Chandler, who had been slowly waking after a night of very little sleep, sat up against the wall of the boxcar and wondered what was wrong.
It seemed remiss to start a day without signing the Cross or hearing a few exorcismal verses. It seemed to be mid-morning, time for work to be beginning at the plant. The lab men would be streaming in, their amulets examined at the door. The chaplains would be wandering about, ready to pray a possessing spirit out. Chandler, who kept an open mind, had considerable doubt of the effectiveness of all the amulets and spells; certainly they had not kept him from committing a brutal rape, but he felt uneasy without them ... The train was still not moving. In the silence he could hear the distant huffing of the engine.
He went to the door, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden wall, and looked out.
The tracks followed the roll of a river, their bed a few feet higher than an empty three-lane highway, which in turn was a dozen feet above the water. As he looked out the engine brayed twice. The train jolted, then stopped again.
Then there was a very long time when nothing happened at all.
From Chandler's car he could not see the engine. He was on the convex of the curve, and the other door of the car was sealed. He did not need to see it to know that something was wrong. There should have been a brake-man running with a flare to ward off other trains; but there was not. There should have been a station, or at least a water tank, to account for the stop in the first place. There was not. Something had gone wrong, and Chandler knew what it was. Not the details, but the central fact that lay behind this and behind almost everything that went wrong these days.
The engineer was possessed. It had to be that.
Yet it was odd, he thought, as odd as his own trouble. He had chosen this train with care. It contained eight refrigerator cars full of pharmaceuticals, and if anything was known about the laws governing possession, as his lawyer had told him, it was that such things were almost never interfered with.
Chandler jumped down to the roadbed, slipped on the crushed rock and almost fell. He had forgotten the wound on his forehead. He clutched the sill of the car door, where an ankh and fleur-de-lis had been chalked to ward off demons, until the sudden rush of blood subsided and the pain began to relent. After a moment he walked gingerly to the end of the car, slipped between the cars, dodged the couplers and climbed the ladder to its roof.
It was a warm, bright, silent day. Nothing moved. From his height he could see the Diesel at the front of the train and the caboose at its rear. No people. The train was halted a quarter-mile from where the tracks swooped across the river on a suspension bridge. Away from the river, the side of the tracks that had been hidden from him before, was an uneven rock cut and, above it, the slope of a mountain.
By looking carefully he could spot the signs of a number of homes within half a mile or so the corner of a roof, a glassed-in porch built to command a river view, a twenty-foot television antenna poking through the trees. There was also the curve of a higher road along which the homes were strung.
Chandler took thought. He was alive and free, two gifts more gracious than he had had any right to expect. However, he would need food and he would need at least some sort of bandage for his forehead. He had a wool cap, stolen from the high school, which would hide the mark, though what it would do to the burn on his skin was something else again.
Chandler climbed down the ladder. With considerable pain he gentled the cap over the great raw "H" on his forehead and turned toward the mountain.
A voice from behind him said, "Hey. What's that you've got on your head?"
Chandler whirled, mad and scared. There was a man at the open doorway of the next boxcar, kneeling and looking out at him. He was a small man, by no means young.
He wore a dirty Army officer's uniform blouse over chinos. His face was dirty and unshaven, his eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but his expression was serenely interested.
"Now, where the hell did you come from?" demanded Chandler. "I didn't see you."
"Perhaps you didn't look," the man said cheerfully, untangled his legs and slipped down to the crushed gravel at the side of the roadbed. He caught Chandler's shoulder. to steady himself. From twenty inches away his breath was enough to knock Chandler down.
But the man did not seem drunk. He didn't even seem hung over, though he walked awkwardly, like a man who is just on his feet after a long illness, or a toddling child.
"Excuse," he said, pushing past Chandler and walking a step or two toward the head of the train, staring toward the engine.
As Chandler watched the little man lurched, recovered himself and spun to face him. The change in him was instant; one moment he was staring reflectively down the track, unhurried and calm; the next he was in a flap of consternation and terror. His eyes were wide with fright. His lips worked convulsively.
Alarmed, Chandler snapped, "What's the matter with you?"
"I" The man swallowed, and stared about him. Then his eyes returned to Chandler. He took a step, put out a hand and said, "I"
Then his expression changed again.
His hand dropped. In a tone of friendly curiosity he said, "I asked you what you had on your head. Fall against a hot stove?"
Chandler was now thoroughly jumpy. He didn't understand what was going on, but he understood that he didn't like it. And he didn't like the subject of their conversation.
He snapped, "It's a brand. I got it for committing murder and rape, all right?"
"Oh?" The man nodded reflectively.
"Yeah. I was possessed ... but they didn't believe me . So they put this 'H' on me. It stands for 'hoaxer.' " "Too bad." The man returned to Chandler and patted his shoulder. "Why didn't they believe you?"
"Because it happened in a pharmaceutical plant. I don't know how it is where you come from, buddy, but where I live .. lived that sort of thing didn't happen in that kind of place. Only it does now! Look at this train."
The man smiled brightly. "You think the train is possessed?"
"I think the engineer is."
The man nodded, and glanced impatiently toward the bridge again. "Would that be so bad?"
"Bad? Where've you been?"
The little man apologized, "I mean, do all the what do you call them? Do all the cases of possession have to be wicked?"
Chandler took a deep breath. He couldn't believe the little man was for real. He could feel the short hairs at the back of his neck prickling erect. Something smelled wrong. Nobody asked questions like that ... He said weakly, "I never heard of any that weren't. Did you?"
"Yes, maybe I did," flared the man defensively. "Why not? Nothing is evil. It's all what you make of it ... and I could imagine times when that sort of affair could be good. I can imagine it carrying you up to the stars! I can imagine it filling your brain with a mind grand enough to crack your own. I can ..."
His voice tapered off as he noticed Chandler's popeyed stare.
"I was only saying maybe," he apologized, hesitated, seemed about to speak again.. and then turned and started off toward the head of the train at a dead run.
Chandler stared after him.
He scratched the area of skin around the seared place on his forehead, then turned and began to climb the mountain. Twenty yards uphill he stopped as though he had run into a brick wall. He turned and looked down the tracks, but the man was out of sight. Chandler stood staring down the empty line of crushed rock, not seeing it. There was a big question in his mind. He was wondering just who he had been talking to.
Or what.
By the time he reached the first shelving roadway he had put that particular puzzle away in the back of his mind. He knocked on the first door he came to, a great old three-story house with well tended gardens.