Train to Maladomini

Darkness. Pain. A sense of … nothingness. Endless pain.

Somewhere out of the darkness came an awareness of existence.

Jake opened his eyes. Blinding light pierced his eyeballs, and he raised a hand to shield his eyes. After a moment he tried exposing them to the light again, slowly letting them adjust.

How long had he been asleep? He couldn’t remember. Vague memories swirled round his head, memories of faces, someone screaming … a long time ago. He had a dim recollection of pain, terrible pain. He couldn’t feel pain now.

His eyes had started to focus, and he could make out a face directly opposite, the withered face of an old man, with paper-thin skin and long strands of wispy white hair. His eyes, a strikingly pale blue, seemed, somehow, to be even older.

"So," the old man said, an amused expression crossing his face, "young Jake joins us at last."

Jake tried to speak, but his throat felt dry. He couldn’t make any words come out. He nodded vaguely. He tried to take in his surroundings. He appeared to be in a train carriage, but something about it didn’t seem to be right. The interior was painted completely black, and the windows were small grimy squares. He had absolutely no recollection of how he got there.

"You are wondering, perhaps, who I am," said the old man. "This man who knows your name. You do not know me, but I know you. I have been waiting to meet you for a long time. You may call me Baal."

Jake felt that perhaps his vocal chords had finally woken up. "Bale," he croaked. "Strange sort of name. Is it foreign, or something?"

"Foreign, certainly, to the world you know," the old man replied.

"If you know so much, how about telling me where the hell I am," said Jake.

The old man looked amused. "If you do not know, perhaps you should try to remember where you were."

Jake rubbed his eyes. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool. "I can’t remember much of anything. I think there was a party … there must have been a party." Any time he woke up feeling this rough, there had always been a party. Not that he could remember much about them.

He managed to pin down a memory that was less vague than the others – a face, a girls’ face. Pretty, blonde, laughing a lot. Good, that was a start. He focused on her face, tried to expand on it. She wore a sexy red dress. He remembered being more interested in her body than her face. What was her name? She had never told him.

Trying to remember any more was like wading through quicksand, memories struggling furiously but sinking fast. His head was starting to ache from the effort. He rubbed his temples wearily. How the hell had he ended up on this train? He looked out of the window, and could see nothing but swirling grey fog.

"Where is this train headed?" Jake asked.

The old man smiled. "That depends on where you expect to be going."

"Just what the fuck is that supposed to mean? I expect to wake up in a bed of some sort with a naked blonde lying beside me. If I woke up face down in the gutter, at least I’d be able to work out what had happened."

There was something that deeply disturbed Jake in the old man’s eyes. To avoid looking at them, he studied the train carriage more carefully. There were no aisles in the carriage, he noticed; the bench he sat on ran right from one end of the carriage to the other. The bench the old man sat on ran parallel. He could see only one other person. At the opposite side of the train, on Jake’s bench, a dishevelled young woman sat, slumped over. She appeared to be asleep.

The carriage was full of such rows of benches, but Jake couldn’t make out whether or not there were other people on them. He tried to stand, for a better look, but he could not move. As he looked down at himself he realised in horror that black iron chains anchored his legs and body to the seat, leaving only his arms free. "What the hell’s going on?" he demanded. "Who’s tied me to the fucking seat?"

The old man spread his arms, revealing that he, too, was draped in chains. "Look," he said, pointing a claw-like finger out of the window.

It felt to Jake like the train was stopping. The steady clack-clacking of the wheels on the track were slowing in tempo. He peered through the filthy window, and saw that the fog had cleared. The train was coming to a stop by a platform. Jake strained to see some clue that might tell him where he was: ELYSIUM the platform sign said.

"Let me get off," Jake said, panic rising in his voice. "Let me off now!"

"You can’t get off," the old man said simply.

Out of the window, Jake could see the people who had just got off the train wandering about aimlessly on the platform, looking dazed and disorientated. Beyond the platform lay a land of lush green fields and trees. Nobody, from what Jake could see, was carrying any luggage.

"What do you mean I can’t get off? Get me off this fucking train now!"

The train began to move again, away from the platform and back into the impenetrable grey fog.

"Even if there were no chains," Baal explained, "you would discover that there are no doors. You cannot get off the train."

"What is this shit?" Jake demanded. "I got on; how the fuck do I get off?"

"You got on the same way they did." The old man indicated the other end of the bench. The girl Jake had noticed earlier had woken up. She clutched at the chains around her waist with wide, unfocused eyes. Along each forearm were the railroad punctures of the heroin addict. Sitting opposite the girl was a thin, middle-aged bearded man, staring unseeing at the nothingness out of the window. The cuffs of his shirt were stained with blood, and he had red gashes in both wrists. What disturbed Jake most, however, was the fact that the man had not been there a moment ago.

"I can’t remember getting on!" Jake cried, getting frightened. "I don’t even know where the hell I am! I want to get off, now!"

"If you think, Jake, you will know exactly where you are. Concentrate, and remember. Remember how you got here."

Okay, Jake thought. Be calm. Panicking won’t work. Think. Think. He shut his eyes, and tried to remember. His mind was turning over and over frantically; he forced himself to focus on the one thing he could remember clearly, the blonde girl at the party.

The party. He remembered the girl hanging on his arm. She was so drunk she could barely stand up. He remembered he’d been chatting her up, and she kept falling over, pressing against him, giggling. He took her out of the house, down the path, holding her up most of the way. He was having trouble walking himself. He seemed to remember someone shouting out to him about not wanting him to drive.

He didn’t listen, of course. He reached his car, opened the door, bundled the girl in. She fell across the seat, tried to pick herself up. The short skirt of her dress hitched itself up to her waist. She was wearing transparent black pants underneath, and suddenly Jake didn’t want to wait to get all the way back to his place; he wanted to get to a quiet bit of road as quickly as possible and get down to business.

He couldn’t remember any more after that. Just vague sensations. Screaming. Shattering glass. And terrible pain.

An accident. It hit him suddenly with astounding clarity. He’d trashed his car. He had a sudden, flash image, the girl lying sprawled across the passenger seat, impaled by a long twisted shard of metal.

Jake looked down at his trembling hands, pale pale hands. He ran them slowly over his torn leather jacket, parted the lapels, studied the shirt underneath. It was ripped in places, and stained with blood. He pulled at the collar, tried to see his chest. It was scored with great bloodied welts. Yet there was no pain, not now.

He looked up at the old man, who gazed at him, expressionless. "Am I dead?" he asked quietly.

"Well, the penny drops at last," Baal replied.

"But … what is this place?" Jake asked.

"Most would call it the afterlife. But, since you don’t believe in the afterlife, you can call it what you like."

"But a train? A fucking train that chugs along dropping people off in heaven?"

"There are some people on this train who will get off at one of the many layers of heaven. We just passed Elysium, as you saw."

"But there are no doors!" Jake said. He could feel panic rising in his chest.

"There are no doors in this carriage," the old man said. "Why would you be getting off at Elysium? You don’t believe in heaven, remember? Do you think they’d have you anyway? Besides the drinking and the gambling you have, after all, killed three people in your short and repulsive life."

"I did time for all those," Jake protested, and suddenly wondered why he felt the need to defend himself, here, for things that had happened such a long time ago.

"For a couple of bar-room brawls that became too violent, perhaps justice has been served. But what about the child who died because you were too drunk to figure out where the road ended and the pavement began? Do you think a few months in jail and a driving ban, which you ignored anyway, was punishment enough?"

"Who the fuck are you, old man?"

"Who I am is not important; you will learn in time. I am simply here to make sure you realise your reward in the afterlife will reflect your behaviour in life."

"Are you saying I’m going to hell? This is some demon train, taking me to hell?"

"There are different levels of hell also, Jake. Surely you can figure it out. What sort of torment and suffering can you imagine in which to spend the rest of eternity? You are chained to a bench, unable to move, in a train whose length is infinite, able to do nothing but watch other people disembark and head for beautiful places you will never be a part of? All of eternity, Jake. Do you have any concept of how long that is? You are not going to hell, my friend. You are here already."

The old man pointed his long fingernailed hand up to the ceiling. Jake found himself involuntarily looking up. Emblazoned across the ceiling in large red letters was a sing word: MALADOMINI.

"Make yourself comfortable, Jake. You’ll be here for a long time." The old man vanished suddenly. His hideous cackling laughter remained ringing in Jake’s ears for much longer, emphasising the endless clacking of the train as it rumbled down the track, the track it would travel for all eternity.