Trolley No. 1852

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It was the spectral hump of Federal Hill that held the solitary man’s gaze in capture, as oft it did, whene’re he took to his work-desk in hopes of a Muse’s whisper. The westward panes framed this inexpressible sight which rose two miles distant, and for reasons the lean, stoop-shouldered man could not explicate, beguiled his aesthetic senses as if to whelm them most utterly. Near dead-center of the roof-crowned rise stood the blackly bedrabbed hulk of St. John’s Church, whose cold Gothic revival windows seemed to stare back at his gaze in a knowing despair. The man felt certain that one day this morbid and singularly sinister edifice would ignite the fuse of a new tale, yet as so often happens to the creatively inclined, there could be no tale without an accommodating catalyst.

The same could be said of his present scribbling, cursorily entitled “The Thing in the Moonlight,” not a tale of itself but some rather desultory notes for one. It gravitated around a salient and very haunting image that had stricken him in a dream not far agone: a decrepit trolley-car rusting on its iron rails, slack power wires hanging overhead like dead umbilici. Ill-hued yellow paint mouldered around the vestibuled car, a colour akin to jaundice. A black and rather faded stencil identified the vehicle: No. 1852.

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