Day 886

Heading back into the town for university after a long summer break seemed to have made him forget the rules. He'd spent all of the first and second year memorising them, beating his classmates and rivals alike (metaphorically and literally) and outlasting over seventy eight students in total. He should have known what to do but being home made made him soft.

He saw the first piece of graffiti on the side of a substation from his cushy seat aboard Carriage D of the inbound train. It read HUSH like all the others did and that was the first warning. It marked the entrance to the town, not the official one but the boundaries between the rest of England and the dimension that the town was unknowingly built in.

At this point he was meant to turn all electric devices off and keep salt on his tongue for fifty minutes.

Instead he turned back to his ebook, vaguely noting that he had a further hour or so until he got to the station itself. The trains liked to go the roundabout way that traced a welcoming sigil into the town's dimension and helped to ease and nausea from crossing the border. He remembered this much and nothing more.

The next piece of graffiti was on the window opposite him, again it read HUSH and gave him a second chance to save himself with the salt he'd brought along just for this. He didn't see this graffiti, didn't see when it crawled onto the train door nearly in front of him, onto the wall in front of him, onto the chair in front of him or even onto his shoes.

He only noticed when the screen in front of him went fuzzy and the distorted phrase repeated again and again and again, always telling him to HUSH until it switched to scream and he finally remembered. But he still forgot that when the words changed you had to swallow three spoons of salt instead of letting it sit.

As the salt sat on his tongue, burning more than last time, he noticed how crowded the carriage now was.

He knew that most people got off at the stop before this one, heading into Borderton and pretending it was the end of the line instead of the frontier between dimensions. A quick glance around confirmed that the people who were now with him weren't human, they were Locals. Locals weren't usually seen on the trains unless something was... wrong.

Taking a deep breath he closed his eyes and slowly let it out, opening them to find himself surrounded on all sides by Locals. Their lidless eyes bored into him, weighing him down with the knowledge that he'd royally screwed up this time. He should have known better. Their pencil-thin lips puckered in unison and they raised their singular finger to all say HUSH.

When the train arrived, Carriage D was empty.