The Third Niche

Old Mircea told me about it in my first week. There’d be a man standing in the third refuge niche inside the tunnel. Just walk past him, he said. Don’t look at him, don’t speak to him, don’t stop.

It was the 1980s, and I worked as a track inspector on a single-track mountain railway in the Carpathians. Every night, in the empty stretches between trains, my job was to walk into that long tunnel with a single lamp and check the rails and the walls. The tunnel was long. It took more than twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other. Inside it was pitch dark, water dripped constantly from the roof, and at regular intervals there were niches cut into the wall, each big enough for one man. They’re where you take shelter when a train comes through.

Mircea’s words, I took for the kind of joke they play on a new hand. Every workplace has stories like that.

On the night of my first solo shift, I went into the tunnel with my lamp. When I reached the third niche, there really was a man standing there.

He wore an old railwayman’s coat, held a lamp in his hand, and stood quite still inside the niche. I instinctively went to greet him. I thought he was a colleague from the night crew.

But something was wrong. The lamp in his hand was lit — I could see the flame on the wick — but it gave no light. That glow lit nothing of its surroundings. Even though the round beam of my own lamp fell on him, the man stayed sunk in darkness. And though water dripped from the roof and everything around was…