Supernatural Arizona: Book III

Prologue: The Conductor

The Conductor saw himself as a ship captain, or a navigator. The Ghost Train was in many ways more like a long, serpentine galley, steering course through treacherous and tumultuous seas, than a locomotive spouting steam and smoke. Nothing was fixed in the Netherworld, almost like a lighthouse standing on some crag, but every which way one shown their light, was nothing but crashing waves, swirling fog and looming shadows. Other times it was more like a forest of crags, twisted and reaching their ancient knuckly branches to intertwine like a network of webs creating a canopy of black. The trees loomed and lunged, leaning towards the rails as if nefarious about their intentions. Or it was a desolate gray desert, like a moonscape, reaching in a barren panorama of nothingness in all directions. Then, it could all change before he past through this way again on the return voyage. The Netherworld was a swirling look into the madness of the torrent of man's colliding thoughts and desires, and thoughts and desires of men are nothing – if not fluid.

But his job was not to wax esoteric. His job was to follow the rails stretching before him just beneath the perpetual coating of fog. His job was to keep his eyes on the strips of parallel vacancy, the only mark of their existence being that they absorbed the energy of everything else. His job was to deliver the goods, and return with the merchandise. The Wastelands of the Netherworld were perilous, and without a ticket for his Midnight Express, one was far more likely to sink in the nothingness of it all before one found another oasis of un-life, tucked in a pocket somewhere, somehow daring to give substance to the spiritual maelstrom.

Many a soul got lost, adrift in those seas. This is why he was valuable. This is why he still had purpose. He was like a Ferryman, but their was no River Styx to cross. Instead it was a world of emotional chaos, mixing and changing like a painting splashed with water, and he was the one who made sense of the madness. He was the Conductor.

Time was meaningless here. History, as a reflection of time, also held little meaning. There was no direct correlation between the current happenings in the world beyond and the world of its spirit counterpart. An act that may have taken an instant, can permanently damage the soul of every single thing it touched, and that permanence... stays, visibly, in the Netherworld. One such place was the Dragoon Wastes, and the twisting mountain pass that led to it.

Shadows would begin to take form, looming forests would become more clear representations of specific locations, the seas would ebb and recede, pulling back and revealing the scars that had left their permanent mark on the world so deep, that even the world of connected spirit was marred. As the churning, agitated whirlings of the Wastelands cleared, he would sound his horn, bellowing out like a deep and irritated dragon, awakening and reentering the world from its cave, and the Ghost Train would appear as an apparition through a portal of surging and rolling mists substantiating into a long, chugging, steaming and smoking snake rolling from the unknown through a place marked by the past.

The Midnight Express, the Ghost Train, followed, as much as one could follow anything in the Wastes, the etched in memory of the Butterfield Overland Stage Route. Time, as is often hard to rationalize, has no definition here. Additionally, although there were certainly areas of the spirit world that were more concrete than others, the environment of the Netherworld was always in flux. Inhabitants of the world were a blended mix of all types from all places. Some had been on this side of the Curtain briefly: some not so much, but since most didn't have clear memories or visions from their lives before, it didn't matter anyway. Little had happened, back in that other place, along the old Butterfield line, of lasting consequence. Attacks here and there, robberies, vagabonds stealing payroll supply and mail, but very few of these events had left spiritual scars of permanence on the world. The Netherworld simply cascaded over them, erasing their indentation on this reality almost instantly, leaving nothingness in their stead... just more of the lost moments of human madness lost to imagination.

So he followed the Void Rails, careening through the storms of shifting human currents towards the few destinations that still existed as depots, places where the Ghost Train stopped, and took on a few drifting passengers and let others off. Reavers, bounty hunters really, that rode the rails in exchange for coin, would leap off as the train approached the platform. They would stand, lurking in the mist and the smoke and the steam, keeping their un-blinking eyes riveted to the comings and goings of passengers, never wandering far from the stock cars, and never taking their hands from their holsters.

The dangerous trek across the Sea of Sand was nearing an end. El Paso was behind, a horrid, slanting, and angrily red-tinged town; it was a place fueled to life among the dead by the continual cycle born of from dreams born in hope simply to die, violently, in angst and loneliness. The Reavers were always busy in El Paso, and the freight always took too long to load. Next stop, Tucson, the Slave Necropolis, where the goods would be transferred to Smelter Trains, and the merchandise would be loaded onto Vault Cars for Transport to Yuma and then onto the black hole that was California.

It was the ride through what was once Arizona that worried the Conductor the most. The living history of this territory, the memories, the pain, the suffering, the bitterness that permeates everything about the lives of so many: it is a place ravaged by the wounds of time. And in the Netherworld, those wounds are cystic, infectious blights that breed every manner of horrors. It should not be hard to imagine, in the living world, Arizona houses the largest square mileage of Native American reservations. Indians, both warring and peaceful, from clans friendly to some and violent to others, from every where across a war ravaged, conquered land were piped in, displaced, and warehoused in concentration camps that became permanent. Very few kept their sacred homelands. Very few kept their cultures. And their souls cried... for centuries: scarring, ripping asunder, and fettering the land of spirit forever with the chains of a tragic history.

The Conductor shivered as the Ghost Train roared from the portal of cascading turmoil, into the ghostly, foggy remnants of the South Eastern corner of the Arizona territory. He pulled on the horn, sounding a throaty warning to the dead that the Midnight Express would be materializing into sight, winding its way through the deep forests and shadows of vines and cursed rotting grapes, as it chugged menacingly up hill... towards the horror that was the scar of Fort Bowie, called the White Dungeon here, and then shooting, hopefully without incident through the Pass and into the Dragoon Wastes.

Sometimes, a rare traveler, who had somehow made it from the cities of the dead to this lost and lonely corner of the world, would signal a stop in Bowie. Again, in the archives of incomprehensible time, this place used to be depot for many a train, but in the swirl of the Netherworld, it was nothing more than a gas-lit bus stop..... cut out from the ravaging and impeding spread of vines. South Arizona had become wine country, and perhaps it was that spirit of growth and hope and connection to life... that allowed this place to exist at all. This rare traveler would stop, and wait in the green hue of the mist and the fog and the overgrowth for a linking stage that would travel south to the Ghost Soiree of Tombstone and the Ghost Haven City of Bisbee. Very few boarded here... if a soul was lucky enough to get this close to heaven in purgatory.... they usually did not leave.

Each time, as the small pinpoint of green gas light faded behind him, and the blackness of the blighted vineyards took over, as the Midnight Express wound its way up into the hills of tragedy: the Conductor braced for the worst and pushed his engine as hard as it could roar. He knew the Reavers would be taking positions on the roof. He wiped at the perspiration on his forehead, momentarily wondering why spirits still sweat, before pushing the thought off as irrelevant and distracting.

It was not safe to lose focus in Apache Pass.