The Dark Somnium - "The Strangers"

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

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My name is Andrew Erics. I lived once in a city called New York. My mother is Terry Erics. She's in the phone book. If you know the city, and if you hear this, find her. Don't show her this, but tell her that I love her and that I'm trying to come home. Please. It all started when I decided, around the time that I turned 25, that it was time for me to give up taking my backpack into work.

It would make me look more mature, I thought, if I won. into lugging around a book bag everywhere like a high school student. Of course, this meant that I had to give up reading on the subway in the mornings and afternoons, since I couldn't quite fit my paperbacks into a pocket. A briefcase would have been out of line since I was working in a factory. I had an MP3 player, which helped pass the time for a while, but when it broke, it would shut down at the end of every song if I didn't skip to the next track manually. I gave that up too.

So every morning, I'd sit in the metro for a half hour that dragged on endlessly, with nothing at all to do but watch my fellow passengers. I was slightly shy, so I didn't like to be caught at it, so I'd surreptitiously watch people. Interestingly enough, I quickly discovered that I wasn't the only person in the world who was uncomfortable in public. People covered it up in various ways, but I learned to see through it. I divided them up into categories in my head. There were the fidgeters who couldn't get comfortable, constantly moving their hands, shifting

their weight, moving their legs closer to the bench, moving their legs closer to the bench, and then further. They were the most noticeably nervous types. After them, there were the fake sleepers who'd take their seat and practically close their eyes in the same second. Most of them weren't really sleeping, though. The real sleepers shifted more, came awake, side. Suddenly it stops, or after a loud noise.

The fakes just zoned from the second they sat until the moment the train pulled up to their stop. Then there were the MP3 player addicts, the occasional laptop people, and the people who traveled in groups and talked too loudly. The cell phone junkies were either very popular or just completely unable to shut up for more than two minutes at a time. Just as people watching was threatening to get unbearably boring, I found my first incongruity. A middle-aged man, brown-haired, average size and weight, and dressed casually. Oddly enough, he seemed almost too normal.

He had no remarkable features, no mannerisms, as if he were designed to fade into a crowd. It was that which led me to notice him. I was intentionally trying to see how people acted on the subway, and he didn't act at all, didn't even react either. It was like seeing someone sitting in front of the television, watching a documentary about fish. They aren't excited, aren't engaged, but they aren't looking away either. Present, but not accounted for. He was on the subway in the afternoons.

It was more than a month into the people-watching experiment before he caught my eye, because I didn't catch the same subway every day and didn't consciously sit in the same car when I did. I saw him for the first time on a Monday, I believe, and for the second time on the Thursday of the same week. He obviously did catch the same train. and sat in the same car, in the same seat even. OCD much? I thought at the time. Since he'd caught my attention so much the first time, I watched him more avidly the next.

He was frankly downright unsettling. He didn't do anything at all. He just sat there, expressionless, head straight, no matter what happened. A woman with a wailing child entered the car and sat right behind him, and still nothing. He didn't so much as turned his head or frown in annoyance. and that kid was loud too. By the time the subway reached my stop, I found myself queasy, and when I exited the car, my hands were shaking like I was having a nicotine fit.

Something about the man was wrong. He was, I thought, some kind of freak, a sociopath maybe, one of those quiet guys, who it turns out has a dozen women's heads in his freezer, the first victim being his mother. I found myself intentionally dawdling after work in the afternoons. stopping to browse the kiosks in the mall near the subway, even when I didn't intend on buying anything. For a couple weeks, I avoided catching that subway, and when I found myself at the stop, when it was pulling in, I made sure to choose a train car as far from the one I'd seen him in as possible. Then, one morning, I saw another person who set off the same warning bells in my head.

A woman, just as plain-looking, just as out of place in the hustle and commotion around her. The moment I recognized her, I realized later, was when my obsession began. My people watching had begun as a bit of a hobby to stay of off-bordom, becoming something of a religion to me. I couldn't enter a subway or ride a bus without finding myself examining everyone, filling out a mental checklist in my head. Plain clothes of solid colors, no brands, check, no expressions, no casual glances out the window or towards other passengers? Check. No bags, purses or accessories. Check, check, check. We've got another.

I started calling them the strangers. I didn't see them every day, even after I started taking the metro more than I needed to, even when I found myself riding buses out of my way in the evenings, but they were there often enough. Seeing one would set my teeth on edge, make my palms sweaty and my throat feel dry. If you've ever given a speech, you might recognize the feeling. Even though they didn't pay me the slightest bit of attention, I felt like I was the one on display for them. I could see them, plain as day.

How could they miss me? They didn't, though. Not in any way that I could tell. And when, eventually, my curiosity overpowered me, I decided to follow one. I chose the one that I'd found first, the man in the afternoon subway, who always kept the same seat. I got on and took a seat behind him. We rode to the end of the line, and he rose and walked out before I did. Keeping distance between us, I tailed him, but he didn't go far. He took a seat on a nearby bench, as expressionless as always, and I turned a corner and waited,

trying to look nonchalant. After a few minutes, the next metro arrived, and I watched him enter it and saw him take the same seat. I couldn't find the nerve to follow him again. He hadn't gone anywhere. He just rode the metro to the end of the line, and then what? Rote it back? What possible reason would he, would anyone have for that? It nagged at me long after I had rode a later train back home and tried to get some rest. I couldn't leave it alone.

Not until I could make sense of it. I found myself more confused. I was downright angry now. Why was this uncanny bastard, this almost inhuman person, riding something? subway trains back and forth, going nowhere. The mind, I once read, recoils from certain things, because the very side of them is an affront. Spiders set it off in a lot of people, particularly great big ones.

They just look wrong to us, alien. This was the effect the strangers were beginning to have on me. They offended my senses. I followed him again the next day, and again the day after that. Every day, for at least a week, the two of us made our sight. Tripto'n't trips together, though only I knew it. By the end of the week, I was following him for hours, until the last train that stopped near my apartment block that night.

We rode from the end of the city to the other, then back again. I wasn't people watching any longer. I was person watching, stranger watching. I didn't have eyes for anyone else, though peripherally I noticed more than a few confused glances sent my way. Other than that, we too might have been the only people. people on the planet for all I cared. I lost my job the next week.

My manager was kind and timid, but firm. I wasn't concentrating, had no focus, wasn't being anywhere near productive. It was actually quite a speech, I think, but I could barely hear it. All I could think about was my new work, my vigil. What would that man know, that thing on the subway get up to when I wasn't there to keep an eye on him? I left work for the last time at noon that day. Normally, I'd have started tailing my subject at 5.30, but I wasn't sure that he'd be waiting

for me. I wish now that I'd paid more attention that day. Was it sunny? It was summer, after all. I could have walked around downtown, maybe checked out a few pretty girls, could have had an iced cappuccino and a smoke at an outdoor cafe, then gone home, put my growing obsession out of my head, found a new job, and taken to reading on trains and bus. buses again. Instead, I waited. More than one train goes up and down the lines. So I sat in the station

for at least an hour until I saw him through a window. I walked into the subway car and noticed for the first time my skin wasn't clammy. My hands weren't shaking. My head wasn't pounding hard. I sat for the first time right across from him, directly in his line of sight. I watched for a change in his face, but he recognized me? If he did, I saw no sign of it, and I was looking hard. We must have made quite a pair, sitting across from one another that afternoon, staring at and into one another. It was hard not to let the building rage in me contort my face, but, with effort, I was able to keep as still and expressionless as him. Inside, I practically screamed to him, react to me, you asshole, see me, damn it. I know you. I know you. I know you,

for what you are? I didn't, though, and my silent demands weren't answered. Not the first trip around, or the second, or the third, or the tenth. We rode far into the night together, and at each terminus, we got out together and waited. I sat right beside him on the bench, watching him from the corner of my eye and still got nothing from him. But two could play that game as well as one. Finally, we made our last trip together.

I had him. I knew it. The last trip of the night before the train stopped running. I'd always let him get away from me at that point, because the end of the line is a long way from my home, and the buses stopped running at the same time as the subways. But this time, I'd follow him, finally see what he was when the train stopped running. I'd get some answers. Maybe.

The subway rolled on, and the anticipation grew in me. The car emptied out around us slowly until it was just us two silent watchers below the city. I fought to keep a manic grin at bay, and the subway train slowed to a crawl, then stopped. The end of the line. The stranger didn't move, still didn't react at all. The car stood still, doors open. I could dimly hear the last few stragglers making their way out of the station somewhere behind us,

footsteps echoing in the silence. Nothing. The speaker system dinged to let anyone half asleep know that we'd reach the terminus. still nothing. And finally, I could hear footsteps again. A conductor or something, popping his head into each car to make sure that it was empty before taking the train wherever the hell it goes for the night. I didn't take my eyes from my silent quarry.

I managed to see the conductor from the corner of my eye when he finally reached our car. He looked in, his eyes roamed over us, and a puzzled look came over his face. He blinked a few times and paused. I waited for him to speak, and the moment stretched out. But then, with a slight shake of his head, he left us. There was a car ahead of ours, and I heard him stop to check that too. And then a few minutes later, the train started up again. We rode for a time, and then looped around, and the subway was parked.

I could see into the windows of more trains on either side of us, and threw their opposing windows into even more. And then he smiled at me. It was just a small curl of the lip that would have gone unnoticed if I hadn't spent the last several hours studying his face. So. He said in a rough baritone, Here we are. I tried to respond, but couldn't right away.

My throat had clamped shut. Terror filled me. It felt like the whole underground cavern we were in had just collapsed onto me. I coughed and stammered and finally managed, with a raspy voice, to ask the question. that had kept me up at night, drove me halfway to madness, and led me to this place and this moment. What are you? He ignored me.

He stood, and the train doors opened. Then, shockingly, he turned to face me. Coming. He didn't wait for an answer, but walked out onto the platform. I scrambled to follow. Come on, damn it! I said. Talk to me.

Who are you? Why do you ride the metro all day? He didn't look back or slow his step. I couldn't see his face, but it's safe to guess that he didn't react at all, no more than he did to anything else. I stalked after him, still shouting for a time, but eventually gave up. Five words was all I was going to get out of him, I guessed. We walked along the platform until we came to a junction, then turned.

Now we were perpendicular to the trains around us. The path ahead of us was lit from above, but I couldn't see where it ended. The trains on either side of us went on forever, as far as far. far as I could tell, far too many trains to service one city. I realized. It wouldn't have mattered by then, I figured, but I probably should have paid more attention to that at the time. I'm not sure how long we walked. I had a watch once, but it broke. I took out my cell phone at one point, but got no reception down here, and all it would show me was no signal. The stranger would stop every now and then and look at a subway car for a minute or two, but then pass on.

It took me a while to figure out why, but eventually I saw that they weren't all the same. Long lines of them would be similar, and then we'd come to a different model. It'd be a little larger or smaller, or have a slightly different shape. The cockpits, or whatever you call the front part where the conductor sits, were superficially different as well. I didn't, and don't know what exactly he was looking for, but eventually he must have found it, because we turned again and the subway door was. opened when my impromptu guide stopped in front of them. We entered and took our seats.

Are you willing to speak now? I asked him. No answer. I sighed with frustration and seriously weighed the pros and cons of punching him right in the face at the time. When suddenly, the lights in the car came on and I heard the engine starting up. What the hell? He gave me a look that was almost sad. You're not going to be able to go back. What are you talking about? Go back where? Nothing again. The train lurched into motion, pushing off in the opposite direction than the one we'd come from. It rolled for a few minutes and then began to slow as we approached the stop.

His vacant gaze grew sharper, and for the first time, I got the sense that he was actually staring at me, rather than just looking in the direction I happened to be in. Be still. Be silent. Don't catch their attention. The train stopped. The door. doors opened and they began to flood in. I don't know what I noticed first, the weird clothes, the two long arms with hands that almost brushed the floor, the jet black eyes and angular faces, or the blue-gray hue of their skin. My eyes took in all those stimuli, but for a long second my brain refused to process it, and

when it finally did, I was barely able to bite down on the shriek that tried to tear its way from my throat. I thought my heart was going to explode. Hell, I thought I was going to explode. I was like a strummed guitar string, everything in me lurched and throbbed. My sight grew dizzy, which I was thankful for, and I vomited. My mouth was clenched shut, and I forced myself to swallow it, barely managing it. My instincts were screaming his words at me.

Be still, be silent, don't catch their attention. That day was a blur. We rode the subway car up and down. the line, still and expressionless, for hours, for days perhaps. It seemed much longer than the line I knew, the line I'd followed the stranger along. The hideous things around us seemed to pay us no undue attention, though we must have stood out fiercely. I was so petrified with fear when we finally returned to the endless caverns of trains, alone.

I burst into tears. I collapsed to the floor and just sobbed for a long time. The stranger watching impassively. When I gained control of myself, I looked at him imploringly. Take me home. I croaked out. Please? I can't.

Don't know which one of these would lead you back, if any of them do. He stood and walked out onto the platform, and I rose warily and followed him. He spun around sharply. I think you followed me enough. The rage I'd felt for him before that the panic had temporarily buried rose up in me. What? I said, rushing forward.

I grabbed him by the shoulder, and with a burst of insane strength I didn't even know was in me, I slammed him up against the side of the metro car. What did you do to me? I slammed him again and again. Take me back! He bore it all passively, and soon the flare of anger in me sputtered out, leaving me hollow. Please! I begged.

Please take me home. That's not how it works. If we stay together, it's more likely that we'll be noticed. Go your own way. Be still and subtle, and they'll think that you're one of theirs. How could you do this to me? Why? He gave me another almost sad look. I had to.

You will too. You get stuck sometimes. He brushed my hands off his shoulders and turned to walk away. I fell to my knees suddenly out of strength and watched him leave. At the junction, he turned back to face me. I'm sorry. And then he was gone. I stayed there on the cold tiles for a very long time.

I curled up into a ball and wept for a while. After there weren't any tears in me, I managed to get some sleep. When I awoke, the subway train I'd come in was gone, off carrying more blue-gray abominations to wherever blue-gray abominations go. I couldn't handle going back there anyway. I tried to find my way back to where I'd started, to find a subway that I recognized, but I wasn't even sure which direction I should be going in anymore. I walked for an hour, then another. Finally, I found one that might have looked familiar, or I was desperate enough to imagine that it did.

When I stepped up to the door, it opened for me, and I took a seat. It started up, and in spite of being a lifelong agnostic, I prayed my heart out. The train slowed to a stop, and the doors opened, and for a second time I thought I was saved. People, human beings. I'd be the most devout man in the world, and then I noticed the eyes, specifically the third, large eye in the center of their forehead. They were easier to take than the last bunch, though, and I was thankful for that. The third eye blinked independently of the other two, though, and that was nauseating.

And when one of them smiled or laughed or spoke with another, I couldn't help but notice that their teeth were sharp and misshapen, and yellow-green with filth. But I was careful and selectively blind. I could pretend for a stretch that I was home, until one of them entered with a sandwich in hand, and I realized with a start that I was starving and hadn't eaten or drank in what must have been days. The next terminus I came to, I decided to try and find something to eat or drink. I don't know why I waited, but it seemed important to ride to the end of the line. I got there and could barely bring myself to leave.

I'd never seen the stranger leave the underground. I'd never seen him eat or drink either. My stomach would not take no for an answer, though. I steeled myself and tried to keep my face carefully neutral and made my way into the upper station proper. And then I got confused. I was looking for escalators or stairs or something like that, but all I saw was holes in the ground, the walls and the ceiling. Gaping, irregularly sized holes, like I was in the middle of a beehive. What was I supposed to do, leap into one?

It didn't make any sense to me, not until someone came through one. He floated up through the floor and then next to me. He frowned for a second, or at least. I think it was probably a frown, but apparently whatever kept them from recognizing me as alien in the subway extended at least this far. It did not, unfortunately, allow me to levitate, which seemed to be the only way out of the subway station, beehive thing. Swearing, I made my way back down to the tunnel.

I was angry, lost, starving, and I'd been abandoned to a fate that, if it wasn't worse than hell, was at least twice as stupid and three times as nonsensical. I was not in the best frame of mind, which I feel excuses the mistake. Normally, I take corners with a wide berth because everyone knows if you just dart around a corner sharply in a public place. Chances are decent that you're going to walk right into someone. As I did, I slammed into someone, a woman, and fell to the ground. Without thinking, I reacted like any New Yorker would, badly.

Jesus, watch where you're going! I realized my mistake even before she did. Her eyes grew quizzical and confused, and when she really noticed me, they bulged with horror. She leapt, well, floated quickly, back from me, and let out something scream-like. A little more yowly than I was used to, but I got the point. Further down the tunnel, I saw alien, three-eyed heads turning towards us. I thought suddenly about all the sharp, filthy teeth, and just like that, I was running. The subway train wasn't there, but there was a sideway along the tunnel.

For the repairmen, I assume, that's who'd use it where I'm from anyway. I took it at full speed and just kept running until each breath felt like getting stabbed. I stopped, panting, and looked back. The tunnel had curved, so I couldn't see the light any longer, but nobody appeared to be following me. Going back, though, was not an option. I continued forward in the dark for a long time. Eventually, I came to a small opening in the wall and stopped for a rest. Hunger, despair, and a full-speed terrified run had all left me absolutely drained.

I probably would have wept again, which seemed to be all I was capable of lately, but it just seemed like too much work. I sat against the wall, legs spayed out, and imagined I was beating that bastard stranger to death with a hammer. It was a relieving image. A rat was shuffling around nearby in the room. dark. Every so often, I would kick out a foot to scare it away, but after a time, I didn't even bother with that. Rabies, or any other disease it might be carrying, would be a blessing

compared to the endless traveling through the subways of strange worlds, lost, destitute, and alone. When it crept near to me, I didn't shoe it off, even when it reached and pressed against my leg. I couldn't bring myself to care. Not until a train passed by, and the light of its cars lit up the culvert I was in, and the thing I had thought was a rat. It was rat-like, yes, but not as much as it was spider-like. If someone had bred the two of them together, the resulting abomination might have been almost as horrible as the thing nuzzling my leg. I shrieked, flung myself from the floor, and booted it like a soccer player would, right into the opposite wall. Its back made a sickening crunch, and I watched it twitch out its last

before the final car passed and the darkness returned. And in the darkness, a terrible thought came to me. I wondered if it was edible. I didn't want to, and I gagged just imagining it, but I was hungry. And there was no guarantee that I'd be able to find food in this place, or ever again. Rat Spider was my only option. I held off as long as I could, but in the end, survival trumps squeamishness. I had my lighter, but nothing to light on fire.

I picked meat off its carcass and cooked it a little by holding it over the flame. But it didn't help much. Nothing could have. Its meat was foul, more foul than anything you can imagine. I've been that desperate for food since and eaten many other questionable things, but nothing has ever been as bad as the spider rat was. In retrospect, that is when I became a stranger. Before, I'd struggled to reach that expressionless state the other had maintained.

What I'd taken for calm was numbness. A sharp rock thrown in a river will, over time, have its edges round off by the water beating over it, and what I'd gone through had done the same. Tearing up and eating a monster in the dark, below an alien world, the last of my edges smooth. By the time I left the darkness and came back into the tunnel, I was as expressionless in empty as the one who'd led me here had ever been. That was not the worst of it, though. The worst of it came later. The first time I got stuck. The stranger had mentioned it, but in the state I had been, I had hardly noticed. One night, at the end of the line, I was asked to leave the train.

The world was one of the closer to normal ones, but other than that, the people were almost human, as I recognized it. They were orange, sure, and hunchbacked, but other than that, they were practically normal. After the last world, the orange guys were pretty much beautiful to me. I thought at first that the conductor was talking to somebody else, but I was the only one in the car. And moreover, I'd understood him. The oranges certainly hadn't been speaking English all day, but nonetheless, I could understand what he was saying. When I did, I began to realize why. I couldn't stand up straight. I was hunchbacked, and as I saw in my reflection against the the window as I exited, orange.

I pieced together the rest from there. Stuck meant that I was trapped in this world for some reason, and stuck looking like them as well, which would be handy if I wanted to take the opportunity to leave the subway station, which is possible most times, but requires a lot of care and is quite overwhelming. Alien worlds are a little revolting, I've found. You try to compare them to your own, but the differences are so vast that it is a It just makes you sick. I left that subway anyways, because it was clear I wasn't returning to the central

hub, what I'd taken to calling the infinite line of subway trains that night, or any other night I soon found out. Whatever had let me go unnoticed wasn't working any longer. I considered briefly staying, but this place wasn't home and could never be. Even if they looked like me, their culture was bound to be different. That was a lesson I'd learned before. Even worlds where people are absolutely indistinguishable for me are fraught with danger. I was once on a world where the people looked just like me.

Well, actually, they looked Brazilian, but that was more than close enough. And learned the hard way that the gesture that to me means hello meant something gravely insulting. Insulting enough that I'd been beaten half to death while a crowd looked on with approval. Besides, even if that place had a culture I could fake, I didn't want to be. want to stay. I wanted to be one of two things, to find my way home or to find the stranger who'd set me on this path and beat the shit out of him. Nothing else would do, so I wanted to move on. I wasn't sure, though, if I could do to some poor sucker what had been done to me. Could I really

force someone else to wander the eternal underground like me? It turned out I didn't have to. After a few months, one of them did notice me, yes, and began to follow me for weeks. I very carefully made it seem like I hadn't seen him, just like the stranger had. But I was torn between the desire to warn him away and the desire to bring him to the end of the line so I could leave his dismal world already. The last night, he followed me to the end of the line, just like I had once done. He hadn't managed to work up the nerve to sit across from me, though, and as soon as the train stopped at the terminus, he rushed off. I waited, hoping the conductor wouldn't see me and I could continue on, but, but as soon as the train stopped at the terminus, he rushed off. But to no avail.

I left the car, and the Metro rushed off without me. I cursed inside. As I walked around the corner towards the ticket booths, the young man who'd been following me attacked, he had a wicked, curved knife and should have caught me by surprise, but I'd been traveling through hostile worlds for several years. My reflexes were sharp. We struggled viciously before I managed to wrestle the knife from him. I don't know how it got in his back.

I don't think I wanted to kill him. I hadn't even been that angry, remembering my own building rage from so long ago. Afterwards, as he lay there, bleeding out, I got pissed. I kicked him repeatedly. You dick! You were supposed to! Follow me! I fled the scene of the crime, but not for long.

I was there bright and early the next day to catch the first subway of the morning, and that night, when I wrote it to the end of the line, I was invisible to the conductor again. I guess you can either kill them or bring them with you if you want to return to the central hub. I was invisible again, but I was also orange and hunchback still. I stayed that way until the next time I became stuck, the next time I killed. That one went much faster. I didn't wait for her to follow me. Once I was recognized as a stranger, I recognized her as the next one, and I made my choice.

I won't bring anyone else into this. It makes me wonder, though, about the stranger who inducted me. I wonder what he originally looked like, and whether he knew he could have killed me. I wonder, too, about the others I saw back home, and the rare few I came across since. Do they kill them or take them? And whichever one they choose, do they consider it a mercy? I can't bring myself to talk to them, to ask, we're damned either way, and the dam should suffer in solitude. I've killed 15 of them now.

I've gotten very good at it, but I've made a decision. I'm done killing, innocents at least. Before I returned to the central hub, I filled a backpack with as much paper as I could cram into it and wrote this story. Over and over again, to be left in as many subway trains as I can. A couple thousand messages and bottles cast into a sea of steel rails. This is a request and a warning. My request above was that you find my mother and tell her a lie. It's a white lie.

Don't worry. Tell my mother I love her and that I'm trying to come home. It may give her some hope or a small measure of peace. I wish it were true too. But here's the thing. I've been thinking of myself as like Odysseus, lost in adrift, looking to return to familiar shores. But I'm not lost at sea. I am lost in endless tunnels, the labyrinth.

The difference is important, because the labyrinths are designed, built. Somebody or something made this impossible place, and they must be held accountable for what they've done to me. They cast me as Theseus, not Odysseus, but I won't play that part any longer either. The strange rules of this place have turned me from the human I began as into something else, then something else again. They have made me a monster, and so I will be the minotaur of this labyrinth. And if I can, I will tear it down around me and destroy those that built it. My warning is that you should be very wary in public places of silent, expressionless men and women.

Keep your distance. They may kill you, or they may do worse. If you see them, run far and fast, and even more importantly, I warn you, I beg you, don't ride the train to the end of the line.