The train came every day at the same hour, as reliable as the sun’s rise and fall, though it came from the wrong direction, from the forest itself. The villagers never spoke of it aloud, but they all knew it came, its shrieks echoing down the narrow roads, a reminder of what lay hidden behind the trees.

The train was a thing of iron and rust, its tracks running straight into the forest, where no one dared to tread. It rumbled through the village, its carriages dark, its windows tightly shut. And inside, L. had heard the stories. The whispers that carried from the train’s shrieking passage—cries, wails, echoes of something trapped, something screaming in the night.

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But she never feared the train. It passed, and then it was gone, leaving behind only the lingering sound of its heavy wheels grinding over the iron tracks.

L. stood by the side of the road, watching the train pass, her gaze never wavering. Some part of her wondered where it went, what it carried, why it never stopped in the village. No one ever questioned it, and no one ever dared to speak of it directly. It was a thing to be ignored, a thing that moved through the world and left nothing behind but fear.