From Where the Tracks End - Part 2 of 3

 

Photo by Hitesh Salaskar on Unsplash

2

I’m not really sure which one of us found that railroad, only that we somehow did. In hindsight, I might be the one who found it on some archived subreddit about the mysterious disappearance of 21-year-old Japanese tourist Minami Hitori. She had solo-travelled three European countries by the time she ended up in the States, where she supposedly had a boyfriend. Now, the identity of the boyfriend was never revealed, and the few accounts that seem to give some more information about him were all, unfortunately, in Japanese.

The day she disappeared, she notified her family back in Japan that she had booked a place for the night and would be exploring the area. No source mentioned what she meant by “exploring” since the original message was translated from Japanese, but given her last known location, the probability of it being the abandoned railroad near the National Park was very high, since it was one of those places tourists used to visit.

I actually found a translation of one of her last tweets, some guy on Reddit had been kind enough to share with the community: There’s something in that tunnel, and when you listen close enough, you can hear it. Nobody in the thread knew what she meant. Some thought it was mistranslated; one user even insisted that the original word wasn’t ‘listen’ but ‘come.’ Allegedly, the authorities changed the original tweet. That unsettled me far more, to be honest, and once I learnt about this whole tweet thing, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Also, to me, those words meant that she had been at the site of the tunnel before and left unscathed, judging by the date, so why hadn’t she that night?

But the railroad was not only abandoned, it was also known as the site of a huge train accident back in the 60s, which killed thirty individuals and severely injured just as many, most of whom were the orphans of slaves from a nearby monastery on a trip to the National Park the week before Thanksgiving.

It caused a huge stir back in the day and led to several policies on the safety of the infrastructure all over the country and demonstrations that led to hundreds of unlawful arrests when it was revealed by an anti-apartheid journalist that those children were deliberately chosen to take this very railroad, while their fairer-skinned peers had taken a much safer railroad route thanks to donations by a select group of white-supremacists that continued to follow the rules of the Jim Crow era and defended their right for apartheid despite they were no longer allowed by law.

A lot of subreddits had already explored and tapped into several theories, of which some were quite controversial in their own right, but no one had actually entered the railroad tunnel to find a trace of her. Not that it was easy to do so. The whole area was closed off to the public, and the only way to get to the tunnel was to go off-trail in the National Park, bypass security stationed there at all times and then follow the abandoned railroad for over half an hour in pitch-black darkness. This was by no means for the faint-hearted, but it was also the level of apparent danger that convinced us to just… go for it.

Bypassing the security was a piece of cake compared to the winding railroad that never seemed to end; we just ducked into the trees and snuck around the park like a pair of bloody ninjas. Man, that was hilarious! And the thing is, no one stopped. Even if someone did see us slip away in the shadows, I guess they assumed we were more ghosts than anything human. That insight, of course, gave us courage – courage that quickly turned into arrogance. Guy even joked about Emmanuelle at some point. That moron.

“Think she’ll be impressed when we come back alive?”

“Dude, she doesn’t even know we’re here.”

“What? You didn’t tell her?”

“Why would I? She has a boyfriend, dammit.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she can’t break up with him!”

I rolled my eyes, hearing this and just took the lead through the park until we were close enough to the guard post and could observe security closely.

Since the guards changed shifts approximately around nine o’clock, there were about two or three minutes for us to jump over the wire fence before the new guards arrived. Piece of cake! What was really fucked up, however, was how dark and quiet everything got the second we were half a mile from the National Park. It was like entering a portal into another world, one that was forever condemned to silence. Even the air shifted completely once we crossed that fence and became thicker without warning.

Honestly, in those harrowing moments in the dark, as we passed the guard post, it felt like even the crickets had gone silent. All of a sudden. Like someone had turned off the sound, and everything that made our little adventure less frightening. It would be a lie if I said I did not think about returning to the National Park at the time, but Guy seemed unbothered by the stillness. And so we pressed on. Like fools.

The deeper we walked in the gloom, the more it felt like we were being swallowed into a place that didn’t want us to come any closer. Even the stars above winked out one by one the further we ventured, as though the sky itself was warning us. Soon, there was only the black line of track vanishing into darker black ahead. I’d never seen darkness eat light so completely. It was like the world was shutting down all around us, and we did not see it coming. Not until it was too fucking late. Things didn’t get any better either when we realised something was wrong with our phones.

“Goddammit!” Brandon said, fumbling to switch on the phone’s flashlight. “Hey, does yours work?”

I tried to click several times on the icon on the display, but failed miserably. “Nope.”

“What the fuck? Maybe we should turn?” he said, adding. “Something’s… off. Can you feel it?”

This was the first time Brandon ever said anything about leaving. Why hadn’t he said so earlier? Then again, maybe he thought I wanted to keep going and just decided to follow my lead. I did keep quiet instead of speaking my mind, after all. But I couldn’t expand on these thoughts any further. Not entirely. Because before us, emerging from the darkness, the rails appeared without warning.

“Do you… see that?” I asked.

“Yeah. How can it just appear out of nowhere?”

I peeked over my shoulder, trying to locate where the tracks ended behind us, but couldn’t see anything but darkness. Brandon was right. How did it just… appear out of thin air? I understood that this place was abandoned, but for the tracks to just, I don’t know, show up abruptly was—

“There it is again! Dude, you can’t feel it!?”

“Hear what?” I said, looking over my shoulder and feeling creeped out. “Stop messing with me, dude!”

I wanted to laugh it off, but the hairs on my arms had already risen. It reminded me of that time when I was a kid and my cousins had told me that the djinn lived in abandoned places. Back then, I didn’t believe them. Tonight I wasn’t so sure.

Brandon insisted. “You can’t hear it!?”

“Dude—”

But my friend did not let me speak; instead, his eyes flickered to something in the dark as if he was trying to figure out what had yet to reach me.

“It’s almost like… What is that? Like some… I don’t know. It sounds like… footsteps? But not, like, normal. More like… more like…”

“Stop messing with me! You’re creeping me out.” I snapped, following his narrowing gaze fixed on the darkness. “Brandon, for fuck’s sake! Talk to me!”

“It’s… It’s gone,” he said, shifting his focus from the dark to me as I looked like a question mark. “It disappeared when you looked.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, but I had no words to respond to those words. Instead, I changed the subject to both calm myself down and make Brandon focus on the real reason we were here.

“Whatever. Let’s go before those guards decide to patrol.”

Honestly, we should’ve just bailed at that point. But I didn’t want to go through the darkness in the direction of whatever Brandon had seen. Not until it got a little brighter with dawning.

“Yeah… right. You’re right. I was just—”

“I don’t want to hear it, dude. Let’s just go!”

“…Sure.”

But even as he said that, his eyes kept peeking over and watching the darkness we gradually left behind as the railroad tunnel came into view in the distance. In the silence, I remembered reading that the children on that doomed train had been singing hymns before the collision. And maybe it was just my imagination, but as the tunnel appeared before us, I swear I could hear faint voices carrying the same melancholy melody. But that harrowing thought did not last.

We were so excited to have achieved our goal at the time that we forgot what had just happened and howled like the idiots we were. To be honest, I still cannot fathom how security missed hearing us, because we were pretty loud and just having a great time shouting into the silence.

Funny thing is, after we calmed down, some five or so minutes later, we realised we had nothing else planned for our little adventure. We were so sure that we would fail or be caught by security along the way that we now came face-to-face with reality in the middle of the night. No one knew we were here. Should anything happen to us, no one would ever find us, and that thought scared us witless.

“What now?” Brandon said.

My eyes fixed on the entrance at once, which gaped wide and where the bricks were stained with soot, as if something had burned its way out decades ago, but the scorch marks pointed inwards – not outwards. Graffiti scrawled across it too, half-faded, as though the paint had faded over time.

“Well, I’m not going in there. That’s for sure.”

Brandon glanced at his watch when I said this. “Me neither. But the next shift is in five hours, and according to my research, the security patrols the area every shift. Since we haven’t seen any light for the past hour, that means they will patrol the area sooner or later.”

“You want to hide inside that bloody tunnel?”

“You don’t?”

“Dude, I’d rather be caught! Like I’m being serious. Didn’t you just say you wanted to—”

“Can’t afford that. My mum’s all pissed ever since the police arrested me the other week, and this might just be the nail in the coffin!”

My eyes drifted to the tunnel suddenly, intrigued by a sudden shift in the shadows that resembled a figure. But as I blinked, whatever I thought I was seeing was no longer there.

“Dude, what’s the worst that can happen? She’s your mum, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, but she’s also a fucking lunatic, who’s threatened to send me to a yeshiva or cut off all financial help!”

“Yeshiva—what?”

“Never mind! You’re really going to leave me here? What about the assignment?”

“We already researched everything.; we even came here like fucking idiots.”

“Not everything.”

“What?”

“We didn’t research everything. Not yet.”

I should have caught on at that point that Brandon was acting out of character, but I must have been so freaked out by the darkness and overall atmosphere that I failed to notice.

“I told you, I’m not going—”

“Come on! Don’t be such a chicken, Hakeem! We’ll just hide there until the security leaves and, I don’t know, try to look around or some shit while we’re already inside?”

“We don’t even know for sure they’re going to patrol, you moron! I haven’t seen a goddamn light in ages and—”

“Yeah? Then, what do you say to that over there?”

I followed the direction of his pointed finger only to grimace from the absurdity of it all. Flashlight. Drawing closer. It was almost comical how the timing lined up, how those beams of light appeared right after we had this very conversation. Even then, however, I failed to notice this coincidence – that was no coincidence at all.

“Shit! Is that the guards?”

“I told you! Follow me! Hurry! Hurry, Hakeem!”

Continue.