The Path Beneath the Flyover
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"WHAT ARE YOU?"

The god was standing in the dank shadow of the flyover, sheltering from the rain that crackled down like TV static. I shrugged. “Just me,” I said, but I felt that I knew what he meant in some ersatz way, behind the walls of obfuscation my mind had thrown up like smoke to hide me from a truth more alien than a divine being hiding from the cold.

The god said nothing in response. Just shivered, drawing around himself a long black coat that was greasy pigeon feathers that was smoke that was ruined polyester in the motorway gutter that was tarmac warm under the rubber and engine fumes, that was the sound of lone footsteps late at night. I felt he was watching me, waiting for something that he doubted would happen. When he turned away, walked without slowing into the stained concrete monolith of the flyover support, he gave me one last glance before the grey slid through his face. Like he knew something I should.

The rain pattered on the hood of my coat like dancing fingers on my way home. Seeped into my cuffs. Shoes seeking out the shallows of puddles echoing with ripples, the city duplicate in shimmering grey.


I see the gods. They are not what you believe in. They aren’t wise, or powerful, or loving. Many of them are just… sad, and lost. Most are dying, forgetting, desperate to pass something of themselves on. To leave an imprint. To be more than a flutter in the wind. They’re a lot like people, in that way. But some… they don’t seem to want anything. They just wander, quietly doing whatever it is they do. Some like to help, in their own, opaque way. Lead you to shining lumps of gravel and carrier bags caught in trees, allow you to briefly feel the wind as a lamp-post does, understand the glassy weariness of a security camera. Some are more malicious, but not like people are. They do what they do because that’s what they are. Some, the ones with closer-woven forms, they have something like thoughts, but they don’t really do things for a reason. They just… do.

They don’t crave followers, by and large. Sometimes I see them crowding places of worship, a pale, indistinct thing clinging to the crucifix of a new-build methodist church with shuddering limbs, something tall and sad with a head cloaked in a paper bag watching people file past into a mosque, but I don’t think they get anything out of it. I think they just like the patterns the people make.

But when they don’t like the patterns… then they become a problem. Some of them are too weak to do anything more than rearrange fallen leaves according to some internal schematic but others are stronger. And more than anything gods like to play with people. Those patterns are the most satisfying, the most vivid, the most complex.

It was one of those gods that I saw when the boy jumped in front of a lorry.

Another grey day and and the motorway rumbled on, grey, flat light without shadows, the usual numbness of the filthy grove my city has sunk into. Those few who brave the walk along the pavement rather than encasing themselves in the aluminium and plastic of a car have shut themselves off in other ways, eyes down, headphones on, minds cold to the touch. There is no such thing as society, here. We shed it. Have been crawling, pink and wet and unskinned, ever since. There is only the self, and the other. Maybe that’s why nobody noticed him standing there, by the side of the road. Why no stranger gave him a worried glance, a hand, a kind word. Why we need to be told in endless PSAs to understand that the things we see strutting about are people as real and fragile as ourselves, as in need of the human voice as we are.

I was too late. By the time I saw him look, step, heard, more in my mind than in reality, the thunk of the truck hitting his body, it was too late. My half-step forwards, the call for help, died in my throat and I just… stood there. The driver of the truck was calling the ambulance. There was nothing I had to do.

The city takes away blamenessness. We are all to blame but none of us will face it.

It was then that I saw the god. Leathery scorch-smell and a body of steel and rubber, oozing threat and testosterone and speed, caustic and vehement and black as nothing and pain.

I closed my eyes. They know when you are looking. Sometimes they react.

I went home with my eyes down. Mind cold to the touch.


It called itself Take. It didn’t call itself a god. It knew things. It liked to trade for them.

I had to break into the gantry beneath the flyover to speak to Take, the flaking maintenance ladder familiar beneath my hands, the grate at the top with the padlock I had broken yielding with a creaking push lost in the sound of the motorway. I stood on the gantry, shifting, waiting. Take would know I was there.

It took it a minute to come down.

I smelt it first. Take filled the air around it with the clean, sharp smell of plastic flowers and lemony disinfectant.

"CHOSEN," Take said, slowly floating down from the edge of the flyover’s concrete. It was hard to tell what Take looked like. Only that it was about as wide as it was tall. That an assortment of fishing hooks trailed below it. That in those hooks were ears, tufts of fur, pulsing gaseous things tugging desperately at their barbed tethers glowing colours that slid off the eyes like wet scales.

“Take,” I said. “I need to-”

“TAKE ANSWERS FROM ME.”

Transactions. Take. Take. Take. Take.

“I have something in exchange,” I said. I held out a broken and rusty teaspoon of cheap iron, a ruined ornamental cast of a building sitting lumpish at the end of the handle. A legend inscribed on the handle was all but indecipherable but for the word “SIDNEY”.

"LET ME SEE," said Take. The hooks shifted with a gentle tinkling and rustling and one floated over, the barb gently grazing my palm. It explored the shape of the thing.

"A STORY LOST," said Take. "A MEMORY OF ANOTHER CITY DEFILED, GROUND TO RUIN BY THIS ONE. A TOOL UNFIT FOR PURPOSE. A DISCARD OR A LOSS? A MYSTERY OR A CASUALTY? WASTE OR TREASURE?"

“That’s for you to decide,” I replied. I hoped Take would like that answer. I certainly had no idea how to respond.

Take snatched it and reeled it out of my hand too fast for me to flinch. “I LIKE IT,” it said. “AND YOU MAY TAKE WHAT YOU WANT.

"I HAVE SEEN THE ONE YOU SEEK.

"HE HAS GROWN STRONGER THAN HE SHOULD BE, SUCKLING OFF A RENT IN THE NOOSPHERE AND GROWING FAT AND CRUEL. OR PERHAPS JUST… IRRATIONAL. YOU KNOW WHAT HE IS, I THINK."

I tensed. I both wished that gods would stop being quite so obscure and understood what Take meant.

"YOU CANNOT KILL HIM," said Take. "AND YOU CANNOT EASILY MAKE HIM SAFE FOR YOUR KIND AS YOU HAVE WITH OTHERS. HE DOES NOT WISH TO PASS ON."

“What do I do, then,” I asked. I needed him dealt with.

Take paused. It seemed shifty all of a sudden. "YOU CANNOT KILL HIM," it said. "BUT THERE ARE OTHERS, CHOSEN.” The hooks clattered like windchimes in the breeze.

"ONE HAS TAKEN AN INTEREST IN YOU," it said. "ONE WHO IS CLOSE, NOW. YOU SHOULD BE HONOURED. THE TAKER OF PATHS DOES NOT USUALLY CARE FOR THE JOURNEYS OF INDIVIDUALS. SOMETHING HAS SHIFTED, PERHAPS. OR PERHAPS HE WISHES TO SHIFT SOMETHING. I AM TOO MUCH LIKE YOUR KIND TO UNDERSTAND."

“But there’s a catch,” I said. A truck passed by overhead and the gantry shook imperceptibly. I tightened my grip on the railing.

"THAT IS FOR YOU AND HIM," said Take. "HE DOES NOT FAVOUR ME." It seemed uncomfortable. "I WILL BE MOVING OFF UNTIL HE TRAVELS ELSEWHERE."

“Are you- afraid?” I had started to panic a little. Take had sat above this stretch of the flyover opposite an office block for as long as I had known it and was the most coherent and likely most powerful of any of the gods I knew of. And something which frightened even them had taken an interest in me. The Taker of Paths? What kind of god took a name like that? What kind of god could take a name that abstract?

"I TAKE," said Take. "AND I MUST SURVIVE TO TAKE." It was as simple as that. Without another word it floated upwards and downwind, drifting into the slowly churning sheetmetal sky with the sound of its taken things singing in quiet clattering.

There is always more to take in the city.


The figure in the cloak was waiting below.

"WHAT ARE YOU," he asked.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, refusing to let my frustration show. Not that it mattered. Some gods feel others’ emotion. Reach inside and toy with the twisting feelings. Dance within the cat’s cradle of the human.

"COME," he said. "YOU HAVE A CROSSING TO MAKE." The cloak of the city rustled and snapped in the slow, hot wind.

I followed.

The motorway is never quiet but it seemed almost furious today, writhing and spitting and growling, red lights one way and white lights the other in the sinking gloom. It began to rain again, fat, warm drops pregnant with ozone and jet fuel. I squeezed around the flyover supports, for each spending a brief moment too close between the blackened concrete and the machine flood. The Taker of Paths simply stepped through the concrete, always ahead of me, never breaking stride.

I felt the presence long before I saw it. It is always easier once you have seen a god once. This one was thick, and slow, and warm. There, the air became stagnant and dim, a miasmatic smog that got thicker the further we went. Shapes seemed to hang in the air, long and fragile, aching outwards. I realised after a while that there had not been a support column to squeeze past in a while and looked around but saw only mist and headlights. The traffic sounds were distant but seemed to come from all around us and the flyover hung overhead unsupported, as immutable and eldritch as a feature of the sky. The red and white lights of the traffic were rushing things of smoke and sharp edges.

“Where are we,” I called after the figure, fearful that something in the fog would hear.

"HIS PLACE," said the Taker of Paths.

Cryptic and unhelpful. One of the shapes drifted aimlessly closer to me and I hurried on, watching as it rushed past in a twisting of black air. I felt a sudden spazm of pain and loneliness that seemed bottomless and endless and justified and realised and-

"WHAT ARE YOU?"

He was standing over me. He seemed smaller, here, his cloak more like rags, paler and greyer and weaker, faded out. But there was the outstretched hand that wasn’t, the expression of unfathomable patience on the face I couldn’t see.

I stood back up. The Taker of Paths turned without another word and strode into the smog and I knew, then, that I had to see this through, though a part of me was sickened by the idea right to my core.

The smog kept getting thicker the longer we walked, and it felt like we’d been walking for hours. I have felt the edges of places like this in the dead corners of my city, the closed shops, the upspurting of another chain store. There is nothing profound here. This place is meaningless, utterly. This is what remains when meaning is lost. This is the dark place at the end of thoughts.

The Taker of Paths stopped.

"WE ARE HERE," he said. By now he was almost mundane, an old man sheltering from the rain under a flyover. Inconvenient and ignored.

“What now?” I asked, my voice sounding strange and hollow, full of half-echoes.

The Taker of Paths did not answer. Simply pointed with a single raised arm deeper into the smog.

Some gods just want to play, and the pieces are everything. Some like rules, though. Some like a twisting of words, a stumbling maze of suggestion that we wander through thinking our decisions our own. Some are cruel in their own strange way and some want to help and I do not know which is which.

I closed my eyes, breathed, and stepped forward.

He was hunched over. The ground beneath his feet was black and jagged and glassy. He moved in convulsions, his form even harder to perceive than when I had first seen him. The air was crushing, stinking of burning rubber and strained tears and loneliness and thick with hate. There wasn’t anything to do.

“Here both ways,” he said, and in his voice I heard his name. Prince of the Emptiness Inside. Lord of the Machine Which Ends. He of Neglected Pain.

The God of Suicide by Vehicle.

Here both ways. Here in body as well as mind, at last.

He had a kindly face, a kindly mask that spat tarry pity. He looked at me, and I at him. He would not move and so neither could I. The phantom motorway churned past on either side, the only clear escape.

My voice was empty and so I could not cry. My chest was full of unspoken words and so I could not speak. My heart was cold and so was my hand and so I could not be pulled out of the mire. My mind was barbed and so I could not ask for help.

His eyes were transfixing. They were bright and cold as the approaching headlights of a truck in the dark.

I had nothing to kill him with and he could not be killed. I had no reason that would make him reasonable. I had nothing.

So I sang.

It felt stupid and pathetic and small and I wanted to cringe into a ball and die but it was something. It was something in the nothing. It was something more than nothing.

The god was a simple thing. He didn’t think, and wasn’t curious. He simply felt something antithetical to his being existing in his space and could not comprehend a way of dealing with it. He retreated, gaze fixed on me. The last impression I had of him in that dark place was his eyes, white and luminous, vanishing dimly into the smog, still fixed on mine like empty suns.

“HE WILL RETURN,” said the Taker of Paths, by my side as if he had always been. “AGAIN AND AGAIN.” I knew, without turning, that they were pointing behind me, back the way we had come, back along the long path under the flyover.

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t keep doing this. I-”

"YOU WILL," said the god. "AGAIN AND AGAIN. IT WILL BE SO. I HAVE SMELT IT ON THE WIND AND SEEN IT IN THE CRACKS OF THE PAVING SLABS. HEARD IT IN THE LAST BREATH OF THE DYING SKYRATS, IN THE WINGBEATS OF THE LAST SKYLARKS. I HAVE FELT IT BEHIND YOUR WORDS." The Taker of Paths began to walk, a shuffling, weakened, indomitable stride. "YOU HAVE A CROSSING TO MAKE," he said,

and I sang in my heart against the dark place inside and followed.

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