The Empty Carriage

Quick Foreword: This is an adaptation of one of my favorite short stories by Shirley Jackson. This premise is entirely her own, I wished to rewrite it from the ground up with my own modern take. 

 

So far, so good, she thought to herself.

First of all, the train station had been quiet. For a city like Manchester, that was a rarity. Sure, it was the day after Halloween, and sure, it was not yet sunrise. But even still, her fear that she’d lose her boy somewhere in the swarming crowds had proven to be irrational. 

    The train had slid to a screeching standstill by the platform, pushing away the remnants of the night before with its rattling wheels — broken shards of glass, crumpled-up beer cans, wayward-flung costume accessories, and the carcass of an iPhone cracked and twisted into obscurity.

    And just like that, with little Jake holding her hand and her newborn clutched tight to her chest, she stepped into the frontmost carriage. No problems. No child abduction. No fatal crowd-crush. No problemo, her father used to say. No problemo. 

 

The inside of the train was far from what you’d expect in a metropolitan city. It had a carpeted, ash-dotted floor that ran narrowly along the center of the carriage. The seats themselves, shouldered together as if warming from the morning air, sported an old Mosquette pattern, the kind she hadn’t seen since her school days when they’d go on field trips in some rented bus. Blast from the past, eh? She thought, but the strange nostalgic charm of that pattern was short-lived when she looked at the table in front of her. And the table a few rows down. Ashtrays. 

Little circular glass ashtrays sat on the ends of each table. The closest one, the one by her table, was filled with the dregs of half-smoked cigarettes. 

“Mam”.

“Yes, Jake?”

“Can I have the window seat?”

She looked around the carriage, then at her watch. “You can have any seat you like, Jakey.”

The boy smiled and made his way along the aisle, looking left and right, weighing up which window seat would provide the perfect view of the countryside. 

Two minutes until departure. Her newborn was pressed firmly to her chest, and she could feel the tiny heartbeat on hers. She checked her watch. One minute until departure. 

Piece of cake, indeed. One, two, three of them, all accounted for, safe and sound (and with window seats, God, was that a pressing matter for little Jakey).

But something inside her stirred. It could’ve been that her newborn's stomach rumbled against hers. But no, no. It wasn’t that. It was just so, well, empty. 

Always the worrier, me darlin’, her father’s voice passed through her head again. It was true. She wanted it to be stress-free, this trip, this little escape. But she’d been taking the trains out of Piccadilly Station for nearly 15 years and had never experienced an empty carriage. 

She looked around again at the strangeness, at the vacancy of it all, with those bygone Mosquette patterns of interweaving reds and yellows and the lingering smell of smoldering ash. But the doors began to hiss and crept shut, making a sucking sound as they pressed together. 

A few rows ahead of her, she could see Jake's blonde bob just above the seat, and his face pressed against the window. There was a rumbling and a cough and the train choked back to life.

 

The skyline fell away behind them. Clattering along, the train wound its way out of the city maze and past the suburban homes. With her head now pressed lazily against the glass too, she watched churches and factories and the ghosts of factories pass in a blur until the blur was nothing but green, sprawling far, far and farther again in a sea of sluggish grassy hills that sloped onwards and upwards into the Peak District in the horizon. 

 

The train howled to a stop every few minutes, but the platforms were empty and so the doors sucked shut and the train wheezed forward again and again. 

 

She felt herself drifting off to sleep as she looked on the low-set clouds that lay over the valley like a great grey blanket. 

The baby stirred.

She looked around the carriage, knowing that nobody got on, but checking anyway, before pulling her top down and letting the baby latch onto her breast. 

“Mam”, Jake said.

Her head was set back against the glass. “Yes, son”.

Little Jake didn’t respond. She peered over her seat and saw his blonde bob his hands against the window and his eyes full of wonder at all the passing scenery. 

    Fixing her top and setting her baby on her lap, she took an old beat-up paperback from her coat pocket. She’d found it in a dentist’s waiting room a few days prior and, to tell the truth, had forgotten it was there until she felt it digging into her waist. She looked at the cover. Not much in the way of artwork, just bold, stark red lettering that read: Something Wicked This Way Comes. 

Her father had been a fan of all things horror, but it never really done it for her. She never had quite believed in the monsters they showed on screen, with their deformations and claws and great, piercing teeth. It was all too on the nose. What she truly found scary was things that could happen in real life, real horrors, so to speak. Like losing her son's hand in a crowd, or…

“Mam”.

“Yes, Jake? What is it?”

“Mammy”. 

“Yes, son? Come to me”, she spoke to him over the rows of seats, her head raised as she watched him withdraw from the window and move along the aisle toward her. 

“Jake?” 

“Mam, I don’t feel well”. 

“You don’t look well. You’re very pale.” And so he was, his skin had taken on the colour of chalk. “Sit beside me. It’s just motion sickness. You’ll get used to these things.”

“It’s not that, Mam”.

“You haven’t eaten yet. That’s probably it. When we stop off, we’ll…”

“Mam. I seen a bad thing.”

“What?”

Jake pointed out the window. She followed his finger towards the scratched glass and onwards towards the trees and fields and barns that rushed by in a haze.

“What, Jake?”

“A witch.”

“A witch?”

“I seen it, I did. I saw a witch. And it saw me.” He huddled in close to his mother's shoulder.

She manoeuvered the beaten paperback back inside her jacket pocket, carefully gripping the baby with her other hand, and put her arm around Jake. 

“It’s okay, son, you had a nightmare. A silly nightmare.” She brushed her fingers through his hair, and after a while, his cheeks flushed again with color and he stood up. 

“Can I hold her?” Jake asked, nodding to the baby.

“She’s sleeping, Jakey. You can, later”.

The boy nodded, and walked back down the aisle, wearily, and slouched back into his original seat. 

 

The train slowed through a small rural village. From the yellow and amber canopy of leaves outside, a church spire rose into the air. A rundown, red-brick apartment building ran adjacent to the station, some windows boarded, others shattered —a few with light burning inside. 

The doors hissed open and shut, and the train was moving again.

She hadn’t even considered opening her eyes until she heard the muffled footsteps on the carpet of the aisle.

“Quiet, this morn’”, a man’s voice.

“Very much so. Peaceful, it is” " she replied, looking up at the man passing by her. He was old, and very tall, and wore a black suit.

“Hi!” Jake said, looking back and up at the passing man as if it were the first man he’d seen in many years. 

“Hello yourself, son”, the man said and sat down beside him. “Hope you don’t mind”, he added, pulling out a case of cigars and a lighter.

“My Daddy smoked, too,” said Jake.

“And you’ll smoke too. And so will your little brother”, the man nodded back to Jake’s mother and the baby. 

Jake’s mother had shuffled forward in her seat and was peering across the carriage at the man. Their voices were barely audible against the drumming of the tracks. 

“All boys smoke when they grow up to be big boys. And some even do it before that”, the man added, pursing his lips around the butt of the cigar and striking the lighter. “What’s your name, son?”

“Hulk. No, my name, I’m Captain America. That’s my name.”

Jake's mother raised her voice from behind them. “It’s Jake. Jake, have some manners”. 

The man laughed. “It’s quite alright, Miss. Nice to meet you, Jake.” 

The train hammered onwards, and Jake had retreated again to the window, where he watched with intent as the sky turned from purple to pink to blue. 

“What are you looking for out that window?” the man said, craning his neck and looking out. 

“Witches.” 

“I see. Find any yet?”

“Just the one. It made me feel ill”.

“Mhmm. They tend to do that sometimes. What age is your little brother back there?”

“He’s zero.”

“That’s not very big, is it?”
“No. He’s still a baby”.

“I see that”, the man said, stubbing out his cigar in the ashtray. “I had a little brother once. Can I tell you about him?”

Jake shrugged, bored now with the man’s droning voice.

“Well”, the man said, “he was zero, too. And just as small and tiny as yours and I loved him very much. Sometimes he cried a lot but that’s what babies do, isn’t it? Sometimes my mother used to let me feed him, and that made me really, really happy. But should I tell you what I did?”

“Yeah.”

“I came home one day and I sang my little brother his favorite song in the world. And he cooed and made all those funny little noises that babies make. And then I put him in the fire!” The man said, laughing.

Jake gasped and looked around at him. “You put him in the fire?”

“Mhmm. I put him in the fire and he burned up. See, our house was very cold, so I heated him up”. 

“Did he like it?”

“He really liked it!”

“Did it heat him up?” Jake asked breathlessly.

“For sure!” Said the man.

Jake’s mother stood up, overhearing snippets of the conversation, and marched down the aisle. “I want you to leave. Now.”

The man laughed and nudged Jake’s arm with his elbow. “Did we frighten you, miss?”

“I’ll call the driver and have you put off!” Her cheeks were flushed now.

The man stood up as the train began to slow to a stop. 

“But then we can put the train driver in the fire”, Jake said, looking at the man, “and he can burn up too just like your little brother”. 

The doors sprung open, and the man turned to leave. As he stepped down from the carriage and onto the platform, he peeped his head back in and looked at the woman. “There isn’t no driver on this train, miss”. And the doors shut.

In her arms, her baby stirred from its sleep and began to wail and cry.