The subway station was never really supposed to be open at night. Most of the tunnels had been sealed off for years, their entrances covered in rusted metal and warnings in faded paint. But on the third Tuesday of October, when the city was quiet and the streetlights flickered like dying eyes, a man named Eli found himself standing at the threshold of one of those forgotten doors. He wasn’t sure how he got there. He had been walking home from a late shift at the bookstore, the kind of place where the only customers were ghosts of lost readers. The air was thick with the scent of old paper and dust, and the streets were empty save for the occasional car that passed by like a shadow slipping through a dream. He took a shortcut through an alley, and somehow ended up in front of a door that shouldn’t have been there. It was painted in peeling blue, with a sign that read "Subway Access" in a handwriting that looked like it had been scrawled by someone who didn’t know how to hold a pen. Eli hesitated. He had heard stories about the abandoned subway lines—whispers of people who vanished after stepping into the wrong tunnel. But something about the door called to him. Maybe it was the way the light from the streetlamp caught the edges of the sign, making it glow faintly, or maybe it was just the loneliness of the night. Either way, he pushed it open. Inside, the air was colder than it should have been. The walls were lined with cracked tiles, and the floor was slick with moisture that hadn’t seen sunlight in decades. A single flickering bulb above the stairs cast long shadows that seemed to move even when nothing else did. Eli descended cautiously, his footsteps echoing in the silence like a heartbeat in a void. At the bottom, the tunnel stretched out in both directions. One path was lit by the same dim bulb, while the other was swallowed by darkness. He chose the lit path, though he couldn’t explain why. The corridor was narrow, the ceiling so low that he had to bend slightly to avoid hitting his head. Along the walls, strange symbols were etched into the stone—some familiar, others alien, as if written by a language that had never existed in this world. Then he heard it: a whisper, soft and distant, like the wind moving through a hollow pipe. It wasn’t coming from any direction he could pinpoint. He stopped, listening. The sound came again, this time closer, and then a voice—low and smooth, like silk over steel. “You shouldn’t be here.” Eli turned around, but the tunnel behind him was empty. He pressed forward, heart pounding. The air grew heavier, the temperature dropping until his breath curled in the air like smoke. The symbols on the wall began to shimmer, their shapes shifting as if they were alive. He reached out to touch one, and the moment his fingers brushed the stone, the entire tunnel shuddered. A rush of cold air swept through, and the lights flickered. When they steadied, the tunnel had changed. The walls were no longer stone but something else—smooth, dark, and strangely reflective. The floor beneath his feet felt like glass, and the ceiling was gone, replaced by a vast expanse of stars that pulsed like a living thing. He stood in a space that defied logic, a place between dreams and reality. From the darkness ahead, a figure emerged. It was tall, draped in a long coat that seemed to ripple like water. Its face was obscured, but its eyes—glowing faintly in the dark—seemed to see right through him. “You’ve come far,” it said, its voice not quite human, more like a memory of sound. Eli tried to speak, but his throat was dry. “Where am I?” The figure tilted its head. “You are where you always were. Just not where you thought.” Before Eli could ask more, the figure stepped back, dissolving into the shadows. The tunnel shifted again, the stars above fading into a deep, endless black. The symbols on the walls blinked out, one by one, until all that remained was silence. When Eli opened his eyes, he was back at the alley, the door now gone, as if it had never been there. The streetlight flickered, and the city was still. No one else seemed to notice anything unusual. But in his pocket, he found a small piece of stone, etched with a symbol that matched one from the tunnel. And in his mind, the whisper still lingered, a question without an answer. Was he ever truly alone? Or had he always been part of something bigger, waiting for the right moment to return?