Haunted Legends (15 page)

If I even considered blowing the whistle, I don’t remember it. What I do remember is thinking I had to stop the train. This thought was followed closely by the cold realization that I couldn’t stop it, not in time to avoid a collision.

I never thought about bailing. It’s nothing to be proud of, but I did stay with the train.

By the time I engaged the brakes, the train was on top of the bus.

There was a ground-shaking smack followed by the rending of metal on metal, the sickening scrape of steel, and then a single scream, which died almost as soon as it rang out, extinguished like a snuffed match. The train kept going, barely shuddering as it bisected the bus, sloughing off the front and back like great rocks tumbling from a precipice.

When it was over, one thing stood out. I never blew the whistle.

But someone is blowing it now.

•  •  •

Later that evening, I take my pickup truck out to the tracks, to Buck’s Creek where the accident occurred. In back I have a bag of flour.

When I arrive, another car, a convertible, full of teenagers, is already there. They’ve parked on the tracks, powdered the bumper with copious amounts of flour, and now they wait, throwing back beers and laughing, pretending to hear noises behind them. They ignore me.

I wait too. An hour passes and the evening drops a veil over the sky, creating a hazy glow that is almost as silver as it is black. The stars are above me in draft, barely bright enough to be seen. Off in the woods an owl hoots, marking time, until the moment comes when the last inches of daylight are shooed away by shadows, and I see them gleaming in the almost darkness, six shapes, rising out of the earth. So slowly it’s as if they’ve choreographed their movements with the setting sun.

By full dark, I can recognize them all; they line up in the order I have set
for them in my room: Michael, Adriana, Phillip, Adam, Samantha, and Suzy. Suzy is not smiling. Phillip does not look pleased or full of athletic potential as he does inside my shoebox. Michael, Adrianna, Adam, and Samantha all look tired.

The children reach out for the car in front of them, their fingers barely grazing the bumper. They don’t push as much as touch, and the car, already in neutral I suppose, rolls off the tracks. The teenagers inside laugh out loud. Somebody snorts and spews beer all over the others. A girl says, “Oh hell no. That did not just happen.” A big kid with long straight hair and a beer in his hand jumps out and runs around to the back. “Holy shit, guys! Holeeee shit! Come look.” They file out to look at the flour and the fingerprints of the children I killed. Yet they cannot see the children who stand on the tracks as if they are unsure what to do with themselves now.

One of them, Suzy, turns around and seems to see me. Her face is distraught, shining silver like the face of the moon on a clear night. Her eyes meet mine, and I hear the voice again. Her voice:
The dead do not haunt the living.

Slowly, they reform their line in the center of the tracks. They stand, resolutely facing east, waiting for the train that will kill them all over again. Within seconds I spot smoke, snaking in thin columns over the tree line. The acrid smell of diesel fills my lungs. The earth beneath my feet begins to thrum.

The train appears, heaving forward like some hound unleashed from hell. The children are erased, obliterated, sent back to the soil from which they rose, sentenced to reform and live again, however briefly the next night and the night after that and on and on until . . .

I let them go.

Driving away, into the shadowed dusk, I finally understand. The dead really don’t haunt the living. The living haunt the dead.

•  •  •

I’ll build a fire. Let the flames lick the bottom of the pines and watch the smoke curl heavenward. Then, one at a time, I will bring them out, toss them into the fire, turn away as they burn.

Last, I’ll come to James’s box. Keeping his button in my hand, I’ll burn the rest. The fire will give off the sweet smell of death and no more lingering, a final scent, like the odor of chrysanthemums after a long rain.

Breathing in the air, I’ll take a moment to think how the world never gives
you what you expect. Like ghosts. Me keeping
them
around. I’ll laugh at this thought and try to take some lesson from my anguish and the way it results in more anguish, an endless cycle, forever rolling over on itself until there is no proper way to tell where the cycle begins or, much less, where it will end.

After I’ve stood for a long while, I’ll open my hand, palm up, and stare down at the button. I’ll consider keeping it, one last token, one more way to hold on. I’ll want a drink. But ignoring that desire, I’ll close my eyes, and in the tilting darkness, cast the button into the fire. When I open them again, all of this will seem half-remembered, a fever-dream of little worlds. I’ll turn back to my house, and when I go inside, I’ll begin the real battle of living with myself and what I’ve done.

Afterword

As a school bus driver, I was drawn to the legend of San Antonio’s “Ghost Children.” Train tracks are anathema to bus drivers, and stalling on the tracks while an oncoming train bears down on you is something we fear in the silences of our routes, long after the last child has been safely delivered home. Telling the story from the train engineer’s point of view was one of those writing surprises that happen without explanation, but in retrospect, now seems inevitable.

In researching the legend and legends like it, I found myself wondering how the principals involved in such an accident would feel about their true tragedies playing second fiddle to these maudlin legends. Soon, I was mulling over issues like guilt and forgiveness and how even sentimental ghost stories might have something to teach us about ourselves and the way we deal with tragedy, communal guilt, and personal recovery.

Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including
Palimpsest,
the Orphan’s Tales series, and the crowd-funded phenomenon
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.
She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. As of this writing, she is a finalist for the Lambda, Andre Norton, and Hugo Awards to be awarded in 2010. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat.

When you, sweet sleeper, wake in the morning, one arm thrown over your golden-sticky eyes, sheets a-mangle, your dreams still flit through you, ragged, full of holes. You can remember the man with the yellow eyes, but not why he chased you. You can remember the hawk-footed woman on your roof, but not what she whispered.

That is my fault. I could not help it. I tromped through you in the night, and ate up your dreams, a moth through wool. I didn’t want them all, only the sweetest veins, like fat marbling a slab of ruby meat, the marrowy slick of what she whispered, why he ran.

I am a rowling thing—my snout raises up toward the moon to catch the scent of your sweat. I show my flat teeth to the night wind. I beg permission of your bedclothes to curl up in the curve of your stomach, to gnaw on your shoulders, your breasts, your eyelids. I must open up a hole in you, to crawl through to the red place where your dreams spool out.

You put your arm around me in the night. Do you remember? My belly was taut and black, a tapir’s belly, a tapir’s snout snuffling for your breath as a pig for truffles. You were my truffle, my thick, earthy mushroom. You were delicious, and I thank you for my supper.

At dawn, blue light shines on my woolly stump-tail. I catch the tin-patched 6:17 commuter train from your house to my home, deep in the Paradise of the Pure Land. My friend Yatsuhashi lumbers aboard at your aunt’s house, the one with the wide white porch. She is fat and full of your aunt’s dreams of straddling her supervisor while he recites Basho. She takes her seat in the empty car; I take mine. She sits up and her tapir-body unfolds neatly along three creases to become the body of a respectable businessman in a respectable black suit. I, too, unfold, and straighten my tie. The attendant brings cups of hot, sweet
matcha,
but we refrain, straining at the pelt with the night-feast. If you saw us, you would not think we had snorted and snuggled against you all through the dark and moony hours. You would think:
there go two wealthy and reputable gentlemen, off to their decent, clean desks in the city.

But we have worked our shifts already, and we aim toward home, hurtle toward it, home to the peach tree of immortality and the pearl-troughs of enlightened discourse, where we will disgorge our meals for the pleasure of eating them again.

“Kabu,” says Yatsuhashi, though she knows my full name is Akakabu. She insists on the familiar because she has no manners. “Do you think dreams taste more like cherries or more like salmon roe? I can never decide.”

“With respect, Yatsuhashi-san, the comparison with roe is not at all apt. Recall that at the bottom of a dream is a hard jewel we may not gnaw, the jewel of the sleeping soul, clung with dream-meat and sugar. Roe is sweet and soft and bursts on the tongue in a shower of golden salt—how rare is the roe-dream! Only the very young and the very old have no pit on which we may break our teeth if we are not careful.”

“Of course you are right, Kabu. But I cannot escape the feeling of fishiness; the dreams of sex-starved aunts wriggle in me so!”

That is my friend’s way of talking. Many Baku talk like this, because they are not sensible, and all they eat all night are the kinds of dreams that do not agree with a tapir’s stomach: drunken dreams, fever dreams, sickness dreams, the dreams of enfeebled children. These are so rich it is hard to resist, like a tiny table set with a cake so moist it wets the cloth, but they make a Baku babble and walk into walls.

Disembark for Yokosuka-Chuo Station.

The mechanical voice is slim and soft and breathy, a dream-voice. I approve. I obey.

Does it surprise you that Pure Land has a train station? It has many. We are subtle, we who inhabit this place—not only Baku but many other beasts and
tsukumogami
and dragons and maidens with the moon in their hair and bod-hisattva with bare feet. We let humans build grey, stocky towers in the Gardens of Right Practice; we let them bring great gun-bristled ships to the Lotus Harbor; we let them pave the Avenue of Yellow Smoke and set up pachinko parlors there. We let them call Pure Land Yokosuka, and we watched the Butterflies of Perfect Thought sizzle on the neon of their nightclub advertisements. We were clever—we are safe, a dream in their sleeping, hidden beneath a human city, where no one, not even their soldiers with golden buttons, will ever think to look for heavenly pavilions. It is not that there is no sadness in the Paradise of the Pure Land. On the contrary, we must all report for sadness once in our long, endless, peach-saturated lives, so that we may have something hard and terrible to hold against the beauty of the Pure Land. No one likes to talk about their sadness, but we have all reported on schedule, and done our duty. I want to tell you about mine, I want you to dream about it, but manners make it difficult to get to the point. I have an apartment above Blue Street in the Paradise of the Pure Land. The street does not really have a name—it has a number—but the humans thoughtfully paved it with sparkling blue stones, perhaps in some instinctive nod to our tastes, and so we and they call it Blue Street, for we are all of us together sagacious folk. From my window I can see the bay, the green water foamed with trash so that each wave is tipped with beer bottles, cellophane, detergent boxes, swollen manga, orange rinds. Beneath the surface is an improbable depository of bicycles, dumped by poor souls who could not parse out the arcane laws of garbage removal—our nature does shine through in places, and complexity of order is paramount in the pure land of contemplation. Jellyfish tangle in the wheel spokes, confused, translucent, lost.