The Black Train

CHAPTER ELEVEN I

—knees before the toilet to vomit harder than he ever had in his life. Holy ever-living HELL, Collier thought in the mad, wincing turmoil. He didn’t remember stumbling to the bathroom, but he did remember the nightmare…

With each pulse of vomit, the alarm pulsed in the bedroom. The images from the nightmare assailed him, and ghosts of discomfort throbbed at his anus and his left nipple. When he was done, his stomach squeezed dry, his vomit floated in the toilet like an inch of oatmeal.

The worst dream of my life…

He sat on the bathroom floor, head between his knees.

It was the first time he’d ever dreamed he was a woman—

Not just a woman, a Civil War whore…

When he could bear the buzz of the alarm no more, he straggled up and smacked it off. It was twenty-five before seven. Oh, shit, he recalled. Church. While showering, the distress in his belly sharpened when he recalled the ludicrous incident with Lottie and, worse, the awful hallucination of those four small hands titillating him…

And the dog.

I got the triple whammy last night, he groaned to himself as he dressed. And didn’t J.G. Sute say that someone was murdered in the bath closet?

And was that trace smell of urine his imagination or…

Downstairs he heard early risers chatting over the light breakfast Mrs. Butler served every morning. Collier stepped quickly past the dining room door, so not to be seen. Then he turned for the door and noticed—

The fancy antique desk sat recessed within the wall, close to the small portrait of Mrs. Gast. The same place it was in the dream. Collier knew his dreaming mind had been quite creative last night, producing the morbid dream out of pieces of things he’d heard. My name was Harriet and I just got raped every which way, and then I saw that weird little dude sitting at that desk, the guy with the messed-up nose. Of course his mind had remembered Dominique’s story of a similar man sitting at the same desk during the wedding reception. He reread the tiny metal plate: ORIGINAL MAPLE WRITING TABLE—QUEEN ANNE-STYLE—SAVERY AND SONS—1779. It was no big deal, he knew, but…

In the dream, I saw the guy put a stack of papers…

His fingers fished around one by one through the letter slots. The slots were quite deep. In one he found an inexplicable business card that read PHILTY PHIL’S BAR! ST. PETE BEACH, FLORIDA. The card was obviously new. He forced his fingers down deep into the very next slot—

Something there…

With finesse and some aggravation, his forefinger and middle finger managed to seize something and pull it out.

A sheaf of very old, heather gray sheets of paper, oblong-shaped, about seven inches by three. The same things he’d seen the man in the dream put in this self-same desk.

Don’t freak out, Collier warned himself. Up front, it seemed impossible, but coincidence more easily explained it. I noticed them when I first saw the desk, but wasn’t consciously aware of it…

Or so he hoped.

The stack seemed about sixty pages thick, and some were white instead of the heather gray. He’d seen one before already, in one of Mrs. Butler’s displays. They were paychecks from the era, and he supposed they might even be moderately valuable to a collector. He read the first one.

RECEIVED OF: Mr. R.J. Myers, AGENT OF THE EAST TENNESSEE AND GEORGIA RAILROAD COMPANY, Fifty DOLLARS.

The date: April 30, 1862, and at the bottom was scribed a signature: Windom Fecory.

Windom Fecory, Collier thought back. The man whom the bank is named after. The man with the gold nose…

Collier peeled off a few of the checks and put them in his pocket. Maybe Mr. Sute knows exactly what these things are. The rest he put back in the slot.

But what of the rest of the nightmare?

Morris, the john in the whorehouse, he thought. Didn’t I see his name on something in one of the display cases? One of Harwood Gast’s rail workers, no doubt. But it could still be explained by a subconscious recollection; even the dull but precise pain in his left nipple could be explained. Collier had to wonder if he was hunting for proof of something supernatural now. I wonder what a therapist would say. “Well, Doctor, last night I dreamed I was a woman and I got corn-holed by a rugged railroad worker. Oh, and I also got drunk with a bunch of gay guys earlier.”

Why bother trying to figure it out?

The morning air outside refreshed him; he was at the church in less time than he thought. As he waited for Dominique, some other people standing outside the church door seemed to be eyeing him, so he moseyed away so not to seem abrupt.

“What are you doing over here?” Dominique asked, appearing around the corner. Collier was stunned. She wore a refreshing camel tan wrap-dress with a smart belt. Her eyes glittered in the morning light.

“Oh, I—”

“I keep forgetting, the Prince of Beer doesn’t want to be made,” she giggled.

“Exactly. Especially at church.”

Collier wasn’t prepared when she gave him a peck on the lips. Her soap and shampoo, as usual, turned him on in a big way; even her mouthwash and toothpaste seemed enticing.

“I…missed you,” he uttered, and then felt ridiculous afterward.

“Good,” she said, and took his hand. The chattering precongregation—mostly middle-aged and elderly couples—began to enter the church when the steeple bell began to clang.

She said very chirpily, “Let’s go in now and ask God to forgive us for our sins.”

“Sure,” Collier said. In my case, it better be a long fucking service… II

“All right, bitch. You want it bad, so you’re gonna get it. Bad.”

“Yes, yes!” J.G. Sute had huffed.

That’s how it had started, but how it had ended was another story…

Naked on the bed, the 300-pounder looked like an obese cartoon. It was less than an inspiring image, and worse were the dream fragments that haunted Jiff from last night’s nightmare. Jiff had dreams like that sometimes, and never understood it. Civil War dreams, along with the most awful images, and last night had been the worst. He’d seen wagons full of people so skinny they looked like living skeletons. Most were naked but the ones still clothed were stripped by slaves. Several male Indians stood around, waiting, with knives in their belts, their eyes keen and patient. The place was so hot. Next thing Jiff knew he was shoveling coal into a vast furnace, and he’d been able to see people bubbling inside…

Jiff bit his lip till the images were gone.

He stood naked in front of his prone and cringing client. For the course of the next hour came pleas, like: “I love you, I love you,” then a hard slap! and “Please! I deserve it! I deserve the pain because I’m not worthy of your love,” then a harder smack! and, “Jiff, my love. I need you to hurt me…”

Like that.

Throughout the regimen, however, shreds of Jiff’s nightmare kept pecking at his mind: women and old men, plus children, bald and starving, standing in a line but—

A line for what?

Aw, God…

Exactly what use Jiff made of the rubber glove need not be mentioned, nor need it be mentioned what and how many areas of J.G. Sute’s corpulent body he’d used the “Naughty Girl Clips” on. His client had wanted pain this time, and it was pain he’d received, until he was a sobbing, sniffling, quivering mass.

Debasement, too, was on this morning’s one-hundred-dollar agenda; hence, the wine goblet. It need not be mentioned what fluid other than wine Jiff filled it with and then forced Sute to consume.

“I’m so unworthy—I’m scum! Shit on me if you like!”

Even for a hundred bucks, Jiff was not quite up to that. As a “grand finale,” however, he slapped his client up a few more times, then took a big hock in his face, but while he was engaged in these final tweaks, he swore he could still see the stoked flames from the dream furnace, thought sure he could still hear the screams…

When services had been properly rendered, J.G. Sute sobbed tears of joy as his elephantine body shuddered.

“My love, I could die now…”

Freak show’s over. Jiff loped to the bathroom sink to wash up. I just cain’t do this shit anymore. When he returned to the bedroom, he was relieved to see that Sute had wiped his face off and donned his robe. The man looked dreamy-eyed now, his demented needs slaked. “That was wonderful,” he sighed.

“Yeah, yeah.” Jiff stood listlessly at the liquor cabinet. He wasn’t going to tell the man that this was his last trick with him. “Mind if I have a shot?”

“What’s mine is yours, my love.”

Jesus. Jiff’s eyes scoured the shelves: Asombroso tequila, Macallan thirty-year-old scotch, Johnnie Walker Green. Shit, he ain’t got no Black Velvet? He poured himself an inch of something and sat down bare-assed on a William and Mary wing-back chair.

Now that his perverse duties were over, his nightmare filtered back into his head.

“Jiff, you look inconsolable.”

The liquor bit hard. “Huh?”

“You appear to be troubled by something…”

“Bad dream, is all. I get ’em sometimes—don’t rightly know why.” The horrid images felt like bruises in the back of his brain. “Dreamed I was a coal shoveler, back durin’ the war.”

“Heaver,” Sute corrected. “That was the official job title in those days. A coal heaver. They shoveled sixteen hours a day, for about fourteen dollars a month.” Sute’s “afterglow” left him relaxed, or perhaps it was just Jiff’s presence. It was a conversation, not a demented sexual scenario. “A contributing factor to the C.S.A.’s surrender was its inability to mine coal as effectively as the North. You were a Confederate coal heaver I take it?”

Jiff’s nude pecs popped when he rubbed his brow. “Naw, and I weren’t paid no fourteen bucks a month, neither. See, in this dream, I was a black man. I was a slave.”

Sute’s bulbous face creased in concern. “You seem terribly upset, Jiff. It was only a dream. But this is interesting. Where were you working?”

“What’s that?”

“Where were you shoveling this coal? A supply ship? A locomotive?”

Jiff shook his head. “A big furnace, and I mean really big.”

Sute’s attention became more focused. “And how do you know it was during the war?”

“On account’a the place was full up with Confederate guards all walkin’ ’round with bayonets on their rifles. They was all callin’ me nigger’n tellin’ me I’m dead meat if I don’t keep shovelin’. Bunch’a other black fellas with me doin’ the same thing. Seemed like the dream went on forever: me throwin’ in one shovel fulla coal after the next. Place was so hot I could feel my skin blisterin’.” Jiff took another inch of scotch and sighed. “I been havin’ weird dreams every now and then long as I can remember, always durin’ the war, but each time I’m someone else, and it’s always horrible.”

“Slavery was a horrible thing, Jiff.”

“Aw, shit, that ain’t what I mean. The really horrible part was what they was usin’ that furnace for.”

“Smelting ore, I presume.”

Jiff shook his head. “Weren’t no ore in the place that I could see. It was more like a prison camp. See, we was shovelin’ the coal into the fuel chutes on one side, but on the other side, the soldiers was throwin’ people into the furnace.”

“What?”

“Yup. They’d bring folks in a few at a time; women and kids, mostly, and most of ’em were naked—see, they come offa these wagons outside. Some still had their clothes on but they was all shit’n puke-stained and fulla bugs. Then every now’n then some Indian fellas’d bring in more women, and each time they done so, a soldier’d give ’em some money.”

“Delivery fees,” Sute said. “Same thing as a bounty. Gast’s deputies frequently recruited nearby Indians to round up civilians who’d fled their homes as the Union forces encroached. Strange that you should dream something so accurate.”

“Aw, shit, but that weren’t the worst part,” Jiff went on, beating down his disgust with the liquor. “Lotta the women they brung in was pregnant, and the kids, too, just little girls, all starin’ out with big hollow eyes in their skinny faces like they ain’t et in weeks. And the soldiers just fed ’em all right into the furnace. Didn’t even think twice about it.”

Sute went silent.

“Babies, too, they was throwin’ in. We could see inside’n the fire was so hot sometimes the person they throwed in would just explode. Others looked like they was melting. Like they’d just turn into vapor.”

Sute lumbered up and began rubbing Jiff’s shoulders. “You’re letting the legends get the best of you. Come and lie down with me…”

But Jiff was spacing out. “Finally, I fall down. I’m so weak, see, that I can’t shovel no more coal, so…so—”

“What happened?”

“The soldiers throwed me into the furnace…”

Sute stroked Jiff’s face from behind. “It’s just the legend, Jiff, it’s the legend. Put it out of your mind.”

“That’s just it, J.G.—my mind. Why in hell would my mind serve up somethin’ so vile? And after I got tossed in, I just kept burnin’. I could see the flesh smokin’ right off my body, but the nightmare still wouldn’t end. Finally I did wake up, and I was screamin’ bloody murder. And you know what? ’bout a minute later, I heard Lottie screamin’, too—her bedroom’s right next to mine. How fucked up is that? Lottie cain’t talk, can’t barely make no sound at all. But she was screamin’, too, like she was havin’ a nightmare herself. Jesus H. Christ, I hope she didn’t have the same one as me.”

“I’m sorry to see you in such duress, Jiff.” Sute was nearly in tears. This was the first time that Jiff had ever confided in him, the first time he’d ever regarded Sute as more than just a kink trick. “Stay with me. Let me make you breakfast.”

Shit, Jiff thought. What am I doin’? He snapped out of it. He’s right, it was just a dumb dream, and I’m all actin’ like a baby about it. He pulled away from his client and began to dress. “Naw, I gotta go. Got work at the inn.” He blinked away the remaining dream fragments yet still felt his stomach souring.

Sute sat back down on the bed, morose that the love of his life was leaving. “If it’s any consolation, Jiff, a long time ago I spent the night at the inn when my roof was being reshingled. You were just a teenager then. But I had a nightmare, too, that’s similar to yours in some ways.”

Jiff paused to look at him.

“I dreamed that I was a Confederate general, who’d sold his soul to the devil, and the first man I met after making the pact was Harwood Gast.”

Jiff felt as though a tarantula had just skimmed up his back. He didn’t want to hear anything about the devil. But he had to ask, “J.G.? You think a place can make nightmares, ’cos of what happened in it in the past?”

“Well, that’s one endless rumor about the Gast House, Jiff. But in truth…no. I really don’t think so.”

“I hope not.”

“It’s ironic, though: the content of your nightmare as well as the history of your mother’s inn. That man from the TV show is quite interested in the topic. He’s almost obsessed with the Gast legend.”

Jiff eyed his client with suspicion. “Yeah?”

“Seems quite odd, doesn’t it? A book writer and celebrity from California, so taken by a Southern ghost story.”

Yeah, I guess it is…“He’s a nice guy and all but this town definitely ain’t the place for him.”

“Southern pride.” Sute managed a smile. “I’ll call you again soon.”

For a split second, he had the most noxious vision: Jiff was shoving Sute into the furnace’s fiery maw. His hand was shaking when he grabbed the doorknob. And, no, he wasn’t going to tell Sute yet that he was dumping him as a client. The tricks were so much easier at the Spike. He’d simply had enough. I’ll tell him next time he calls, he decided, and just said for now, “See ya later.” Then Jiff turned to leave.

“Gracious, Jiff. You really are out of sorts, aren’t you?”

Jiff turned. “Huh?”

“You were about to do something you’ve never done before.”

Jiff was getting irritated. “What’cha talkin’ about?”

“You almost walked out of here without your money,” Sute informed him and smiled. Then he gave Jiff a check for one hundred dollars.