On the High Road to Oblivion

Prologue: A Passage to Nowhere

They left at midnight.

A wan moon was just beginning to climb from behind the hills on the other side of the valley as John Perdue crept to the eaves of the Hathaway farmhouse and tossed a pebble at the second floor window.

“Johnny!” A voice hissed from under the porch to his left.

He ducked reflexively, but he already knew who it was. “Zeb! I thought you’d be sleepin’.”

Zebediah Hathaway slid out from the dark recess. “Not on your life. I couldn’t sleep.”

Johnny knew the feeling. They had been planning this for more than a week, waiting for the moon to be right. The lights never came when the moon was full. “C’mon. We gotta beat feet if we’re gonna make it there and back.”

Zeb trundled his bicycle from its usual place of rest alongside the porch and walked it alongside his friend as they hastened down the drive to the main road where Johnny’s bicycle was stowed. In the interests of stealth, both boys had removed the playing cards clothes-pinned to the front forks. Once clear of the immediate vicinity of the Hathaway house, both boys mounted their tubular metal steeds and charged off into the night.

Their destination was only about ten miles as the crow flew, but the road and the power of the legs pumping the pedals could only get them so close.

They dismounted and stashed their bikes in a stand of brush near the railroad crossing. The tunnel that cut through Saddle Mountain was a few miles from the intersection, but while the boys had no qualms about riding their bikes along the rail bed, their bravery did not extend to riding in the pitch black underground passage where the slightest deviation in course might send them crashing at full speed into the rough hewn gutrock.

The tunnel, they felt certain, was the key to the mystery.

The Saddle Mountain tunnel was about fifty years old, and for most of that time, it had been as innocuous as any other such passage. But all that had changed in the last year. At first, the stories had been discounted as the product of overactive imaginations or the delusional ravings of drunk hobos. But soon, even the town’s most respectable citizens admitted to having seen strange lights in the night sky high above the mountain, or having glimpsed the ghost train passing like a silent shadow through the darkened woods, vanishing into the tunnel, but not emerging on the far side. The rumors had begun to sprout like weeds. Someone remembered that three workers had died clearing a partial collapse five — or was it fifty? — years previously, and although no one could remember their names they were reportedly migrant workers with the Job Corps, or possibly Chinese laborers, who in their death throes had uttered a curse unleashing elemental magic to haunt the rail line. Fear of a spectral encounter was enough to keep all but the most intrepid young thrill seekers away, but Johnny and Zeb, who imagined themselves to be a modern Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, saw only an opportunity for adventure. Armed with battery powered lanterns, they had twice walked the length of the tunnel, but found nothing to explain the rumors. Of course, that had been during the daytime, and the ghost train only rode the rails at night.

Their speculative conversations dropped to a whisper as they reached the tunnel mouth and as the last hint of starlight was swallowed up by the darkness, they fell silent altogether. Unsure of what exactly they hoped to find, they simply groped along in the darkness, eagerly waiting for something — anything — to happen.

Their diligence was rewarded.

Not half an hour later, they heard a shrieking noise like metal grinding against metal. The ground began to vibrate underfoot, a sensation both boys associated with the approach of a locomotive, and they immediately sought refuge against the rough tunnel walls. Suddenly, about two hundred yards ahead of them, a sliver of light appeared in the veil of darkness.

“That’s it!” Zeb whispered, and pulled his friend along.

They got only about halfway when the ground shifted under their feet like the floor in a funhouse and both boys went sprawling. The rumble was even more pronounced, but Johnny was certain that the surface beneath them was moving, and he lay completely still. Further down the line, the light was getting brighter as a section of the tunnel wall opened up. The rumbling continued for a full minute, then ceased as abruptly as it had begun. The light continued to shine, but as Johnny’s eyes adjusted to it, he realized it wasn’t much brighter than a kerosene lamp. Then, the light moved.

With a sound barely louder than that made by the chains of their bicycles when they rode, the source of the light rolled forward, out of the previously hidden recess. The boys could not make out any details, but judging by the size of the silhouette blocking the light, it was about as big as a boxcar. The shape stopped moving with the faintest hiss of pressurized air, and then the rumbling sound resumed.

“It’s a turnaround,” Zeb whispered in Johnny’s ear. “The whole section of tunnel moves to connect with another tunnel.”

“Where does it go?”

“Let’s find out.”

Shrouded in darkness, they hastened toward the closing gap from which the silent train car had emerged and slipped into the side tunnel with only a few seconds to spare. The tunnel section rotated back to its original configuration and the dim light cast by the train car was shut off altogether, returning the boys to total darkness.

“So much for a ghost train,” Zeb remarked. “Just ordinary men, up to no good I’ll wager.”

“Who do you think they are?”

“Bootleggers, maybe.”

Johnny swallowed nervously. “What should we do now?”

“This tunnel has to lead somewhere,” Zeb returned, ever fearless. “Come on.”

At some point in their trek, Johnny decided to start counting his footsteps. There was no other way to measure the passage of time. When they had traveled perhaps two miles, he felt a change in the air. “I think we’re almost out,” he whispered, unnecessarily.

“I feel it too.”

Sure enough, about a hundred steps further on, they saw starlight overhead and the moon off on the horizon. Johnny had studied maps of the county and knew that this line did not appear on any of them. Nevertheless, the simple fact that he was now once more beneath a familiar sky bolstered his spirits. No matter what else they discovered, he could use the moon and stars to navigate his way out of this strange place.

They continued along the rail line for at least another two miles. In the dim moonlight, they could discern that the landscape was flat, almost unnaturally so, and covered only with scrub and a few small trees. Then, without any warning, the ground sloped away.

“Lookit that,” gasped Zeb, pointing down to where the rail line vanished in a misty depression. A few hundred yards to their left, a collection of familiar but completely unexpected shapes rose like islands from a sea of silvery fog. Barely visible wraiths moved between the shrouded structures. “There’s folks down there.”

“Might be folks,” Johnny answered gravely. “Might be somethin’ else, though.”

“Let’s go find out.”

Before Johnny could cast his vote on the matter, Zeb bolted from their vantage and made for the buildings, crashing through the brush on the hillside. The second boy breathed a curse that would have earned a mouthful of soap bubbles had his mother been within earshot, then chased after. He hadn’t gone ten steps when lights appeared.

It might have been swamp gas, except that there weren’t any swamps in the whole valley, or ball lightning or any number of other things that people usually attribute as the explanation for strange lights, but up close Johnny and Zeb saw that it was none of those things.

“Holy God,” whispered Johnny, reaching his friend’s side and gazing up at the blue corona that had taken station directly above. A second luminous shape rose from the mist and spiraled lazily toward their position, falling into an orbit around the first.

“Zeb, we need to run.”

“No, Johnny. Don’t you see? It’s not Martians at all.”

Suddenly a finger of brilliant light stabbed down and transfixed them. Primal panic took over and Johnny could think of nothing but the need to flee. He scrambled out of the circle of light and dashed for the tree line, but skidded to a halt when he realized Zeb wasn’t beside him. His friend remained fixed in place, staring up at the light as though he were gazing at a window into heaven itself.

“Zeb! Get over—” A bloom of pain, more intense than anything he could possibly imagine, stole the cry from his lips. Every fiber of his body seemed to on fire, and his head felt like a balloon about to burst. He dropped to the ground, writhing in a fetal curl, consumed by the agony.

Time ceased to have any meaning for him as he lay there. In fact, only a few seconds passed before the sky exploded.

The brilliant but focused spotlight became a supernova that filled the night from horizon to horizon. A blast of intense heat buffeted Johnny, but it was a welcome change from the other sensation, which had ceased at the moment of the blast. Flaming debris rained from the heavens, but Johnny could only lay motionless, quivering like a jellyfish washed up on a beach, as the memory of the assault slowly dribbled out of his nervous system. It was an oddly pleasant feeling.

Gradually, other sights and sounds began filtering into his perceptions and it occurred to him that perhaps he should flee. “Zeb!” he hissed, but no answer came.

He struggled to rise, but found that he could only move his left arm. His other extremities were held fast, and as he struggled to free himself, he realized that it was the earth itself that held him prisoner. He was half buried in the ground, as surely as if someone had dug a pit, thrown him in, and then packed the dirt down upon him.

“Zeb, help me!” He made no effort to whisper now. In a panic, he thrashed about, loosening the soil beneath him enough to wrestle his other arm free and prop himself up. “Zeb!”

A few fires still burned on the ground around him, but their dim glow revealed no trace of his friend. In fact, the entire area where Zeb had been standing was gone…or rather changed. Where there had once been a sloping hillside, there was now an abrupt drop-off, falling perhaps fifteen feet. The ground below was completely flat and smooth; aside from the smoldering debris, there was not so much as a blade of grass, and no sign at all of Zeb.

Johnny was still struggling, still crying out for his friend, when more of the wraiths emerged from the mist.

Three days later, a railroad detective rousted a young man from a freight car bound for Baltimore. The unresponsive deadhead sustained a nasty wound in the course of his ejection, which led to a brief hospitalization, followed by an even longer convalescence in a sanatorium. It would be two weeks before the boy would be able to identify himself as John Perdue from central Pennsylvania. He had no memory of what had happened during those lost days, and no idea what had become of his friend Zeb Hathaway.