Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. The one thing you notice sitting
up for another midnight crossing is that night on the
train is in true darkness, but something more granular. It
hums in the space between the reading lights, seeps through
the seams in the floor, glints just out of reach
on the edges of your vision. And then there are others,
moments so rare and so brutal, when the tranger stops,
not at a station, just stopped, as if someone higher
a press pause. That's how it happened the first time.
We'd only just pulled clear of the lost straight town
sodium vapor lump trail in often the miss behind us.
I'd been fighting sleep as usual, staring out through the
greasy window, for it pressed so hard against the cold
that my skull hurt, as if searching for some pattern
out in the endless farm fields. My seat rattled with
every rail, joint, arms proocking against the wall, rough fabric,
always a little too cold or too hot, always wishing
for something other than what I had. I remember my
a drifting shut just for half a minute when the
brake's hit It drored all the way through my boat
ones a lurch and almost animal wine. Then everything slackened
and the silence blanketed us. I opened my eyes, none
of the usual four orescent buzz, no voice on the intercom.
I had that strange, half waking sense he get between towns,
the knowledge that whatever stopped us, it wasn't on any timetable.
Somewhere ahead, an elderly woman's knitting needles clattered to the floor.
There was a shuffling in the aisle. I shifted stiffly,
hot thumping, glancing towards whether the door was lined up
across from my seat. That's when I saw him, a
middle aged man, graying his raincoat wrinkled by travel suit trouser.
I pressed need enough to belong to a manager or
civil servant. But his eyes, those wide, animal round eyes,
darted over each of us in turn, as if counting,
then counting again, sure he'd missed some one. He had
a battered suitkis clutch to his chest like a flotation device,
knuckles white. He muttered something too low for me to catch,
and then abruptly rose, almost trippy over his own feet.
The rest of us just watched in a daze like
a theater audience, not sure if the show had begun.
Nobody moved to help or question him. Not immediately. My
dawn stuck as he sidled toward the door towards nothing.
I could see through the wide windows, nothing but tangled
weeds and formless dark. No platform, no lamp light, no signs,
just the dead wires of an ancient track crossing, and
a pale geometry of snow lying hard beside the sleepers.
Only when he reached for the emergency lever did action
ripple outward. A young conductor not much older than I am, fresh, pink,
face caps lightly askew, eyebers raised as if he expected
a prank, fast up beside him. Sir, you can't open
that here, the conductor said, not quite stern, not quite concerned,
as though rehearsing for what trouble might come. The man
ignored him. He woke the latch in fits and starts,
fumbling with hands that must have been frozen. I have to,
he whispered, voice trembling. It'll be too late if I wait.
The conductor's confusion blossomed into a wary resignation. He freeze
at there, he said, lore now, as if hoping not
to disturb the other passengers. Where do you think you're going?
The rest of us were silent. I felt a surge
of something, sympathy maybe, or a prickly alarm that ran
all the way up my shoulders. I craned forward in
my seat. Let him be, someone muttered to maybe the
old woman, Maybe just the wind. The conductor hovered, but
the man's assistance was final. With a clank, the door
cracked an inch, air rushed in chop as needles. His
suit case hit the step with a six lap. Then
too quickly he was gone out into nothing. I called
after him, reflexively, wait, at least bring your coat. My
voice sounded shrill to my own ears. He only turned
his head for a moment, not meeting my eyes, almost
as though listening for something else entirely. Then the darkness
closed around him, swallowing the line of his back in
the bunch black. The conductor looked at me, then out
into the void, then shrugged. There was something performative about
his nonchalance, like he was pretending this was a common occurrence.
Nothing to see here, folks, move alarm. He keyed something
into a hand held termoal and closed the door. The
silence that followed was hollow, metallic. The old woman stooped
for her knitting. A few seats ahead, a businessman adjusted
his tie and looked away with a hydraulic side. The
train rumbled back into motion. I realized then that I
was clutching my knees tight, as though bracing for another
lurch that didn't come. Only when the rattling steaded did
I notice the notebook. It was bristling with sodden Then
pages jammed up beneath the edge of my own seat,
just out of sight. Maybe it had been near the
whole time, or maybe well, the question didn't quite let go.
I hesitated, then drew it out. The cover was fake leather,
water stained and gum Yet the corners it pealed open
with a faint, musty stickiness, revealing cramp lines of writing
in several hands, some clear, mouse frenzed scrolls and sketches crowned.
Every page stands in shadows, mark the margins. Flicking through
half by instinct, I picked up phrases that leaped out
at me. Myle mark a one hundred twelve, stay awake
past the bells. The eggsit row did not accept the
conductor's offer whole sentences, trailed off in panic, as though
the author had meant to return but never did. I
closed the notebook, heartscraping up into my throat, my own reflection.
Tim in the window met my gaze with a stranger's resignation.
The fields said by once more empty, and somewhere behind us,
the lost man and his suit case vanished into the
night for good. I have always been a par sleeper,
something Jenne, my mother likes to say. As a child,
I'd lie awake on summer nights and canted headlights as
they flickered over our silling eyes, passing between each one,
the house ticking and settling itself around me. In adulthood,
insomnia settled deeper, anchoring under my rips. My life, if
I am omnist, is marked out in shunted increments, commute, shift,
commute again, Restless days with pencil pushing tasks, bruce mornings
in some one else's city, nights collapsed in boored sheets
beside my eling mother. The train for me is a
floating pregatory. At first, I thought of it as a compromise,
a way to maintain my job in the city and
answer my mother's horse late night calls from the town
where we both grew up years ago. My father would
have handled those, but since he'd faded out of our lives,
most of the obligations drifted to me. The overnight service
became my routine, my strange safety. Two or three nights
a week. I bored at the city's edge, settle among
the faceless crowd, and let the ordinary discomfort loll me
somewhere between sleep and focus. Familiar faces would drift in
and out habit days of the half lit, dbre world.
The train made the old woman with her endless netting
clicking mile after mile, the highes, strong young executive with
a severe ball always immersed in her glowing tablet. A
pair of teens, all eyeliner and spits, slutched in the gloom,
daring one another to slip beer from battered cans. Life
on the train was all deflection and inertia. People kept
their heads down, built in visible boundaries of silence. I
mostly kept to myself. The hood up had funds in
window see whenever I could claim it. Each station offered
a new crop of strangers, but the pattern never changed.
Steps up, plastic bags down, a rush of coal, then
resignation as the doors closed and we slipped into motion again,
city blowing away behind the next city, crawling up from
the horizon, a little too late to do me any good.
The conductors, most of them, were polite, but remote. They
changed shifts at the midprint, usually at the last real
town to before the night became just filled after field,
track after track. Their voices blurred in my ears, always
reciting the same platitudes, always a shade tu brisk or
two tired tickets, Please watch your bags, thank you. I
learned to tune out the crying of couplings. The temperature swings.
On bad nights, frost climbed the windows in frout a
lace made you doubt you were moving up. Sometimes over aired,
an announcement would garble through the speakers, snatches of garble
French or German, as though the lines crossed with somewhere
else's business. Once the train stopped for so long before
dawn that I thought I had missed work entirely, only
to find out we'd never left the siding outside town.
Once a drunk man picked to fight with his own
shadow until security peeled him away. Once I found a
pair of infant shoes under my seat, pink and tied
impossibly small. It was in this monotony that my sleet
starved mind found a kind of ease. The movement didn't matter,
My obligations feeded in the silence of the rails. You
could almost believe the rest of the world was gone.
Nothing to do but roll forward. All was shining, never arriving.
I tried forgetting about the man with the suitcase, the
lurch of the brakes, and the notebook I had stashed in
my back back. The next day, I finished a shift
in the City Windows office, flickering panels, endless forms, to
process dozens of signatures on things that would never matter.
My phone clock ticked wrong, always slipping, as if the
night before had said something subtle in me. Back on
the train that same night, I resolved not to dwell.
The compartment was half empty, The regulars were hunched in
their usual places, and the rest of the passenger, strangers
made stranger by the harsh light, did their best to disappear.
The world outside was a charcoal smear of rain, this
time not snow, slicing diagonally against the glass. I tried
to read, tried to sleep, but the Nober kept prickling
in my thoughts. Every time the wheels hit a rhythm.
My mouth already I caped as of being my pack
and prying open the warp cover. Inside. The skirt verged,
some blocky, some looping, some nearly illegible joodles in the margins,
rough trained diagrams, seed numbers, arrows pointing to mysterious symbols.
The time line was fractured. Some entrans were tersely clinical,
Day six woken by bells, Car three, Seat nineteen again.
Others were desperate. Don't trust the new conductor, silver whistle,
too bright smile. One page had nothing but the phrased
stay awake, stay awake, stay awake, scrolled so hard to
toe the paper in one set of frantic notes, so
near diagrams, someone had circled to seat nineteen in different cause,
connecting them with jagged lines. The page's snapped med thought, jittering,
drifting into half finished shapes that looked for almost like
mild makers. Here and there phrases stood out. Gustop two
thirty eight a m only after the double belt and
beneath it. Don't accept the conductor's offer, No matter what
I glanced at my phone, but we were already out
of range of dead zone, so thick every network bar vanished.
Before we left the last precinct light. The feeling of
being observed crept in, clear as coal mice. He felt tighter,
the lights overhead flickering in on familiar patterns. I closed
the notebook, exhaled, and tried to loose myself in the
sound of rain. Near the halfway point, the train slowed again,
a gentle hesitation, this time, not the panic of the
night before. I leaned forward, searching the ale. That's when
I noticed a young woman near the doors of the
third car. Shoe small, all sharp elbows, intense posture, her
duffel bag wedged between her knees, a worn baseball cap
pulled low, hair tucked under. At first, nothing seemed odd,
Then as the wheels clicked to a halt, just ran
to her feet, quick, furd of us, all the knuckles
whitening on her back, the dot of her glance toward
the windows, nothing but a blood fence and darkness, no
stop at all. She slipped to the doors, fumbling with
the released, tense purposeful, barely concealing her fear. I half
rose intervened, but a sudden weight of indecision pinned me.
The conductor for this, like an unfamiliar woman with severe
glasses and tired eyes, glanced up from her end of
the cabin, but merely observed silent. The young woman hesitated
just for a second, looked over her shoulder, lips moving
in a nervous littany, then forced the door with abrupt
precision and vanished into the wet dark. The conductor wrote
something on her clipboard, but neither stopped her nor followed.
All around the handful of overnight passengers looked away, burying
themselves in their little kins tablet's paperback novels, the sort
of crossword puzzles old enough to yellow at the edges.
My heart hammered. I scrolled rapidly through my phone's reil lap,
hunting for any sign of an scheduled halt. Nothing, not
even a pink from GBS. It was as if both
the stop and the passenger had passed through without a mark.
A cold thread of dread wound through me. Twice now,
in two consecutive nights. Someone had left the train where
no one was meant to, and the crew had done nothing.
The note exurgency gnawed at me, each line growing clearer
by the ire. Pay attention to the bells. Caught three
every time, seat nineteen, saymer. I redoubled my efforts, making
a mental note of the time two forty three am,
the car ahead of mine by one in the seat nineteen,
exactly as written. The reality pressed down. This was a coincidence.
There was a pattern buried in the sleepless iires, and
for the first time, I want it, truly wanted to understand.
The ire was on board fracture into smaller slices of paranoia.
I started keeping my own log in the margins of
the notebook, scribbling columns, car number, daytime, weather, sea changes.
No detail felt too small. Passengers, faces, ticks and habits,
moments of departure. I tracked them all as if the
act could pin reality into place. But it was hard
to share my unease. The next night, on that same line,
I drifted through the rouse catch in the eye of
familiar faces. Did you see anyone leave last time? I asked,
careful to send casual friendly. Most stayd blankly, blinking in
sleep to pervision or in Egypt defensiveness. One shrugged, I
was out cold, mate, Sorry. Another laughed nervously unplugged her
Herbert's deeper. The regular is the knitting women. The businesswomen
simply ignored me. They wore sleep on their faces like
a second skin, and interested in any interruption to their
private rituals. It frustrated me. I tried again, Higher up.
I flagged down the conductor during a lull. This one
was tall, sallow, with a thinning patch of hair and
a badge reading as Ladoc. When I asked about the
odd of a knight, stopped couching it as a time
tabling question. He offered only a practiced drug old rails.
Sometimes we stopped from maintenance signals, a crew swap out.
Here can be anything. But there was a flicker behind
his eyes, something that darted across his face. As soon
as oppressed the way his answer overlapped too quickly with
an apology the way his hand tightened on the next
passengers ticket. After in the lunge car, I rummaged for
a stack of printed manifest some one had left behind.
I matched see numbers against the moments I dracked. None
of the names were Seat nineteen Car three. First the man,
then the young woman were on the list at all.
No Jane Newton, no polar nothing similar. It was as
if the seats had been unassigned. I checked my phone,
but heated a connection was worse than ever. Even the
built and recording apps stuttered and cut out. Out of frustration,
I set it running on voice memo and let it
capture the ambient mammour as we rolled past another empty expanse.
Much later, when I played the audio back, it was
almost all static, until in a brief lowl a phrase
history tense and unmistakable, not your stop, not your name.
It settled like static in my ears, impossible to explain away.
One evening, by the vending machines, I overheard two men,
maybe mid fifties, construction boots, muddy with old work, cargoing
in hushed tones. I heard she asked for it, the
girl last week. This aided she made a request. The
other replied, barely audible. It's always the same. The ones
who go, they don't come back, nothing left, nothing to
go home to. Their conversation trailed off as I stepped closer,
swallowed by the rumble of the rails. That night, in
my hotel room, I used the flickering Wi Fi to
search for missing persons from the rail line. I found
fred some a few weeks old, some dated years back,
about people known to travel over night, a pattern of
walk aways and lost signals. Oddest of all were the erasures,
profiles deleted, mid comment, obituary pages, young golf line, entire apartment,
lisas passed on but no forwarding contact, nothing left behind
but brenda rears. The city was full of ghosts, only
now on the rails. Some vanished without any trace at all.
I considered giving up, just letting a note but be
But the rhythm of the train and the silence of
my Forehne kept pulling me back. Night after night, the
sensation deepened. Something or someone was helping people vanish, and
the train was complicit. Several rides later, the air had
shifted even before I board it. I was aware of
a pressure, like the difference in the atmosphere before a
storm breaks. The staff seemed grimmer, passengers few are more guarded,
and I was more tired than I'd ever been. Jaw
bruised by and saw me a Han's eyesy, every interaction
taking more thought than it should. My questions only earned
froster glances. But there was one new face, someone younger
than I had seen in months, A woman with row
skin under her eyes, hair shone and even at the temples.
She fidgeted, tracing the same circle over her knees, wrists
scattered with faint scars, A hospital bracelet poking from beneath
the sleeve of her hoodie. She pushed on the edge
of her seat like a trapped bird, lips pressed, thin
eyes darting. I sat nearer, trying to look an obtrusive
The note becopen in my lap like an idle je
At first she wouldn't look at me. I'd tried to smile,
conjured some harmless observation about the temperature. She barely twitched Bernie.
When the train lurched unexpectedly in the conductor's shadow, flickered
past a tall blockie with a two careful smile. Did
she seem to decide? Her whisper was quick forced. He's
helping me, He helps all of us. You have to
pretend or they'll know. I blinked, feigning ignorance, but her
hand shook. Who helps, I asked, foislow the conductor, one
of them. You make a request, you don't get a
second chance. Her glance slid away, my friend rode this
route last month. She left at one of the the
places with no names. After it was like she'd never existed.
No or, no posts, no birth date, nothing. My family
barely remembered her. No one did. She swallowed so hard
I could see the flutter under her jaw. If you
see me, go, please just forget me. Don't try to remember.
It's better. I was about to ask more when a
shadow blocked her row. The conductor, this time an older man,
face pinched and eyes so dark they scene painted on,
paused and forced a smile every warm enough back, he asked,
but the question had no substance. The woman stiffened. Yes,
thank here, she eeked out, voice flat. He moved on,
scanning tickets with exaggerated patience. Later, somewhere deep between stops,
the signal bells chimed twice in rapid succession, the pattern
I loved so many times. I took up the note
because thisly praading muscles trained to hide my interest. The
car round me, thin people shifting, an eternal silence settling.
This time, I resolved not to miss the moment when
the train slowed so imperceptibly, you'd only notice if you'd
watched for it. I saw the young woman step toward
the door, her movements almost mechanical. I rose, following for
a slow then picking up hisces. Panic pounded in my chest.
The doors hissed. I glimpsed, reflected in the black glass,
not just my own face, but a jostle shadows behind it.
Out in the pearly snow, three tall figures waited to
neither passengers nor crew, yet undeniably present. They hovered at
the embankment's edge, blowed in the shallow night, as if vibrating,
just out of phase with the world. The woman hesitated,
looking back, eyes so wide I could see nothing but why.
Then she stepped forward, and in that moment her form twisted,
light bending away, and she disappeared into the dark. I
faltered at the door, heart racing, unable to force myself
out or to call for help. The conductor's voice was
a distant muffl drum. I returned to my seat, hand shaking,
mind throwing, with a single conviction the game was real,
and I just stepped on to the boer. By the
time dawn broke, casting harsh angles over the threadbast seats
and welted passengers. I knew my place in the pattern.
The others kept their faces turned away. The notebook felt
heavier in my pack. In my bones, I understood some
doors open only in the dead stars, and not every
crossing lets you back in. The rest of the day
moved around me as a somebody else was wearing my skin,
shuttling through the rehearse steps of city life, scanning out
at my job's tent style, shuffling from coffee line to
work station, phone silent in my pocket. It was as
though I hadn't just watched someone out for oblivion. The
echo of those three waiting figures followed me through every corridor,
every break room, their silhouettes hovering like an after image.
Paper were covered in front of me, unsigned, unread. Even
the simplest forms are nerved means names and numbers blurring,
as if daring me to spot which of them might
be on the cuspo venching. I capt seeing seat numbers
flash in my head at odd moments nineteen nineteen nineteen,
always in that third car, people's faces in the hallways
would seem half a race, as if I'd only just
missed someone I was meant to remember. Ack at my desk.
I wrapped my hands round the lequarpmugged on impulse, tapped
the notebook partway from my back. Again. I studied the cover,
creased and sagging, the binding warp by water, as if
it had passed or a dozen hands before mine. I
tried to convince myself it was just a run of coincidences,
travelers with nowhere to go, old folk, all clinging to
the night. Yet I knew that was right. There were
too many consistent patterns, too many warnings gold across the margins.
My shift ended flat and gray, and outside fog pressed
against the city's edges, the street lights diffusing into blow
orbs of yellow. My mother called while I passed the
pharmacy window, her voice tremulous, as always, demanding at viz on, groceries, appointments,
the prevalence of fire or threats that shifted daily in
her mind. I suit her, promised i'd be back the
next night, and got off the coal already half in
another world. I stood at the platform edge that evening,
rolling over my own choices. There was no sense in
skipping my journey. I still had to get home, and
that meant the train plot from thirteen the eleven fifty
two departure, a procession of shadows blinking in and out
of the station lights. I spotted a few regulars and
nodded nearly imperceptibly, receiving their practiced half smiles in return.
The train was running late, just by six minutes, but
that slippage set my nose on edge. I'd become expert
at reading time on this rut. How even delays felt
built in, as if the machine running the schedule used
failure as a form of camouflage. The conductor swapped out
again to nights was a young woman with streaks of
red d eye in her close cropped hair, her expression
grave and and smiling. She checked tickets in new silence,
her focus almost theatrical in its intensity. When our eyes met,
it was as if she saw the notebook through my back.
The engines were the poles through the floor, and I
found myself holding my phone thumb, hovering over the recording up,
even while knowing it might not do any good. The
train passed in and out of reception, my screen flicking
between a no service and a few hopeful bars. Somewhere
anew the rear of the car, one of the teens
from my memory, flip bottle caps, seat back, drawing half
hard at shushing from an older woman. I paid careful
attention to the double bell to night. I was hyper
aware of every time, every sigh in the vents, every
flicker of the gangway lights. When the signal bell sounded,
stuttering in not quite their usual pattern, I tensed the
map on our phone app insisted we were still well
away from the next scheduled stop, and yet the brakes
whispered slow and certain. I glanced at the seat huts
i'd scrolled on a napkin to night. Seat nineteen was
occupied by a heavy set man in a thread by
bomber jacket, posture slump with exhaustion, a shoving bag between
his feet. He looked for all the world like someone
without any were better to be. But I watched him,
hands strumbling, slightly, lips moving, praying maybe or counting. The
train slowed all the same in that stretch I'd come
to dread. Flanked on one side by black fields and
the other by a stone retaining wall shrouded in fog.
The passengers held the breath as though they all understood
somehow that notice must not be drawn in these moments,
and then it happened. The man stood up, slowly, methodically.
He didn't speak as he collected his bag, as simply
moved to the door, with none of the urgency or
panic of the woman last night. The conductor watched him go,
hands clasped neutraally at her waist, her lips pinched into
a near frown. There was a moment where her eyes
tracked me, almost a challenge, almost a plea for silence.
And then the exit lever clicked and the man with
the bomber jacket vanished into the night. My heart hammered.
I fought the impulse to follow, forcing myself to take
note of every detail, the car number, the time, even
the sequence in which he zipped his back. The conductor
keyed something into her hand terminal again, a new pass
codes or simply a note for the records. It was
impossible to say. Once the doors closed and the train resumed,
it crawled toward the next real stop. I opened the
notebook and wrote, furiously, my pen, blushing across the ragged
edge of a full page, astorusk, Who keeps the records?
What do the conductors know? Why isn't any one stopping them? Asteris.
The notebook's earlier instructions echoed in my mind. Astus, do
not accept the conductor's offer asterisk. It occurred to me
suddenly that I could be missing something simple. Maybe the
passengers who left simply staged there a secret society banned
by ritual encode, but beneath that progmatic culper and a chill.
If their goal was only disappearance, Why the secrecy of
the notebook, Why the erasure of digital traces, the deliberate
and naming of the vanishing seats. After this third goes stop,
the air grew heavier, and noticed other passengers sidling further
from me in the corridor, perhaps suspicious now of my
extended interest. During a lull, I tried a new tactic.
Standing in the vestibule mid car, I engaged in what
should have been an innocent chat with a gangly man
in a post soul uniform. You ride often, I ask,
keeping the tone light. He eyed me, shrugged. Plenty of
foot gone, sure, but most people just step off at
the wrong station after too many drinks. His BRA's knit
for a moment. But sometimes, yes, something's odd about the
new reps. My cousin used to ride. She's well, not
a round march these days, he trailed off, turning his
attention back to a blank crossword. Late that night, unable
to sleep, his gold online forums, searching for mentions of
lost train travelers. Deep in a thread about railway curiosities,
a common caught my attention. The any one else noticed
tickets vunds from the system for overnight lines, all at
the same seat numbers. The moderator had flagged the common
conspiracy nonsense threads locked, but I followed the bread crumbs
through our cap pages and stray links, stitching together a
patchwork of vanished names and blurred digital footprints. A few
days later, what bled together with my session sleep slip
further from my grasp. Exhausted, I half dreamed as I
wore the morning shift, replaying the girl's warning forget my face.
With mounting unease, I checked the notebook, compulsively, running my
thumb over the warped corners, searching for new meanings in
the margins, as if expecting it to update itself to
war me and you. My mother's room was crowded the
next night, herketticat tidying, her neighbors, gossiping in the hallway,
the TV muttering out a leaping oud for sleep aids.
I said little, just said that her bedside while she dozed,
the hospital lightning flickering its pale signature across her cheek bones.
She talked in circles, sometimes calling me by my father's name,
sometimes confusing my job for the train schedules she once
memorized in her youth. I watched her breathe, listening to
the slow hiss of her oxygen, and wondered if one
day I might vanish from her world as neatly as
those girl passengers from the train, if the erasure would
ripple backward and due my presence in her mind before
anything physical left the world. When my phone buzzed with
the trains impending schedule, I excused myself and slipped out,
pausing long enough to fold her shawl and tucket against
her arm. The walk back to the station was windless
and strange, the city dream like, as though it had
been emptied for a dress rehearsal I hadn't been invited to.
At the platform, a police car idled its lights off,
a single officer inside staring out blankly across the rails.
I nodded, received a distracted look, and pressed on into
the warmth of a waiting lounge. The train was on
time to night. As I boarded, breathing in familiar blend
of engine oil, metal and stale air, I counted heads
and scannedful regulars. The conductor this evening, a middle aged
maam at the Clipromos session. The creased Navy uniform greeted
each of us by wrote his face in pervister, any
hint of the extraordinary. I settled into a window seat
one row back from the infamous seat nineteen. This time
it was empty. I couldn't help feeling a wriggling sense
of expectation and knowledge that something must happen to fill
the pattern, even when no target was present. My reflection
on the window floated above blackened fields, the glass vibrating
as we bill speed. The woman across from me had
her tablet out, scrolling furiously through spread. She saw reports,
lips moving as she read movement in the isle of conductor,
pausing suddenly glancing at the ramakers. It was subtle, but
I saw an almost unconscious hitch in his step as
he passed Seat nineteen, eyes flicking there in a way again,
as though unwilling to risk registration. The teens, two of
them to night and more subdued than usual, watched this
with the kind of animal weariness. The minutes slumped by,
the train slicing through persistent drizzle, the lights inside buzzing
with fatigue. I tried again to quiz my neighbors, asking
my questions under the pretexts of boredom, long night, I
said to the woman with the tablet. She didn't look up,
but she nodded. Been rough lately, she answered, sleeps off.
You notice weird things at this hour. My pulse jumped,
like what. There was a pause, then she shrugged, little stuff,
people moving seats. Sometimes, ye get a stop in the
middle of nowhere, maintenance whatever. But I just keep my
head down, she smiled, lips thin. You don't want to
get too interuristive. Folks get nervous if you do. The
statement so casual sounded like advice and warning all at once.
I caught her gaze, just for a flicker of a moment,
and saw fatigue there, but also wariness. Perhaps a shared
secret was simply the resignation of someone who lived the
monotony too lawn and had learned to fear its cracks.
The train pressed on, cutting across a bridge with shallow
water glinting below. I stared out, watching the reflections warp
as we pass. My own face is storted by the
imperfections in the glass. I listened carefully for bells the
passing I now recognized intuitively none sounded. In not to
Night still, I traced the path of my own obsession
in the notebook. Under to Night's log I scrawled empty seat,
no departure to the rules, bent for absence or wait
for the next soul. I scribbled arrows, connecting names and numbers.
They weing in a kind of logic that barely held together.
Sleep came in brief flashes, feverish and thin. In a dream,
I imagined myself walking the length of the train, as
each car emptied and darkened, each door opening on a
field of snow, flanked by those faces watchmen. No matter
how I ran, the NeXT's car was always empty, the
lights always worked, and Seat nineteen forever waited for me.
At the end, I jawed awake, mouth dry, as the
final city platform slid into view on a smear of
sodium lit fog. I gathered my things with numb fingers.
The note still tucked under my arm and filed out
with the rest, each of a shuffling off stedge, moved
by scripts we hadn't written. The next several days date
to by with little change, but I watched the train
and everyone on it with a predator's focus. Each regular
became a suspect, not in any criminal sense, but as
a potential participant or keeper of secrets. I noticed subtlets
in their mannerisms, the way some avoided the conductors, others
stuck religiously to their chosen seats, and still others were
turned pale when the bells sounded. Soon I began to
recognize the kind of code among the conductors themselves. Flight, yes,
occasionally even warm, but only within strictly observed boundaries. At
every shift change, a low voiced exchange would occur between
the departing conductor and the fresh arrival, some talling of passengers, perhaps,
but always with a glance down the car. At the rouse,
I had learned to count the same seats each time
seemed to receive more than a passing look. On another night,
as the rain and moved in wild gusts against the glass,
the pattern broke once again. The third cost seat nineteen
was occupied by a small woman, a stranger to me
herein on the script, hands folded in her lap so
tightly the skin blanche. She wore a faded greenscarth and
a raincoat too large for her frame. She attracted no attention.
Her stillness made her invisible. But as soon as the
bells peeled two shop rings, almost like a signal, I
watched her tents. The conductor to night, a dire or
a man with thick jowls and a weary expression, watched
as well, his nose almost brushing his screen as he
checked his lock. The train sloved, not with the jolt,
but with a slow, theatrical desceilation. The woman looked over
her shoulder, caught the conductor's eye, and in that instant
something passed between them. Permission, perhaps were confirmation. She rose,
gathered her satchel, and stepped into the vestibule. The doors opened,
as if in response to a silent command. She hesitated,
looked right at me, her eyes pleading or warning, I
couldn't tell, which, then vanished into the rushing dark, swallowed
by the night breath. Beyond the rails, I sat frozen on.
After the train pulled away, the eggsit lights still casting
its puddle of dulgold over her now empty seat. The
conduct made a show of checking paperwork, then resumed making
rounds as though nothing unusual had happened. The tension in
my chest had nowhere to go, so I scribbled another
page of frantic notes, desperate to make sense of repetitions
that seemed to defy all logic. And so it continued
a rhythm of disappearances and denials, warnings passed and furtive glances,
the constant pressure of knowing, of being known to no
clinging to me like sweat under my shirt. I found
myself doubting, not just the reality of the events, but
my own memories. Had there been a notebook at all,
had to faces that seen ever belonged to real passengers
or only to the fever of a chronic insomniac. It
was in this liminal state of battle with the boundaries
of reality that I promised myself next time, when the
moment came, I would not just watch. I would intervene,
or at the very least follow the mystery one step
further past hesitation, pass the rules of polite silence toward
whatever true border lay beyond the exit row. The notebook,
now bristling with my own frantic observations, and the anonymous
frants of lost travelers before me, felt waiter. Every time
I handled it. I was no closer to understanding the truth.
But the cruel certainty of the pattern, and the growing
sense that someone or something was watching what I chose
to do, made indifference impossible. Whatever lay at mile marker
one hundred twelve, whatever bargains the conductors made for the vanish,
I was already entangled. All I had left was to
pot deeper and see if the darkness would blink first. Sleep,
if it came at all, after that night, was little
more than a stutter between memories than waking in the
hours after watching the woman Faye from the threshold of
the train, her figure dissolving into the snowy dark three
figure stations just beyond the margin of the floodlight. Everything
I'd thought stable in my routine came apart, even sounds
that should have been familiar, the dry rattle of heating coils,
the far off wine of metal, the low calls of
the conductors, now seen and coded loaded with fret O'
warning The first thing I noticed was the way people
started looking at me. Not openly, never directly, but enough
that now and again half a face would tilt my
way as I walked the cars, and then immediately look away.
Familiar passengers changed their habits the business. When I moved
two rows down, turned her back to the window. The
knitting woman backed up ties as quickly knew my journey,
and one morning stepped off before her usual station, casting
me a glance so sharp it felt like accusation. Conductors too,
altered their pattern. Where before tickets were checked with blundfficiency
and appraising rossau, now a stilted politeness had crept in
fresher loos and strained pleasantries, faces fixed in static smiles
that never quite reached their eyes. One night, as I
stood outside the bathroom waiting for the stoll to free up,
the older conductor with the clip must have passed me
early for you, isn't it, he said? But the way
his handhovered just over my jacket pocket made a clear
this wasn idle talk. That same ride, my ticket was
double checked and I was asked twice where I board,
it as if they expected my story to change. All
the while the notebook weighed heavier in my bag, its
battered cover, picking up new stains, the air just culling,
as if recoiling from my grip. Flicking through the latest
inges became a compulsion of every sketch, Every jagged sentence
seemed to shimmer between sands and warning astorists, don't take
the offer, stay out of sight, not your seat, astro
risked to words repeated until the inside of my skull
f round. I tried to keep my routines as unchanged
as possible, but the effect was cumulative. Phe calls became
strained to my mother now come, pining that I sounded
far away, submerged, not quite recognizable. In the office, I
type mistakes into formed foundates and names, blurring co worker's
casual conversations, fading as if the world at large was
gently professionally pushing me out. At the end of commutes,
I'd sometimes pause on the platform in the dark, just
to look back at the train through the glass, watching
for the flicker of faces that might be watching me.
Sometimes the glare of the lights in the window cast
my shape as little more than a smudge, and other
times they seemed to see shadows moving behind me in
the reflection, never quite aligning with the real world. It
happened again the following week, another night, another cold, another minute.
Riding the knife edge between numbers and panic, I sat
vigil beside the three infamous seats, my journal open, pengrepped
too hard. This time it was a man in a
sharp overcoat, reading glasses perched on his nose, who left
at the unmarked stop. He barely looked up as the
bell signaled. His movements were those of someone who'd accepted
their role and sequence is located from obligation or witness.
The rest of the carriage held its breath while he went.
When the door closed, something in the air felt thinner,
as if the train was now a fraction lighter, riding
higher in the gloom. It was only when I tried
to replay a voice memo of that moment that I
understood what it cost. My phone screen flashed, then died.
When it came back to life, the entire folder was missing,
saved not to any kloud, not to any drive I
could find, but blank, as if overwritten by noise. My
notes too began to slip. Heide, scribble the seat number
in the margin, but crossing it out, left a smudge
that trailed through three different pages, as though the paper
itself was ashamed of the memory. Even waking, I began
to question the boundaries between intent and accident. Forms were
quintnessing or misplaced? My name on one time sheet was
spelled differently, closer to someone else's. A letter to my
mother returned and delivered with a stick of reading. No
such personet address. It was a typo, or perhaps just
a glitch in the system, but it skulched the hollow
spase inside me. All the same, I tried to anchor
myself with facts. Each time I boarded. I loved the
details departure time, car number, who sat where, but the
train seemed to resist. Row numbers changed order, printed guides
were different than before. Late one ride, I watched the
digital map on my phone inch backward, as if in
doing a mile. The only constance with his circle's seat
numbers and the repeated sick certainty that at some hour
of the night, another passenger would rise and vanish the
train with even silence, and reality would press on as
though nothing had changed. It saw me. It became my shield,
sleeping even less in fear that I would lose more
of myself to whatever current ran beneath these rails. Fatigue
turned the city gray in a morphice. I began to
miss call's appointments, emails from my boss. Nothing felt and
could except the sounder tray made at its lowest, that
warping metallic wine before it stopped between markers. I spent
my waking ires, chasing echoes, always just behind, never quite
able to put my hand on what needed proof. The
more I insisted to myself that I could control the outcome,
the more the world resisted. One day, I walked past
a mirror in a corridor it workend for half a second,
didn't recognize the angle of my own mouth. A coworker
passing by nodded to me with a blank, formal politeness
he previously reserved for strangers. But the stakes were turning, tightening,
drawing me in. The evidence wasn't just in the note,
in the faces that disappeared. It was in the way
the train itself seemed to reorient me, reordering the sequence
of things, threatening to strip even the memory of what
I'd seen. The next night's vigilance replaced any hope of escape.
I watched the regular shrink into themselves. The conductor now
rarely looked anyone in the eye, and when he did,
the effect was so coldly neutral that it felt almost
like a warning. The teens anticks faded away, reduced to
silent texting, and the elderly woman's hands trembled whenever the
bell sounded remotely off pattern. I tried to replay my
own recordings after each ride, desperately searching for something I
could use, But more and more often the files corrupted,
scratches of white noise, unplaceable whispers, images shot through with
jaggult lines. Once, in the seconds just before AGO's stop,
the audio picked up a phrase not in my own voice,
you can only go forward, and then static, spoiling until
the ap shut down. Other passengers, the ones I dared
approach her question, gave nothing back. Some outscented themselves entirely
after a single ride. Others offered blank stares, loops, pressed
tight ayes, con glacial. I started to suspect that the
ones he still returned on really returning at all, or
at least not the people I remembered. Attempts to follow
up through the cities, missing persons portals met with brick walls,
faces i'd seen de part sometimes appeared briefly, then blink
from the sight. As I reloaded vital details, addresses, birthdays
flickered out of existence, missing even from archived versions. Whenever
I tried to report the pattern by phone, calls dropped.
When I wrote an email to the transit authority, all
that pinged back was and not a reply, thank you
for your concern. We are unable to discuss matters under investigation.
That phrase stuck in my mind under investigation. But was
anyone investigating besides me or of those in charge merely
learned not to leave files where they might trip up
the machinery of disappearance. Everything kept circling back to the
same points, the seat numbers, their marked stops, the raised recos,
and the insistent mountain read that if I didn't act soon,
I would lose not only my evidence or memories, but
my own self, whatever small part of me was left
and smudge by the shadows of the train. With that
obsession overtook caution, I started planning on the next journey,
backpacked with an array of supplies to phones, extra batteries,
a printed schedule, even an old digital camera. I chose
a seed as close as possible to the exit road,
settling in just behind them, slightly across from Seat nineteen.
The train's rhythm fell into my pulse, ever shugar and
curve through the dark countryside, key to the single fraught purpose.
This time I resolved not to simply watch a record
or take notes. If it happened again, I would act.
Follow the passenger, confront the conductor, test the rules that
everyone else had learned to fearfully observe. The train crawled
out of the city, halting longer at each stop the night,
pressing its cold hands to the glass. The snow out
in the fields was a pale, rotten gray under one
sodium lamps. I ignored the other passengers, scanning instead for
anything odd, changes in staff, new faces, disturbances in the
neutral dance that always proceeded a go stop. Ire after ire,
the pattern bill. The lights flickered as we needed the
midpoint the sea assignment matched that circled in the notebook,
And when the bells came a double chime just before
two forty seven, a in my entire body tenst in anticipation.
This time, a man in a tattered raincoat stood and
gathered his things face averted. I snapped photos, flicked my
phone to record, and stepped out in the corridor moments
after him. The conductor watching didn't stop me. Instead, he
shifted his weight or positioned his cap, and with a
strangle sigh, pulled a small plastic token from his pocket
to rail badge, polished dull by countless word fingers. He
handed it to the departing man, as if his stowing
a final, invisible right. The passenger said nothing. His steps
were uneven but certain. Behind me a shadow with another
regular perhaps, or just a trick of my own anticipation.
The train wheezed, a fitful hall door was hissing open
on dockness, deeper now than ever before. As the man
stepped up, I caught a glimpse of the demarcation line
he on the gravel shoulder. Three blurry figures in the snow,
seemingly and substantial, yet so fixed, they refracted what little
light made it that far. The conductor glanced at me,
then at the departing man. That's moving in the same
rhythm I'd heard once. Ugh, static, You can only go
forward for them, there is no return. Fighting the urge
to step back, I inched close enough to the open
door to let the cold bite my cheek. At the
edge of vision, the three standing shades started forward. The
departing man hesitated, or seemed to hesitate, then crossed the
threshold and impossibly began to fade. It was as to
the air around him thickened, warping light, swallowing color, until
by the time he reached the end of the embankment,
all that was left was the impression of motion, scattered
tracks disappearing into nothing. I raised my phone thumb stab
in the videobuddon, but the image jumped, frame after frame,
snapped into soft, impossible negatives, faces, blurring time, stuttering. Somewhere
in the deep static that replaced the sound, the phrase returned,
not your stop, not your name. Back inside, the conductor
made a quiet show over locking the door, then nodded
to me, a subtle acknowledgment that felt more like a dare.
The spell broke, the train surged forward. I sagged against
the wall and knees buckling. Fumbling with numb hands, I
tried to call up the recording, but more than ever,
the results slipped through my fingers. Six minutes of static,
a few blurred images, a single still frame, where my
own face hovered in double exposure beside the ghostly stain
of a departing passenger, as if on cue. The lights
overhead buzz snapped, dock, then came back, this time colder, brighter,
less forgiving. When I turned, the rest of the passengers
were silent as flicked away, locked in the protective torpor
of those who learned afflection by necessity. What choice was left?
Something or someone controlled the exits here, and whatever rules
governed this exchange. They were far older and stricter than
any written time table. The notebook's warnings looped again in
my mind, redoubling their urgency astro stay awake, don't sit,
don't accept the conductor's offer, asterisk. For the rest of
that rye, I barely breathed. Morning found me back in
the city, jaw aching from clenched teeth, no clearer on
mode of ocillation. I called and sick to work, had
the noteboo under my mattress, and paced friars. But nothing changed,
no call's return, no emails acknowledged. Even my own mother's
voice on the phone now sounded faint, as though the
line was stretched up beneath miles of black water. That
day I made my decision. Obsession had burned away any
hesitation or hope of safety. I would catch a proof,
even if it meant becoming the very thing the notebook
had warn me against. I started watching the old footage,
the corrupted voice notes, anything I could find that hadn't
already wrote it. It was in these physy scraps that
I started to recognize a pattern beyond seat numbers and bells.
Every time ago stop approached, the video picked up fluckers
of motion near those seats before the official key, barely discernible,
but always in the same pattern, as if presences were
rehearsing the moment in advance. Sometimes a token, a key,
a ring, a torn tram ticket was left behind in
a circle seat faintly visible in one frame and absent
the next. The camera, like memory, escaped a glitch in
those moments, erasing only the center of the story. I
cross checked the names from old manifest print ups with
anything I could pull from social networks or public records.
The effect was chilling. The Vanish did simply disappear. They
had lost access weeks before, flagged for suspension or duplicate account.
Passport renewal tonight pacelet's return to sender. Each time I
followed the thread back somewhere near the one hundred and
twelve mile of the line, the digital tale winked out completely.
That number nagged at me one hundred twelve. I scanned
the schedule on the map, My marker one hundred twelve
laid deep in an unmatted stretch described only as a
rural crossing five a no population nearby, nothing built, no sabatellite,
termasory showing more than a pock stretch of field, and
an ancient electrical reele box. I went back to the
note comme it for clues. One frantic, barely legible entry.
Stay awake past one hundred twelve, where it finds you.
If you forget, you end up wherever the last person went.
Tokens left behind Drayne the memory on the facing page,
car three seat nineteen to night, same faces, watch for
the offer. It was as if all the signs had
been there from the beginning, only exhaustion or fear had
kept them muddled. Two nights later, I made myself ready,
fall and freshly charged. Came a hell height notebook, open
to the last full page. I took my seat before midnight,
backradge at breathslow. Every face in a train seemed to
be waiting for something now an audition cast rehearsing their cues.
The conductor to night was the grim man with the
thick glasses. He passed by twice, not checking tickets, but
scanning taking men. One. At one thirty seven a m.
The first bell rang, sharper than usual. I braced the
notebooks wedded under my palm. The train rolled into a
stretch of featureless. It felt dreamt radder than real. My
heart thudded, but my attention sharpened to needle point. Every creak,
every footful sound it amplified. No one moved At the
next official stop. At the next still nothing. But at
two ten the bells sounded their double stroke, clear, insistent,
matching every previous pattern at tense penritty. Two seats ahead,
a young woman in a greecewhet to one I hadn't
seen before, stiffened and began packing her satchel. The trenslow,
lights flickering outside well becoming a shifting haze beyond the glass.
The conductor reappeared, this time holding a thermis and a
paper cup. He stopped by my seat, cold night. He
said a too bright, too rehearsed, would you like some
coffee on the house. My mind snapped to the notebook's
warning astors do not accept the conductor's offer astorrus. I
shook my head, forcing a bland smile. No, thank you,
I'm fine. He watched me a beat too long, then
moved on, setting to coffee on the small ledge beside
the departing woman. She shied away from both the conductor
and the cap gazed, darting to the window. I caught
the age of fear in her expression, something I recognized
from my own reflection. A train lighted to a halt,
slower this time, as if drawing out the moment. The
doors opened, not to any platform, but to that impossible
snowcakes shoulder listed on no schedule. The light beyond the
threshold was oily wavering London in faint glimmers of color
that belonged to no known spectrum. I stood, camera rolling
hard in my mouth. I'd edged close to the door,
determined not to retreat outside. The three figures stood same height,
same posture as before. Between them, the snow was unostobed,
not even footprint from those who had left before. The
conductor cleared his throat and spoke voice a fraction of
a whisper for them, there is no return to You
have to look forward. The young woman ice Hollow stepped hestitated,
then went out. She paused at the margin, turned it
just for harpeat, and looked back over her shoulder, straight
into my face. For a moment, I saw myself reflected
in the window, features doubled and smeared, as if both
of us existed in the same instant, both about to
step summer that had always been waiting for us. I
trusted the camera around, desperate to capture everything, the frozen
tableau of the conductor's helpless face, the shape of the
departing woman. The screen jittered, then froze, then blank to static.
In the gap, a phrase cut through electronic and broken,
not you stop, not your name. I stayed where I was,
RESI sting the urge to chase, after resisting the pull
that seemed to whisper, this is you, reced your return,
your pattern. When the doors hissed closed, the pressure released.
My knees buckled as I slumped against the wall. A
conductor avoided my eyes, pressing onward down the corridor. Other
passengers brewed silent relief. The train lutched back into motion,
leaving the vanish to their shadows behind. My heart hammered
in my chest a metronym of fred. I stumbled to
the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face. When I returned,
the seat the woman had occupied was empty, safe for
a torn ticket and a batted house key, place side
by side. Half hypnotized, I pocketed them. The rest of
the night, the train ran in silence, the wall outside
grew indistinct, the windows painting only uncertain shapes by. During
his end, I was spent. My hands trembled as I
tried to review my footage, broken, corrupted, but for one
sliver of video, the door opening to emptiness, my own
blood reflection ghosting across the field of vision, and a
faintly recorded phrase. The exit rose, always waiting. When dawn came,
I found the city walk slightly out over them. Train
terminated at a platform I had never seen before. Security
stopped me at the door problem last night. The officer asked,
you caused a disturbance, wandering recording The crew was uneasy.
I tried to explain. A passenger vanish, the unmarked stop,
the figures in the snow, my phone with the video,
the notebook with the notes, but everything seemed fractured. A
photo's blank audio phuz corrupted, the notebook's last pages stuck
together ink blood, until all that remained was ghostly script.
If you don't accept you stay, someone always replaces you.
They took my name, questioned me for iars in a
subterranean room lined with mirrored glass, but none of my story.
Fan traction, sleep, deprivation, they said, finally, exhaustion, stress happens.
Maybe take a break from travel to see a doctor.
They handed my phone and notebook back, almost reverently, as
though wary of handling something unclean. In the iris that followed,
I wandered a city, trying to force the world into focus.
I scrolled missing person's sights obsessively. Profiles flickered, then vanished
as I refreshed some of the faces I had seen,
leaving some I'd only seen out of the corner of
my eye. At work, my badge failed to scan, and
I would told I wasn't in the schedule. The notebook's
original text was barely decipherable, now only burning after images
remain if you forget where you sat, you can still
get off. If you take the offerer, you're gone for good.
My own skulls until laced with these legible in places,
as if the act of writing had already begun to
make part of what I was. Riding the train the
next night, I felt invisible. The regulars avoided me, the
conductor saw straight through me. I tried to swap seats,
but each car seemed subtly designed to return me to
my old place. In desperation, I waited for the bells,
but that night no double chime sounded, and the train
ran straight and humorless all the way to the city's edge.
But the rules were shifting. I began to suspect that
staying when your pattern marked you cost as much as leaving.
On my final ride, aboorded late, choosing a seat had
never occupied before, one that had never been circled in
a notek. The car was empty save for a few
solemn faces, the conductor who checked tickets sullenly. It felt
for the first time I could slipped through the cracks.
Halfway between stops, I leaned into the aisle, heart, cycling
between dread and numness under my seat. Something scraped, distallible
above the rattle of the rails. I reached down. There
where only dust and this screw should have settled was
another batter page from the notebook. The handwriting was near,
this time, tight and horrod. If you are reading this,
you can still get off, but only if you forgot
how you got here. I sat motionless, reading the line
over and over. Outside, the fields were indistinct, gray on
white on black, no markers left to guy. For a
long minute, I watched my reflection in the window pane.
The glass vibrated faintly with the movement of the train,
distort in my face until only half of it looked familiar.
And in that warped image I could see the shadow
of another face laid behind, half known, blurred, as if
Ferozier had already started licking at the edges. The page
shook between my fingers. The door was at the end
of the costlid open and closed, tugged by the draft
as if inviting me to move or to stay. I
set the page down, tapped the battered house key beside it,
and pressed my palm to the window, feeling the cold
humming through the glass. The final phrazence spoled in my mind,
quiet and inevitable. The exit row is always waiting. The
final phrazen spulled in my mind, quiet and inevitable. The
exit row was always waiting. I sat a moving the
faded keat and skull page cold against my palm, numbly
aware of this subtle difference in the train's pace, A
slockening that didn't match any stop on the digital map,
A hush falling over the carriage, like the backward rushed
before storm's first cast. The aging light of her head
barely held at the borders of my vision. Shadows seemed
to pull themselves across the seats, thickening nearer the circled numbers,
even though I had purposely avoided them. To night. A
woman passed through the aisle, one of the regulars, but
I struggled to summon her name. Her hair, usually alertly curled,
now hung limp, and she gave me a glance so
vacant it slid away before meaning could form in her gaze.
She adjusted her knitting bag absently, hesitated at the door
to the next car, and then continued each step, faint,
as if she trod somewhere else. Entirely. My hand culd
tightened the notebook slip the groove's nearly cutting skin, as
if that pain might serve as ballast. I looked again
to the window, I seeking some sign that the world
outside still obeyed ordinary geography, but only the endless suggestion
of snow. Fence posts blowed to monochrome, and the trembling
smear of my reflection. More uncertain than ever, I pressed
the heel of my hand into my brow, fighting the
fog that threatened to climb into every empty nick of myself.
The trains pare crackled to life, distorting as if some
old tape was playing. Next stop, end of the line.
Please have your tickets ready, mind the gap. My phone
buzzed with the notification, but the display came up blank,
just a pale glow, with no messages, no miscalls. I
cycled through recordings, nothing. The corrupt video from the night
before now returned the sickly green error, the audio replaced
by a sound like breathing through a rough scarf. The
last cleap image was of my own provole cord in
the glass, the notebook held up between us, the bell
sound of once unlike the quick double chime might come
to fear. I exhaled the sound loud in my ears.
Out of habit, I shifted in my seat, gay scanning
for the conductor. He was at the far end of
the next cut, head bent as if consulting notes. When
our eyes met, his expression was neither challenging nor apologetic,
simply resigned, a flicker of warning lost in miles of
practice neutrality. As the train accilrated into a map nowhere
the world outside the glastick and into swirling edges of snow,
I tried to recall the shape of the crossing at
mile one hundred twelve, struggled towards or the events of
each prior night, but every detail seemed to escape at
the age of focus. The tokens on my tray, table, key,
torn ticket, the single slip from the notebook felt like
anchors to a world I was no longer certain of,
Caught between fear and I need to do something. I
unatched from my seat and crossed the aisle toward the
infamously circled roar. My footsteps did not so much echo
as fade behind me. At seat nineteen, I pause, my
fist tight against my chest, trying to listen for any
sign of movement from the exit doors. The train drew
to a whispering hall. No one else moved. All faces
seen turned away, some buried behind scarbs and upturned collars,
others simply rendered vague by the distance. I could feel
more than see the pressure of watches, perhaps my own anticipation,
perhaps the gaze of those outside waiting. The doors exhaled
with the slow metallox eye, the cold outside bit sharper
than night anticipated. There was a suggestion more than sight,
of tall, arguing forms of the tree line, their postures
half familiar. The conductor, having approached with his hands formally together,
lingered just within the vestibule, attention fixed on the threshold.
He turned to me, the sadness in his eyes abrupt,
an intimate. You shouldn't stand so close, he murmured. He added,
almost inaudibly, Sometimes if you watch too long, you forget
what you're waiting for. I looked down, the notebook page
trembled in my hand. The bottle greenhouse key sparkle, briefly
catching a glint from some source I never located. Some
one moved into the corner of my field of vision.
A man all track seat stubble, catching the leak of light.
He paused, uncertain, braced against the panic that twisted his
weathered features. He watched the figures in the snow, and
for a moment seemed in the verge of stepping out,
but halted, as if a teather snap taught at his ankle.
The conductor gave no instruction, offered nothing. Further silence pressed in,
thick and final. I did nothing. I did not step
into his place, nor utter a warning. I saw him
waver at mouth opening and closing, and certain which direction
he chosen to forget. Finally he retreated, folded into himself,
and slipped back to the foddest seat Eileid's closing, as
though in collapse. The doors closed and the train rolled on.
My heart did not slow. I slipped the note page
into my pocket, unable to trust its presence in plain side.
For the rest of the ride, I sat on, blinking.
This jowned into my knees. At each stop thereafter, I
checked for new faces, new warnings, but the passengers each
side as a waiting out a test. No one else
left it an its scheduled gap. No other conductor offered comfort.
By the time the train reached its scheduled end, the
Dorn bleeding fitfully against the tinted glass. I stood in
the aisle, gripping both key and slaps, scanning the carriage
for any last evidence of rupture, any sign that pattern
had not simply closed a ring around me. Security was
waiting as we disembarked, not ye informed. Their attire was generic,
as if the simple act of anonymity was armor in itself.
One reached for my arm. Sir, y've wandered between curs
after curfew. May we speak with you? Exhaustion made my
tone bland. I'll tell you what I remember. They kept
me in a small windowless office in the bewrels of
the terminal, a space that smelled faintly of meldew, and
we heated coffee. The man who questioned me had kind eyes,
but nothing I said, no phrasing managed to evoke anything
but weary resignation. He checked my bagridage, flipping through the fields.
Each time the digital reader paused, flashed and conclusive were
set and the notebook he prompted, after a polite interval,
nodding toward the battered object on the table, I hesitated,
It doesn't really help anyone does it. It just marks you.
He seemed to understand. We can file it if you like,
or you can keep it a while longer. It won't
change much. Something in his voice made me shiver. Do
you know about the rouse the ones with the circles?
He packed the notebook carefully, then slid it back across
the table. I know that you're a tired and that
tired people see what's in front of them one way
or another. He offered me a cup of tea. I refused,
letting the silence rise. When I left the office, the
concourse seemed less fixed, its signage oddly jumble clock four
minutes out of step with my phone, the voice announcing
trains of beat too slow. I tried that evening to
call my mother to tell her I would be late.
The phone rang without answer, then returned a soft tone.
This number is not connected. My heart thudded. I pressed
readell nothing, only the mechanical buzz of a line redirected
somewhere I couldn't reach. That night, I sat on my bed,
the objects from my pocket arrayed in a single line
on the comforter key, torn ticket, the new page from
the notebook, worce aft of the creases my hands, however,
and certain what to keep. When I finally forced myself
up for water, I returned to find a keygon only
in impression, ghostly in a blanket. I did not know
if I had ever had it at all. For days,
the world wore a new thinness. At work, my badge
sometimes worked, often did not. Colleague's faces blurred together, and
my own supervisors stared through me with vacant politeness, as
if expecting me to explain my presence. At home, I
found I had misplaced croceries, left notes signed on a
spacky hand. I did not recognize. The city blurred at
the edges, store awnings changed color. Music playing an elevator
cycled between songs I never heard, and the crosswalk flickered
a strange intervals. I returned to the train each journey,
I took a different seat, tucked away the slip of notebook,
and yet every mile marker seemed work into a deadline.
I began scripling dates and times on my hand, in
case the notebook itself was intrustworthy. One night, I must
have my fading resolve, and lingered in the vestibule. When
the bell sounded, no one else moved. This time, Seat
nineteen remained empty. The conductor passed, and in his eyes
I saw not malice nor collusion, simply fatigue curdled into necessity.
Will you be traveling all the way through? He asked,
voice muffled as if through glass. I am not sure,
I heard myself reply. He nodded. It doesn't make much difference.
Most of us are only passing through these days. I
let the conversation end. There. My feet hurt, my mind
thromb begins, some pressure. I could no longer a name.
I fled to my seat. I was fixed on the window,
desperate for any landmark. I might recognize a silo, a barn,
all at farmhouse. But the land rolled on, unfamiliar and continuous,
snow rising and vanishing at the horizon, all details just
out of recal. There was no ghost stop, but the
knowledge of its inevitability never lifted. The train became my world, boundary,
shrinking inexorably to the limits of carriage window ritual at
evor take a check, I felt the silent challenge, are
you returning? Or are you next? The day came when
folding through the motions of commute, I found my name
listed nowhere at the station, Chaos on work schedules, even
among old funk contacts. Paper mail arrived without address only
current resident. My mother's room at the care home was empty.
When I checked, Reception claimed they had never heard of her.
My skin crawled and produced, Surely, surely there was an error.
Back at the apartment, all the pages of the notebook
were blank, as if the words had retreated. Only the
last new scraps urvoved. The message pressed deeper from repeated handling.
If you're reading this, you can still get off, but
only if you forgot how you got here. I read
it again, tracing the indentations until my finger tit tingled
with the thin metallic hang of ink. My own handwriting
had begun to mimit the previous hand lipping and stuttering
on the margins of old receipts and letters. The boundary
between entries was praying on what I thought would be
my last commute. I closed my eyes as the train
left the station, determined not to observe, not to mark
down mail, milocar number, to forget the rules for one journey.
I failed, of course, as soon as the bell rang,
A tense bracing for the signal. Was it meant for me?
Should I rise? Should I watch? Was forgetting even possible?
Or just another rich sure, the notebook demanded, but nothing happened.
The ryde continued, one stopped, blurring to the next, the
carriage empty except for myself and the conductor, who never
once met my gaze. Outside, snow fell with that patterned blanketing,
rails that seemed to curve and twist endlessly, with no
sign of arrival. When we finally stopped beside a platform
glazed in pale sodium, I rose, heart thrumming, and ascended
without resistance into the think hold. No one checked my ticket,
No one greeted me. I walked the length of the platform,
unable to recall which end would bring me into the city.
On a whim, was some echo of instruction? I doubled
back to the train, entering by the last car. Almost unconsciously,
I slipped into a seat in that exit row. At
my feet liot under the seat cushion. My hand found
a page from the notebok. I had never seen a
muddied application form, A signature rendered faceless by a single
watery blare, A small ring tied to the binding with
covened thread. I stared at my reflection in the window.
The angle bent my face, pressing other lines and features
into its shape, until half of it belonged to me
and half to a stranger. In that instant, I realized
I could no longer recall the order of events that
had led me to this moment, not the first journey,
not the last disappearance, not the reason I had started
keeping the lock. I did not know if I had
been watcher or watched. As the train idled, the page
in my lap showdered gently under the vibration of the engine.
I waited an tea of expectation. At last, in the glass,
my reflective mouth moved, forming only a single phrase, one
I could not be sure it was mine. The exit
row is always waiting the train in the world, My
own name. Everything else slipped into the indifferent hush of
the rails, and for that instant I was neither here
nor gone, but only another open sea, awaiting the next
hand to turn the page. And that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.