At least his father had a place to sleep every night; a meal to eat; a paycheck to collect every Friday. What did Rollie have to show for his own years, beyond the shabby clothes and pathetic possessions he carried?
Perhaps tomorrow, tomorrow when the sun comes out and the snow starts to melt… maybe there’d be somewhere in town he could clean himself up, maybe even get work…
He still wasn’t sleepy. Now he began to fixate on something that had been bothering him since he approached the slaughterhouse—the name: Exeter. Why was it so… ? Ah, now he remembered: A story he’d heard as a child, half-forgotten now, save for the dread it had set curdling in his belly.
It was years ago. Apparently the place was abandoned, even back then, save for three Dobermans that served as guard dogs. They were left alone at night to keep intruders out… intruders like me. One morning, the caretaker found all three dogs dead in a bloody heap on the sidewalk in front of the building. Windows in the third story had been shattered, the glass scattered around their corpses. Sometime during the night the dogs had leapt to their deaths.
Were they chasing something when they plunged from the tower, or was something chasing them?
Rollie listened to the crackling fire, slowly drifting into sleep at last. He dreamed of rail cars; a consistent subject. He’d spent much of his youth as a hobo, crisscrossing the country in boxcars and hoppers on the main lines. He had pleasant memories of those days, and usually pleasant dreams too, but not tonight.
Tonight, he dreamed of something he’d seen in Omaha many years ago when he jumped off the train in the yards—a man’s body strapped to the top of one of the cars. Not exactly unusual; many hobos tied themselves down to keep from falling off when they fell asleep. But somewhere between here and there, something terrible had happened:
He’d been beheaded, perhaps by a bridge or tunnel.
It was the last train Rollie had ever hopped. The sight of that headless body never left him, nor did his dread of trains, which began that day. He’d never ridden a train since.
He screamed as he jolted awake, the sound echoing throughout the basement. He was disoriented at first, forgetting where he was. For a moment, he thought he could hear the sound of a train; that dreadful whining, clacking noise they made in the night. But the sight of the smoldering fire brought him back to reality. He remembered where he was.
Then he heard it again.
He was awake this time, and listening intently. There was no mistaking that sound. It was far off in the distance, a lonely, restless wail; that damned clicking noise as the wheels caressed the track.
Getting closer.
The concrete floor began to vibrate. A burning ember rolled off the fire.
It must be outside… hadn’t he crossed a couple of nearby tracks to make it here? Nothing to worry about; it would be over in a few minutes…
But the din continued to escalate, the vibrations beneath his feet almost throwing him off balance. He thought he could hear tiny bits of mortar crumbling from the walls, shaken loose by the disturbance.
And then he saw the beam.
Like the sound, it was faint at first; perhaps a reflection from outside? No… the light focused to an intense glare, growing brighter and brighter with every heartbeat. Motes of dust danced in the light; fragments of the mortar he could still hear shaking free of its moorings. Like a cinema projection… No… no; not like a cinema projection. Real, and closer than he’d presumed…
Not outside; the light was coming from within the slaughterhouse, its glare so bright now, it was painful to look at.
The heat and stink of diesel, a churning engine, shrieking wheels… the thunder of its approach shook him to the marrow, stealing his breath.
No!
He didn’t believe it, yet couldn’t deny it. Rising from his seat beside the fire, he ran. In the close confines of the basement, the acridity of diesel fumes choked his lungs and stung his eyes.
He ran as fast as he could, the basement seemingly endless, stretching into black eternity. After a while, as the train’s lamp thrust him into ever sharper relief, he felt like he was running in painful slow motion.
Everything seemed to freeze momentarily, and Rollie felt a presence nearby. He began to turn, hoping to catch some glimpse of the intruder, but never did.
He hit the wall at full speed. He felt his nose smash into the bricks, his teeth shatter. As if calling out to him, the train behind screamed one final time.
That scream was so deafening that Rollie thought his ears would burst. He turned to face his pursuer; caught only a glimpse of the winged emblem emblazoned across the monster’s nose, and the fierce, blinding light of its one Cyclops eye.
It was not a painless death.
Outside, the snow fell relentlessly on Derbytown, and on the old slaughterhouse. All was quiet. By midnight, the footprints Rollie had made in the champagne powder were lost forever.
2
It was a day that glinted.
The April sun shone brilliantly; a golden light, a promise of spring’s victory over death.
A red ribbon stretched across the building’s entrance shimmered as it caught the light; the kind of gaudy decoration reserved for grand openings of museums and shopping malls.
The sun also gleamed off the golden scissors with which the ribbon would soon be cut. The blades were open, gilded jaws awaiting their moment. The man who held them did not match their flamboyance, nor that of the towering building that loomed above the impressive crowd.
Alex Cantrell was a man of casual elegance. He stood before his building like an artist ready to unveil his latest work. He seemed almost shy before the crowd; the flashbulbs and television cameras, but his eyes burned with quiet pride.
And that pride was justified. The Exeter Lofts, as the building had recently been christened, was majestic.
It represented Cantrell’s greatest achievement, both as an architect and an artist; a monument to his sheer persistence and belief. He’d single-handedly wrenched this building from the sooty oblivion in which it had long languished, and recast it as a beacon of the city’s future. In his hands, it had been reborn; transformed from an industrial blight on the city’s horizon into a thing of beauty and opulence. Its past was nowhere visible on this sunny morning.
No detail had been overlooked in Cantrell’s obsession: Hundreds of thousands of bricks had been painstakingly sandblasted and reset; the rough, utilitarian trim replaced with beautifully executed stonework; its industrial rectangular windows redone in graceful arches and panes.
Its most striking feature, the square clock tower, was topped with the original mansard roof, but its rusty iron surface had been coated with gleaming copper, its massive clock cleaned and restored, minute hand now gliding silently and imperceptibly.
The structure’s main entrance had once been an industrial steel door. Now it was a resplendent gateway; crystal glass windows flanking carved cherry doors, topped by a granite lintel upon which the word “Exeter” had been chiseled in delicate Art Noveau script.
Before the entrance, a cobblestone circular drive led up from the street. Even the grounds showed Cantrell’s keen eye for design: a meticulously contoured lawn, exotic trees; a central marble fountain gushing water.
The mayor stood at the dais, proudly regarding the crowd. He tapped once or twice on the microphone to get their attention.