Mama Diamond stirred uneasily. She dropped the paperback and stood, bones creaking almost as loudly as the old pine planks. She shuffled down Parkhill Street to the old Burnt Stick railroad station, to where she could get a good long look at the tracks.
The depot had not been active for twenty-five years. Freight used to come through every couple of days, low-sulfur coal hauled from the Hanna mines in Carbon County. But the freights never even slowed at Burnt Stick. The depot was a relic, all flaking paint, planks and beams bleached by sun and cracked by cold. She guessed it was the smell she liked best. Old wood, wind-whipped, giving up ghosts of pine and creosote.
The old Union Pacific tracks cut due south into the Medicine Bow Range, north into the gray sage foothills of the Shirley Mountains, then east across the Laramie Range, where ages ago sharks the size of sperm whales had settled down to die, later joined by maiasaurs and T. rex. The call had come echoing off the hills, and Mama Diamond turned, facing their heights, squinting up her good eye against the ruthless slate light. But if there was a train, she couldn’t see it.
She watched for a time, patient but vaguely alarmed.
Now came the whistle again, closer, almost taunting (no need, surely, to blow a whistle in all this emptiness). Mama Diamond had the unsettling thought that she should climb down off the platform and paste her ear to the steel track like the Indians in the old matinees. She’d probably pull a muscle if she tried it-get stuck there, and the train (if there was a train) would split her head open like a cleaver splitting a vine-ripened tomato.
But there was no need to listen to the tracks, because here was the train itself, suddenly visible winding out of the foothills like a black millipede scuttling from a crevice in a basement wall. It was blurred in the distance, so she couldn’t be certain if it had topped the ridge or actually burst out of the earth itself. She tried to resolve the shape of the thing, peering into an ice-breath of wind that made her eyes sting and water, but all she could at first make out was a featureless assemblage of rectangular boxes, like a subway train.
As it approached, however, it seemed to take on complexity and ornamentation, and she wasn’t sure if her eyes were playing tricks or-crazy thought-the train was actually changing as it drew near, deciding how best to present itself.
It came chuffing down toward Burnt Stick, and Mama Diamond stepped cautiously back into the shadow of the depot. Her mouth was dry again, but she had left her canteen on the porch, the chill air turning its surface cold as a tombstone as it lay atop the Clancy paperback.
The train began to slow.
Sweet Jesus, Mama Diamond thought, what dark miracle is this?
It was no ordinary train-as if she needed convincing of that, in a world without machines. It now clearly revealed itself as a single engine with a long string of passenger cars. The engine was antique-looking but shiny clean, like a coal-burner dragged out of a museum. The passenger cars were rounded and streamlined like the old transcontinental sleepers. Both the engine and cars were a carapace black, and the passenger windows, too, held the same darkness, no light piercing through. The insides, Mama thought, must be cold as a freezer. And who in their right mind would paint a passenger car that kind of black? If it was paint; the whole thing looked cast in onyx.
The train slowed, came huffing to a stop like something out of a dream, and Mama Diamond began to wish she had taken the trouble to hide herself, began to wish she had not even come here, that she had stayed inside like a sensible person. Though she suspected there was no hiding from whatever the train carried.
She thought about how peaceful it had been just a few minutes ago, when she was alone with her book and the sleepy hum of the town.
The train halted, hissing hot breaths of steam. Mama Diamond tried to get a look at the driver. But the cab windows were blacked as well.
From within the cars, Mama Diamond discerned a new sound, of movement and bodies, and a burbling of voices that might have been men or beasts or something in between. Her stomach tightened, she felt the bristly, gray-steel hairs on her neck rise.
A passenger door slid open on the first coach and Mama Diamond jerked her head in that direction.
A man climbed out. A man with long black hair pulled hard back and held by a white-gold clasp, wearing black fathomless shades, black shirt and slacks and belt with a white-gold buckle, his long black coat fanning out behind him. He held a dark cigarette with burning red tip, and smoke curled from his cold thin lips.
As he walked toward her, Mama Diamond knew this contained, silent man had not been one of the brute voices within. His voice would be as clear and sharp as a stiletto.
She stood watching as he came near, and in the merciless gray light it seemed as if he suddenly shimmered like ripples on a storm-wracked lake and changed, growing bigger and bonier, like strata shooting up out of a rock face. His black leather cloak altered, too, stretching out long fingers, gaining its own powerful architecture, becoming…
Wings, leathery wings big as box kites, supported by vast pebbled shoulders, which in turn supported a scaly head, ridge-boned and hard-angled, with eyes set deep in burnished sockets, eyes golden as Kazakhstan amber wrapped around a Jurassic spider. The cigarette was gone from his taloned hand, but a memory of smoke still curled from between his dagger teeth.
I’m too old to run away, Mama Diamond thought. Probably crack a hip if she tried, and then what? № 911, no ambulance out of the county clinic.
Anyway, she thought, when Death comes for you with bat wings and golden eyes in a black impossible train, running probably isn’t much of a strategy.
Her knees trembled. She hoped they wouldn’t buckle on her. The dragon drew up close to her now-slowly, smoothly, with the invisible majesty of great power-and fear bubbled through Mama Diamond like a dizzy drug.
The dragon-thing, this grotesque that had been a man-no, merely seemed a man-moments ago, stood glaring down at her.
“I couldn’t decide what to wear…so I thought I’d give you a choice.” His voice, clearly New York/East Coast, held the precision of a keen blade, plus a resonance potent as a boulder rolling down a rocky slope.
A choice, Mama Diamond thought. Like the train itself, changing as it drew near, somehow taunting, threatening.
“Which is the truth?” Mama Diamond asked, and was surprised at how level her voice sounded.
“Both…but this is the latest model.”
Mama Diamond studied the razor claws, the teeth like a tyrannosaur. “If this is what I have to deal with, I’d just as soon see it.”
“You’ve got sand,” the dragon said. “Or I could say grit…or stones.” Mama Diamond knew he was toying with her, playing his cruel games as he had no doubt often done even before the world had turned over, before he had become what he’d always been within.
Mama Diamond said nothing. Silence, she knew, could be a blade, too. Or at least a tool to make folks get to the point.
“Good of you to meet me,” he said, and even in the gray light of winter coming, his black scales held an iridescence like the peacock pyrites she’d once hawked to city dwellers who’d only seen those colors in grease streaks on tarmac.
“I have to confess I didn’t know you were coming.”
“But you did. On some level. We know a lot of things we don’t think we know. You are Judith Kuriyama?”
Not for a long time, not really. “People call me-”
“Mama Diamond.”
“Uh-huh.”