Train Yard or the Ghost of Horatio Grey

Hello Dear Readers,

Forward:

It has been suggested by some of my readers that I take too long to get the meat of a story.  So it's my aim to remedy that.  I'm going to try a change in format.

Gemma, Vic, Otto, and I stood aghast, with our mouths open.  Our breath steamed out into the cold night air.

Otto is Gemma’s mother's cousin's son.  He stood next to us, hands in his pockets and black hair pulled back.  He spent several years homeless and this was one of the regular places he had slept.  He got better though.  He was our guide for the evening.  He said he could introduce us to Horatio Grey.

We were surrounded by an abandoned trainyard that used to service the Newton Manufacturing Company before it switched to delivery trucks.  When train station went out of business and it was left rust.  We stood surrounded by the hulks of rusting train cars, crumbling concrete buildings, and warped rails.

And one ghost.  He wore a long shabby coat and was digging around with a shovel.  Well, he was trying to dig around, being a ghost he was merely going through the motions.  His name was Horatio Grey, and this is where he died.

Once again Kevin's Crossing has brought me closer to the unexplained than I had ever considered possible.  The excitement was nearly uncontainable.  It took all my control not to pee myself.  But it was cold out.

The ghost ignored us, as Otto said it would.  He said it was one of those 'psychic memory imprint’ kinda ghosts.  Where it just did the same thing it did in life over and over.

“What is he looking for?” I asked.

“He's searching for Captain Archer’s buried treasure,” Gemma said.  It turns out when she isn’t steaming milk at the coffee shop she's working on getting a degree in Oral History.  How perfect!

“I'm familiar with Captain Archer,” I said.

“Of course you are,” she replied.

“Okay, we've seen the ghost, can we go now before Bigfoot, Jak-Jak, and Freddy Krueger show up to help him?”  Vic seemed to be the least comfortabl.  He had his hands stuffed into his pockets and he kept looking around nervously.

“It's fine.  He's harmless,” Otto said.  “He doesn't respond to anything and if you try to get close to him he just fades away.  He's like a looped gif.”

“And we've seen him, let's go to Muriel's and get waffles.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He used to work at the train yard but lost his job when they shut it down.  Shortly after that he snapped and started telling everyone that he knew the location of Captain Archer's treasure.  He began coming out here all the time, digging around looking for it.  He didn't have any friends or family so nobody stopped him or got him help.  Unfortunately, it was weeks till anyone realized he was missing.  After checking his house they came out here and found him dead” Gemma said.

“Do they know what happened?”

Otto chimed in.  “No, he had been out here for a while and the rats hadn’t had much to eat since it closed.  So there wasn't much left”.

“Oh.”  It was such a grisly fate, but such a fantastic mystery at the same time.  I wonder if the ghost of Horatio Grey was able to appreciate that?  My mind couldn’t stop racing.

“Why was he looking here for treasure?  Did he have a map of some kind?”

“With an ‘X’ on it?” Gemma smirked.

“Yeah!”

“No,” She said.

“Oh”

“After the train yard closed he said an angel came to him.  Supposedly he had three wings and no face.  Two white wings pointing outwards and a central red one pointing up,” Vic clarified.

“It’s not buried here anyways,” Gemma stated.

What!?”  Where is it?” I asked, startled.

“It’s not here because Jan March says it’s elsewhere.”

“Who’s Jan March and how does she know?”

Gemma signed.

“Well…,” Vic started, but turned red and looked over at Gemma.

“God, you’re such a child,” She scowled

“When we were in middle school there was a girl named Jan March, that was a few years older than us.  She said she had a prophetic dream on the night of her first period that showed her that the treasure is in the dump,” Gemma said in one breathe.

“Oh,” was all that I could think to say.  I had no idea that menstruation was so magically.  I made a mental note to investigate it further.

“Can she still do it?”

“Do what?” Vic asked.

“Have visions?”

“She says that was the only one.  People made fun of her for years because of it,” Gemma said, “It was so bad that as soon as she graduated high school she joined the navy and didn’t come back for years.”  I made several mental notes.

“Alright, well we have confirmation of the life after.  Our views of the universe have been fundamentals rocked.  But it's freezing cold out here, let's go get some waffles,” Gemma said.

“Fucking finally!” Vic exclaimed and headed toward the car without looking to see if anyone was coming with him.  Otto shrugged.

“Okay, I just want to try one thing,” I said reaching into my pocket and heading towards the apparition.

“What are you doing,” Gemma said.  Concern in her voice.

“An experiment, it'll just take a second,” I said, pleased that I remembered the flashlight.  I had purchased it recently from Ziggy’s Mini Mart.  It was just the right size for the mystery bulb from my Art Deco lamp.  I had been shining it on graffiti around town with no effect.  I was now going to see if it had any effect on the spectral Mr. Grey.

“Ugh,” Otto said from behind me.  He sounded confused about something.  I got about twenty feet from the ghost when it started to fade.  I took a few steps back.

“Mr. Grey?” I asked and got no response.  It seemed like the polite thing to do.  He just kept walking around the same area trying to dig holes in the ground.  I was already holding the flashlight by my side.  I pointed out at him and flipped the switch.  What happened next was unexpected, even to me.

The world seemed to explode with impossible light.  As if the pale otherworldly light from bulb had gone through some type of magnifying prism.  Around Horatio Grey was an enormous gleaming superstructure that seemed connected to his five chakras.  It was an indescribable five-dimensional lattice that appeared to be infinitely expanding while simultaneously collapsing in on itself.

If I looked at the structure I felt like I could see the inside moving in different directions.  Horatio Grey was oblivious to all of this and continued to try to dig for pirate treasure.

We were seeing something people were not meant to see.  I had peeled back the outer layer of reality and peeled behind the veil.

“It's like that time when I was five and I had a fever of one hundred and four.  I was hallucinating terribly,” Otto said in a flat voice from somewhere behind me.  “The world looked kinda like that”.

I marveled at the unfathomable celestial instrument that whirled in front of us.  The ghost of Horatio Grey was just the tip of the iceberg.  I could hear coughing from behind.

“Vic,” Gemma said, concern in her voice.

“I can't-,” he croaked and coughed again.  Gemma stepped forward and hit the off button on the flashlight.  The technicolor wonder in front of us vanished.  Leaving only a lonely ghost who didn't even know we were there.

“We getting him out of here,” she said giving me a stern look.  She and Otto lifted Vic up and began carrying him to the car.  I turned back to the ghost for one last look.  But I found myself looking past him into an opening in the darkened forest.  It was the path of the train tracks, mostly overgrown but at one point it had lead to the factory.  That nebulous entity that had informed every aspect of life in Kevin's Crossing for nearly a hundred years.  Its influence could still be felt today.  I was going to have to pay it a visit at some point. And I'll need help.  But if recent events have taught me anything it's that I need to consider the consequence of these exploits before involving others.

All that would have to wait for another time.  We got Vic into the car and made a beeline for Muriel’s Diner where some strong coffee and gravy fries put things right again.  Except that Otto said after what we saw, he was going to need to call his sponsor to start going back to meetings.

I’ll keep you updated!