Owl and skull with botanical wreath

Hollin Cross had been unstaffed after nine for as long as she had worked there. The porter left the key under the tea urn, and the ticket machine swallowed coins with a sigh. Old Mr Pell had kept a tin in the lamp room before her. Inside, wrapped in flannel that smelled of paraffin, was a skull found in the cutting when the drains were laid in 1961. He used to say the owl would come for it when the line finally closed. Nobody believed him, and then the line closed.

On Friday the final service was cancelled for a landslip beyond Sallow Bridge, so there was no train to wait for. Dorothy took the tin down and lifted the lid. The skull had a wreath of pressed bramble and hawthorn wired round its crown, the leaves gone to tissue, and beneath it lay a green glass stone the size of a thumbnail, cut in a shape she had seen only on the lapel of Pell's old coat. She set the stone on the windowsill, where the lamp threw its light across the rails.

The owl came down from the gantry without a sound, wings opening wide over the tracks, and settled on the sill beside the stone. It looked at the skull for a long moment, then at her, and she understood that Pell had never meant the bone at all. She locked up at midnight and left the window unlatched. In the morning the stone was gone, a single grey feather lay where it had been, and the distant signal swung to green for a line that no longer ran.