That Hell-Bound Train

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That Hell-Bound Train is a fantasy short story by Robert Bloch that won the Hugo Award in 1959.

[edit] Synopsis

In the beginning of the story the main character, Martin, becomes an orphan. His father dies when he drunkenly gets himself smashed by a train-car where he works, and his mother runs away with a traveling salesman. Martin roams around drifting from job to job, once even stealing hub-caps for a living. He is oddly attracted to trains, and he rides them everywhere he goes, and continually hums a tune his father use to sing, That Hell-Bound Train.

One day a train he does not recognize (he knows the trains well) stops near him. A man gets off, the conductor of the train, and offers Martin anything he wants. In return he will eventually have to ride the Hell-Bound Train, and give his soul to the devil. Martin outsmarts the devil by asking for the ability to stop time once in his life so he can live in that moment of his choosing forever. In this way he will never have to ride the Hell-Bound Train. And, if he picks his moment right, he will literally live happily, forever.

He fixes up his life, getting a job and working hard to get a raise. He meets a woman he would like to marry, and can't decide whether he wants to stop time then and live in that moment forever. He decides against it. He has children, but then decides to wait until they are grown to stop time. But when they are grown he has an affair with a younger women and his wife leaves him.

He is old, but decides he can have his moment as he is traveling around the world. It turns out that traveling does not have moment he wanted to live in forever. He tries to make some friends, so he can spend eternity with them, but he is getting old. He has a stroke, and goes to the hospital. He sneaks out of the hospital to look for his moment, only to have a second stroke. He lays dying decide whether or not to stop time then so as to save his soul, even if he has to live his dying agony forever. He decides against it and dies.

That old conductor returns on his train to take Martin's soul to Hell. The Conductor tells Martin that others have tried this wish, but they never found the perfect moment, always waiting for something better, until they died just like him. Martin laments on this for a while but then realizes there are others on the Hell-Bound Train, and they are all having their last and greatest time of their lives because soon they will be damned in Hell. He chooses that moment to stop time, at which point the conductor (who is probably the devil) realizes that they are all stuck in that moment forever. The ending leaves Martin in a positive moment, and possibly renders the conductor (whether he be the devil or one of his servants) powerless to do the same to others.