Jogging forward, Kierk slows as he approaches, growing wary. Looking around, the platform is still almost empty. So Kierk places one foot on the protuberance, has a hand against the tiled station wall for balance, and leans out into the tunnel, trying to see how far the ledge extends into the tunnel. It continues as far as is visible, hundreds of feet out, until being lost from view, and is almost hypnotizing in its curve. He expects to see, in the dark, a figure hugging the wall far down, slowly creeping away. But instead he sees nothing. Had he hallucinated the entire thing? No, the man had been real. Kierk hears a squeaking directly beneath him and looks down. Locating the sound in the mess of sundry takeout and pulped newspaper waste stuck up along the tracks, he sees the rats, three of them, suddenly foregrounded, two paused in movement, the third scurrying amid the garbage, and it’s one of the paused ones that draws Kierk’s attention, one of the little dark forms that Kierk can’t quite make out—it’s on top of something, clutching its little paws and mouth around it, gnawing something glinting like the head of a mushroom, something with the nail still attached, a small stub, a brown big toe, and it comes to Kierk in a revelatory rush that there must be many little unaccounted bits still out there, being gnawed upon, taken off to chthonic nests, serving as rotting birthing beds for hosts of hairless rat litters, mewling cannibalistic nibbles out of a rotting—

The crumpled pamphlet dropping out of his hand in shock, Kierk is backing up, he’s turning as the leonine roar of the subway train approaches, he’s beginning to run, hitting the turnstile so hard he bounces off one of its edges, lets out a yelp at the pain in his hip, rounds into the empty corridor, takes the steps three at a time, nearly losing his balance on the slick top step, then is off like a shot down the street, where he loses himself among the people, the vendors, the bicyclists, and Kierk is slowing now, calming, still breathing heavy but just walking now, until, several blocks later, he pauses and, leaning against a brick wall, comforts himself in the propinquity of the crowd.

It couldn’t have really been a toe. Nor could the man with the red baseball cap actually have vanished. The heat had to have created a mirage, a short hothouse dream, an underground nightmare; the poet in him said ignis fatuus, the scientist said not color constancy but thematic constancy, the philosopher said it was nothing but the mummified gauze of expectation, and if he unwrapped it in slow trepidation he would find just a collapsing emptiness underneath as nothing was holding the form to begin with. And what of the knock at his door last week? Perhaps another symptom . . .