Originally Published in Not One of Us #78.

He was a man once. Or at least something living. Before the fog. Before the black beat of the river. Before the hood and cloak took the place of his skin and muscle. Before he was Charon. Before he was the witness. 

Now… 

Now he is the ferryman, but there is no one left to ferry. Not a single soul has touched his shores in millennia at least. Perhaps the sun and all the stars in all the skies have gone out and there is nothing left above but fog. All he knows for certain is that there are no souls for the ferryman to ferry. All he has for company is his vessel, the train. 

He wonders at this, the end of all things, how much longer he should wait. There have been great pauses before, and the Charon that came before him had not prepared him for them. The longest lasted centuries, though he had neither the means nor desire to count the days, hours, and minutes in this underplace. For hundreds of years, not a soul whispered onto the sands, ruby-eyed and afraid. Then, one day, all at once, they returned. A flood, a flow, a fire of souls arrived and passed across the Styx on his train. They were different, sure, perhaps shorter, stouter, sadder than those he remembered coming before, as if they’d somehow forgotten death was possible at all, but death has a way of washing out difference until all that’s left is bone, bleached and brined, begging for rest. He ferried them just the same.

This waiting is different. It borders on infinite, and he senses an utter and total quietude draped across everything.

Charon thought he wanted rest, once. At first, he was just a shade, a dead man. He’d begged, bartered, and stolen for it on the shores of the Styx. But then, when it was given to him, he refused it. He was done living, yes, but he wasn’t ready to die, so instead he took up the ferry, took up the souls, and let the Charon who came before rest. 

He’d summoned the train with a friend who wasn’t ready either. Together they’d shared the burden, the toil, and the joy of ferrying. It was them and the train – a laughing, foaming, burning, engine strong enough to pull everyone, even those who died coinless, across the river.

Then his friend decided she was ready to end, and he ferried her, too.

The truth is you don’t need a ferryman to carry you to the other side of the Styx. There is no other side of the Styx at all, really. The fog that coats the river just thickens and thickens until it swallows everything that ever once composed the melodies of a life. Any shade could wade into the Styx and be taken from it. They rarely do. If there’s one thing Charon has learned, it’s that the easiest way to let go of life is with company. 

Which is why there is Charon. 

Which is why he stayed, even after Toshiko left and it was just him and his train. 

Now they are all that is left of everything. They’ve spent eternity together, and he loves the steel insistence and certainty of the train. He loves the sparking wheels that spin atop the Styx. He loves the charcoal soot it spits. He loves the fire and heat and screeching of its mass. He loves the piston movement of the coupling rods that join the driving wheels together. He studies the perfect circle of their motion, starting where they end over and over. It’s an image that sustains his work, it is the march of lives. Each one ends where it began, in oblivion, and yet the collective locomotive of the universe churns forward. Or it has. Without death there is no life. Now the universe’s engine has quieted. Everything is completely still. 

The universe has ceased. Where has it all gone? 

Out, he guesses, like a candle. An image flashes, a mother’s face leaning over a sleeping child – him? Yes, him, the man that Charon was. The flames shear away the dark for a moment and he, the child, cracks his eyes and sees a sliver of her face, warm and orange and smiling for just a moment before she blows the candle out and the darkness swallows her. 

If he was a man once, then he was also a child. He has not remembered his life in a very long time. Why does it return to him now? Without souls to ferry, perhaps he is no longer Charon, just that lonely man who died so many eons ago. 

If the universe is the candle, he is the smoke rising from the cooling wick. Without light, there is nothing left to witness. 

The train swims beneath the surface of the Styx. Charon watches from the near shore where souls used to wander. Its lights cut spears through the inky depths. Charon hopes, secretly, that it will not rise from the river. That it will dive deep and disappear of its own accord. He loves the locomotive, but he cannot leave it alone in the universe. He is Charon. Everything that is must be witnessed by him as it dissolves. He does not know if he has it in him to choose to be alone. Who will witness the witness?

The train has no one to carry. In disuse, rust patinas its luster. Paint peels, and its creaks, to Charon’s ears, sound weary. It is time, though, he dreads it. It is time. He will do his ferry this final kindness, though none will be left to do it for him.

He calls forth the train from the Styx. It breaches like a whale, and calls like one, too. It drags the point of its pilot to the sands, but the rest of its body lingers in the water. Charon must pull it himself. Each inch takes decades as he hefts without pause. The whole of his being strains. The effort is immense, but he does not relent, not to exhaustion, or sadness, or boredom, or grief. He does not stop until the cab, the engine, and the tender car filled with coal are ashore. 

Hundreds of passenger cars still swim in the Styx behind it. Charon approaches the three links of chain that connect the locomotive to its cargo. He raises his bony hand and brings it down to the taut metal. It sparks and shatters and Charon’s chest aches where his heart once was as he watches the cars descend and vanish into the Styx. 

“It is just us, now” he whispers. The now unfamiliar sound of his voice echoes in the empty afterlife. 

“It’s ok,” he says, running his hand along the body of the locomotive, relearning words. “You’ve more than earned your rest.”

Charon begins by climbing the tender car where the coal sits, waiting for a fire. 

“The flames have all gone out,” he says to the coal. With his hands, he takes the coal to the river and lets it sink. Back and forth and back and forth, dozens of lumps at a time. His hands stain black but the Styx washes everything away. Eventually, the tender car is empty. He breaks the coupling chain and heaves the empty car back into the river. The Styx takes it without complaint and swallows it as easily as sleep. 

Sleep. He remembers the distant child of death. He remembers a voice that sang him to sleep, once, whiskey and tenor and the stubbled cheek that brushed his when the lullaby was done. The train creaks and he remembers his nervous heart beating in his chest, too.

The fuel is gone, but the locomotive remains. The work remains. 

The metal bolts take all his might to unwind. The soldered-together pieces eventually yield to his rusting grip. He removes the plow-shaped cow-catcher that splits the Styx’s lapping surface and lets the river take it. The steam chest crashes into the sand with a heavy bouldering shrug. He drives it through the grains and lets the water take that too. The ashpan, the struts; the steam dome and whistle; the vestiges of black paint; the crank piping, the eccentric rod; everything. The Styx welcomes it all.

He unbuilds the ferry from the outside in. Had he tears to cry he would, but his empty, skeletal masque can only gape, hollowly, at this, the end of everything. Each piece he removes, the river swallows, until there is little more than a metal husk and wood planks remaining. He pauses at the wheels, the turning motion that had represented everything above and living in the world. He rips the rods and sends the circles, the very concept of forward motion and progress, into the depths. Once this is done, he finds his sadness spent. He stoically rends the rest of the metal off the wood and sends the train’s skeleton sinking. 

“Goodbye, my friend.”

Once, the train’s headlight eyes had been summoned from the Styx’s depths. Once, the brilliant shine of it had carried him past his death and had given meaning to the meaninglessness of death. The train had made him Charon. What is a ferryman without a ferry, after all? 

He searches the shore and the Styx for an answer, but none is given. 

The final bones of his compatriot sit, rotting wood on the shore, and he is more alone than anything that has ever been. His loneliness hangs like bloody muscle and sinew from his body. It beats from his chest now, each successive pounding wrapping him in a mass of flesh. His aching, lonely heart sings through the emptiness and stitches him shut with skin. In his grief and isolation, he becomes a man once more. A man who liked bergamot and apple, whose neck was always sunburnt, who had kissed his father and mother goodbye at fifteen and never saw them again, who had died and never really accepted it, who had become Charon rather than disappear, who had witnessed life after life at its end, who had held hands and cajoled and cried and laughed with their spirits, who watched the fog take them and told them, yes, I see you, I see your leaving, and I will remember it. 

Who will witness him? 

On the shore, he is alone, and he could walk into the water and let it take him, but he is afraid. He’s remembered fear, and its icy grip, this last phantasm of his human life, holds him tightly. He does not want to die alone. The wooden remains of his friend still rest, bleached pale wood on the shore. 

He is not done with this after-life. He joins the wood to itself, sands it smooth with his rough hands and the last of the psychopomp magic within him. He curves it into something like a hull. He makes himself a ferry, a boat this time, here at the end of everything. He smiles as the perfect circle of the train’s driving wheel reoccurs to him. Endings into beginnings. A ferry into a train back into a ferry again. His smile fades. The movement will all soon cease. In a burst of courage and momentum, he heaves the boat into the water.

He jumps quickly into it as it leaves the shore. It floats toward the fog, the endless otherside that never comes. Eventually, he idles in the flowing water. It is all ending, he knows, but his beating chest cannot abide this truth. He could live, he thinks, he could paddle back to shore and wait on the sands. Perhaps – right? – perhaps someone will come to be ferried again someday. But it is an empty hope, hollow and untrue. He cannot unknow the truth that this is all that is left, but he squints hard and tries. He is not ready to die. He has never been ready to die. 

The wind through an open window in his childhood home drifts across his cheek and the flash of his mother’s crooked, toothy smile summons itself. He was a man, once. He was a child, once. He is alone, now. 

He could have left when there were others to witness him, but he’s been too scared. He hates himself for his indecision, for the fear he’d let guide him. He’s clung to this meaning to the bitter end and now, what does he get for it? He faces the black of the river alone and he cannot bear to lower himself into it and depart. He turns back and sees the shore of the once-living still in view. He cries for it, he thinks of swimming back, but that would only prolong the inevitable.

Instead, he rips at the wood siding of the boat and throws it into the water. He tears plank from plank from plank and when all that’s left is a single stretch of wood, splintering and barely wide enough for two feet, kneels on it, balancing above the black. 

So it ends as a prayer, he thinks. Perhaps that’s how it started. With his palms, he paddles the boat forward. The inky flow laps at the wood. When he is draped entirely in fog, and the shore is gone from view, he stops. 

This is it, then, he thinks. The brilliance. The fever. The noise. The longing. The ending. The living. The dying. All of it, all of it, done now. 

He alone to witness it. 

He dips a toe in the water, and it is not as cold as he would have thought. It does not feel like anything at all. He lowers most of his body behind it and it is nothing like being held by his mother. He always hoped that’s what death was like. One long, warm hold. Instead, it is this. This nothing.

If he dissolved now, it would be the finale. The final witness to all of it, the mess and order that had spun atoms into stars into life into death into life again now emptied and still. Nothing would ever look upon anything. And he can’t imagine it ending forever. Not just him, it, all of it, gone and lost. He grasps the final piece of wood and holds his head above the water. He gasps above the dark he cannot bear. 

Through the panic a name. Ambrose. His name was Ambrose. He hears it as clearly as a Sunday bell ringing through his head. His mother had named him that, his father had sung it low beneath a setting sun and campfire, his lover had whispered it in his ear, his friend had shouted it across a crowded platform to find him. He is a man. The Styx laps at his torso. It is neither hungry nor dismissive. It just is. He wishes it would tug at him, help him, claim him, anything. No. The choice must be his. He can choose to hang in the empty as all the lights blink off. Or he can do what he was never brave enough to do before. He could end. It is not easy to end. But he had never lived an easy life, nor an easy afterlife. Why, then, should this be any different? The closer death comes, the more life flows through him, through memories, and the flash of faces, and the smell of breaths, the thousand ringing sounds of his name. Alone, but not really. Fearful, but brave. No more ready than he has ever been, but ready, still, at last.

What is a ferryman with a ferry, without souls to shepherd? 

Just a man. 

At this, the very end of all things, Ambrose simply lets go. As everything ends, Ambrose finally rests.