The Loop

By Roberto Scarlato

Just when you thought it was safe to take the train...

It was supposed to be an uneventful trip. A three-day visit to Chicago to attend a funeral. But Eugene Pharrell has just stumbled into a maddeningly treacherous journey back home. One that has pitfalls, phantoms, lost worlds and, possibly, no way out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roberto Scarlato
• Release date: Aug 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386852650

Roberto Scarlato

Roberto Scarlato is an author, blogger and audiobook narrator. He writes speculative fiction, mystery, suspense, thriller, romance, horror and crime. Scarlato grew up in a small suburb of Chicago, where his love of a good story was cultivated by shows like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Twilight Zone.” A bibliomaniac from the moment he learned to read, he began weaving together his own tales at an early age.  In November 2014, Scarlato quit his day job. He now writes and narrates full time. He married his high school sweetheart in 2010 and they have a daughter.

Book preview

For Uncle Frank,

A man reunited with his sweetheart.

The only things that overshadowed Eugene Pharrell’s loss was an ever present sense of dreariness, fatigue and, oddly enough, somehow a sense of displacement.

He had boarded the train at 3:30pm back to Flint from Chicago. It was a three day emergency trip. One in which he had to say goodbye to a dear uncle. He was there for the wake, even though the thought of seeing a dead body up close disturbed him. And he made it to the funeral. He even offered to be a pallbearer but there was no need. The man was loved by many.

The trip itself would take five to six hours.

It was his first time on a train. Let alone on one for that long.

The first time he stepped on the train he was nervous, rolling his one carry on suitcase onto the steel metal steps. He had taken the trip with minimal complaining and actually faced the direction of the caboose. It gave him the sense of being pulled back to Chicago, a place he neither love nor cared for. It had become something of a haunted landscape to him; one filled with too many ghosts of second chances long since past.

Oh, how he longed for all those second chances back.

He got hungry once, headed to the café car two hours into the trip. Against his better judgement he ordered a burger which they heated up in a high-end microwave. However, it was not a high-end burger. The thing tasted as if it had been killed twice. He sprung for a corona to wash it down. It was early morning but, who was going to tell him it wasn’t advised. He was traveling alone.

While he was outside the church, just before the funeral, tying a Windsor knot in his tie while on the run, he noticed something very peculiar. He had thought he had seen the sky shift. Not the clouds. Those were fine. This was more a crack in the façade. For whatever reason, the sky, blue as it was, opened with a long thing crack and outer space could be seen, with a flurry of stars hurling through it.

When he stopped running, tripped and fell, scrapping the palm of his right hand, his eyes shot back to the sky and the foreign slit was gone.

He was sure he had seen it and yet sure that he shouldn’t have.

The mind, when grieving, had a funny way of manifesting uncertainties.

Eugene shuffled in, moments later, using a moist towelette to treat his hand to his own stinging displeasure.

Now he was back on the train, ready to wash himself of the city and its tendrils of grief.

Only this time the experience was much different.

Whereas on his first trip he had conversed with a few passengers and the train was practically stuffed, this time around there were only three or four people mulling about. But he could have been wrong. There might have been more in business class. God he should have sprung for business class.

Last time he got on the train at eight in the morning and arrived at one in the afternoon.

This time, by the time he got back, forgetting any minor delays, he’d be back to his home by midnight.

He felt something in the air of the train when he first boarded. A thickness that wasn’t there before. A creeping despair that hadn’t engulfed him the last time he traveled. Why? He knew what he was in for.

But was he really?

Once he was settled in his seat, the power went out suddenly.

A few of the passengers hemmed and