Sean E. Britten

A serial killer stalked the rails and tiny plastic streets of Franklin Toreno’s toy train set. Spanning sixteen-by-six feet, the table holding the set wouldn’t have given a man much room to hide but it was plenty of space for a killer an eighth of an inch tall. Franklin assumed the murders were a recent development. How, and why, were separate mysteries.

The train set originally belonged to Franklin’s grandfather, as a project he’d started when he retired. Franklin had been very young at the time. As one of those men who’d equated retirement with death, working on the train set probably bought pop-pop another ten years of life. When he did eventually go, Little Americaville and the rest of the railway passed into the stewardship of Franklin’s father. He’d presided over it for another decade until a massive coronary took him before his time and the set went to Franklin himself. His pop-pop’s initial investment had been considerable, and his father had expanded it even further while leaving some sections underpopulated. Over the last decade with it in his possession, Franklin liked to think he’d stayed true to its history while also making it his own. Thousands of dollars had been poured into the set over the years. Probably tens of thousands, Franklin was afraid to do the math.

When Franklin and his wife Julia bought their home, he’d insisted on a basement big enough to hold the full train set. She’d resisted but he considered it nonnegotiable. He might only get the chance for a real session running the trains once a week but he checked on the set almost every day. Not that the trains or people ever went anywhere on their own of course. Normally. Until now.

Before making the first ugly discovery, Franklin drifted over his miniature world with a small smile of satisfaction. Tracks ran around the outside of the table and circled through the centre. Two towns sat on different sides of the baseplate. Little Americaville occupied a large section of the southern plane of the table. Smuggler’s Bay, smaller of the two towns, sat in the northwestern corner. Between them were farms and woodlands, rolling hills, crisscrossing rivers, tunnels and bridges, narrow roads. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Something caught the corner of Franklin’s eye just as he finished his circuit of the table. He lowered himself over the set, nostrils flaring. A small campsite sat in the southwestern region of the table. Trees three to four inches tall with miniscule leaves clustered between two rail lines but in their middle was a clearing with a little orange tent, a few stacked logs, and a campfire. At least, that’s the way Franklin had set it up.

The orange tent looked broken and torn, although its sides were stiff plastic and not material. The stacked logs were in disarray as if knocked over during a scuffle, the campfire, less than a quarter the size of a postage stamp, had burnt out. There should have been a figure sitting by the fire, a miniscule stick and marshmallow in hand, but they were gone. Franklin reached between the trees and prodded at the tent. Looking around the rest of the clearing, he saw a violent slash of red near the treeline. It almost looked like blood staining the scatter of false grass.

There, between the trees, were several little black lumps that also looked out of place. Tiny, shapeless, but somehow familiar. If Franklin didn’t know better, he’d have thought they were cockroach waste. Prodding, he found they were loose, not secured beneath the branches.

Along one wall of the basement was a workbench where Franklin kept all his tools, paint, bits of landscape, some of his trains, and dozens of plastic storage containers holding all sorts of figurines and scenery. He went to it and returned with a pick and set of tweezers. With great care, he retrieved the tiny lumps and returned with them to the bench where he had a light and a magnifying glass for close up work.

Under the magnifying glass, Franklin confirmed the little lumps looked a great deal like garbage bags at a HO scale. Each of them was no bigger than the cotton bud on the end of an ear cleaning swab. Their outsides were soft plastic that shifted when touched, and each was knotted at the top. Franklin used the pick and tweezers, and his steady hands, to tear the first bag open.

“What on earth is that?”

Franklin ripped open the other bags and laid their contents on the white workspace. In the first bag were a pair of legs, severed at the hips, as small as those of an insect but human in shape. In the others were arms and a head, and what looked like a bloody torso. All of them were streaked in bright red. One of the inhabitants of Franklin’s little world, murdered, dismembered, and stuffed into garbage bags.

Struggling to understand, Franklin returned to the set. He poked around the clearing as if looking for clues. The damaged tent and blood suggested the camper had been killed and dismembered there. Using the tweezers, he probed beneath the trees where he’d found the trashbags. After a short search, he did find one other detail out of place. A little red speck as big as a bee stinger which he picked up between the prongs of his tweezers. He returned with it to the magnifying glass. What he was holding was a tiny knife, miniscule, appropriate in size for one of the inhabitants of the train set world, that had been apparently used and then tossed aside.

xXx

“Have you been messing with my train set?” Franklin asked.

Julia gave him a withering look. “Why would I touch your little toy? I haven’t even been down there in months.”

To Franklin’s wife Julia, the train set was nothing but a money pit. They’d had that argument too many times though for her to want to revisit it now. A few times, when they were dating and the train set remained at his mother’s house, she’d messed with him a few times. Mixing a couple of dinosaur toys amongst the residents of Little Americaville as if they’d been terrorising the town. Leaving a few figurines in suggestive poses. He’d taken the gags with strained humour. Now though, she preferred to pretend the set didn’t exist at all, refusing to talk about it and pretending Franklin simply disappeared from time and space whenever he went downstairs.

“No, no reason, I must have just misplaced some things,” Franklin said.

Later that night, while Julia was getting ready for bed, Franklin went to the basement again. The lights flared to life, bathing the train set from end to end. Part of him felt ready to catch someone or something in the act. Of course, nothing moved or made a sound. He had a system of lights rigged to the set to create a nighttime ambience when he desired, street lamps and lights on at the stations or in houses, but it hadn’t been switched on.

Franklin circled the table. The battered camp and streak of dry blood remained as proof he wasn’t losing his mind. He continued around the set, paying particular attention to the scenes of Little Americaville. The small town along the southern portion of the table encapsulated so much of what Franklin appreciated about the train set, and he suspected his father and grandfather had felt the same. A perfect little world just the way he wanted it, free from decay and outside influences. From the train station to the town square and Main Street, it harkened to a lost golden age. The people and showboat cars were throwbacks to the Fifties and Sixties.

The northeastern corner of the table was mostly wilderness. A single set of train tracks crossed a small canyon and disappeared into a tunnel beneath the northern mountain range. His tired eyes combed through the trees, the tallest of them still only a few inches tall. A waterfall tumbled through a gap in the highest peaks, over rocks to a rippling pool below. Acrylic, like water and foam frozen in time and space and shrunk to miniature form. There, beside the pool, Franklin saw a splash of colour out of place.

Another body, another miniature plastic corpse. This one, at least, was in one piece, spreadeagled between the trees and the water’s edge. Franklin leaned awkwardly across the table to get close enough to see it. The table broke down into sections and he would have to move it if he really wanted to interact with the area.

Although the figure’s face was miniscule, he could see bits of skull poking through the flesh. Its stomach cavity appeared to be hollowed and more bone, ribs, showed in the chest. Had this one been there longer, and started to rot? It was possible, given its awkward and out of the way position. Had scavengers of some kind gotten to it? Again, possible, some miniature wolves and a grizzly bear a little over an inch tall standing on its rear legs roamed this part of the set. Possible, if the whole thing wasn’t crazy.

More blood, dried and dark brown, stained the scatter under the body. The murder site lay almost perfectly diagonally opposite across the table from the first body Franklin discovered in the trash bags, he noticed. It seemed inescapable. His toy train set had a serial killer.

xXx

Franklin slept restlessly and felt distracted at work most of the next day. A natural reaction to having a murderer sheltering in your basement, he supposed, no matter how small. Julia was out when he got home. He dropped his briefcase, unknotted his tie, and headed straight for the basement.

Again, nothing looked immediately out of place. Franklin made a slow circuit of the set without spotting anything. He hadn’t yet moved the body from beside the waterfall and it remained in the same place and condition as the night before.

Little Americaville’s Main Street modelled the kind of stores Franklin imagined one would have found on the central avenue of a town in the 1950s. A malt shop, a barber with a striped pole, old fashioned grocer, and a regal palace of a golden age picture theatre. Only recently, he’d decided the place had been a little too static so he’d decided to jazz it up with a Fourth of July parade. Crowds massed the sidewalks and he already had a marching band and a couple of miniature parade floats heading down the middle of the street. Flags flew from just about every building, and smaller flags sprung up from the crowd.

A couple of spaces along Main Street were a work in progress but Franklin didn’t spot any changes that he hadn’t made himself. The thought had occurred to him, however, that if there was a serial killer mixed in among the the residents of his tiny world, it was probably a new addition. All of the set’s new additions had been placed as spectators for the parade or in the crowd in front of the town’s courthouse. He’d bought a bunch of generic townspeople posed as waving or cheering or just watching to serve as space fillers.

Franklin looked over the crowds but he didn’t see any obvious gaps. He’d taken pictures of the figures though, dozens of them, as he’d set them up. Going back through the photos, he might be able to find one that was missing or out of place. His serial killer.

Taking out his phone, Franklin poured over the crowds in Little Americaville for ten minutes before he spotted it. Not his misplaced killer but another change so obvious he’d managed to overlook it until then. The mayor was missing. Franklin’s July 4th parade had essentially two crowds waving flags and holding balloons, one massed along Main Street and one in the town square watching the mayor make a speech. But the podium where the mayor had been standing was empty. The well dressed woman Franklin had cast as the mayor’s wife remained, along with the other town hall officials, but the mayor, with his top hat and sash, couldn’t be found. He even poked around the crowd and stage to make sure the figurine hadn’t just fallen.

“The mayor? Could it really be you?” Franklin said aloud.

Franklin decided it might be worth getting a point of view from within the world of the train set itself. Returning to his workbench, he went to the shelves and fetched a train with a wireless camera mounted in the place of its cabin. He took the train to the trainyard on the western side of the table and set it on the tracks. He’d shot dozens, maybe hundreds of videos with the rig. Bringing the feed from the camera up on his phone, he went to the train’s controls.

“All aboard the four-forty to Little Americaville.”

Franklin held his phone in one hand and controlled the train with the other. It left the trainyard and rolled around the southwestern corner of the table. Wheels made a comforting clickety clacking over plastic rails. It passed the section of woodland where he’d found the first body but he couldn’t see anything from the POV on the video. Slowly, he went through the Little Americaville train station and past the town itself. Nothing leapt out at him. Past suburbia and the edge of farmland filled with loitering plastic cows. Around the southeastern bend, and he let it pick up speed.

On the phone, Franklin glimpsed something out of place right before it went wrong. The video looked quite dramatic. He saw it jump, and the train rolled, over and over, coming to rest in an imagined heap in a farm amidst strangely incurious cattle. On the table, Franklin glanced up to see the toy train jackknife and fall to the side of the rails with a clatter, rolling to a stop.

The train and camera were undamaged. More important was what the train had hit. Franklin circled to the other side of the table to survey the damage.

Another body lay across the tracks where the train had derailed. It had been bisected into three separate chunks by the wheels of the train, although such a thing should not have been possible. In spite of the red paint, blood, covering the pieces, Franklin didn’t need a magnifying glass to identify the victim. He recognised the sash around its chest, now separated from its legs and head. The decapitated head, which he found in the nearby field of cows, still wore its little plastic top hat. The mayor wasn’t the perpetrator of these crimes but another victim, kidnapped and sacrificed, somehow, to the tracks.

Franklin felt wrong leaving the body where it was so he collected it along with the one he’d found rotting in the mountains. Setting them aside on the workbench, he watched back the recording on his phone. Nothing seemed amiss but surely if the mayor had been on the track when he circled the table earlier he would have spotted it. The camera was as high quality as one its size could be. Franklin skipped to the end of the video and went backward, frame by frame. There it was. Just after the train came around the bend, he could see it if he zoomed in. In one frame, the track ahead was empty. In the next frame, the plastic figurine of the mayor suddenly appeared. As the train approached, he could see the figure was complete and fine. After the crash, he’d found it sliced into three pieces.

At the back of his mind, Franklin had been keeping the thought that this was all some elaborate prank in reserve. Sort of an emergency ripcord to stop him spiralling into thoughts that this was so crazy he had to be losing his grip on reality. Even though Julia had expressed no interest in such a thing, and none of his buddies or folk who knew about the train set were likely to pull such a prank. There was no one he was really that close to, only other enthusiasts online. But now he had video proof, not much admittedly, not likely to convince anyone else, but proof that something entirely elseways was going on.

Franklin continued to pore over the detailed crowds of Little Americaville and the photos he’d taken previously in an attempt to identify his potential serial killer. It took him nearly an hour but finally he believed he had them. The figurine didn’t look like much but it was one of the dozens he’d only recently added. It had been placed in the crowd watching the mayor’s speech and was now gone, and it didn’t fit the look of the first two victims either. Unassuming, it didn’t stand out in Franklin’s memory and had only been used to plump up the crowd. Well, they said serial killers looked like everyone else. Long sleeved blue shirt, tan pants, brown hair. His face, merely two dots and a slit of a mouth, was unreadable. His body language, compared to the figures around him waving and clapping, looked bored, with arms crossed and a slight lean. Franklin had his suspect. Searching the rest of the train set, Franklin couldn’t find the specific figurine anywhere.

Julia arrived home and called out to him. When Franklin replied from the basement, she immediately lost interest in knowing what he was doing. He tossed up what to do next. He could show her the video and the tiny plastic bodies, tell her what had happened, but it would just sound insane. In fact, he didn’t like having the bodies or body parts sitting on the workbench in case they were discovered. But just throwing them away in the trash felt wrong, and putting them back where he’d found them would be despoiling his perfect world.

Outside Little Americaville was a weathered church and graveyard with a dozen gravestones. Taking a scalpel, Franklin cut squares out of the polystyrene in front of three graves. For the mayor, he specifically selected a grave with a grander statue of a winged angel, while the others got normal gravestones the size of baby teeth. He buried the three bodies and filled the graves with polystyrene and fresh scatter. Part of him wondered if it might be worth creating a small funeral scene, with the mayor’s wife and some figures in dark suits, maybe a few members of the marching band playing ‘Taps’, but he was too distracted.

xXx

The next day, Saturday, Franklin headed straight for Bobby’s Hobbies and Toys, the hobby store he frequented when not ordering online. Its shelves were crammed with trains, scenery and figurines, as well as hundreds of different models, puzzles, toys, paints, and other bric-à-brac. The proprietor, Kevin not Bobby, always looked thrilled to see Franklin, as he should given the amount of money he spent, but Franklin wasn’t in the mood for conversation about the latest models and displays.

Only one thing made sense to deal with a serial killer and criminal one-eighth of an inch tall. Among the train set models, Franklin collected as many period accurate police vehicles and police as he could. He ended up with five 50s-style cars with black and white livery and a dozen uniformed officers. He also added one Sherlock Holmes-esque detective in a deerstalker hat, holding a miniscule magnifying glass.

“Putting in something new?” Kevin asked, when Franklin dumped his load on the counter. “A police station or something?”

“Just looking to restore some law and order,” Franklin said.

Kevin laughed like he didn’t quite understand the joke. “Right, right.”

When Franklin got home, he headed straight for the basement with his purchases. Turning on the lights, he approached the table and recoiled. Things had changed again but now on a much larger scale.

Without their mayor, the people of Little Americaville had descended into anarchy. Scores of little plastic figurines appeared to be frozen mid-riot. The crowd in front of the courthouse had invaded the stage, causing the mayor’s wife and the town officials to flee. Flags littered the ground and bits of scenery were overturned. Those watching the parade from the sidewalk had invaded the street. A dozen random citizens were fistfighting with the marching band. Others appeared to be trying to overturn one of the parade floats. The figures weren’t posable, they shouldn’t have been capable of adopting new positions like they had done. Whatever the killer in the blue shirt and tan pants was doing, it was spreading. The murders weren’t just eliminating individuals, they were corrupting Franklin’s whole miniature world.

“No, no, this isn’t right.”

It wasn’t possible. One little figurine couldn’t have done all this. Franklin hovered over the table. His first instinct was to start correcting the scene and putting everything back into place. Something stayed his hand. He felt strongly that interference wouldn’t help, and in fact might make things worse.

Tearing open the plastic bag from Bobby’s Hobbies and Toys, Franklin inspected his new acquisitions. He might not be able to interfere without consequences but he could fight fire with fire. Franklin unwrapped two of the identical police cars, each with a pair of officers visible through the windshield, and placed them on Main Street in the thick of the riot. Half of the individual police figures, with truncheons and teeny tiny handguns on their belts, he placed around the cars in support. He set another car in Smuggler’s Bay and the last two on the roads at different points of the table, driving patrols. He placed a pair of officers at two of the train stations, as if looking for a man on the run. The detective and final two officers he decided to put at the site where he’d discovered the first body. Maybe he could find some kind of clues with his tiny magnifying glass.

When everything was done, Franklin unlocked his phone and scrolled to the photo of the figurine he’d identified as the likely killer. He zoomed in on that almost featureless face. Feeling a little unhinged but not caring, Franklin circled the table and held the phone toward the newly placed police officers.

“This is your chief suspect,” Franklin said. “Whereabouts unknown, but last seen in the vicinity of the late mayor. Handle with extreme prejudice.”

Once that was done, Franklin set up his laptop with its webcam pointed at the table and left it recording. That only gave him one wide view of the table, he realised, encompassing the railyard and Little Americaville but missing Smuggler’s Bay and a great deal of the set. He should have bought more cameras while he was out.

Hesitant to leave but unsure of what else he could do, Franklin took the car keys and left the house again. Julia hadn’t bothered to ask what he was doing. He left the laptop recording.

After another hour, Franklin returned with another half a dozen cameras and an adaptor to plug them all into his laptop. When he headed to the basement, however, he found the lights turned off. Julia was in the living room reading a book.

“Hey, did you turn the lights off in the basement?” Franklin asked.

“Yes? I walked past the door and saw them on.”

“Well, I was doing something down there.”

Julia looked unimpressed. “Sorry? You hadn’t said anything, I thought you’d just forgotten.”

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it.” Franklin tried to cover for his frustration.

When Franklin switched on the lights and returned to the train set, he was dismayed to see Little Americavilla had changed again. Contrary to his expectations, one of the police cars he’d placed there was laying on its roof while the other sat empty on a new angle. The riots had worsened and some of the police figurines were brawling with civilians. Other officers appeared to have fallen back to the small police station near the courthouse. Several storefronts, the barbershop, the grocery, had broken windows. One of the parade floats lay on its side and someone had driven a car through the front of the malt shop. Small fires, not real ones but ones made of glazed orange plastic, sprung up inside trash cans and other vehicles.

Franklin checked the laptop but nothing on the recording changed before the lights went out. He couldn’t make out anything in the dark for the next forty minutes after that. He let it play at several points and listened, straining his ears with the volume turned all the way up, but couldn’t hear anything either.

Franklin walked the rest of the table. The other police he’d placed on the roads or at stations, the detective and those in the clearing, hadn’t moved. He reached Smuggler’s Bay. The corruption had reached there as well.

Franklin had imagined Smuggler’s Bay as once home to pirates and bootleggers but now a thriving port. A sheet of frozen acrylic stretched to the edge of the table, foaming with whitecaps. Fishing boats and sailboats dotted the bay. A small cargo ship with a working crane loaded and unloaded boxes near the train tracks. Seagulls the size of gnats decorated buildings around the bay. The area was a little rougher than Little Americaville with a couple of bars and a tattoo parlour with colourful designs in the window. Sailors in white uniforms with little peaked caps prowled the streets. But it had been a clean and sanitised kind of rough neighbourhood, like in an old movie.

Now, graffiti covered some of the houses and buildings around Smuggler’s Bay. Sailors walked the street arm in arm with women in skimpy clothing, prostitutes. Another couple of sailors brawled in front of one of the bars while a third knelt in the gutter, apparently retching. The police car was in the same spot where Franklin had left it but another car had mounted the sidewalk and ran itself into a lamppost.

“No, it’s not meant to be like this!” Franklin’s voice took on a shrill edge. “You’re not meant to be like this! It’s supposed to be happy and neat and safe!”

Franklin’s eyes fell to the lighthouse on the outskirts of the bay, near the corner of the table. It had a real working light that revolved in the top. Crucified to the outside of the lighthouse, wrapped in chains as thin as dental floss, was another one of Franklin’s sailors. The figurine’s tiny head slumped against its chest, painted red as if from a slashed throat.

“Another one? This can’t be happening, this cannot be happening!”

Unable to stand looking at it, Franklin removed the sailor and chains from the lighthouse. Its spreadeagled arms and legs remained stiff. The blood on its chest looked fresh but felt dry to the touch. Franklin wanted to give the sailor a burial at sea but he wasn’t sure how to manage it. He put it aside on the workbench for the moment and started unboxing the cameras.

Over the next hour, Franklin set up a ring of cameras around the table. All of them pointed in at his corrupted little world. He concentrated on the points where bodies had already been discovered, Smuggler’s Bay, the tracks where the mayor was found, the mountains in the northeast and woods to the southwest, as well as over the railyard and Little Americaville. All of them hooked up to his laptop and recorded through a program meant for security systems which he’d downloaded. The chaos in the streets of Little Americaville, the debauchery in Smuggler’s Bay, the police patrols, all of it remained frozen in time. While he set up the cameras, he kept an eye open for the figure in the blue shirt and tan pants but he couldn’t see it anywhere. He even pulled up a few houses to see if he could be hiding inside or under one of them but he came up empty handed.

When Franklin finished, he had good coverage of all sides of the table. Most of the middle of the set was relatively flat, farms, low hills and rivers, except for Lovers’ Leap in the very centre, so the cameras had a view across the whole landscape. The tiny serial killer wasn’t done yet, he was sure of that much. He could feel it. If the figurine wasn’t stopped, he would lead the whole train set down a very dark track.

Throughout the rest of the evening, Franklin couldn’t concentrate on anything else. He checked the cameras on his phone constantly, and made regular trips to the basement. Julia noticed how distracted he was through dinner and became annoyed, but largely just treated him coldly. He insisted on leaving the basement lights on, claiming he was doing a timelapse video down there, but other than some comments about more wasted money she left it alone. It was his money to waste, he almost barked back. Stress was starting to get to him. Even if the lights were turned off, or power went out, the cameras that he’d bought had some limited night vision and the laptop battery would keep them running for a short while without electricity.

xXx

Nothing changed by the time Franklin went to bed. He slept restlessly and picked up his phone to check the basement throughout the night. When he woke up on Sunday morning, he went straight downstairs. His laptop and cameras were running and everything looked identical to how it had been the day before, for better or for worse, but he had to see it with his own eyes.

“Maybe it can’t move if it’s being watched,” Franklin said to himself. “Schrödinger’s cat, the uncertainty principle, something like that. It won’t work if it’s being observed.”

It didn’t quite make sense. Franklin remembered the way the mayor had suddenly appeared on the tracks just ahead of the train-mounted camera. Maybe the cameras had spoiled the killer’s plans, or he was just biding his time.

“Are you going to stay down there all day again?” Julia shouted from upstairs. “I thought we could go out for breakfast!”

Franklin hesitated, looking at the running cameras. “Alright, alright, I’m coming!”

The cameras kept on recording. Either the killer would strike, things would change, or he wouldn’t. Franklin wasn’t sure what he would do if the killer didn’t at least try, maybe he could begin setting things right again. The police remained on patrol or gathered at the station. In the clearing, the detective and two officers stood exactly where he’d left them.

“Is something wrong?” Julia asked, as Franklin drove them to breakfast.

“No, nothing, nothing.”

“You seem distracted lately.”

“I’ve just got a lot of-, work on my mind.”

“It’s not something to do with that stupid train set?”

“What could be wrong with the train set?”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t call it stupid. I know it was your father’s, and it belonged to your grandfather before him. We earn enough that you can spend your fun money on whatever you please, I suppose.”

“Well, uh, thank you.”

Franklin wondered if he should tell her what was going on. The killer in the blue shirt and tan pants. The mutilations. The corruption of his innocent little world. But she would probably have him committed to a mental institution, it was too impossible to believe with seeing it unfold the way it had.

“It’s just been so long since we did something, the two of us,” Julia said. “We should organise a vacation.”

Franklin instantly worried about leaving the train set for too long but realised Julia wasn’t proposing they take off to somewhere that afternoon. “Sounds good, once I’m done with these work problems we could set a date?”

Franklin kept checking his phone throughout breakfast and while visiting the stores Julia dragged him to afterward. He didn’t spot any changes, but then small shifts would be difficult to make out on the phone screen. Fortunately, Julia seemed to be in a good mood and didn’t mind.

Right before they headed home, Franklin idly flicked through the cameras. Everything looked the same but as he swiped from one feed to the next, something felt off. He returned to the feed that had caught his attention and took a few more moments to study it. With his fingers, he could zoom in on parts of the screen. That camera directly overlooked Little Americaville from above the train station.

There, blue shirt, tan pants, brown hair, the killer stood on the edge of the train platform. From Franklin’s perspective, his undetailed face appeared to be staring right down the barrel of the camera.

“We have to get home,” Franklin said.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, no, just-, you’re alright to go?”

As soon as they got home, Franklin went straight to the basement. The killer had disappeared from the Little Americaville train platform. Instead, he’d left behind another body. It took Franklin a moment to recognise the detective without his magnifying glass, or his head. The detective sat as if waiting for a train but above the shoulders was only a bloody stump.

Franklin stepped sideways and checked the clearing where he’d originally placed the detective. The two uniformed officers he’d left with him were crumpled, unconscious or dead. He still didn’t see a head but he did see one miniscule object on the ground. Picking it up with a fingertip, he found it was the detective’s lost magnifying glass. He turned his attention back to the overall table.

“Where are you? Where are you?”

Franklin tore through the frozen rioters in Little Americaville, and couldn’t find the killer. He circled the table, peering through trees and under houses and bridges. He found nothing. Turning to his laptop, Franklin picked up the recording of the camera from the point where he’d spotted the killer and rewound.

On the recording, just before Franklin had checked in, the platform was empty. And then suddenly, the figurine in the blue shirt and tan pants appeared at the entrance to the station. Franklin’s blood froze. The killer stood there for a minute and then changed again as if part of the footage had been edited out. He appeared as Franklin had seen him before, staring into the lens of the camera.

Franklin skipped ahead thirty seconds, a minute, five minutes. Suddenly, the figure was gone and the headless detective took his place on the bench instead. Franklin searched the other recordings but couldn’t see where the killer might have gone.

Why the train station? It felt like the killer was taunting him. His first killings had been quiet, tucked away in the plastic wilderness. Then, there was the mayor on the train tracks, making Franklin himself an unwitting accomplice. He’d gotten bolder, chaining the sailor to the lighthouse and now killing the detective and displaying the body at the set’s largest station, as if to prove Franklin’s police force couldn’t stop him. But was that all it was? Franklin felt like he was missing something. Some clue that might lead him to how and why this was happening.

Turning to his workbench, Franklin retrieved a handful of wooden skewers. He used lengths of them to secure bits of landscape in the train set’s polystyrene base. Franklin went around the table and began sticking the skewers roughly at the spots where each body had been found. The clearing, the waterfall, the tracks by the farm, the lighthouse, and Little Americaville’s train station. They stuck up out of the ground like flagpoles spread to five corners of the set.

Franklin studied the sticks for a while before returning to his workbench. He came back with a ball of red string and tied the end of it to one of the skewers. From there, he began lacing the string from one stick to the other, as if measuring distances. He started making patterns.

It took some time and experimentation, but eventually Franklin had the string laced between all five skewers in a way that made sense. A five-pointed star stretched across the entirety of the table. The devilish symbol of course looked a little wonky, some arms longer than others, but it sent a chill down Franklin’s spine. This was what the killer was trying to create, he was sure of it. Some kind of devilry or black magic, but why? Surely his existence and the way he’d corrupted Franklin’s little world had to have some sort of black magic behind it.

The misshaped pentagram centred perfectly on Lovers’ Leap. Of course, the plateau sat in the exact middle of the table. But could the pentagram be outlining the site of some final depraved act? A climax to the killer’s orchestrated murders?

Lovers’ Leap was the tallest point of the table except for a couple of mountains in the northeastern range. Its peak, however, was perfectly flat. A narrow road wound its way up the mountain to a lookout on the top. Franklin’s father had created it as a kind of makeout point for the local teens and as such there were three fifties-style cars parked at the lip of the lookout, a couple in each of them gazing over the expanse of farms and glades in the direction of the railyard.

“What are you planning?” Franklin said.

Julia called from upstairs. “Honey, you coming for dinner?”

“Uh, I’ll-, I’ll be up in a minute.”

Spoiling Julia’s good mood, Franklin grabbed his dinner and took it to eat downstairs. Nothing changed in his absence, the cameras all recording anyway. He ate staring at the string pentagram. Nothing moved.

They were going to end this tonight. After eating, Franklin left the plate and utensils on his bench, perched himself on a seat by the table, and stared. Lines of red string cut across the landscape between jutting skewers, out of place. He wanted to start setting things right but a kind of magnetism stopped him. He had to deal with the killer and his plans before anything else or it just wouldn’t work, he knew it in his gut.

For the next couple of hours, phone in hand, Franklin kept watch and occasionally circled the table. Julia called out with obvious annoyance that she was going to bed. He told her goodnight but stayed where he was. He only strayed upstairs to make himself a cup of coffee and he kept his eyes on his phone the entire time.

Nothing happened for the next hour, and Franklin felt himself getting tired. His mind wandered. With a sudden spasm of inspiration, he unplugged all the cameras, tossing them aside, and he shut off his laptop. The videos didn’t prove anything anyway. They looked like bad fakes with lazy editing. Without the cameras, it was just him and the train set, and maybe his phone if something really crazy happened. The basement lights had a dimmer setting. Franklin lowered them until they were almost off and then switched on the nighttime effects for the train set instead. Lights sprung up around the train stations and tracks. Streetlamps popped on in Little Americaville and Smuggler’s Bay, and around railroad crossings. On the far corner of the table, the lighthouse began to strobe. Its warning light turned, and turned, and turned.

The nighttime lighting felt right. As Franklin settled back into his chair and watched, however, he found his eyelids getting heavy. The figures on the table remained frozen but the strobing lighthouse gave them a sense of movement. Lovers’ Leap, in particular, was only lit up every few seconds as the lighthouse beam struck it.

Stobe. Strobe. Strobe. The effect felt almost hypnotic. Franklin’s chin dipped toward his chest and his phone nearly tumbled from his hand. The lighthouse beam glinted off the windshields of the three cars lined up along the edge of Lovers’ Leap. Suddenly, the light hit the plateau and Franklin spotted a new figure hunched behind the cars. He stiffened but didn’t move out of his chair.

Another couple of beats and the light struck again. Another figurine had definitely appeared on the lookout and now stood alongside one of the cars, not behind it. Holding his breath, Franklin leaned forward, waited, and watched for the next sweep of the beam. From the angle he was watching, the killer disappeared again. He was maybe behind the cars, shielded from Franklin’s line-of-sight. A dark streak of colour painted the windshield of the car he’d been standing beside.

“No!” Franklin stood up.

Nearly knocking over his chair, Franklin leaned across the table. In the next flash, he saw a body hanging half-in, half-out of the window of another car, more blood splattered down the side of the vehicle. Darkness, a couple of beats, and when the light returned he saw two figures frozen in mid-sprint across the lookout. A young woman dressed like a cheerleader in front with a man, blue shirt, tan pants, chasing her with a knife. Franklin went to reach for them but hesitated and fumbled with his phone instead. The plateau plunged into darkness. When the light returned, the cheerleader was sprawled near the road leading up to the lookout with blood pooling around her head. The killer was gone.

“Where are you?”

Somewhere between blinks, Franklin noticed for the first time that two police cars had appeared on the road winding up to Lovers’ Leap. Something had pulled them away from their patrols to the lookout. They weren’t going to be fast enough to save the remaining teens.

Light strobed, and Franklin saw the killer standing over the driver’s side of the third car. He reached inside. This time, Franklin didn’t move. It was almost over now, so he let it happen.

Light, dark, light, dark. Each time, the scene changed slightly. Blood covered the interior of the third car as well. The police vehicles teleported their way a little further up the winding road. Then, the killer was standing at the centre of the lookout. The centre of the table. His face and arms raised to the sky. A streak of blood covered the front of his blue shirt and he still had the bloody knife clutched in his fist.

A sacrifice, was it all some kind of sacrifice? For what purpose, the pentagram, the deaths? Was it all intended for him, for Franklin himself? If the residents of Franklin’s tiny world were aware of him in some way, it made sense they might consider him some kind of god.

Why didn’t matter, time to end this. Franklin reached across the table. He went to pinch the killer between his fingers, to pull him out of the set. As soon as one fingertip made contact, Franklin felt his feet go out from under him. With a lurch, he found himself falling. And falling, and falling. He somehow plunged toward the table without hitting it, picking up speed as if dropping from a great height.

With a jolt, Franklin was suddenly standing on solid ground again with his arms raised. He tried to cry out but he couldn’t make a sound. A distant light swept over the landscape every few seconds. Stiffly, he lowered his arms.

One of Franklin’s hands felt hot and sticky with blood. He was holding what looked like a large kitchen knife. He tossed it away from him and it hit the ground with a plastic clatter. He was outside, not in his basement, or was he? Light strobed. Three Fifties-style cars were parked against the edge of a clifftop behind him. A body hung through the window of one of them. Another body splayed on the ground nearby. He tried to cry out again and couldn’t, his mouth wouldn’t even move. Reaching for his face, he found it hard and smooth and unfamiliar. His hands were clumsy, with blunt, unmoving fingers.

Looking to the night sky, Franklin saw a vast being looming over the land. Unimaginably larger than him but half-hidden behind some kind of veil. They looked staticky, unreal, and their movements blurred and stuttered as if falling in and out of time. The giant had his face, and was wearing his clothing. Franklin looked down at what he was wearing instead. Blue shirt with a streak of blood down the front, tan pants. He and the killer had swapped places, swapped bodies.

Two old fashioned police cars sped into the parking lot, lights flashing but no sirens, and four cops leapt out of them. Their faces were crude and unformed with only dots for eyes and slits for mouths. Their skin looked like grainy plastic and their hats and clothing appeared to be part of their bodies rather than something they were wearing. They didn’t speak but their intentions were obvious as they drew their guns and raced toward him. When they were one-eighth of an inch tall, those guns looked tiny. From this perspective, the weapons seemed enormous even if they were just as crude as everything else about the officers.

Lost, Franklin fell to his knees and showed the officers his hands. He couldn’t raise a voice in protest and didn’t know what else he could do. Two of the officers tackled him and pushed him to the ground as the others kept their guns trained.

Facedown, Franklin felt plastic cuffs slide around his plastic wrists. The figurine cops kept him pinned but he managed to twist enough to look at the sky again. He was smiling. The killer wearing his face was smiling. As Franklin watched, the giant version of himself turned away from the table and walked away to the basement stairs, turning off the last of the lights as he went.

======

Sean: Not sure where the inspiration for this one came from. There’s a pretty cool hobby store in a shopping centre my wife and I have reason to visit occasionally, and they had a rad little train set in their window that was gone the last time we were there. I appreciate mostly the fact that they would add Godzilla figurines to it from time to time, which is exactly what I would do if I had a train set like that one or indeed the one in the story.

I feel like most men, from time to time, nurse the idea of having a giant toy train set or something similar. Actually for me, if I had all the time and money in the world it would be a sprawling Lego city. Maybe two Lego cities, I can’t decide, the same city but one of them regular and one of the post-apocalyptic. I do collect Lego and I have a few things worthy of display but I feel like I haven’t had the time to enjoy a build in months, let alone the expense of it all.

Coming up in October is DRACTOBERFEST! Last year, when I was writing stories inspired by nothing but the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, I got most of the way through the year and realised I hadn’t written anything with a dragon in it. That seemed counter-intuitive so I dedicated the five weeks of October to nothing but dragon stories. I believe I should have at least three this year, three very different dragon stories, and the first one is… very, very weird, so check back in the first week of October for that!