From Hurried Ascensions
by Esi Noire
The train slowed without sound.
No screeching brakes. No lights. Just a change in pressure, like the moment before a storm breaks open. Rene pressed her hand to the glass, but there was no station outside, just an open field filled with tall, waving grass.
Then she saw the sign.
It wasn’t hanging. It was **growing** – a rusted rail spike with ivy curling up it, forming letters in dark green:
**Platform 1885**
Rene stepped off the train.
The earth here pulsed under her feet.
Old. Listening.
A wide clearing lay ahead. And in the center, a blade – half-buried in soil, glowing faintly with the same violet shimmer as her grandfather’s train ticket.
She knew this place. Not in memory, but in blood.
It was Springfield.
Not the one she grew up in, but the one whispered about. The one her great-aunt called “the ground where voices sank.”
The blade pulsed. The air thickened.
And then she heard it, a rhythm rising from beneath the field, a sound like heartbeats wrapped in train whistles.
Behind her, the train hissed once.
She turned back, but the door was gone.
Rene Dey was standing alone on a platform that never existed, waiting for a past that never truly left.
Wicked Grim Stories 
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