He hurried back to the Acura and dug the camera and tripod out, sure that when he turned his back, the leaves would have settled, this rapturous moment gone. They were still turning, though, and he walked up to the gravel ridge where the train tracks ran and got the camera set up and turned on.
For this he wanted the zoom reduced as much as possible, a wide-angle shot that captured the bizarre look. The light was poor, the gray gloom of twilight, but it was enough to work with. Behind the swirling leaves the deer stood at the edge of the tree line and stared at him. He’d been standing with his eye to the viewfinder for a few seconds before their ears rose and, one after another in a silent sequence, they took quick leaps into the trees and vanished. It wasn’t until the last one disappeared that he became aware of a sound, faint at first but building rapidly. Wind was part of the sound—more wind in his ears than there was in the air, heavy and roaring. There was something else over the top of it, though, light and lilting. A violin.
Now a third sound joined in, lower than both the violin and the wind, and at first he thought it was the steady plucking of a cello or bass. Then it grew louder and he realized it wasn’t an instrument at all, but an engine, the sound of heavy gears straining, pounding along in constant rhythm. The violin rose to a frantic shrieking and then vanished abruptly, and the wind died down and the leaves fell out of the vortex and scattered over the ground, one blowing across the grass and trapping itself against Eric’s leg.
The engine sound was louder than ever, approaching fast, and Eric turned from the camera and looked up the railroad tracks and saw the cloud. It was a roiling, midnight-colored mass sitting low on the horizon and blowing in fast. He stood in the middle of the tracks and stared up at it, feeling the fading sun on the back of his neck but seeing nothing but darkness ahead, and then the clouds parted and fell back and a train emerged from the center.
It was a locomotive, and that malevolent dark cloud was boiling out of its stack, thick snakes of black steam. A whistle screamed, and Eric could feel the vibrations under his feet now, the rails trembling with the approaching weight, loose gravel rattling.
The train was moving faster than any he’d ever seen, and he was standing right in its path. He stepped to the side and caught the tip of one shoe on the rail, stumbled and almost fell as he lifted the tripod and scrambled down off the tracks and into the grass where the fallen leaves lay. When the locomotive thundered by him, he had to turn from the tracks and lift one arm to shield his face. Then the whistle split the air again and he looked up at the boxcars whirling by and saw that the train was colorless, all shades of black and gray except for one white car with a splash of red in the Pluto Water logo. The door of this car was open and a man hung from it, his feet inside the car and his torso extended, weight resting on the hand clasped to the edge of the door. He wore an old-fashioned suit with a vest and a bowler hat. As the car approached he looked at Eric and smiled and tipped his hat. It seemed like a gesture of gratitude. His dark brown eyes held a liquid quality, shimmering, and Eric could see that he was standing in water, some of it splashing over the side, glistening in the darkness that surrounded the train.
Then the train was by, an all-black caboose at the end, and the accompanying cloud lifted and Eric stood staring into the sky, looking at nothing. A car came down the road, swerving into the oncoming lane briefly as it passed the Acura, and the woman behind the wheel gave Eric a curious look but didn’t slow, went on toward West Baden Springs on the heels of a train she clearly hadn’t seen.
8
THE SENSE THAT CREPT over him then was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, reality and the world he knew separating and speeding away from each other. He’d seen the train so clearly, had smelled the heat and felt the earth shudder. It had been real, damn it.
But now it was gone. Faded into the evening air like an apparition, and he was sure that the woman who’d just passed by had not seen a thing. There was not so much as a trace of smoke in the sky.
Even the wind was gone. That thought brought the spinning leaves back into his mind, and he turned to the camera and flicked open the display window. The leaves had been real. He had that crazy shit on tape.
He punched the rewind button and then play, jumped through some film from the casino until he reached the gloomy field and train tracks and the…
empty sky.
There were no leaves in the air on this tape. Nothing except the tracks and the trees and the tall grass waving in the wind.
He went back to the casino shots again, played the video all the way through, squinting at the screen, and again saw no trace of the spinning leaves.