# Signalman By [softcover.eth](https://paragraph.com/@softcover) · 2022-01-26 --- He was right every time until he wasn’t and by then it was too late. The signals were caught and the trains got close then too close then so close he was in between them and there was where he was destined to stay. The trains screamed as it happened, their brakes biting into iron and slowing their carriages as much as they could but by the time it was too late it was, well, too late and our signalman found himself pinched and covered almost entirely in pain. His head above the rent iron but the rest of him caught so close together that too much movement would be the end. With the long metal beasts stopped, their coal engines cooling, the conductors climbed down to the brown and red ground and tipped their hats in silence to the signalman who nodded back to them as he kept all that he wanted to say in his throat where the words could stay until, like everything else, they fell out the other side. “Get the ones we need,” said the conductor whose train had the first clear signal and so the conductor whose train took the second clear signal walked off east towards the town about two miles away. The remaining conductor stepped back towards his engine and leaned in to speak to his curious coachhands as passengers looked out from their windows as much as they could though they couldn’t see the front of the trains. “Before they disembark,” the conductor said and the coachhands hurried to dust off a thick blanket they used for the frigid passes atop the mountains. With his engraved pocketknife, the conductor sliced a circle in the thick canvas and took it back to the signalman. He hoisted himself uncomfortably against the smeared nose of his engine and draped it carefully over the signalman’s head. The blanket was not heavy to the conductor but was to the signalman. He groaned as it sat on what remained of his shoulders. Soot falling black amongst the damp red on the dirt. The conductor stepped back beside one of the coachhands and removed his overcoat, turning it inside out and handing it over to the coachhand who took it inside the engine in time for the first of the curious passengers — a few from each train — to step to the dry ground. “How do you feel?” The conductor asked. “Not good,” the signalman said in a hollow voice, his lungs tight even beyond the rasp of a long smoking habit. “I thought so.” He looked about him as the trains started to empty. “Would you like me to disperse everyone?” “I’m a warning now, aren’t I?” The conductor looked back to the crowd. “I’m sorry.” “Not your fault, mate.” The crowd pooled about them as the fathers first looked to the ghost below the black sheet and their eyes then drifted to the ground below smattered with indescribables. The mothers next before they covered their mouths then their children’s faces. Too late. Wails and tears and retreating small crowds as the signalman looked down to the material draping from his broken frame. He sighed and it hurt more than you can imagine. The coachhands from both trains gathered with their sooty hands raised over their still-racing hearts, all afraid with their own stoking they had so condemned the signalman. They kept looking down the road to the east as they awaited, despite contagious agnosticism, some priest or cleric that could forgive them the transgressions of simply firing the engines of huge, dark trains destined for speed and efficiency at all costs. When that cleric did arrive, hours later and beside the conductor of the train with the second clear signal and the coast clear of the passengers who cried and consoled each other in their cabins, much of the town was in tow to fill in that pool of people for whom this was a one in a deathtime chance to see a spectre with breath. Men at the front of that crowd kept the grisly ground hidden from their families. The blanket kept the signalman modest. Murmurs grew and the crowd’s solemnity fell away to an eery, immodest discussion between parents and children and siblings and friends. In that soft din the cleric approached and the two conductors stepped closer with him. The signalman looked to them both. “Thank you,” he said. He looked up and then out over the crowd to the ridge visible through the trees and his eyes scanned left to see if he could spot the sea at the edge of the coast long in the distance but alas. He looked down and across through the crowd before down to the ground where his gaze fixed. The cleric looked to the signalman. “I’m sorry, friend.” “Don’t be.” “I’ll confess that I can’t help it.” The cleric stepped closer to look the signalman in the eyes, keeping his feet careful about the mess and his own gaze up, only up. “Do you have any confessions of your own?” The signalman shook his head and the cleric could see the skin pulling at the edge of his chest, visible through the shorn cloth of his work shirt, stretching against the iron. It pained him greatly and he stopped and he felt something move. “Have you another blanket, please?” The coachmen from the second train ran into the engine to retrieve theirs and they draped it up before him as the signalman released what remained of his core like in the exercises that had all come to nothing and there came a wicked slosh and a thick slop upon the earth. Beneath the thick, whole blanket no one looked. “Please,” the signalman said. “If you’ll do it.” The cleric opened his tome and began to recite, in the private quiet held only by the court of conductors and coachhands, the signalman’s rites. Gossiping in the crowd faded to silence as they realised the funeral had begun and it was a soft quiet moment like in a church in a way that only life, not faith, truly makes real. “Amen,” the cleric said at the end and the crowd repeated: “Amen.” The cleric turned to the signalman and asked if he had any last words but the cleric realised a moment too late that he’d already said them. The cleric turned away and the conductors looked to each other and then their coachhands and they made the quiet agreement to move the train and free the signalman’s spirit. They cast the second blanket upon the cursed ground beneath the dead man and the crowd turned away with the spectacle now concluded and they began to make their way back to the town without much hesitation at all, the rest of the day still somehow apparently ahead of them. The cleric followed and the engines whined back to life and there was more screeching as the trains scraped by each other for a moment and then came free. They journeyed on and each passing carriage could see out of their windows the blood red nose of the other train with that slick ephemera that can be all that remains of a man when it goes wrong. --- *Originally published on [softcover.eth](https://paragraph.com/@softcover/signalman)*