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The beam from the flashlight makes Orpheus’ shadow elongate, the height of giants, stretching forward in front of him until it slips off the railroad tracks to blend into the darkness. He tries to think of each shift of his own shadow as a signal from the girl that must still be walking behind him. He tries not to look into the darkness beyond the flashlight’s illumination, or to despair at the long, flat track ahead of him, that fades away as the flashlight’s powerful beam reaches its limit without ever showing a hint of the end that must be coming.
He can’t hear her voice. He can’t turn to look at her. He can no longer even reassure himself by imagining a crowd silently following him — when he tries, the imagined people are all translucent, fading away even in his mind’s eye, immaterial and ghostly next to the bright orange beam that is all he can see.
All he can do is keep walking, and watch the orange light that wavers across the tracks ahead of him.
~
There are two ways this story could go.
~
He doesn’t see the grey light on the horizon, not until it’s too late.
The flashlight’s beam is too bright, and it outshadows the dim illumination of the coming dawn. Orpheus’ eyes are lost in the night, and there is only the path before him and the bobbing beam of the flashlight coming from behind.
As long as the flashlight is there, he thinks, he can keep walking. The light drowns out his fears, and when he wonders if this is a trap, if there is really anyone following him, he watches the light and thinks of the girl who holds it; watches the light and reminds himself that something in the King of Hadestown wants him to succeed.
Something in Hades does want him to succeed, to be sure — the part of him that was once a man in love with a woman; the part that let him pick up again the song of his age-old love, and pick up his feet and dance; the part that might have been happy with his wife, if he had been able to keep her. But another part of him cannot imagine keeping her but by force; another part of him ordered the building of the wall; another part cannot be anything but a King, or care for anything but the security of his reign.
Orpheus will not know which part of Hades it was that gave him the flashlight. Whether he gave it in good faith, and it was only unlucky chance that things went the way that they did; or whether Hades intended to help on what the dark and the Fates had already begun — Orpheus will not know.
He knows only that the flashlight
flickers
out
and his hard-earned hard-kept certainty goes rushing away from him, its foundations eroded by doubt and only ever supported by a fragile, flickering beam of light.
He turns.
When the sun rises, it shines down on the shoulders of a boy who stands on an empty railroad track, alone.
~
(Tell it again.)
~
He doesn’t see the grey light on the horizon, not at first.
The flashlight’s beam is too bright, and it outshadows the dim illumination of the coming dawn. He walks, eyes fixed on his own shadow, trying to make the soft crunch of gravel beneath his feet drown out the chorus of the Fates in his ears. But winter or summer, spring or fall, the sun goes on rising, and eventually he begins to fear that the flashlight’s beam is weakening.
His heart jerks in his chest at the thought, and he almost turns, but the light is still there and he holds himself back. And then he realizes that his shadow is less dark because it’s less dark, not because the flashlight is less bright, and he walks faster, towards the point on the horizon that grows brighter every moment.
The orange of the flashlight is replaced by orange in the sky, fading to pink and red and purple, swathes of colour across the eastern sky. Orpheus can’t see the flashlight any longer, but the light of the almost-risen sun is washing his doubts away.
The railroad station that is his destination appears ahead of him, closer than he imagined it would be, with the way the tracks seem to stretch to infinity before him. His walk becomes a run, his pounding heart and heaving breath drowning out the soft whispers of doubt that survived the morning light. The sky grows brighter, brighter, in preparation for the appearance of the sun.
His heart is in his throat and he cannot feel his legs when he steps off of the tracks, onto the railroad platform, but he does not stumble, does not fall. (He will wish he had fallen.)
He steps off the tracks, and as he turns, the first rays of the sun reach the road to hell.
He turns, and he sees her.
The sunlight illuminates her face, more beautiful than he remembered. It catches on her hair, and her eyelashes. It falls upon her feet.
Her feet are still on the railroad track.
He sees her — standing in the sunlight, eyes glittering with tears — and then she is gone, banished like morning mist by the dawning sun that shines down on the shoulders of a boy
who stands in a railroad station
alone.
~
There are two ways this story could go, but they both end the same.
(Tell it again even so.)