The Black Train (23 page)

Her chuckle fluttered in the dark. “Yeah, right.”

I’m fucking crazy about you…
“I can wait till it’s
not
too soon.”

“No, you can’t. Shit, in this day and age there’s probably no guy anywhere who’d wait that long…and you’re distracting me, anyway.”

“Distracting you?”

She turned on the bench, still grasping his hand. “You’re the one who wanted to hear my story. I didn’t want to tell you, but you insisted.”

“And you told me. It’s a great story, and I believe it. But what’s that got to do with—”

“My story’s not over,” came the abrupt information.

Damn it
…“There’s more?”

“Everything I’ve told you until now is
squat
compared to the rest. Now. Do you want to hear it, or not?”

“Yes…”

So this was how she checked her boundaries.
I don’t care,
Collier thought. He was content to sit with her hand
in his, their shoulders touching…that is,
he
was content, but the same wasn’t holding true for a certain part of his anatomy.
Deal with it! Don’t be an asshole and piss her off…

“The stench from room two, like I was saying, disappeared so fast, I honestly don’t see how it could’ve been there. I must have imagined it.”
You didn’t.
Collier kept the correction to himself.

“And I found no trace of the old guy with the screwed-up nose, so I told myself that was my imagination, too. Shit, it happens sometimes. Tired, long day, hadn’t eaten much—it happens. No big deal, right?”

“Right.”

“But I told you, except for room two, the other rooms had their doors open, and the second-floor rooms on the stair hall all have balconies overlooking the garden, the courtyard, and then all that scrubland past it.”

“I know, it was the first thing I noticed about my room when I walked into it. So…what happened?”

For the recital’s entirety, Dominique had maintained a smooth, none-too-serious composure, as though she were fine with the likelihood of it all being imagination. Now, though—

Collier’s gaze on her face hardened.

It was akin to a Hollywood morph the way Dominique’s expression went dark. Her eyes, at once, looked troubled, and she almost stammered a few times. “In one second, there was—was—orange light, real bright—”

“Orange light? Where?”

“In the French doors right when I was standing at the doorway of the room you’re staying in.”

“Dominique, I don’t understand. Orange light?” Alarm. “Was part of the house on fire, or the fields?”

“That’s what I thought at first, but no, and then I thought I must’ve fallen asleep and woke up at the crack
of dawn.” She paused. “But my watch said it was going on two in the morning.”

“So you went to the balcony, right? And looked out—”

A stifled nod. Was her hand shaking? “I went out the French doors, and saw that it was a fire, all right. And I heard a ringing sound, too. The entire backyard was lit up, and shifting. I could feel wafts of heat…”

Now something began to nag in Collier’s mind—

She spoke in front of her, not to him. “There’s an old Civil War-era iron forge out there. I don’t know if it’s
still
there but—”

“It is,” Collier spoke up. “I saw it the day I came. But Jiff told me it’s never used for anything but a barbecue nowadays, for holidays and parties.”

“Jiff wasn’t there, and this was no barbecue. Ore was being smelted in that thing. Every time the bellows pumped the orange light doubled…that and the intermittent sounds of a hammer made the whole thing feel maniacal. There’re several different chutes on the walls of the forge, and all that light and heat just
poured
out of them.”

Collier remembered the look of the thing, and the vents, one quite large. “What next?”

“There was a man down there, too, of course, but I couldn’t really see any details. He seemed to be working in cycles: pumping, hammering, pumping, hammering, like that. But every so often he’d disappear around the other side of the forge, and the light would go down some ’cos he wasn’t pumping.”

“Probably skimming slag or whatever it is they do.”

“He was pouring molten metal out of a little crucible,” she verified, “but I didn’t find that out till I got down there.”

Collier considered the scenario. “Must’ve been pretty scary.”

Another slow nod. “The whole thing was so crazy, I
had
to go out there. Somebody smelting
iron
in a bed-and-breakfast garden at two in the morning? You’ve got to be kidding me. I was freaked out, yeah, but I was also mad. I ran down there—”

Collier couldn’t help but anticipate. “And the guy was gone and the forge was cold.”

She nudged him. “Hey,
I’m
telling the story!”

“But am I right?”

“You’re dead wrong. By the time I got down there, if anything, the light was brighter, the air even hotter. The guy’d come back around, pumping the bellows and hammering something on an anvil, but now…I could
see
him…”

Was she doing it on purpose? Collier didn’t think so. He used the old line: “You sure know how to keep a jackass in suspense.
Tell
me. Who was the guy?”

She looked directly into his eyes, straight-faced. Now her hand was slick with sweat. “What did you think? It was a blacksmith—circa 1860. High leather boots, canvas pants, a slick rawhide apron. He was hammering a strip of metal, and alternately yanking the bellows chain. So I said, ‘Hey, what the hell are you doing?’ and I said it loud. But he didn’t hear me, just kept whacking away.”

“What did he look like, I mean, his face?”

“Big bushy mustache, and the skin on his face was like pitted leather. He wore this hat that was sort of like a leather cowboy hat but without the sides curled up, and the front flopped down. I yelled at him again, and he kept ignoring me. He walked back around the side of the forge and that’s when I saw him dipping the crucible into the vent. He took it out and poured it into a stone mold that looked like it had wax or something in it, and he did it very carefully. Then he picked the mold up with tongs and dunked it in a tub of water.”

Collier could feel the pulse in her hand pick up.

“He brought the mold around, knocked the metal out
with a hammer, and started beating on it—the cycle beginning again.”

Collier felt dour when he asked, “Was it a mold for shears?”

She looked at him, startled. “Yes. Why do you ask?”

He knew he couldn’t possibly mention the morbid nightmare. “I saw one in Mrs. Butler’s display cases. A mold chiseled out of stone, for wooling shears.”

“Well, that’s what these things looked like. They were big, like tin snips. He had a mold for each half, and after he’d banged on them a while, he tossed them aside with the tongs. There were two piles of them on the ground, sizzling.”

“Did you tap him on the shoulder, give him a nudge to get his attention?”

Dominique seemed tired now. “To tell you the truth, that’s the first thing that came to my mind, but I didn’t. Because I was afraid if I touched him—”

“There’d be nothing there.”

She nodded. “I shouted at him one more time, and I mean at the top of my lungs…He obviously didn’t know I was there, but when I shouted, he kind of paused and stood up straight. Then he turned around and looked right at me.”

“I thought you said he didn’t know you were there.”

She made a nullifying hand gesture. “Or I should say, he didn’t look right
at
me, he looked right
through
me.”

Collier thought on that.

“Then”—she visibly gulped—“I noticed the rest.”

“What!” Collier nearly yelped in frustration.

“His eyes,” she said in the lowest tone. “The whites of his eyes. They didn’t look human. The whites were yellow, like someone with a disease, with darker smudges like soot. His face, right just then—the way his eyes looked, I mean…I was more terrified at that moment than I’ve ever been in my life—that one second of look
ing in his eyes. Because I got the sickest feeling that for maybe a sliver of a second, he saw me.”

Collier was keyed up. “What did he do next?”

“He grimaced, and it turned that pocked, leathery face into the grossest mask. Then he starting pumping the bellows again.” She let out a long sigh. “So there. That’s my story.”

Crickets chirruped around them. The night had deepened and grown more humid; Collier felt clammy at his armpits.

“Wow,” he said.

“I forced myself to walk back into the inn, all that light and heat raging behind me. It was a
wall
of heat. I got back inside, looked out the window, and—of course—the backyard was dark. The furnace was cold, and there was no one there.”

Collier believed her at once. Unlike many he’d met thus far, bullshitting wasn’t her style, nor was exaggeration. But he’d seen some things, too, hadn’t he?

He elected not to mention them.

A question popped up. “Was this…back in your drinking days?”

She smiled. “Fair question. And, no. This was years later. Hallucination? Sure, it could be, but I don’t think so, and I don’t think it was lucid dreaming or any of that stuff, and I wasn’t on medication for anything. I’ll never know the answer”—she pressed a hand to her heart—“but in here, I think it was a ghost. A revenant, discorporate entity, or whatever it is they call it these days.”

“ ‘Ghost’ works just fine for me. And that was the last time you ever took a catering job at the inn?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’ve done a bunch since then. But that’s the only time I ever saw anything funky.”

Funky is right. I’ve got voices, piss stench, dogs, nightmares about SHEARS, and some woman flashing my keyhole with a shaved crotch. Could we BOTH be crazy?

Collier dropped it.

She half laughed but it didn’t sound convincing. “Anyway, now that I’m done telling it, it all sounds pretty silly.”

“You’re wrong about that,” Collier argued. “The Gast House is a pretty chilling place if you’re in the right frame of mind—or, I guess in this case, the wrong frame of mind. Mr. Sute said that many, many people have had unusual experiences there.”

She tossed a shoulder to dismiss it, but it was obvious her retelling left her discomfited.

“Enough of all this ghost stuff, though,” he said more softly now. Her hand remained clasped in his.

He was looking at her again. He drew her back to him—had the story kindled her desires?—and found she was even more eager to kiss than before. Each tongue played around in the other’s mouth with more fervor this time. Her breath seemed hotter now, if that were possible, and a bit of that push-back barrier had lessened. Her hand ran up his arm and over his chest as her tongue seemed desperate. Collier fell into a luscious void right then. Dominique was the fresh-baked bread still warm from the oven, and he was the butter melting into it.

The words in his head arrived like a zombie’s drone:
I could really fall in love with her…

Next she draped one leg over his to afford closer contact. For a moment he expected that smooth, bare leg to slide over his groin…but that never quite happened. Instead her hand around his back pressed him tighter to her.

He began to slowly suck down the side of her neck, and when his tongue laved over her jugular vein, he could feel her pulse beating like a hummingbird’s, but as his tongue continued to glaze her throat and bare shoulder, the taste of her sweat, plus the commingling scents of body spray, soap, and shampoo magnified his rising horniness. He had one hand around her side, part of it
over the gap between the clinging top and waist of her skirt. He knew he was testing her now, encroaching her obscure boundaries, but she didn’t flinch when his hand pressed flat against her belly and the tip of his pinkie slipped an inch beneath the waistline of her skirt. Collier’s Evil Twin voice returned:
Congratulations, stud! Right now your finger’s about four inches from Party Central!
but Collier was too fevered to listen. He didn’t move his hand but let his tongue trace the rim of the cami-top. Something told him not to slide the top down and expose the breasts he’d sell his soul to see, but he very gently ghosted his lips over the top of the ruffly fabric.

Then his lips inched closer to the nipple…

“Oh, jeez!” came a frustrated whisper.

Collier brought his lips away, but his hand remained in place. “What?”

“This is my fault,” she sighed. “I know better. I need to tell you the rest…”

Collier was almost indignant. “No more ghost-story stuff!”

She paused to collect her breath. “No, more
me
stuff.”

Collier didn’t relieve his embrace. “If you don’t want to go all the way tonight, that’s cool.” He tried to sound understanding.

“I should’ve explained everything earlier but I don’t want to go all the way
ever.
What I mean is I don’t have sex—at all—anymore. I probably didn’t make that clear before.”

Collier contemplated a thoughtful response but couldn’t.

“I’ll put it bluntly,” she continued in a wearied tone. “I don’t fuck. I haven’t since college.”

Collier tried to manage his reaction
.
“I understand,” he assured her but really didn’t. A small chuckle. “We weren’t
fucking,
you know.”

“I
mean,
” she added, “I’m never going to have sex again until I’m married. Making out is one thing,
but…that’s all I do. No sex out of wedlock, ever. That means any kind of sex—coitus, anal, oral. It’s part of what I was telling you before. It’s part of how I pay off that credit card I used to get my life back.”

Think!
Collier thought, but the alter ego piped in,
She’s just making an excuse so she won’t feel guilty after you ball her from one end of the street to the other! Keep feeling her up! In a few minutes you’ll have her so hot she’ll turn into a great big bowl of Do-Me Stew…

Was that really it?
We were making out pretty heavy.
He replied like a trained actor, “I understand.”

There was a fret in her eyes. “I don’t think you do, and I realize that most guys don’t—they can’t. It’s not reasonable for me to expect them to. And the part that sucks the worst is I really like you.”