The story
The muggy heat of the Cali night hung thick beneath the station’s steel roof. By that hour, passenger traffic had dropped off noticeably, leaving only the distant echo of engines and the dull hum of the fluorescent lights. Next to the automated reload kiosk, waiting his turn with the quiet patience of a regular, don Hernando held his transit card in trembling fingers. Behind him, Sofía and her husband Mateo waited to validate their own fares, eager to catch the next bus home.
The silence on the platform broke with barely audible footsteps. A man stepped out from the side of the kiosk, and his presence chilled the air instantly. He wasn't dressed in rags, nor did he look dangerous, but his face froze any thought of a greeting. His skin was crosshatched with deep, taut, whitish scars that pulled his features into a grotesque asymmetry: one eye rested far too low, almost on his cheekbone, while the other sat abnormally high, nearly touching his hairline. Yet his gaze was piercing and lucid.
"How much balance is left on that card?" the stranger asked in a flat, raspy voice that seemed to vibrate straight against their eardrums.
The question was unusual but harmless. Out of sheer reflex—and desperate for an excuse to look away from that mangled face—Mateo and Sofía glanced down at the kiosk’s glowing monitor. The old man looked toward the greenish screen too. In crisp, perfectly clear digital numbers, the display read six thousand five hundred pesos.
Looking down and glancing back up took no more than two seconds.
"There's six thousand fi—" Mateo began to answer, but the words caught in his throat.
The man was gone. In front of them, nothing remained but empty space and the dull reflection of metal. In the blink of an eye, the entire platform had become completely deserted. It was physically impossible for anyone to have sprinted the twenty meters needed to clear the turnstiles or vanish behind the pillars without making a racket across the floor tiles. Mateo took a couple of steps toward the railing, peering into the shadows of the dedicated bus lane, but the dim light revealed only empty asphalt. A chill crept up the back of Sofía's neck as she and the old man shared a terrified silence.
Trying to shake off the dread through sheer routine, don Hernando cleared his throat and raised his card to slide it into the slot. But the plastic hit a dead stop immediately. The old man pushed harder, but the card only bent slightly against an invisible resistance. Even though the slot was visibly wide open, something solid and impenetrable was blocking the way.
Rattled, her heart racing, Sofía reached out and pressed the release button on the side meant to clear jammed cards. The internal mechanism kicked in immediately: gears whirred, the familiar metallic click of the ejection roller sounded, and a puff of air blew through the slot. Yet nothing came out. The cycle finished, and the machine lapsed back into a dead silence, leaving the three witnesses frozen beneath the flickering light, trapped in the certainty that they had just crossed paths with someone who no longer belonged to this world.
