Neve Emek: Room 102 - Part 2 of ?

 2

The pitter-patter of rain obscured the view through the windshield, distorting and blurring the lines of reality. I didn’t focus on the downpour or the way the wind swept through the serene neighbourhood I couldn’t even afford if I worked a lifetime. It wasn’t like I didn’t try my best to provide for my ex-wife and daughter – I was simply not enough. I guess she wanted to live another life, one where she never had to worry about finances. Even so, I knew that the guy she lived with was not whom she truly loved.

Alena and I met by chance. She was an exchange student on a visit to her friend, with whom I happened to be on good terms since we lived in the same student apartment. One night, that mutual friend called me over after getting a scare with a stalker who had followed the two of them at the bar they went to. I caught the guy as he was trying to break in and made sure he did not return. It was only when this friend invited me over for a cup of coffee as a thank you that Alena and I first met and, eventually, fell in love.

I had seen my fair share of beautiful women by then. But she wasn’t human; she was another species. Or at least, that’s what I thought. Maybe it was the fact that she was a metalhead that made me think she was. I don’t know. All I knew was that she too felt the same way.

When she finished her course and had to leave, I confessed, and we kept a long-distance relationship for a few years. I proposed to her when she came over at our fourth anniversary and spent the night imagining what our wedding would be like, what our kids would look like, and what kind of beautiful life we would have as a family.

Perhaps it was those memories we shared that ensured me that one day she would return to me. I know, wishful thinking on my part. But what was the alternative? That I lose all hope and just… fade away? Once I secured the ownership of the property, I would be able to sell it and use the money to get my life back. I couldn’t stop thinking this whole inheritance thing was sent from Allah as a way to help me get back on track. Maybe I was just getting ahead of myself, who knows, but I couldn’t help but feel this way.

When the door swung open, Alena stepped out into the light spilling from the porch. Her arms were folded over her chest. She didn’t walk, she marched towards the car. For a moment, I thought she’d be over the moon to see me, tell me she missed me. Instead, she wanted me gone. Not just from her house but from her life entirely. Imagine that.

I had never seen her like this before, so cold and indifferent. It was as if the woman I had loved, the woman I once believed I knew better than anyone, had been stripped away and replaced by a stranger. How could someone change so much? Was this hardness always there, buried somewhere beneath the surface, and had I been too blind to notice her true colours? The thought unsettled me more than her stern expression – more than I wanted to admit.

I thumbed the switch and lowered the window, hoping to explain why I had come. But she didn’t give me the chance. Her words cut through the silence before I could even open my mouth. She hated me. Why? We had been in love once, so how come all there was left between us was this profound hatred instead? I guess the saying about the line between love and hatred being thin was true after all. Only, why had I failed to see this until now?

“What are you doing here? Go.”

“Just listen—”

“No. My husband will be back any second! Leave.”

“Your husband… right. I know. I just need to say one thing.”

“We don’t have anything left to say. It’s over! I’ve moved on. I’m happy here, Sami. Why do you keep turning up? Don’t I deserve peace? Doesn’t our daughter?”

“You think I didn’t try?” The words felt bitter. I felt bitter. How could she accuse me of not providing for her, of not making her happy? “I bent over backwards, gave everything I had to you – to our daughter! I loved you, Alena! I still do. Can you say the same about him? Does he even love you? Do you love him?”

“This isn’t about love, and you know that.”

“No. It’s about money, isn’t it? Always hungry for more. Like—”

She snapped. “Don’t you dare.”

“—a fucking whore!”

“Get out of here! Don’t ever come back!” she shouted. “Do you hear me?”

But I didn’t leave. Neither did I respond to her pleas. I just stared blankly at her, trying to find the right words to say sorry. I didn’t mean to say those things to her. I loved her. So, why did I say those horrible things to her? I just—

At the end of the driveway, twin beams of light pierced through the dark, growing larger as a car rolled to a stop. The engine stopped, and out stepped the man she’d chosen over me. He wore a tailored suit that looked more at home in a glass tower than here. This was the first time I had ever seen him in person. I already knew enough about him, though. He was a director of operations at some corporation, born with money, living with arrogance. People said he had a taste for other women, too, and a mouth that dripped with contempt whenever he spoke about them like the crude bastard he was.

Alena rushed to meet him, clutching his arm as if to ground herself. At first, I thought she was pulling him back from me, shielding me from his glare. Then I saw the bruises beneath her sleeve, those dark smudges on her pale skin, and realised she wasn’t protecting me. Not at all. She was trying to keep him from lashing out at her. The sight hollowed me out and stirred something inside me that I knew not I had in me. Contempt. Disgust. Awe, even.

The Alena I remembered was fierce and stubborn, a woman who spoke at protests and wouldn’t let a single injustice slip past her without calling it what it was. Now she clung to this piece of shit like a fragile shadow about to break, shrinking without even trying to put up a fight. Not once in all our years together had I ever shouted at her, not once had I laid a hand on her, even in our worst arguments. And here she was, clinging to a man who did both. What a bloody irony this whole thing was…

She pleaded with me to leave with those pretty eyes, to not do something stupid and just leave. How could I, though, after seeing those bruises on her arms? At the same time, I knew that she would only be beaten should I try to confront the guy about it. In the end, she left me no choice. Though it was hard to turn a blind eye, I could do nothing but accept that this was the kind of life she had chosen for herself. But my daughter didn’t, and as soon as I claimed the inheritance, I would make sure she stayed with me. I guess this was why that letter arrived right when I was about to end things. Had I left this world too soon, what would’ve become of my daughter?

When I hit the road, I thought of calling the police for the briefest of seconds. But what was I going to say? Alena would never testify against that guy, and I didn’t know if he beat my daughter. All I knew was that those bruises meant nothing as long as Alena did not claim otherwise. Only I wished she’d ask for help, say she made a mistake and wanted me back in her life. But she didn’t. She’d rather be beaten up by a brute than get back together with me.

A smirk tugged at my lips as this thought crossed my mind. Fucking hell.

The road narrowed as did my thoughts in the gloom.

I did not consider myself a good person, but that did not mean I was a bad person, did it? Like all humans, I too had both good and bad days. Coming here, telling her I was to leave for Israel, was the last thread of hope I held onto. Why did I even assume she’d somehow listen and tell me not to go? I didn’t want to go. Not really. But if leaving everything behind and starting anew somewhere no one could find me, perhaps Israel would be the perfect place? But what would happen there, I had no way of knowing beforehand. All I could think of was the agony of losing both my wife and daughter, the feeling of not being wanted, the emptiness of being lost in this vast, bloody world.

Back in the apartment, the walls closed in around me like a crushing weight and suffocated me. The bills were piling, rent was overdue, and the landlord threatened to cut the electricity.

Hunched over the kitchen table, my daughter’s drawings pinned on the refrigerator arrested me. A family of three. Supposed to be happy. She drew it when she was three. Alena wanted to get rid of it, but I convinced her not to. Since when had this happy family of three fallen apart? The day I got injured at work and had to stay at home for three months? Or had it cracked years before, and the incident only acted as a catalyst? It was one of those things I wanted to ask Alena, but I never managed to. Couldn’t. I guess I feared what she would say.

Beyond the open balcony door, rain fell against the railings and chilled the inside. Drawn by the cool air, I crossed the room and leaned out into the wet night. The soft patter reminded me of something from the past, one I could not recall, especially this moment where the moon had yet to rise fully and twilight gave way to complete darkness. Like a lullaby, the steady murmur comforted my broken heart and soothed my soul – or whatever remained of it.

I patted my pocket for a cigarette, already imagining the first draw. Instead, my fingers caught the edge of the letter, which was still folded and worn. For a moment, I just stood still and did not move. My thoughts were all over the place, and the longer I thought things over, the more convinced I became.

The inheritance wasn’t just a curiosity now; it was survival, a chance to reclaim something – anything – before it was gone. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight. But here, in the rain’s cold embrace, it was the only chance I had. At least, that was what I thought. Believed.

Besides, what was the worst that could happen? The atrocities against my people had ended a long time ago, and the homeland of my ancestors had been stolen. What beef would there be between me and the current population, who were not part of the illegal siege and the consequent displacement of the Palestinians that happened years before they were even born? None of us chose our parents or the country we ended up being part of, and so I had no right to condemn an entire population that neither took part nor supported the humiliation and murder of my people.

Still…

It all seemed too good to be true. I wished the solicitor would tell me more about how the property ended up as being my sole right to claim, especially since it felt like she lied or did not tell the whole truth during our brief phone call. You see, I looked up the bill she said was about to be passed in the Israeli parliament, but from what I could gather from the few English articles I found on the internet, the bill had been in circulation for over a decade. Something else had prompted the solicitor to find me. But what kept her from telling me? Moreover, where was my missing aunt, who was first in line to inherit the property?

These were only the tip of the questions that I told myself I had to ask the solicitor once I arrived in Israel. As someone with a good head on his shoulders once said, when something’s too good to be true, then it probably is. Something was off. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was or could be, only the pit of my stomach twisted, and my instinct screamed at me to be on high alert. And so I did.

By the time the sun rose, the decision was no longer a question. The ticket was booked, my passport lay ready on the counter, and the date of departure loomed closer with every tick of the clock. More than a journey, it felt like an escape – a chance to abandon everything that clung to me here: the wreckage of my marriage, the loneliness, the hollowness left by choices I couldn’t undo. I told myself I was leaving to start over, to breathe different air, to become a better version of myself – one not constrained by finances.

What I didn’t stop to consider was the other possibility: that I wasn’t running away at all but running headlong into something darker. Inevitable, even. My choices were no more than a performance of free will. Then again, how could I have known? I was just a human, made of skin and bones. Perhaps I should have listened to the alarms ringing inside my skull, the restless warnings that broke into my thoughts whenever I tried to convince myself I was doing the right thing. But I pressed on regardless, not despite those alarms, but, in a way, because of them. Madness, I know. But don’t we all have a loose screw? The alternative was death; no in between. I wanted to live. So, I chose the only option that would keep me alive for as long as possible.

I thought.

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!”

Neve Emek: Room 102 - Part 1 of ?

Author's note: This is a finished work-in-progress at 45,000 words. This first chapter has been edited but not the rest of the chapters, so it may take a while for me to upload them. Hopefully, you won't mind!

1

There have been both moments of regret as well as joy in my short adventure on this thing called life, some self-inflicted, others not. But I did not deserve any of these things that happened to me. So, how did things get to this point? I ask that question to myself even now, in this very moment, and I cannot find an answer.

It all started (and ended) with a letter, one I did not see coming – even if I somehow did wish for it. You see, I was a miserable person. My wife of eleven years cheated on me with some rich douchebag, and my daughter took my wife’s side… and then they both left. Just like that. I know how this sounds. I must be such a horrible person for everyone to just leave, right? But that’s not it. There was a time when I, too, was a diligent and hardworking man, slaving through my humble job day in and day out, but once I lost my grandfather, something in me snapped. Alcohol became my only comfort, my only friend.

I grew up in an immigrant household. My grandfather was a refugee from the occupied Palestine, who sought asylum in the UK with my mother, seven-year-old me, and my only surviving aunt and her husband. Mum lost my father, whom she had married only two years before the total siege, to the ‘most moral army in the world.’ He told me when I was of age that my father died trying to protect us, that he had shielded us from the bomb that destroyed an entire building housing several people with nowhere else to run in the open prison.

When the atrocities ended, finally, and millions were displaced from their homes, my grandfather did his best to keep me safe and far away from an environment scarred by carnage. Given these circumstances, he was very strict with me. I was told to pay respect to the people who allowed us refuge in their country, and told me not to act like those who had fled persecution in Europe into another country only to take it for themselves.

I swore to live by those words, and so, I worked harder than anybody else. I didn’t have to, but I did. At the time, it felt like I had to. Proving myself, my worth, became my only purpose in life. But not for my own myself but for those who always brought up issues with immigration and the failure of integration. And yet… the harder I tried, the less worthy, the less human, I felt. Like a machine, an empty shell with no soul of its own, I did nothing but spend every waking hour trying to be the best version of myself to the point of forgetting myself, the culture my grandfather tried hard to preserve despite all odds in a foreign country, and one day, a switch just flipped in my head. I guess my wife’s betrayal was the catalyst, or that one piece of domino, to bring it all falling apart and shatter.

It was the sixth anniversary of my grandfather’s passing and the first I spent by myself, just drinking the night away and looking out the balcony with a half-empty bottle of beer. I wasn’t supposed to drink. I lived my whole life as a teetotaller, as a cultural Muslim who had once learnt the Holy Qur’an by heart at the request of my grandfather, but things were different now. I was different, another person.

Had the night sky always been this clear? I counted the stars and distant planets shining brightly against the backdrop of profound darkness. Mum said grandfather used to count the stars back when we were in occupied Palestine to help me sleep through the constant bombings that had etched such a scar into my soul that I still jolted up by the slightest noise, even though the threat of bombs was long-since gone. Thus, I too began to count the stars whenever I had the chance,  and somehow, doing so always helped me calm down.

I wished upon the stars. I’m not sure why I did that. Never have. But as I finished the bottle and shut my eyes briefly, my unsound mind did its own thing. A miracle… I didn’t even care what kind of miracle it would be, what size or shape, only that it would guide me out of this dark tunnel I was trapped in and help me see the light before darkness swallowed me whole. Because I knew that by the time the sun rose above the horizon, I would bid this world farewell and join my grandfather and father in heaven.

Was I miserable for wanting to die? I did not think so. People often assume those who commit suicide are cowards, that they are too weak, but I disagree. I think those kinds of people are the bravest people to have walked this earth and left on their own terms. Imagine for a second that you have no option but to die: do you have what it takes to commit fully to the thought? The answer is most likely no. Because humans, like other animals, are not wired to die but to survive – even when dying. That’s why people on the verge of death suddenly become better only to die shortly after; it is our brain's last attempt to delay the inevitable.

I should’ve studied medicine. Mum always told me I was too bright for my own good, that I would be of help to people in need if I studied medicine. But what kind of physician would I become, who failed miserably at curing himself from the traumas of his past? No, instead I decided to become a regular blue-collar worker and earn a living the hard way, where my brightness neither stuck out like a sore thumb nor got me in unnecessary trouble. That didn’t mean I spent less time on the sciences, of course. I guess some people are born nerds, and I was one of those guys. I wasn’t sure what intrigued me, honestly. Perhaps the complexity of the human body and the way it was wired to perfection? One head trauma or injury could turn you into a vile serial killer or a genius mathematician – if that’s not some hardcore stuff, I don’t know what else could be. Deathcore?

Okay, hear me out. Everyone knows that intelligent people bang their heads to metal music. Or, maybe that’s not true. Whatever. In my case, however, I liked that sort of music not because I was introduced to it by someone or played the guitar, but because it became my voice and only outlet for letting go of all frustrations and hatred swelling inside me. That’s what happens when you have an IQ of 132 – neither a genius nor an average person. Instead, you become stuck between two sides of the same coin, neither this nor that, just… different.

 Okay, enough rambling. Let’s get back to the story.

It was the morning after; I woke up with a severe hangover, so I brewed myself coffee and toasted some bread. Not that I had any appetite. Funny thing with suicidal people is that they go about their routine chores automatically, going as far as being more cheerful than usual. When you think about it, that is not as weird as it sounds. It is those who smile the brightest who hide the darkest secrets. And when you know that darkness is about to leave forever, that weight on your shoulder lifts and, for as long as it lasts, you leave good memories with those who still care about you, who think you’ve finally found a way to cope and become better. Yet it’s all a façade, a cruel joke, or perhaps one final gesture of kindness. Who knows? Maybe it is none of those things.

12:30 pm. I remember the exact time vividly.

I had just showered and made myself comfortably numb with a sleeping pill when I heard a noise coming from the front door. It wasn’t knocking or anything like that, and I did not expect any visitors either.

There was an envelope in front of the door. It hadn’t been there when I ran the bath. The content of it was just as bizarre as its arrival, sent by someone who signed off the letter with their title and what I assumed was a last name: Solicitor Harris. Allegedly, I had inherited a property from a distant relative I had no recollection of. My grandfather never spoke about the family he left behind or those who had resisted the siege till their last breaths. But I wasn’t the direct heir to the property; Amal Khalil was. We shared the same surname, but I didn’t know anybody by that name, not until a memory I had suppressed resurfaced.

I was about six or seven, maybe older, maybe younger. Bombs had been raining down on us for several years by then. But I was a child, and as everyone knows, all children ever want is to play and have fun. So, I snuck out. I don’t really have a ‘sequence’ of memories, but more like frozen pictures in my mind left from that time. In one of those images, I keep seeing a face, a woman with green eyes smiling,  then, suddenly, children running and people collapsing from what I can only guess is gunshots, and then I see a barrel pointed at me and a man in uniform laughing and saying something in a language I don’t speak or understand. The image is then replaced with another. I see the young woman again, seizing me and running. I don’t really recall her name, but she stayed with us for a few days before she disappeared. I once asked my Mum, years after we fled, who she was, but she refused to answer. But something in her eyes told me she knew who the woman was and that she was part of the past that we all tried hard to forget and leave behind us. But what if she were Amal? The date written on the letter of her birthday did align with the age of the woman I saw in those fragments. Who could she be, and why had she disappeared and never returned – even when the occupiers took over the land completely and Palestine was wiped off the map completely?

There was a picture attached of the property, too. A grainy, black-and-white photo. A graveyard? Something about the place sent chills down my spine, so I turned the letter over and re-read it to make sure I wasn’t missing things. But here’s what it read, roughly: I was told to return to Israel as soon as possible and bring with me everything that could help identify me for the transfer of ownership, under one condition. What condition? I must’ve read the letter several times before I finally gave up trying to decipher what this condition was or could be.

There was an address in the letter, but I had only an old passport as a token of my time in occupied Palestine to remind me of the pain inflicted on my people, and no reason to pay a visit to an undemocratic country that had yet to be punished for its war crimes. What was I going to say at the airport? That I am a Palestinian trying to get ownership of an inherited property in Israel? Well, wouldn’t that be stolen from me the moment I say the word? Besides, I didn’t speak a word of Hebrew and speaking Arabic had been forbidden, even English in some rural parts.

But the real question was: what if it was all a prank? The letter came out of nowhere. For all I cared, this was nothing but a cruel joke. So I assumed that was the case and resumed my routine, putting on hold killing myself. I’m not sure why I even did that. Maybe I knew another letter would arrive shortly after? Like some kind of instinct or fifth sense, whatever you pick. The second letter too was written in the same manner and, again, signed off by Solicitor Harris. But in addition to the former letter, there was also a phone number I could call attached.

It came one fine day in October. I woke up to a rattle of some sort and started for the hallway. And there it was. I knew who had sent it before I even opened the envelope. Still, it took me a few minutes to hit up the solicitor. Not because I feared it was a prank, but because of how persistent the solicitor was in their endeavour to reach out to me since the last letter had been sent three weeks ago. While I did not know the ethnicity of the solicitor, I knew the population did not like the indigenous people owning land and property they claimed as their own, so what exactly was this person’s deal?

Though I did not expect much when I dialled the number and let the ringing carry on for a while longer than I wanted, I did not expect a woman’s voice on the other end of the line. In my mind, I imagined the solicitor as male and anticipated an authoritative and deep voice, not whatever ‘cheerly’ thing this was. In hindsight, I believe the person I spoke to wasn’t the solicitor, but her assistant I would later encounter at their office. But more on that later.

“Shalom! Good afternoon, Harris & Levinson. Who am I speaking to?”

“Uhm… hello. My name’s Sami Khalil. I received a letter from your office about an inheritance?”

“Yes, of course! May I confirm – are you calling from abroad?”

“From the States, yes.”

“One moment…”

A brief pause passed.

“Yes, I have your file here. You are the niece of Amal Khalil, correct?”

“Ah, yes. She… was my aunt. The letter said I’ve inherited… uh… some property? A graveyard, of all things? But there was… mention of a condition that wasn’t, uh, spelt out.”

“That’s right. The property is a registered family burial ground on the outskirts of Neve Emek, also known as Bayt al-Ruh before it was renamed.”

“Okay.”

“Here’s the thing: under local regulations, it must remain in the stewardship of an heir for a minimum of six consecutive months before any sale or transfer can be lawfully executed.”

“So… what you’re saying, essentially, is that if I don’t live there, I neither keep it nor sell it?”

“Not quite. You can refuse the inheritance, of course. But if you wish to claim it, you are obliged to take up residence on or near the property until the six-month period has run. After that, you are free to sell or otherwise dispose of the land, provided the local council does not object.”

“And why exactly wasn’t this written in the letter?”

“The letter was merely a notice of entitlement. The details of the will, as well as the statutory conditions, must be explained directly to you. That is standard practice here, Mr Khalil. Would you be able to travel to Israel to attend to this? The sooner the better.”

“Why the urgency?” I probed. “It’s been years since my aunt disappeared without a trace. Why now?”

“As we speak, a bill is moving through the Knesset. If passed, it will allow the state to claim property under Palestinian stewardship without trial or appeal. I’m telling you this because, once enacted, it would make your claim nearly impossible. You would do best to establish your rights before that happens.”

“That’s… messed up.”

“I know. Which is why I advise haste, Mr Khalil.”

“And if I don’t come? What then?”

“If you decline or fail to satisfy the residency requirement, the inheritance will pass to the local council. The council would then absorb the land, and your family’s entry on the register would be removed, which would make any future legal claim to the property extremely difficult.”

A prolonged silence prevailed as I tried to process everything. Why did things need to be this complicated?

“All right. I’ll think about it. Thank you for explaining.”

“Of course. Do let us know how you wish to proceed. We can arrange a meeting in person once you are in the country.”

“…Sure. I’ll be in touch.”

Like that, the call clicked off, and I was left alone with all my demons.

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.