Haunted Legends (14 page)

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria is one of the most shadowy and controversial figures of Russian history, so it is not surprising that his former address figures in many ghost stories. There is a phantom limousine that stops by his house every night, and then there are the ghosts inside. Among all the different versions of this legend, I chose the most horrific. The actual life of Beria is just as shrouded in mystery, horror, and contradictory
reports—the stories of kidnappings and rapes coexist with legends of giant meat grinders and other infernal torture devices in his basement; little hard evidence was found for any of them. Even his role in history is not entirely free of controversy—most know him as Stalin’s butcher, but some argue that after Stalin’s death he was on the forefront of reformism.

For me, this story was an opportunity to talk not only about a great evil, but of regular people complicit in it. How does one live after something like that?

John Mantooth teaches seventh-grade English and drives a school bus in central Alabama. His short stories have appeared in
Shroud, Feral Fiction, Shimmer,
and
Fantasy.
Currently, he’s finishing up his master’s thesis: a collection of Southern noir about hard men, dead babies, and vehicular collisions
.

I imagined Suzy running across a great expanse of prairie, hair swept back by the wind, mouth opened to a laughing smile. For the prairie I used cut grass from the yard, taking time to glue each blade to the inside of the shoebox. Above her, cotton-ball clouds hang beneath an orange-peel sun. On either side are the things she loved in life: Skittles; Barbie dolls, represented by tiny, color cut-outs from
Girls’ Life Magazine;
miniature plastic puppy dogs I found at a garage sale; and a beaded necklace, each bead painstakingly looped along a filament of thread no larger than a wisp of hair. Her hair, or so I like to imagine.

As for Suzy herself, I found her at the flea market, a glorious little figurine at the bottom of a box of toys. I knew the second I saw her. Something about the eyes, the smile, the windswept hair. It was Suzy.

I found the others in much the same way. Oh, not all of them were ready-made like Suzy. I had to piece Samantha together from old action figures, but eventually, I got her right.

When I started them, three years ago, just after the wreck, I had plans of calling the parents, the families, inviting them over to my room, showing them what I’d done, how hard I’d worked to denounce that day, to make their children alive again. I imagined them impressed, murmuring to each other, pointing at the level of detail, marveling at how I seemed to get everything just right. There would be tears, of course, but I’d wrap them up with hugs, and the tears would never hit the ground. Instead I would soak them all up in the folds of my shirt, so that when the families left, I could hang it in my
closet unwashed, and touch it each day, another reminder of what I’d wrought.

Today, I stand inside my room and survey the six shoeboxes, wondering what might be done. I can think of nothing new, so I go to them one at a time, starting with Michael, ending with Suzy—Adriana, Phillip, Adam, and Samantha in between—the order I see them when I dream. I listen, their voices welling up from deep inside the boxes, soft sounds like murmuring wind. Leaning closer, I mold the sounds into words and they become a chant I cannot understand. But later, when the house is silent and I’m in my bed, drifting freely from sleep to waking and back again, I’m able to just make out what they are saying:

The dead do not haunt the living.

•  •  •

I thought about moving. After all, how many train engineers would stay in the same community where they caused such tragedy? Besides, by the time I got around to putting my house on the market, I’d already started the shoeboxes, and I needed to be here on the south side of San Antonio to finish them. Not that anyone has ever bothered me much about it. Most people assumed that the bus driver, Jake Crowley, was at fault because he put a shotgun in his mouth three hours after the wreck and blew off the top of his head.

Nowadays, if people talk about the accident at all, they speak of phantom trains and ghostly images of Crowley prowling the crossing at Buck’s Creek with a lantern looking for all the children he lost. There’s also a widespread belief that parking your car on the tracks where the accident occurred will cause the spirits of those six children to push your vehicle to safety. Teenagers like this last one. It’s common enough to see them heading by the carload out to Buck’s Creek with six-packs of beer and bags of Gold Medal flour to sift like dust over their back bumpers. Drunk enough, they can convince themselves of anything, even that the demarcations in the flour are the prints of angelic fingers rather than where moths have landed, drawn to the warm glow of the taillights.

And even though I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since the day of the wreck, I can believe it too.

•  •  •

Inside Phillip’s box I have laid smooth strips of hardwood, oiled and polished to a shine. Over these, I’ve painted lines and erected miniature hoops. Phillip
would be a senior now, if he had lived. He would have been a varsity basketball player, a good one, according to his coaches. The article the newspaper ran after the accident quoted the varsity coach as saying that Phillip was one of the middle school players he had already pegged for a college scholarship.

When I stare into his shoebox like I am doing now, I can almost hear the crowd behind him, cheering him on, insisting he live.

And sometimes I can lose my hold on this world, like roots slipping through the soil. When this happens I see him move. I see him play. And for a time, he does live again.

•  •  •

The thing that pleases me the most about my dioramas is that they represent an ordered place where violence cannot intervene. Here, I keep the children safe through diligence and attention to detail. They are invulnerable here, impervious to the awful winds of fate. Here, trains do not run, nor buses stall. Here, towns are not consumed by grief.

•  •  •

I’ve slept a dreamless sleep until my eyes open and see the blinking clock beside my bed. The room is dark, and it must still be hours before morning. Heaving myself out of bed, I go to the window and see that the yard is a wasteland of trash and tree branches. Earlier in the night, a great elm in my front yard cracked in two, and one side has fallen against a power line causing random electrical sparks. They look like silver eels, whipcracking in a black sea.

I hear a knock at my front door. A moment later I’m peering through the peephole at James, my brakeman at the time of the accident.

Like me, James had been drunk the day of the accident, and like me, he’d been able to act sober enough at the scene of the wreck, when everybody was shouting questions at us. In fact, he’d been the first one to come to my defense during the inquiry. “Wasn’t anything Arch could do. Everybody knows that the county commission should have put a crossing arm at Buck’s Creek a long time ago. In my opinion, no engineer could have avoided that accident.”

James and I fell out of touch after the wreck, mostly due to my own guilt and anger. But also because there seemed to exist between us a kind of physical knowledge, an unspoken bludgeon. Whenever we were together, it hurt. I stopped answering the phone when he called. Once, I met him on the street
on my way home from the library. We both pretended not to see the other. It was an unwritten pact, and we understood the parameters: suffer alone.

Now he’s outside my door, having braved a thunderstorm in the middle of the night.

I’d heard he was sick with cancer, but even that doesn’t prepare me for the way he looks. His body is smaller, his collarbone protruding out and around his neck like some obscene bone scarf. His hands are crossed in front of him, clasped together like clusters of hooks that have become accidentally entangled. His arms droop like fishing line, so skeletal and long, I wonder how he moves them, as the muscles are so deteriorated, they appear to have vanished. When he speaks, his teeth—what’s left of them—smile of their own accord, a crooked pumpkin grin.

“Arch,” he says. “Can I come in?”

I step aside and he shuffles past into my living room.

I sit down, gesturing to the couch for him.

Outside, a rush of rain begins again, so loud against my tin roof, I wonder how I slept through it the first time.

“I got some things to tell you, Arch.”

Lightning flashes, making the room go white and then black as my power goes off for good. It’s so dark James is nothing more than a shadow across the room.

“What we did, getting drunk on the train . . . You feel like a murderer. But that’s over. For the longest time I wanted to go back to the day I lied and take it back. I wanted to go to jail. Die there. But I couldn’t. You understand?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I understand.”

“Those kids down at the tracks. I talked to them. They want me to tell you something.”

“Don’t do this, James.”

“They want you to understand. They’re not still here because they want to be.” He speaks calmly, oblivious to my rising anger.

“It’s because I put them there, right, James? You were only the brakeman, ultimately not responsible for any of this. Isn’t that the deal?” I’m across the room, reaching for him before I know what I’m doing. Grasping his shirt in my fist, I try to pull him to his feet. But he’s heavy, way too heavy for a man his size. A flash of lightning lets me glimpse his dark eyes; they’re unexpressive, calm.

“Let them go, Arch.”

He seems about to say more when a barrage of lightning lashes the house, illuminating the room in a series of repeating flashes as if a million cameras are being snapped in an instant. When the room goes dark again, James is gone; I can’t see him at all. His shirt is still balled in my fist. In desperation I pull hard on it, trying to find him, trying to pull myself back to him, but it’s no use. His shirt rips. My fist holds something, but I can’t see what. My head aches. Thunder pounds around me. The room spins, and I lose my grip on consciousness.

•  •  •

The next morning, sun streams in my window so brightly I can barely keep my eyes open.

The clock next to me blinks 12:00. I shade my eyes and peer out into the yard where the elm is split open. The power company is there, already working on the broken line.

I feel wasted, tired beyond all reason, as if I did not sleep at all. James’s visit is still etched in my memory. But what had he wanted to tell me?

A dream, I decide. Then I realize something is clenched inside my fist. Opening my hand, I find a solitary button.

•  •  •

I confirm James’s death with a quick phone call. According to his wife, Beth, he died last night in the midst of the storm.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say.

“James told me the truth, Arch. He told me about being drunk.”

“Beth . . .”

“I hated him. I wanted him to go to jail. Then the next day I wanted him to be with me forever. Back and forth like that. It was a long time before I forgave him. Even longer before he forgave himself.”

“It wasn’t his fault, Beth. It was mine.”

“Nobody can carry that by themselves.”

“Ever wonder who decides?” I ask her.

“Decides?”

“Decides which kids are due to die? Which bus will stall on the tracks? Before the accident, I’d been drunk dozens of times on that train. None of those mattered.”

“Arch . . .”

“And how many children’s deaths had I heard about before the wreck? Hundreds at least. All you have to do is turn on the nightly news and you’ll get your fill. But you know what? I shrugged them off. Paid them no mind. It was like they didn’t matter. But it changes. It all changes when you’re driving the train that hits the bus. They’re not just children anymore. They’re your children.”

•  •  •

I begin James’s box the next day. I construct James out of a clothespin and spindly bits of wire. His head is the button I managed to keep from my dreamlike encounter with him.

Painstakingly, I build a little train and Popsicle-stick tracks. Placing James inside without me feels strange, but I do it anyway. I create a grayscale sky and dot the landscape with trees made from old bottlebrushes. Finally, I fashion the school bus from an old Cheerios box and place it on the tracks, just ahead of the train.

The day of the accident, in a shoebox. I feel like God, except powerless to stop the past.

•  •  •

A few days later I hear a whistle blow. I step outside on my back deck and study the trees behind my house, as if they are somehow responsible for the noise. I know somewhere behind those trees are the tracks where the accident occurred, but they are miles away, too far for me to hear a train.

Yet I can’t deny the sound. I go back inside, into my sanctuary, and sit in front of my dioramas, waiting for the calm feeling to come over me, the feeling that lets me believe I am in control and the children in these boxes are not dead.

But I can hear the whistle here too. If anything, it’s louder, more insistent, blaring, demanding that I do something. But what?

Closing my eyes, I try to go back to the night I dreamed of James.

What did he want? What had been so important?

Let them go, Arch.

“They won’t let me go,” I say.

Then another voice. A voice from my dream. A child’s voice.
The dead do not haunt the living.

“Yes they do,” I say. “They haunt me.”

The train whistle is louder.

I remember the day of the wreck, watching the trees as they scraped the sky. They looked like claws; the earth trying to peel back heaven.

That’s what I was looking at when the one-hundred-car payload I was pulling began to wrap itself snakelike around the blind curve, and I saw the school bus stalled out on the tracks. One minute I had been drunk, perfectly content with the world, and the next I was cold sober and stricken with such bone-numbing panic I literally felt helpless, stuck inside my own skin.