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“Hello. I’m Ghostbur.”
The new arrival stands on the parallel end of the tracks, opposite from the benches. He wears a nervous smile. He tugs at the hem of his horrid yellow sweater with blue-stained fingers.
He is everything Wilbur is not.
The air between them lingers with the thick scent of salt. There are no breezes here besides the occasional bluster that a passing train will kick up, but that is a rare spectacle, indeed.
“I know.”
Wilbur has seen it all, the inner lives of each pitiful server resident. In blurring train car windows, he has caught glimpses of towers a single block wide that soar into clouds which cluster gravid with rain and an itching darkness. He has seen fires burn and then collapse in dying coughs, extinguished by their own embers. He has turned an eye to the wavering pieces of the people he once controlled. Snow freezing hands. Scars coating palms. Smoke smothering lungs. He has witnessed it all. He has waited.
There is a distant rumbling down the tracks. Something is coming for him now.
For thirteen. Bloody. Years.
He has waited.
This is his own personal hell.
He has been its guardian, the king of the burning red light and the rolling grey shadows. Alone, save three other souls who came, went, drifted. They were not tethered to this realm like he was. Schlatt could go to his limbo whistling, thirsting for a physical exercise to chafe at his blackened lungs and brittle bones. Mexican Dream would fuck off to who-knows-where, but the eerie echo of a smile plastered across his mask told that there was more to him than he let breach the surface.
Tommy had not come on his own accord.
He was in the same lineal plane as Wilbur, yes, but he was somewhere else entirely, too. There were cards spread out before them both, vinyl-edged and stained with fingerprints, but while for Wilbur the deck was laid out atop a creaking black-iron bench, for Tommy they were floating on pure nothing.
(Why was that? Tommy’s void? Did it form that way as a result of being pushed from the living too soon, before his limbo had been hand-tailored to suit his worst nightmares? Or had he simply been blank? A canvas struck by darkness, painted over by the hands of a man who called himself god, who had leeched Tommy of all his color and art? Wilbur never got an answer.)
Tommy came. He stayed. And then he was gone.
Dragged back to the surface, kicking and screaming, sealing the gap behind him. Oh, how Wilbur had leapt for the closing train doors as Tommy was being taken away, but he was just a fraction of a second too late, fingers slipping on the red steel that slammed shut tight.
(In all honesty, he had not been diving across the platform to rescue Tommy, to wrench the boy back from life’s snapping jaws. That was what a better soul, a better person would have done. Wilbur is not good. He had been hoping to catch the train himself.)
This is a wicked place.
Schlatt drinks. Mexican Dream smiles. Tommy leaves.
And Wilbur- well, Wilbur has been screaming until his throat bubbles up with red foam and clawing at the concrete walls that constrain him. It is not fair, he thinks as he digs yellow, chipped nails into the peeling dust, that he had spent his last few months in the physical world caged in a suffocating stone prison, only to meet the same fate in death. He was the canary in the coal mines, bound up and choking on the fumes. He was locked then, just as he has been locked for over a decade now.
And at last, he has found someone who he can toss over that enclosure to.
The realm’s new owner stares at him with frighteningly innocent eyes.
This place is going to tear you apart, Wilbur almost says.
“I hope you enjoy your stay,” he says instead.
There is a train, pulling in. It is shining in crimson, glossy paint. Within its cabin, its driver dons a flash of a taunting smile. One that burns of “welcome home”.
If Wilbur sees the way Ghostbur flinches at Dream, he ignores it. Coolly, he takes the first step towards the open doors, but there is a cry from the opposite platform.
The crystal windows are so polished that Wilbur can see every defining line etching Ghostbur’s face through them. Spotless, he thinks.
“Wait! When do I get to go back?” the greyed-out ghost asks. He speaks it like a plea.
Wilbur has no pity to spare, no words left to soothe the stings and cuts.
That is why he lets the honesty fall heavy as an anvil. “If all has gone right, then never.”
Blue swells to the surface of Ghostbur’s wet eyes. He cries in sorrow, is drowning with it.
“But, but Tommy-.”
The platform shudders with the electric hum of metal. Two tunnels run through the concrete walls: one to, one fro. Wilbur has spent years running down one, chasing after his breath, only to be spat back out of the other. They are impassable, impenetrable. They take delight in being the kind of game that is enough to drive even the kindest of souls mad.
Wilbur hopes that Ghostbur drank in every last bit of sunlight he got, because he will live only under the neon scarlet lights now.
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll get the chance to talk to good old Toms myself.” He flashes his most sincere smile, but it must not seem so pleasant at the way Ghostbur’s face contorts in horror.
The ghost flinches, creeping backwards until he hits the concrete wall. He leans back on it for support. Spirits breathe, too, Wilbur realizes, as he sees the rapid rise and fall of the other man’s chest.
He sends his best salute to Ghostbur as he steps aboard the train. A president’s salute, the one that means farewell.
The doors close fast behind him.
He takes a seat on the leather, reaches a hand up to cling tight to the hand-strap that dangles above. His knuckles go white with the force of his grip.
A lock of hair falls into his face and he does not brush it out of his sight.
He grins, wild as ever, as the train pulls away.