The Cypress House

2

THEY PILED OUT OF THE CARS and onto the station platform, everyone milling around, stretching or lighting cigarettes. It was getting on toward ten in the evening, and though the sun had long since faded, the wet heat lingered. The boards of the platform were coated with swamp mud dried and trampled into dust, and out beyond the lights Arlen could see silhouetted fronds lying limp in the darkness, untouched by a breeze. Backwoods Florida. He didn't know the town and didn't care; regardless of name, it would be his last stop on this train.

He hadn't seen so many apparitions of death at one time since the war. Maybe leaving the train wouldn't be enough. Could be there was some sort of virus in the air, a plague spreading unseen from man to man the way the influenza had in '18, claiming lives faster than the reaper himself.

"What's the matter?" Paul Brickhill asked, following as Arlen stepped away from the crowd of men and tugged his flask from his pocket. Out here the sight was enough to set Arlen's hands to shaking—men were walking in and out of the shadows as they moved through the cars and down to the station platform, slipping from flesh to bone and back again in a matter of seconds, all of it a dizzying display that made him want to sit down and close his eyes and drink long and deep on the whiskey.

"Something's about to go wrong," he said.

"What do you mean?" Paul said, but Arlen didn't respond, staring instead at the men disembarking and realizing something—the moment they stepped off the train, their skin slid back across their bones, knitting together as if healed by the wave of some magic wand. The swirls of smoke in their eye sockets vanished into the hazy night air. It was the train. Yes, whatever was going to happen was going to happen to that train.

"Something's about to go wrong," he repeated. "With our train. Something's going to go bad wrong."

"How do you know?"

"I just do, damn it!"

Paul looked to the flask, and his eyes said what his words did not.

"I'm not drunk. Haven't had more than a few swallows."

"What do you mean, something's going to go wrong?" Paul asked again.

Arlen held on to the truth, felt the words heavy in his throat but couldn't let them go. It was one thing to see such horrors; it was worse to try and speak of them. Not just because it was a difficult thing to describe but because no one ever believed. And the moment you gave voice to such a thing was the moment you charted a course for your character that you could never alter. Arlen understood this well, had known it since boyhood.

But Paul Brickhill had sat before him with smoke the color of an early-morning storm cloud hanging in his eyes, and Arlen was certain what that meant. He couldn't let him board that train again.

"People are going to die," he said.

Paul Brickhill leaned his head back and stared.

"We get back on that train, people are going to die," Arlen said. "I'm sure of it."

He'd spent many a day trying to imagine this gift away. To fling it from him the way you might a poisonous spider caught crawling up your arm, and long after the chill lingered on your flesh you'd thank the sweet hand of Providence that you'd been given the opportunity to knock the beast away. Only he'd never been given the opportunity. No, the stark sight of death had stalked him, trailed him relentlessly. He knew it when he saw it, and he knew it was no trick of the light, no twist of bad liquor upon the mind. It was prophecy, the gift of foresight granted to a man who'd never wished for it.

He was reluctant to say so much as a word to any of the other men, knowing the response he'd receive, but this was not the sort of thing that could be ignored.

Speak loud and sharp, he thought, just like you did on the edge of a battle, when you had to get 'em to listen, and listen fast.

"Boys," he said, getting at least a little of the old muster into his tone, "listen up, now."

The conversations broke off. Two men were standing on the step of the train car, and when they turned, skull faces studied him.

"I think we best wait for the next train through," he said. "There's bad trouble aboard this one. I'm sure of it."

It was Wallace O'Connell who broke the long silence that followed.

"What in the hell you talking about, Wagner?" he said, and immediately there was a chorus of muttered agreement.

"Something's wrong with this train," Arlen said. He stood tall, did his damnedest to hold their eyes.

"You know this for a fact?" O'Connell said.

"I know it."

"How do you know? And what's wrong with it?"

"I can't say what's wrong with it. But something is. I got a… sense for these things."

A slow grin crept across O'Connell's face. "I've known some leg-pullers," he said, "but didn't figure you for one of them. Don't got the look."

"Damn it, man, this ain't no joke."

"You got a sense something's wrong with our train, and you're telling us it ain't no joke?"

"Knew a widow back home who was the same way," spoke up another man from the rear of the circle. He was a slim, wiry old guy with a nose crooked from many a break. Arlen didn't know his name—hell, he didn't know most of their names, and that was part of the problem. Aside from Paul there wasn't a man in the group who'd known Arlen for any longer than this train ride.

"Yeah?" O'Connell said. "Trains talked to her, too?"

"Naw. She had the sense, just like he's talking about. 'Cept she got her sights from owls and moon reflections and shit like you couldn't even imagine."

This new man was grinning wide, and O'Connell was matching it. He said, "She was right all the time, of course?"

"Of course," the man said, and let out a cackle. "Why, wasn't but nine year ago she predicted the end of days was upon us. Knew it for a fact. Was going to befall us by that winter. I can't imagine she was wrong, I just figured I missed being raptured up and that's how I ended up here with all you sinful sons of bitches."

The crowd was laughing now, and Arlen felt heat creeping into his face, thoughts of his father and the shame that had chased him from his boyhood home threatening his mind now. Behind him Paul Brickhill was standing still and silent, about the only one in the group who wasn't at least chuckling. There was a man near Wallace O'Connell whose smile seemed forced, uneasy, but even he was going along with the rest of them.

"I might ask for a tug on whatever's in that jug of your'n," O'Connell said. "It seems to be a powerful syrup."

"It's not the liquor you're hearing," Arlen said. "It's the truth. Boys, I'm telling you, I seen things in the war just like I am tonight, and every time I did, men died."

"Men died every damn day in the war," O'Connell said. The humor had drained from his voice. "And we all seen it—not just you. Some of us didn't crack straight through from what we seen. Others"—he made a pointed nod at Arlen—"had a mite less fortitude. Now save your stories for somebody fool enough to listen to them. Rest of us don't need the aggravation. There's work at the end of this line, and we all need it."

The men broke up then, drifted back to their own conversations, casting Arlen sidelong stares. Arlen felt a hand on his arm and nearly whirled and threw his fist without looking, shame and fear riding him hard now. It was only Paul, though, tugging him away from the group.

"Arlen, you best ease up."

"Be damned if I will. I'm telling you—"

"I understand what you're telling us, but it just doesn't make sense. Could be you got a touch of fever, or—"

Arlen reached out and grabbed him by his shirt collar. Paul's eyes went wide, but he didn't reach for Arlen's hand, didn't move at all as Arlen spoke to him in a low, harsh voice.

"You had smoke in your eyes, boy. I don't give a damn if you couldn't see it or if none of them could, it was there, and it's the sign of your death. You known me for a time now, and you ask yourself, how often has Arlen Wagner spoken foolish words to me? How often has he seemed addled? You ask yourself that, and then you ask yourself if you want to die tonight."

He released the boy's collar and stepped back. Paul lifted a hand and wiped it over his mouth, staring at Arlen.

"You trust me, Brickhill?" Arlen said.

"You know I do."

"Then listen to me now. If you don't ever listen to another man again for the rest of your life, listen to me now. Don't get back on that train."

The boy swallowed and looked off into the darkness. "Arlen, I wouldn't disrespect you, but what you're saying… there's no way you could know that."

"I can see it," Arlen said. "Don't know how to explain it, but I can see it."

Paul didn't answer. He looked away from Arlen, back at the others, who were watching the boy with pity and Arlen with disdain.

"Here's one last question for you to ask of yourself," Arlen said. "Can you afford to be wrong?"

Paul stared at him in silence as the train whistle blew and the men stomped out cigarettes and fell into a boarding line. Arlen watched their flesh melt from their bones as they went up the steps.

"Don't let that fool bastard convince you to stay here, boy," Wallace O'Connell bellowed as he stepped up onto the train car, half of his face a skull, half the face of a strong man who believed he was fit to take on all comers. "Ain't nothing here but alligators, and unless you want to be eating them come dinner tomorrow, or them eating you, you best get aboard."

Paul didn't look in his direction. Just kept staring at Arlen. The locomotive was chugging now, steam building, ready to tug its load south, down to the Keys, down to the place the boy wanted to be.

"You're serious," he said.

Arlen nodded.

"And it's happened before?" Paul said. "This isn't the first time?"

"No," Arlen said. "It is not the first time."

3

THE FIRST TIME Arlen Wagner saw death was in the Belleau Wood. That was the bloodiest battle the Marines had ever encountered, a savage showdown requiring repeated assaults before the parcel of forest and boulders finally fell under American control, and the bodies were piled high by the end. The sight of corpses was not the new experience for Arlen, whose father had served as undertaker in the West Virginia hill town where he was raised, a place where violence, mining accidents, and fever regularly sent men and women Isaac Wagner's way to be fitted into their coffins. No, in the moonlight over the Marne River on a June night in 1918, Arlen saw something far different from a corpse—he saw the dead among the living.

They'd made an assault on the Wood that day, marching through a waist-high wheat field directly into machine-gun fire. For the rest of his life, the sight of tall, windswept wheat would put a shiver through Arlen. Most of the men in the first waves had been slaughtered outright, but Arlen and other survivors had been driven south, into the trees and a tangle of barbwire. The machine guns pounded on, relentless, and those who didn't fall beneath them grappled hand to hand with German soldiers who shouted oaths at them in a foreign tongue while bayonets clashed and knives plunged.

By evening the Marines had sustained the highest casualties in their history, but they also had a hold, however tenuous, in Belleau Wood. Arlen was on his belly beside a boulder as midnight came on, and with it a German counterattack. As the enemy approached he'd felt near certain that this skirmish would be his last; he couldn't continue to survive battles like these, not when so many had fallen all around him throughout the day. That rain of bullets couldn't keep missing him forever.

This was his belief at least, until the Germans appeared as more than shadows, and what he saw then kept him from so much as lifting his rifle.

They were skeleton soldiers.

He could see skulls shining in the pale moonlight where faces belonged, hands of white bone clutching rifle stocks.

He was staring, entranced, when the American gunners opened up. Opened up and mowed them down, sliced the vicious Hun bastards to pieces. All around him men lifted their rifles and fired, and Arlen just lay there without so much as a finger on the trigger, scarcely able to draw a breath.

A trick of the light, he told himself as dawn rose heavy with mist and the smell of cooling and drying blood, the moans of the wounded as steady now as the gunfire had been earlier. What he'd seen was the product of moonlight partnered with the trauma from a day of unspeakable bloodshed. Surely that was enough to wreak havoc on his mind. On anyone's mind.

There were some memories in his head then, of course, some thoughts of his father, but he kept them at bay, and as the sun broke through the mist he'd done a fine job of convincing himself that this was nothing but the most horrifying of hallucinations.

It was midafternoon and the Marines were readying another assault, seeking to push deeper into the Wood, when he turned to two of the men he'd known best over there, known best and liked best, good boys who fought hard, and saw that their eyes were gone. The flesh remained on their faces but their eyes were gone, the sockets filled with gray smoke that leaked out and formed wreaths around their heads.

Both of them were dead within the hour.

For the rest of the war it was like that—bones showing in the night battles, smoke-filled eye sockets smiling at him during the daylight. That promise of death was all he ever got. Never did a ghost linger with him after the last breath rattled out of tortured lungs, never did a phantom version of one of those lost men return in the night to offer him some sense of the reason behind it all. No voices whispered to him in the dark, no invisible hand guided him in battle or menaced him in sleep.

He spoke of it only once, knew immediately from the looks exchanged around him that if he kept telling the tale he'd soon be hospital-bound with all the other poor shell-shocked bastards who gibbered on about things far from the grasp of reality. Arlen kept his mouth shut and kept seeing the same terrible sights.

As the war went on, he discovered some of them could be saved. They would perish if left to fight alone, but if he could keep them down and out of the fire line, sometimes they made it through. Not often enough, though. Not nearly often enough. And there were so, so many of them.

After the armistice the premonitions ceased, and for a time Arlen thought it was done. Then he'd walked into an Army hospital back in the States to visit a buddy and had seen smoke-eyes everywhere he looked, stumbled back out of the place without ever finding his friend. He'd gone to the first speakeasy he could find and tipped whiskey glasses back until his own vision was too clouded and blurred to see smoke even if someone lit a match right in front of his face.

He'd worked in a railyard for a time, had seen a man with bone hands and a gleaming skull face laughing over a joke just minutes before the chains on a log car snapped and he was crushed beneath one of the timbers. The last time Arlen ventured back into West Virginia—it wasn't a place of warm memories and welcoming embraces—he'd gone hunting with a friend from the war who'd turned into a bitter drunk with a stump where his left hand belonged. One-handed or not he'd wanted to go hunting, and Arlen had agreed, then saw the smoke swirling in the man's eye sockets about thirty seconds before he stepped into a snarl of loose brush and a rattlesnake struck him in the calf, just below the knee. Arlen had shot the snake, whose thick coiled body would've gone every bit of five feet stretched out full, and cut the wound to bleed the venom, but still the smoke wouldn't leave those eyes, grew thicker and darker as Arlen dragged his old friend back to town, and he was dead by noon the next day.

So there were incidents, but in this warless world they were far less common, and he worked hard at burying the memories just the same as they'd buried the men who created them. Drinking helped. Even through Prohibition, Arlen always found a way to keep his flask filled.