The door. Key. Ignition. Cold. I should have seen it. The signs, they were everywhere. But I did not see it. I did not want to see it. I could not see it. I could not accept neither them nor what they meant. And now I’m here, looking at the illuminated dashboard of the car, the cold and lifeless lights, the rev counter vibrating around the half-thousand mark. I had come here looking for You, but I found something completely different. Something I never wanted to find. Something I never wanted to admit to. I still can’t. I won’t. My world is still not ready to accept it for fact. This is not my world, something has happened, but I don’t know what. I don’t know when. But something is very wrong. I should have never come here. There are things in the world one is better off not knowing, not experiencing, not feeling. Now, at last do I understand what people mean by that.

Hail, dropping on the roof of the car. It was no coincidence that it was now hailing is this dark and cold night with no stars and no Moon. It was done by Them, who had done to the world and this place what they had. Hail, every knock on the glass and metal felt like the crooked knuckles of the forgotten thousand-armed Old Gods. Of those Old Gods I had heard years ago, spoken of in the dusty old tomes stacked on top of the wardrobe out of reach of children. Books written by bearded gentlemen who now existed only as nameless faces on old photographs.

They were here, those Them. Whether they had any connection to the Sky people, I could not tell. But I can feel that They’re here. In my carelessness, I have now let them in. And now they are with me, in here. Always. Lurking in my dreams.

*

I had come looking for you, in here. When the Sun was still far above the masses of clouds. And a could armada with no end in any direction was slowly sailing across the skies above the road leading to the train yard. Threatening to release their ordnance and soak all below from everything natural which was craving for it to all buildings forsaken by both mortal souls as well as gods. Although the gates ahead were wide open, he left the car well outside them.

Gates, which looked like they could never close again. So comfortable did they look sitting in the grass, slightly bent. The part not obscured by grass was covered with the powdered rust and some white material. It was either some old enamel or altogether something mysterious and alive. The gates were somehow newer than the fence, as the rusty chain-link fence had been attached to the same kind of concrete posts as the ones in the forest designating an area not to step into. An area full of ever-vigilant mines guarding an old missile site which now existed for a way more mysterious purpose. But the history of the Trainyard was similarly hidden from both him and the locals. It had always been here, nobody knew any different, nobody ever admitted to any different. The only thing certain was that a human hand had built this here and a human spirit had contaminated it to such a degree that nature could no longer claim it back.

The ants, little red critters on their trails right before the gate. But there was a weird issue with this trail. On the side of the Trainyard, right at the gate, it ended as if cut with a knife. As if there was an unseen wall, a border which the little creatures could not or dared not to cross. A border I should have noticed and an example I should have followed. But I did not, or did not want to. I don’t know whether it was crazy fearlessness or naivety to think that our worlds were somehow different, that what affected the ants was safe for me. That I was somehow more powerful than them, that I stood higher than them. I was wrong, it was rather the opposite which was true.

*

I stepped across the line, to the other side. And now I have circled back here. And here I am further away and more removed from the beginning than I possibly could have been before. I am even more removed from this afternoon when I first arrived. The trail is now gone. A road the time has wiped away from behind me and into some secret pocket of the world. Steps I should have never taken. Decisions I should have never taken.

The cabin heating has been turned to the maximum, the heated seats as well, but it is still cold. The hail is still threatening me on the other side of the glass. But it only threatens, only tries to scare me, tries to remind me of my rightful place. The shadow of the world I came from, the world which is now irretrievably gone. I’m still cold, violently it intrudes, through the glass, the seals, through the smallest cracks. Irrespective of the heating and the temperature, it still tries to wrap me in its cold cocoon. To force me to stand straight and with my back straight, to face the situation I jumped into, blinded by love. Not letting me to escape, not even deep into myself.

I cannot leave. I don’t want to. There is still something here that I have not seen, something I have to see before I leave. To turn on the radio? It won’t help me. The air is full of sounds and noises, there are no stations, only noise and somebody’s voice crying out from between the layers of noise. Was it your voice? No it was not yours. I can no longer even remember your voice, but I know it. It was that same voice which on that moonless night escaped from the airwaves into the world. Calling you away, to there, where ever ‘there’ was. Yes, away, to someplace else, because one cannot get elsewhere from here. This place here is everything, there is no other world. Everything else is lost. Or perhaps, am I lost?

*

I stepped across the line and immediately felt that this was not the world I had been in a step ago. This was a different place. The trail of ants, the car and the road were all left behind, on the other side of a peculiar unexisting, imperceptible security glass in the form of the posts and the fence. And now the Trainyard was gradually losing its previous unremarkableness. Two-story pale building of brick, with everything which could be sold for scrap already torn from it. An expansive roof and a train platform below it, a blackened shell of a passenger train car and a stack of construction wood right next to it.

And of course the deafening silence all around. As if there was nothing alive around me. No plants, no animals, even the sky was empty of both birds and bugs. As if they too had known that there was nothing good in here. That the evil concentrated here had reached into the heights barely below the clouds and had also scared the creatures of that realm into staying far away from this place.

You. I saw you. Standing there on the door of the train car.

“Rheya!”

I called your name. And only then I realized my error. Regret, depression, sadness. It was not you. You were not here. Nobody was here. I fell on my knees, doubting if even I was here.

It was only a piece of plastic, soundlessly flailing in a wind I could neither hear or feel. White plastic covering I had recognized for your hair. My foolishness. A wish to see something that could not be real. But perhaps, it was you? But this car. This burnt train car sitting on the rails before the platform. Its black metal skin, now stretched over once bare steel. I approached it slowly. There was something threatening about it. Within it. Behind the broken and soot-covered windows. Perhaps a world that was even more mysterious and strange than the lifelessness here.

There was nothing in the train car. No living thing, not even anything that could have once been living. Not even you. Only my head, my stupid brain and spirit creating these hallucinations for me, a longing which made me hear and see broken pieces of a world lost and wiped away a long time ago. I stepped out of the train car and gazed at the chain-link fence bordering the perimeter. Rust-covered rails, silently speaking of expansive timelessness. For years now, nobody had come through here, this empty train car had sat at least the same amount of time at this platform. The low warehouse beyond the unoccupied pair of rails was empty. No wooden boxes, not ever trash, as if everything was carefully packed away and taken along, with a certain intent to never return.

Under the clouded skies, everything between the old Stationhouse and the gray fencing slowly opened itself to me. A dead area, a territory straight out of dreamland. Tall grass. Uniform, with no errant plants amongst it. No greens, no leaves, just pale golden plants, dried to death. A giant cemetary of nature, expanding before and after the gray fencing. And the rails reaching said fencing, for which, curiously, there was no gate to traverse. As if the fence had been placed long since everything alive had left the Trainyard.

This field also took part in conjuring this lifelessness. Not only the external lifelessness. As the skies too were empty, not a soul, no birds and no bugs. Especially those two should have been in there, furiously looking for a prudent shelter before the coming storm. And this deafening silence, sharply cutting through hearing and even consciousness. Even my own steps on the rail ties were silent. No souls, no sounds, no wind, not even slightly an uncomfortable temperature to sense. Just like dreamscape. A hellish dreamscape. Unbearable.

I stopped, looking at a rock before me. I knelt down to pick it up, to use it to shatter the silence with noise. To shatter the static world, to shatter this void I could not sense. To get rid of this pressure weighing down on me. This pressure which forced me into the position I was in when first arriving in this world, which was now forcing me to exit it the same way, alone and as a total alien to this world.

The rock flew, hit the galvanized gray fence 3 meters tall and made it vibrate, made it sound out. Forced it to release a sound so unnatural in this utter silence. It then fell to the ground, rending an abominable sound out that as well. And then it remained there on the ground, silent and unmovable. As was everything else as far as I could see. The sound changed nothing, I had been mistaken, the world was still squatting on my shoulders, on my mind and my senses, suffocating me by trying to make me become like it was.

This was not a desert, deserts still had life, deserts had a soul, a feeling of openness. This place had no soul, only invisible shadows, only suffocated senses, even the openness was missing, everything around me was in a state of compression, forced under its own weight to become soulless and unnatural. Probably by the same people who once desecrated the Trainyard.

I stood before the galvanized chain-link which separated this limitlessness, this hell from the one over there. This was a place of endings, it should have been the end.

*

I should have stopped right there. I should have come back and left. But I didn’t. Something in me refused to do that. Something, the existence of which in this colder and ever more alien of a world, I now regret. Something human. Something I dare call human while I am now shaking here. A human curiosity. I wanted to learn what was on the other side, I have always wanted to.

You know this already, don’t you? Since our youth and the day you arrived to my little town in the North. A short and cold summer we spent together, once long ago. That place also had a fence, a low wall of brick bordering the world of our childhood. Which was so mysterious in its extents and the way it bordered everything. Back then we did not realize that it was not separating the world from us, but us from the world. I wanted to learn so bad what lied beyond that low brick wall. And when I finally learned it, the magic was gone, the mystery was gone, the unknowable was gone. Only the first steps beyond that wall were special, and after that the magical world disappeared. I only discovered it again with You, here, in the South. And now this world, having shed its skin of adventure, was trying to rob me of myself, if it hadn’t already done so.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Everything here, this place itself, was pure evil, I understand it now. It is inhuman, unnatural, perverted. This is why bugs, animals and life in general are all avoiding it. It has grown alien on its most basic cognizable level. Once it was human, natural, pure, when it was still used for its intended purpose. But now, it is only semblant, it has changed. It is a former part of the world, which the world has cut out of itself and removed in the most categorical sense, not willing to have anything to do with it, a total abjection. The true monstrous and unnatural evil.

*

I should have stopped there and gone home, to wait for Your voice under the roof boards and by the cold fireplace of rough stone. Your voice, somebody’s voice. Your return, the care of your grandma long since passed, who was still rearranging items on the bottom floor of the house as she saw fit. But I did not do it.

Thus I still stood below the unending masses of clouds. Still they had not released their ordnance, keeping it within as if to ridicule both land and nature. As if waiting for something, expecting an event they could help with, something they could make even more complicated. Something to give them permission to relieve themselves of their burden. The dead grass around me had now grown even more gray, almost the same color as the clouds or that galvanized chain-link fencing. Only the texture was different. As if the whole world had lost its color and turned grayscale. Even the guard tower behind me which carried a basket for spotlights at the top. Something I dared not to climb, only to look at the rusting and creaking steel lattice. It would seem the people looking to steal any remaining scrap did not dare either.

But the fence before me was of no problem. And thus I started to climb it, slowly but surely. I threw my leg over the top and descended on the other side. A strange feeling came over me when I finally touched the ground. Unexplainable. An unreality of the world, a dreamlike quality of the world. Something I could not put my finger on, as if my mind was tricking me. But only for a moment. I was now free to look at everything which lied beyond the fence, as I had seen it be. The Trainyard. This wasn’t right. I had climbed over the fence and now I should have been outside the perimeter of the Trainyard. But I was not. This side of the fence also had a steel observation tower made of rust and creaks, anchored to the ground with massive steel cables. This place also had the rear gates of the Trainyard, dead gray grass and rust-covered train tracks. And all of it was in the correct handedness too, as if I had simply turned around.

So I hadn’t climbed the fence, had I? It was only my imagination, wasn’t it? I had stared at the fence and thus fallen into daydreaming. It was disturbing to find my consciousness betraying me. My own mind. How could I ever expect to find You like this? I climbed the fence once more. Everything which had happened had to be a flight of fancy, there was nothing wrong with the world. However, once I had reached the ground and turned around, I was still looking at the yard I had just now climbed out of. Impossible. This could not have been so. I had clearly climbed over the fence.

*

I still cannot believe that even this did not convince me to stop. My own mind, my own spirit, my own body. Either one of them was betraying me, or they all were working with this monstrous unnatural evil. I don’t know. This Cold, discarnate souls frozen to death, these thousands of fingers and toes it carries as some ghastly jewelry around its scaly neck. These thousands of souls it has in its pouch. And now, gently but surely it was trying to pick me off and put in its satchel.

What happened to this place? What made this place disconnect from the world? What was it that cleaved between this place and the known world a wound as wide as the Universe itself? What has happened to me? Am I still myself? Am I still here or there? When I went There, when I stepped There, where everything in my life receded on instinct, did I leave for good? Left Here for good? Is Here an impossibility? Have I always been There? But once I was from Here, I was born in the North, after all. But still…

Even after tiring myself out repeatedly climbing the fence, this strange feeling resisting cognition I had, why did I not bring it along and leave? Why? I know, that human curiosity again. Human! Human?! Do you get it? You there, outside, on the other side of the car window? A man is not an animal, what is human is not animal! A human is stupid. It is so stupid that it thinks! So stupid that is has something besides instincts. That he has an option to follow them or not. That he chooses, that he can choose at all, to go against his instincts and die for his curiosity. Yes, a man is no animal. Animals are wise, animals cannot lose their minds. Not like humans. That’s why animals are wise.

*

I walked back, right through the Trainyard. Having made up my mind to try and ground my sanity. Nothing looked different. It didn’t matter which side of the fence I was, if I had even changed sides at all. I walked out. Across the trail of ants, to my car. I entered it and turned it on. My plan was simple: I wanted to distinguish the two sides of the fence with something I could not be mistaken about. With something which was from somewhere else than this place damned by both the world and God. I drove the car to the platform and then onto the tracks between the train car and the fence, nearing the section where the train tracks ended.

And in a completely bizarre way, it looked as if on the other side of the fence, there was also a green SUV moving towards the fence. Identical to mine, but its lights did not come on when I flashed mine. Two options: either I had thoroughly lost my mind with looking for You, or this was a bad joke by some unknown actor. Perhaps that same person who had passed me on the road here with the exact same vehicle. I was almost certain of it.

I stopped the car by the fence, the nose of the vehicle a meter away from it. I switched off the engine. The vehicle on the other side of the fence had its engine already stopped. The fence could not have been a mirror. I was on this side, but not on that side. Yet the car and the rest of the world were on the other side as well. Even the license plate on the car was the same as mine. Which also convinced me that somebody was playing a distasteful but well-executed joke.

This time I was not going to climb the fence, there was a pair of red pliers on the car floor. I used these to cut a hole in the chain-link fence big enough to crouch through. I even bent the cut section against the intact fence on my side and used an errant piece of wire to fix it. I crouched to the other side.

The car was identical to mine indeed. Same license plate, same color, same badging, same VIN, but none of this convinced me, they all seemed to be small details easily altered. I opened the driver door and then finally vertigo and a feeling of a waking sleep hit me as I gazed in the front passenger footwell. This could not have been caused by anything external, the only source was me.

My hand was still holding the red pliers I had used to cut the fence, but now the pliers fell into the driver’s footwell. There in the passenger footwell I did not see red pliers, but in the dust and dirt on the rubber mat, I saw a clear outline where the pliers had once been. Had I once again ended up on the original side? This was impossible. I got up to look at the fence. A small section of it was cut and bent towards this side, fastened to the rest. This meant that there was something very wrong with my mind. I was still on this side of the fence. Why could I not traverse it? What stopped me, why could I not get to the other side?

This started to annoy me to such an extent, that as a final course of action I decided to use the roll of rope which I had in the car. I tied one end to the car and climbed through the hole in the fence. And after I had done that and dropped the roll, I could be certain, I was on the other side of the fence. Finally. But still, despite the rope, and the rails traveling from one side of the fence to the other, there were still green old Jeeps on both sides of the fence, and from this side as well, the cut section was bent inside. Impossible.

In addition, the silver rope was running diagonally. From one door to the other, with the roll sitting on the ground. Going through the hole again, I found a similar situation on the other side. The rope from the car to the fence ran straight, in parallel with the train track. Yet on the other side of the fence it looked diagonal. As if there were two lines and two rolls of rope. One on each side of the fence. But only one line to connect them. One line, four ends.

I opened the driver side door and started the engine. As I closed the door, it seemed to me that the engine on the other car beyond the fence was now also working. I went through the hole once more. I walked around vehicle once more to find nobody. And once again a hysterical panicky laughter started to come over me. One fence, one me, but two of everything else. Two entire worlds, impossible. This could not be so. One line, four ends. One line, four ends. Monstrous incomprehensible evil.

*

One line, four ends… do you get it? It is not possible and yet it is. It is. It was. I am once again here, in the car, by the fence, near the open gates to the Trainyard. But I cannot know if I am on the right side of the fence. Am I? I don’t know. I can only hope that I’m on the same side You are. That is the only thing that matters. One line, four ends. I am starting to understand how strange it is of me to talk to You about it. An emptiness. To those in the shadows of night. Even after tens of times around with me using the same key to turn one car off to start other, still I cannot understand…

What did I do? I should not have met That. It should not have gone this way, I was only hoping to find signs of You. I was hoping to find any idea where You disappeared to, why You disappeared. I was hoping to understand what was going on with You, with me, with the Nameless Town. And now I know nothing at all. I only know You. I don’t even know of myself, of the world even less so. I want this nightmare to end! I want peace, I want to look, I want to find, I don’t want to get it, I don’t want to understand. I want nothing but you…

*

But this is not the reason why I am now here freezing and trying to understand what is going on with my mind. Who is the one playing these cruel games with me and whether a white room at Luiga is a memory or something way more frightening.

One line, four ends… haw-haw, that’s not even the beginning yet! My laughter echoes in the empty car. And without me even noticing, the laughter turns into sobbing and babbling. As if I myself was not doing it, as if I was sitting here and watching myself from the side, sitting in the driver’s seat, my head against the steering wheel. One line, four ends… somehow I was becoming to accept that things were so. That when I was sitting in the hole in the fence, on either side of me there was an SUV and a roll of rope. That the four ends of the rope came to a single piece of line. That the fence flap was turned on the inside on both sides. I could barely think it thinkable to myself that this really was so, but now, when I returned in the early darkness of the night…

This twisted weird evil which comes out of its hiding place in the dark of night and rainless lightning and extends its huge mist-like wings all over the lands... I saw him, he came to me, came for me. Because of what I had learned here. Even this little, the village folk kept away from, kept to their activities and tried to ignore the weird. I did not do it, I did not submit to this, and now I was to be punished for this.

*

I was sitting by the fence, alone, having taken the car further away once again. In the dark, in the fading dusk of the late night. Hearing the thunder get closer and closer. Listening to it only for the reason that it was the only sound I could hear here at all.

But now it was no longer the only sound. There was wind, I could not only hear but feel it, the wet cool wind on my face. It forced me to turn my eyes away and look a the world beyond the fence, and it seemed as if nature was slowly returning to this world. I saw the dried grass submitting to the winds rushing across the fields, letting themselves be stroked softly and bending themselves in response and honor. I saw black spots in the sky releasing sounds which could only belong to common hooded crows. And to top it all, I saw the Trainyard on the other side of the slowly coming to life. I saw the lights slowly coming up, as if somebody was slowly turning up the current.

At the beginning I thought it was an illusion, but with every passing moment, I saw it was not so. In the other Trainyard the lights came on, there were no sounds but I could see something going on. In the other one, but not the one in here. Not the one on my side. This one remained dark. Lifeless. While the other one was lit, bathing in the powerful discharge of arc lights, this one was only lit by occasional lightning bolt between the clouds above. Accompanied by heavy thundering rolls across the skies. It was happening over there, away from me, on the other side of the fence, and it kept on happening over there. No matter how many times I crouched through the hole in the fence, how many times turned around. I always found myself on the side that was dark and lifeless.

Rain was now falling, lightning descended to hit the ground, deafening rumble echoing between the clouds. Wet and cool rain watering the grass, quenching the earth and everything both dead and alive, both on this and on the other side of the fence dividing the world. And then I saw it. Him. At first I thought it a mirage, created by the Trainyard in full lights. But this was lit by the lightning. But then it was lit again.

It was not you. It was me. Me. Standing in the rain, on the other side of the fence. Breathing in an unnatural fashion, ignoring the rain, clothes soaked from it. This could not be, this could not be me. I was Here, and yet me was there. But was the me there also me? Was the fence a fence or a mirror? It could not be a mirror because the Trainyard on the other side of fence… was dark once more. Or was is dark still? Had it ever been lit up at all? Or had I been always standing here, looking at my reflection illuminated by lightning?

I stepped closer to the fence and pressed my fingers through the eyelets in the chain-link. Meaning it was not a mirror, yet the Train yard on either side was dark, lifeless. On either side there was rain in the darkness. I turned my head away and froze. The fence was gone. And the next lightning bolt striking the ground not too far also lit up the figure of me standing before me staring at me. There was I, and right before me was another me, the one that had been on the other side of the fence. And instead of the fence, my fingers were grabbing his arm…

*

Do you get it? I am here, in the car, but I cannot be certain if I am really here. Am I on the right side of the fence, is anybody? Was there a right side at all? I had received my punishment. I had received my lesson on the topic of not submitting to the order of things. What comes now, I don’t know. But something is clear. You are lost to me. The world is lost. This night changed everything. I am lost. I lost myself the same moment I stepped in here. I cannot return from here and if I continue onward I only reach here.