The Signalman's Ghost

© 2002 E. Michael Lewis
All rights reserved.

Karen pulled a pillow over her head while her mother pounded on her door.

"Karen, honey! Telephone!"

Karen peeked at her clock. Red digital numbers venomously spat 6:37 AM at her. There ought to be a law, she thought.

Her mother called again. "Karen?"

"Bring it to me on the portable, will ya?" Karen reluctantly uncovered her head and reached down to turn off her waterbed. She hoped this tactic would delay the call by so much that the person calling would get bored waiting and hang up.

It didn't work. Her mother immediately opened her door and thrust the phone at her. She was dressed for church but had yet to fix her hair. The sudden smell of White Diamonds made her daughter's nose turn up.

Karen took the phone and mouthed, Who is it?

Her mother shrugged, fumbling into her earrings. She did not appear to be leaving.

Frowning, Karen said, "Hello?"

"This is King County Search and Rescue calling for Karen Norwood."

Karen bolted upright. "Speaking."

"Karen, we've got two missing explorer trainees at Camp Brinkly. Rendezvous is at eight o'clock at the Arco in Monroe. Can you make it?"

Karen's eyes grew wide. "Two ESAR trainees?"

"Yes. They were due back from Course Two this morning, but another team found their campsite wrecked and radioed for help. We hope—"

"South track," Karen interrupted. "They were on South Track, weren't they?"

"Yes. Can you make it?"

Karen didn't say anything for a moment. Her mother sat down next to her, suddenly noticing how pale she looked. She teased the hair out of her daughter's face and asked her if everything was okay.

"No," Karen said into the phone. "No, I can't make this one."

"Karen, we show that you've been unavailable for the last five searches. Would you like to be taken off the active list?"

"Yes, thank you." Karen sounded a bit too relieved. She passed the phone back to her mother without hanging it up, gently nudging her mother out of her hair.

"It was just ESAR," she responded to her mother's silent inquiry. "They wanted me to go on a search."

"Why'd you say no? You don't have to work today, do you?"

"No," Karen said weakly.

"Well, for all the money we put into your gear, I'd hate to think that you're going to give it up just because of Gavin."

The mention of his name stung her. "It's not because of him."

"What is it, then?"

"Mom, there are just some things that I don't even want to search for, let alone find."

Her mother recoiled from the force of her daughter's sixteen-year-old wisdom.

"If you say so," she sighed as she stalked from the room. She shut the door behind her.

Karen turned her face back into her pillow, trying but failing to keep hot tears from spilling out. She cried until she saw Gavin's face disappear from beneath her eyelids, and at last she was asleep again.

Karen's sleep brought her no comfort. In her mind's eye, she watched the events unfold just as they had four months ago.

Karen had always been a tomboy, and she had always been eager to beat any boy at his own game. The game that fall had been ESAR, Explorer Search and Rescue. Gavin, her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, had gotten her into it, playing on her overactive sense of competition. He also promised her long hikes alone in the woods. While that promise fell on its face, she found that she did like the other trainees and learning about the outdoors. Gavin bragged that when they were certified, they would even be paid by the state. But Karen didn't care about the money. Her simple happiness was in showing up Gavin.

The training took place at a Boy Scout camp named Camp Brinkly, near Monroe, some twenty-five miles northeast of Seattle. The camp was referred to by ESARians simply as Hell (though Karen often argued that Hell would have been a lot nicer). In the summer, it was a novel place for young Boy Scouts, but autumn turned it into a cold, muddy, swamp-filled morass. ESAR trainers called it the ultimate terrain for mock searches. After all, they said, it couldn't get any worse.

Course A was the introductory session. There, they hiked to find their pace, learned searcher etiquette and how to read maps. They did a mock evidence search, just like the ones they'd if the police found any new Green River Killer victims.

Course One came next. There they learned how to do the math for compass runs and compass story problems. They worked in pairs. Karen found that she worked surprisingly well with Gavin. She decided to put an end to the friendly competition between them. After this, she felt free to concentrate on the lessons they were being taught. Course One ended with their first wilderness compass run. After they completed it together, both suffered from a typically teenage sense that nothing could go wrong with their partnership.

Then disaster struck in the guise of Course Two.

Course Two was the big one. Teams of two were given six cross-country compass runs and four location problems to do between 8 a.m. on Saturday and 1 p.m. on Sunday, completely unsupervised. Much to her surprise, Karen's parents had no objections to she and Gavin spending the night in a wild swamp. Karen's mother trusted both her daughter and her boyfriend. The ESAR trainers were harder to convince, but eventually they relented. They attended the very first session of Course Two, on the first weekend in October.

They failed miserably. More rain fell in Washington that weekend than in the past five years. They were soaked within minutes. Wet and miserable, they began bickering, and when they found they could get farther by swimming than by hiking, they gave up. They suspected that they were off more than the minimum of two hundred feet they needed to pass. Later, they found out they'd been off by nearly twice that.

While only one team passed Course Two that session, Karen was still discouraged. Gavin assured her that they'd do better the next time.

He was right. The next time they passed. But not before vowing to never set foot on South Track again.

South Track was rumored to be the toughest and most demanding bit of the wilderness in Camp Brinkly. Rumor had it that it was all swamp, and that it was free from wildlife because it was fit for none. Karen and Gavin were delighted when that turned out to be false. After crossing one stretch of swamp, the forest opened up into a tall pine cathedral, packed with trees but free of underbrush. It reminded Karen of a gloomy park, with the flat gray sky and a carpet of dead pine needles that silenced the steps of their hiking boots.

They had hustled their math, eaten while pacing, and rechecked their calculations twice before they started out. Their efficiency and the dry weather let them put all six of the compass runs behind them the first day.

Gavin counted his pace as Karen stood waiting for him on their sixth run. "Sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven."

Karen hugged him as he stopped before her. They kissed before he spoke.

"Hal-lah-looyuh, the last one. See any markers?"

Karen pointed nonchalantly behind him, where an orange metal plaque was nailed into a tree. "C," it read.

"How could we have overshot it?" he asked, turning away from her.

Karen turned him back.

"Does it matter? That's the first we've been off. Even if we're wrong, we can afford the error."

"You say that so casually, for someone who wants to pass."

Karen smiled and checked her watch. "It'll be dark in a half an hour. How far do we have to go until we reach the location problems?"

Gavin consulted their map. "About two hundred feet ahead is a railroad grade. Looks like we follow that to the main road. 'Bout a mile as the crow flies."

"Okay, let's go. I don't want to pitch the tent in the dark."

"Me either."

The couple kissed as they headed for the grade.

Karen knew all about railroad grades. Monroe was founded as a logging town, and the hills around it had once been riddled with railroads. Railroad grades were places where the dense forest suddenly opened up into wide, barren roads. That was all that remained of the logging boom of the late nineteenth century. No rocks or ties were left, just the absence of evergreens and underbrush marked the path that the logging engines had once taken. Karen found them eerie. It was strange to watch the forest open up like some old library book, innocently providing you with a path to wherever you were headed.

They reached the grade and followed it up a gentle incline for twenty minutes before Karen felt a drop of water fall onto her forehead.

"Did you just feel a raindrop?"

Gavin stopped, surveying the sky through a hole in the canopy of branches.

"Yeah," he said slowly. "Looks like our luck's run out. Want to camp here?"

"In the middle of the road?"

"We're hardly gonna get run over, Karen."

Karen wasn't listening to him, but looking up the path. The grade had grown a little tight for their tent.

"I see a clearing up ahead," she said. "We'd have more room up there."

Gavin came to her side and looked. A clearing wide enough for his tent sat nestled into the armpit of a bend some fifty feet ahead.

"Okay, I'm game."

The two hurried up the grade as the thick drops groped their way into a steady rhythm. They quickly took off their packs and started to set up. Gavin had just laid out this tent and begun to pound the spikes in when he called out: "Karen, c'mere, you gotta see this."

She came away from the campstove and their dehydrated spaghetti dinner.

"Look," he said, showing her the small hole he had dug in the carpet of dead pine needles. "Concrete. Like a foundation. This is the corner."

"Like an old building?"

"Maybe." Gavin thought for a second. "Maybe a signalman's shack."

"What?"

"Way back when the trains ran through here, there were signalman who stayed at junctions and tunnel entrances who switched the track and lit the warning lanterns and stuff. I bet that's what this is."

Karen looked around. "I don't see any tunnel or junction now. The turn, maybe?"

"Maybe."

"Weird," Karen said, "to be sleeping on it now."

"Yeah, pretty weird."

Karen went back to the spaghetti and continued to watch it simmer. Gavin finished setting up the tent and climbed inside. Karen joined him as the rain accelerated. Soon they had their stomachs full and their sleeping bags zipped together for warmth.

"Good night, little princess," Gavin nuzzled into the nape of her neck. It was the only pet name she allowed him, and he only got to use it in private.

"Good night, darling," Karen giggled, in spite of herself. She would do a lot more giggling before they went to sleep.

What woke her first was the red light.

The rain had stopped and Karen opened her eyes to find the tent bathed in a sinister red nimbus. It reminded her of the idiot light in her '83 Dodge Omni, the one that forecast an expensive trip to a mechanic about three seconds before the engine stalled. At first she thought that it was the sun, that it was morning, but rolling over and unzipping the tent, she saw that the forest was still dark. In the distance, she began to hear something.

"Gavin, wake up," she said, shaking him abruptly.

Gavin woke up slowly. "Hmm—what is it?"

"Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

The noise outside grew very loud and immediate. Gavin bolted upright, almost pulling the tents spikes free in the process.

"Oh my God, what the hell is that?"

The noise swelled, coming only closer. The caterwaul of metal on metal screeched deep into their ears, almost but not quite covering the other sound that seemed to drift down on them from high above.

A train whistle.

Gavin panicked. He had discarded his portion of the sleeping bag and opened the tent, racing out before Karen could stop him.

Karen heard him curse as his feet met jagged gravel. She watched him fall flat on his face.

"Gavin!" she yelled after him, racing to his side.

Her wool socks protected her feet from the rocks. She collapsed next to him.

Gavin lay moaning and holding his bleeding mouth as Karen felt with her legs for what he had tripped over.

Railroad ties.

She did not have to look up to know what was coming. She could feel it through the tracks. Karen grabbed Gavin and was about to pull him up when they both froze. The train's white beam cut through the red, silhouetting the figure that was running toward them.

A stalwart man, impossibly tall with filthy black hair that crawled from his head and around to his chin broke through the beam and ran toward them. His denim overalls were darkly stained and his red plaid shirt was tattered at both sleeves. He reeked of soot and machine oil.

"Danger! Clear the way!" he shouted. "For God's sake, clear the way!"

Karen could only watch as the giant halted before them and picked up Gavin by the front of his polypropylene longjohns. Karen gasped as she saw the stranger's glassy eyes and heard the tremor in his voice.

"It's coming!" he shouted. "Her brakes are out! I've got to warn the camp! We'll all be killed!!"

Then something changed. The figure set Gavin down as he turned back toward the oncoming train, not fast, but as though his joints had been filled with molasses.

"I couldn't warn them...." she heard him say, his voice almost calm. "They're all going to die...."

The engine loomed unthinkably closer. The sound of the whistle, the squealing brakes, and the insistent chugging again became deafening.

"RUN!!" the signalman shouted.

He yanked her to her feet and shoved both teenagers ahead of him as they ran pell-mell down the track. Karen looked ahead, then behind.

It was too late. She could hear the bell on the engine ringing, she could see the cattle prod thrusting out in front of the engine like a giant pair of scissors. It was only a matter of feet. Twenty feet. Ten feet.

Up ahead, she got a moment's view of seven, maybe eight ramshackle buildings: a logging camp. Forty men lined the tracks, ready to begin their long day of work, groggy and unaware of the danger. Karen knew the train wouldn't make the last curve.

"It's coming!" the signalman shouted from their heels. "For God's sake, get out of the way! Look out below!"

With his words finally out-sounding the train, she felt his rough hand place itself between her shoulder blades and shove her to the left. At the last second, she saw Gavin pushed the other way.

"Gavin!" Karen felt her feet lift up as she tumbled down an embankment and into a patch of devil's club ten feet below the tracks.

Her lithe body twisted in time to watch as the signalman was cut down by the cascading train. His bloody debris rained down on her as the coal car derailed and covered the scene in black. Karen could only scream as the empty logging cars flew by her and tumbled into the camp, sending everything into lethal disorder. A decapitated hand, perhaps the signalman's, landed on top of her own, as if to comfort her.

The last thing she remembered were the screams. She harmonized with them until she lost consciousness.

Karen awoke with a start. At once she knew was safe—the noonday sun streamed through the window of her room, washing it with mid-March half-warmth. Outside, she could hear the comforting whine of the family lawnmower. She even had her teddy, whom she hadn't slept with since grade school, tucked neatly under her arm.

A knock sounded at her door. Her mother again. "Honey, are you awake?"

"Yeah, come on in."

Karen watched her mother study her from the doorway. "You gonna sleep all day?"

The sixteen-year-old stretched and yawned simultaneously. "I might."

"I don't think so, young lady. Your father would like some help with the lawn. I don't know why I let him talk me into not waking you for church." Her mom prepared to go.

A lumped filled Karen's throat. "Mom?"

As her mom watched, Karen launched herself from her waterbed, slowly sauntered up to her and inexplicably hugged her tight.

Yes, Karen Norwood was safe, just like that night four months ago, when she woke up in Gavin's arms, covered with thousands of little scrapes and bruises, blood in her hair from his split lip.

They got up the next morning and passed Course Two, and later Course Three and its terrible, realistic mock search, but she and Gavin didn't last until Halloween. She missed ESAR less than her boyfriend, but she realized that both only find people who look for them.

Karen's mother pulled away and said, "What was that for?"

"You just looked like you needed one." Karen smiled at her and hugged her again. She pushed from her mind the image of the campsite of those two dead trainees. She wondered fleetingly how ESAR would explain their crushed and mangled bodies to their parents.

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