“On the Down Line” (1867)

This story by George Manville Fenn is primitive stuff. The structure is weird and veers toward the pointless. It’s from the Chillers for Christmas anthology, the second in a series of four on the theme edited by Richard Dalby. So far the connections to Christmas have been fairly strained, or merely coincidental. Yes, typically, this one takes place at Christmas. It involves a flashback to the Christmas the year before. Dalby is obviously well-read in 19th-century gothic / romance / horror lit. The anthology also ranges into the 20th century so he’s probably good all over. But he seems to have a collector / fan streak that can trump his taste. His intro to this story boasts of its obscurity, for example. OK but sometimes that happens for a reason. Dalby compares Fenn to Dickens and that seems apt. This story starts on an appalling scene of poverty and desperation on a Christmas (Eve, perhaps). Our first-person narrator is down and out, has been out of work for a year. He’s out scrounging and begging. A little girl gives him a penny, which makes him weep for his abject state. Then he sees a guy who is familiar and who eventually recognizes him too, promises him a job, gives him money. Our guy wanders off and has a merry Christmas after all, and finally gets around to telling us the story of the year before, when he lost his job because of this generous guy. Our guy was an engineer or perhaps stoker, and the generous guy got on board the train and hijacked it, reasons unclear. He had a gun so our guy went along with him, as one does, but that’s the reason he lost his job. Anyway, the ghost part of the story may be the most muddled yet, though it has a notably striking doppelganger element. Annoyingly, it also involves technical details about train lines—me, I’ve never heard of up lines or down lines and they aren’t really explained. Clearly enough they are parallel adjacent tracks. When the lines run close, in the story, a ghost train appears and travels alongside it so precisely that our guy can look over into its engine compartment and see himself there. I liked that, as doppelganger themes and images don’t often register with me. And while I often complain of too much explanation I fear this one has too little. Why is our guy seeing a ghost train at all, let alone with himself on it? And who is this generous guy and why did he hijack the train last year? Not clear.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Story not available online.