Al-Marashda

My name is Yasser, Yasser Abdel Rahim.

For my entire life, I had never once set foot on a train. My mother harbored an inexplicable, deep-seated hatred for them, and she was constantly warning me against them. She would always repeat, with absolute terror gleaming in her eyes: "The bus is much better, my son." Truly, I never knew a logical reason for this buried loathing, nor why she preferred that we perish from exhaustion traveling the agricultural roads, rather than riding a comfortable train. I never understood her secret, and I never argued with her about it, until now. Until that night.

January 6, 2026.

I was compelled to travel south to my village in Upper Egypt to finalize the paperwork for my mother's inheritance. So, for the very first time in my life, I decided to take the train. I awoke to the sound of the radio broadcasting a weather warning for a rainy day, relentless thunderstorms, and lightning cleaving the very fabric of the sky.

Although it was only ten in the morning, the sky was choked with heavy, black clouds laden with rain, making the daylight look like the dead of night.

At Ramses Station, I stood before the ticket window. Behind the glass sat a man in his late fifties, his face worn, etched with the wrinkles of profound exhaustion, and his eyes ringed with dark circles as if he hadn't slept in a century. He asked for my destination, and I simply replied:
"Qena."
"Alright, the train leaves in an hour, from platform 4."
I told him, glancing at my watch:
"No, I am not ready now, put me on the three o'clock train."

At that, I felt the man jolt for a second, as if struck by an electric current. He paused and raised his eyes to me, then turned slowly to look at a paper wall calendar hanging beside him, and said in a trembling voice:

"You'd better avoid that three o'clock train, son, it has no first or second class, it is all third class, and it stops at many stations, you won't be comfortable on the journey, and..."
I interrupted him sternly:
"But I want to travel at three o'clock."

The man fell completely silent. He nodded slowly, like someone handing a condemned man over to the gallows, printed the ticket, and handed it to me. And when I turned to leave, I glanced back for a moment, finding him standing, following me with a strange look, and he kept staring at me until I disappeared entirely from his sight.

I returned home, and the sound of the rain that had begun to fall was deeply depressing. I packed my small bag and a blue folder containing the documents, and left the house.

The road to Ramses was drowning in rain, mud, and a bizarre darkness. The station looked like a monster swallowing travelers. The moment my feet touched the platform, a stifling quiet slapped me across the face. The three o'clock train sat there like a lifeless iron corpse. The train was not merely empty, it was mysteriously desolate, save for two other passengers. Its long carriages swam in pale neon light, as if an animalistic survival instinct had warned the passengers at the very last second before boarding, causing them to flee for their lives in sheer panic, leaving behind this desolate void.

The air inside the carriage was suffocating, swimming in that same pale neon light that flickered with every jolt. Directly in front of me sat a young soldier, clutching a tattered canvas bag to his chest as if it were his last shield in this world, his eyes glazed over, betraying a long deprivation of sleep. To his right sat a fat, excessively sweaty, heavily built man with a dyed mustache, wearing a shiny shirt that reeked of sweat. He was the sort of human who chatters loudly and incessantly to mask an internal dread of something unseen.

Near the borders of "Beni Suef," the temperature in the carriage plummeted suddenly. It was a bone-chilling cold, a cold that carried the scent of burnt flesh, and the dust of graves.
The seat beside me was empty, then, it became occupied.

I swear to you by all that is holy, I did not see him board, I did not hear his footsteps in the aisle, nor did I feel the seat vibrate when he sat down. It was as if he materialized directly from nothingness into existence.

He was an old man, emaciated to a degree that inspired both pity and disgust. His skin resembled old, wet newspaper stretched taut over a skeleton, and he had a broad forehead glistening with an unnatural sweat, his eyes sunken into two dark pits that reflected absolutely no light. He rested a cracked leather bag, looking as though it were fashioned from flayed skin, upon his knifelike knees.

For a full minute, he stared without blinking at the protruding edge of the ticket in my shirt pocket. Then, he turned his neck toward me with a terrifying slowness, so much so that I imagined I could hear the cracking of his dry cervical vertebrae. He opened his mouth and spoke:
"Are you getting off at Qena?"

I jolted in my seat, trying to hide the tremor in my hands, swallowed my saliva which now tasted like ash, and feigned composure:
"Yes."
He nodded excruciatingly slowly, rubbing his dry hands together, which produced a sound like the scraping of sandpaper:
"First time going down there at night?"
I clutched the blue folder to my chest as a flimsy shield that protected against nothing, and said:
"First time going down there at all in many years."

He kept staring directly into my eyes, his own eyes widening demonically. He leaned toward me until the chill of his breath touched my face, and whispered in a voice that sank icy claws into my brain:
"If the train stops before you get there, do not get off. Block your ears."

I looked away from him for a few seconds, then turned back to explode in anger at him, to curse him and chase him away from my side, but I found the seat empty. I looked around in panic, there was no one in the aisle, and the carriage door was shut. He had evaporated. As if the laws of matter and physics did not apply to him, he delivered his warning, and returned to the void.

I convinced myself, as do all fools clinging to logic to evade madness, that exhaustion, grief, and lack of sleep had birthed this hallucination. I went back to staring at the window glass, my reflection was pale against the darkness of the fields outside, but for a single second, I swear the reflection did not blink when I did.

At fourteen minutes past eleven before midnight, something unexpected happened.

The metallic skeleton of the train shrieked. The sound of grinding iron brakes tore through the silence of the night like the scream of an animal being slowly slaughtered. It was not a normal stop at a scheduled station, but a hesitant, sickly deceleration, as if the train were sinking into a pool of mud, and as if the driver were fighting an overwhelming urge to smash the emergency brakes and flee the cabin.
The carriage lights died for a moment, then returned with a sickly white glow. The two passengers jerked their heads up in terror. The fat man spat a filthy curse and wiped his profuse sweat. The soldier sat up straight, gripped his bag, and said in a hoarse, trembling voice:
"God preserve us, is everything alright?"

I wiped my breath's condensation from the glass and peered out. I saw nothing but a crumbling concrete platform, swallowed by a literal darkness, you could touch it with your hand and choke on it. A low stone building resembling a mass tomb stood there, above its door a yellow bulb casting a pale, swinging light, emitting a repulsive electrical buzz. On a metal sign, eaten away by rust to reveal a color underneath like clotted blood, the name protruded:
"Al-Marashda."

Suddenly, the train driver's voice blared from the dilapidated intercom. It was not his usual voice, but the voice of a man trembling with terror, speaking rapidly like someone running away from something, or toward something:
"Anyone getting off at Al-Marashda, get off immediately, the rest of the passengers stay in your seats inside the train! Nobody open the doors and nobody look out the window, we have a red signal ahead, we will wait a few seconds until it clears, do not get off!"

I grabbed my bag and stepped down, as Al-Marashda was closer to my home than Qena, and driven by herd stupidity, boredom, and the suffocation inside the carriage that had become like a tomb, the fat man and the soldier defied the instructions and followed me out.

The moment my foot touched the platform, I realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the very composition of this place. The Upper Egyptian air that night was not natural air, it was dry, freezing, carrying particles of dust that stung the skin like needles. And the darkness surrounding the platform was not merely the absence of light, it was alive, a dense black wall standing just a few meters from the edge of the lit platform, as if the world ended right there, and the unknown began.

A dreadful creak groaned from the door of the stone building, and out stepped a toweringly tall man, his frail body wrapped in a black wool coat that swallowed his features, holding up an old lantern with a shivering flame. He was a man nearing seventy, his face carved with deep wrinkles, and his eyes were entirely dead, the eyes of a man who had seen hell over and over until his soul had extinguished.
He shifted the lantern from his right hand to his left, stared at us with a gaze devoid of any human empathy, and said in a rough voice:

"Whoever is waiting for the tracks to clear, go inside and sit in the office, nobody stay standing on the platform in this dark."

The fat man lit a cigarette with his lighter, laughing loudly and provocatively to hide his tension:
"Why? Does the platform bite at night?"
The man fixed his eyes on the fat man's face, and said with a lethal coldness, a coldness that froze the blood in my veins:
"No, worse than that."

The way he pronounced the sentence, and the funereal tone entirely devoid of jest, made my guts twist. The fat man dropped his cigarette unconsciously and crushed it, and we all meekly followed the man into the office.

The room was rank. It reeked of dust, old paper, and burnt flesh. It housed a torn sofa bleeding its stuffing, a wooden desk with gnawed edges, and on the wall hung a massive grandfather clock with broken glass, its hands completely dead and frozen at exactly "11:14." In the corner sat an old radio transmitter, its wires severed and blanketed in rust. On the opposite wall hung a black and white photograph of the station, but the faces in the picture were blurred and erased, as if the subjects were screaming while it was being taken.

The man sat behind the desk, placed the lantern in front of him so our shadows warped against the walls like dancing monsters, took off his thick spectacles to wipe them on the edge of his galabiya, and said:
"My name is Girgis, I am the station master, or what's left of him."
The soldier asked him, rubbing his hands together in obvious fear:
"Will the delay be long, Uncle Girgis?"
Girgis raised his naked eyes, the lantern's flame reflecting in them like two dying coals:
"The delay isn't with the train, soldier."

I hate this kind of mystery. The mystery that precedes disasters. I stepped forward and slammed my hand on the dusty desktop:
"Then why is the signal red? What exactly is holding us up in this godforsaken place?"

He ignored my question, put his glasses back on, and stared at my features for a long, very long time, as if reading my thoughts, then suddenly asked me in a raspy voice as though coming from the bottom of a well:
"Whose son are you?"
I was slightly flustered, but I answered:
"I am Yasser, Yasser Abdel Rahim."

His hand stopped completely. He froze for two seconds, a silence so heavy descended that I could hear the hum of blood in my ears. Then he lowered his hands with a terrifying slowness, placed them on the desk, and his voice dropped until he was nearly whispering:
"Abdel Rahim? Abdel Rahim who worked as a signal assistant here?"
My heart plummeted into my stomach, and right then, I remembered the look of the ticket clerk who had stared at the calendar! He knew something I didn't!
"Yes, did you know my father?"

Girgis leaned toward me in his seat, his face approaching the lantern light so his wrinkles looked like black trenches, and said, his tone oscillating between pity and horror:
"Know him? The man lived his whole life on this platform."
The fat man let out an obnoxious, forced laugh, waving his hand:
"He means may he rest in peace, of course."

Girgis didn't even glance at the fat man, treating him like a buzzing insect. He reached a trembling hand into the bottom drawer of the desk, pulling it open with a screech that made my teeth ache, and retrieved a massive black ledger, its leather cover coated in a layer of mildew and wrinkled as if it had been exposed to intense fire. He turned its brittle, yellowed pages with a maddening slowness, as if leafing through the book of the dead, until he stopped at a specific page, and slowly turned the ledger toward me.
The page was lined, and at the top was a header written in dried red ink that looked like old, clotted blood.

I read the date written in the ledger with dreadful clarity:
Manifest of the Missing, Al-Marashda Incident / January 6, 1991.
I ran my trembling eyes over the handwritten names, until my eyes froze, and my heart quite literally stopped beating at the fourth line, as if it were written in fire:
Abdel Rahim Abdel Aal, Signal Assistant, "Not Found".

I took a step back and bumped into the sofa. I spoke in a voice I didn't recognize, the voice of someone choking and dripping with sheer loss:
"Are you insane? My father died in a train crash?! My mother told me all my life that he died in his bed while we were in Cairo!"

Girgis folded his hands over the ledger, a bitter, dark smile appearing on his face, and a sigh heavy with sorrow escaped his chest:
"If he had died in his bed, my son, it would have been easier. A comfortable death is a blessing."
The soldier stood up and backed toward the door, while sweat poured from the fat man's forehead, his cigarette dropping from his hand, his eyes darting between us in pure panic:
"What... what are you saying, old man?"

Girgis sighed, like someone preparing to wade into a swamp of corpses, and began to speak, his voice dropping gradually until it was almost a whisper:

"The night of January 6, 1991, at this exact time, 11:14 PM. The world was blanketed in a fog that blinded the eyes. A freight train entered the wrong switch at breakneck speed, meeting a passenger train coming from the opposite direction. Fire, smoke, screaming, corpses, people roasting alive inside the train, and the power was cut. Your father was on shift, and I was with him. We kept reaching out, pulling people from the ruins, calling out to the injured. And then, amidst all that hell..."

Girgis paused, swallowing with immense difficulty, his eyes widening as if he were watching the scene unfold before him right now.
"The station's loudspeaker out there on the platform turned on."
The fat man furrowed his brows and yelled with mild hysteria, his voice trembling:
"What loudspeaker? Didn't you just say there was a crash, destruction, and the power was out?"

Girgis slammed his fist on the desk with suppressed fury:
"Yes, it turned on! Even though the electricity in the entire district was out, and the pole holding the speaker was melting from the heat of the fire. No wires, but it worked. It started letting out static, and then it began calling out names."
I asked in a hoarse voice, trembling, the dryness tearing at my throat:
"Whose names?"

Girgis spoke, pressing on his words as if spitting poison:
"The names of the injured and the passengers. But the speaker wasn't calling them in a normal way, no. Every person heard their name being called in the voice of the person they loved most in the world. One would hear his mother crying and calling out to him, another would hear his wife begging for his help, another would hear his children screaming. And whoever's heart gave in..."

Girgis looked at the office door with genuine terror and finished:
"And answered..."
I finished it for him, my teeth chattering:
"They disappeared."
Girgis nodded with profound grief:
"Yes. The darkness would descend on them like a black shroud and take them. Without a trace. Without a body. Without a drop of blood. As if they never existed."

The fat man forced a choppy, hysterical laugh, wiping the heavy sweat from his neck:
"What a load of tales! Every old station has to have its myth."
Girgis turned to him with a gaze sharp as a razor, and said with a terrifying stoniness:
"May God make it easy for you, but the moment you hear someone calling your name outside, remember that you laughed, and do not answer. Swallow your voice."

And in that exact moment, as if the entity lurking outside had been waiting for that very sentence to give its signal, and decided to prove the nightmare true.
We heard a loud, piercing hum that drilled into our ears. It came from outside. From the burnt speaker hanging on the platform pole.
A terrifying electrical buzz, like the grinding of a sharp blade, then came a tender, soft, warm woman's voice, dripping with anguish, pleading, and tears:
"Mahmoud Galal, where are you?"

The four of us stiffened in the office like statues. The air stopped in my lungs. We looked through the dusty office window. We saw the young soldier, "Mahmoud," who had been standing with us just moments ago, had walked out without us realizing or hearing the door! He stood in the middle of the platform, his back to us, his head tilted sharply to the side as if listening to a gentle reproach we couldn't hear.
And in a hypnotized tone, entirely stripped of human will, hijacked like a puppet with cut strings, the young man replied in a calm, surrendered voice full of longing:
"I am right here, Mother, alright, I am coming."

Girgis lunged from behind his desk like a wildcat, kicked the chair aside, and rushed toward the door carrying the lantern, screaming hysterically and waving his hand like a madman. The fat man and I followed blindly.
The scene on the platform defied all logic, the young man was walking with slow steps, toward the edge of the platform, toward the darkness.

Girgis screamed at the top of his lungs:
"Stop right there, soldier! Son, come back! Do not answer! That is not your mother! Don't take a single step outside the light!"
But the soldier didn't look back. He didn't even blink. He stepped down from the platform onto the train tracks, and walked toward the wall of darkness. We didn't see him fall. The instant he crossed the boundary of the yellow bulb's light, he dissolved.

I saw with my own eyes how the air folded around him like the mouth of a formless black beast, swallowing him without chewing. He vanished entirely. We didn't even hear the crunch of gravel under his boots after he crossed the line of darkness. He vanished, leaving nothing behind but his bag tossed on the platform.
The fat man backed away until he was plastered against the exterior wall of the office, fell to his knees, and began to sob like a small child, his eyes bulging so far they practically leaped from their sockets:

"What is this?! What is happening, oh God?! I want to get on the train!"
Girgis grabbed him by the collar of his shiny shirt, dragged him inside, and shook him violently:
"If you get on the train now, the darkness will eat you! Get inside and nobody move! Put your hands over your ears and shut your mouths!"
We scrambled back into the office, pulled the door shut behind us, and bolted it.

I sat on the floor panting, feeling utterly nauseous, my chest rising and falling like a drowning man. Girgis stood beside me, wiping his face beaded with cold sweat, looking at me with a gaze full of a lethal pity:
"Your mother understood the secret, that is why she never let you ride a train."
I raised my tear-filled eyes to him, my mind rejecting the absorption of all this madness:
"And how did you know?"

He said, averting his gaze to the ledger:
"Because your mother came here a month after the crash, carrying you in her arms, and asked me if the Calling could return. I told her maybe, and since then, she only ever takes the bus."
I felt a stab in my stomach:
"And my father?"

Girgis stroked his white mustache, then said:
"The day of the crash, your mother had brought your father his dinner, and she was pregnant with you. It was absolute chaos, people running everywhere, and the speaker was calling for everyone. The speaker called your mother's name then. Your mother froze in place and was about to answer, so your father, terrified for her, pushed her back, stood in her place, and answered the speaker instead of her. He said 'I am coming', and the darkness took him. A sacrifice for her, and for you."

He fell silent for a moment, then continued:
"What happened doesn't just end. We've been like this ever since. On this anniversary every year, the signal turns red, and it has to hunt down a train. The signal closes, and people get off to hear their names. The whole railway authority knows the story, which is why they stay inside the train. And they warn the passengers not to disembark."

And here, in the midst of this terrifying stillness saturated with the stench of death, the absolute worst nightmare a human mind could conceive occurred.

I didn't hear the voice from the speaker outside. And I didn't hear it from the door.
I heard it whispering directly behind my left ear. It was so clear it made my skin crawl as if a high-voltage current had struck me.
It was my mother's voice. The mother I had buried with my own hands just days ago! She called me with the exact same familiar, tender tone she used to wake me for school:
"Yasser."

My heart stopped beating. My limbs paralyzed completely. I didn't move. I didn't breathe.
The whisper repeated, closer this time, dripping with pleading:
"Yasser, come here, my son."

I dug my nails into my knees with all my strength. Girgis stepped close to me, clamped his rough hand firmly onto my shoulder, and hissed through clenched teeth with a terrifying resolve, like a snake's hiss:
"Look at me, Yasser. Do not, do not look behind you."
I told him, staring at the wooden floorboards beneath my feet, hot tears scorching my face:
"That is my mother's voice, my mother whom I just buried a week ago!"

Girgis replied, his fingers gripping the edge of the desk:
"That is the tragedy, they know exactly where your weak point is. They use the freshly dead because the pain is still raw. That is not her voice, that is 'The Thing' wearing her voice."

With a swift motion, Girgis opened his desk drawer, pulled out an old, folded scrap of paper, and shoved it in front of my trembling eyes.
It was in my father's handwriting. The slanted, neat, and distinct handwriting I knew so well from his old papers in my mother's box. Written on it in clear haste:
"If the boy grows up and comes here, do not let him listen to the Calling, and if he hears me, tell him not to believe it."

I stared at the paper, feeling something tear loose inside me. It wasn't just fear. Fear is a naive emotion compared to what I felt. There is another kind of pain, infinitely more humiliating and crushing, to remain terrified and stripped of will, hearing the one you love crying out for you, knowing with absolute certainty that going to them means your own doom, and possessing nothing but sheer helplessness.
Suddenly, the rhythm of the horror shifted.

We heard the sound of footsteps outside. Many footsteps, slow, their owners dragging their feet along the platform. Like a procession of the dead walking aimlessly.
One black silhouette after another passed behind the glass of the office window. Deformed heads, missing limbs.
Girgis lunged and yanked the tattered fabric curtain closed, violently covering the window entirely, shouting in a strangled voice:
"Nobody look at the glass!"
The fat man, who had turned a sickly ash-gray, asked, swallowing hard:
"What is out there?"
Girgis answered, his eyes squeezed shut:
"Those are the ones the darkness swallowed over the years and we never found their bodies, they are coming back tonight looking for replacements."

I could very easily play the hero, I could tell you that I held myself together, that I laughed in the face of fear, but I wouldn't be honest. The naked, shameful truth is that a part of me, a sick, broken part, was ready to rip the door open and sprint onto that blind platform if I heard my father call me just one more time, merely to find release from this torment.
And because the universe loves to test our deepest fears and strike us where it's lethal,
The external speaker called out indeed. Loudly this time:
"Abdel Rahim Abdel Aal."

Then, a second of suffocating silence later, a man's voice came to me, a voice I had never heard in my life except on old cassette tapes and in stories. A deep, sorrowful voice, overflowing with agony and supplication:
"Yasser, I am here."
My head snapped up automatically toward the door. The entity wasn't satisfied with just my mother, it used my father as a double trap!
The voice called out again, with genuine heartbreak and sobbing that tore the strings of my heart:
"Come take me and let us go home, Yasser, I am so tired."
I felt my tears leading me toward disaster. I stood up, swaying toward the door, ready to surrender myself.

But Girgis pounced on me, seizing my shoulder with immense force, pinning me against the wall, and said, shaking me:
"If you move toward that door I will tie you down! Your father wrote it himself, do not believe them! Do you want to waste his sacrifice?"
As for the fat man, something horrifying happened to him, something that shatters the boundaries of sanity.
He raised his head slowly. His eyes were no longer human. They were bloodshot, and his facial features slackened as if his will had completely surrendered. He said, looking at me, in a hollow voice utterly devoid of life that sounded nothing like his own:
"Answer, son, go to your family, maybe you will find relief from this pain, and we will all find relief."

And in that maddening moment, without any preamble, the fat man stood up, and with a monstrous, supernatural strength completely at odds with his weight and flabbiness, marched toward the door. Girgis tried to grab his arm and stop him, but the fat man shoved him violently, throwing him to the floor, and proceeded to slide the wooden bolt of the door and step out onto the platform.
In the fraction of a second that the door was open, and before it slammed shut behind the fat man, I looked at the darkened window. I saw the fat man's reflection on the glass of the outer door.
It was not his face. I swear by all that is sacred, it was my face!
My own eyes, wide with sheer terror. My pale, terrified face, twisted into a impossibly wide, demonic grin, was grafted onto his massive, fleshy body in the reflection! The entity outside had bet on me, and when Girgis stopped me, it possessed the fat man, wearing my face, using him as a cheap substitute when it failed to drag me out!
The door slammed shut. The howling wind, the murmurs, and the footsteps cut off abruptly with terrifying speed. A dead silence fell.
Seconds passed like an eternity. Then we heard from outside, from very far away in the depths of the blackest dark, the fat man's own voice ringing out into the void with absolute, submissive calm and total contentment:
"Alright, I have come instead of Yasser."

What happened next will prey upon my dreams until the day I die.
Every broken speaker in the station shrieked to life all at once. They erupted in a deafening blast of static, the whistle of gale-force winds, and overlapping voices. Then the sounds gradually faded, allowing the speaker to announce with absolute, lifeless chill:
"Substitute received."
Followed by the sound of the train signal clicking to green, then our train's long, piercing whistle.

Girgis pulled himself up from the floor, panting, staggering. He picked up his lantern and turned his face away from me, speaking in a broken voice:
"It's over, it has permitted you to leave. As soon as the train moves, get on it, and do not, do not ever look out the window or behind you, no matter what you hear!"
I leaned against the wall to stand, and asked him weakly:
"And you?"
He shrugged without looking at me, seeming like a ghost from the past, his eyes utterly dead:
"My role ended a long time ago. It is written that I must remain here until the very end, writing down the names of those who went, and those who will go."

A minute later, we heard the train's whistle announcing its departure. I bolted out onto the platform like a madman. The air was heavier than lead, and the darkness was creeping toward me like a predator. As I ran, I felt the platform elongating, stretching like rubber in a nightmarish, illogical way to prevent me from reaching it.

And when I finally planted my foot on the carriage's metal steps, as the train began its slow crawl forward, I heard my father's voice right next to my ear. Whispering with the coldness of graves:
"Just look at me, one time."

And because a human being is too weak to resist everything all at once, and because emotion always betrays reason, I turned around.
Oh, how I wish I had been struck blind before I turned.
I saw him standing on the edge of the platform, just outside the sickly yellow circle of light. Or something that looked like my father. A man in his late fifties, with features I had only seen long ago in a single photograph my mother kept in her drawer. His face was unnaturally pale, his eyes wide without eyelashes, and on his shirt were black stains, as if an ancient fire had touched him.
He was smiling an exhausted smile. He tilted his head in a profoundly unhuman way, and spoke in a voice from which maggots seemed to fall:
"I'm tired."

That single word, and that sight, were enough to drive me insane and throw myself down to join him.
But I saw something that saved my mind from succumbing to it. I saw his shadow cast upon the platform, and his shadow was not attached to him!
The shadow was entirely separate, standing a full pace behind him. And it did not take the shape of a human. It took the form of a massive, deformed, gelatinous mass, writhing and pulsing, stretching toward my feet to drag me in! As if the demonic entity were wearing my father and his image as a filthy mask, standing behind it and operating it like a puppet to hunt me down!
I hauled myself into the carriage, slammed the door and the window shut with every ounce of strength I possessed, and locked them tight.

The train surged forward, leaving the cursed station behind and gathering speed. I collapsed onto the metal floor of the carriage, gripping the edge of the seat until my fingers ached, trembling violently.
That night, I heard everything from behind the sealed window panes.
I heard my mother, my father, my name, and the sound of countless footsteps sprinting alongside the train as it departed, desperate to cling to it, hoping to find salvation within it.
And I heard, from very far away, the hysterical, maniacal laughter of the fat man, right before he faded into the darkness.
Then, absolute silence.

I arrived at my village at dawn. I finalized the paperwork and returned to Cairo the exact same day by bus.
I told myself what cowards always say when reality slaps them in the face, fleeing from madness: shock, grief, exhaustion, and an old ghost story blown out of proportion by an overactive imagination.
A month passed. Then two months. I told no one. Because whoever heard me would pass a judgment with only two possibilities, and no third: I was either a liar, or a madman. I desired neither title.
I thought the nightmare was over, and that I had survived. Until the thing happened that forced me to write all of this down.

I was in a perfectly normal metro station in the heart of Cairo, standard crowds, normal faces, at exactly fourteen minutes past eleven.
Suddenly, the electricity cut out for just five seconds, then returned.
And in that brief window, the speaker right above my head clicked on. It didn't announce the train's direction or warn about the doors. It spoke a single, intensely clear sentence, directed entirely at me:
"Yasser Abdel Rahim, collection postponed to next year."

When the lights came back on, the advertising screens were all pitch black, save for a small white line of text at the very bottom, which vanished quickly before anyone else noticed:
"Next Station: Al-Marashda."

I turned around to flee the station, only to be paralyzed by the sight of the passengers around me. They had all frozen in place. They were staring at me with profound bewilderment, pure horror shining in their eyes, some backing away and pointing at me with trembling fingers. I didn't wait to understand what they were seeing, I bolted like a madman, shoving my way through the crowd, and sprinted up the stairs to the street.

I jumped into a taxi and burst into my apartment like a hurricane. I rushed straight to the small bathroom mirror, searching for any deformity or demonic possession, but, I saw nothing! I inspected my features, my face was perfectly normal, pale and dripping with sweat, but it was my face, the one I knew. I breathed a sigh of relief, assuming the people's stares were merely due to my sudden panic.

I went to the kitchen to brew a cup of tea to calm my shredded nerves, then walked into my bedroom to change my clothes. And as I turned around, I froze dead in my tracks, and the teacup slipped from my hand, shattering on the floor.
I looked into the wardrobe mirror, there was something moving on the wall behind me!
It was my shadow!

My shadow, completely detached from me, now moving as it pleased, entirely independent of my own movements! I stood completely rigid, motionless, while my shadow stretched upon the wall and raised its arm. I couldn't believe my eyes, I thought hallucinations had overtaken me and my mind had finally collapsed. I curled up in the corner of the room, shivering, having no idea what to do.

A full month passed.
A month during which I felt a sickly adaptation to the curse. I began exclusively choosing dark places, dim corners where shadows wouldn't show. I became terrified of the light, for the light exposed my horrifying reality and proved to me that I was no longer whole. I started sleeping in faint darkness, fearfully watching my shadow moving on the wall by itself, as if preparing for something.

But today, the terrifying shift occurred.
I woke from sleep, looked around, and saw no shadow. I checked the wall and the floor, there was no shadow at all. My heart leapt with joy, I told myself it had vanished! I believed the curse had lifted, the nightmare was over, and this entity had finally left me be.

I stood up, overwhelmed with happiness, and went to get dressed to finally step out into the light. I stopped and looked in the mirror.
And I did not find my reflection!
Instead of me, my missing black shadow stood inside the mirror, smiling at me with a terrifying mockery, and with a finger made of pure gloom, it wrote to me on the glass from the inside, a single sentence, in the exact same slanted handwriting of my father:
"Next Station: Al-Marashda."