And silent.
The hair on Henry's arms prickled. There was no noise, not even the sound of birdsong or lizardscuttle.
Just like in the canyon.
He wanted to run away. Something bad was in that cabin, and there was no way this situation could turn out okay. But he steeled himself for the worst and forced himself to put one foot in front of the other. "Ray!" he called out. "Ray! You home?"
Silence.
Henry took a deep breath, walked up the single step to the porch and poked his head inside the cabin. "Ra-" His voice died as he saw his friend's body.
Ray was lying nude on the floor, what was left of his face gnawed to the bone, the terror in his intact eyes in direct contrast with the death's-head grin of his exposed lower skull. In the ranger's clutching right hand was a corner of the Navajo throw rug he'd bought last year at Third Mesa. His left hand was a stump, fingers nowhere in sight, a puddle of blood pooled around it.
Henry was sickened. But not surprised.
He looked to the left, catching movement out of the corner of his eye. A thin line of light issued from beneath an improperly closed blind in the kitchen, offering faint illumination that revealed two dark figures seated at the breakfast table.
The twins.
They were seated across from each other and though no sound issued from their shadow lips, they were laughing, rocking slightly in their chairs, their bodies jiggling with mirth.
Once again, he had the feeling he was supposed to glean something from this, that he was being given a message or warning, that something was trying to impart information, but he had no clue what it could be.
Confused, scared, but above all angry, Henry strode over to the closest window and pulled the shade nearest him. It rolled up with a loud snap and light poured into the cabin. He moved to the next one, pulled it open. And the next one. And the next one. By the time he looked over at the breakfast table to see the reaction of the twins, they were gone.
Good, he thought, satisfied.
He looked out of the cabin's windows toward the flat expanse of desert to the west. And froze.
In the middle of the sand stood a train.
The sight was more threatening and far more frightening than that simple description made it sound. For the train was bathed in darkness, not merely black, but suffused with an aura of dread that could be sensed even from here. This was no shadow or slightly more substantial shade; it was a concrete presence in the desert. There was an antique steam engine with accompanying tender, four passenger cars and a caboose. He could see a yucca that had been squashed under one of the engine's metal wheels, could see the odd murky heat waves shimmering around its irregular surface. How it had gotten there and where it had come from-
he would not venture to guess, but there was no doubt that it had arrived.
He remembered a story his father had told him about seeing a ghost once on a train in Nebraska. His dad had been riding the rails looking for work, using the freights, as so many migrants had at that time, to get him from seasonal fruit picking in California to corn harvesting in the Midwest. It was night, of course, and he'd lost his lone fellow traveler back in Wyoming when the man had hopped off at his hometown. The night air was cold, and Henry's father was huddled in a corner of the boxcar, wrapped in a stolen horse blanket. It was practically pitch-black, with only a thin sliver of moonlight showing from a crack in the closed door. And then It wasn't.
There was strange luminescence in the opposite corner. Not the radiance of an electric light or a gas flame but a vague gray glow that gradually brightened into a sickly green. For a brief moment, his father said, he'd seen the form of a man, an Indian warrior, and though the ephemeral figure was fierce in its appearance, he had felt no fear. The ghost disappeared, not §< fading away, but blinking out of existence, though a remnant of that gray glow remained for several moments longer. They were passing through an area where the railroad had been built through Indian territory, and his father assumed it was his own
native || ancestry that had allowed him this glimpse of a spirit long departed. Henry thought of that now, looking at the train in the sand. He watched for a few more seconds out the window, then exited through Ray's back door to get a better view. Other rangers, he saw, were walking out of their cabins, too, having also noticed the phantom locomotive. The train was no hallucination; it was really there-not that he'd needed any proof-but he was still a little surprised that other people could see it. Jill was on duty, as was her husband, Chris, but / Stuart, Pedley, Raul and Murdoch were all converging on the well-worn trail that linked the park service housing units.
He joined them. Although the dark train was still more than a mile off, everyone stopped at the edge of the path, afraid to move closer. The feeling of dread emanating from those motionless black cars was powerful even this far away, and Henry remained alert, on edge, ready to bolt should even a puff of steam emerge from the smokestack.
"Slow train to the coast," Stuart whispered next to him.
Henry remembered the euphemism. They'd used it in the army to refer to someone who'd died. There was one kid in basic training who had keeled over while running, been taken to the infirmary and never returned, and when asked for details about what had happened, the DI had said simply, "He took the slow train to the coast." That was Henry's first exposure to the phrase, but like everyone else in his unit, he'd used it excessively over the next three years, eight months and twenty-eight days. It had been decades since he'd heard, said or even thought of the term, though, and the image conjured by Stuart's whisper frightened him even more.
Slow train to the coast.
The coast.
He thought of his dream, the vast expanse of water, and that linguistic connection, tenuous as it might be, caused his skin to ripple with gooseflesh. Again he sensed meaning and purpose just beyond his reach.
All of them were quiet, those who dared speak whispering like Stuart. The train waited-like a lion, Henry thought-and the rangers waited, too, wondering what was going to happen next, whether the train was going to speed away, disappear into thin air, turn and crash into them and their cabins ... or sit there forever until one of them grew brave enough to approach it and investigate.
He looked from Stuart to Pedley to Raul to Murdoch, then turned back toward the train.
Why was it here? What was its purpose?
Were the twins on it?
The desire to learn the answer to that question was almost enough to get him to walk across the sand to find out.
Almost.
There was the blast of a steam whistle, one short quick burst that made them jump as one. There were noises in that sound that should not have been present in the whistle of a train, subliminal tones he could neither hear nor identify but that for some reason made Henry think of multitudes screaming. He was about to run away, following an instinctive desire to flee back into a cabin so he wouldn't be out in the open, when the black train took off, not starting slowly, and picking up steam, but departing instantly at full speed, like accelerated film footage. In seconds, it was past the dunes and gone from sight.
"What in fuck's name was that?" Raul breathed.
"Yeah," Stuart said.
"Ray's dead," Henry told them numbly.
"A train?" the superintendent said skeptically. He looked around at the faces of the rangers before him and obviously did not see what he'd hoped to see. Henry looked around, too. There was no embarrassment or hesitancy on the features of his coworkers, only grim determination and barely concealed fear.