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.

Muse

Photo by Sai on Unsplash

The house lights faded first in the vaulted concert hall, so that rows of shadowed faces stretched beyond the reach of the spotlight, even the ceiling arched so high that the dim glow failed to touch its darkened curves, causing a stir in the upper balconies where the sudden hush, like one single exhale, revealed that each seat was full and anticipation running high.

Both the fill and key lights came alive above the majestic stage not long after, followed closely by the backlights catching the polished black lid of the Steinway concert grand. Two footlights along the platform’s edge kept just enough glow for safe footing, the soft colours creating shallow shades along the stage as Francisco approached the centre of the podium.

Hypnotised eyes traced his every move, the way his breath fogged beneath the intense backlights as he took his designated seat at the grand piano. With his slender fingers hovering above the black and white keys, a moment of absolute silence hung in the air. Then, as he flexed his wrists once, in E‑flat minor, he struck the first chord of Samuel Barber’s Sonata.

The action of the hammer danced beneath the enthralling sound, the immediate mechanical click lost beneath the sonata’s brutality, and notes shattered into the air in dissonant clusters that lingered too long, bending back from somewhere high in the deepening shadows where the stage lightning could not reach.

When the Adagio’s slow ostinato began, his fingers pressed softer, sinking deep into the weighted keys, and the haunting melody bent again, before collapsing into the opening of the finale. His hands moved faster now, crossing and twisting in all directions as the grand piano growled and shrieked in four different tones, creating a hauntingly beautiful harmony.

Then… silence. The striking notes came to an end as thousands breathed out as one, gasping, captivated by the melancholy sonata and lost in its remarkable and tender melodies that ended far too soon, far too suddenly.

And the world tilted on its axis.

Francisco lifted his hands off the keys, and the cameras pulled back and tilted the frame so that they captured a distorted version of the concert hall and the thousands of attendees, who secured seats at great expense to witness the craft of his otherworldly artistry as a famed pianist, whose renown stretched far and wide, across the globe. A living legend, a black sheep in the dwindling industry slowly losing its soul, bringing back the golden days of the classics with his talents.

But as the cameras lingered on his inverted form, recording the chiselled features of his face under the dimness and shrewd angle, he carried a secret so great that should the word spread, he might never recover from it, and the ladder be ripped out from under him before he even reached the top.

Greeting the audience, bowing just low enough to make it look like he cared about them, he raised his head and let his eyes settle on the clapping audience clad in elegant costumes made from the finest fabric to ever exist. But it was not those superficial details that caught his attention this very second.

As the sea of bewitched attendees fought to meet his gaze, the stage lights gradually switched on, and his eyes settled on a young woman who wasn’t supposed to be there. Garbed in a black evening dress, she wore a smile on her china face, one that grew wider by the second until it turned into a grotesque rictus – something in between a grin and a scream cut short. Too short, in his opinion.

When he straightened his spine, she was gone, and in place of her remained an empty seat with white lilies on top, and from the petals dripped fresh blood. A smirk tugged at his lips as he saw the crimson liquid, reliving the moment his muse sacrificed her body and soul for him, going so far as to become his – truly his – just to see him grow into his full potential, or rather, die thinking her selfless contribution added something to this mundane world.

But she wasn’t the only one who had these unhealthy ideas, not the only muse he had and would continue to have for as long as his secret remained hidden from plain sight.

People of all sexes and walks of life sought him out, some as genuine fans of what he represented or thought he did, while others were slaves to their sexual desires, hankering for his flesh as if it were the forbidden fruit itself, unable to resist the sweetness. But what was so bad about Eden’s fruit? Wasn’t it the beginning of humanity as it is, or perhaps, the moment humanity’s story began to unravel because it fell apart first?

Without the darkness we each carry deep in the chambers of our blackened hearts, what purpose would light serve? In the end, light was created as a response to this vast darkness and the weight of that morbidity within it, hiding in plain sight but never truly seen, not until it was brought back into our lives one way or the other – sometimes – on purpose, even.

And just as light needed darkness to thrive, a harmless and necessary agreement, so too was the pact Francisco made with his victims. He gave them what they wanted in return for something far greater, turning each one of them into his muses and keeping them alive in his memories and celebrated magnum opuses. Such was indeed the secret he carried, and not a single day passed without him honouring them, as he relived their final sacrifices each night before stepping onto yet another sold-out stage.

With the cheers reaching a disturbing crescendo and the concert hall trembling beneath the weight of the audience’s fervent applause, Francisco slipped away from the podium, and his shrewd, upside-down shadow stretched long and restless into the growing darkness beyond the stage lights.

 

A Promise Kept

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash
”Please reopen the case! My daughters have been hurting for too long,” Chung Mi-Suk collapsed to her knees and clasped her hands together in a relentless, heart-wrenching plea that twisted the onlookers’ stomachs with guilt. “Please! My daughters are hurting! Please help me put them to rest!”

The milling police station was on pause, watching the tragic spectacle of a mother pleading on behalf of her deceased daughters to the police. But no one could quench the fire burning within the poor woman, for the sexual assault case had long since been written off by the attorney in charge, and two decades had gone by in a heartbeat. There was nothing they could do. Nothing but watch. And as Mi-Suk realised that her prayers would fall on deaf ears today as well, as they had done so for the past decade, she staggered back up on her feet and exited the station.

The rain poured down ruthlessly and drenched everything in ice-cold water. She lifted her shoulders and chafed her arms from the cold yet did not try to flee from the rain or seek shelter somewhere where it couldn’t reach her. Instead, she stood her ground at the steps of the police station and watched the world go by before her in a rapid sequence. In those fleeting moments, while watching the common people go about their routine, she broke down and wept from the helplessness.

The evidence she so carefully collected over the years and put on pen to paper, an entire dossier with files upon files, now lay on the wet ground, the paper crumbling and eventually melting away like the seething fire in her heart consuming her resolve.

She was dying. A whole lifetime had come and gone in the blink of an eye, and before she realised it, she had become a mother, a widow, and now just an old lady whose only purpose was to seek justice for the twin daughters she raised so tenderly, whom she shielded from this cruel world, only to see them melt away just like how these papers now faded to the cadence of the heavy rain.

“Hey, ahjumma, you okay?”

She didn’t answer; instead, she looked on without moving as two young men rummaged through her pockets and ran away with the few coins she had, leaving behind her purse and an old photograph of her family before the tragedy took place and everything fell apart. With shaking hands, she picked up the photograph and smiled, wiping away her tears.

“I won’t leave this world until they’ve all paid. Umma, promised you, remember? Even if I have to keep on living and cheat death, I won’t break my promise to you, so sleep tight, my angels. Umma will soon join you and your appa. I promise.”

Rising back up on her feet, she trudged through the crowd of people from all walks of life as they fled the pouring rain, their movements in the background a blur of motion and their presence almost negligible.

The only thing Mi-Suk could see, the only thing that arrested her, was the large LED display with an award-winning movie director and his up-and-coming press conference and subsequent movie premiere for his newest blockbuster. And when she finally was close enough to it, staring up with hollow and detached eyes, her tears blended in with the salty rain and something in her expression changed – one that gave away nothing yet told a chilling story all at the same time.

Then, like the undead, she dragged her feet through the bustling capital, towards the studio where the press conference would be taking place later that night. She saw or heard nothing but the angelic voices of her beloved daughters, the way they called her umma, and those blissful days back in time when this cruel world did not blacken their purity and fill them with hatred and shame.

One and a half hours; the press conference was only one and a half hours away now.

Her eldest said the director was always the last one to arrive on time, that he would let all the filming crew and staff wait for him on purpose to relish in his ego. Such people never changed, only became worse over time. Their ego was so high, their sense of reality so low, yet they actually dared to believe themselves as nothing more than the filth they were, for they had become so used to tramping on and deriding those unable to fight back that they thought they were invincible, that they could stave off justice by paying those willing to accept the money thrown at them like the barking bitches they were.

And perhaps, they were right to think so, now that she thought it through, from where she lay in wait at the underground parking lot of the studio with a metal pipe tightly in her bony, wrinkled hand. Perhaps they were indeed right to think so….

Half an hour passed. Then, gradually, forty and fifty minutes. No one showed up in the parking lot, not even other people. Eventually, she decided to wait the entire length of the conference, approximately two hours or slightly more than that. She spent those hours just waiting and doing nothing else, counting the seconds, getting lost in thoughts and old memories, then restarting from the beginning on a never-ending loop.

At around 10 pm., things started to shift, and the solitude and harrowing memories gave way to other kinds of thoughts, the kinds that only a grieving mother could tolerate without losing her sanity along the way. She followed each person, tracing their movements, while keeping an eye out for the one she was looking for. But even as the minutes ticked away, the director remained elusive. Had he not come to his own press conference? But then she recalled the LED display she saw earlier tonight and knew that couldn’t be the case. Perhaps this wasn’t the parking lot used by the people who attended the conference?

Feeling the pressure of time, Mi-Suk hid the pipe in her bag, her youngest gifted her with her first pay through sweat, blood, and tears – and as she learnt after her passing – with her body.

She started for the stairwell leading to the lobby.

The entire place was filled to the brim with newspeople, overly zealous fans with no regard for their own or other people’s safety, and the few celebrities who were now standing at the centre of the red carpet posing for the paparazzi. Overwhelmed by the blinding lights and recurrent shutter of the cameras in the background, she noticed a young woman screaming her head off a few feet away and quickly made her way through the crowd, showing each one of them aside, and then grabbed hold of her.

“Director. Where is he?”

The young woman cast her a side-long look, judging and eyeing her down, before replying with a hoarse voice. “Director Kim? He’s still backstage, I guess. Why, are you a fan or something—”

Mi-Suk grabbed both of her hands—“Thank you, thank you!”—and slipped past security unnoticed, perhaps due to her old frame and those seventy years of agony that had hunched her back, turned her hair grey, and made her lose her teeth prematurely. After all, what harm could a seventy-year-old pose to anybody?

Only if they knew… only if they knew the fire burning inside her, the one that flared now and then, and ate through the deepest chamber of her heart, body, and soul like she’d entered the inferno even before shutting her eyes shut to this wicked, corrupted world.

Navigating the backstage was harder than she thought it would be. She passed by an entire corridor lined with doors for the third time by the time she heard what she could only describe as the sound of a muffled scream. Before she knew it, she found herself in front of a door with no label on it and perked her ears. She’d gone deaf once due to a vascular issue in her right ear, way before she lost her daughters so untimely, but had managed to get it back after treatment. She still had issues with that ear, but despite her hearing loss, those screams were so loud that she, for a few seconds, was stunned into silence.

Yet, as she looked around the corridor and the passersby, she noticed that no one even cast her a glance or inquired about the screams coming through all the louder with each passing second. She thus grabbed a crew member talking loudly over the phone, trying to bring his attention to the strange sounds.

“Young man, listen. You must call security!”

The young man tried to shake her off. “Ahjumma, how did you get in here? Huh?”

“Someone asks for help, in there, listen,” she tried, pulling the crew member closer to the unlabelled door. “I’m not lying. Listen! You must hurry and call—”

“Shibal!” The young man pushed her away so hard she hurled towards the walls, hitting her head. Gliding a hand through his sleek hair, staring her down with an annoyed look, he crept closer with a look that gave away that he indeed heard something but pretended not to.

“Hey, ahjumma, I don’t hear a damn thing, so stop the crazy act and leave before I call security. Do you hear me? Hey, I’m asking if you heard me? Shibal! Bitch, I said—”

“Always the same thing. It never stops. It never does. Why? Why doesn’t it ever—”

“Huh? What’d you just say? Never—what? You cursed me or something? Fucking bitch—”

Mi-Suk reached for the metal pipe in her bag. She didn’t hesitate, not even as the young man lay in a pool of his own blood, begging for mercy. Instead, she repeated her words, just as he told her to do moments ago, and kept bludgeoning his face until he stopped begging for his wretched existence and lay motionless on the linoleum floor. She then left his body to bleed and turned her attention to the unlabelled door, the pipe dragging at her side, as she twisted the knob.

A young woman lay naked, drugged, on the lap of the director whose wasted life she’d come to take. The filthy perpetrator stood up as he noticed her at the door, pulling up his trousers. She locked the door before anybody could intervene and save the director’s life.

Then… she took one step at a time. Slow and steady. Seeing nothing but darkness before her, hearing nothing but her angels’ voices in her ears, feeling no other emotion but that of a grieving mother who had gone without getting justice for far too many years.

“You want money? I’ll pay you! I’ll give you my entire fortune! I’ll do anything!”

Mi-Suk couldn’t help the smirk playing on her lips. “Then tell me, Director Kim, can you return my daughters to me? Let me see them one final time so I can ask for forgiveness?”

“…What? Daughters? Hey, ahjumma, you,” he pointed at his head, mocking her sanity, “you’ve lost a screw or something?”

“When I kill you, the world will know, finally, the monster you are… the things you’ve done… those horrible, horrible things you’ve done to such pure souls, who wanted nothing but recognition for their hard work, to repay their parents with their first pay, to give back to the world…”

“Huh? What’s this about? I’ve done nothing! Yah, ahjumma, you think I’m the only one who does things like that?” He paused, his eyes darting from the pipe in her hand and the young woman now getting back her senses. “Besides, you think fame at a young age comes at no cost? We all pay the price, in our ways, and bitches like this with their bodies. What’s so bad about it, huh? Nothing’s for free in this world, shouldn’t someone of your age know that the best?”

“That pay!” she snapped, her eyes turning wild with the anger festering beneath the surface, “has cost two precious lives! Tell me, Director, what kind of price tag requires forty counts of rape, derision, and sexual abuse by several men, of whom the majority are married and have kids of their own!?”

“This is just the way of the world! You think killing me will stop the system?”

“Then I’ll break the system, too, until none of it remains, if doing so I must until the very second I cease to exist! For killing people like you… it is not justice. It’s an obligation.”

The door behind them flung open as security entered. By then, however, the director had already succumbed to his injuries. They found Mi-Suk cradling the young woman, wiping away her tears and lulling her into comfort; her face and clothes covered in crimson, and her eyes wet with tears she didn’t know she still had. When she saw the security guards with their weapons aimed at her, she released the young woman and picked up the metal pipe on the table before her, advancing.

“Stop! Stop moving! Stop moving and put the pipe on the floor. NOW!”

But she didn’t stop, nor did she let the pipe fall. Instead, she let it down to the side, letting it drag on the floor, and then brushed past the security and the crowd of onlookers as she continued down the hallway aimlessly. Several people followed her, capturing her movements with their cameras and livestreaming. But the crowd didn’t stop her, not even as the security tried to step in. Instead, they became her live shields and blocked anybody trying to intervene.

She came to a halt at the centre of the red carpet, now directly facing the shutters, those blinding shutters that kept capturing her every single move and livestreaming. For a while, she just stood there and said nothing, not even as the crowd grew larger and the number of cameras only increased. Then she released her grip on the metal pipe, collapsing on her knees, addressing the nation and the police that failed her.

“I, Chung Mi-Suk, hereby plead guilty to the murder of Director Kim, the perpetrator in my daughters’ sexual assault case that was written off before the investigation could even begin. My daughters… my poor angels, when they heard of this, blamed by the authorities for being raped on several occasions by several men, including Director Kim, killed themselves before justice could be served. My husband died not long after, unable to live with the grief, and I tried decades – decades! – trying to make my voice be heard! Yet no one heard my pleas, bought for and paid with dirty money! So, what else could a mother do but kill her daughters’ abusers herself? To make sure they rested in peace, wherever they were, to finally be able to let go of the past, and say: “I did my best, the only thing I could, and kept my promise to you.” I do not ask for leniency but for my daughters’ case to reopen, as well as other similar cases the prosecutors wrote off in return for bribes and lavish gifts, or perhaps, buried secrets. I, Chung Mi-Suk, thus plead guilty to all charges against me…”

A delayed applause erupted through the crowd of people, of whom some couldn’t keep their tears in, while others, infuriated by the prosecutors’ failure to follow proper protocol and capture people like Director Kim, demanded justice and for all cases related to sexual assaults to reopen despite the statute of limitations.

While Mi-Suk never wanted this to be the case, spilling blood was her last resort, and she did not regret it. Not one single second of it. Even the inmates at the prison she was sent to broke out with cheers as she was escorted to her cell by two female guards, praising her strength as a mother and her unwavering love for the children she lost too soon and in such a short time, one after the other.

She died of old age only a few months short of spending a year in the prison, where she became the light of beacon for the inmates and the nation as a whole, recounting her twin daughters’ merry childhood as well as those harrowing years before the light in their eyes shut forever, bringing the whole court to break down and the prosecution to admit to their negligence and failure to follow proper protocol in front of the public, convicting those who deliberately took bribes and wrote off cases to hide their own skeletons in the cupboard.

But this was far from over. As with everything in this world, behind the scenes, new cases of exploitation and abuse occurred. Director Kim was right. There was no stopping the systematic abuse going on in plain sight; this was indeed the truth. But one thing was certain: every unpaid deed resurfaced and justice served sooner or later. No man was safe, and sometimes, all that was needed for that to happen, was someone like Mi-Suk who stared death in the eye with conviction and forced the world to open its eyes and see the ugliness behind purple-tinted glasses, even on the account of her own livelihood and health, for heroes needed neither fame nor comfort, only the will to force the system to reboot now and then.

Whether this deed was the unjustified murder of children, leaving them to rot from hunger, or the atrocities of barbarians with no empathy towards people other than their own, or the numerous world leaders watching a whole population burn yet choose to turn a blind eye like the cowards they were and would forever be as long as yet another innocent life was taken before it has a change to bloom like the flower they were meant to be – neither a terrorist nor a human animal living in open sewages…

 

 

 

 

 

Under the Radar

Photo by Andy Li on Unsplash

“The law of supply and demand is crucial for our understanding of the free market. If the price is too high, supply will exceed demand. But if it’s too low, demand will exceed supply. Remember, the market always seeks equilibrium. Any other questions?”

A female student Professor Ismael recognises from a previous class shoots her hands up in the air. She is one of three female students who wear the symbol of submission, the hijab, and proudly show their religious upbringing.

He waits for a few seconds before addressing her. He knows from his vast experience as a senior professor that students sometimes ask a question they already know the answer to and want to give her a few seconds to come to her own conclusion.

“Yes, you over there.”

“Isn’t the law of supply and demand too simplistic to explain real-world markets, sir? What about markets with monopolies or oligopolies?”

“Good question! The law, of course, helps us understand general trends, but it’s not meant to explain every nuance in every market. In monopolistic or oligopolistic markets, where there is one dominant seller or few sellers, the law of supply and demand can still apply, but it behaves differently. You’ll learn more about how these kinds of markets work in greater detail in your next class. Anything else?”

Silence. This is a good sign. The clock reads 3:57 p.m., and not only is he drained from having classes back-to-back, but so are the students at the University of Baghdad, who have had classes since early in the morning.

“All right, then, that’s all for today’s lecture. Please make sure to pack up your stuff and I’ll see you next time.”

A former fighter pilot for the Iraqi military during the Cold War and an honorary member of the Chair of the Board of Trustees, he is one of the most respected professors at the university. Adhering strictly to the rules, he is described as both “book smart” and “well-rounded” by his colleagues in the Faculty of Microeconomics.

After answering the remaining students’ questions about today’s lecture, he waits five more minutes until the last student finally exits the auditorium.

According to the schedule, however, he still has one more lecture left for the day in the same auditorium, so he briefly leaves his belongings and goes out to grab a cup of coffee before the start of the next class.

It is during this time that the fire alarm goes off.

Given the large size of the Microeconomics department and with no fire or smoke in immediate sight, he decides to return to the auditorium and take his stuff with him. Theft has been a huge issue over the past couple of years, and he can’t afford to lose his lecture notes and slides due to, what he assumes, is a prank at that point in time.

The alarm keeps ringing as he puts his laptop computer into his leather bag and sets off towards the emergency exit staircase, which leads to the faculty emergency exit grounds. But as he descends the emergency exit staircase, he notices a smell he recognises as sulphur from his time as a fighter pilot.

Now this isn’t a smell he’d pay any attention to on any normal day, but the unusual circumstances, coupled with the nostalgic inputs from his subconscious, make him follow the foul and sharp odour as he continues to descend towards the lab floor.

The first thought taking over his mind is a malfunction of the air conditioning system (HVAC) located in the utility room. But when he fails to unlock the room, he decides to return to the main floor and give maintenance a call.

As he inches closer to the emergency exit door, however, he realises that the temperature has risen too abruptly. This prompts him to return to the utility room and follow the sharp odour for a second time. It is also at this point that he notices something he missed the first time. The student lounge room, located farthest back in the corridor, is cracked open.

The student lounge room, as well as all other non-staff rooms, is part of a new system the university has employed over the last few years to ensure the safety of the students after a particular incident occurred back in 2003.

The previous safety system employed a one-way access protocol, where students had to physically bring a staff member, often the administrator or receptionist, to the student lounge to physically unlock the door. The staff were, however, required to register this in the safety log to prevent the system from setting off an “unauthorised access” alarm.

But they weren’t the only ones with a working access card – the professors, as well as all other staff members, also had similar access cards for obvious reasons. These, however, did not trigger the said alarms.

The safety protocols at the time of the accident did not consider these entries as safety hazards. But to err on the side of caution, the professors, as well as other staff members, were instructed to refer the students to the reception in case they requested entrance to the student lounge rooms or other kinds of group study rooms.

The new system, of course, now works vastly differently. Each staff member now has limited access to certain floors, rooms, and areas. A staff member with access to floor 1 thus has no access to floor 2 and needs access to that floor through another staff member’s access card.

What set off this new system, however, is a case that Professor Ismael only heard about through the grapevine in the professors’ office over the years. Although it is an incident that should never have happened or been allowed to happen, the aftermath of the entire ordeal now ensures that better and safer protocols are employed. As they say in the aviation industry, “every protocol and safety measure is written in blood.”

It is the 26th of October 2003, approximately eight years ago from today’s date.

Over the course of a few weeks, the weather has deteriorated severely, and it is the first day of the holy Ramadan. Due to these external factors, the university is unusually empty, and only a third of the students and staff members are present.

An undisclosed female student, referred to as victim K in the official police records, enters the Faculty of Microeconomics around 1:15 p.m.

This timestamp, as well as all others following this, is undisputedly correct. The investigators know this because the student used her student ID card extensively on the day of the incident.

Investigators also later discovered that the victim planned to enter the main auditorium, H134, via section B, after texting a friend that she’d lost her keys, possibly in the auditorium where she’d had a lecture the previous day.

This female friend becomes a huge lead later on and helps the investigators timestamp the victim’s last moments more accurately. But at the time all this happens, of course, neither the investigators nor the said friend knew this.

At around 1:29, the security camera in the emergency exit staircase captures victim K, shaken, as she descends the staircase and keeps going until she reaches the lab floor. Seconds later, the entire faculty goes into a blackout and all subsequent records perish.

The first message that establishes the victim’s whereabouts comes around 1:34. From this message, the investigators know that the victim is now hiding in the student lounge room and urgently asks her friend to call the police.

Half a minute later, at around 1:35, the female friend replies with something along the lines of, “Why?” and shortly afterwards, “You okay?”

To this, the victim does not respond for about five minutes. The time now shows 1:41. But the tone of the subsequent messages after this makes the investigators suspect the victim is no longer the one responding.

“I’m okay” is the victim’s second-to-last message, followed shortly by “Don’t call the police.” Investigators link this to the fact that, at that point, the perpetrator or perpetrators had gone through what the victim had sent to her friend and were beginning to panic.

At timestamp 2:56, power returns to the faculty. All working security cameras show no anomalies. The few people who have been trapped inside the building at this time, both staff members and students, now exit the faculty.

When the timestamp shows 3:18, another blackout occurs and is later noted by the security system as an “induced blackout,” disclosing to the investigators that someone has manually shut down the entire building. This second blackout lasts no more than two hours.

At this point, the victim’s parents contact the police and a missing person search is initiated – but only after seven more hours pass. Due to the faulty policies employed by the Baghdad police force at the time, a 24-hour policy is strictly followed, and no missing person report is accepted.

That’s when the victim’s exchange with her friend reaches the police officers, and a formal missing person report is filed. But it’s too late – by about three hours. The victim’s half-naked body, with her underwear stuffed into her mouth, is found by the dispatched team led by lead investigator, Detective Achmad.

A junior investigator is later reported to have said in subsequent interviews with the press that “the body had deteriorated way more than what it should have” considering the time of death and the time of discovery.

This discrepancy in the rate of deterioration, which the autopsy report describes as “non-normal swelling of the internal organs due to external factors,” leads the investigative team, particularly Detective Achmad, to consider one possible scenario.

The HVAC is now a major lead, and the investigative team sends the output and input data recorded in the system log to Forensics for further analysis. This takes approximately two weeks. The system log records abnormally high temperatures and manipulation of oxygen levels, which aligns with the reported hypoxia symptoms recorded by the dispatched team upon entering the lab floor.

The profile of the suspect or suspects is now clear to the investigative team. They are dealing with someone with vast technical knowledge, who can manipulate both the HVAC and blackout systems, while also having greater-than-average knowledge of pathology and the degree to which the body deteriorates in different scenarios and extreme external configurations.

A thorough background check of the entire staff and attending students available to the investigators at the time, however, does not yield the kind of niche profile they are looking for. The criminal profiler in the US, to whom the investigators sent the translated documents, states that none of the listed individuals could be the perpetrator or perpetrators.

As this lead goes cold, Detective Achmad now decides to focus on the staff and students who were inside the faculty building before and during the two induced blackouts.

They focus their investigation on suspect A, an employee who had been kicked out due to undisclosed reasons, and suspect C, a male student who is the last and only person the victim engaged with before the first blackout.

The investigators know this due to secured footage from the hallway of section B by the main auditorium, which shows the victim trying to unlock the door but fails repeatedly before suspect C appears on screen for approximately half a minute.

During his witness statement, suspect C is recorded saying he had had no interaction with the victim and that he wasn’t aware she was in the building at the time of the first blackout. But the footage shows suspect C engaging in small talk with the victim, which the suspect initially denies during the subsequent hearing – now as a prime suspect – before he finally confesses.

When asked by the lead detective why he denied interacting with the victim during the witness hearing, suspect C does not give an immediate reply and requests a lawyer instead.

This event prompts the press to announce in the local newspaper that the prime suspect is the perpetrator of the case and that the police are trying to secure more evidence to bring forth to the attorney in charge.

This is not an outcome the police expect, and as the public demands the prime suspect’s arrest and trial, this puts immense pressure on the investigative team, who are not wholly convinced suspect C is the one they are looking for.

But why do they think that? As mentioned earlier, the profile they are looking for is someone with an above-average IQ, a vast knowledge of different technological and mechanical systems, as well as an interest in pathology.

Suspect C, however, during his initial health check-up, is reported to have an IQ just below 90 and no other reported hobbies but football and video games, according to his two roommates and family members.

Things, however, are out of the investigative team’s control, and the authorities disregard Detective Achmad’s complaints about the lack of evidence. They now force the attorney in charge to issue a formal arrest warrant. The evidence required for such a procedure is manipulated, resulting in the arrest of suspect C on the evening of 18 November 2003.

Now, this is a time of massive public unrest, and only a few months after the invasion of the US troops to secure oil for Uncle Sam under the code name “Operation Iraqi Freedom” has come to a belated end.

It is in the ruling authorities’ interest to put down any public outrage, arrest the suspected perpetrator, and focus all leads on the capture of The Butcher of Baghdad who’s still on the run.

The investigative team, due to these circumstances, is now pressed to obey orders from their higher-ups, and suspect C is officially recognised as the prime suspect.

Detective Achmad, however, continues the investigation behind closed doors and through his own means. His close-knit team members, consisting of two junior detectives and one investigator-in-training, now focus on suspect A, who has not been interrogated formally as a suspect up until this point.

Suspect A’s witness statement and recorded hearing show high stress levels in his voice and body language, especially when the lead investigator asks about his relationship with the victim, to which he firmly denies having any relationship.

After sketching a timeline of suspect A’s proposed alibi and securing evidence of his whereabouts, they note something the first team of investigators missed – most likely due to the public’s ongoing outrage and demand for the death penalty, as well as the pressure from their higher-ups to conclude the investigation as soon as possible.

At around 1:27, two minutes before the first blackout is recorded on the security log, suspect A is caught heading towards the malfunctioning CAM03, near another emergency exit staircase that is not commonly used by students but is frequented by staff members.

This staircase is therefore not an uncommon route for the suspect in question to use. But the circumstances are abnormal.

Suspect A has been formally discharged from his service as a janitor due to undisclosed reasons by HR and is not supposed to have access to this part of the faculty at any time at this point.

But the system records show that he has used his ID card extensively, a whopping 15 times in the course of half an hour. This unauthorised use later causes the HR department to investigate their failed adherence to the safety protocols. This interim investigation later reveals that the Head of HR at the time of the crime is a friend of suspect A.

These findings prompt Detective Achmad to formally request an arrest warrant from the attorney in charge, but his requests are dismissed and the reasons recorded as “insufficient evidence provided.”

The lead detective, after complaining about this unfounded dismissal, is let go from his position as lead detective and demoted. His untimely transfer and demotion raise eyebrows within the police force, but no one comes forwards to defend the detective.

The case closes.

Until now.

As Professor Ismael enters the ajar student lounge room, holding his breath from the increasingly foul odour taking over, a horrific sight unfolds. A young woman, naked from the abdomen down and her hands bound together with duct tape, lies on the lino floor with her back turned to him.

That’s around the same time he experiences the first signs of low oxygen and the increased temperature that keeps surging. Startled, he storms out and ascends the emergency exit staircase close to the student lounge room. As he fumbles to pull his phone out and dial the emergency services, he forgets all about the fire alarm still blaring in the backdrop.

The entire faculty has been evacuated by the time he reaches the main floor. That’s when the power shuts off and he loses his grip on the phone. He runs towards the nearest exit, but due to the blackout, the automatic doors do not open.

He realises soon, as the sirens blare in the background, that he’s not only in a full-blown lockdown, but that the building is on fire and the smoke is now visible to the naked eye.

He knows from previous experience that it takes the firefighters ten minutes to get to the faculty, but this is not any normal day. It’s the last day of Ramadan and time moves slowly when it’s 33 degrees Celsius outside and with unusually high humidity levels from the Persian Gulf.

He figures soon that it’ll take somewhere between 20 to 30 minutes before the firefighters arrive. But with the heightened levels of smoke he sees, coupled with the low level of oxygen he just experienced, he figures that it’ll take no less than fifteen minutes for the concentrated Carbon Monoxide levels to knock him out.

And from what he observes, the fire originates from the second floor, which means the colourless smoke is more concentrated on the second and third floors of the building but will quickly spread uniformly throughout all four floors as it cools down.

This observation leaves him with two options. He either has to break the bullet-proof glass and flee in no less than fifteen minutes, or he must navigate to the lab floor where the oxygen level is manipulated and hope the firefighters arrive before whoever configured the oxygen levels returns it to a normal level and feeds the fire.

He chooses the latter option.

While this is an unorthodox choice by any means and one that is very much reckless by any normal standard, he knows from his time as a fighter pilot that Carbon Monoxide poisoning is more lethal and immediate than hypoxia.

The lab floor is just as vacant as earlier, only this time he sees that the utility room is cracked open. By then, however, he’s halfway down the corridor and closer to the student lounge room than the emergency exit staircase on the other side of the corridor.

But he doesn’t want to take any chances and decides to take the other emergency exit staircase when he notices that someone’s on the move in the utility room.

This prompts him to quickly enter the student lounge room rather than get caught by whoever is hiding in the utility room, which he now believes could be no one but the perpetrator himself.

After sneaking back into the student lounge room, now re-experiencing the returning symptoms of hypoxia, he studies the victim, whom he recognises as the female student who challenged the law of supply and demand earlier in his class.

But his surprise doesn’t end there.

The victim snaps her eyes open and screams.

He sits on her and covers her mouth, in a state of panic, as she slowly stops moving. Only when she’s completely incapacitated does he realise that he has smothered her to death in the chaos that broke out.

While this unfortunate outcome could’ve been prevented, he acknowledges that his lack of situational awareness is due to the low levels of oxygen as well as the fight-or-flight response of his body, but also due to what he now suspects is Carbon Monoxide poisoning coming in through the vents.

Covering the victim with his blazer, afraid of what his body is now capable of, he recognises that whoever did this to the victim in the first place is probably now approaching to check on her. With this still fresh on his mind, he sprints out of the student lounge room and into the restroom across from it.

But this relief is short-lived.

The blazer.

With his heart in his mouth, he returns to the student lounge room and takes his blazer with him, storming out of the lounge room without once looking back and locking himself into one of the stalls.

The first thing he hears seconds after this quick manoeuvre is footsteps. What he doesn’t expect at this point, however, is how abruptly they stop. He calculates that the perpetrator has stopped in the doorway of the student lounge room, not fully going in to check on the victim.

The footsteps move away soon afterwards and grow fainter with each passing second, until he recognises the thud of the nearest emergency exit staircase opening and closing.

This unexpected event sets off a lot of questions in his mind, and while trying to figure out what’s going on outside, he hears the emergency exit staircase door opening and closing for the second time. All these sequences of events take no less than three minutes in total.

Then, the emergency exit staircase door opens and closes for a third time.

A subtle click reverberates through the empty corridor, telling him that someone has locked the emergency exit door and trapped him in there.

But he has stopped feeling panic at this point.

His sanity deteriorates, and so do his erratic body movements. He recognises that he’ll soon lose all control of his body and needs to act fast.

As the first signs of outside help reach him from the vents, sending blares of sirens all over the vacant lab floor, he takes off his belt and secures it on the tap. It’ll take the Carbon Monoxide to off him somewhere between seven and ten minutes, and the hypoxia will render him unable to control his body in less than three minutes, but keep him alive much longer.

He feels his body stiffen and his lower extremities harden with the surge of blood increasing to his lower half.

After making sure the belt is fast and won’t break on him, he ties a knot around his throat and, after a moment of hesitation, lowers himself.

As the saliva drips down the side of his mouth, the first crack from his thyroid reaches his ears, the only organ now picking up signals. By the three-minute mark, he’s on a full-blown erection, and his body now fully reacts to the effects of the hypoxia before he loses all vital parameters that have kept him alive up until this point.

When the firefighters, the first to arrive at the crime scene, find the victim and Professor Ismael, they soon relay to the investigators in charge the nature of their findings and the semen they’ve found on the tiled floor.

However, due to the rapid and extreme deterioration of the victim’s body, no semen can be secured on her body, although signs of forceful penetration are noticed by the pathologist in the initial autopsy report. The cause of death is recorded as “loss of oxygen to vital organs leading to heart failure.”

When the identity of Professor Ismael as the prime suspect reaches the press, a witness soon comes forwards and recounts the events leading up to what the local press refers to as a “copycat of the sexually motivated rape and murder case of 2003.”

The witness is a reinstated janitor and former military officer who played a key role in leading the democratisation process under the U.S. administration during the 2003 invasion. He had unfairly lost his job that same year following accusations of improper conduct made by a female student.

The key witness tells the interviewing journalist during a TV appearance that he’s witnessed the crime in person and recounts his horrific encounter with Professor Ismael as “bone-chilling” and one which he does not want to “repeat ever again.”

He concludes the interview by saying he hopes “a day will come when the women of Baghdad can live without fearing for their lives at the hands of savage men,” – a statement that gains nationwide recognition and applause, prompting the international media to label the now 66-year-old as “the Guardian of Children and Women’s Rights for Liberation and Equality.”

Meanwhile, mass applause breaks out in a municipal police station outside of Baghdad, cheering as the 66-year-old receives a joint award from two of the most internationally renowned charity organizations.

Detective Achmad looks at the milling crowd of officers applauding all around him with a hardened look on his face before exiting.

This imposed democracy has once again failed to protect women, and instead of holding the perpetrators accountable, those entrusted with upholding the democratic system now celebrate them.

Pulling up a pack of cigarettes, he inhales the poisonous smoke before drawing a last drag and putting it out with his foot. As the cheers continue in the background, he pulls out his Glock 19 and puts the barrel under his chin.