Authors: Peter Straub
He went quickly down the aisle, pushed aside the heavy door, and for a moment stood in the rocking space between cars and peered through the gritty window. This was their car — Tom felt an angry certainty that if Skeleton were on the train, he would be sitting near them. The thought made his bowels liquefy. But the seat behind theirs was empty; the people he could see from the window were those to whom he had spoken or nodded. He pushed the door aside and went in.
One of the sleepy mothers smiled at him. The long car felt warm and comfortable. Tom imagined that if Skeleton were actually seated there, his nerves would have screamed, alarms howled.
Three cars remained. Since Skeleton had got on Tom's half of the train, there was a thirty-three-percent chance he was in the next car. Tom left his own carriage and pushed open the door to the next.
Here all the lights were off. Tom closed the door behind him. His eyes adjusted slowly. This car is almost empty, which is why the few in it were able to enforce their unanimous opinion that nights on trains were for sleeping. One of the men, mustached and blue-jeaned, grunts in his sleep and digs his face deeper into the untender material of the seat. Tom has seen at once that none of them is Skeleton. He wishes that he could curl up like this, grind his face into a seat, and be somewhere else, safe — and then he feels that he is walking straight through their dreams, trespassing in them.
This man who lifts a shoulder before him, is he dreaming of the snake that circles the world and rests with its pointed tail in its mouth?
And the man two rows back who sleeps like a child, his head thrown back and knees asplay, does he dream of some Rose Armstrong, some perfect girl who haunts him? Or of a flame-girdled toad with a jewel in its forehead and a key in its mouth?
And does this one dream of being a hunter in a starry wood — Orion with his drawn bow?
Or of a man become a hunting bird?
Then he feels that he does not trespass through their dreams, but
is
them; that he is a dream being dreamed. His feet do not quite touch the ground. Their snores and stirrings carry him to the end of the dark carriage, and the door floats to the side under the pressure of his hand. He sweats, his head full of cobwebs . . . hunting birds . . . blazing toads . . .
He was sweating, that is, sweating and dizzy on the swaying platform between carriages, and it seemed to Tom that his mind was floating out of his control, prey to any fancy that came along. He has been someplace he has never been before.
Being dreamed?
Him, steady Tom Flanagan? The thought of Skeleton was somehow the cause of that. And as he put his hand on the door to the next carriage, he realized that by his earlier reckoning, there was a fifty-percent chance of seeing Skeleton in this car.
He marched up the aisle, looking rapidly from side to side, checking the faces even though he was sure that if his enemy were present, he'd be so visible as to be fluorescent. Two ten-year-old girls flouncing up the aisle in identical calico dresses separated to let him pass.
Tom pushed his way out into the breeze again. By his reckoning, the odds were a hundred percent that Skeleton was in this last car.
He had to pee — it was like pre-exam panic. He swallowed, and hoped that Del was already safe in his seat, thinking that Skeleton was out of their lives for good. Tom grasped the handle and pushed the door. He knew Skeleton was there.
But there it was again, that shock, even though he had thought he was prepared. For down at the end of the carriage, the very back of Skeleton's head met him, narrow and matted with mouse hair.
He has no power now, Tom told himself; he can't do anything to us. There was no reason to fear him. In that case, maybe Del was right. Don't let him see you, just make sure and go away and hope he gets off the train at the next station.
Tom almost did it. What stopped him was the thought of going back to Del and saying, yes, he is here, and then spending the next two days and nights in fear. He imagined himself and Del in their sleeping car, heeding every sudden noise. He would not allow himself to be so childish.
He took a step nearer the hated head.
Tom closed his mouth on a breath, took a quick step around Skeleton's side, and dropped himself into the facing seat. Adrenaline blasted his good intentions, and he blurted out, 'What are you doing here, anyway?'
Then crumbled — another shock. The face was Skeleton's at fifty, not Skeleton's now. It was the same skinned, reptilian visage with smudgy pouches beneath the same colorless eyes, but with a lot of extra years on it. 'I got a right to be here,' the man said. Then the stingy flesh colored. 'Who the hell are you, anyway? Get outta here.' The man's thin, hand trembled against the side of his face, went to his tie. 'Geez, get this kid.' He appealed to empty seats for witness. 'Get lost, kid. Lemme alone.'
This moment was truly like being trapped in a dream — the man was eerily like Skeleton, was, if anything, even more hideous than Skeleton. But he was certainly not Skeleton. He looked one step elevated from trampdom.
'You're tryna mess with me, ain't ya, kid? Just get outta here before I cut you to pieces.' The man was like an angry, bewildered dog.
Tom was already up out of the seat, stuttering apologies. He saw a conductor down at the other end of the car, and fled.
From movies he knew that little balconies rode at the end of trains, and he darted out through the rear door. Yet here was another puzzle. Another car swayed before him. He was not at the end of the train.
What the . . . ?
The car had not been on the train when they boarded that morning. He and Del had entered the fourth car from the end: he remembered that absolutely. This car had somehow been magicked onto the end of the train.
Tom reeled.
'Get this kid,' the man said to the conductor.
The door heaved to one side, and he slipped through, ignoring the conductor's shout.
But the next car — now here was real disorientation. He had gone fifty years back in time. Gas lamps flickered on flocked walls, a thick patterned carpet glowed. Hunting prints shone down from the walls. A knot of men dressed in old-fashioned checked and belted suits regarded him. Most were bearded, some smoked long cigars. He could smell the whiskey in their glasses.
'You have made a mistake,' a tall burly man with a stand-up collar and a Vandyke said quietly. 'Please leave.' He looked stonily at Tom through a thin gold pince-nez:
The conductor banged the door open and fastened a rough hand on Tom's upper arm. 'I couldn't stop him in time, Mr. Peet.'
'All right, yes, understood. Remove him.'
The conductor hauled Tom out into the next carriage. The old defeated Skeleton Ridpath turned on his seat in a grotesque parody of snobbery and faced the window.
'Don't ever go back there again,' the conductor said in Tom's ear. He did not sound angry. 'They might look crazy, but that's their business.'
'What is that, anyway?'
The conductor released Tom's arm. 'Private party — own their own car. Food? Liquor? You never seen anything like it. You gotta be rich to live that good. They hooked up a couple stations back, going all the way to New York. Just leave 'em alone, son. You got plenty of train to walk around in.'
When Tom got back to his seat, he sat down beside Del, who stared. 'Is he there?'
'Just an old guy who looks like him.'
'Aaaah.' Del slumped back into his seat, sighing. 'Thank God.' He smoothed his glossy hair, looked at Tom, grinned. 'You know, we were both scared shitless. But what could he do to us, really? Even if he was on the train?'
'Maybe he's the Ghostly Presence,' Tom said, and Del tried to smile.
That night, rolling through Illinois on his upper bunk, Tom dreamed of lying by a campfire in a deep wood. The moon was a huge eye. A snake whispered up to him and spoke.
3
A morning of French toast dripping maple syrup, hard little sausages that tasted of hickory smoke, tomato juice: Ohio just ending outside the dining-car windows, an epic of grain-filled plains separated by dark smoky cities. By now nearly everybody who had joined their train in Arizona was gone, and churchy, singing Midwestern voices had replaced the sunburnt drawls. The most important new passengers were four middle-aged black men dressed in conspicuously handsome suits — they had supervised the loading, late at night in Chicago, of a trove of instrument cases into the baggage car and were supposed to be famous musicians. The conductors treated them like heroes, like kings, and they looked like kings: they had an extra charge of authority and no need of anyone else. Morris Fielding would have known their names.
'One of them's called Coleman Hawkins,' Del said. 'The conductor told me. And you'll never guess the name of the quiet one without any hair.'
'You're right. I can't guess.'
'Tommy Flanagan. He plays piano, and the conductor says he's fantastic.'
'Tommy
Flanagan?'
Tom put down his silverware and looked at every table in the dining car.
'I don't think they get up this early,' Del said wryly. 'Don't look that way. If someone has to have your name, it might as well be a fantastic piano player.'
'Yeah, it's sort of neat. . . but I'd rather have him be a fantastic third baseman,' Tom said. For a second he had felt that the man, as modest and civilized as an Anglican priest, had stolen his name from him.
4
'I wonder what he's going to do this time,' Del said.
'Play the piano somewhere, dummy.'
'Not your namesake, Jell-O Brains. Uncle Cole. I wonder what it'll be this summer.'
'Is it always different?'
'Sure it is. One summer it was like a circus-clowns and acrobats all over the place. That was when I was a little kid. Another summer, it was like movies. Cowboy movies and cop movies. That was a year I went to movies all the time — I was twelve. Saw a double feature every Saturday. And when I got to Shadowland, every day was like a different movie. I never knew what was going to happen. There was Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe and William Bendix and Randolph Scott — '