So the day had been bad, after all.
‘What do you mean, “unjust”?’ Job asked. It was a lovely morning. It was a cool wet wind sprinting over the bright morning sunlight. Fences and rooftops gleamed – dew evaporated, rose in gentle mist from their edges. He occasionally recalled, again, that he had no skin, and felt numb and cold. But he forgot it frequently. He was leaning against a fence, looking into a crack in the pavement. It was wet and hard on his back.
‘Murder, Job. How could you not consider it unjust? Murder! Murder, yes, Job. The extinction of another life, and all the things it may have achieved!’ So rattled, hollow-voiced, from the crack. Their eyes – or skin – or whatever it was – were like the eyes of a trapdoor spider in a tree hollow. A low glimmer. Curvature, white.
‘Who’d I murder?’ Job asked.
‘What haven’t you murdered? To think! Why, most recently – a moth, Job. A trifling creature! With a trifling crime, yes, yes. A few muggings, perhaps. A murder of its own, perhaps. The theft of a man’s skin, indeed, perhaps – and, yes, yes, the very crime of a moth attempting to be human.’
Job stood up. He wasn’t entirely sure if he was hearing things correctly. He was feeling woozy, and confused.
‘And yet! The answer, Job, was murder?’ A pause. ‘Unjust! Unjust! Unjust unjust!’ Another pause, and then, a lighter voice, from deeper down. ‘We ought to send someone to kill you, Job!’
‘Well,’ said Job, toying with the chunk of pavement in his pocket. ‘I–can’t say I disagree with you-’
‘He agrees! Yes, he agrees, of course! And to think, after such a lack of guilt, of admittance, Job, yes!’
Job scratched his head. It was a scraping of metal on metal. ‘Are you really going to punish me for the jobs you sent me on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Uh.’
There was not much of an argument to be made there. So, just like that, Job had been fired and exiled. He always was vaguely aware something of that nature was going to happen, at some point. The Men Who Lived Behind the Cracks in the Pavement had a view on justice that could be best described as ‘arbitrary’, and Job would never forget the day he had been sent to kill a very large fish for possessing an unnatural monopoly on scales. It was just, rather, difficult to believe that it had happened on that particular day, then. And he was feeling so relatively good, too.
Job never really bought into the Men Who Lived Behind the Cracks in the Pavement all that much. His worldview was hardly shattered. His perceptions on reality hardly needed any great changes. The Men claimed, as most gods did, that the universe was an invention of their own, and nobody else’s. That they had bashed a great crack in the emptiness before the existence of anything, therefore allowing an endless spillage of something. And that every day the cracks in the pavement would spread and spread and spread until everything was engulfed, and all would be like the beginning again. There was, presumably, some paradisical type thing for their adherents. It wasn’t that he disbelieved them but, rather, it didn’t particularly affect his life whether he did or not. He was sure they were right, anyhow. It wasn’t really his business anymore. He would get along.
He had now come face to face with the very thing that came upon everybody left on earth, eventually: he had no prospects. Earth, barren earth. Witch-cursed earth. Nothing left but the cults and the ghosts. And Job.
What else was there to do, but leave?
‘Luis…’
‘Luis?’
‘Luis…!’
The vines announced, as he ascended the slope, tinkling, weighed down with all his things.
‘Don’t call me Luis,’ Job replied. ‘I’m Job.’
‘I don’t want to be rude, but, well…’
‘We heard you were…’
‘Leaving?’ They all swished and shook together as they spoke.
Job searched for what to say. He ought to have said more. He wasn’t a poet. He was always rubbish with English. He couldn’t find anything, however, all rubble and shells and detritus. He hadn’t anything to say but: ‘Yeah.’ And he shrugged.
The vines mumbled to each other for a bit. Went quiet, for a bit. Job waved to them, before he boarded the train. He couldn’t be sure at all–it was a touch windy, after all–but he swore they waved back.
He did not have very much, in general, and of what he had, little was ‘dear’. He had his coat, stuffed to bursting with all the knick-knacks needed to keep him running. And a hefty backback, clinking and clanking with even more. All dried food, bottled water, the artefacts and charms (notably missing his engraved chunk of pavement). Oil for his joints, a blanket, an umbrella. So on. All he dwelt on was Mars.
Mars, concrete and smoke. Onyx-black towers, leaning in stacks into the brown skies. Ships whizzing between them, or through ice-clouds. People. People, flowing like liquid in the streets. He couldn’t imagine how loud it would be. How crowded. He couldn’t remember what it was like – filled streets.
So the train groaned, and clacked away from the platform. Low metal screeching. Quiet clicks from the tracks. Earth slid by.
It was dark and quiet in the carriage. Dust flitted in flashing beams of sunlight. The clouds were colossal, today. Mountainous, craggy. Long bruises in their sides, peaks and cliff-faces. White as greek temples. Every time Job shifted, all his pockets, his backpack, clinked and clattered. It was unbearably loud. Everything felt like it ought to have been quiet, so Job didn’t move. Even the things in the train seemed to agree. It was inactive. In his boredom, he looked to the train monitor. It said:
UNDERUNDERUNDERUNDERUNDERUNDERUNDERUNDER
He rubbed his face, blinked. He had never been to UNDERUNDERUNDERUNDERUNDERUNDER. He, in fact, hadn’t even known of its existence, except, perhaps, before the day he shot that moth. Lots of places appeared on the train monitors, and Job had never willed himself to visit them. There were stories of people riding the Halfways Company trains, aided by Railway Scholars, into Hell itself, saving the souls of loved ones and escaping. Sometimes they ended with a sad sort of twist, somebody looking back into Hell and getting drawn back in instantly or turning into salt or such. They were very exciting, enthralling tales which was exactly why Job disbelieved them. Not that he ever wanted to be the man to find proof.
It swam across the monitor. It was not a name that filled him with any kind of glee. A marching row of the word UNDER, unfolding forever. Rolling and rolling and rolling. He had no chunk of pavement to grasp, anymore. He fiddled with the tunnelgun. It reared up on him: he was alone.
So Seven Hills swept by. The leaning faces of houses, the signpost forests jutting. What might have been the carpark BAR was in. It wasn’t unfamiliar past this, per say. But it was hardly familiar, either. He had seen these places as emblems, nothing more. Symbolism. This place, where the hills went steep so the houses almost seemed to be standing atop each other’s shoulders, and their front doors were decorated with imagery of eyes, and lips. This place, where a park grew into a forest, where rugged branches and bark hanging like leprous skin intertwined as tight and hard as chains, where the dry leaves hung down and coated it as a singular colossal roof, where strange lights could be seen flickering in the darkness, and where lost children were said to be taken to. And this place, where a small apocalypse had been begun and been promptly ended when the two denominations of the cult (so he heard) accelerated from angered arguments to straight up warfare, leaving a wide blasted crater, smooth and empty inside, streets unfolding and hanging over the edges like hairs, houses gazing downwards.
And then came darkness. Not like the tunnel the train had driven through on that day with the moth, which the train would already have passed by now. It was a plunge into a clawing, grabbing darkness, almost instantly. Job shut his eyes, opened, shut. He held his hand out, grasping, moving. Nothing. An omnipotent, curling blackness. Job was running on trust, and nothing else. Trust that the train was still around by the feel of leather on his arse. Trust he was still around by the raggedy canvas-feel of his coat.
The lights flickered on, soon enough. The bulbs were dusty and stained, the light, brownish – but they were train lights, all the same. An icy white, glimmering over all surfaces, digging into the eyes. But through the windows remained nothing. Flat, empty blackness. Job clutched the tunnelgun. He clutched his backpack.
And what were those, in the distance? Studding the walls? Job gazed. They were still and heavy in the air. They glimmered. And that, spreading at the bottom of the window. A gaseous, grey phosphorescence, stormy and slow.
Stars, Job realised. He was seeing stars. And, stretching in the distance–a glowing fog.
A flapping shape soared over the glow. And Job saw, in the sky, blacking out a star here or there, the tips of flailing masses. Twisting, turning. Metal screeched, shrieked. The train shook, and Job’s backpack tinkled.
Job’s eyes adjusted, or the glow spread closer, as the train lowered deeper. Bulbous, formless shapes, was all. Great raggedy rock formations, stalagmites howling up out of the phosphorescence. Waving silhouettes. Warping, shifting. Fleeing into the spaces between rocks.
Perhaps he should have just walked.
The train wailed, stopped. Job gazed out the window, down, into nothing. What held up the tracks? Great poles? Or did they float? How so, then? It seemed inefficient, all of it. It struck him as thoughtless urban planning.
He knew that these were all pointless concerns. Job felt a kind of dreamlike tiredness. A lightness in the head. He was aware of his surroundings entirely, aware of his status, aware of what was happening and what probably would be happening. But he could do nothing about it. So he was a passenger, thoroughly, in all possible ways. He thought of urban planning. He thought of the people who had installed the tracks here. He thought of the few people on earth who still caught this train every now and then–perhaps this very carriage–to and from a job, or a family, or a shop. He tried his hardest not to think of anything else. He tried to not think of why the train had stopped.
The doors creaked open. Wet, frigid, sticky air seeped in. It was cloyingly sweet. It gave Job a headache. He clung to the chair, frozen, had his fingers wrapped tight around the tunnelgun. The train shook, moaned. Job glanced up. Saw the edges of dark shapes forcing in through the open doors of other carriages. Flailing, moving. Glistening. And the doors, finally, creaked back shut. And the train clattered steadily onwards. Seas of iridescent white fog roiled beneath. Job exhaled.
And the carriage door behind him rumbled open. A plodding of vague limbs. Shifts in the air, vortexes, an inhale, exhale. Job glanced down at the shadow on the floor. He saw the way it folded into layers. The angles, the protuberances. The way they moved in the air, and swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled in on themselves. He heard a clicking. A slumping. And – a thump of leather. It was, Job figured, just two more seats behind him. It clicked to itself. The shadow on the floor swirled. Job groaned to himself.
Onwards the train sped. Job was drunk on adrenaline. He felt sweat pooling in his clothes. Spilling downwards over his skin, when he had neither sweat nor skin. The clammy chill of the outside air, still swirling. He was rigidly unmoving.
The train went on like this for what might have been hours, might have been days, might have been months. Job couldn’t tell. Whenever it stopped, his agony reached a peak. New electrified waves of fear pierced through him, stronger each time, no matter how much he swore to himself he was used to it, that there was nothing to be afraid of. Whenever he felt relaxed, leant back a little in the chair, he would hear a click from behind, catch a glimpse of the shadow, the way it folded and unfolded, and would straighten instantly. And on it went.
The visitor left, eventually. Job heard the way it shuffled, all organic sounds, clicking and swishing and thumping. He shut his eyes tight, felt a brush of cool, slimy air. He was, soon, alone again. He reclined, slightly, glazed over, wide-eyed.
Until, eventually, the stars began to blot out. That sloughing phosphorescence receded further and further, until it was clear something dark was blocking it out. He felt the chair hugging him, gravity pressing him back against it. It was going up. His back hurt. His head throbbed.
Light flooded in. Sudden and blinding, almost pure white, tinged with the dust on the windows. Blazing patterns into the floor, gleaming off Job’s chassis. Cutting, penetrating. Job keeled. His head throbbed. At the very next station, still throbbing, half-blind, groaning and clinking, he flung himself from the train.
The concrete bit into his face and arms. It was gravelly and warm. And the air was so free and sweet and clean, even though his face was planted in the ground. And the leaves rustled, and the wind brushed over his hair, lingered on his coat. He laid there, breathing. And, finally, pushed himself up, patted himself down.
‘Fuck,’ he concluded.
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