Bezpłatny fragment - Fear

Fear is born

Within our depths

Not as a result of the action

Of third forces

Imagine the following situation: You are alone. All around is only darkness, the platform is illuminated by a single lamp, whose meager glow gives no sense of security. Suddenly you hear footsteps behind you, a gentle gust of wind assures you that you are not alone. The rustle grows, you can already hear the creaking of heavy boots on the frozen snow. You turn around. The platform is empty… It is winter. The season does not encourage hiking, so most people travel by a perfectly developed railway network. Trains run one after another.

At the stations of big cities, there is unbearable overcrowding. Stuffy air and cigarette smoke make it impossible to breathe. Here and there, the attentive gaze of an observer might encounter representatives of the poor asking for modest donations. On a huge board, information about trains and schedule delays is displayed — in short, everything useless to the passenger, and to make matters worse, it creates even more confusion. Suddenly, information about the departure of the next train appears on the board, probably to some larger city, maybe even to the capital. The noise and shouting increase, people begin to push toward the platform entrances. A general confusion arises. Someone dropped a suitcase. Now they are bending down for it, blocking traffic, someone is throwing a few curses at them. The situation becomes unbearable. The atmosphere at the station can affect even the greatest stoic. And effectively throw them off balance. It is only noon.

You are tired of waiting, so you go to information, looking for another connection. In vain. Due to weather conditions, secondary lines have been closed. You wait at the station, talking to passengers, listening to the melancholy melody coming from the radio speakers standing near the bar. You feel like an outsider. Just as you are about to leave the main station, news of an additional train connection circulates around the platforms. You get up, but without hope. After all, there are so many people wanting to get on. You walk slowly toward the correct entrance, not rushing. The train pulls in. New carriages shine in the midday sun, the air cushions work almost silently. It seems that it is the wind playing tricks on ears tired of constant noise. The carriages stop with effort, the conductor gets off.

You stand in front of the door together with a crowd of others like you. Everyone waits in silence, staring at a tall, middle-aged man, who likely got the job through an influential acquaintance of his father, the director, or some other high official. The conductor, however, does not look at the cramped crowd; he looks at you. You pretend not to see that look. You turn your head, deciding to turn back and take the bus home. But the man does not give up. He calls you. Pretending to be surprised, you approach. He saw you earlier sitting in the waiting room, lonely, tired; now there is an opportunity to go to your destination. You do not protest, you board the carriage and take a seat by the window. It is a few minutes past one. Despite the low temperature outside, the sun begins to warm pleasantly. You feel sleepy, leaning against the back of the seat.

Staring at the picture outside the window, you don’t even notice the jolt accompanying the carriages pulling away. The train starts moving. Shapes move slowly, heavily; you are still at the station. But after a moment, the shapes move faster, the image begins to blur, until finally only the outline of the station is visible, looming on the horizon. It emerges from the icy fog and heavy city smog. You pass consecutive stops, stations, railway stations, and finally large urban agglomerations. The gentle rocking lulls you to sleep. Conversations, the voices of passengers drift away. Drowsiness overcomes you. Your head tilts slightly forward, then back and to the sides. The rocking lulls you to sleep. After a moment, nothing reaches you except the distant murmur coming from under the floor. You are asleep.

The train travels on, passes more cities, and finally, guided by an unknown force, it reaches a wasteland. Only a red line is visible, painted along the body of the machine, gliding through the white expanses of snow and ice. The world must have looked like this thousands of years ago, during the ice age. All around, no human settlements. Silence. Silence that the noise does not allow to rest. Your ears ache. But you are asleep… Outside, it gets dark. Darker and darker. And the train rushes on, kicking up plumes of white powder on the sides. It plunges into an unexplored area. Faster and faster, as if it wanted to escape these inaccessible lands and return to civilization. However, this is not an easy task at all. Because the snow desert has no end and has no intention of ending.

Night falls. The engine driver turns on the light. The headlights penetrate the area for a mile ahead of the massive locomotive’s front. It looks as if a flashlight carelessly abandoned by a tourist were sliding down a flat slope. A storm breaks out. Snow curtains appear, sweeping the carriages like whips. Yet, the brave machine continues to race forward. Finally, however, the desired time for rest comes. The station approaches, like a yellow, barely glowing light, the flame of a small candle lit in a long, dark tunnel. The train slows down. However, it does not stop at the station, but a bit beyond it. Brakes do not hold on the slippery rail at such a temperature. Someone nudges your shoulder. You slowly open your eyes.

You look over your neighbor’s shoulder and see a massive man. The conductor. You have to get off. The train does not stop at your station. You have to change. So you get up, reluctantly, you approach the exit, you don’t see the platform. The conductor informs you that you have to go back, as the train passed the platform a few minutes earlier. However, that is not the end of the bad news. It happens quite extraordinarily often that if something bad happens, it does not happen alone… Your next train has left. You have to wait on the platform. You jump out of the carriage, falling knee-deep into soft snow. It is not the time to cry over dry socks. You turn your back to the direction of travel, walking forward. The wind blocks your path. You do not give up, however, you trudge through the white powder, carving your way with your shoulder, covering your face. You can already see the station, and after a few minutes, you climb onto the brick platform.

Large stations are crowded, but at small stations, the situation looks completely different. You will not find a single person here; at stations like this, not even stray souls appear. There are no buildings here, not the smallest shelter. Only the platform itself, often not even that, and on both sides, the train tracks. You realize that the conductor did not tell you the whole truth. Hours spent in the wind and snow await you, waiting for the arrival of the desired train. However, you are not completely alone at the station. Every few minutes, subsequent trains fly by like comets, similar to each other, or perhaps even identical — you cannot tell, they move too fast. You have nowhere to warm up, you are freezing. All around is darkness. Only the meager light of a streetlamp informs the drivers that ahead of them, in this boundless, black void, there is a small, almost forgotten by all, little station where no one gets off. Unless it’s a day like this. You wonder if you are the only passenger who has set foot in this place since one of the maintenance trains took away the workers who had finished their work, having built this piece of land in a sea of white, cold powder.

You pace in circles, trying to warm your frozen limbs; the gusts of wind, the passing trains, the waves of razor-sharp dust stirred up then, which buries itself in everything it encounters, do not make this task any easier for you. Full of resignation, you lean against a meager, slender, and some three-meter-high streetlamp. You cannot sit down, even though there is, most likely, a rotten bench on the platform; you would not be able to get back up. Maybe the bench, frozen no less than you, frozen solid as a rock, would support your weight. You don’t know that, and you don’t intend to try anyway. But this does not hinder the conducting of thoughts. It might look funny to see the bench falling apart under your weight, but its fragments, piercing a certain part of your body, would not look funny at all. And you stand in the cold, the snow does not stop falling at all, the waves only rise, and the wind, playing on this wasteland, making jokes about such capricious weather, moves masses of snow so that it seems that this platform is actually an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean, not a platform in the middle of a plain frozen by winter.

Besides, this station cannot look any more pleasant at other times of the year. Maybe only at the beginning of spring, just after the ground dries up after throwing off the masses of snow, when nature wakes up to life. Although it seems that even Mother Nature has forgotten about this wasteland. Standing on the platform, you engage in a conversation with yourself, with your own thoughts, like an unrestrained avalanche of words, the meaning of which you are no longer able to grasp yourself, blocked by a rising wave of cold. In such moments, the most diverse thoughts come to mind. You wonder what it would be like if you were not alone. Alone as a finger in the middle of this ocean of cold. All around, there is silence, apart from the howling of the intensifying wind. Specks of snow get everywhere; you are unable to shield yourself from them, a high collar does not help, frozen hands wrapped around your neck do not help.

The wave of cold causes shivering; the body craves warmth, looking for it in the most diverse ways. However, nothing is able to provide that warmth. The shivering intensifies. You surrender to the power of nature, general exhaustion overcomes you, the image before your eyes blurs, you perceive fantastic shapes in simple, everyday things, you desire nothing more than a warm bed or simply — sleep. You wonder what is happening to you. Guided by the fading remnants of the thoughts of a dying mind, you turn around and start moving forward. You must warm up, to feel reviving warmth for even a moment. Tripping, you begin to walk around the platform. The snowdrifts are getting bigger. Probably no train will leave from here anymore; you are losing hope. You know that on days like this, even rescue services do not venture further than city streets, so no one will clear the tracks, no one will look for one passenger lost by chance. No rescuer will venture into the wild reaches of the plains, especially, no one even during the day will dare to visit this plain.

Only now have you recognized this desert of life. The only place where not even the smallest leaf of a stray plant grows. On this plain, nothing grows. It is not to winter that it owes its landscape. It is not winter that shaped these waves of snow, so picturesquely wandering to the horizon. Your eyes no longer perceive the details of the landscape. The last breath of life ceases. You start wandering aimlessly, however, you do not leave the platform, the only concrete oasis, a shelter, an island in a sea of death. Once again, you return in your thoughts to that morning when you were sitting at home, surrounded by a loving family, by the fireplace, in which sparks were mischievously frolicking — how you miss those sparks. A wave of heat overcomes you, you feel yourself drifting deep within yourself. And you think this is the end, but your end will not look like this, it will not be so peaceful, fished straight out of a fairy tale, undistorted. You will not end your life among the family hearth, you will not die in the arms of loved ones, you will have to die in agony, feeling yourself losing sensation in your limbs, pain will not allow you to lose consciousness, only suffering will bring solace in the moment of death.

You do not know that it is not yet time for your death, that this would be a premature death; you will not die here, on this wasteland. You will not die in this life. You will not die in suffering. And you keep walking, looking for support in objects encountered by the touch of a blind hand; finally, you fall under the weight of your own, limp body. But it is not time yet. So you get up with the last of your strength, walking further and further, and the platform has no end. Frozen eyes no longer see at all, you don’t even recognize contours, the finest outlines, you don’t even find a speck of color in the blurred tunnel, passing from white to black, without a beginning and without an end. You know that you can only count on yourself, that no one else will help you, because you are alone. No one ventures into the plain of death if they cannot get out of it as quickly as possible. Once again, you remember the station, the conductor, the crowd of people pushing into the entrances… You regret letting yourself be carried away by the moment; naivety, that is how you describe your behavior, and yet it was not naivety, but a need.

Why then do you tell yourself about your stupidity? It won’t save you anyway. You walk on the platform. You turn back and keep going, you don’t count the distance; if you had stepped off the platform, you would have probably reached the next, perhaps more traveler-friendly station long ago. There is no other station, you know that well; you drive away thoughts of escaping from this place, you must be persistent. Make this your strength, do not let numbness and resignation take hold. Keep going, warm up, draw fire from these steps you have already taken so many of. And do not give up, because that won’t help in anything anyway. You circle with your thoughts in unknown space, listening to the hum of the wind, contemplating your fate. Do you have the right to be on this earth? When you boarded the train around noon, you did not know that your journey would end this way; you only knew that you would return home, to your beloved ones, and now… Could everything end in just a few minutes? No. You cannot let that happen. You gather all your strength, you lean against a small, rotten bench, which, completely frozen, does not crack under your weight.

You rub your hand against your other hand. You rub your chest — the mind is renewed, brought back to life, but this does not change the fact that you are now dependent only on your mind; the other senses, except for hearing, have long since refused to obey, they do not give up and do not return from the other side. You do not pay attention to it. You know that it is not important now; sight will return when it is needed. Now you must warm up. Nothing else matters. You will do everything for that tiny bit of warmth that is missing, and which is worth its weight in gold here. However, you will not warm up; the prevailing weather conditions do not allow it; to make matters worse, the wind, omnipresent and unruly, tearing away the remnants of reviving energy, killing the flame of any hope for warmth. You are alone as a finger, on the platform of a side railway line, forgotten by the world, you gather the remnants of strength not to fall asleep, not to die, not to lose hope for further life, for the coming of a new day, a new tomorrow, which will erase from memory the memory of the nightmare that this night is for you. However, you know that the day will not drive away the cold at all, it will not drive away the annoying wind, it will not change your situation. There are places on earth that it is better for a person to keep away from; this is one of such places.

You walk on the platform, you have warmed up a little, you slow your pace, but a cold shiver, a feeling of alien cold, does not disappear at all. You have a strange feeling that you are not alone. You speed up, but you do not turn around; fear grows in you, finally you stop. You listen to the silence and the wind. You know that you are only dependent on this sense, because your eyes still do not transmit any image to you. Only now do you realize that you are blind. You listen to the silence, the sound of falling snow, and the wind. Suddenly the sense of danger increases, you feel someone’s gaze on you. A drop of sweat flows down your back, cold, until shivers go through you. You stand still, listening — silence. You wait in tension. But you hear only the rustle of the wind, nothing more. Silence. Tensed muscles, in tension, ready to tear the body to escape. However, nothing happens, and you start to feel cold again. So you move from the spot after a while and go further, a bit slower, stopping every now and then to listen. There is silence and apparent calm, suddenly you hit something, you touch it with your hand, your heart begins to beat like a blacksmith’s hammer. It’s just a lamp. However, your breath does not want to return to normal, you start to feel dizzy. Something is wrong. You feel a terrible pain in your chest, as if you were about to be torn from the inside. A cramp of all muscles does not allow you to straighten up. You mobilize all your remaining strength, clenching your hands on your chest, slowly, almost having broken your teeth, you straighten up. The pain passes, your breath stabilizes. You cannot stand like this, you must walk, otherwise you will freeze. You move again, taut as a string.