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.

Femgore Review

Photo by Catalin Pop on Unsplash

I can’t understand females despite being one myself. Sure, you’ve got a kid to take care of and all that, but why endure being beaten black and blue when you can just… feed your abusive partner some pills?

I can’t understand how somebody can be so stupid when ending the misery is so easy. So easy that I can’t phantom why anybody would rather endure the pain and agony than fight back in the most perfect way there is?

Or when you’re raped and lying next to your rapist, why not just take a knife and stab them when they least expect it? It’s so easy that I can’t understand why no female ever does it, why they choose to endure rather than to end it.

I’m no sexist, yet sometimes the very stupidity of my sex gets me worked up in ways no words can truly capture. At the same time, I perceive myself as a feminist at heart, for I’d rather see my sex fight the oppression and the abuse by giving right back to their abusers than stay idle, yet they rarely do.

That lack of action actually made me distance myself from my peers. Like, seriously, you’re just going to get raped and do nothing about it? Your kids? Your poor, poor kids? Well, aren’t they better off at some random orphanage than learning how to treat other people from that partner of yours?

But those kinds of things aren’t even the tip of my disturbing opinions about females and the growing trend of embracing masculinity, which is all about showing similar and violent tendencies as the very sex that puts them in so much misery.

Like, seriously? You think you have what it takes to take on an average man with that build of yours? Sure, steroids will help you get those muscles to look way larger than they are, but are they actually making you strong enough to fight back a man with natural levels of testosterone?

I’m not a man, but I think the answer to this question is pretty obvious, and yet… Nowadays, female authors seem to give my sex the false hope that we can take on an average man with ease, abuse them, and show just as much brutality towards them, as they have shown to us for ages. But just how detached from reality must someone be to actually believe this crap?

I’m not talking about transgenders but cis-people, by the way, even though when the transition has begun plays a subtle part here, like the density of the bone, the levels of testosterone before it was suppressed, and so on. Anyway, so what I am trying to say is that… I’m going to prove them all wrong.

Getting raped? Easy! As long as you have a hole somewhere, there will be dogs barking up across the country. What is hard, the hardest part in fact, is to turn the dog into a bitch and make it howl while you, as the female in this situation, make it immobile, cut off its testicles, and then grind the flesh with a proud smile.

Really, the only realistic way to do all that is to, well, knock out your rapist with a blunt object when they’ve finished their thing or, surprise, feed them some pills. But that would be too easy and wouldn’t prove the theory of how women are capable of doing exactly the same things to their abusers as they have done to them.

So, what do you do in that scenario? Well, the best outcome would be to physically fight off the rapist and then go from there. So… that’s what I decided to do.

Did it work? It did not. But I’m here, writing this, so something must’ve gone right… right? The thing is, I just did what any sensible female would in such a predicament: I tore my abuser’s ear off and then chewed on his nose. A tad too salty and metallic in taste, not to mention the acidic aftertaste of the byproducts produced by bacteria on the skin tissue. Yikes! Why do men never shower?

Overall, this method was a very unfortunate 3/10 – would not recommend. For my next attempt, if I ever should decide to push the limits, I’d definitely prepare more beforehand in case something goes astray during the review itself. And, well, I’d also practise my cutting skills so that the body parts are grounded to perfection before dumping them down the drain.

Also, for my next article, I’m open to new recommendations. So try your worst, and I’ll see you next time in another abysmal review!

Important notice: the procedures outlined in this article were performed under controlled settings and should never be replicated.

Voice of God - Part VII [Final Part]

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

“Ms Carlton…? What’s the matter?”

I tried to contain my tears, but it was easier said than done. 

“They… they’re going to—these people, they… I don’t know where to begin, I… I just want to get away from this place but… but…”

“I’ll come pick you up, okay? Do you think you can meet me in the woods? Ms Carlton?”

I shook my head. “No, I- I can’t. They—you don’t understand, they’re…”

“I’m calling the police.” He took a short pause. “It’s… Everything’s gonna be fine, okay?”

“… Okay.”

He hung up.

I packed my stuff in haste and set out into the darkness.

I had two options: I either did as Nath told me and played God or made a break for it and wished upon the stars that the police find Vera before it was too late.

The woods were as lonely as I recalled.

Closing in on the spot where I met the retired journalist for the first time, I got the feeling that someone watched over me.

I looked around me in the murk, trying to discern something – anything – out of the ordinary.

This delayed me for about half a minute or so.

When I noticed the flashlights to the right, I hurried towards the roadway only to baulk.

David Chapman was there.

But he was not alone.

The guy I saw in the church, the one who was with Nath, was right beside him.

They were whispering; they were looking for me.

As the beam of blinding light pointed at me, I cowered behind a clump of bushes and held my breath.

The duo neared.

I was losing my mind trying to figure out what was going on.

That was when I overheard their bizarre conversation and knew the police were not on their way.

“You think she figured it out?”

The journalist, “No, she sounded clueless. She must be on her way; I’m sure.”

“What do we do with her when she comes?”

“I’ll have to ask Mary that, but we need to find her first. Here, hold the flashlight. I’ll call and see if she’s on her way.”

I fetched my phone and tried to power it off. My hands, however, lost their functionality.

I shook out of control, in a cold sweat, but my hands did not move the way I wanted them.

I switched the thing off at the eleventh hour and took a deep breath.

But my relief was short-lived. 

My heart sank and my breathing became increasingly shallow and irregular. 

“Did you hear that?” asked the guy.

“No, what did you hear?”

“I’m not sure. I keep hearing things these past few days. It must be the spirits…”

The flashlight turned direction.

The duo disappeared into the night.

I turned my phone on and put it on mute, then called the person who dropped me off here.

The chauffeur.

It was past the wee hours.

He did not pick up.

I left a desperate voicemail and asked the driver to come pick me up as soon as he received the message and call the police.

I was going back.

It was no use in calling the police at this point.

The retired journalist and the others would manipulate anyone who stepped foot inside this place. I was certain. 

Nath’s words rang in my ears.

He said there were more people like him, people who believed Mary was a fake prophet pretending to be the voice of God.

It was written in their Gospels that I would challenge her throne, that I would denounce her as the voice of Satan.

And… that was exactly what I was gonna do. Did I even have any other option? 

If doing this meant I could keep Vera safe, then I would join this wicked game of pretend this very second.

I returned to the gates of Hell.

The night was vivid.

All the villagers gathered at the dilapidated church for the ceremony – this sacrificial ritual that would claim Vera’s life.

I felt the rusty, cold doorknobs in my hands before I flung the door open and made my way through the aisle.

I locked gazes with Mary whose entire face was drenched in crimson in front of the altar. Before her, the catafalque stood, its lid partially open.

I felt the numerous gazes fixed on me yet all I could see was the distorted face of this person, who called herself the descendant of Mary Magdalene and the voice of God. 

My eyes wandered to the catafalque where I left Vera to her demise.

A pang of ache hit my chest.

I shifted my attention to Mary once more. Neither of us said a word. Then I turned to the mass, to these lost spirits who were ready to ditch their God for a new one.

I raised my hands high in the air; I didn’t have to say a single word. 

Nath stepped forwards and kneeled before me. The rest of the congregation Mary and those before her manipulated all these years followed suit.

I turned to face Mary again. As I did that, she charged at me with a crowbar.

I did not budge; I just shut my eyes.

A hoard of footfalls emerged from all directions and on either side of me, rushing forwards like brutes and screaming their heads off.

When I reopened my eyes, I saw a pile of lunatics on top of one another at the altar, tearing Mary apart and ripping her into pieces. Alive.

I backed away and almost lost my footing at the macabre sight.

My heartbeat picked up.

I grabbed the crowbar on the floor and pulled off the rest of the nails on the catafalque.

I broke off; the tears threatening to spill.

The poor thing greeted me with a stiff expression on her pallid child’s face. Her eyes shot open, her cheeks hollow, and her heartbeat no longer beating.

I snatched her out from her tomb and carried her out into the darkness from the backdoor.

I locked gazes with Nath as I rushed out yet he did not follow me.

But his face looked… How should I put it? Peculiar, like a wolfish grin unlike any other. 

It made my blood run cold.

I shook the dire thoughts away and plodded through the graveyard and took a detour to the woods.

David Chapman and the other guy weren’t prowling around.

I ran with all my might.

It was during this plight that I noticed that I sprinted in circles.

I had run in over ten minutes and I had not reached the end of the forested area yet. 

I broke off and put the lifeless girl on the ground.

She had no pulse; I knew that, but I still tried to shake her back to life.

She did not respond.

I stooped over her cold body and broke into tears, doubling over and crying my heart out.

It was over. Everything… was over. I came too late. I… I failed Vera. 

Even if I magically found a way out of this place – somehow – I would still have to live with the insight that I failed to save Vera when I had the opportunity.

Something seized my arm.

I stopped breathing.

I stared down at the child whose black eyes now stared right through me.

A hint of a harrowing grin showed up on her pale lips, and her nails dug into my skin.

I gasped and crawled away from her.

Vera, or whatever this was, got on four legs with her head twisted 180 degrees, and stared at me with her upside-down eyes.

I stumbled on something and looked up.

An identical grin plastered on my late mother’s ripped lips met my distorted face. 

I stopped breathing and forced myself up.

I did not know where I was running towards or in what direction; I just ran.

I only stopped when a sudden beam of light blinded my vision.

I covered my eyes. When I reopened them, I was back in the church.

The shredded and mutilated body of Mary lay in front of the altar I stood on.

The mass hailed me, rocking in place and praying like the mad people they were.

They were beside themselves.

Nath sat me down on an adorned throne in front of a disturbing painting of Mary as the Devil.

And he said something only I could hear amidst the chaos, something that would forever haunt me.

“You just killed the Voice of God.”

Voice of God - Part VI

Image by Michael Kauer from Pixabay

I sneaked out into the chilling night air the day after meeting David Chapman and somehow found myself in front of the crumping parish church. 

The godly structure arrested me as soon as I was close enough to feel its towering height, eye-like and menacing windows and the piercing tower obscured by dark clouds.

Unbeknownst to myself, I came to a standstill and held my breath.

It was locked.

I tried to budge it open with force twice, but it would not open and reveal the darkness it brooded on.

Thinking I had at least tried and that I now ought to return to the school grounds, I shifted my gaze to the churchyard teeming with stale and grim gravestones as far as my eyes could see.

Then I reasoned there must be a second exit or a hidden entrance from the back to the graveyard due to the nature of the beat-down and antique structure dating from the 1800s.

With these thoughts in the back of my mind, I set off to the churchyard where the undead lay still in their dark and filthy tombs made of sin. 

An earthly odour filled the entire yard. The soil was damp, although it hadn’t poured down and painted the premises dark.

I moseyed through the forlorn gravestones; most of them were dated two generations before I was even born.

Time stood still.

I was in a Timeslip of a kind and each step led me farther from my own world, although I could swear the gloomy night sky was still the same.

By the time I found the backdoor, I had forgotten why I had come here in the first place.

For a mere second, I thought of returning but knew I could not turn a blind eye to the sinister things happening in Dew Shire.

I found a rock and hammered it against the bolted door repeatedly until it unlocked.

A breeze of cold air chilled me to the bone with the grating of the rusted and stale backdoor which had not been used for ages.

I found myself next to the altar where I witnessed Mary’s unfazed speech a few days ago.

But this was hardly what caught my attention.

Far from view and the numerous rows of benches to the left of the altar was an underground passage. It was narrow and suffocating.

My insides turned upside down as I took the flight down from the creaking stairs only to break off.

I was not alone.

At first, the voices were faint and seemed to echo all over the place, but then they grew louder.

It was then that I saw two figures coming down from the second floor; I recognised one of the voices immediately.

It belonged to Nath.

The other voice, however, was unfamiliar.

I rushed to the closest row and hid as the two men, much to my surprise, made it to the altar and then entered the underground passage.

There was a hint of distraught in Nath’s guttural voice, and although I did not know the reason behind his distress, I knew it had something to do with Vera’s sudden disappearance.

By the time it was too late to regret it, I stood up and followed the two men inside.

But they were nowhere to be found as I entered the hidden chamber made of stones and seemed to be stuck in a time long since forgotten.

The first thing I noticed was the scent of incense, much like the ones I smelled at Mary’s home – only this time it was much more intense, almost thicker and more suffocating in this small, enclosed space.

Then I noticed the catafalques all around me and a shiver shot up my spine, unable to focus or wrap my head around what emerged right before me in all directions. 

Just as I forgot about the two men, their approaching voices reminded me of their presence and I got into a state of panic.

My first thought was to flee the underground chamber, but my eyes shifted focus and I found myself dashing towards another hidden passage inside the chamber in the opposite direction of the approaching voices.

That was when I found yet another catafalque, but this one was new and, much to my surprise, not nailed.

I opened it just in case Nath and the other guy approached and I would have a place to hide when I jolted back at the sight that met me.

The white, empty and expressionless stare of a pair of eyes.

I must have gasped, there was no way to tell if I had or not, but I noticed right then and there that the approaching voices faded away all of a sudden.

Without realising whose eyes I locked gazes with, I squeezed into the catafalque and closed the lid just enough to fill my lungs with fresh air.

A string of light was all that entered through the gap I purposely left, but it was enough to help me discern whose cold body I lay next to.

A shiver shot up my spine at the morbid realisation that I now held onto the corpse of the very little girl I had come to find.

I covered my mouth and stifled yet another escaping gasp.

“How sure are you about this? Mary doesn’t like surprises. You know better than anyone…”

It was Nath’s voice.

My quivering eyes shifted to the gap as soon as I heard him.

“It came from here, I’m sure. I heard footsteps, I tell you! Why would I lie?”

“Must be the spirits then,” Nath said and added before the other could interject. “Surely, you don’t fear what’s already dead and gone with the unforgiven wind?”

There was a short pause after this.

The person with Nath remained hushed and wouldn’t respond to this.

My heart skipped a beat, and I fixed my darting eyes on the gap as Nath broke the prevailing silence.

“See, the lid’s open. We just need to nail it so the spirits won’t escape and play us for fools. Gimme a hand, will ya?”

“Don’t think that’s a good idea…”

“Well, you’d rather be alone with the spirits, then?”

Whoever was with Nath backed away. I could almost hear the frantic beat of his heart as he replied.

“I’m not touching that thing! You take care of this yourself, and…” The stranger paused as if he heard something out of the ordinary, before carrying on as if nothing happened. “… make sure it stays closed.”

The man left; I was sure.

There were no more noises for a while and I thought of sneaking out, when I realised someone was moving about in the silence yet did not approach the catafalque.

It was during this time that something unexpected occurred. The cold child who I thought was dead came alive.

My flickering eyes fraught with horror widened at the sight of the flailing child struggling to escape her ill fate.

Too stunned to move at first, I barely covered Vera’s lips and let my eyes wander to the gap where the string of light now was obscured.

Vera scratched me all over, unaware of why she was stuck in the dark and panicking. 

The lid closed and left both of us in pitch-black darkness. 

Vera stopped moving just as suddenly as she had come to life – turning cold and still anew.

Then I heard it: the clanger of something being nailed down.

How long I had been inside the catafalque I did not know.

At one point I lost all senses and perception of time and place and could only focus on my strained breathing.

Vera had not come back to life during this time.

I thought I heard the hissing of a snake, the chatter of laughter and the image of a babbling spring now and then.

After a while, however, I realised that all these hallucinations were nothing but the products of my deteriorating mind in this enclosed, tight and narrow space shrouded in shadows. 

By the time I gave up all attempts to break free, the lid opened and I stared blankly into a pair of green eyes I recognised.

I was hauled down onto the cold stone ground.

My eyes, which had adjusted to the darkness, were a blurry mess and it hurt to keep my eyes fully open and exposed to the dim-lit surroundings.

When I regained my vision and met Nath’s eyes, I recalled the little girl still inside the catafalque and forced myself up despite having no strength left in my body.

I could hardly stand up, but I pushed the lid aside with all my might and pulled the child out.

Even this time, as I held Vera in my arms and brought her out into the light, her body was as cold as ice. There was not a single sign of life in her.

Yet I somehow knew this was far from the truth. Vera was still alive. How, I did not know and had no way of explaining under these macabre circumstances, but I was certain.

I let the girl rest on my thighs and gently shook her back to life. Her cold body did not move and her eyes did not meet mine even for a second, but I saw her bruised fingers twitch at my desperate pleas.

This was enough for me.

As I was about to carry the girl out and flee the chamber, a figure calling my name made his presence known once again.

I flinched at the realisation of his existence and picked up my pace when he said something I could not ignore.

I came to a standstill and stared down at Vera. Her pallid face was stiff and blue, just like the undead.

But this child was not dead – dying, yes, that was obvious – but far from it as long as I nurtured her back to life.

I knew every second was worth this little child’s life and that we had to get out of here, out of Dew Shire, as soon as possible.

But his words were too difficult to ignore.

I, albeit unwillingly, turned to face him, and when he did not elaborate on his words, I pressed on.

“What… what are you, people?”

“We are human, just like you…”

“You expect me to believe—”

“Don’t you know,” he began, “that human beings are far more wicked than any other entity?”

I looked down at the poor thing.

Although I agreed, I wasn’t about to confirm Nath.

He, instead of telling me the truth he promised, kept beating around the bush as if to gain time for whatever wicked lie he intended to tell me.

I was not going to let him do this.

“What’s going around in this place? What were you gonna do to Vera?”

He briefly dropped his head. “And if I tell you everything, will you let that child go?”

“No! Never!”

“Then I can’t tell you what you want to know.”

“She’s just a child!” My voice cracked; the thought of abandoning a helpless child was enough to make me see red. “Vera, she’s… she’s just a child, for God’s sake! What did she ever do to you people—”

“Let’s say you bring Vera with you and flee this place, and then what? She’ll just be replaced by another child! Do you think you can save them all?”

“From… from what?” I asked. “From what should I save them – if that’s what I have to?”

“You don’t get it, do you? Saving them is beside the point here! You can’t save her, not like this!” He paused upon seeing my distorted face and softened his voice. “Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but… let the child go. That’s the only way you can save her…”

“No, I’m not gonna—”

Nath punched the wall.

“I’m telling you the way to save her, don’t I! Can’t you just… just trust me this once?”

“Trust you…?” A bitter smirk played on my lips. “Then give me something I can believe; tell me what you’re hiding.”

He rubbed his face; his antsy eyes fixed on the child I carried close to my bosom.

His flickering gaze then met mine as if he noticed how I studied him at that very moment and broke out into cold sweat.

He was desperate in his pleas; he wanted me to put Vera back into the catafalque.

“Listen, I- I can’t tell you anything before you do as I say, all right? I’m not…” He rubbed his face again, which turned pale and he wheezed as if he was stuck inside a catafalque himself and couldn’t breathe. “I’m not playing mind games, okay? I’m not trying to fool you, I just… Please, you gotta listen to me before it’s—”

“Nath…?”

We both turned towards the sudden voice echoing from the other side of the passage and the larger chamber.

It belonged to the man who was with Nath, I was sure of this and for a second I thought I had met my doom.

But Nath did not respond to the man looking for him, neither did he ask the other for help.

Instead, he remained silent.

I stared at the helpless child thinking this was the end of us, when the voice became fainter and then disappeared for good.

I caressed the poor thing and noted that she regained some colour on her cheeks.

Then I… put her back into the darkness.

I did not trust Nath, of course, I did not, how could I? But he just let go of a perfect opportunity to get rid of me and he did not take it.

It made me wonder whether there was any truth to the words he said.

He let out a sigh of relief and collapsed on his knees, rocking back and forth as if he were a toddler trying to soothe himself from a looming danger.

“Why are you like this?”

He stopped rocking and looked at me from where he stood on both knees.

For a second, it looked as if he had forgotten I was there and tried to wrap his head around how I had come to find him in this dismal state.

“What… do you think of Mary?”

I frowned. Didn’t he ask this question already? At the same time, I could tell that he didn’t actually want to ask me this very question, only that it was the closest thing to whatever lingered on the tip of his tongue.

I did not respond.

I thought nothing of Mary.

During my short-lived career, I had seen my fair share of peculiar people and Mary was one of the sanest people I had crossed paths with even if I did not want to confess to this at the time.

What I could not deny however was the way she pulled people in and the way her sweet, honeyed voice made everyone around her let their guard down.

It dawned on me then that this must be the reason the villagers listened and heeded her every word as if she was delaying the words of God Himself.

Immediately after this train of thought, I recalled what the children told me about their Gospel. I don’t even know why this thought occurred to me, but it did.

And before I knew it, those singular words escaped from my lips even before I became aware of their existence in my dismal mind.

“She’s… she’s the voice of God?”

Nath, horrified by the nature of my sudden confession, stood up and backed away as if he had seen a phantom.

“How—” He stammered, trying to form words and clear his mind all at the same time. “Did you just… No, it’s not possible! Yet you…”

“Is this why you call her that – Mary Magdalene?”

“Not only that,” he confided in me. “There’s more to her name than you can ever imagine.”

“Then enlighten me.”

“How well do you know your Gospel, Ms Carlton, that’s all it boils down to…”

“I have never been religious, I’m afraid. I only know what my mother taught me two decades ago.” Then added before he could reply. “Why’s this so significant?”

“Do you believe in God?”

I pulled a half-hearted smile despite the circumstances.

“As I mentioned earlier, I have never been religious despite my upbringing.”

“That’s not a reply,” Nath said and rephrased his question.

I frowned.

“Do you believe in the good and evil?”

“I already answered that…”

He paused for a few seconds as if to make sure I understood everything he said and left no stone unturned in my attempts to answer these questions he was asking instead of giving me the truth I sought.

“But you said she was the voice of God. What made you think that?”

“I…” I didn’t know what to say. Why this kind of thought popped up in my head, I couldn’t say even if I wanted to. 

“Have you considered then that she could be the voice of the Devil instead?”

“What?” He didn’t respond to this. I briefly looked away to gather my thoughts. This was getting ridiculous yet the person in front of me was dead serious. “As in the Devil disguised as God’s voice, is that what you mean? That she’s pretending to relay the voice of God?”

“Something like that, yes. But she wasn’t the first of her blood who started this game of pretend as a false prophet.”

“False prophet?”

“Mary Magdalene was the first. She tricked a great many Christians, saying she conveyed the voice of God, and in her footsteps followed her descendants.”

I smirked without meaning to. I couldn’t wrap my head around the nonsense I was hearing. Had these people gone bonkers or was I too abstruse for my own good to believe in these fairytales disguised as gospels? 

“So, let me get this right: you’re saying that Mary Magdalene, the first of her kind that is, was pretending to relay the message of God? And that,” I paused to gather my thoughts, “she’s in fact relaying the voice of the Devil?”

He nodded without wasting any time. 

“She’s been living off of these lies, her Gospels that is, since the dawn of time! She whispers evil and won’t stop at nothing!” As if to make sure I got everything right, he paused shortly before continuing in that same maniacal voice that made me shudder. “And I’m afraid only you can stop her…”

“Me…?”

“It’s written in the Gospels, Ms Carlton! It was prophesied that you’d one day arrive in Dew Shire, destroy the Gospels and save us!”

“That’s—”

“Have you never wondered why you don’t look like your mother?” he interrupted me.

I knitted my brows upon hearing this. He pressed on without waiting for me to respond.

“Seeing how you look at me right now, you must have wondered, after all…”

“This… this is getting—”

 “She’s not your mother, is she? Not the one who gave birth to you, that is.”

I briefly dropped my head. David Chapman’s voice rang in my head as he recounted the fate of Enis Fair and how her offspring was never found.

A pang of ache spread from the deepest chamber of my heart to my fingertips, and I backed away without being aware of it, horrified and beyond myself at this realisation. 

It then hit me that it wasn’t Dew Shire, which lured me into this trap but my own mother, whose fate I once heard as a child, and then as an adult from the very journalist who had last seen her alive.

But how was all of this possible? Why was I of all people prophesied to bring an end to the false prophesies? Just why…?

How would I even stand up against someone who whispered the sweet tongue of the Devil and brought the entire world to her feet with a single gesture?

“Why… why me?” I asked, unable to clear my harrowing thoughts and let my doubts put to rest. “I don’t believe in this nonsense, I never will, so why me? Why am I mentioned in the Gospels?”

“Mary’s mother, the prophet and former Mary Magdalene, let you live the day your mother was murdered. They ripped you out of her and you were brought up as the rest of us but everything changed when you became six years old.

“It was prophesied that you’d one day grow up and declare yourself a prophet to destroy the voice of God. You were ordered to be killed just like your mother, Enis Fair.

“But your mother, the woman who brought you up, fled with you the night they came for your head. I was ten years old at the time and my memory is no better than yours but I clearly remember you.

“And I have waited for you all this time, we all have. I’m not the only one who sees through the lies of the Devil and wants to break free. There are more of us who no longer want Mary around.”

“You’ve been waiting for me?” I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

Nothing made sense.

I was to declare myself a prophet to fool people? Then again, if all of this was true and these people really believed these things then—I lifted my eyes off the ground as Nath spoke once more.

“Please, help us! No, you must help us!”

“I don’t even know how!” I began, unsure of how to explain myself to this person who truly believed I was his saviour.

“I don’t know how to help you.”

“There’ll be a ritual tomorrow tonight.” He shifted his eyes to the catafalque.

“We hold a ritual every ten to fifteen years and sacrifice one of our own for the Second Coming. Vera’s parents pleaded with Mary to have her.”

“What do you mean—”

“She’s going to be killed in front of the altar,” he began, “we’re all going to eat a part of her to honour Mary and pray that her bloodline never dry up.”

“What in the—you’ve done this before?”

He shook his head. “This will be my first. Our last sacrifice failed since your mother fled with you.”

“How can I trust you? For all I care, you’re telling me all of this to gain my trust and then lure me to my death.”

“You… just have to take my word for it.” He looked around himself, fidgeting and anxious. “We need to go now! Mary’s gonna be here any second! She shouldn’t see us here!”

I shifted my eyes to the catafalque, where the poor child slept soundly, unaware of what was going on around her. 

“Are you going to nail it?” I already knew the answer yet it made me shudder, nonetheless.

“Only after Mary arrives and gives the go-ahead.”

“And then what?”

“I already told you,” he whispered and leaned in. “This is the only way we can keep her safe!”

“I…” I couldn’t tear my unfocused eyes off the catafalque. 

“As long as you do as I say and accept your role in all this, nothing’s gonna happen to that child. I promise.”

I briefly shut my eyes. “I’m not… what you think I am. I have no power to stop Mary or- or whatever this is about…”

“You’ll figure something out, I’m sure you will! Your name is written in the Gospels! I don’t know why or how, but if the Devil fears you, then I trust you with my life and so does everyone else!”

“You don’t it!” I said, raising my voice and unable to keep in the growing frustration. “ I’m not a prophet! I’m not God and I’m certainly not the voice of God, either!”

“I never said you were – you did. Just now.”

“I don’t even believe in the things you people believe in! I don’t believe in God or the Devil neither in Heaven nor Hell.” I took a pause. “And I’m not a bloody prophet; I’m not.”

“Then pretend that you are! If you really want to save that kid’s life, that is…”

I was flabbergasted.

“Then what… what do you want me to do, exactly?”

“You’ll know what to do,” he said, adding before I had the chance to press on. “Make sure to be here during the ritual. I’ll leave the backdoor open.”

Could he truly be trusted? As I was having these thoughts, now back in the office, I could not stop thinking of everything he told me with such sincerity.

I was certain of only one thing: I was not a prophet and I did not mean to fool people prone to be made a fool of.

At the same time, I could not explain how my name somehow became part of a prophecy and that this had come into existence and ignited hope in these people the second I arrived here.

Moreover, I could not sleep soundly when I knew Vera was dying in the darkness, afraid and perhaps disappointed that I abandoned her to die all alone.

But what if all of this was true?

What if…?

I couldn’t sleep a wink.

I was in the safety of my office, but I knew something terrible was going to happen soon.

As midnight approached, I could no longer bear the harrowing thoughts and phoned David Chapman.

He did not pick up right away.

I began to count the seconds.

And as soon as I heard his voice, I broke down in tears.

I was in a blind.

Vera was inside that catafalque, trapped in the suffocating darkness, and some lunatics believed I was some kind of prophet!

I was losing it.

I needed someone to tell me the way to go – what to do and how to do it.

David Chapman was the only person I could think of.