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“That’s right,” Bill said, puffing on a cigar clenched between his teeth.
“Well. I got a story for you, then.”
“Oh, Lord. Here we go.…” Nelson rolled his eyes and shuffled his deck of cards in case anybody wanted to go another round.
“Now, let a man tell a story! It’s a good story, too. You’ll see,” Coleman insisted. “It happened right here on this train. About two weeks ago last Thursday. Now, I had the job of being the porter on duty in the sleeper car. All the curtains were drawn. Folks sleeping off the hooch they snuck on board and were pouring into their ginger ales all night.”
“So many orders for ginger ale!” Philippe said on a laugh.
“Coleman’ll still be telling this story when we pull into N’awlins,” Nelson said to Henry, Memphis, and Bill with a wink. And for a moment, Memphis was entertained enough to put aside his misery.
“We were passing through Alabama, I recall, coming close to Selma. I’m sitting there, feeling a might bit sleepy myself after a long day, when I hear something. I reckon it’s one of the customers having a bad dream. But it’s real whispery. Like silk rubbed across sandpaper…”
“Silk across sandpaper…” Philippe said dreamily. “Why, Coleman, I didn’t know you were a poet.”
“You gonna hush up?”
Still laughing, Philippe motioned him on.
/> “Anyway. The whole corridor started filling up with, well, a smoke, I guess you might say, but to be honest with you? It was more like a strange fog.”
Memphis, Bill, and Henry sat forward in their seats, electrified.
“Well, I was afraid it might be a fire, you see. So I got up to check, but there was no fire that I could tell anywhere. I was just about to alert the conductor, and that’s when I saw her. She was down at the end of the corridor in that haze. A lady in a long dress and gloves and a flowered hat, like she was going to a church supper. She said, ‘Excuse me, porter, is this the stop for Cahawba?’ I put my finger to my lips and motioned for her to follow me into the dining car so she wouldn’t wake anybody. She just kept waiting by the door. The fog was all around her, and now I really was worried there was a fire. ‘I need to get off at Cahawba,’ she told me again. I said, ‘Miss, I’m sorry, but this train doesn’t stop at Cahawba. Selma’s the next stop.’ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘But I have an engagement in Cahawba. My brother’s in the prison there. I must go to him.’ I didn’t have the slightest notion what she was talking about, but I needed to let the conductor know about that smoke. So I said, ‘Miss, if you’ll wait right here a minute, I’ll be back to help you.’ ‘Oh!’ she said, and she got the funniest look on her face, like she just remembered something important. ‘This is my stop.’ And then, as sure as I’m sitting here, she vanished right in front of my eyes—the Lord is my Shepherd!—and she took all that mist with her. The corridor was clear as could be. And she was nowhere to be found.”
“Or you fell asleep and that was all a dream,” Roger said. “Hey, maybe you can ask the dream walker here to find your lady friend tonight.”
The other porters busted up laughing.
“Go on, go on, have yourselves a good laugh. But you ain’t heard the other half of the story.”
Nelson shook his head and spread out the cards in his hand. “Like I said, all the way to N’awlins.”
Coleman ignored him. He leaned forward. There was an intensity in his eyes. “When I got to Selma, I asked the stationmaster if he knew of any place called Cahawba, and if so, was there a prison in the town, ’cause I’d had a passenger asking to get off at Cahawba to go see her brother there. Well, I tell you, that man turned pale as an old slug. He said, ‘There used to be a prison in Cahawba. It held three thousand Union prisoners during the Civil War, and it hasn’t been in use since. Cahawba’s abandoned, mister. It’s a ghost town, home to nothing but weeds and the dead.’” Coleman straightened his spine with that and raised a hand. “My right hand to God.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Nelson let out a big, booming laugh. And all the porters joined in once more.
“It happened. I’m telling you it happened,” an indignant Coleman insisted.
“I believe you,” Memphis said, and the laughter quieted down some. “There’s things out there. And they’re coming for us. You need to know this.”
The mood in the compartment shifted from ease to a charged discomfort.
Nelson held tightly to the deck of cards. “Seraphina mentioned something about a trickster in the crossroads, a King of Crows. What is that?”
Bill blew out a perfect ring of smoke. “The Bogeyman. ’Cept this one ain’t somethin’ your mama made up to keep you in line. This one is the real McCoy.”
“Well, what does he want?”
“Chaos. He wants us good and scared,” Henry said.
The train rushed past the clanging bells of a crossing. The sound swam past the windows and faded into nothing.
Nelson shook his head. “There’s no order anymore, I tell you. It’s like this poem I read by this Irish fella. Something about a falcon not being able to hear the falconer—”
“‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,’” Memphis quoted. “W. B. Yeats. ‘The Second Coming.’”
“That’s the fella. Yes, sir. No order. No order.”
