FICTION BY JONATHAN CHAPMAN

Jonathan Chapman is a Northern California native who has contributed several stories to The Horror Zine and other ezines over the last decade. He is a Staff Book Reviewer for The Horror Zine.

He has a lifelong dream of taking the Trans Siberian Railway on vacation and has a love of creepy ghost stories. 

THE YERGA
by Jonathan Chapman

Thomas woke—groggy and disoriented, eyes still glued shut by sleep—to the sound of screaming and shouts coming from outside of his train sleeping compartment.

He lay, unsure what to do. What the hell was normal on a Russian train moving through the vast isolation of Siberia at dawn? Was it a drunken fight between two big dudes after too much vodka? The stereotype of Russians drinking a lot was not a myth, it turned out. You did not eat in the dining car with traveling Russian workers without being plied with vodka. A lot of vodka. That must be why I’m so disoriented, he thought. He vaguely remembered joining the drinkers the previous night.

The sounds stopped as he opened his eyes. He lay motionless for a moment, thinking about the screams he had heard.

Those screams seemed more desperate than what would typically come from bar fight. Fights were angry; these screams sounded terrorized. He heard them from deep in his mind, deep in his unconscious state, pulling him back. They were the screams of fear and agony. Drawing a breath, Thomas stood and put on his pants. He stepped toward the door of the tiny train compartment.

He was the only passenger in that cabin so the bunks on either side were empty. Only his own gear cluttered one bunk. Thomas slid the door open. The train lurched and moved side to side, making him sway in the doorway. The ever-present clank-clank- clank of the rails covered the sound of its movements.

The aisle outside was empty. There were three cabins in the car to the right of him, and two to the left. And then he realized that the doorways of cabins to the right were open, all of them, the doors littered with the debris of the old Soviet era oak doors, smashed into splinters. A pool of blood had soaked the carpet in a beat red semi-circle in front of each doorway. The smell of copper reached him above the oil, grease and steel of the train. The smell was cold as the air in the freezing train car.

He saw plenty of blood, but where were the victims? Worse, where was the killer?

Thomas looked to the left. The doors of those cabins were still closed. Okay then—he’d go that way. He stepped out into the hallway, expecting someone to emerge from the rooms of blood at any moment, maybe wielding an axe or knife, and that would be it for him. The thought hit him that he did not want to die there on a train hundreds of miles from anything in a vast snowy steppe.

Thomas bolted for the door at the far end of the rail car which would lead him out of this car of blood and into the next car. Beyond the exit door would be the occupants of the other cars, possibly including people in authority: rail police, a conductor or an attendant, and safety. He ran to the door and his hand bounced off the lever painfully. It was locked.

There was no way out of this blood-soaked train car.

“Hey!” Thomas shouted. He banged on the door, looking behind him, feeling the whole time that he might receive a blow in the back. The killer must be in one of those rooms! Waiting! Coming out any second! “Hey! Let me out! Oh God, please!”

An attendant appeared in the window. It was one foot by one foot at face-level, a thick glass with distortions from the cheap manufacture and the very thickness of it.

Thomas pantomimed the act of opening the door, demonstrating the lever turning. He nodded, pointed at himself.

The attendant, a middle-aged man with a thick face, big jowls, three days’ worth of gray beard stubble and big blue Russian eyes, stared at him and said something in Russian. He pointed at the window, presumably at the car or the people behind him, he wasn’t sure.

“Yerga!” The man shouted. “Yerga!” He said it as if that explained it all.

“Yerga?” Thomas repeated.

“Yerga!” the man shouted and drew a curtain across the thick glass.

Thomas pounded on the door for another minute, but the attendant didn’t come back. He turned. Perhaps the exit door on the other side of the train car? But that meant passing by the three cabins that had been opened and desecrated—and the killer (or killers) might still be hiding in them. No; that was not really an option.

He noticed that the two cabins down the way on the left side were not only closed but locked, with curtains drawn. They, too, must have heard the commotion. Maybe they were right to hide and wait it out. Thomas ran to his cabin, slid the door shut and locked it, falling into the chair next to the window.

Help would certainly come sooner or later. Maybe at the next train station?

He took his phone out and scanned for bars. The Russians had spaced cell towers intermittently along the route, but they were too far apart so that cell coverage only lasted about five minutes and then faded. A few miles later bars would come back, in and out. Thomas saw no bars.

He looked out the window; the train was moving at about seventy miles an hour across a flat, limitless expense of snowy steppes, empty, the sky a giant gray bowl above. The horizon had a certain vastness there—it went on forever, almost as if it overlapped with other dimensions, other places.

A bar on his phone! Thomas plunked on the keys, recalling the international number of his friend Mikhail in Moscow. It was early morning. He hoped Mikhail was up.

He glanced out at the wastelands out there running far and away to nothing in frozen vastness and he was swept away and seemed to be floating in emptiness. His destination was out there…somewhere in the endless steppe.

“Hello?” Mikhail answered. His voice sounded strained, scared almost. Strange.

“Mikhail! It’s Thomas! I’m so glad you answered! Listen—I’m in trouble!” Thomas shook his head at a frightening thought. What had that thought been? He brushed it away.

There was a long pause. Reasonable, Thomas thought, with a call like that. Just Mikhail gathering himself.

“Thomas?”

“Yes! It’s Thomas! I need help!”

“What’s wrong?”

Thomas gushed out the story of what was happening. “And the man just pointed and said the word yerga, whatever that means. Do you know what that word is?”

Long pause. Mikhail came back and his voice sounded resigned, tired. “A Yerga is a Russian myth.”

“A myth?”

“Well, some believe it’s real. It can be real. No, it is real.”

“What is it, then?”

“It’s a spirit, a thing, a monster. It catches lost souls and wears them like a shirt. It pulls them on and thinks it actually is that person. With that, the Yerga doesn’t know it is dead; it still believes it is alive. It roams the vast unknown spaces of the steppes of the continent, roaming like a wind, looking for the living. Caravans on the silk trail have talked of them for millennia. They are lost spirits that have been transformed by the mystic forces in all that wasteland. It’s where lost, angry spirits go. The old caravans often spoke of the terror of a stranger arriving at night to their campfire, hundreds of miles from anyone.”

“What does a Yerga want? What does it do?”

“It’s a creature. A Yerga might find a caravan and attach itself to the caravan and in their rage and loss, kill everyone in it.”

“They kill everyone? Why?”

“I told you, they are angry. They aren’t just dead ghosts; they are dangerous creatures,” Mikhail said emphatically. “I don’t know what twists them or transforms them, but they become something else. Someone else. I told you, they are killers.”

The line cut out. They had traveled past the point of the most recent cell tower.

Thomas panicked. Who knew when he’d be able to make another phone call? He wished he had used the precious phone time to make plans to notify authorities about the train murders instead of talking about some made-up monster. What good was learning about a Russian superstition? He should have discussed something relevant to saving his own life.

“Shit,” Thomas said. What to make of Mikhail’s rantings? A lost soul roaming the steppes? A creature? Killing travelers? No; that was crazy. More likely a drunken madman in another cabin. The other passengers were still hiding in their cabins just as he was.

He calmed himself by remembering that this was the twenty-first century where most things made sense, and there were logical explanations instead of myths. They would reach a station and the authorities would intervene and all would be well. When he got back to Moscow, he would slap Mikhail on the head and say, good joke, asshole! It would all be fun over yet another glass of vodka.

Suddenly there was a knock on his cabin door. Slow, low, timid. A gentle tap-tap-tap. His heart tried to leap out of his chest. He imagined a hulking madman leaning against the door listening and grinning, tapping with one finger, knife at the ready.

It was the innocent slowness of the tap that made it more terrifying. His imagination overtook him. He could feel a cold steel blade across his throat. Was this his last moment on earth? Was this all? Would it hurt? Would it be agony like he expected? How could this be? He was not ready! This was not supposed to happen to him! Not now when he was just starting to turn his life around!

Thomas moved slowly to the door, knowing it was too frail to hold back a determined attacker, and pulled the curtain on the little window aside. There a small blonde woman stood, looking frantically both ways along the aisle, then peering up at him.

This was no killer. There was no way a small woman like this one could have overpowered two large Russian men. She was a potential victim, just as he was.

“Let me in,” she whispered.

“In?” Thomas said, then his fear abated, and he opened the door. The young, pretty woman slipped inside and slid to a seat on the bench/bed across from his.

“Are you safe here?” she asked. His Russian was not good, but he tried to follow and answer in Russian. 

“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked her. “The doors are locked at both ends. I saw blood on the floor, and I heard shouting.”

She nodded. “I heard the shouting; more like screams.”

He wondered something. “There are other locked cabins to the left. What made you choose my door to knock?”

And then he was interrupted by his phone ringing. The next service tower must be coming into range, he thought.

“Thomas!” Mikhail’s voice called.

“I’m still on the train, Mikhail, still locked in the car. A woman has come here seeking shelter. What the hell do we do?”

“You…have a woman in the cabin?” Mikhail sounded alarmed.

“Yes! She’s hiding from whatever is going on out there just like I am!” Thomas watched the woman listen to him talk. She looked at him with big eyes.

“I…think we need to talk about the Yerga,” Mikhail said.

The woman across from Thomas was watching the doorway, clearly shaken and terrified. Thomas was not sure how much of his conversation she could pick up in her understanding of English.

“This isn’t the time for that crap. I don’t know how long I’ll have phone reception. We need to talk about notifying the police about getting me and this lady out of here.” He realized that he didn’t even know the young woman’s name.

“Listen! It isn’t crap!” Mikhail said back with force. “Yergas are real! They exist! You need to understand that.”

Thomas took a breath and sat back. He didn’t know what to believe anymore but he trusted Mikhail. “So, you’re saying we have a Yerga on the train? A wandering spirit that is demented and kills travelers while thinking it’s one of them?”

“I…think so.”

Thomas decided that if Mikhail wanted to believe that there was a traveling monster, that wasn’t important as long as they figured out how to save him and the woman. He tried to steer the conversation to rescue. “Okay, fine. How do I get off this train? I’m sure the police know how to deal with your monster.”

The woman across from him calmly leaned back in her seat and casually glanced out the window. He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Why was she so relaxed?

“About the woman…” Mikhail began.

The phone was dead, he realized. He laid it down on his leg, facing the woman.

“You are well?” she asked, a strange question considering the circumstances.

He nodded, feeling suspicious. “You?”

“Da,” she said and nodded towards the door. “Quiet.”

“Quiet,” he repeated. He looked out the window and studied the vast tracks of snowy land that stretched into the utter emptiness. It was more felt than seen. Outside of the rattle and clank of the train rolling and rumbling down the tracks, there was no sound. Locked in the rail car, they may as well have been alone in that wasteland. 

The woman also gazed at the vastness and her blue eyes were brilliant in the light. “Forever, the cold.” 

Thomas swallowed and looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time. She was small and pretty and blonde and something about the way she sat was…strange. 

“What is your name?” he blurted suddenly, his heart thudding heavily. Why was his adrenalin racing? What was he afraid of? Just a young woman— 

“So alone,” the girl said. “So very alone.”

“Why are you talking in riddles?” He realized his fear was mounting. He couldn’t slow his increasing pulse rate. He gripped the seat’s armrests and saw that his hands were slick with nervous sweat.

Thomas noticed that the woman gripped her own armrests, and he instinctively understood that she felt nervous as well. Or was it excitement? Was she trying to decide something? Worse—
was she planning something?

He studied her hands. Her fingers were long—too long. His heart pounded as he realized…as he watched…the fingers became white and claw-shaped. His eyes jumped upward to judge her expression and he was horrified to see that her face took on a longish appearance, as though it was stretched to unnatural proportions. 

“We can talk about this,” he choked. It was pure impulse—keep her talking, keep her calm; to somehow make her think they could both reason this out…to somehow make her believe that together, they could come to some sort of mutual agreement as to how this could be handled. Whatever this was.

They were sitting across from each other in the tiny cabin; she was perhaps three feet away across the narrow space. Together they locked eyes; locked wits.  

She shook her long, blonde hair in what should have been a beautiful feminine gesture, but it was grotesque to see such a distorted shade of pale. Just like the snowy landscape, her hair was empty of color and warmth. She could blend right into the West Siberian Plain, devoid of life.

And he knew Dimitri was right. 

“I just want to live,” Thomas said in a rush. “I just want to live.”

If Thomas screamed, no one heard it.

The official report stated that two tourists were killed by an American who seemed to have broken out the window and jumped. The trackless wastes of the steppe gave up no secrets, no bodies; no physical proof. The train attendant signed off on that report as he had before: it happened. Once in a while the train crossed paths with a Yerga. It was just how life was.