Chapter 1: Tickets for the Forgotten

Chapter 1: Tickets for the Forgotten

The world under the Oakhaven Bridge was a kingdom of concrete and shadow, ruled by the ceaseless, grinding roar of traffic overhead. For Liam Ashford, it was a temporary purgatory. He repeated the word to himself like a mantra—temporary. Three months of this damp, grimy existence hadn't managed to scour the belief from his bones, even as the cold seeped into them.

He sat with his back against a graffiti-scarred pylon, clutching a thin, threadbare blanket around his shoulders. Across the small, makeshift encampment, a handful of others huddled in their own private miseries. There was Sal, a man whose face was a roadmap of hard living, nursing a dented flask. There was Martha, an elderly woman wrapped in layers of salvaged clothing, who hummed tunelessly to herself. Liam knew their faces, but not their stories. He kept his distance. His pride was a stubborn, dying ember he refused to let go out. He wasn't one of them. Not really. This was just a statistical anomaly in the project plan of his life, a temporary deviation he would soon correct.

"Cold bites deep tonight," Sal grunted, his voice a gravelly rumble that barely carried over the din of the cars.

Liam just nodded, pulling the blanket tighter. He didn't want to engage. Conversation meant acceptance, and he wasn't ready to accept this. His gaze drifted to the worn leather watch on his wrist. It hadn't ticked in a year, but it was a relic from his old life, a symbol of a time when minutes and hours mattered, when he had meetings to attend and deadlines to meet. It was his anchor to the man he used to be.

That’s when the noise changed.

It wasn't a sudden silence, but a dampening. The percussive thunder of tires on steel joints overhead seemed to recede, becoming a distant, muffled heartbeat. The air grew still and heavy, thick with the smell of wet pavement and something else… something sterile and cloying, like old flowers in a sealed room.

A man was standing at the edge of their camp.

He hadn't been there a second ago. He didn’t walk in from the street or emerge from the deeper shadows. He was simply… there. Tall and unnaturally still, he was a living paradox. One half of him, from the polished shoe to the sharp lapel, was dressed in a perfectly tailored charcoal grey suit, the kind Liam used to covet in department store windows. The other half was a nightmare of decay—a filthy, tattered black suit from a forgotten era, its fabric rotten and stained. The division was a perfect, clean line down the center of his body. His face was lost in the gloom cast by the bridge, but a smile was clearly visible, a wide, white crescent that seemed unnervingly, impossibly cheerful. He leaned on a heavy, ornate cane of a dark wood that seemed to drink the meager light.

No one moved. Even Martha’s humming had ceased. The man took a silent, gliding step forward.

"Good evening, my forgotten friends!" his voice boomed, yet it didn't echo. It was cheerful, resonant, and utterly out of place. "A difficult night, is it not? A night where the bones ache and the soul shivers. A night where one might wish for… an exit."

He spread his arms wide, a grand, theatrical gesture. "I am here to offer you one. A ticket to a better place. A ticket to salvation!"

From the pristine pocket of his grey suit, he produced a small stack of what looked like old-fashioned train tickets, the kind made of thick, cream-colored cardstock.

Sal snorted, a brief return to normality. "And what's this 'salvation' gonna cost us, mister?"

The man's smile widened. "A pittance! A trifle. The very things that weigh you down. The anchors that bind you to this miserable shore." He gestured with his cane towards their meager belongings. "Your worldly possessions. A fair trade, is it not? An end to pain, to hunger, to cold, in exchange for mere trifles."

A desperate, dangerous silence fell over the camp. Liam’s analytical mind screamed that this was a scam, a cruel joke. But he saw the flicker in Martha’s eyes. He saw the way Sal’s grip on his flask tightened, not with possessiveness, but with consideration.

"My blanket?" a young woman with hollow eyes asked, her voice barely a whisper. "It was my mother's."

"A beautiful memory," the man cooed, his voice dripping with sympathy. "But memories are heavy, child. Where you are going, you will need no protection from the cold."

He glided over to Martha first. She looked up at him, her rheumy eyes wide. "My music box," she whispered, clutching a small, dented tin box to her chest. "It doesn't play anymore, but…"

"But it reminds you of a time before this," the man finished for her, his voice gentle. "Let it go. Let it all go."

With trembling hands, Martha held out the music box. The man took it with a delicate grace, placing it on the ground at his feet. In return, he pressed one of the cream-colored tickets into her palm. She stared at it as if it were a holy relic.

One by one, they came forward. Sal surrendered his flask. The young woman gave up her mother’s blanket. A man with a ragged beard traded a pair of cracked boots for a ticket. Each transaction was the same: a cherished, worthless object placed at the man’s feet, a ticket given in return. A small pile of misery was growing on the concrete.

Liam watched, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs. This was madness. A collective delusion brought on by despair. Yet… he looked at the faces of those holding their tickets. The deep lines of anguish seemed to have softened. In their eyes was a strange, vacant peace. An end to pain. The words echoed in his head, a seductive poison.

What was he holding onto? Pride? A broken watch? The fiction that he, Liam Ashford, project manager, was somehow better than this? The dampness was in his bones, the hunger a gnawing beast in his belly. The roar of the traffic was the sound of a world that had forgotten him.

He stood up, his legs unsteady. He walked towards the man in the bisected suit, pulling the dead watch from his wrist. It was the last piece of his old life. The last anchor.

"Me too," Liam said, his voice hoarse. He held out the watch. "Take it."

The man turned his shadowed face to Liam. For the first time, the perpetual smile seemed to falter, just for a second. He looked down at the watch in Liam’s hand, then up at Liam’s face. His gaze was ancient and piercing, and for a horrifying moment, Liam felt like his entire life, every hope and every failure, was being weighed and measured on an invisible scale.

Then the smile returned, wider and more cheerful than ever. But it was a smile of rejection.

"Oh, no," the man said, his voice laced with a playful, almost pitying tone. "Not for you." He raised a hand, waving away the offer as if shooing a fly. "I'm sorry, but you aren't ready yet. Your ticket is not yet printed."

Humiliation washed over Liam, hot and sharp. He was being rejected from the bottom rung of society. He wasn't even hopeless enough for the madman under the bridge. He stumbled back, clutching his watch, his face burning with shame and confusion.

The man ignored him, turning his attention back to the others. "Now," he announced to his new flock, "Hold your tickets tight. The conductor is coming. The train is about to depart."

He tapped his dark cane on the concrete. Tap. Tap. Tap.

The sound was dull, final.

And then the world went silent. Utterly, completely silent. The roar of the bridge vanished. The city's hum was gone. The cream-colored tickets in their hands began to glow, casting a soft, sickly yellow light on their peaceful faces.

Liam watched, frozen in horror, as reality began to unravel. Sal, Martha, the young woman—they didn't scream. They didn't move. Their bodies began to shimmer, to lose cohesion, like heat haze rising from summer asphalt. Their edges blurred, their forms becoming translucent. For a brief, terrible instant, Liam could see the concrete pylon through Martha's body. Then, like smoke caught in a gentle breeze, they dissolved into nothingness.

One moment they were there. The next, they were gone.

All that remained was the small, pathetic pile of their traded belongings at the stranger’s feet. The dented flask. The tin music box. The tattered blanket.

The man in the strange suit bent down and tidied the pile with one pristine, gloved hand. He gave Liam a final, lingering look—a look of profound, cheerful amusement. A look that said, You’ll see.

Then he took a single step back, into the deepest part of a pylon's shadow, and vanished as completely as the others had.

The sound of the world crashed back in. The roar of the traffic overhead was a physical blow, a deafening thunder in the sudden, absolute emptiness. Liam stood alone under the Oakhaven Bridge, the cold wind whipping around him, the useless watch still warm in his trembling hand. He was surrounded by the ghosts of a community that had existed only moments before, and a silence that screamed louder than any person ever could.