Chapter 5: The Conductor of Souls

The phantom tickets fluttered from the conductor's fingers like dying moths, each one inscribed with names that made Rei's vision blur when he tried to read them. The trapped passengers were turning in their seats now, their waxy faces animated by desperate hunger, reaching toward him and Yano with movements that were just slightly too fluid to be human.

"Don't let them touch you," Yano warned, raising her weapon. The device hummed to life, casting an eerie blue light that seemed to push back the shadows creeping along the train car's walls. "Physical contact with the absorbed victims will pull you into their state."

Rei pressed himself against the window, feeling the unnatural warmth of the tunnel walls through the glass. His Taint was screaming now, the mark on his forehead burning so intensely he could barely think. But beneath the pain, he was beginning to sense something—a deeper rhythm underlying the Anomaly's manifestation, like a heartbeat buried in white noise.

"Yano," he said urgently, "there's something else here. Something driving the whole manifestation."

The conductor laughed, the sound echoing through dimensions that shouldn't exist. "The boy sees deeper than most. Yes, there is always a source. Always a beginning." Its form began to shift, the pristine uniform dissolving to reveal something underneath that hurt to perceive directly. "Would you like to meet him?"

Before Yano could respond, the train car lurched violently to one side. The lights flickered and died, plunging them into a darkness lit only by the pale glow from Yano's weapon. In that brief moment of blindness, Rei felt the whispers in his head coalesce into something approaching coherence.

Listen, they seemed to say. Listen to what lies beneath.

When the emergency lighting kicked in, they were no longer in a passenger car. The space had transformed into something that resembled a conductor's booth, but twisted and expanded beyond rational dimensions. Banks of switches and gauges covered walls that curved away into impossible distances, all of them monitoring routes that existed only in the spaces between reality.

At the center of it all sat a figure hunched over a massive control panel. It wore the remnants of an old JR uniform, but the fabric was stained with decades of neglect and something darker. When it turned to face them, Rei saw that it had once been human—the bone structure was right, the proportions familiar—but whatever humanity it had possessed was long gone.

"New passengers," it said in a voice like grinding gears. "It's been... how long? Time flows differently on the eternal route." Its eyes were milky white, but they tracked movement with predatory precision. "I've been maintaining the schedule for so long. Every station, every stop, every soul that needs transport to their final destination."

"You're the original conductor," Yano realized. "The one who created this manifestation."

The thing that had once been human nodded slowly. "Forty-three years of perfect service. Never a delay, never a missed connection. Until..." Its face twisted with an emotion that might have been grief or rage. "Until they said I was no longer needed. Automation, they called it. Progress."

Rei felt his Taint pulse with sympathetic resonance. Through the psychic connection Kuchisake-onna had carved into his mind, he was picking up fragments of the creature's memories—decades of prideful service, the devastating blow of forced retirement, and then... darkness. Despair so profound it had torn a hole in reality itself.

"You killed yourself," he said quietly. "Right here, in the control booth."

The conductor's smile was a rictus of broken teeth and exposed bone. "I became one with the route. Now I can ensure that no passenger ever has to worry about being abandoned, about reaching the end of the line with nowhere else to go." It gestured to the control panel, which Rei now realized was covered in personal effects—photographs, watches, phones, all the small treasures that had been in the pockets of the missing passengers.

"But you're not helping them," Yano said, her weapon trained on the conductor but not yet firing. "You're trapping them. They have families, lives, people who need them to come home."

"Home?" The conductor's laugh was the sound of metal tearing. "Home is what they tell you exists until they decide you're no longer useful. No, no—here they have purpose. Here they are part of something eternal."

Rei closed his eyes, trying to filter through the chaos in his head. The whispers were telling him something important, but it was buried under layers of psychic static. Then he remembered his training—Yano's lessons about Anomaly behavior patterns, about finding the internal logic that governed even the most irrational manifestations.

"The pocket watch," he said suddenly, opening his eyes. "There, on the control panel. That's your anchor, isn't it? The thing that keeps you tied to this manifestation."

The conductor's expression shifted, becoming wary for the first time. "Forty-three years of service. Every shift timed to the second. That watch never failed me."

Yano followed Rei's gaze to the antique timepiece sitting among the collected belongings of the missing passengers. Unlike the other objects, it seemed to pulse with its own internal light, and the air around it shimmered with distortion patterns.

"If we destroy the anchor," she said, understanding immediately, "the manifestation collapses."

"And the passengers?"

"Released back to normal space-time." Yano's finger tightened on her weapon's trigger. "In theory."

The conductor rose from its seat, and Rei realized that it was much larger than it had initially appeared—its form stretched and twisted by decades of existing partially outside normal reality. "You will not take my purpose from me," it snarled. "Not again. Never again."

The control booth began to shake as the conductor's rage manifested as physical force. Gauges exploded in showers of sparks, and the walls themselves seemed to pulse like living tissue. Through it all, the pocket watch continued its steady ticking, a metronome keeping time for a dance of madness.

Yano fired three shots in rapid succession, beams of concentrated light that struck the conductor center mass. It staggered but didn't fall, its form already beginning to regenerate from the damage.

"Physical attacks won't work," she called to Rei over the sound of reality tearing apart around them. "It's sustained by the Anomaly's logic, not by biology."

"Then we need to break the logic," Rei replied, his mind racing. The whispers in his head were reaching a crescendo, but for the first time since Kuchisake-onna had marked him, they seemed to be trying to help rather than torment.

Touch the watch, they urged. See what really happened. See the truth beneath the story.

Rei lunged toward the control panel, dodging a swipe from the conductor's elongated arms. His fingers closed around the pocket watch, and the moment skin met metal, the world exploded into vision.

He was in the same control booth, but forty-three years ago. A younger man in a pristine uniform sat at the controls, tears streaming down his face as he read a termination letter. But there was someone else in the room—a figure in a long coat and surgical mask, watching from the shadows with eyes full of ancient sadness.

"So much pain," Kuchisake-onna's voice whispered across the decades. "So much anger at being discarded, forgotten. Would you like to never be forgotten again?"

"No," Rei gasped, still gripping the watch. "It wasn't suicide. She was here. She influenced his death, turned his despair into something she could use."

The conductor—the real conductor, the human being who had died in this room—heard Rei's words and stopped his attack. For a moment, confusion replaced rage in his milky eyes.

"She was... she was here," he said slowly, memories surfacing through decades of Anomalous existence. "The woman with the mask. She said she could help me, could make sure I was never forgotten."

"But she lied," Rei said, feeling the truth of it through his Taint connection. "She didn't want to help you—she wanted to create another anchor point for her influence. Another way to touch the world through human tragedy."

The pocket watch was growing hot in Rei's hand, the metal beginning to burn his palm. Through the psychic connection, he could feel the conductor's original personality struggling against the Anomalous overlay that had defined him for decades.

"My name," the conductor whispered. "I... I had a name. Tanaka. Tanaka Hiroshi."

"She stole that from you too," Rei said. "Made you into just another urban legend, another story to frighten people with. But you were a person. You had forty-three years of perfect service because you cared about getting people home safely."

The control booth began to shimmer, reality reasserting itself as the Anomaly's internal logic started to collapse. Through the expanding cracks in the manifestation, Rei could see the interior of a normal subway car, filled with very confused but very human passengers.

"I can let them go," Tanaka said, his voice becoming more human with each word. "I can... I can get them home."

"That's all you ever wanted to do," Rei agreed. "Help people reach their destinations."

Tanaka nodded and turned back to his control panel. But instead of the impossible array of gauges and switches, there was now just a simple train operator's console. With movements that spoke of decades of practiced skill, he began the shutdown sequence that would return his passengers to the world of the living.

"Tell them," he said as his form began to fade, "tell them that Conductor Tanaka ensured they reached their destination safely. One last time."

The pocket watch crumbled to dust in Rei's hand, and the phantom train began its final journey back to reality.

As the manifestation collapsed around them, Rei caught one last glimpse of something that made his blood freeze. In the reflection of the control booth's windows, he saw Kuchisake-onna watching from the shadows, her terrible mouth curved in what might have been approval.

She had been here forty-three years ago, turning human tragedy into supernatural horror. And now she was watching Rei learn to unravel her work, as if his ability to see through her manipulations was exactly what she had intended all along.

The face of the killer in Tanaka's death wasn't just familiar—it was a preview of betrayals yet to come.