Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #20 November 2015 | Page 7

Now, where was I? I remember, I remember
everything and don’t you go thinking otherwise. My
memory ain’t gone all doolally like a lot of folks my
age apart from forgetting how I got from my bed to
the can and what I was supposed to be doing there. I
remember that night like it was yesterday. A cold wind
blew in from the north and it dropped the temperature
in its tracks just like a deer if you hit it right.

Now understand son this ain’t no pansy-ass
memory like you get from people who reckon some
alien has taken them into a spaceship to probe their
asses. My daddy didn’t raise no bullshit merchants.
We lived outside of Sacramento and Daddy was a
factory worker, worked all the shifts he needed to so
we could have food on the table. I was born in 1910,
just before the Great War that Daddy was too old to
go to. Mom died from the flu just after the war ended
in 1918. Daddy lost his job just after the Depression
began and killed himself six months after that. I
found him hanging from the rafters in the barn. I was
nineteen going on twenty and after he died I left the
place and took to the road. Late ‘30 I found myself in
Hooverville and that’s where I was when it all went
down.

So I ain’t one for making shit up you
understand that. I was twenty-two that night, one
of the elders of the camp for all that’s worth. It was
bone cold and all the fires we had going didn’t help.
We were huddled around a brazier drinking coffee
when we heard the train coming up the slope with
the wheels skidding and slipping on the rails. We
could tell when the trains were struggling so a few
of us decided to go and have a look. Would it have
been different if we hadn’t? I don’t know and anyway
what’s done is done.

There were six of us that walked out of the
camp and up to the track. Soon enough we got to the
spot where the track levelled out and down the line
we could see the light, wavering a little back and
forth. It was coming slow, smoke billowing out of the
stack and blotting out the stars before it blew away.
It was eerie standing there watching it get closer
like that old B-movie shtick where you see someone

running towards the camera and they never seem to
get any closer and then BAM! they’re right on top of
you. It came on, inexorable, and you just knew it was
going to make it, nothing in this world would stop
it. It was Lou that said it was inexorable, he was an
educated man and had run a store in Boulder. Hattie,
who’d cried for a week after Legless Willie died, was
there too, along with Sidney Meyrick who’d been
a stockbroker, Elmore Rosen, who was the head of
one of the Okie families trying to get home, Johan
Breekman, who never said anything of himself, and
me.

The lamp on the front wasn’t bright, barely
enough to cover twenty yards in front of it. It looked
like a cat’s eye and I’d swear that there was a darkness
in the middle of it that you couldn’t see straight on,
you had to turn away and look out of the corner of
your eye to see it. It was like it didn’t want you to
know it was there. I couldn’t help but shiver while I
watched and it wasn’t the cold that caused it. I sure
didn’t reckon that standing next to that line on that
night watching a train come up the slope was the best
place to be. Lou said it must have felt like that to Jason
when he saw the Cyclops coming out of his cave. Lou
was fond of quoting the classics especially over a plate
of soup beans and bacon.

That train looked old. Elmore said it was an
old 4-4-0 like they ran in the 1860s on the Union
Pacific and they hadn’t been running for forty years or
more. He said it didn’t look good to him, not good at
all, no sir. Me? I can’t tell one train from another but
after he said that I had to agree with him. We all did
when I come to think on it. And as it got closer we got
to hearing it, we’d heard it in the camp but standing
up there by the line we couldn’t hear squat. Wasn’t no
reason not to hear it but we didn’t until it got real close
and I’d swear on my mother’s grave that was the case.
There’s a line in a poem by Keats I think, Darkling I
listen and we all were listening right enough but heard
nothing.

Yeah, you can shake your head and wonder
if I’ve gone mentally AWOL but I haven’t. Not only
didn’t we hear it but we didn’t notice that that we
hadn’t heard it. It was like it was normal not to hear a

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