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Artwork: The Suicide House by Will Jacques
The Last Train Long Ago Left the Station
Joseph S. Pete
Driving down Broadway downtown, past storefront after empty storefront, past the mouldering Palace Theatre, a brick apartment tower that looked bombed out, and a long-abandoned chop suey storefront that appeared frozen in the calcified amber of the 1950s, Matt wondered when Gary, Indiana, the “Steel City” where half the population decamped after the mills stopped hiring, had ever been the so-called “City of the Century”.
He pulled up on the long-vacant Union Station. The grand structure was smack dab in the heart of a company town that was abandoned by America’s first billion-dollar corporation, that became the crime-ridden “Murder Capital of the United States”, and that since had gotten so hollowed out it no longer qualified for that dishonor. Even the crack dealers, who once violently fought over every block of territory, shooting rivals in the head at sometimes point-blank range, left for more opportunity elsewhere.
The once-bustling Union Station was once featured in a Hollywood movie, a film noir about a postal inspector getting implicated in an unsolved murder that could have involved a broader conspiracy. It was a focal point in the city, a station that sent tens of thousands off to boot camp, war, college, holiday visits, vacation or points unknown.
Now it was a decaying husk of its former self. Though Union Station still had the grandiose facade of a major civic structure, it had rotted away inside. The roof was gone, the walls were covered in teenagers' hasty, skittish and amateurish tags, and the stairwell was crumbling away step by step.
Matt was volunteering to help fix the place up, drawn by guilt since his grandparents’ generation had forsaken the city that steel built and his parents’ generation ignored it while it rotted away into its current, likely irredeemable state. More than a third of the homes and businesses were empty and blighted, many torched by arsonists or drifters who camped out in vacants with burn barrels to keep them warm from the bitter lake effect, cold wafting like a winter fury off Lake Michigan. There were long-shuttered high schools where textbooks and violin cases mouldered inside classrooms strewn with broken glass and graffiti. There were entire city blocks where only a single lonely soul lived.
A local artists’ collective planned to clear away the debris surrounding the train station, board up the windows, install a viewing station so gawkers wouldn’t get crushed by falling rubble, and cover the outside with colorful murals. They envisioned an art and architecture park where people drank in the Beaux Arts masterpiece that once served a more practical use.
Matt spent the day with them hauling off brush and litter, shovelling out weeds and laying down brick for a courtyard.
“I’m taking this down to the chop shop,” the Unitarian minister Jessica joked while hauling a dirt-caked Chevy bumper off to the dumpster. “I’m going to make a quick buck.”
“You're going to be a dollaraire.”
“Hey, that's not nothing in a hardscrabble town like Gary.”
He was so sweaty and exhausted at the end of the day that he drove off back home two suburbs over at the end of the day, without bothering to snap photos of the murals.
Later, while scrolling through Twitter, enthralled in the soft lambent light of his phone as he lay in bed unable to sleep, he decided he needed something about his good deed to post to social media. So he returned to the site the next day.
A lean, lanky guy in a hoodie inside was tagging the building.
“Hey man, we good?"
“Yeah, yeah” Matt said, and gave him a thumbs-up for emphasis or visual affirmation, in case he was hard of hearing.
He snapped several more photos on his phone and then headed back to his car.
As Matt unlocked the door, the hooded man loomed suddenly behind him.
“I asked you if we’re good.”
“Yeah, I said yeah,” Matt mumbled.
The man in the gray hoodie, about his size but far more aggressive in bearing, backed him up against the car door.
“We’re good? You’re not going to report this? There’s not going to be a call to cops?”
“Man, I said yeah. There’s no problem.”
As was his wont, Matt overthought it.
“So long as you don’t tag over any of that fresh paint, any of those new murals, there’s no problem.”
The guy in the hoodie slammed him back against the car door with one hand, clenching a can of spray paint in the other.
“There better not be.”
He brushed past Matt and stormed off down the sidewalk.
Shaken, Matt drove off, his nerves jangling. It took him a few days to fully calm down.
***
Displeased with the photos he took too quickly on his iPhone, Matt headed back out to Union Station to see if he could snap more aesthetically pleasing shots if he had better lighting, more time and no psychos breathing down his neck.
Still rattled, he grabbed a knife and tucked it into his pocket. He tried to convince himself it wasn’t just about graffiti writer, that these vacants harbored squatters, junkies, and sometimes unbalanced homeless folks who might be hopped up on booze, meth, heroin or who knows what.
Union Station was all his this time, in all its decrepitude and fading splendor. Though the exterior was spruced up, the inside of the squalid vacant building was grimy, dark and foreboding. Shadows darkened every corner. Everything seemed gloomy and eldritch.
He wandered around, snapping photos of all he surveyed, gingerly making his way up the eroding staircase. The place felt filled with ghosts, apparitions of long-gone tellers, dutiful conductors and bushy-eyed passengers embarking on great and hopeful journeys.
A shaft of light drew Matt’s eye to an indiscernible lump off in the corner. He thought nothing of it until he came up close while circling the perimeter. It seemed meatier and more substantial than the rest of the rubble scattered about.
The hump smelt like faeces. Morbidly curious, Matt drew near, swiping at a tattered cloth with his outstretched phone. It was a face. A bloated, pallid face. The skin looked waxy, unnatural.
“Hey, you okay?”
He tapped at the corpse with his shoe, got no response.
“Lady, you okay?”
It sunk in all at once. This woman was dead, dead as hell here in a vacant building where he was trespassing, where he had no permission to be, where he was breaking the law, maybe even committing a felony that could never be expunged from his record. It wasn’t clear how she died but she was wrapped in a ratty, dirty cloth, so it sure as hell looked like she had been dumped here after the fact.
Matt panicked and fled. He didn’t know what happened but he knew he needed to get out of there. He knew he needed to get as far away as possible.
***
A few months later, Matt got a push alert on his phone from the local newspaper.
A killer police caught with a garroted prostitute in the bathtub of his seedy motel room had confessed to other murders, a lot of other murders.
It turned out he had been dumping the bodies in vacant buildings in Gary.
Matt’s heart pounded so hard he felt like his rib cage would be pumiced to dust. Nausea upset his stomach. His breath grew short. He gasped, felt like it would be a merciful relief if he were to die soon.
He should have called his finding in; he should have reported it. Now a woman was dead and he could have prevented it. He had to atone for this, had to help with their investigation.
“Hello, 911.”
“Yes, I’d like to report a murder.”
“A murder?”
“A body. There’s a body on the second floor of Union Station.”
“Where is the body located?”
“On the second floor of Union Station, off in a corner.”
“How did you find it?”
“Sir, how did you find it?”
“Sir, I’m going to need your name and contact information.”
Matt slammed the phone down, hoping the call was untraceable.
***
The visions started.
Matt could see that inert body, that clammy flesh, those unnaturally blue lips wherever he looked. The dead woman haunted him, kept him awake even longer when he lay in bed peering into the glowing void of his phone. He couldn’t escape that ghastly vision, that grim visage.
A push alert lit up his phone about a freight train derailing in downtown Gary and ploughing through the wall of Union Station, causing it to collapse into a pile of stone and brick and twisted metal. The rest of the building would need to be razed for safety’s sake, since it was no longer structurally sound.
Excavators chomped into the building, eating it away piece by piece. When it was finally gone, Matt hoped he might be free, liberated from those spectral memories.
But he lay awake yet again, glued to the steady stream of 280-character updates, news stories, musings and bon mots, successfully chuckle-inducing and less so.
That’s when he noticed the ashen body beside him, completely bloodless. The face was chalky, the belly distended, the mass leaden and unmoving. Demolished or not, he could never escape that building. Or could he never escape himself. What had he done? Who was he? The body he saw was a woman and this was a man, a pale and very, very dead man.
It took a second but he recognized him as the lanky man in the grey hoodie who feared he would go to the police.
“I asked you if we were good,” he bellowed. “I asked if we were good.”
The lean man in the hoodie was again aggressive and threatening. He was shouting at top volume but his lips weren't moving. They were pale, waxen. His body was inert but his booming, bellicose words filled Matt's skull.
“I asked if we were good. I asked if you could let it alone.”
Half-awake, uncertain, Matt pressed against the hoodied
man's ratty sweatshirt and anemic flesh.
