The Black Train

“Um-hmm. Ooooo. She tells me she’s going to bed and I can lock up when I’m done. If I need anything, I can just call out for Jiff ’cos he’s around mopping the floors.”

Collier errantly touched her shoulder. “Please tell me you went upstairs to look around.”

“Of course I did. But by now I have to admit I was a little freaked. Most of the lights were out, and the place was real quiet. I’m positive that no one came down the stairs because you can see both stairwells from the atrium. So I go up…”

Collier was becoming intrigued. “Yeah?”

“It’s dark up there. The minute I set foot on the landing, I regretted it. But I look anyway. All the doors were open to air the rooms…except one. It was locked.”

“Room two?” Collier asked.

She looked surprised. “Yeah.”

“That’s the room next to the one I’m staying in. It’s also the room where Penelope Gast and her maid were murdered.”

Dominique’s look of surprise darkened. “I didn’t know that. How do you—”

“Well, I mean that’s what Mr. Sute told me,” Collier amended.

“Wow,” she paused, reflecting.

“So—come on—what did you see upstairs?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Collier felt cheated. “Nothing?”

“Nothing yet. I didn’t see the guy and when I looked out the windows I didn’t see the two girls but—and this is the unsettling part—I did smell something.”

An irrepressible chill swept up Collier’s back. Please don’t tell me you smelled—

“I smelled urine. Jeez, I’ll never forget it. Old urine, like when you walk under an expressway bridge where homeless people pee. It seemed to emanate from that door—room two. I actually got down on my knees to look in the keyhole, and that’s where the smell was coming from—right from that hole.”

Collier didn’t know what to say, or what he might add to corroborate.

“But the funniest part? It was gone a minute later.”

“The smell, you mean.”

“Right. One minute the hall reeked, and the stench coming out of that keyhole was so strong it was like steam. And the next minute…”

“Gone like it was never there.”

She nodded slowly.

Collier remained silent for several steps; then her face turned mischievous.

“Either you just swallowed a frog or…something’s bothering you all of a sudden.”

Collier decided what the hell. “I’ve smelled the same thing a time or two myself.”

“I love it!” But then her enthusiasm lapsed. “But, you know, it’s probably just a rotten carpet or something. Mildew.”

“Yeah, maybe. That would be a much more sensible reason why Mrs. Butler never rents that room. It’s just unserviceable, not haunted,” he said, but continued in thought: Haunted…by urine?

“Sure. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe I’m more impressionable than I think, and I simply thought I smelled it.”

Collier pushed his hair back. “Your mind invented it, in other words?”

“Yeah.”

“Dominique, what reason would your subconscious mind make you think you were smelling…that?”

“Because of the story!” she exclaimed as though it were obvious. “You know. The whole ‘Mrs. Tinkle’ thing. I’m sure J.G. Sute told you about that, didn’t he?”

“No, but Mayor Snodden did. Some kinky ‘water sport’ fetish is what I assumed.”

“No, no, that’s not it.”

“Well then what is?” Collier insisted. “Why did people call her Mrs. Tinkle behind her back?”

Dominique almost blushed. “Same reason they called her ‘Penelope Piss.’ You don’t know?”

“No! So tell me!”

She seemed coyly uncomfortable now. “That’s what she’d always have her secret lovers do. You know. You never heard of Redneck Birth Control?”

“What?”

“A Southern Douche? Jeez. I guess I have to explain everything…as gross as it is. Whenever her lovers were…done…”

Collier finally put the pieces together. They urinated in her after they came, to wash the sperm out. For shit’s sake! “All right, I get it.”

“And the rumor is she always took her lovers to the same room—the door marked room two now—and that’s why it always reeked of urine.”

“How charming,” Collier muttered. Yes indeedy. A Southern Douche.

“It didn’t always work, of course,” she added. “Penelope had several abortions.”

“Sute was kind enough to point that out.”

A stasis passed as they walked. Collier presumed her story was over. “Oh, look,” she said and immediately stood on her tiptoes.

Collier’s sudden leg fetish raged. Her shapely calves tensed as bare heels elevated in the sandals. Then he pictured her standing like that bent over nude…

Pervert. The word clacked in his head like two stones smacking. Pervert, pervert, pervert…

“The moon,” she said. “Tell me that’s not creepy…”

They’d walked to the end of the side street. There were no streetlamps here. Crossing the road at an angle was another length of track sunken in the bricks. It extended past the street and seemed to continue into scrubby grassland. Collier walked out farther with her and actually found the rail still mounted securely on century-and-a- half-old railroad ties. An oblong moon the color of brick cheese glowed eerily in a shallow sky.

In the oddest vertigo, like a snippet of nightmare, Collier saw a woman’s face, grinning in a wanton evil, then skeletal hands rising up toward the moon.

The face of the mirage belonged to Penelope Gast…

“I second that,” he finally said. “Perfect setting for your ghost story.”

“And that’s the land, right out there. God knows how many acres, not used for anything anymore.”

He realized after the fact that they were holding hands.

Something almost like a hidden terror trembled in him. Who did that? Me? Her? He didn’t know…

“And it never will be,” she continued, gazing. “People really do believe the land is hexed by what Gast did out there.”

Staking the heads of slaves and hoeing them into the earth, he remembered. It was monstrous, but…

Collier wasn’t particularly focused on town history anymore. Oh my God, this girl… His blood felt like oil heating up on a stove top, just from the warm sensation of her hand.

“And in a way, even though all that scrubland out there is pretty ugly…there’s still something beautiful about it.”

“Yes, there is,” Collier agreed without even getting it.

The low moonlight on her face surrealized her features, leaving lines and wedges black but luminescing the rest. Now her eyes looked bottomless, the swell of her bosom and the moonshine on her legs a threshold to something that transcended the reality of his lust. Collier had never seen a more beatific face in his life.

Who turned whom, then? Collier didn’t know. She remained on tiptoes when he suddenly found himself kissing her. Her grip on his hand tightened and grew hotter; the tips of their tongues met. Her other hand stole around his back and urged him closer, and when he slid his mouth off her lips and ran it down the side of her neck,