The Station Master’s Replica

In the autumn of 2014, my family and I lived in a converted railway station, the old ticket office now our living room, the waiting room our kitchen. The station had been decommissioned in the 1970s, and the tracks were overgrown with weeds, but the platform still stretched along the front of the house, a concrete runway to nowhere. My father, a retired railway enthusiast, had bought it cheap, and we’d made it our home.

At that time, the residents were my father, my mother, my older brother Carl, my younger sister Emily, and me. We’d all grown accustomed to the strange acoustics of the place—the way the wind would whistle through the gaps in the old doors, the way the floors creaked at odd hours. But the first sign of something truly wrong came on a cold, drizzly night in late October. My father had been working late at his new job at the city’s transport museum, and he’d taken the last train home, arriving just after midnight. As he walked up the platform, he saw the lights on in the living room, and through the window, he saw Emily sitting at the computer, her back to him. He called out, but she didn’t respond. He assumed she had headphones on, so he unlocked the front door and stepped inside. The living room was empty. The computer was on, the screensaver swirling, but no one was there. Puzzled, he walked to the kitchen, expecting to find Emily getting a midnight snack. But as he passed the pantry, the door swung open, and Emily stepped out, holding a glass of water. My father asked her if she’d just been on the computer, and she said no, she’d been in her room all evening. He didn’t press it, but he felt a chill that had nothing to do with the draft.

The next week, I saw it too. I came home from my night shift at the local hospital, exhausted. As I walked up the platform, I saw my father’s silhouette in the stationmaster’s office, which we used as a study. He seemed to be staring at the wall, not moving. I knocked on the window, but he didn’t react. I went inside and called out to him. He wasn’t there. The room was empty, the desk lamp flickering. I called him on his mobile, and he answered from the bedroom upstairs, confused. I told him what I’d seen, and his face went pale. He said he’d seen Emily the same way a week ago. We didn’t know what to make of it.

Then Carl saw it. One Saturday afternoon, he was in the old waiting room, which we’d converted into a lounge, watching a football match. He got up to use the bathroom, and as he passed the ticket window, he saw Emily outside on the platform, standing perfectly still, staring at the overgrown tracks. He tapped on the glass, but she didn’t move. He went to the front door to call her in, but when he opened it, the platform was empty, and he heard Emily’s voice from inside, asking where he was. He turned around, and she was standing in the hall, looking confused. Carl told us later that her eyes had looked hollow, like they weren’t seeing the world in the same way.

We began to notice a pattern. The doppelgangers appeared at odd hours, always in peripheral vision, always silent, always just a figure in the corner. They seemed to be copies of us, but not quite right—the way they stood, the way they didn’t blink. Emily saw one of Carl, standing on the platform with his back to her, and when she called his name, he turned and vanished. Dad saw one of Mum, standing in the kitchen, but when he approached, she disappeared into the pantry, and a moment later, the real Mum came in from the garden.

The station had a history, we learned later. In the 1940s, a stationmaster named Mr. Abbot had died on the platform, struck by a train, but not before he’d been seen in two places at once. The villagers had whispered about a ‘twin’, a duplicate that had appeared before accidents. The station was abandoned after a tragedy, and some said the place was haunted. But we were rational people; we dismissed it as coincidence, shared hallucinations, a gas leak. But then I saw my own.

It was late November, and I was alone in the house. I had been reading in the old waiting room, but I felt a sudden urge to go to the stationmaster’s office. I don’t know why. I walked in, and there at the desk sat me—a perfect copy, wearing the same clothes, with the same tired expression. She looked up at me, and her mouth curved into a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. I screamed, and she vanished. But the smile stayed in my mind, a hollow mockery.

I told Dad about it, and he decided to investigate the station’s history. He found old newspaper clippings about the stationmaster’s death, and a local historian mentioned that the station was built on land that had once been a crossroads, a place where ‘the veil was thin’. But we didn’t need supernatural explanations. Something was happening, and it was getting worse.

On the first of December, we all gathered in the living room, trying to reassure each other. Emily suggested we might be seeing reflections from the old glass in the windows, but we knew better. Then Dad told us he’d seen a doppelganger of Mum, and Mum admitted she’d seen one of Carl. We realized we’d all been seeing them, each thinking it was isolated.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I heard footsteps on the platform, slow, deliberate. I got up and look out the window. There was a figure standing on the platform, illuminated by the moon. It was me. And beside me, another figure—Dad. And another—Emily. They were all standing in a row, facing the house, their faces blank. I woke Carl and Emily, and we all watched in horror as the doppelgangers slowly pointed toward the old signal box at the end of the platform. A red light began to blink.

We decided to leave the next morning. But as we packed, the doppelgangers appeared throughout the house, sometimes in the hall, sometimes in the kitchen, always watching. They never spoke, never moved, just existed in our space, multiplying. We were trapped, surrounded by our own reflections that were slightly wrong.

The last thing I remember is the sound of a train whistle, though no train had run on those tracks in decades. And then the lights went out. When we woke, we were outside the station, the sun rising, the station dark and silent. We never spoke of it again. But sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I see a smile that isn’t mine.