Station

by Jarrett Brandon Early

  And strange it got.

  Clouds of white assailed Shirley's eyes, transforming them into milky marbles staring into the distance. Shirley's mouth slowly opened and continued to open well past the intentions of human biology. Hadder, wide-eyed and tense, winced at the sounds of muscles tearing and ligaments snapping filling the empty room, echoing off bare walls to bombard him from multiple angles. The lower jaw continued to drop as Shirley's head tilted back, creating a cavernous maw that looked as if it could swallow the world.

  Just as Hadder thought he could take no more, that he would run from the building screaming, searching for a stone with which he could bash out his ruined brains, the terrifying transfiguration ceased. Both men stood unmoving, one set of eyes glued to one giant mouth.

  "Shirley?"

  As if in response, noise began to emanate from deep within Shirley, a needle being dropped on the human phonograph. A voice boomed from the living speaker, containing none of Shirley's country twang or cigarette roughness. Instead, it was distinguished and ancient, with a cadence that lulled Hadder like a cobra in the face of a seasoned charmer. The words filled all - room, ears, and mind, alike.

  Greetings and salutations, my invited guest. You have been chosen amongst millions to receive the greatest gift that can be bestowed upon an individual of your ilk – a second chance, a new life. I know it has been hard for you, struggling with issues both unique to yourself and common to all. For whatever reasons, real or imagined, significant or trivial, you have proven unable to cope with that which has been presented to you by this current world. Your recent actions have demonstrated your contempt, or at least apathy, towards this existing life of yours. I do not judge you for this. On the contrary, I empathize with you and, in some of your cases, even admire you for it. I want to help you. In your possession is a key, granting you access to a better place where you can remake yourself into the person you always wanted to be. Accept my gracious offer and the bar representative before you will reveal the path to a fresh beginning. This world is not for you, and you are not for it. Join us in utopia, where dreams blossom rather than withering on the vine. Join me and help me remake you into the person you should have always been. I hope to see you soon. Godspeed.

  The needle rose, and the record stopped. The chasm of Shirley's face began to shrink back to its original state, the impossibly stretched muscles and ligaments falling back into place until it finally started to resemble the mask of a man once more. The twin snowstorms that had encased Shirley's eyes began to clear, the bright blues of his retinas appearing like the morning sun. Seconds that felt like hours passed and Hadder feared that he had just born witness to the death of a man. Finally, however, Shirley took a massive breath before succumbing to a fit of coughing, desperately holding the bar to remain upright. It took several moments for the older man to compose himself enough to speak.

  Hadder had let entire ordeal pass without saying a word. What does one say to incredible absurdity?

  Shirley, seeming thankful for the silence, refilled both their glasses with a quaking hand. "Fuck, that never gets any easier. Apologies for the graphic show; there's no way around it. Kudos, though, you handled it quite well. Some have run for the hills."

  "I might have, but I still can't feel my fucking legs. And I may have pissed myself a little."

  "An honest man. Probably hasn't served you well in life, but I appreciate it nonetheless."

  "This doesn't seem like the sort of place that rewards or even suffers fake bravado."

  Another Shirley chuckle followed. Another cigarette was lit. "Quite right, you are, son! Now let me respond to your honesty with some of my own in kind. I'll try to cut through the mysticism and smoke and mirrors that my boss, this fine establishment's glorious benefactor, favors and shoot you straight. You have a choice to make, one that will fundamentally alter your existence."

  "For the good or bad."

  "That's not for me to know. I can only offer options. Tell me you wanna move forward, and I take you on. Tell me you want no part of this madness, and you relinquish that key, and I tell you to get fucking lost. But given the circumstances that must have driven you and your fellow key holders here, could any reformation be anything but positive or at least par for the course?"

  Hadder's recurring nightmare of taking an unforeseen exam for a class he had skipped all semester came to life in real-time. "Any details to assist me with this decision, Shirley? Anything at all you can tell me?"

  Shirley rubbed his beard uncomfortably. "I'm just a tool, son. A pawn in some cosmic game that's too big for an old country boy to comprehend. I play my role and keep my head down. I sold my soul a long time ago, and this is my purgatory. Yours is elsewhere, far above my pay grade."

  "Is that what I'm doing, selling my soul?"

  The deep, sad sigh that fell from Shirley almost brought tears to Hadder's eyes. "No, that's what I did. You're being offered something else entirely. A new path. A different life. An escape from all this."

  "Anything else, Shirley?" Hadder felt sickened by the desperate plea he could hear in his own question.

  "Yeah, just one thing. It's like a river, son. Moves only in one direction, if you catch my drift."

  "I don't."

  "If you go forward, there ain't no going back. There ain't no peeking in and seeing if you like it or not. This ain't no holiday, it's a permanent vacation."

  Hadder had not been good at making big decisions in recent years. He either overthought, procrastinating until choices were made for him or all options ceased being possible. Or he made choices in the span of a breath, weighing no alternatives and giving no fucks.

  "I think I'm in, Shirley."

  Shirley delivered his patented, serious look. "You think? Why don't you take a minute and think this over, kid? I ain't trying to rush you."

  "I don't think. I know. There's nothing for me here, hasn't been in some time. I'm already on that river, and it's only flowing in one direction. I need to see where these waters are leading. Let's go. Now, please, before I lose my nerve or shit my pants."

  Shirley slammed both fists onto the bar, which threatened to become sawdust beneath them. "Fucking right! Follow me, you cavalier bastard."

  Shirley marched towards the back of the tavern, slipping out from behind the bar and past a small bathroom hidden from view. Hadder scooped up his terrible key and trailed, giving the toilets a wide berth and offering a silent thanks that he didn't have to use the facilities. Shirley pushed open the rear door and held it open. "Dead men first," he teased, motioning Hadder through the exit. As he walked out, Hadder was immediately blinded by the wash of sunlight that engulfed him and cursed its severity.

  Had he known that it would be last sunlight he would see, he might have treated its warm rays a bit more gently.

  But Hadder did not treat them as such, throwing his arms in front of his eyes and cursing the sun and its damnable insistence on showing things as they really are, warts and all. His pupils shrank before its enormity, and he slowly lowered his shields, blinking a few times in surrender.

  Hoping to discover some secret garden or mystical pool hiding behind the bar called Station, Hadder couldn't help but frown when faced with a wasteland of discarded engines, cinderblock-supported frames, and rusty remnants of once-great voices of American ingenuity. There was only an automobile junkyard, just as one would expect to find in this armpit of the country.

  Shirley limped ahead. The wind began to kick up, lifting dust to sting the side of Hadder's face as he followed. He turned to block the onslaught, and when it ceased, he looked ahead to see that Shirley had stopped at an old Lincoln Town Car. It appeared to be an early 90's model, similar to his grandfather's, except instead of being a brilliant midnight blue, it was blood brown and covered with rust holes. The Lincoln was buried in the ground, showing only the top two-thirds of the car. The bottom of the trunk appeared to be level with the sun-battered ground.

  Shirley must have noticed the "are you ser
ious" look that had crawled up to sit on Hadder's face.

  "It's not much to look at, I'll grant you that. But here we are, nonetheless."

  "I don't get it."

  "Pretty simple, really. Just take your key and open the trunk. Climb in, and that's it."

  "What's in there?"

  "Hell if I know, son; I just work here. You're the twenty-seventh person I ever let in, although you're the first in a long while. But I tell you this, I've yet to open this here trunk to find any skulls, bones, or dried blood. It must go somewhere."

  "Anyone ever come back out."

  "I told you, it's a one-way trip, son." The wind increased. Whether it was trying to push Hadder towards or away from the trunk portal, he had no idea. Shirley protected his eyes from the cutting sand.

  "Let's hurry it up if you don't mind. Shit or get off the pot, as my daddy used to say. What'll it be?"

  Hadder briefly thought of his old life, how meaningless it had become. How no light had appeared in the proverbial tunnel to show him the way. Perhaps this was the light he was so desperately waiting on. Despite the crew of butterflies that had found their way into his stomach, he saw no other alternative. "Guess I'm shitting."

  Hadder removed the key from his pocket, knelt down, and inserted it into the trunk's keyhole. His breath caught as he slowly turned the key.

  Momentary doubt fell away as the trunk popped open. It was wholly unremarkable, just a filthy Lincoln trunk, graciously void of any decomposing predecessors. As a child, Hadder remembered thinking how easy it would be to fit three bodies in the trunk of his grandfather's Lincoln. This trunk only had to accommodate one.

  "In you go," Shirley yelled, the wind now having risen to point where the conversation was becoming difficult. Demonstrating a determination that belied his recent character, Hadder dropped to all fours and crawled into the trunk.

  Or was it a tomb? It certainly was the end of one life, but would there be another on its heels? Or would he find only darkness and a dearth of oxygen?

  Hadder looked up at Shirley, his hands resting on the top of the trunk. "Well, son, end of the line!" The wind was a storm now, sending garbage wrappers and old newspapers alongside the dust and dirt to pepper Shirley and the other forgotten residents of the impromptu junkyard. "Tell that fucking devil Albany, ‘hello and go fuck yourself,' for me!" he called through rumbles of laughter.

  "Wait!" Hadder screamed. "What was that about a devil?! Shirley!"

  The top slammed shut, immediately cutting off the sounds of gusting winds and maniacal laughter, ushering in the kind of silence that one encounters in deep caves or space. And then the darkness that Hadder feared fell. Like the bottom of an ocean trench, it pressed and suffocated. Like the hateful words from a loved one, it was tangible. Like lights out at the end of the first day of a prison sentence, it was the realization that things would never be the same.

  CHAPTER 2

  It took Hadder several moments to move. Left alone in the absolute dark and silence, he felt mildly relaxed considering the circumstances, as if back in the womb. And maybe that was the point, a rebirth of sorts. Poking around the trunk in the darkness, his hands felt only the cold hard metal of the Lincoln's exoskeleton to the sides and near the trunk entrance. It seemed his only option was to push on, backward, delving deeper into the belly of the rustic incubator.

  Hadder slithered towards the back of the trunk, feeling his way in the blackness, hoping to avoid the sharp bite of a rabies-infected rat. At worst, he would encounter nothing more than a solid barrier typically found between trunk and carriage, truly rendering this a tomb and finishing the job that he started but failed to complete.

  Hadder reached hesitantly, unsure what he truly cared about more, finding a door to a new life or an end to this one.

  After what seemed like endless advancement, his fingers finally encountered resistance. But it wasn't the firmness of felt upon steel that his fingers touched, but rather the silkiness that one would imagine surrounds white sand resorts that interrupt unhappy but otherwise tolerable lives. It kissed Hadder's fingertips but let him through. First, his fingers were allowed entrance, followed by his wrist, arm, and shoulder. Despite not feeling any open area beyond and knowing that any end might be preferable to a stifling death in the back of a junked Lincoln, Hadder pushed ahead, rolling his whole body through the sand curtain. At least, he hoped it was a curtain and not a pure block of suffocating matter.

  Two rolls in and Hadder was still surrounded by the soft substance. Daring not to open his eyes or breathe in, the idea formed that he would die in limbo, no physical body or family to ever recount his existence. Just as well, he mused. Hadder wanted to be forgotten.

  And with that thought painfully dry humping his mind, Hadder rolled again, this time feeling dead air rather than more velveteen silt. In the nanosecond it took for gravity to wrest control of the situation, Hadder found time to consider which was worse, suffocation or the splatter from a long fall. And again, he wondered, why God didn't those pills work?

  Hadder fell heavily, but not damagingly so, onto the cool, sandy floor of what he assumed to be a cave. Having gone spelunking in his younger days, Hadder recognized the deep level of absolute blackness that surrounded him. He rose unsteadily to his feet and felt around blindly. Behind, there was no hint of the ledge from where he fell, only the rough, impenetrable surface of a rock wall. He hand-walked along the wall, searching for anything that may offer a way back or out. Finding none, Hadder took a calming breath, already sensing the weight of darkness beginning to breed claustrophobia.

  It seemed Hadder was at the tail end of a tunnel, with only one real direction to travel, which was comforting. He moved slowly, now and then tripping over a rock formation or small pothole in the floor surface, everything threatening to snap ankles and create a permanent mummified addition to the dry cave. Hadder walked, scooted, crawled, and crept forward, unable to decipher seconds from minutes or feet from yards. But like Columbus's crew, on the cusp of permanent hopelessness and mania, he forced himself to believe that there was an end to the vast nothingness.

  Mid-step Hadder froze, then sat down, unsure that what he had just felt was real or only a malicious phantom of his own conjuring. He held perfectly still.

  There! This time he was sure of it. A gentle breeze caressed Hadder's cheek like a Thai kiss. On he went, emboldened and stooped in a half-walk, half-crawl like some crazed calisthenics exercise. Excited by the promise of the same light he had cursed earlier, Hadder almost ran headfirst into the cave wall, putting out his left hand just in time to save himself the indignity of leaving a bloody faceprint on the rock.

  The cave doglegged hard to the right, so Hadder kept his hand attached to the wall, sliding it along as he was herded into an almost 90-degree curve.

  Coming out of the turn, Hadder was immediately flooded with relief that only accompanies a life that narrowly dodged a turn for the absolute worse. There, maybe one hundred yards away, was the faint opening of the cave. It must have been night out, with minimal light filtering in, but Hadder's pinhole pupils picked it up immediately, giving him renewed purpose and speeding his crawl-walk into a crawl-run.

  Hadder slowed as he approached the cave mouth. Dry vegetation cascaded down from above the cavern, obstructing the view of the outside.

  Some thoughts bubbled up before Hadder snaked his way through the dry creepers. It was midday when he submitted his fate to the long-dead Lincoln. How long had he been stumbling along in that cave? Did he pass out at some point, unable to determine unconsciousness in the lightless tunnel? And most troublesome – although he was by no means an expert in the topography of the region, Hadder didn't recall it being a hotbed of dry cave systems. In which case, where the hell was he?

  While these questions were both perplexing and worrisome, next to the fears of suffocation, falling from an unseen height, and becoming permanently lost in the perpetual darkness of an unknown cave, he shook these concerns off reasonably quick
ly.

  Mustering his courage, Hadder clapped his hands together and plowed forward through the parched plants. A stiff breeze, barely perceptible inside the cavern, blew back his hair as he stepped out from the protection of the earth, his feet slipping from the hard rock onto soft sand.

  Hadder looked out at the landscape and had to remind himself to breathe as he stared into the barren face of an uninviting desert that spread out in all directions, disappearing into the horizon.

  Dumbfounded, Hadder shuffled ahead and slid down a small hillock that rose up to greet the cave opening. Reaching the bottom, he noted that the ground was not soft and giving, but rather hard-baked dirt, void of foliage, with a thin layer of sand atop it, like the boardwalk leading down to a busy beach. The wind whipped around him, creating small sand devils that swept up dead weeds and sent them on cyclone carnival rides, depositing them dozens of feet away. The twisters seemed appropriate sentinels, warning Hadder not to continue on this path, but unaware that this was the only option available to him.

  Hadder's eyes rose, and he was awestruck by the clarity and size of the moon in this wasteland. Never before had he seen it play such a role in the night sky, as if he were viewing it from another, much closer world. He felt unsubstantial standing under its gaze, fighting the urge to prostrate himself before the great satellite.

  Dark, wispy clouds cruised across the sky. Occasionally, lightning streaked between clouds, connecting them momentarily by a leash of electricity, brightening the desolate world in a flash before fading away in surrender to the night.

  The air was crisp and dry, with a clean, pleasant smell indicative of areas not yet tarred by man. With open sand all around, Hadder had no idea which way to travel. Only dark shadow could be perceived in three directions, with the hill-cave dominating the fourth view. Lighting continued to shriek across the sky, shining a spotlight on various areas at a time. One bolt illuminated the skeletal remains of a dead tree far ahead. A second raged behind the hillock, and Hadder looked back to discover that the hill continued to rise far above the cave entrance. A third struck in the distance to Hadder's left, lifting the veil along the horizon.