At least in his experience.
And Tom Miller was exhibit A.
The engineer left his office frustrated and angry, and Holman sighed as he swiveled in his seat and looked out again at the sky. Hell, he was getting squirrelly himself. He'd been in the freight yard office for going on three years now, and he spent more time watching clouds than he did trains. It was the randomness of the clouds that appealed to him, the amorphous ever-changing shapes he enjoyed watching. The herd of miniature tyrannosauruses he'd seen a few minutes back had coalesced into a segmented snake; the giant dachshund was now a sinking Titanic.
Trains never did that. Boxcars were always boxcars, flatcars always flatcars, and, like he was a child, it was only the occasional anachronistic caboose that brightened up his day and gave him any joy at all.
"There!" Tom shouted from the outer office. "There! I told you, you son of a bitch! I told you!"
Holman went out to see what the commotion was and found the engineer sitting in front of the computer, logged on to an amateur site, one maintained by train fanatics who used digital webcams to record specific sections of track in order to capture the scheduled passing of passengers and freights.
This time, they'd caught something else.
Holman stared in shock at the image on-screen.
It was indeed a black locomotive but one unlike any he had ever seen. It was racing down a section of track that the streaming crawl identified as east central Colorado, past a train on a siding that could have been Tom's, could have been someone else's. The strange thing was: the engine had no markings, no detail, not even a recognizable design. It was as if a child's drawing of a locomotive had been granted three-dimensionality and been brought to life. There was about it the same sort of simplistic relationship to reality.
Only ...
Only there was a malevolence to it as well, and a sense of wild fury. The engine looked sinister in its bulky blocky blackness, and the way it sped past that stationary freight on the siding, the speed with which it passed and the sheer volume of smoke that poured out at that moment, bespoke a tremendous anger. Holman had no doubt that if the other train had been on the same track, the locomotive would have smashed right through it and continued on unscathed.
Tom hit a key on the computer and the mystery train repeated its approach and passing.
"I told you!"
"What is it?" Holman wondered, and realized he'd been speaking aloud only when everyone else in the office chimed in with "I don't know" and "You got me" and "I've never seen anything like that before."
Ghost engine, Tom had said. He hadn't been joking, and Holman now understood why. Since his father's day there'd been tales of ghost trains, retellings of the Flying Dutchman story transferred to the rails, knockoffs of other myths concocted by bored conductors or imagined by tired engineers on late-night runs. Neither he nor anyone he'd ever met had believed any of them, but he thought now of the adage that behind every legend was a grain of truth.
He watched the dark engine speed past the webcam.
Or more than a grain.
"What do you think now?" a triumphant Tom demanded.
"I believe you," Holman said simply.
That seemed to throw him. "Then, uh, what do you think it is?"
"I have no idea. But it didn't register on any of our sensors and didn't show up on the grid."
"A ghost engine?" Tom said. The triumph was gone from his voice.
"Maybe so," Holman admitted. "Maybe so."
Thirteen
Selby, Missouri
Luke, the previous desk clerk, had been right. This job just flat-out sucked.
Dennis sat behind the counter, reading a Barry Welch paperback about a coven of witches in a Utah time-share community, glancing up every so often to see if anyone on the highway was even considering turning in to the motel parking lot. There'd been no one checking in or out all morning, and the only human contact he'd had was when the grotesquely overweight man in 110 had come in to complain that the ice from the ice machine melted too fast.
Dennis had promised to inform the owner.
He hadn't told his mom or his sister that he was working here. They thought he was still tooling around the countryside, exploring the wonders of this great land. If they found out he was spending his days behind a ratty counter in a fleabag motel in Selby, Missouri, humoring psychotic behemoths, they'd demand his return faster than he could say "I'm fine," his mom with an insufferable I-told-you-so attitude, Cathy with a sense of politely masked disappointment that would be even harder for him to face.
Two more weeks and he was out, he decided. By that time, he should have enough money to coast all the way to the coast.
He turned back to his novel.
"She's a stupid old witch and a*crazy old bitch! She's a stupid old witch and a crazy old bitch!"
Dennis' head snapped up at the sound of the children's singsong voices.
"She's a stupid old witch and a crazy old bitch! She's a stupid old witch and a crazy old bitch!"
He knew that chant. He'd forgotten about it until now, but when he was a little kid, a group of neighborhood boys had said that to his mother when they saw her on the street. Cathy had been too young to know what was going on, but he had been mortally embarrassed, and it was not until his father, home from work, had caught the boys at it, lectured them and threatened to tell their parents that the taunts had finally stopped.
The kids now were also shouting the refrain at an elderly Chinese woman as she walked along the sidewalk in front of the motel, and Dennis experienced a weird feeling of deja vu. He was the adult now, in a position to stop those kids the way his father had done, and he checked to make sure the register was locked, then ran out from behind the counter, out of the office and onto the sidewalk.
"Stop that right now!" he ordered. "Leave that woman alone!"
The old lady hurried off as the kids turned toward him. There were three of them-two skinny dirty boys wearing cutoffs and T-shirts, and one belligerent fat boy in jeans and torn Hawaiian shirt-and they faced him with sullen resentment. "Who are you?" one of the skinny kids demanded.
"It's none of your business."
"Was that your mama?" The fat kid laughed derisively.
"Go home!" he ordered. "Get out of here!"
"No!" they all shouted.
"Now!"
"Chink!" the fat boy yelled at him, picking up a piece of gravel from the sidewalk and throwing it.
He ran at the kid, but the punk stood his ground, and it was only after Dennis yelled, "I'm going to kick your fucking ass!" in the most threatening voice he could manage that the little shit finally took off, his friends following.
Dennis slowed, stopped, as the boys dashed around the corner. What the hell was wrong with kids these days? Even in small towns in the middle of nowhere, they seemed to have lost their fear of adults. When he was little, even the wimpiest grown-up was someone to be feared and respected. Now it took direct threats to coax even a halfhearted response out of them.
He started back toward the motel office. Chink. He almost laughed. Had he ever heard that word in real life before? He'd read it in old books, but that was about it. The word never even showed up in movies, as far as he knew.
Social progress apparently came very slowly to the hinterlands.
Niggers and Kikes.
He flashed back to the "Noose of Justice" at The Keep, and the smile on his lips faded. Suddenly the child's anachronistic racism didn't seem so benign. There was a history of intolerance here, he realized, an entire culture he'd never been exposed to on the East Coast, and more than ever before, he felt like a stranger in a strange land.