The Ghost Train

 Last year I decided to spend a vacation in Yekaterinburg. I live in Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan— which is a picturesque city. I boarded the Nizhnevartovsk train in the morning, which was supposed to arrive in the capital of the Urals around midnight. The hotel room was booked, and the phone number of the local taxi was entered into the phone. All that remained was to lie down comfortably on my favorite top shelf of the compartment and turn on my favorite Leonard Cohen headphones. A family was traveling with me: mom, dad, and a son about seventeen years old. As I read, I gave them the humor magazines, and the train rocked steadily and moved forward.

As often happens, some kind of mishap occurred, and we were held for thirty minutes in Ust-Katava, and then for more than an hour in Chebarkul. So we were an hour and a half late.

Around midnight, I quietly went out for a smoke, so as not to wake the neighbors. I love the smell of trains, I love leaning against the window, watching sleepers, lanterns, rare barracks on the tracks, striped picket posts float away into the distance. Now, for the life of me, I can't remember the name of the station, which stood for three minutes, and the station was a brick shed with an incongruous clock on it.

The conductor came out into the vestibule to see whether to open the door for her or not, but no one was eager to leave this hole for Nizhnevartovsk, which meant there was no need to fuss. Only a girl, definitely from the local area, in a tracksuit and a red puffed jacket was walking, talking on the phone. With a wave of his head, black hair flutters in the wind, and the awkward movement sent the gadget flying onto the sleepers.

The hands on the station clock jumped to ten o'clock in the evening, Moscow time. The local time is zero hours zero minutes. Midnight.

The girl jumped off the sleepers, bent down for the phone, in my headphones Cohen asked me to give him crack and anal sex, Stalin, the Berlin Wall and St. Paul. Even through the music, I could hear the increasing rumble of the train. The carriages were rushing at great speed where the girl was. Every carriage, every window is imprinted in my memory, like the pictures of a mad photographer. Gaping mouths, frantic, pain-filled eyes without irises, the slit throat of a woman knocking on a window. A hanged man was dancing in the vestibule, looking for support. All the passengers were dead and everyone was trying to escape. And in his headphones, Cohen talked about souls screaming, "I repent, I repent, I repent." Cohen didn't know what they were talking about. Cohen was singing in a hoarse voice, and wagons filled with corpses were rushing past me.

A hand pulled me away from the window. The hum of the train subsided, and I cautiously looked at the rails, expecting to see meat, guts, and blood, but the girl in wet sweatpants was staring at us with bulging eyes and muttering something.

The train started moving, and the ill-fated station floated into the distance. I took off my headphones:

— That's what happened? Y-y-you know? You, uh, pushed me away, so you know?..

I stammered and screamed at the same time. Panic seized me. For the first time in less than twenty-seven years of my life.

"Come to my place, I'll tell you everything."..

Five minutes later, we were sitting in the staff compartment and slurping cognac and chocolate out of glasses. Zhenya, that was the name of the guide, helped herself to chocolate, and I helped myself to cognac.

— I've been working here for seven years. The girls were talking about the ghost train. Some saw him, some didn't. I didn't believe it. The first time I ran into him was about five years ago. I closed my eyes and prayed. I thought it didn't happen that way, that it was crazy. I would put it down to glitches, but no—two more girls saw him. And in the third car, a passenger did not get off at his station. He disappeared, leaving his passport and belongings. He just disappeared. We handed over his property and forgot. You never know, maybe the roof went off.  Zhenya exhaled and downed her glass. — I didn't think about the ghost train then. Yes, the horror stories say that you can't look at him for long, or you'll get sucked in, but I didn't believe in horror stories either. And two years and three months ago, I decided to give my friend a ride with a rabbit. She had to travel from Chelyabinsk to Nizhnevartovsk to work, so I put her in jail. The girls said in the morning that they had seen that train outside Sverdlovsk. And I didn't see Oksana, my friend, anymore. And no one saw it.

Zhenya burst into tears—oh, those drunken tears... "I don't want her fired," the thought flashed through her mind.

I stayed with Zhenya all the way to Yekaterinburg. I thought about the train, its passengers, and the unknown Oksana.

I didn't see Zhenya after that night, even though I was on the same flight back in the next car. And the Leonard Cohen song has left my playlist forever.