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Every large city has its fair share of rumours and urban legends.

Every city has its ghost stories, like the one at F...S... station. I hear S saw him once.

The story goes like this: S is in the city for a night out and he's stumbling down onto platform eight. He's hazily waiting for his train home, when he sees a figure across the station, beyond the rails, on platform ten.

This man, wearing beige overalls and a hard hat, doesn't look that out of place in a station that's often got construction going on, except for the fact he's soaking wet. His clothes, his hair, everything, as if he had fallen into the river behind the fence. There is something haggard about the way he stands.

The man is turning his back to S, and S doesn't know why he thinks this, but he absently, drunkenly thinks: ha, this guy doesn't have a face.

Then, the train arrives and S gets on, still staring at the man through the windows as it departs the station a few minutes later. The train curves slightly, giving S the perfect angle to catch a glance of the man's face... but then the man turns his head the other way.

There are other stories. there are always other stories.

In my early teens I went to a school in the inner city, and there too rumours ran wild, about classmates and people from other schools, of course, but also the school building itself and its many underground levels.

One day some of my classmates went to explore those levels. They said that they followed the dim corridors to eventually reach their goal, a heavy metal door that led directly into the underground railway tunnels, although to their disappointment the door was locked shut.

The door was locked shut because a few years prior another group of kids went into those tunnels, and one of them got caught trying to go back on his own a few days after their risky but unnoticed first escapade.

He wanted to go back on his own because of the tunnel exit, he said, he had to know.

This tunnel exit went downwards, deeper underground instead of upwards to the surface like a tunnel exit is supposed to do.

He had to know.