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EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF WILLIAM HENRY MARSHALL

January 1st 1976
                            I noticed a strange thing today.  I was travelling on a crowded underground train, standing in fact.  After one station where a lot of people got off, there was a seat left empty.  People who were still standing just ignored it.  Very strange.

February 2nd 1976
                             I saw it again.  A seat left untaken for several stations.  This time I watched closely and as a matter of fact after more seats became vacant, all of them were quickly filled.  I wonder why.

March 3rd 1976
                             Three times over the last fortnight I have seen the empty seat phenomenon.  Each time I’ve not been close enough to take it myself.  In fact it has always been at least half a carriage away.
     I had a strange nightmare about it.  Nothing very strange seemed to happen;  it was just an ordinary journey on the underground like I make twice daily.  Yet in the dream I was terrified.
     I’m going to keep a record from now on.  Perhaps if I study the thing carefully enough, the reason will become obvious.

April 4th 1976
                              Eight occurrences, a sort of pattern, but no explanation.  It’s really getting on my nerves.  But there are four things I can say fairly definitely about the ‘empty seat’:
1) It never occurs before Green Park, nor after Leicester Square.
2) It never occurs in the morning.  Only in the evening, on my journey home.
3) As soon as other seats are vacated, they are always filled.
     4) Everyone else seems to ignore it.

May 5th 1976
                             I’ve given up keeping a record.  I was learning nothing.  And the thing has been occurring more and more frequently.  And it’s been getting closer.
     My reaction makes no sense.  What does an empty seat really matter?  How can it be my concern?  Yet somehow it worries me.  I’m treating it like something supernatural, which is absurd.  A ghost on an empty train I could just about accept.  But in a crowd?

June 6th 1976
                             I’ve tried not to write about it, but I’ve finally had to give in.  For the past week it has been there regularly.  I’ve been getting really neurotic.  I think I’ll have to change my job.
     Incidentally, I remembered a story which gave me a bizarre idea about what the ‘empty seat’ might be.  There was this mathematics exam question which went as follows, ‘Three fishermen catch a certain number of fish and then take a nap.  One wakes up and decides to divide the fish into three equal portions.  He finds that there is one extra fish, so he throws it back.  Then he puts his share in his knapsack and goes back to sleep.  A little later the second fisherman wakes up and, not realising that one share has already been taken, divides the remaining fish into three equal portions.  There is once again one left over - he throws it back.  Then he puts his share in his knapsack and goes back to sleep.  And of course the third fisherman wakes up and once again divides the fish, once again finding one too many and throwing it back.  The question is, what is the minimum number of fish they could have started with?’
     There is a sensible answer - twenty-five, I think.  But there is also the alternative of minus two.  Mathematically, it works, if you can accept negative fish created by throwing fish that did not previously exist.
     Impossible?  But the candidate who gave that answer was Paul Dirac, the same man who in later life proposed the existence of the anti-electron or positron, which was hardly more bizarre as a concept than negative fish.  And positrons exist.  Indeed a physicist would have a hard job explaining why whole worlds of anti-matter cannot exist alongside our own.
     Not that I think I’m dealing with something made of anti-matter.  Clearly not.  But could you have a negative person?

July 7th 1976
                             Today a cloudy day unexpectedly turned sunny just as I was hurrying off to buy lunch.  Something made me stop and sit down on a garden wall, just soaking in the sunlight.  I don’t know how long I sat there, but I missed lunch and was still late getting back to work.  But it didn’t matter.  I have definitely chosen to change my job.
     Everything seems much better now.  I even forgot to look for the empty seat on the way home.

August 8th 1976
                             I wish the employment agency would hurry up and find me something.  It’s really getting me down.  I am sure now that the problem is not so much the place I work as the necessity to travel there by underground.  The new job will have to be different.
     The more I think about it, the more it seems an inhuman way to travel.  You are trapped in a lighted room, surrounded by darkness.  No way out, no way of knowing where you are.  Miles of rock between you and the outside world.
     But what is the empty seat?  If there could be a Daemon in such a place, would that not be its proper form?  Not so much something invisible sitting in the seat as its very emptiness and lack of purpose!  It is the irrational at the heart of organised and rationalised technology.

September 9th 1976
                             The thing gets closer and more frequent.  For a time I had pushed it away, but now it returns.  And I begin to see some sort of reason, though an irrational one.
     It so happened that I looked in the window of a shop that sold books and magazines on occult and psychic phenomena.  I saw one that had an article on something called ‘The Piccadilly Triangle’  I got it, and my worst fears were confirmed.
     It pointed out the existence of a strange pattern in the heart of London’s underground system, a right-angled triangle.  Its edges are the Victoria line between Green Park and Warren Street;  the Piccadilly line between Green Park and Leicester Square, and the Northern line between Warren Street and Leicester Square.  Maps show this as a perfect right-angled triangle with the Victoria line as the hypotenuse.  More than that, each side has exactly three stations in it.  Furthermore, from Oxford Circus, the mid-point of the hypotenuse, you have the Central line and the Bakerloo line going to the mid-points of the other two sides.  The other three lines also fit into the pattern;  the Metropolitan and District lines bracket it north and south, while the Circle line encircles it completely.  None of them touch at any point.
     Clearly, such a thing can be no accident.  They mentioned strange things that had been seen in tunnels, or late at night on near-empty trains.  But that can only be one aspect of the strange forces invoked by such a pattern.  For the first thing I noticed about the Empty Seat was that it occurred only between Green Park and Leicester Square - the Piccadilly line side of the Piccadilly Triangle.

October 10th 1976
                             Only now can I bring myself to write of such a terrifying experience.  Yesterday I found the Empty Seat right beside me.  I could have gone over and sat in it - yet I could not.  I found myself gripping the hand-hold with painful force, looking anywhere but at that seat.  I very nearly collapsed, so bad did I feel.
     Of course it put me in a terrible mood for my interview today.  I’m sure I made a very bad impression.  I suspect I put 1976 as my date of birth and made a few other silly mistakes like that.
     Is it deliberately trying to frustrate and ruin my attempts to escape it?

November 11th 1976
                             A deep depression centred on my mind.  I find everything crumbling about me.  The strain is becoming impossible.
     I must consider the nature of my adversary.  A technological daemon of some sort.  A blend of old and new.  For who is to say what might be hidden in the many ancient cities we have buried beneath our modern city?  London is as old as the Romans, or older.  Did they not find a temple of Mithras once?  Who can say what temples of older and darker cults may lie hidden and sullenly brooding beneath the earth?  Or beside the dark caverns of our modern underground?
     Yet the daemon is thoroughly modern in form.  It has no real form, but is rather an absence of form.  At times I try to think of it as some invisible monster sitting there.  But it is nothing so simple and ordinary.  I can see it as nothing else than the irrational emptiness of the seat itself.
     Very modern.  In earlier days, a haunting must happen to those who were cut off from human aid in deserted houses or on lonely roads.  But now, are we not all totally isolated and alone, in the centre of a vast crowd of strangers?  In a manheap of millions, where can one go for help?
     And why do I alone notice the thing?  Was it there in previous years, and I noticed it not, merely occasionally contributing to its existence by not sitting in a particular seat?
     And are there others of its kind, lesser and weaker, yet no less modern?  Small imps that spread untold misery through erratic coffee machines?  Electric lights that furtively turn themselves on and off?  Typewriters that make humorous or disruptive misprints?  Who is to say how many obscene or malicious telephone calls are actually made by the telephones themselves!

December 12th 1976
                             I must face up to this hallucination.  For hallucination is all it could be.  How could I have persuaded myself that there could be such things as ‘technology-daemons’?  Such an idea is against all reason.
     What hallucination is easier than an empty seat?  For one’s so-called fellow passengers are basically irrelevant to one’s existence.  The only way in which one is affected is whether or not a seat is filled, if one wants to sit there.
     Tomorrow I will go and sit in that empty seat.  Perhaps I will be sitting on someone whom my hallucination has prevented me from seeing.  Or perhaps the hallucination will come no more, now I have decided to face it squarely.  Or perhaps the seat really will be empty.  What if it is?  The fear will haunt me no more.

     This is the last entry in Mr Marshall’s diary.  We know that on the next day he did a normal day’s work, and a fellow passenger definitely remembers that he was on the train - standing, as usual - at Hyde Park Corner where she got off.  No one else remembers him.  He did not return home, and no trace of him has been found.  He was never seen again.
     That was twenty years ago, and the Piccadilly Triangle has disappeared.