Kieli still hadn’t come back when they started approaching the station, so he’d searched every car from front to back for her, but he hadn’t been able to find her anywhere. Meanwhile the train had pulled into the station, so he’d grabbed their belongings and gone outside, just in case she’d gotten off the train before him. But no matter how hard he scoured the platform and the ticket gate with his eyes, she was nowhere in sight. The train parked alongside the platform was restlessly belching out steam as if it couldn’t wait to depart. Guess I’ll search inside one more time… He got back on board, taking just the radio with him, and started walking back from the front-most car just as he had last time, but somewhere around halfway through the train he started to feel as if maybe this wasn’t the way to find her after all. Still, if “this way” wasn’t right, he naturally had zero idea what else to do. He was so far at his wit’s end he was starting to actually feel impressed—how could anyone possibly get so neatly lost on a train, where there was nowhere to go but in a straight line? “You know, Master, the train’s going to leave pretty soon.” “I know, but…” When he came through the rear deck of Car Eight and into Car Nine something suddenly caught his attention at the edge of his field of vision, and he came to a stop. “……?” Harvey walked a couple of steps backward, coming back out onto the deck again to stand in front of the connecting door. For just a split second, he felt something off, as if he was seeing double. His right eye had taken a beat to catch up with his left and let their two images overlap, so at first he thought maybe that was what was causing the feeling, but no; the quality of this “offness” seemed different. He squinted intently up at the door, but the harder he looked, the more it seemed to elude him, slipping out of his peripheral vision so that it was impossible to grasp what it really was. “Sometimes the clearest way to see the unseen is with the unseeing, huh?” A voice piped up behind him out of nowhere. A boy’s voice, a bit on the high side, with intonation that betrayed an accent he’d never heard before. Sensing something like malicious hostility, Harvey’s brain automatically kicked into high alert. He spun around only just in time for his peripheral vision to catch a shadowy form fleeing nimbly out of sight. Immediately, he launched himself half-over the railing of the deck, but it had already disappeared without a trace into the gap between the train and the platform. What was that…? Whoo-oo-oo! The piercing scream of the train whistle started up, heralding their imminent departure. Light gray steam belched out of the exhaust pipe as if to tell him he was out of time. Harvey tore his attention away from the suspicious figure and turned back to face the connecting door again, but he was at just as much of an impasse as before; he still couldn’t figure out what had felt so off. The clearest way to see the unseen is with the unseeing…? After a moment’s thought, he experimentally covered his left eye with his hand. With his good eye blocked, everything in eyeshot abruptly turned sketchy. He looked up at the door again using only the unreliable vision of his right eye. There before him loomed a door so old-looking it was uncanny. Every last inch of it was covered in red rust. The stench of rotting flesh began to waft toward him and mingle with the thick smell of rust, leaving Harvey momentarily transfixed. He gulped. When he looked up to the top of the door, he saw the words “Car Nine” engraved in a scratchy, antique font on a metal plate as horribly rusted as the door itself. It was the door to a car that wasn’t supposed to be there. “Can you see that, Corporal…?” “Yes, Master. I just saw the same thing you did.” Quit it with the damn “Master” thing, Harvey grumbled internally, winding the radio’s cord around his wrist before setting his hand on the lever of the door, which was coated not only with rust, but also with some viscous, sticky substance he couldn’t identify. He paused for just a moment, and then with no further hesitation pulled the door open with one yank. For all he’d imagined exactly this, he still sucked in a little startled breath when he laid eyes on the interior of the car. The walls and ceiling and even the seats were crawling with the same dense red rust as the door. In any normal circumstances, the long car stretching before him would have been rotting in a corner of some dump for decommissioned vehicles long ago. He didn’t see anyone sitting in any of the seats; instead a crowd of people had concentrated together in one section of the aisle. Looking around above the heads of the shorter passengers, he caught sight of the girl he was looking for in the center of the throng. “Kieli!” Within the group, every member of which turned toward him in concert, he glimpsed a certain face that shocked him to the core. Me—? Yet even as he stood gaping at it, the face crumbled apart until the figure looked like a poorly made clay doll. Pestered and pulled at from all directions, Kieli turned a near-tearful face at him. Harvey forced his way through the outer circle of the crowd and reached out his hand. Kieli reached out too with all her might from in between the people surrounding her. When her hand brushed his, he gripped it and pulled her forcibly out of the middle of the mob. “Harveeyyyy!” Kieli leaped at him; he caught her to his chest and, for lack of any better ideas, launched into stream of abuse. “What’s wrong with you, just wandering into another weird dimension again—?!” “No, you can’t take her away!” A little girl clutched at Kieli’s clothes—at least, you could call her a girl, but her face was plainly that of a corpse. Half-rotten skin darkened to an earthy brown, all the flesh gone from its cheeks, no eyes in either socket, and a void yawning black as night behind the round eyeholes and the gaping oral cavity. “She’s going to stay here forever. She said she wanted to ride the train forever!” All around the girl, the other passengers stretched out their hands toward Kieli. Harvey turned around to face the exit, careful to shield Kieli, but the moment he laid eyes on the connecting door, it melted as though it had been doused with acid, fusing with the rusty wall. Now come on, why don’t the both of you stay here forever? Stay with us on our never-ending journey… The passengers began to flock around them, all entreating them in dull, monotone voices and wearing vacant smiles on faces the color of dirt. Maybe the lingering sentiments of the ghosts had gathered together to carve out a niche for themselves within some tear in the fabric of reality; whatever was going on, it seemed that inside this space that should have been impossible, they could manifest physically. In short, they were being mobbed by a pack of dead people, and it was making Harvey himself shrink away now. “Do something, Corporal!” he yelled to the radio in his hand. But no, even this radio that would’ve blasted a shock wave at them any other time was panicking. All Harvey got was a squawking clamor of “Gah, stop it. Stay away from me. You’re creepy! Get away!” Had the Corporal forgotten about his shock waves along with everything else—? Now was definitely not the time for it, but Harvey found himself getting dizzy. You’re so useless… The train careened onward at an unnatural speed. Harvey darted a sidelong glance at the scenery shooting past out the windows and cursed. But then: Whoo… His ears picked up a faint, faint sound just barely in hearing range, and intuition kicked in. He reached out his arm as far as it would stretch through a gap in the horde to open the closest window. The outside wind whipping by stirred the hair on his head and the stale air inside the train car. “Kieli, Corporal, we’re jumping!” “Huh?” “Huh?!” Before the other two could grasp what he was about to do, Harvey lifted Kieli up by the torso onto the window frame and flung himself out the window, half-pushing her along ahead of him. The wilderness scenery had been tearing by at breakneck speed; tossed right into it, Kieli screamed, and the radio screamed right along with her. Harvey gathered them both into his arms in midair. After only the briefest of flights he was slammed into the ground; he made a controlled landing and rolled a few times. The hard concrete did bang up his shoulders and back some, but the impact was nothing compared to what it would have been at the speed his sight had gauged. The walls of the train cars glided by bare centimeters from where they lay. When Harvey heaved himself into a sitting position with a sigh, the last car was just clearing the end of the platform, and the train pulled away from the station with one last loud whistle. “…Hmm?” Kieli, who had been clinging to him with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, hesitantly raised her face and started looking around them in openmouthed bewilderment. A group of people in the middle of the platform were watching them, wondering what the matter was. Harvey also heard a few whispers of “Where did they just come from?” “Sir, you must know that’s dangerous!” bellowed a pale-faced man, running up to them. He looked to be the stationmaster. Harvey’s eyes met Kieli’s—she was obviously still dazed— and they sighed and shrugged in defeat. The two of them (plus the radio) had been sitting on the very edge of the platform. They got a harsh tongue-lashing from the stationmaster, but fortunately the train had departed on schedule anyway, so they were released after about half an hour with no more punishment than that, and with a series of apologetic bows (from Kieli; Harvey just looked moodily off to one side and refused to apologize at all), they put the station office behind them. “I got royally chewed out. I got unjustly chewed out when I didn’t do anything wrong. And it’s your fault.” As soon as they left the station house with their belongings, Harvey immediately lit the cigarette he’d been holding off on during their chewing-out (his one concession) and started complaining. When Harvey was really mad he was more likely to stop talking altogether, so Kieli didn’t think he was that angry, but her “I’m sorry” was contrite anyway. “Ugh, and the Corporal is completely useless.” “I’m a-ashamed of myself, Master…” The radio sounded crestfallen, too. There was a high fence that started next to the station house and ran along the train tracks. Leaning her hands lightly on the chain links, still a little groggy, Kieli looked through the fence toward where the tracks disappeared on the horizon. She couldn’t even see a trace of the train’s belching trail of steam now, let alone the train itself. The ghost car carrying the dead was probably riding along with it, in some chink of reality on that train. Never, ever stopping, no one able to get off, no choice but to continue their never-ending journey…For decades, for centuries, maybe even for eternity. The girl’s face sprang up in the back of Kieli’s mind. I couldn’t be friends with you after all. I’m sorry. I can’t afford to ride in that train car with you forever. Because we still have a destination to get to on our trip. But if we didn’t have a destination, if it were okay to go on a carefree trip forever… “…Were you thinking you didn’t want the trip to end?” Harvey murmured out of the blue. He was leaning against the fence and smoking, still looking disgruntled. Kieli kept her eyes on the tracks and didn’t answer. But she didn’t deny it either, which went a good way toward confirming it in the end. She liked to travel. She liked riding on trains, and visiting all kinds of cities and places, and absorbing the feel of different atmospheres dyed with the emotions of the people who lived there, or of the people who had once been there. And most importantly of all, as long as this journey lasted, they could stay together—that’s how she’d always thought about it. Unconsciously she was always worried that something would be lost when the journey ended. If we didn’t have a destination, if it were okay to go on a carefree trip forever… Could that train car have been reflecting a warped version of her own desires? “Never-ending journeys aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, you know,” she heard Harvey mutter quietly next to her. That familiar low, gravelly voice that rumbled in his throat a little, speaking in unemotional, offhand tones. Kieli tore her gaze away from the tracks and turned to look up at the tall man standing beside her. But Harvey ended his speech there; now he was gazing beyond the fence with an I didn’t say anything expression on his face. Whenever he made that face it meant he was 100 percent uninterested in continuing a conversation, so Kieli turned back to the tracks too, and made no response. Maybe the train Kieli wanted to ride on forever was a train Harvey was sick of and wanted to get off. She could so easily picture him not even waiting until they reached a station, just jumping out the window all by himself instead, and that terrified her. Even if I can’t make it to the final stop with him, please let me ride with him for as many moments as I can… The wind blowing along the tracks hit the fence and changed angle, whipping Harvey’s coppery hair and Kieli’s black hair in two different directions. They gazed off in the distance where the train tracks met the sky, each with their own thoughts…thoughts Kieli was sure didn’t quite meet.
Chapter 86
13 min read