Off the rails (IP)

I did not come to Dr. Jennings of my own volition. It was my wife’s idea, and she insisted upon it with such an air of resolve that I had no choice but to acquiesce. Her concern for my health, she said, had reached a point where she could no longer bear to watch me suffer in silence. She is a practical woman, my wife—kind, though prone to a certain imperiousness when she believes herself in the right.

And so I found myself reclining, uncomfortably, upon a couch too soft for proper posture, staring at a ceiling dotted with an absurd number of recessed lights. Dr. Jennings sat across from me, her pen poised above a notebook. She had the practised composure of someone who spends their days listening to people describe their unravelling lives.

“Sir Hatt,” she began, her voice as smooth as the leather armchair she occupied. “Let’s start with the voices you mentioned last week. Would you like to elaborate on that?”

I shifted uneasily. “Voices, you say? That’s a rather dramatic interpretation.”

Her pen twitched, but she said nothing.

I cleared my throat. “What I described were not voices as such. Merely... impressions. Sensations, if you will. A curious awareness that I find difficult to articulate.”

“And these sensations occur where, exactly?”

“At the rail yard,” I replied, though my voice faltered on the last syllable. It was not the admission itself that caused me discomfort but the sudden image it conjured—of gleaming steel tracks crisscrossing the yard, of engines lined up like soldiers on parade, their polished faces gleaming in the sun.

Dr. Jennings tilted her head slightly, her expression one of neutral curiosity. “Go on.”

I hesitated. The silence stretched between us, taut as the cables of a suspension bridge. “It is difficult to explain without sounding foolish.”

“Foolishness,” she said, “has no place here.”

That seemed an invitation, though not one I was eager to accept. “Very well,” I said, sitting up straighter. “There are times when the engines appear... animate. That is to say, they seem to observe me. Their eyes—”

“Eyes?”

I flushed. “Their faces, I mean. The painted faces on the engines. They seem to follow me as I walk the yard. Sometimes, it’s as if they’re watching me, assessing me.”

Dr. Jennings’s pen scratched against her notebook. The sound was uncomfortably loud.

“And do these... sensations include auditory elements?”

My hand gripped the brim of my hat, which I had been holding since I entered the room. “Occasionally. A murmur here, a sigh there. It’s nothing concrete. But there was one instance—”

“Yes?”

“There was one instance where I could have sworn I heard Thomas—that’s one of the engines—say something. He was stationed near the turntable, and as I approached, I distinctly heard him mutter, ‘Late again, as usual.’”

The memory of that moment struck me with unexpected force. I felt the weight of it anew, the way I had stopped in my tracks and glanced about, certain there was some explanation, though none presented itself.

“Trains don’t speak,” Dr. Jennings said gently.

“Of course they don’t!” I snapped, the words escaping before I could catch them. “Do you think I don’t know that?”

She remained unperturbed. “Then why do you think you heard one?”

The room seemed suddenly smaller, the air thick. “Perhaps I’m overtired. The railway business is not what it once was, you know. We’ve had to contend with modernization, with new technologies that make men like me obsolete.”

Dr. Jennings made another note. “Change can be difficult to process, especially for those who have devoted their lives to a particular way of being.”

Her tone was infuriatingly calm, but I said nothing. Instead, I stared at the potted fern in the corner, its leaves arching gracefully as if to mock my growing agitation.

Image: By The Basingstoker - https://www.flickr.com/photos/15507655@N05/4279337516/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107031838