All existent phenomena of the universe and I are of one reality. That is me, and I am that.

Śūnyata

In the absurd drama of life, Death is the only suitor who awaits you patiently at every passing station, cold yet gentle— shy but a daring handsome man, true to you when all else fails you. You see him in the simple glimpses of life among the crowd of people; grey and gloomy in the rush hours of underground metro, or in some random red telephone booth amid the NY city’s skyscrapers.

I, Rhea Cordon, a 29  year female took my  break from the mundane life of a manuscript editor at a NYC’s publishing company. I  booked myself a flight to Romania, quitting my job, deleting office e-mails, ignoring the calls and voicemail from my doctor and left behind a single note for my family that I am off to find myself in the wilderness of the world. The mind had become chaotic since there’s no order in this Kafkaesque society. A far idyllic place was a good where to start with. Buddha had gone to the wilderness to find his true self, and I was no different— I ended up in Bucharest.

Oftentimes, I had thought what a dull boring life to live with. Having met some tragedy surely would have been more meaningful than this nihilistic void what man calls to be a life.

If you were to be given another chance in life, would you not acquire it? Escaping the present to be elsewhere was what I had desired, but little did I know that I would end up in a complete different world.

I was on a train, reading a book that I had got from an old bookstore in Paris, when an incident changed my life. It had led me to another realm and morbid reality; a surreal world of mystery, lies and truth, reality and deception till I could discern none in the end.

Then, I met him who was the answer to all the questions, and his existence was the biggest question in itself.

In this world, there’s another world apart from humans, and the souls with deep regrets enter that world from ours.

On the morning of October Thirteenth, I boarded on the train to travel around in Romania.

It was 9:00 am when I stood waiting on the platform to get on Mocăniță. Mocăniță is a steam-locomotive in Maramures, Transylvania and Bukovina, originally used to transport the goods, but now it is mainly used for the purpose of the tourism. I took the one from Vișeul de Sus to Maramures County to Paltin which includes a ride through the serene and peaceful valley of Vaserului as well. As I was waiting for the train and reading the book in hand, I felt something brush past my legs, and I looked down to see a greyish-black cat sitting at my feet.

It was a Transylvanian cat—a black Karpati which is a new breed of cat from the Carpathian mountains. The cat mewled in pain, and I noticed that its right leg was injured and bleeding. I squatted down and looked at its wounded leg before reaching for my bag to find something to stop the bleeding.

I found my hair scarf in my bag and tied it around its leg, and picked it up to place it gently on one side of the platform lest another animal harms it. The cat mewled at me again, but it was time for me to board on the train, so I left the cat to care of the station master.

Surprisingly, there were not many tourists on board, and the train was almost empty. I found my compartment, put my luggage in place and settled down in my seat. The old lady sitting across me and knitting a sweater kept staring at me which made me uncomfortable. There’s also a middle aged man reading a newspaper in the back seat, and a young woman with her eight years old son at the front. She tried giving him homemade egg sandwiches, but the child refused it and asked his mother for his bag of chips instead. I smiled at the warm scene as I recalled how stubborn of a child I had been myself all my life.

The train finally started moving through the beautiful forestry line of the lush valley. I pulled out the half-finished book from my bag and turned to the page Three Hundred and Sixty Nine.

‘Samsara’, I read. ‘Those with unfulfilled desire, return to a place—'

The steamer whistled as the train passed through a tunnel engulfing everything in pitch black darkness. I closed my eyes as the train moved through the narrow tunnel for what felt like an eternity, and I sighed to myself in those few stolen seconds of life.

‘Unfulfilled desire’, I mused. An unfulfilled desire of what? I had a family, friends, a stable job and a career; then, what it was that had made me travel to such a far off place?

What I was looking for in life?

I opened my eyes as the tunnel came to an end, but something didn’t seem right. I looked up from the half-read book in my lap and did not see the child with his mother in the front seat. Things became much bizarre when I didn’t see that old lady and the man in the compartment either.

‘Did they get off at a station?’ I thought to myself.

The train was passing through the tunnel, so I reckoned it was impossible to miss the station unless I had fallen asleep and others got off it without waking me up. I got up from my seat in panic and looked around the cabin. The luggage was also gone except for the newspaper on the man’s seat.

The train was running on its track with full speed through the open fields on both sides. What puzzled me and made my heart unsettled was that it was a tourist train that wouldn’t leave anyone behind before reaching its final destination, so where did they all go?

I decided to look for other people on the train, but then noticed the growing darkness outside the window. The skies had suddenly turned dark grey, and I could see a storm brewing on the horizon. The remaining light of the sun was devoured by the thick dark clouds, and lightning flashed across the sky splitting the world into two halves. I looked through the window again, and in the flash of lightning, I saw black apparitions standing in the fields.

Struck with sudden fear, I rushed to the compartment’s door, but then stopped midway when I sensed those grotesque figures drawing near to the train. The sound of the cackling thunder rolled in, and the glass door of the compartment started rattling. I slowly back-treaded from the door before the thunder cackled again, and the door burst open. I started running in the opposite direction not daring to look back and see what was chasing behind me.

In the momentarily flash of lightening followed by the cackling sound of thunder, I saw those apparitions at the windows looking straight at me.

I pushed from one door to the other, running through empty compartments and almost fell off the train as I had reached the end of the boogie and looked down to see the coupling that held the two carriages together. My entire body froze in bone chilling fear when I heard a low-inhumane growl right behind me. Something wet like a saliva dripped on the back of my neck, and I lunged forward to jump, but a strong hand grabbed my arm and pulled me upward.

The raindrops dusted his pale chiseled face and hair formed a halo of mist around his head. His dark amber eyes pierced through mine as he slashed the screeching creature behind me with his dagger and grabbed my hand running inside the carriage.

“Keep running!” He instructed, and I was too dazed to process anything.

“Are we under some sort of animal attack?” I managed to ask, but he did not answer except for a plain instruction not to look back.

We reached the end of the boogies, and he asked me to hold onto him tightly before jumping off the moving train into the open grass fields. I let out a shout upon the fall as I had scrapped my elbow, but he urged me to get up and clasped my hand as we ran through the green fields towards the thicket of trees.

The mist from the rain shower had also settled on the ground which made it difficult for us to see anything around us. Apart from those shadows of tall trees and their crooked branches, nothing was visible.

The silence around us had become defeating that I could hear my own heartbeat in head.

“Can you climb the tree?” He asked me, and I shook my head. “No, I—"

“Pardon me then!” He cut me off mid-sentence and grabbed me by the waist, hoisting me up on the tree. I blushed in mortification but quickly grabbed onto the tree’s branch and pushed myself up on it, holding onto its thick trunk as if my life depended on it.

He got himself up another tree and shifted to scan the ground below. I swallowed nervously and looked down to see what he was looking but also noticed his sharp features. He had high cheekbones, pointed nose and chiseled jawline with proportionate mouth. He was dressed in a black leather-suit with the knives and daggers attached to his leg holster.

“What are those things?” I asked him after composing myself.

“Soul-eaters” He said, “These things come out in the rain and are attracted to the void.” I took me a moment to process his answer. Were they some kind of wild animals that attacked the humans? Did something happen to the other passengers on the train as well?

“Aren’t local authorities doing anything?” I inquired from him. “Where is the rescue team?”  It was alarming to be attacked by something ghoulish and local authorities not taking care of it put the lives in danger.

“What?” He was taken aback by my questioning. “Aren’t you a forest ranger?” I asked him.

“Miss, what makes you think—” . He had become clearly lost at this point. “How did you get in here?”

“I was on the train and missed my station.” I explained myself to him.

“You missed the station?” He gave me an incredulous look. “That’s the first one I have heard.” He sounded bemused that finally ticked me off.

“How else could I have gotten in here?” I snapped at him for being sarcastic in such a serious situation.

“No one gets in here when they miss the station.” He said to me. “This is a no man land, and you being here is no coincidence.”

“What do you mean?”  

He raised a finger to his mouth and asked me to be quiet. He carefully shifted his weight on the branch and looked down to see the ground. There was something down there, something lean and slender; reptile like a gigantic black salamander with long tail slithering and moving in the mist, and there were two of them. My heart leapt up in my throat in fear, and I cursed myself for falling asleep on the train and missing the station. I could have been at work having my black coffee, going through manuscripts and sorting out those e-mails had I not decided that I didn’t want this boring corporate life and went on a vacation.

“Can you stop being so pessimistic?” He chided as if he read my thoughts. “You’re attracting those things here.”

“What have I done?” I was beyond exasperated.” I didn’t choose to be stuck in a God forsaken place to be eaten by something malicious.”

“They feed on negative emotions of a person. Can’t you think of something happy?” He asked and I scoffed at the thought. When did I ever have a good memory?

He stretched his leg over the tree’s branch and leaned back against the rough bark to rest.

“Are you going to sit like this?” I was stunned at his outlandish behavior for being relaxed in such a situation.

“If you can’t think of a way out, I can’t help you out either.” He had closed his eyes, and didn’t answer me when I called him leaving me to my own contemplation.

 The only happy memory I could perhaps recall from was the warm smell of hazelnut cookies that father used to bake on the rainy days as we would sit in the patio and enjoy the weather—or the stories grandma used to tell us on stormy nights to make us fall asleep.

I did not know when or how I fell asleep there, but when I woke up, he was sitting alert on the tree and asked me to be vigilant as well.

“Did you recall something? Pease remember that I can’t go back either unless you do.”

He said, gripping the dagger in his hand ready to strike whatever it was down there in the fog.

“All existent phenomena in the universe and I are of the same reality”. He chanted looking at me intently, and a sudden realization dawned on me.

‘Śūnyatā’  I spoke that word.

The word from the book.

The Void.

A flash of blinding white light engulfed everything around us, and I covered my eyes with my arm to shield myself against the light. I lowered my arm to see the fog being cleared off in the forest, and warm sunlight had filtered in through the clouds.

“Let’s get out of here.” He interrupted my thoughts, and I jumped down the tree matching up his pace to get back to the fields.” What happened?” I inquired, but he had no time to explain anything to me.

“I’ll get you back on the train, and don’t think of ever coming back here.”

“Why would I even come back?” I remarked earning a scoff from him. We continued running through those fields to get back to the steamer. However, I did find it strange that it still hadn’t left. That person once again gained his momentum and got me up on the boogie telling me to get back inside the compartment safely.

“Don’t ever come back!” He shouted as the train picked up its pace. I turned to leave before I realized that I hadn’t even asked his name, but he’s long gone by then and nowhere in sight.

I got back inside the compartment and sat down on a seat to catch my breath and calm down my nerves. I closed my eyes, sighing in relief as the train moved through the valley again. Just then a hand shook me, and I opened my eyes to see that old woman looking down at me.

“The station has arrived”, she told me and I jumped up to see that young mother and her son, and the man standing around me.

“Are you alright?” The boy asked, and I knew I wasn’t alright. The door was back in its place as if nothing had happened before.

“You had fallen asleep, dear.” The lady told me after seeing me confused. I felt relieved upon hearing; however, the scratch on my arm made me question whether this whole incident was a dream or not.

The rest of the trip went well, and we returned by Three in the noon. I got up from my seat and collected my luggage to get off the train. During my ride to the hotel, I kept thinking about the incident and concluded it to be a lucid dream because of the jet lag and traveling exhaustion. I might have accidentally scraped my arm somewhere when boarding on the train, so I didn’t dwell on it further.

I arrived at the hotel in Boia Mare where I already had the reservation before for my room and checked in at it. I left the luggage at the door the soon I got inside my room and plopped down on the bed relishing in its comfort. After few minutes, I managed to drag myself to the shower and called the hotel service for the warm meal before settling down in the bed to sleep.

The book was lying upside down on the nightstand, and I picked it again to finish the reading.

‘Samsara. Those with unfulfilled desire return to a place called…’ I paused as I lingered upon the next word in dread.

 ‘—Hell’