Psychological horror · 3 min read ·
The Stranger Who Finishes the Crossword
On the 7.40 each morning a man with a red pencil finishes the crossword in the seat beside mine, and the answers he writes are the ones I was about to write, a moment before I write them.
- perspective: first
For six years I have taken the 7.40 from Halden to the city, and for six years I have done the crossword on the way in. It is the only part of the day that is mine. I have the same seat, the window seat facing backwards, and I have the same pencil, a soft HB that I sharpen the night before. I am good at crosswords. I was the one in the office who could finish the Thursday puzzle before the tea went cold, and I used to be proud of that.
Last March a man sat down in the seat across the aisle and began to do the same puzzle.
I did not notice him at first. He had a red pencil, which I thought was an odd affectation, and he worked very fast, without looking at the grid for long. I was on the second down clue, a word for an old measure of cloth, and I had the first letters, and I was reaching for the answer when I heard, quite clearly, from across the aisle, a soft pencil stroke, and then the word written out in capitals, correct in every letter.
I looked up. He was looking at the window. His paper lay open on his knee, and the answer was in the grid.
I finished my own clue. It was the same word.
The next morning I made a point of getting to the seat early, and when he came on at Ashgrove I watched his hands. He filled in three answers before the train reached the bridge. Each one I had just been about to write. Each one, when I checked my own grid, appeared in mine a second later, in my own handwriting, though I had not yet put the pencil to the paper.
I told myself I was tired. I told myself that crosswords are full of common words, and that a man on a train can guess the same answers as a woman on a train. But the clues he finished were not the easy ones. They were the cryptic ones, the ones that take an hour and a fresh mind and a little luck, and he finished them in the time it took the carriage to cross a river.
On the third week he spoke to me. It was just before the tunnel. He leaned across the aisle, very polite, and said, "Nine across. You've got the wrong first letter."
I looked at my grid. I had written the wrong letter, I saw, and I had been about to correct it.
"It's a river in Italy," he said. "You'll get there."
I did not thank him. I was too frightened. I went back to my puzzle and did not look up until the train came out of the tunnel into the grey light over the city. When I looked across the aisle, his seat was empty, and his paper was gone, and the crossword I had been doing had been completed in red pencil in every square, in capital letters, in a hand I now recognised as very close to my own.
I have been on the 7.40 every morning since. I have not finished a crossword in four weeks. I leave my grid blank in the last five minutes, and at Ashgrove he gets on, and sits across the aisle, and fills the empty squares one by one, very quietly, while I watch the river go by and try to remember the word for the thing I was going to say.