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surrounding dirty windows pleasantly resistant to the setting
sun’s rays. All too often, the light overemphasized the world,
eradicating shadows and denying mystery its purchase upon
the unseen.
According to my travel guide, the train had been
repurposed back to its initial use, having been used previously
for the transportation of the dead. Corpses were as abundant
as flies directly after the Darkness, and many fixtures of the
old world were converted for the clean-up effort. Though
smartly redecorated, the train failed to conceal its history,
feeling more like a physical memory of darker times.
My car was empty save for one other man. He carried a
vintage camera apparatus, the kind that sat atop a tripod of
wooden legs. It appeared carved entirely from the darkest
wood and the most lusterless of metals. He occasionally
looked over at me, smiling like a mortician after a disaster,
his teeth so large they seemed almost cartoonish. He
disembarked at the next stop, somewhere in the middle of
the woods, atop a platform even more abandoned than the
Coldchester station. The darkness seemed to mourn his
absence. I tried to imagine what the photographer wished
to photograph, so far out in the middle of the woods, and so
late in the evening.
The train pushed on for some time, its rhythm calming.
The passing sights, frozen into view by the cold light of the
moon, were hypnotic. Reclining my seat, I nearly merged
with the aged leather, sinking into sleep as deeply as I did
the seat. I wondered why dreaming wasn’t listed as one of
the train’s enumerated attractions.
As soon as my mind drifted beyond the gentle specter of
the moon, I reached out for a dream. Yet where my dream
should have been, there was something else entirely—a
changeling of sorts, as if my own dream had been stolen and
somehow replaced with someone else’s. I am a dreamer of
no small skill, and I know my own dreams. This was not one
of them.
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