Trestlewood Estates

 

 

 

I can remember the day the old conductor finally found his head down at the old trestle that spanned Red Creek. That was also the last day anyone ever set foot out at Trestlewood Estates.

That one slice of forest and that creepy old wooden bridge which looked as if at any moment it would crumble down into the trickling brown waters were our only local landmarks. The Haunted Trestle is what it was called back then. No one ever went out there because they didn't want the ghost to get them and take their head, but everyone in Bent Hope knew exactly where it was.

The story was the always the same as it passed down through the generations, and every old lady in Bent Hope could recite it like a scripture.

Shortly after the Civil War, a conductor running supplies from Weldon to Raleigh was using the abandoned train line as a short cut when he encountered a snagged switch and leaped from the train to tug at the rusted bar so that the train could cross the creek. The faulty switch, and his antiquated brakes worked against him that night over the waters of Red Creek. The train kept moving, and as the conductor tried to grapple his way back into the cabin to take control of the haywire engine, he lost his footing and fell beneath the unforgiving steel wheels. From that night on, the resentful conductor was known to scour the banks of Red Creek in an eternal search for the head that was shaved off by those sparkling wheels.

Sometimes you could hear him walking in the forest crunching leaves and branches under his boots as loud as any bear. Sometimes a strange wind would pass that was muggy with heat and reeked of coal oil, so powerful the stench would remain in your clothes. Sometimes the sound of a voice raised in anger could be heard, echoing down by the banks of the creek but when you looked – nothing was there. Sometimes you could see the light from his lantern swinging at waist level in the middle of the rusting trestle but when you approached it would vanish.

My parents' generation and the one before theirs knew that the old trestle was haunted. It was a mysterious local legend for a reason and anyone from Bent Hope who actually did go out there would come back with some creepy, unexplained story about their encounter with the old conductor. He was always there. Always looking.

Everything remained that way for years and years until one day a company from Raleigh purchased the little creek-side slice of land and shaved the trees and hills away as if they were icing on a cake. As if that was going to be okay with the old conductor.

There was space for twelve identical houses that would hug the banks of Red Creek and give an impressive view of the old trestle. The company printed up beautiful brochures and tried luring some local families to buy, buy, buy - but no one was that stupid. No one from our town wanted to go anywhere near the haunted trestle.

The trucks still rumbled in every morning – all summer long. The hammering kept going. The grinding went like clockwork. The buzz saws pierced the lunchtime lull. The work never ceased. They proceeded undaunted and on schedule.

Everyone in town watched with one eyebrow raised as the foundations were poured from the back of spinning trucks. We all had this sense of foreboding. We were all holding our breath and waiting. It gripped every member of Bent Hope young and old. As every night came, we listened cautiously to the sound of the trucks leaving for the day. Then we could breathe.

That all changed when Cyrus McMillan's head got cut off. After that no one ever went out to Trestlewood Estates again.

It was supposed to be called Trestlewood Estates. It was supposed to usher in a new era to our tiny, rural town and bring prosperity and a fleet of new families eager to spend their dollars in our tiny shops.

The construction team came from Raleigh to hammer and saw, nail and yell relentlessly until the twelve little homes were ready for their families. Cyrus, the son-in-law of the man who owned the company that had purchased the property – and the one person fully invested in the venture happened to stay late the night of the 16^th to inspect some of the dry wall they were putting up in the fourth house down. While the bulk of the team left for the day, Cyrus bent over the dusty table and sneered at the frustrating riddle in his plans.

As he stood in the empty house with the skeletal walls casting elongated shadows across his feet like a prisoner, Cyrus inspected the blueprints with the scrutiny of a jeweler. Something was off in the calculations somewhere. He could smell it.

Cyrus squinted and sketched some errant doodles on the border of the blue carbon paper while his brain muddled over the possibilities he'd overlooked. His mind was absorbed in the cryptic doodle when the first meek knock came from the front of the house.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

It was soft but insistent. Whoever it was had meant to be heard but not impolite.

Cyrus looked up from the table toward the doorway. There was no door so there was nothing to knock upon, but the noise had come from that direction.

He stepped toward the cinder-block porch and preened his neck through the opening. “Hello? Who's out here?” Cyrus ventured to call out, but there was no response other than the dim tinkle of water at the bottom of Red Creek and the hiss of the wind in the trees.

“This stress is killing me,” he muttered as he spun back to the blueprints. Cyrus had a bad habit of discussing his thoughts out loud to himself. “I'm starting to hear things. I can't wait for this to be over.”

Cyrus stopped and grimaced at the dark splotch in the center of the foyer wall. The dark, bleeding stain in the newly hung sheet rock was vexing the entire crew. If he didn't figure out the cause of the leak soon, he'd have to explain his error to his father-in-law and face that mask of scorn and disappointment.

There seemed to be no way to stop the seepage from filtering up into the walls when there should be no water at all. They had laid pipes and irrigated the entire shelf of the creek so it was as inexplicable how there would still be ground water oozing up the spongy walls.

Cyrus knew there had to be something in the details that had gone unnoticed. The angles were off somehow and if he didn't fix it they would end up paying through the nose for repairs and restorations from disgruntled home owners. Not to mention the ridicule he'd face if his father-in-law found out he was using cheap labor and bottom-level materials.

He had to nip this problem in the bud and make his father-in-law happy by saving the company all the agony that his oversight might cause. The entire development had been Cyrus' idea. His neck was on the line. His father-in-law had rallied against their marriage, and this would seal it. Cyrus grunted and stomped back to the drafting table, defeated.

The last of the trucks rumbled by outside on the dirt path sending plumes of red dust into the room. Cyrus looked up from the table through the windowless window and watched as the brake lights turned onto the state route and vanished. Just as he sighed and turned his attention back to the blueprints, the knocking returned from the front of the house, this time sending a tremor through the floor boards.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

Cyrus shot through the open doorway and over the cinder-block stairs to land flat footed on the powdery yard. He stepped further away from the house until he could see both sides of the property. With his hands on his hips, he marched around and shouted with authority.

“Who's out here banging like that? You just missed your ride home! Don't think you can catch one with me either. Who's doing that? Answer me! Answer me!”

But no one answered. The only sound was the crackle of the wind in the limbs surrounding him, soft and rhythmic almost as if the forest were breathing.

Cyrus stood facing the empty house. He ran a hand through his thinning hair and groaned. He looked toward the old trestle at the bend in the road. His chest drummed with an anxious heart. His reputation was at stake over this debacle and Cyrus felt the ulcer growing in his gut by the hour. He had to fix the problem or he'd never hear the end of it. His father-in-law had ridiculed his abilities since the honeymoon, so there was no way Cyrus could let Trestlewood Estates be a failure. They had to sell, his marriage depended on it.

If each of the properties went for what they expected to receive, he would make his father-in-law a profit of nearly eight-hundred thousand dollars on the whole deal. Cyrus' acceptance could be bought with that much money.

He puffed his chest out and stepped back into the dim interior of the house. With his jaw clenched with determination, Cyrus stepped back up the cinderblock stairs.

As soon as his foot crossed the threshold the sound shook the framed walls so hard the second floor foundation creaked and dust settled down from the cracks in the timbers. It burst like a cannon just inches behind him as he stepped into the house. Three steady blasts, so loud the vibrations sent a twitch down his back.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Cyrus flinched at the explosive sound and hunkered his head down into his shoulders.

He certainly wasn't the type to be startled easily, so he kept himself from screaming and walked calmly out of the house and around to the back yard. A high pitched tone filled his ears. His flesh tingled as if he were being watched, but every time he turned around to check there was nothing there but orphaned piles of lumber, tools and debris; Igloo coolers and hard hats.

The night oozed down around the treetops and the sound of the waters in the creek seemed to grow steadily louder as the sky lost its vivacity. The woods were thick and tangled and pressed around the little strip of land on all sides. A rusty creak pierced the silence as the trestle groaned in the breeze.

There was no one outside the house. There was no one anywhere in Trestlewood Estates. Cyrus could see from one end to the other, and nothing moved at all. Platforms of forgotten lumber lay waiting until tomorrow. Grease-stained wheelbarrows sat pressed up against piles of folded tarps. Pallets of concrete powder sat waiting for the hose. It looked exactly like it was supposed to – but that didn't explain the banging.

Cyrus walked around the opposite side of the house, looking carefully along the foundation for any sign of the seepage as the sky faded from indigo to black and the first stars sparkled out with eagerness.

Cyrus flipped the exposed circuit beside the doorway as he stepped back inside house number four. A half dozen dangling bulbs burst with light and cast lonely coffee-colored shadows across the floor.

He stepped back into the dining room and looked at the curled edges of the blueprint. “I have no idea what's wrong,” he said to himself, the one person sure to listen. “I have to go home and deal with this tomorrow. I can't think anymore. I'm beat. I give up.”

The yard outside was cloaked behind the weighted velvet curtain of darkness. He stood illuminated in the open window and drummed his fingers on the table with nervous energy. He traced the barrier wall with his split fingernail until he found the tiny notations for where it met up with the plumbing system. Cyrus couldn't pull the nagging sensation out of his mind. He knew he was close. The intricate angle wasn't right. He could sense something off in that calculation so he flicked open his briefcase and pulled out his electric calculator. He couldn't let go.

Keying in the numbers rapidly, Cyrus chewed on his lip with thought. It wasn't like him to miss something this imperative – something this revealing about his skills as an architect.

Wham! Wham! Wham!

The force cause Cyrus to tumble backwards and lose his balance. The floor under him shifted and something on the second floor clattered to the ground and rang like a cymbal.

Cyrus marched toward the open window with the calculator still clutched in his hand and as his heart drummed against his Adam's apple, he hurled the small plastic device in anger. He threw it as hard as he could out into the front yard and stood framed in the window - waiting; listening for the sound of it shattering outside in the darkness. But there was nothing.

The calculator never landed. There was no sound at all.

Cyrus knew (because he had penned every inch of the development himself) that there was nothing in the yard that should have absorbed the shock of the plastic shell. There was supposed to be a crash-clatter-slam. There should have been something. Anything. He should not have been denied the satisfaction of hearing it burst into a thousand micro-pieces across the ground. Cyrus felt cheated. Robbed of even the smallest amount of satisfaction after a bizarre and frustrating day, he sighed and picked up his briefcase from the table. Cyrus jingled the keys in his pocket and stepped out of the dining room.

He grimaced at the dark spot in the foyer wall and stepped toward the doorway. No one ever saw Cyrus alive again.

The next morning his crew arrived to find his Buick still parked outside of house four.

When the foreman leaped from the truck at 5:45am and ran up to the house, he found a pool of mahogany blood drizzling down the face of the cinder-block porch and the limp feet of Cyrus McMillan lying twisted just inside the doorway. His pants were pulled up so the cold, blue flesh of his ankles shined in the golden morning sun.

The foreman bellowed out in alarm and the truck full of construction workers emptied in a flash as everyone ran to see the headless body of their boss.

Stepping over the gore, the foreman walked into the dining room as he dialed 911 on his cell phone.

The operator answered with a reluctant drawl as the foreman read the words left scrawled on the blueprint in Cyrus' blood. Four words that none of us in Bent Hope would ever be able to say again without a cold chill running down the back of our necks.

As his eyes leaped from the jagged script to the decapitated corpse of Cyrus, the man stuttered and read the terrifying message to the woman on the phone.

“Thanks For The Head.”

 

"Trestlewood Estates" originally appeared in Bleeding Ink Anthology and is included in The Collected Tales of R.W.Webb, Volume One (available in paperback or fancy electronical space devices).