Love, Death and Robots. Volumes 2 & 3

Glancing back, I saw that I was seized by several of the things, and the dog like shape had clamped its jaws on the heel of my boot. I saw too that the things were not entirely without features after all; or at least now they had acquired one all-encompassing feature. A split appeared in their faces, where a mouth should be, but it was impossibly wide and festooned with more teeth than a shark, long and sharp, many of them crooked as poorly driven nails, stained in spots the color of very old cheese. Their breath rose up like methane from a privy and burned my eyes. There was no doubt in my mind that they meant to bite me; and I somehow knew that if I was bitten, I would not be chewed and eaten, but that the bite would make me like them. That my bones would come free of me along with my features and everything that made me human, and I knew too that these things were originally from train stops, and from frontier scouting parties, adventurers and surveyors, and all manner of folks who had at one time had been crossing these desolate lands and found themselves here, a place not only unknown to the map, but unknown to human understanding. All of this came to me and instantly filled me up with dread. It was as if their very touch had revealed it to me.

I kicked wildly, wrenching my bootheel from the dog-shape’s toothy grasp. I struggled. I heard teeth snap on empty air as I kicked loose. And then there was warmth and a glow over my head. I looked up to see the train man with a great flaming torch, and he was waving it about, sticking it into the teeth-packed faces of those poor lost souls.

They screeched and they bellowed, they hissed and they moaned. But the fire did the trick. They let go of me and receded into the waves of grass, and the grass folded back around them, like the ocean swallowing sailors. I saw last the dog-shape dive into the grass like a porpoise, and then it and them were gone, and so were the lights, and the moonlight lost its slick glaze, and it was just a light. The torch flickered over my head, and I could feel its heat.

The next thing I knew the train man was pulling me to the top of the hill, and I collapsed and trembled like a mass of gelatin spilled on a floor.

“They don’t like it up here, sir,” the train man said, pushing the blazing end of his torch against the ground, rubbing it in the dirt, snuffing it out. The smell of pitch tingled my nostrils. “No, they don’t like it at all.”

“What are they?” I said.

“I think you know, sir. I do. Somewhere deep inside me, I know. There aren’t any words for it, but I know, and you know. They touched me once, but thank goodness I was only near the grass, not in it. Not like you were, sir.”

He led me back to the train. He said, “I should have been more emphatic, but you looked like a reasonable chap to me. Not someone to wander off.”

“I wish I had been reasonable.”

“It’s like looking to the other side, isn’t it, sir?” he said. “Or rather, it is a look to one of many sides, I suspect. Little lost worlds inside our own. The train breaks down here often. There have been others who have left the train. I suspect you met some of them tonight. You saw what they have become, or so I think. I can’t explain all the others. Wanderers, I suspect. It’s always here the train stops or breaks down. Usually, it just sort of loses steam. It can have plenty and still lose it, and we have to build it all up again. Always this time of night. Rarely a problem, really. Another thing, I lock all the doors at night to keep folks in, should they come awake. I lock the general passenger cars on both ends. Most don’t wake up anyway, not this time of night, not after midnight, not if they’ve gone to sleep before that time, and are good solid in. Midnight between two a.m., that’s when it always happens, the train losing steam here near the crawling grass. I guess those of us awake at that time can see some things that others can’t. In this spot anyway. That’s what I suppose. It’s like a door opens out there during that time. They got their spot, their limitations, but you don’t want to be out there, no sir. You’re quite lucky.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Guess I missed your lock, sir. Or it works poorly. I apologize for that. Had I done right, you wouldn’t have been able to get out. If someone should stay awake and find the room locked, we pretend it’s a stuck doorway. Talk to them through the door, and tell them we can’t get it fixed until morning. A few people have been quite put out by that. The ones who were awake when we stopped here. But it’s best that way. I’m sure you’ll agree, sir.”

“I do,” I said. “Thank you again. I can’t say it enough.”