"York-UnmarkedCrossing" - читать интересную книгу автора (York Steven J)

STEVEN J. YORK

THE UNMARKED CROSSING

Mars glows brightly just over the horizon, casting ghostly reflections on the
waves. I look up at the sky, and my mind wanders. I hear the echoing cry of a
slow freight train, winding its way along the track behind our beach house, back
beyond the dunes.

Then, the familiar itching in the back of my skull, the thoughts, unbidden, come
into my head. I am having a vision.

My mind's eye blinks away the sleep, and I see the grade crossing behind the
house, marked with only a small wooden sign, easily missed in the darkness.

The horn sounds again. It is a lonesome, mournful sound, like a prehistoric
beast, the last of its kind, calling a mate that will never come. In my mind's
eyes, I can see the locomotive, rocking down the track, clattering its way over
the old steel bridge a few miles north, pulling its load of empty log cars from
the mill up the coast.

I think of the crossing, and the car that rolls up to the crossing, tires
crackling and popping on the gravel, stopping squarely across the track. The
woman driving is lost. She takes a map from a glove compartment and turns on the
dome light.

I look across the dunes, and can see the light in the upper floor bedroom of my
beach house. Behind it is the railroad, and just beyond, the highway. I think
about the train, and try to estimate how far it is from the crossing.

She missed the turnoff for the freeway, thirty miles back. The intersection is
poorly marked, and the moon is only now rising. People get lost there all the
time. She studies the map intently. What was the name of the little town she
just passed through? She can't remember.

I begin walking up the beach, looking for the path between the beach front
houses that will lead me to the street. I stumble in the darkness, and the dry
grass that grows in the dunes stabs through the thin cloth of my slacks. I find
the trail again, and quicken my pace.

The woman spots the right town on the map, but decides that she can't possibly
have gone that far wrong. She scans the highway, twenty miles south of where she
actually is, looking for landmarks she will never find. She hears the train, but
thinks of it only as a geographical reference. The track is nowhere near the
road she is looking at, but she is looking at the wrong road.

I come down the dunes between the houses across from my beach house. There is a
streetlight, and I can see well enough to run now. Ahead of me is a small hill,