By Gaslight Chapter 2 Dox

Union Station, Portland Oregon, Thursday, 5:00 P.M., October 17, 2020

 

T

hirty hours on the Coastal Starlight train and he hadn’t seen the coast once.  It was a fine ride, much better than, than what—what is that ache?

Dox was out of sorts.  He had adopted a new identity, even legally got his name changed to Dox Smith two years ago, after he lost his job for posting his political views on social media.  Before he even bought a backpack or a train ticket he got his name changed, a man with no history in a nation that hated him could do little worse than a change of name.

Ever since the train hit Oakland he’d had this terrible ache in his right hand.  His paranoia about the virus had kept him out of the bathroom except for right after the steward cleaned them.  He went nowhere on the train without his rubber gloves on, even washed the rubber gloves when he was done in the bathroom.

Is that why his right hand ached so much, because he was wearing these gloves?  Then why not the left hand?  Maybe because it was smaller—he was right-handed after all.

He would have to make his way through another train-side homeless camp as a lone hobo, just a little guy and he was highly reliant on his right hand for working his knife.  Big tweakers had their own canes and bats—and he had his aluminum bat sticking out of the top of his rucksack.  But it was the knife that kept them off a man and preserved a little fella from a homeless woman’s raped fate.

The train was winding along the Columbia River Gorge in its gloomy, rust-tinged majesty.  The hand was driving him crazy.  He had to take a look and headed down to the bathroom.  As it happened, one of the aluminum doors in the 2-foot wide metal hallway was rattling open and he ducked in, found paper towels, pulled the door shut and locked it with a paper towel, disposed of it and then gingerly peeled off that black plastic glove.

A black shadow streaked by his right eye and another by his left.  Each time he tried to follow their progress he got a sick queasy feeling in his shrunken gut.  Almost 60, after a life of work, and here he was, alone on the rails like an A.D. 1900 hobo, but minus all of the prospects…noting but lame old age looming grey before him…

No!  No!!  What the hell?

Dox, who had until a couple years previous been a discredited man living under a given name rather than his defiantly taken name, looked down at the previously aged, spotted and thin-skinned back of his hand, swollen from years of order picking in refrigerated warehouses and saw a terrible black spot.  This was not cancer or some outrageous liver spot, but something artificial, something that looked like the “black spot” handed to that pirate of old who had violated an oath and fallen out of favor with his cutthroat brotherhood.  From the back of his hand just behind the swollen knuckles, to the base of his thumb and upon the wrist proper, was a clean, clear, hairless, black sphere—not an exact circle—that appeared tattooed but shone, and the skin that shimmered with that glassy black radiance sprouted no fine little hairs but had been given over wholly to this radiant sink hole of lightlessness.  There was something unsettlingly concave about the spherical mark.

To check his faltering sanity, Dox turned to the mirror, held up his hand and could see therein the shining blackness tattooed—no, branded—no implanted—there.  He shivered and shook when he noted that the bright white light of that tiny, unsanitary cubicle seemed to bend towards that tiny sphere of night where his hand ached so.  Standing with a shiver a bit more rigid he looked himself in the eyes in the mirror, afraid now to look at the apparition upon—or rather within—his hand and wrist.

As the train rocked and the steel wheels squealed below his tin-trapped feet, homeless reprobate Dox Smith, formerly concerned citizen and wage laborer Theodore Roy looked at his small weathered face, pinched nose and bald head and saw there something wicked, thirsty and unfed.

A larger head, as if floating or rooted on a taller set of shoulders—yes, a hazy outline of higher wider shoulders played dully behind him in the mirror—shimmered hazily above his own head.  Or did this shadow of light emanate from his head?  There, about his ears and eyes expanded a larger, more artistically formed head, possessed of a higher forehead, black and still substantial hair, though closely cut, over domineering eyes, sporting a forked mustache beneath scarred cheek and above a wickedly pointed beard of short cut.

This hallucination would not dissipate and the base of his brain burned, icy claws gripped within his head as he seemed to grow a bit stronger than his scrawny norm and a shiver coursed through him as if something old and forgotten had within him been reborn.

The image framing him faded in the mirror.  But this granted no comfort, no reprieve, for then, within him, within his very head, in his mind, echoed words, “Yaas, Drood, find the Hindoo priest.”

He vomited in the sink, and, embarrassed at himself, began running the water, trying to clear that fine, L. A. soup kitchen slop from the bowl, forever fouling the gloves, which he then discarded in horror.

“Take me damned virus!  It will be better than going insane.”

With another shiver and an unmanly shake, he drew his green bandana up over his nose, and feeling the train begin to brake, stepped out into the hallway to heft on his rucksack over his denim jacket and jeans and await the welcome opening of the door, when he would once again be able to breathe straight air without sucking life’s breath through a face diaper.

The train shook and the old Mexican woman leaning on her cane looked to him as he instinctively placed his right hand to her shoulder to keep her from falling into the electrical panel casement.

Her eyes crinkled in an easy smile as he withdrew his hand and then, as he smiled back, she caught sight of the unnatural sphere of night on the back of his hand and her smile went out like a harshly blown candle.

The ache in his hand and the sickness in his belly returned and continued during the long, slow braking process.

Then, finally, the conductor opened the door and Dox motioned for the old woman to step off first and she shrank back into the press of the others, mostly men.  A bit wounded in his vestigial honor gland, he shrugged his shoulders and stepped off onto the metal stepper and then to the concrete platform.

The station was crowded with masked normals and he could not wait to get free of their fearful taint, to get out to the round-about cab stand and walk, walk, walk, hike, march and leave the toxifying hallucinations of that train bathroom behind.  These dreads were only amplified by proximity to the fearful zombie mob at the station.

The sun was dipping down as he walked to the bus stop past the tents on the sidewalk and the moist air closed in around him between the tall empty buildings.

Oh, one could not get aboard a bus with cash, and he had no credit card…

A hike it would be.