Why do the clocks always stop at the same time? What causes the echoes to sound different at night? How do the shadows stretch in impossible ways? Why do the trains sometimes arrive from tracks that don't exist? What secrets lie in the abandoned platforms?
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The trains always arrive at your station. The question is which one to take?
― Mehmet Murat ildan
Cordelia Thorne checked her pocket watch for the seventh time in ten minutes, though the ornate timepiece seemed to mock her with its steady ticking. The station’s grand clock tower showed 11:47, while the platform clock read 2:33, and her watch insisted it was barely past nine. Around her, fellow passengers waited with the peculiar patience of those who had long since stopped questioning the inconsistencies.
The announcements had ceased hours ago, cutting off mid-sentence as the station master’s voice dissolved into static. “The 11:15 to---” and then nothing. Cordelia noticed that others seemed untroubled by this, their eyes fixed on tracks that stretched into darkness beyond the platform’s gaslight reach.
She observed the other waiting passengers more closely. A businessman in a pressed suit stood rigid beside a leather trunk, his newspaper dated three years hence. A young woman clutched a ticket to a destination Cordelia had never heard of, though the name seemed to writhe and shift when she tried to read it directly.
As the night deepened, Cordelia realized she couldn’t remember which train she was waiting for, or where she intended to go. Her ticket stub felt warm in her gloved hand, the ink seeming to pulse with its own rhythm. When she finally looked at it, the destination read simply: “WHEN.”
The distant sound of an approaching locomotive echoed through the station, though no light appeared on the horizon. Cordelia understood, with a clarity that terrified her, that some journeys were never meant to reach their intended destinations---and that she had been waiting here much longer than any mortal schedule could account for.
