There is no sex in this story!
I'm waiting for the Night Train.
In my job this is probably the scariest thing I can do, not the waiting, that's easy, but the bit that comes along when the train arrives, and I start doing my job.
The Night Train is not what you think it would be. Yes, it is a train, or at least it looks like one, and yes, I'm stood on a train platform, but that is where everything stops being normal.
There is a woman stood next to me, she is looking at her phone, probably Instagram or Tik Tok or something stupid like that. She is humming to herself, the mundanity of it makes me smile, the train will be here in a moment, I can already feel it.
Time is a funny thing when the train arrives. If you have the special abilities, you can feel time slipping away from you. It really is an odd feeling when you try to describe it. Imagine the tide going out, except the water is time and the beach is you. It slowly ripples and flows over and around you, but it recedes at the same time. Like I said, weird.
I look up as I feel the effects of the Night Train's imminent arrival. They start to appear, luminous things, up in the rafters, down by the rails and drifting in and out along the platforms with the other, more worldly passengers.
And then it is here, with a rush of spectral energy as it glides into the station. Phone girl next to me is frozen out of time, not that I am in time for it to be moving... The train seems to make its own time to exist in. Describing these things is difficult if you don't understand this world like we do.
And who is 'we'? Hi, my name is Ben, and I am a conductor. No, not a conductor for an orchestra or even a bus or, what you probably thought, a train conductor. No. I am more the electrical conductor. My job is to ground, or more accurately,
absorb
energy, more specifically spectral energy.
When people live, they generate energy, life force if you will. When you die that energy or life force, is expelled. People that die of illness or old age don't have much extra energy left at the end, it is all spent living life or fighting off whatever disease killed them. These people don't pose a problem. The real problem with someone dying unexpectedly, often violently. Wars are the worst, they produce huge problems for people like me, thankfully over time, war has become less of a problem for the world and less of a problem for us.
Our biggest problem now is numbers. There are a lot of people on the planet now and all that life energy is flowing around. The problems for us now are everyday accidents, car crashes, workplace accidents and the violence that comes with too many people in a big, urban area. Thankfully muggings don't tend to kill too many people, those are always the worse for me, it taints the energy, you can always tell when someone has suffered violence at the end. Thankfully violence is something that happens to other people.
As the train's doors silently open the surge starts. The energy around me leaps up as all the spectral energy rushes to the train, I can feel my eyes glowing as I feel the energy envelope me. These are the souls, if you will, of those that have died since the train was last here.
Sunset is when the train arrives. Every day at sunset the train will pull into the station... What station? All of them. When the sun sets where you are the train will arrive to accept its intended passengers, those souls leaving this Earth for the
