WORLD TRAIN: BEGINNING
MD Shoatzycoatl
Acknowledgments
From the dinosaur kid in the first grade and the kid I pushed into a pine-tree while playing football to Kindergarten teachers, paper boy bosses, card game opponents, college roommates, army guys that put lemon juice up their noses, Japanese foreign exchange students, brothers, parents, day-dreamers, students, flower girls, bandanna-wearing treasure hunters, medievalists, teachers who passed me when I should have failed, mushroom plumbers, fairy godmothers, umpires, athletes, Sky-walkers, sky-talkers, relatives, neighbors, lunch ladies, lovers, and God. Thank you. This book would never have been written if it weren’t for all of you.
ZERO
Something’s missing…let’s run through the grey matter one more time: Hat backwards? Check. Number two pencil? Check. Book-bag put away? Check. Cell-phone silenced? Hang on…check. Head down, brain on, and always go with your first instinct? Check.
1.What’s the last digit in π? (You can’t be serious…)
a. 8
b. 4
c. 2
d. 1
2. Solve for the variable y: (x + y = z / m); where x = 7 * 52 / 365, z = Time, and m = the universe + ½ the sun’s daily energy output / existence. (I stink at math…doesn’t π go on forever?)
a. Life
b. Silliness
c. You
d. God
3.Roll two six-sided dice ten times. Based on probability, what are the odds you’ll die in the next twelve hours? (Professor Doomsday here. What a morbid question – I’d better get rolling…)
a. 1 in 10
b. 1 in 5
c. 1 in 1
d. None of the above
4. Suppose you meet someone from a previous lifetime. How would you describe the mean difference from the norm? (What kind of question is this?)
a. Great
b. Average
c. Slim
d. None at all
5. If Alpha = space, and Beta = matter, then Alpha + Beta must equal: (Alphas and betas? How about double cheeseburgers and fraternity riots?)
a. Nothing
b. Something
c. Everything
d. Forget it, I already bombed this test
6. Why have zero if everything starts with one? (…what in the world am I missing?)
a. we need it as a foundational model
b. zero is cool
c. the Greeks really counted zero as one
d. zero is necessary in the universal language of numbers
ONE
I was walking the wrong way down the railroad tracks. There were smokestacks to my right and a gravel hill to my left. Snow covered the ground and my frosty breath was freezing the tip of my nose. I was leaving a statistics class – we had just taken an exam and my mind was racing. Not that I liked statistics, but the exam was hard and I couldn’t afford to fail it. Something about alphas and betas – patterns in the universe. Strange symbols and ancient languages. It could’ve been German class and I wouldn’t have known the difference. It made me wonder how people ever got on the same page in the first place. Ug the Caveman draws a line in the dirt and Johnson the Wolverine draws a circle. They don’t know what they just did, but they make sense of it somehow. Words, sounds – I just wanted a cup of hot chocolate.
My book-bag was hurting my shoulder. It was one of those that had a single strap designed to go over your chest. I watched the wood beneath the railroad tracks – stepping between the rungs and wondering how many people had slipped on its smooth icy surface. They say God created the Earth in seven days. I’d like to know who ‘they’ are, and how ‘they’ were lucky enough to meet God. Maybe He did create the world in seven days. I guess I could care less – I suppose it’s the same either way, although one had to ask: Was He bored? Did He just decide one day to take a lump of clay and call it Earth just because? There had to be a reason – a reason why we try to figure out a reason.
A train sounded in the distance. I must have gotten at least a seventy-five on the exam. If not, they might put me on academic probation again. ‘They’, the arbitrary ‘they’. The Universities, companies, governments, sports stars, wild priests, aristocrats, wombats, and flying circus monkeys. You ever wonder who runs the world? It used to be the British crown. That changed into Louis Armstrong and Superman. Nowadays, it’s Pinky and the Brain – Pinky of course always winning the Presidency. But none of that matters – really.
Looking at my wristwatch, it read: 5:49. The pale, partially frozen sun was dropping towards the horizon. Class ended at five thirty and I was supposed to join a study group at six. At the base of the hill to my left a street ran parallel to the railroad tracks. An occasional car would pass, driving towards the busy intersection ahead. That was my destination. Inevitable and unavoidable. Like death. My car was on the other side of the intersection in a dirt parking lot behind a large hotel. Destination to destination – perhaps guidance for life. Always moving from the moment your eyes open. Point A to Point B to Poi…I chuckled. The end of the line. Like a train. Lincoln to Cheyenne to Denver…all the while, the train’s too busy to realize it’ll stop working someday and be replaced.
“Hey man, need a ride?” a peer offered from the window of his Honda Civic – he’s pulled up against the gravel hill to my left and drifts at my speed, his exhaust is as frozen and deadly as the fog around my face.
“That’s okay.” I told him. “I’m parked just a little ways up. But thanks.”
“No problem.” The Honda Civic zipped away.
Nobody seemed to offer a ride these days. I probably would have declined anyway, no matter how far I was walking – I figured it was too hard to trust people anymore. And besides, I like walking down the railroad tracks. It makes me feel like I’m going somewhere. Truly – do you ever think about trains when you’re stopped at a railroad crossing? The red lights and the striped wooden barriers. The train rolls by and you wonder where it’s going. By the end of the day, the driver will be somewhere far away, but at that point in time he’s right there – in your world and passing through. Others see him as well, people that I’ll never meet, but we’re connected. Through that train and that driver. Even if for a moment, a moment is forever.
I walked into the intersection – cars stopped on each side of the careless wood barriers. The only thing I could hear was the loud ringing of Life’s bells – slowly fading between beats and giving up to the chilly moans of Death’s trumpets. My mind must have truly been racing. The beginning of the universe. Alphas and betas. Trains and Honda Civics. People were getting out of their cars and yelling at me – so many people making noise at the same time, leaving me to wonder what they could possibly be saying to create such a mess. It was as if I was the train. All of those people getting out of their cars and shouting in unison. We were connected, forever and in a moment of Time.
The train’s horn scared me as it blasted over the sound of the now Lifeless bells. I turned around and discovered I was walking the wrong way down the railroad tracks…
TWO
Spinning and spinning, like a merry-go-round – my head hurt from the dizziness. When I opened my eyes, I found myself staring at a flickering light above me. My back hurt, I had a headache, and my knees were just beginning to thaw. A light rumbling noise came from outside the small room I woke up in. Immediately, I noticed the periodic beep as the room went down and I came to the conclusion that I was in an elevator with no numbers or buttons. Abruptly, the room came to a stop and the doors in front of me opened with a hiss.
There was a long hallway. I could hear the distant sounds of subway cars coming and going. I sat still for a moment, staring outside the elevator doors when a strange creature no taller than my hip poked his head into sight. His skin was green and he resembled a goblin – a gremlin of sorts. I was dead – I had to be. Was this heaven or hell? I couldn’t tell, but there weren’t any pearly gates in sight.
“Got a smoke?” the little devil asked as it peered into the elevator – seemingly more fascinated with it than with me.
“No.” I replied. “Where am I?”
“Level one, one, three, nine.” It responded. “What kind of scrap-lad doesn’t carry a smoke?”
“Who are you?” I asked.
The creature turned and walked away. He was wearing a black pinstriped business suit and a demon’s tail waved behind him. The smell of the outside filled the elevator. A dank, afterbirth taste entered the back of my throat. I stood, my legs buckling for a moment as if it was the first time. Slowly, I made my way out of the elevator, a neon sign above read: ‘The Great Birth Canal’. The hallway opened to a subway dock.
The creature looked back at me, “How about some food – you hungry?” His voice was that of a middle-aged man.
“I’ve got a headache.” I said.
A subway train came from the darkness and stopped at the dock. Digital banners scrolled across the trim of the train, reading: ‘construction worker’. A coarse voice projected from the train speakers: “Failures get off.” The train doors opened and passengers unloaded, different in appearance from head to toe. Some had fins and wings. Others had several eyes or tentacles or leathery scales – just about anything you could imagine.
A large jelly-blob leaving slippery streaks behind it stopped next to me – it had a tank of water strapped to its back and a vacuum-looking appendage for an arm. The jelly spoke, but I didn’t understand. Apparently it was asking me a question.
“Not here, pal.” My green friend explained. “Upstairs. Floor one, one, three, eight.” The jelly complained. “Nope. No elevators. Sorry.”
The jelly turned and went its own way. The coarse voice came over the train speakers again: “Departing.” The doors closed and the train sped away.
“Wanted to know where ‘Doctor’s Assistant’ was.” The green creature laughed. “Good luck with that one.”
“Is this hell?” I asked.
“No.” the gremlin answered. “I’m starving though. There’s a little hole in the wall place not too far from here. Come on.”
The creature walked towards a set of stairs, marching behind those who got off the subway train. What kind of fate was this? I could still taste the afterbirth. The walls to the subway dock were old and cheap – made of concrete. The elevator doors closed in the distance and the neon sign went out. Is this what happens when we die? Perhaps it was the last thing my brain remembered before flickering out as the emergency medical picked up my splattered body parts. The jelly form slumped against a nearby wall, seeming to flicker out itself. What a horrible job. I wonder what lucky person gets to clean me up for a living. Go to the bar after scrubbing the frozen tracks and say, ‘Oh yeah, only had to clean up one kid today, not bad at all.’
My green friend was getting away and I figured I should follow him. The stairs were narrow and the congestion of people – things really – created a stench of body odor. I didn’t mind because it was better than the afterbirth I’d been tasting.
The top of the stairs opened to a hallway that split left and right. The sign in front of me read: ‘1138’. The green creature turned right. At the end of each hallway, there were revolving gates. An obese man with a whiskered chin sat in a booth adjacent to the gate, his weight spilling onto the counter in front of him and through the sides of his station. His customers paid him coins – which he ate with haste, allowing them through to the next set of stairs.
I couldn’t fathom how a person got so large. Somewhere in the mess of lard and skin there was a brain – or at least I’d like to think there was. The whiskered man grunted as he breathed in and out, sounding as if every wheeze was going to be his last. A new aroma presented itself as I approached the station. Urine and waste – I would have preferred the afterbirth. It became apparent this man lived in that booth, eating coins and sleeping between customers.
The green creature was just tall enough to see the slot where you gave the whiskered man your change. “You got anything?” the gremlin asked me.
“Uh…” I searched my pockets, finding a matchbook and the pencil I had taken my statistics exam with.
The demon gave the whiskered man some extra coins, gesturing to me. “He’s covered too.” The whiskered man ate the coins and the gate unlocked. We passed through and went up the next set of stairs, opening to a stale lobby. A string of gates – similar to the one we’d just come through – cut the room in half. On the far wall beyond the gates, there were elevators. The half I stood on had a dead plant in each corner.
“What’s your name?” I asked the green creature out of gratitude.
“Umpei.” The demon replied.
“Thank you…for paying.” I mentioned.
“Yeah. Well don’t get used to it.”
Umpei avoided the gates and walked across the lobby to a metal vent covering, lifting it and climbing in. I watched the lines form at the next set of gates. Perhaps this was heaven. Everybody paying to get in, all of those who hadn’t earned it were left behind – like the jelly on the subway dock. It was nothing like the golden barrier I’d imagined amidst a white cloudy canvas.
“Are you coming?” Umpei shouted at me from inside the vent. I walked over and looked in, eventually squeezing into the square of darkness. “Just keep crawling.” He advised – it was already too late for me to go back. My body was wedged into the vent and I could only use my strength to go forward. Like a Chinese finger-trap or a one-way street with no turn around.
THREE
I climbed out of the metal vent and fell into a pile of garbage. Rotten banana peels, rusted tin cans, used diapers, and an assortment of other unidentifiable waste. The heap of garbage was soggy – the germ-ridden juices soaking my clothes and making me shiver. Quickly, I found my feet and waded out of the trash. Umpei had avoided the garbage altogether.
“Sorry about that,” he said as he looked me over, “I should have warned you. The people in this sector never clean up their messes. Figure it’s someone else’s job.”
“I see.”
“And smell.” Umpei pinched his nose and gestured. “Welcome to Z95, the trashiest place in all the heavens. Hope you’re still hungry.”
Heavens? Plural? Z95 was a city built within a concrete dome. The buildings were tinted brown and covered with muck. Fences were large coils of barbed-wire, and there was no such thing as grass or dirt – only filthy concrete.
Umpei proceeded to the most noticeable building, attracted by the neon lights and shady tenants it seemed. The glowing sign above the entrance said: ‘Velvet Nipple’. Several beings crowded the outside of the place, staring at me as I passed. A muscular man with eight arms acted as a bouncer, letting Umpei ease through without trouble. Customers greeted my green friend as though he was well known. I wondered if I was well known for a day – my death making the front page in a small town’s newspaper: ‘Student Hit By Train…Frozen to Tracks’.
We entered the ‘Velvet Nipple’. Low lighting was expected. The air was smoky and the entertainment was straight ahead. A bar against one wall and a pizza parlor on the other. Strange music blasted the people into a trance. A squid-headed beast grabbed my arm and muttered something that sounded nasty. Umpei was quick to my defense, “He’s mine!” the goblin scolded. “Go do your own work!” I noticed the word ‘work’. The squid-headed beast threatened Umpei and went the other way. “See that pizza place over there?” Umpei pointed – there weren’t any customers. “Wait in there.”
“I thought you said you were hungry.”
“Give me a minute, kid. Business calls.” Umpei gave me a push and disappeared into the tangle of beings around.
I weaved my way across the room to the pizza parlor and sat at the counter. The only employee there was a young woman with good looks. “What do you want?” She asked.
“I…uh. Don’t have any money.”
“Wasted it all out there, huh?” she chuckled.
I looked over my shoulder at the sea of beings mesmerized by the naked dancers in front of them. “No, I’m not interested in that.”
“You smell terrible.”
“I’m sorry.”
The woman laughed. “Where are you from?”
“Uh…a small town.” I replied.
“What brought you here?”
“A train.”
She rolled her eyes. “You want anything?”
I looked at one of the cheese pizzas behind her. “Do I have to pay?” The woman took a used plate from under the counter and wiped it off with a black rag tucked under her belt. She put a piece of it on the plate and gave it to me.
“So what do you do?” She asked as if I knew.
“I don’t know.” I responded – eating what she had given to me.
“I mean…what train did you get off of?”
She was wearing a cross necklace, dangling in front of her apron. “I’m looking for heaven.” I told her.
“Heaven?”
“My friend said this wasn’t hell, so I figure I’m on the right track.”
The woman laughed as Umpei entered the pizza parlor and climbed onto the counter, “You two are quick to the bit.” He said.
“Is this your friend?” The woman asked me.
“Don’t start!” Umpei shouted at the woman as she turned her back and walked away. “If you had any worth, you’d have been gone a long time ago!” The gremlin shifted his attention to me. “She’ll take care of you for the next week – clean you up and get you ready.”
“Ready?” I asked.
“For harvest.” The parlor girl was quick to interject. “You’re a creep, Umpei.”
“Watch your mouth!” He warned. “Don’t listen to her, you’ll be better off. It’ll be a…grand adventure, so meet me here in two days. Got it?”
“Scum.” The parlor girl hissed.
“I wish I could throw you in as a gift, but you’d get thrown back!” Umpei climbed down from the counter. “Get some new clothes, kid. You stink. And remember, two days – and don’t let this one put any funny ideas in your head. She’ll ruin you.” Umpei walked out of the pizza parlor and disappeared into the crowd.
“What was that all about?” I asked the woman who leaned against the counter.
“Business. You’re being sold.”
“Sold?”
“That’s what he does. I should have known when I saw you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
The woman walked to the makeshift wall separating herself and her customers, removing it and gesturing to me. “Come on. Let’s go back to my place and get you some new clothes.”
“You can’t sell people.” I protested.
She walked into the grimy kitchen behind her. Shattered plates mixed with baking flour covered the floor. The walls had long-dried tomato sauce splattered across them and buckets of old dough were everywhere. A barely mobile walrus-looking man with a chef’s hat turned to watch the woman pass. “Take care of the front, Wald.” She said. “Umpty Dumpty calls.” The walrus-man made a deep, rumbling noise as the woman continued to a back room littered with canned vegetables and climbed down a ladder built against a hole in the ground. I followed and a sulfuric metal smell filled my nose.
Sold. Implication: slavery. I had apparently become a function of business.
“He just waits like that.” She carried the conversation as we climbed down the dark tunnel. “Snatches up the helpless saps who get thrown off the trains. They don’t know any better. Never seen the gears and cogs that keep this thing going.”
She was referring to some kind of infrastructure – the organization that Umpei worked for. There’s no way heaven had an infrastructure with rules and jobs, right? I thought heaven was a place where you sat around and watched Lakers games, played chess, and jogged with your grandpa. That’s your reward for getting in…
We came to the bottom of the ladder, the tunnel opening to a foggy hallway. The walls were made of large slime-covered bricks, pipes of different sizes built along the ceiling and manholes every twenty feet along the floor. Stale colored lights provided sight – half of them broken or barely flickering. Other passageways branched off the corridor we had climbed into.
“What train did you say you got off of again?” She asked as I followed her down the corridor.
“I don’t…remember.” I replied.
“Come on. Everybody denies it, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Especially with me. Let’s see, I’ve been kicked off of twelve trains. Secretary, hair stylist, beach bum…now how do you fail at being a beach bum?” She laughed and went on. “Newspaper writer, photographer, parks worker, taste-tester, test-taker, model…that was fun, but my personality didn’t go over too well with the shoot organizers. Magazine coordinator, clothes designer, and riverboat rower.”
“But you work in a pizza parlor…”
“Yeah, after the riverboat debacle, I met Umpei and he tricked me. Tried to sell me twice. Finally stuck me where I’m at and agreed to pay me next to nothing if I took care of his prospects.” We turned down one of the corridors, a subway train was zipping by at the end. “Oh, hurry. I don’t want to wait for the next train!”
We ran down the corridor as the subway train came to a stop. An aged elephant-man climbed off – squeaking with every step. The doors closed after we got on. The inside of the subway car was almost empty. There was a hooded figure in the corner, soaked in its own blood. The woman grabbed one of the poles in the median and held on – I flew against the side of a seat as the train moved. Regaining my balance, I grabbed the same pole the woman had a hold of. Advertisements lined the inside of the car. One of them pictured a woman on her side, sporting black lingerie – something foreign written above her. Cigarette ads with the camel. Some sort of drink, probably alcoholic. Pictures that promised an escape – something to look forward to.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“I don’t…remember.” She replied in a coy fashion. “But someday I’ll go by Natalie Hersh.”
She was beautiful – almost supernaturally so. Her hazel eyes, the way she smiled, and her dark brown hair that went just past her shoulders. Her laugh was boyish, but her voice was enough to make you want to protect her. She made me feel like a warrior, wanting something to look after.
“You should run away.” I told her.
She smiled and shook her head – her teeth were perfect. “You’re serious?”
“Of course I’m serious. I don’t know why someone like you should handle Umpei’s dirty work…”
Natalie’s smile disappeared and she looked to the floor. We didn’t say anything for the rest of the train ride.
FOUR
Once the train stopped, Natalie and I exited into another set of hallways identical to the ones prior to getting on the train. The subway sped away behind us. She greeted an old woman washing her clothes by the side of a dirty puddle – the old woman smiled a hole full of gums in return. Natalie pushed aside a piece of cloth covering the doorway to her living quarters.
The living room was small and tidy. Two cushioned chairs, a faded picture of a celebrity, and a dusty cot were some of the features filling the room. A small kitchen area had a refrigerator, a dripping sink, and a bowl of spotted fruit. An ancient two-deck tape-player was the only entertainment available. Natalie pushed aside another cloth, revealing an even smaller room. It was her bathroom. A hole in the ground was her wash basin, a few plants scattered the area, hanging on for life.
Natalie filled the basin with water. “Jump in.” She said. “I’ll see if I can find you some clean clothes.”
After Natalie left, I undressed and stepped into the murky water. There was a small bookcase on the far wall – I couldn’t read half of the titles because of their small print or foreign characteristics. A stack of dice-shaped cubes sat in a tray at the washing basin’s edge. Examining one, I determined from the flowery smell that it was soap.
I dissolved one of the cubes into foamy bubbles and sank down to my neck in the water, continuing to stare at the bookcase and decipher what I could. Dancing with Life. I could picture it. Spinning in a mirrored ballroom. The tenants wore masks – except Life of course. It wore a laurel on its head, a lightning bolt across its back like a bow, and a pair of Greek sandals with a white gown made of mist. Life was almost transparent, but it – like the mirrors – had a tendency to reflect an unpleasant image of yourself. The masks that covered the dancer’s faces depicted beasts. Lions, eagles, horses, and bears. I didn’t have a mask – I was man himself, dancing with Life. Half-human, half-goat satyrs harped away to the side. I was unmasked and naked. Vulnerable and dancing. And there was Life – staring at me with the same eyes I stared back.
Natalie returned, a set of clothes hanging over her arm. She brought one of the two chairs from the living quarters with her, placing it at the basin’s edge and promptly occupying it. “How’s the water?” she asked.
“It’s fine.”
“That’s good…see anything you like over there?” She was referring to the bookcase.
“I uh…didn’t really look.”
“Oh. Don’t you read?”
“Kind of…some class-work here and there.”
“Class-work?”
“Statistics, history…a couple others – before I got on the train.”
“Where are you from again?” I didn’t answer. “I bet you’re a spy.” She said, standing and taking a text from the bookcase.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“You’re so secretive.” She flipped through the pages of the text – it was one of the many I couldn’t read. “Let the water under the heavens gather together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” She read from it. “And so it was. God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters the sea.”
“Is that the Bible?”
“The what? No – my granny gave me this book a long time ago.” She continued to read: “And let the Earth produce growing things – let there be plants that bear seed and trees that bear fruit. And so it was. God cared for His children in the creation of our world.”
“Where am I?” I asked. “What is this place?”
“Do you think everything was born from the sea?” She answered my question with a question.
“I’m serious.”
Natalie shrugged. “I dunno.”
“What do you call it?”
“Gaia block, level one nine eight three. It’s just apartments.”
“No, not this place, I meant everything, and why are you reading that to me?”
“I thought you’d like it.” She said sheepishly.
“It’s alright…” I backed off.
“Some people live their lives for this stuff, but not me. I’m going to be famous someday. All over the trains – my body, my face. People will stare at me and say ‘there’s Natalie Hersh’. Rah. Rah.” Natalie imitated the sound of cheers. “That way I’ll never die.” The word ‘die’ rang through my mind. Die. Die…‘That way I’ll never die’. Is that it? The lure of immortality and being forever recognized. “Besides,” Natalie continued, “I figure the only choice we have in this world is what we decide to make it – you know?”
She had a point. How much of the world was a product of our own mind – of our own choices? And how much was a product of the group – the collective nature of humanity? There didn’t seem to be an answer, but there was something deeper – perhaps only God knew, or perhaps it was God who was created by the individual in the first place. Perhaps not. If I ever met Him, I’d ask Him myself.
“I can see that.” I finished our conversation, sinking further into the bath and keeping my mouth shut. The truth was, I wanted Natalie, but I couldn’t have her. The world she created was much different than the one I was going to have. Our destinies were on different tracks although our trains were parked in the same station…for the time being.
FIVE
I waited until the middle of the night. After my bath, Natalie provided me with a new wardrobe, a small bowl of rice, and a pillow to sleep on. She slept on her cot in the living area. I was on the floor. It was uncomfortable and smelt like day-old milk. I’d pretended to sleep until I could hear Natalie’s quiet snore. She had been kind to me, and I wished that I could wake her to say ‘thank you’, but it was impossible. I walked to the edge of her cot, kissed her hand, and said “Goodbye”.
I exited Natalie’s living quarters into the foggy hallway with stale, flickering lights. The old woman who was washing her clothes sat in the same spot, her body curled against the wall fast asleep. I was careful to step over her shawl and make no noise as I navigated my way back to the subway station.
The trains were still running – one of the reasons I was able to stay awake. Lighted grids and maps caught my attention at the terminal. There was no way to tell where I was at from the larger perspective – just lost with a lottery of directions – arrows pointing me to random places.
The next train stopped in front of me – the doors opening and inviting me in. I hesitated, thinking of Natalie Hersh. If I got on the train, it was doubtful that I’d ever see her again. Any hope of running away with her would come to an end. But I couldn’t stay to live out Umpei’s plan, and it seemed hopeless to try and convince Natalie to run away with me.
The doors started to close, I hurried and climbed aboard. Seconds later, the subway train began to move. There was nobody else on the train – I was alone. Natalie Hersh was gone and I hoped she would find her own way. She was after immortality and I wasn’t. Her pursuit of scarring Legend’s sacred stone followed a separate set of tracks – my train was a runaway, tearing recklessly into the unknown and forgetting the threads of Time itself.
There was a small display on the upper area of the subway car, showing the multiple drop-off points and loading docks – I couldn’t read the language describing the train’s route. There were various symbols and marks – some linked and others standing by themselves. To a lot of people, the symbols meant something. Like magic. As if a sorcerer enchanted them, tying invisible strings to each of the letters and symbols. The map had pictures as well. I could depict food and sleep. Every five minutes or so, the subway train stopped at the next loading dock. The doors would open, nobody would get on, and we would keep going.
Trying to make sense out of the foreign words in front of me, I thought back to the passage Natalie had read to me from her mysterious text. It was the Bible. Although she didn’t know it, lifetimes past, nations and cultures were built to worship those words. Wars were fought on the premise of scripture. People died for it. But why? Because they interpreted them differently – that was my best guess. Some say the Bible was made up – the dirtiest hoax of all-time. Others believe the Bible’s teachings, spreading its word and selling God’s power like a salesman. Holy. Divine. Did God really speak to priests and disciples? Who knows, but the truth was: fighting and dying over such words seemed to be pointless. Who’s right and who’s wrong? But really, who cares when everybody else doesn’t seem to listen anyway? My mind was spinning as fast as the train was moving. At least the bath had cured my headache.
Perhaps the real answers were beyond the realm of comprehension. Perhaps not, and perhaps a little bit of both. Staring at the grids and maps gave me no direction as I couldn’t decipher the arrows. Concrete walls sped by outside of the subway car. It was a prison – the entire place. I was running from one cell to the next, not finding satisfaction in being complacent like the rest. I wasn’t satisfied to just exist and I wasn’t satisfied to die.
There was a feeling in my gut that was hard to read. A feeling of partial excitement and partial fear. As if the butterflies were there, but they were calm. Making me tense, but relaxing me at the same time. Eventually, the sound of the walls speeding by blurred with the rhythm of the subway bumping over its tracks. I lost Natalie, but seemed to have found a train. It was comforting to know I was able to make my own decisions in this strange world, and I didn’t need to rely on others to make them for me. Trying to ignore the thoughts in my head, I focused my mind on the set of heavy eyelids hanging in front of my face…sleep would be nice…
SIX
My eyes were closed, but I wasn’t surrounded by darkness. The summer sun gave warmth to my skin and the sound of a soft breeze relaxed my body. I was lying in a thick patch of green angel hair grass under the swirling blues of open sky and against a large tree – its shadows stretching the opposite way. A woman’s hand glided over the edge of my face – She hummed a beautiful song to the tune of the peace which rested with us.
My heart felt dense and alive – a feeling I never remembered to be true. A feeling that brought security and light. A feeling of purpose and wholeness. Opening my eyes, I saw Her face, Her piercing green eyes and Her golden brown hair that flared with a reddish hue which bore Chaos to the world. She smiled, not breaking Her magical hum and I smiled back – both of us finding the meaning of life in each other’s eyes.
I tried to remember Her name…I tried to remember where we were and when this had happened – but I couldn’t. My mind was blank, my voice was mute, but I knew it was real, and I knew that She loved me.
“Last night a visitor came…” She sang. “…with flowing blonde hair and loving skin. So angelic she smelled like Sin.” Her voice was gentle and mesmerizing. “God don’t let me live in the shade of the Fiddle Tree…ever again…”
I stirred from the world of dreams, sitting for a moment – trying to let the sleepy sunshine of my dreams bleed through and beyond the stale and colorless afterlife world I’d seemed to have stumbled upon. Although my body didn’t move, my eyes shifted through the open subway train doors in front of me, several soft red lights were flashing from the displays all around. The train had stopped at an ominous and empty loading dock where crumpled newspaper pages fluttered strangely in a thick and breezeless air. The subway displays were useless in their undecipherable state. At the end of the loading dock, there were four doors, three of them blocked by steel bars and the last providing a dark and uninviting entrance to an unknown place.
Go…
A chill shot through my spine – a whisper in the air. Or was it in my head? Suddenly, I no longer felt safe sitting in the subway car – I no longer felt the bright rays of light on the sunny side of the Fiddle Tree.
Hurriedly, I wiped the stream of drool from the side of my face, stood up, and exited the subway train, looking over my shoulder to check if the vehicle was my source of panic. But it wasn’t.
The loading dock was large, enclosed, and made of concrete. It looked like an empty underground parking lot and smelt of ink – the same smell you would expect to find between the pages of a newly published book – hanging in the dense air.
Being spooked brought back memories of an old school teacher I used to have. And although he taught science and most of the things he would say were rooted in empirical fact, his explanation of a chill – the very thing that had driven me from the confines of the subway train – was ethereal and baseless. He said there were only two things that caused a chill: either someone had just knelt before your grave, or your soul was touched by an angel – a guardian spirit trying to seize your wandering attention.
See yourself…
Another chill and the strange sensation that I wasn’t alone on the loading dock. Someone – something – knew that I was there. The air in the concrete bay moved without as much as a breeze. One of the possessed newspaper pages caught itself on my leg with the invisible wind. There was a black and white picture of an old locomotive, passengers seeming to get on board. There was a spot of green on the page. Looking closer, I saw that it was Her eyes – it was the girl who hummed in the sunshine from my first afterlife slumber. Reaching down to grab the worn page, it tumbled away from my leg and into the darkness of the one open doorway at the end of the loading dock.
The feeling of being watched was suddenly gone and the subway train no longer seemed haunted. But I was curious to know – I needed to know – who She was and why Her picture seemed to suddenly haunt me. My dream had brought comfort, a sense of being home, and at this moment – in a place where I was lost and all alone – I wished I could go home, wherever and whatever that really and truly was.
I entered the dark doorway and felt my way along the walls, my eyes were wide open and I couldn’t see a thing. That same school teacher once asked if we were to lose one of our senses, which would we choose and why? None of my peers chose sight even though they were already blind. Not in the sense that their eyeballs didn’t work, but in the sense that their brains weren’t taught to make their eyeballs work. We sang the ABC’s and took naps. Hot lunches and spelling tests. We’d play football at recess and stick gum to the bottom of our desks. Develop crushes that none of us had any intention of letting out beyond the realm of notes and hearsay. Our eyeballs weren’t taught to taste hot lunches and develop crushes. Our eyeballs weren’t taught to sing the ABC’s and take spelling tests. They were taught nothing…nothing that would help us to see the world for what it really was.
I felt my way around a corner and saw light coming from another doorway. I exited the dark hallway, finding myself in a city similar in build to Z95. It was a dome of concrete and the buildings were dirty and old. There were noticeable differences, however. The city appeared to be deserted. Newspapers littered the streets, and the smell of ink was still very strong. There were two texts lying against the side of a building, torn and battered – another book waterlogged in a puddle to the side. In the center of the city, there was a large tomb-like building, its architecture archaic and crude. Stone steps led to the entrance of the building, a clock tower extending itself upwards to the concrete ceiling above. Etched in the stone above the entrance was: ‘Zimbazzi’s Library’.
I sensed the fleeing specter – the watchful presence from the subway loading dock continue to move away from me and towards the building of books ahead. Walking towards the library, I witnessed a set of books in a scrap – as if possessed themselves, the inside of their covers were filled with sharp teeth. One of them tried to escape while the other tore at its cover. There were other stray books, and they all seemed to be out to damage one another. Many of the texts I saw rampaging the streets of this strange city were ugly and scarred from their barbaric endeavors.
As I approached the library, the great stone doors opened themselves and several texts scrambled to be free of its confines.
Here…
The specter whispered, the newspaper picture with Her face trapped inside tumbled past my feet and into the building which beckoned me in. I hesitated for a moment, as it suddenly seemed that something darker was at work in this seemingly haunted and abandoned city. But I had to know – I needed to know who She was and why our fates wrestled with one another amongst dreams of happiness and buildings of renegade books.
I climbed the stairs and entered the library. At first it was quiet, the library’s shelves were mostly empty and the floor was littered with shredded pages and torn book covers. The heavy doors closed behind me, the sound of stone hitting stone echoing eerily through the dusty interior.
The feeling of being watched had irrefutably returned. I scanned the littered ground for the newspaper with Her face and beautiful green eyes, but it seemed to be gone – vanishing again amidst an invisible cloud of swirling sorcery, simple parlor tricks, and subtle Fiddle sticks. The watchful presence made me feel uneasy and trapped – butterflies beginning to take flight in my stomach.
Remember who you are…
The whisper took on a bit of inflection. It was Her, and it was comforting. But the moment was short-lived. The sounds of shuffling and tumbling approached, spilling out of the tunnels and denizens of a once finely kept library. Mounds of books and thick texts swarmed towards me, shouting at one another as their teeth-filled covers flapped in the air. “Look at me!” One of the books shouted, others being buried under the wave of texts. Some of their covers were torn, stitched up, and torn again. Some had beautiful covers – artwork, fancy lettering, and brilliant colors. And others had no covers at all, dragging themselves behind the rest in a pitiful manner.
The wave of books knocked me over. Most were trying to gain my attention, others pounded against the double stone doors that held them in. “Me, me!” called a screeching voice. “Outta the way, Princess! He was looking at me!” One of the texts pushed itself before my eyes. “I’ll fix that!” Another book began to shred its brethren. Others replaced the damaged text in my face. “Look at me! Look at me!”
Flailing my arms and legs, I threw the pile of books away as best as I could. Every text had empty pages – they told no stories and attempted to eat mine. Tempers flared and the texts argued over my interest and snapped like wild beasts. It was a mudslide that was hard to escape, but eventually I did, running at random through the corridors of the library. Some of the books gave chase, more joining as I passed, but I kept moving until I found safety up a flight of stairs.
I stopped at the end of another corridor and dropped to my knees in the shadows of more bookcases. The shelves snored away as more savage texts rested up for another day of action. I could see the first floor beneath me through a nearby railing and finely weaved wire fence. Chaos continued to manifest itself below, causing quite a commotion, but my attention quickly concentrated itself on two texts that held a conversation on the other side of the bookcase I knelt by. One of the books bullied the other.
“Do you want this job or not?” the bully book shouted. There wasn’t a response. “Answer me! Do you want it or not?”
“Yes, BW.”
“Call me sir!”
“Yes, sir.” The coward book cried.
“That’ll cost you three pages! Now spit’em out!” The helpless text opened its bruised cover. The bully ripped three pages from the coward’s inside and ate them. “Now get back to work!” It commanded, shuffling away.
The helpless text drug itself across the floor in an obedient fashion, coming around the corner and screaming at my sight. By reaction, I grabbed the book, shut its cover, and muffled its voice. “Shhhh. Shhh.” I reassured it with a whisper. “It’s okay, just be quiet. I won’t hurt you.” The screaming died down and I set the helpless text on the ground. It looked sad, its cover giving home to a number of healed scars and sporting a title about iridology.
“Did Zimbazzi send you?” it reluctantly asked.
“No.” I said, noticing its pages which were filled with words. “I came from the subway.”
“Oh…so you’ve seen the outside world…”
“Well, not really, but maybe…in a way I suppose. You look so sad.” I avoided its question.
“It’s my lot in life.” The book responded. “I’m cursed and doomed to live like this forever.”
“That’s not true.” The words flew out of my mouth without much thought.
“Just look at me. Look at all of us. I refuse to act like they do. And for what? Zimbazzi laughs at them, and yet they continue to be savages.”
The text was awfully open, its despair and carelessness showing through. “Who exactly is Zimbazzi?” I asked.
“He’s the dictator, the regent, the foul wizard who created this miserable mess.”
“I take it he’s the one in charge…”
“Of the library, the city, and all of the books in between. I’ve not seen the light of day in many years I would guess. I try to misbehave so they’ll take all my pages, but they don’t go as fast as I’d like. I don’t want to remember how this all started. I don’t want to remember the life that I had before.”
“That’s terrible.” I said.
“Nobody cares.” The book continued. “There won’t be anyone to read me when all is said and done.”
“I care.”
“You don’t, and you won’t when you live in a world such as this. Only writers who don’t write and readers who don’t read. It’s quite miserable being a text and realizing it in a world of texts that don’t realize it. Perhaps the hurt will go away if they hurt me enough.”
“Which is better?” I proposed. “Hurting and realizing it, or hurting and not knowing that it hurts?”
The book turned away from me. “Sometimes, I’m not sure I know…in any case, I’d better get back to work.”
“Wait!” The helpless text stopped as I spoke. “What if I want to leave? I’ll take you with me!”
“You can’t leave.” The text explained. “Once you’re in, you never get out. When the clock strikes midnight, you’ll be turned to a tome…like the rest of us. It’s Zimbazzi’s curse that haunts this old library.” I thought of the clock tower at the top of the building. “It’s half past eleven.” The book continued. “Could be morning though, it’s easy to lose track of Time.”
Don’t be afraid…
Her whisper calmed the butterflies in my stomach and for a moment – just a split second, I felt confident and powerful. No longer naked in my dance with Life, its laurels, and its masked animal companions. I felt as though I was protected, but the feeling was fleeting – a slight glimpse, I suppose, into a life long forgotten.
“What about the clock tower.” I asked. “Is there a way to get there?”
“Books can’t climb, so it’s of no use to us. But there’s a ladder around here somewhere if you wish to find it.”
“I do, and I want you to come with me.” I said, the absent feeling of being strong leaving a wind of inspiration in its wake.
“Zimbazzi’s up there. If I’m discovered, it’s likely he’ll feed me to his furnace.” The helpless text refused my offer. “There are many dreadful stories within that hot stove – I’d prefer not to add to its collection.”
“Please…” I begged.
“I must defer. My goal is to forget myself without dying…I’m sorry.”
The helpless text drug itself away. The implications of its last words weighed heavily on my mind as I began my search for a ladder. ‘My goal is to forget myself without dying’. Natalie wanted to be remembered with death and the helpless text wanted to be forgotten without death. Given the opportunity to leave, it stays behind, afraid of filling all of its pages at once. Instead it chooses to waste away with Time in the den of its own remorse. As though it had greatness once – and could have it again – but instead decides to remain helpless.
I found the dusty ladder leading to an ominous room above – it was made of wood and seemed old, although it supported my weight as I climbed it. The next room was small and full of cobwebs. Three candles huddled together and came to life as they saw me. One of them crawled along the floor and led me through a hallway, the other two following behind. I felt as though I was entering a kingdom where I wasn’t allowed. The chilling presence from before was somewhere near, haunting the hallway that its candlelit carriers guided me through.
“Come no further!” the ethereal voice that had welcomed me to the library before now shouted its warning. The candles didn’t stop and I felt obligated to follow. A wooden door at the end of the hallway slammed shut. “Come no further!” The ethereal voice shouted again. The heavy wooden door was locked – the voice came from the other side. The three candles bent their flames to the door until it took fire. “Go back! Please!” I could hear the wizard fleeing up a flight of stairs.
Don’t stop…
Again, a sense of courage shot through my veins and my soul took flight from my body. I watched myself kick at the burning door over and over, splinters fraying from the wooden blockade until finally, the door collapsed and I ran through. While I had no control over the actions of my body, I couldn’t help but experience the sensation that I had been here before – or at least somewhere similar at some point in Time. Just like the Fiddle Tree and Her beautiful song. When did it happen, or had it happened yet? This was slightly different, however. I already knew what my body was about to do, as though I had succumbed to a sudden spell of déjà vu.
I stood at the bottom of the clock tower, a staircase spiraling up to the gears and cogs that made the place function. From my out-of-body standpoint, I caught a glimpse of the wizard and his silly purple-starred tunic as he disappeared into the machinery above. “Go back! Go back!” he cried with panic – he was nothing more than an angry adolescent wearing a ridiculous pointy hat, his face riddled with zits and oozing with puss. Quickly, my body raced up the stairs, skipping every other step. “Oh my flames! My furnace, why have you betrayed me?” the wizard’s voice cracked as he referred to his enchanted candles. My spirit followed my physical being to the top of the stairs – gears and cogs spinning around us. Levers acted on their own as chains went up and down, allowing the great machine to dictate the world below. The clock’s arms indicated that it was eleven forty. Zimbazzi began pulling on a chain as fast as he could, speeding the clock’s pace at an alarming rate. Eleven forty-two. Eleven forty-four. My body rushed at him, my arms reaching for and unsheathing a phantom sword. Zimbazzi fell away from the chain and his face filled with fear. For a moment, I felt bad for the angry youth and hoped my body would stop. He was defeated and broken, his world tumbling before him as my body grabbed hold of the Time-changing chains and reversed its direction.
“Who are you, and why won’t you leave?” Zimbazzi cried on the floor, his voice no longer ethereal and haunting.
As Time flew backwards, my specter was engulfed by a jarring vision. I was back under the Fiddle Tree, my eyes were shut and my ears once again listened to Her beautiful song: ‘So angelic she smelled like Sin…God, don’t let me live in the shade of the Fiddle Tree…ever again…’ Her voice drifted away as the warmth on my face became cool. I opened my eyes and She was gone, a tail of dust swirling where She once was and scattering in the growing wind. I now sat in the shade of the Fiddle Tree, the skies turning red and gray, the tree’s leaves withering and falling around me. Great comets of destruction flew above me as the angelic green grass grew into flames. Large pieces of the world broke off around me, allowing pillars of black smoke to escape the depths below. I turned to look back at the Fiddle Tree, but it was now gone. Instead, Her broken, mutilated, and now lifeless body hung on a blood-soaked cross, the backdrop a bevy of free-flowing lava streams.
I snapped away from the terrible image, my soul quickly regaining control of my body. The reversal of Time had turned Zimbazzi into a mere child – tears streaming down his face. I took my hand off of the chain and allowed the world of this strange city to return to normal.
“Please,” the little boy wizard sobbed, “don’t leave me up here…he’ll punish me for failing.”
I wanted to ask the boy who he spoke of, but other thoughts took prominence in my mind. Instead, I extended my hand and Zimbazzi took it. We climbed down from the clock tower. The candles were gone and the library was full of people again. A woman burst from the crowd, her stare directly on the child that held my hand. “Zim! Where have you been?” She took hold of him aggressively. “You have lots of schoolwork to do, and the library isn’t a place for children with reading problems.”
The woman scampered away with the wizard-to-be, and I slowly made my way out of the now restored library. Two men brawled in an alleyway, their once fine clothing torn and dirty. “Shut up Eddie!” One of the men shouted between punches. “Fink didn’t give you a discount for that filthy suit!”
“Oh yeah?” The other man retorted. “You’re only jealous because everybody sees me first!” The fight continued – my ignorance was welcome.
Some things were bound not to change regardless of appearance and circumstance – regardless of what the eye can see. But other things were bound to be ever-shifting. Transforming and illusive despite our best efforts to capture it. I sought truth in the beauty of Her voice. Of the warmth on my face and the gentle touch of Her hand. I sought truth on the sunny side of the Fiddle Tree and found a slippery dark ending instead. But She couldn’t be dead. She whispered to me. She took my body and my invisible sword and cut down a cowering wizard in a library of cursed books. She showed me a part of my being that I had never seen, and for that, I felt very thankful.
I made it back to the empty subway loading dock – the newspapers no longer fluttered in an eerie ink-filled breeze. The subway train was still there, the red lights were still flashing, and the passenger doors were still open. I sat down in the same train car that I had once fled, now knowing that I was no longer being watched. Although the disturbing image of seeing Her lifeless body before me made my journey back to the world of dreams difficult, I remained hopeful that Her voice would return and my soul would drift back to the sunny side of the Fiddle Tree.
SEVEN
“Wake up!” A familiar voice shook me from my sleep. My eyes opened lazily, finding Natalie Hersh standing before me. She had a hold of my shoulders and looked me in the eye. “Come on.” She pulled me to my feet.
“Huh?” My grogginess added to the confusion.
“Hurry! Come on!” Natalie’s voice was urgent. The subway car was full of passengers and moved at a high speed. A strange man with tentacles hanging from his mouth moved out of Natalie’s way as she pulled me towards the door leading to the next subway car.
“What’s going on?” I found the sense to ask, bumping into a tusked being whose face looked like an agitated puffer fish. It made an angry sound and pushed me with an appendage.
The door at the back of our subway car opened. Two crow-headed humanoids entered in uniform, carrying machine guns. Seeing Natalie and I flee, one of the black bird soldiers crowed, raising its weapon and firing. Careless aim worked to our advantage as Natalie exited the subway car and guided me to the next.
“We’re being shot at.” I stated the obvious out loud.
“I’ll explain later!” Natalie pushed her way through the next car of passengers. The crow attackers weren’t far behind, shooting at us with just a glimpse. Natalie continued from one car to the next, pushing an obese octopus-armed man into the doorway to slow the crows. “Excuse me…thank you…” Natalie weaved through the crowd to another exit door. Instead of continuing to flee, Natalie ducked under the chain railing guarding the flimsy bridge between cars and climbed onto the side of the train. “Come on!” she looked at me as if this was an everyday task.
“Tell me what’s happening.” I looked back into the previous train car. The crow soldiers were still struggling to get past the octopus-armed fatty.
“Do you want to go to Hell?” She asked, catching my attention. “Then follow me.”
Hell? The mention of the word was like an anchor, tied to my foot. A man resembling a seahorse looked at me as if I didn’t belong on the train. I felt like I was sinking and the only hand reaching under the surface to save me was Natalie’s. I didn’t know why I was sinking, but I got the sense that even if Natalie pulled me up, there wasn’t an escape from the dark abyss below. It was as if Fate was a great white, lurking under me and waiting until I gave up. What were my choices? Take Natalie’s hand or sink like a buried treasure that wouldn’t be found.
One of the black bird soldiers fired its machine gun at me, the bullets ricocheting against the steel framing of the subway car. I ducked under the chain railing and followed Natalie. She climbed around the side of the train, the walls of the subway passing by with a blur. “We’re going to have to jump.” Natalie shouted over the noise around us.
“We can’t jump!” I said – the great white was waiting.
“We have to or we’ll die!”
One of the crow soldiers leaned around the front of the subway car, making an awful noise and signaling that it had captured its prey. Another crow soldier leaned around the subway car from the other end. They fired their machine guns at us. Natalie jumped and I felt myself sinking again. Her hand was gone and I panicked. I was short on breath and thrashed for the surface. One of the bullets tore away the skin on my forearm. I let my body loose, falling away from the train.
The only thing I could do was hope. An arbitrary belief in the midst of elements beyond my control. Like a devout follower, kneeling before my Father – my bed. Clasping my hands together and falling away from the train. Some say a prayer keeps you above water – keeps you believing in that which you can’t see. Like the dark abyss and the great white. You know it’s there, but you can’t see it until you’re already in its jaws. Drowning instinct and feeling leads to the bottom of the ocean. Sunken ships and buried treasures. The answers were there – they must be – I just had to believe.
What happened next wasn’t entirely clear. A sharp pain in my shoulder and my body was spinning. Rolling end over end and suddenly to a stop. Dim lights buzzed above me, the subway train fading in the distance. Natalie Hersh leaned into sight. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.” I responded, not sure how to feel.
She took my hand and helped me up. “We have to get out of here.”
“What’s happening?” I felt like a broken record, trying to get the anchor off of my foot.
“Umpei knows you’ve run away.”
“I’m not going back.” I told her.
“Neither am I.” Natalie and I walked down the subway tunnel. She was half distracted, looking for a way out. “I was a coward not to listen to you in the first place.”
My shoulder was bleeding, but it wasn’t that bad. “How did you find me?” I asked.
“You were all over the news. Front page of every paper from top to bottom.” She hesitated. “Defeated the great wizard, Zimbazzi.”
“Great wizard…” I mocked her words, thinking back to the harmless boy. Natalie stopped next to a steel grate, removing it and leaving the subway tunnel. I followed, wondering what was going through her mind. “Do you ever pray?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“Why do you ask that?” I should’ve expected her to be rhetorical.
Rectangular lights were built into the walls, most were covered with muck and grime, preventing them from allowing sight beyond the length of your arm. We waded into murky water, going deeper as the hallway continued. The sound of rushing water got louder and louder. “My mother always said you could tell what kind of a person somebody was through their belief in God.”
“Do you believe in God?” she guarded herself by asking another question.
I didn’t answer – I couldn’t answer. But I suppose it was a prerequisite provided my quest. Where does one go without faith in the final destination? The hallway opened to a large room filled with dark water, like a fish tank with its light turned off. On the side of the room, a large pipe opening provided streams of filthy waste water, pouring into the pool in front of us. Straight across the room, there was another hallway – the stink of sewage around us. The floor at the opening of the hallway dropped off. Natalie swam out into the room and towards the other opening – I followed reluctantly. My final destination was unknown, but it didn’t prevent me from continuing on. I needed answers, and Natalie was right. We had to jump. We had to move or it was over. Perhaps the man with the puffer fish face, the octopus fatty, and the confused seahorse were accustom to living underwater. Being stagnant made them sink – being stagnant transformed them.
Natalie reached the other hallway first, turning to help me out of the water. We were in the bowels of nowhere it seemed. Running, trudging, and swimming without any real explanation. Natalie continued to lead us through the maze of murky water.
“You should’ve told me you were leaving.” Natalie seemed more concerned than strict. “The world’s a dangerous place you know…”
“Were those Umpei’s men? The crows?”
“Government soldiers. Umpei is a dark-dealing General. A big player in the slave business.” The mention of government hinted at a notion of organization to some extent. “Keep’em on the trains or keep’em where they can’t be seen.” Natalie looked back at me. “That’s their slogan – that’s what chases us.”
“Who runs the whole thing?”
“Nobody really knows.” Natalie shrugged. “I heard a rumor that it’s the devil himself. Sitting up there, watching his world below. I asked Umpei a long time ago and he put me to work. Told me not to be nosy.” We walked through ankle-deep scum, my shoulder stinging from swimming in the dirty water. “Like a hawk – he, she, whatever it is – swoops down and takes out those who fight back…those who look up.”
Zimbazzi’s last words to me echoed through my mind: ‘don’t leave me up here…he’ll punish me for failing.’
“Where do we go from here?” I asked Natalie.
“We hide. Swim far enough below the surface so that we can’t be seen.”
“Then what?”
“Pray that we don’t run out of air.”
EIGHT
After trudging a while, Natalie and I came across a pocket of colonies filled with eccentric, poverty-stricken people who were abnormally short with round pudgy faces. They built their homes in circular alcoves that broke adjacent to the tunnel we were following. Their doorways were simple – a piece of cloth secluded one from another. Water dripped from the ceiling and the walls were moist. The smell of rot filled my nostrils. I tried to breathe through my mouth, but the smell was so strong it made me feel as though I was eating it.
Natalie pushed aside a piece of cloth to one of the alcoves and entered. The room was surprisingly large compared to our previous surroundings, but remained small in the grand scheme of things. An old man with a stick sat across the alcove next to a pool of water. He churned the stick through the pool, focusing on his task at hand.
“Stay here.” Natalie said as I sat down, giving my legs a rest.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to figure out where we are. I shouldn’t be long.”
“Do you have any food?” I asked.
“I’ll find something, just stay here.”
Natalie left the alcove, leaving me accompanied by the sound of dripping water and the old man’s hoarse breathing. I couldn’t see the alphas and betas of the universe, but I could feel them all around me. At work like a bunch of construction workers. They built hope – dreams. They built environments and personalities. They built looks, luck, and losers. They built the world, and they built people.
“If you’re hungry, I’ve got a little something over here.” The old man coughed through his scratchy voice. “Come on,” he beckoned, “I didn’t mean to, but I grabbed my biggest eel today. Too much to eat for an old man.”
Eel? I stood up and walked across the room. Normally I wouldn’t have dare tried the creature, but my stomach was grumbling and I was desperate to taste anything besides the rot. I sat down on a lifeless rock across the small pool from the old man. The pool itself was tinted yellow-brown and gave home to hundreds of eels. The old man’s churning agitated them.
“It’s right over there if you want a piece.” The old man motioned with his head to the side of the pool. Laying on a piece of newspaper was a large eel and a machete. The head was already cut off and a small section thereafter which the old man must’ve eaten. The newspaper was wet and flies hovered around the dead creature. “Just dip it in that sauce over there and you can’t even taste the death.” There was a bowl of dark liquid sitting next to the newspaper.
Picking up the machete, I cut off a piece of the eel. The skin was tough to cut through, but the meat was watery and severed quite easily.
“It’s a shame really. He was the leader.” The old man was referring to the dead eel. I put the piece of meat in my mouth – it was warm and salty. “Look at all of’em…” The eels swirled together around the old man’s stick, creating havoc and striking against one another. “It was an accident you know? Grabbing that one.”
“Yeah…” I said with courtesy.
The old man splashed his stick against the surface of the water. “They don’t know any better. Not sure why he’s gone, or what took him. Why did it happen?” The old man shrugged. Alphas and betas swirled in that pool, and they were swirling through the old man’s words. “Sacrifice…I didn’t mean to grab that one.”
I cut off a larger piece of meat and devoured it. The warm flesh slid down my throat like jelly.
“On the Viper Plains, you learn life as symbols.” The old man churned the pool again with his stick. “The serpent is always shedding its skin, it’s the magic of becoming slippery. It hides underwater for illusion. Distorting itself and causing its worshipers to lose faith – to become its prey. My mentor told me only those who can grasp the serpent from its illusionary world can come to understand themselves and where they stand with the nature of things.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
The old man lashed out, reaching his hand into the pool of eels and grabbing one of the helpless creatures from its habitat. Holding it above the water, the eel struggled at first, but the old man’s grasp drained its life away. When the eel stopped moving, the old man threw it against the wall to his right. “To conquer illusion brings understanding to one’s universe. To these eels, we sit in the sky and because they’re shrouded with illusion, we cannot be seen. They swim for the surface, like fools wrapped in their own slipperiness, trying to see the force that disrupts their world.” The old man held up his stick. “Arbitrarily, we destroy them and they don’t understand.” The old man put his stick back in the pool – the eels swirling at the surface around the invading obstacle. “If you cannot grab the serpent in its illusion, you cannot understand the difference in your life and the forces that affect it any different than the serpent cannot understand the difference between the stick and myself.”
I stared into the pool, watching the eels spin around the old man’s stick. He was right, in a strange sort of way. We’re all serpents in a world of churning sticks it seemed. I never thought of who held the stick – what power was behind the power? And what power did that power pray and worship to? How small we might be. How inconceivable the universe really was. What do these eels mean? The old man had mentioned sacrifice. For what? The powers above – the stick in the water? They were different things, and nobody would ever know until it was too late. Until the old man looked the eel in the eye before slamming it against the wall and vanquishing its life.
“Give it a try.” The old man urged me to grab one of the eels.
I didn’t say anything. Instead, I plunged my hand into the pool. Clenching my fist around one of the eels – the creature slipped away before I could carry it out of the water. I tried again, grabbing at another eel and ending with the same result.
The old man chuckled and leaned against the wall behind him, leaving his churning stick at the pool’s edge. He closed his eyes and drifted into his own illusionary world.
Hours passed, and I splashed my hand through the water unsuccessfully. The walls were built of layered stone, a dark brown in color with fungus growing on them. What was this place? Not the old man’s alcove, but all of it. ‘The Great Birth Canal’, the subways, the pizza parlor, the city of books…
Natalie’s hand pulled me from under the water once again. She entered the alcove with two poorly wrapped sandwiches. “What are you doing over there?” She saw me sitting at the old man’s pool.
“Nothing, just keeping myself entertained.” I shook the dirty water from my hand and crossed the alcove.
“I figured you’d be resting. Here.” Natalie handed me one of the poorly wrapped sandwiches. The bread was hard and the contents consisted of fungus and other smelly things. “It’s all I could find.”
“Do you know where we’re at?”
“Yeah. Level one, one, ninety-seven. Quarantine ducts.” Natalie took a bite of her sandwich.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means we’re in the middle of nowhere. I mean, not nowhere, we can get out of here pretty easy, but nowhere in the sense that nobody will come down here looking for us.”
“That’s good.”
Natalie took another bite of her sandwich and threw it against the wall. “I’m sick of this! I’m sick of watching every train I could take pass me by. I want to be famous! I want to see the world and be a part of it! Get married and be happy…” She sighed, shattering a glossed look in her eye. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I said.
“I get frustrated.”
I sat in silence for a moment. “So let’s do something about it.” The word ‘let’s’ had slipped out, like one of the eels trying to escape my grasp. “Whatever this place is…I want out of it too! We can help each other.”
Natalie smiled and shook her head. “I’m sorry I lost my temper, it’s been a long day.” She leaned against the wall just as the old man had and closed her eyes. “I’m gonna get some sleep. Don’t run off on me again, I was really worried about you.”
The sound of dripping water echoed through the alcove. Natalie fell asleep and I stared at the old man’s pool of eels.
NINE
“She’s still out there.” An old woman’s voice came from the shadows behind me. “Fighting, searching, struggling, and crying. She loves you.” The old woman’s words put tears in my eyes. “You have to be careful, the body is but a shell of who we really are. Our spirit and soul seek what we truly want – follow them and perhaps you will find your way out of the fog.”
“I’m afraid.” I said.
“Of what?”
“I’m afraid of being alone. I’m afraid of losing the people that I care about.”
The old woman came to my side, folding her aged hands in her lap. “You’ll never lose the people you care about.” She told me.
My eyes blinked open. Natalie was sitting at the edge of the eel pool, stirring it with the old man’s stick. The old man himself was gone. The sound of dripping water prevailed through the alcove. “What’s the outside world like?” Natalie asked.
“I don’t really…remember.” I said – Natalie’s emotions were mysteriously empty and bland. “I’m not entirely sure where I came from.” I stood and walked to the pool’s edge.
“I’m not entirely sure where you came from exists.” Natalie stared into the murky water. Her comment was direct and targeted at me, not the larger perspective.
There was silence for the next minute or so – I watched the eels ignore Natalie’s stick. What did she mean by that? Was she insulting me? I wasn’t sure how to digest it. “So what’s the plan?” I broke the silence.
“Well, I thought about what you said last night, and I agree with you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. We both want answers, and we both want out of here.” Natalie stopped playing with the stick and the pool of eels, looking at me in a strange – almost distant kind of way. Something was different. Changed. “I need to know how you got here.”
“I…told you.”
“Nothing. You told me nothing.” She quipped. “I threw away the life I’d been living because you asked me to run away with you. I gave you my trust…now give me yours.”
I hesitated, wondering if she would believe me if I told her the truth. “I think I was hit by a train…” I told her. “I know it sounds crazy, but I think I’m dead. I don’t know what any of this is.”
“That’s why you said you were looking for heaven.”
“One second I was walking back to my car like I always did and the next thing I know, I wake up in an elevator and I’m here.” I waited for Natalie to respond, but she stayed quiet. “Do you believe me?”
“I believe you’re very important to Umpei, and you’re very important to a lot of other people as well…”
“Like who?” I asked.
“I’ve got a friend who lives in a colony not far from here.” Natalie ignored my question. “He works for the government, but he’s not a loyalist. He has access to a lot of information and he can give you a lot more answers than I can.”
“Maybe he knows more about who runs this strange place.”
Natalie smiled. “You know, there’s never really an end to anything. Always somebody bigger, better, and forever above you.” She stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”
TEN
We left the Quarantine Ducts and wormed our way through another set of sewers. The smell of rot no longer seemed to affect me. After swimming through another waste management tank, we trudged across a merchant. Gorged and ugly, the merchant smelt of soil and resembled an upright earthworm with pocketed clothing. Natalie gave the merchant her jacket in exchange for a crescent earring and a sloppy pile of mush which we shared for lunch. I didn’t care much for it, and it really didn’t taste like anything, but perhaps that was due to my adapted sense of the diseased environment around me.
Leaving the sewers with the help of a ladder and a loose grate, Natalie and I came across a rectangular room. The top side of the rectangle was the ceiling and towered a hundred feet above us. The room was piled high with dead bodies of every sort. Some decapitated, some strangled, and others there was no way of telling the cause of death. I didn’t ask Natalie, but I assumed we had stumbled across a twisted mind’s lair and their rotting evidence – a serial killer and their feast. The bodies were bloated and you could feel the bacteria crawling up your nose. Their eyes were empty and broken. Almost like a picture or a painting. It didn’t matter where you stood in the room, you felt like they were staring at you – reminding you that they’d been tricked, their souls stolen and vanquished. Something horrible floated in that room, reminding me that the serial killer and the dead bodies were created by something larger. Something very dark and uncaring – biased towards the catastrophic and rolling in it. I wanted to run and forget the fact that I had seen what I did, no matter how important it was to recognize.
Another loose grate led us into a crawl space filled with vermin. It was dark and you couldn’t see, but I could hear Natalie in front of me so my fear never surfaced. We climbed out of the crawl space and into a street of sorts. Crowded with beings and artificial light that made everything orange and brown. Advertisements were rampant and inescapable. A vehicle with seven wheels honked its horn at Natalie and I, forcing us out of the street and next to a melon stand. A green-skinned ogre looked down on me as Natalie took a piece of paper from her pocket and examined it. I noticed it was a map and figured she had bartered for it yesterday night while I sat at the eel pool.
The same feeling I got from the serial killer’s cellar entered my body. Something horrible plagued this place and floated through the air – something cold and paralyzing. Horns were a constant as merchants voices blended together in an overtone above the crowded streets. Walking eyeballs, women with wings, overgrown men with pig snouts and chipped tusks. Every direction I looked, there was a different looking individual. The green-skinned ogre was still staring at me and drooled on my shoulder. “I hope you know where we’re at.” I told Natalie as my discomfort rose.
“My friend lives here.” She replied.
The advertisements were overwhelming. ‘Do you sometimes feel dull and unenergetic? Try Anvocor. Live a more complete life and experience the joy of being alive! All you have to do is take it twice a da…’ The ogre’s drool smelt like a gym locker. ‘The meta-booster enhances awareness and sedates the mind to a more calm and pleasant surrounding all the time! To order, slide your PIN card at the nearest station and type in meta-now! It’s all yours for seventeen easy payments of forty-five, ninety-five. That’s seventeen easy payments of forty-five, ninety-five. Fifteen percent off the suggested price. Act now before this offer ends.’ It was pathetic, really. How one’s world was transformed to this. Artificial and robotic. How does the saying go? ‘The more convenient, the more American’? This wasn’t America, at least, not on the surface as far as I knew. It was something else, and it made me wonder if Life was doomed to such a fate in the reaches of Time and societal maturation.
“Come on.” Natalie led me away from the melon stand. I stepped out from under the waterfall of drool. The green-skinned ogre looked at me in a state of sorrow and complacency, almost as if it didn’t have a soul behind its dumbfounded face.
We walked through the crowded streets, the advertisements continuing to deafen me. We stopped in front of an alleyway, waiting to cross a busy street with a crowd of others. A strange noise caught my attention from the depths of the dark alley – like a person hacking up a pile of snot. It repeated itself and sounded deep and drawn out. There was a shadow within the shadows, its slick form maneuvering itself over a dead body. I looked closer and the shadow turned its ugly head to look at me. The monster had a set of long, sharp teeth that exaggerated themselves in front of its face. Its nose was made of two black holes underneath a set of glowing red eyes. Upon seeing me, the monster barked angrily in its hacking manner. Its victim’s eyes were empty, but pleaded to me no matter where I stood. Following its hacking barks, the monster leapt upwards. It had a set of wings and a long pointed tail.
Traffic stopped and Natalie continued across the busy street. I kept my eyes behind me, staring at the dark alley and wondering what I had just seen. Surely I wasn’t the only one who saw it. Were these people too wrapped up in their complacent worlds, or was it because such a horrible monster slipped from shadow to shadow? A heavy feeling tightened the muscles in my stomach, as if I had just swallowed a bag of bricks. The sudden realization that the dark monster I had just seen moments ago was responsible for all the dead bodies underneath this rotten city presented itself.
A large man with an unshaved chin and one eye sewed shut grabbed me by the arm after I crossed the street. He yelled at me in a language I couldn’t understand – his breath enhanced with frost. I turned to Natalie for help, but she was no longer there. The brute shook me and lifted me in the air, his voice roaring, his other eye about to pop out of his skull. The advertisements vanished, the people in the streets ran for cover, disappearing into buildings and behind dumpsters. The brown-orange lights turned off and the city was swallowed in twilight. Before I had a chance to defend myself, the unshaven man slammed me to the street and took out a fat-bladed knife. My back hurt. The once crowded streets were vacant, the people’s vehicles abandoned or gone. I tried to escape, but the man had me by the throat with one of his pudgy hands. Again, he yelled something foreign and shook me by the jugular. Looking past the man at the rooftops, I saw the glowing red eyes of the dark alley monster. It spread its wings and barked its horrible snot-filled cough.
Where was Natalie? And more importantly, why did everything stop? Why was the world suddenly colored in shades of the grave? For a second, I could have sworn snow was falling in the streets. The unshaven man raised his knife, the monster leaped from the rooftop it was perched on and came down on his back, sinking its wretched teeth into the brute’s skull. The one-eyed man fell lifeless to his attacker, his hand releasing me. Quickly, I rolled away and to my feet, standing at the other side of the street. The dark creature was triple the size of the large brute, and slurped away at its prey. The unshaven man’s body jellified itself. Oozing from the grasp of the monster and piling itself onto the street. I spun around and ran, the monster barking at me and following in pursuit.
I turned down an alley, not looking behind me. The muscles in my stomach were still tight and my fear began to surface – my hands were getting cold. I could already feel the vermin chewing away at my corpse as I rest in the monster’s pile of trophies. Sweat crossed my brow and I felt the eyes of something larger. Not the monster, but the one who held the monster’s leash. My skin was covered with goose-bumps – the feeling was similar to what I had experienced in Zimbazzi’s wretched library.
Ducking behind a dumpster, I found myself in the company of a frail mouse-looking woman. She shivered like me, fear glazed over her eyes. “What’s happening?” I asked her.
“It’s the Doom Gaze!” she squeaked back, referring to the monster of shade. “Oh fret, oh fret! Why can’t I be happy? Why can’t I enjoy my life?”
A strange man with beady eyes and a wolf’s snout poked his head out from under the dumpster to join our conversation. “That’s what it wants! If you can’t be sad, you can’t be controlled. And if you can’t be controlled, you’re dangerous! It’ll take your soul and suck it away!”
“Who’s the one that owns this terrible pet?” I interjected.
“The cosmos. The Creator of it all!” the wolf-man whispered.
“God?”
“Beelzebub.”
Beelzebub? I’d heard that name before. In books and stories, always the genesis of some evil-willed mischief. The demonic version of Satan, if there was such a thing. Natalie had suggested that it was the devil himself who overlooked this strange world, and perhaps she was right. But it wasn’t Hell. The fiery caverns in my mind must have existed elsewhere.
The Doom Gaze’s mucus piercing bark rattled our souls as it appeared on top of the dumpster – its red eyes were the gateway into the realm of nothingness. The mouse girl started to scream, but the Doom Gaze snatched her up with one of its scissor-like claws and sucked her soul into the imprisonment of non-existence. Her body began to ooze into a jellified blob. The wolf-man scampered out from under the dumpster and ran. The Doom Gaze barked and I followed the wolf-man’s lead.
We ran into a building and up a flight of stairs, passing several others who were hiding from the terror outside. The wolf-man stopped and looked me in the eye with a growl of his own. “Stop following me!” he warned. “It wants you, and I won’t put my life in peril for a doomed soul such as yours!”
I let the wolf-man go, he jumped from an open window to the rooftop of another building and out of sight down a set of stairs. Standing at the window, I watched the lifeless street in front of me. Where was God in all of this madness? It seemed that death was a disease that went unchecked. The good, the bad, and the in-between. They were all victims of what appeared to be random slaughter. Like a lottery where the devil was the one drawing the numbers. Seeing such horror, my belief in God began to drift. If there was a God, why would He let things like this happen?
The manholes in the streets lifted. Common-looking blobs of jelly goop slithered out onto the pavement. They were the accumulation of what had happened to the unshaven brute and the tiny mouse woman. Transparent forms without a soul, wandering aimlessly and making low, almost haunting moans. This was all that was left of the Doom Gaze’s work. The trail of death and perhaps the foreshadow of Hell.
I heard a cry from another room in the house. Leaving the window, I explored, entering the room of the sobbing sound. There was a mirror, two and a half feet tall and standing over the dead body of a well-dressed man. “My master…” the mirror cried. “What have I done to you? Please come back and see the sadness you’ve left behind.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My great master Sussicran did not want to live.” The mirror told me through its cries, turning to look at me with its reflective surface. “No matter what I say, I’m afraid he’s gone forever…”
“What happened?”
“He forgot to take his Anvocor.” An old crone emerged from the shadows, leaning on a jagged walking stick. Her hair was a mess and her eyes were different colors. The wrinkles on her face made her look a hundred and fifty years old.
“No, no.” the mirror corrected the crone as she stopped halfway in the shadowy light. “That’s not it.”
“I have some extra if you think it’ll cure him.” The crone held up a bottle of ‘Anvocor’, her hand coming from the depths of her empty robes.
“You don’t seem to understand.” The mirror continued. “Oh, what have I done? Sussicran has died and it’s all my fault.”
“You’re a mirror, surely you weren’t the cause of this man’s death.” I tried to reason.
“My poor master. He didn’t realize the reflection on my face was a mere illusion of himself. He fell in love not with me, but with his double…kind sir, you’re quite correct. I’m just a mirror, and my master Sussicran could never grasp his lover in the shiny surface before him.” The mirror sobbed. “If he could not be with his lover, he no longer wanted to live.”
The crone once again emphasized the medicine in her hand. “Sounds like some Anvocor would have done him some good!”
“No.” The mirror reflected on his master’s death. “It was trickery and pictures of a soul that never existed. That’s what brought about his foolish end.”
“It’s not your fault.” I told the mirror.
“It is!” the mirror shouted back. “I’ve been cursed to trick the fools of this sad world.”
“Perhaps the fools were already tricked.” I offered, staring at Sussicran’s dead body. He wore garments of silk and a crown of gold. As if he was the king of something. A ruler of a foreign realm where the rivers ran with such molten metal, the silk hanging from the trees like weeping willows. A land where more was not enough. The tress could have been dead and the rivers empty and there wouldn’t have been a difference. He was a king of something beyond that. Beyond the silk and gold. Beyond the crone and her Anvocor. Sussicran was the king of a kingdom of fools. The land of the blind and the land of many kings who seemed not to see.
“Look at me.” The mirror hopped to my feet, wanting me to pick it up. “Tell me what you see.”
I bent over and took the mirror in my hands, looking at myself for the first time since being delivered to this strange world. My face was the same as I had remembered, the only difference came in the five o’clock shadow across my chin. My face looked blank. It wasn’t without a soul as I’d like to say, but it seemed empty and transparent. Like the blobs on the street, you could see that I was wandering. Searching for a substance I might have lost. Like a fish out of water – dried up, helpless, and waiting for its end.
“Are you happy?” the mirror asked as I examined myself.
I wasn’t entirely sure. In some ways, I might have been happy, and in others I seemed sad and lost. My eyes drifted from the reflection of myself. I looked at the border of the mirror. It was painted red with a king’s crown of gold. The initials ‘CAD’ were inscribed in a small text deep in the border’s wood. It was Cad the Mirror, abandoned by his blind master’s eyes and the lover he saw. Looking at the reflective surface, I wiped a smudge away. A red glow caught my eye in the background behind my head.
Turning around, my eyes remained blurry. Unfocused, but not abandoned. The Doom Gaze stood with its wings spread wide, blocking any exit that might be found. The crone faded back into the shadows and I wondered where Natalie was. The Doom Gaze barked its horrible cough. I closed my eyes, accepting the nonexistence that would soon befall me. A sharp pain in my shoulder and I drifted away…
ELEVEN
A grizzly man with a scar and a smirk looked down on me. He was a marauder. I could tell by the dirty red bandana tied across his forehead. Shards of his greasy, dark hair hung down in front of his face. The smell of ash was all around me. The marauder had a gap between his two front teeth. Somehow, I recognized him. From posters and bounty signs perhaps. He was famous for something obvious, but I couldn’t recall. I knew he was the leader of something and he gained followers by killing the faithful of others all around.
“I’m glad you survived.” His voice was welcoming in a strange sort of way. Like an enemy having pity on his fallen foe. “They say God favors the good, and it looks like you’re not one of them.” I began to speak, but the man interrupted me, holding up a hand wrapped in torn rags. “Save your words… Boethius-” the man called to one of his warriors. “See to it that this man receives bread and water.” He tore a necklace away from my body and stared to its gem in the palm of his hand. “If God has no place for him, perhaps he has a place with us.”
The pain in my shoulder throbbed as my eyes came open – my mind coming back to the realm of consciousness. I was strapped to a table, the room was well lit and the walls were white. Four of the military’s black bird soldiers guarded the only exit which remained open. A medical technician worked on my shoulder, mending the deep wound I suffered from the Doom Gaze. Two people argued in the next room over – it was Umpei and Natalie Hersh.
“You promised me he wouldn’t be hurt!” Natalie stood her ground.
“He’ll be fine.” Umpei reassured her. “He’s alive, isn’t he?”
The medical technician took a metallic shard and shoved it in my wound, digging into my muscles like a fishhook. I squirmed as the pain was far less than comfortable.
“You’re going to watch after him, right?” Natalie asked.
There was a delay before Umpei spoke. “You got what you wanted.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It doesn’t matter what you asked! Do you understand?” Another pause – Umpei was angry. “You’re lucky to even be a pawn in all of this mess.” Pawn? If anybody, Umpei seemed to be the pawn. “Now leave and get on your World Train before I take it away.”
“You’re despicable…”
“Despicable? Look at what you did to your friend so you could be famous.” Natalie didn’t say anything as Umpei laughed. “Train scuds. You’re all alike. Stand in long lines and throw the person in front of you down on the tracks so you won’t miss your own train.”
Natalie slapped Umpei and walked away. Her train was departing, leaving the docks, and leaving me behind. The medical technician burned my skin shut with a scalding hot tool. I screamed and tried to hide inside myself. Like a turtle inside its own shell, not wanting the world to hurt who I really was. My voice died down as the pain faded away. I opened my eyes and Umpei stared at me from the base of where I lay.
“Some girl, huh?” He said.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“You blew it, kid. Two days and I had you headed to a high estate. Not even a servant lord. You were going to be an assistant. Somebody with real potential. Instead, you trusted her and ran off. Caused trouble and now you’re in for it. The sad thing about it all, she gets off scotch free. Stole your potential. I told you not to listen to her.”
“She sold me out.”
“That’s the way the world works, kid.”
“No. Just this place.” I laid the bait, wanting to know more about my surroundings.
“Helios?” Umpei took it. “Where else are you gonna go? This is the center of the world. Everything starts here, everything ends here.”
“Is that so?”
“You bet your tail it is. There’s Helios, and then there’s the rest of the world. Ruled by the exiles and the uncivilized.”
“And this place is ruled by Beelzebub.”
“Excuse me?” Umpei heard me the first time.
“The keeper of the Doom Gaze.”
“What do you know of him?”
“I know this isn’t Hell.”
Umpei stared at me for a while, his mouth breaking into a smile. “You’re right – but Hell does exist. It’s where souls go to disappear.”
“Does he rule over that too?”
“You need to mind your own business, keep your nose out of things. The only thing you can search for around these parts is mischief and death.”
The medical technician squeezed a dark gray cream from a thick tube and rubbed the slimy substance over my charred skin. At first, it was warm and felt like it was moving on its own, but the cream quickly turned as cold as ice. Like a gravestone spreading across my chest and pronouncing my death.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“You’ve caused quite a mess, kid. You’re scheduled to go before the High Court. It has to do with taking down that wizard.”
“Will Beelzebub be there?”
“Listen…I don’t know what’s gonna happen to you, but you hooked yourself and they’re reeling you in.” Umpei thought about his words, perhaps trying to be optimistic. “If you disrupt the system, and you’re caught, the only thing you have left is a prayer.”
To who? Or what? God seemed absent from this unforgiving world. I remembered telling Natalie that you could tell what kind of a person somebody was through their belief in God. But what exactly is that supposed to mean? The word ‘belief’, and especially the word ‘God’. I felt small, resting on that medical table. The only power I knew above was staring down at me with his demonic eyes. Hell existed, but there wasn’t a hint towards Heaven. Beelzebub existed, but there wasn’t a hint towards God. Where were they? I was small and hiding inside myself. I needed somebody, anybody to reach out and reassure me there was still something to live for.
TWELVE
Umpei’s black bird servants removed me from the medical technician’s table – Umpei leading me out of the building. We were above the advertising city, following walkways which towered above the mindlessness below. Umpei was in front of me and three of the crow-looking soldiers behind me – escape wasn’t an option.
I stared down at the city and wondered if anybody ever bothered to look up. It was like a living organism, the people comparable to cells, doing what the city dictated to stay alive. No thought. No vision beyond how to self-sustain. It was a system of automation based on the infatuation of staying alive with regard to personal stake. I was like a sick cell amongst the rest. Easy to find, and easy to remove before any damage could be done. But what was removing me? Something bigger than the city I guessed. It was a world of giants. So big and so powerful. Their subjects didn’t know the difference because they couldn’t see the giants in the first place. If only they’d look up, they would see the vines growing to the heavens above.
Crossing the network of skyways, we came to an elevator. Umpei entered a security clearance code and the doors opened. The buttons had symbols I couldn’t understand. Umpei pressed one of them and the elevator went up.
I thought back to Natalie Hersh. Her cunning smile and quick wits. She’d made a fool of me and put hope in a world that knew no better. The logistics of the situation were still shady, but I figured she wasn’t only bartering for a map while I was left at the eel pool. If nothing else, Natalie prevented me from sinking in a world that was easy to drown. It was true – for a moment in Time – I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. Like a train passing in front of me, she was there and I wanted to climb aboard. I remembered what she said that influenced me the most: ‘The only choice I figure we have in the world is what we decide to make it.’ That summed up who she was and why she made the choices that left me in a bind.
The elevator doors opened to a rusty railway. The floor was nothing more than grates of sharp steel, steam spraying through the pipes below. Everything was bronze-colored and the smell of stale condensation filled the air. The sound of brakes screaming and sparks flying came from another place, somewhere above, and somewhere below. Another set of elevator doors were directly ahead. Umpei opened them and looked at me with leave.
“Another sad story being thrown away…” He said.
What appeared to be the Grim Reaper stood in the elevator, waiting for me to get in. “You’re leaving me too?” I pleaded for Umpei to stay.
“I don’t keep pets, kid. I only catch them.” Umpei didn’t want to show the pity he had. “Here.” He tossed me a stone from the palm of his hand. “For the giants above and the luck you seem short of. Take care of yourself.”
I wanted to say something, a ‘thank you’ maybe, but I kept my mouth shut. Umpei stared at me until the elevator doors closed. The dark being tapped his cleave sickle against the floor and the elevator was off. Speeding so fast, it made my stomach turn.
I looked at the robed man next to me and wondered what was next. The skull inside its black cloak could hardly be seen – the vapor of souls taken seeped between its rotted teeth. Fear gripped my heart and my skin was surely pale. The fact that I’d already slept assured me this wasn’t a dream. I thought back to the railroad tracks outside of my statistics class to calm my fear. I was embarrassed to speak out loud, but I thought of God and all the greatness He supposedly had. Not because I believed in the Lord I couldn’t see, but because I wanted to, and I was scared that He might not exist after all.
I looked up as butterflies entered my body. The sides of the elevator were open and clear. I could see out to the world around me. We were traveling upwards and had left the concrete confines of the place below. The sky was dark and there were skyscrapers that looked like needles, pricking the stars above. I could see the edge of the center of the world. Helios was a disc shape, standing hundreds of thousands of stories tall and just as many wide. I moved to the edge of the elevator opening, leaning out and looking at the world below. The surface of the disc-shaped prison was covered with life. Controlled and busy – serving the giants above. It was a city with guts that went deep and functioned the same inside. The trains were like worms, crawling all over the organism and transporting the cells from place to place.
The view went away as the elevator was surrounded with walls and came to a stop. The doors opened with a hiss and the Grim Reaper-looking man waited for me to leave. I was at the top of one of the needle skyscrapers – the tallest I assumed. Exiting the elevator, I walked into a wide hallway with a low ceiling. There were prison cells on each side of me, filled with beings of all different kinds. Some gnawed on the bars that held them back, and others ripped off their own body parts for consumption over starvation. The dark being prodded me forward, pushing me along to a large square platform. The distant sound of chants and cheers haunted this dreary place. The skull-faced man didn’t follow me onto the platform, but pulled a lever instead that made the deathbed move upwards. The ceiling opened and the prisoners below began to scream and holler.
The deep grinding noise of the platform’s gears and cogs ceased as I was pushed into an open pit at the basin of a towering circle around me. The floor was covered with dirt and littered with bones and mangled bodies. It was an arena of death, the audience lined the sides of the towering circle, sitting in carved out booths and watching from above. There was a Shepard with a flock of five sheep in the pit with me.
“Guilty!” A voice from far above thundered.
“No, no…” the Shepard cried as fear buckled his knees.
“Life is not to be created outside of our decree!”
“It’s only my sheep! They’re harmless and warm!”
“Death to you, including your flock!” the voice raged and slammed its mallet down.
“And now for the feature we’ve been waiting for…” A man said as he exited a gate in front of me, a woman right behind him.
“I’m Sin.” the woman said with a mischievous grin.
“And I’m her brother, Death.” the man confessed.
“We’ve had an eye on you since the moment you were born.” Sin continued, her blonde hair streaked with black. Her teeth were pointed like daggers and her pupils held the Big Bang inside. She wore the suit of a bloody goth succubus, a pair of wings to match and a fiends tail behind. “Very abnormal in spirit and soul.”
“It’s not a wonder you’ve caused such a stir.” Death’s voice was slick and subduing. His garb was dark and quite formal. His hair spiked short above his head. A dark purple scar stretched across his face like a strange creature’s claw, its fingers jagged with cause. “Quite impressive, I must say. But unfortunately for you, such antics must stop.”
“I wish to speak with Beelzebub.” I had the courage to speak my mind. The demons and devils that sat all around burst out with cackles and laughter alike.
“He’s here.” Sin’s voice quieted the crowd. “Say what you want for he sits right above you.”
The arena was silent except for the Shepard’s whimpering. I looked up at the circle around me. At the very top, near the ceiling, a much larger opening was carved in total darkness. The Doom Gaze sat perched at the edge of its rail. I knew Beelzebub occupied that opening just the same as I knew that I stood in his lifeless pit. “I know this is your world,” I spoke to the King of all demons around, “and I’m sure you’re content with the way it’s rigged, but I refuse to live by your rules and the savagery by which it functions.” I paused, not even the Shepard whimpered now. “Where is God in this sick decay?”
“Silence!” the man with the mallet let his thundering voice strike. It wasn’t Beelzebub, but an ill-looking man with an executioner’s mask who sat in an opening adjacent to his Lord’s.
“I won’t be silenced because that’s what you want!” I yelled and refused to succumb to my fear. “If God exists, he’s surely not here. Absent and banished, if not murdered and gone. I swear to you by the life that I have, I will find Him! Be it in body, buried or alive, I will find God and bring him back here. There will be light in this world of darkness and lost souls.”
Whatever Life was behind the executioner’s mask was frozen at the mention of God. I had declared an end to Beelzebub’s world. The problem I faced was completing my quest. I knew there was hatred. There was corruption and control. I had observed these things and been a part of them all. What I hadn’t seen were the actions of ideal. People were lost and blinded alike. The definitions of right and wrong seemed blurred, and the only distinction I could find belonged in the people’s scripture they wrote themselves and forgot to follow.
One of the Shepard’s sheep broke the silence with a soft sound that echoed through the arena. Sin smiled before speaking, “You destroyed one of our regents.”
“Zimbazzi…” Death filled in the blank.
“He was a pathetic little boy, and a poor example for what you all stand for.” I said, letting my emotions get the best of me.
“You dig your own grave.” Death said with a laugh.
“It’s better than having it dug for you.” I retorted.
The occupants of the arena began to chant ‘death’, not referring to the person in front of me, but instead to my fate. “Listen to them.” Sin paused. “Is that what you want?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“At one point, perhaps you did.”
Death circled around me. “Guilty by his own words.”
The man with the executioner’s mask slammed down his mallet. “Guilty!” his voice thundered from far above.
“Let word of this man’s fate get out to the streets!” Death shouted to the crowd before turning to me. “Provide the pictures of his bloody corpse to the press. Print his story and tighten the leash. Nobody will oppose us…not even God.”
Death and Sin left the arena to the crowd’s chants and cheers. “Death to you!” The executioner slammed down his mallet. “Release the Gigaloth!”
The demons and devils were filled with excitement. A large gate near the Shepard’s end of the arena opened slowly, creaking and dragging the dirt with its grave weight. Emerging from the shadows came a beast of incredible mass. The Shepard ran towards me as the Gigaloth stepped into the arena. Its body was ten times the size of mine, hair lined the bony spine of its back, and its skin was dark – a mixture of purple and black. Its eyes were yellow and its claws were red. Standing on two feet, the beast bellowed a roar that resembled a lion’s. Its teeth were skinny and sharp, like a tyrannosaurus-rex, its tail long with a large tuft of hair at its end.
The Gigaloth snatched three of the Shepard’s sheep in the depths of its jaw and turned its gaze towards the Shepard and I.
“Please,” the Shepard dropped his wooden pole and clasped his hands together as he stared at me, “Save me, I don’t deserve to die!”
The man’s plea struck at my heart, but there was nothing to do – Beelzebub’s beast towered above us with snarls. “I’m sorry.” I told the Shepard, my words draining the life from his eyes, “there’s nothing I can do.”
“Please!” the Shepard repeated his plea. “Please! I’m a good man!”
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. The Gigaloth picked up the Shepard by one of his legs, lifting him towards his unjust end.
“Why?” the Shepard asked as tears fell from his face. “Why must I die when I’ve done no wrong? I beg you kind sir, don’t let me perish!”
I watched the beast devour the Shepard, lowering him into its mouth. The Gigaloth ripped his body in two, chewing his upper torso before finishing the rest. The crowd was electric straight from Zeus’ hand. They cheered and chanted for more. I couldn’t shake the mental image of the Shepard’s last look from my mind. He was scared of the giant that had taken his life, crying and pleading to me to be free. To him, he had done no wrong, but to others, namely the giants we lived with, it simply didn’t matter.
The Gigaloth picked me up, wrapping its muscular hand around my torso. The crowd continued to cheer, more and more excitement as the beast carried me closer to its mouth. Was this the end? Some say a person can sense when they’re about to die, giving them a chance to make peace with themselves. I had no such feeling inside of my soul. Not right now, and not when I was hit by the train when I left my statistics class. I took out the stone that Umpei had given me, throwing it as hard as I could at the Gigaloth’s face. The stone hit the beast square between the eyes, at the base of its ugly, large forehead. The monster stumbled backwards and fell to the ground with a groan, its large hand dropping me in the dirt below. The Gigaloth’s body created a cloud of dust that cleared rather quickly. The crowd dropped silent at the sight before them. The Doom Gaze jumped down from its rail, coughing and hissing through its snot-filled throat. It didn’t make it far as the chain around its neck held it at a distance.
“Enough!” a deep voice subdued the arena with fear. It was Beelzebub speaking from the darkness above. His voice was gurgled and shook my soul. “My suspicion is now confirmed.”
“Show yourself!” I shouted to the hole far above.
“Sin…Death.” Beelzebub’s voice echoed off the walls. Sin and Death entered the arena through the gate they had left. “Take him to his brothers. He shall never see the light of this world ever again.”
“Grant me an audience. Please!” I shouted as Sin and Death took my arms.
“Your soul will soon be mine.” Beelzebub said with confidence. The arena’s occupants once again started their chants of ‘death’. “Silence!” The arena fell lifeless as Beelzebub’s echo faded away. “And when it is, the darkness will flow through your veins and you’ll be made to worship your new Master. You’ll be made to grovel in the dust and cut down those you once loved. You’ll be made to serve me.”
“Wait!” I screamed as Death and Sin began to take me out of the arena. A curtain spread itself over Beelzebub’s mysterious lair – the Doom Gaze flew between the sheets to follow its master. “At least show yourself, you coward!”
“It’s useless to resist, you know.” Death told me.
“Soon, you’ll be one of us!” Sin laughed.
We left the arena through a doorway. The hall was dark, only lit by floating orbs giving off an orange glow. In the distance – at the end of the hallway – there was light.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked as I struggled to be free.
“You wanted to know what Hell is like…” Death twisted my arm behind my back to stop my squirming.
“I’m afraid you’re going to be spending a lot of time th-” Sin was interrupted by a seismic blast. All three of us were knocked off our feet, the sound of an explosion in the distance.
“Ugh…what was that?” Death winced as he picked himself up.
“I…don’t know.” Sin had the wind knocked out of her.
“Get up!” Death grabbed my arm and violently pulled me to my feet. “What is this?” He hissed, his face only inches from mine. “What do you know?”
My mind was empty. I stared into Death’s angry eyes unsure of what to say. Then, another blast that knocked us over once again followed by the muffled sound of gunfire.
I scampered to my feet as fast as I could and made a break for the light at the end of the hallway.
“You’re dead!” Death screamed after me, also getting to his feet and giving chase.
As I approached the light, the gunfire became less muffled. I could hear demons howling and men shouting commands. The end of the hallway had stairs leading upwards.
Entering the light, I stumbled over the stairs and made my way into an open dome-covered plaza of sorts. The perimeter of the plaza was covered with train docks – some awaiting departure, and others empty – as well as doorways and vending carts. Straight across the plaza from where I stood, there was an elaborate set of wicked gate doors. To my right, the side of the plaza was blown open, debris and rubble spread across the floor. Men and women armed for combat poured through the opening from an aircraft, weapons ablaze at the demons and devils which filled the place.
“Gotcha!” Death’s icy hand grabbed me from behind. But no sooner than that, a bullet pierced his shoulder and knocked him back down the stairway.
“Over here!” a woman shouted as she ran towards me – a group following her and providing cover fire. “You’re alive!” she smiled as she approached. “It is you!”
“Who are you?” I yelled over the madness around me.
“Don’t worry, we’ll explain later. For now, we need to get you out of here!” The woman grabbed my hand and led me towards the aircraft hovering by the hole in the side of the plaza. “What?” she screamed, putting a hand to her earpiece. “No! We’re coming now! Give us twenty seconds!” On the far side of the plaza, the wicked gateway opened slowly, letting all kinds of chaos into the fray. Bigger demons, uglier demons, Gigaloth-riding demons – demons of every sort and every kind entered the battle. “Just hang on Biggs! We’re almost-”
The aircraft burst into flames and fell from sight. I could hear the pilot scream in the woman’s earpiece. She stood stunned for a moment, her immediate companions trying to hold their ground.
“What are your orders, General?” one of the men blasting his gun yelled. “We can’t take him with us!”
“This way!” The woman said. “We need to get him onto one of the outbound trains.” We started towards the nearest occupied train dock.
“Why can’t I go with you?” I asked.
“This might be a one way trip for the rest of us…”
We ran onto the loading dock, the woman leading me to one of the open doors. The train’s passengers were filled with panic. “Let me help you.” I pleaded.
“You can’t die.” The woman finally looked me in the eye. “You’re the only hope for the Resistance.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Hell…” the woman looked at the wicked gateway in the distance and then back to me. “Your brethren are there. We’re gonna try to save them too.”
“Who are you?”
“General! We have to move!” one of the men called.
“Look,” the woman told me, “This train is going to put you somewhere in the Northwest Badlands. Find the coast and follow it south until Freeburg. The resistance is there and they can take you to Master Bede.”
I grabbed the woman’s arm as she turned to go. “What’s your name and how did you know I would be here?” She hesitated. “I want to trust you…” I told her.
“Freyja’s my name, and it was Natalie.” She said. “Natalie told us you would be here. She’s a spy and she works for us.”
I let Freyja go. She ran to a nearby terminal and worked with haste. Within moments, the train door closed in front of me and the vehicle began to move. While the other occupants of the train panicked – they were prisoners to be banished I guessed – I stood with calm. Freyja and I stared at each other as the train moved away. She seemed to be filled with all the answers I needed, but there wasn’t Time…there never seemed to be enough Time…
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