Tracks

Hideout

Content warning for profanity, a mental breakdown, and implied sexual content.

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The train passes, and the room is completely dark. Jacks shoots up in bed, eyes darting across the room to find the source of the voice. He could have sworn it was right beside him.

"Explain yourself." Jacks calls to the void. Will it answer? He can hear nothing but his own heartbeat and the blood rushing to his head as he waits, his breath stuck in his throat.

"Everything that happens on the tracks..." The voice trails off, beginning again after seemingly finding words–

"I bear witness to."

The room seems to distort, and sounds of metal wheels striking tracks fill his head. Jacks slams his eyes shut, trying to alleviate the sound, until he sees vivid images behind his eyelids. 'Hallucination' would be an understatement. Countless accidents, derailments, fires. Boarding, departing, loading, striking, all the way back to the very laying of the tracks, this dark creature seems to have witnessed everything. The vision swirls in black and white, Jacks finding himself suddenly watching a man, somehow familiar to him, looking through the woods in the dark for something before stepping onto the tracks. He disappears. Another man, that thief from the train station he took the knife from, stares wide eyed and pale at the entity standing behind Jacks, stumbles across the opposite side of the awning across the tracks, and vanishes into thin air. The third man, tying the black dog to the tracks in the meadow returns to the tracks with a group of dangerous looking men. They cross the tracks to look for the man who had threatened one of them, only to blip out of existence, completely, and without a trace. The vision seems to be deepening, flashing bright light between these scenarios until it finds Joseph, panicking just out of reach with the deer. Jacks opens his eyes with a sharp inhale, clearing it from his mind.

"Close them again. I won't show you what you don't need to see." The entity's voice rings directly into his ear. He trusts it. Jacks closes his eyes again, wondering exactly why the closeness of the voice in proximity to him is making the chill of the room disappear. But the thrill of the entity's presence melts away the moment the vision returns in monochrome, his mother standing beside Joseph's. They are speaking beside the tracks.

"My boy's not dead." Jacks' mother says to her, lipstick-tipped cigarette in hand.

"What?" Joseph's mother looks up, tears in her eyes.

"I saw him in the next town at the station. Held a knife to a man to steal some drugs." She blows the smoke towards the tracks, away from Joseph's mother, who only looks up at her with shock.

"Chances are, he took Joseph's body and ran so he wouldn't get caught. Always knew he was good for nothing." The vision abruptly ends, but Jacks' face is already hot and wet with tears. He opens his eyes to the dark of the room. He starts to breathe heavily, catching himself hyperventilating before letting out a cracked scream into the mattress to muffle the sound. He pulls back up to yell in the direction of the formless voice.

"That fucking bitch blamed it on me!"

The entity allows him a moment to release, speaking gently after he seems to calm down.

"I'm sorry that she was able to find you, Jacks. It's my fault." The voice seems to circle around him.

"No, no no... It's all over. There's nowhere left for me, now." He smiles through tears, choking a defeated laugh out of his throat.

"Jacks..." The ghostlike man lays a hand on his forehead, nothing but a slight pressure that seems to push his hair down. He freezes.

Jacks sits up, turning to look at the door.