The Midnight Whistle at Hollow Station
On the edge of a sleeping town, the old rail yard holds Hollow Station like a fossil, its peeling green paint and a timetable that seems to drift out of alignment with the calendar. I tend the graveyard shift, dusting benches, testing a bell that sticks, listening as fog slides along the tracks in a living, breathy way. The locals whisper that nothing comes through Hollow Station after midnight, that the place keeps its own hours. Tonight the rumor feels heavier, as if the air itself is listening for something long overdue.
At exactly twelve, the world chills. A whistle unfurls—not from any locomotive, but from somewhere deep inside the walls—a long, mournful note that threads through the platform and up the chimney. Lamps jitter, casting spiders of shadow; footprints appear on the damp concrete where no one has walked; a coal-black silhouette glides along the rails, the kind that seems to exist only in memory. A breeze curls around the ticket window, and the bench beside it creaks as if someone invisible settles in to wait alongside me.
The station does not keep trains; it keeps promises that never arrived, etched in frost along the glass and never wiped away.
From the mist steps a conductor, translucent as moonlight yet solid enough to be feared. His badge glows with a pale, wrong light, and he knows my name—though I ceased saying it years ago. “Some journeys never end,” he says, offering a quiet nod toward a carriage that bears no destination. I want to retreat, but my feet move of their own accord. We board the phantom car, and the world tilts into corridors of memory: stations where strangers once stepped off and never returned to the platform beyond.
- Listen for voices that learned to ride the midnight line and never learned to disembark.
- Watch the glass, where frost writes names that only the station can recall.
- Remember that the clock winds backward here, not forward, and time will bow to those who wait.
- Choose what you will become: a passenger or a keeper of the hours when the city forgets to sleep.
The carriage rounds a bend of memory and reveals faces pressed to windows, a grandmother with a pram, a soldier with a torn letter, a child who once laughed in the rain. Each person seems to search for someone who never arrived, and I feel the weight of being watched by every gaze from the past. When the whistle sighs again, the choice narrows to a single breath: stay and guard Hollow Station’s hours, or step back into daylight and forget the routes that haunt you. The dawn leaks pale gold through the glass, and Hollow Station holds steady—the same rust, the same name, but I am different now. I am a sentinel of the midnight timetable, listening for a future that will always be tethered to the past. The whistle may quiet, but somewhere between miles of steel and fog, the night remembers me as much as I remember it.