The Comet’s Grief

Last autumn, my cousin Lena and I drove up to the abandoned switchback road near Dead Man’s Curve, a place local kids swore was haunted by the spirit of a railway brakeman who’d been crushed by his own lantern during a derailment in 1923. They said on foggy nights you could see his light bobbing along the old tracks, searching for the lantern he lost before the accident. We were bored, and I had just turned eighteen, old enough to rent a car but young enough to think I was invincible. Lena, who was seventeen, didn’t believe in ghosts but loved the thrill of scaring herself silly.

We parked at the lookout point where the road ended, and the forest swallowed the old right-of-way. The fog was thick, and the only sound was the distant hum of the power lines that ran beside the abandoned tracks. I had my phone out, ready to capture something, anything, for my vlog. Lena was laughing, doing a fake séance, when she pointed. ‘Look!’ A light flickered far down the track, like a dying flashlight. It was small and bluish-white, pulsing in a steady rhythm. I zoomed in, and my phone screen showed a perfect little sphere hugging the rails. It kind of looked like a comet, glowing with a strange, cold fire.

We watched for a minute, and then it started moving. Not bobbing, but shooting straight along the rails, picking up speed. It came to the spot where the power lines crossed overhead, and then it jumped onto the wire, sizzling like a spark. The sound was a low vibration you felt in your chest, like a cello string too deep to hear. Lena grabbed my arm. ‘Get the car started.’ But I was frozen, watching it slide along the wire, growing brighter and bigger as it approached. It stopped about twenty yards from us, hovering over the road, and then it started to pulse faster, as if it were angry.

That’s when we heard it. A sound like a child sobbing, but twisted, coming from the light itself. It was a high, keening wail, and it seemed to say, over and over, ‘Where is it? Where is it?’ The vibration intensified, and my teeth rattled. I finally snapped out of it, yanked open the door, and shouted for Lena to get in. She was already inside, fumbling with the keys. I jumped in, and we peeled out, gravel spraying. The light chased us, keeping pace with the car, moving along the power lines that followed the road. It was with us for a good mile before it veered off into the trees, and we didn’t stop until we hit the main highway.

Back at home, we couldn’t shake the feeling of that vibration, that low hum that seemed to have burrowed into our bones. I reviewed the footage. There was the light, clear as day, but there was something else. In the frame right before it jumped onto the wire, I caught a dark shape, tall and spindly, like a man made of smoke, standing at the edge of the trees. It was holding something in its hands, something that glowed with the same light as the comet. And I realized with a chill that the sobbing sound wasn’t coming from the light itself. It was coming from the shape, and it was crying over the glowing object, as if it had lost it and was begging for it to come back.

We didn’t sleep that night. The next day, I went to the local library and dug through old archives. I found a newspaper from 1923 about a brakeman named Silas Hove, who lost his lantern in a derailment and was found dead the next morning, his hand clenched around a wire, electrocuted. The article said he was known for his grief, that he’d lost his daughter a year before to a fever, and that he’d never recovered. He was always muttering about finding his ‘lantern,’ but the town thought it was just grief talking.

Now, I think he was searching for something else entirely. That light, that comet-like thing—maybe it was the girl’s spirit, twisted into a beacon. And Silas, bound to the tracks, still searching for a child he’d lost. But why chase us? Maybe because we were the first people to stop and watch, and he was trying to show us, to make us understand. Or maybe he was trying to get us to help him find the real lantern, the one he dropped into the chasm when the rails buckled. And the vibration we felt—that was him, rumbling through the earth, asking for a witness.

We haven’t gone back, but sometimes at night, I hear that hum. It’s faint, but it’s there, like a distant train. And I wonder if Silas will ever find his light, or if he’ll keep chasing anyone who dares to look, forever begging, ‘Where is it?’