Sojourn

Allen rattled back and forth in his seat as his mind negotiated with his body. Are we still asleep? The boy pressed his eyelids down in an effort to fool himself. The seat bucked again and Allen slumped over on his side. He felt hard, splintered wood flaking against his face and palms. An ancient mildew wafted from between the vibrating boards.

Where are we? Neither Allen’s mind nor body knew. The breeze that normally carried through his paneless window was absent. He couldn’t hear the TV static punctuated with the hissing clicks of pop-top beer cans. His father wasn’t yelling at him or the phone or the dishes piled in the sink. There wasn’t even the smell or feel of cat-piss carpeted hallways.

Allen opened his eyes and met an abysmal darkness. He sat against a wall rather than in a chair like he thought. The room tremored, groaning like a tornado had sucked it up into the sky.

The walls hiccupped again and tossed Allen into the air. His arms flailed in panic for something to grip, but only managed to pick up jagged splinters in his fingertips. A crack appeared in the wall to his right. It allowed rays of golden sunlight.

Allen soaked in the freshly illuminated surroundings. The room lacked the modern veneer of furniture and decor, and even the muted shriek of electrical outlets. It had four shaking walls sandwiched between a floor and ceiling. His finger ran along the rusty iron rivets holding the place together.

Allen tiptoed across the rumbling floor with delicate caution. Moving like an injured crab, he stretched one shaking leg out into the dark before the other, while hoisting his upper body off the floor with his arms. The muscles below his waist refused to cooperate.

He plopped down in front of the shimmering crack in the wall and waited to catch his breath. The gravity of this strange predicament began to settle upon his chest and shoulders. His father often called this kind of pressure suffocating. The thunderous heartbeat threatening to collapse Allen’s chest only amplified itself with the inability to fill his lungs.

The crack jostled as they hit more turbulence, and it ebbed itself open a few more inches. Allen surveyed the fissure from floor to ceiling and realized its complete symmetry. The separation in the wall wasn’t a crack at all, but a door. He snaked his fingers through the gap and pulled it to the side. The entire wall peeled away and rolled out of his grasp.

Allen looked down and found the chugging wheels and levers of a locomotive. What he expected to be an airborne barn house was actually a rocking train compartment. To his right, a series of boxcars stretched as far back as Allen could see. Some of the cars were black with soot, as if they had been on fire. Most were just a dingy brown.

When he glanced to his left, however, Allen couldn’t make sense of what he saw. The train extended forward for several boxcar lengths before it vanished into nothing. As the train charged ahead, Allen watched the boxcars melting away one at a time, as if passing into an unseen tunnel. He sucked in an anxious breath as his resident train car approached the point of evaporation.

Maybe we’re in a dream. It was a reasonable theory. It explained how he found himself on a train and why his legs didn’t work. He looked out the boxcar and noticed how foreign the landscape was. Lush jungle foliage covered every inch of land around the tracks. Vines and gargantuan leaves swung back and forth just out of reach. Palm trees towered over the terrain like great fibrous skyscrapers. Then why do my hands hurt?

The splinters along the soft flesh of his fingers told Allen he was awake. He turned them face-up in his lap to better inspect his wounds when the lights went out. His head snapped up but the jungle and all its soft easy light vanished. Even the sounds he had taken for granted went silent, left with only the metal rattle of the tracks. The monkeys, the rustling leaves – nothing.

The black curtain pulled away. Light flickered through a fluid veil until a new landscape poured into view. This one had rolling gray hills and a rugged cliffside. Clouds blew into neatly filed rows like corn stalks in the sky. A path cut along through the colorless grass running parallel with a lakeshore. A crowd danced their way toward the water. None of them turned to look as the train rocketed along the hillside.

We must be right on schedule. The tightness in Allen’s chest and throat loosened like the noose of a commuted death sentence. He leaned back on his hands, minding his wounds, and watched the temporary view pass him by. Quartz and crystals, too far and too heavy to carry, studded the countryside. It appeared the diamonds had leached all the nutrients from the soil and left the grass brittle and bleached.

When Allen squinted, he thought he saw tiny creatures buzzing around the scattered gemstones, like bees migrating between flowers. But these little bodies were too long and agile. Allen thought they could be fairies. He leaned forward to get a better look as they danced among the minerals.

“Basa!” Someone hollered from up ahead. Allen looked to see a man standing near the tracks. He was tall, tan, and had a toothy smile across his face. “En su nu basa!” The stranger cheered. Allen offered a neutral wave in return.

The man plucked a long, slender spear out of the soil beside him and extended the shaft out as an offering. Allen hesitated to grab it as he rolled by. The man’s eyes widened and he took off at a sprint, shaking the wooden pole as he ran. “En su nu mil may!"

Maybe he’s a delivery man. Allen reached out and took the spear in his hands. It was smooth and balanced to the touch. The stranger smiled and jumped in the air after he passed the weapon off to the train. Everything dripped with déjà vu.

Allen’s view was cut off and shrouded with immediate darkness. He hadn’t noticed the nonexistent tunnel this time, which seemed to have the same effect as before. The black curtain in between each world acted as a real tunnel keeping the railway intact, no matter where it roamed. Allen briefly wondered if he was the only transient onboard.

Light chewed at the rippling black veil around the train, except the tone seemed different. Red charges exploded through until it engulfed Allen’s vision. Pillars of inferno twisted up until they exhausted themselves in a vortex of smoke. Stalactites drooped down from the ceiling like enormous, fossilized teeth, etched with soot and draped in cords and wires. Some of the coils sparked with loose electricity.

Allen scrambled away from the door. His legs struggled to kick his body backward, as if they were asleep. The hot breath of the furnace wafted through and summoned beads of sweat across the boy’s brow. The air smelled like boiling roadkill and forced Allen to gag.

A giant ogre toddled back and forth in the firepit. Fat and covered in burns, the beast carried stretch marks from his cheeks down to his girthy toes. The sweltering atmosphere ensured the creature was hairless, even on its scabbing dome. It let out a rancid yawn as it tinkered about with its work.

An ocean of humans covered the ground and every other surface around the giant. They looked tiny before their rotten keeper. One group was caught in the motions of a dance routine, while another cranked out a cross fit circuit. All of them were naked, and their skins turned shades of red and purple from the heat and muscle trauma. The giant wiggled with delight and encouraged them all to keep moving.

“Make the salt!” It roared over its subjects. They scurried along to keep themselves lathered in sweat.

The boy clutched his stomach and doubled over with nausea. Tears bubbled from behind his eyelids and cut away the ash on his cheeks. He missed his dad, who was probably near blackout drunk in the broken recliner of his living room. He missed their shitty plywood house and the overgrown weeds in the yard. And being able to sneak in and out of every window because none of them held any glass. Even cleaning up the empty beer cans scattered around his father’s throne was a close memory.

Guilt gnawed its way out of Allen’s stomach and up his throat. He thought about his family and all the relatives he never came to know. The bubbles in his eyes gave way to a breathless weep and he surrendered. He sobbed for everyone he loved and strangers he would never meet – all forced to live in various shades of ignorance.

The giant clapped its hands and pointed at the boxcar as it rolled through its ring of hell. Allen covered his face and waited for the darkness to overtake the train. It came and went, taking the heat and decay with it. He peeled his palms away from his eyes and met a new reality. This time, it looked like the bustling streets of a futuristic city. People in white vacsuits, whirring chrome satellite dishes and flying cars. Allen saw what looked like an old timey jester perched upon a roof. They made passing eye contact as the train shot by.

Allen had a new perspective of the boxcar with his back to the furthest wall. He noticed something in the darkness to his left, sporadically illuminated with the outside world’s flashing light. It looked like cloth or canvas piled up in the corner. Only after he rearranged himself to get a better look did he realize it was a dead body.

He recoiled when he saw the boots jutting out from the shadows. It wasn’t anything like a fresh corpse, but Allen could see the bleached white bones of a skeleton shaking back and forth. It was dressed in heavy mid-century clothing, complete with tacky golden jewelry. Allen held the spear out in front of him with white knuckles.

The train passed into the folds of the wormhole and left Allen in the dark, though now he didn’t feel alone. His eyes widened as he recognized the clicking sounds of teeth and joints bouncing up and down against the wall. It reminded him of his father clacking away on the keyboard during a late-night writing binge. Click click click CLACK!

Allen kept his eyes on the body as the light rekindled and brought a new world into focus. The skeleton clutched something within its folded arms. He crawled over and pulled away the thin bones draped across its chest, and beneath them lay a book. Allen grabbed it with both hands and carefully extracted it.

It was less of a book and more of a tome. Pages that may have once been glued inside were loose and disheveled. Hundreds of sheets of different styled paper had been filed away between the originals. Allen noticed the language and handwriting seemed to change every ten or twenty pages. He recognized some German, Spanish, and even Japanese characters. Little, if any of it, was archived in English.

The light came and went several times as he thumbed through the record. The world around the train cycled every forty-eight seconds, by Allen’s count. The darkness held for twelve seconds. This exchange let him analyze about half a page at a time, and totalled for one single minute. The precise timing left an uneasy reservation in the back of his throat.

The words gave way to diagrams as he turned more pages. One illustration showed the train as a sewing needle punching through a symmetrical stack of layered fabrics, stitching them all together in the same place and time before it looped back through to the start. Allen hoped to find railway tickets or baggage stickers. How the hell did we get here? The skeleton only clicked its teeth.

The view beyond the boxcar frame changed from rolling dunes to a desolate outlier planet to a medieval village caught under a solar eclipse. No two places were similar or related at all, like a random revolving door.

Allen scanned another page and recognized something. It wasn’t a word but a hard scribbled picture of a necklace. Sketched in black ink, it showed a pendant with mysterious runes and a slender arrow pointing up through the center. Allen peered at the necklace around the skeleton’s withered chest. It was a perfect match.

He looked back down at the drawing, trying to make sense of it. The doodle was frantically circled like the most important item on a shopping list. Notes and bullet points festooned the markings, but none discernible to him. Allen could only reason that whatever these other languages said about the pendant, it was generally the same information. They were all short sentences of four or five words, all of them with the same general syntax and syllables. Some of the words between similar languages were even identical.

He set the book down and reached out for the necklace. Whatever caution he had applied to retrieving the book was nothing compared to what he was doing now. Allen held his breath as he lifted the stiff leather cord up around the back of the skull and down over his own head. He let it fall around his neck so the pendant rested inside his shirt.

The light blinked out and left the train in familiar darkness. The boy shook back and forth as the train traversed a particularly rough length of track. He counted to twelve in his head and a new world sprung to life right on queue – this one a sprawling tundra with a lone frosted tower in the backdrop.

Allen wasn’t looking outside, though. He looked down and found that he could read the book now. Every page was in perfectly structured English, short of some poor handwriting. He was right about the repeat phrases around the picture of the pendant. Find one of these.

He discovered the ledger was an operating manual for the train and its destinations. Loaded with tips and tricks, it contained advice on which worlds to explore and time schedules for when the train rolled through different places. What had looked unpredictable to Allen was apparently well organized and maintained. Someone learned the timing of every stop, and what they might find if they were to get off.

The outside world switched from the tundra to a dismal parking lot. A burned-out building stood in the middle of the asphalt, each door and window boarded up from top to bottom. The roof had a charred hole along one side where the flames licked their way to freedom. Allen found there were no cars or evidence of anyone ever being there. Not even a scrap of trash dared to blow around the forgotten lot. The sky, locked in a wash of gray swirls, offered nothing reminiscent of clouds or sunlight. It was as if the building were a ghost of itself, stuck in time as a train stop.

Allen’s stomach groaned as he flipped through the crackling pages. His foggy mind couldn’t recall anything before waking up on the train. His empty stomach was evidence of additional time passage, though, because his counting implied he had been awake for less than an hour. When did I last eat?

He couldn’t remember. Had he gone to school yesterday? Allen always plucked an apple from the tree by the cemetery on his morning walk to campus. He’d spend the entire first class period tonguing the apple skin stuck between his teeth. He didn’t feel any skins in his mouth now, so it couldn’t be a weekday.

You can only get this on Saturday. Jane had taken him to Dom’s Deli for lunch. She ordered him a cold cut Italian, fully loaded, with sweet onion chips and a coke before they drove up the face of Mount Ranoa. They ate on the hood of her Honda while she pointed out all the different parts of town.

Jane was the beautiful girl who lived one street over. She smoked, ditched class, and her father owned a pawn shop. She was cool in a way that Allen had only seen in movies or daydreamed about – nothing he ever experienced for real. She was the only friend he made since his father moved them across the state to pursue his lifelong dream of unemployment. When I sell just one BOOK, you’ll forget we ever lived like this.

The train jostled and Allen racked his head against the wall. His tongue lulled between his teeth and he bit right through it. The boy’s eyes watered in the darkness as the world outside rearranged itself once again. He swallowed a mouthful of blood as he recalled the sensations of fighting the urge to kiss Jane on the mountain. She had given him a knowing look that brought his heartbeat up into his throat, which now he felt like he could taste.

Light shot through the doorway and Allen thought he smelled olive oil. His eyes blinked open as he saw the rolling Old West. A mile off, another train ran hot in the other direction. He couldn’t help but wonder if it was a real train loaded with coal and copper, or a train like his that only carried kids and corpses.

Men labored between the two railways. One team dug a hole and set a post, and another team came up behind them with bales of barbed wire. It looked like grueling work in the dry desert heat. Tumbleweeds fanned out and maneuvered between the commotion, kicked up from the train’s gust. It was odd to see the tangible effects of his transportation.

A rider overlooked the laborers from the back of a massive black stallion. Allen did a double take as he recognized the overseer as the jester from the future city. It was unmistakable as his outfit was identical. Even under the Arizona sun, he was still garbed in a clown’s outfit complete with a tri-point bell hat. Their eyes met again, and the jester let one hand fall from the reins to the revolver on his hip.

Allen did his best to retreat into the shadows of the boxcar, but he knew the rider could see him. He groped in the dark for the spear, but found feathers and string instead. The spear cycled into a beautiful longbow complete with a handful of arrows.

The jester’s lips curled back into an ugly snarl as the train carried on through the dust. He lifted his hat into the air and jingled it over his head.

That can’t be real. Allen knew that was a weak conclusion. Where could he draw the line on any of this being real? Being haunted by an interdimensional court jester was as much his reality in this moment as Dom’s Deli was yesterday. There was nothing to argue otherwise.

He turned back to the book, which held some knowledge about the train. One writer frantically composed a timetable of hundreds of stations and in which time they existed. Another scribbled about potential dangers of the train, including outright murder. Allen flipped pages until something caught his eye. The train runs the same schedule day in and day out – it will always drop you off at the right time, but not always the right place. Sometimes your origin world might be a little different from the last. Your mind and body won’t always be the same.

Allen’s useless legs rolled back and forth. He waited for the light to return, turned the page, and pressed on. The writer that he traced through the book had clean, delicate handwriting. It was pleasant to follow. If you ride the train long enough, it will take you back to yesterday. If you ride it too long, though, you will never find tomorrow.

He swallowed hard and shut the book. The world outside was mountainous and forested, with waterfalls along every cliff. Clouds of black birds swirled like cyclones above the tree line. Allen stared out into the slideshow with a vacant resolve to recognize anything at all.

The train drifted through hundreds of different settings before the boy started to fade into exhaustion. His eyes drooped every time the twelve second blackout occurred, and the flash of light startled him awake. He cracked his eyes open once and found a wasteland of train wreckage. Engineers wandered up and down the boneyard as they scavenged parts for other engines. A small crowd of sharply dressed spectators gave the locomotive a round of applause as it rolled by. Allen spit a cheekful of blood at their feet.

He leaned against the frame of the boxcar and sighed. The curtain dropped on one world and came up on another. It was a grassy field framed with low brush and oak trees. There was an old picnic table set beside the track and a rusted-out playground.

Alger Park. Allen sat up straight and felt a chill run down his spine.

“Holy shit.” He muttered. “Holy shit, this is it.”

The train wrapped around the forgotten park in a lazy half circle. The tracks below shined from use. But up ahead where the train disappeared, overgrown weeds blanketed the railway. The boxcars evaporated into the next world a few seconds out from where he was.

Allen panicked and reached for the archive. It slid back over to where the skeleton sat, just out of arm’s reach. He gripped the rotten wood panel and overextended his elbow to lay a finger on the rough leather cover. He inched it toward him in a cold sweat, and hoped the dark didn’t overtake him again.

How long would it take for me to get back here? Allen looked over the skeleton with overwhelming dread. Even if the world cycle started over, he’d starve waiting for Alger Park to return. Survival without food, water, or use of his legs would be impossible. Allen started to hyperventilate as the tome teased its way out of his grasp.

The train hitched and the book slid into Allen’s control. He tucked it under one arm and reached for the bow and arrows to his right. Instead he found the cold black steel of a handgun. Allen scooped it up and hurled himself into the stinky park grass below. His boxcar vanished before he hit the ground.

Aches came to life throughout Allen’s legs. He leaned back in the dirt and watched the boxcars rattle by into the next world. They were identical, except for some being open and others closed. One roared by that had a fixture attached to the roof. The jester. He hunched forward as he kicked his long legs and whistled a showtime tune.

“Bethought I hath killed thee!” the clown quipped as he evaporated into the wormhole.