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The halls of Glenmorrow stretched long and shadow-shrouded outside Vincent’s bedroom door. Down the center of the corridor, where earlier that evening a runner rug striped in shades of blue from powder to deepest midnight had bisected the worn wooden floor, ran a set of railroad tracks. They glowed in the darkness, steel-gray like a sky fit for storming.
Turning left, Vincent kept to the side of the tracks. There was barely enough space between them and the wall for his wide frame to fit. He half-scooted, half-wiggled down the hall toward Mrs. Lapsley’s old room.
This was, he realized, much worse than the last time. Last time, the tracks had only extended beyond Mrs. Lapsley’s door a few feet, laid down with a wistful sigh, and vanishing once the old lady wiped her translucent tears away. They had more substance this time. Vincent bumped into them, and they bent around his tire, snapping back into place as he moved along. He felt the chill of the steel and the thrumming of lonesome, endless journeys on the rails. No , Vincent thought, these tracks won’t tear up easy tonight.
Vincent shimmied down the narrow passageway, trying his best to keep clear of the tracks. Touching them would not hurt him in the physical sense. They were of their world, and he was of his. While things from either side of the here-and-now often bumped into one another within Glenmorrow’s walls, it was rare that either one had any dents or scuffs to show for it. Mrs. Lapsley being Mrs. Lapsley, what Vincent had to watch out for were the tricks those tracks played on the mind. A two-second touch, and you were wallowing in the same despair she felt when her husband, the late Mr. Lapsley, set out to meet his business partners and never returned. Longer, and you would hear his letters playing, folksy tales of railroad life punctuated by the crackle and pop of the phonograph. You’d feel nostalgic for places you had never been, sights you had never seen with your own eyes. Heartbroken for the dreams Mr. and Mrs. Lapsley had, that never came to be.
Way-back-when and far-far-away thundered down those tracks like a runaway locomotive, carrying along any soul who got too close. It was easy, if you were not careful, to get as lost as poor old Mr. Lapsley.
At the end of the hall stood an arched door. Vincent’s headlights caught on the curling pattern carved into the heavy wood, casting shadows in the grooves. He pushed the pedal on the floor at the door’s right, clacking the knocker.
Betty Stout opened the door after the third knock. She did not look at all surprised to see her landlords’ child outside her bedroom at half past two in the morning. “Is Mrs. Lapsley having another, ahem, little moment?” She asked.
“I’m afraid so, Miss Stout. I need to go inside and talk to her,” Vincent said.
Betty glanced down at the floor. She could not see the tracks, but she had a hunch they were there anyway, based on what Theodora had told her about the previous incident. (Vincent’s mother felt it only fair that the boarders know what went on under Glenmorrow’s Mansard roof, regardless of whether or not they could see it unfold.) “One moment, please.” Yawning, she retrieved the quilt from her sleeping mat and draped it over herself. “I’ll be in the parlor. Come and collect me when you’re done.”
“Yes, Miss Stout.”
Once Betty had gone, her progress down the hall to the ramp unimpeded by the phantom tracks, Vincent peered into the room.
In the present time, Betty Stout’s room was plain and comfortable. One bureau, which had come with the house and inside which Betty kept her formidable collection of hats. Two small shelves built into the wall, holding books and a framed photo of Betty’s mother. A large sleeping pad, dripping with lace at the edges, covered most of the floor.
Like many of the boarders’ rooms in Glenmorrow, this room had once been part of a much larger one. Years ago, when Vincent’s parents purchased the crumbling Railroad Age mansion, they chopped up the cavernous bedrooms and parlors, the great hall and grand ballroom, cutting them down to a size that made sense for cars. Opulence by locomotive standards was unsettling vastness to an automobile. The results were cozy, if strange. Take the corner of fresco on Betty’s ceiling, patches of blue sky and white locomotive steam hazily visible under seventy-five years’ worth of grime. See the semicircular window made a quarter-circle by way of a new wall. You learned to appreciate architectural quirks, living here.
From the doorway, Vincent called, “Mrs. Lapsley, may I come in?”
A muffled, tearful voice answered, “Yes, Vincent dear, but forgive me. I’m not at my best right now.”
Vincent drove into the room, and the floor fell away beneath him. He looked down on the old stone-tiled floor below, the phonograph in the corner, the sleeping-tracks with their flamboyant gilt embellishments glowing in the lamplight.
Mrs. Lapsley floated in the middle of the room. The ribbons on her hat fluttered, as if caught in a breeze. She gazed up at Vincent, her blue eyes shiny with tears.
“I’ve done it again,” she said.
“It’s alright, Mrs. Lapsley,” Vincent said. “The tracks went all the way down the hall, but nobody else felt them. Miss Stout is asleep in the parlor. Everything will be fine if you–”
“Do not tell me everything is fine, young man!” snapped Mrs. Lapsley, in the imperious tone that had struck fear into the boilers of many an employee of her family’s railroad, manufacturing, and banking empire. Then her expression softened. She shook her hood, forlorn. “Child, I know you are only trying to help, but you don’t understand how it feels to be so completely, utterly, hopelessly stuck as I am.”
Vincent thought of the melancholy radiating from the tracks, and felt their chill again.
“My husband is doubtless riding the golden rails of Willoughby right now. Meanwhile, I am here and there and nowhere. Everything beyond the front gate of this house is ash and fog and storm clouds. Where is the road? ‘For all shall make the final journey on the great Open Road.’ Mother, are you there? Phoebe, get out here and help me this instant! ‘We shall lead our siblings of the road homeward.’ Vincent, my child, where is the road? ”
Mrs. Lapsley started to cry. Mother, Phoebe, and the Open Road, all unreachable. The tracks in the hall vibrated with memories of gutting loss. Vincent heard a rumbling coming from the other side of the door. A steam whistle wailed, briefly drowning out Mrs. Lapsley’s weeping.
Then the lock clicked, the door swung open, and the tracks slithered into the room. They rose up, looping around and around. They lowered one end down to Vincent’s eye level, and the little hearse swore the spike closest to his face regarded him with a look of anguish.
Vincent drew back. Moving and rearing up as if to strike, the tracks reminded him of the monsters from the movies he and his father went to see at the local theater. He knew the strings were there, knew this creature was a bit of imagination given form, knew that it couldn’t really hurt him, but that did not make it any less terrifying when it dominated the space in front of him.
They floated, Vincent at the level of the “new” bedroom’s floor, the tracks above and around him, and Mrs. Lapsley, silent now, in the middle of the air. Vincent took a breath to calm himself. He remembered what his mother told him the last time Mrs. Lapsley summoned the tracks. Fear and anger are not your friends when the voices in the walls start talking. Those voices are, likelier than not, more frightened and angry than you are. Do not lash out, offer a helping tire instead.
Abandoning the grounding comfort of the invisible bedroom floor, Vincent zoomed around the open space, thinking. His eyes wandered to the phonograph in the corner of the room.
“Mrs. Lapsley,” Vincent called up, “let’s play the letter again.”
She turned around and peered down at him with a teary, skeptical look. “Which one, dear?”
“The one you used to play for me all the time, about the abandoned station. You know, the one that annoyed Mr. Weston.”
Mrs. Lapsley snorted. “Oh, him. ” She floated down to meet Vincent. “He said my husband’s letters—how did he put it?—‘exerted a most deleterious effect on the psychological development of the growing child.’ As I recall, he told your mother not to let you listen, otherwise I’d sell you on ‘a life of excess and corruption.’ Hooey, and besides, everyone knows damn well I never played the really ‘deleterious’ letters in mixed company—ah, you didn’t hear that last bit.”
The tracks leaned in to listen.
“It’s none of your business, either!” Mrs. Lapsley sniffed.
The tracks retreated, chagrined.
“Go ahead, Vincent,” said Mrs. Lapsley.
Within these walls, as in any place where the years collected dust atop one another, memories held power, and you could fight a painful one with a happy one. Vincent concentrated, calling up a memory of his own.
He was four, a young thing enchanted by old things, and he sat on the rug in the parlor in front of the phonograph. Mrs. Lapsley tapped a pedal, which spun a wheel, which moved a slim brass arm across the cubbies inside the phonograph’s base. The arm chose a cardboard container out of one of the cubbies. Vincent read the faded label on its round lid: To E. P. L. From S. L. 3-23-1926 .
Now for the tricky part. An object that existed in both the past and present, like the phonograph, may behave like it belonged to one or the other in the liminal no-when Vincent and Mrs. Lapsley occupied. It may also change its mind from time to time, on whatever whims governed the thinking of household devices (Uncle Ned might have an idea, Vincent thought). There was no telling which moment in time the thing dwelt in, until someone went to use it.
His toddlerhood memory guiding him, Vincent floated downward from his spot in the air, Mrs. Lapsley a few feet behind and above him. He touched one tire to the phonograph’s pedal and, mercifully, felt the smooth brass. The wheel clicked. The crank turned.
Vincent pulled a lever toward himself, and the arm lurched up, then over. Its felted claw closed around the cylinder, and then it swiveled outward to meet a little basket woven out of metal. It plunked the container into the basket, popped off the lid, and removed the wax cylinder. Another lever raised the arm to the level of the mandrel. The claw slipped the cylinder into place. Vincent pressed one button to set the mandrel spinning and another that lowered the reproducer.
Mrs. Lapsley floated next to Vincent. The tracks coiled around the two cars and the phonograph. There were a few seconds of click-clicking as the needle crossed the blank part of the record. The three listeners leaned in closer.
Out of the phonograph’s horn a whistle bellowed, deep low rumble punctuated with bright, sharp bursts of steam. A warm greeting reserved for the sender’s nearest and dearest. Mrs. Lapsley smiled, spectral tears welling in her eyes and falling onto her hood.
“Sunday, March Twenty-Third,” Mr. Lapsley began.
“My dearest Elyria,
“I hope this letter finds you in as ebullient a state as I on this fine morning. I’ve set up my recording equipment in the former station master's office. Sunlight is pouring in through the tall windows, and the view is so magnificent that one hardly notices the broken glass.
“We arrived in Gold-Bluff Junction early this morning. The ink hadn’t yet dried on our merger agreement with West Overland, and already we were picking over their carcass. Overland Station comprises the greater–the far, far greater–part of the town. A few outbuildings cluster around it like rusted-out hulks around an oil pump long since run dry.”
Vincent stuck his grille up against that of the phonograph, like he used to do as a smaller boy, back when Mrs. Lapsley still held court in the third-floor parlor. He imagined that, if he looked close enough, he could see through the cloth covering the grille, into the tin horn, and glimpse Mr. Lapsley’s world. Gleaming steel tracks crossing golden desert beneath the blue, blue sky, and Overland Station looming above it all like the temple of an ancient god.
“Let me tell you about Overland Station. The photographs our scouts sent back don’t do it justice. I am of the opinion that Messrs. Reed and Stern, architects of Grand Central, were children playing with building blocks next to the unknown genius of Overland. Columns, graceful in spite of their gargantuan height and girth, hold a portico so far above our cabins that they may as well be holding up the sky. Through the grand entrance lies a space so marvelous that to call it a mere ‘Great Hall’ is a grave insult. You’ve heard it said that, in Willoughby, the tracks are made of gold, and the window panes are diamond set in silver. Well, here is our promised land, brought down to Earth for the joy and the utility of mere mortals.”
“Tracks ought to not be of gold,” Clarence, Vincent’s father, said when he heard the letter. “Too soft, and what’s this about diamond windows?” (He pronounced “windows” like “windas.”) “I know you railroaders had serious dough, Elyria, but that’s a whopper if ever I heard one.” Theodora glared at her husband, and Mrs. Lapsley told him to shut up.
“Miss Fleming and Mr. Vaux, representing the Board of Directors, accompanied us on our tour of the station. Our guide, a Mr. Percy Morrow, seemed oblivious to their total disinterest in the Guastavino tiles or the antique clock above the information desk.
“‘Bother to all that!’ Mr. Vaux huffed, and you know him well enough to picture the look on his face. ‘Just tell me if the place is structurally-sound or not. That’s all that matters to us.’
“‘It is, sir,’ said Mr. Morrow.
“‘As for the necessary refurbishments,’ Miss Fleming interjected, [Mr. Lapsley did his best imitation of her Mid-Atlantic accent] ‘Can they be finished on a modest budget?’
“‘Of course, madam,’ Mr. Morrow replied.
“Those shiny-grilled twits! Between them they’ve the finest coachbuilding in the country, and more money than the Conductor Themself would know what to do with, yet there they were, quibbling over dollars and cents like they always do. Be glad you weren’t there, dearest. I fear you’d have lost your temper.”
Mrs. Lapsley needed not be in the presence of the Directors to lose her temper at them. She generally remembered to send Vincent out of the room before she let loose, yet nevertheless he picked up a few choice phrases from her rants.
“At the conclusion of Mr. Morrow’s tour, the Trustees were satisfied with Overland Station’s prospects. Tear out the tracks, put in the machinery, and presto, the rail palace becomes a fine manufacturing plant. Nobody needs the gilding or the paintings or the woodwork to make a rearview mirror, or a headlamp, or a window-shade.
“Pope & Lapsley will, of course, maintain a couple sets of tracks, so that locomotives might transport raw materials and manufactured goods to and fro. ‘Don’t fret, Simon old fellow,’ Miss Fleming said to me, ‘You’re not going out of service yet.’”
Mrs. Lapsley always tensed at this part. Her late husband ran the Pope & Lapsley Company alongside her and had for thirteen years at the time of recording. Hearing him spoken down to like that, his widow could not abide.
What made it even worse was the hitch in Mr. Lapsley’s voice when he told that part of the story, the dropping of the faux-posh Miss Fleming accent for his own baritone. The Director’s remark hurt him, dug its way deep into his engine and rusted there. It was the type of thing that haunted you, kept you constantly peeking over the horizon, guessing when the rails in front of you might run out.
The tracks seethed at Miss Fleming’s remark, too. The end closest to the phonograph whipped from side to side, as if they were trying to shake something off of them. Vincent heard something that might have been metal bending and might have been a far-off wail. The tracks coiled a length of themselves around the floating cars and the phonograph. The scene was oddly tender.
“Well, they can’t put me out of service yet, because those two golden children never did an honest day’s work in their lives. Mr. Morrow assured us of Overland’s stability, but I bet it would fall down around us if Fleming and Vaux were left in charge. No, railroad business is our domain, which is just as well. No need for them to go sticking their grilles into our plans.
“Overland is ours. That is what’s important right now. You typed the command that drew the golden arm with the real ink pen across the real paper. You pushed the button that pressed our company seal into the wax, made everything nice and official. ‘Twas a lot of frivolous theatrics, if you ask me, but tradition insists upon it. Oh, well.
“Overland is ours, and dear Mr. Vaux and Miss Fleming are on their private railcars back to Alverna Springs. Now, let us get down to business. You remember Mr. Holly, from the old Baldwin Works back East? He owns the summer cottage next to ours? He’s bringing three of his finest engineers with him, and they will be here within the week. I trust Holly. He’ll give an honest assessment of what we can expect to accomplish, given our means and the location. Based on what I have already shared with him, he speculates we may be able to accommodate several infirmaries in the station itself, and that excludes any new construction. Laying tracks down to the valley shall be no trouble at all, he estimates. He was pleased by the thought of convalescent engines taking in the grasses. ‘Just as mechanics soothe the ailing body,’ he said in his letter to me, ‘so does the valley’s austere beauty soothe the soul.’
“Oh, I suppose we can build their piddling little factory, if they insist. We certainly have the money. Hartford-Parry is doing fine. As for the rest of it, I’d like to see Fleming, Vaux, and their two cronies object. The other five Directors are in our camp. Isn’t it wonderful, darling? Everything we hoped is coming to pass. Your father and my mother are smiling at us from Willoughby, way yonder over the horizon.
“The bells are ringing in the new hour, my love, and I fear I haven’t much more space on this record. I will end as I always do: I love you, take care, and eyes forward.
“Your devoted,
Simon.”
A final crackle, a skip, and the repeater rose. As the mandrel slowed, the tracks uncoiled themselves. They rose up and over the retreating Vincent and Mrs. Lapsley before coming to rest in a clanking heap on the floor.
Then, something Vincent had never seen in all of the “little moments” he’d handled happened. The phonograph’s grille disappeared with a crack like distant lightning, revealing the horn.
The mandrel still spun, albeit slowly. One end of the tracks poked upward, and as Mrs. Lapsley and Vincent watched from the opposite corner of the room, they stretched and thinned themselves out until they were almost invisible. Making haste, lest the mandrel stop spinning while they weighed their options, the tracks twirled counterclockwise into the horn.
They vanished in seconds, threads of silver catching the gaslight before disappearing into the phonograph. Mr. Lapsley’s letter, and the memories it captured in wax, acted as an escape hatch for the poor tracks, so far away and a-when from where they belonged. Vincent had no way of knowing for sure, but he guessed that they came to rest between Overland Station and the valley, as Mr. Lapsley planned. In spite of all that happened later, the con and the coup and the court battles, that mild March morning in Gold-Bluff Junction was a beautiful moment in time. Vincent thought he might like to live then, and he was certain Mrs. Lapsley would, too.
Mrs. Lapsley floated next to Vincent, smiling faintly. “It’s a shame,” she whispered, “a terrible shame.”
Vincent did not know the full story. There were certain conversations not even the permissive Furnesses allowed their son to listen in on. All he knew was that, about a year after the recording of the letter, the company’s Directors, Miss Fleming and Mr. Vaux among them, took control of the company. Mrs. and Mr. Lapsley lost their power, and most of their money. A couple of months after that, Mr. Lapsley headed West again, this time to seek help from some of his family’s old business partners.
Mrs. Lapsley never saw Simon again.
Some time and many sorrows later, the widow-of-means arrived in Clarence and Theodora’s driveway, brandishing a copy of the notice they published in the newspaper, advertising “Rooms to Let.” That was ten years ago, shortly after Vincent’s parents brought him home. Mrs. Lapsley was the first Glenmorrow boarder, and while she died when Vincent was five, she refused to let mortality get in the way of living on her own terms.
“I am so awfully tired, child,” Mrs. Lapsley said.
Vincent did not miss a beat. “Goodnight, then, Mrs. Lapsley.”
With those words, part well-wish and part command, Mrs. Lapsley’s forest green paint faded to sepia. She grew translucent, fuzzy at the edges, before vanishing in a puff of coppery smoke.
Around Vincent, the room reverted to its modern form. The sleeping-tracks disappeared. Electric lights replaced the gas lamps, and rugs unfurled over the floor tiles. Betty Stout had dragged one over to a corner, where she was presently fast asleep. The phonograph, same as it ever was, stood in the corner across from her. She had not heard a word of Mr. Lapsley’s letter.
Vincent honked his horn, waking Betty. “I took care of it, Miss Stout. You can go back to your room now.”
“Thanks, kid,” Betty said. “What time is it?”
Vincent glanced at the wall clock. “Quarter to five.” He yawned. Time had a way of passing, when you dove into it as he did.
“Early morning for you, I guess.”
“Looks that way.” Every incident involving Mrs. Lapsley or any of Glenmorrow’s “long-term residents,” as his mother called them, had to be recorded in the house’s logbook. Vincent knew to get the night’s events down as soon as he was able, before he forgot anything. That was Theodora’s rule.
He wished Betty a good morning and headed down the shadowed hall, toward Glenmorrow’s library. Somewhere above him, a steam whistle laughed.