Midnight Station.
The place the train had announced as having a casino was already unlike the spotless Segwang Station from the platform onward.
Red and yellow lights.
The moment we stepped onto the floor, I saw strings of small, bulb-like lights clustered tightly together along the ceiling, glittering in multicolored rows.
Some of the bulbs were burnt out, and some strings were broken or severed, but that only made the atmosphere stranger.
It felt like an old, worn-out entertainment venue.
[Hmmm. It seems they haven’t kept the place up properly.]
But we only focused on the facilities for an instant.
Because an even more shocking sight was unfolding around us.
The passengers who had gotten off with us.
The long-term missing persons who had squeezed out through the train doors in a flood—
the moment they left the train and set foot on the platform of Midnight Station,
their true appearance was revealed.
“…!!”
Worn-out clothes, rotted coats, filthy tangled hair, hollow and gaunt bodies.
The appearance of those who had been isolated and abandoned for a very long time.
Once freed from the train’s effect—“showing the riders exactly as they first were”—their appearances were unmistakably those of long-term missing persons.
A cold shock gripped the group.
But to people who had entered all kinds of dangerous Ghost Stories, this much might still have counted as a somewhat familiar scene.
What was truly shocking was something else.
For example…
Their bodies were in pieces.
“……”
Arms, legs, sometimes hands, eyeballs, noses, ears, hair… all kinds of absences manifested visibly in their appearances.
It was not just one particular body part, nor was there any pattern to it. Some were in such a state they could barely walk or move at all.
They tried to move the way they had originally been meant to and kept falling, or crawling, or…