Trapped between worlds, trapped in time, and ultimately trapped by the very systems we trust to carry us toward safety. Some doors, once opened, can never be closed.
The subway platform was empty when Marcus stepped off the 11:47 train. Just him and the fluorescent hum of the lights. He’d worked late again—third time this week—and now found himself alone in the fluorescent wasteland of the downtown station at quarter past midnight.
He pulled his coat tighter. The platform seemed longer than he remembered, stretching into shadows that the overhead lights couldn’t quite reach. His footsteps echoed off the tiled walls, a lonely rhythm that made him acutely aware of the silence surrounding everything else.
As he climbed the stairs toward the exit, he noticed something odd. The station looked abandoned in a way that felt intentional, as if someone had drained all the usual nighttime activity from it. Usually, there were security guards, the occasional custodian, at least some signs of human presence. Tonight, nothing.
Marcus quickened his pace.
When he reached the turnstiles, he froze. A figure stood at the top of the second set of stairs, perfectly still, facing away from him. The person wore an old-fashioned conductor’s uniform—the kind he’d seen in vintage photos of the 1950s—complete with a cap and a pocket watch chain.
“Excuse me,” Marcus called out, his voice smaller than he’d intended. “Is the station closing?”
The figure didn’t move. Didn’t acknowledge him at all.
Marcus hesitated, then moved forward slowly, climbing the stairs. As he got closer, he could see the uniform more clearly. It looked pristine, almost impossibly so—not a thread out of place. But there was something wrong about it. The fabric had a peculiar sheen, almost translucent.
“Hey, are you okay?” Marcus asked, now just a few feet away.
The figure turned.
Marcus’s breath caught. The conductor’s face was pale, almost gray, and his eyes were empty—not blind, but empty, as if someone had carefully removed all the substance of the person behind them. When the conductor moved his mouth to speak, his jaw moved with an audible crack.
“You missed your stop,” the conductor said, his voice like wind through a forgotten tunnel. “You always miss your stop.”
“I… I got on the right train. I got off at the right station,” Marcus stammered.
“No.” The conductor shook his head slowly. “You’ve been riding the 11:47 for three years. Same time, same platform, same train. Always the same. And you’re still waiting to get home.”
Marcus felt ice move through his veins. “That’s not… I just worked late. I just—”
“Check your pocket,” the conductor interrupted.
Against his better judgment, Marcus reached into his coat pocket. His hand closed around something soft and decaying. He pulled it out with a gasp.
It was a transit pass, but it was old—decades old. And when he flipped it over, he saw his own name written on it in faded ink. The expiration date read: March 15th, 1987.
His birth date.
“What is this?” Marcus whispered, though some terrible part of him already knew.
“You’re one of the passengers,” the conductor said gently, and there was something almost like pity in his hollow voice. “We all are. We ride. We get off. We climb these stairs. And then we ride again. That’s what we do now.”
The conductor moved closer, and Marcus could see now that the man’s skin didn’t quite fit right, as if it were stretched over something that wasn’t quite a body. Where his neck disappeared into his collar, there seemed to be empty space.
“No,” Marcus shook his head violently. “No, I’m going home. I’m going to leave this station.”
He turned and ran up the remaining stairs toward the street-level exit. His heart hammered in his chest as he burst through the doors and out into the night.
But he stopped short.
The city was wrong. The buildings were there, but they looked as if they’d been drawn by someone working from memory—not quite accurate, edges slightly off. The streets were empty except for other figures like the conductor, standing motionless at intersections, all of them wearing transit uniforms from different eras: 1950s, 1970s, 1990s. They all turned to look at him simultaneously.
“Wait,” a familiar voice called out.
Marcus spun around. Standing at the subway entrance was his mother. But her face was gray, and her eyes were empty like the conductor’s, and she was wearing a transit uniform from the 1980s.
“Mom?” His voice broke.
“Come back inside, honey,” she said, her mouth moving with that same awful cracking sound. “You don’t belong up here. You belong with us. Down on the platform. On the 11:47.”
Behind her, through the subway doors, Marcus could see the platform. But now, standing on it, were dozens of people—hundreds maybe—all in transit uniforms from different decades, all motionless, all facing the tracks. And in those tracks, he could see something moving, something vast and ancient, coiled in the darkness like a serpent made of shadows and abandoned dreams.
Marcus ran.
He ran through the streets of the twisted city, but every path led back to the subway entrance. Every street curved and doubled back. The empty figures followed him with their heads, eyes fixed on him even as he fled, not chasing, just watching with patient interest.
Finally, gasping and terrified, Marcus stumbled back to the subway entrance and down the stairs. He didn’t know where else to go. The world above had revealed itself as false, a stage set, a thin illusion. Below was real. He could feel it.
He reached the platform. The other passengers parted silently to let him through, and when he looked down at himself, he saw he was wearing a transit uniform. It was dated 2024. His hands had taken on that translucent quality, and he could feel the absence beginning to creep in behind his eyes.
The 11:47 pulled into the station.
The conductor stood by the doors, the same gray-faced man from the stairs, and now Marcus recognized him as he had been—himself, thirty-seven years older, waiting.
“Welcome,” his older self said, extending a hand with impossible gentleness. “You’re finally ready to accept where you are.”
Marcus wanted to resist. Every fiber of his being screamed to run, to climb back to that false city and keep running. But he was so tired. He’d been so tired for so long, hadn’t he? He couldn’t quite remember when. Working late. The 11:47. The platform. Day after day, month after month, year after year.
Three years. The conductor had said three years.
But when Marcus thought back, trying to remember before the train, before the endless cycle, the memories wouldn’t come. There was nothing before the platform. The platform had always been there. The 11:47 had always been there. And him, waiting, always waiting.
Except.
Except there was something. A moment. A flash of something important. He’d been in a car. On a street. It was March 15th, 1987. He was seven years old. His mother was driving him to school. There had been a truck, a red light, a sound like the world breaking—
And then, nothing. Nothing but the platform. The train. The endless 11:47.
The conductor’s empty hand was still extended.
“How many passengers are here?” Marcus asked, his voice strange and distant in his own ears.
“Everyone who’s ever died on this line,” the conductor said. “In three hundred and twenty-seven years. We wait for them to remember. When they do, they join us. When they stop fighting, they help welcome the others.”
Marcus looked at his mother, at the hundreds of gray-faced figures in their vintage uniforms, at the vast presence coiling in the depths of the tracks—a thing that fed on lost souls, on people trapped between the world they left and the world they couldn’t reach.
And he realized, with a clarity that was almost worse than the terror, that the conductor wasn’t evil. None of them were. They were just… trapped. Waiting. Feeding the thing below to keep themselves from dissolving entirely. Each new passenger was another moment of reprieve. Another soul to sustain the spiral of their eternal captivity.
Marcus took the conductor’s hand.
The Twist
But this isn’t the end of the story.
The moment Marcus’s hand touched the conductor’s, everything shattered.
The platform vanished. The other passengers, the train, the coiled thing in the darkness—all gone. Marcus found himself gasping awake in a hospital bed, his wife’s hand gripping his desperately, tears streaming down her face.
“He’s awake,” she sobbed. “Oh God, Marcus, you’re awake.”
Marcus’s throat was dry, his body felt strange and heavy. Around him, he could hear the beep of monitors, the soft susurrus of hospital machinery.
“I’m okay?” he managed to croak.
His wife’s face crumpled further. “You’ve been in a coma for thirty-seven years.”
Marcus’s blood went cold. “What?”
“The accident,” she whispered. “March 15th, 1987. You were seven years old. A car hit you. The doctors said you’d never wake up. Your mother…” she broke off, unable to continue.
As Marcus tried to move, tried to process this information, something terrible became clear. Through the hospital window, he could see the city. But it was wrong. The buildings looked like they’d been drawn from memory. The streets were twisted, doubled-back. And everywhere—everywhere—he could see them. Gray-faced figures in transit uniforms from different eras, standing motionless in the streets, in the hospitals, in the rooms around him. All of them watching. All of them waiting.
His wife’s grip on his hand was becoming colder.
And when he looked at her, he saw her eyes beginning to empty.
“Welcome back,” she whispered, her voice crackling like the conductor’s. “We’ve been waiting so long for you to remember. We need you. The thing below is always hungry.”
Marcus understood then. There was no wake-up. There was no escape. The hospital was just another layer of the platform, a more sophisticated illusion for someone sophisticated enough to see through the first one. He hadn’t escaped the 11:47 at all. He’d never escaped it.
He was screaming when the fluorescent lights above flickered and hummed, and a sound—distant, but drawing closer—echoed through the hospital room. The sound of a train approaching the platform.
The door to his room opened. The conductor stepped inside, and now Marcus could see through the illusion of his face to something vast and patient underneath.
“Come,” the conductor said. “The 11:48 is arriving. Your shift has begun. There are new passengers to welcome, and you must help us feed the thing below.”
And Marcus walked, because he had no choice, because he had never had a choice, and perhaps because the thing below was already inside him—had been inside him since that moment on March 15th, 1987, when a seven-year-old boy’s body hit the pavement and his soul got caught between stations, lost forever on a train that never arrives, watching, waiting, welcoming other lost souls to join him in the eternal commute.
The last thing he heard, as the train doors opened and the vast presence in the darkness reached up to embrace him once more, was the conductor’s voice:
“Welcome back, Marcus. Let’s ride.”
And the train pulled away from the platform, carrying its cargo of the eternally damned deeper into the darkness, where the thing that had waited so patiently for him ever since that fatal day was finally, completely satisfied.
The Last Passenger” is a story about being trapped—trapped between worlds, trapped in time, and ultimately trapped by the very systems we trust to carry us toward safety. Some doors, once opened, can never be closed.
Related articles:
Ghost Stories: The Whispers in Apartment 7B
