doors, and she’d already slid the glass partition open so I could hear her.

“Can I help you?” she asked blandly.

I looked around, certain I couldn’t get out of this place fast enough. Gleck was nowhere to be seen, but the young cop who had accompanied him to my room was standing over by a door with an air of celebratory ignorance and clueless superiority that would’ve done his boss proud. “I’m here for Caleb LeClerc.”

She arched a painted-on eyebrow. “And you are?”

“Tired of this bullshit. Gleck said the deal was for this morning and here I am, so where’s Caleb?”

“Just calm it down a few thousand pegs, princess.” She struggled off her stool, various keys and things jangling as she made her way out and around to where I was with an unintentionally hilarious swagger. She gave a quick sideways glance at the young cop. “Sonny, ever heard of Caleb LeClerc?”

“Nope, sure haven’t.”

She pointed at me. “And do you know this person?”

“Never seen him before in my life.”

“Apparently he’s under the impression Chief Gleck made some sort of arrangement with him regarding this Caleb LeClerc individual.”

“Chief Gleck’s never met him either, so I got no idea what he’s talking about.”

“Well if you two have never met this gentlemen then how could there be any kind of arrangement between you?”

“You told me you were holding him.” I took a step toward Sonny.

“Currently, I don’t believe we’re holding anyone. Are we, Pearl?”

“Nope,” she said.

Sonny opened the door and nonchalantly stepped aside. “But you’re free to check the cells if you want, mister.” He smiled. “Well go on, tough guy.”

I brushed by him none-too-gently then made my way through the door and along a brief section of hallway which led to a set of stairs. I hesitated and looked down into the waiting darkness, then slowly began my descent.