Phantom Nights (30 page)

The depot sported a new paint job too, green apple shade with plentiful gray trim, all of it glistening as if the paint hadn't completely dried.

Yet there wasn't a light anywhere except for the red filters on the lantern that the stationmaster was swinging casually back and forth as he watched Alex approach with his bike. He was a lanky man with a stuck-out Adam's apple and a grin that looked to be all false teeth. He wore his short-billed cap well back on the domed crown of his head.

"Hello!" the stationmaster said. "Here to see Mally?"

Alex left his bike across the track because he knew from previous visits that he wouldn't be able to push it through, up two steps from track level. He could easily pass from moonlight and creature-sounds and the heady swelter of a country summer night to the strange firmament, essentially a void, across the track, but his bike couldn't go with him.

Alex chose not to go either, not just yet. He had never seen the stationmaster before. His being there wasn't necessarily a good thing.

"It's all right, come on up," the stationmaster urged him, glancing over his shoulder at the restored depot. "How do you like what we've done to the old place? A lot more cheerful, hey? Not such a dump anymore."

Alex made a job of clearing his dry throat. But as long as he remained where he was, on his side of the track, he knew he couldn't speak. On
their
side—he nodded guardedly as the stationmaster looked around at him again with that unvarying cheeky grin. The red light continued to scythe through inky darkness.

"Mally will be along. Meantime aren't you just a little curious? Don't you want to have a peek inside? Everything's how it was, the way you remember. I'll just throw a few lights on to help you find your way."

Alex shook his head. The stationmaster eyed him indulgently.

"Nothing to be afraid of, Alex. Only a few new friends waiting. Young people like yourself, eager to get to know you." He stepped to the platform's edge and swung the lantern out over the track like a lure. The light flushed Alex's face. "What do you say, bud? Join us."

Alex didn't like the light; it came at him like a headache ball. At its glowing periphery with each long swing he saw figures ill-defined, long faces sorrowful but also threatening. He looked away and closed his eyes, shutting out of his mind everything but Mally's benign image.

When he looked up again, the depot was dilapidated and as shack-ugly as ever. The stationmaster was gone. Mally stood in his place, wearing the peasant blouse and denim skirt he had picked out for her at Dunkel's Department Store that afternoon. She didn't have a lantern with her. Self-illumined as always by the faint light covering her revealed skin surfaces, a wet, birthing glow.

"Alex, I told you," she said glumly. "You need to stay away from here. They're beginning to come through to you."

He was so happy to see her that he jumped boldly across both rails without looking first. Never a good idea. There were trains all the time in this starless place of Mally's that didn't announce their presence until they were almost on you. Moving fast like the snap of a whip but without much sound; that is if they didn't intend stopping at Cole's Crossing to pick up. No one got off there, of course.

"But I wanted to see you," Alex said, bounding up the steps to platform level. "And they're always here anyway, inside. Looking out. Less than shadows. Not scary except for the eyes sometimes. They're eyes with nothing to tell you." Still happy, moving around her as she followed him with her own eyes, Alex wallowing in the luxury of language, slinging words about until he got her to smile at last.

"You have a lot to learn. What happened to your hand?"

"They burned your house down last night while I was there looking for the key."

She seemed perplexed by the knowledge that she had had a house once. "Who did?"

"Leland Howard it must have been, and the sidewinder who drives for him. They threw Molotov cocktails through the windows. Oh, and I saw
him
in town today."

"Leland Howard?"

"No, the other one who came to the house with Howard the night you were—don't you remember
any
thing anymore, for Christ's sake?"

Mally shrugged. "It's all so . . . far away now, Alex. I'm sorry."

"Well, they nearly killed me and your father. I didn't know he was in the house too until—Mally, I didn't have time to find the key. I'll never find it now, so we have to come up with another way to . . . to skin that polecat," he finished, reaching into his memory stash again for the rich lingo from a thousand western-story pulp pages.

"What key?"

"Mally, stop doing that, you know what I'm talking about!"

"I told you, it's . . . too far away."

"But you've only been—your funeral was today! Down there," Alex said with an angry sideways chop of his arm toward the Little Grove churchyard.

"Oh, it was? Were you there, Alex?"

"No. I
hate
funerals. Anyway, I knew I'd see you tonight; I can see you anytime I want to, so you're not really dead, Mally! You never will be as far as I'm concerned."

"Shouldn't I have something to say about that?"

"What do you mean?"

"Alex, your power over me is growing, but it's not right, don't you see? This is not an evil place, but you can make it evil just with your thoughts. You're . . . holding me back for your own selfish reasons."

"I'm selfish? I'm trying to help you get even with the sumbitch who did this to you!"

"I don't mean to hurt your feelings. But I'm okay now, really. Takes a little time to get used to being dead. I don't hate Leland anymore. Pity him, maybe, but on this Side it's all bygones. I barely remember when I'm with you what was done to me, and when you're not here, well, ghosts don't dream, baby. Will you listen to me now? I said you are holding me back from where I need to go next, and when you do that you harm yourself. What's it costing you to pop Across night after night to chat with me? More than you can imagine, and I'm afraid for you."

He didn't understand her or want to make the effort. He felt wonderful being there. He turned his back on Mally and discovered a train had slipped in while they were talking. Streamlined splendor, wreathed in huffing white vapors, silver and blue on the outside, bewitchingly lighted within the parlor cars. Happiness on the faces of the few who were boarding at Cole's Crossing. Young or old, they all had made their grades.

The portly conductor looked around inquiringly at Alex, nodded toward the open doorway of a coach.

"Catching this one, son?"

For an instant, Alex imagined stepping up into the vestibule, entering the fabulous coach. And that would be all right; why not join them? What was so great about the life he'd be leaving behind? Bad fate and worse prospects. Then he felt Mally's dismay and disapproval; the silver train dissolved before his eyes like mist from chilled glass and he was looking down at the railroad grade and men walking with flashlights, his bike where he had left it, his scattered body in beams of light and gobbets of blood on gray ballast. He shied away from the scene and faced Mally, staggered, almost contrite.

"
Now
do you get my meaning, Alex Gambier? You almost
went
. Set foot on one of these trains, you are right away a dead boy on the other Side. This is not your time nor place here. Step wrong where you're not welcome yet, it will cost you extra lifetimes of hard work to catch up to yourself. I'm telling you: Go home now. Get out of here while you still can."

The negative pull she was exerting tightened the skin around his skull; he felt her desire to fade away. But tonight he wasn't letting Mally go so easily. As she had said he needed to do, he focused his mind and heart on her and was pleased by a surge of energy in his breast, a contained storm. She seethed before his eyes, then settled back into her shape and the ensemble from Dunkel's Womens' Wear Department with a stunned expression.

"Didn't have to yank so
hard
," Mally complained. She looked down at her feet. "Painted my toenails blue while you were at it," she said, marveling.

Alex smiled, just a little smug. "I don't want to go home yet. I make big medicine, Mally Shaw."

"What else can I
say
to you? It's not for my sake, Alex, that you're wanting revenge."

"Why is it so wrong for me to care? Nobody else gives a damn. Least of all—"

"Uh-huh. Almost spilled out there, didn't it? Because evening up the score with Leland Howard is really all about you and your brother Bobby. You bein' so angry because you think he's let you down again."

"What if it is?"

Mally walked away from him, crossed her arms, uncrossed them, held her head for a few moments, trying to control agitation or possibly squeeze out some inspiration.

"All right. Maybe we can strike a bargain, Alex."

"Yeah? About what?"

She faced him. "Let's say if I can help settle all those scores that are so important to you, make things better between you and your brother, will you promise to get back to the life you belong in, grow up to be the man I know you can be, and let me go once and for all? Because you're not needing me half as much as you've convinced yourself you do, Alex."

He was a long time replying.

"Fix Leland Howard?"

Mally nodded.

"You said your medicine wasn't that big."

"Let's just put our heads together and think about how. If we have ourselves a bargain, that is." Looking straight at him, challenging his doubts.

"Only if things work out like you're saying," he said reluctantly, hungry that whatever scheme they settled upon for Leland Howard's downfall would work out, agonized at the prospect of never seeing her again.

She took another walk. Deep in thought, nodding to herself. "Alex?"

"What?"

"Next time I see you, maybe it ought to be an occasion. I'd like a red dress. Fiery. Silk. Clinging."

"Okay."

"Pearls. Earrings too."

He smiled; she was enjoying herself. "Sure. Why?"

"Well, it's dim in my mind, understand, but I don't believe I was looking my best the last time I entertained Mr. Howard."

"The last—? I don't—
entertain
? What are you talking about?"

"Gettin' even, sugar. That's what we're both talking about, isn't it?"

A
fter following the boy around Evening Shade for the better part of two days and observing his antics on the platform of the abandoned depot at Cole's Crossing, Jim Giles was convinced he had a mental deficiency. Walking up and down, crouching, springing up, waving his arms, crying; probably talking to himself in other people's voices although not a word or a shout reached Giles's ears. His half-brother Eugene was thataway before he lowered his common-law's eyebrows a good two inches with an iron fry pan and had to be committed. They said Eugene had multiple personalities. However many that was, Giles would have bet the kid at the Crossing probably wasn't far behind Eugene's entourage of spooky-doo's and insolent hangers-on.

So he came down here nights to rant and howl at the moon, which was nearly full, and get it or
them
out of his system if he could. Giles waited on the boy to cool out and wondered how to kill him tonight. Broke neck was a sure thing but obvious murder would mean a more intensive investigation. The past two nights other vehicles had driven by Little Grove, carrying niggers, kids, livestock; somebody curious might recall the old pickup parked directly across from the church two nights in a row. But nobody had seen Giles. He had broken the bulb in the gooseneck fixture above the doorway to wait in full dark, except for the tiny glow of the occasional cigarette he liked to smoke when he was tired of chew.

He already had left one body in the immediate vicinity, so it wasn't going to happen here. Giles would look from time to time at the double-barred grill protector on his '48 Chevy. A notion forming. The blue-and-white bicycle lying down at trackside. Giles didn't wear a watch, but he knew it was late. The boy had come down from the platform at last and was standing between the rails. There was a green signal up, his face and mussed hair tinted putrid greenish like something from a foul-water grave. He hadn't bothered to unbutton his shorts, just hiked up one side to reveal most of an untanned flank, holding his cock out on that side, long arc of piss in the moonlight. Okay. Giles took the nearly smoked cigarette from his mouth, dropped it on the concrete stoop, his hand going to his groin. It had been a long time since he had cornholed a boy. But this one was crazy. Didn't fit in with his plans nohow.

Giles let go of himself. He was thirsty from waiting. A beer would taste good afterward. Didn't drink alkyhall but liked an occasional beer. So come on, kid. Let's get this over with. He had been studying on the risk involved. Other vehicles on the road with them as the boy pedaled doggedly toward town. But at this hour traffic was bound to be sparse. He knew where to do it. No guardrail. Accelerate on the curve, ram the bike with that high bumper, take off a leg at least before the boy and bike went tumbling thirty feet into a snaggled moccasin-infested slough. If he didn't break his neck in the fall, he'd bleed to death fast. Days, even a week before anyone chanced to find him down there.