by Mike Ashley
at the foot of the steering column. “Which one?”
“Which foot?”
“Which pedal?”
“Don’t matter which pedal – one’s the brakes and the other’s the fuel. We either jerk to a stop or we jerk forward. Either way, we may be able to break them up.”
Abbott spun around, thrust out his right foot and
it was going to be okay . . . What the hell was all the fuss about – everything was going to be A-okay
jammed it down hard.
The train stopped in its tracks.
A high pitched squeal came from beneath them, the sound of grinding metal. Then from somewhere behind them, they heard a series of collisions, loud crashes and explosions.
“She’s jackknifing,” the driver said as he pulled himself up. “Hit the other pedal.”
Abbott moved his foot across and
shit, the train’s jackknifing . . . he said it was jackknifing – what does that mean, exactly? It means we’re going to die . . . it means “tough titties, Sergeant”, we’re going to
jammed it down again, this time on the second pedal. The train lurched forward and he fell back, away from the pedals.
The man stepped to the steering column, shook his head, and stomped on the fuel pedal again, this time keeping it pressed.
Abbott came to a stop against the back of the room and
. . . it’s the end . . . that’s it . . . we’re finished . . . we’re going to die . . . I’m going to die . . . what will that last gasp of breath be like? how will it feel?
immediately put his head in his hands.
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesu—”
“Shut up!”
“That’s it,” Abbott shouted over the noise of the engine and the steam and the pounding of the wheels. “I’ve had it with this. We’ve had it. Everyone’s had it.”
And he started to sob.
He hadn’t cried in years . . . in fact, he couldn’t remember when he had cried. Then came a flood of memories . . . a hallucinatory kaleidoscope of faces, some old, some not so old and some young . . . some of whom he knew were friends, some lovers and some
mothers? fathers?
relatives . . . but all of them different colours and wearing different styles of clothing . . . and each of their faces stared at him from the recesses of his mind, like pictures on a badly-tuned TV screen, pictures trying to get through . . . staring through the static at him and trying to get through.
“You have to go back.”
Abbott shook his head at the imagined – remembered? – faces.
Who were all these people? Why did he recognize them? They were all shaking their heads at him in his myriad memories . . . turning their faces from him, disowning him for what he had done. He could hardly breathe, the sobs coming in spastic gulps, tearing his throat and his chest.
“Ohgodohgodohgodohgo—”
The old man spun around and kicked Abbott in the shins. “I said, you have to go back . . . you have to go back and break them up.”
Abbott wheezed and coughed saliva onto his hands. “Have to . . . have to go back? You said you never stopped the train?”
“I don’t.” The old man turned back and nodded to the screen. “I mean you have to go back to the last carriage. You have to break them up.”
Abbott started to moan and shake his head. Then
. . . he remembered sunshine . . . and laughter – he remembered dark days that turned out not to be so dark after all
he stopped.
“There’s no need to do anything,” he shouted triumphantly, waving his hands in the air. “We’re going again . . . you’ve got it under control again. There’s no worry . . . don’t you see!”
“Now you listen to me.” The word “me” split into a series of elongated “ee” syllables and the old man thumped a fist against the side of his head causing one of his eyes to plop out on a long, coiled spring. “Shit!” he snapped. “Pardon my French but now look what I gone and done.” He pushed the eye back into its socket and twisted it around until it made a dull click . . . but not before Abbott saw what was in there. Flickering lights and more metal.
“The two of them are locked together,” the old man said, nodding to the screen. “I can’t break them up. First Despair gets the upper hand and then Hope . . . that’s what’s happening – can’t you hear yourself? That’s what’s happening. I can’t break them apart and I can’t risk stopping the train or entrusting it to you. The only way is for you to go back.”
Abbott laughed at the sudden flood of elation coursing through his head. “Boy, you sure are a worr—”
Then the flood withdrew and in its place came a wave of doom drifting across his mind . . . a thick black cloud of death and destruction, the promise of decay in the silent sanctity of the grave, the three-in-the-morning thoughts of loss and disease and failure, the certainty of that final breath . . . his body reaching upward with every last ounce of determination and energy, but all to no avail. Determination and energy didn’t count for anything in this game.
A tear rolled down his cheek.
“We’re finished, aren’t we?”
The driver pulled off his baseball cap and threw it to Abbott. “Put that on.”
“Huh?”
“Put on the cap. It’ll help.”
Help? Will it stop me from dying? Will it keep away tumours and growths, liver failure and embolisms? Will it make people love me? Will it keep my heart beating? Will it stop my bones crumbling? Will—
The old man spun around and, in one fluid motion, lifted the cap from Abbott’s lap and pushed it on to Abbott’s head. Then he spun back and grabbed the steering wheels again, spinning them wildly, his feet jabbing the pedals ferociously, first one and then the other, his other hand shifting levers, first forward and then back, the train spinning, jolting, pirouetting.
“What’s happening?” Abbott felt conflicting waves washing over him, some – like regular waves – pushing him forward and upwards, and others pulling him back . . . bringing him down. But it was manageable now. Now he was able to ride the currents and tread the water.
“They’re kicking the shit out of each other . . . if you’ll pardon my French,” the old man said breathlessly. His voice had changed and Abbott watched the man’s back, noting with sadness – and the tiniest frisson of fear – that he appeared to be crying. But what happened when a man made out of metal cried? Abbott didn’t like to think. In fact, Abbott would have preferred not to think about any of it. “Oh god,” the driver said, the words coming out in a soft voice that somehow carried above the sound of the train. “Ohgodohgo—”
Abbott pulled the cap tighter and stood up. “I’m on my way.”
Once out of the cab, Abbott made his way across the space between the platforms, smelling the air as it buffeted him, sending his coat tails spiralling up and out around him. Trying hard not to think about the nearness of freedom, he stepped across and forced his way into the first carriage.
At one time, the carriage may well have been the last word – or, going by what the old man had said, perhaps the first – in luxury, with ornate hangings and chandeliers glittering from walls and ceiling, and plush drapes, gathered with sashes, relieving the blur of outside glimpsed through dusty windows. But not any more.
Now the floor was a veritable battleground of debris and rotting cloth, mildewed timber and rusty pipes of metal, rolling languidly to and fro to the movement of the train.
He stepped across the piles of junk and rubbish, almost losing his footing one time as the train pitched suddenly sideways, and made his way through the carriage to the door at the far end.
For a few minutes, Abbott thought that he was not going to be able to open it. And then it gave, creaking open on hinges that had lain immobile perhaps for millennia. As he took what he hoped would not be a last look around the place, he wondered how anything on the train worked. He glanced back at the dusty floor and the cobwebbed walls and tried to equate the
ir obvious aged and dilapidated condition with the old man’s story of a train that had always run . . . presumably since the days when the world was still only a formless mass of unfettered energy, on through the times of the dinosaurs and on past the crucifixion and ever onwards to the present day.
He didn’t know what made him do it – one of those automatic things when the body seems to assume its own motivation – but he placed a hand over his heart and pressed. For a long time, there was nothing . . . and then a thick and solitary beat pounded once against his palm. Then nothing again.
He felt for his pulse. But it was only after waiting several minutes that he was rewarded with a single blip beneath the fingertips pressed against his wrist.
So that was it. Time had been slowed down. That was how the train had managed to keep even its present shambling condition, roaming around the . . .
cosmos? dimensions? heavens?
when it should long ago have crumbled to dust and flakes of rust.
As he began to squeeze through the doorway on to the second platform between the carriages, he realized that even that information brought with it a sense of foreboding: the brutal fact remained that not even the train – this artefact presumably from the very dawn of time – was to be spared the process of deterioration. One day, it would fall apart . . . no matter how successful he was today.
And when it fell apart, the train would come to a stop.
And when the train came to a stop, nothing would be able to keep apart the two battling figures in the last carriage.
And then—
He pushed through the gap and stepped across on to the next platform.
All of the carriages were the same as the first . . . each of them strewn with cloth and wood and dirt, pieces of metal and glass littering the floors. Halfway along the fifth carriage, he turned back and saw his footprints in the dust of centuries: facing front again, there was nothing. Everything was as it had been since . . . since when? And what had it been like before the train set off? Where were Hope and Despair then?
The train jackknifed sideways and Abbott flew forward, arms outstretched. He hit the floor with his left shoulder and slid to the end corner, near the door. Pieces of glass from a long-ago smashed lantern dug into his face and neck but the pain was limited and short-lived.
He got to his feet and dusted himself down, bending his knees as though he were riding a surfboard to weather the sudden changes in direction.
When he stepped though the door and on to the platform, he came face to face with the last carriage . . . much wider than the others.
From inside came the sound of thunder.
The sides of the carriage thudded – Abbott fancied that he saw the thick-looking wooden planks shudder a time or two, and then the thunder seemed to move away slightly.
It was now or never.
He pulled the baseball hat tightly down around his head and stepped across the gap, over the thick coupling links that forever tethered the last carriage to the eternal train, and he grasped the rail.
On either side of him, fields flashed by, and buildings, a wall, some houses . . . the wind blowing his hair and trailing his coat tails like a kite. But he kept facing forward.
On the wall in front of him was a recessed handle set into a door.
He took hold of it, pulled it outwards and pushed the door.
It slid open on to the thunder.
It was a place of shadows, a place of darkness lit only by laser-light beams streaming from the hundred thousand cracks and splintered knotholes that dotted and criss-crossed the wooden walls.
The sound was deafening.
It was a herd of dinosaurs rampaging the Jurassic plains.
It was the everlasting electrical storm that fuelled the sun.
It was the sound of conflict, an endless fight between tireless armies on a field of blood . . . a battlefield so big that the sun never truly set on it, for the armies were so vast that they spread across entire time zones.
It was all of these and much, much more.
The two figures seemed to be locked together.
One had the other by the wrist and by the back of the neck.
The other, one arm taken up by its opponent’s hand-hold, had its hand clasped around a piece of neck, pulling it ever nearer, stretching it like a turkey’s wattle . . . and with each step it took backwards, clearly pulled from behind by the hand on its own neck, its opponent followed, the two of them stumbling, staggering . . . soundlessly fighting for foothold and traction on a floor that had been smoothed by constant footwork into something more resembling dusky marble than the wood it truly was.
Abbott sidled into the room and thought for a moment of preventing the door from closing . . . in case he was forever trapped in here, striving to keep out of the way of the two leviathans rampaging around the carriage. Then he saw that there was a handle on the inside of the door. He grasped it and turned, watching the door’s edge – the lock went back and came forward: back, forward. He frowned.
Then why hadn’t they left the train?
Then the old man’s words
. . . nothing else matters to them . . . why, I don’t figure they’d want to take a break or get off of the train . . . even if they could
came back to him.
That was why.
They existed, these things, only to fight. To fight each other and win. Watching the creatures stagger around the carriage, Abbott wondered if even that summary were sufficiently accurate. He wondered if it were simply the fighting that counted . . . and that, maybe, if one of them were to be defeated, it would be a Pyrrhic victory for the other.
“Hey!” He waved his arms like he was about to take off. “Hey, break it up, okay?”
The things caromed to one side as the train lurched, but their holds didn’t waver. Abbott grabbed the door handle as he pitched forward and swung to the side with it, his legs pinwheeling until he hit the wall and lay against the open door.
And there it was, gaping at them.
The outside.
The light from outside flooded through the doorway and into the carriage, illuminating fully the chaos in which the two things had existed for so long. And, as luck would have it – though Abbott thought that maybe luck didn’t have the ante to sit in on this game – the combatants were caught in profile, the light spilling down the length of their bodies, catching the bones and musculature.
And they looked around, as one entity, ceasing for the most infinitesimally small fraction of time. Their faces were bizarre contradictions of emotion and personality, awesome and gentle at the same time . . . even within the same furrow of hairless brow.
Without a second’s thought or hesitation, Abbott pulled himself to his feet and threw himself at them.
And he screamed.
The creatures seemed to frown – was it wonder? fear? amusement? It didn’t matter. In that split of a split second, their holds relaxed.
Abbott hit the thing on the right and slid off into its opponent, his coat wafting behind him like the cloak of an avenging angel or one of the creatures of the night, the do-gooders he used to read in the comic books in simpler times.
simpler lives?
so long ago.
And as he hit them, the train ground to a halt, then started again, then lurched around. Wheels screeched and hissed, the train’s whistle blew into the world filling it with just the one thing: noise.
The fighters staggered, slipped, fell, coming apart.
One of them scrabbled to its knees while the other turned in its prone position on the floor and reached out a grasping hand.
There was no emotion on their faces.
They did what they did because that was what they did. No hate, no fear . . . no intelligence.
The train spun.
Abbott rolled across the floor to the back of the carriage.
The door swung shut and everything became gloom again.
Now the train spun around the other way, speeded up,
stopped almost dead in its tracks – if it had have been on tracks – and then shot off again, slewing in the opposite direction.
The creatures had rolled apart, one against the side wall and the other already getting to its feet against the door.
Abbott pulled himself to a sitting position and started to shuffle.
Both of the creatures were now on their feet, pacing each other in a wide circle, hands outstretched, knees bent for maximum spring.
He shuffled along the side wall as they tried to lurch at each other, and the train leant over madly, sending one body flailing against the wall only a few feet from Abbott’s shoulder.
Oblivious of Abbott, the figure spun around and tried to grab its opponent, and the train shifted again, sending it spinning down to the back wall. The other scrabbled on its hands and knees in pursuit but already the centre of gravity was shifting again, and the creature fell backwards.
Abbott got to a semi-kneeling position and scurried towards the door.
Behind him the thunder had abated.
Now there was only the silence of intent.
The storm had passed. For now.
He turned the handle and crawled out on to the tiny platform, pulling the door closed behind him.
They were passing fields.
A sea of corn waved in the late afternoon sunshine.
The sky above it shone clear blue.
Abbott caught sight – briefly – of a road sign before it sped past into memory. It was a road sign he had seen before.
The air, blasting now into Abbott’s face, tasted of cotton candy.
Abbott pulled himself to his feet and looked up.
And somewhere down the train, in the tiny cabin, the old man turned a wheel or maybe stepped on the other pedal . . . or maybe the train just hit something . . . and Abbott lost his hold.
He flew through the air, through the gap between the last carriage and the one in front of it, and then the train was moving past him, the last carriage with its eternal altercators . . . and he was still flying . . .
A huge ploughed wave of grass and soil swept behind the carriage like a brown and green-flecked curtain. And then it was gone, the engine’s mournful wail like the distant sound of a storm drifting away.