Anka and Michael slip into an abandoned railway station and find a living circle of light in the waiting room. Something on the far side knows their names.
It was the kind of evening that turned every sound into a warning. Fog pressed low over the outskirts of the city, blurring the tracks, the pylons, the broken fences around the abandoned railway station. The old brick hall stood under a skin of ivy and spray paint, its windows blind, its entrance half-collapsed, as if the place had been trying to erase itself for years.
Anka stopped at the gate and looked up at it. "Still sure about this?"
Michael lifted the torch, though his grip had gone slick with sweat. "No. But we’re here anyway."
That earned him the briefest smile. Then they crossed the yard together, stepping over cracked concrete and dead weeds that rattled in the wind. The main door hung open on one hinge. Inside, the air was colder, dense with dust and old rain. Their footsteps sounded too loud in the empty hall, bouncing back from the tiled walls in thin, nervous echoes.
The station had the hollow feeling of a place left mid-breath. Torn timetables still clung to the walls. A bench sat overturned near the ticket counter. Somewhere deeper inside, metal creaked once, then fell silent again.
Michael swept the beam of the torch across the corridor leading to the former waiting room and froze.
"Anka."
She followed the light and saw it too.
A glow was leaking through the open doorway ahead, not the yellow of a bulb or the blue of a screen, but something steadier, stranger. They moved closer, slow enough to hear their own breathing. In the middle of the waiting room, on the scuffed tiles where travellers once stood with their luggage, a circle of light shimmered and pulsed as if it were alive. Its edges rippled like heat above asphalt, only brighter, cleaner, impossible.
The hum in the room deepened. The hair on Anka’s arms lifted.
"That’s not possible," Michael said, but he did not step back.
The light brightened again, and the shadows around them jerked against the walls as if something inside the circle had shifted. For one breathless second, a shape gathered in the glow. Then a voice, faint but unmistakable, slipped through the air on the other side.
It said their names.