It was not a graceful darkness. It lay as if it had tripped and fallen across the land, rather than softly blanketed it as one would have expected. And the lights outside the window of the train slipped furtively past, as if ashamed to be caught outside in this heavy darkness. Their light did not fall far.
The train rushed through the night but every so often it, too, stumbled. Then it waited on the tracks, but the darkness outside the windows remained the same. Sometimes the passengers could not tell if they had come to a stop or were moving stealthily forward. They felt disoriented, and somehow cheated.
Sometimes the train's path would take them through and past a small
and unacknowledged station. The stations bore their signs, but the signs
were small, only footnotes that would escape even the attentive reader, and
their lights could not command the darkness surrounding them. They rushed past,
and at most, a few disjointed letters were conveyed to the people sitting in
the train, watching the cold night outside. And then they too joined the rest
of the journey, and were gone.
The darkness outside hid the coldness in the air. The winter should have been
crisp, clear and brittle; not this heavy, misted air that surrounded the lights
until it seemed that they, too, would surrender. Somehow it was wrong. In spite
of the christmas lights shining dimly from city windows, it seemed as if this
was no winter.
There was nothing definably, quantifiably wrong. The night had come, as was
usual now, in the early afternoon; unannounced, but expected. The weather had
been cold, though the winds not quite as cold as they had been. The chill drove
underneath the jacket without reaching into the marrow, not finding the bone.
There was no snow, but then there was never snow, here; winter
was only the cold and the depth-seeking winds with no snow to cushion their
barren rush.
The passengers watched out the window, looking for something in the unmarked
blackness outside. Those who stared long enough could begin to notice that the
darkness was not as featureless as it seemed; the black heaviness of the earth's
colors and the liquid, blueblack ink of the sky did not blend into each other,
but were divided - if only one could find the line. But the lights in the train
were determined to thwart the darkness, and made this watching difficult. They
were lit, turned against the darkness that threatened to invade on every side.
The night outside made a mirror
of the panes, but an incomplete one; the lights that sped past and were
rapidly overcome seemed to make their way through the heads of the people in
the car before disappearing into the wake. And still their light leaked out
the windows and was swallowed - for there was always more of the heaviness than
there was of the light - and the windows were reflected in each other, too;
darkness throwing back darkness into its own mirror of lights. It became difficult
to tell which was the real, which was the reflected void; or was there even
a difference?
Something was wrong, but it seemed as if the night itself was surrounding that
something, holding it secret. The lights knew; but they feared the knowledge,
and pleaded to look away. Please, do not notice us, they said, and they desired
that the watchers forget they had been seen. It was not, it seemed, a knowledge
that was meant for the watchers, the passengers locked inside the light, the
train that ripped its way through the heavy, misted veil of the darkness - a
veil which closed behind it, seamless, after its passage.