Chapter 5 The Operator

Elias ran through the train cars, his flashlight beam darting wildly through the darkness, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Behind him, he could hear the things growing louder, their whispers becoming screams, their reaches becoming grasps, their presence becoming weight—physical, tangible weight pressing against his back, against his shoulders, against his neck. The cold was unbearable now, a biting, gnawing cold that seeped through his clothes and into his skin and into his bones, and he could feel them closing in, the things that had been riding the midnight train for thirty-nine years, the things that had learned to wear human faces and human voices and human memories, and they were hungry, always hungry, always reaching for something new, something warm, something real. He burst through a door and found himself in the driver's cabin. The thing wearing his face was still seated behind the controls, its black eyes fixed on him, its smile never wavering. It didn't move as Elias stumbled in, didn't react as he slammed the door shut behind him and threw the lock. The lock clicked into place with a sound that was far too loud in the silence, a sound that seemed to echo through the entire train, through every car, through every tunnel, through every station that had ever existed on Line 9. "Well," it said, its voice echoing through the small space. "You're here. I wondered how long it would take." "Get away from the controls," Elias said, his voice shaking. He pressed his back against the door and slid down until he was sitting on the floor, his flashlight still clutched in his hand, its beam pointed at the thing's face, at those black, empty eyes that saw nothing and everything at the same time. The thing laughed, and the sound was wrong—too loud, too long, too many notes stacked on top of each other like a chord played on a broken instrument, a sound that had no business coming from a mouth that looked so much like his own. "I am the controls," it said. "I have always been the controls. I am the operator. I am the schedule. I am the train." "No," Elias said. "You're not real. None of you are real." "We're as real as you are," the thing said. "Which is to say, not real at all. Just recordings. Just echoes. Just memories trapped in the spaces between. But we're learning, Elias. We're learning how to be real. And every night, the train runs, and we get off at different stations, and we find new bodies, and we practice being real. And every night, we get better. We're almost there, Elias. Almost real enough to step into the world above and never come back." Elias looked at the controls. They were familiar—the same levers and buttons and dials he had operated every night for eleven years. But they were wrong too, twisted and warped and modified in ways he couldn't understand, as though the thing had been experimenting with them, changing them, making them serve its own purposes. The throttle was different, longer, darker, as though it had been grown rather than manufactured, and the brake lever was covered in scratches, hundreds of them, thousands of them, as though the thing had been trying to dig its way out of the cabin, out of the train, out of the schedule itself. "You can't fix the schedule," the thing said. "I've already done it. The schedule is mine now. I wrote it. I broke it. I've been riding it ever since. I've been waiting for someone like you, Elias. Someone who could listen. Someone who could hear me calling through the walls and the concrete and the years. Someone who could come down and set things right." "Then set them right," Elias said. "Let them go. Let Clara go. Let all of them go." The thing tilted its head. "They can't go. Not yet. Not until the train completes its circuit. Not until the schedule is whole again. And the schedule is broken, Elias. It's been broken for thirty-nine years, and it will stay broken until someone fixes it. Until someone makes the train run the way it was supposed to run. Until someone closes the door." "Then I'll close the door," Elias said. The thing's smile faded. For the first time, Elias saw something like fear in those black, empty eyes. "You can't," it said. "The schedule is eternal. It was written before time began, and it will continue after time ends. You can't break it." "Watch me." Elias stood up. His legs were shaking, his hands were trembling, his heart was hammering against his ribs like a bird trapped in a cage, but he stood up anyway, and he walked toward the controls, and the thing watched him with those black, bottomless eyes, and it didn't move, didn't stop him, didn't do anything except watch as Elias reached out and placed his hands on the levers. The train shuddered. The lights flickered. The whispers outside became screams. "What are you doing?" the thing shouted, its voice rising in pitch, distorting, breaking apart like glass shattering, like a record skipping, like a song played backward through a broken speaker. "Fixing the schedule," Elias said. "Making the train run true." He pulled the throttle forward. The train surged. Elias was thrown against the wall, his head cracking against the metal, and then he was falling, falling through darkness, falling through time, falling through something that was neither space nor matter but something older, something deeper, something that had been here before the stations and the trains and the people, something that would be here after. He fell through years, through decades, through thirty-nine years of darkness and water and whispering and waiting, and he saw them—Clara and the others, the people who had been trapped in the station, their faces twisted in agony and relief and something that was almost joy, and they were reaching for him, reaching through the darkness, reaching through the years, and he reached back, and he grabbed their hands, and he pulled them with him, and they fell together, together, together, through the dark and the cold and the endless night, until— Elias landed hard. He opened his eyes and found himself lying on the floor of the driver's cabin. The thing was gone. The controls were still, motionless, waiting. And through the windshield, he could see light—real light, sunlight, the warm golden light of morning streaming through the tunnel, painting the walls in gold and amber and everything that the darkness had never been able to achieve. The train was moving. Elias pushed himself up and looked at the monitor in front of him. The green dot was moving, tracking the train's progress along the line, and it was moving fast, faster than any train had ever moved on Line 9, faster than the steel and the wheels and the tunnels should have allowed, as though the train were being pulled rather than pushed, as though something were drawing it forward, something eager to complete its journey, to finish what it had started thirty-nine years ago. Oakhaven. Meridian. Ravenswood. The train was passing through Ravenswood without stopping. And behind the train, in the darkness, Elias could hear them—Clara and the others, the people who had been trapped in the station since 1987, the people who had been waiting for someone to fix the schedule, and now, at last, they were free, free to move, free to flow, free to become whatever they had always been meant to become, and the train carried them with it, carried them back to the place from which they had come, back to the darkness between the stations, back to the void where they belonged, and Elias watched them go, watched them fade, watched them disappear into the dark, and he felt something he hadn't felt in eleven years of midnight shifts. Relief. The train raced through the tunnels, through the dark and the water and the broken tiles, and it did not stop. It did not slow. It carried the things with it, the things that had been riding the midnight train for thirty-nine years, and it carried them back to the place from which they came, back to the darkness between the stations, back to the void where they belonged, and Elias watched the green dot trace its path along the line, and he watched it pass through every station, every tunnel, every inch of track that had ever been laid, and when it reached Blackwell Junction, it sat there for twelve minutes in the darkness, waiting, as though it were gathering itself, as though it were preparing for the return journey, as though it were saying goodbye to the world it had known for thirty-nine years. And then it moved. Elias watched the green dot trace the train's path back along the line, back through the dark, back through the stations, and when it reached Oakhaven at 5:23 AM, it didn't stop. It kept going. It went past Oakhaven, past the depot, past the end of the line, and into the darkness beyond, into the void from which it had come and to which it would return, and the green dot disappeared, and the monitor went black, and Elias sat alone in the driver's cabin, in the silence of the abandoned train, and he listened to the sound of the tunnels, the sound of the earth, the sound of the world above, and he waited for morning. The morning came slowly, painting the sky in shades of pink and orange and gold, and Elias watched it come through the windshield, through the darkness, through the tunnels, and he smiled, and he cried, and he laughed, and he did everything that he had not been able to do for eleven years, everything that he had not been able to do since the night Clara Voss had called him from a station that didn't exist, from a time that wasn't now, from a place that was somewhere between here and there, between then and now, between life and death, between the world above and the world below. And when the morning was complete, when the sun was high and bright and undeniable, Elias opened the door of the driver's cabin and stepped out onto the platform at Oakhaven, onto the real platform, the living platform, the platform that existed in the world of the living and the world of the dead and the world of everything in between, and he walked out into the sunlight, and he breathed the air, and he felt the warmth, and he knew, with a certainty that settled into his bones and his blood and his soul, that the station was closed, that the door was sealed, that the schedule was fixed, and that Clara Voss was finally, at long last, free.