Johnny Wraith Stories

The train chugged along for what seemed many hours. Through the windows an endless array of tract houses flashed past, and kept flashing past. Was Hades nothing but an endless suburb? Who’d have thought? What was I supposed to do here? You can just walk out of the place, but no one ever has, I’d been told. You can’t get off track because the journey through Hades is one way, it had been said. Adam’s talk of the torment found here – the vices. Or were they virtues instead of vices here, as the conductor suggested? What was I supposed to do with them? I wasn’t seeking any torment. Oh, what the hell. I was in Hades now, and I had to deal with it. I’d done it to myself by falling for a snake. I’d stepped out of permanent stone and into temporal flesh and sand just for a bottle of Chardonnay and a girl in a sundress with no underpants. Come to think of it, that wasn’t why I was in Hades. That girl and the wine were the lure, not the cause of my being here. The sin, or the injustice for which I was suffering, at least according to the snake, had something to do with my being a pillar for so long. I had held up the flux and chaos for everyone else by just standing there, a pillar in the desert, watching the seasons turn with every slow blink of eye. So, if I accepted all I’d been told as truth, I was in Hades because I’d been changeless too long. Was I somehow being punished for having taken a taste of immortality? The tree in the garden is forbidden for a reason, be the tempting fruit a chance to turn to stone, to sip of Chardonnay, or to have lust with a snake. Partake of the fruit and you just might be in for a ride through Hades’ suburbs. Or was it the shrooms, absinthe, or hashish lollipops? If only I’d never tumbled off the bridge and into the water. Still, I was glad for it. Sometimes you have to seek the glimmer in the darkness, and that is the beauty in fireflies. Ever since meeting Vatsulu, I’d been on quite an adventure. It was a welcome change of pace. Who else gets to swim with a fish with a man’s face, be swallowed by a whale and escape from it by breathing through a mermaid’s tit? How often do we get the chance to stand as a pillar in the desert for more than a thousand years, take instruction from a talking skeleton, sleep with a snake in a sundress, or plummet into Hades wearing nothing but a canvas sack? Oh yeah, and the barkeep’s whiskey was free of charge. How often are the drinks free in any tavern? Change and flux, the chaos of it all, we have been and will be all things, dogs, cats, men, women, snakes, and foul again. Seek not the answers but the questions. The vices… the virtues… eternal torment. Ride the train. Wait for nightfall. Catch the fireflies and put them in a jar to light the way.

Someone was shaking me. “Sir, sir! Wake up! We have arrived at the first stop.”

“Er, eh… what?” I’d fallen asleep and the conductor had his hand on my shoulder.

“We’ve been stopped here for a while, and it’s about time to depart. Don’t you want to get off at your first stop? Why have you just been sitting here, sleeping? Your ticket will still be good when you want to board again.”

I looked out the window. “It looks like the same place. Haven’t we gone anywhere? All the houses and streets still look the same.”

“Johnny, it’s all a matter of perception. I understand where you are from the sun rises and falls over and over again. The days go from Monday through Sunday over and over again. Every two weeks you receive a paycheck for sitting at a desk and doing the same thing you did to get the previous paycheck, and the one before that. I hear you have to pay the same bills every month: mortgage, utilities, cable television, water, and trash. I can’t fathom how you can tell one day from the next where you’re from. I think it is kind of the same thing for you, being a stranger here. Just how you see nothing but sameness in my world, I see the same thing in yours. Everything really is different here, even if it looks the same as everything else from the outside. It all depends on how you look at it, or maybe it is how you live it.”

I scratched my head. “O.k., so if I get off at this stop, and take a look around, I’ll start noticing everything isn’t the same?”

“Probably not at first,” grinned the conductor. “You need to start by looking into things.”

“Oh, come on, please not another riddle!”

“Try knocking on a door or two.”

“Who will answer?”

“It can be anyone you have known that has died.”

“Everyone here is dead?”

“Yes.”

“Even me?”

“Some questions shouldn’t be asked, Johnny.”

“Then this really is the land of the dead?”

“It is Hades.”

“And no one has ever left it?”

“Nope.”

“What about Lazarus?”

The train conductor grimaced and his silence spoke clearly. Seek questions. Don’t ask them.