Congratulations The document you hold is not merely a job offer; it is a covenant. You have been selected as the Night Station Attendant for Ravenmore Terminal. The compensation is substantial, the hours are solitary, and the regulations are absolute. This is not a post for idle timekeeping. It is a vigil. Ravenmore, a minor station excised from public record since 1974, persists as a silent junction between the comprehensible and the unfathomable. Each night, a train passes through.
Your obligation is not to service it, but to preserve the delicate boundary it signifies. Your duties appear straightforward: maintain illumination, ensure the timepieces are wound, and, most critically, adhere to the regulations. They are your sole protection. Let this serve as your exhaustive manual, your handbook for endurance. Observe meticulously, particularly Regulation Five.
The Terminal and Its Silence.Station Attendant
Ravenmore Terminal persists in a condition of endless dusk. Its majestic architecture whispers of a past epoch of voyage—elaborate ironwork, marble floors dimmed by years, and wooden benches burnished by phantoms, not patrons. The atmosphere is constantly chill, bearing the aroma of moist stone, aged electricity, and ozone—a metallic forewarning that precedes the nocturnal events. As the incoming station attendant, your primary task is to acquaint yourself with the topography of silence. The ticket counters are sealed.
The departure display is inert, its final destination perpetually glitching: “DELAYED.” Your station is a compact, warmly illuminated refuge against the vast gloom of the central hall. This light is your initial barrier. It must never be extinguished.
Your function as station attendant is essentially distinct here. You are not a conductor, nor a patron advocate. You are a keeper of the liminal, a mute observer to a procedure that must remain undisturbed. The contemporary world’s notion of a train station attendant—dispensing tickets, providing guidance—is a perilous misconception here. At Ravenmore, you are the tether to the realm of the living. Remember this separation. It is what will keep you anchored.
The Regulations: Your Litany Against the Dark
The regulations are not recommendations; they are the essential protocols for safeguarding your sanity. They are cataloged in the ledger upon your desk, inscribed in a script that appears to waver and pale. Commit them to memory.
Regulation No. 1: The Midnight Prelude.Station Attendant
Exactly at 12:00 AM, a train whistle will resound. It is overwhelming, a sound of rending metal and boundless desolation. It vibrates the beams. Every instinct will shriek to sprint to the platform, to witness its origin, to execute the presumed duty of a station attendant. Crush this impulse. No train has stopped here Since 1974. That whistle is not a herald of arrival; it is a probe into the abyss.
It is the terminal inhaling from another realm. To set foot on the platform at that instant is to step into that inhalation, to be consumed. Remain within your illuminated office. Allow the silence to repossess the hall afterward. It invariably does.
Regulation No. 2: The Solitary Passenger.Station Attendant
You will see them—a man in a trench coat, a woman clutching a small case, a child. They sit alone on a bench, looking lost and out of time. Your instinct will be to help, to ask if they’re okay. Don’t. If you say, “Where are you headed?” they will turn with eyes too deep and empty, and ask, “Do you want to come with us?” This isn’t an offer. It’s a draft. Do not reply. Not even a gesture of negation. Turn and walk deliberately to your station. The sound of your receding footsteps is the sole refusal they will acknowledge. A competent station attendant recognizes when assistance becomes an entrapment.
Regulation No. 3: The Lights on the Tracks.Station Attendant
In the deepest hours, you will detect it: the crush of gravel, the weight of footfalls treading the rails beneath the platform rim. Inclining to look is a natural, human inquisitiveness.
Oppose it. If you do look, you will perceive specks of light in the tunnel’s opening, far into the distance. They will appear to oscillate and advance. Do not fixate. They are not a locomotive’s lamps. Fixation forges a link.
It informs them you are observant, that you are present. The lights will cease oscillating and commence swelling, not approaching, but dilating, stretching toward you. Avert your gaze. Occupy yourself with winding a clock, inspecting a light switch. Sever the visual bond. A watchful station attendant understands some corridors are not intended to be lit.
Regulation No. 4: The Unsolicited Ticket.Station Attendant
At 2:00 AM, the most antiquated ticket dispenser, a brass-and-wood antique, may shudder to operation. Its mechanisms will clatter, and it will emit a single, pale ticket. Inspect it. If it is void, discard it in the metal receptacle. If it displays a destination—”Elysian Fields,” “The Final Station,” “Terminus”—discard it. Yet if it bears your name, in sharp, printed characters, do not succumb to alarm. Do not be lured into reading the destination.
To read it is to accept the voyage. Do not conceal it upon your person, considering it a memento or a prize. You must inciner it promptly in the office’s aged pot-bellied stove. Witness the paper twist and char. The destination is not a locale for the living. A station attendant must process all tickets, particularly those designated for one.
Regulation No. 5: The 3:00 AM Arrival.Station Attendant
This is the essence of your task. This is the principle upon which all others depend. At 3:00 AM, it materializes. You will not hear it. You will sense it—an abrupt, intense plunge in temperature, a frosting of the panes, a silence so dense it compresses your eardrums. On the platform will rest a train. It is elongated, black, and completely noiseless, its exterior coated in a hoarfrost of unnatural cold. The portals will part with a sigh of condensed air. No one alights. The interior is an opaque darkness.
Regardless of circumstance, do not look within.
Do not peer into the carriages. Do not attempt to discern the seating. If you glimpse the windows, you will see only the reflection of the terminal behind you. But if you look, and you perceive your own visage gazing back from inside the train—composed, perhaps smiling, already seated—do not shriek. Do not flee. It signifies the boundary has been breached. You are already aboard. The reflection is not a foretelling; it is a confirmation.
In this moment, your duty as station attendant transforms. You must remain composed. You must rotate, gradually, and walk back into the terminal, following all prior regulations with machinelike exactitude until your watch concludes at dawn. The reflection’s implication is uncertain, an obligation not yet demanded. Frenzy hastens the outcome. Composure may defer it. This regulation is the reason for your recruitment. Your forerunner, we suspect, failed this trial.
The Philosophy of the Vigil.
Why does this post endure? If the terminal is shuttered, why sustain it? Ravenmore is a relief mechanism, an appointed transit nexus. The train that passes through is not for passengers of flesh and blood. It is a carrier for other entities—reverberations of interrupted passages, energies unfulfilled, notions that travel upon rails of recollection and remorse.
Your presence, a living, breathing station attendant, sustains the “Station Attendant” as a concept of departure and arrival for the living world. You are the signal that declares, “This place remains claimed by the waking day.” By obeying the regulations, you uphold the pact that confines these nightly transits, guaranteeing they proceed through but do not linger.
A Final Admonition
Your watch spans from twilight till sunrise. Sustain the illumination. Wind the clocks; their constant rhythm is a pulse for the vacant hall. When the anomalous transpires, retreat to protocol. The regulations are your implements, your incantations. This is an isolated occupation, yet a vital one. You are the night station attendant. You are the sentinel of the platform’s brink. Remember, not every train that arrives at midnight possesses a destination for the living. Some are merely traversing the gloom, and our paramount service is to permit their passage without providing a guide, a comrade, or a view inside.
Welcome to Ravenmore Terminal. The ledger rests upon the desk. The initial rule is to never be tardy for your watch. The ultimate rule is to endure until daybreak. All that lies between is an examination of your vigilance. Good fortune. You will require it. Now, please, rotate the key within the front lock. The sun descends. Your vigil commences.
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