The Witch of the Mountain - Part 1 of 3

1

That fateful night not only brought with it the hush of the undead waiting for Judgment Day still, but also unforgivable sins of the past, of the bygone yet to be paid. It was also that night that the village lay heavy under the guise of that pretentious silence, trapped beneath a force only a few truly understood with their senses. Hah! Even those abysmal stray dogs stopped barking for a change!

The derelict mosque had loomed high in the clear sky, casting the rural village located in the middle of nowhere into a deep and suffocating gloom, and out of that darkness a woman emerged though no one expected her. She walked down the centre of the road, her steps steady and gingerly – all alone yet not at the same time – her obscure face clouded with a sorrow so deep and gut-wrenching that it was nothing less of a sin to look into her misty, ancient eyes. It was as though she had fled something dreadful, as though she carried the weight of a vile curse upon her shoulders, one only a few had experienced – thank god.

Her hands, those wrinkly and fragile hands, were clenched together and trembling – mind, not from the biting cold but from fear in its purest form, somehow, anyhow. No one knew why, no one could say the reason without sounding mad, but one thing was certain: whatever horrors pursued her had driven her here, into the night, to this very town, just as an unknowing girl stirred from her slumber with a gasp, drenched in beads of cold sweat running along her brows and tiny neck.

This was the first time Irmak had ever seen the mysterious visitor, though she had heard rumours of her existence. You couldn’t exactly stop children from running their mouths, could you? But she didn’t know the strange lady would be there too, in that deep darkness, as sleep eluded her without as much as a warning and she found herself in front of the frosted, laced window. She loved to watch the world at night, watch life pass her by and reminisce of another time, one different from hers. Also, strangely enough, whenever darkness fell over their village, it was like it was breathing differently for some reason, pulling at her, drawing her into the depths of the secrets she had yet to uncover.

Sometimes she imagined the shadows carried the shadows of the past, the unforgivable sins of those still alive and kicking, and that if she listened closely enough, she might see the vicious shadows look back at her and whisper something wild back – heck, she wanted that to be the case! But they never quite did, as if they pretended she wasn’t there, lurking in the murk, watching their every move. Nevertheless, she would find herself there, at the window, whenever the call to evening prayer rang and brought with it the darkness that soothed her soul so. But that night, the suffocating silence she otherwise despised so, gave way to something else – something else entirely.

The woman’s feet were bare and her whole body was soaked wet. Her hair clung to her face, caked with dirt, and foul droplets traced her arms as though she had been dragged straight from a river. There was a smell about her too, of damp soil and something faintly metallic. It was clear at first sight that something terrible had happened to her.

Irmak’s first thought was to wake up her parents, tell them that an elderly woman might be needing their help, but then she remembered that they would only scold her for being awake at this late hour. Thus, she dismissed the thought just as quickly as it crossed her mind. Still, she could not leave the woman in such a pitiful and poor state, could she?

She opened the front door just enough to peer out. The woman was there, motionless, as though she knew Irmak was watching her all along. With her heart in her mouth, Irmak then stepped into the garden and onto the narrow, bumpy road, where the woman lingered still until she raised her head ever so slightly. Irmak’s eyes narrowed as she took a good look at the woman, but her wet hair veiled her face and obscured all hints of what the strange visitor might look like.

“Hi,” she gingerly said, waving her hand awkwardly, “I’m Irmak. Do you… need help?”

The woman did not answer. She only stared at the girl, then slowly lifted her arm and pointed into the distance – towards the mountains.

“Is that where you want to go?”

The woman gave a nod.

“Do you want me to help you go there?”

The woman, once again, nodded and confirmed her.

Though hesitant, Irmak stepped forwards and supported the woman, helping her down the bumpy road with her small build. Together they walked into the night, farther and farther away from the heart of the village and closer to the mountains where no sane soul dared to linger in the wee hours.

The woman’s arm felt icy under the touch, and though the night was still, the woman’s hair seemed to stir with a breeze that wasn’t really there. Irmak tried to hum a tune under her breath, to calm her nerves and convince herself that everything was under control – the way she did whenever she was frightened – but the sound was meant to die in her throat eventually.

From time to time, she tried to speak and break the silence with her childish questions, but the woman never replied, and so they walked on in silence until they reached the fork where the mountain path began. Well there, Irmak hesitated for good. Her mother warned her never to take the mountain road, though she never explained why. She knew only what she overheard from the kids in the village, that once, long ago, a witch lived in the mountains and practised black magic, cursing the women so they could no longer conceive and bear children. No one knew why she bore such a grudge against the villagers as far as she knew, but Ahmet, the village fool, said he knew why.

When she was only a child, Ahmet had said, the imam of that time raped her and demanded later that she get rid of the foetus since he planned not to take her as his second wife. The unfortunate thing, however, loved her unborn child so much that she wanted to keep it despite the imam’s threats. And when the imam’s wife and family got wind of what had happened at last, they presumed that poor child had seduced her abuser and forcibly took the infant from her, ripped it straight from her tomb prematurely and buried her alive to save their face and honour.

From that day forth, the witch swore an oath of vengeance; she conspired with the djinn and vowed to bring ruin to the village. The men, terrified, dragged her into the mountains and savagely violated her, hoping to shatter her power and resolve. Even Ahmet, that fool, was forced to take part, though he did not want to at first, out of fear of what the men would do to him should he refuse. Like that, they thought they had defeated her and forever silenced her. And not long after this happened, the women once again began to bear children. Six babies were born in total. Irmak was one of those six babies. But aside from her, no one else survived early childhood. The children who lived in the village as of writing these arcane words leading nowhere came from other, nearby villages in the hopes of keeping the population from shrinking any further.

 People came to believe it was the witch’s doing that too, and so they found her and killed her. No one knew where they had left her body, though, since she was never reported missing by her family, who fled the village overnight that same day. However, people claimed they could hear her cries in the witching hour still, mourning her child who had been buried alive and whispered curses, colliding with the djinn.

Irmak pulled her arm free as these thoughts resurfaced from the deepest corners of her subconsciousness telling her to be careful and not to take a step further than she already had.

“I-I should go home now, it’s getting late.”

The woman spoke at last. Her voice was heavy with sorrow, just like how Irmak imagined it would be, and a chill shot down her spine.

“I am your mother, child. Don’t you recognise me?”

Her eyes narrowed, deep wrinkles forming. She didn’t know this woman, yet the words pierced her heart like a wound torn open for reasons she couldn’t understand. The way she said them… as though she truly believed those words…

“No.”

“Oh, my child… My sweet, sweet child…”

The woman cupped her face, and in her eyes, Irmak saw tears, saw a sorrow so deep it seemed endless. She knew, then. This was her. The witch. The woman who had been raped, who had lost her baby, and who had sworn vengeance against the villagers.

“You’re a witch,” she said, the words escaping her before she could hinder them. “Right?”

The woman lowered her head, shame shadowing her face. Painful memories seemed to weigh her down and take over her bleak mind. Then she looked up again and met Irmak’s quizzical gaze.

“Forgive me, my child,” she said, her voice breaking. “You are not her. Go back to your family now. Don’t look back and… promise me to never walk out at night again.”

The woman then turned towards the mountain path and walked away, leaving Irmak no chance to reply. Instead, she stood watching until the woman vanished into the dark, then returned home as she had been told.

By dawn, before the first light touched the sky, soldiers came with sudden, grim news: the entire village had been poisoned, and no one survived except Irmak and her family. Doors hung open, meals sat unfinished, and bodies lay where they had fallen, some in beds, some in the streets, faces twisted as though they had seen Shaitan himself. Irmak clung to her mother’s skirt as the soldiers told them what had happened, and her small heart hammered out of control as he thought back on her encounter with the witch.

Years later, long after she and her family fled that cursed place, Irmak heard the truth of what really happened that night. Apparently, the soldiers had found the source of the poisoning and wrote off the macabre case as an accident caused by a rotten corpse that had been found in the well the villagers used for drinking water. But there was no update on whose corpse it was or why it had been inside the well – or for how long…

The incident affected her in more than one way. Even as a grown woman, she would wake some nights with her face wet from tears she did not remember shedding. In her dreams, she walked again on that mountain path, always with the woman at her side, always hearing those same swords on repeat: “Oh, my child… My sweet, sweet child…” And when the wind howled and whistled in those harrowing moments, she could hear the djinn echoing those same words from the mountain path she had left behind in her past but never truly escaped. 

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.

Sticks and Stones - Part 3 of 3

 

Photo by Dylan Hunter on Unsplash

3

Reluctantly, Christoffer started for the dumpster and climbed into it without looking back. And then, for a long time, nothing happened. He must’ve stayed in the container for several minutes when he finally dared to lift the lid and stick his head out, at which point, it had become dawn and the sky was painted in the shades of twilight.

Neither Betül nor Farouk was around when he climbed out, stinking worse than he could smell. But their absence was not the only perplexing thing. All around him, scattered at random, were what he could only call human body parts in all shapes and colours, as well as different stages of decay. Even the soil beneath his feet was full of bits of flesh here and there, sticking to his shoes like glue.

But before he could wrap his head around what had happened during those hours he stayed hidden in the container, he staggered back only for something to get caught underfoot, something that he immediately recognised upon picking up. It was a stone, one that belonged to Farouk. But what was it doing here?

He retraced his steps back to his apartment, taking in the bloody carnage all around him but unable to make sense of it. But the worst had yet to come, only he didn’t know then. When he finally arrived at the third-floor landing, the door to his apartment gave way without resistance and unlocked. Inside… nothing. Only traces of blood – a lot of it – on the striped wallpapers, on the floorboards that had become swollen. Neither his mum nor Reila was around, though. In their stead, something else was.

In the kitchen was a large pot bubbling away. As he crept closer, each step warier than the last, he lifted the shaking lid and came face-to-face with a stew made of human body parts. One of the severed fingers had a ring on it, one his mum had been gifted by his deceased father and never took off. This realisation made him stagger back, and his breath became shallow and laboured, and that was exactly when the living room door slammed shut with a deafening bang across the kitchen.

He whipped around and sprinted out the gaping front door, not looking back even once, not until he made it safely out of his apartment and was back outside. When he looked up at the third floor, however, a faceless shape waved at him from the kitchen window, and he fled that instant, springing wherever his feet took him. Once he came back to his senses, he was back at the site of the dumpster, or rather, back inside it, counting the seconds, wishing upon the stars for a miracle that this was only a nightmare and that he would soon wake up from it.

Once nighttime came, however, nothing changed. Stuck in a bad dream with nowhere to go, he climbed out and picked up more stones on the damp soul, and as if to keep himself from losing his senses completely, began to play by himself like a madman.

He must’ve played for several hours by the time he noticed the approaching footsteps and quickly hid back inside the container. Through a small gap, he saw the homeless people returning, each one of them chewing on a human body part. They settled at the dumpster site and drank all night, oblivious to his presence, and when morning came, they left.

This repeated for a few more nights, with the homeless people returning to the container with human body parts and then leaving only to return the next night. One morning, however, instead of waiting in dread for dusk to come, Christoffer decided to follow the homeless people who seemed to be unaware of him, no matter how much noise he made.

They wound up a dark pathway through an empty field or some kind of overgrown pasture no longer used and kept walking for hours on end without respite. And when darkness fell once more, the pathway came full circle, and they were back at the site of the dumpster, only now Christoffer knew where the source of all those human body parts came from.

During this nocturnal walk with no aim or purpose, the homeless people picked up wooden sticks now and then, and by the time night came, those sticks became human body parts. But the homeless people weren’t even aware of this, for they were far gone and unsound of mind to think straight and get back to their senses to realise they were caught in a loop of some kind, reliving the same day over and over, and somehow, he had ended up in that loop, too.

By the second week, he decided to pick up some sticks himself to quench his growing hunger, and although the sticks tasted weird and gamey, like rotten flesh, he did not mind since he knew the sticks were anything but human. The taste even grew on him after the fourth fortnight, and he ended up joining the homeless people, who did not mind him following them around and mimicking them.

Then, one night, as they were having a feast by the fire, something that had never happened happened. One of the homeless people turned to him as they were about to get back on their feet and follow the dark pathway till dusk. This was the first time they ever talked or acknowledged him, as if mimicking them had somehow allowed him to become visible again.

“You stay here, climb the container.”

And so he did.

When morning came, he climbed out only to find himself back in the normal world, no longer bound by the time loop. But several years had passed since then, although he had stayed the same age as when he disappeared. Everyone he knew had long since either passed away or moved to another place – everyone save his good friends Betül and Farouk, who had grown grey and as old as the hills.

They recognised him immediately, although it took him a second to recognise them. None of them could explain what had happened that night, only that he disappeared after climbing into that dumpster. Betül had told the police what had happened, but the police refused to believe her story, and so he was registered into the system as another runaway. When they asked what exactly had happened during the time he was away, he couldn’t tell the truth – or rather – the whole truth.

The two of them passed away not long after this fated reunion, dying almost a week after one another. The entire neighbourhood was in mourning during the funeral, and Christoffer had attended it with those stones that Farouk always carried with him, the ones he found in the nightmarish loop. But as he was paying his respects to his two friends, he heard a familiar rustle in the clump of bushes near the Muslim cemetery, and he decided to take a look at what it was.

There, hiding in the bushes, were some wooden sticks arranged in a neat circle. Without realising it, he picked some up and started chewing, slowly making his way back to the funeral attended by the whole neighbourhood. When they saw him approach, they gasped collectively and pointed fingers at him. When he looked down at the stick, it had turned into a human leg dripping with fresh blood.

Then… a chilling scream.

A woman rushed from the clump of bushes with a child in her arms, one of its legs missing. When she saw him, with his teeth still dug into the tender flesh, she let out another bloodcurdling scream, and before he knew it, the people around him tackled him to the ground and kept him there until the police arrived. When the police asked for his name, he gave them the one his parents gave him, but they wouldn’t believe him, saying he couldn’t have stayed this young after all those years.

Now he was locked up in an asylum, counting the days. His psychiatrist said he had been cured of his illness and that he would be able to return to normalcy once the related paperwork had been sent off to court. In the meantime, to kill some time, he played stones by himself and occasionally chewed on his own arms to satisfy his hunger. Once he returned home, the first thing he would do was to climb into the dumpster. That way, only a child stupid enough to come near a place like that would go missing, and the police would write them off as simple runaway cases.

Sticks and Stones - Part 2 of 3

 

Photo by Foad Roshan on Unsplash

2

“Argh! I told you guys to listen to me! My mum’s going to kill me!”

Betül and Christoffer locked eyes, both apologetic, as Farouk crouched down in defeat and looked devastated as the phone kept ringing in the background. He lived two blocks away from themand would have to walk for several minutes in the gloom to get home.

Also, everyone in their neighbourhood knew that his mum was really strict. She had become so after having lost her husband in a work-related accident seven years ago, and so they feared that she might actually thrash Farouk as a form of discipline for not returning home in time to take his epilepsy pills.

Christoffer, “Hey, don’t beat yourself up too much, dude. You can just stay over at my place, and I’ll have my mum call yours, say that you had a seizure and couldn’t make it home?”

Farouk looked up with misty, bloodshot eyes.

“Then she’ll only get more upset!”

“No, I think Chris has a point. Would you rather she thinks you’ve spent the night at the playground?”

“Of course not! Are you mad!? She’ll kill me if—”

“Then, it is decided,” she said, gesturing at Christoffer. “Hey, lend me a hand and let’s bring this idiot to your place.”

“What about you?” Christoffer said as they each wrapped an arm around Farouk, who was still quite out of it to even lift a finger or move on his own.

“I’ll be fine. My apartment’s not too far from your place.”

“No, I meant, like, won’t your parents, I don’t know, say something?”

“My parents? No, why would they? It’s not like it’s the first time,” she said, changing the subject before he could inquire further. “You had a little sister, right? What was her name, again?”

“Reila,” he said, adding, “she’s not really my sister, though.”

“How so?”

“My mum remarried when I was a toddler to some Japanese guy, who dated her for the green card and then, yeah…”

“Oh, I see. But I thought you two looked pretty close the other day.”

“The other day?” Christoffer repeated, adjusting his grip on Farouk, who was dragging his feet through the pavement with a hollow look on his face as if his whole world had shattered and fallen apart right in front of him.

“Yeah, at the supermarket. You know, the one near the gas station.”

“Ah, right! Yeah, Mum brought us along grocery shopping, but I wouldn’t say we’re that close.”

“Really? Why not, though? You guys must’ve basically grown up together, like real siblings, no?”

“Reila can be… difficult, sometimes, you know?”

“Difficult? Like to elaborate on that one? How difficult can she even be for you to say this?”

“Hard to explain… Not sure where to start…”

“Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I just thought you looked close, but—”

“It’s just that she creeps me up, sometimes. Especially as of late. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s older or her teenage hormones acting up, but…”

“But?”

Christoffer cast a look at Farouk as if to make sure the other was too lost in his own misery to pay attention to their conversation.

“It’s like she’s possessed. I keep seeing her wake up at night, going through the entire fridge. Mum thinks I’m the one doing that and won’t believe me.”

“And your step-dad?”

“He’s, uh, not around anymore. Been dead for two years already.”

“Oh, sorry ‘bout that. I didn’t know…”

“Don’t be.”

“And you and your mum’ve been taking care of her all this time?”

“Yeah…”

“Wow, I’m not sure my mum would do that,” she said matter-of-factly before suddenly coming to a halt and seeking his confused eyes. “Hey, did you just say she was going through your fridge every night?”

“…Yeah, why?”

“So, basically, she’s hungrier than usual? Right?”

“I’m not following.”

Betül let go of Farouk and helped him settle on a wooden fence, which only reached to their ankles at either side of the pavement.

“Lamia! She must’ve been possessed by her!”

“I said she was going through the fridge, not eating children, dude.”

“Yeah, so what? Maybe that’s just how it begins? And then, when the hunger grows, she might—”

“Betül! Hemen buraya gel!”

They both turned in the direction of the kiosk just around the corner, where the silhouette of a dumpy woman with a hijab made some angry gestures at Betül. It sounded like her mum, it even looked like her from this angle, but why was her face completely swallowed by the darkness? Not to mention the way she moved her arms seemed so… stiff? Unnatural, even.

“Is that your mum?”

“I…”

“Betül!”

“Hey, you okay?” Christoffer said. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“Huh? No, I’m… I’m fine. I’m just… confused.”

“Confused?”

As she was about to reveal what was going through her mind, Farouk suddenly rose to his feet between them. In a trance, he then pointed in the direction of the corner where the silhouette was, before going into a seizure with his eyes rolled back into the sockets. They barely caught him in time, and when the worst of the convulsions were over, the silhouette in the corner was gone, too.

“What… what was that?” Christoffer managed, his voice cracking. “Hey, talking to you, Betül! What the heck just happened?”

“I’m not—”

She never finished her sentence, or rather, could not. A nauseating odour arose from the kiosk, right at that shadowy corner, the smell a cross between charred flesh and the sweet and greasy smell of swine mingling. Then, that voice came again, this time from somewhere behind them, and Farouk went into another seizure.

“Gel! Gel! Gel!”

Behind them was nothing but darkness and several apartments lined up on one side. But not for long. Through the shadows, where the eyes could not penetrate at nighttime, several figures emerged, their chilling voices repeating like a broken record the same words over and over again.

“What do they say? Betül!”

“Come,” She met his bewildered gaze, just as fraught with dread as her own. “They are telling us to come.”

“Come? Come where?”

“I-I don’t know! How would I—”

“Reila?”

Betül followed his eyes back to the strange figures moving closer and closer to them by the second, and that was when she saw the girl she had seen at the supermarket the other day. But like her own mum, the girl’s features were hardly visible in the gloom, as if her entire body had been drowned in a sea of shadows and become one with the darkness.

And as Christoffer was about to rush towards her, Betül seized his arm. “What are you doing? Can’t you see it’s not her?”

“…What?”

“Look at them, look carefully! See, Farouk’s there too! But he’s here, isn’t he? Whatever these people are, they are mimicking people we know, trying to lure us closer!”

“How is… how is this even possible? What’s going on?”

Betül, on full alert, “Now’s not the time for asking questions! If we don’t move any time soon, we might not make it!”

“Make it?”

“Listen,” she said, “we have to hide. And that quick!”

“But where? Look at him.” Christoffer gestured at Farouk, who had finally stopped convulsing but was still unconscious. “Does it look like he can move to you?”

“Who said we’re bringing him with us?”

“Uh—what?”

“Quick! Hide in that dumpster over there! Hurry!”

Christoffer followed her gaze to the corner and arched his brows.

“Isn’t that where those homeless—”

“Stop asking questions and just go! Hurry!”

“What about you?”

“I’ll try to distract them! Now go! Go, Chris! Go!”