Michael Koryta
The Cypress House
© 2015
For David Hale Smith and Michael Pietsch: It’s a team game, and I’m deeply grateful for the wisdom, encouragement, and, above all else, faith.
Part One: SOJOURNERS
1
THEY’D BEEN ON THE TRAIN for five hours before Arlen Wagner saw the first of the dead men.
To that point it had been a hell of a nice ride. Hot, sure, and progressively more humid as they passed out of Alabama and through southern Georgia and into Florida, but nice enough all the same. There were thirty-four on board the train who were bound for the camps in the Keys, all of them veterans with the exception of the nineteen-year-old who rode at Arlen’s side, a boy from Jersey by the name of Paul Brickhill.
They’d all made a bit of conversation at the outset, exchanges of names and casual barbs and jabs thrown around in that way men have when they are getting used to one another, all of them figuring they’d be together for several months to come, and then things quieted down. Some slept, a few started card games, others just sat and watched the countryside roll by, fields going misty with late-summer twilight and then shapeless and dark as the moon rose like a watchful specter. Arlen, though, Arlen just listened. Wasn’t anything else to do, because Paul Brickhill had an outboard motor where his mouth belonged.
As the miles and minutes passed, Brickhill alternated between explaining things to Arlen and asking him questions. Nine times out of ten, the boy answered his own questions before Arlen could so much as part his lips with a response. Brickhill had been a quiet kid when the two of them first met months earlier in Alabama, and back then Arlen believed him to be shy. What he hadn’t counted on was the way the boy took to talk once he felt comfortable with someone. Evidently, he’d grown damn comfortable with Arlen.
As the wheels hammered along the rails of northern Florida, Paul Brickhill was busy telling Arlen all of the reasons this was going to be a hell of a good hitch. Not only was there the bridge waiting to be built, but all that sunshine and blue water and boats that cost more than most homes. They could do some fishing, maybe catch a tarpon. Paul’d seen pictures of tarpon that were near as long as the boats that landed them. And there were famous people in the Keys, celebrities of every sort, and who was to say they wouldn’t run into a few, and…
Around them the men talked and laughed, some scratching out letters to loved ones back home. Wasn’t anyone waiting on a letter from Arlen, so he just settled for a few nips on his flask and tried to find some sleep despite the cloaking warmth and the stink of sweating men. It was too damn hot.
Brickhill finally fell silent, as if he’d just noticed that Arlen was sitting with his eyes closed and had stopped responding to the conversation. Arlen let out a sigh, grateful for the respite. Paul was a nice enough kid, but Arlen had never been one for a lot of words where a few would do.
The train clattered on, and though night had settled, the heat didn’t break. Sweat still trickled along the small of Arlen’s back and held his hair to his forehead. He wished he could fall asleep; these hot miles would pass faster then. Maybe another pull on the flask would aid him along.
He opened his eyes, tugged the lids up sleepily, and saw a hand of bone.
He blinked and sat up and stared. Nothing changed. The hand held five playing cards and was attached to a man named Wallace O’Connell, a veteran from Georgia who was far and away the loudest man in this company. He had his back turned, engaged in his game, so Arlen couldn’t see his face. Just that hand of bone.
No, Arlen thought, no, damn it, not another one.
The sight chilled him but didn’t shock him. It was far from the first time.
He’s going to die unless I can find a way to stop it, Arlen thought with the sad, sick resignation of a man experienced with such things. Once we get down to the Keys, old Wallace O’Connell will have a slip and bash his head in on something. Or maybe the poor bastard can’t swim, will fall into those waves and sink beneath them and I’ll be left with this memory same as I’ve been left with so many others. I’d warn him if I could, but men don’t heed such warnings. They won’t let themselves.
It was then that he looked up, away from Wallace under the flickering lights of the train car, and saw skeletons all around him.
They filled the shadows of the car, some laughing, some grinning, some lost to sleep. All with bone where flesh belonged. The few who sat directly under a light still wore their skin, but their eyes were gone, replaced by whirls of gray smoke.
For a moment, Arlen Wagner forgot to breathe. Went cold and dizzy and then sucked in a gasp of air and straightened in the seat.
They were going to have a wreck. It was the only thing that made a bit of sense. This train was going to derail and they were all going to die. Every last one of them. Because Arlen had seen this before, and knew damn well what it meant, and knew that-
Paul Brickhill said, “Arlen?”
Arlen turned to him. The overhead light was full on the boy’s face, keeping him in a circle of brightness, the taut, tanned skin of a young man who spent his days under the sun. Arlen looked into his eyes and saw swirling wisps of smoke. The smoke rose in tendrils and fanned out and framed the boy’s head while filling Arlen’s with terrible recollections.
“Arlen, you all right?” Paul Brickhill asked.
He wanted to scream. Wanted to scream and grab the boy’s arm but was afraid it would be cold slick bone under his touch.
We’re going to die. We’re going to come off these rails at full speed and pile into those swamp woods, with hot metal tearing and shattering all around us…
The whistle blew out shrill in the dark night, and the train began to slow.
“We got another stop,” Paul said. “You look kind of sickly. Maybe you should pour that flask out.”
The boy distrusted liquor. Arlen wet his lips and said, “Maybe,” and looked around the car at the skeleton crew and felt the train shudder as it slowed. The force of that big locomotive was dropping fast, and now he could see light glimmering outside the windows, a station just ahead. They were arriving in some backwater stop where the train could take on coal and the men would have a chance to get out, stretch their legs, and piss. Then they’d be aboard again and winging south at full speed, death ahead of them.
“Paul,” Arlen said, “you got to help me do a bit of convincing here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We aren’t getting back on this train. Not a one of us.”
2
THEY PILED OUT OF THE CARS and onto the station platform, everyone milling around, stretching or lighting cigarettes. It was getting on toward ten in the evening, and though the sun had long since faded, the wet heat lingered. The boards of the platform were coated with swamp mud dried and trampled into dust, and out beyond the lights Arlen could see silhouetted fronds lying limp in the darkness, untouched by a breeze. Backwoods Florida. He didn’t know the town and didn’t care; regardless of name, it would be his last stop on this train.
He hadn’t seen so many apparitions of death at one time since the war. Maybe leaving the train wouldn’t be enough. Could be there was some sort of virus in the air, a plague spreading unseen from man to man the way the influenza had in ’18, claiming lives faster than the reaper himself.
“What’s the matter?” Paul Brickhill asked, following as Arlen stepped away from the crowd of men and tugged his flask from his pocket. Out here the sight was enough to set Arlen’s hands to shaking-men were walking in and out of the shadows as they moved through the cars and down to the station platform, slipping from flesh to bone and back again in a matter of seconds, all of it a dizzying display that made him want to sit down and close his eyes and drink long and deep on the whiskey.