Phantoms Beneath the Subway
The city hums with a dozen different languages, and beneath it all, the subway breathes in a slower tempo, like a giant sleeping. I learned to listen for that breath when the streets above forgot how to sleep. At the far end of the platform, where the fluorescent light flickers and the tiles remember every step, the air grows colder and thicker, as if the tunnel itself is exhaling a secret.
On nights when the last train roars away into shadow, I stay behind to sweep the dust from the rails and count the echoes. The first whisper arrives as a tremor in the concrete, a breath that doesn’t belong to you or me. It rises from the track bed, from the space where the rails kiss the earth, and it repeats a name no one in the city would ever admit aloud.
“We never left the car,” the whisper says, “we simply learned to ride the silence between stations.”
The tunnel swallows noise until it becomes a language: soft clinks, distant groans, a chorus of footsteps that aren’t mine. I tell myself it’s fatigue, or perhaps a trick of the heat—until the signs begin to move. The overhead signs blink in a rhythm I recognize not as a signal, but as a heartbeat. The clock behind the service window glances backward, counting down to a moment I’ve never seen in the daylight.
- Cold air that crawls under your skin and never leaves.
- Footprints that vanish just as you reach them, leaving only a sting of frost on the platform.
- A chorus of voices, each one muffled by metal and distance, chanting my name in a cadence I cannot place.
I find the capsule of the last car, a ghostly capsule with seats that never rust and windows that reflect nothing except a pale, sleepless city. In the reflection, I glimpse faces that resemble me, but their eyes are pulled inward, as if they have learned to see through time itself. They press closer, not to scare, but to remind: there was a night when every rider became part of the underground choir, and when the morning light finally returned, the chorus dissolved into steam.
When a voice finally speaks from the tunnel wall, it is not a shout but a careful invitation. “Stay with us,” it pleads, not angrily but with the soft persistence of rain that has memorized your doorstep. And for a moment I understand why so many who ride these rails never leave the stations they haunt in the waking world—their memories are too heavy, their longing too loud, their losses too sharp to carry above ground.
Night after night I listen and learn, letting the subway teach me to listen back. The phantoms aren’t here to terrify; they are caretakers of a bridge between eras, guardians of a promise that every goodbye is followed by a return. When my shift ends at the first pale light of dawn, they melt into the bricks, leaving only a quiet ache and a memory I can’t quite name, as if I’ve been shown a doorway I’m not yet ready to step through.