The heavy oak door slammed shut behind him. He heard a key turning in the ancient lock on the other side. He made no effort to push it open again.
The ground curved before him, as if the natural arch of the planet had been accentuated. The grass grew in squares, each side as far along the ground as his body was up from it, framed by glowing white mosaic pieces implanted firmly in the soil, cement that once flowed between the cracks now content to keep its place. The fleshy clumps of plant matter arched out over their boundaries, flicking at one another in the silent breezes. It could have been inside or it could have been outside. It didn’t seem to matter. The sky or ceiling was bloated with musty darkness. Down from it there came tiny flying filaments of time and memory that slipped through the air like paper-thin eels with the translucent, fibrous wings of moths. Everything was relaxed and dreaming, the ground occasionally twitching like the muscles within a sleeping animal. There was an emotion drifting between the far reaches of this place, wandering, orphaned by those who once gave it name and home. Was it sadness? No, something farther down. It was the feeling that sleeps in the silt at the bottom of the well where the wooden bucket cannot go by law of its own buoyancy. Something beautiful and proud. A secret.
He walked across this quiet plane. His bare feet were soothed by the softness of the grass, and his eyes nearly lulled inside themselves by the depth of the green, and the damp glow of the white tiles.
One of the swimming creatures hummed into view in front of his face, almost within reach. The weightless strand of silver ribbon regarded him with a lazy curiosity, as pinpoints of red and gold oozed inside its hollow form. He slowly lifted his hand to stroke it, but the thing had never been there by the time his fingers were unfolding. He sighed and let his arm fall slack at his side.
He walked again, amusing himself by balancing on the tile borders, cold on his toes. He started moving faster, now hopping, now skipping between and around the squares. Soon he was running, jumping across each tile of landscape like a piece on a game board, the gleam of the insects in the air lighting his way. They followed him, their tiny ambient flames pulsing with glee. They grew bolder, playfully curling around his limbs and then flying away again, but never quite touching skin. He was smiling, almost laughing.
Then the creatures suddenly stopped following him. He halted soon afterward to whirl around, to call out to them, waving his arms like a happy madman. But they would go no further. They looked on, solemn now, their lights cold. His grin evaporated from his face. They hovered, staring beyond him. With a cautious air he turned to see what lay before.
Cutting a gash across the glowing landscape was a featureless embankment of gravel, holding aloft the unbearable weight of a rusty pair of railroad tracks, rotting wooden planks between the iron bars. Carefully, he climbed the rocky slope, small pieces of the great wall tumbling down the side to clatter to rest on the ground below. Where the rocks landed, the grass seemed to wilt, and the glow of the tile dimmed.
He stood at the top now, his bare feet planted on one of the metal rods. The iron sucked the warmth from his feet and legs. He looked over his shoulder. His playmates were darting around each other frantically. Beckoning him back, perhaps? He couldn’t go back. Not now. Not when he was so close.
He could feel it, somewhere between the bottom of his skull and the roof of his mouth. The secret was here.
The creatures flew off. There was nothing more they could do.
He sat down on the splintering wood between the two rails and waited. The temperature began to drop sharply. Soon there were flecks of white coming down from the sky, which had shifted from black to a hazy grey. He felt like the atmosphere was arching downward toward him, and the world arching upward with him at its peak, so that he could almost touch the vaporous hue that was the sky. He began to shiver, from both cold and anticipation. There was something coming.
As he stood up, one of the specks alighted on the back of his hand. He lifted it to his mouth, and licked it. It did not melt. It was salty and sour. It was not ice. It was ash.
The gravel began to vibrate. A bellowing tone embraced the world, so low in frequency it could hardly be heard as felt. The rust on the tracks was flaking off. The rotted wood was becoming new, fresh, almost green. He looked up from the ground and down the track.
The train hit him before he had time to flinch. Time slowed to a crawl. He felt like the wind had been knocked out of him, and along with it his mind, his memories and ideas floating away among the gallons of blood that were frozen midair in drops and lines and nebulas. Every part of him was pulling away, being splintered and mixed and scattered on the wind until it was dust in a million different forms and places. He was letting go, everything becoming cloudy as he himself became little more than a cloud. A vapor. A smear on the train tracks. And it was alright that way. It was alright.
But no. A single will was still alive. As the shrapnel of his body was careening apart and away, only one thought was left behind, one desire, one twisted lump of hope and love and hatred that spoke these words:
“I will never end.”
The fragments of his body began reassembling themselves, his thoughts coagulating into cubes and rods and shapes of reason, his mind flowing forward and inward, each splinter of bone taking its place, every ounce of blood forming into the shape of veins, and the veins forming around that blood, and around that muscles and organs and glistening viscera, and soon the skin itself was in place, the brain enclosed in its hard shell, the heart entombed in the curving ribcage, a desperate prisoner beating against unmoving bars.
Before he became real, he slipped through the hard steel of the train, and was inside.
Time resumed.
The inside of the engine was so cold he could hardly move. He shook himself, vaguely remembering sitting on railroad tracks, waiting. He must have caught his train, although the why and the how had thoroughly escaped him.
But there was something more disturbing. Something in the air. A feeling that perhaps he did not belong, should not be here. This place felt wrong. Being alive felt wrong.
He was looking directly into the furnace. The fire was bright blue. Coal was pouring out of the open hatch. The ash floating on the outside air was sucked into the great black smokestack, and down into the hungry tendrils of flame.
He approached the furnace. His eyes began to ache with the cold, his body straining against it as if it were a physical force.
Hanging above the furnace, parallel to the floor, was a spade. It was shining and clean. It had never been used. He had to reach it. His limbs were barely responding. He was reaching, up and out and forward. He had to reach it.
And then he did.
He pulled it up and off its hooks. It came into his hands easily. It felt familiar.
He shoveled the first load of coal back into the fire. It flickered, then erupted even taller, another wave of cold pushing out at him from the searing blue violence. He clenched his teeth, and began shoveling coal into the flame as quickly as he could, every bit of his mass intent on this one task. The fire had to die.
It fought back valiantly, but soon it was smothered and killed.
The room went dark. Warmth began to trickle back inside, like rats into a building once its tenants are dead and gone. He could feel the train slowing, its source of momentum cruelly suffocated.
He slid open the door of the train. Exhausted, he fell out onto the gravel. The sharp rocks opened new wounds, and he welcomed the heat of the blood on his skin.
When he awoke, he stood up gently. Pain leaped through his body. Everything burned. He looked up at the train. It was still and quiet. He limped away from the engine, moving down the side of the behemoth. To see if it had any cargo.
The cars of the train were massive cages, with tightly interlocking steel bars. Inside each were thousands of the mysterious flying animals. Looking at him.
He unlocked and opened the door of the first cage.
They streamed out of the railroad car like a river of light, flying off into the warm blackness over the tiles of grass.
He unlocked and opened every cage. He was a breaker of dams, and a creator. He smiled as he watched the very last of them fly off into the glow and fog of their meaningless world, unborn souls that would now never be born.
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