The Train Station
THE TRAIN JERKED INTO THE STATION. THE DOORS OPENED and belched out a payload of souls. A gaggle of demons stood next to the defunct ticket counter, smoking, completely disregarding the incoming hordes, while nearby a thick, green liquid oozed out of the men’s room.
Brian, who had just walked into the station that morning, frowned. “Hogshead?” he asked a demon who’d just tossed his cigarette and was grinding it into the pavement with his hoof. “Has anyone checked the restrooms today? Do I see slime bubbling out of the men’s?”
The stocky, blue demon scratched a bump next to his right horn and shrugged. Then he thumbed the loin cloth out of his nether regions.
“For Satan’s sake,” Brian hissed at Hogshead. “Get Georgie and have him check. Great Lucifer only knows what’s down there. If a bog eel took a wrong turn in the sewer system again, half of Perdition City will be backed up by the end of the day.”
Hogshead shrugged, readjusted his loincloth, and shuffled off indifferently. “Get to work, guys!” Brian called to the rest of the infernal workers.
Demons dawdled sullenly, crushing cigarettes under cloven hooves, but each eventually picked up pitchfork or pike and shuffled towards disembarking souls. Brian sighed, noted that the racks of photocopied maps needed to be refilled, sighed again. He scribbled Maps in his notebook, although he’d just lost his umpteenth assistant. Who could he send back with maps and brochures? The line at the help desk, a year long, was growing again, winding out of the Admin Building and around several city blocks where demons had set up food carts with chewy burnt hot dogs, flat sodas, and soggy chips, and tacky gift shops with cheap mugs and t-shirts for sale.
Demons were terrible at paperwork; they didn’t have the necessary patience and attention to detail. They constantly effed-up or walked off jobs. Brian thought a soul might be better, but ever since he’d been created for his job, he’d never seen one working in Admin. He supposed he could ask Satan. That was more trouble than it was worth and would imply his own incompetence. Besides, he had been formed to carry out regulations, not to ask questions, even though infernal guidelines were in such knots from being bent to Satan’s will that untangling them was almost impossible and often required groveling to the big guy. Breathe, he told himself. Worry about personnel changes later. He wondered why—since he’d been specially created to manage Hell—he was so badly behind.
The Train Station was on the eastern outskirts of Hell. There was only one train: Old Number 13, always coming in, leaving multitudes of souls. And eternally returning from whence it came—empty. Hell was a one-way destination. Pulled by an ancient steam engine, no match for the rest of the Hellscape, the train daily belched out its payload of souls onto the dilapidated platform.
The tracks ran into Perdition City station through two steep, red, rocky banks, bubbling with blood-red lava that seemed to come from nowhere and go nowhere, upon which swarms of small crimson demons clambered and scurried, switching their forked tails and brandishing pitchforks. They spat out poisonous green clouds, mostly for show, and their razor-sharp teeth kept the hillsides littered with bones. They were tasked with keeping the recently deceased from running back into the tunnels or climbing up the banks to escape.
This was Hell as marketed in the Upper World. What the residents considered true Hell, a region of indescribable, ineffable torment, was farther in and deeper down. If you could a get birds-eye view of the whole land, maybe from a helicopter or something—not as a passenger on the Hellicopter rides advertised at the Train Station, a mistake that could ruin your entire afterlife—you would see a sinkhole: a yawning, black cavity in the space/time/infinity continuum.
From the edge of this vast hole in the belly of Hell, a soul would see sharp edged rocks, shaped like teeth, shallow pools carved out from the walls by acid. From one side, the gushing crimson Lava Fall from the Lake of Fire tumbled down the dark hole, eventually swallowed up by the gaping maw. On the opposite side, the invisible River Nepenthe poured chill torrents into the abyss. Once a soul fell in, it would be burned, frozen, then doused with the waters of forgetfulness. No one could say with absolute certainty what, if anything, was left of a soul afterwards, because no soul had ever returned from the bottom. It was assumed that what waited at the bottom was—nothing. Nonexistence.
A few souls arrived in Hell with the goal of annihilation, a pressing need to become nothing. They disembarked the train, felt the magnetic pull of the cold dead heart of nonbeing, and flung themselves over the edge—no hesitation. However, most of the damned and even the demons avoided the Abyss at all costs. Though the rules of Hell were byzantine, and constantly bent or broken to suit Satan’s whims, one rule that remained constant was that no soul or demon, no matter what infraction was committed, could be thrown into the Abyss against their will.
Nevertheless, the great nothing was a constant backdrop to life in the infernal lands. No one questioned anymore why Hell had been built on this plot in the Netherworld. Only Satan and three executive members of the board— Mammon, Beelzebub, and Lucifer—knew exactly how Hell Incorporated had been founded: real estate deals, grant money, and charters were lost within the mists of eternity. If it had occurred to anyone in the infernal lands to wonder whether Satan had thought every cunning plan all the way through, they were unlikely to voice the concern. Like other rules in Hell, administration and staff rarely understood why and it made everyone’s life easier to avoid questions. Questioning Satan, Lord of Darkness, King of Hell himself, was a one-way ticket to a job in the Western Wilds or Bogs of Despair.
As manager of Hell, Brian had unspoken questions, drowning as he was in too much work, not enough budget. Regardless, he did his best to follow the rules and take care of the inhabitants of his dark, sad corner of the Netherworld. He always wore a cardigan with elbow patches and a bow tie that matched the patches, with boring brown lace-up oxfords, neither athletic nor dressy. He felt the outfit put souls at their ease and distinguished him from the demons, goblins, and the other beings who were in his charge. Compared to the rest of the staff, he was a normal, albeit slightly geeky guy. No horns, no hooves. His only distinctive feature was that he was almost seven feet tall, and a little stooped. Sandy blond hair, and tortoise shell glasses completed the picture. He’d been created for this position and for whatever reason, Satan thought it best to have him appear human.
One of Brian’s many jobs was supervising the influx of souls. Today he was making a scheduled inspection of the Perdition City Train Station; inspections were required twice a decade to make sure the blue Baalzephon demons, in charge of security and intake, were carrying out their duties to some bare minimum standard. They never were. Each time he visited the station and saw souls pouring off the train in an inexorable, swelling river, Brian’s anxiety grew. Every century the population of Hell increased. The budget never did. Over the last few trainloads, he’d noticed even more of an uptick. He always told himself that somehow things would work out. The sentiment was beginning to feel less reassuring.
During his last teleconference with Satan, he’d dared to express stress over the budget. Satan lectured him. “Any anxiety you feel is simply an unwanted byproduct of your creation. To create a good manager, you have to throw in a little angst, otherwise you don’t get someone who cares about the work. Your feelings, though necessary, are meaningless to me. Get back to work.”
Satan told him the budget didn’t need to expand—his theory being that, eventually, greater numbers meant more misery. The more miserable the souls were, the more of them would decide that becoming nothing was preferable to the mere thread of existence they maintained in Hell. If souls were miserable enough to toss themselves over the edge of the Abyss, Satan argued, Brian’s problem would be solved.
The problem was that few souls chose nonexistence—perhaps half a percentage point as population density rose—not enough to make a meaningful difference. Brian shipped souls without housing to the Western Wilds every day with no solid plan as to how they were to be housed or adequately punished.
Satan hadn’t created him to think, Brian reminded himself. He’d been rendered existent to carry out a specific set of duties. He was made for Hell. He took out his black leather notebook and glanced at the checklist.
1. Garbage
2. Lost luggage collection
3. Repairs
4. Greet group of new citizens
5. Mingle
6. Maps
He added: #7. Check restrooms. Then crossed it off. He often added completed tasks to his list to cross them off simply because it was so satisfying.
The rusted black sides and crooked smokestack of Old Number 13 had seen better days, but the train still huffed its way from the Valley of the Shadow of Life and Death every day, laden with the damned. Today, yet another throng of souls poured from the train doors. The wraith engineer tipped its cap and gave Brian a wave. He waved back and noted that one of the benches on the platform was rotten. He put it on his list, even though the budget wouldn’t cover new benches.
With sudden decisiveness, he made a note to have Georgie remove them entirely. He wasn’t even sure why they were there in the first place; passengers arrived at the station and were immediately herded into the city to await their eternal destinations. The benches, like the ticket counter, were holdovers from when Hell first opened.
The disintegrating welcome sign, rusting fences, rotten benches all made his anxiety spike. He didn’t know how to stop the decay without more funding.
Something needed to give. He just hoped it wasn’t him.
