The Last Train Home

The platform was empty when Marcus arrived, which was unusual for a Friday night. The departure board listed the 11:40 as on time, but the only other person in sight was a woman in a dark coat standing near the far end of the platform, her back to the tracks. Marcus checked his phone. No service. The station clock jumped a minute and then held still.

He found a bench and sat down. The woman did not move. After a while the train appeared out of the dark, its headlights cutting through the light rain that had begun to fall. The cars looked older than the ones that usually ran this line, their paint slightly faded. When the doors opened, no one stepped off. Marcus boarded the middle car. The woman entered through a door farther down.

The interior was clean but dated. The advertisements above the windows were for products he did not recognize. A recorded voice announced the next station in a calm, slightly metallic tone. Marcus counted six other passengers, all of them sitting separately, none of them looking at one another. The train pulled out of the station with a smoothness that felt wrong, as if the wheels were not quite touching the rails.

At the first stop no one got on or off. The same thing happened at the second and third. Marcus began to pay closer attention to the other passengers. Their faces were difficult to focus on, as if the light in the car refused to settle on them properly. The woman in the dark coat sat three rows ahead of him. Once, she turned her head just far enough for him to see the edge of her profile, and he had the sudden conviction that he had seen her before, though he could not place where.

The recorded voice announced a station that did not exist on the normal route. Marcus stood and walked to the door, intending to get off and find another way home. The door did not open. He pressed the release button. Nothing happened. Through the window he saw an empty platform and a sign whose letters rearranged themselves when he tried to read them.

“It won’t let you off until it’s finished,” said a man sitting across the aisle. His voice was quiet and unsurprised. “I’ve been riding for a while now. The stops are not for us. They’re for the train.”

Marcus stared at him. “What does that mean?”

“It means the train is collecting something. Or delivering something. I haven’t figured out which. The others don’t talk much. Some of them have been here longer than I have. The woman in the coat got on two stops before you did. Before that she was standing on the platform the same way you found her.”

The train continued. Stations passed in a blur of sodium light and empty benches. Marcus tried his phone again. Still no signal. The air in the car had grown colder. Condensation formed on the inside of the windows and then froze in thin patterns that looked almost like writing.

At a station marked only by a single flickering lamp, the doors opened. The man across the aisle stood up. “This is as far as I go,” he said. “If you see a platform that looks like the one you started from, don’t trust it right away. The train can copy things. It learns the shape of the places it passes through.”

He stepped off. The doors closed. Marcus was left with the remaining passengers, including the woman in the dark coat. She had turned fully around in her seat and was watching him. Her eyes were the same color as the frozen patterns on the glass.

“You’re still trying to decide whether this is real,” she said. Her voice was soft and carried easily over the sound of the moving train. “That’s normal. Most people spend the first several stations arguing with themselves. It doesn’t change the route.”

Marcus swallowed. “Where does it end?”

“For some people it ends at a station that looks like home. They get off and walk into a life that is almost the one they left. The differences are small at first. A street name that isn’t quite right. A key that turns the wrong way in the lock. By the time they notice, the train has already moved on, and there isn’t another one coming.”

She stood and moved to the door as the train began to slow. “This is my stop. If you see me again on another platform, don’t follow me onto the train. The second time is harder to leave.”

The doors opened. She stepped out onto a platform that looked, for a moment, exactly like the one where Marcus had begun the night. Then the light shifted and he saw that the benches were wrong and the exit tunnel led into a darkness that had no stairs. The doors closed. The train pulled away.

Marcus rode until the car was empty except for himself. The recorded voice no longer announced stations. The train moved through a darkness that pressed against the windows without the interruption of platforms or signals. Eventually it slowed. The doors opened onto a familiar stretch of concrete and a departure board that listed the 11:40 as departed.

He stepped off. The station was the one he had entered hours earlier, or something close enough that the differences took time to notice. His phone had service again. The time read 11:38. The train that had carried him was gone, and the tracks were empty.

Marcus walked home by surface streets. He did not take the train again that winter. On nights when the rain fell the same way it had on the platform, he sometimes heard a low mechanical sound in the distance that might have been wheels on rails, and he would turn up the volume on whatever he was using to fill the silence until the sound passed.