Malorie(41)

Malorie sleeps.

Rocked to sleep.

And the hours pass.

And the dreams that come include Sam and Mary Walsh. At turns they stand before her, living, before becoming dust, sand blown away by a moving train, two tiny points in infinity that no sane woman can be expected to find.

And in the dreams there are creatures.

Everywhere.





FIFTEEN


Despite the setting, the voices of other people, the sound of guitars being played, the motion of the train, and the man Dean himself sitting across a table she has not and will not see, Malorie still thinks of her parents. And how can she not? The last time she rode a train, it was with them, the Wolverine Line, from Detroit to Chicago, as Dad spent the beginning of his vacation in the bar car and his two daughters stared out the train windows, watching a wholly new landscape pass with more precision than it ever did in a minivan. It was exhilarating then, two Upper Peninsula teens heading to the big city for the first time in their lives. They only saw a sliver of Detroit, their drive down taking them over the bridge, through Mackinaw City, Gaylord, Bay City, Flint, and Saginaw before reaching the bustle of the suburbs of Detroit, the very area Shannon and Malorie would eventually move to, shortly before Shannon looked out a window and took her own life. Back then, on the Wolverine Line, the car full to capacity, Dad laughing with strangers in the bar car, Mom reading a book across the aisle, the idea of Chicago might as well have been Oz. Glittering constructs and shimmering suits, magic in every brick and bone.

“Here,” Dean says. He guides Malorie’s hand to a plate. “Fruit if you want it.”

Malorie, blindfolded, wonders if it’s possible that somehow the very train they took to Chicago, the cars themselves, made their way through some sort of boxcar arc, orphans moved from one location to another, so that here she sits in the very same rectangle that she and her sister once rode, feeling then the electricity of infinity ahead.

“Shoot,” Dean says. “Hit me with all you want to know.”

But before she does, a woman’s voice comes close.

“Dean,” the woman says. “There’s a man in car six who thinks a spider or some bug is crawling on him. I keep telling him I don’t see anything, but he insists.”

“And he wants us to get rid of it?”

“I guess so.”

Dean laughs. It sounds genuine to Malorie.

“Some people do expect old-world luxuries when they board, Jill.”

Malorie momentarily thinks that he’s talking to the woman. She’s forgotten she is “Jill.”

“Car six?” he asks the woman.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take care of it. Thanks.”

Then, the two are alone again. Only they’re not. Malorie hears the quiet conversation of other people. Hears them discussing cities in Michigan, the telegram, the fact that they’re on a train and if a train again, why not everything again, why not the entire old world again, sooner than later?

Malorie imagines Tom the man sitting across from her, sitting everywhere in here. It’s been sixteen years. In a way, she attributes this progress to him. This is what he’s accomplished. He’s brought back the train.

Just like he once brought back a phone book that led Malorie to the school for the blind, then to Camp Yadin, where a man delivered a pile of papers with her parents’ names on them.

“All right,” Dean says. “Hit me.”

“How many times has a creature got on board?”

“None.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I suppose I don’t. But the people who went mad on this train saw something outside.”

“How do you know?”

“Again, maybe I don’t. But myself and the other staff walk around without folds. So, I suppose something would’ve happened to one of us by now had there been one on board. Again, the people who went—”

“You said people transport dead bodies.”

“We deliver them, yes.”

“Are there any on board right now?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Two caskets in storage car one. About exactly where we first met. By the back door. I would recommend not sleeping in there. Smells a bit of the grave.”

“Thank you for the honesty.”

“Any sunnier questions? Like, how many people died putting the train back together?”

“I’m sorry,” Malorie says. “But right now all I care about is those two teens. All I care about is getting them where we’re going safely.”

“Well, where are you going?”

“I don’t feel like telling you that.”

“But I’m someone who might be able to give you the most direct route.”

“I don’t feel like saying.”

“Fair enough.”

“Are there any passengers on this train that worry you?”

“Worry me? No. There is a blind woman, but she’s better off than any of us. Why do you wear the hoodie and gloves?”

The question catches Malorie off guard. It’s the first time she’s felt anything close to being socially self-conscious in a long time. It’s an old-world state of mind she has not missed.

“You think they can drive us mad by touching us,” Dean says.