Harold the Tormentor, Pt. 4

~~~Part 1~~~
~~~Part 2~~~
~~~Part 3~~~

Harold walked to the center of the dining car and proceeded to lay down in the aisle. He folded his hands on his chest and stared at the ceiling. The light fixtures were all covered with yellow frosted glass, and occasionally the lights would flicker whenever the car shook a little harder than usual. Harold laid there and tried to think about absolutely nothing, and was largely successful until he heard the door open at the other end of the car.

“What are you doing?” asked Roger, entering in from whatever void it was from whence he emerged. Roger wasn’t particularly shocked by the sight of Harold laying on the floor; he’d done it before. They’d both done it before at some point, because the boredom ate into their beings like the worst kind of cancer imaginable.

Harold didn’t answer immediately. After a moment, he replied, “I dreamed of Maggie that last time.”

“Maybe she was dreaming of you too.”

Harold cast his gaze downward for a moment at Roger, who took a seat at one of the tables.

“If she’s even still alive.”

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

Harold sat up on his elbows, looking at Roger. “How the hell can you be sure that we’re still alive?”

“I can’t,” said Roger. “In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d say that we’re not. This might, in fact, be hell.”

“Living without Maggie is hell to me,” said Harold. He sat upright on the floor and raised a hand, inspecting his wedding band. He slowly twisted the ring back and forth on his finger with his other hand; he tended to do this whenever Maggie entered into the conversation.

“Who knows,” said Roger, looking out the window, “maybe someday she’ll join you here.”

Harold glowered at Roger. “Don’t even fucking say that.”

Roger snickered to himself. “Always so touchy about the whore.”

Harold leapt to his feet and pointed his finger at Roger. “You shut the fuck up, Roger.”

“Or what?” Roger replied with a smirk. “You’ll kill me? You’ve said yourself you doubt Maggie’s…”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Harold, walking to the other side of the dining car. He calmly fiddled with the numeric lock on it until it opened. By this point, he knew the combinations on all the combination locks, and there wasn’t anything on the dining car that he hadn’t been in at least once… including Roger.

“Drop it…” continued Harold, as he worked. He opened the suitcase and took out a rolled-up bundle of cloth. Then he walked back to the table where Roger was sitting and unrolled it in front of him. Inside of the cloth was a collection of knives.

“…or I’ll cut out your tongue now and wait on you to get a fucking infection and die. Sound like a plan?”

Roger sneered at Harold. “Whatever.”

Harold took his place on the other side of the table, plopping down in the chair. He buried his face in his hands. Roger sighed loudly.

“You know there’s nothing we can do about anything,” said Roger.

“I know,” said Harold, his face still covered.

“Think of how the world has changed since we’ve been gone. Think of all the springs that have burned up in summer, all the pretty autumns being buried beneath wave after wave of snow. The ones you’ve loved… who knows how many are left?”

“Maggie’s still alive,” said Harold into his hands. “I know she is.”

“No, you don’t,” said Roger. “She may have died a hundred years ago. How the hell would we know?”

Harold looked up at Roger.

“You know I’m right,” said the disheveled businessman. “Entire generations may have come and gone, and we wouldn’t know it.”

“You ass,” said Harold.

“What?” asked Roger, sounding surprised.

“There is no hope here,” said Harold. “Leave me with my dreams. Leave me with my memories of Maggie. I don’t want to end up like you and forget everyone and everything I used to know before ending up in this goddamned dining car. I can’t just leave my life behind like that.”

Roger sighed. “I used to be like you.” He picked up a nasty-looking serrated blade from the collection and inspected it. “I used to struggle to hold on to the memories of my previous life. The people I knew, the places I passed every day on my way to work, the flavors of foods not served at high tea.” He smirked as he said this, then frowned again. “But after a while, all this endless monotony gets to you. Everything becomes a haze, and a week is like a thousand fucking years.”

Roger got down out of the chair and crawled to the aisle in the middle of the car. He sat there on his knees, facing away from Harold.

“This is life,” said Roger. He held up the serrated knife in his right hand.

Harold watched Roger in disgust. This was all so routine to him. How could he have given up like that? How could he just accept a fate where he has to be murdered every fucking day? Harold sighed and stood up. He calmly walked over to Roger and took the serrated blade from him. Roger closed his eyes as he felt Harold get a fistful of his hair to hold his head steady. Harold pressed the edge of the blade to the side of Roger’s neck.

Both men knew their roles.

Harold the Tormentor, Pt. 3

Harold came back to consciousness while he was still dreaming. In the dream, he had been talking to his wife at their kitchen table in the early evening. Sometimes he would regain control in his dreams and enjoy the lucid dreaming for as long as possible.

“You’ve not been yourself lately,” said Maggie. She was a pretty woman of around thirty years of age, with dark curly hair. In the dream, she was in her bathrobe and slippers, drinking coffee and looking radiant from having just bathed.

“I know,” said Harold, finding himself able to control his actions within the dream.

“Where have you been going at night?”

“I am stuck here, Maggie.”

“Stuck where?”

Harold opened his eyes, almost involuntarily. All around him was blackness, save for the dim light that spilled from the door that was a few feet away from him.

“If only I knew,” he said aloud.

Harold sat down. He had no idea what he was sitting on, because the “ground” was just as dark as everything else around him. For all intents and purposes, he was sitting on nothingness. It was cold, hard, and smooth, and it seemed to stretch on forever into the sea of black. He laid back and stared “upward” into the nothingness, thinking about Maggie. It was getting hard to remember certain details. It had been so long, such a very long time. Roger and Harold had tried keeping track of the time but found themselves unable to remember very clearly how many days were passing them by. Part of this difficulty lay in the fact that the “days” were of variable length.

Each day was exactly as long as it would take Harold to kill Roger.

On a few occasions, they would call a “truce” of sorts and see how long they could go, to see what would happen to them. By their reckoning, they managed to make it about a month or so before they were at each other’s throats. The smell of body odor and accumulated human waste (there wasn’t a latrine on board the dining car) drove them to nausea and contempt, and intense hunger goaded them beyond sanity. The only food that they’d ever found on board the car were the tea and scones, as well as a few packs of saltines and a small metal flask of whiskey that they’d found in one of the suitcases. The dining car had never stopped moving, and the clack of the “tracks” also wore in their nerves. In the end, Harold ended up killing Roger with his bare hands, strangling him to death. A few minutes later, the whistle blew, and Harold again found himself in the darkness, staring at the door.

On other occasions, Harold would rush into the dining car and immediately set about to kill Roger. Once, he ran in, grabbed one of the chairs, and stood beside the door at the other end of the car, waiting on Roger to enter. When he came in, he broke the chair over Roger’s back and proceeded to beat him to death with the leg of the chair. That day ended in under half an hour.

Harold stared into the blackness. It was vast and suffocating, and the implications hung large in his mind, almost moreso than the realities. He got up and walked toward the door.

Standing next to the door, Harold looked down and saw his body illuminated by the light. He was dressed as he always was. He held up his hands and examined them in the light. They were a working man’s hands, and they were free of blood. He looked first at the palms of his hands, then turned them over and looked at his knuckles. Then he raised his hands to his face and felt the stubble growing there. It was always the same amount of stubble, and he could never seem to grow a beard. He’d had a beard when he and Roger had tried to go without death, but when he’d come to after killing him, Harold found that his beard had been reduced to the same amount of stubble as before.

Harold looked up, into the window on the door. He could faintly see his reflection in the glass, though it was opaque and hard to make out details. On the glass were a lot of smudges and fingerprints. Inside, the car looked stationary. It always looked stationary until he stepped inside, at which point it was as though he was stepping into a moving car, coming in from somewhere else on the train.

He put his hand on the brass handle and turned it, swinging the door open. Looking down at the wedding ring on his finger, he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

Harold the Tormentor, Pt. 2

The two men sat in silence for some time. Harold seemed to have lost his interest in the menu and simply stared out of the window. Nothing could be seen but the same perfect darkness from which the men always emerged following their ritual.

“Poison,” said Roger.

“I wasn’t feeling like the old hack and slash,” said Harold.

“I see.”

Roger got up and walked over to the cart where the tea service sat. He took a scone and tasted it. The taste was both familiar and new, which by this point had become rather boring to him. He took two cups, added a lump of sugar to one, and poured tea into both cups. He then took the tea back to Harold, giving him the cup that had the lump of sugar.

“Thanks.”

Roger said nothing as he sat his own cup of tea down by the plate on his side of the table. Without sitting, Roger returned to the far end of the car, to the stack of luggage in the corner.

“Are you choosing today?” asked Harold. He had to raise his voice somewhat, because the constant clacking of the track and the ambient rattling of the glass and ceramic items on the dining car made it difficult to hear at opposite ends of the car.

“Sure,” said Roger, his voice barely audible to Harold.

Harold tasted his tea. After all this time, it was still pretty tasty. A rational man might have thought that after an unknown length of time passes when you only had tea to drink, that you would eventually get tired of it. But a rational man would have a difficult time explaining the events as they transpired on the dining car. Harold had no fear of being poisoned out of spite or malice; that wasn’t Roger’s style. Roger just wasn’t the killing type.

Neither was Harold, for that matter.

Roger returned to the table carrying an old-looking suitcase with leather straps. Holding the suitcase in one hand, he picked up his teacup and sat it in the windowsill of the car. Then, without saying a word, he laid his arm on the table near the window, and swept everything off the table in one sudden motion. Harold just so happened to be holding his tea as Roger swept his arm across the table. The dishes and silverware crashed to the floor, and one of the empty water glasses shattered; the thin carpeting of the dining car did little to buffer its impact.

Without missing a beat, Roger swung his other arm around and slammed the suitcase down on the table. Harold sat up and scooted his chair back a little from the table, still holding his tea.

Roger looked up at Harold for a moment, then looked back down at the suitcase. It was all-too-familiar to Roger, and opening it was like second nature to him. Within moments, the straps were undone and the suitcase was opened wide. Roger stopped for a moment to peruse the contents, then began to set them out on the table. Harold sipped his tea and watched as Roger began laying out all sorts of antiquated medical devices, rusty and stained from years of use. The crude hacksaw was the most noticeable piece of equipment in the bag; it went at the edge of the table. In just under a minute, Roger had completely emptied the suitcase of its contents; with a wild look in his eyes, Roger then tossed the empty suitcase across the car. He took his seat, scooting up to the table, and leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table and holding his head in his hands. Roger stared at Harold.

“How’s the tea?” asked Roger.

“It’s good, as it always is,” replied Harold. He watched as Roger retrieved his teacup from the windowsill, took a sip, and began to eyeball the various pieces of equipment laid out on the table.

“Poison’s just so… boring,” said Roger. “We need something spectacular now.”

Harold said nothing and watched as Roger picked up a pair of surgical scissors and looked them over closely. He opened and closed them a few times; they were still pretty stiff, almost too rusty to be used for their intended purpose.

“How about,” began Roger, eyeing the scissors and then looking at Harold. “How about you jam these into the back of my head and open them up, abortion-style?”

“That didn’t work too well the last time we tried it,” said Harold.

“Hmm…” said Roger. He placed the scissors back on the table, then lifted up a small scalpel. It was stained, but still looked usable.

“You could slit me open and yank out my entrails…”

Harold took a sip of tea, and appeared to consider the offer.

“You could even strangle me with my own intestines, how about that?”

“You’re a sick fuck, Roger.”

Roger seemed to be beaming. “Well, you’re my enabler.”

Harold furrowed his brow and took another sip of tea. He sat his teacup back on the table and stood. He then walked over behind Roger and put his hands on the other man’s shoulders.

“Ah, have you changed your mind about the scissors then?” asked Roger.

Harold reached down and took the scalpel from Roger’s hands, bringing it up close and inspecting it. Then, he put his hand back down to Roger’s shoulder.

“No,” said Harold. He took the scalpel, pressed the cutting edge against Roger’s jugular, and made a single, quick slash across the other man’s throat. Roger began to gurgle and sputter; Harold remained standing behind him. He brought the scalpel back up and inspected it again. This time it (and the ends of his fingers) were covered in blood. Harold bemusedly studied the scalpel for a moment, then tossed it over his shoulder. The scalpel landed on the table behind them, leaving splatters and a red streak as it slid to a halt on the tablecloth.

Calmly, Harold walked back and took his seat again, taking a drink of tea and watching Roger. The other man had spilled his blood all over the other implements on the table, and the white linen tablecloth seemed to absorb Roger’s blood as it left his body. Roger’s face was laying in the plate again, just as it had with the poisoning. This time, however, Harold watched as Roger raised his hand, slow and trembling, from the table, and mustered up enough energy to give Harold the thumbs-up sign. Harold smirked somewhat and took a sip of tea.

A few moments later, Harold heard the deafening whistle of the train, and felt himself slip into oblivion. He hadn’t bothered to look for any differences this time.

Harold the Tormentor, Pt. 1

Roger entered the dining car unannounced. By this point in his long existence, it had grown to be instinct, and any motivation he might have had to question his entry into the dining car had long since passed. It was dark, as it always was, and the dining car rocked and shook as the train sped along toward its destination. The clack of the railroad was a now-familiar sound, and Roger paid it no heed. Had anyone else heard it, they would certainly have thought the train was traveling at a high rate of speed.

Harold was sitting at one of the two-seater tables on the right, and he didn’t bother to look up when Roger entered.

“Hey,” said Roger, nonchalantly, as he walked to Harold’s table and took a seat.

“Hey,” said Harold, who was looking intently at a menu.

“Don’t you have that thing memorized by now?”

Harold looked up and furrowed his brow. “I would have sworn I saw something different today.”

“You always say that,” said Roger, adjusting his tie. Roger wore a cheap suit and consistently looked slightly disheveled.

Harold looked back down at the menu and read very carefully. Appetizers… those looked the same. Salads… maybe it was a different kind of dressing… When Harold raised the menu to about three inches away from his face, Roger began to impatiently tap his fingers.

“There’s never anything different,” said Roger. “We’ve been over this.”

“I know… but this time is different,” said Harold.

Roger huffed loudly. “Jesus Christ Harold, can’t we just get this over with?”

Harold looked up at Roger for a moment, then returned his gaze to the menu. Roger gave Harold an evil look, then looked down at the table.

The dining car was always impeccably clean and well-furnished. The tables were all set with fine china, and a silver tea service was always at the ready on a small cart near the opposite end of the car. There were never any other passengers on the car, and Roger and Harold always got their choice of tables. Roger saw that Harold had brought the tea service to this particular table; this was nothing new, for Roger and Harold both enjoyed tea, and there was always a delightful mint tea hot and waiting for them each time they returned.

Roger saw that Harold had poured two cups of tea, and beside the cup closest to Roger were a couple of small beige capsules.

“Is this today’s special?” asked Roger.

“Mmm-hmm,” said Harold.

“I see,” said Roger. He picked up one of the capsules and looked at it. There were no markings on the capsule, and it looked rather much like a multivitamin. When Roger sniffed it, he noticed a slight smell of bitter almonds. Roger looked up at Harold, but Harold was busily reading the descriptions of the entrees and paid little heed to the man sitting across from him. Roger placed the pill back beside the other one and watched Harold.

The man staring intently at the menu was definitely of the working class. His jeans were not particularly clean, and his button-up shirt was missing a button near the top. On his left hand Harold wore a wedding ring, and his fingernails were dirty. To the casual observer, the man would seem very out-of-place in the exquisitely furnished dining car.

“So,” asked Roger, “what are you waiting for?”

Harold looked up. “I’m not waiting for anything. Help yourself.”

“Are you kidding me?” asked Roger. “At least come and force these down my throat.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

Roger grew agitated again. “Don’t feel like it? How the hell do you think I feel about it?”

Harold looked back at the menu again, turning it over to study the back. “Weren’t you just lecturing me on knowing how things ‘always are’?”

“Fuck you,” said Roger, scowling at Harold. He picked up the pills and placed them in his mouth, then took a big drink of tea. The red-hot liquid burned his tongue, and Roger quickly pulled the cup away from his lips.

“Careful, don’t burn yourself,” said Harold, smirking.

“Go to hell,” said Roger. He reached over and grabbed the menu from Harold.

“Hey! I’m looking at that.”

“You’ll have it all to yourself in a few fucking minutes, jerkwad,” said Roger, rising as Harold rose to grab the menu back. The two men stared at each other, their faces just inches apart. Hate glowed in the eyes of both men.

The two men slowly sat back down, keeping eye contact. Harold watched as Roger’s eyes began to slowly close, as if he were being beset with narcolepsy. A moment later, Roger was unconscious, and he fell forward, his face landing directly in the fine china in front of him.

Harold returned his gaze to the menu, now beginning to scan the page more urgently. He knew he only had a few moments of light (and continuity) remaining, and he was determined to find the difference.

Exactly two minutes later, Harold heard the deafening whistle of the train. He closed his eyes and winced somewhat, feeling his eardrums burst and warm liquid begin to trickle from his ears. When the whistle ended, everything went dark, and from the vibrations of the car, Harold felt like everything was slowing down.

Then… Harold blacked out.

When he regained consciousness, Harold saw a small, brightly illuminated door in front of him. Just as always. The familiar void… and the door. There were no alternatives, and procrastination did no good whatsoever. Eventually, he would have to step through.

At the moment, Harold wasn’t too intent on exploring the darkness; he’d gotten lost in it once, for what he reckoned was about four days. To Roger, however, nothing had been different.

“Let’s see what happens this time,” said Harold aloud, to himself. He opened the door and stepped through.

The dining car was the same as it always was, and there in the corner were the suitcases, neatly arranged as ever. The cart was nearby, and the tea service was where it should be. Harold took a scone and raised to his mouth to take a bite.

Tasty.

He held the scone in his teeth and picked up the silver tray on which the tea service was sitting. He took a seat at a larger table this time, and looked out the window. All he could see was blackness, and it didn’t take long for him to begin to daydream.

About ten minutes later, Harold heard the door open at the opposite end of the dining car, and out of the corner of his eye, saw Roger enter. The man in the cheap suit approached Harold’s table and took a seat. The two men said nothing to each other; Roger sighed deeply and stared out into the blackness.

The dining car rocked and shook as the train sped along toward its destination.