Three friends reach a ruined railway station on the edge of the forest, where a locked door stands open and something in the dark seems to be watching them back.
It was the first cold evening of September, the kind that made the forest smell of wet leaves and old earth. Lena, Maks and Igor pedalled hard along the narrow path, their bike tyres hissing over pine needles and scattered gravel. Ahead of them, at the edge of the trees, stood the abandoned railway station everyone in town talked about and nobody wanted to visit after dark.
People said the place groaned at night. People said lights sometimes flickered behind the broken windows, even though the station had been shut for years.
Lena was the first to stop. She looked at the crumbling platform, the weeds choking the tracks, the dead windows staring out into the trees.
"Are we really doing this?" she asked, trying to sound unimpressed and failing.
Maks grinned and lifted his torch. "That depends. Were you hoping for a boring evening?"
Igor said nothing. He only glanced at the station door, and Lena saw the doubt flash across his face before he hid it.
They locked their bikes to a bent signpost and crossed the broken paving stones to the entrance. The door stood half-open.
Lena frowned. They had passed here that morning on the way to school. She was sure the door had been chained shut.
Inside, the air was cold and stale, carrying the smell of dust, damp wood and something sharper, like paint. Their torch beams swept over cracked walls and a ceiling webbed with shadows. Leaves drifted through a shattered window and skittered across the floor like tiny animals.
On the platform, a bench lay on its side beside a clock that had stopped at 3:33. Beneath it, someone had painted a line of letters in quick, slanted handwriting. The paint still looked wet.
Igor crouched to stare at it. "This wasn't here before."
Lena stepped closer and caught the bite of fresh paint in the air. "Then who was here?"
Maks gave a short laugh that sounded too loud in the silence. "Maybe the ghosts are redecorating."
They moved deeper into the station, one room at a time, their torch beams crossing and separating like nervous hands. Every sound seemed amplified: a drip somewhere behind the walls, the creak of a loose board, the whisper of their own breathing.
Then came the knock.
It was quiet at first, barely more than a tap, somewhere behind a closed door at the end of the corridor. Lena stopped so abruptly that her torch beam shook against the wall.
Tap. Tap.
The sound came again, this time from the glass pane beside the door.
Maks swallowed. The light in his hand swung across the window, and Lena saw what it caught on the other side.
A figure.
Dark, still, human-shaped, standing on the empty platform where no one should have been.
For one second, none of them moved. Then the shape shifted, as if it had noticed them watching. And when Maks jerked the torch higher, the platform was empty again.
A long screech tore through the darkness outside, thin and metallic, like rails bending under weight.
Lena opened her mouth to speak, but the station answered first. More knocks sounded from somewhere deeper inside the building, and then, one by one, lights began to flash in the far end of the corridor, pulsing through the dark as if something inside the station had just woken up and was looking for them.