One last glance at the strange object seemed to say that our guide was correct as we could no longer see the young man anywhere nearby it. There was no sign whatsoever that he had even been anywhere near it. There was no signs that anybody had ever been anywhere near it. Tall grass bent down by the young man stepping on it had once again been replaced with an untouched pasture.
Slowly, our remaining group started walking up the railroad standing a dozen meters above the marsh on reinforced concrete pillars. Looking back down the slope of it, it was impossible to tell whether the pillars and the concrete sections on which the rails stood had fallen into the marsh at some time, or was the railway here before the marsh. And the marsh and the waters were now hiding an opening to some underground tunnel. At the same time, the pieces of the crumbled hospital were clearly convincing me that there could not be any tunnel or channel hidden under the waters.
I turned around and rushed after the others. And then I heard a faint yet heavy sound on metal screeching. A sound I could not put to a source. As if bare metal was rubbing against another piece of bare metal. As if a train or a tram had slowly rolled along uneven rails. I lowered myself down on one knee and touched my hand against one of the rails. I could clearly feel a vibration that was only growing stronger.
“People. A train is coming.” I said.
“A train?” The Professor asked. “This is an abandoned land. There are no trains. There aren’t even people.”
“It is true that there are no trains.” Mariann said. “But there are carriages. This is the main line. And sometimes a few carriages get lodged moving from the mine and since it is downhill all the way, the carriages manage to gather quite a bit of speed. If we assume that we are unlucky enough for the carriage not to go off the rails at any of the junctions or corners, it will eventually end up here.”
“You knew this might happen didn’t you?” Laura asked. “That a train or a carriage might come straight at us?”
“I suspected.” The girl in black said. “I hoped to avoid any panic and also make it faster to the maintenance platform ahead. Over there.”
She pointed a few dozen meters ahead, where nothing out of the ordinary was visible.
“Should there be something we cannot see?” I asked.
“Rungs of a ladder. We have to hurry up, this train will reach here in no time at all. By the time it reaches the broken bridge in the distance and become visible it is too late to do something or escape.”
“We could always jump into the marsh.” The Professor said.
“You saw what happened to the boy.” Mariann said. “Jumping or falling off the railroad into the marsh basically results in the same fate.”
The girl in black quickened her pace. Not wanting to know whether she was right this time as well, we followed her and tried our best to keep up.
Just where she had pointed at, there was a steel ladder without a protective framework around it descending onto a service platform made of knurled stainless steel. The girl in black was first to descend, spending an inordinate amount of time due to her little cart and oxygen tank. At the same time the screeching of metal was now much more audible and also much more threatening. Also, despite all around us being bare, with wetlands full of small bushes below us, interspersed with kolks, the screeching echoed as if stuck in trees or merely in our ears. I felt the noise radiate into my head and bones straight from the rails and all the metal of the elevated platform which touched anywhere near the rails.
After Mariann, the Professor descended as well, and again we heard the metallic noise. At first I thought it to be the train getting closer, but instead what was creaking was the metal platform that was supposed to be our savior. Obviously even the weight of two people was too much for the aged welds and bolts on that thing.
“We’re gonna have to stay on the ladder.” I said, as I climbed down.
“No surprise.” Laura said as she climbed on top of my head.
Again we heard the creaking of the rails, but this time the sound was outright deafening, drowning out all other sensory experience, even human voices and our own thoughts. Then I could see how a lone carriage appeared from the dim fog ahead rushing forward without slowing down. It was impossible to judge the speed of it, but within several seconds it was already upon us, passed us while carrying powerful vortices of air and then plunged in the black waters of the marsh disappearing without a trace. It did not hit the shards of the building, it did not run off the rails, waters came together after it in two big waves and it was gone.
Laura slowly climbed up and so did I. There was no need to touch the rails to be aware of how hot they had become.
“What the hell was that?” Laura asked. “Some kind of especially strange ghost train?”
“That was no ghost train.” I said. “That was real.”
“If it was real then where did it disappear to?” Laura asked. “This is a marsh, correct? The rails just disappear into the water. Tat carriage should have hit something when it made it into the water, whether it would be the peat or mud at the bottom or the shards of the buildings themselves. Or...” She fell silent for a moment. “Or might there really be a hospital hidden under the marsh?”
“All options are correct.” Mariann said as she finished climbing up with the help of the Professor.
A moment later the metal platform they had been standing on broke off and fell into the marsh.
“In what way are all options correct?” I asked. “All of them cannot be simultaneously correct. There is either the marsh and remains of a hospital or some other structure and a tunnel.”
“They are both correct.” The girl in black repeated her thought. “For us there is no tunnel, for the train there is. The theory of special relativity. The world is completely different based on in which direction and at which speed we travel.”
“The theory of special relativity does not function in this manner.” Professor remarked in an annoyed voice.
“No, it does not.” Mariann agreed. “But this works as an analogy for explaining things. We should get moving. We’ve wasted enough time here.”
The Professor said nothing, instead he took his binoculars and breathed onto the glass to wipe them off with a cloth.
“Is it me or am I seeing the contours of an aircraft under the water?” Laura asked.
“You may well be seeing such a thing.” Mariann replied. “After the apocalypse a lot of things fell down here. Those faintly visible are but the topmost objects.”
“After the apocalypse?” The Professor asked. “This means what? A cataclysmic end of the world?”
“Not quite.” The girl replied. “An apocalypse in and of itself is not an end of the world. According to the Bible, apocalypse means that humans attain the omniscience of God and there is nothing left to be discovered or learned. This is not for one person to attain but for the whole of humanity at once. In unison and in general.”
“And?” The Professor asked. “You don’t mean to say that all this really happened? In this place?”
“There is no doubt it did.” Mariann said. “But then something went wrong. God created the world and man after his image, but when man tried to utilize the heavenly knowledge by himself, he could not even use it to bend the frailest blade of grass. Instead something else got bent. Man as a collective did not understand the clear distinction some individuals had taught their children thousands of years ago already, that logos and tehne are not the same thing.”
“I assume that is the most concise way of explaining it?” I asked.
“Indeed the shortest and clearest,” she smiled. “If says everything important to know.”
“Would you look at that!” Laura suddenly exclaimed, pointing at a black kolk in the distance.
I too looked in that direction and saw two objects reaching out of the water half way. The first one seemed be a short and pudgy cruise missile half-submerged into the waters. With a large vertical rudder and a single horizontal wing.
The other object was much bigger, with a cream-colored surface and looked like a past vision of a future space vehicle, irrecoverably sunken into the forgetfulness. This aircraft was also halfway under the waters, the only part visible was section of the delta-wing rising high above the waters. On the topside of it were two vertical rudders, while underneath there was a row of six exhaust nozzles for turbine engines. The corners of the delta wings seemed to be on hinges and movable. Neither aircraft had any specific country markings and the markings on the tail rudder were either completely worn away or had never been there to begin with.
“A cruise missile and an old space plane.” I said. “Nothing special.”
“It is so painfully obvious you know nothing about aircraft!” Laura said, disappointed in my lack of excitement. “This is not a cruise missile, this is a single J58 turbojet engine. And that other thing is an almost legendary piece of technology...”
“Once long ago, Russians were the masters of copying the flying machines of the imperialist West.” Mariann said. “Once there was even a massive chemical plant known as the Combine, which produced all sorts of unusual materials for the local super secret OKBs. They liquefied nitrogen and other gases for the particle accelerators, produced small batches of Tammelin’s esters which were later shipped into the N-labs at the 47. Secret Base. They also produced triethylborane used to start up the J58s and pentaborane for the engines of that other aircraft.”
“I am looking at that railway crossing in the distance with my binoculars as well as without them and, is it me or is that whole crossing sitting in the air without any kind of support?” The Professor asked.
“You are not wrong.” The girl in black said. “I have no idea why or how it is standing there like this and survives the carriages that get loose from time to time, but the crossing was originally indeed designed without a middle support. The two side arches rested on each other and the cross made by the
steel beam running along the railway and the steel beam running along the roadway. These allowed to omit the middle support as a kind of tensegrity structure.”
“Right in the middle of a bottomless marsh.” Laura said. “They probably tried to fill it in and create a foundation for the pillars but did not succeed.”
“Exactly.” Mariann smiled. “And the soft ground on the edges of the bridge also let loose and there into the black waters parts of the bridge disappeared. That is kind of the way this dreamlike landscape before us was born.”
With every further step along the railway, the true size of this strange upended landscape amazed us in a terrifying way. Here, the railway was much higher above the marsh than it had been before, roughly about 20 meters above it. And it seemed that further away it stood even higher. And a pitch black slightly steaming kolk extended to either side of of the railway bridge as far as the eye could see, only on the horizon could we see anything resembling a forest.
But ahead of us was the railway leading to a crossing with ruined asphalt and broken arches of the bridge. I could not tell where the ends of the arches and the road had been, where had they touched the banks on either side, and that was despite being able to see the blackened steep embankments and the dark ominous forests quite clearly. Some kind of twisted metal beams were reaching out of the waters but their origin was unclear.
“The span of the arches was much shorter than it might seem now.” Mariann said. “But when the world was twisted, the arches fell first, and then the landslides into the bottomless marsh stretched the kolk under the bridge into this maddening chasm you now see before you.”
As we got closer, our eyes started to make out the broken pavement, the still remaining metal barriers on the sides of the lanes and a few remaining concrete poles which still had lamps on them but the torn wires swung in a slight breeze.
“The most disturbing thing is that these lights on top of the pole light up at night. Just like some of the street lights on either bank tend to do. And even some that reach half way out of the water.”
“How do you know that?” Laura asked.
“I just know.” The girl said, smiling. “it doesn’t matter, how.”
Soon, our group made it into the middle of the railway crossing, between the crossing gates with faded paint and patches of reddish rust. Onto the broken pavement between the rails and onto the remnant of the bridge on either side of the rails.
Even here, in the middle of the railway bridge, at least 30 meters above the surface of the water, I could not tell the light poles from the black forest and the pavement on the banks from the grounds. Despite that I was beseeched by a strange and ghostly but also dream-like feeling. A feeling that as I had now seen this strange remnant, I could wake up and find myself in a hangover.
“What if that soldier had not let you go through the marsh?”
“Then by the time darkness was truly falling, we may have only made it to the bank of this chasm here. You can see that the dark waters reach far, very far. And the road wanders around all that, making the journey several times longer. Much longer than I previously said it would be.”
“And if we had to spend the night here?” The Professor asked.
“There are secure places one can spend the night at.” Mariann said. “There are also others which are not, so it would be inadvisable. The problem is that should you fall asleep where it is not safe to do so, the place you wake up at might not be the place you fell asleep at. For example, should you fall asleep here, you might wake up in the morning to a convoy of military trucks traveling over an intact bridge. Or to something even more unpleasant.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Mariann raised her face towards the sky.
“We should continue moving.” I said.
“Indeed.” Mariann agreed. “The next crossing is already visible, about half a mile away from here.”
“That dirt road?” The Professor asked, having raised his binoculars once more.
“The very same. After that there is some distance to travel across the marsh and then about a mile before the destination, there is a final crossing.”
“What if we cannot continue along the railway?” The Professor asked.
“We must go.” The girl in black said. “The safest way is to follow the rails.”
“But what if the railway is broken?” The Professor asked.
I too now raised my binoculars to examine the distance. It seemed our crewmate was correct: not far from the next crossing the rails were ripped and twisted towards the sky as if something big had come out of the earth and rushed up into clouds. It was impossible to understand or even imagine the force capable of twisting steel rails like aluminum wire, bending it back and forth and ripping it out of the ground.
I lowered my binoculars to hand them to Mariann.
“This is bad news.” The girl immediately said. “We must go along the railway. And much faster. I can already feel everything growing dimmer. And to remain in the middle of the rails when night falls and all the shadows come out of the woods to examine the strangers… a bad idea.”
*
“Dammit, it is already getting dark.” The girl in black said, having stopped and was now observing the sky.
The gray clouds now looked much clearer than during the day, with a much better contrast. As if they were now hanging much lower than before. On the fields of reeds surrounding the elevated railway we could hear a familiar and yet so alien wind rustling, carrying with it the cool and damp air of an autumn day soon about to end. It blew the clouds slowly across the sky. All the signs were pointing to the fact that as soon as it really got dark, freezing rain would start as well.
It was unclear where the wind was driving the clouds. But the direction was irrelevant if the needle of a compass was revolving like a propeller. The only variety being in speed. In the middle of the black kolks and the broken bridge it had happened much slower than here, on the railroad.
“I think we are almost there.” Mariann said. “About half a kilometer further away the rail line takes a left turn and the reeds will end.”
As if to sure up her words, she started pulling her oxygen cart with renewed vigor.
“There is one thing I still find myself unclear on. And I am pretty sure I did not receive a proper explanation for that.” The Professor started.
“How is it possible that the loose carriage got across the section of the rails ripped apart? I could not see a single fork in the rails before that. And here too I haven’t seen a single one. Despite the fact that the gravel road we walked on also had no railroad crossings. I just cannot make sense of it.”
“You are not the first and you won’t be the last person to not understand that.” Mariann said. “Better and more skeptical people than you, Professor, have reconsidered. Usually of course after they have had to learn and adapt without external help. And those who have not managed to learn and adapt… sometimes you can even see them. For example when in the middle of a desolate marsh you suddenly come across some scientist who is desperately gathering soil samples and trying to understand them with unsane single-mindedness.
These people are everywhere. Here they usually come across as scientists, over there where our journey began, people have also seen all sorts of strange people in places and at times they should not be present at all. Places like that have a kind of amplifying effect on people’s mind. If man clings to science in the marshes, the marsh will also cling to man.”
“And if a person totally lets go and steps along the marsh in perfect peacefulness, he can go where ever he wants without fear of getting lost?” Laura asked.
“In general terms. If you are no longer afraid of getting lost in the marsh and into this world then there is nothing left for you to be afraid. The marsh is like a circular track. In an ideal case you will always end up back where you started. But depending on how hard you hold onto the world, in turn depends on when and if you make it back to the original location. If a person does not follow this track then on one hand he will always find himself from the beginning where he wants to find himself in, but on the other hand he is also stuck in his beginning and in his space-time. However if one were to travel the marsh without fear it is possible to move away from the starting location, but one must be aware that to get back to the beginning may take an uncountable number or circles around. The same place and the same time are not necessarily the place where the journey began.”
“This is not at all what I asked.” The Professor said.
“I know.” Mariann said. “I apologize. But the story is the same in general terms: we see the world from a certain point of view, the carriage’s point of view is different. And space-time is dependent on point of view. This is one explanation. The other explanation is more of a question: what is a ghost train?
“A ghost train is a train that does not follow conventional rules.” The girl in black continued. “It rides on rails that do not exist or are not in use, it has no engineer driving it, it does not obey the laws of physics except should it hit somebody. Same thing: the train is seeing the world as it was back when it was a real train. Us – we see it a little differently. Since it is a railway train, then as a ghost train it can only exists where there once was a railway. Since time and space have been twisted into a pretzel in this place, it may also exist in places where there is not yet a railway.”
“Wait-wait! Just wait a second!” The Professor started waving his finger. “This raises several questions about time! Are you saying that this place, this world here, in a fragmented form is again and again living through the times between the moments of its birth and its death, unchanging? But us and all other creatures who have traversed this place or have gotten stuck in here, live though it as a singular and un-repeating experience?”
“Something along those lines.” Mariann said. “When we get to the house, I can give further explanations on how I see this world and time.”
“I cannot see any house yet.” Laura said. “Only this brown mountain with no vegetation beyond the reeds.”
“The house is on top of that, quite nearby.” The girl in black replied. “And if I’m honest, then this is not a mountain but instead a shoulder of a crater.”
“A shoulder of a crater?” I asked, hearing something completely unexpected. “A crater of what?”
“Now that’s a question unto it’s own.” Mariann said. “There are as many answers as there are theories about the marsh.”
It didn’t take long for us to make it out of the reeds and then we finally stood on a railway on the foot of a tall rim in front of us. The railway made a turn to the right and followed along the edge of the crater rim. As much as we could tell in the encroaching darkness, there was not single plant on the hill before us, not a living nor a dead one, as if the whole earth was salted. There weren’t even any traces of anything having ever grown here, there wasn’t even any dirt. It was all reddish brown, smaller and bigger boulders, lots of dust and dark gravelly sand and a barely noticeable footpath. Or marks of something heavy being dragged along the ground. It was impossible to tell.
However something what our attention immediately focused on were two ditches or channels with vertical walls running in parallel right up the side of the mountain, or the crater as Mariann said. These seemingly started quite far in the distance and went up the side, leaving a large squarish wave pattern on the crest of the rim. These two tracks were so massive that the small hut at the crest of the hill made of seemingly incidentally found materials easily would have fit into one of the tracks without reaching above it.
From the intersection of these tracks and the rails it was obvious that whatever had driven through here and up the hill had done it after the rails had been built, while the rails had clearly been built after the crater appeared. This conclusion was supported by the fact that sections of the railway were sunken into the earth and this reddish brown stone with sections of the rail twisted into all sorts of shapes. Whatever had made these tracks up the flank of the crater had also driven across the railway without even noticing it, stretching and bending the rails as thin wires. At least this solved the issue of how to get across those gigantic depressions.
“I only have one question.” Laura said. “What in the hell has created these tracks?”
“An excavator dug them?” The Professor asked in a sarcastic tone. “Why is a much more interesting question.”
“These have not been dug with an excavator.” I said. “At the bottom you can clearly see the marks a caterpillar continuous track would make and the granite boulders have been damaged in a similar way.”
“You mean to say a vehicle made these?” the Professor asked. “There is not a single vehicle in the world which would have caterpillar tracks this wide. No super tanks, no mining equipment, no orbital launch vehicle moving platform. Never mind that even smaller vehicles would have problems making this gradient, the most these most massive tracked vehicles could make is between 2 and 5 percent of a gradient. And the speeds would be less than 5 kilometers and hour.” He fell silent, looking around. “Never mind that… does any one of you even know how to make calculations?”
“What do you mean?” Laura asked.
“Caterpillar tracks nine or ten meters wide. More than 4 meters of clearance and a total width of close to 30 meters.” The Professor pointed at an area between the tracks. “Can you imagine what the weight must be to sink so deep into the rocky ground? Can you imagine the power requirement of such an object?”
“All this may hold true for the place all of you are from.” Mariann said. “But in here things were different. One or two modular reactors with closed fuel cycles each putting out a couple of hundred megawatts of power, which were once off the shelf stuff at the Yadernoprom, some DC motors and the rest is right before us. What on God’s green earth all this was necessary for, that I cannot answer.” She gave a pensive sigh. “We should hurry, it grows dark much faster than it might seem right now.”
Bu the time we made it on top of the circular flank towering above the marsh and the fields of reeds, it had gotten properly dark. Also during the rest of our ascent, the girl acting our guide refuse to share any more explanations on our twisty and barely noticeable trail up the hill, only pointing towards the crest above.
The low light only made our journey harder, despite us using the flashlights. The darkness was heavy and all-encompassing, like a thick silty soup. During the daylight everything seemed mundane, but the electric light the flashlights produced was strangely powerless. Sure, we could point the lights on the ground right in front of us and see something, but more than a couple of meters ahead our flashlight could not illuminate anything. As if we had tried to use our flashlights to light up a bottomless pit.
This meant that we mostly had to resort to our sense of touch to find our way, trying to sense harder and smoother ground under the soles of our boots. Or to perk up our ears and try and follow the creaking of Mariann’s oxygen tank.
By the time we made it to the building made of pieces of ruined construction containers, pieces of wood and concrete elements, the flashlights had turned completely useless. Darkness swallowed all, the light didn’t even reach our boots, never mind the ground. It only blinded our eyes. And even that only at a distance of maybe 20 centimeters, no further. Even an inch further it seemed that it was just an old light emitting diode with no discernible use.
Only the door creaking and the keys rattling against the door let us know that we had finally made it. A moment later we heard boot steps on a rough wooden floor, which got muffled by layers upon layers of scrap carpets spread on the floors. The flashlights were still useless, only by putting the light straight at the surface could we make something out.
We could also hear somebody shaking a matchbox and soon candle upon candle big and small started lighting up. Strangely, the candles were far better sources of light than our flashlights. And the more candles were lit up, the clearer we could see the interior of the building. Inside the house was much bigger than it had seemed on the outside. A single level, a single room with a flat roof.
On the inside the house looked much less dilapidated than on the outside. It was almost normal. All walls were covered with vertical wooden boards, and it also seemed there was insulation against cold there. All walls were covered in bookshelves from ground up to the ceiling, most were filled with old and thick books, Only one small shelf was without books, and this mostly had candles on it that Mariann was now lighting up. There was a bed by the side of the wall and underneath the bed one could see a ladder used to reach the higher shelves under that ceiling which rose to more than three meters in height. Next to the bed there was also a small dirty window.
In the middle of the room there was a stone oven with a big fireplace. Above the fire place there was another chamber for cooking food, almost looking like a pizza oven. Next to the bed, there was also a stack of folded up chairs and many rolls of pelts. On the ceiling surrounding the oven there were six or seven sockets with bulbs hanging down.
“Smells like a wooden cottage which has not had inhabitants for a long time now.” Laura said.
“This place also has electric light?” I asked.
“It has.” Mariann said. “But somebody has to switch it on from the garage.”
“There’s a garage here?”The Professor asked.
“Somewhere there’s a door there.” Mariann said. “There should be two cars in there.”
“How do you know all this if you have never before been here?” Laura asked. “And where did you get the keys?”
“The keys were in the lock on the inside.” The girl in black said. “The man who once lived here left for better hunting grounds. I don’t know if literally or figuratively. In any case he left his little cottage unlocked for those worthy of it. And in his opinion everybody who managed to get through the marsh were worthy. I met this man once, a long time ago, that’s why I know.”
Mariann dragged the oxygen cart to the door I had not noticed earlier. She pushed it open and disappeared into a dark room on the side of the building. Moments later a heavy crack rang out and bright electric light lit up in the dark room. I followed Mariann into the room, which turned out to be a garage. My gaze fell on two cars which had probably been there for a very long time. Both stood on bricks. The tires along with wheels were stacked into two neat piles not far from the main breaker box.
One of these was at low four door sedan at least 5 meters long. Dark green in color. Honestly speaking, I had never seen such a vehicle before. With a long hood, a slightly shorter rear deck and spacious and massive cabin. All that despite the roof reaching barely above my lower ribs. The emblem on the nose was also unfamiliar to me, an escutcheon of a noble family surrounded by oak wreaths. But the ribbed and patterned glass on the headlights told me that this car was very old. From an era before light emitting diodes and gas discharge lamps became common in cars.
The other vehicle was much bigger, also at least a meter longer. And a pickup truck. Wine red in color. With a cabin that could easily hold five or six people. A bed over two meters in length. The shape of the hood and the nose spoke of power and potential, while straight axles and leaf springs with a deep curve also meant that the vehicle was reliable enough. The depiction of a ram in the front and center of the grill was also unknown to me, but something in the general shape of the two vehicles and the similarities in headlights told me that these two vehicles were roughly from the same era.
“I had one like this once.” Mariann said, looking at the green car. “Well not like this, but one with the same emblem. From an era before the people on the other side of the ocean started mounting big eight cylinder engines transversely in the front and mating them to front wheel drive.”
“I sincerely doubt that a low passenger car like this was able to traverse all those gravel roads, dirt trails and even terrain with no roads at all.” I said.
“And yet it was.” Mariann smiled. “The man who built this house, it was his first car. When things went off the rails he refused to abandon it, despite there being tons of better vehicles to use and most people were gone. Didn’t matter that it wasn’t the best to roll from one pothole into the next and every pothole ripped plastic parts from the bumpers and the side sills. He even used it to make it up here and find a good spot for a house. Only when he had to start carrying material up here for building the house did he find other vehicles to do the work with, that red one included.”
“There’s some decent light in here.” The Professor said as he stepped in. “Why can’t we get similar light in there?”
“There are no windows here, that’s why it is brighter in here.” Mariann said. “The darkness has no way to intrude from anywhere. And nobody outside can see this brightness. It is slightly darker in the toilet. And in the living room the bulbs are the same, just that there’s a dimmer wired into the circuits in there, to keep the amperage low.”
“Why?” The Professor asked.
“Because the darkness here is not the same as elsewhere. Outside you all saw it on your own when flashlights became useless. The light attracts the darkness. And the brighter the light the more darkness can swallow it. That’s the reason a candle illuminates more than a flashlight. The other thing is that the darkness flows in through the openings, through open doors, through window glass. If we make the living room as bright as it is here, you will definitely see how the darkness presses in through the window panes and soon there will be complete darkness around the fireplace not remedied by neither the candles nor incandescent bulbs at full power.”
“I would not disturb you otherwise...” Laura said. “But there is something you must see.”
“What?” I asked.
“Through the window.” Laura said. “What’s visible through the window.”
All of us, except the girl in black, followed Laura to the dirty window beside the bed. She was right, the view visible from it was worthy of our attention. I had thought that the darkness was all-encompassing and both the sky and the earth would be melded into one in it. But despite that, in the distance I could see two sources of light. On of these was located within the crater, slightly to the right under the flank. Through the window it was too difficult to understand what it was exactly we were seeing, but I could discern enough about it to see that they illuminated some kind of metal construction or lattice. Among others a tall tower which however did not reach beyond the edge of the crater.
The other source of light was located further away. Much further, probably beyond the opposite crest of the crater and probably down the flank of it. To be fair, the source of the light wasn’t even visible, they only things that reached us were powerful spotlight beams that scraped the night skies as if looking for something.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Mariann asked. “Makes you shudder all over, doesn’t it? On these rare occasions the clouds do not cover the whole of evening sky, the sunsets here are truly marvelous. The whole of the crater is but a black land under the horizon and the strip of sky above the horizon is burning with reddish orange color before the approaching night time cloud cover.”
“You know what these are?” Laura asked. “Especially the one more distant?”
“In the crater, there is old mining equipment. It kind of reminds me of something that could leave these caterpillar tracks climbing up the to the crest of the crater’s edge. And on the other side of the crater, there’s...” the girl in black gave a smile, probably already knowing the reaction her words would give rise to. “Center Station.”
“The Center Station!?” The Professor exclaimed. “The Center Station? Do you mean that in the crater there are...” he fell silent for a moment, “the ruins of the Nameless Town?”
“The ruins...” the girl in black said. “In most concise terms, yes. And the forest and the marsh surrounding the forest is what the Forbidden Forest became after everything had ended.”
“But what happened here?” Laura asked. “As far as I know, they say that the Nameless Town was hit by a meteorite...”
“More like an asteroid.” The Professor said.
“All these stories start the same.” Mariann started with a slight annoyance. ““A few dozen years ago a meteorite fell here. And then people realized it was no ordinary meteorite.” I have heard that story a thousand times over. Some say there fell a meteorite, there fell an asteroid, project Midas or Daedalus or Icarus or Medusa, Orion et cetera. Something related to nuclear impulse engines.”
“So what really happened?” The Professor asked. “Because what you’re telling us is considered to be information classified at the highest levels.”
“A lie classified at the highest levels.” The girl in black replied. “Nothing more. I don’t know what exactly happened, but I definitely know what could not have happened. All of it started with the Center Station. The first switch was turned in there.”
“Can’t we check that out tomorrow?” Laura asked. “By going to the Center Station?”
“Unfortunately not.” Mariann said, leaning against a small desk. “The Center Station lies on the other side of the crater and on the other side of all possibility. One can never reach that place, not by going along the ridge, not by going around the footing of the crater. Not even by going through the bottom of the crater. At least one will not reach the Center Station we see illuminating the sky at night.”
“What do you mean it is impossible to reach that place?” The Professor asked. “It wouldn’t take even a day to get there! I could go there and return on my own as soon it gets bright outside!”
“You can.” Mariann said. “But I cannot guarantee you will make it there. I also cannot guarantee that should you return, you would manage to return to us. Or even to this house. Considering how twisted and knotted up the world is in this place, I would not be the least bit surprised if you would turn out to be the person who actually erected this house. Or some other abandoned dwelling is this place.
To be fair, I have my own reasons for coming here. And I can fulfill that even without your presence, Professor. If you wish to leave and try and manage the best you can on your own, be my guest, I won’t feel offended by that. This place has seen plenty of people who have wanted to either test themselves or escape a world full of idiots which has nothing left to offer them.”
“As much as I remember seeing, you had little choice in the matter or coming or nit coming here.” The Professor said. “You were under military arrest and bound from hands and feet.”
“I was, but that was only because they had no choice in the matter or whether to let me come here or to not let me. All that theater was their idea. The subordinates knew that no lock would work while the superiors demanded that everything humanly possible and impossible was to be done...” She paused to take a glance at the rest of us. “I’ll go light up the fireplace.”