Night of the Langum

Night of the Langum

I sat in my bed, staring at the TV with my hand clamped over my mouth. My God, I thought. He dies. The kid dies. I reached for the emergency vomit bowl we keep on my nightstand for the kids and held it in front of me. It had been about thirty years since I’d last watched Radio Flyer, the early nineties movie my brothers and sister and I had based our childhood on. It’s a story about two young brothers who create a sort of fantasy world as a way to escape the cruel abuse of their stepfather. I think I was in fourth grade when we watched it, which would mean my sister was in second. We watched it a lot, my brothers and sister and I. Mom gets borderline hysterical if we mention this to her now. She says she’s not sure what she was thinking, letting us watch that show.

As a child, I’d never realized the severity of the abuse, or possibly even that it was the main theme of the movie. All I remembered was a movie about kids free-range exploring the outdoors in a way that—even by the nineties—had been somewhat lost to the world. As a child, I’d seen only a movie about the fantasy world every kid creates for themselves, a movie where the kid flies away to safety in his homemade airplane, flies away to see the world. Now, I was horrified.

Friday nights were the Night of the Langum, back then. It was said that, late at night, a ghost train would come rumbling down the Haunted Muir Trestle—a rusty, 19th-century train bridge—and Old Man Langum would howl at the moon. If there was a full moon out, or if a new Hardy Boys book was released that week, then it was an Extra-Special Night of the Langum. There was nothing really special about them, except for the full moon and the Hardy Boys book. Langum was the last name of the school janitor; I don’t remember his first name. I probably never knew it. He’d be there late on Fridays, rolling his rickety cart of cleaning supplies through the open halls, bumping over the cracks in the cement. Sometimes we’d hide from him in our secret hideout, which was really just a row of tall shrubs. My brother, who’d raised himself on books like Sherlock Holmes and The Three Investigators, loved all things Gothic and clandestine. So he’d invent any reason for us to hide, and his own folklore to spook us with on Friday nights: Old Man Langum, and the ghost train of Muir Trestle.

On any given Night of the Langum, we’d walk to the school late, after the evening fog had set in. The Muir Trestle was about a mile from the school—far enough away to be mysterious, but close enough to punctuate our adventures with the haunting sound of a train whistle in the fog. We’d go with our dog Barney-Guybrush. He was two-years-old when we adopted him, and his name was already Barney. I think it used to be a classic dog name, like Buster or Spot, but by the time we got him, it was just the name of an annoying purple dinosaur. We tried to change it, but it never really stuck; hence, Barney-Guybrush.

At the very back of the school, there was a tiny playground for special-ed kids, right next to the deep, dark woods, which were really a pear orchard. Students at the school were never allowed to climb the fence into the woods at the back, so naturally there were always rumors about what kind of monsters, ghouls, and bad guys lurked in that great beyond. We’d play a game called Why’d the Chicken Cross the Road: basically, three of us would swing on the swing-set, while the fourth poor dumb bastard would try to run right in front of the swings without getting kicked. It usually ended with my brothers getting into fight; Robin would run off yelling while Trevor chased him with swinging fists.

When it was dark, we’d practice our emergency Drill. We’d all take our officially-nonchalant places, pretending to read a book or play in the sand or whatever other nonchalant activities elementary school kids do, then Robin, my brother—he was probably in eighth grade at the time, though he won’t admit it now—would very loudly whisper intruder! or flash his secret-spy flashlight, and we’d all run to the tunnel slide and pile in. Robin would go first and wedge himself at the bottom of the slide to hold the rest of us up, then Trevor would slide in to help, then me and my sister, Hilary. She and I didn’t do much to help; we were pretty young. Then we’d all sit as still and quiet as possible until the intruder had left, if there ever was an intruder. Barney-Guybrush would usually get confused at the drill, but he couldn’t fit in the slide. This was in the mid-nineties in California, when there was a lot of paranoia about serial killers, so of course we had a plan.

We had to actually do it one night—the Drill, that is—for real. That night lives in my memory as a dark and stormy night—our dark and stormy night—where fog covered the skies, and the street lights cast an eerie glow. It was around ten p.m., and we were playing, or Robin was reading us a Hardy Boys scary story, and we saw a distant light bobbing slightly up and down, crossing the field, more or less coming in our direction. Robin yelled intruder, and then he told us to run. We ran—we were several-hundred yards away from the Playground, where the tunnel slide was; Robin was well in the lead as a junior-high track star who probably hadn’t fully grown into common sense yet. It was exactly like every chase scene I’d ever read—my heart pounded in my throat and my legs felt full of lead, moving in slow motion, as I ran through the low-laying, ominous fog. I guess clichés are clichés for a reason. I looked over my shoulder and saw the light was now bobbing up and down faster, and definitely coming in our direction. I distinctly remember the electric shockwave of thrilling, frightened pleasure that shot through me—a pleasure that could only come to a kid running over a foggy moor from a strange and mysterious light, summiting the Gothic daydreams of any child.

We ran to the Playground, threw open the chain-link gate, pushed-and-shoved our way up the rubbery steps to the tunnel slide. It was probably one of the more exciting moments of my life, having a childhood fantasy realized. I mean, we were actually doing the Drill for real, which I cannot say about Smokie’s “Stop, Drop, and Roll” obsession of the time. The slide squeaked more than usual, but as we settled into our hiding places, we could all hear the ten o’ clock ghost train rumbling across the Muir Trestle not far away, blowing its whistle; and as sure as the night was dark, we could hear Old Man Langum somewhere in the distance, howling at the moon. I had always known the stories were true. We looked at each other, our breath making clouds of fog in the slide, and Robin held his finger to his lips. Barney-Guybrush ran around, excited and panting, with a big-doggy grin and big, awkward gait. He loved our games, and I saw him as our protector.

The intruder came through the chain-link fence only moments later, but I just knew the Slide had some sort of force-field around it that would keep him from seeing us. His feet were quiet on the sand. Playgrounds were still filled with sand back then. However, as fate—or some tear in the multiverse—would have it, we were soon looking into the beam of a flashlight being shined up the slide. I wasn’t scared as much as disappointed. He was a cop. The intruder was a cop. He thought we were vandals. And then he wanted to know why we were hiding from him, and why we were out so late.

“We thought you were an intruder,” Robin said, after he’d climbed out of the slide. His voice suddenly sounded different than usual. More like a grown-up, which made me cringe, if cringing was a thing back then. Trevor slapped his forehead with his palm and walked around muttering to himself. He had more sense and logic than his years should have allotted him. More than the rest of us, anyway.

Robin, clearly embarrassed, explained to the officer that it was all pretend. It was all a game. I don’t remember the words he said, but his voice still echoes in my head today. It hadn’t been a game. Not for me. I think I thought the night might have turned out better if the guy had been a serial killer instead. A serial killer would never have found us—we’d have held our breaths without realizing it, and our hearts would have pounded so loud we’d be worried he’d hear them. But he’d have eventually moved on, villainously looking elsewhere for us while we made our escape through the deep, dark woods. I think I left a piece of my heart, a piece of my childhood at the playground that night. The cop drove us home for being out past curfew, except for Robin, who ran home with Barney-Guybrush. He, the cop, asked my mom if she knew we were out past curfew. She did know, but I don’t think she said so.

That school we went to: it was an elementary school by day—my elementary school, actually—but it lives in my mind now as some kind of Wonderland. Or Neverland, more like. Most of my best moments from childhood can be traced to Friday nights, the Nights of the Langum: we lived in that town for six years, and we spent most Friday nights at that school. One time we found a knife in the Hideout. We buried it in a safe spot, just in case we ever needed it.

On Friday nights, after our adventures at the school, Robin and I would stay up for hours, reading with a bowl of Goldfish crackers. Back then, there was only one flavor of Goldfish crackers, and they didn’t have smiles yet. Robin would read Hardy Boys, I’d read Sweet Valley Twins. My flashlight would make a sort of lemon-slice pattern on the pages. Those books were my world. I tried to read one as an adult a few years ago, and they committed every writing faux pas listed in those bullet-point blog posts for novice writers nowadays—from info dumps to flawless protagonists—but to me, the info dumps were comforting. They were the same in every book, and I could recite them by heart. I could probably still recite them by heart. I always tried to live up to the flawless, beautiful Elizabeth Wakefield. I thought maybe someday, when I was older and wiser, I might have peaches-and-cream skin and long, sun-streaked blond hair. I don’t yet; I’m pushing forty now, and my skin’s still a very mediocre pink, and my hair’s closer to being streaked with gray than streaked with sun.

I don’t know exactly when those years ended. Our parents split up, I guess, and we moved. We couldn’t take Barney-Guybrush with us, my mom said. So he went to live at my grandparents’ farm. He died a year later, they told us. I remember when they sent us a piece of paper with his muddy paw print on it, as a memorial. I clamped my hand over my mouth and hid in my room for the rest of the night. Nobody tells you about that day when you get a new dog.

That same year, my mom started wanting me to wear makeup, and I started wondering if I was fat. Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield went on to Sweet Valley High, and their plights became exponentially more mature. Robin got a girlfriend and sold his Hardy Boys collection so he could take her to dinner. Trevor got into a group of friends that T.P.ed houses every weekend, and, not to hurt my feelings, but I was not invited. Hilary kissed a boy before I did. My mom remarried and my stepbrothers hated me. Everything that’s supposed to happen, but that I always thought wouldn’t happen to us.

A family friend died years later, when we were all in our thirties. We didn’t talk much, Trevor and Hilary and I—though Robin and I spoke occasionally. We were heretics of our own forsaken cult, and there’s never much to say between the heretic and the cult. Not for polite company anyway. Somewhere along the way, my siblings and I had become polite company.

As if from the four corners of the earth, we all made our way back to California for the funeral. Robin brought his wife, Teresa, and his six-year-old daughter. I brought my four-year-old, Baer; Trevor and Hilary came without their families. Unsure of how to relate to each other’s adult lives, we planned a weekend of stuff for old time’s sake. Anything we could do to relive the past, because nothing is ever as good as a memory. And because none of us had matured much past our childhood mysticism—our hearts were still in that Radio Flyer world. Nothing had ever come close to those dark, foggy, spooky nights on the grassy moors of the school.

“Muir Trestle,” Robin said, as we all sat around a park table after the funeral. “We’re doing it. A good, old-fashioned Night of the Langum—this time we’ll see the ghost train with our own eyes.”

I laughed. He was joking, but only mostly. “We’re doing it!” I was excited. I’d always gone along with anything he suggested. Even at thirty, I’d still have probably followed him off a cliff.

“I’m down,” Trevor said.

“I guess I am too.” Hilary seemed hardly more than indifferent.

The legendary, 19th-century train bridge was named after John Muir, whose property it had originally run through. It was the crowning jewel of all our childhood folklore—the classic, Gothic cliché practically in our backyard. It lived in our memories as the sound of a ghost train, but we’d never dared to explore it as children. Or maybe we weren’t allowed. Built in 1899, it spanned 1,600 feet and fed into a 300-foot-long tunnel. It was where Old Man Langum would go to howl at the moon, although no one could know that for sure. It was rusty, graffitied, and it towered like a haunted castle over our California valley.

“Is the bridge really haunted by a ghost train, Mom?” Baer asked me as we hiked up the grassy, thorny hill to a small, plateaued area just outside the tunnel, just before the bridge. There was no moon out that night; shadows were a gray area between the real and the surreal.

“Maybe,” I said, wiggling my eyebrows at him, “you never know.”

“It definitely is,” Robin said, cackling for dramatic effect. “Keep your ears open, Baer, and you might hear Old Man Langum howling at the moon.”

“Don’t be dumb,” Trevor said. Polite company or not, I guess baseline sibling dynamics never change.

“I’m more curious about the Ghost of Old Man Muir,” I said. “This used to be his land, you know. Once upon a time.”

“Ooh,” Robin said, and I almost thought I could hear admiration in his voice. “Another layer to the legend.”

I felt Baer cling a little closer to me.

“Milly,” Robin said. Milly wasn’t my name, but it’s what he’s always called me. “I dare you to walk across the bridge and back.”

I hate turning down a dare, especially from one of my brothers, so I grinned and followed him over to the tunnel, Trevor and Hilary close behind.

“It’s dark,” I said, standing on the tracks at the entrance. I looked from the bridge, to the tunnel, and back to the bridge again. “Three-hundred feet across. Jeez, you can hardly see the end, not at this time of night, anyway.”

“Old Man Langum’s probably waiting on the other side.”

Hilary laughed a distant, sophisticated laugh. “I’m good,” she said, and went to sit by a tree at a safe distance.

“You’re a dork,” I said to Robin, rolling my eyes.

“Mom, don’t do it,” Baer said. “It looks like where a t-rex lives.”

“You heard the boy,” I said, “I guess I’m not doing it. I don’t need any t-rex encounters tonight.” I didn’t want to admit—to Robin or myself—that ominousness had somehow lost some of its charm.

“Alright then, I’m going,” Robin said. “I’m going across the bridge. Anyone in? Last chance. Trevor? Millard?”

“We don’t know when the next train comes, Babe,” Teresa said passively. They’d been married for fifteen years, and she knew not to waste too much energy trying to change her husband’s mind.

“I’ll run fast,” Robin said, dusting his shoes of her concerns before he took off at his practiced jog.

“Wait up,” Trevor called, turning his baseball cap backwards and following after his brother.

I looked up at the night sky, unlit and cloaked in fog. The Muir Trestle stretched into the murky darkness and disappeared. The tunnel was a gaping black hole in the night behind me. It called to me. It called to me like nothing else had in years. All my childhood Gothic fantasies pulsed through my veins with a familiar, electric shockwave of frightened thrill. I stepped onto the tracks.

“Baer, why don’t you go wait over with Aunt Hilary and Teresa,” I said.

“I want to stay with you,” he said. His voice was small.

“It’s not safe, Sweetie,” I said, like he was a pesky little brother instead of my only child. He turned away, and I turned towards the tunnel.

I walked one plank at a time, each one creaking beneath my weight with that sort of echoey thunk only train tracks have. It was beautiful and ominous and spooky; the graffiti scribbles on the entrance walls of the tunnel seemed to take on demonic life: tunnel minions screaming desperate warnings.

I stood in the middle of the tunnel, in the middle of the tracks, safely and soundly enveloped in the darkness. I breathed in the damp, stagnant air and closed my eyes. There was a surprising lack of difference in my vision whether my eyes were opened or closed. It was intoxicating, and I could feel myself vibrating.

I opened my eyes as the vibration grew stronger, as if opening my eyes would heighten my other senses. The vibration definitely was growing stronger, and I realized I could hear the chug of a train approaching.

I heard the whistle blow; it was loud, and it was coming around the bend, approaching the tunnel. And then the howling. Howling accompanied the sounds of the train. A thousand howls filled the night: an orchestra of ghosts, or maybe a cult of janitors roaming the valley, performing strange rituals and calling to the moon. It was sublime, ethereal, for just a moment, before reality checked me and I ran out of the tunnel, back to the wooded plateau where my son was waiting.

Teresa sat there, shaking and cradling her daughter next to Hilary. The pressure wave accompanying the train as it bulldozed out of the tunnel may as well have been a tsunami, and I knew then it wasn’t a ghost train. It wasn’t a fucking ghost train.

I clung desperately to Baer and instinctively clamped my hand over my mouth, suppressing vomit—my imagination was colliding with reality, creating a dizzying kaleidoscope and wrapping my chest in a sort of transcendent panic. It was a crushing chokehold: what if I’d brought Baer with me into that tunnel? What if I hadn’t run fast enough? What if my brothers hadn’t been as lucky as I?

I stayed down, clutching the roots of the tree, but lifted my eyes toward the tracks, trying to see through the fog to Robin and Trevor. The train had almost driven the length of the bridge by now. Within a minute, it had disappeared completely into the night, into the fog, as quickly as it had appeared. Driven back through that tear in the multiverse. As far as the night was concerned, it may as well have been a ghost train. My heart exhaled and breathed in deeply as I saw Robin and Trevor walking slowly back up the tracks, towards us. I thought Teresa might run to Robin, but she stood still. Maybe in shock, maybe angry.

“I thought you were smooshed,” she said, refusing to look at him.

Robin held her and apologized over and over again. He looked shaken as well, but turned away to hide any signs of it.

Turning away from my siblings, I looked towards the end of the bridge again. I could see nothing except the glow of a few street lights below, but I heard a single howl echo through the fog.

“Old Man Langum,” Robin said.

Robin, Trevor, and Hilary left before I did. I think we all still felt sick to our stomachs. I left Baer to have a day with his grandparents while I went to visit my old neighborhood. I wanted to go back to the school. We hadn’t lived there since I’d been in seventh grade, and I had no idea if anyone I used to know lived there anymore, either. But it was still my hometown. I parked in the small, empty gravel lot across from our old house.

The neighbor’s lawn was overgrown. They must have moved, the Flanders. I half-smiled to myself as I realized that probably wasn’t their real name—my dad had just called them that because the guy would mow his lawn incessantly.

Ron’s house, with the truck. He’d never worn a shirt, and had once gotten a boner while talking to my mom. It was a family joke for years that I realized I only now understood.

The lawn at the corner by the stop sign was covered in leaves. An elderly man named Joe used to live there; I remember watching him lovingly rake the leaves, the way only an elderly man would do. My mom always talked about bringing him cookies, but then one day he was gone, and we’d never made the cookies. Maybe no one had raked the leaves since.

I marveled at the sidewalk more than anything else, how its cracks and crannies were still so familiar to me, it was like I’d never missed a day of walking it in twenty years.

I made it to the school and hesitated a little before walking in. It was California, so it was open-halled. Open to intruders, which I guess was me now. I walked to all our old landmarks and hideouts, but I didn’t have the key to them anymore. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I stretched and twisted and turned my mentality, they weren’t the magical places that still lived in my mind’s eye.

The shrubs of the Hideout had been uprooted and paved over. I wondered if they’d found our knife.

The short, chain-link fence with the gate that was always unlocked, that used to surround the Playground with the tunnel slide and the swing-set, was now replaced with a tall privacy fence, chained and padlocked.

The deep, dark woods looked a lot more like a pear orchard than I’d remembered.

I walked back through the baseball field, which had once been a foggy moor. Back through the halls, halls we used to shout in to hear our echoes. My head was down; my mind was reaching—for what, I wasn’t sure. Like a secret password or a handshake or something. Something that would grant me access back to my childhood, back when I knew I’d live forever.

A sound suddenly echoed through my memory, and then through the halls of the school around me. I wondered at first if I was imagining, but the sound grew louder as it approached me from behind. It was the sound of a very rickety cart, rolling over the cracks and bumps in the cement. I turned, and saw Old Man Langum—a little older, a little more hunched. Still making his way through the open halls.

Somewhere in the distance, I heard the faint rumblings of a train, and the howling of a hundred dogs.