From Where the Tracks End - Part 3 of 3

Photo by NicoleLaurenPhotography on Unsplash

3

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?

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!”

From Where the Tracks End - Part 1 of 3

Photo by Caitlin Taylor on Unsplash

1

I don’t know where to start. There are so many things I need to put on paper, but the words seem to elude me. The right words, that is. Honestly, I am afraid. I’ve finally come to terms with reality and the things that forever changed me, still…

The pen keeps slipping between my fingers, not because of the morphine, but because my hands shake when the house goes quiet. Unnaturally so. That’s when I hear those footsteps I heard back then and hear Brandon calling my name and pleading for help. But I shut him off every time, carry on with my life. In a way, I have to, if I want to keep my sanity – and health, too. The doctor said both my arteries were clogged and ticking on borrowed time. Maybe that’s why I’m finally writing this down… because I’m not sure which will come first: death or Brandon’s footsteps crawling back through the walls and the floorboards.

It all began with an assignment in college. I had just changed my bachelor’s programme from science to the arts after failing my mechanical engineering courses two years in a row. My old man was pretty pissed, for good reasons, of course, so when I told him I wanted to pursue a degree in journalism, he just let me, you know? But our relationship did go south for a while. He didn’t tell me off or anything like that, though; he just gave up on me, I guess. It made me want to prove myself to him, not by grades, but by doing something no one else dared. That was what the assignment really meant to me: a chance to matter.

Anyway, fast forwards to the assignment. So, Professor Brookes was kind of a weird person whom the other professors also avoided like the plague. Rumour had it she’d been fired from two other universities before ours, though no one knew why. Some said she’d written papers on topics so strange the administration had to literally hide them. Others said that she’d been caught sneaking into archives closed to the public. Also, she smelled bad. Like, really bad. Did she ever run a bath? Stranger still, she gave us the strangest assignments, and the one I am going to talk about today is one of those. But more on that later.

Once, she’d asked us to visit a graveyard at night and write down not what we saw but what we felt. You heard that right. Half the class handed in blank pages, and she just gave them C’s. Like, what the actual fuck? It gets worse. “The absence of sensation,” she told us, “is still a sensation.” Crazy bitch. Looking back now, however, I realise that she had some loose screws because what kind of professor even does that? She also used to pause mid-sentence whenever the lights flickered during class, and then she would stare at the ceiling for so long that the rest of us looked up too, expecting to see something moving, but we never saw anything out of the ordinary. Then, she would snap out of it and smile…

My name is Hakeem, by the way. I was the only student with a Middle Eastern name in class and a physical appearance that screamed “Muslim”. Sure, I was fasting during Ramadan and praying from time to time, but I was more of an agnostic than a Muslim in its purest meaning. I wanted there to be a life after death, only I wasn’t so sure whether there would be one, as some of my more devout family members wholeheartedly believed. Maybe that was why the idea of ghosts and curses fascinated me so much, because if the dead could linger and haunt the living, then maybe something lingered for us all, and death wasn’t just a locked door leading to the promised land.

The assignment we were given was to research a topic within the occult arts and then do a presentation on our findings. It wasn’t really a thesis, but we were told to follow the same principles and be as academic in our research as possible. Since I was into pretty much everything horror at the time and deeply fascinated with crime shows, I decided early on to find some haunted place and just… have fun.

So, Brandon and I teamed up to impress the girls in our class, especially Emmanuelle, my crush. She was an exchange student from Nice, and I had kind of set my eyes on her the moment she entered my life. She was gorgeous, had a nice body, and a sweet personality to go with it. I knew she had a boyfriend back in France, but that did not stop us from flirting, did it? Besides, she knew I liked her and probably saw it just as some innocent fling or whatever. Sometimes, during group discussions, she’d lean forwards just enough so that her hair brushed against me, and the rest of the guys, Brandon especially, would fall quiet as if she’d cast a spell. It wasn’t just attraction, though; it was the way she made the ordinary feel romantic. Around her, even Brandon’s dumb jokes were funny.

Who’s Brandon? See, Brandon is an interesting character even by my standards. He was the class clown and had a really goofy personality, and an overly sick tendency to do some slapstick comedy when nervous. One time, we were exiting the cafeteria on our way to class when he literally spilt a box of milk over himself after some chick waved at him. She was probably greeting someone she knew, honestly, but Brandon was convinced she liked him from that day forth, so he dragged me with him down that same corridor whenever we had a break. Poor girl must have caught on and never set foot there again.

But he had another side too, one most people missed because they never really gave him a chance. He’d linger after class to ask professors questions no one else thought to ask and spent hours on obscure forums reading about folklore legends, conspiracy theories, and ghost sightings – not because he believed in such things but because he wanted to understand why others believed them. He said belief itself was scarier than any monster. Yeah, that was the kind of person he was, and I loved the guy to bits.

He was a good person, you know? The kind you could rely on blindfolded through a dark tunnel in the dead of night, while simultaneously being chased by some shady-looking people – or ninjas. Man, I liked the guy! Never met a better person, honestly! I remember one night after class, Brandon dragged me into the library’s basement to show me a forum thread on hauntings in an abandoned hospital he had been hooked on and then went on to have a whole speech on the psychology of herd mentality among people who believe in the supernatural and how they egg one another on through blatant lies and made-up stories.

Still crazier, he was born into a Jewish family in the Polish suburbia and then relocated to Israel as a teen. But listen to this: Brandon was a pretty darn good human rights activist and did not once back off from standing up against what he believed to be right to do. Maybe that was why we got along so well, though I was more of a ‘who-cares-about-some-people-faraway’ kind of guy, and he was the literal opposite.