The Monster on the Tube

Dom leaned back against the door of the cramped tube carriage. It was always packed on his way back home from work, packed and miserable. He stared out over the sea of people in front of him. These people, they reminded him of blowfish. They floated through the carriages, through their lives in fact, being led by their phones, these glistening orbs of light. They fished relentlessly in the internet surf, catching click bait upon click bait until their batteries hit dry land. After that, with no more light to illuminate their digitally worn faces, they fade back into the abyss of reality. Dom despised what the world had become, and his powerlessness to fight the tide.

He got out his phone and scrolled through his Facebook page. Just as he was skimming past a video selling him slippers that looked like pets, a movement flashed across his peripheral vision. He looked up from his phone at the tube window. On first glance, everything looked normal to Dom, just a reflection mirrored back at him. However something flickered in the centre of the window, and he realised something wasn't quite right. One of the bodies in the reflection was upside down. Dom looked away and rubbed his eyes. It had clearly been a long day of staring at the computer screen. But when he looked back, the upside down man was still there, passive and unmoving.

What the fuck was going on?! Dom scanned the carriage for the mysterious upside down man and found nothing. He started to feel uneasy, this didn't make sense. He wondered if this was some kind of practical joke. He'd probably end up on some greatest fails YouTube compilation when he freaked out live on the carriage. But there were no cameras in sight, and everyone else seemed completely oblivious to the mysterious and unsettling reflection in the window.

Dom inspected the upside down man more closely. His back was turned in the reflection, however he could see that he was wearing a long black trench coat with an upturned collar. The coat hung off the figure very loosely, as though it was only supported by a clothes hanger. The upturned collar met a head of short black hair that stood on end. On his feet were two shin high black leather boots. The man was completely motionless. As the carriage hurtled the rest of the passengers from left to right he remained passive and unmoving, like a statue in a storm. Dom felt his lungs constricting as an icy chill ran down the back of his spine. Something was deeply wrong.

A sudden screech erupted from the carriage and the train jammed to a halt. Dom's gaze was broken as his head lurched forwards into the back of the passenger stood next to him.

'Apologies for the st....ccrrrrrr...... we will..... crshhhhhhhhhhhhh............

The tannoys update fizzled out into nothing and an eery silence descended on the carriage. The lights started to blink. Dom pushed himself back further against the door in an attempt to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. He felt incredibly uneasy, and as the lights began to flicker more rapidly he felt himself holding his breath. Weirder still though was the reaction of the other passengers. Nobody had even looked up from their phones. Dom shook the man next to him and asked,

'What do you thinks going on, how long do you think this will last?'

But the man just shrugged his shoulder and Doms arm fell limply to his side. Dom tried shaking him again but the man was completely unresponsive. Suddenly, the lights stopped blinking and cut straight to black....

Dom looked around the carriage. All that was left was the illuminations from the handheld phones of the passengers. The rest of the room was so dark that Dom couldn't even see who or how the phones were being held, it was like they were just hanging there, floating. A feeling of panic started to grab Dom, rooting him to the spot. It was at that moment that Dom realised that each phone had exactly the same picture being displayed. A bright white background with one simple figure on it. That of an upside down man. Dom double checked the beacons of light throughout the carriage, every phone was the same. Then one by one, the phones started to cut to black. Like some kind of sick countdown, the carriage got darker and darker around him until there was only one phone left. Dom grabbed his phone from his pocket and turned on the torch. The carriage was completely empty, somehow everyone had disappeared. Except for one man .......