On a forgotten platform at a junction no map records, a man waits for a train he half-remembers from childhood nightmares. In his hands, a battered red book falls open, again and again, to the same impossible picture: a tunnel mouth, a lamp, a solitary figure who will not quite turn his face to the light. As the night thickens and the pages repeat themselves, memory and prediction begin to trade places, and the question of who is watching whom will not stay safely inside the story.

First published in The London Mercury in November 1935; later collected in the volume The Sun Cure (1936).

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) was a British poet and prose writer, best known for poems such as “The Highwayman”.

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