Fellow traveler.

 One chilly November evening, work dropped me off at the regional town of N. I had to take the train. I boarded in the evening, and the train arrived at N in the morning. I took a compartment for business trips. There were three or four other people in the carriage besides me and the sleepy conductor. Everyone was sitting quietly in their seats. It was cool, apparently they decided not to heat it too much, since there were practically no passengers, so I decided to leave my jacket and woolen turtleneck sweater on. The train jerked and, gaining speed, left behind the illuminated, noisy island of the city. The train was surrounded on all sides by the silent night.

Occasionally, in the monotonous rattle of wheels on joints and the noise of movement, the rustle of an opening door and the bang of a vestibule door lock crept in. The dim light bulb in the compartment only outlined the shelves and the table, she clearly did not have enough strength for more. It was impossible to read. It was boring to look at the blackness of the window with the occasional flickering lights of distant, rare houses in this direction. I didn't feel like sleeping either. Leaning back, I closed my eyes and listened to the knocking, gradually merging and transforming into a kind of melody. The melody of the railway. And, apparently, dozed off. I was awakened by the sharp whistle of the train and the noise of the oncoming train that cut into the music of the wheels. Like filmstrips, bright spots of windows of an oncoming passenger train flew by the window. It was only when the darkness of the night and the monotonous sound of the wheels returned that I saw Him. He was sitting across from her, lost in the darkness of the shadow from the top shelf. His hands rested open on his knees. It was impossible to see the face, but the attentive gaze was felt literally physically. We sat in silence for about half a minute, looking into each other's eyes.

—I'm sorry, you seemed to be dozing, I didn't want to wake you up," the night passenger broke the silence.

 I glanced at my watch, trying to determine how much sleep I'd had, but I couldn't determine when I'd fallen asleep. After some effort and calculations, it turned out to be about an hour - have you been here long?

— No, a quarter of an hour, no more.

— Oleg.

— Viktor Petrovich. You can just say Victor.

I was about to shake hands with my fellow traveler, but he continued to sit with his hands folded in his lap, only nodding his head slightly. To hide my awkwardness, I asked:

— Are you going to N?

— No, to Myasnitsky forest. It's much closer.

"I haven't heard."

— A small village. Several houses.

— Do you live there?

It seemed to me that a smile flashed across Victor's face.

— No, rather, on a business trip.

— And what can you do in a small village on a business trip?

— Communicate with people.

Here, he smiled again before answering. They usually smile like that when they're not telling the whole truth.

— Are you an ethnographer?

"Something like that."

I wasn't going to pull answers out of the fellow traveler with a pair of tongs, apparently, he didn't want to communicate, and I didn't ask him further.

Several minutes passed in silence. I looked out the window and wondered if I should go to bed or continue to sit.

— I collect and research mysterious and paranormal phenomena.

Wow, Viktor Petrovich decided to let me in on his business.

— An interesting activity. Is it a hobby or a profession?

— Modus vivendi.

— Lifestyle.

— Do you know Latin?

— Just a few catch phrases. I learned it at school to impress the girls.

"Was it successful?"

— You are the first one who appreciated it.

This time the smile was friendly. Strangely, the shadow did not allow one to see the features of the fellow traveler, only an attentive look or a smile appeared separately.

— So what is the mysterious thing that happened in... meat, I think... forest?

— Myasnitsky.

— I'm sorry, Myasnitsky forest. Was someone hacked, perhaps?

— Yes, during the war. More than one thousand soldiers perished in the swamps in the Bora region. The fighting was so fierce that there was no time for the dead, and there was no one to clean up, and they lay around the neighborhood. Later, when the fighting shifted to the west, the locals who returned to the village buried the fallen. But since then, men's voices are heard in the forest, and there is a smell of shag, then a soldier knocks on the hut, asks for water to drink or a loaf of bread. Or even someone will see the whole battle scene in some ravine. Few people want to live in such a place, so the people ran away, only a few old women and old men survive.

It gave me the creeps. No, you can't scare me with stories, but in the semi-darkness of the compartment, where glass separates from the pitch darkness of the night, and only one dim light bulb saves, the images of the restless soldiers flashed through my mind too clearly and realistically.

"Aren't you afraid of ghosts?"

Once again, a smile emerged from the shadows.

— As in the joke — "why be afraid of us?". No, it's not scary. Sometimes the living are scarier and more dangerous.

— I agree.

We sat in silence for a minute. The fellow traveler continued to examine me, and I, looking out the window, digested what I had heard.

— Have you been to many anomalous zones?

— I've traveled all over the Sverdlovsk region. It is rich in anomalous places. For example, in the poultry farm area, on the outskirts of Yekaterinburg, there is an unfinished four-story hospital, which has the reputation of being a bad, cursed place. There, for no reason, bricks fall on the heads of the curious, the floor falls under their feet, and concrete stairs threaten to collapse at any moment. Everything is crumbling, the walls are collapsing, there are holes in the floor... The building is covered with modern legends. The construction site is no more than 15 years old. It was abandoned due to the mysterious death of the director. But even during the construction process, people were constantly dying there... According to rumors, the construction of the hospital began on the site of the old cemetery. And over the years, several children and teenagers have lost their lives inside the gloomy room. Among other things, ghosts have been seen materializing in it, strange bluish flashes of light in window openings, as well as new brickwork and fresh cement coatings, although no one is even thinking about resuming construction. Damn, in a word.

"Is there really something there?"

— Yes, the place is gloomy. At first, melancholy comes over, and after an hour in the building, depression covers. It always seems that someone is watching you, some rustling, sighing. And this is during the day. No one dares to go there at night.

"Where else were you?"

— I was on the TV tower. All in the same Yekaterinburg. The building of an unfinished TV tower. It towers over the city near the circus. It's not a good place. Until the entrance was sealed, it served as a gathering place for Satanists. All kinds of extreme athletes who like to look at the city from a bird's-eye view often fell from a height and fell to their deaths. The feeling there is similar to that in an unfinished hospital.

— But all sorts of bad houses, I heard, priests consecrate, and ghosts or whatever is bad there disappears.

"It's happened before. Only a bad place is not a dirty room where the floors are washed, the dust is wiped, and there is nothing, everything is clean. There's not much you can do here with holy water and prayers. Are you a believer yourself? I see you're not wearing a cross.

— It's hard to say. I believe in God, but I don't go to church. And the cross is an attribute, its presence or absence does not increase or diminish a person's faith.

I patted my chest to back up my words... wait a minute, how did he know?

— And what makes you think that I don't wear a cross?

— By the way you asked about the consecration. The slight disparagement of the word "priest" led me to this, otherwise the word "priest" or "father" would have been used.

— Do you believe in God yourself?

Now I've tried to catch him in the answer now.

— As Jung said, "I don't need to believe it — I know it exists."

"What's the difference?"

— Faith, one way or another, implies the presence of further evidence, and knowledge is an axiom.

— What's the scariest place you've ever visited?  I tried to steer our conversation away from the shaky ground of the Theosophical debate.

The fellow traveler was silent, my question clearly awakened some unpleasant memories in him. His hands nervously moved up and down his knees. For a moment, his neighbor's body leaned forward, and his face slid out of the shadows. It seemed to me that fear flashed in his eyes. But the face immediately disappeared into the shadows. There was no smile, just one attentive look from unblinking eyes.

— This is the village of Rastess. The now uninhabited settlement of gold miners, located about 25-30 kilometers west of Kytlym, is still in the same Sverdlovsk region. Previously, the famous Babinovsky highway passed through it. Mysterious lights are seen in the sky every now and then. There are many stories about evil spirits and evil spirits. Tourists and hunters avoid these places. There's not a soul in the village these days. All its inhabitants seemed to have disappeared somewhere, leaving all the things in the houses. And there are open graves in the cemetery. It could be attributed to folklore, but I saw it with my own eyes. The Babinovsky tract has long lost its former significance, and the road to Rustess is completely lost in the forest expanses. I got there with a local guide, and then I almost got lost a couple of times. We went out early in the morning and arrived in the evening. It was summer, so it was still light. The place is creepy. We walked around the village. All along the way, it felt like people were all here, only everyone was hiding from us, lurking nearby and watching. And most importantly, there are no birds.… The silence is dead. It was already getting dark, and at first we planned to spend the night near the village. But as dusk began to fall, fear drove us away. Well, we were confused during the day, but at night… Anyway, we got lost and went back to the village. The sky was clear then, and the moon, which was almost full, was shining well. Everything seems to be quiet around us, we are standing on the outskirts of the village: it's scary to go somewhere unknown, and it's creepy to go to the village, and it's impossible to stand still. We see that everything seems to be the same in the village, but on the other hand, something is wrong. It looks like an ordinary residential village. And we went out near the cemetery of the settlement, I looked and felt the hairs on my head move, and the graves were standing whole. The crosses are even, not skewed like in the daytime, and in some places there are flowers on the mounds. I nudged the guide, pointing to the cemetery, but he saw and let's cross ourselves, and he began to whisper a prayer very quickly. I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye, turned towards the village and... horror seized me, my legs immediately became wobbly, I want to run, but I can't. People were approaching us silently, unhurriedly—women, men, old people, children. And all this in deathly silence. Dozens of eyes stared at us without blinking! And no one said a word. The guide pulled my sleeve and started running along the overgrown highway. His jerk brought me out of my daze, and I rushed after him. We ran for a long time, and soon I lost sight of him. Panting, scratched all over, wet, I flew out onto some kind of road. It was only there that I collapsed to the ground and lay there for maybe half an hour, gasping for air.… And I never saw the guide again.

The fellow traveler fell silent. His voice trembled at the last words of the story, apparently reliving all that horror. I was also impressed by the story. I wanted to say something to lighten the mood and change the subject, but nothing came to mind. I pressed my back against the wall of the carriage and stared out the window. Somewhere out there, in the blackness of the night, a creepy village with its silent night inhabitants flew by. The music of the wheels was soothing. Dark. Pillars flying out of it for a moment. Sparse lights flying in the distance. And a knock, a steady, soothing knock. Knock... knock... knock… uk…

I must have dozed off again. I was awakened by the sharp whistle of the train and the noise of the oncoming train that cut into the music of the wheels. Like filmstrips, bright spots of windows of an oncoming passenger train flew by the window. I thought of my fellow passenger, who had been so unceremoniously left alone with his terrible story, and looked at the seat opposite. It was empty. There was no one else in the compartment. I stretched, got up, and went out into the hallway. The carriage was asleep. There was a rustle at the beginning of the carriage, and the sleepy conductor appeared from her compartment.

— Tell me, how long ago was the Myasnitsky Bor station?

"How should I know?"

— How, there should have been a stop there.

— Yeah, about five years ago.

"What do you mean?"

— It's been five years since we stopped there.

- Why?

— Because no one has been living there for five years.

Pouring herself a glass of boiling water from the tank, the conductor dived back into her compartment, letting her know that the conversation was over.

— Wait, what about my traveling companion?

"What traveling companion?"  A sleepy and now angry face poked out of the compartment.

— Well, the one who got hooked at the station and recently got out.

The head disappeared.

"What traveling companion?" We haven't stopped anywhere yet. So no one came in or out. You should go to bed.

The door buzzed shut.

And I was standing in the narrow corridor of the carriage, completely at a loss. And somehow I didn't want to return to the empty and dim compartment at all. A shudder went through my whole body at the terrible thought of the nature of my interlocutor.

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.

Unplanned stop

 I tell it from my father's words, he likes to tell this story a dozen times to everyone who is happy to listen. He was teaching physics at the time and rode the subway every day. It was a long time ago, when our metro was still called Leningrad.

He was driving after work one day, and then the train stopped in the tunnel. Passengers are not panicking, everyone is doing their own thing. Only a sound began to be heard, as if water was gurgling somewhere, or a tunnel draft. They said over the speakerphone that the train would resume movement soon.

And then the lights went out.

There were no mobile phones to light up, and people in the dark began to worry. Someone lit a lighter, but it was of little use. A girl started crying in the carriage. People gradually began to worry and grumble, saying what an outrage. Through the grumbling, my father could make out the sounds from the tunnel: the murmuring had become louder.

"The tracks are flooded," a passenger said knowingly. — We'll be standing for a long time.

People started to worry, someone had already panicked and started shouting that the tunnel was going to flood up to the ceiling, and they would all drown here.

The train had been waiting for ten minutes. The water was gurgling quite clearly now — it seemed as if it was flowing directly under the carriages, and in a rather violent stream. In addition, there was another sound — as if someone was slapping wet palms on the glass and rubbing the glass with a characteristic creak. You never know what anyone does in the dark from idleness — my father did not pay attention to it at first, but then realized that the sound, firstly, was moving - the "flip—floper", invisible in the dark, moved from one end of the car to the other, faded away, and then returned back. And secondly, the sound was clearly coming from outside.

Even my father felt a chill here. Other passengers also began to notice something was amiss. At first, an aunt told them not to bully, but then a more attentive citizen whispered, "It's outside," and everyone fell silent at once.

Soon, the sound began to come from the other side of the car, as if this bully had easily bypassed the car and walked on the other side. The train was standing in pitch darkness in a tunnel in which water was clearly gurgling. The invisible minx easily reached the windows with his hands, although everyone can imagine the height of the car. At the same time, he jokingly walked around the car in a circle, as if the coupling between the cars was not a hindrance to him.

The guy with the lighter decided to investigate what was going on there. When the sound got closer to him (he was standing at the door), he lit a light and held it up to the glass...

Everyone who saw who was outside jumped to the other side of the carriage at once, so that it swayed. A face was staring at the glass. White, even bluer. It was difficult to see the details through the glass, but this creature had small dark eyes framed by thick dark circles, like those of a terminally ill person. His mouth was wide open, and the skin around it was sagging and flabby. It was only visible for a couple of seconds, then the guy dropped the lighter, and the car plunged back into darkness. Now the slapping on the glass has become more frequent. Someone screamed, "Close the windows!" People huddled together in the center of the car in a panic. Then the splashing of water was heard already inside the carriage, as if someone had knocked over a bucket on the floor...

My father doesn't remember much about what happened next, but for about five minutes there was complete confusion — people were screaming, clinging to each other, no one understood anything. And then suddenly the lights turned on. People looked at each other and at the black windows. The splashing stopped, the murmuring of the water subsided. The train started moving slowly. When the doors opened at the station, people rushed out so quickly that those on duty at the station even became worried.

And when my father looked back, he saw that the sides of the car and the windows were all wet, although, as it turned out later, there was no flooding of the tunnel, there was just a wiring malfunction, which was repaired in ten minutes.

The subway incident

 I went down to the subway. The time was about eleven o'clock in the evening. As usual, there was a lot to do at work on Friday, which is why I came home so late. Very tired, I entered the last carriage. Ignoring everyone, I sat down on an empty seat, turned on the player at full volume and closed my eyes. Fortunately, it was necessary to go along one branch — however, to the very end.

I must have dozed off. When I woke up, the train had already stopped. I noticed that there was no one near me. Looking around, I saw that I was the only one in the carriage. This alarmed me, but then I looked into another carriage and calmed down. A large group was sitting there and discussing something. The train began to accelerate, and I finally calmed down. But then a song went through the player, followed by another one... I knew that we had a long commute between stations on the line, but it was only for a little over two minutes, and both songs lasted at least three minutes. The train was still traveling at the same speed.

I went to the glass between the carriages and looked at the company from the front carriage. They looked calm, but something about them seemed strange to me. There were three of them—two girls and a guy. One of the girls was sitting with her back to me, facing the others. Suddenly, I realized what had confused me: the girl sitting with her back was moving her arm too rhythmically. Every fifteen seconds, she raised her hand, twirled it, explaining something, and lowered it again, like a wound-up mechanism — with precision to the second. Then I noticed the same pattern in the guy. He nodded his head with the same frequency. I knocked on them, but they were doing the same thing at regular intervals.

"I like trains," came a voice from behind.

A chill ran through me. I forced myself to turn around. A boy of about six years old stood near one of the doors and looked out the window.

 I could barely manage, being absolutely sure that there was no one in the car a minute ago.

—Alexey,— he introduced himself seriously, looking at me with green eyes. Then he turned to the window and stared in fascination.

— Why are you alone, where are your parents?

"My parents left without me," he sighed. — Mom was crying, but they couldn't take me away...

The boy sighed again and continued:

— The station is coming soon, and I'll go for a ride, — he looked at me and smiled. — I really loved riding the subway and on the train to visit my grandmother...

Suddenly I woke up, sitting in a crowded carriage. I stood up, giving way to a lady, and stood all the way home, looking at the people crowding around me. When I got home, I poured myself some hot tea and went online. I spent an hour typing queries for the name of the station, stage, and nearby stations — until finally, on one of the news feeds, I found a mention of the boy's death right in the train carriage on the stretch between stations. There was a picture of a boy on the side. Alexey was looking at me from the monitor screen.

Since then, I have been unable to sleep on the subway and, driving along the stretch between these stations, I always remember the boy with green eyes who loves to ride trains.