The Tall Figure on Platform Two

The 23:52 is the last train, and the station out by the science park is unstaffed at that hour — two platforms, humming lights, mist off the retention ponds. I have waited there alone dozens of times. The aloneness was the normal part.

He was on platform two, opposite. I say 'he' for grammar. A figure in what read as a long dark coat, facing the tracks. My first glance filed him as a tall man. My second glance is where the trouble started, because the brain does automatic arithmetic with things like doorframes and benches, and the arithmetic kept coming back wrong. Against the timetable board he stood beside, he was over seven feet. The proportions were the worse part — the shoulders too narrow for the height, arms that hung a station too long, and a stillness I have only otherwise seen in herons.

I looked away, the way you do, city-trained. When I looked back he was — not closer, that would be a horror film — rotated. Facing me now, across two track beds, though I never saw any movement at all. The face was at the exact distance and darkness where you cannot honestly claim to have seen features, and I will not invent them, but I will report this: the certainty of being looked at was as physical as wind.

My train came in on my side, blessedly, all light and aluminium and ordinary Tuesday air. Through the windows, as we pulled out, I watched platform two slide past from thirty metres, then ten. Empty. Every camera-lit metre of it, empty — and the mist over the far tracks was still parted in a long vertical seam, the shape of where something had been standing, closing slowly like water behind a boat.

The conductor, checking my ticket, saw my face and asked. I said someone strange had been across from me. He clipped the ticket and said, not unkindly, 'That platform's got a reputation after the last train. We don't stop opposite anymore.' And I checked. The 23:52 is the only service that station gets which uses platform one. Every other train, all day, both directions, uses two.