‘The Train’

This is roughly a 30 minute story (with editing), an attempt to shake from my head the dusty, thick, cobwebs; an attempt to try and make my blog still retain some of its creativity instead of writing too personally about my own problems and my lack of being able to cope with issues that I should never have bared publicly on a very public blog. Stupid.

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The Train hurtles through the deep night, like a thing possessed from the very fiery depths itself; it’s whistle screeching an ear-piercing scream, a scream so loud that people cover their ears in abject terror; this in effect warns folk in advance to lock their doors, shutter their blinds, to hide,and turn their heads away from its passage, as if the very visual contact in itself would be enough to make one mad, delusional, to end up where this mystery train is said to be headed, or even to have arrived from. There was talk of mad people in the local Sanitarium who screamed and shouted, caused from having witnessed The Trains passage, turning them insane, but this is something of folk legend however and allegedly, so the tale goes, on a certain night, in a certain month, one can hear the mystery train; if you are brave, you can see its passage in the depth of this cold night, the red sparks from its chimney billowing behind it, leaving a cloudy, red tinted haze that looks as if it spawns fire, like some fiery comet blazing a trail of smoke and ashes from its passage.

The Train. No, that should read ‘The Train’. You knew about this tale many years ago, again it was one of the folk-tales that you read as a boy – and turned the page, not really taking it in, yet another story from the past containing old superstition, formed into a moral warning to scare, to try and keep you on the straight and narrow, to warn you, or at least subconsciously so, of what could happen if you strayed from the path, to wander, to become enticed to wonder just what actually lay from the beaten track, the path well trodden. Away from safety. As you grew older, and these old folk-tales became something of a distant, hazy memory – gone, but still stuck within your mind, at the very back, deep within your subconscious, this tale stayed with you, because it was a tale that scared, that turned your body cold; this one was the most terrifying in the book. You had seen it re-hashed in different formats and stories throughout your life; Ghost-Trains, trains with one-way tickets, screaming their passage along railway tracks fallen into, a long time ago, states of disrepair, in memory of maybe a train crash, or some other disaster. But ‘The Train’ stayed with you, never to be forgot, because there was something quite shivering and very very scary about it…