The moment my foot touched the wet platform, the world shifted entirely. Gravity felt thicker, like I was wading through syrup. The faceless figures kept moving with mechanical precision, their boots splashing in puddles that mirrored the amber light from the train windows. I wanted to step back, but the platform stretched behind me into fog, dissolving into nothing. The living room, my tiny TV, the couch—they were still there, ghostly outlines behind me, tethering me to some fragile sense of reality I could barely cling to.

The train was closer now. Its hiss was deafening, steam curling around my face, hot and metallic. The smell of pizza clung to it, absurd and impossible in combination with the sharp, oily scent of the engine. My stomach twisted. I realized I could hear it—the faint, rhythmic echo of my own heartbeat, perfectly synced with the thrum of the rails.

A door at the far end of the train opened. Not one of the sleeper cars with their dim amber light. Something else. A compartment without walls, or maybe with walls I couldn’t see. From inside came a single flickering light, almost like a lantern swinging in the wind. I could sense movement inside. Slow. Patient. Waiting for me.

I stepped forward. The platform shifted beneath my feet. It was alive, pulsing with rhythm, pulling me toward the open door. The faceless figures parted without looking, forming a silent corridor. I couldn’t tell if they were protecting me or leading me into danger. My chest tightened. Every instinct screamed to stop, to run backward into the remnants of the living room that lingered behind me. But something, something older and more compelling, urged me onward.

The TV flickered behind me, showing the roomette interiors of the train. In each one, passengers sat alone, their eyes hollow, staring straight ahead. The roomettes glowed faintly, as if they were caught in perpetual twilight. But I didn’t see faces. Not really. Only empty reflections, distorted and strange. I realized, with a shiver, that some of them were…me. Or versions of me. Different ages. Different clothing. Different expressions. All watching. Waiting.

The lantern flickered again, and a voice, thin and echoing, whispered:

“Welcome aboard.”

I froze. It was human, yet not. The kind of sound that reverberates in your skull, not your ears. I wanted to reply, but my mouth was dry. My throat tight. My voice caught in the invisible gears of the station.

I looked down. The rails beneath me glowed faintly, as if the train’s light was leaking into the fog, forming paths I was meant to follow. I took another step, and the air thickened, pressing against my chest. My heartbeat thrummed in my ears.

Then it happened.

The first faceless figure in the corridor stopped and turned toward me. Its head tilted unnaturally, the movement too slow, too deliberate. And then…a sound. A scraping, like fingernails on metal, followed by a hiss of steam that felt like it entered my lungs. My stomach lurched. I wanted to run, but my feet were no longer mine.

The figure lifted its hand. I knew what it meant. I had seen it before in the TV, in the faint glimmer of Railway Risqué. The gesture was a command. Step forward. Enter. Submit.

I swallowed hard. And I did.

The doorway swallowed me.

I expected light. I expected heat. I expected safety.

Instead, I fell.

Or maybe the train did.

There was a moment where time didn’t exist. The walls around me dissolved into mist. The rails disappeared. The hum of the engine became a roar in my chest. And then I landed—on something solid, yet moving. A floor that shifted beneath me, undulating like water frozen in motion. Amber light flickered across a space that shouldn’t exist: roomettes, yes, but elongated, twisted, stretching in impossible angles. The smell of pizza was everywhere, sticky, cloying, with undertones of metal and rain.

I looked around. The faceless figures were there, but different now. Watching me, circling me, floating almost, gliding over the warped floor. I realized I wasn’t just on the train anymore. I was inside it, but also outside it, and the space itself was alive, bending to some logic I couldn’t comprehend.

And then I saw it: a figure at the far end of the train car, clearly not faceless. Sitting in a chair, watching me. My double. The one from the living room. Only this one smiled differently—knowing, amused, terrifying. And it beckoned.

I wanted to scream, to throw myself backward into the fog I had left, to return to the ghost of the living room and the tiny yellowed TV. But I couldn’t. Something held me here, in the amber glow, in the thick air, in the impossible architecture of the train that defied every law of space and reason.

The double raised a hand.

And the whispers returned, louder, faster, overlapping:

“Sit. Wait. Watch. Join us.”

I stepped forward.

The train’s interior pulsed with expectation, alive with the promise of something I didn’t want to understand, yet couldn’t resist.

The doorway behind me—the tether to my living room—flickered. A glimpse of beige walls, my couch, the rickety particleboard table. I wanted to reach for it. I almost did.

And then the train shuddered.

Something big, something outside the frame of reality, was coming.