Entry Two
Feeling drained from the busy day, Ian leaned his head against the window of the train for some brief shut-eye. He didn’t want to fall asleep but the gentle knocking and rocking of the train was lulling him away. It was pitch dark outside save for the occasional orange light that zipped by.
He snapped his head up as another train passed in the other direction. The noise was deafening. Outwardly it looked like any other South-West train. It was what was inside the train carriages that had disturbed him. Each compartment was a sinful red, filled with what looked like body-parts hanging from hooks, and other unidentifiable shapes; they all moved in a jerky fashion.
As soon as it had shown up the train was gone, clacking and rumbling as it went. Hurriedly Ian looked around his carriage; nobody else appeared to have seen the horrific sight. He wondered if maybe he’d imagined the train, doubting his own eyes.
Whatever it was, he wrote it off to dreaming. Sometimes it was better not to know. Ironic, really; the thought of bad dreams in this nightmare. Ian peered into the inky bleakness beyond the window thinking to himself how his commute felt a little longer everyday. It was easy to get lost in rhythmic motion of the train and the steady bright and dark of passing lights.
He tried to look ahead, to get some indication of the city creeping closer in the distance. He spotted nothing but a dull glow on the horizon. If he didn’t know better he’d have said it was the sun rising and that he’d spent all night on this train. That he’d eventually reach the station only to catch a train right back to the office. But that couldn’t be the case, Ian hadn’t seen a sunrise in decades.
Ian looked away, around the car at the other lost souls. Most everyone staring at their feet, or talking to themselves. He remembered being confused, once, about such things. The way that you pack three dozen supposedly social creatures into the close quarters of a commuter train car and suddenly everyone turns inward. But sure enough, of all the potential voices, the dull hum of the engines and the clacking wheels on the track were the only sound he heard.
“Hey.” A grinning man jerked Ian from his thoughts. “What’d you see?”
Strangely, Ian’s first instinct was to turn inward as well. He looked around to see if there was anyone else this broken-toothed man might be talking to. Anyone at all. But sure enough he was staring a hole right through Ian, the intense focus of his stare a stark contrast with apparent distraction of the rest of his body. The mans hand and feet in constant motion, his mouth twitched its dirty grin, splitting the constellation of scabs marking his face revealing fresh raw flesh beneath.
“I, uh,” Ian stammered, “What do you mean?” He deliberately focused his eyes over the mans shoulder, hoping his distant stare would distract the man into looking elsewhere. No dice.
“Train, the other train, you saw it right? You saw them?” The man chuckled nervously.
“Saw who?” He tried to look anywhere that right at the mans eyes, impossibly unwavering. He looked at sole-worn shoes, the frayed cuffs of the mans pants, at the grease-smeared front of the man’s gas station jumpsuit, the nametag which read “Gil,” but he always came back to his eyes . . . Or his teeth, which was actually worse.
“You saw the Flayed Men.” Gil’s eyes shifted at the words. Just enough to betray his discomfort, but not enough to indicate he believed anyone else cared enough to be listening in. The words tugged a fearful nerve in Ian’s chest as well, though he couldn’t say why.
“Look, Gil . . . You’re name’s Gil, right?”
“Sure.” He chuckled and picked a chin scab.
“Alright, Gil, I don’t know what you saw, or have seen, or are seeing but I just want to go home and get some sleep.” The city was upon them, immediately. Dimly lit windows blurred past and the soft engine hum was replaced with the rush of wind as the train surged through the urban canyons.
“No.”
Ian was taken aback, “What?”
“No you don’t. You’ve been riding this train for eight years.”
He thought back, trying to count time.
“If you wanted to go home you’d be there by now. We’re only here,” he gestured at the city whipping by outside, “Because I made you uncomfortable enough to want to be somewhere else. Besides, what have you got to go home to?”
“What?” A strange mixture of fear and confusion edged into his voice; something approaching panic. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Gil’s grin faded and his voice dropped, “What do you have at home that’s so much better than being here on this train… With me.?”
He let his eyes drift back to the window watching the city lights fly by. He thought of home, of his television, of his Xbox and microwave burritos. His mind drifted from his bean-bag chair to his toilet, to his perpetually unmade bed. Suddenly his apartment took on the aspects of a hiding place more than a living space. A place where he could go to escape, to distract himself, to lose himself in the inky bleakness.
“It hits you hard down here, doesn’t it?” Gil spoke, a here-to-fore unknown sobriety in his voice.
“What’s that?”
“The introspection. Clarity comes fast.” Gil sighed, “That’s why you aren’t home yet, there’s nothing more for you there than there is here. Your soul knows it, so it doesn’t bother.”
Ian didn’t like it, his mind was reeling, things weren’t making any sense but somehow he knew that Gil was right. Right on a very profound level.
“What’s your name?” Gil asked.
“Ian. Ian McKinney”
“Ian McKinney, come with me to my home. Break the routine, do something different. It’s you’re only hope.”
Apprehension stalled he speech but after a long moment of silence Ian nodded. The brakes on train squealed almost immediately.
**************************************
Gils apartment was not so much different from Ian’s own. A dilapidated studio, it was basically four walls with a curtain hanging around the shower and toilet area. A worn out hide-a-bed couch was deployed in one corner facing an old rabbit-ears style television. Some manner of home shopping network played in between bouts of static and the volume fluctuated sporadically.
Nearby on a night stand a laptop computer, missing many of its keys, lay open with some manner of pornographic video frozen and pixilated; a spinning clock indicated efforts to load. Gil followed Ian’s gaze to the computer and shrugged.
“It’s been doing that for weeks.” He grinned mischievously, “It’s the only thing doing any buffering around here. Have seat.” Gil pulled up a wobbly chair of his own and began to untie his shoes. The knot seized and the shoelace snapped in his hand. Gil grunted, “Figures.”
Ian stood, frozen in place, Gils new tone made him nervous. “What? Uh, what figures?”
Weariness clearly displayed on his face, Gil raised the broken shoelace into view as though it answered every question Ian could ask. Ian shrugged again. Gil dropped the fragment tot the floor, clearly exasperated. “Do you know where you are?”
It was Ian’s turn to throw the isn’t-it-obvious look as he gestured around the room. “At your place. This is your place, right?”
“Yes. Well, really, no. It’s your place.” Gil stood and crossed the room, pulling back grubby curtains concealing a grimy window, “All of this is your place, and your fault.”
Ian moved toward the window. The entire dusty surface was host to an elaborate string of profanity someone has composed with their fingertip. He tried to look through it at the derelict city outside. “What do you mean?”
“Ian?” Gil started, “Do you remember dying?”
“What?!” Ian stumbled backward from the window, nearly tripping over a bundle of electrical cords suspended across the room. Hadn’t seen them before.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no.’” Gil gestured toward the hide a bed, “Sit down. Don’t try to avoid the spring in your ass, it’ll find you anyway.”
Ian, mind reeling, tried to pick a spot without a spring poking through and sat. The spring found him anyway; Ian grimaced. “I need to know what’s going on. What do you mean ‘do I remember?’”
“I mean you’re dead, kid. You died. Judging by where I found you I’d guess train wreck. In your sleep. Probably never saw it coming.” He eyed Ian expectantly, “Any of this ringing any bells?”
“No.” He thought, “Wait, does this have anything to do with those… Those, what’d you call them? Flayed Men?”
“No.” Gil waved the idea away, “Yes, no… Tangentially. We’ll come back to that. Look, point is, you’re dead. This is Hell and it sucks.”
“Hell?! Why am I in Hell?”
“Don’t look at me. That’s kind of the reason you’re here.”
They both sat in silence. Somewhere a clock ticked off-rhythm. The computer moaned and went right back to buffering.
“So, what now?” Ian asked, defeated.
“I’m thinking. Look, I’ve been here for a long time and I’ve seen people come and go.”
Ian’s attention perked up.
“Yeah, go. People go, either one way or the other, and I think I’ve got a handle on how this thing works.” Gil grabbed Ians shoulder and held him fast making sure he had his attention, “Why do you think you were on that train?”
“Because it’s how I get home.” His statement was voiced as a question, “I ride it every day.”
“No,” Gil franticly waved his hands in the air as though swatting flies. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, you’re driving this train… This proverbial train. All of this, I mean. Like a dream… A dream that sucks.” Gil stood suddenly an clenched a nearby chipped coffee mug in his fist. “The kind of dream where every time you start thinking it’s gonna get better, something shitty happens and you get coffee on your shirt!” Shouting now he hurled the coffee cup through the white noise on television. The mug shattered, the television continued its fuzzy tirade.
Ian flinched as high-velocity porcelain fragments showered the apartment. He shifted his weight on the bed and put his hand in a wet spot. He wiped his palm on his jeans and opted not to think about it. “So,” he began, his voice a little shaky, “You’re saying that I was on that train for eight years because I wanted to be there?”
“I don’t know,” Gil whirled on him, “Did you?”
Ian felt the intense introspection hit him again, “I don’t think I wanted to be there. At least not so much as I just didn’t care about being anywhere else.”
“Uh h. Even home? Or work?” Gil asked, calming himself.
“I guess not. I mean, I don’t really have a lot going on so it doesn’t really where I go to not have anything going on.” Ian looked down at his shirt, and snuck a glance at his palm, just in case.
“Yeah, I think we’re zeroing in on your problem.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. See, like I said, people come, people go. Some go up,” Gil pointed to a water stain on the ceiling. Ian released a relieved breath. “Some go down.” He pointed at a cigarette burn on the orange carpet. “And they get there by working through their shit.”
“You mean like, face their fears and repent and that sort of thing?”
“Yes and no. Sort of. That’s over simplifying I think.” Gil stopped an thought for a minute, “Look, I’ve seen folks spend days, weeks, decades praying and crying and apologizing and ‘repenting,’ as you put it, and it doesn’t do any good.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. And, and others just sort of glide out of here like it was nothing. Something just clicks for them and they walk away. Which brings us to the Flayed Men.”
Ian tried to focus, “I’ll bite, how?”
“Well, down below… Like ‘Below’ below things are real bad. Lost souls like you and me, they get worse than just being constantly annoyed. We’re talking torture, the worst kind. Having their finger nails pulled off, spikes in the ass, skin flayed off and boiled in oil… Worse than all that. Worse than you can imagine.”
“Sounds like Hell.”
“It is!”
“I though you said this was Hell.” Ian countered.
“It is, too, I think. It’s like a cake, there’s layers. This is like the frosting.” Gil was gesturing wildly by this point speaking quickly, vaguely, often inaudibly. He appeared to have distracted himself by realizing how much he missed cake.
Ian watched him, skepticism growing. There was no doubt something really strange was happening, but Gil’s notion that “this is Hell.” wasn’t sitting right with him. It started out sounding plausible, but the more he ranted about cake, the more he sounded like some crazy conspiracy theorist he’d seen on the Discovery Channel. He snapped his fingers in Gils direction trying to retrieve his attention. Eventually he slowed and re-focused on Ian.
“So,” Ian started, tentatively, “What does this have to do with the Flayed Men? Why are we the only ones who can see them?”
“We’re not.” Gil hurried back to the bed and sat down close to Ian. He whispered his rancid breath into Ian’s ear. “We’re just the only ones who do.”
Ian backed up a bit. “Explain.”
“It’s simple, really. It all comes down to what their working through. See, when folks come down here they turn inward. Become real focused, obsessed even, on their problems. Most of them just wallow in it, see. Like I saw one guy who just hoarded everything and wouldn’t let anyone come near. Another guy just went around just blindly raging out on everything; like everything regardless of what it was, like he couldn’t even see beyond the red in his eyes.”
“Oh!” Ian piped up, “Like the, uh, the Seven Deadly Sins. I think I saw something about that on TV.”
“Yeah, sure.” Gil waved it away, “And it’s like that; most of them never snap out of it, and eventually they go downstairs. But some people, they figure it out. They find a way and they beat this thing and they get out. And that’s what I think the Flayed Men are about.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Well, I think they’re from down below. And I think they’re breaking out. I think they found a way.”
“What does that have to do with us?”
Gil stared through Ian like I he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re really not getting this?”
“No.”
“C’mon, man,” Gil tapped a pair of fingers repeatedly on Ian’s forehead, “We find their train and we stow away. We get out!”
Ian’s skepticism returned, “You want to stow away on a train out of the lowest layer of this cake in hopes that it takes us out of Hell? What makes you think they’re actually leaving? Maybe they’re just going someplace worse. Maybe it’s just a sort of torture transit moving them from one terrible thing to the next? What if it screws us completely?”
“And what if it doesn’t? Anyway, I don’t think it matters.”
“I’m pretty sure that matters to me.” Ian stood and moved to the door, “I’d rather sleep with a spring poking me in the back and water dripping on my head than spend eternity burning in hellfire.” His hand was on the doorknob, “You’re on your own, man.”
“You do that a lot, don’t you?” Gil asked. The fanatic leaving his voice and his mood suddenly cold. “Talk yourself out of things? You do it all the time. That’s your problem, you know.”
Ian froze in place.
“That’s why you’re here.” Gil rose to his feet slowly, “Not because you’re mean, or angry, or hurt people… because you’re lazy. That’s one of them, right? You’re discontent all the time, but you’re too lazy, or scared, or whatever to make any effort to change anything. So now you’re stuck here, riding a train, perpetually commuting from your dead-end job to your dead-end home with no noticeable difference between the two so you just sit there, in limbo. Perpetually moving, but not going anywhere.”
Ian felt paralyzed. He wanted to argue, he wanted to say that he’s looked at other apartments, that he’s tried to move up the corporate ladder, that he’s even tried internet dating… But he hadn’t, not really. All his efforts had amounted to self-sabotage, or a lack of follow-through. Just enough effort to look like he was making an effort without actually doing anything. A smile crept across his face, “And that’s why it doesn’t matter, right?”
Gil raised a lone eyebrow.
“It doesn’t matter where it takes us. It just matters that we go. That I go. That I at least try to Better my situation. Right?” Ian twisted the doorknob and pulled it open “That’s gotta be it.”
“Sounds good to me!” Gil grabbed an old backpack and headed toward the door, “Let’s go and get out of this hole.”
“Well,” Ian paused, “I actually want to get back to my place get some sleep. We’ll go tomorrow when we’re both fresh and rested.” He watched Gil’s smile fade, “You know, could be a long trip. Should probably get some food and stuff, too.”
Gil dropped the backpack to the floor, “Yeah,” he mumbled, “You’re probably right. We’ll go tomorrow.”
“Alright, then.” Ian replied, “I’ll see you here in the morning.”
“Sure.” Gil sat down on the wobbly chair in front of the static on the television, his back to Ian. “You should probably take the stairs down. The elevator’s broken.”
