Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. The train was already breathing when
I arrived, its rusted sides exhaling steam beneath and to
link strings of lights, rain hammering out a relentless rhythm overhead.
I made a dash through the puddle, puck crossing, tuck
of my press case under one arm, shoe slick and
sodden as the overhead pa wall of my train, to
make ready for final boarding midnight, the IRA for crossing
into lost places. There was a taste of metal in
the air. The city's terminal iron bones gone to moss
neon signage crackling within certain lights seemed locked in novoustaces.
A handful of traveler is morion the top the island platform.
Every one's face half shadout, waiting for something they wouldn't name.
Not many boarded at this ire. A young man in
a travel company polo counted bags for a dozing family.
A businessman griping into his cell behind me, A couple
of students huddled silently near a vending machine. The rest
full soft shuffles, glances at phones, movements. Choreograph of attired
habit in the particular and settledness that stalks public places
after midnight. I dupped through the nearest carriage door, droplets
trailing behind like glass beads. The first of the staff,
a mess Delaney, the conduct a, greeted me with a
close smile, rain flex on the peak of her hat.
A tickets please, she said, her voice efficient, careful, clipped
at the edges her badge gleaned below the corporate logo
line speedic Rail. Even her routine check radiated attention. It
was as if she was counting not just boarding passes,
but the measure of each passenger's and tent. I'd presented
my digital assignment slip alongside my photo credentials. She peered
at the press card longer than most, due scrutinizing the
embedded ship of the device, resembling a miniature scanner. Her
eyes flicked to me, once, sharply, then again, mister Ames,
special accommodations. I see here on business feature piece for siscup,
brighter rail futures and all that. Is there a problem?
I kept it casual. She didn't answer, but her nod
was careful, and her posture one of compliance, not comfort.
Lights inside flickered anemically. The train's corridors were a strange
blend of ears battered fullwood paneling and digital announcement screens,
grass fixtures scuff by the years, sleeping compartments lined with
Fredbrok carpet, windows fogged at the edges. I passed surveillance
cameras blinking red along the archery's new editions, out of
place against the funereal daker. Suddenly, the door to the
platform slid open again, this time admitting shouts and slivers
of blue led flash. Two uniformed officers heard in voices
urgent but controlled. I heard a mess till lay stride
become brisk. She intercepted the nearer baggage cart spoke in
low tones. The businessman and the family looked up, a
ripple of anxiety passing among us. Even the hum of
the train's engine seemed to hesitate. We need to manifest
from lost stop. One officer demanded, what's happened? Asked the
young man in the travel polo, his voice cracking. The
other officer was already weaving a plastic sheet at a
mess delaney in evidence bag, inside of which climmered a phone.
They exchanged quick summer words. I caught just enough disappearance
over night, sagment last known in her compartment, more resolved
Lener no record of departure. The phone had been found
on her pillow, its audio recording halted just before dawn.
I took a few sneaking notes, pretending to text a
stewde trundle passed with an evidence bag and a clipboard
through the sheen of plastic. The phones recording notification glowed
red for half a breath. Their conversation turned sharply, the
officer saying she just vanished. No one saw her leave
a mess. Delaney's jaw tightened. We have all the footage,
no unaccounted intervals, she insisted. But I caught a flicker
of doubt in her eyes. I drifted closer as the
car emptied. As the compartment door sealed, I heard a
faint hiss of static. Some one had tap play Onlna's phone.
Audio filled the heavy air, garbled, static wheels clacking, then
unmistakably a voice sootha in its sounded winborne arrival or
rival arrival. One of the officers cut the audio, abruptly,
sliding the phone back into its pouch. They moved down
the train, the echoes of their words and that strained
was but clinging to the walls. Long after their footsteps faded,
we lurched forward, doors, locked warnings, tiined the night, swallowing
a smile by mile through the thick trained glass, a
city dwindled, gas stations and warehouses becoming streaks against the
storm inside. Every passenger seemed to draw deeper into themselves,
eyes fixed either enphone screens or on the inscrutable darkness outside.
It was not the weather, nor the lateness, but that
single word arrival, repeating, croaking and forlorn in the static,
that sire of the air. Before we'd even passed the
city's edge, I realized this was going to be a
story about routine infrastructure up grades. The night train was
keeping secrets, and I was already seated for the journey.
My second compartment, I've restored a measure of professionalism. If
routine was armor acinsha tight, my regular beak called for immersion,
living with my subjects, finding a grain beneath the shine
feature reporting my editors called it, though it always felt
more like Loki infiltration, listening, blending in watching what people
did when they thought no one really cared. The compartment
was warmer than expected, if narrow, electric blue upholstery, A
miniature fold down desk silvered mirrored, distorting my reflection. My
suitcase standard issue, batted to fit beneath the lower bunk,
A stack of case notes in a bat of field.
Noober kept me company. My phone or corridor camera dated
A locke never left my right front pocket. This assignment
was on the surface of land, chronicling the modernisation pushing
rail travel grassroots impacts, safety systems, digital retrofits. It paid
well enough, but lacked the animating friction I craved. The
real pyrols went in the nuts and bolts. They were
always in people and the deforming pressures of money. Time
in oversight. I had spent weeks reading about line speedic rail.
It tangled un the funded company shepherded into the new
er only by the promise of state contracts and glossy marketing.
This particular route, the Northern Lattice, had a storied history.
ePRESS runs for the powerful in the post war years,
a gold rush of source in the oil decades, now
diminished to a lifeline for small towns lucky to see
a traina day. The echo of the officer's investigations still
haunted the car, but the rhythm of the rails began
to cast its spell. I did a circuit, ostensibly to
get the lay of the land, but also to gauge
the mood down the corridor. The business traveler hunched over
a spreadsheet on hisels within laptop, periodically muttering into a
wireless headset. His name, I later learned, was Surrey. He
embodied that perfect corporate opacity mingled annoyance and panic, ready
to disappear behind the screen at any hint of the
world's complications. In the next carriage, a family commandeered a
twin set of seats. The father played endless videos of
woodland animals for chirpee in sagniac six year old. His
wife quietly read from a well thumbed Russian fairytale collection,
lips moving, I starting to the windows whenever the train's lover,
as if trucking invisible landmarks across from them. An elderly
couplemaster and missus Rooke, sat shoulder to shoulder at the
forced intimacy of travel, making them seem even more of unit.
She arranged her for small pill bottles and order on
the table. He watched the rain as breath fogg in
the glass. I don't know how long they'd be marred,
but their silences were practiced companionable. In the dining car,
a steward and a curss oil blue uniform greeted me
with a forced cheerfulness. First time on the northern ladders,
he asked, Wiping his hands on a towel, he boasted
about the heritage features, some from the original nineteen fifty
three run. Then soft Fie lamented the new digital upgrades.
Good for safety, I suppose, he confided, But these computers,
always hungry for repairs, were used to do things by
hand and landon now short hiccup and its all alerts.
And as we passed through the observation lunge, thick pained
windows hide in the night's face, wheat poles of the
yellow light, I made small talk with two students, murmuring
about a city protest, and a man in a raincurt
calculating travel times on a printed timetable. The lounge was
meant to feel open, communal. Instead it had the gently
stifling hush of an old cathedral, every word bouncing off
velvet and brass lights flickered briefly as we rolled past
an unlit station, and I caught my own reflection, pale, drawn,
as if I'd slip forward half a decade in the
space of an hour. Back in my compartment, I organized
my notes and toppled in the voice memo ap part routine,
put shield eliot ames Night one trained departed eleven fifty
seven pm. Severe weather delay, police investigation ongoing due to
missing female passenger at Linamorzov. I paused listening. The only
sound was the persistent form of rain and the metallic
chine of passing track joints. There was comfort here in
the old rituals, the slow settling in the measured pacing
of the train as it climbed out of the city basin.
Yet unease lingered beneath the surface. The other passengers fagned indifference,
draping themselves in screen glow and paperback pages, but their
eyes betrayed them, jumpy and certain, sliding right past the
doors to Lina's compartment. In every public space, the staff
monitored the flows. Even when they serve coffee. It is scanned, mocked, assessed.
Something about the police presence or maybe the news itself
had shaken every one out of the soft stupa that
usually takes hold oft the sire. Every routine action was overperformed,
as if to deny the outliat, blot out the threat
now haunting the rails. By two zero a m. The
train's schedule had stabilized, settling into the ghostly lull of
late ires. My mind circled back to that form, the evidence,
back that echo on the audio arrival. I kept repaying
a moment in my head even as I pressed on
with the script notes for interviews, scattered trance's safety stats,
soft inquiry about passenger onness. In the age of automation.
It had been I thought a long time since anything
about a story had genuinely unsettled me. Somewhere out there,
Lino Morozov was listed as missing, her phone harvested for
digital traces. The rail, like any institution, would paper over
the break in routine. Still trains remember, so do those
who follow their trails. I had not expected that a
job of infrastructure might start with the vanishing, but I
covered enough stories to know sometimes you don't choose the mystery,
the mystery chooses you. And already the train was gathering
speed and distance and secrets as it ran deeper into
the heart of the storm. It's surprising what details start
to nat once you tune your attention outside the script.
After a knives rest the circuit of the aisles, my
professional curiosity began to edge toward paranoia. My route took
me past the rear staff cabins through a partially opened doorway,
a glimpse of small room bristling with screens dimly late.
It bristled with surveillance monitors and glowing indicator lights, each
flickering with the data feed from the train's interior and
exterior cameras. Near By, a group of staff had formed
the tight knots, speaking in undertones, their uniforms blurred in
the gloom, their eyes drifted reflexively to the camera feeds.
I couldn't make out any words, but got a sense
of urgency, as if they had no privacy even among themselves.
Leaning casually against a bulkhead, I cut snatches a staff
chatter from a cracked radio, A missing images again not
just tonight. At the trains pier began to start of
cutting out, just as a steward passed and fiddled with
a wall panel. I lingered beside an equipment locker of
feigning an interest in an antiquitous chimatic. That's when I
made contact with the juniority technician. He was easy to spot,
late twenties shirt and tucked thumb nervously caressing a lanard.
Sorry to bother, but have got a press brief from
the new upgrades, I ventured, hoping to draw him out
with the language of the mundane. I'm Julian, he said,
brushing past me, but not unkindly. His fingers trembled. Too
much caffine or too little sleep, perhaps both. Can you
tell me about the system? Looks like your running redundancy
across three nodes, I guess, pointing to the screens, He hesitated,
glancing behind him. We suppose to. It's robust, unless it isn't,
he leaned, in, voice dropping. There are times nights, mostly
when people just disappear from the cameras, lightly blinked out,
then show up later as if nothing happened. We patched
the files, blame the system. Move on, I studded him.
Does this happen often? He showed a finger nail as
darting to the row of monitors more since the last
round of upgrades. There is a stretch north where it
happens the most, the dead zone. Sometimes it's a glitch.
Sometimes he trailed off, distracted by a beep on the
nearest panel. Never mind, I pressed gently, and Linimorsov The
name landed like a stone in still water. Julian's face
went rigid, his voice shade lower. You didn't hear that
from me. He stepped away, a keying and a cod
that shut. The equipment roomed all between us. The train's
lights flickered in perfect synchrony our entry into shifting black outside,
old growth forests pressed close to the glass, swallowing up
every hint of the storm riven sky. The only life
remaining in this place was the one manufactured by the train,
a passage of warmth and light and an endless, starless dark.
For several minutes, I stood at the window. Reflections moved
in parallel through the carriages, faces half obscured. No one
met my eyes. I wondered which of us would be
visible moment to moment on those patched over surveillance logs. Here,
one instant erased in the next. The tension among the
staff did not dissipate security passes were checked at every
car as we entered the dead zone. Tea mugs rattled
on trays. The business traveler made a shore stretching, cracking
his knuckles, but never truly relied. At the family drew
their little one closer, their voices sinking. Only the elderly
couple maintained their composure, heads together as masss rot quietly
recited prayers of renotted hands. The administrator's voice over the
pia urged patients as we trouble shoot technical issues come
into this line's modernizations. I noticed their words never quite
reached the specifics. Something about the way the night press
against the windows and broken by even a single light
outside gave the impression of traveling not through landscape, but
through a passage between worlds. The security of the rails
felt strangely precarious, one layer of steel and protocol between
us and what waited beyond rests Uno, content with staff
half answers, I resolved to get a closer look at
Lina's compartment. One morning, seat into the bleak corridors of Pallide. Instinctase,
I took my chances. While the investigation seemed briefly to stall.
Detective Ham was stationed outside the seal room. She was brisk, local,
more tired than impatient. Perhaps it was my credentials or
her dislike of being dictated to by corporate policy that
let me talk her into watching me examine the compartment
for a journalistic context. Her job to oversee, not to obstruct,
she said, as long as I was quick. Lina's birth
was in the serb, the suit gase still zipped and
touched below the lower bunk, and an open paperback face
down on the shelf. The sheets rumpled at the edges,
but a marked a struggle. The bathroom was immaculate, tall
folded soap and stirred on the phone pillow, the crime
scene tag already crusted with stickiness. Her phone lay silent.
I was handed a pair of gloves and given exactly
three minutes. The first thing I noticed was the absence
of almost everything. Ascent of cammalty lingered faintly in the air,
but no make up kit, no scattered pens or jewelry,
no charger fingers trembling only slightly. I scrolled through the
phones interface. The last act of file was a voice
memo just over forty seven minutes, stamped with an eye
at the teen, the last interval, when Lena was confirmed
anywhere by the staff. The rest of her apps were
in use that day. Do you have headphones, I asked,
keeping my tone even. Hann nodded, her eyes narrowed but
not unfriendly, crushed in the narrow corridor and feeling the
sweep of the train's movement beneath us. A press play.
It began innocuously, sheets, rustling, faint humming, anonymous whole voices,
then a long silence broken only by the hum and
drone of the train. The sound of breathing slowed and ragged,
sliding further into soft static, midway through something cold beneath
the ordinary, an audible drop in temperature, back quickening on
the recording, followed by that same word arrival, repeated in
a voice that sounded neither holy male nor female, utterly
without affectation. Each iteration sounded as if forced, her throat
nearly closed by sleep or sore. The last two minutes,
whispering in the background, not quite forming words, and a
dry tapping sound, maybe finger nails on the glass. I
handed the device back, pulse laced with adrenaline, saying thank
you in a whisper that barely reached my own ears.
Anne asked if I'd hurt anything unusual, something about arrival. Yes.
That told her. She didn't react, simply lobed my eggsit
her mind elsewhere. I took a quick look through lean
as journal, lying open on the narrow nightstand, pages half
felled in sharp aprack hand. The entries were meticulous, dates
and times recorded precisely. She'd written about a recurring nightmare,
shadows sliding past her window, a coldness like water around
of her voices, asking did you miss your departure? There
were sketches too, elongated figures posture just outside, two tall
faces unfinished, one note near the end, simply Rea, Everything
important happens in the in betweens. Under the mattress, I
found a folded map in ballpoint, an obsessive tracing of
the train's course. There were hash marks at exactly thirty
miles north of our last stop, a segment of recognized
as it did's own Julian had mentioned above it. Lena
had written a single word why. Down the narrow corridor.
I pushed through the nie that cloned to each car,
compelled by a sense of growing urgency and buttonholed a
mess Delaney near the dining car. She met me with
practice patience, but little warm. I mentioned persistent rumors of
technical difficulties and not just glitches, but recurring outages on
this line. She sipped off my question with corporate platitudes.
Upgraries take time. No system is perfect. Our staff is
trained for all contingencies and passengers if he is our
top concern. She met my gaze evenly, oppressed harder. But
these outages always happen in a specific segment, don't they
near the northern woods. A smile thin I'm not able
to comment on ongoing operations there. Suggest you enjoyed the
lounge experience, mister ains the railway's best stories of the
Once passengers make for themselves. To her left, the dining
car attendant, a gaunt man with crow's feet and the
hint of a rural accent, fussed over a coffee urn.
I tried again, ever hear anything strange along this route
after midnight. He pretended to busy himself, but his eyes darted.
Lights flick up there Sometimes passengers get uneasy, but then
people are prone to rumors after dark stormed platricks in
the Paris system. I thanked them both, and as they
turned to leave, the lights of a flicker, plunging the
car into moment train near darkness. A nervous shift passed
over the staff. Voices rose, then faded behind me. Conversation resumed,
brittle and shallow. I overheard one of the steward's mutter,
it's just like last winter. But I was already moving on.
Curious what other passengers had noticed, I drifted toward the
tail of the train. Most tried to keep their heads down,
nosesimbac's headphones ceiling out the room, but the family with
the child agreed to speak once the mother recognized my
note book. You're riding about the train, she asked, managing
a thin smile. We took the lattice last March. Never
saw this much fast. Our boy, Benny was disappointed when
half the light went out near the pine grove. She
nudged a child. Tell the man what you saw before
you slept. Then he looked at his toes, then up
at me. There was a lady in blue pajamas in
the hallway. She waved at somebody. Then the lights went
snap and she was gone. The mother offered an apologetic glance.
He says, she was right outside the door above, maybe
two in the morning. It was while you all were
fixing the generator. I noted the time. Did any one
else seem to notice her? The mother hesitated, honestly, it
was late. Maybe I dreamed it too. Her eyes flicked
anxiously toward the window as another researchless stretch of dark
forest pressed itself against the glass. Passing through the lounge again,
I found missus Wert netting methodically, her husband's snoring beside her.
At some point our eyes met across the aisle. She
spoke under her breath, not quite to me, more cantankerous
aside to the world. Another one gone, she muttered, fingers
nodding the urn. Always the same, same as when we
were young and soldiers rode these cars home. I asked, quietly,
carefully what she meant. Missus Rokesgay stayed on her knitting.
No one likes to talk about disappearances. Easier to say
some one walked off. Always easier that way, they're saying.
The missing woman might have left voluntarily. Always the story,
she said, words clipped. But the train always keeps running,
doesn't it. Our conversation ended, drifting out with the rhythmic
way of the car. I returned to my seat. The
unease no longer theoretical. It percolated through every conversation, every
gesture of professional normalcy, the practice denials, the refusal to
linger on danger. Wall of it rang hollow rehearsed. This
was more than a single disappearance. There was a history
below the official surface, and every one knew to keep quiet.
These encounters left me more determined than before. If the
story would far deeper than new technology and rule the soldier,
I'd need to look outside the official record. On alongs
leapless morning, fueled by instant coffee and instinct, across paths
with Julian again. He was loitering near a second class
tod causet, fiddling with a service panel. Still wrestling with
those logs, I asked, trying for a note of empathy
rather than accusation. For a long moment, he didn't answer. Then,
lowering his voice, he said, they don't erase the logs.
Not really, it's oll lock. I do just have to
know where to look, but they flux searches if I
show an outsider, make it hypothetical. What would I find
if I pulled the last year's incident reports for this line?
He hesitated. I kept pushing, Who would want to make
passengers forget about gaps and disappearances? Why so much pressure
for silence? Julian's face pinched with anxiety. Everybody loses something
out here. Eventually, he whispered, not asking as easy. If
the logs, I'll have to proxy through the maintenance address.
If you're caught, I wasn't involved, He keep in a
few commands, thum, hovering over the send button. The screen
displayed a pat trick of ikons, a decades worth of
incident files disguised as repel ocs, maintenance failures, routine upgrades.
He slipped me a printed file, quick invertive. Back in
my compartment, I began my review. The data stretch back
ten years, nine disappearances, each of voluntary disembocation or clerical anomaly,
each with an a tightcoster of mile markers. The very
deads are and Julian had pointed out. Each time camera
logs glitched, staff gave identical statements, and all outside requests
were referred back to corporate pr Buried in the files
were memos minimize negative publicity who do not escalate as
side standard protecoll order as signed by middle managers. I
recognized from press releases. The pattern was as regular as
the rails. One or two incidents every year, masked, minimized,
always attributed to routine human error. Heart pounding, I lobbed
each incident. The conclusion was inscapable. The lattice was being
protected from embarrassment, from liability, maybe from something much older
than corporate secrets. The very dead zone was, by internal logic,
simply not real, not for public talk. The passengers practiced
in difference, taught not spontaneous, now seemed like a ritual
bread of necessity. Near sundown. As the trains led into
another silent station, I realized I wasn't as invisible as
I like to think. I caught mass Delaney in detective
hand sharing words in the reflection of a dark window,
with a conversation stilled. As I approached hand's workhorn hands
were folded, her body blocking the corridor, and in the
okay but not friendly way CoP's used when giving and
spoken warnings. I hope, mister Eames, that you are enjoying
your journey. Ms. De Laney said with a brightness that
didn't touch her eyes, taking in the scenery, documenting the experience,
I replied, measured Delane newly and closer, lowering her voice
so only I could hear. Curiosity can be a dangerous
thing for everyone. The trains lights dipped, humming as it
rolled between substations, and her expression all to just perceptibly something,
knowing older than she looked free, your own good. Try
not to dig too deep. Nobody likes trouble on the line.
Detective Hann added quietly, this is a simple case. Don't
make it complicated. My mouth was dry. I'm just a reporter,
detective the facts lead with the lead, Han's voice became gentle,
almost kind. Sometimes there's nothing there. No one wants to see.
Someone get out looking for a story that doesn't exist.
A impulse of stat a kiss from the far end
of the corridor, as if some speaker had been left alive.
As a step away, feeling that I was tracking my retreat,
the train juttered, light losing power in a slow wave
of section by section, plunging into darkness. An instant's silence
thence off chaos, door slamming, heels clattering. Someone's voice raised
an alarm. My hand fumbled for my phone, calmercorder running
just before the overhead lights cycled back on a chilling
brush of breath that my lefty of time between my
heart beats, not a physical touch, nothing solid, but a
whisper as reala's memory arrival at that grasped the damp
syllable and needlescraping down my spine. I spun no one behind,
but the recorder vibrated with feedback, the word echoing and
layered static. By the time the power returned, Ms de
Laney and Hand had already slipped away, the warning made
clear by the absence as much as their words. Passengers murmured,
anxious but already rationalizing. The staff resumed their rounds, a
little paler, but even more determined to box the night
away For myself. I abandoned any thought of retreat. Every
instant screamed that I was now past the point of
no return, that the train's secrets, human or otherwise, were
now starring back at me from every camera and window.
The risk was no longer abstract, and the story was
no longer someone else's. Outside rain slid down the glass,
making prisms of the ghostly force just beyond reach. The
rail signed their ancient promers, you can travel forever as
long as you don't miss your arrival, and all the
while the darkest press closer, waiting for that final irreversible crossing.
The rails signed their ancient promise, you can travel forever,
as long as you don't miss your arrival, and all
the while the darkness pressed closer, waiting for that final
irreversible crossing. The car hommed with an easy silence after
the blackout, as if everyone had agreed to ignore the
moment outright. I ducked back into my cabin, but couldn't
make myself sit. The events, the pointed vice, the power
failure that voiced crooking arrival straight into my device, leaped
to my mind. Fragment's refusing assembly. Something ugly had nested
itself along the thresholds between the recorded and forgotten night
and day, the critical interest between the outside world and
the compressed universe inside the night train compel. I pulled
out Leana's journal again, flipping past interests about the scenery
and sleeplessness. My attention caught on a page I had
skinned before but not really registered. In not cluster of dates,
each circled with the word interrupted pin next to them.
Below that, a shaky drawing of her own compartment window
shaded a pair of silhouettes at the edge, neither totally
inside nor outside her script. Beneath they never knock, but
some part if he wants to open anyway, A persistent
clicking through my nerves hot outside struver set the carriage breaker,
his shoes squeaking on the linoleum. Down the corridor, the
doors to adjoining bus hissed open, and shutters of testing
their own hinges. I watched the reflection in the glass,
nothing more sin as to than my own hollowed outline.
Yet with each flicker of fluorescent light, it became easier
to imagine something else standing behind me, shifting weight from
foot to firt. Hunger rasped me, so I headed for
the dining car nerves ragged with captain checked by the faint,
familiar room of burnt coffee and reheated bread. The steward,
putting on a show of composure, handed me a mug,
his eyes linger. In a moment, he lawn on my badge.
He didn't speak, neither did I. It suddenly felt as
if the whole staff were operating by a different timetable,
glancing at one another in secret coat hands always close
to belts or radios. Even the conversations in the gallexianed
orchestrated to ex cli. Near the vestibule, Surrey, the business
traveler intercepted me. He leaned in pitch flow. My wifi's
been cut off for a half iire you notice any
trouble since the police left. Technical difficulties offered. Keeping my
tone neutral seems like power for this ride. He scowled,
whole statements getting odd. Heard the Gulf rebunks down complain
some one tried herd dole just before the blackout. He
jerked his head toward the back. People don't just vanish
staffs spooked. Ye know anything, just what they tell us,
But if you remember anything else, He shook his head,
already pulling away, retreating into the fortress of his laptop's glow.
As I passed the family, Benny, the restless child watched
me with white eyes, fingers played against the glass. His
father glanced up as if to ask for reassurance, then
looked quickly away. No one on the train wanted to
be caught thinking about absence, not Lina's nor anyone else's returning.
I almost glided with Julian, who, at his head down
had he pulled tight over paliers. I gestured him into
the service alcove, lowering my voice to graul what happens
when these outages line? You ever see anything the logs
can't explain? For a long moment, he hesitated, eyes fix
on some invisible point beyond my shoulder. You want the
archives to, he whispered, voice brittle, don't open them now,
wait until we're clear of the dead zone. If you
get flagged, let's just say no one involved comes out
of it. Well, show me something, Julian, give me anything,
I pressed. He pulled up a schomatic on his tablet,
tellsing it so only I could see. Look, every time
there's a gap in surveillance, it's right here, his finger
tip tree is a thirty mile segment north of the
last name, siding a blank stripe and the animated lock.
You're not supposed to be able to go off graade
on corporate infrastructure, he said, But here every sense of
the whole damn system drops out. When the logs fall
back in. Sometimes passengers don't always the same spot. I asked,
Paul's hurrying. He nodded a tremor, threading his words night
trains only never on the noon express, never in daylight.
He hesitated, glancing up at the rattle of a passing door. Listen,
you take these files out, rat them over wireless, but
if any one asks, you got them yourself. The conversation
was cut short as two conductors approached, one carrying a tray,
the other posture in for authority. Julian invaded into the
corridor's gloom, shoulders hunch while the conductors made a show
of cheerful hospitality, but their I stayed hard. After they
moved on, I slipped away, nearly bumping into missus Ruk
by the washroom. She regarded me with a keen, almost
painful sympathy. Sometimes the thing you're looking for isn't what
you think, she murmured. Her hands fluttered to the crucifix
at her neck. Trains gather up stairs. Men think they're
in charge, but it's the eye memory that keeps its
own reckoning. Before I could pose a question, she retreated,
knitting clutched to her chest. If I'd been less unsettled,
I might have laughed at the wisdom of those words. Instead,
it felt like the culmination of every half glimpse warning
in each corridor. Back in my compartment, my phone vibrated.
Julian had sent a p d'eth, a sampler of maintenance
lugs with flagged deviations matched to the train's passage drew wilderness.
I scrolled, mapping disappearances of the gaps described. It was
all there, Camelog's time stumped to nothing, official explanations boiling
to to aerror, codes and reboots, instant reports filed and sealed.
For a moment, a creeping sense of unreality threatened to
overwhelm me. Nine people now ten, always the same place,
always the same plausible to idylity, And this time the
system's need for normalcy brush up against something much older
and more implacable. My eyes drobbed from the relentless blue
of the screen, but I couldn't stop for further I read.
The more the facts bled into the airlessness of the nitrosity,
of all the other disappearances, all the odd missing minutes
no one we ever speak of. Suddenly, from somewhere near
the front car came a panic voice to help pleased.
Then the brittle hush of radio's crackling to life. My
hot spiked the air around me, thick with the knowledge
that Inquiry Hill was not welcomed, nor, as suspected, entirely
in my control any more. It was clear the official
story was simply flaughted. Was a mask on this journey,
by accident or design, had drawn me to the pivot
point where every mask eventually cracks in the corridor mirror.
For an instant I thought my eyes looked not back
at me, but straight past my shoulder into something waiting
right outside the glass of flicker of anticipation, adeptless and
blinking patients. Rain lashed the windows harder now, but the
only real storm was the one gathering along the invisible
rails ahead. I have seemed to pressin in the carriage
after the blackout, like the echo of a gasp, never
quite release. I could hardly convince myself to move. Every
muscle coiled, as if the night itself were waiting for
my next step. The other passengers walked as if a
cross crackdace, gliding past one another, heads down and eyes everted,
each conversation more cautious than the last. Maya's trichard, every sound,
each pop and flicker of the fluorescence, the sigh of
the carriage doors, the mechanical drone of the train as
it pushed deeper into forest. The sense of being observed
had peeled away my last layer of detachment. For the
first time in a long career, I no longer felt
immune to the store's dangers. It wasn't just fear, though
fear had itstaken me, but a piercing awareness that the
trained secrets were moving beyond my control. Mess to Laney
in detective hands, warning seemed inadequate now, like a torn
umbrella in a storm whose violence they themselves did not
wish to face. I kept circling back to that whispert
wined into the snarl of static arrival. My thumb brushed
the recorder was button again, as if it could anchor me,
but all it caught weather shivers in my own breath.
I unpacked the files Julian had sent, scrolling feverishly through
the PDF under the weak pool of my reading light.
Each liked entry, each incident resolved internally a crowded my
mind's eye, faces replaced by lines of text, vanished souls
translated into date stamps and authorization codes. I kept the ciphering, mapping,
replaining the inflections of those who had spoken to me.
I could picture the silent panic in Julian's glance, the
resignation burned into the steward posture, the ragged fatalism in
the Cesseric's muttered warning. The pattern had of grown gossip
or corporate caution. It had become ritual. My reasoning tried
to press the facts into a single trench, the missing,
the dead zone, the stat's telltale choreography. Yet something in
the pit of me rebel, sensing a breach between what
could be reported and what might never be described. Late
in the evening, while rain continued its relentless siege in
the windows, I heard the train shift gives grinding As
we slowed nearn and let crossing for a second, I gumpsed,
my own face doubled in the glass, haggard, twitching with
the tension of too much knowledge and not enough certainty.
If Lena's journal was to be believed, the train was
a liminal place, the geography of thresholds baked into its
very architecture. Sleep eluded me. The ache behind my eyes
throbbed with every fresh spike of alertness. The intercom crackled
at two while they m a the PIA voice Life
Versus Ever recited an apology for ongoing technical issues, and
requested passengers remained clear of the compartment doors for scheduled
over night diagnostics. The subtext was as clear as the
challenge in a mess, Delaney's stare, stay put, don't wander.
I ignored the suggestion and slept into the corridor. My
feet made almost no sound on the aging linoleum, but
someone was always two steps ahead or behind. Shadows doubled
and redoubled with every uca aarant light. Somewhere near the rear,
I heard soft, regular tapping metal on glass or nail
onward in the gloom. By the vestibule, a door hung open,
just enough to throw a wedge of cold air across
my path. I paused, heart raising as a silhouette flickered
within the corridor, bulged with sensation, smoke, old cleaning fluid,
the echo of lathy lingering on a pitch held toulon
Lena's journal. Tight in my jacket, pressed against my robes
with feign confidence, I moved on, ducking round a pile
of bundled service linens and heading for the equipment alcove
near the surveillance room. I'd seen Julian pacing earlier, eyes
darting whenever another uniform passed. Now he was back at
the panel, hands trembling. His lanyard was missing, Juliane, I called,
just above a whisper. He started, then eased. You shouldn't
be here, he hissed, but did not look away. They're
watching fand scheduled loggins. They're watching everything. A reply drawing nearer.
But it doesn't matter if everyone vanishes any Wait, is it?
There was no answer to that, so I move closer.
What happens Julian when the train hits the dead doon
to night? His lips thinned. If you're hoping for proof,
you can print forget it. That all corrupts. The censor's
audio visual spit out garbled files, shadows only I need
to see them anyway. At pressed, he flicked open a
hidden drawer in the silver rack, pulled out about it
external drive. He handed it to me with the wariness
of a man passing a bomb. I shouldn't but check
the hidden partition. Only look onlyless and while we're outside
the blackout zone. After that, you're on your own. He
was gone before I could thank him. Back at my compartment,
I plugged in the drive and brought up as protected files,
row on row of short video loops from elway adouring,
as each one fust at the edges, time stems stammering,
frame sliding in and out of coherence. I watched passengers
flicker out of view and then impossibly reappear, pale and
strangely stilled. Occasionally, a figure, always just barely within the frame,
would stand by a door, their features in distinguishable, waiting
for something unseen. Between clips, there were abrupt jumps of
cameras freezing, then blinking to new content, as if nothing
had happened. The audio files chilled me further, and several
ovalapping with the click and hum of the rails, voices
whisper so unmngled by distortion, but all repeating the same refrain, Arrival, Arrival, Arrival.
A tremor started at my finger tip and crawled up
my arm. I could not say who was more to blame,
the staff who had seen too much in chosen silence,
the corporations scrubbing its conscience, or something deeper in the
woods and rails that made silence inevitable. I scrolled, searching
for line essace among the many, and there she was,
a freeze frame on a grain of feed, standing at
the junction of two corridors, not moving yet. Somehow as
dark and intent, even through the blow, seemed to stare
straight at me. Sleep was impossible. With dawn's and nemic
lights splintering through the blinds, my focus blurred. I realized
there was not hunting a scoop. I was hunting a
reason for everything not to fall away beneath my feet.
The train's announcement system jolted to life shortly before eight.
We thank you for your continued patience. Upgrades will be
completed before the next scheduled stop. Please remain come the lines.
Corperate loco flickered over the hallway screens, offering aspirational messages
about progressive rural connections. Above this, behind every word, I
heard the ugly churne of unease, like bone tumbling in
a clothes dryer. Passengers shifted in their seats, some packing,
others resigned to wait. No one asked after Elena. Her
compartment door had been sealed and tagged. The yellow tape
looked and congruously festive. Crew move with tight silent urgency,
eyes ducking the moment contact was threatened. I tried to
make sense of the night. I had spoken with nearly everyone,
extracted half secrets, found the mechanical trail of missing persons,
and unearthed what could have been classified as a cover up.
But the Night Train was not to give up its
riddles just because they'd been named. Hungry for any further
threading capable of waiting, I messaged Julian by encrypted a
note for one last top before nightfall, I kneaded out
of the dead zone. I needed to believe in something
that could be fixed. When Julian finally returned, he looked
washed out, his cheek necktars if by accident. I shouldn't,
but you need contexts, he said, His voice was barely there.
Reducked into the unused luggage compartment at the rear, just
before it was time to lock it for the night.
He hunched in the shadows, face drawn. There's a second layer.
This route doubled its senses last year. They buried the
old logs under a ghost server, one that supposed to
lip junk data forever, but some of the senses snapschists.
They pick up more than Faircaft's. He showed me his foam.
It displayed stills, stretches of snowy forests at night, mistpressed
close to the windows, the empty strip of track in
a handful faint white forms drifted between the trees, elongated
with the sensor failed to focus, sometimes costed just beyond
the safety fences. The effect was of a crowd, both
waiting and watching. In others blowed faces pressed against the
windows from the outside, impossible angles, mouths, and hans, trailing
as if sliding past at a natural speed. It's not
compression artifact. Julian murmured thumby nervously, nobody loving lines up
like that. There's something out there and inside too old
or new, doesn't matter. The logs record just enough to
ruin a good night's sleep. What happened to the last chitec?
I ask, partly out of professional reflex, partly looking for
a life lane, he paused. He went missing mid run night.
Similar to this. His badge was later found in a
siding thirty miles north. Train never officially stopped on paper.
He resigned for medical reasons. They brought me up from
regional support after a dully Eke settled against my chest,
the same place the dead's own. He nodded, and for
a moment air between us thickened. Julian leaned in, lowering
his voice almost in nothing to night. We crossed that
segment again. The logs are blank. If you want to
see for yourself, surveillance needs a rebued in person. There's
a back door, but you'll have to come with me
after one a m. And if not, he managed something
between a laugh and a cough, he won't get another shot,
not until the next one disappears. Fine, I said, I
want to see it for real. His eyes darted from
side to side. I'll meet you outside the monitoring room
at one fifteen. Headphones, no flashlight, and whatever happens, don't
open a door unless you are at all agreement in place,
I watched him hurry off, had angled down. Back in
my compartment, I gather everything, recorder, back up, battery, Lina's journal,
the external drive. I felt exposed, hunted, but steadied by
the sense that whatever answer I uncovered this night, it
would be the only chance to break the surface. At dinner,
missus Frooke's knitting was more complex, a looping black and
white pattern. I could not decipher. Her brow furrowed in concentration.
When she caught my eye, she only shook her head,
as if preempting another question. The everyone thinks he can
pin it down the facts, she murmured, quietly. But things
lived on these tracks before there were facts. Sometimes we
just get in their way. Do you stay awake through
the dead tone, I asked, gently, deferential. She patted her
husband's knuckles. Baltric. One keeps watch wonderams. Sometimes it helps,
sometimes not. She returned to her knittinghunch a little deeper inward.
I retreated to my compartment, time crawling until the agreed
ire Surrey in the adjacent carr ordered a neat whiskey
and avoided all eye contact. The trains flowed imperceptibly, as
for as closed an outside Somewhere beneath the insulation, the
rails began to sing again. When one Fatina arrived, A
stepped into the corridor, hot throwing. Julian was already waiting,
a string of axes cots tucked into his sleeve. He nodded,
no words needed. We crossed to sleeping cars. The only
life of security camera red ice swinging on its bracket,
the only sound the half of my own breath. Julian
led the way to a reinforced deeal door. He tapped
in a cove, then slid through. I followed inside. The
surveillance room was cramped for screens, glowing banks of switches,
A battered headset strung across the console. Julian flipped to relay.
The screens began to cycle vision from every car, rolling
in measured sequence. At first, everything seemed ordinary. Passenger's dozing
staff circulating the windows of blank mirror. He dropped the
headset onto my lap. Listen, watch for the corruption. The
train's tempo changed, an inaudible signal that we'd entered the
critical stretch. One by one, this greens began to twitch
fridit warped lines tearing across the feeds, looping images jittering
as if stuck between frames, halways empty and then full,
Passengers flickering in and out of existence in sleep. Faces
sluckened in odd ways, sometimes multiplying, sometimes vanishing. In one view,
Lena herself appeared standing perfectly still in the back corridor,
eyes fixed toward the camera. Her lips moved, unreadable but unmistakably,
forming the shape of a word arrival, Chilian pointed to
a third feed. That's the compartment she vanished from. Watchnow.
A shadow, impossibly tall hovered just outside the closed door.
It seemed at once an absence in a presence blurred
at the margins, as if borrowed from another reality. Lina
inside jerked upright, as if awakened by a touch. Her
gaze rose to the camera. For an instant, an arm,
half transparent, rose at her side, Then the feet dissolved
into blue white static muskin crawl. Both at the sight
and the smell, something feaded and metallic, as if the
rooms there itself had been turned over. The walls poles
with the hum of electricity struggling to stable. Julian exhaled, swept,
beating at his temple. It does this every time. It's
like the software becomes as if can't hold what happens
in here, only outside, lobbed it. His voice faded as
another monitor flickered to motion. Lena again, walking briskly through
a blank hallway, hair loose arms at her sides. She stopped,
looked up, then disintegrated into scattered pixels. Outside the windows,
the darkness seemed to thicken massing at the glass shape
shifted at the forest edge, momentary impressions of face's hands
rippling through the gloom, as if tracking the train with
predatory calm. Do you see them, Julian asked, nervously, not
turning away from the monitors, I see enough. Suddenly, all
forced greens snapped to static, followed by an inhumanly slow
voice over the pie and error message walked by some
external source. Arrival, Arrival, Arrival. Lights above began to flicker again,
this time in time with the pulse of the words.
The carriage door slid open, one after another, as if
summoning something forward. Julian grabbed my arm, panic transforming his
seemingly cool indifference to desperation. We have to, he hissed,
The systems going to hard weset. None of this will survive.
As we scrambled from the surveillance room, the temperature dropped abruptly.
Are breath making ghosts before us? The corridors were not
quite empty. Passengers stirred as if freaking from huff remembered
dreams as glazed lips moving in silent imitation of the
word that haunted every file. Arrival. We ducked into the
lost lepricar. Through the thin glass, I glimpsed a row
of pale figures standing beside the tracks, too still, too symmetrical,
their outlines trembling as we sped past, faces half lit
by the train's lights. Stairs fixed in the windows watching
us rattle by. They didn't wave, they didn't turn, just stirred,
as if waiting for something or someone to cross. A
soft keening filled the carriage, pitch just below audibility. I
pressed my recorder against the air, unsure if anything would
be captured. In the compartment head I saw Lean again,
unmistakable in her blue pajamas, standing before an open emergency door,
or her face turned away. Without thinking, I moved forward,
Yank and Julian with me. He resisted, no, Elliott, you
don't go to them. You wait for morning, and they
pass you by if you're lucky. But I could not
look away. The car was freezing, and condensations spread across
the glass, as if the night itself was drawing breath.
I reached out, hand shaking. At that moment, the train lurched, violently,
tossing me into the far wall. The door slam shut,
then reopened from the corridor behind Ammess Delaney appeared, and
this time her mask had split. Her eyes were wild,
hair damp with sweat, mouth tight. A ship's rigging in
her hands was the service lock. You have no permission,
no right to open the ricket. This isn't a game,
mister Ames. Her anger was unfaint, raw, but underneath it
was terror. People are disappearing, I managed, gasping. They're not
all leaving by choice. What are we carrying through this place?
What are we supposed to ignore? She stepped forward, pressing
her back to the door as if to seal it
with her body. The train shuddered again. The rhythm of
the tracks faltered, as if we were slipping loose from
the world. It's not up to us. It never was,
the line perdace us All. Her hand shook so bad
as she nearly dropped her log book. I've seen too much,
thirty six years, lost more than passengers, I told myself
it was the route, the pressure, bad luck. But some
places aren't meant to be crossed. Julian slumped against the wall.
Face waxen. Tell him, then, tell him what the staff
say after dark, About not looking out the window, about
not answering if someone knocks. The lady glanced over her shoulder,
fear naked on her face. We mark the line. That's all,
keep to the protocols, while the anomalies pray. No one
else steps off. When the censor's blank, you count everyone twice. Rituals, superstitions,
she laughed, brittle, hopeless, And sometimes it doesn't matter. They
come anyway. Another pulse of static jangled the pier. This
time the word came as a command from every speaker,
every shadow arrival. The specter in the emergency end of
the car beckoned slow and deliberate, as if to remind
us of a promise. I felt myself step forward, shaking
with a chill. I could not explain. The windows began
to frost, obscuring the view outside. Somewhere Lena, his voice,
floated up from memory, her final journal line, Everything important
happens in the in betweens. I forced myself to stop
at the threshold, heart hammering against my rips, Julie and
seized my arm, and in that contact the spell broke
behind us. Mss Delaney dropped to one knee, weeping openly.
A gap opened in the static. For what felt like
several heart beats, the train was suspended between here and
no were rail of bridge over. Nothing I saw in
that moment, every venice face reflected in the glass, soldiers
of students, porters, and children. Lina standing beside what might
have been my own form, faceless waiting. The wheels thundered.
Momentum return the dead zone spout us out into morning.
The spell snapped, light stabilized, The train rolled onward. No
one beside us seemed to notice anything had passed. I
staggered back to my berth with Julian in tow The
minutes ahead blowed staff hauling battered luggage, passenger's rubbing eyes,
someone cursing the breakfast menu, a child asking if the
rain had stopped. There was no sign that anything truly
strange had happened, no trace of last night's storm, aside
from the faint taste of copper in the air and
my own ragged nerves. Julian vanished into the cruise base's
eyes hollow mess. The Laney was soon at the far
end of the train, collecting waste, as if noth thing
had broken her composure. The only overt sign were her hands.
She now wore gloves, perhaps to cover her trembly. In
the days to follow, I tried every angle, interview passengers,
press corporates, bookspeople, uploaded files to back up drives, wrote stores,
both direct and cryptic. Nearly everything I recorded came out jumbled,
file corruption, swallowing. The most extraordinary footage, where I thought
I'd caught Lean's voice, there was only stat acord, the
word arrival looped over blank stretches. No one from the
company offered answers. Instead, my calls were fielded, then stowalled.
Detective hand was on leave. Shulian never responded to another
message mess Delaney's staff. I d was listed as retired
due to hell. A handful of advocacy groups ran my report,
stirring up a trickle of outfrage, but the railroad responded
only with threats of legal action and press releases calling
me irresponsible. A single envelope arrived at my apartment, no
return address, postmark from a rural town along the lattice
inside a faded photo showing me staring from a deserted
platform beneath the flickering lamp. I wore the wrong coat.
My posture was wrong too. I could not remember ever
being in that town. There was also a disposable phone,
battery half drained, already playing a loop the whisper Arrival, Arrival, Arrival,
I kept returning to the last image. My own sound
face blowed around the edges, as if just crossing a boundary,
on the verge of stepping off. I left the envelope
on my desk for days, refusing to touch the phone,
refusing to answer the knocking I sometimes thought I heard
at my door. I do not sleep on trains any more.
I do not stare into the darkness as the courages
rolled us low, relentless passage between places that were de
rival lingers, patient, as I am never in a hurry.
I find, as I sit in my apartment stale morning light,
that I am listening for the silence after the moment
when something touches the glass, whispering that a journey never
truly ends until it is account of her. And I
do not look to see who is reflected beside me.
My days felt shrunk and exposed. Apartments in city streets
suddenly pressed in tighter, and I spent. I was cross
checking my findings, chasing the smallest lead, certain that if
I led anything, drop something imperceptible would slide out of
reach forever. At night, the world closed round my study.
The rhythm of far off trains ran through the blocks,
plumbing the hamavoires, then and droning the walls, vibrating the
loops of whisper fragments that my mind had voluntarily translated
as arrival. I rarely slept in the weeks after stepping
off the lattice. Instead, I scrolled back through all that
I recorded each night, hoping there might be some date
I'd overlooked, some Carfang's signal waiting in the mess. Instead,
what I found reminded me how fragile evidence becomes under pressure.
Lena's face, once so vivid, and surveillance stills blurred and fragmented.
The best clip I managed salvage caught her for less
than two seconds, a pale oval, unreadable, just behind the glass,
in the dead zone. In the audio, my own voice
sometimes joined as reciting the word arrival, each time overlaid
by distortion, as if the thing repeating it was not
only outside but also inside me. Some mornings I would wait,
convinced that instead of surviving, I had carried something back
across that liminal place dislodged from the ordered world. I
pressed for answers, still swinging between the sense that I
narrowly escaped and the dread that none of my supposed
scaped matter. The railroad company officially and repeatedly denied everything.
No confirmed anomaly, no one accounted disappearances this decade. They
defected all questions about Lenamorosov, citing privacy or ongoing investigation,
then deploying more permanent strategies. Responsive emails replaced with four metters.
Calls escalated, then disconnected, the representative shifting from polite denial
to stone silence. Eventually my press badge full of me
for a kind of informal exile. Blacklisted from further ticketing,
my emails quietly bounced a loyal leaving a series of
veiled threats about injurious messaging. What I could piece together
from Julian's looks, most of them now corrupted, with archas
placed far behind secondary firewalls, corroborated only part of what
I'd seen. A few days after disembarking, I tried to
contact and directly, only to receive a blank text in reply,
a string of zeros in a single phrase. No further
access then nothing. I tried again for detective hand, but
she too hadvanished from public recage, transferred, retired, or simply
scrubbed by whatever mechanism the company or its partners operated
to raise in convenient personnel. Even missus Rourke and her husband,
whose names I'd found in the manifest disappeared from listed
numbers and directories. It was as though the story had
tied off its loose ends with brute to bureaucratic finality,
leaving only the static and that impossible. Whispers proved that
any of us had ever traveled through the night at Dall,
but the consequences kept multiplying, even if the fact so dearly.
One refused to settle into conclusion. I purpished my findings
what I could anyway, through an online journal, mixing hard
reporting with the fragments that would only sound mad ast
stripped of context. The clicks rolled in comments, stacking by
the hundreds, most from readers hungry for a conspiracy, desperate
to believe that the system itself could not be trusted.
Some advocated further investigation, Others accused me of embellishing. A
few offer private stories of their own vanished relatives, details
that sometimes fit the pattern, sometimes veared toward the extravagant.
My phone poles with tips mostly dead ends. A handful
of people contacting me from shielded numbers, most eager to
talk only until I press for verifiable fact. One former
night conductor, speaking in a whisper that wreaked of loneliness,
told me it's a trap. They bring us out to
empty spices, and when the senses were set, we walked
the aisle counting empty beds. But the real number doesn't
add up, and no one complains because complains disappeared to
a nurse hued commuted for two years on the same line,
admitted waking most nights at the same hour, convinced that
someone stood just outside her building's door waiting for a trainer.
Should never come, and rumors burrowed deeper. One tipster, an
I contractor who wouldn't share his name, wrote me check
the payrolls employees on leave. Most don't come back. This ay,
it's medical, but there are other coats. No sign nopeber
just initials. Now. Middle management calls it passed her risk
the joke, but the logs show more gaps, Like the
world itself blinks, and some people just go compiling what
I had. I tried new ways to watch the footage,
to scrape something clear from the haze. I played the
files on different machines. Occasionally I picked up shadow traces,
other faces layered behind lenez, the flicker of soldiers uniforms
from decades before, a woman in a red coat stepping
repeatedly into an open door before vanishing altogether. My own
reflection sometimes stared back from the monitor, altered eyes gone bank,
as a corpse's mouth, flickering at the corners, as if
half way to forming arrival. Once jolted upright by fear,
I found my camera, A simple smartphone, now running low
on battery, had been triggered to record at three in
the morning, a time at which, as far as I
could remember, I had been sitting in the other room.
On playback, my voice rose low and distant, answering a
question no one had asked. They're waiting. The city itself
felt newly haunted. In the aftermath, rain trapped the windows
lawn after night fell, never loud enough for comfort, just
persistent enough to remind me what it sounded like when
I boarded Lattice that first night. I took to changing
my routes, staying away from train stations in subways. Several
times out walking I saw faces through caffic glass that
I could have sworn belonged to other lattice passengers. Missess
Work's careful hands perhaps are the unmistakable scowl of Surrey,
who never returned my messages each time I left to
Sin to confirm it, fearful of what acknowledgment might draw up.
The corporate response hardened in weeks. The Rower's legal team,
its logo and intricate lattice work of rails braided with Citycress,
contacted my publishers, serting the dangerous and reality of my story,
warning of lawsuit if I continued harassing employees or impeding
the safety of rural infrastructure. My editor, half sympathetic, let
me go quietly, no ceremony, just to perfunctory full call
and an apology about risk mitigation. I was left to
work on my own, isolated, but for the brief camaraderie
of common dist paranoid, curious, sometimes genuinely helpful, and the
gritty companionship of other freelancers who, though not involved with
my story, understood the calculus of institutional silence and private obsession.
Now that I was spent of my access, pressed to
the margins, I fixated on concrete details that would not dissolve.
The map leaner had annotated, now carefully pinned upon my
faded desk, mocked me with its series of hashmarks north
of the last station. The pattern was a refutable I
gathered the government, accidant reports, comb community forums, obsessively correlated
missing person bulletins, but nothing could read it all together
without the critical appture. The railroads so jealously guarded the
real rowlocks from the stretch, the full surveillance tapes, the
service bulletins, and edited for a corporate continuity. They lay
beyond me, now locked down, their existence and my own
access to them agreed upon by no one. The sense
of unfinished business gnawed at me in my dreams. The
night trains rhythm caught and held me at the threshold
of their corridor compartment doors, swinging wide to the sigh
of distant brakes. Leena and all all the others lined
by the tracks, their faces crafted from memory and blanks
between the frames, their eyes locked on mine, and behind them,
the spectrul echo of my own figure translucent waiting, hand
raised and silent beckoning. I fought to keep the investigation alive.
I sent one more encrypted bundle to a former colleague
in broadcast, hoping digital redundancy and legal distance might preserve
what I could not publish myself. I was careful, even paranoid,
to making off site backs, but I knew that whatever
force was at work Ala the Laddice cared nothing for
digital insurance. The real danger seemed to reside in silent
dead spaces, where data failed and people simply blink out,
replaced by shiver inducing absences. My apartment, once a refuge,
became something like a waiting room. Doors clicked after midnight,
the elevator stalled between fours, and the shadow under my
entry rocks seemed to extend a few inches further each evening.
If I caught myself in the mirror. On those nights,
the shapes standing behind my own flick had just long
enough to remind me that while everything normal unexplainable had returned,
something else had come through with me or had followed.
It was in those increasingly strange nights that the atmosphere
turned from one of exposure to a right dread sleep eroded,
the phone calls stopped, replaced by nondescript packages left in
the mail room, reports from civic archives, and antiqui without note.
Once a batted notebook with no visible writing. I contacted
the original passengers from the journey. Most never answered, some denied, ever,
writing lattice. A couple seemed frightened to be reminded at all.
A month later, late spring, fog rolling low along the city,
the envelope arrived. It was nearly witless, the paper damp
with the suggestion of old smoke and train oil. There
was no sender, only a roural postmark. The snapshot fell
into my palm me at some crumbling platform, deserted, washed
in gray nite. My posture was neither familiar nor foreign,
somewhere in between, held intention by the cameras in different gays.
The details felt wrong, my heird just to shade two light.
I caught two seasons out of date, and I was alone,
apparently waiting for a train that, as best I recalled,
I had never tried to catch. Also inside a propaed
burner phone already powered on the screen, struggled through its
bute cycle, then began to play, recording a loop stitch
to erratic increments, a clotted hush, followed by up word arrival, arrival, arrivals,
sometimes laid with static, sometimes clear, as if whispered just overhead,
always seeming to fracture the boundary between playback and presence.
I turned the device over in my hand, half expecting
to find some clear sticker or serial number and mark
of the sender. There was only a tiny housemark in
the case, the same as Lena had used to map
her in Betweens. This fish crept up my arms. The
recording played on, growing louder as the phone heated in
my palm, the word distorting, stretching apart, so that even
the silence hummed our arrival and willing unready, I placed
it face down, letting the audio feede. As the battery
reached its end, the screen dimmed to gray, then black,
and for a moment, as the final whisper trailed away,
the reflection was not mine but pale, hollow I double,
one whose shoulders hunched and waited on the other side
of whatever glass now separated me from the world. The
lattice ran through the apartment, shadows deeper, pressed in with
the waiting patience the night outside was full of passing trains,
each one bearing something unacknowledged, something not listed on any
manifest I kept watch at my window, refusing to blink
when the reels called out. Long after, I found the
phone lifeless, and I never powered it on again, not
out of fear, but a weary, superstitious caution, as if
any further listening might pull me across the threshold I
had so narrowly survived. And in that hush listening to
the world's been on its night time grid, I waited
shadows crossing behind me in the glass, breath stopping and starting,
always straining for the one word that still has not
let me go. And that is the end. Thank you
for listening, and I will see you in the next one.