Nowhere People

by Perry Ruhland

            It was a tall, narrow room with torn carpets and torn wallpaper. Racks against the walls held tweed jackets, trench coats, and ratty old trousers. Valises lay piled or scattered across the floor, overflowing with mint tins, ink ribbons, teaspoons, sets of portable checkers, eyeglass cases, plastic combs, hand mirrors, shoehorns, nail files, tweezers, stout and square perfume bottles, and lockets which, when opened, held faded images of Grace Kelly and Gloria Grahame. Bushels of panama hats, filthy and worn, grew on a wooden stand. Price-tags rose from their colored bands like feathers. The cheapest was one-hundred-and-seventy-five dollars. Above the door, on a handwritten sign were two words: NOWHERE PEOPLE.
            The way back to the counter took me down through the cluttered basement, into a labyrinth of leaning shelves, and back up a coiled flight of stairs. Along the way I procured an antique pewter bowl. I haggled the price down a few dollars. As the clerk wrapped the bowl in brown paper, I said something to the effect of:
            “Earlier today I came across a room with a strange name and some very expensive wares.”
            She nodded. I asked:
            “What is a Nowhere Person?”
            She told a long and fantastic tale of certain forces discarding a genre of effects in hotel rooms, airport terminals, and lonely subway platforms. She suggested a conspiracy between city infrastructure, local government, and the marvelous. Basically, she fed me a ploy to nudge suckers into buying some very expensive junk. I dropped my new bowl in the dumpster on the way home.
            It would be some weeks until I next thought about the Nowhere People. One night late in May I met with an old friend for a drink; this drink became several. Hours later, I was walking home through the local boulevards in high spirits. The rain had stopped, and the neighborhood lights were doubled in the wet asphalt.
            On a long street of iron grates and empty stores, my only company were the giant faces of realtors beaming down from lighted billboards. Every few blocks I passed a bus stop with an empty bench. It was a while until I saw the corresponding vehicle, headlights gleaming over the horizon. The bus rattled past the stops ahead, but as it pulled beside me, the streetlight flashed red. During that brief interval, I happened to peer inside.
            The bus’ interior was dull, plastic and bathed in fluorescents. It held only a single passenger. This passenger leaned back in their seat, facing out towards the window. They wore a stained and rumpled trench coat and a pair of checkered slacks. A panama hat with a black or purple band was pulled low across their face. And then the bus was gone.
            My daily commute consisted of a short but not exactly convenient trip on the commuter rail, which required me to walk down a long and curving subway corridor. This corridor, with its film advertisements and polished floors, always put me in a certain mood. Now, it reminded me of what the cashier told me about the Nowhere People. They were not people per-se, but rather a genre of discarded effects found abandoned in the dredges of the city’s transport infrastructure. The Nowhere People themselves, rarely seen, could be considered the hypotheses of a population which certain atmospheres suggest. Here it was easy to imagine that around the curve, there might be a stranger waiting in a tweed coat and trousers, a stranger with a panama hat pulled low across their face.
            At the time I worked for a library with little attendance, and most of my shifts were spent stuck behind the circulation desk. During the interminable downtime, I staged films for my mind’s eye, imagining rich dioramas and populating them with a single anonymous figure, a Nowhere Person of my very own. Figures walked through the gullet of a cavernous multi-story carpark, stood in an elevator whose buttons would never be rung, and sat beneath a covered shelter in the pouring rain.
            At first this practice was done all for my own amusement, but as the weeks went on I found myself noticing with greater intensity the life suggested by the city’s sterile zones. Blank lobbies suggested hidden faces; empty parking lots beckoned me to stop and stare. In mornings and evenings on my way to and from work, I started to half-seriously anticipate an encounter with one of the Nowhere People in the long and curving subway corridor. The figure never materialized, but the possibility that it could added a certain excitement to the routine, weaving in its suggestion a coherency to the flickering lights and the echoes of distant footsteps.
            The Nowhere People became something of a fixation by the time I found myself back at the bar across the neighborhood, sitting across from a woman who, it so happened, worked as a rail operator for the city. I made sure to buy her a round before I asked the question.
            “Have you ever heard of the Nowhere People?”
            “Nowhere People?” She laughed. “Where did you hear about that?”
            I lied. She seemed to consider it.
            “In that case, I’ll tell you something you'd like to hear. First, people like us don’t talk about that, you know. So you didn’t hear it from me, or from anyone who knows anything. But this is the truth. I used to work the owl service, right? Ten to six. Not as bad as you’re thinking, but not the best time in my life. Really, for every ride with a passed-out drunk, there are three that are basically empty. At the end of the line, you have to go back through the carriage and do a sweep, get the cigarette butts and wrappers, you know. A lot of times, between three and five, let's say, you’ll find nothing. Maybe some crushed cans in one car, and that’s it for the whole train. So it’s easy to just go on autopilot. Walk to a car, look under the seats, walk to the next. That’s what it was like this time too. An hour north, check, an hour south, check, and back to the north again. It was around five. I opened the doors and made my rounds. The trains we run have eight cars. The first six were fine. Back of one stunk like weed, but look, nobody’s there, I can’t pretend to care. But I step into the seventh car and it’s pandemonium. The lights are spazzed and the floor’s a goddamn mess, right -- there’s one of those old fashioned suitcases, the kinds with no wheels, and it’s blown open. There are mirrors and socks, a crushed pack of cigarettes, some beat-up hat, a shoe… All of that shit’s just lying there. And I think, ‘what the hell is going on here?’, but then I remember all these things I wasn’t supposed to. I see the coat spread across the seats, and I know.
            “It’s freaky. You can imagine that. And I’d been on the job for a while, you know, I knew what I was looking at. I also knew I couldn’t say shit about it. Because nobody says shit about it. And that scared me. Really, that was scarier than seeing it. I thought it’d be impossible, going through life and not just screaming out ‘Hey, I saw one, I saw their fucking clothes’. But after a few days it wasn’t so bad. And soon it wasn’t really there at all, just this little weird cubby in the back of my head, picking up dust. Sometimes I’d remember it and I’d get a chill. But it went away easy. It doesn’t always do that. It fucks some people up.”
            She drained her drink, so I bought her another. She waited for it before continuing.
            “I did end up telling someone about it. I told other people too. One of them had his own story. A bus driver, owl service like me. Lots of times he drove for miles without a passenger, just cruising past stops, rattling down the empty streets. But still he’d check the mirror out of habit, just get a quick glance at empty chairs. Just one time, one of them wasn’t empty.”
            She paused. Sipping her beer had become a production.
            “One of the seats was moving, vibrating, kinda. He said he stopped the bus right there and watched, thinking he was going crazy while the plastic got all frothy. It started to foam. Something was coming out of it. It was a shape coming out of it, and it was one of those Nowhere People, with the suit and the hat and everything. Soon it was all there. The seat was normal, and he was just sitting on it. Not moving or anything, just sitting. The driver swears this up and down. It just bubbled up from the bus.”
            Obviously there was some judicious exaggeration on the part of the conductor, to say nothing of the tale of the haunted bus driver who, in retrospect, may or may not exist. Yet putting aside all questions of flickering lights and men bubbling up from plastic, it was impossible to deny that the Nowhere People were very much a known quantity. They were out there, I’d seen one myself. I was certain that if I tried, I could see them again.
            The following evening I returned to the antiques store just before closing. From the room labeled NOWHERE PEOPLE I bought a shirt, pants, tie, coat, shoes, hat, valise, and eyeglass case. I returned home, made dinner, then put on a pot of coffee. When I tried on my disguise in the bathroom mirror, the figure on the bus stared back at me.
            At ten, I took my valise and stepped into the night. Although the station was a mere ten minutes’ walk away, the heat was roiling, and the disguise was hardly fit for anything but a crisp winter day. Still, I would not shed this jacket for the world, and I came into the air-conditioned embrace of the long and curving subway corridor clammy and damp with sweat.
            Only a few scattered individuals were waiting for the G-line trains. A short man in a basketball kit stared at me until I boarded the first train to arrive. Onboard: a trio of young people arguing nonsense, a family of five with children and parents sitting in silence across from each other, an older man with legs spread across two seats, sleeping with an open mouth. I sat strategically apart from them all and held the valise in my lap. The train moved south. I’d sat in the same manner on the same rail line headed in the same direction just that morning -- and how different it was now!
            I watched riders enter and exit from the shadow of my hat. Some looked at me, some did not. I rode past the station where I disembarked each morning, and stayed seated until we neared the end of the line. The next stop provided easy transfer to the E and F lines -- I disembarked there. The man with the spread legs still slept.
            At this platform I boarded an E-line train going west. From there I changed to an H-line train headed northeast. I went on to ride the F-line, the D-line, and yes, again the G-line -- this time headed back home -- only to abandon it for another F-train headed in the opposite direction. And so the night passed along a web of interlocking rails, the trains filling and emptying along a retreating tide until I was at last alone.
            The F-line howled through the underground. Bulbs on stone walls blurred past the window like a skyline in abstract. The trains were louder with nobody inside; I could hear the walls vibrate, the lights buzz. At each stop I checked if anyone was boarding or exiting the train. The platforms were dead. I felt myself sinking into the atmosphere of the train. At times the lights flickered, or the air grew cold. I waited for the Nowhere People to arrive.\
            The train rose from the subway and ran across the edge of the darkened city on elevated rail. The platforms above were as vacant as those below. Between two lonely stops I noticed I was no longer alone.
            I happened to look through the window of the cabin’s door. In the adjacent car, a figure was seated. It wore a stained and rumpled trench coat and a pair of checkered slacks. It held a valise in its lap. A panama hat with a yellow band sat crooked on its head. With my phone’s camera I zoomed in on the stranger’s face. He was square-jawed, lips pursed and stiff. His skin was unblemished. The car’s ceiling and the strip of its fluorescents reflected on his cheek. His black eyes were unblinking because they were painted onto plastic.
            I fumbled with the exterior door -- changing cars on a moving train was not a habit. When it opened, I stepped onto the car and closed the door behind me. I sat directly across from the Nowhere Person.
            The man stared at me. His black eyes bore into mine. His lip trembled. He blinked.
            “Are you…” the Nowhere Person turned blue. His words wouldn’t form, clutching his valise like a child with a blanket. “...one of…” was all he could manage.
            “No,” I shook my head and tried to smile. “Just undercover.”
            He beamed.
            “Of course, of course you are. It’s just -- and this is a compliment -- you look a lot more like them than the others.”
            “The others?”
            “You know. The rest of them. Us.” He motioned to himself. “The Nowhere Searchers. That is what you’re doing, right?”
            “I suppose it is.”
            “Yes, of course -- the getup, the trains. Are you new to the scene? I haven’t seen you around before. I always try to ride the F when I can. It’s proven, you’re thirteen percent more likely to see one on here than on any other line. I haven’t seen one yet; you know how it goes.”
            “I do.”
            The train approached its penultimate stop. The imposter was still grinning at me. He fumbled through his pockets.
            “Say, have you met Henry yet? He’s been with it for a while. Likes to ride the bus up north. Apparently he saw one at a stop, but he didn’t get a close look. You’re a tin guy, right? Check in with him if you want to know more about the tins. Man, he has more tins than anybody. Here, I have his card.”
            The idiot withdrew a crumpled business card and stuck it in my face. I didn’t take it before stepping onto the empty platform. The doors closed behind me, and the impostor still stood with the card outstretched. He waved as the train headed towards its final destination. I stood on the platform and watched him disappear.
            In my rush, I had left my valise behind.

Perry Ruhland is a writer based in Chicago. His writing has previously been published in Baffling Magazine, Vastarien Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, and ergot.press. Learn more at perryruhland.com