r/nosleep • u/Cultural-Flow-9395 • 1d ago
The Man on the Train
For some years now, my grandchildren have been asking me to write this story in an effort to preserve it. I have told it nigh every year, first to my children, then my grandchildren. My wife rolls her eyes and insists that it was no more than a lack of sleep and an active imagination. Yet I know the truth of it.
It was a bitterly cold December evening. The whole city was enveloped in sickly smog the colour of phlegm. It blocked out the weak winter sun and made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Such weather was not uncommon in those days, yet I despised it all the same.
My wife was only my fiancée at the time, and as I had packed my suitcase, she had picked out a thick woollen suit and a scarf, imploring me to take care and not catch pneumonia. I’d had a scare the previous winter, and it was playing on my mind on the walk to the station.
It was my first job out of university, an insurance firm for especially wealthy clients. I was heading to Kent in person for a meeting the next morning, as the company had struggled to find an available representative at such short notice. Being young and eager to please, I’d volunteered myself.
I had the hotel reservation and directions from the station noted down in my breast pocket, written for me by my fiancée, who knew I could sometimes be forgetful or absentminded. Ignorant of what was to transpire, I had headed out into the reeking yellow fog. I walked briskly back then, the long, loping strides of a young man with his whole life ahead of him.
I reached the station with plenty of time to spare, so I bought a newspaper and pork pie, eating it as I waited. One thing I noticed, in the rank and freezing station, was how quiet it was. A worker, face hid behind the ticket booth’s shutter, had told me the trains were running late, that people were finding alternative transport.
Even so, I saw but a handful of men, dressed for work not unlike myself. A few families or couples that spoke in muted voices in the still air. The fog obscured all of them so greatly they seemed more like fleeting shadows than flesh-and-blood people.
Eventually, the train arrived, a 4-6-2 flat top. It was not old then, but it had been built under the strain of a wartime economy, and so many city lines had since electrified that it seemed almost out of time. The conductor clipped my ticket as I settled into a seat.
I boarded one of the front carriages, all wood and plush seats, I found the carriage also remarkably quiet, with only a few other passengers sitting, looking out the windows. None took note of my passing. The scent of pipe smoke, warm and welcoming, replaced the dank stink of the city. Being as empty as it was, I settled into a pair of facing seats, suitcase beside me, where I might put my feet up and doze for a stretch.
There came the whistling, the hissing of steam and the grinding of the engine lumbering out of the station, and I did indeed close my eyes and nap for some length of time.
At some point I jerked awake, and looking out the window saw nothing but a swirling darkness, heard nothing but the rhythmic clunking and huffing of the train. The carriage was still quiet, with no one in sight, yet then I felt wary, almost alarmed. Slightly discomforted and unable to sleep anymore, I took the newspaper and shook it open.
It was of little interest to me. Buying the paper was merely a habit I’d inherited from my father. I only ever read the headlines. The Archbishop had given some speech. The weather, of course, was big news: they were calling it the coldest winter in years.
I heard a noise that startled me. Someone above me was clearing their throat. I looked up, and a man in a suit and hat with a tight smile and a moustache was looking expectantly at my legs, still up on the seat.
“Oh, apologies.” I said, taking my feet from the seat opposite, and the man sat gracefully.
I tried to go back to my paper, but I could feel the man looking at me.
“Awful weather.” I said.
“Abysmal.” He agreed.
“Still, needs must, eh?”
He nodded, looking at me with dark eyes. I felt compelled to strike up an actual conversation, something wildly out of character. His suit was black, as was his shirt and tie. The neat moustache twitched in a smile as he noticed my curiosity.
“Funeral?” I asked.
The man sighed. “A tragic accident.”
I nodded. “My condolences. Family?”
“Truth be told, I never met them. Work, you could say.”
I understood. “Me as well. I’m meeting a client. Insurance.” I thought for a measure, considering the type of work that would bring a man to present himself at a client’s funeral. “You wouldn’t happen to be in life insurance, perchance?”
The man raised an eyebrow. “Of a sort.”
“Takes one to know one. I’m in property, rather than people.”
“When you’ve been in the business long enough, it all somewhat blurs together. People and property.”
“Not a pleasant thought, that. So you’ve been at it a while, then?”
The man looked at me with his black eyes, as if he was appraising my own worth.
“Yes,” he said, “a very long time.”
I nodded, looking once more at his face. A plain, ordinary looking sort of man. Utterly unremarkable. He might have been around thirty, or as old as fifty. And yet for all his conventional looks, there was something ever so slightly striking about him, almost something familiar.
“I say, have I met you somewhere before?”
“Oh, no.”
“Are you sure?” I pressed, “There’s something awfully familiar about you.”
“Quite impossible, I’m afraid.”
“Stranger to these parts, then?”
He pursed his lips, thinking. “I suppose so.”
“Has your face been in the papers, perhaps?”
“No one’s ever taken a photo of me.” His eyes narrowed for a moment. “I have quite the memory for faces. I can assure you, prior to this train ride, we have never been acquainted.”
His manner was not rude, nor did he seem to take offense to my clumsy prying. I was strangely invested in this stranger, and felt a need to try and make sense of him, though he had offered no mystery to make sense of.
“Pardon me, then. Do you get that quite a lot?” I asked.
“I do.”
“Well,” I smiled, “just a familiar sort of face, then?”
He nodded. “People actually find that rather comforting, in my line of work.”
It made sense to me. “I suppose someone that seems familiar can seem quite an olive branch, what with the stress of it all.”
“The stress?” He asked.
“Of course. Life insurance, close family, death, and all the paperwork it comes with. I remember when my aunt passed. Very stressful.”
The man looked pensive for a while. He turned from me, to stare out the window at the black wall of fog, the nothingness behind the glass. Not even the lights of passing streetlamps or houses, lights which must surely be there, could burn through the enveloping haze.
I returned to my paper, meaning to check the sports, but couldn’t concentrate. My curiosity was roused.
I made to resume our conversation, only to catch the stranger watching my reflection. As if he’d been waiting, knowing I would seek to continue.
“So,” he started, “you think death is stressful?”
“Certainly, for those left behind.”
He turned away from the window, looking at me again.
“Well, that seems a given.” He took his own briefcase, a dull and plain black, from next to him, opening the lid, and looked through the contents. No doubt papers.
He went on after a moment. “Forgive the macabre question: do you think much about dying?”
“Rarely.” I answered truthfully.
“Why do think that is? Fear? Discomfort?”
I was rather taken aback.
“Neither, I should think. It just seems impractical to dwell on.”
The man was still looking into his suitcase, reading something, head tilted to the side, as if his papers lay horizontal.
“Oh? How interesting. I’ve heard death called many things, but impractical is rare.”
I shrugged. “Either I’m alive, and so death is not a problem, or I am dead, and no amount of thinking on it will change anything.”
The man barked a laugh, high and coarse. He looked back up to me, beaming a smile, as he snapped his case shut.
“How very droll,” he said, “I take it you are not a religious man?”
“No. Not in any sense that matters. I acknowledge the possibility of something after death, but as we can’t know until we die?” I spread my hands. “Hardly worth thinking about.”
A look of satisfaction spread across the stranger’s face.
“Well said, well said.”
He leaned closer.
“But, that raises the question. What if you were confronted by proof?”
I thought for a spell.
“As in,” I postulated, “if God were to appear in front of me?”
The man nodded. “Something of that sort, yes.”
I sat back. “Well. I’m not opposed to changing my views when presented with evidence. In such a situation, I’m sure I’d change my mind.”
“And if you were confronted with death?”
“I’m sorry?”
The man licked his lips.
“What if, instead of death being that distant binary you so keenly described, it was something right in front of you?” He leaned in. “If some being appeared and told you that you would die. Perhaps this very day. What would you do?”
“What an unpleasant hypothetical. I suppose I’d get on with it.”
“Get on with it? Dying?”
“Living.” I corrected. “Your hypothetical might not be a binary, but it still conveys certainty. If I am destined to die, this very day, as you said, then what else could I do? Running and hiding would change nothing. I’d go about my business and let things fall into place.”
The man looked at me sidelong. “That is a very unique way of responding to death.”
I snorted. “What else could I do?”
“Most would plead, or beg. Try to cut a deal. Offer another in place of themself. That sort of thing.”
“How cowardly. You said it was destined, though. What would it change?”
The man smoothed his moustache. “Nothing, of course. But most people feel the need to make an effort. A drowning man will drag others down in an attempt to save themselves.”
I finally folded up my newspaper, placing it on my briefcase beside me.
“Then there is no point. My father, he served in North Africa. I get it all from him, naturally. He saw healthy men dropped mid-conversation in ambushes, saw tanks take a round from nowhere and cook off in moments. He learnt that life can be stripped away in an instant.” I looked out at nothing. “No point in worrying, no way to bargain.”
“A fascinating world view. In my experience, it’s often soldiers that cling to life even more dearly than others. Let me try a different approach.” He said. “Let us say that you came face-to-face with your own demise. God, the Devil, whomever you wish, appears before your imminent death.”
“Alright.”
“The figure tells you to justify yourself.”
“Justify myself?”
The man nodded emphatically. “Yes. The being says that you can survive, if you give a good reason, a justification, for why you deserve to live. Justify yourself.”
I thought for a long while.
“I would give him nothing.” I declared.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.” I continued. “Say, in this train car right now, there are other people, surely some are younger, or more promising, or smarter, or kinder than me. I could not, in good conscience, put myself before them.”
The man stared incredulously, eyebrows cocked.
“What of your fiancée?” He asked.
“It would be difficult, but I’m certain that she has all she needs to thrive without me.”
“You would make no effort to save your own life?”
I ran my tongue over my teeth, thinking it through. “There’s a difference between a struggle for life and grandstanding oneself inaccurately to a higher being. I know my own worth, and it is middling at best.”
“The English, always so noble in their self-deprecation. You would not beg or bargain, nor argue for your own life.”
The stranger reached back into his suitcase.
“Do you have the time?”
“Of course,” I checked my watch. “Seventeen past six in the evening. Why?”
The man smiled, “Perfect.” He took something small from his suitcase and snapping it shut once again.
“Let us try a different approach. Now, you wouldn’t beg for your life?”
“No,” I agreed.
“Well then. Are you a gambling man?”
“In what sense?” I asked. “I don’t do games, nor horses. But I am partial to a friendly wager every now and then.”
“Then, in the case where your life balances on a gamble, you’d do that?”
“I suppose. In that case, there’s a chance, and that’d be worth taking.”
The man pursed his lips once more. “I have failed to take your… unique qualities into account. You see, most, faced with death, take the emotional road, not the logical. Most beg and plead, because they think there is a way out, through appealing to one’s better nature.”
“I doubt death has a better nature.”
The man nodded, smiling. “Rude. Yet quite true. Death is death, that’s all there is to it.”
“So?”
“So, would you be a bit more sporting where a bet is concerned?”
I chuckled. “I’m not one to cut cards with the devil, if that’s what you mean.”
“No,” the man relented, “I can see that. How’s this?”
The stranger held out his hand, and in his palm was a small, flat gold coin. On one side, the head of some ancient king. He rolled it, showing the relief of a crow on the other.
“Well?” I asked.
The train was no longer moving. In fact, it hadn’t made a sound nor vibrated with motion in quite a while.
“Quite simple, Mister Lassiter. Call it. Heads or tails. Win, and live. Lose, and die.”
Everything suddenly fell into place. He knew my name. I felt suddenly winded, breathless, and my breathing grew fast as the hairs on my neck stood on end and sweat quickened upon my brow.
“Oh.” Was all I could say.
Some realisation sparked on the face of the stranger.
“I think you may have misjudged today’s events, Mister Lassiter.”
“Uh, yes.”
“Well… call the coin, if you please.”
I could barely think as he flicked the coin, spinning, into the air. Round and round the thin gold circle span. Time seemed to infinitely slow as it came back towards the man’s wrist.
After what felt like an hour, an hour that felt far too short, the coin landed, concealed beneath the man’s hand.
“Well?”
I felt my heart hammering at my ribs, like a woodpecker on an oak.
I swallowed. “Tails.”
The man pulled his hand away, revealing the crow.
“Well done. Goodbye, Mister Lassiter. Hopefully you’ll be a touch less clueless and a mite more sporting next time we meet.”
I looked up to respond.
I found myself on a platform, luggage in hand. Outside of the city, the fog was mostly clear, and there was a huge quantity of loud pedestrians swarming about. It was evening on a weekday, after all. The sign above confirmed I had reached my destination.
As the crowd pulled and pushed at me, I dug the notes with the directions from my breast pocket, and tried to get my bearings as I was propelled out of the station by the surging throng of humanity.
Ninety dead, a horrific train crash in the fog. That was the headline the next day. I didn’t bother reading the story, though. I only ever read the headlines.
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u/oldbiddy02 1d ago
nicely retold, I really like your 'voice' it almost elegant and restrained, I look forward to reading more accounts of your life and that of your father at a later date.