The story had been told so many ways that no one remembered who told it first.

Some said it began with a letter written in pencil on damp paper, found inside a forgotten locker at a rural terminal. Others swore it came from a railway janitor who vanished one night and left only his broom leaning against a locked door. However it began, every version shared one constant: the unnamed station that did not appear on any map, but appeared in the rain, always in the rain.

In the small mountain towns, children used to play a game called “Find the Zero.” They would wait by the tracks at midnight, counting the seconds between distant whistles. The bravest would press their ears to the rails and whisper, *Are you coming for me?* The rails always answered in their sleep—a faint tremor, a sigh. Some children grew up and left; a few never did. The old women said they had followed the sound too far.

There was an engineer named Haskel, who worked for the national line before the war. He was meticulous, quiet, and superstitious in the practical way of men who deal with machines. One autumn, he was assigned to repair the signals between Milepost 304 and the forgotten freight junction beyond it. The schedule gave him two nights; he finished in one. The following week, a new signal light appeared along that same stretch—one he hadn’t installed. White glass, iron frame, wired to nothing. It pulsed once every twenty seconds. The timing was precise, impossible, patient.

When he returned to remove it, he found a small platform under its glow. It was not new. Moss had already claimed the bricks, and ivy wound around the posts like veins. The sign above the roof had been stripped of letters. Only the nails remained, black dots against a white board, spelling nothing. In the space where a name should be, the rain hung still, refusing to fall. He said later, before his voice failed, that the rain *listened.*

For months after that, the countryside spoke of the station without number. Farmers on the night freight swore the train slowed on its own when passing Milepost 304, as if some old reflex in the steel remembered a stop that was no longer listed. A conductor named Emilia claimed she saw people standing under the roof, holding suitcases wrapped in oilcloth. When the lamps of her train swept over them, the suitcases glowed faintly from within, like lanterns filled with seawater.

In one retelling, Haskel disappeared the following spring. In another, he retired and built a house facing the line, where he sat every night waiting for the white light to return. His son swore the light did—briefly, on the anniversary of his father’s death. It blinked twice, like a farewell.

Local newspapers treated it as folklore. “Rural Illusion Haunts Track Workers,” read one headline, with a smiling photograph of a reporter beside a rain-soaked mile marker. The article mentioned that no official railway map listed any siding or stop near that area, but did not explain the photograph printed beside it—a blurred frame showing the edge of a roof and a shape beneath it, holding an umbrella, though it had not rained that day.

The photo went missing from the archives two months later. The page number on the microfilm jumped from 12 to 14.

Years passed. Trains modernized. Schedules tightened. The new electronic panels displayed station names in clean, predictable light. Yet every now and then, among the blue letters and numbers, a single frame of static would appear—white, round, wordless. The operators learned not to comment on it. One supervisor simply wrote in his log:  

> “Fault at 02:17. Non-repeating. Pattern resembles zero. Ignore.”

In the seaside city of Venth, an artist held an exhibition called *Platform Series.* Each canvas depicted a train station blurred almost beyond recognition. The critic called them “portraits of memory in rain.” Visitors felt uneasy but couldn’t say why. In one painting, the blurred sign seemed to shift when viewed from an angle. A hidden number, a looping circle. The curator covered it with glass to stop people from touching.

Among the guests was an old conductor with a slow, permanent tremor in his right hand. He looked at the painting a long time, then whispered to no one, “Still waiting.”

By morning, the painting was gone. The gallery’s CCTV showed only snow. The timestamp at the bottom of the frame read 02:17:00.

The legend spread, as legends do—not because people believed, but because it fit the shape of a fear they already had: that the world keeps forgotten rooms for those who take the wrong door.

Some said the nameless station appeared anywhere the earth was lonely enough to listen. Others said it lived beneath the language of timetables, written in the rhythm of train wheels and heartbeats. One line always returned, no matter the tongue:

> “There is a station that waits for no one, but welcomes all.”

The archivist who compiled these accounts—who might have been a journalist, or merely a collector of stories—ended the file with a note scrawled in blue pencil:

> “The station without number is not a place.  

>  It is the thought you have between stations,  

>  when you realize you’ve missed your stop.”

He underlined the time: **2:17 A.M.**

No date. No signature. Only a faint circular stain, as if made by the base of a lamp.

And so the story moved again, by word, by rumor, by dream, adding one more carriage to the endless train of memory, until even the tellers forgot which way they were traveling.

The station remained, patient, unnumbered, listening in the dark.