Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 86

This week's prompt photo is actually a close up shot of a much larger photo, taken by Brian Romeijn, a Rotterdam based photographer, who became well know for this series of photos he took of the Orient Express, which stands abandoned in Belgium after its last trip in December 2009. You can see the original picture on his site, Precious Decay, along with a variety of other photos of urban decay.

It prompted a dark tale. I went for a ghost story and this came out instead. Enjoy!

The General Guidelines can be found here.

How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here.

There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.

Lie In Wait

He walked through the carriage. He could see them all perfectly in his mind’s eye, seated in their finery. The travel outfits, the latest fashion of the era, bought specially for the journey: bustles and black ties, stiff collars and corsets. He could hear their pleasantries and their witty banter as they past the time staring out of the windows. Men and women – rarely children, unless groomed for such a trip to sit quietly and attentively – impressed by the carriages, the exquisite train, all revelling in their wealth and comfort, all believing that it was the purpose of life.

Then as he passed through into another carriage, he felt it. It was still present at the edges, gnawing away at the fading decadence. A pervasive darkness that lay in wait, as it had done then. Little had they known how vulnerable they’d been; how easily they had been taken and diverted. He wondered how it had manifest; how it had travelled from one to another.

He witnessed the dark stains, too numerous to hide, even in the decay that the decades had wrought; the rips and slash marks in the upholstery where the filling now burst from, and heard a whisper of the cries that had been released in their last throws.

No one had been able to explain the arrival of a train full of slaughtered people, with no one living but the driver, who had been oblivious to the contents he’d been carrying, despite spending a lifetime rotting in a prison cell paying for it. People had speculated on who else it could have been, how someone could have jumped on or off the train and done it. But he knew differently.

He had examined the faded pictures, identified the marks from one to the other, how each had taken their part; the system and pattern was ever present in the chaos of the pictures if you had a mind to see it, and he did. And here, now, he knew he hadn’t been wrong in its origin. 

He paused in the middle of the second carriage and waited. It whispered at the edge of his hearing, words starting to form, cajoling, persuading, enticing. He smiled. If he could get it to come to him, he could give it what it needed: a channel, an outlet, a place to reside. He would welcome it and give it an opportunity. It would be his, to use as he pleased.

His head tilted back as the murmurs grew to voices, and opened his arms. The smile on his face spread, his mouth opening wide. And as it arrived, a roar of laughter built up inside him and exploded out, shaking the remains of what they dubbed ‘the carriages of carnage’, waking the souls that slept there, to taste the fear again.