Crossroads

I wake to the purring engine of a train.

The seat I’m occupying is one beside a window. Ivory clouds press against the glass, obscuring my view of the world beyond. Grogginess permeates my mind, blurs my ability to grasp why I am on a train and where said train could possibly be going.

I stretch. My right shoulder protests with a gristly crack. No pain follows, so I continue to stretch. A yawn bubbles out from my throat.

“Last one to wake,” a voice rasps from the seat beside me. It comes from a squat woman with skin more wrinkled than crumpled paper. A faded green bucket hat covers most of her forehead and brows, though mean eyes glare at me from beneath the hat’s brim. “I nearly kicked you. Your snores are louder than the damn train.”

“Oh, relax, you decrepit creature,” another woman snaps from the window seat across from me. She’s just as old and wrinkled as the first woman, but sports no hat and has doe-like brown eyes that remind me of hot chocolate—the kind you get when you use cheap powder that tastes more like sugar than cocoa.

“You can’t tell me that her thunder grunts didn’t annoy the crap out of you, too, Janice,” Woman One responds, her glare leaving my face to scorch Woman Two, Janice.

Janice meets the glare with one of her own, the expression at odds with the softness of her eyes. She reaches up and plucks out a foam ear plug from one of her ears. “I barely noticed them, Greta.”

“I’m sorry,” I mumble, another yawn threatening to escape. I swallow it back. Woman One, Greta, returns her gaze to me. There’s a sharp quality to her watery eyes, and I sense that she is not one to miss details, no matter how small. I fight the urge to smooth the wrinkles in my pants.

We’re sitting in a cramped compartment that’s entirely decked out in gray drapery. Short curtains cap the window, the fabric also a drab gray, though the carpet and seats are darker, similar to burnished steel. There are four seats, the final seat by the door empty.

I still have no idea as to why I’m here.

The train’s engine gives a sudden scream. I flinch. Greta and Janice don’t even blink.

“Even faster? Wonder what’s the hurry,” Greta mumbles.

The clouds clinging to the window begin to disperse as the train barrels on. Fragments of blue sky peek through. Nothing else. No buildings or trees, no mountains or fields of grass. Only sky stained a robin’s egg blue.

“Where are we going?” I ask. The ladies ignore me. The compartment door slides open and a man steps in. He is both incredibly tall and incredibly thin, the skin on his face taut and gleaming, eerily like overstretched plastic wrap. His eyes are round and dark as pitch.

“Tickets.” His voice is as thin as his limbs.

I rummage in my pockets. No ticket. A quick glance around reveals to me that there are no bags inside the compartment, mine or otherwise. Greta and Janice hand over their tickets, the slips of paper as gray as the curtains. The man deftly clips them with a small puncher. I open my mouth, heart racing, to notify him that I do not have a ticket.

He leaves the compartment before a single syllable leaves my mouth. I blink.

“So, what’s your name, dear?” Janice asks me kindly. A spool of silver wool is suddenly in her lap, and she’s begun knitting, thin brows bent in concentration. Did she grab the wool from under her seat?

Her inquiry breaks through my unease. My name. What is my name? I sift through my memories, all of them sluggish and almost painful to examine.

“Camilla,” I manage to tell her. Now that I’ve recalled who I am, it’s easy to remember. How could I nearly forget?

“A pretty name.”

“Not a pretty sleeper,” Greta gripes. She hasn’t mysteriously produced any wool, but she has randomly begun holding a few clear marbles. She brings them close to her eyes and frowns. “Unclear.”

I’m lost. Utterly lost. Panic, slow to arrive, lands in my stomach. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

“We know,” Janice says. “Try to calm down. Panicking will help you none.”

She doesn’t make me feel better. If anything, she ignites more panic within me. “How do you know?”

Greta guffaws. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Janice sighs. “I believe that’s clear, Greta. She did just ask.”

“Unclear,” Greta repeats, frowning again at her marbles.

My heartbeat slams in my chest. I look out the window. Clouds have congregated once more against the glass, no longer white but a gray that matches the inside of the train.

Why is everything gray?

Where is this train going?

My right shoulder blooms with pain. I gasp and clap a hand to it, expecting blood. No wetness meets my skin, but the pain remains. I pull away my blouse to inspect myself and am greeted by a large multi-coloured bruise.

“Careful, dear. You’re injured.” Janice speaks over the clicking of her knitting needles.

More pain erupts along my left hip. I bolt out of my seat, gasping. Sweat drips down my nose and lands on my lips, salty and hot.

“Not great under pressure, are you?” Greta comments. Both of the women are stoic, comfortable in their seats. But the clouds outside are darkening further and there’s an aura in the compartment, thick and oily, full of ill intent. Greta’s eyes gleam.

The compartment door slides open again. A third woman sidles in. She’s garbed in a floor-length cloak that’s as dark as the thin man’s eyes. The hood is up, so I can’t make out her features.

“There you are, Hatch. We were—” Janice stops speaking. Hatch is shaking uncontrollably. She raises one arm and points at me, the finger trembling as she holds it aloft.

“Crossroads.” Her voice grates on my ears, as shrill as metal dragging on a chalkboard. The agony in my hip and shoulder flare and ripple across the rest of my body. I bite back a shriek. The little light left in the compartment abruptly winks out, the glass entirely covered by shadows, all of which coil and undulate like thousands of snakes.

It’s too much. The panic takes over, white-hot and blinding. I bolt from the compartment, my panic so consuming I can’t calculate distance properly and slam bodily into the adjacent corridor’s wall. I push off the wall and tear down the corridor, each step jarring my aching body.

I fly by other compartments, all of them open, filled with leering faces and eyes that shine with malice. Some light filters through the darkness that consumes the train, but not much, only enough to hint at bizarrely shaped people. Hisses and growls follow me as I continue to run.

A thin hand with skeletal fingers reaches out and clutches at me. The owner of the hand is stronger than my panicked momentum, and as such I find myself pulled to an unceremonious halt.

Chest heaving, I peer up into the face of the thin man from earlier. His eyes roam down my throat, the expression within them ravenous. Now that I’m so close to him, I note that he has no pupils. Only large irises that devour his eyes entirely, leaving no space for white.

“You choose avoidance?” His tongue flicks out and wets his lower lip.

“Of what?” I whisper. Animal-like fear has robbed me of any sense of logic. I can’t help but feel like a rabbit caught in the slathering jaws of a wolf.

The shadows in the train thicken and press down upon us. They are no longer insubstantial, and have a subtle weight that licks along my skin, leaving behind an oily residue.

“Fleeing the crossroads creates chaos,” the man tells me. “The train will go where you will it, based on the decisions you make. You have chosen poorly so far.”

His eyes move up to lock with mine, and their onyx depths trigger a memory embedded within me, of choking water and bubbling screams.

“I drowned,” I can barely get the words out. “Am I…”

His lips peel back to reveal a set of cracked, rotting teeth. “Dead? Of a kind.”

A sound makes me crane my neck to look beside me. A monstrous thing of scales and winding limbs hovers at my shoulder. Its head is molded in the shape of a blunt wedge, and long teeth curl around its jaw, wickedly sharp and gleaming with saliva.

“The choice approaches,” the thin man rasps.

I shriek as the monster reaches out and takes a hold of my shoulders with twisted claws. They pierce through my shirt and flesh, but before I can process this new agony, we’re suddenly in the air above the train.

Wind collides against my body. The tracks the train follows are like any other tracks I’ve seen, the one perfectly normal thing I’ve come across in this nightmare. But the train doesn’t rattle across land; rather, it winds along a stretch of dense cloud that alternates between white and black, vestiges of it reaching up to cradle the train like a lover.

And ahead the tracks diverge into two, the left-most one leading into a bank of steel clouds that exude a threat that locks the breath in my throat. The right-most track climbs upwards, into a painfully-bright orb that could only be the sun.

“Decide,” the monster holding me aloft hisses. My stomach lurches as the train barrels towards the crossroads. I can’t seem to look away from the left track, at the beckoning darkness and the promise it holds.

Janice, Greta, and Hatch flicker into being in front of me. Greta’s green hat nearly flies off her head; she slaps a hand to it and holds it in place. Janice is still knitting, her pace furious, needles blurring as they piece together an impossibly thin strand of silver that blows up into the sky above her. The wind tosses the thread towards the dark clouds and I gasp.

“You yearn for punishment,” the monster comments. “So be it.”

I want to protest, but the words are locked in my throat, heavy and unwieldy. The train squeals as the right-most tracks dissipate, the path to the sharp brightness gone forever.

And we hurtle into the dark depths.