David waited until 1:30 AM. The food cart had completed its round. The suited entity above had settled into dormancy. Razor was eating his second protein bar with the slow, reverent pace of a man who had rediscovered the concept of real food.

  "I’m going out," David said, standing and pulling on his coat.

  Razor stopped chewing. "Out where?"

  "Car 13. The restricted zone at the back of the train." David held up the brass Master Key. "This opens every door from here to Car 12. Car 13 requires a different approach."

  "You’re out of your mind." Razor’s voice was flat with conviction. "The pregnant thing is still out there. And the conductor—"

  "The conductor just completed its round. It won’t return to this car for at least ninety minutes based on the patrol interval I’ve observed. The Weeping Mother moves car by car, front to back. She’s currently in Car 3 or 4. I have a window."

  Razor stared at him. "You’ve been tracking their patrol patterns."

  "I’ve been building a model." David pocketed the key. "Lock the door behind me. Eat. Sleep if you can. I’ll be back before the 3 AM food cart."

  He stepped into the corridor and pulled the cabin door shut behind him.

  The hallway was a tunnel of dim light and shadow, the wall sconces casting yellowed pools on the floor at irregular intervals. David moved through it with the measured pace of someone who understood that speed was less important than noise discipline.

  He reached the connection between Car 8 and Car 9. The Master Key slid into the lock with a precision that felt intentional—the key wanted to be used. The door opened onto the next car’s corridor, identical in layout, different in the specific pattern of bloodstains on the carpet.

  Car 9. Car 10.

  Halfway through Car 10, the train’s whistle screamed.

  The sound was wrong—not the operational whistle that signaled a station stop, but a longer, lower frequency, a sound that vibrated in the chest cavity and the orbital bones. The wall lamps died. Not flickered—died, as if someone had pulled the main breaker for the entire train.

  Absolute darkness. And from outside the windows: nothing. Not the darkness of a night sky or an unlit landscape. The nothing of a space where light had never existed and never would.

  The train had entered a tunnel.

  Rule 9: When the train enters a tunnel and absolute darkness falls outside, do not turn your head toward the window. No matter what is pressed against the glass.

  David stopped walking. He stood in the center of the corridor, facing forward, his eyes fixed on the vanishing point of the hallway ahead.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The first impact came three seconds later.

  SPLAT.

  Something hit the window to his right with the wet, heavy sound of a water balloon filled with something denser than water. Then another. Then dozens, hundreds, a continuous barrage of impacts that turned the windows into a percussion instrument playing in compound time.

  Through the glass—which David did not look at, which he kept in his peripheral vision only, processed by rod cells and lateral geniculate pathways that could detect motion and shape but not resolve detail—he perceived movement. Pale shapes pressing against the exterior surface. Faces. Many faces. Flat, distorted, the features smeared against the glass like specimens pressed between slides.

  And then the voice.

  "David..."

  Nicole’s voice. Coming from the glass to his right, at the exact height his ear would be if he turned his head.

  "David, it’s so dark... I’m scared... just look at me, just for a second..."

  The reproduction was excellent. The pitch, the cadence, the specific way Nicole’s voice thinned when she was genuinely frightened—not the performative fear she’d deployed in arguments, but the real thing, the sound she’d made once during a thunderstorm when the power went out in her dorm and she’d called him at 3 AM. David had held the phone to his ear and talked her through the dark for forty-five minutes. He remembered every inflection.

  The entity outside the glass remembered them too.

  "Please, David... I know I hurt you, but I’m dying out here... just one look..."

  David kept walking. His gaze stayed locked on the corridor ahead. His footsteps maintained their rhythm—steady, unhurried, each boot placement deliberate.

  He did not look.

  But he noticed something that the entity hadn’t predicted: the simulation of Nicole’s voice was technically perfect but emotionally wrong. It was using fear—the version of Nicole who called during thunderstorms. The real Nicole, the one who had stood in a hotel bathrobe and told him to stop acting like a martyr, would never beg. The real Nicole, at the end, had been cold, practical, already-moved-on. Fear was the wrong character model.

  The thing outside the glass didn’t know Nicole. It knew David’s memory of Nicole. It was playing back his own cached data, filtered through his own emotional associations. And those associations were already outdated—corrupted by the reality of Room 602, overwritten by the new data he’d collected in the hours since.

  The voice faded as he walked. Other voices replaced it—his mother’s, his roommate’s, Professor Chen from his compiler theory class—each one a cached recording pulled from his memory and replayed with varying degrees of fidelity. None of them made him turn.

  The tunnel lasted two minutes and fourteen seconds. David counted each one.

  When the train emerged, the wall lamps flickered back to life. The pale shapes peeled off the glass and disappeared. The corridor was empty and silent.

  David checked his watch. He’d lost two minutes but gained confirmation: the tunnel entities operated on a stimulus-response model that accessed the player’s memory for bait material. They were dangerous to anyone with strong emotional attachments and weak boundary discipline.

  David had strong emotional attachments—he wasn’t a machine, regardless of what his affect sometimes suggested. But his boundary discipline had been forged in a very specific fire, very recently, and the scar tissue was still fresh.

  He unlocked the door to Car 11. Then Car 12. And at the end of Car 12’s corridor, he found what the mirror had shown him.

  The red iron door. Car 13.

  And in front of it, on her knees, her broken fingernails leaving fresh scratches in the metal: the Weeping Mother. She had circled back. Her patrol loop was faster than David’s model had predicted.

  She was between him and the door. Ten meters away. Well within her detection range.

  David pressed himself into the shadow of a doorframe and began to think very quickly.