The figure of the ghost train carriage

 The figure of the ghost train carriage VIDEO

I woke with the taste of copper between my teeth and the unmistakable certainty that someone had just exhaled their last breath in the seat across from me. My eyes filled with an amber light that did not come from the sun but from the carriage lamps, a sickly glow that painted the faces of the empty seats jade. There was no one. No luggage in the racks, no forgotten coats, not even the dust of a footprint on the blue carpet. The train sped forward at an impossible velocity, a metallic hum vibrating through my molars, reminding me I was alive—or at least that my nerves were still sending signals to a brain that doubted its own existence. The silence inside the carriage clashed obscenely with the roar outside, a sepulchral stillness broken only by the occasional creak of a structure strained by speeds no human engineer would have dared design. I looked out the window and saw that the landscape was not moving; it was the mountains that fled from us, or perhaps the sky itself sliding past like a heavy, wrinkled curtain.

My left hand trembled. In it I held a ticket folded into a paper scar, its letters impossible to decipher because the language had changed since the last time I blinked. I tried to stand, but my knees gave way with a wet snap, as if my ligaments had been replaced with out-of-tune piano strings. The air smelled of ozone and cheap perfume, a cloying mix that made me instantly nauseous, a sweet fermentation clinging to the walls of my throat like poisoned honey. The emptiness of the carriage seemed to breathe with its own rhythm, as if the metal itself inhaled and exhaled in an ancient ritual that predated humanity. I scanned the central aisle. At the far end, among shadows gathered like obedient animals, I made out a figure. It had its back turned—or so I thought—because when I blinked, the silhouette turned its head at an angle no anatomy allows and smiled at me with teeth too long.

I said nothing. Words had turned to sand in my throat. The wall clock, one of those round artifacts with Roman numerals, read 3:42, but its hands spun backward, devouring time with a voracity that felt obscene. I dragged myself down the aisle, gripping the backs of the seats, each one as cold as the marble of a freshly sealed tomb. The figure did not move, yet every time I looked at it directly, it was closer, as if the seconds I lost blinking were stolen by it to shorten the distance between us. My heart pounded in my temples, a prehistoric war drum announcing the end of something that had not even begun. I suddenly remembered that I remembered nothing. I did not know my name, my age, or why I wore a black suit that wasn’t mine and polished shoes that squeezed my toes like jaws. The last clear image in my memory was a red door, a golden handle, and the sound of a distant bell that I now recognized as the high-pitched screech of wheels on rails.

I also remembered the cold of that handle under my fingers, the feel of polished brass that seemed to vibrate with its own electricity, and my mother’s voice calling me from somewhere completely devoured by oblivion. It was a memory that smelled of fresh bread and fear, a combination that sent an uncontrollable shiver through me. The figure rose. Where its face should have been there was only a smooth, reflective surface like the mirror of an abandoned bathroom. In it I saw my own reflection, but transformed: my skin hung in strips, my eyes were two bottomless black sockets, and my mouth stretched open in a silent scream that lasted eternities. I staggered back, hitting the window behind me. The glass was freezing, and when I turned to look outside, I understood we were nowhere I knew. The sky was a deep violet, almost black, and the stars did not shine but dripped like tears of melted wax. Beneath the train there was no ground, only an endless abyss where trunks and rocks fell in silence, because sound could not rise to reach us. It was as if we traveled along the edge of the world, that boundary maps dare not draw.

The figure took a step forward. The carriage contracted, walls curving inward like the ribs of a dying animal. The seats groaned under an invisible pressure, and for a moment I felt the floor soften beneath my feet like a hungry tongue. The air thickened into an opaque liquid that forced me to breathe with my mouth open, gasping like a fish out of water. I searched for something—anything—that could serve as a weapon. I found a forgotten umbrella under a seat, a razor blade in my jacket pocket, and a memory: a woman’s voice whispering that I should never get off at the last stop. But there were no stops. The train did not slow. Stations howled past the windows, ghosts of light and concrete where no one waited and no one boarded. They were empty sets, scenery for a play the audience had abandoned centuries ago. The figure extended a hand. The fingers were too long, joints bent in impossible directions, and in its palm gleamed an object I recognized with a jolt that stole my breath: it was my wristwatch, the one my father had given me when I turned eighteen, the one I had buried with him in his dark oak coffin two decades ago. The watch read 3:42. Its hands moved backward. A cold sweat ran down my spine as I realized the figure was not a stranger, but myself in some future I had already lived and forgotten, a version eroded by time and madness that had inhabited this train since before the rails existed.

It was not a nightmare, because in nightmares one can wake, and I knew with visceral certainty that I had never been awake until that moment. The ticket in my hand began to burn. I felt the searing heat against my skin without it leaving burns, an immaterial fire consuming the ink and revealing truths my mind could barely endure. The blurred letters suddenly sharpened, and I read my own name written in ink that smelled rotten, followed by a date: today’s, tomorrow’s, always. The train jolted violently, throwing me to the floor. The carpet received me with obscene softness, as if I were falling onto a living organism. The lights flickered. In the intermittent darkness I saw the walls covered in names, thousands of names carved with something sharp, and among them I recognized mine, written over and over until forming a pattern that resolved into a face—my face—staring back at me from the metal surface with rusted eyes.

The figure leaned over me. Its breath smelled of chloroform and wilted roses. It did not speak, because it didn’t need to; its thoughts flowed directly into my brain like black water flooding a basement. It showed me images: myself boarding the train again and again, in different eras, with different faces, always in the same carriage, always at 3:42, always choosing the seat by the window because something in my nature condemned me to repeat the same gesture for eternity. Each time the train reached its destination, I boarded again at the starting platform, erased but not freed, a scratched record on the universe’s gramophone. The revelation crushed me with its overwhelming weight. The train was not a means of transport—it was a digestive system, and we were the food that was never fully consumed, chewed over and over in a perfectly designed cycle of suffering.

I tried to scream, but my voice came out as a whisper of static, white noise blending with the clatter of the wheels. The figure touched my forehead with a finger that burned like ice. My vision shattered into a thousand fragments. I saw my childhood rush past, saw the red door and the golden handle, saw the woman from the voice saying goodbye with a sad smile from the threshold. I also saw cities I had never known, loves I had never lived, and a death waiting for me in every possible version of my existence. Everything clicked into place with terrifying precision. I had not boarded the train by mistake. I was the train. I had built these rails with my own hands, forged the steel with my own guilt, stoked the boiler with the fire of my remorse. Each journey was a punishment I imposed on myself, each repetition a lost chance at redemption rotting in eternity. A dreadful understanding took hold of me: every journey I had taken, every journey I would take, was a choice I kept making with the stubbornness of the condemned who mistake prison for home. Tears burned down my cheeks. I slowly stood, feeling my body change, my bones lengthening with wet cracks and my skin turning translucent like fogged glass, taking on the same waxy texture as the figure now standing beside me—not as a threat, but as a companion in condemnation.

I felt my teeth sharpen against my will and my eyes sink into the darkness of their sockets. My blood seemed to turn into cold mercury flowing through my veins with unnatural heaviness. My reflection on the polished floor no longer resembled the man I had been, but a dissolved version of myself, a blur of flesh and time. The carriage filled with a blinding light that came from nowhere, a white irradiation that erased shadows and revealed the true rotten nature of wood and metal. The hum turned into a melody, something beautiful and ominous announcing the transition, a song composed in a musical scale belonging to no human culture. I looked out the window one last time. The abyss had vanished. Now there was a platform—the platform of a station I recognized with a knot in my throat: it was the station of my hometown, the one that had burned in 1973, the one that had not existed since before I was born. A small boy waited at the end of the platform, wearing a black suit too large for him and polished shoes that pinched his feet. He held a folded ticket in his left hand. He smiled at me. There was no fear on his face, only immense and terrible curiosity, the gaze of someone who does not yet know the exact price of the mistakes he is about to make. The train began to slow with a metallic screech that tore through the air like wet paper. The door opened on its own, releasing a gust of wind that smelled of jasmine and ashes. I stood. My legs no longer trembled. I walked toward the exit, feeling how each step freed me from something ancient and rotten, but also how something new and worse clung to my back like a shadow. As I crossed the threshold, the boy raised his hand to greet me, and on his wrist I saw my father’s watch, marking 3:42, its hands moving backward. Behind me, the train started up again. I did not dare look back...