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ATSF 666

Ride the rail - straight to hell

By C S HughesPublished 2 years ago 19 min read
5

“She had a kind of grace, even as a small child, and also a kind of anguish. She brought herself here and threw herself down. In her letter she said there was a beauty here, and an incongruity. I see that.”

Down in the arroyo, in the pit of the canyon, amongst the tumbled scree and bracken, the ironwork made a lattice of the sky, dizzying in its precise geometry. Small in the expanse of sand and wind carved rock, arid and alien in its hostility, Randall could also see that. The bridge in its order, the white van and the black SUV, the two men, one somber and stick thin in dark glasses and a crisp black suit, the other uncomfortable in a white plastic construction helmet, loose high-viz vest over a technician’s uniform of pale shirt and tan slacks, in that landscape wearied by aeons, a forgotten sea where only small thorned things clung to desperate lives, in that storm still and perilous beauty, men and their machines and constructions and platitudes were out of place.

“It’s almost a year since she fell, since she threw herself down,” said the gaunt man. The flowers in his hands, roses, lavender, in black cellophane, he threw down. They lay bright and forlorn against the rust red rocks, the sand moving in the wind, slowly consuming them.

Not knowing now what to do with his hands, he crossed his arms, and held them tight against his ribs. “They say because of who I was, other children treated her like a freak, that she was in love with death, because of my lyrics, because of my songs. You can lay it at the hands of the savagery of youth, or at these hands, that didn’t protect her from that cruelty, but the truth is, some children have a grace that defies this world and its untold injuries, and so they fly.”

“You’re right, some children are too good for this world. I remember I thought that when it happened. When I saw it in the papers,” said the technician. “Musician, aren’t you?”

“I used to be. Sean Speck and The Lost Cause. I don’t do that anymore. Now I’m just Sean Spencer.”

“More of a Glen Campbell fan myself, than that heavy rock. Randall Candleman, safety engineer.”

Candleman felt a brief urge to offer his hand, but he held the sonic transducer - a portable metal fatigue testing device like an electronic tablet with a cable and wand attached - tight in both hands, and his levity struck an off note, so as acknowledgment, a nod sufficed.

For a while, between them, there was nothing but the silence of slowly drifting sand, which Candleman broke, in measured tone, with a fact that seemed both solemn and intriguing – “The people that once lived here, in those caves up there, would say her voice is still on the wind.”

“Because she killed herself?”

“Because she was never taken up. The first bridge here was built by the Puebloan people that lived in the cliff caves a thousand years ago. Not strictly a bridge, no. A spider spindle thing of hemp and wood and twisted vines still green with fruit and flowers, tethered to the trees either side of the canyon. Not a bridge between here and there,” he said, pointing with the wand, “but a sky bridge for their burials. They would take the bodies of their dead out there, tied in something like a loose cocoon, suspended in the blue, and gather and sing a deep thrumming song that brought the hawks and the vultures. They would tear apart the dead, carrying the pieces into the sky. If the song was weak, if there was a storm, and the birds didn't come, if the body and the bridge just rotted and fell into the canyon, to be eaten by lizards and wolves, they would say her spirit couldn’t find its way to the other world, that her voice was still on the wind.”

Speck felt a tightening in his chest, he could hear an echo on the wind, a soughing, a childish voice lilting a verse about a mockingbird, a memory.

“You’re talking about my daughter,” he said, his throat grinding.

“Sorry, sorry. I only meant, not her, but a thousand years ago,” he said. “I read it in a book.”

Candleman’s voice trailed to a silence, that left only the wind, a ringing like blood in Speck’s ears. He tried to dismiss the noise. He wasn’t sure what held him there. He turned to leave.

“I thought, at the time, I thought maybe she didn’t kill herself,” said Candleman. “This bridge is notorious you know. Dangerous.”

“What exactly do you mean by that?” Speck was thinking of the gun under the car seat, consumed by red rage visions. He could leave this fool here for the sand and the scorpions to eat. Or himself. But no, he’d got rid of the gun months ago.

“The bridge is a killer. No listen. I don’t just test the metal. I study the places I have to check. In the midst of the great storm of 1849 the cavalry wiped out the natives that lived here, so the railway company could build this bridge. The natives pulled in their ladders and rope bridges, but they didn’t resist, most of them didn’t even hide. They sang. The bodies fell from the caves and the cliff tops. Those that stayed in the back of the caves - the old, the infirm, the children - the soldiers dashed their brains out with rifle butts, or just pitched them over the edge. Flood waters rushed down the canyon, down the arroyo, scattering the dead across the desert plain. In their mythology, they didn’t go up, but went down, to some kind of cold and miserable underworld. A few, the soldiers left alive. A few girl children.”

Speck was clenching and unclenching his fists. He had long, powerful looking fingers, big hands and bony wrists jutting from his sleeves. Frankenstein’s hands, Candleman thought. He wondered if Speck had those strangler’s hands because he was a musician, or if he was musician because he had those hands?

“In 1853 they finished the bridge. It was meant to open up gold fields in the Southern Sangre De Cristo Range, but the gold there played out after only a few years. The first official train across, which joined this spur line from Santa Fe, taking dignitaries, miners and their families, well, they say she bent sideways, threw off a locomotive and train of four passenger cars, coal car, mail car, the whole kit and caboose, into the arroyo, here below, then raised herself up so - except for a splintered railing - you wouldn’t even know she buckled.”

“The theory is, it was a kind of oscillation, set up by the rhythm of the train, that ran through the bridge like a wave. ‘A fearful symmetry’, an engineer at the time called it. Eighty-seven souls lost. They added these cross braces and extra supports. It never happened again, but there were collisions, derailments. Falls. Of course it’s a walking bridge now, part of the national park, it hasn’t carried a train in 150 years. They say a tourist fell to his death just a few months ago, struck by an eagle. He climbed the safety rail and had his ear pressed to the old iron. They added a higher rail last year. I couldn’t tell you the number of…”

Candleman had somehow circled around to the subject he had been trying to avoid.

“Suicides,” Speck finished. “Isabel moved down here, to Cross Canyon, the town near the edge of the park, to do an internship as a ranger - a conservation officer. She loved it here. She left a note. Not explicit, but not ambiguous either.”

“I couldn’t imagine. I’m so sorry,” said Candleman. This time, he seemed to understand, that for such loss, the condolences of strangers were superfluous, like a language you once understood, but had forgot.

“Why did he climb the rail?”

“There’s a story. They say the old iron remembers. There is a sound in the metal. A song, a thrum - a heartbeat. If you place your hand against it, if you listen carefully, when the wind is rushing down the canyon, you can feel the temperature change, you can hear the voices of the lost, some say you can hear the life taken up by the bridge, pulsing.”

“Who says? Who are these ‘they’ you keep talking about?”

“You know. Local stories, the grapevine, eyewitnesses, reports. Them.”

“They say eyewitnesses are unreliable, the worst kind of evidence,” countered Speck.

“Hey, they don’t call me The Doctor for nothing.” Candleman pulled something like a gleaming metal octopus with one great eye from his pocket. A stethoscope.

“We can listen for ourselves.”

Speck could again, almost make out the words, a lilting, childish sing-song on the wind…Daddy’s gone a buy you a mockingbird…a fading memory. Speck took the stethoscope.

“Do you use that in your work?”

“No,” said Candleman. “Not really. It began as a joke. The guys at county started calling me ‘The Bridge Doctor’, and they gave me the stethoscope one year. Though I don’t just check bridges. Any critical steel framed structure. Buildings, storage tanks, refineries, transmission towers, radio telescopes, satellite dishes. The thing is, I’ve used it. I’ve listened to each building, each frame, each tower, each bridge, and they all have a different sound.”

“How do they sound?”

“Oddly enough, you can kind of hear a wail in them, a low miserable wail, when the metal is sick. I’ve confirmed it with the transducer. I checked the Apache Canyon Railroad Bridge, that’s a deck plate girder bridge in Santa Fe County, built in 1894, and it sings a pure sweet note, like running your finger on the edge of a wine glass. I once listened to the Upper Canyon Diablo trestle, the original, not the replacement, up in AZ, it screamed like breaking glass. When I tested both of those with the transducer - it uses ultrasonic and subsonic waves to check for metal fatigue, crystalline fractures, rust, density flaws, and all the other weaknesses metals are prone to, the Apache Canyon was fine, and the Diablo needed to be replaced.”

“And this one? Does this bridge have a name? Have you listened to this bridge? What bloody song does it sing?”

“Oh, this one has no name I know of. A map reference, maybe a code number in the annals of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, but no name, and it’s my first time here. I haven’t heard it sing.”

“Give me those.” Speck took the stethoscope, placed the tubes in his ears. He walked over to the pylon. He had to pull himself up a little against the footing, the rough concrete stained yellow by desert sands, the embedded pebbles, showing through, polished and black like eyes.

The bridge hung over him. He reached up and placed the mouth of the thing against the metal. He heard its heartbeat, as Candleman had said. Something like the pounding rhythm of a train, coming closer. Then a sound like fire. Then, perhaps, a choir, distant, something low and mournful. Then the lilting, child’s song…if that mockingbird don’t sing…London Bridge is falling down, falling down…my fair lady...

The whisper faded. It was somehow like the voice was still there, but he was becoming deaf to it, he was falling away.

“I can’t hear it anymore. I heard her singing, but I can’t hear her anymore.”

“Listen, wait. I’ll send a wave through it, a pulse, with the transducer, both nodes. What can you hear? That will make it vibrate.” Candleman reached up and placed the tip of the wand against the girder.

A wrenching scream, a metal keening threw Speck to his back on the sand.

“What was that? I heard that? What was that?” Candleman was shouting. His face looked clownpale, mouthing speech. His words were thick like he was under water.

Speck could still hear the scream, like metal wheels, like falling.

Something hit Candleman in the chest with a whomp. He fell back and sprawled. The transducer tangled in his hand as he tried to gain purchase to get up. With a high sheik something else hit him. Talons ripped his cheek. A bird, huge and screeching and red as a wound was scrabbling at his face, trying to get at his eyes under the hard hat.

Above, past the ironwork lattice, above the arches, in the desert blue, a cloud swirled and thickened, something like smoke, something like a tornado. Speck pulled himself to his feet and ran, arms raised, shouting at Candleman to run, to the van. Small birds beat at his neck with fierce wings, scratching with needle claws, tearing pieces from his ears, flying up with gobbets in their beaks. His sleeves were shredded, blood pouring from his wrists. The door handle slippery in his grasp.

Candleman was almost to his van when out of the swirl an eagle struck, not a bald eagle, but something angular and dark. Blood blossomed in long rents on his back as the weight of the creature smashed him into the door. It swirled away, wings beating, blood dripping from meat in its claws. Candleman scrambled into the van as the cloud for a moment obscured the van.

There seemed to be an order in the madness of the birds. They swirled in the cloud, the bright and the dark, the fierce and the plain, the raptor and the prey, until by some ill reason one stooped from the mass, swooping out of the sky to rake and peck and shriek and batter with frenzied wings.

Speck hit the side of the SUV like a tackle. He jammed the handle up and down. Locked! He could see the keys in the ignition. A silver blur struck his shoulder, ripping through fabric, into the flesh.

It jabbed at his face, striking for the eye with a hooked, yellow-tipped beak, hitting so hard the lens of his sunglasses starred. He batted it away with a forearm, dragging at the rear door handle. Wrenching it open on hands and knees he clambered in. As he sat up there was a buzzing, an insectoid whirr. A tiny bird, jewelled wings a blur, hung in the air in front of his face, lapping with a long tongue at the blood that pooled at the rim of his glasses and dripped down his cheek. It watched him with a red fixed glare, eyes fixed and mesmerized. Ruby drops dripped on its emerald chest. He slammed it into the window glass, held it there scratching at his fingers until he could hit the switch in the armrest to lower the window. He palmed it out the gap, and it vanished back into the wing storm. He reversed the switch and the window edged back into place, and he struggled into the front seat.

The cloud swirled, and another bird swooped out of the swarm, this time something small and grey and swift. It battered at the windscreen then swept off again. For the life of him Speck couldn’t help but think of one of those peculiar 19th century dances, where, enlivened by music and cheers, participants would take turns coming out of the crowd and performing a strut, part walk, part dance down an aisle comprised of their kin. The thought of it unleashed something from inside his chest, a shriek, a howl of laughter.

As if in response, the ussussurus of wing beats faded. He could see the cloud of a sudden disperse like thrown ashes. There was a metal keening on the wind that rose and rose until it was like a scream in his ear and he grasped his head in both hands.

High above a ripple ran through the bridge. With an earthquake roar the entire structure seemed to buckle sideways, pulling from the face of the rock and tipping, then in front of Candleman’s van two great pylons lifted from the floor of the canyon, in a haze of dust and crumbling cement, then those great feet stepped sideways and planted themselves more firmly in the earth, and the bridge poised for a moment, like a coursing beast testing the air. In one lumberous and shrieking moment it stepped again, curving its back and its entire length, and bent one end down, as if to take a close and ravenous look at the small things on the ground between its feet.

Then, with a hungering and deliberate purpose, it stepped forward.

Candleman was gesticulating wildly from the cab of his van, mouthing something, when the great concrete sheathed pylon came down and crushed it like a tin can underfoot.

Speck turned the ignition and drove, out along the arroyo, toward where a trail wound up the hill into the south west edge of the national park. Through the dust cloud in the rear view mirror, he could see the bridge, the concrete crumbling away from its girder pylon limbs, as with a piston motion, part animal, part machine, it dismembering Candleman’s van.

As he lost view it was batting at the wreckage like a cat with broken mouse. He thought, I’m hallucinating. But he wasn’t hallucinating.

He thought, this is hell –nor am I out of it. He thought of home, the ranch on the outskirts of Santa Fe. At the top as he swung onto the road through the park, making for the highway, the tips of the Sangre de Cristo range red in the setting sun, the hunched and silent shoulders of the mountains now in shadow, he saw the thing in the distance, cresting the hill, a tangled silhouette against the violet sky. It swayed back and forth, searching. Then it came.

He could only think of one thing, if this thing was going to destroy him, he would see Isabel one more time, or at least, be at her grave. At the highway he turned south toward Gila and Cross Canyon, the town where she had lived, where under ugly red sandstone, she was buried.

Speck drove, fast, the car shuddering. The radio blared one of his own songs, these are days of dogs and metal… he was shrieking. The metal thing, he could now only barely conceive of it as a bridge, was loping in the distance, some vast sextipedal beast. The birds still swirled around it the way small scavenger fish follow a shark, waiting for carrion and carnage.

Against the horizon in its fire, the monster ran, pacing, taking obstacles black in the twilight with the grace of a loping hound, with indefatigable purpose, a machine-like insectoid articulation. Like the song, above the engine roar and the drone of tyres, a metal scream sawed at his ears with a ragged breath-like rhythm.

For a moment on the dark sides of the mountain he lost sight of it, then it seemed to be far away, on the edge of the sierra, four arched legs fixed to the mountainside, bent upwards, the two forward pylons clawing at the brightening constellations, standing rampant, its jutting cantilever platform raised up and roaring silently into the night.

He could see the sleepy yellow lights of the town, winking on in the dusk. The graveyard ahead, just a turn off the highway through a rose tangled white picket trellis, held orderly rows of simple markers in marble and sandstone, freshly mown lawns, benches under lamps. It was even called a park, Cross Canyon Park, as if its visitors could pack up their frisbees and baskets and Gingham blankets at the end of the day and depart.

From the gate he could see her stone, even in the oncoming dark. Though not ostentatious, a plain block of orange and tan marbled sandstone, with her named, and her dated, and the inscription, Ever Loved. It was large, a supine megalith behind a dark, oblique reflecting pool, tendrils of mist rising from the mirror of its surface, overshadowing the more ornate and traditional markers around it.

A peace overcame him. He wept. He thought now he was free of the thing, now it had disappeared into the wilderness, he would call someone.

They would lock him up, but they could go and see where the bridge had been, themselves. They could follow the trail it tore through the earth. First he needed to see Isabel. He needed her forgiveness, simply for all those absences. He thought, after all, that’s what it was.

Then with a squeal the bridge reared up on the black and stone jagged horizon, crushing fences, breaking and scattering markers, its girder legs piercing deep into the soft earth, so plumes of dirt erupted as it stepped.

The birds that rode its girders and railings, flew from that uncertain perch and settled in rows on every cross and arch and on the wide stone arms and wings of angels.

The bridge stalked forward, perhaps like a centaur, or a vulture, then stopped and shook itself so more birds scattered, in a fury of caws and metal.

It raised its forelimbs high with an awkward piston savagery bringing them down so her stone cracked in pieces. It hung above her grave with blunt limbs tearing and ripping jackhammer blows at the earth.

Speck’s chest swelled with agony. He gulped air into his lungs, tasting damp earth and ozone and hot iron, something alien and avian, and something like mouldering leaves, only ranker.

His neck pulsed, his throat tightened like the skin of a drum, and he let out a long fierce wail that tore at his chest, and rang in his throat like it was brass, one high resonant note of anguish, and a deeper one that ached his ribs that joined it.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

A lament that stilled the trees and silenced the wind.

The sound of breaking, the shriek of metal in his ears stopped. He could hear a fading ticking, the resigned creak of cooling iron, as the bridge, like some weary pet, lay down across the grass and gravestones and slept.

There amongst the torn and quiet girders she stood, pale and aglow, finger to her black lips, until the darting shadows of the birds tore the shade apart and fled, carrying her up. When the last pale wisp of her was gone, when all the birds had flown, when all that remained was the torn earth, the broken stones, the still and rusting iron, Speck turned away.

He got in the car and drove. He thought it was a dream. That he was still in it. He could still see it laying there in his rear view, as on the other side of town he swept up the curve of the interstate onramp.

There was a metal keening on the wind. He saw the sign for the Cross Canyon-Santa Fe Highway Bridge.

A bridge over endless black ribbons, going nowhere. He felt in his bones, through his hands tightening on the wheel, through the metal of the car, through the whirr of the tyres, in the steel and concrete, a deep and resonant hum.

Horror
5

About the Creator

C S Hughes

C S Hughes grew up on the edges of sea glass cities and dust red towns. He has been published online and on paper. His work tends to the lurid, and sometimes to the ludicrous, but seeks beauty in all its ecstasy and artifice.

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