The train passed by only at night, when those still awake were becoming desperate for sleep and those asleep were looking about the dark, lost halls of their strangest dreams.
Only when the only business to go about on was haunted. When even the latest, most dedicated drunks had stumbled to their berths, curtains were pulled across the only lit windows like a finger pressed to pursed lips, hush, someone might be listening, and the moan of the locomotive could almost have been a howl raised to the waning moon.
It shook the windows and the dreams. Lips and curtains trembled, sleepers pulled themselves tighter into their covers, while those awake whispered to their pillows, please, please, not me.
It never stopped at the station. A roar of light blurring down the empty tracks, every window uncovered and ablaze; all responsibility lay with the town to try not to listen.
It passed in a black wind known only for how the wildflowers that had been blossoming by the tracks would be torn free and strewn in its wake, found come morning. Daisies like the blessed passage of a bride, black-eyed susans staring down the tracks, all left to wilt where they lay. None dared touch them.
None dared knock on the doors of their neighbours and call out are you all right?. Either those who had nodded good night to one another the night before would emerge, or not.
One would not. Who this time? The train never stopped, there was no earthly way it could take on passengers, but one person who had laid their head down in the town the night before would be gone, and no one would have any doubt of where they were now.
