Dropped into the Telfer Subway on a dry dusk that felt stitched together from leftover daylight, aye that half-warm, half-sour hour when the city exhales its stone breath and the air tastes faintly of rain that changed its mind, and the mouth of the subway yawned open like some low-slung animal jaw carved out of concrete, and the tiles glistened with the wet shine of old storms and teenage marker-pens, and the whole place was frozen in that low electric murmur of long-lost conversations stuck between the walls, and as soon as I stepped inside the light shifted—aye it always does here—a thin sickly fluorescence that shook like it’s being held hostage by its own wiring, flicker-twitching shadows into strange angles on the curved white tiles.

     And my footsteps—Christ, those footsteps—they didn’t sound right, no clean click-clack, more a hollow drum-beat swallowed then spit back by the tunnel’s long throat, echoing out too far, bouncing back too late, as if the subway was adjusting the rhythm, editing my presence into something that suited its own mood.

     I walked on, shoulders brushing graffiti ghosts—names half-scrubbed away, arrows pointing nowhere, a heart drawn in thick marker now bleeding into a smear—and every few steps I heard it: another tread behind me, slightly out of sync, a soft lagging echo that didn’t come from my footfall but from some prelude or afterthought, like the tunnel wanted to accompany me in its own syncopated half-life.

     The smell down there was a cocktail of damp stone, old beer, cold metal, and that faint burnt-dust scent of overworked lights, a smell the lungs recognised before my brain did, a smell that’s lived in this city longer than any of us, clinging to the tiles like a memory forgotten by its owner.

     As I moved along the curve—aye the long slow bend you can never quite see around—the footsteps behind me kept time the wrong way, sometimes early, sometimes late, sometimes overlapping my own stride until I couldn’t tell who was following whom, and my pulse did that skittering jazz-throb in the ribs, half fear, half fascination, and I slowed down to listen better, but the echo slowed too.

     I stopped—full stop—breath held like a fragile glass—and the sound stopped a heartbeat later, as though the tunnel itself had forgotten to breathe. A cold wee knot tightened in the gut. The kind the city gives you sometimes without warning, a knot tied from nothing but the certainty that the air behind you isn’t empty but aware in a way stone has no right to be. And the tremor of fluorescent flicker buzzed louder, a high thin whine that pressed along the edges of the ear, and the tiles shimmered for a blink—aye just a blink—like something moved across them, a ripple, a pulse, the tunnel taking a slow inheld breath.

     I turned—just turned—and the far mouth of the subway looked smaller than it should’ve been, a narrowing slit of daylight that pulsed soft  like a heartbeat hiding in stone, and the space behind me held nothing but curved wall and quiet, but the quiet had weight, a presence that wasn’t present but wasn’t gone either.

     So I kept on, footsteps tapping their uncertain rhythm, echo chasing them with its own stubborn pace, until I reached the midpoint where the graffiti thins and the air feels colder, as if the world forgot to warm this exact square foot of space, and the echo there shifted, changed its tone, a little sharper, a little more confident, like the tunnel wanted to walk beside me now instead of behind, and the concrete sang in that low cracked-hymn way only tunnels know, voice made of damp, memory made of mold, and the echo’s latest footfall came a fraction too soon, as if stepping toward me, not after.

     And something in me—the marrow maybe, or the bit of soul that listens harder than the ears—whispered: aye lad… keep movin’. So I walked, faster now, and let the sudden rush of cold air fling itself down the tunnel toward me, let the echo scramble and scatter like it wasn’t prepared for my change of pace, let the flicker of lights blink above like an old code no one’s lived long enough to translate.

     And when I climbed the final steps and stepped back into open air, the sky looked softer than it had any right to be, and the whole city breathed easy again, and my footsteps—real ones—felt like they belonged to me.  But as I walked away, the subway exhaled behind me, a long low rumble, a sound too soft for thunder and too alive for stone, and for a heartbeat I swear something down there kept walking even after I’d left.