This is the sixth part of the story. You can read the first parts here:
Up to the Engine Car
Riot act (Engine Car #2)
The Trial (Engine Car #3)
Old Friends (Engine Car #4)
Hinderwall (Engine Car #5)
None of us was ready when it happened. Many said we just weren't prepared, you know, that they caught us unaware and that we could've defended ourselves, if we'd had a heads-up. But you know what I think?
I think that's just an excuse that's mighty convenient. I think the end would've been about the same, regardless if we knew or not. It was just the way things were, we would've never had the gear to fight them, even if we'd known. But we have to try, we have to tell ourselves we might've stood a chance.
It was a dark day outside. Too dark, there were shadows that fell on the ground and walked alongside you and by the time we realized those weren't shadows, it was far too late. That's how they came, kid, through the shadows. Not on some grand ship, there was no big landing or mysterious object in the sky. I guess it figures that we didn't get it right, huh?
Don't ask me how they got into the shadows, into our shadows, 'cause I couldn't tell you, but I never saw anything like it. I started seeing things. We all did. You'd be walking down the street and you'd think you were seeing double, because you'd be looking at yourself, like you were in a city of mirrors. Only there were no mirrors about. It was just them, looking like us. I don't know what they really look like. Suppose they looked like some other species before they came here, but it sure wasn't their face. Hell, I don't even know if they have a face to call their own, maybe that's they go around borrowing other people's.
Anyway, they didn't stay like that for long. No, they started to diversify, they learned to adapt and change their faces, which made them harder to recognize. They were making themselves into new people, they were taking faces no one had ever seen before.
That's when the lockdowns started. No one came in, no one came out, we were all stuck in one country, not allowed to leave, 'cause they thought they could keep an eye on the population that way, you know, identify the...intruders.
But that didn't work. It was silly to think it would, really. People started fighting. You know, with each other, not knowing if they were real or if it was them.
I've never known what to call them. Some say 'aliens', or shape-shifters. It doesn't matter now, anyway, because they're gone.
'I thought you said we couldn't beat them.'
We couldn't. We didn't, but we beat each other. They made sure we destroyed enough of Earth to put a serious dent into our evolution. There used to be billions of us around this world. Now? I don't know, I guess there's no way of finding out now.
One day, we woke up and they had left. At least we think they have, we didn't see them, things started to quiet down. There's something different now. People felt...as if they didn't belong to themselves, you know, when they were here. It was like I was here, but I wasn't just here. I was in other places at the same time and I don't feel that anymore.
So, maybe they're gone.
Johann sits and stares at the ghostly man beside him, eyes wide in his head. The world as he thought he knew it seems shattered. For all his while in this world, he's heard time and again that the world was turned to dust, that through some horrible virus, the world was shattered to bits, to nothing and that outside the train, there is only dust that awaits them. And not only is there more than dust, but he's come out only to find that the world wasn't destroyed, after all.
There is no world of dust and there was no virus.
It was all a lie and nobody thought to tell him, the Captain Major, his friends, even old Mrs Summers, they all lied to him. And the truth seems to finally hit home, now, as he realizes his mistake in believing them all.
'Thank you,' he tells Hector and the man who once seemed a ghost smiles.
'You shouldn't blame your mom for not telling you. Why would anyone want to pass on such a story?'
I don't have a mother.
The words hang on Johann's tongue, and yet he doesn't speak them out loud. He just nods and leaves the ghost man behind. As he goes through town, he looks at the people and tries to imagine their doubles, walking side by side, the shape-shifting things staring back at them.
One over there, waving at the little girl – Paula, he thinks – from the other side of the well. The woman with the long blonde hair who passes him by coming around from the other side. Even Hector, sitting beside himself, both of him watching Johann as he goes.
He waves. They both wave and it's funny to Johann, somehow, because it's not the doubles that seem fake, but the real ones. They always kind of looked like ghosts to Johann. He remembers that first day, when he'd seen Hector watching from the window, and he'd thought him a ghost, a spirit wandering an abandoned town.
Close, but not close enough. There are different truths, ones that once known cannot be unknown. And Johann wishes he would've known sooner and he curses, in his head, the Captain Major and the entire Council for thinking they could keep the truth out, that they could keep reality at bay by locking themselves away.
'It doesn't work that way,' he tells Wilkins. Or at least, it shouldn't. Truth should have a way of worming its way in.
And he stops in his tracks, as if held by an invisible hand, and runs back to where the two Hectors are – in his mind, one ghostly, one alive.
'I don't understand something,' the boy says, watching Hector's face. 'Why did you not rebuild? Why didn't you try to make things go back to the way they were? You know, when they first came...'
Hector smiles and Johann notices, as the two faces shift into a grin that the ghostly man's missing two teeth, one of the sharp ones, on the row above and one in front, on the bottom. And yet, the real one (as Johann unwittingly thinks of him) does not. That one has perfect teeth, if slightly yellowed. How curious.
'Because that's when they came,' the Hectors say, simultaneously, 'and they destroyed that. Now, they wouldn't have done that if they were perfectly happy with the way things were. We figured that if we tried to rebuild, they'd only come again. So, we don't and maybe it's not so bad. The world wasn't all that great back then, trust me. I think they brought us back to this,' he gestures to the town around him, to the shovel in his hand, to the world as it is now, 'for a reason.'
'What reason?'
Johann tries his level best not to stare into toothless Hector's mouth as he speaks, but not because it would be rude, although it would. He has this eerie feeling that if Hector notices his missing teeth, he will undoubtedly become aware of the other Hector – the one with perfect teeth – and that will frighten him to no end.
He would scream, for a start, a scream that's ringing through Johann's imagination as something most frightening. He must not make the man scream.
'I think only they would know that, don't you?'
'I guess so,' Johann mumbled and went away. As he walked the streets and the alleys of the little town, he wondered what the world had been like, before, and what had been so bad about it that the..things had felt the need to eradicate it. Surely, there had been some good things, though not all. Maybe not enough to make them deserve that.
He wondered what he would feel like to see his own ghost – because he kept thinking of it that way, a spirit of sorts -and furthermore, to have his world destroyed.
And for the first time, he missed his life on the abandoned train, when the biggest mystery in his life had been whether the Conductor slept in a bed or hammock or indeed, if he slept at all. When things had been much simpler, in their own silly way. He'd never felt it as a personal loss, although the supposed destruction of the world back then had been so much greater.
To think there was nothing left but dust seemed so much worse than to find there'd only been some fighting and death. And yet, that didn't seem so bad. He'd taken it with relative ease, the idea that the world was gone, because that was just the way things were.
But now? To think that someone came and decided to destroy the world in which his parents lived, it seemed...so much like trespassing.
Every man's compartment is his own, he thought as he went. But now, it seemed that nothing was your own, if strangers could come in and just destroy it, just rip it to bits because they didn't like it.
It seemed...unfair.
That night, Johann Earthstocking could not sleep, because whenever he would close his eyes, the image of the two Hectors would appear on the back of his eyelids and he would stare into that toothless mouth. That perfect grin.
It would not leave him be.
'It's just nightmares,' he whispered in the dark to Wilkins, whom he held tight to his chest, but who was having little effect on calming the boy. And he tried to tell himself that the story Hector had told him frightened him to no end. That was all, it was just a story, something that had happened long ago.
That was the only reason he'd thought he'd seen the two Hectors, side by side, and the girls by the well, and the blonde women...But the only one he hadn't seen twice was old Mrs Summers and he'd thought it was because he knew her, because maybe it was stranger to imagine her as two, which only went ot prove it was just his imagination.
And suddenly, like a solid block of cold, cold ice the truth drops in young Johann Earthstocking's mind and it's shattering, and it's loud and it's unlike anything he's ever seen before. The truth stuns him and he doesn't make a sound, at first, because he doesn't know how he'd tell anyone. Not even dear old Wilkins, who – until now – has been privy to all the boy's secrets. And the boy's long wiry legs scramble out of bed and run down the stairs, because the words will explode in his chest, if he stays like that much longer.
He doesn't even stop to knock at the door. He just pushes it open and bursts into Ann Summers' room on the bottom floor.
The old woman is sitting up in bed, looking out at the sky, through the high, freshly cleaned window in her room. And the flames flicker, on the candles beside the bed, but they don't go out.
'You lied,' Johann says and his voice is shaking with anger. Anger like he's never felt before, not even when he'd thought the Captain had lied to him. Never. And it boils his blood and makes the boy's skin glow a strange color.
'Yes,' the old woman nods. Her skin draws a strange parallel to the boy's. She has skin of a pale yellow, almost like a ghost herself. But not quite. Oh no. 'I lied to you and I'm sorry. It was never my decision to lie to you, Johann, and if I could've told anyone, it would have been you.'
'Then why didn't you tell me?'
And the boy frightens himself with the harshness in his voice.
Mrs Summers shakes her head and flashes him a sad smile. 'Because then, it wouldn't have worked.'
'You know, when I first went to the engine room and looked outside, I thought there had been some mistake. I didn't want to believe that you'd lied to me for so long, that the whole story about the world of dust was just a big lie. But it wasn't a lie, was it? There was a world of dust, destroyed by a strange, deadly virus.'
And the words taste like molten ash on his tongue, yet he forces himself to spit them out. 'It just wasn't this world.'
Ann Summers' eyes meet his own. 'No.'
He should've known, the boy thinks, how did he not know? How did he not feel it?
'And the monsters that Hector told me about, the ones without a face, that was us, wasn't it?'
The old woman clears her throat. 'Not monsters, not without a face.'
'No? Then what? If not monsters, what?'
She says nothing. 'You destroyed their world!' Johann screams and his scream rings out through the sleepy town and the dark night.
'We never meant to destroy it,' Ann Summers says slowly and Johann keeps expecting her face to melt and her voice to change, and yet, she's exactly the same as he's always known her. 'We didn't know they'd go to war with each other, we didn't see why they'd do that, why they'd try to kill us.'
'Because you were trying to steal their face!' Johann keeps screaming, 'cause he's not quite sure he can stop anymore.
The old woman shakes her head and she looks close to tears. There is great sadness in her eyes and it's genuine, Johann knows, she's not lying now. 'No, we never meant to steal their faces, we were just trying them out, trying to build our own. We just wanted to live here in peace.'
Johann nods and looks away from her, anything not to see her, because to him, she's become the epitome of lies.
He stares at his teddy bear and feels as if he's cheated the toy. Into thinking that he was a real boy, maybe.
'All the people on the train, were they all...?'
And he remembers what Hector said that afternoon, about not knowing what to call them.
'Yes,' the old woman says immediately.
'But why?'
'We thought maybe our mistake was that we tried to be like them. We thought maybe if we made a generation who thought they were humans, that we were humans, maybe they'd never know. We figured we could live like them, act like them, play and talk and do everything the way they do, that eventually when you and the other little ones would be all grown, you could go out into the world, you could be like them. Maybe they couldn't tell the difference. And maybe you would never know about the world of dust.'
And he'd like to deny it, to say anything different, but he can't because Johann sees clearly that he is the very first of this generation of...lied-to little children. Little things, because who knows what they really are.
'All that talk about the Conductor and the train moving through a world of dust?'
'We figured you could forgive a lie, and we needed a reason to keep you on the train, to make sure you didn't go into the outside world until we thought you were ready.'
'So there was never a Conductor?' Johann asks, and feels so silly for it, for needing this confirmation, although he knows very well it's all a lie.
'There was, once,' the old woman says, quietly. 'He's the one who led us to this world, but he was killed back when their wars started.'
'It wasn't their wars. They were wars you created.'
'We never meant to.'
Johann Earthstocking, who suddenly, upon realizing, curses his own name, runs out of the room and out of the house with the purple door before the old woman can stop him. And he walks through the town, trying to think, but only finding muddled thoughts.
He remembers, as he passes a freshly dug-up hole in the ground, the two Hectors, as they stood grinning, side by side. They tried to look like them, but it wasn't a perfect copy. That's why the second one wasn't missing two teeth. He didn't know.
And he feels a strange kinship to the Hector with the perfect teeth. He tried his best, most probably.
Johann grits his teeth, as a grim possibility flashes by him and he wonders, briefly, if he is also an imperfect copy of another little boy.
And he knows, even now, that regardless if he is or he's not, there's nothing he can do. Because even if he knows, there's not a soul he can tell.
