Australian author Cage Dunn is one of the writers whose stories are featured in the soon-to-be-published anthology The Haunted Train: Creepy Tales from the Railways. Here she answers our questions about train journeys and writing.
What’s the creepiest experience you’ve ever had in a train?
This is something I’m reluctant to share. I will tell you – but I warn you, this is going to creep you out.
Visiting Western Australia, I decided to book a return trip by train back to Adelaide to visit more relatives. It was December, and the train was almost fully booked. There was one two-seat chair that had to be booked as a single fare. It was cheap. I took it. The trip across the flat plains of the Nullarbor was a dream trip. I love watching the passing shrubbery, the colour changes of the sands over the changes of time, seeing the eagles soar across the sparse landscape.
And then I found out who occupied the rest of the carriage. Yes, the whole carriage. Not people. Okay, one keeper. A guy with hair dreaded on one side and sheared in jagged lines on the other. He took great pleasure in showing the only other occupant of the carriage his charges.
Spiders. In glass tanks. And big airholes. I’ve seen how spiders squeeze through tiny spaces. I saw the size of some of these spiders. I know a bit about venomous spiders. Of the hundreds of occupants in these fragile encasements, most were not the sort of companion that enabled sleep.
I stayed awake. It’s a long journey. They wouldn’t let me walk the halls of the Indian-Pacific that travels from Perth to Sydney, stopping at major towns and cities along the way. They wouldn’t let me get off at Kalgoorlie.
Three days and two nights awake and jumping at every tickle of the air conditioning.
Is that a trip you’d be willing to take, even if it were offered free, if you knew who’d be travelling with you? I know better now, but that constant state of fear and the physical reactions to the imaginings is what I remember.
And how relieved I was that the count when I exited was the same as when I entered (some of those critters have a high value on the black market, apparently).
For your story in The Haunted Train, where did you get the inspiration?
Although I’m not going to say the name of the town where I lived as a child, anyone who knows the area will most likely recognise it, or maybe the mention of the mine will give an idea.
The story is appropriate for horror, for more reasons that the pub tales of the old engineer/driver.
The town had a few interesting elements to build on: Slaughter Street siding (on Slaughter Street, of course), a local doctor by the name of Dr Butcher, and the visiting dentist (it was a tiny country town) everyone called Drac, but whose name was Vlad (he didn’t appreciate the humour).
The train was an open-carriage talc train that traversed the western boundary of the town, followed by the bleed of white dust clouds that painted shapes against the arid landscape. The vision that floated up looked like ghosts released from pain as the screaming train moved on.
It’s amazing what a kid’s mind can do with white clouds that billow behind a belching beast (I was a kid with a vivid imagination, but combine the town stories with the clouds and you have Monsters).
But the mine trains were also part of the fabric of the town. People set their watches by the morning train (0500), and the pub patrons repeated the tales of weird things experienced on the train and down the track.
My story incorporates one of those town myths about the train that travelled too fast into the stopblock on a terminus (the end point of a short line) and flew into the salt lake, to disappear into the sticky black mud for all time.
I’ve incorporated one of the engineers who told tales of one particular train, and the story grew from my childish fears of the monster he created.
That’s where the main character fears come from, the train engineer who told everyone about the evil soul of this train. The story engineer experiences the evil first-hand, and knows it’s the end of the line for one of them. At least.
What’s the scariest story you’ve written?
Diaballein. It’s a story that comes from the tales told when I was young, told around campfires (or was it a barbecue? Children have their own memories of how such things were) by the oldies and friends. A monster trapped within a stone, forever seeking a path into this world. And the innocents who must stop the invading horde by ensuring the continuation of the story through tales and myths to train the new guardians without scaring them to death.
How do you go about research for the fiction you write?
Research equals: Living and Reading. More living than reading. Life experiences and dreams of things we want to experience. Write what you’d love to become, rather than what you know. I want to know everything, but my passions are for the highly emotive memories of a life experience. Or the imagination that makes it appear to be an experience.
All my stories have an element of my life, and there’ve been some scary moments, but nothing will ever be as scary as my mother, who thought that locking kids in the laundry cupboard, in the dark, and then talking of what the devil does to naughty children … that’s top of my list of scary moments, and I wanted to know if other people had similar experiences and how it affected them. Life. It’s full of those experiences.
These are my first-point research places, the parts of my life that remain as bright as living in neon in my memories, and then I find the facts and evidence and locations that support, confirm or empower the memory/experience.
What are you currently working on?
The current project is two collections of short Aussie pub yarns – Country and City – with all the thrills of things that go bump in the shadows, that glimmering light on gloomy lakes – that isn’t the moon, stories that enthral and thrill the visitors to new places, new towns, but always at the local rubbity-dub pub.
The country collection is about outback yarns told all along the Australian highways, byways, and back-of-the-black-stump goat-tracks; told in pubs and clubs and caravan parks, and anywhere a soul may wander. Tales to warn travellers and locals alike to be wary of where they go, what they do, cos there’s always something out there, waiting, and closer than they think.
The city collection is about the dirty boulevards, the people who congregate in the dark alleys, the sounds and tastes of the city that resides below the glitz and glamour. The real world under the veneer of civility has its own style of story. There are bush poets come to town, country kids come to find the big lights, and people on the run from nowhere to anywhere.
What do you personally, as a reader, like about anthologies?
Shorter stories give me time to read a complete world in a moment. Life gets so busy, people have no time to do things, and there are always important issues to deal with, so grabbing a few minutes out of the turmoil is special. Short stories make an impact in a fast-paced world. They are the breath of air needed to turn things off for a while. And it can be a mood or tone that changes the outlook for the day. A lovely, dramatic moment in a life not my own allows me to ‘feel’ the reality of that moment, to step away from it at the end having imbibed to my heart’s content. There – short stories are like specialised wines – a glass of wine to suit the taste of the moment.
ABOUT CAGE DUNN
Cage Dunn is a storyteller, a fibber, fabricator, and teller-of-tall-tales, though not all her tales are outright lies. She was born in the drylands of Western Australia, way, way, way out on the outer edges of the black stump that was exiled from the middle of nowhere (only a slight exaggeration). Currently residing in Adelaide, South Australia, after having lived in every state, every city, most regional towns, and working at any job that came along (from sewage trucks to taxi driving, from bartender to tutor, from copywriter to migration law, from legal library assistant to programmer, and so on until etc.) and occasionally staying somewhere long enough to end up with a BA Comm (Professional Writing) and Grad Dip Computing. A wanderer’s soul, still wandering through stories of wonder.
ABOUT THE BOOK THE HAUNTED TRAIN: CREEPY TALES FROM THE RAILWAYS
Come on board for a Gothic journey in a funicular railway in Victorian England, a freight train in the Carpathian mountains, a high tech sky train in Bangkok, an underground railway in Tokyo. Visit stations which lure with the promise of safe shelter but harbour unexpected dangers. Meet the people who work on the tracks – stationmasters, porters, signal-men – and those who travel – commuters, tourists, dead bodies, murderers and ghosts.
In this volume, editor Rayne Hall has collected twenty of the finest– and creepiest – railway tales. The book features the works of established writers, classic authors and fresh voices. Some stories are spooky, some downright scary, while others pose a puzzling mystery.
Are you prepared to come on board this train? Already, the steam engine is huffing in impatience. Listen to the chuff-chuff-chuff from the locomotive and tarattata-tarattata of the giant wheels. Press your face against the dust-streaked window, inhale the smells of coal smoke and old textiles, watch the landscape whoosh past as you leave the familiar behind and journey into the unknown.
But be careful: you can’t know the train’s real destination, nor your fellow travellers’ intentions. Once you’ve closed that door behind you and the wheels start rolling, you may not be able to get out.
The ebook is available for pre-order from Amazon at the special offer price of 99 cents until 31 January 2023. (After that date, the price will go up.) https://mybook.to/Train .
The paperback edition will be available soon.
Exquisite Corpse