Phantom Hands of the North Sea Train

Speed. In the beginning, everything siphoned into a feeling of intense, irreversible, almost incomprehensible speed. And the moment Arametta Malâme felt it, she was already gone.

Gone, into a world that startled her eyes as much as it stunned her senses the second she awoke.

“A…A-oh?” She managed discordantly in a small and distant voice, as the aftermath of what must have been the slow ooohs and aaahs of a low, loud whistle faded away. A sound she couldn’t comprehend nor explain.

Around her, the silver-rainbow glass of rows of windows filtered a bluish light into the brilliantly-colored space she was sitting in. Breathing delicately, she shyly shifted sleep from her body by shaking her legs and moving her arms, finally tossing her head around and throwing strands of her long, glistening hair back, all as if to ready her eyes for the widest perception of her sudden surroundings. When she did in fact brave an assessment of her environment, the sight stole her breath and ran away with it.

It was glorious. Illuminatory. Constantly startling. Arametta sat in silence, drowning in awe. Against the thick wood and woven fabric of a 1920s train cabin, she sat unmoving, deducing slowly that she was, of course, placed inside some sort of locomotive.

“Mon Dieu! M-my God…” she whispered, fear puncturing her stomach sharply, feeling as though she had swallowed a basket of swords. Where is this train…going?, the soft thought thudded against her temple.

As she turned her head back and forth, she caught the gleam of something in her lap, and glanced down to view the end of a long jeweled necklace dangling down to her stomach. Moving to quickly catalog the rest of her attire, she held her arms up gently in order to scan her dress. It seemed oddly familiar, a shimmery black lace that fell into tassels at her calves and hugged her hips and chest finely. Sighing strangely, Arametta’s brow darkened as a foreign sense of relief trickled through her coolly. She reached up lightly to finger thick, pinned curls positioned around her head, juxtaposed by the many loose strands that darted out of their hold and lay dangling against her high cheeks and around her neck, as if roughly pulled out by some sort of tumultuous wind. Or wayward hand, she thought uneasily. She touched her barely sticky lips to feel the bright bloom of lipstick. Red, she noticed dispassionately. Her eyes felt heavily dusted with dark shadow and she brushed against her cheeks to find a soft rouge covering the apples.

Her hands, however, lay bare and pale, where she imagined there should be gloves. As she ran her fingers over the material of the seats, she wondered why there wasn’t.

What lay under her hands was a fabric and a design she knew well. And a time perhaps too. But that was the last familiar aspect of the vessel; the world against the windows came from a different universe altogether, as did the edges of the train and sounds it produced.

Light and lovely images, shining like reeds in the setting sun, flew past her from the outside, the windows wide enough to allow spots of starlight in, all cutting between rushes of copper, emerald, and carmine sky. They were too fast to see, but they beamed with what must have been the intense brightness of vast emotion, and Arametta sighed wondrously at the sight.

After a moment of puzzled entrancement, she turned back toward the glittering cabin, nearly suffocated with delight, then glanced down at the rows of seats behind her. Her eyes frantically searched for another starry-eyed onlooker, but upon finding none, the knowledge of being truly alone hit her chest hard.

Yet what she did find were six or seven rows of similar seats, positioned perfectly behind hers and on the opposite side of the car, ending in a striking red door. Arametta leaned forward and squinted her dark brown eyes to see it, but the writing that she noticed scrawled in gold across it was thin and backwards. Decisively, she stood and shakily walked to the back of the vessel, suddenly curious. Fast-moving air combed through her hair and rifled through her clothing, but she pursued those few golden words.

Upon reaching the end of the car, she haltingly ran her fingers across the letters as she read aloud,

“La Château de la Mer du Nord”. The Castle of the North Sea.

France. Arametta’s body went cold. As the rhythm of her soul suddenly came to a halt, something floated down from the corners of her vision and danced gently across her raised hands.

It was a yellowed, detailed document, slicing through the air in steady back-and-forth sways, falling slowly enough for her to read it. In elegant, wide French, the paper exclaimed, “You are cordially invited to the wedding of…Arametta Malâme and Henri Laurent…”

Arametta’s heart lurched, but she continued to read. “On the date of April 12th, 1922, at La Château de la Mer du Nord…”. April 12th. The Castle of the North Sea. With a vicious shiver, she fought against surprising tears, surging into her eyes and causing them to glitter in a way that was all wrong. Entirely all…wrong, she thought, speechless and spellbound. The paper continued to drift toward her lithely, only to dissolve into millions of tiny dots of white color at her eventual touch.

“Ah-”, She gasped, hands soon abandoned by the decorative page. The one that seemed to hold her only happiness.

At that, Arametta whipped around, sucking in the sudden urge to scream. She did not, only let out a low moan that drifted through the air and settled against the rattling windows. Then, after breathing out and resting her face into a small, pained smile, she began walking to the other end of the car, where a welcoming door caught her attention.

Pushing through the rectangle of well-polished wood, Arametta walked into what felt like the warm and sudden spiral of falling asleep. Before her was a collection of glinting images, bursting into the cabin and curling around her in siren-like whispers. They were glistening pictures of carousels, churning magically into the air and carrying with it the jarring out-of-tune laughter of two young children. Drawings and letters, words and music spun in and out of her vision and gathered in strands of light and color until backing into silence. Spinning tops and the arched backs of a French hillside she may have once known rippled across the air, glowing against her face and sparking in her eyes until they darkened and disappeared.

“On the date of April 12th, 1922…”, the thought pinned itself to her mind with a piercing agony, and would not leave her head.

Each cabin was like that, shelves of a life Arametta may have recognized if she only took the time to notice the particular wave of the dark hair and dazzle of the dark eyes of the girl running through the forests, hunched over thoughtful letters, gazing calmly at the pinking sky.

Yet she continued on blithely, through each chapter, each beginning, each car. Until, as Arametta reached what she thought must have been the front of the train, the car she ran through kept tossing her back at the open door whenever she made it through the car. Bewildered, she paused at the entrance, pretending she couldn’t feel the burning warmth of the train’s engine room and the enticing urge to go toward it.

On her first run through, the white pearly haze of clouds greeted her in bright pillows of thought, only to blacken and fall into a dark, dull rain that covered her completely and ran over her in suffocating, quickly-babbling rivulets. As she annoyedly motioned to leave, she almost thought she heard the words “murder murder murder murder” dripping from the air smilingly.

“On the date of April 12th, 1922…” —is it April? Arametta wondered suddenly. I believe, I believe it is…but she let the idea go. Everything was so haunting, so glorious, that Arametta thought it was something like a dream. Perhaps, a nightmare.

Opening the door to the last cabin once more, Arametta stepped into a gallery of paintings, gathered into the golden space and greeting her somberly, images of men she did not know waltzing by behind gilded frames, all stuck in a frightened countenance and adorned with the most piercing sets of eyes she had ever seen.

As if caught at the very moment before something horrible befell them, Arametta shakenly assumed. They soared across the air in fragmented rectangles that pinched at her skin, terror nettling inside her as she first balked, then ran through them.

All the while, the silver train shuttered and shifted into its atmosphere, hurtling into a space and a time unknown.

“On the date of April 12th, 1922…”

Last, she walked back into the car again, eyes wild and stomach turning, only to see out of the corner of her right eye a small, slight mirror. With a swift, surprising stop, the sounds and rustles of the train came to a quieted halt.

Arametta turned to face herself.

“April 12th, 1922…”

She was beautiful. That was her very first thought. Beautiful. But something about the way her eyes rested hungrily on her face and darkly into her soul made Aramatta’s shoulders shake. And one thing—she never blinked. Even as Arametta looked her up and down, she stayed gazing at her as if looking at or into something or someone else. Which made it all the more alarming when she swiftly grabbed the edges of the clouded mirror and yelled,

“BLINK!!!” with a force and an urgency that threw Arametta backwards.

And as she shook her head in confusion and fought to regain her footing, Arametta looked up through the strands of her tousled hair at the mirror and the woman, just in time to see her throw herself viciously against the glass.

“Heeeeaah!” Arametta gasped loudly. Then quieted.

Then felt as if…as if a part of her were saying goodbye

“April 12th…On the date….Arametta….On–April 12th…Arametta and Henri….Laurent…1922…Henri Laurent….Henri…”

With nothing but a simple shriek, Arametta stood still as the mirror severed and broke, the sound reverberating sharply and widely like the crack of a heart.

+++

Blink. Someone commanded. In a voice that rang like hers did, as if pulled straight from a memory. And she listened. Entangled at the apex of the painful, stunning collapse of her chromium dream, Arametta stopped. And blinked. And breathed. And truly opened her eyes. The glow of what once was still glittered slowly in small, dazzling embers somewhere deep inside the two unreadable circles.

Yet now, newly she saw—through the thick tongues of a dark and gripping haze—a curled hand. Outstretched, bathed in a sallow sunlight she didn’t recognize. And as slow filters of color bled wider onto her consciousness, she saw the strips of another hand, grasped impossibly tight by the first.

Frowning slightly, Arametta reached desperately for feeling within her body, true feeling, but only could detect an angry wind tearing at her skin and clothes and the strange heat of some sort of body, beating behind the metal vessel to which she may or may not have been clinging. She quickly turned the other way and tilted her head to the left, only to catch a fractured and startling glimpse of a series of fast-moving wheels, slicing along blades of wood and tufts of grass. For a stolen moment, she stared, entranced and sullen, at the painting-like—yet very much real this time—ground as it raced by.

“PLEASE!” A small, hoarse whine sounded out from the fringes of her sightline, crumbling her sight and numbing her already-distant senses. Arametta whipped around, dazed and half-blind, breathing hard and body frozen at the cry.

“W-Wh-” Her tongue touched lamely around for words that would not come, before being quickly and vehemently interrupted by another “please!!”.

Blinking wildly, Arametta stiffened and gawked, her jaw turning and fighting for speech. Then, a sound, much like a low scream—and much more like the discordant slam of an untuned piano—erupted from beside her. It rang in several OOOOH OOOOOOH’s, the noise slamming and ricocheting into her mind, carrying with it both force and fear.

Breathless, Arametta recoiled as sudden, sparkling images of carousels and painted eyes hurled and starred across her vision, swiping startles of color across the consuming blackness and pouring the sight, smell, touch, music and voice of the world back into her consciousness. Coalescing like the wayward beats of a far-gone heart, the bent shards of Arametta’s mind and soul slowly built onto one another, gathering together until—with a sudden, echoing shriek—the ultimate crash of that psychical wave ripped her from the sharp comfort of her thoughts and blasted her sight with color and life.

And the thin tremolos of breath, her breath. And…the shivering hands of a dangling girl. Her hands. As she looked up, the wind threw her wild hair behind her and revealed her full and defined face, alight with thousands of emotions yet still somehow shadowed in the pomegranate-tinted glow of a dying day. And with a clarity so bright and enrapturing it threw her head back, Arametta stared bleakly and brightly into the pale eyes of a terrified man, balancing in front of her in the deepening blue-black.

Henri? Ha ha. Henri! Ha ha, no, not Henri, not Henri!! She thought in a scattered, sporadically-crazed mental language. She heaved brokenly, tightened her fist, and glared suddenly and closely into the eyes of a person…a person who could have been…Pierre…oh Pierre…or Micheal, or ha ha Gabriel….or hahaha so many more!! And more and more! Far-away, mutated images of faces she knew fluttered through her mind like falling cards, cards that all shifted and scattered at the delineation of the eyes these faces held.

The eyes, more aqua, more hued, and more cataclysmic than the waves off the shores of the North Sea. The North Sea…my North Sea. Eyes she knew better than the folds of her own once-lively heart.

Henri. The name echoed through her senses in hollow rivers of anguish, mottling her mind with memories she once stifled, burned, threw knives across. The eyes that traveled across different faces and different hands she held and different lives she…she…she…

“April 12th, 1922…”

And now, she slowly blinked at those eyes again. They may have been paler, than….they may have been paler, and well, smaller and, and rounder too, she thought with difficulty. But, haha no, see? They’re his.

She gazed venomously back at a face that suddenly shifted into his. They are!…It’s you, Henri, I see you now. Ha ha. Henri! The man before her began to twist, slicing into Arametta's thoughts and spoiling her wicked fun as he began to softly whimper.

“HUSH!!!”, She seethed vociferously, the words streaming from behind a wide-eyed smile. Her lips then pursed, and stung unexpectedly with the sudden, penny-like taste of being dipped in blood.

“Henri Laurent…”

The man shuddered spasmodically against the wind as the train suddenly flew back into Arametta’s perspective, her eyes suddenly flicking around to see the smoke welling around her and a stone tunnel pacing toward her in the distance.

Red clouds dotted the watercolored beauty of the horizon, soaking her face ruby as she tilted her arms closer to the cylindrical hull to which she clung. The man suddenly wailed as—smooth as an eel slipping into the ocean—she shifted both him and herself against the train as it careened into the dark.

In the absence of light, Arametta’s mind came alive. Screeches and clangs from the vessel against her quieted to white noise amidst the loudness of her thoughts, the anger of her thoughts. The power of her thoughts.

In them, she swung through days she once knew, feelings she no longer touched but brushed her fingers against lightly, as if they were people she longed to love again. Yet feelings she would never know again. Then, both ghastly and glowing images of a different train and a different time fell through her thoughts.

“On the date of…April…April 12th, 1922…”, and then the sudden images of men falling to the ground below.

As her mind sprinkled these wicked delights into her consciousness, Arametta clenched her fingers together and felt the glorious moan of another person whose life she controlled. Henri. And at each click and clack of the tracks, she swam into deeper delusion, where she replayed the screams and whispers of her victims with a consuming, violent joy.

But at a sharp jolt of too-bright light, a new memory twirled into her head. It was of a sparkling jewel, fastened onto the wrong hand of a girl in the wrong place with the wrong–hello Henri. Arametta blinked up at his figure. But he was faceless, the space across from her fuzzing after a glimpse of his countenance. Her hand, however, still laid firmly in his. NO. Shocked and enraged, she furiously attempted to yank her hand loose, but it was impossible. He held on with inconceivable strength, pressing firmly against her palm and bruising her knuckles slowly and heartlessly.

“Arametta Malâme and Henri Laurent…”

Arametta could only stare. At him. Holding her hand. Her bloodied hand. A hand that was once so clean, so very strong. A hand Henri had betrayed, a hand that once belonged to a girl, a girl too beautiful to survive in a world this cruel and too naive to keep grasp of her mind once love let go.

NOW LOOK. Said someone. Suddenly. Arametta giggled then, studying the dips and curves of her hand in the breaking light. White and thinly boned, fingerprinted with the lilting remembrance of all those who grasped it just as tightly as she grasped his. Henri. When she depended on him for life. And all those after, all those who needed her. And those she never, never needed back.

“On the date of April 12th…” It was April 12th. Just a different year. A different play-out of the same story, one from many years ago. But to Arametta, it hadn’t quite happened yet. At least not in the way she wanted it to.

“On the date…”

The wind outside rattled the train against Arametta’s swinging skirts and shook her memories loose again, jumbling them around until they glued together into a single image, resounding and replaying like film from a jammed spool.

A girl and a boy. Holding hands, eyes to each other as if seeing the midnight stars for the very first time. As the world glittered and disappeared around them.

And then that girl, falling into the shadow of a nearby tree, slowly and in bitter heartbreak. As the boy turned and ripped his hand from hers.

“Henri…”

No. Arametta sighed. No. Ha, ha–at this moment, she laughed out loud. A haunting and childish sound, like the hollow snicker of dented wind chimes.

No.

And with that, the wind around her somehow slowed, dancing down her dark hair like it used to. At a time long ago, when she ran through tall fields and gazed at the world with a different type of joy.

“Arametta….and Henri…Laurent…”

Yet, the echo of her laughter bouncing off the silver windows of the train and back against the shrinking tunnel brought her focus to a head.

Henri.

In an almost girlish manner, her face quickly soured as it fell once again upon the tortured, thwarted image of boy and a hand that burned into her brain.

A hand. A hand she now could feel. Against the slow tear of the wind and the beat of his heart.

Henri.

And this time, hahaha-and her laughter rang loud again. This time, she was so much smarter, and oh so lovelier, and–

This time, she felt nothing close to love. As she gazed another time into Henri’s ghostly eyes. Grasped his cursed hand.

Placed a small, venomous kiss on his forehead.

Henri…

And let that hand go.