Chapter 8: Athens of the North

I laid on my back, unable to muster the effort to pull myself out of bed as I stared at the diary in my hands. I hadn’t dared open it again nor did I need to: not when that final page had already burned itself within my mind, despite the fact that I was in far too much pain to read it properly, just before the reset. All of this implied a great many things. Like the existence of magic in truth, rather than mere sleight of hand, and that the man whose diary I’d rifled through had been far more than a mere physician. A magician, then, one who had lost his life upon the distant predecessor to the train I was on, and had cursed the entire line for it. A curse that, perhaps, led directly to my present situation.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure why the old man had spent his final moments inconveniencing future commuters, rather than, I don’t know, using his vast cosmic powers to heal himself. Perhaps there was a rule or limitation against it, or maybe he simply didn’t know how to? It didn’t really matter, in the end: his exact motives were irrelevant, what I needed to do was find a way out of the trap. I’d already made some progress, I was sure, four hours of it in fact, which I doubted was a coincidence. Finding the diary was the first piece of the puzzle, now I just needed to solve another six hours, and I could arrive at Fort Worth and put this debacle firmly behind me. Or did I?

Edinburgh was the major interchange for the Caledonian Sleeper, the station where the long, sixteen carriage train would be broken up into three components, only one of which was heading to Fort Worth. This necessitated maintenance work on the tracks, as well as a switchover to the diesel locomotive, since there was no electrified rail further north. We would have to stop, so maybe, I could simply leave upon arrival, and damn the rest? It wouldn’t be long before I knew for sure, less than half an hour in fact, so I packed up my bag, taking the diary with me, and headed out to the carriage door, on the off chance that there wasn’t another contrived delay or amendment to the journey.

Typically, now that I actually had genuine expectations of getting out, time seemed to slow to a crawl. I didn’t want to take the laptop back out, in case I had to make a sudden run for it, so I was forced to resort to something I’d managed to avoid doing up until now: plugging my earbuds into my phone, and listening to music. Still no internet, of course, so all I had were the albums I’d already downloaded, which were all songs that I enjoyed, but also songs I’d heard many times before. There were worse ways to spend half an hour, but it wasn’t great either. The one bright spot in this, since I didn’t care what the other passengers thought of me, was that I had no hesitation in singing aloud, something I usually avoided in public.

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“We’re no strangers to love,

You know the rules, and so do I!

It’s a full commitment, I’m thinking of

You wouldn’t get this from any other guy…”

—

After a short musical interlude lasting thirty minutes and change, the overhead speakers roused from their slumber to declare that we were now approaching Edinburgh Waverley Station, the hub for all long distance trains passing through the Scottish capital. That was enough to get my hopes up, as it wasn’t a cancellation or any other such nonsense, so I put my phone away, and spent the final few minutes to the station the way I’d begun, staring eagerly at the door. In typical, horror film fashion, that was when the screaming started. Not from me this time, mind you, as the diary was still tucked away safely in my bag. No, the screaming came from the other end of the carriage, more specifically inside the cabin which I’d spent most of the previous loop inside, reading.

It was deafeningly loud, worse than should have been possible through the thick and rather soundproof walls of the cabin, so it wasn’t hard to fake curiosity from where I was standing. As before, a pair of uniformed officers from the Transport Police took the lead, though no waiter followed after this time, as there were no indications of a missing passenger who’d recently been in the Club Car. They still had to force their way inside though, using strong arms and a handheld battering ram.

“You’d think they’d have a spare key,” one of the strait-laced students in the nearby cabin muttered, having stuck her head out into the corridor to see what was going on.

It was a surprisingly good point, you’d think such a feature would be standard on public transportation, or even a master key of some kind. Maybe there was one, but it had been lost somehow? My speculation was cut short as they breached the door, heading in one at a time. Unlike with my own experience, this entry wasn’t followed by the whine of a taser: instead, both men promptly returned, carrying a body between them. It was the meth addict from before, and he was dead, but not from my knife: his eyes were both open, blank and unseeing but fully intact, so what was going on here?

He was clutching his chest, too, which might have been a coincidence: many hard drugs had unfortunate implications for cardiovascular health, but I didn’t believe it, not after what I’d just read. I’d killed him in the previous reset, could that have been the cause of his sudden and fatal heart attack? Possible, though I had no idea how to prove it either way without more murder, and more importantly…

“Due to a medical emergency, doors will not open at the next station to allow first responders to arrive on the scene.”

Ah, there’s the kicker. God damn it all.