It's not that this late train is unusually empty; London commuters from Leeds or Sheffield often get snarled in these southbound tangles. But when your attention is pulled away from whatever distraction mercifully transported you somewhere else, you imagine that the passengers you initially shared it with had to voluntarily opt to migrate elsewhere, so uncharacteristically barren is this carriage. You recognize the other lingerers that, like you, were oblivious to the hasty evacuation of this one carriage, and while their number is small, you somehow distinctly recognize their faces. Except for one, sitting in isolation, whose singularly unsettling presence most certainly triggered the exodus. And perhaps you might have made your own hasty evacuation to escape the aura of stomach-knotting despair he resonates, and that's before you clock his crutch and overall disheveled condition.
Except when you and the others arouse yourselves to vacate the area, something in your guts, a creeping sickness emerging from the center of your chest, goes sour and painful and hard like you've swallowed an ice block of rotten murk. Except it's always been there, forcefully shoved down into a too-small hole of opaque static whose composition you spend every waking moment reinforcing with whatever mundane matters you can vainly scavenge despite the fact that every morning you wake up to feel the walls closing in faster and faster.
And you see, on his face, reflected in the window that he vacantly gazes out, that reflected doom finally breaking the surface. His eyes are shards of a life utterly shattered by something unspeakable. And you know it's unspeakable, because you've been trying to name it for years now. You first heard it one evening, lying in bed, your rational mind treading water to avoid being swallowed up by the utter terror that now lives in every cell of your body since that day, and that night when you made the fatal choice to close your eyes for just a second, that's when you heard it.
The ocean.
Not the one outside.
The one inside.
In your blood.
Not the warm, clean, idyllic playground you see in films or the one that we carefully curate our experience of when we visit the threshold between our world and It.
The other ocean. The one that is so deep down that it doesn't breathe. Doesn't move. No light. No sound. No joy, no questions. That unthinkable, unreal abyss spoke to you from the impossible darkness. And it said "The singularity devours all. Time is just a game."
Ever since that day, it's all you hear. The inaudible, inescapable din of the Ocean Game, everything else just a flimsy scrap of plastic pulled tight and destined to be ripped away.
Why does it talk to you and only you?
Don't ask.
What does it want?
Don't ask.
What is it waiting for?
Now.
PS: I do have to set the minimum threshold to three other attendees. If that doesn't happen by Friday, I'll be planning to bone up on the games I'm running instead.