The demon sets serpentine limbs against the clattering door and slides it shut. Now the car is dark and the air is close. The clanking chaos of the train drowns Niko’s wheezing struggle to regain his breath. When he can speak again he addresses the darkness. “Why. Did you help me? Who. Are you?”
And the darkness replies in a familiar voice. “What’s the matter, buddy pal? Don’t you recognize me?”
Niko stares and feels an awful deepdown recognition grow.
Familiar laughter in the closed and rocking space. “After all the years we spent together.” Niko’s heard thousands of recordings of himself. Enough to recognize his own voice replying from the shadows.
“Here.” Snap of leather, and a supple tendril bearing a jaundiced yellow light the color of a failing flashlight moves between the two figures in the boxcar, one supine and the other kneeling, to render in Rembrandt chiaroscuro a funhouse visage floating disembodied in the dark. “Better now?”
Niko takes in deepset eyes reflecting steady cold light, a broad brow, thickbristled eyebrows, mottled brown hide, wide face and prominent jaw, large nose, broad cheekbones and gaunt cheeks. Twisted and contorted, sinister and mutilated, the demon’s face still recognizable as his own.
“You’re me?”
In the sepia light the full lips curve in a lopsided grin. “Close but no cigar,” says Niko’s voice from this thing’s mouth. “I’m your demon.”
HOT WIND FLUTTERS Niko’s tattered coat as the boxcar clatters deeper into Hell to carry its divided load along its destined route. The walls and floor are slimed with human filth, the stench is overwhelming. For once he’s thankful for the dimness.
Near one wall the demon sits crosslegged like a huge statue of Niko carved into a gargoyle, swaying languidly with the boxcar’s rocking, not resting against the wall because of his wings but hunched forward with mottled tendrils hugging pointy knees and waiting silently for Niko to absorb this latest development and looking all the more horrifying in his sure familiarity.
The strange thing is that Niko doesn’t need much explanation. The creature before him looks exactly like the demon he has always pictured, the supple critic and whispering adviser who for so long lived within his mind. Urging him Have another drink. Admonishing him Don’t let her tell you what to do. The self aggrandizing voice that exhorted him to put his own needs first, then told him what a selfish prick he was. The voice that on a rooftop whispered Jump. Here is the demon he has wrestled all his life. The enemy he has come to protect because he believes that to exorcise it is to tamper with the engine that drives his art. The imagined creature manifest and sitting across from him in a filthy boxcar on a rocking Hellbound train. And the face it wears is Niko’s own.
The desecrated face smiles as Niko begins to understand. The ruined head nods. Acknowledging his acceptance. Their tacit communion.
Niko snorts and ducks his head. His demon grins.
Niko looks up at him again and nods back. His demon laughs and nods back. Niko laughs too, finally, with the finality of understanding. What else is there to say? They’re twins after all, however out of true the likeness. The moment hangs unspoken in the boxcar air.
Soon they quiet down and listen to the locomotive’s soulhulling horn whistling in the dark while it ferries its load of misery and pain farther into the territory of despair. A cargo seeking mercy from creatures without conscience. Finally Niko nods again as if the iron language of the train has spoken to him in a primitive and private tongue and he regards the demon, his demon, sitting patiently before him.
“You’re taller than I imagined.”
His demon laughs and Niko follows. The train screams boastful oblivion. Many miles away, mulchosaurs glance up from their gutstrewn prey and scream replies to the iron challenge shrieked across the tortured air beneath the world.
From the folds of its wings Niko’s demon produces a bottle. Sealed cap, white letters on black label. “I believe you dropped this.” He leans forward and holds the bottle out.
Niko takes the whiskey from him. “I believe you’re right,” he says, and breaks the longshut seal.
A HUNGRY TRAIN howls down the gloom and feeds its pace by eating souls on rails set in the poisoned land like stitches in a rotting wound while Niko takes the offered drink and smoky liquid floods a tunnel decades dry. His demon nods approval as the man drinks from the bottle and the trainhorn blows an aching note as his charge on a Hellfound train falls off the wagon like an ousted angel.
Down the hatch the demon says in Niko’s voice.
Lookin at ya Niko toasts. He holds the whiskey in his mouth expecting that his throat will clamp and when it doesn’t lets the liquor trickle down his throat and waits. No pounding skull no clenching gut no breaking sweat. A faint but not unpleasant burn of smoky liquid in his mouth.
He swallows. His eyes tear up, his face turns red, he feels he’s going to sneeze. But it has always felt like this or worse.
“Like falling off a bike,” his demon says.
“Or a wagon.” He lifts the bottle one more time but hesitates.
“Go ahead. The second stroke won’t make you more unfaithful than the first.”
But Niko bangs the bottle on the rocking floor and watches amber liquid sloshing with the freightcar’s motion. “So,” he tells the bottle. “You’re back.”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of. What’s that mean?”
“I’m back but not the way you think.”
“No shit, Sherlock. Now if I want to wrestle you I can do it with my hands.”
His demon’s smile grows fond. “Not what I meant, bud.”
“Don’t call me that.” Niko grabs the bottle up and takes that second swig and does not see his demon’s look of undiluted pleasure.
“Let me deal you some cards here, buddy pal. One, a cute little succubus clamped onto your leg like a horny little poodle dog. Two, a toasty fire inside a comfy little igloo. Three, two lovenotes in your own crappy handwriting, Exhibit A sealed in a bottle of Tennessee’s finest, Exhibit B delivered via Greek Express.”
“You wrote the notes.”
“No shit, Sherlock. And built the igloo. And made the fire. And knocked that little sucker off your leg.”
“But why.”
A helpless shrug. The ravaged face wears something sad and tender now. The demon wraps his wings about him as if cold and now it’s his turn to stare bleakly at the whiskey bottle. “Because, you poor fuckedup loser,” he tells the bottle, “I love you.”
PITCHFORKED DEMONS STOKE the famished engine with a coke of anguished souls. Niko in the stifling boxcar feels the old familiar fuse burn in his belly and he looks away from his own demon swaying with the boxcar’s languid motion. He senses the demon’s embarrassment and feels embarrassed for him.
“It’s an occupational hazard,” his demon says. “Sometimes we get a little too fond of the thing we’re decimating.”
Niko slides his guitar case between himself and his demon.
“See, I’m part of you. Which means I’m also partly you. Mostly you never needed me. Did you know that? Mortals often don’t. You undo yourselves just fine without us. But sometimes you flog yourselves right up to the brink and then just stand there wavering. That’s where we come in.” He mimes a little push with S-shaped tendrils.
Niko undoes the catches and raises the lid and stares into the case like a man at the funeral of an old lover. He takes another swig of booze. Three old friends getting reacquainted on a train. Can I have a hallelujah.