Whispers on the Midnight Platform
The old clock in the hall never keeps company with the living. On nights when the rain writes its own alphabet on the glass, I come to the Midnight Platform to check the schedules that never seem to align with dawn. My hands are stained with ink, and my ears are tuned to hearsay rather than announcements. The station, once bustling with travelers, now breathes in sighs and echoes between the rails.
Whispers begin as a murmur, a chorus of hollow steps that never touch the ground. They slip out from the gaps where doors should close, threaded through the air like cold rain. The platform lamp flickers with a greenish glow, and every light seems to spell a different name on the glass: Ada, Holt, Thea—the memories of people who never left. I tell myself it's fatigue, but the whispers rearrange themselves into sentences that are almost prayers.
When the midnight train finds you, it asks for your truth, not your ticket. If you listen, it will tell you what you left behind, and what waits for you in the quiet between stations.
A horn sounds, not from a locomotive but from the void, and a car door opens on its own. A carriage appears as if dragged out of a different century, polished wood and brass that gleams with a pale phosphorescence. Inside sit silhouettes, not seats but the memories of yesterday's travelers—one breathes in the seat opposite and swears the air tastes like rain and smoke. The old timetable on the wall shows a train that did not exist in life, yet it stops every midnight as if it were owed something.
My own name is whispered into my ear, not spoken by lips but pressed into the back of my skull by the chill of air that shouldn't be. The voice is tender and ruined: "Do not stay; the fastest way home is the slowest way to forget." I hesitate, for the whispers promise passage to the other side, but also a warning: to board is to be measured by the station's rules and become a part of its inventory of souls.
- Quiet footsteps that follow you out of the glass booth and vanish when you turn.
- Tickets printed with dates that never existed in the living world.
- Lights that dim to red whenever a passenger tells a truth they're ashamed of.
- Names in the dust that match your own, in handwriting you did not ink.
When the bell tolls the final minute, I step back, resisting the urge to walk the platform into the embrace of the specters. The train remains in the tunnel, a rumor with wheels. The whispers gather into a single thread—an invitation and a warning—and I let it fray around the edges of my consciousness, promising to return. After all, the Midnight Platform never sleeps. It only waits for the next night to listen again.