Excerpted from Bram Stoker Award Winner Steve Burt’s 2005 collection, “Wicked Odd: Still More Stories to Chill the Heart,” published by Burt Creations Publishing. The story is posted here for Bram Stoker consideration for the convenience of members of the Horror Writers Association. It also appeared on the Dec 2005 website www.dredtales.com.

Steve's Latest - Night Train to Plantation 13

Copyright 2005 by Steven E. Burt

I kept my eyes averted, not wanting to meet the UPS driver’s gaze as I signed for the two packages from Maine. He couldn’t have missed the return addresses, a funeral home on one, Augusta Mental Health Institute on the other. Light bulbs had to be flashing on in his head. I figured he’d recognize the heavy, smaller box as cremation ashes, an item he’d no doubt delivered before. Not every UPS package required a signature, but a box containing a person’s remains, even if only ashes, would surely require a signature, probably for legal issues.

The other parcel, the one from AMHI, apparently required a signature for a different reason. It wasn’t because it exceeded any particular dollar value--I had an idea what was inside and doubted the contents were worth a total of fifty dollars—but likely required delivery acknowledgment for the sender. Official Business, AMHI had stamped it. And, as if those two words and the return address being a State Hospital weren’t accusing enough, a social worker had penned on it in red ink: YOUR FATHER’S EFFECTS. I was sure I felt the driver’s eyes burning into me as I scrawled my signature on the electronic clipboard. I felt embarrassed and ashamed.

Back in the security of my apartment I sat on the couch and stared at the packages. The smaller, heavier box from the mortuary seemed less threatening, so I slit it open with my house key. An unsealed envelope lay on top with ATTN: Arnold Burnett typed on it. I opened it and slid out a funeral director’s card that identified the ashes as my father’s. It also listed a few vital statistics. Name: Robert Burnett. Age at death: 42, which I had known. Place and date of death: Augusta, Maine, which I had known. Marital status: never married, which I had known. Place and date of birth: Plantation 13, Maine, which I had not known. My father had never spoken of his hometown except to mention Bangor, Maine, where he had spent his early years with his own father.

Beneath the cards sat a thick-walled plastic bag that reminded me of the potting soil I had bought in Wal-Mart, its top puckered and tied off like a belly button. The bag filled the inside of the box completely the way milk spreads to occupy the shape of a milk carton. I opened the top of the bag and touched the ashes, feeling the softness and the grittiness between my thumb and fingers, and letting it sift through. I recalled a line from a soap opera’s opening credits: like sands through the hourglass, then dug my thumb and fingers deeper into the ashes as if I were clamming a beach below the low water line. My middle fingertip met something hard, a tiny foreign object that wasn’t ashes, and when I worked it free I realized it was a tiny fragment of bone that hadn’t been totally incinerated. I felt around and discovered more bits of grit and gristle. I had read that this was common, but this was first-hand and it unnerved me to be sitting on my couch with my father’s remains on my fingers and under my fingernails and in the wrinkles of my knuckles. I set the ashes box on an end table and went to wash my hands in the kitchen. My father wasn’t going anywhere. I could handle the disposition of the ashes later.

When I got back to the couch, I opened the AMHI box and spread its contents--my deceased father’s officially itemized personal effects--on the coffee table. There wasn’t much: the clothing he’d been wearing when they checked him in—a pair of black socks, a pair of tan work boots without laces (no doubt removed for his safety), white underpants and white tee shirt, a pair of Lee blue jeans (38W x 34L), a blue chamois work shirt (Large), a worn black belt (probably taken from him when he was institutionalized, then returned to me after his death, unlike the disappeared shoe laces), a pair of soft brown work gloves, a hand-knit green-and-white ski cap. In a clear plastic bag I found a promotional pen from the Portland Savings Bank, a dime and three pennies, a Swiss Army knife, and an apartment key. Another plastic bag contained a worn leather wallet shaped by my father’s buttock, a ten and three singles. Thirteen dollars in change and thirteen bucks in bills. What a lucky guy.

Inside the wallet, a plastic photo insert held his driver’s license, social security card, and a snapshot of me in his arms at age three. Even then it had been obvious that I was his kid. We had the same wild hair, flaming red, the same freckled faces, and the same broad, toothy grins.

Another similarity was our eyes. His left eye—which was a glass eye--was a mesmerizing green, an almost perfect match for his right eye, which was a match for my right eye. But the similarity ended there, because although he had a glass left eye, I had no left eye, none at all. What people saw when they looked at me—until the year I turned five and started wearing a black eye patch--was flesh, a sealed eyelid that they mistook for a gigantic skin graft. I had no left eye and, thankfully, no open left socket. This drew unwanted attention, countless intrusive questions, and caused me great embarrassment. People asked why the lid had been sewn shut, and my father would explain that it wasn’t stitched but was a congenital defect—the skin had always been that way, there was no functional eye behind the lid, no optic nerve, and corrective surgery would not restore my sight.

When I set my father’s wallet back on the coffee table, I caught myself rubbing the eyelid hidden behind the patch. I felt something stir inside me. At twenty-one years old, for the first time in my life, I experienced something I had never felt in my teenage years—a deep yearning to be with someone of the opposite sex. I sat a few minutes trying to make sense of it. This was new to me, yet I found I was clear about what the feeling was, though not about what it meant or how to respond to it.

The last item on the table was a purple velvet bag with black drawstrings, a poke bag like a prospector might use for gold dust or a school kid for marbles. The bag hadn’t been mine, but I felt it trying to trigger a memory. I’d seen it before, but where? Someone had pulled its strings tight and pinched a sticky label around the top to seal it. I fingered the label, smoothed it out, and made out my father’s handwriting: For Arnie. I squeezed the bag like it was a Christmas present whose contents I was trying to guess. A marble, a big one. And something papery, maybe a letter. I sat back on the couch, heart fluttering, hands trembling.

I had seen my father only once in the last two years, and that was after AMHI had the Maine and Connecticut State Police track me down to say he was in the State Hospital. He’d had a breakdown. His diagnosis was bipolar disorder along with adult-onset schizophrenia, and the prognosis sounded bleak. I was devastated.

The one time I visited him he was withdrawn, non-communicative, fragile--shattered. When I saw him curled up on a mattress on the floor of his room, I could hardly bear it. Trite as it may sound, the phrase a shadow of his former self perfectly described the man I saw that day. I was confused and ashamed, and in my weakness and isolation I cut him out of my life, exorcised him. I left my father stranded in the mental ward. With absolutely no relatives and very few friends, it was all I could do to take care of myself.

But although I had deserted him, he hadn’t abandoned me. Here he was in my living room.

I ripped off the gummy label and loosened the mouth of the bag, half expecting steam or smoke to spew out and a genie to appear. Then, heart on tiptoes, I tipped the bag and the huge round object slid out the bag’s throat and plopped against my palm. I stared at it, then started to giggle, and to laugh, and a minute later I was crying and laughing at the same time. There, staring up from my palm lay not a marble but my father’s green glass eye. I hadn’t recognized the bag at first, because he used it only once in a blue moon for storage, like the week he was fighting an infection of the socket and couldn’t wear it. Most often the bag sat in the drawer of his bedside table.

“Someday it’ll be yours,” he’d said a couple of times when I was young, but he never explained.

I’d always wondered why I might want it, since I had no socket in which to place it. Why would he pass it on to me? But here it was, my bizarre inheritance.

I lifted my eye patch and held the glass eye against the web of flesh, imagining myself inserting it into an empty socket the way my high school friends had popped in their contacts. Would I then look as normal as my father had? I walked to the bathroom and gazed into the mirror. The green eye was an almost perfect match for my good eye, and for a moment I fantasized gouging out a socket with a teaspoon so I could force it in.

A wave of melancholy washed over me—was that it, melancholy? For the days when I’d been young and my father had been alive and active in my growing up? Or was it sadness and grief at losing him, at feeling lost now without him, at suddenly being an orphan?

As I rolled the glass eye around with my thumb, it struck me that it was neither. The feeling wasn’t nostalgia or even grief. It was more like homesickness, but it wasn’t about yearning for a place I’d been before; this was an instinctual pull toward someplace I’d never been, this was a primal feeling like birds get when it’s time to migrate.

I set the eye on my father’s folded white tee shirt on the coffee table, picked up the purple bag again, and drew out a folded piece of paper. It was a letter from my father dated two years earlier, two nights before he was committed to AMHI.

Dearest Arnie, my son,

Please forgive me for disappearing last month, but I had no choice. I prayed the breakdown and the mental disintegration would never come for me, but I knew in my heart it would. I even knew when. My cycle is just like my own father’s, 42/21, and his father’s, and his father’s father’s. No doubt it’s yours, too. Our family line pays a terrible price to continue, always hoping things will be different, better, less cruel for the next generation. So far, though, nothing has changed.

I cannot explain what may lie ahead for you. If you follow my footsteps and my father’s and his father’s, it will be both an adventure and a curse. I will not tell you what to do or not do, just as my father did not tell me. We make our own choices. I can only tell you this, if you resist the deep yearning awakening in you now, you may live to old age. If you feel you cannot, if you do as I did, you’ll find incredible joy, but only for a short while. I have always loved you, my son, and I have never regretted my own choice.

Your loving father,

 Robert Burnett

Paper-clipped to the bottom of the letter was an old punched train ticket from Maine. Passage was from Bangor to Eagle Lake to Plantation 13 and back. The ticket had been used twenty-one years earlier, on the day I was born.

* * *

            Two weeks later, during my college’s weeklong break, I boarded a bus in New Haven and headed for Maine. Since my father’s ashes and letter had arrived and I’d held his glass eye against my eyelid, I had found it impossible to concentrate on class work. My heart ached. At twenty-one I was finally feeling like a lovesick teenager. Throughout my teens I had been, for all practical purposes, asexual. Neither males nor females had turned me on. I simply had no interest. But now I yearned, I felt desire. But although my eyes wandered after women, it wasn’t for just any women, it was women pushing strollers and carriages and carrying their infants in slings across their bellies. It took me awhile to clarify it, but I soon saw that it wasn’t the women I wanted, it was the babies I coveted. I was like a middle-aged woman whose biological clock was ticking too loudly. Not having a child led me to unexpected fits of weeping that caught me off guard. They crept up and blindsided me, and often I sat sobbing at the preciousness and beauty of life, marveling at the miracle of one generation being able to pass itself along to another. Something deep, something primal, was drawing me to northern Maine to my father’s home of origin. And though I had never been given a birth certificate, I was sure sure that his home of origin was also mine.

That afternoon around 1:30 I found myself in the Greyhound station in Bangor, asking where the railway station was so I might catch a train north.

“Ain’t no passenger trains out of Bangor, not for years, just freights,” the aged ticket agent said through the grillwork of his cubicle. “If you’re going north to Millinocket, Houlton, Fort Kent nowadays, you drive or take the bus.”

“What about Plantation 13?” I asked.

“Plantation 13?” he said, a note of incredulity in his voice. Then he turned on his stool and called to the fat man sitting behind him at an office desk, “Hey, Charlie, a second one for Plantation 13.”

Charlie the manager creaked back heavily in his swivel chair, rose, and edged in beside the older man at the ticket window.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told the other young man.”

I pulled off my ski cap then, and my hair caught the two men’s attention, momentarily diverting the conversation.

“You two brothers?” Charlie said, furrowing his brow.

I shook my head. “Don’t know any others. Why?”

“You’re both redheads,” he said. “And same black eye patch.”

“And the other kid is going to Plantation 13, too,” the old ticket agent added. “He came in last night, must have taken a hotel. His bus leaves in half an hour.”

“Bus for where?” I said.

“It’s the Houlton run, but the driver’ll drop the kid off at Eagle Lake. They still run an old log train from there out to Plantation 13.”

“So Plantation 13 is a town?” I asked.

“Well, yes and no,” Charlie said. “You see, a plantation is a sizeable geographical area with no formal government. The land is largely uninhabited, usually cared for by the big paper companies that contract to log them. The only people that far out in the boondocks work in the logging operations.”

“What you refer to as Plantation 13,” the ticket agent interrupted, “is no more than a cluster of shacks that threatened to blossom into a village shortly after World War II. But it didn’t work out. It was too far off the beaten path to support gas stations and supermarkets. What’s there now is little more than a ghost town for fifty or a hundred die-hards who are too stubborn to leave.”

“Definitely no hospital, right?” I said.

“Houlton would be the closest,” Charlie said. “Why do you ask that?”

“I was wondering where babies would be born.”

“Home, I expect,” he said. “Unless they plan ahead and stay with friends or relatives in Houlton about the time they’re due.”

My father’s birthplace hadn’t been listed as Houlton. The card had read Plantation 13.

“Will I have to piggyback a ride on a log car?”

“No,” Charlie said. “The log train has an engine, a coal car, one or two log flatcars, and a caboose. You and the other kid will end up riding in the caboose with the conductor. It’s not heated, but it’s out of the wind.”

“How come there’s no passenger car?” I asked.

“Because,” said the ticket agent, that train has two purposes: to get supplies from Eagle Lake to Plantation 13, and to haul logs from Plantation 13 to Eagle Lake. Strictly speaking, it’s not supposed to carry passengers.”

“But I can get a ticket, right?”

“At the café in Eagle Lake they’ll sell you a ticket,” Charlie said. “But it’s a wink-wink sort of thing, not strictly legal. So the waitress will give you is one of the old train tickets they sold twenty-five years ago. Just buy it and give it to the old conductor and he’ll let you ride in the caboose with him.”

“So when does it run? Tonight or tomorrow?”

“It only runs the first and fifteen, and today’s the fifteenth,” the ticket agent said. “It’s an odd arrangement that has them run two trips today. The locomotive, coal car, and caboose belong to Eagle Lake, but the log cars are the lumber company’s and stay in Plantation 13 so they can load them. They leave Eagle Lake and haul supplies to Plantation 13 in the morning, hook up to the log cars, bring them back to Eagle Lake, then make a second trip back so they can return the log cars, and then run empty back to Eagle Lake.”

“So the train’s already gone today?” I said, alarmed.

“On the supply run, yes, and to bring back the logs,” Charlie said. “But after supper they’ll leave Eagle Lake on the second run and come back at midnight.”

“So I have to go to Plantation 13 and ride back the same night?” I said, wondering how I could track down any relatives or get any information in a couple of hours.

“Yep,” the ticket agent said. “Unless you want to stay two weeks. Your ticket’ll be punched anyway, so it’s up to you. You don’t have to decide beforehand.”

“So it’s a couple of hours or two weeks?”

The two men nodded.

“Is there a hotel?”

The two men shrugged and Charlie said, “We’re not travel agents. All we can do is sell you a bus ticket to Eagle Lake.”

“You in? We’ve already phoned to say the other kid is coming,” the ticket agent said.

I bought a ticket and as I walked away I heard the ticket agent say to Charlie the manager, “Happens every year around this time, doesn’t it? Like the swallows returning to Capistrano.”

* * *

            On the bus trip to Eagle Lake I sat with the other redhead. Tim was from upstate New York, stood four inches taller than I, and spoke in a deeper voice. He also had ruddier skin and more freckles. Except for our height, weight, and skin tone, we had a lot in common. Our unmanageable, flame-red hair looked like we’d both dyed it from the same bottle and our green right eyes matched perfectly. We were twenty-one, born the same day, just as our fathers had been born the same day and died at age forty-two the same day in separate mental institutions. Neither Tim nor I had known our mothers nor ever thought to ask about them. Under our eye patches we had the same congenital defect, the sealed eyelid.

In talking we discovered we were both loners, not because we chose to be, but because we felt a natural separateness from other human beings and didn’t feel a strong attraction to anyone, either male or female. But we had both found a deep primordial longing, a magnetic attraction toward our roots that seemed to have awakened in us right after the deaths of our fathers. We were like moths drawn to a flame, and I doubt either of us could have abandoned the quest. Something was pulling us, something stronger even than the need to discover our history and origin. We were experiencing feelings so intense that we couldn’t begin to fathom them.

We also had in common our fathers’ glass eyes.  Tim’s lay nestled in a hard plastic jewelry case that had been made for a ring. He kept it in his breast pocket close to his heart. Mine lay warm and secure in its purple bag in my side pocket, the bag’s drawstrings tied to my belt.

* * *

“We get the train tickets for Plantation 13 inside, right?” Tim asked the driver after we clambered down the bus steps at the Eagle Lake Café.

The driver shrugged, the door shut, and the bus chugged away.

“Better get inside and grab a hamburger, boys,” said a voice behind us. “Train leaves in fifteen minutes.”

We turned and saw a man leaning out the café’s front door. Judging by his furrowed face, he was well past retirement, but still he wore the black uniform and hard-billed hat of a railroad conductor. Protruding from under his hat was a thinning layer of not gray but flaming red hair. I could see by the light of the porch bulb that he wore a black patch over his eye. When he caught us staring at it, he flipped the patch up and revealed a fleshy eyelid sealed like mine.

“Food and tickets in the café,” he said, and walked inside.

The café was warm and its only waitress hospitable. I wanted to sit at a table and ask questions of the conductor, but all six tables were taken, one by the conductor, engineer, and brakeman, but I preferred privacy, and neither the engineer nor the brakeman was a redhead. And they each had two eyes.

“We’ll talk on the train,” the old conductor said.

Tim and I sat at the counter. We ordered hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes, which we wolfed down as if they were our last meal. The waitress sold us two roundtrip train tickets.

“We usually close at nine, but this being a special occasion, we’ll be open all night,” she said. “Those who get back after midnight usually drink coffee or nap with their heads on the tables until the morning when the bus pulls in at 7:30.”

The train crew got up before I could ask what she meant by a special occasion, so Tim and I stood too. We left enough for the bill and a good tip, and followed the men outside to the train. While the engineer and the brakeman climbed up into the cab of the locomotive, we followed the conductor into the caboose.

* * *

“I’m sure you’ve guessed by now,” the conductor said as the train pulled out, “that we come from the same stock.”

He removed his cap and ran his fingers through his hair--except on top where he was bald. He looked like a monk, and for a moment I thought it might be a disguise, a skullcap like an actor might wear. He saw our surprise at his baldness.

“My apologies, gentlemen,” he said, relaxing in a chair. “I forgot that you’ve only seen your own and your fathers’ hair.” He pulled out a pipe and tamped tobacco into it. “Those of us who live past forty-two tend to go bald around fifty. I’m seventy-three. I’ll likely live to be a hundred, possibly a hundred and five. It appears that longevity is the reward for celibacy in our line. A dubious reward, I’d add.” He removed his black eye patch and set it on the table.

I stared at the conductor’s eyelid, wondering if somewhere he had a green glass eye that his father had passed on to him.

“When we get to Plantation 13,” he said, “nobody’s going to force you to get off the train. When I was twenty-one, I came here same as you. There were three of us, and I didn’t go into town when the other two did. I stayed on the train with the fellow who was the old conductor then. Believe me when I say, there’s no shame in staying on the train. Even now, I stay aboard when we’re in Plantation 13. I’ve never seen the town, so I can’t tell you what’s out there. And the boys who make it back don’t speak of it. So I don’t know, I just don’t know. And because I haven’t paid my dues, I haven’t earned the right to know.”

We sat rapt, listening to him.

“But one thing I can say is this: when midnight comes, be on this train, because it pulls out whether you’re on it or not. If you’re close, I’ll pull you aboard if I can. Trust me, you’ll want to be on the train. Nobody who’s missed it has made the next one two weeks later.”

* * *

After an hour’s train ride through rugged terrain, the train slowed, and my eyelid began to itch. I was still rubbing it when we pulled to a stop in a broken-down, mist-covered railroad station.

“Plantation 13,” the old conductor said from the back porch of the caboose. He made a sweeping arm gesture. “All ashore that dare go ashore,” he said without stepping out onto the station platform himself. “If you’ll excuse me, we’ve got to decouple the log cars on the side track, then do an about-face for the return trip. Stay or go, it’s up to you, gentlemen. You’ve got roughly three hours. Remember what I said. Midnight.”

I hesitated a moment, thinking about the bald conductor who expected to live to be a hundred, and about my father—and Tim’s father—dying insane at forty-two. Deep inside me, logic battled instinct. I was sure Tim was wrestling with the question, too. After a moment we looked at each other and seemed to draw strength from our new relationship. We climbed down from the train and walked toward the dim streetlights that promised some semblance of a downtown.

Plantation 13’s business district was a cross between an Old West ghost town and a 1940s movie set without any automobiles. Main Street was dirt, with a couple of side streets off it. No sidewalks, twenty street lamps total, the downtown’s wooden buildings needing either paint, patching, or a wrecking ball. A sign in one window proclaimed a bar inside, another a pool hall. One block contained a hotel, a dry goods store, a hardware store, a drugstore/soda fountain, and a barbershop. As we walked down the center of the street I felt like Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas pacing through Tombstone on the way to the gunfight at the OK Corral.

On one corner appeared two women dressed like saloon girls in heavy eye makeup. Three others stepped from the shadows of a side street and slunk toward us, waving, teasing. From the door of the bar came two more, with scarlet feather boas around their shoulders and matching feathered Mae West hats. I could sense others closing the gap behind us, and when we turned, we were surrounded by women. They could have formed a chorus line. They all had flaming red hair like ours, and bewitching green eyes—not one eye but two each. These women were beauties—at least they appeared beautiful to me--captivating, desirable.

“Hey, sweetie,” one called kittenishly to Tim, linking her arm with his as if he were her beau. “Movie starts in ten minutes.”

She and a half dozen others raised their hands and pointed to the movie house on the next corner. It said MAJESTIC THEATER. Half of the bulbs of its marquee were burned out and nearly all of the letters had fallen off, so that it was impossible to make out what the movie was.

Two women, one on either side of me, clasped my hands in their warm palms and ushered me toward the theater. One looked to be around eighteen, the other fortyish, but both made my pulse race. I could hardly catch my breath.

Tim had his arm around the shoulder of a knockout and was veering toward the theater. We had a huge crowd of women following closely. There was no animosity among them, no possessiveness or fighting over us. It reminded me of World War II, when the men were away and Rosie the Riveter could play. Where were the men who did the logging? But perhaps this was simply ladies’ night on the town, my mind said trying to convince myself, and these women were treating us like soldiers and sailors at a USO dance. Whatever was up, the women of Plantation 13 were definitely glad to see us.

The ticket booth at the theater entrance was dark and empty, so we walked right in, all of us, close to a seventy-five by then. The concession stands were dark and cobwebbed, the carpets dusty. But inside, it was just like any old theater. The floor slanted toward a stage, above which hung a huge curtain that would soon uncover a screen when the movie started. The aisles were lit by lamps hidden low on the outside seats, and tarnished brass numbers marked the armrests of the seats.

We poured into the center section of the movie house the way teenagers sometimes do, en masse, only with Tim and me--suddenly the most popular kids in school--in the very middle of it all. Dozens of us squeezed into the plush but worn flip-down seats. The only thing missing was popcorn and sodas. And conversation.

I glanced to my right at the younger woman holding my hand, and as I did, I made a mental note of the red EXIT signs that glared at me from either side of the stage.

“Lorraine,” the woman purred, as if anticipating my question. “What’s yours?” She lightly rubbed my forearm.

 I could hardly form words, my mouth was so dry, but finally I croaked out “Arnie.”

“Arnie. That’s nice,” she said, moistening her lips and flaring her nostrils.

The lights dimmed and the curtain opened. In the row ahead of us I heard Tim say, “I’m Tim” to one of the women beside him, and a woman’s voice answered, “Tim. That’s nice.” She lay her head on his shoulder.

A projector lamp flickered behind me somewhere as the curtain in front of us parted, and as it did, a hand caressed the back of my neck. I felt a mix of alarm and pleasure. A moment later the MGM lion roared and the screen came to life as the opening credits rolled. I felt many hands on my arms and shoulders, stroking, massaging, touching lightly. Fingers teased my hair. As my heart raced and the blood pounded in my ears, Lorraine turned to me with longing in her eyes. She opened her lips slightly and her face drew close to mine. I gasped, breathless, then leaned in and met her kiss. It was the most exciting moment of my life.

I couldn’t see Tim, but I had no doubt that he, too, was in the throes of a passionate kiss.

Lorraine’s tongue probed my lips, and I opened them slightly for her. My entire body was burning up. She slipped her hands behind my neck and drew me to her, and I wrapped my arms around her and held her close. My eyelid felt warm and pulsed in time with my heartbeat. Lorraine’s wet tongue teased mine. I couldn’t get enough of it. In that dark theater in Plantation 13 that night, I found myself in another world.

Then suddenly—this is the only way to describe it—more of her tongueslithered past my lips, and more of it, and more. It filled my mouth completely, the tip of her tongue gripping my own tongue at its base as if with pliers—holding me prisoner—so that I had to inhale and exhale rapid, shallow breaths through my nose. I opened to my eye and, even in the dark, could see her green eyes had gone pink, bright pink. They were wide open, glowing, concentrating.

One part of my brain told me I had to remove my arms from her, but another part, something deep down, something instinctive, told me to hold on, and I did. As she filled my mouth with her tongue, I held on for dear life. The movie went on in the background, but it was like being trapped in a dream unable to wake up. It was like hearing and seeing underwater. I had no idea what the movie was about, and I didn’t care. I was in a state of euphoria, alternately terrified and thrilled, and I lost any concept of time. In that moment I didn’t care about the rest of the world.

As the words THE END came on screen, Lorraine broke free as quickly as she had come on to me, her arms cool and clammy now, her tongue recoiling rapidly the way a vacuum cleaner cord rewinds. My mouth sucked down air in big gulps like a newborn babe spanked to life in a strange new atmosphere.

The entire room breathed then, I could hear it. A collective sigh of relief. Or exhaustion. As the lights came up slowly, I could see everyone relax, as if they were about to fall asleep after laboring all day in the hot sun.

My eyelid itched and the left side of my head felt heavy, weighted, off-balance. When I put my left hand up to feel my cheek, the cheek was swollen. So was the eyelid. It was puffed out so far that my right eye could see its paunchiness over the bridge of my nose. I felt a migraine building in my head.

From the next row, Tim turned and looked up at me. His eyelid was huge, too, as if a bee sting had caused a severe allergic reaction. We looked hideous.

Suddenly the clapping began. The horde of women started slowly, politely, then gathered intensity and concentration. A rhythm developed, and as they clapped their hands together faster and faster and faster, it was like the beating of bees’ wings. The sound was hypnotic, and though something told me to rise and run, something else—a voice from eons past--told me all was as it should be.

Lorraine and the woman with Tim clapped, too, then joined their voices in a high-pitched chant, hands moving with blurring speed now. The others blended in, mouths open, their throats producing a hreee sound over and over, like nineteen-year locusts on a summer night.

I felt my eyelid stretching and straining, the flap of skin struggling to contain the swelling behind it. My head and eyelid were about to explode. Suddenly a bolt of pain shot through my cheek and struck a hot nerve deep down behind my empty eye. Then another pain, and another. I couldn’t stand it. I yelped and screamed. So did Tim. I stood up. Tim stood up. We wailed together in our agony.

The women ceased their clapping and chanting. The houselights brightened. The entire left side of my face went into a cramp and spasmed.

Suddenly my eyelid burst. So did Tim’s. They exploded like piñatas, spewing forth something like wet rice kernels—maggots—that hit the warm air of the theater and metamorphosed into dozens and dozens of tiny bat-like creatures. They grasped the gift of flight instantly, instinctively, and swarmed around Tim and me. The warm air agreed with them, and they grew bigger as they swarmed, so that in no time they were each the size of a thumb. And as they expanded, I could see they had faces--human faces--with tiny wisps of red hair, and legs and arms that began to sprout from their bodies.

Most had two green eyes, but a dozen or more had only one—a right eye, the left one hooded, like mine and Tim’s. I wasn’t afraid of the newly birthed creatures. In fact, I stood in awe. I felt an attraction, an affinity. Love.

One landed on my shoulder, a one-eyed creature whose arms and legs had just emerged, and it stared up at me like a pup in a shelter, terrified, eyes begging.

The women of Plantation 13 went berserk, scratching and clawing and biting one another to get at the new births, not at the ones on the floor and on the seats that were molting their wings as their lungs filled with oxygen, their bodies swelling and shaping into plump-cheeked, red-haired, green-eyed baby females--but to get at the one-eyed males, grabbing the poor things like chicken legs, ripping them apart with their teeth and swallowing them in quick bites.

Suddenly I knew why I was there.

I curled my hand around the pitiful creature on my shoulder, pressed it inside my shirtfront, and began pushing and punching my way through the crimson-mouthed women in their feeding frenzy.

A steam whistle sounded, barely audible over the din in the theater.

“Tim!” I shouted. “The train!”

He shoved two struggling males inside his shirt, and with elbows and fists fought his way through the hysterical mob. As we started uphill for the lobby, four or five women scuttered over the seats and beat us to the rear door, blocking our retreat.

“There are exits by the stage!” I shouted, and we straight-armed our way through the crowd to the red lights.

Tim flung open the door, and a rush of cold night air whooshed in.

“Down there!” a woman a few paces behind us screamed. “They’re stealing them.”

We stepped out into the chilly night and Tim slammed the door and held it with his shoulder. The steam whistle sounded again, twice this time. I glanced at my watch. Three minutes.

We ran down the alley, and I heard the door crash open behind us. I knew the women were pouring out of the building behind us, and we had less than twenty yards on them. As we rounded the corner of the Pool Hall building, we glimpsed another horde of flesh-starved women spilling out of the Majestic past the ticket booth.

The steam whistle blasted impatiently. Thank God neither group of women had been able to cut us off from the train. We could see the station, and it all came down to a footrace now. All we had to do was outrun them.

“Here they come! Get them!” someone screamed, and four women stepped out from behind the station platform to block our escape.

“Go through them!” Tim shouted, and we tried to knock them down like they were bowling pins.

Tim went down clutching the precious cargo in his shirt. I had two hands free and punched wildly.

“Get up and fight, Tim!” I cried. “Use your hands.”

But they piled on him too fast, and the other two groups of women were almost on us.

“Come on! Run!” I heard the conductor shout. “You’re the only one with a chance now. Run!”

The whistle blasted six or eight times in rapid succession then, and I could see the train moving slowly away. It was no longer struggling to overcome it own inertia, now it was rolling steadily forward, picking up speed. I put a hand to my shirt, made sure that my own cargo was still there, and lit out for the tracks. It looked like it was moving away faster than I was running.

“Run!” the conductor yelled again. “Run!”

I heard the women’s voices behind me, but I didn’t dare turn to look. Puffing and panting, I managed to match my pace with the train’s forward movement, then reached out for the old man’s open hand. For a moment I was sure the train had gotten just beyond my reach, but then the old conductor grabbed the handrail, swung himself as far back as he could and clamped his hand around my wrist. I gripped his wrist, too, and he swung me to safety. I looked back and saw my pursuers abandon their footrace.

The conductor ripped up a white sheet for us to use as swaddling cloths and, clearly envious, spent as much time as he could rocking my son. Or perhaps it had been Tim’s. I don’t know why, but we didn’t speak of Tim on the trip back to Eagle Lake. The child cried and slept like any other baby, and by the time we reached the Eagle Lake station, he had plumped up enough that he was pink and fleshy and—except for his webbed left eyelid—looked just like a newborn.

The kindly conductor swabbed the sticky afterbirth fluid from my eye socket and covered it with gauze. He cautioned me not to insert my father’s glass eye for at least two full weeks.

“Twenty-one years is what you’ve got, Arnie,” the conductor said the next morning as I boarded the bus back to Bangor, “if you don’t count the year or two of insanity at the end. I wish you and your boy the best.”

We waved goodbye, and I wondered if the balding conductor—nearly four times my age, like a doting grandfather who doesn’t get to see his grandchildren often enough--was happy with his own life choice. Was there a chance he’d still be the conductor in twenty-one years, when it was my time to become ashes and my son’s time to take the night train to Plantation 13?

My eye socket itched under the gauze bandages. But this time it was a different kind of itch. Now it ached for the symbol of fatherhood that had been my father’s and my grandfather’s and my great-grandfather’s, the glass eye. As soon as the socket was healed and ready for it, I’d put it in. And when my time came, as it no doubt would, I would pass on to the beautiful son who now lay so contently in my arms.

I nearly named the boy Robert, after my father. But then wondered who I’d been named after and why, and eventually I decided it was more fitting to name him after Tim, the friend and comrade we’d left behind at Plantation 13. As my father had written: our family line pays a terrible price to continue.