The Scapegoat
The Third Avenue El lumbered along the elevated trackway, its grimy steam engine smearing dark smoke across the sky. The train rode above the city streets where men glanced suspiciously at each other, fearful of anything they believed to be against God.
One man on this train was arguing with the conductor up front by the steam engine. His name was Anton Lumen, and his presence implied desperation and poverty. In this way, he was not unlike many people in the city. He wore an old worn jacket, frayed at the bottom with patches sewn all over, and his dark hair betrayed the fact that it hadn’t been washed in several days.
“Look, Mr. Conductor,” Anton Lumen pleaded, “please let me off at 99th street, please! If I don’t get to my job in five minutes, I’ll be fired!”
“This is an express train,” the conductor said. “It don’t stop at 99th. The next stop is 106th. If you want to go to 99th, you’re gonna have to get out at 106th and transfer to the downtown local to 99th.”
“I’ll be late, if I do that!” Anton insisted. “I’ll be fired! I can’t afford to lose this job!”
“I’m very sorry sir,” the conductor said, “but this train is on the express track, we can’t stop at 99th, even if we wanted to!”
Anton stormed back inside the first car. “God damn it!” he swore viciously.
“And watch your language, sir,” the conductor shouted over at him, “you could—what the hell? Who set the switch?” For just at that moment, the train passed over a switch track, and rather than heading straight on as the conductor and driver expected, the train switched to the local track, and was now heading straight for another train which had stopped at a station. “Pull the break! PULL THE BREAK!”
But too late. The moving train smashed into the stationary train. There came the horrible sound of ripping wood and metal, and finally the sound of the engine burning quietly.
The transit authority couldn’t tell with certainty that a broken switch track had caused the crash, so they began looking for scapegoats. First they wondered if it were an act of God, but after further consideration they decided to look for other possibilities.
They didn’t have to look very far. As soon as the authorities began to rescue the survivors from the wreck, they found their scapegoat.
“It was him!” the survivors yelled, pointing at Anton Lumen. “He wanted the train to stop at 99th, so he switched it to the local using witchcraft!”
Witchcraft was so widely feared, that the accusation alone was often enough to prompt an arrest. The authorities didn’t have enough money to conduct a full investigation, so instead they hauled Mr. Lumen away to prison to await a trial.
The city prisons contained a dismal collection of desperate people; starving homeless who had stolen food, drug users, religious heretics, alleged homosexuals, and now an accused witch. Things did not look good for Anton Lumen. He was certainly late to his job now, and even worse, he had been thrown into prison because someone had accused him of witchcraft. He shivered. Everyone knew what fate awaited a witch. He would be incinerated, and his ashes—well who knew what happened to a witch’s ashes.
Luckily for Anton Lumen, the Transit Authority quickly found another scapegoat to blame for the crash; the transit worker who had been responsible for the maintenance of the 3rd Avenue trackway was found to belong to a heretical sect of Christianity, and therefore (according to the government) must be involved in Satan Worship. After reviewing the evidence, the authorities decided that he was a more probable suspect than the desperate and now jobless Anton Lumen, and so Anton was let go.
As Anton was leaving the prison, he spied a handsome young man, probably in his late teens, being dragged through the prison corridors by armed guards. A teenage girl younger than him, probably his sister, was hanging onto his arm desperately, shouting, “he is not a witch! NOT A F###ING WITCH!”
Anton watched this procession, wondering whether any of these accused witches were really witches, or just the victims of paranoia. He put this thought out of his mind though; he now had other things to worry about, for he was once again jobless.
