MicroHorror

The first train was scheduled to arrive in the morning.

It was nearly midnight and the air was cool and clear. Bobby Jenkins sat on the town’s sole bluff watching the work crew laying track. He had been asleep on the coarse blanket that served as his bed, but the noise had woken him–that familiar clang of hammers against steel. So he snuck out as his father snored on and muttered in his sleep; his father often claimed to hear low voices in the dark.

Bobby thought the work had been finished; he had watched it progress for over a year, ever since he’d heard the first explosion. “That’s the ’glycerine,” his father told him, wild-eyed. After that, the tracks appeared, and the workmen with them.

The coming of the railroad was the most exciting thing that had happened to this town since he’d been alive–Bobby was born the day the war for the Union had ended. He read Andy Dibble’s newspaper as best he could and he was excited when they said that this was the beginning of a new age–that of the “iron horses.”

The boy preferred watching the workers to going to school: the iron men, the spikemen, the trackmen. They were gruff and strong, all, wearing hats and overalls, swinging hammers and picks. They smoked constantly and used words that his father spoke rarely and, when he did, prayed about for days after.

Earlier in the week, Bobby had seen the tracks finally meet the station–a barren patch of land with one spare but newly built cottage of wood and tar. The men let out whoops and hollers. Andy printed a front-page story saying that the tracks were operational and the first train would arrive in the early hours of November 1.

But now this night crew was working nearly a mile back from that station house. Bobby did not recognize any of these silent and disparate men. They were certainly not of the same rowdy group he had watched all year, though none of them had been locals either.

The railroad bosses had scouted the area before beginning construction. They knew right away that the townspeople didn’t have the strength or the numbers to do this grueling work; the population was a mere hundred and fifty, quiet and sad folks. It had started as nearly a thousand, but disease hit hard; Indian attacks, too. There were accidents, and so many men lost in the war. Now, it was nearly a ghost town. And so they called it Deadman. The water to the west was known as Deadman’s Sound.

But the tycoons saw money here, and with the lure of money comes people. Thus, the railroad.

Bobby’s father spoke against this. “The dead run this town. You can’t tell me otherhow,” he said. “And the dead don’t like the living–not us and certainly not outsiders.” Bobby was surprised at how many of his neighbors listened, as if they heard voices as well.

“Boy,” his father whispered to him alone, “don’t expect them to stand for this.”

But Bobby was happy. This first train was bringing in workers and families. It would be a fresh start for a place preoccupied with ghosts.

From below him, the only sounds were of tools splitting the tracks. Cutting them, turning them. The men did not rest; there were many of them and they moved fast. They were blue in the moonlight.

Bobby breathed in the rising mist and soon fell asleep. He dreamed of an empty town.

As the night wore on, the men continued to work. They re-laid the rails with great efficiency, leading them leftward, away from their original path. When they finished, just before dawn, the tracks ran to the water, with no stop and no end. The men disappeared in the light of the sun as the train sped toward town from the south.

It would arrive in Deadman as scheduled.