I’m sure of this because until last week, I was in the Bahnhofs cleaning up after it.
Oh, I’m not talking about ghosts walking around haunting toilets or kiosks, although they do sometimes.
Zum beispiel, there have been times when I’ve worked on a subway platform mopping up a pool of vomit some homeless wino left for me and I’d feel a chilly breeze rush over my body, although there was no approaching train in the tunnel to push along the wind.
Or, there have been times when I would finish for the day and come back later, only to find a broken flower pot on the floor or magazine stand tipped over and there was no one in the subway station but me. Stuff like that never bothered me much.
But I can say it gets strange when dead folk show up on a train without a ticket to ride.
Once I saw the ticket checkers armed with their tired, old german shepherds, trying to pull a dead guy off of a train to give him a fine. They should have known better; the barking dogs were going crazy and as soon as they caught the guy and took him off the train, he disappeared in the middle of the station, standing right next to them.
Mostly, it’s the living people using the subways who upset the dead and provoke them to act out. The grumpy commuters, loud teenagers and arrogant tourists, especially the aggressive ones, make this happen all the time.
Last weekend, I was working the Wittenbergplatz station when there was a fussball game going on in town, a match between Hertha Berlin and Schalke 04. Thousands of hooligans from Pankow, Marzahn and Königswusterhausen descended upon the city, stuffing the trains to the brim, wearing stupid on their chests like badges of honor. Eventually, all hell broke loose.
The beer in their stomachs must have floated up inside their brains, forcing all the good sense out of their ears because they whooped and they hollered. They jumped up and down inside the trains trying to make the cars jump off the rails acting like they had lost their minds, shouting around, chanting drunken cheers, smashing beer bottles, molesting women and children and peeing all over the place.
Apparently at some point, things must have gotten out of hand.
I had just finished emptying all the trash cans on Track No. 2 and as I paused to watch the chaos in the trains, I felt something move under my feet as the platform began to tremble. It felt like the tremor of a distant earthquake, as if a heavy tractor trailer truck was about to roar past.
The floor quivered and protested the same way the ground above the subway vibrates when trains run underground, only this time, there was no train moving.
Fine silt from the crumbling ceiling cracks began to sprinkle down, raining silently on my forehead. It was as if the station and all of its bricks and walls, support columns and beams, floors and stairways, even the tracks themselves, began to revolt and say "nie wieder".
That’s when I got scared.
Trying not to panic, I turned to walk towards the stairs, thinking "Scheisse! I’ve never seen THAT before!" and the fluorescent lights over my head exploded, sending thick clouds of acrid smoke dancing across the ceiling. Blinking in sudden darkness, the smoke reached me, closing my throat, making me gag. As I coughed, a second explosion roared through the station, rocking the air and I stumbled to my knees.
Blaring alarm sirens wailed and instantly, the station was jammed with panicked people. I could see the elevator doors at the end of the subway hall open and shut too quickly, its glass and metal walls rattling to pieces.
Hisses and pops banged behind the elevator shaft and I knew something was terribly wrong inside the electric generators. The slate grey transformer boxes bent themselves over, illuminated by hot white flames sputtering and darting through the heavy support columns between the tracks.
The horrible screams inside the train cars hurt my ears as I quickly crawled along the floor, inching towards the stairwell wall until my eyes were seized by an unholy sight: a Bombardier Transportation subway train, which had paused packed with people, was convulsing, having a seizure and lifting itself up off the tracks.
I'm enjoying the story, mein bruder. Feeling the Sturm und Drang.
Posted by: Zeus Fiction | March 08, 2010 at 09:55 AM