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I didn’t once look
behind me, not even as the darkness swallowed me. Every step I took sounded
wrong, though… somehow. Not sure how to describe without sounding mad. To be
honest, I couldn’t even tell if the tunnel was guiding us forwards or pushing
us deeper against our will. But I never looked back, never. Had I done so,
perhaps I would have noticed that there were no longer any beams of light
coming towards us. But I didn’t. I just followed Brandon, or rather, I followed
his footsteps. And for some strange reason, he wouldn’t stop running, not even
as the entrance of the tunnel became a black hole behind us.
Only when I grew tired and slowed
down did I notice how strange Brandon’s footsteps were. It was like someone
kept running in place without moving, neither slow nor fast. I couldn’t even
discern whether the footsteps were coming from somewhere in front of me or
behind me.
“Dude,” I began, still trying to
catch my breath from where I had hunched forwards. “I don’t think I—”
The tunnel breathed. That was the
only way I could describe it. The air pulsed as though the stone walls
themselves inhaled and exhaled like a living being, and my breathing fell out
of sync with it, and for one dizzying moment, I wasn’t sure if I was the one
gasping or if this forsaken place was. Somewhere ahead, faint at first, then came
the rhythm of wheels on tracks, the sound of a train that couldn’t possibly be
there. Then hymns, like children’s voices rising and overlapping until my ears
rang and my senses became distorted.
Then I saw it.
A pair of legs. Skinny. There was
no body attached to it… I think. All I knew was that I never took my eyes off
the grassy railroad, not even once. Yet this person, or whatever it was, was
not Brandon. I just knew it. Still, I could not raise my head or look up;
instead, while still hunched forwards and holding my breath, I staggered
backwards just enough for the distance between us to be in the ‘safe zone’.
And then I looked up. I wished I
hadn’t. With bony hands outstretched, a malnourished kid lunged at me as soon
as our eyes met, aiming for my neck. My legs went completely numb as I tried to
flee and fell, crawling and crying on my fours like a bloody toddler, before
stumbling back up and running with all I had towards what I thought was the
exit. But then the footsteps slowed, and what remained was that strange sound
of someone running in place, so I came to an abrupt stop and listened. The
sound was growing louder, I could tell, but it wasn’t actually moving –
more like it was running faster in place.
Then it stopped.
I covered my mouth on instinct,
stifling the scream, trying not to reveal my whereabouts in the dark that kept
growing darker and deeper by the second. But I was nowhere near the exit. I was
sure now. Couldn’t even see it. Had I run in the wrong direction? Or was the
darkness messing with my senses?
Drop.
I instinctively reached for my
nose.
Drop-drop.
Something slimy had fallen,
something that felt slightly grainy as I rubbed the liquid between my fingers. I
couldn’t see what it was, only that it came from above me. Even the taste was
odd against the tip of my tongue. It had a pungent kick to it, one that made me
grimace as I tasted it. It wasn’t blood, though. This was something far worse.
I fetched my phone with shaking
hands, unable to calm down as I found the flashlight icon on the screen. It
worked this time. Before me was a sea of darkness that even the flashlight
could not penetrate or illuminate. But it was better than pure darkness.
Drop.
I gulped hard. I wanted to direct
the flashlight above me, knew I had to, but my hands wouldn’t listen. My whole
body was crippled, and my senses were on high alert. Were I even breathing? Damn
it!
What I did next even I
have a hard time understanding. I guess my brain just couldn’t take it and
completely shut down. I shit myself. I had never done that before, but as the
urine got all over the place and soaked through my underwear, I did heave a
breath of relief. It kind of anchored me to reality, you know? That I hadn’t
completely lost it and that I was still alive, somehow…
That was when something brushed
past my ankle. It felt cold and slick, but was gone before I could react. My
flashlight jerked upwards still, catching absolutely nothing, but the air
smelled, I don’t know… off? I had never encountered such a smell before, and
whatever it was, it made me stiffen and hold my breath for a moment before once
again relaxing my shoulders. I was safe. For now, of course. Stil…
The moment, however, did not last
long. Not long enough, that is.
As I moved my head back, still
catching my breath, a pair of bony arms suddenly lurched and held me in a
chokehold, tackling me to the ground and scraping my throat and tearing at my
skin. It came out of nowhere. I couldn’t even see who was trying to choke me
because I lost my grip on the phone, and the flashlight just switched off on
its own. But I had adjusted to the dark well enough to realise that the force
trying to end me was not a child after all, but an adult man so malnourished he
passed off as a boy.
He had empty sockets where eyes
should be, a long and thin beard, and hardly anything to cover his private
parts. From his mouth dripped that foul-smelling saliva all over my face. At
some point, I decided to fight back and punched the stranger repeatedly on his
bald head until he let go, and then I started to run like I had never before.
Not even once did I look behind me, dared not to, and after what felt like an
eternity, I got out of the tunnel. Alone.
I figured, no, I hoped,
that Brandon had made it out safely already – that he had to – and ran straight
to the security and asked if they had seen Brandon. But instead of listening to
me or asking why I looked like I had seen a ghost, they detained me and brought
me to the police station. Even there, I tried to explain to the officers why I
had trespassed and that they had to let me call Brandon and make sure he was
okay, but they wouldn’t. Man, they didn’t even bother listening to me!
Looking back now at this old age,
although I’m not so sure, I remember that one of the guards muttered something
under his breath as he cuffed me. At the time, I thought it was just an insult
due to my ethnicity, but later I realised he said: ‘Another one.’ Another what?
I never dared to ask. Maybe I should have.
In the end, I spent the night
detained and had no access to my phone until later tomorrow evening when my dad
picked me up. But Brandon’s phone was completely shut down, and it dawned on me
right then that there was a high possibility that Brandon never made it out of
the tunnel. But I… couldn’t go there again. I tried. Numerous times. Even brought
some people I met through Reddit, but everyone chickened out once I told them
the real reason we were there. One puked before we even reached the
fence, and another said he saw a child running between the trees. And so, by
the time we reached the tracks, I was alone again.
Family and friends started calling
me obsessed, unstable, and even cursed, while people online I had never met in
person, gave me all sorts of wicked nicknames, such as ‘The Railroad Maniac.’ Maniac…
What was I, a monster? I only ever wanted to find Brandon, come to terms with what
happened that night inside the tunnel. What was so bad about finding out the truth?
My psychiatrist even said Brandon wasn’t real, that he only existed in my mind.
Even the kids back in school pretended they didn’t know him. It was like that
place had erased all traces of him, and I just… couldn’t understand.
All I could do was stare into
that suffocating darkness and call his name. I did that for over sixty years,
and had I not suffered from diabetes and lost one of my legs to the darn
disease, I would’ve continued to look for him still.
Funny thing is, sometimes, when
the morphine dulls the pain and the world goes quiet, I… hear him. Or at least I
think I do. And then I wonder if he ever left at all, or if I’ve been listening
to the wrong side of the darkness all these years. And maybe – God forgive me –
Brandon was still waiting for me. In there. In that all-consuming darkness. Thinking
I abandoned him.
There you go. Call me whatever
names you want. I know I failed Brandon; that he was the last person I should
ever fail, but sometimes fate chooses us, not the other way around. Had I not
found the strength in me to fight back then, I might have been trapped in the
tunnel like Brandon. Besides, it appeared to me now at this old age, that Brandon
had been lost to me the moment he heard those footsteps I could not, not until
I was deep into the darkness.
That was why I chose to do
something I should’ve done much earlier. I was going to return to the tunnel
one final time and look for Brandon. Inside. I owed him that much as his one
and only friend – the only friend of his who still remembered him. You see, the
remorse was getting to me and digging deeper under my skin for every year. I
did not have much time left, either. My doctor told me my arteries were almost
clogged and too stiff from years of battling with diabetes, so that an aneurysm
forming was not a question of if, but when. So, I decided to
leave this world on my own terms.
The government was busy waging
war on foreign lands under the guise of ‘forced democracy a la Afghanistan-style’
and creating the Middle East’s very own “Riviera” on stolen land, to have
enough budget for doing anything about that bloody railroad. It had already
become a famous site for numerous creepypastas over the years and attracted a
huge amount of tourists each year, so that the whole distance between the
railroad to the tunnel itself was full of placards of information about the viral
creepypastas that had used the location as inspiration, as well as some lesser-known
historical facts about its origin and so on. The tourists had also left soda
cans and sweet wrappers along the rails so that the litter sparkled like
confetti under the sun. A tragedy packaged for Instagram, I guess.
I didn’t dare to go during the
night for reasons I hope I do not have to explain here, but since I went there
in the middle of the day during a weekday, nobody was around save for me. In the
daytime, I finally understood how absolute the darkness had become that night
some fifty years ago. For a moment, I even thought I saw Brandon waiting just
inside the tunnel, grinning, his hand raised as though to wave me in. When I
blinked, he was gone, and the tunnel stood empty before me.
The whole place was located in
the middle of what I could only describe as some kind of deserted highlands,
leading straight into a chain of mountains, of which the abandoned tunnel was
meant to lead straight through. But given the enormity of it all, just taking
the train through that tunnel would’ve taken several hours – in the dark. And
that was when I finally understood what happened to Brandon. What really
happened, that is. And it had less to do with the supernatural than with the sciences.
It occurred to me at the time
that Brandon might have kept going straight forwards and eventually set off too
deep into the tunnel to make it back out. Yes, I did see that malnourished
figure in the tunnel, but what if he, too, was another lost person seeing
hallucinations due to malnourishment? I remember reading a case once of a woman
who had gone lost in a forest she used to visit every week, and when they found
her, she was so malnourished and frostbitten that she had gone into a state of
hallucinations, so that she thought the people trying to look for her in the
forest were some kind of monsters she had to hide from. When she was finally
found, she was in the last stage of delirium and passed away in the hospital a
day after she was rescued due to multiple organ failures. Maybe something
similar was the case even here?
But this realisation set off
another train of thought. If I were right and Brandon truly had been wandering
the tunnel and gotten lost, he must have died a long time ago, and his remains buried
somewhere in that darkness. Starting from here and going to the very end to pick
up what remained of him was a bad idea, not to mention there was a limit to how
long I could walk without tiring with the crutches. Also, I wasn’t that young
man anymore, but someone on the brink of death. And what about my daughter?
Wouldn’t she miss me dearly should I venture into the tunnel and not make it
out again?
In the end, I could not go
through with it. But by coming here, I finally understood what must have
happened to Brandon and that strange man who had tried to choke me. Only, why did
it have to take such a long time to realise the truth? And what kind of bastards
had let those poor children ride a train for several hours in the dark just
because of their skin tone? Sometimes I wondered if people who believed in the
social construction of races even had a functional brain, categorising people
into white, yellow, brown, and black, and rainbow, like they had a recipe on
how to create the perfect human based off on the colour of their skin,
disregarding that even within a country, people were born with different skin
tones and intelligence levels.
Did I ramble on again? Sorry. I’m just a person about to die, so why not sprinkle a few truths here and there and provoke people into using their brains for once and be humans, with all that it entails?
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