Secret Trains

Ron Koppelberger

Secret Trains

It was entirely dappled with the crimson droplets , the box, the damn crate. Will Sky stood near the end coach at the rear of the Evening Bullet; the train sang the ever moaning rails with grunts and pounding rhythm, with complaining progress, she had been making the route for a lifetime.
The mystery of the cargo that the dark train carried was an empty, vague illusion draped in shadow and passion, vague like the motes of dust that infer a distance, age and an old character. Will touched the red beaded spray covering the heavy oaken crate, “ What the hell is this?” he wondered.
Will felt older like the tinctured blood of a rusty machine, oil, blood and oil, moving at a snails pace. Oil, human……yet what had happened to this curious rider, the owner of the blood. A Murder had perhaps taken place, who knows he thought.
The train moved closer to its conclusion through darkness and wild advances.
The box ballooned and swelled before Wills tired eyes, unveiled, laid bare it throbbed and proposed secret enormity and a dark hazy mist. Will watched as the nails holding the framework of the box popped free, one by one. Blood poured in streams from the edges and seams of the box. Like some dark magic the box fell open and terrors and surreal dreams prevailed in a cloying mix of blood and oil. Was he an innocent passenger on a midnight train to oblivion, a desperate rider, “Oh god, what is it, Oh god!”
Unclad the doppelganger stared naked beneath an ashen gray sheet covered in oil. What was this…….it had his face……it was him! How, he thought, this can’t be…..“I’m me not this thing!” he gasped aloud.
Exactly like him the sheeted man stood and showed him the wounds on his hands, deep, deadly, final. Will trembled in fear split between curiosity and phantasmic unreality. The doppleganger sang an old song and collapsed to the floor of the box in a heap of gray cloth, oily rags and smoke. Afterward Will looked at his hands and sighed, he must have had something evil to eat he thought wondering about the hallucination.
* Later there was a fire on the night train. Someone had stored oily rags too close to a lantern and the entire car had gone up in flames. Will had run to the front of the car and pounded on the locked door separating the cars. There was a small window between the cars and Will smashed it with his bare hands cutting him severely and mortally wounding hi,.
Thus the cycle moved forward as did the train to futures told in blood and smoke, each car a different story, Wills only one of many. All told by portent and fortune, the Evening Bullet moved ahead on the tracks and for some it was just a way home, for others an endless cycle of revolution, turns given an end to an end to an end………