The Train That Wasn't There
Thomas didn't notice anything was wrong at first. The car was similar to his usual commuter train. Same blue seats, same overhead luggage racks, same faint smell of burnt coffee and tired commuters. He settled into a window seat and resumed reading his newspaper.
It wasn't until the train emerged from a tunnel into brilliant sunlight that Thomas looked up. Outside the window, mountains rose in the distance. Snow-capped peaks against an impossibly blue sky. There were no mountains on his commute. There were no mountains within two hundred miles of his home.
"Excuse me," he said to the conductor passing through the car. "Where exactly is this train going?"
The conductor checked a pocket watch that looked antique. Bronze, with symbols Thomas didn't recognize on its face. "We're making good time. Should arrive at the Station shortly."
"The Station? Which station?"
The conductor smiled in a way that didn't reach his eyes. "The only one that matters, sir."
He continued down the aisle before Thomas could ask more questions.
Fellow Travelers
Thomas looked around the car with new eyes. The other passengers were... odd. An elderly woman in the seat across from him was reading a book with no title on the spine and pages that seemed to glow faintly. A young man near the back had a bird perched on his shoulder. Not a parakeet or a parrot. An owl. A full-sized barn owl, watching Thomas with unblinking golden eyes.
"First time?" The voice came from the seat behind him. Thomas turned to find a woman about his age, with wild gray hair and a smile that seemed to know things.
"First time for what?"
"Boarding by accident. It happens more than you'd think. People get distracted, step through the wrong door, and suddenly they're here." She gestured at the window, at the impossible landscape rolling past.
"Where is 'here' exactly?"
"Depends on who you ask. I call it the Between. The space that exists in the gaps between one place and another. One moment and the next. One choice and its alternative."
Thomas's newspaper had vanished from his hands. He hadn't noticed it going. "This is insane. I need to get back. I have a meeting at nine."
"You'll get back. Probably. The train doesn't keep anyone who doesn't want to stay." The woman tilted her head, studying him. "But most people who end up here find there was a reason. Something they needed to see. Someone they needed to meet."
The Station Between
The train slowed. Through the window, Thomas saw a station unlike any he'd ever encountered. The platform was marble, white and gleaming. Trees grew through gaps in the stone, their branches heavy with fruit that glowed like lanterns. People moved through the space, some in modern clothes, some in fashions from decades or centuries past.
"Last stop," the conductor called. "All passengers must disembark."
Thomas had no choice but to follow the others onto the platform. The air smelled of flowers and cinnamon and something else, something he couldn't name but that made him feel like he was seven years old and summer was never going to end.
"Thomas Johnson?"
He turned. A man stood before him in a rumpled suit, holding a clipboard. The man looked familiar somehow, though Thomas couldn't place him.
"That's me."
"You're expected. Please follow me."
Expected? Thomas wanted to ask questions, but his feet were already moving, following the man through the station, past impossible sights: a fountain that flowed upward, a musician playing an instrument with no strings, a child chasing a cat that flickered in and out of visibility.
They stopped before a door set into a wall of flowering vines. The door was painted red, the exact shade of the front door of the house where Thomas had grown up.
"Go ahead," the man said. "He's been waiting."
The Meeting
Thomas opened the door and stepped into a room that shouldn't exist: his father's study, exactly as it had been when Thomas was a child. The leather chair by the window. The desk covered in papers. The smell of pipe tobacco and old books.
And in the chair, pipe in hand, sat his father. Dead these twenty years.
"Dad?" Thomas's voice cracked on the word.
"Hello, son." His father smiled, the same smile Thomas remembered from Saturday morning fishing trips and birthday dinners and the moment, witnessed through a hospital doorway, before everything went dark. "Took you long enough to catch the wrong train."
"This isn't real."
"Real is a spectrum, Tommy. Sit down. We don't have much time, but there are things I never got to say."
Thomas sat. Listened. His father talked about pride and regret and the words that got stuck in his throat when they mattered most. About how he'd watched from somewhere distant as Thomas struggled and succeeded and failed and tried again. About how proud he was, always, even when he'd been too stubborn to say it.
When the door opened again, Thomas was crying. His father was fading at the edges, becoming transparent, becoming light.
"Go back, son. Live well. Don't wait to say the important things."
And then Thomas was standing on a train platform in Grand Central Station, morning commuters rushing past him, his briefcase in his hand, the nine o'clock meeting already forgotten.
He pulled out his phone and called his daughter.
"Dad? Is everything okay?"
"Everything's fine," Thomas said. "I just wanted to tell you something. I love you. I'm proud of you. I should say it more often."
A pause. Then: "Dad, are you sure you're okay?"
"Better than I've been in years," Thomas Johnson said. And meant it.