The Christmas Train

Content warning: gore, suicide, references to child abuse

Death came by train.

I had been watching The Polar Express at the time. If I had been watching Speed, Keanu Reeves might’ve pulled up in a city bus, or John Malkovich would’ve dropped a prison transport plane on my street if I had been watching Con Air for the twelfth time this month.

But it was Christmas eve, and The Polar Express was my daughter Lottie’s favorite holiday movie. I sat down in the butt print in the middle of my sofa, chewed on a handful of aspirin—yesterday’s hangover still walloping against my temples—and washed down the bitter pills with a slug of whiskey. Cheap stuff. I can’t afford anything that doesn’t claw its way down my throat, and even if I could, I like the burn. I like feeling…something other than the headache. This place makes it worse. This hellhole apartment with peeling wallpaper, roaches that skuttle back to their holes when I stumble from the couch to the mattress on my bedroom floor, and rooms that always smell like piss no matter how many bottles of bleach I dump over the linoleum.

I’ve only been a few rungs up the ladder from death for a while now.

The last thing I remember before death’s arrival is the TV spinning and the bottle of Tennessee swill dropping from my fingers. Then an ear-splitting whistle sends me to my feet.

I sway and blink my eyes at the TV but can’t make out the picture, can barely see the empty bottles on the floor. Whiskey and aspirin. I don’t remember finishing either one. My head still throbs despite how many gritty white pills I’ve taken, and my hands cover my ears against another shrill whistle as white light floods the living room. I shuffle through pizza boxes and other empty whiskey bottles that have collected around the couch to the room’s lone window. I squint through the frost on the glass at the smoke billowing in the street. When it clears, just like in The Polar Express, I see it.

The train.

The whistle blares again, and I almost piss myself at the sound. The train doesn’t move, and I get the distinct feeling it’s here for me. I stumble across the room, push my feet into the worn pair of tennis shoes by the front door, and hurry down the stairs and into the snow.

It’s freezing out. That part is never mentioned in the movie. The kids riding the Polar Express are outside at night above the Arctic Circle in fucking pajamas and they never get cold or frostbitten, while ten steps into the snow in front of my apartment and my toes are wet, and the winter air bites at my bare arms and through the thin fabric of my old T-shirt.

However, just like the movie, there’s a conductor standing between two cars, asking me if I’m coming. He lifts the lantern in his right hand just enough to show me his face, and I shit you not he looks like the Tom Hanks conductor from the movie, except when he smiles at me in the yellow light, it stretches his features too far, and his lips peel back over crooked, too-white teeth.

Who are you? What is this? I ask while my own teeth chatter.

Why, this is the Christmas Train, of course, he continues to sneer.

I notice red garland strung above the windows of what looks like a passenger car, and the green and gold bulbs—some intact, others in shattered pieces—clinging to the strand by thin, metal hooks.

The conductor pulls a clipboard out of his jacket and holds it out for me to read, asking, Is this you?

My heart stutters at my full name and date of birth at the top, followed by my last employment that ended two months ago and visits to a rotating list of food banks ever since, and all the times I’ve donated plasma for whiskey money.

Farther down the list is the date of my divorce, and notes about Christmas four years ago in big, bold, accusing letters.

He tsks. Being evicted, liver’s failing, unemployed. Haven’t seen your daughter since…

I get the picture, I say, cutting him off. I hear something dripping and flick my eyes to the garland again and realize it isn’t red. It’s actually silver, coated in what looks like blood streaming down to stain the snow below.

A low grumble rumbles from the conductor’s throat, but he stays in character, saying, It seems to me this is your crucial year. If I were you, I’d think about climbing aboard.

I shake my head and expect the train to move on when I refuse the ride. I’m still staring at the garland when the conductor reaches out and grabs me by the shoulders, dragging me up the steps and tossing me into a darkened passenger car.

Sulfur stings my nose, subtly masked by burnt chestnuts, the cloying pine of floor cleaner, and traces of cinnamon, as if someone actually tried to make this a Christmas train but got all the details wrong. There’s music coming from…somewhere. A holiday song sung by children—When Christmas Comes to Town, I think—is playing quietly, but the lyrics aren’t quite right. Hanging from the tree are friends who come around—No. No, that isn’t how the song goes. My ears are playing tricks or it's another detail that has escaped the demented creator of this train.

My left forearm suddenly burns, and I howl in pain. In the darkened car I can vaguely make out a rectangular outline as if a strip of skin has been cut and peeled away.

“The fuck—"

The conductor pushes me down into a seat. Immediately the butt of my jeans is soaked with something I can’t see in the dark car but feels cold and slippery against my skin. I try to stand but the conductor keeps me anchored, lifting the oil lamp in his hands. At this proximity, I see details I missed outside—more evidence of this recreation gone wrong. Pock marks in his cheeks, one eye slightly higher than the other, and his conductor cap tipped over his left ear, that is too far forward and curling in on itself.

We are on a very tight schedule, he growls, and I’ve never been late before, and I am certainly not going to be late tonight. Then, as if he forgot this detail from the movie, he shuffles back to the opening between the train cars and waves his lantern to signal the engineer.

The Christmas Train begins to move.

It sounds like a train, puffing and chuffing, but with more creaks and groans as if the wheels and walls aren’t held together by iron and steel but bones and mangled human bodies—

No. I don’t know why that thought crosses my mind. I don’t know why I’m on this fucking train.

Cold seeps deeper into my body. I clench and unclench my fingers to keep the blood flow going. As we pick up speed, the garland on the outside of the train brushes against the windows, leaving red streaks on the glass.

Someone clears a throat.

I assumed I was alone, but now that my eyes are adjusting to the darkness, I see maybe five or six other people around me. There’s a woman two seats ahead of me with hair that’s wet and matted, as if she’s been pulled from the bottom of a lake. On the other side of the aisle, directly across from me, is a man that reminds me of the know-it-all kid from the movie with his glasses and tight pajamas. He purses his thin lips and clears his throat again. At least he doesn’t ask me about fucking trains.

Someone near the front sobs. I shift and the seat squishes underneath me, releasing more fetid liquid that soaks into my pants. It smells like swamp water, decay, bodies decomposing underneath the surface—

Stop. I can’t think like that. I need to focus on something not terrible and immediately Lottie comes to mind. My daughter who turned fourteen this year.

Who cried when I asked her if she’d spend the holiday with me.

My guts twist and I push her out of my thoughts too.

My eyes adjust further, and I wish they wouldn’t. Now I can see strands of garland hanging across the train car, and small, round balls dangling from them. Unlike the prickly tinsel hanging on the outside of the train, the garland strung overhead moves and shakes like they’re gelatinous or soft. I’m wondering what they are made of when the conductor shuffles past me toward the front of the car, muttering something about suicides at Christmas.

Suicides? Before I ask what he means, he announces to the car that this was our last stop. Doing his best Tom Hanks, and failing so miserably I ache for the original version from my piss-smelling living room, he calls out: Are there any Christmas Train passengers in need of refreshments?

No one speaks or moves. The conductor raises his lantern to illuminate his grin, and the light reveals the garland strung around the compartment are ropes of bloody intestines, and the round balls are eyeballs secured to the strands by nerves and tendons. There’s one bouncing above my head that I notice for the first time. It’s blue and staring straight down at me.

More sobs break out when the door at the front of the car opens and an undead crew of men in waiter uniforms file in and hurry down the aisle to stop by each of the seats. It’s time for hot chocolate, but this is nothing like the movie. The corpse that stands beside my seat has been dead for some time. I see the bones in his wrist through a ragged hole in his skin as he sets a wobbly table in front of me. The sweetly sour stench of decay tickles the back of my throat when he leans over me again with a mug and pours something black and clumpy from a tarnished silver pot. I gag on the smell of the corpse and the chunky black glob that bubbles in the cup in front of me. The bubbles pop, releasing a stink like the smell of a thousand hardboiled eggs left to rot in the sun. I hear some of the other passengers puking. I brace myself for the song and dance that accompanies hot chocolate in the movie, but I imagine the corpses will fall apart if they attempt the moves. The one beside me doesn’t even have a throat; it looks like the trachea has been gnawed straight through by rats or persistent bugs with a millennium to digest a body.

He notices me watching him and smiles, broken skin where his lips used to be curling back over teeth barely held in place by gums that have dried around the jawbone. A dark beetle skuttles out of its open mouth and down a patch of flesh still clinging to his neck. I feel the blood leave my face and my body temperature drops another degree.

With an unexpected flourish, the undead waiters step back from the tables and try to click their heels together. Some manage it. Others twist and fall before jerking back to a somewhat standing position. Mine stays on his feet and waves the bones at the ends of his hands in triumph.

Jazz hands.

That’s when I know I’m dreaming. This is all one terrible, disgusting nightmare.

Here we only have one rule. Never ever let it cool! The conductor cries out. I’ve forgotten about the sludge in front of me. They…they expect us to drink it?

The corpse beside me clicks his heels again. More jazz hands. It’s like he’s proud of his effort. He gestures toward the cup, and I shake my head and refuse. Protests spring up around me, then I hear glass breaking as if someone’s mug has been flung against a wall.

All at once, the undead waiters form a jerky, ravenous mob and descend on the woman who broke her cup and is screaming that she won’t drink it, and they can’t make her.

They don’t try. Her defiant cries turn to screams of visceral pain and agony. In the light from the lantern that the conductor swings back and forth, I catch glimpses of legs and arms flailing…and being completely torn from her body. The attack drags on until the screams become choked sobs as she fights for breath, and then…nothing besides the wet twisting of organs being devoured and teeth cracking on bones.

When they’ve had their fill, the corpses return to their tables. Mine looks down at me with a wild, lipless grin, his face smeared in fresh blood and chunks of something pink stuck in his throat that I can see through the hole in his windpipe.

Here we only have one rule, never ever let it cool takes on a whole new meaning now. The corpse gestures to the sludge still bubbling in the mug. I understand—we all do—what happens if we break the rule. My hand trembles as I force myself to reach for it. The others around me cough and choke, then moan and scream as they swallow. It’s between this cup and death and honestly…death looks pretty fucking good when one of the bubbles pops its rotten egg funk directly into my nose that I forgot to hold.

Wake up, wake up, wake up, I beg.

But I don’t.

The corpse leans in, overly eager to see if I will fail. Dream or not, I assume if I can smell death, I’ll also feel the mob of undead tear me limb from limb.

I hold my breath and put the mug to my lips. It’s only as the sludge touches my mouth that I realize it’s bubbling because it’s boiling. I understand the screams around me now. But I’ve been drinking bottom barrel whiskey for months, so I’m used to feeling the burn all the way down my throat. But even the worst whiskey couldn’t have prepared me for the taste of a thousand rotten eggs. The raw sulfur. The stringy hair that gets stuck in my teeth as I choke it down. The chunks of…something…that I coax down my throat with my tongue. I drink it all.

And when the cup is empty and hair that snagged on my molars irritates my tonsils, I set the mug down and look up at the corpse who looks a little disappointed that he doesn’t get to eat me.

The undead waiters collect the cups and tables and shuffle in a line back up to the front of the car where the conductor opens the door for them to exit. The woman in front of me waits until they are gone before she throws up all over the floor. More gags follow. I’m struggling to keep it down—don’t ask me why I don’t just let the sludge roll up my throat too. Fresh vomit joins the fetid stink of eviscerated organs, pine cleaner, and cinnamon, and I’m beginning to sweat, as if someone is ratcheting up the heat. I need off this train. My mind races back to The Polar Express for what comes next. After the hot chocolate, a little girl with a lost ticket is removed from the passenger car, and a little boy finds her ticket and traverses the top of the train to find her. He encounters a ghost, I think. The last place I want to be is on top of this Christmas Train speeding through a scene I can’t see out the dirty windows, and the last thing I want is to run into their fucked up version of that already fucked up ghost, but I do remember that the last car—the one behind this one—is empty and clean and might be a place for me to hide if I can’t rustle up the courage to jump off the back.

When the guy across the aisle from me is bent over puking on the floor, I slip out of my seat and to the door in the back. The wind that hits me between cars isn’t the frigid winter air I left behind. It’s warm and…dry. I cough on it and wrench on the door to the next car until it begrudgingly opens. It closes behind me without my help and I realize my mistake the second I hear it slam.

This car is nothing like the caboose in the movie. Instead of walls lined with comfortable seating, it’s stuffed floor to ceiling with junk. I’m squinting at something hanging by four strings like a marionette when I understand what this is.

I’m in the car of unwanted toys.

The scene in the movie was so creepy, full of dirty, broken toys and that damned ghost wielding a puppet, that Lottie always made me skip it. I shudder wondering what the Christmas Train has conjured for this car. Probably a bunch of disfigured creations inspired by the bedroom of that dysfunctional little brat on Toy Story. What was his name? Sid. Yeah, that’s right. Sid used to scare Lottie too. The first time we watched it I told her buck up when she started crying when the messed up toys emerged from underneath Sid’s bed. Buck up. I’d been drinking that night, or I never would’ve said it. I didn’t drink as much back then but still enough to say stupid shit to my kid.

Tears prickle in my eyes and I swear that if I ever get off this fucking train, I’m going to make it up to her. All of it.

Through the cluttered car, I see a faint light coming from what I hope are windows in the back. I start pushing my way through the toys when the swinging marionette above me knocks into the side of my head. It’s furry and wet. I wipe the side of my face, and my hand comes away dark with blood. I should’ve known that there would be far worse things than disfigured toys here. I reach up to stop the thing from swinging and lock on the glassy, lifeless eyes of a dead cat.

It can’t be…I know that. I know this isn’t really Murphy, the neighbor’s cat from when I was ten.

The one that used to poop on our lawn.

The overfed feline that wandered into our yard for the last time when my old man stuck a firecracker up its—

No. I can’t. It’s not Murphy, and I can’t go back to that memory. I spin and collide with a pile of actual toys that fall around me. Stuff from my old bedroom when I was a kid—baseball cards, an unused catcher’s mitt with my name etched into the fabric, a bike with a loose chain that I never figured out how to fix, tangled game controllers attached to a cracked Atari console that Dad threw against the wall, the picture of me and my parents that used to be tacked up beside my bed before my old man put out a cigarette over Mom’s face.

I spin away from the toys, duck around the hanging cat with the exploded anus, and slip in a spray of vomit covering the wood floor. Must’ve been from one of the many, many times my old man didn’t make it to the toilet before the day’s whiskey rolled up his gullet. How many buckets of puke had I cleaned when I was a kid? Tears stream freely from my face as I catch my footing and try to decide if it’s better to press on through the mess of memories to a possible exit, or turn around and go back to the train car filled with hanging intestines and whatever else the conductor was waiting to unveil.

I take a few steadying breaths, wipe my eyes, and head for the faint light at the back. It feels like salvation. I survived my dad’s wrath for eight years after my mom died—with the perfectly round cigarette burns on my shoulders to prove it. I could survive a few more minutes.

To amp myself up, I clear my throat and holler, “You don’t scare me anymore, asshole. You’re dead. You’re fucking dead, you monst—”

A cold, hard hand closes around my throat and my father’s face is suddenly in front of me. He’s gaunt, his gums have pulled back from his teeth, and he’s dressed like that damned ghost from the movie in torn beggars’ clothes, but it’s him. I smell the whiskey on his breath and recognize the mania in his sunken eyes.

You talking to me? I’m the king of this train. I’m the king of hell. What is your persuasion on the big man? The devil himself?

He grins and it’s unnaturally wide, stretching the skin on his face until it’s tight, like a rubber band.

Feeling is believing, he says, and the hand at my throat becomes scalding hot, along with the rest of the car. My terrible memories are suddenly on fire all around me. The flames catch on my dad’s clothes and burn through the fabric before melting his skin. The fingers around my neck flare white hot until they disintegrate, the rest of my old man’s body blowing away as if on a nonexistent wind like the ghost in the movie. I hunch over, dragging hot air through my swollen windpipe, and stumble toward the door while my entire childhood reduces to ash. I almost make it when my feet slip on something metal.

I look down at a license plate, bloody and matted with hair.

No. No. It’s too much. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

Don’t go back to that place. Don’t go back.

I feel myself toppling out of the train car and into the memory of Christmas Eve four years ago when it was my holiday with Lottie and she was still happy to spend it with me.

But I’d been nervous, so I drank that day. Not a lot by today’s standards, but more than I should have. I knew better than to drive. I ate a burger and popped a dozen mints before picking her up. If her mom wasn’t busy hosting her new boyfriend’s family for the holiday, she probably would’ve noticed I was drunk and kept Lottie at home. I would’ve been pissed and probably made a scene, but maybe my little girl would still love me.

If my ex-wife hadn’t been so busy entertaining, she might’ve noticed her dog got out of the house without a leash.

I feel the car swerve on the ice, hear the tires squeal and Lottie scream. I barely see the yellow blur before the thud of impact and the unmistakable shift of wheels rolling over a body.

Lottie shouldn’t have been there that night. I shouldn’t have been driving. It was an accident. I’ve apologized a dozen times. A hundred. It never matters. My little girl will never love or trust me again.

Get help, my ex-wife said a few days later. She was understandably mad at me, but mostly just heartbroken that I let myself get so bad and dragged our daughter down with me. Months passed and then years. She stopped asking me to get help and told me to stay away. She didn’t understand that I wasn’t an alcoholic, no matter how many times I said it. I didn’t belong in AA. I could stop drinking any time I wanted to, I just didn’t want to. It was all I had left. Then she’d throw Lottie in my face, and I’d remind her that Lottie didn’t want to be with me anyway.

I wasn’t a bad dad. I just had a bad night. Lottie didn’t know how bad I could’ve been. She didn’t know broken furniture and cigarette burns and a blown up cat. Didn’t she realize—

You are just like me, my friend.

My father’s voice drags me from the memory and back to the burning train where my skin blisters from the heat.

I know who you are…you’re a DRUNK.

He screams until my eardrums threaten to explode and I fall forward.

When I land, I’m outside the burning train car on the platform of the caboose. Hot wind and smoke whip across my face but doesn’t sear my skin. There must be fires everywhere. Is the whole world burning? I cough and reach for the railing at the edge of the platform, and immediately pull my hands back from the scorching metal.

Wake up, wake up, wake up, I sob to myself, clutching my red, trembling fingers to my chest. If this is a dream, why does it hurt so fucking much?

I peer through the smoke for something—anything—beyond the train to tell me where I am. I doubt we’re in Cleveland anymore. We might not even be on planet earth.

Though, maybe we’ve entered the bowels of it.

Without touching the railing, I take a tentative step forward to peer over the end of the train, and gasp.

There’s nothing down there. Nothing. No ground, no…no tracks. Nothing. Or, if there are tracks, I can’t see them through the smoke. But I think I see something else—

I trip forward as a skeletal hand swipes at my legs from underneath the train, and equally bony fingers land on my shoulder and pull me back. I turn and find the conductor smiling at the skeletal fingers that slowly retreat into the smoke underneath the train before turning his attention on me.

Ticket please. Unless you’re planning to jump?

He gives me a nudge, and as if on cue, dozens of skeletal hands creep out of the smoke over the floor and railing, the fingers tapping like they’re waiting for me to be the dumbass my dad always said I was and jump into their bony grasps to be dragged beneath the train where unimaginable horrors awaited.

The conductor laughs and says, Didn’t think so. Ticket please.

I know from the movie that there will be a ticket in my pocket. I gingerly reach with the tips of my fingers into the pockets of my sweatpants. When I find them both empty, I shake my head at the conductor.

If I don’t have a ticket, does that mean I can get off?

He shakes his head and widens his eyes until I can see myself reflected in the black pits of his pupils. My skin is waxy and white, pulled away from sunken eyes rimmed in dark circles. My lips are blue and the outline of four fingers are burned into the flesh on my neck.

And then I smell it. Vomit. Only this time it’s not on the floor, it’s covering the front of my shirt. I don’t know how I haven’t seen it or smelled it until now. My chest is wet with chunks of what look like pieces of ham from the shitty microwave dinner—my lonely man’s Christmas feast—that I forced myself to eat before I hit the bottle.

Before I drank a fifth of whiskey in one sitting and swallowed a couple dozen aspirins for a headache that I suddenly feel beating like a bass drum in my temples.

The conductor pulls something greyish tan from his jacket pocket and hands it to me. Skin. I’m holding a strip of skin roughly cut in the shape of a rectangle…the same dimensions as the raw, red patch on my left forearm. My ticket, cut from my very own body. Carved in the flesh in jagged lines are the letters H – E – L.

Son, your ticket’s been punched ever since you killed your daughter’s golden retriever.

I’m back in my seat now. If I squint through the grime on the windows, I see sparks flying past the train in billows of black smoke that I can smell inside. And if I squint through the smoke, I can just make out structures burning. I can’t tell what they are and that’s probably for the best. Occasionally it looks like some of them are moving. Maybe even running. People on fire.

I stop looking out the window.

The woman in front of me starts muttering apologies. The man to my left runs his fingers down a rosary and quietly mouths prayers. When he turns toward me slightly, I see a patch of red in the center of his chest around a small, round hole in his pajamas. Someone up front bangs on the windows. Another bolts past me to the back of the car—either to jump out between the cars or find salvation in the caboose.

Either way, they’re in for a hell of a reckoning.

The eyeball dangling above me watches all hope leach out of my body. The music pouring into the car changes from a horrific version of Believe where it sounds like Josh Groban is being physically tortured through every word, to the song that signals the arrival of Santa Claus in The Polar Express.

The wheels squeal as the train begins to slow.

You’d better watch out.

You’d better just die.

You’d better black out, I’m telling you why…

H-E-L.

I know from the movie that more letters are added to the tickets after the kids have seen Santa, and it’s always a message the kids need to hear. Something special to tie the experience together.

He sees you in your nightmares.

He stalks you while awake.

I try to think over the children’s voices singing the damning version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Once the train stops, I have a feeling the last letter of my ticket will be the final “L” that seals my fate. Would being ripped apart by skeletons beneath the train be worse than eternal damnation? The person up front starts pounding louder. I think they’re banging their head against the glass, probably hoping to kill themselves before we arrive.

So many suicides at Christmas.

That was what the conductor had said. But I wasn’t a suicide. I wasn’t trying to kill myself tonight. I just drank too much and took too much aspirin.

Even in my own mind, the reasoning feels flimsy. I’d been slowly killing myself since that Christmas four years ago when I lost my daughter’s trust and traumatized her for life.

When I carried her mangled dog up the steps of her mother’s house during a holiday party.

When Lottie collapsed crying in the blood soaked snow.

The music starts to slow, until the voices of children grow deep and run together into one deep, gravelly voice beckoning me and the others in the car to our graves.

I’m not a suicide, I affirm one last time and stand up. I’ll take the skeletons or burning memories over actual Hell when I don’t belong there. At the back of the car, where I knew it would be, is the emergency brake.

The blisters on my palm pop as I wrap my fingers around it and pull.

I wake up on my couch covered in vomit. I’m freezing cold sitting in a puddle of my own urine and the empty whiskey and aspirin bottles are on the floor by my feet.

I chew on the chunks of puke still in my mouth as I take deep breaths that don’t smell like sulfur or burn my lungs. The Polar Express is still on TV, at the end when the little boy watches his parents ring his bell but can’t hear the sound because they don’t believe in Santa Claus anymore.

The bell that’s proof that it wasn’t all a dream.

I reach for the remote with a trembling but unburnt hand to turn off the DVD player, and stare at my reflection in the black TV screen. I’m alive. By some miracle, I’m alive. The whiskey didn’t kill me. It was all a dream.

Or…what the fuck is that?

I tilt my head when I see it in my reflection…red marks on my left forearm. I swallow and remind myself I’m alive, though it suddenly doesn’t feel like it, and force myself to look down.

The letters H – E – L are carved into the skin in angry red lines. It…wasn’t a dream. I choke back a sob when I see the final letter. Not the “L” I was expecting, but a “P”.

Help.

It isn’t the letter that chokes me up, or even the fact that all of it had been real. It’s a swelling of unexpected love in my heart for one kind thing my old man ever did for me, which will be a permanent brand on my skin.

The “P” wasn’t carved like the other letters.

It was burned in the tiny perfect circles of the tip of a cigarette.