You get used to seeing the same things on the morning train. Same faces, same conversations, same bloke spilling coffee on his tie before we’ve even left the platform. But that morning, something different caught my eye, and my nose.
There was this faint smell in the carriage, like smoke, or maybe burnt dust off a radiator. It was difficult to place. It wasn’t like the typical smoke you get from a fire. It just seemed unusual. Nobody else seemed to notice. A woman across from me was laughing into her phone, and the fella next to her was hammering his keyboard like it owed him money.
I sniffed again. It was there, all right. Acrid, but oddly old, not the clean, chemical kind of smoke you get nowadays. Something heavier, like coal or charred cloth. Then, just as quick as it came, it was gone.
I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, and no-one else seemed concerned, so I just put it down to one of those things.
As the train slowed into the station, I glanced past my reflection and up at the big glass hotel that sits just beyond the tracks. In one of the second-floor windows stood what looked like a child-sized doll. Pale face, expressionless, perhaps a little sad. It was dressed in old-fashioned clothes, Victorian, I guessed. Its head was forward, but looking over me and the carriage I was in. It seemed to be looking out across the city.
It was the sort of doll that definitely belonged in a museum, not a hotel. It was so out of place, but I couldn’t stop staring. I couldn’t help wondering why someone would take something like that to a hotel. By the time the train stopped and I stepped onto the platform, I looked up again. The doll was gone.
Next morning, there it was again. Same window, same doll, motionless. Nobody else seemed to notice. Too busy scrolling through newsfeeds and emails to look out of the window.
Then suddenly something inside me dipped, like stepping off a kerb you didn’t see. My pulse thudded in my ears, and there was that whiff of smoke again, curling at the back of my throat, dry and unpleasant.
It stuck in my head all morning. Over lunch, I started poking about online. The hotel’s website was all brick, glass, and chrome, all “boutique luxury” and “city views”. I wanted to see what had stood there before. A few clicks later, on one of those old map archives, I found it. The Slate Wharfe Workhouse, right by the old cut of the Wharfe, just south of the railway lines.
A miserable place, by the sounds of it. I found a grainy photograph. It looked miserable too. Soot-blackened brick, barred windows, smokestacks in the distance. Then I came across a snippet from a 1908 newspaper: “Fire at Slate Wharfe Workhouse. Many Saved by Workhouse Labourer.”
The article was short. They thought the blaze started in the laundry. Most of the children were dragged out by a labourer who went back inside again and again until the roof came down. The report said he’d tried to reach the last child, a girl seen trapped at an upstairs window, banging at the barred window as the flames took hold. Her body was never recovered.
That night, I dreamed of heat and smoke, and child’s hands pressing at the windows.
Next morning, I made sure to sit by the window in the carriage again. As we slowed past the hotel, there she was again, the doll, staring out. I lifted my phone and took a picture. When I looked at it later, I felt something cold tighten in my chest.
The doll was there, yes… but behind it, faint in the reflection of the glass, was the outline of a man. His face was partly lost in the glare, yet the shape of it, the hair, the eyes, the jaw, it looked horribly familiar.
It looked like me.
I don’t know what to make of it. But sometimes, when the train brakes before the platform and the air smells faintly of hot metal, I catch that old taste of smoke in my mouth… and once, I swear, I coughed up a fleck of soot.
And this morning, as I sat there trying not to look at the window, my phone buzzed with a new photo, no message, no sender.
It was my photo of the doll.
Only this time, its head had turned… and it was looking straight at me.
An original short story by Andrew Scaife
© Andrew Scaife, 2026. All rights reserved.
