Ghost Train

Waiting for the 6 train at Union Square, normally a hurricane of activity, dead at four in the morning. Cory worked the night shift at The Inn in Gramercy Park, which usually allowed him to work on his horror novel Taken (nothing to do with the Liam Neeson movies). Once Kevin would relieve him, he’d spark a joint and meet Carla for a late dinner (her breakfast) at the Waverly Diner. The diner was a routine they had since Eugene Lang, when they stayed up late to watch disturbing horror movies into all hours of the night, roaming the streets buzzing with a feeling like the world had tilted, before they’d make their way downtown for omelets.

Listening to the song “Dance Macabre” from a band called Ghost, maybe he was thinking about ghosts…? Well, he was always thinking about ghosts. Had this idea for a book he’d been working on about ghosts who steal warm bodies, so they could get back to the side of living. But it was tricky for the ghosts. They couldn’t simply snap into a mortal. They had to coax their way in, be a familiar, an image of a loved one passed. Many times throughout Cory’s life, he felt the essence of something beyond this world, a window into another realm. Carla believed it too. They kept a journal, documentations of this essence. New York City with a population of nine million, all the dead souls who had passed haunting its pavements. Anyone who didn’t believe in the supernatural, unworthy of their time.

A lady sat on the wooden bench eating her newspaper, chewing with delicious abandon. He kept his distance. A rumbling echoing from down the tunnel. Two lights bathing in the abyss. A roar of steel, wheels sharp against the tracks, sparks flying, but no train. A faint image of windows whipping by, a blue hue lingering as it passed, straphangers hanging on, except no people, just the vague impression of someone who once was, before the train flew away, escaping into the black.

Cory swallowed, aware of his cottonmouth and the joint he inhaled. “Whoa.”

He turned to the newspaper eater and she coughed, the phlegm gurgling, before she spat out a wad covered in blood.

–

“You won’t fucking believe what happened,” Cory said, sitting down. Carla already hoovering a black coffee. She had her nest of hair up in a bun, dark mascara ringed around her eyes, her clothes ripped like she’d been slashed, each fingernail painted a different color that held the coffee.

She yawned at the morning. “I don’t ever think I’ve seen you this animated.”

True. Cory always maintained. It’s how he dealt with the city, his anxiety. If he always maintained, he’d never freak out and could limit his meds. Why he chose the night shift at The Inn, so he wouldn’t have to deal with anyone else. By eight when he clocked in, guests had already checked into their rooms. The clientele older, so less likely to stay out late. Once it hit eleven, he could usually start writing.

He kept a small pad. Had millions of them. How he wrote everything down. A madman’s scrawling. One day, all the little notebooks would make sense. They’d congeal into one masterpiece.

“So, I’m at Union Square…” he began, in disbelief that the newspaper chewing woman wouldn’t even be in this story. “And I hear this train, chug, chug, chug…”

“Choo-choo,” Carla said, pulling on an imaginary lever. She’d inhaled a joint too.

“But no train.”

“Like one of those workmen trains that just keeps going?”

Cory shook his head. He needed sugar to tell this story. He tipped his head back and poured some down his throat. That got the synapses firing.

“No. No train. Like a fucking ghost train.”

The waiter came by to ask what they wanted, but they couldn’t be interrupted so they shooed him away.

Carla chewed her lip ring. “OK, the train was a ghost, or it was a train filled with ghosts?”

“Both!”

She made a rock n’ roll symbol with her hand. “Gnarly.”

Carla looked so cute. Sometimes it broke Cory’s heart that they’d never be more than friends. They kissed, once, a zillion moons ago, high off mushrooms after kissing the wall. It felt right, but also so wrong, like it would change everything between them. But it didn’t. It happened that one time and they wouldn’t let it ruin what they had. Because what they had was too special.

“Then what happened?” Carla asked, practically foaming at the mouth.

“Nothing, it went into the tunnel.”

She jumped up and grabbed his hand. “We have to go back.”

“We didn’t eat.”

“Fuck eating,” she shouted to the mostly empty diner.

Maurice at the front gave her a screwy look.

“Sorry, Maurice, I love your grub. We’ll be back!”

Maurice rolled his eyes as Carla whisked Cory out of the diner. How it was—Carla the idea person, Cory taggling along. He liked not making decisions. His home life was such a mess, he had to make way too many decisions growing up. Cleaning up his mom’s puke every night after she’d devour a fifth of gin ever since his father burned to crisp as a first responder during 9/11. He’d been in the womb at the time, waiting to be ushered into a world covered in ash.

They made their way back to Union Square, the city still empty so early in the morning, like he wished it could be forever. Cory loved the city during the pandemic, quiet as a whisper. He could hear birds. He could hear himself think. He could walk for miles and not see anyone. He was living in a horror story, and missed those times when it felt like he and Carla were the only people who existed.

“Was this the precise place?” she asked.

Newspaper Eater still held court at the bench.

“Yeah, she was there,” Cory said, nodding at the woman who’d replaced newspapers for a People Magazine.

A normal 6 train came by. And another. They waited an hour as the station filled up with early morning commuters.

“Maybe the trick is coming back at the exact same time you saw it?”

“Kevin showed up early, so I left. It probably was four on the dot when I saw it.”

“Then it’s date, Duck, tomorrow at the tracks at four.”

“Duckie, I was really high…”

She covered his mouth, her lips so close, lipstick black as her hair. He could smell the coffee she drank.

“No, don’t discount it. You do that all the time. This was real, Duck, I can feel it… The energies here.”

Newspaper Eater bolted up in her seat. “No, no, no,” she howled like an owl. Her face lined with dirt. Hair wild like a flame. He could see her tongue, brown like spoiled liver, an indication she didn’t have long. He saw it in his mother before her end, how the body just decays. She smelled of vinegar and was upon them, thrashing around, bits of newspaper crumbling from her mouth. She shook her fists.

“No, no, no,” she pleaded again. “They will take.”

Carla pushed the woman away. The woman did a twirl and landed on her tailbone.

“They will take you,” she cried. Barely anyone in the crowd giving more than a cursory glance.

Cory and Carla ran out of the station, popping up on 14^th Street by the Whole Foods, the air smelling of incense.

“I can’t believe you pushed her!”

“She was on me like a cheap ass suit.” Carla ran her fingers through Cory’s dyed-blonde hair. “I love your roots.”

“I’m growing them out.”

“Anyway, I gotta head to work, but tomorrow, four a.m., you and me and the ghost train.” She walked away, giving the finger from behind. “Bye, Duck.”

Cory walked home, all the way to Leonard Street where he lived in a one-room apartment that included a bed, kitchen, and a bathroom where the door didn’t have enough room to close. He lay on his bed, lighting another joint, absorbing the events that just occurred. He’d seen a ghost train and an unfortunate soul attacked him and Carla, warning they would be taken. His novel was called Taken. He could forgo sleep and work on it instead. He sat at his desk mere inches from his bed. He kept a picture of his father in view, the man in full firefighter regalia, the last picture his mother had taken when she told him she was pregnant. They’d been dating at the time and he asked her to marry him. He had a bushy mustache from a long-ago era that ate up half of his face, looking like the old Yankees player Don Mattingly. In the picture, Cory could see his mother snapping the pic through a mirror in the distance. She looked so young, before life dug in its teeth. He found himself touching the picture, as if conjuring it into existence. He got a notepad and began scribbling.

When Cory wrote, he left his body. Where he went, he never knew. He was absorbed into Taken, not as a character per se, but as a god pulling the strings. Conducting the chorus. Making it all dance. He wrote about what happened to him and Carla, ending with her running her fingers through his poorly dyed hair. The sun was setting and he had to piss like a devil. His stomach growled, angry, so he went down for a white pizza that he housed on the street.

At The Inn that night, he caught up on a little sleep after midnight. He had a dream of being born, having dreamed this nightmare before, but not for a while. In the dream, he was born to a woman who wept. She cried so hard her tears sounded like bombs. Outside of the hospital room, a plane flew into the Twin Towers. Unable to reach her husband as he plunged into the wreckage never to be found, the woman screamed for the father of her child, but he never came. She never gave up screaming.

“Wakey, wakey,” he heard, as his eyes pushed through the film, and he saw Kevin tapping him on the shoulder.

Cory shot up. “Fuck, what time is it?” He began grabbing his stuff.

“Four on the dot,” Kevin said, showing his Apple watch.

“Fuck.”

Cory tore out of The Inn, rushing to Union Square. A pro at smoking, he managed to inhale a joint. He found Carla sitting on the bench where the Newspaper Eater was last morning. Carla crying mascara tears.

“I’m sorry, I overslept.”

She swallowed her cries. “I saw it.”

“You did?”

“I saw my grandmother.”

At the Waverly Diner, they housed omelets: Carla’s vegan, Cory’s loaded with meat. She told him the story. She was the only one on the platform when she heard a faint screeching sound. A gust of wind whipped through the tunnel. Two lights appeared in the mist like a pair of spellbound eyes. A warmth crawled into her blood, shot through her like ice cream. She’d never felt so safe, so surrounded, so at home, not since her grandmother was alive.

She lost her parents to overdosing before she even had a memory of them. Her grandmother swooped in. Already seventy on the time, existing on a diet of cigarettes and Diet Coke, believing in spells and voodoo and evil lurking around every corner. Carla would come home to her grandmother chanting, warding off evil spirits that took her child but would never take her grandbaby. It was the first thing Cory and Carla shared with one another when they met at an orientation party. No one was talking to them, the spooky wallflowers. Carla with her too-green contacts that made her look otherworldly and Cory unable to form a sentence. He chewed too many edibles, afraid to mingle otherwise. Carla sensed his hesitation.

“I like your roots,” she said, pointing with her multi-painted fingernails at his hair. He’d done a piss poor dye job, and it looked like a yellow bomb, Big Bird on his head.

“I got roots,” he said.

“My roots are at the end of a heroin needle,” she said, referencing her long-dead folks.

“Mine are at the bottom of a gin bottle and through a sea of flames,” he said, thinking he never sounded so poetic.

Cory thought of that day they met, which changed his life. How exciting everything appeared afterwards. Carla was excited like that now. He could feel her vibrating energy.

“This blue…” Carla stopped, as she figured out how to explain, how to rightfully put it into words. “Not a light, this blue…existence whisked by me, and I could see people, but they weren’t real people, they were the essence of people.”

“Yes!” he yelled, holding her hands. “That’s what I saw.”

“Like the Ezra Pound poem, ‘In the Station of the Metro—The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.’”

Even though Carla was a poet of horror, she harkened back to the greats from a century before.

“Anyway, the last time I saw Grammy, dying from stomach cancer and all… I mean, you know how bad it was: the back and forth to hospitals. And she was miserable, but, like, holding on.” She stopped to suck back a tear. “She was on that train.”

“No way.”

“All the way. The train whooshed by and there was Grammy. She had these long fingers she used to call E.T. fingers and she was beckoning me, like, come on this train.”

“Did you?”

Carla laughed out of the side of her mouth. “Did I hop the ghost train? No, I did not. How do you even get on a ghost train?”

–

After Cory’s shift at The Inn, Carla met him at a quarter to four and they walked to Union Square. She was a different than her usual self, less bubbly. She nursed a coffee like a lifeline. Cory was the opposite, bouncing down the streets.

“Are you OK?” he asked, because she hadn’t spoken yet.

She shrugged. “Still adjusting.”

“After seeing Grammy?”

Carla got a chill, rare in the spring weather. “I see her everywhere now. Not, like, her ghost. Just in my mind. All the memories.”

“That’s a good thing?”

Carla rubbed her nose, flicked a piece of snot away. “Is it? I just got over her, like, it hurting so much, and now…”

Union Square loomed as Carla flinched.

“I don’t know if…”

“Are you chickening out, Duckie?” Cory asked.

“No, I’m not chickening out, just… The bloom has worn off. First, I was all, Grammy OMG, this is amazing, and now I’m like, WTF, Grammy? Back in my life?”

Cory nudged. “She’s not quite in your life.”

“What if it was your mom?”

An ice cube licked down Cory’s spine. He had put his mother out of his mind a long time ago. It had been six years since she passed, his senior year in high school. They’d been living in Connecticut. He’d just turned eighteen, so he didn’t have to leave his home. He had to deal with getting a lawyer and selling his house. Most of the money went to debts she owed from hospital bills toward the end—she never had decent insurance. He’d gotten a scholarship at Eugene Lang that paid almost full with room and board included. He thought they felt sorry for him. After graduating, with his bank account at zero, he got the job at The Inn. It paid enough for him to get a piece of shit apartment and a bit left over for notepads and omelets at the Waverly Diner.

“My mother’s not on that train,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because she’s already in hell.”

When they got to the platform underground, Cory looked at his watch and saw they had one minute until four.

“So, what’s the plan?” he asked.

“Nothing. We watch it go by. Like always. Bye, Grammy.”

“Or…”

The bowels of the station began to rumble. The sharp screeching of wheels against the tracks. Two headlights beaming from the expanse and then a roar as the ghost train rumbled forth. Through the windows, the souls beckoned, like Carla had described Grammy doing. In one car, Grammy peered through the window while Carla let out a gasp and looked the other way. The car passed by, Grammy’s hollow eyes burning in Cory’s memory.

In the next car, a visage of a man with an extraordinary mustache.

Is it…?

Could it be…?

Cory had been waiting for this possibility. His father whipping by. Still in purgatory from such a harsh and sudden death, unable to let go. Or maybe Cory was the reason he never let go. Because they had never been able to meet in life.

Cory found himself stepping forward, the sparks from the ghost train tickling his nose.

“Cory…” he heard Carla say, but she was already a million miles away. He wouldn’t listen. He kept on. The last car of the train in reach, as he stepped off the platform.

–

Suspended in air. The caress of a feather. A warm sack surrounding him like he was still in the womb, waiting to be born. And then he broke through into the back car of the ghost train. Stepping down on what felt like a cloud. The visages of the people turned his way, stared with a mixture of awe and shock. The old and the sadly young, frozen however they died. His father, or what he believed was his father, a few cars up. He walked past their wretchedness. They glanced up to see if they knew him, if he was there for them, and then lowered their hollowed eyes in despair. All these souls stuck in the in-between, still with business on this Earth. He kept on to his father’s car.

Upon entering, the car had a different feel, warmer than the others, like he was meant to be there. His father at the far end, his mustache glinting in the blue light.

“Dad?” he said, standing in front of him. His father sitting on a scooped seat. Not in the flesh, but close enough. He’d never said the word “Dad” before, never had a reason. If his mother spoke of him, it was always “Frank this, Frank that,” never “your father” because the man never got the chance to be one.

His “father” patted the seat beside him and Cory sat down.

“Dad?”

Cory was beyond tears, shell-shocked, quivering. His heart beating so fast, he thought it would pop out.

“How… What is…?”

The idea of forming words too hard for Cory to manage. He wanted a hug, just one, just to feel him for once.

“I don’t know,” his father said. “Only that I ride this train, through the tunnels, searching.”

“For me?”

“I don’t know what I was searching for, but now that you are here, I think it’s you.”

Cory reached out to touch him, but his hands went right through. Still, an extra warmth lingered on his fingertips. His father’s essence, he believed.

“You died before I was born.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how?”

“…Yes.”

In his father’s hollow eyes, the planes crashed into the towers, brought them down in flames. A hand shot out of the rumble before it became lifeless.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t understand what, Dad?” Even though the circumstance was sad, calling his father “Dad” made Cory smile.

“Don’t understand…” His father gazed around at the other souls who stared back with their hollow eyes. “What I’m doing.”

“On this train?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. You died almost twenty-five years ago. It’s 2025. You were a firefighter. A first responder.”

“Yes, fire.”

“And you ran into a building to save lives, but the building collapsed. I was born that day. You were supposed to come to the hospital, but…”

“I never made it.”

Cory shook his head. “Mom, raised me, but she was never really there, like mentally. She checked out. Became an alcoholic. She’s dead too.”

“Dead?”

“Yes, Dad, everyone on this train… You all are dead.”

“You’re dead too.”

That ice cube from before returned to the top of Cory’s spine, began to trickle down.

“N-no, I’m alive.”

“Then how are you here?”

Cory looked out of the window. Pure blackness. They were in between stations, trapped in the tunnel.

“I stepped on.”

“Why?”

Cory raised his voice. “Because I wanted to see you. Don’t you want to see me?”

“See you?”

“Yes, I’m your son. But we never met in life. So, we are meeting now.”

In his novel, he had written this passage, but it went very differently. He was able to hug his father’s ghost. His father listened to the story of his life. They cried together. And his father told him that whenever Cory needed his presence, to hop on the ghost train, for as long as he lived.

“Don’t you want to hear about me?”

His father remained silent.

“I-I’m writing a book. It’s about you. Well, it didn’t start out that way, but everything I write is about you. Because you were taken away from me too early. It’s called Taken. It’s about ghosts who ride on a train because they haven’t been able to transfer over yet fully to the other side. They want our souls, souls like mine. But you don’t. You just want to be with me, to make up for the time we lost.”

Cory was sniveling, snot pouring from his nose, his eyes red and raw. He felt his father take his hand, the grip tight. If he tried to squirm away, he couldn’t. The train whipped by 23^rd Street, then 33^rd and 42^nd St. Grand Central until the numbers stopped making sense, 248^th Street—that didn’t exist, did it? And then 651^st St., 8,982^nd St., as a sinking feeling sat in the pit of his stomach.

This was not his father.

He tried to yank away, but the ghost’s grip was too tight. The image of his father shedding to reveal what truly existed behind the façade. A shell of a being, no distinguishing features, simply an orb of malevolent energy that crept upon him, covering every inch of his skin. It turned his hands blue. He could sense it rushing through his blood, dark like an oil slick, his veins bulging. It trickled up his neck, primed to pour into his mouth so he could swallow it whole. He resisted, but it pried his lips apart and rushed inside.

Flashes of a former life sizzled. A cruel boy who tortured a dog. A teenager beating up a smaller kid with a bat. An adult in a dank apartment who rose from his sofa to get a beer and opened a freezer full of heads placed on popsicle sticks. A man who chewed human flesh. Who died in a hail of bullets when the cops burst down his door. A sick fuck who wanted back on this planet, riding the ghost train and waiting for a sucker.

The train rattled through the tunnel as Cory felt his own life slip away. The few good memories he had, most of them involving Carla. The two of them walking through New York City the day after the shut-down pretending they were in I Am Legend. How her nose crinkled when she laughed. The many colors of her fingernails. His Duckie.

“Duckie,” he said, the last word he would utter before he was consumed.

The train reached Union Square again, as the wicked being unstuck its essence from Cory’s body. With hollow eyes, Cory watched from the train as it stepped off in Cory’s old body where Carla waited on the platform with her head in her hands.

“Cory,” he heard Carla say, as she jumped up and threw her arms around it.

Cory banged on the window to no avail. Carla wouldn’t look at the ghost train, or ever return again to watch it pass through the station, this he knew.

“Y-you were gone,” she cried. “Like, I thought I lost you.”

Cory watched this other being touch Carla’s face.

“No,” it said. “Don’t worry your pretty head.”

It smiled, sharp as a blade, turning back toward Cory.

Its eyes full of flames, bright as a burning sun.

The train shot into the tunnel, a wisp of its chugging remaining.

The being put its arm around Carla, taking her away.