Proud of his newly acquired promotion, he was taking home in one of the compartments his fiancée, his poor Kasienka, one of the victims of the disaster. In the middle of a conversation with her, he suddenly felt a strange unease: something was strongly drawing him out into the corridor. Unable to resist, he went out. At that moment he saw, at the exit of the car’s vestibule, the vanishing figure of the naked giant; his body, grimed with soot, drenched in a sweat dirty from coal, gave off a stifling odour: there was in it the smell of fennel, the stench of burning smoke, and the scent of grease.

Boron threw himself after this figure, wanting to intercept him, but the vision vanished before his eyes. He merely heard for some time the thud of naked feet on the floor—thud, thud, thud—thud, thud, thud….

Within an hour the train crashed into an express from the Dukedom of Gaja.

Since that time the Sloven had appeared before him two more times, each time as an announcement of a disaster. He saw him the second time several minutes before the derailment near Rawa. The Sloven was running on the car roofs and giving him signs with a stoker’s cap that he had snatched off a sleepy head. He looked less threatening than on that first occasion. And somehow there had been no loss of life, merely a few minor injuries.

Five years later, riding the passenger train to Bazek, Boron saw him between two cars of a freight train heading in the opposite direction and bound for Wierszyniec. The Sloven was squatting on a buffer and playing with the chains. His colleagues laughed at him when he drew their attention to what he had seen, calling him crazy. But the near future proved him correct: that very night the freight train, going over a bridge, tumbled into a chasm.

The Sloven’s omen was infallible: whenever he showed up, disaster was certain. These three experiences strengthened this conviction in Boron and shaped a deep belief connected with the Sloven’s portentous appearance. The conductor felt a professional, idolatrous veneration towards him, and feared him as a deity of evil and menace. He surrounded this vision with a special cult; he formed an original view of this being.

The Sloven resided in the organism of a train, filling its multi-segmented frame, pounding unseen in the pistons, sweating in the locomotive boiler, tramping along the cars. Boron sensed his proximity—a presence permanent, continuous, albeit not visible. The Sloven lurked in the soul of a train; he was its mysterious potency during times of danger: at the moment of a bad presentment, he disengaged from it, thickened, and assumed corporeal form.

The conductor considered it needless, even laughable, to oppose him; any potential endeavours to ward off a disaster he foretold would be futile, obviously in vain. The Sloven was like fate….

The renewed appearance of this oddity in the train, and right before the train’s final destination, put Boron in a state of great excitement. At any moment one could expect an accident.

He got up and began walking nervously along the corridor. From one of the compartments came the hubbub of voices, the laughter of women. He came closer and looked inside for a few seconds. He dampened the gaiety.

A man drew back the door from a neighbouring compartment and leaned out his head.