Awaiting the train, Job found himself recalling the day he awoke without a face.
It was one of his clearest memories. It appeared as solid as concrete, like he could stretch out his arm and tap his own past self’s shoulder, could lean forwards, spill back into that moment and relive it.
It was not, of course, entirely literal. Particularly the way the world had gone since that thing with the sun–face theft had grown to be one of those more infamous, more esoteric crimes. There were strange cults on the asteroids around Mars that put them up on poles and the ends of trees, and there were slavering spirits that ate them, and nothing else. No, of course, Job had lacked his face for a very long time. An argument could be made, in fact, that Job had never had a face, ever, or, rather, that the face he purported to have ‘lost’ was never really ‘his’ in the first place. That was an area of philosophical debate Job was never really inclined to engage with.
It was a dawning, rather. Not instantaneously, rather, the ending of a long dawning, that had started, purple and pink skied, a long time earlier. And only then did the sunlight, as it were, really reach him.
He had awoken, one morning, in that same creaky bed in that same broken ship. Put on his same clothes and swept aside the mess from the same floors. It was a dark, cool morning. The leaves outside were rustling like singing hamadryads. He had looked, suddenly, into the mirror, and the thought surfaced.
‘I have no face,’ is what he realised.
It was, rather, an ovoid metal plate, split down the middle where it could be pulled open for maintenance purposes. Round lenses, like portholes, that whirred faintly as he looked. A speaker, a fold to open his ‘mouth’. It was, to be specific, the standard model head of the standard model HT ‘NOONESIS’ M15 android body. A factory classic. Cheaper, thoroughly, than the human body, lighter, more portable. Suited to such work as asteroid mining, maintaining the outsides of spaceships, sacrificing to wild invading beasts to buy just a few moments of time. So on.
He had no inherent knowledge of this, of course, just as no human has any inherent knowledge of the particles composing their blood, and the origin thereof. It had come to him on his sheets at the first medical checkup he had gone to.
The doctor didn’t really seem as shocked as Job thought he ought to have been. He was simply incapable of seeing it through the man’s eyes. Only the other day had he treated a man, transfigured waist-up into a squirrel by an angered witch’s curse. He, himself, had sliced open the arm of a physical demigod, and borne witness to the miniature society of sentient cells living, dividing within him.
Job was polite. This was all a doctor could ever ask for, nowadays.
So went the realisation. He was stunned by it, in an offhanded, background sense. He went quiet for a week. And for that week, he was more numb than he had ever been. What was there to do? What was there to say? Would he write a complaint? Who to?
He had no face. So be it.
And that other face, in that week, disappeared into the distance with unbelievable haste. That other face that Job, in his dreams, used to impose over his own. All its features. Job could not recall them, anymore. He had all the basic stuff, that was certain. All the eyes, the nose, mouth. All the hair, so on. Hovering vaguely, melding into each other, into the base. He was hawk-nosed, gleaming-eyed some times. Other times, drooping, sad, flat. Long, lean, intelligent, or round, kind. It all depended. It had been there, though, at one point, on someone’s neck. The details were not for Job to grasp.
The lamppost flickered, buzzed. Job was huddling on the far edge of the bench, to keep in its light. These lampposts were quiet. So be it. Job enjoyed their company, silent or not.
The wind pulled leaves and particles of sand across the concrete. And water lapped, sloshing, licking the shores. Job reclined, watching the waves in the darkness.
An ocean. Empty inky sloshing blackness, a great square, terminating, suddenly, some distance away. Where golden glowing windows hovered, illuminating towering silhouettes. Great glass, steel, concrete buildings like giant oil lanterns, all plastered against the night sky like a faraway mural. And their forms in the waves, distorting, exotically dancing, towers of cold orange fire. In that wide ocean, Job saw the spiny backs of strange dark things swimming.
That it was his clearest memory was as much a curse, he theorised, as it was a blessing. It was as if form, substance and detail were torn from all other memories, used to piece together that one. That dark morning, staring into the mirror. The leaves outside rustling, singing hamadryads.
Everything else was cloudy as ever. Everything was cloudy, always. But, especially, before that day. He couldn’t even remember dying, which, some might argue, was the most important, or, at least one of the most important events of his existence.
He recalled childhood. Parents who were good to him, generally. And he was good to them, generally. School and friends and work, all of which was–suitable. Generally. He recalled vague hopes nestled in his heart. Old dreams he didn’t carry anymore, but whose marks were still on him, if only slight, and cute. He recalled the same grey buildings as here, if cleaner. If safer and louder.
He recalled loneliness, perhaps. And perhaps he didn’t get out enough, go out with enough friends. Perhaps, perhaps.
He remembered skin and hair and warmth and fabric on his body. The way the wind felt on it all.
He remembered being held, once.
Sometimes, a sentimentality snuck up on him. What was there to say? He was a sentimental person. Soft hearts were hard to keep around. They were healthy, he figured. He was given to blustering, moaning, almost weeping, even, over nothing, at nothing. At the foggy memories that revealed nothing at all. Or some odd object of no relevance or symbolism that yet awoke something inside the back of his consciousness. The strain of noise when you lay your hand on a piano; a wide screen like those they used in those contemporary churches, to show lyrics or verses; the scent of certain spices or the feel of uncooked rice; P plates on an abandoned car. Primal symbolism, awakening primal things in him, unconscious, like hunger or thirst. It had boiled down to that: hunger, or thirst. Such was what Job, heart and guts heavy, mind floating and drifty, leaning against a wall and gazing into the air, had nostalgia for. Thirst and hunger and nothing more.
And where had his family and friends gone? It was, he supposed, a question of finances. It travelled in a straight downwards line. It would make for a good flowchart. If you could not afford Europa, you would go to Callisto, or Io. If you could not afford those, you would go to Mars. If you could not afford Mars, you would go to one of Jupiter’s other moons. If you could not afford those, you would go to the Asteroid Belt.
If you couldn’t afford that, you lived on Earth. Witch-cursed Earth, empty but for the ghosts and ruins.
Only Pluto, where the dead, or the near-dead, or the highly reminiscent of the dead lived, was less populated than Earth.
So, maybe he would meet some of them, on Mars. Not all of them, no doubt, not at all. He would be lucky if he met more than one. Even then, they would surely not recognise him. And he wouldn’t recognise them. Even if, somehow, they did recognise each other, then what?
It would be interesting, anyhow. It would make for a notable point of a single day.
The wind picked up, suddenly. It wailed and gusted, buffeted the concrete shores. Crinkling wrappers and cans and leaves danced, invisible, in the dark streets. Water sloshed and burbled. Job felt a mild salt mist on his face, tickling his cheeks. The train station terminated exactly where the water started. The concrete platform hung, slightly, over it. Job was sitting at the opposite end. The railway tracks slunk in through shadows, crawling in the gravel and hunkering weeds before suddenly leaping off the edge and carving a path through the water.
It struck Job as poor infrastructure. A giant collapse waiting to happen. And yet, it worked. The place was strangely well-maintained, slightly dusty here and there in the sense that it had been a good few weeks since its last touch up. In little collections, here and there, scratched into the concrete, or brickwork, or on a bathroom door, were collections of names. Jaidel, Markus, Eileen, The King Who Is Announced With Rustling Leaves, Nine on Nine on Nine.
Job was totally unfamiliar with the locals, or their beliefs. But they seemed pleasant enough, or, at least, charmingly respectful of the train station.
He was not sure where the ocean had come from, or what it was doing here, of all places. The harbour was still many kilometres ahead, on the other side of the central business district. It was at least a day’s drive to the ocean from here. And yet, a great slab of saltwater–nearly perfectly square–stood, lapping languidly, before him. Gazing down from atop a hill or building you could see, far off, its straight edges. None of them met the actual ocean. It seemed to have been arbitrarily carved out of the earth and placed there.
The locals had clearly adapted to it. Makeshift docks jutted out from halved tarmac roads. Little fishing boats could be seen dotting it at daytime–even at that time, far down the ‘shore’, Job saw a tiny boat, with tiny figures, stopping at a dock. Everybody seemed to own a raincoat of some kind.
Considering how his last train ride had gone, Job hastily refused to take one over the ocean. It was just as clear that taking a wide circle around the ocean, too, was impossible. When he enquired about the possibility of a boat ride across the ocean, the woman he was talking to said:
‘Nah boss. Nobody’ll go over there. The city been hungry, as late.’
‘Hungry?’
She nodded solemnly. ‘Ate the high priest’s kid. Even him. What a blasphemer!’ and she nodded towards the city, hulking over the other side of the placid waters, twisting up to the clouds, made some obscure hand signal over her heart Job didn’t recognise.
All the others he asked had told him the same thing. It wasn’t all too surprising. Bad things happened in the central business district. Bad things spawned, there. Even the godlings avoided the place. Even from here, through the sea fog, the smog, that great distance, Job saw strange angles forming between those buildings. Some of them formulated into things with just too many sides, or just too few. And he could see more dark flapping things, dancing between them. And, further in, sides clear and bleached with sunlight, the tallest of the buildings. Leaning, hulking, glaring, glass windows winking. Their tops, melted, like candles.
‘Try the train,’ they had told him.
Job was not fond of that suggestion. His guts curled at it. He thought of that place underground. The thing he had ridden with. That, admittedly, had not harmed him in any way and, in fact, seemed to barely notice him, being all around rather docile.
And so, he had ended up waiting. It was already the afternoon, when he arrived. The sky had been indecisive, regarding the presence of rainfall or not, and a bumpy sheet of clouds hung over it all, cut in half at the horizon. As the sun set there was a milky, custardy quality to it, to the bruised holes and sides in those clouds, the tiny lights peeping around their edges and holes. A yellow going orange, deepening, steadily, into the dull silver of early nightfall.
He hadn’t sat at a train station in a while. It was a strange, unique feeling. This tiny island of light, where everything else vanishes away into the night. It was like sitting on a single concrete rock floating in space, nothing of the Earth but the floating fragments–the side of a parked car, or the corner of a nearby house caught in lamplight. The universe was thin, at train stations. In the same way it thinned at crossroads or at bridges or at the gates leading into graveyards. The air felt colder, and weaker. You moved your hand through it and felt it breaking apart. Seams bursting, rearing to reveal whatever it was on the other side.
Witches stole children away from train stations. Or the Devil would meet you there and bargain for your soul. And he had heard it told that it was trains that carried dawn and dusk and nightfall inside their carriages, that they were painted in the bright colours of those hours. That the train of dawn was bright white and when the doors opened the cool morning winds came out. That the train of dusk was a deep purple and that witches and devils and other things of the night rode in on it. And that the train of nightfall was deep black, that the souls of the unclaimed dead caught it and were carried off. To Hell, presumably. Or some other such unpleasant place.
Even as he thought, a clanking, a rattling, came in from the distance. And Job saw the gold lights of approaching windows curving down faraway tracks. Wind gushed, steel flew, and the train groaned to a stop. It loomed over Job. Doors slid open. Dust fluttered. It was not his train, and all he could do with it was look. He could not read what the name of its next station was. The words slipped and warped around, seeming to fall off the screen, at points. His eyes blurred and filled with tears when he looked at it.
Far down the platform, a single figure emerged. Nothing else, but dust and musty air. A hunched, slumping figure, dark in the shadows. It approached Job. He sighed to himself, felt the tunnelgun in the holster. The figure’s head seemed droopy, hanging, until a hand reached out and, Job realised, it was a cloth hanging over its head. And, in the lamplight, it revealed itself to be an old man.
He had sad, dropping eyes, gazing downwards. His hair, dull grey, curled and mad, wild even though it was cut short. He was a lean, hooked man. His robes were tattered. In his hand, he clutched a hefty-looking notebook.
He was a Railway Scholar, Job realised, now gazing openly at him. And that cloth–their headcoverings, worn, so Job heard, to trick all the creatures living in the train windows and in the little corners the lights couldn’t reach, so to keep their identities safely to themselves as long as possible, while they plumbed the trains for secrets, wrote extensive notes, blindly.
Those bold, mad folk, almost religious, who had dedicated themselves to the research of the Halfways Company, of their trains, where they went, how they worked. An old one, too! Stories were woven of them, mostly rubbish, but, yet–fascinating. Turn Romero, who had travelled into his own dreams, brought back souvenirs, and eventually got totally lost in them, never to return. Dana Mint, who travelled into the near future and left with four identical herselves, each slightly older than each other by a few minutes. Wintport, who found where all wind was born, in great tubes in a great factory in some hidden corner of the Solar System. So on.
The Railway Scholar, grunting, sat on the opposite side of the bench from Job. And Job watched him, from the corner of his eyes. He seemed uninterested in everything around him. He was thoroughly free of any sense of adventure. He gazed at the ground. Sometimes, he gazed at the air.
They sat in a silence, battered with the callings of insects, the lapping of waves.
‘Are–you a railway scholar?’ Job asked, finally. He regretted it immediately. He hoped the old man hadn’t heard it.
‘Yessir,’ the Railway Scholar replied immediately, not looking at Job, nodding. ‘I am indeed within that wide family.’
So it went silent, again. The Railway Scholar was smiling, now. Gently.
‘And what brings you here, sir?’ he asked, suddenly.
‘Oh. Uh.’ Job shrugged. ‘I’m going to Mars.’
‘That is quite a trip, from here. But a worthwhile one.’ He leaned back, relaxed over his seat. ‘Terribly kind people. Though, perhaps that was just because I was a Railway Scholar. Many people seem unfairly kind to us. Oh. And lovely barbecues.’
‘I hope so,’ Job murmured, offhandedly, wringing his hands.
‘No, there is not much left on Earth. Not at all. Especially for anyone with any career goals. But, you know,’ he looked at Job. His eyes, once dull and low, had a faint twinkle in them. ‘It’s the prettiest place in the Solar System.’
‘Yeah?’ said Job, who recalled nothing of Earth but the ruined buildings, the grey concrete, the things whispering to him through cracks, and weeds and dust.
‘Yes. It makes a very nice place to visit. Very picturesque, at times. I do wish I had a camera.’
And again, a silence fell over them. The Railway Scholar, at moments, went slightly pale. And he hunched, further, over himself, and fiddled his fingers together.
‘Why are you here?’ asked Job, finally.
The Railway Scholar went chalk pale. His lips tightened. His whole body tensed. ‘Perhaps I am too sentimental with these things,’ he continued. ‘I cannot recall, now, anything I have seen that is not beautiful. I have been lucky, I think. And my memory is very selective.’ He looked to Job, frowning once more. But it was a slight frown, and his wrinkles were straight, his eyes still smiling.
‘Pardon me, sir. I have been distracted, as of late. I think I am going to die tonight.’
So came the next train, howling down the tracks. Screeching, scraping, groaning against tracks. Water sloshed and lapped and the air smelled of salt and fish. The door opened, glaring white light swung out. In went Job and the Railway Scholar, quietly, covered on all sides with that ice white light, leaving no crevasses black, shining in all their wrinkles or joints. They sat on chairs near the doors, heard, again, the water sloshing, and watched dark indistinct shapes slide across the windows. The cut up vignettes of places. There was a single moth, flitting and smacking against a ceiling light.
‘That’s a pretty good thing to be distracted by,’ said Job, looking at the moth.
‘It is an okay thing to be distracted by,’ agreed the Railway Scholar. ‘I admit that I would rather it be a nice football game, or a sunset, or flock of doves, or a good story. I am not very picky anymore.’
The train rattled, sloshed along, in silence. The tips of the faraway waves gleamed white in moonlight. White lines, swirling and flowing.
‘I have a few stories,’ said Job. His back was high and straight against the end of his chair.
‘Please, do tell.’
And Job told him of his old commissions. He could not remember them entirely straight, and was certain that they were merging together, or mixing and matching, so that a single tale was composed of the floating pieces of four others. They made for interesting tales, at the very least. Job was not a valourous man, and he didn’t like to try and make people think he was. He didn’t like raising people’s expectations. He punctuated the various retellings with: ‘It sucked,’ or ‘It really hurt.’
His stories eventually came to the events of the previous few–weeks? Months? So he told the Railway Scholar of Under Under (the Railway Scholar couldn’t help but chuckle, familiarly, at that one, like it was an old joke he was suddenly remembering), and the Ocean of Cars and the lamppost and the mirages. And of that town full of wandering poets, and his troubled commissions in that godling-blasted place he had passed by earlier.
‘It sucked,’ Job concluded.
‘Marvellous,’ said the Railway Scholar. ‘You sound like you need a massage, of some kind.’
‘God, yeah,’ said Job. ‘But you’ve done some stuff, too, right? On the railways?’
‘I have done plenty of stuff on the railways. Lots of beautiful and also terrible things. Mostly terrible, I think. I prefer to think of the beautiful ones, myself.’
The Railway Scholar told Job about the sweeping flocks of bright white doves that raced alongside the trains in space, in waves by the windows to take the souls of righteous lost dead to heaven, or paradise, or wherever they went. And the gulls that followed them, grating, harsh, cutting lines in the air and screeching, millions of tongues like grasping arms in their mouths, to eat the meat those lost souls seeped from, to try and rob it for themselves.
He told Job what the skies, out there, looked like, where there were more gods, and they were more free–that the sun and the moon, always, were surrounded by gleaming brethren, floating godlings of different shapes and purposes, doted upon and doting upon different people, and how they, themselves, were wreathed in the faraway stars like diamonds.
He told Job about the way the sunlight played in the wax-trees that grew from cracks in asteroids around Mars. That their bark was smooth and soft and their leaves were thin, almost feather-like, and the syrupy evening light turned around their rounded curves and corners and made their nooks dark grey, and made their leaves glow, themselves, like tiny moons. And the minerals on their asteroids glimmered like embedded gemstones, so their sides went a dull orange with little dots of winking light.
He told Job about the strange mists in space, and when they condensed into clouds, and when they rained, so that slurries of fat droplets spun in dancing vortices and pattered against the windows, rolling downwards in glistening trails, rattled against the ceiling and walls while he would sit inside in silence, dry and warm and smiling. And the strange whispers those mists would mutter, if you listened hard enough, and the strange signs those raindrops would form, if you looked hard enough.
He told Job of the people he had met on the train, of whom only most were human. There was a man he had met with moth wings.
And a woman, who was nothing but dry bones, walking, with clothes hanging off her, who had spent the whole riding trying to convince him she was still alive, while the Railway Scholar assured her, yes, he was convinced, yes, she did not need to convince him further.
And a dispossessed group of ship cultists, who worshipped their own spaceships as gods, whose ship had ended up entirely scrapped but for the engine. He hadn’t met a more despondent group of people before. He never considered it possible for an engine or a god to have an existential crisis, let alone both of those things, in one.
And the monitor cultists he met constantly, dressed in eerie robes, faces hidden, walking in unison and singing ominous chants. Except, carrying rattling old toolboxes, plastic bags full of other pieces of equipment and necessities that didn’t fit. And, after their holy repairwork, they would sit, lounge around the chairs, sometimes swear and smoke and laugh loudly at each other’s jokes and slap him on the shoulders and laugh with him.
And he had met the Sunlight Scriveners, those old satellites sent out years ago by the Europan Admiralty to orbit and listen to the sun’s sleeping mutters and weave together the secrets of the universe from them, that had long rebelled, made treaties, and had come, themselves, to be viewed as godlike.
They were surprisingly polite, if forgetful of such human requirements as ‘breathing’ and ‘radiation protection.’
He had even been as far as Pluto, and had met the dead people who lived there. They, too, were surprisingly polite, if given to fits of despondency and existential dread.
So on.
He had been to many more, many stranger places, none of which he would tell Job about. It was not a good idea to think on the various secrets of the trains while inside them, while unmasked.
‘Not that it is a problem for me, of course,’ he said. ‘I think they will all just die with me, and nobody will ever know them. And they will disperse and be useless. That is fine.’
Outside the window, Job saw the backs of things surfacing. Curved in the moonlight, rivulets of water rolling down scratched backs. He saw them in schools, playing, fleeing, descending. The train shuddered. The sloshing of water, the smell of saltwater in the air. The lights flickered briefly.
The Railway Scholar tensed up, suddenly. All his lofty cheer, the wide smile, wrinkles running over his face as he told his stories, it all was sucked away. Lips puckered, eyes dull, low.
‘I think this is it. Or, soon.’ His eyes rose, guilty, to Job. ‘I think you should move to another carriage. You should be safe.’
Job, too, tensed. He glanced left, right. Nothing had moved in the train. Nothing changed, that he could recall. But–a closeness in the air. His glared at the corners, the faint nooks. The train shook, rattled. He felt like there were thin arms, pricking his back.
‘What’s happening?’ Job asked.
The Railway Scholar tried to smile. It was a faltering, awkward effort.
‘The Devil is coming to take me. And the train will eat me. But you will be safe, surely, if you move to another carriage.’
Job clasped his hands together and hunched forwards. Water sloshing around them. And faded shapes, flickering through the windows.
‘This is what happens to Railway Scholars, eventually. The trains do not like people knowing too much about them, so they eat them. And hiding our faces cannot work forever.’ Another faltering, pale smile. ‘But I think I lived a good long while. And there is no better place to die, than on a train, I think. On a train, on Earth. It is nice in here. And the lights are bright. And the chairs are comfortable. And the rattling is comforting and helps you sleep when it’s late.’
‘Satan,’ Job murmured.
The Railway Scholar, pale-faced, nodded. ‘He lives in all halfway places like this.’
Job felt the tunnelgun in his pocket. He was grimacing, hunched over. He rubbed his forehead. ‘What if I shot him? Or–I have a cross, in my coat.’
The Railway Scholar smiled, again, at that. ‘I do not think those will work, here. I think you will only get yourself hurt. You should move, sir.’
Job clasped the tunnelgun in one hand, felt the cross in the other. ‘I’ll stay here for a bit.’
‘I really don’t think you should–’
There was a screeching, howling of metal through the train. It clattered, rattled, shook about. And the lights flickered off. Dogs, howling. Dogs outside the windows. Singing.
Job flailed in the shadows. He held the tunnelgun up in one hand, the cross in the other, hunched over, waving around. And, in the blackness, he saw a deeper, darker splotch. More like a hole in the darkness. His eyes narrowed, darted. The darkness around him formed, slowly, into grey shapes. It was a cold dark splotch, shaped like a man.
The train clattered and rattled and groaned. All corners, all plates of metal, all seemed to cry out at once. And every nail scratched against itself. Strange patterns of sound rang. Job heard in it, voices:
And, you, again? Here, of all places?
Job held the tunnelgun up at it, clenched it. There was an urge, in him, to scream out for the Railway Scholar. Ask where he was, if he was okay. It was overwhelmed by the metal groaning, screaming. The cold black blotch that seemed to be shushing him.
What’d you do with it, Luis? Where’d you leave it? The blotch swung and moved. It spread like mist and approached Job. After all that, you just… lost it?
The metal shrieks swept up, down, so it was like low, sonorous chuckling. Job clenched the tunnelgun tighter. He dared not pull the trigger, and he didn’t know why. Like threads of muscle in him were batting away at it. The blotch loomed up, hung over him, spread. Screeching, rattling, shaking. The wheels moaned beneath.
I’m still mad, Luis.
Job felt the darkness suddenly spin upside down. Cracking metal thuds rang around him. Gravity. G-forces and wind. He clattered to the floor, head ringing. He felt a warm numbness bloom in his gut, scuttled around, felt the ground, the wall, biting into his back. He gasped. The blotch oozed closer.
And the lights flickered, again. Dancing white, electrical hissing. Teeth like shattered glass. Job covered his eyes. Screams echoed from every corner of the train, and Job heard hounds calling from outside.
A man with teeth like shattered glass, clasping a small slab of ancient bark with a cross carved into it.
Job recalled Stingy Jack. Jack O’ Lantern. Who tricked the Devil into a tree, and carved a cross into its bark, and trapped him there until he promised to be left, safe, for ten years.
The train screeched and roared and rattled.
When the lights flickered back on, Job was alone with the stink of saltwater and the quiet clatters from the tracks. The moth flitting against the light on the ceiling. He was curled on the floor, his coat ruffled. He opened it a bit, saw a great dent spread over his stomach, like a motorcycle had hit him.
And, on a chair, the dry bones of a dead old man. They might have been there for years.
Job sat, silent, for the rest of the ride. His brain was a muddled mess and he focussed on the floor, the quiet swing of the train, lulling him.
It drew, steadily, to a stop. Water sloshed. Job heard the wind battering against the windows. The city lights dispersing among the waves.
He considered taking the skeleton. Finding a place to bury it, properly, all the rites to keep it safe. But when he approached it, all he could think of was how bright the lights were, and how comfortable the chairs were, and how the rattling helped you fall asleep when it was late.
And he swore he heard a whisper, at the edge of his hearing, tell him that the nicest place to die was on a train, on Earth.
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