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.

Sticks and Stones - Part 3 of 3

 

Photo by Dylan Hunter on Unsplash

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You stay here, climb the container.”

And so he did.

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

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

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

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

Then… a chilling scream.

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

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

Sticks and Stones - Part 2 of 3

 

Photo by Foad Roshan on Unsplash

2

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

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

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

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

Farouk looked up with misty, bloodshot eyes.

“Then she’ll only get more upset!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How so?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But?”

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

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

“And your step-dad?”

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

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

“Don’t be.”

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

“Yeah…”

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

“…Yeah, why?”

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

“I’m not following.”

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

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

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

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

“Betül! Hemen buraya gel!”

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

“Is that your mum?”

“I…”

“Betül!”

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

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

“Confused?”

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

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

“I’m not—”

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

“Gel! Gel! Gel!”

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

“What do they say? Betül!”

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

“Come? Come where?”

“I-I don’t know! How would I—”

“Reila?”

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

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

“…What?”

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

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

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

“Make it?”

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

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

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

“Uh—what?”

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

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

“Isn’t that where those homeless—”

“Stop asking questions and just go! Hurry!”

“What about you?”

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

Sticks and Stones - Part 1 of 3

 

Photo by Luca Maffeis on Unsplash

1

”No! You missed it, dude!” Farouk snapped as the huge piece of stone failed to hit the smaller ones lined up on the sandy ground, rising to his feet from where he was crouched and utterly devastated that his team was losing. Again. “How can you even miss it twice in a row!?”

Betül rolled her eyes before picking up the carefully chosen stone with the uneven edges, one she had successfully used over the course of a year without once missing the mark. That is, until today. She couldn’t say what it was, but something felt off. Whether it was the overcast weather, the increasingly darkening sky, or just something innately inside her, she did not know, but whatever it was, it made her skin crawl and mouth run dry like her whole mouth was made of sandpaper.

Christoffer, on the other hand, was a team of his own and older than them by a year. He celebrated his miraculous win with his signature gesture, shaking his shoulders in an Egyptian dance and making loud noises to annoy Farouk on purpose – going as far as turning his back to them and shaking his butt like a real Arabian belly dancer.

“Woohoo! Losers!” he said, making a huge ‘L’ with his hand, before extending his hand. “Now give me everything you stole!”

Farouk, cheesed off, “Stole!? We won it fair and square, you little—”

“Hey, easy, you two! And you,” Betül said with a firm voice as she turned to face Farouk. “Give the guy back his stones and shut it.”

“Uh… what’s with her?” Christoffer mumbled.

“Do I look like I know?” Farouk said. “Here, these were yours, right?”

Christoffer studied each piece of stone as if it were a jewel. Farouk had fetched from his pockets a full of valuables and picked up three jagged stones seemingly at random. It was a mystery how those huge stones even fit into his pocket, not to mention on top of all those smaller ones in there, too.

“Yeah, seems like it,” Christoffer said, placing the stones inside his folded shirt since he did not have pockets of his own. “When on earth did you even win all those stones? You have no social life or something? No school?”

Farouk lifted his head with a proud smile, so much in fact that Betül thought for a brief moment that his crooked nose would stay suspended mid-air and wanted to smack him back to his senses. But she didn’t do that, of course.

“Dude, like, who do you think I am? I am the Farouk!” he said. “I always have time for victory!”

“Victory?” Betül repeated, her tone laced with sarcasm. “More like defeat! Besides today, have you ever truly won without my help? Like ever?”

Farouk met her sarcasm head-on, his eyes narrowing and lips curling into a pout. “You’re seriously going to live as if stuck in the past? What matters,” he said, grinning wide, “is what we win today, in the present. Which means, I win. Not you, sor-ry!”

“You’re so dumb, you know that?”

“Who you calling dumb!?”

As the two teammates were about to clash and get into a huge fight, one in which Betül would emerge as the winner since she was larger in build than Farouk, who hardly had any meat on him, Christoffer nimbly intervened and separated them before they could start throwing punches.

“Yo, calm down, you two! Hey, you guys hear me!? Geez! Stop it! Both of you!”

Betül ran a hand down her hair as she was the first to retreat, before Farouk too calmed down enough for Christoffer to stop holding him back. “You guys are craaaazy. How did you even end up being friends?”

“Friends? More like enemies!” Betül said, adding. “I recruited this idiot after seeing him win once, and then he just kept losing ever since!”

“You mean twice! I won twice!”

“Dude,” Betül exclaimed as she realised what he was referring to. “Winning against those homeless people… you call that a win? Like, seriously!?”

“Well, you didn’t dare, remember?”

“Yeah, but only because they are homeless, duh!” she said, adding in one single breath before he could interrupt, “and don’t act like you don’t know the rumours, you idiot!”

“What rumours?” said Christoffer.

“Don’t mind her, they’re just rumours!” said Farouk. “See! Nothing bad happened to me!”

“Just because it didn’t happen that one time, doesn’t mean it won’t happen ever! Just how stupid can you even be?”

Farouk glared, rolling up his sleeves to throw another future punch when Christoffer interrupted. “Hey, guys, what rumours?”

Betül and Farouk both turned to Christoffer at the same time as he was about to repeat himself, both of them seeing red and too furious to explain stuff to him. “SHUT IT!”

“Uh, what?” Christoffer said, the tone of his voice giving away just how offended he was at being shouted at out of nowhere. “You guys… got some loose screws or something? Dude, I was just asking.”

Betül, now a tad calmer. “You haven’t heard the rumours? Is that it?”

“Why would I ask if I knew?”

Betül then exchanged a knowing look with Farouk before gesturing each of them to come closer, so that they hunched down in a tight circle of three.

“I’m not sure where the rumours come from or who spread them,” she whispered, dragging each word on purpose to get her words across. “But I don’t doubt them. Not even for a second.”

Farouk, “Me neither.”

Christoffer, utterly confused, arched his brows low and whispered, “What do you mean? You’ve… seen something?”

Betül drew a deep breath before finally speaking, letting her brown eyes sweep over the two boys for the briefest of moments as if to prepare them for what she was about to reveal.

“I was walking home from school one day two years ago. My sister was sick, so this was my first day going home on my own, and as you both know, our apartment is right around that dumpster those homeless people hang out at, drinking and pissing all over themselves. Like, ew, so, so disgusting… Anyway, so I was walking home, and then I felt something strange, like someone watching me. So, I looked around…” She paused, letting the silence stretch on for a tad longer than either of the boys wanted. “And, then I saw one of those people was staring straight at me!”

“W-What happened next?” Farouk croaked.

“Then he waved me over, of course!”

“And did you?” asked Christoffer.

Betül broke the tight circle. “Of course I didn’t, idiot! If I did, would I be here, you think?”

“I don’t get it. What’s this whole rumour thing, then? To me, it just looks like the guy wanted to chat or something…”

“It hasn’t been long since you moved here, right?” she said.

“Yeah, it’s been about four months or so. Why do you ask?”

Farouk, “There was this girl, let’s call her Ida for convenience. One day, as she was walking home from school, she disappeared. Just like that! The whole neighbourhood tried to find her, but when night came, she was reported missing to the police. According to the rumours, someone saw her talk to one of those homeless people before she vanished!”

“She was… never found?”

“No,” Betül said, “she wasn’t! The police wrote off her case as a typical runaway, but the poor girl was only eight years old when she went off the radar, only two or so years younger than what we are today.”

“You think… there’s some truth in those rumours, then?”

“Of course!”

“But didn’t you,” Christoffer turned to face Farouk, “just say that you played and won against those homeless people? If the rumours were true, then you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

“Yeah, but I was not by myself! All the neighbourhood kids were there too! Just imagine if I’d been there all alone?” Farouk shivered at the thought. “I’d be long dead!”

“Still, something doesn’t add up. Maybe the police are right? Maybe she just—”

“An eight-year-old runaway?” said Betül, adding before he could protest. “Come on, dude! Get real! No kid that age runs away, unless…” Betül gestured them to come closer again, closing the circle, “…something else happened to her.”

“Like what…” Christoffer said, his voice cracking from the growing dread in the air around them. “…exactly?”

“You two ever heard the story of ‘Lamia’?”

“Lami—what?” said Farouk, who was getting increasingly unsettled by the stuff they were discussing as the sun fell below the horizon every passing second in the background, casting the entire playground in deep shadows.

“It’s originally a story from Greek mythology, one only a few know, and luckily for you two, I’m one of those people in the know…”

“So?” said Christoffer. “What’s the story about?”

“Okay, so there was this super pretty queen named Lamia, and Zeus, the king of the gods, liked her – like, liked liked her – and his wife, Hera, got soooo mad. She was jealous and made Lamia go totally nuts! She took away her kids and made her into this scary children-eating monster!”

“Children…”—Farouk, peeking over his shoulder at once as if something had moved in the deepening shadows and crept closer to them—“…eating monster?”

“And get this, you two,” she continued without missing a beat. “Lamia could never close her eyes, like ever, so she just wandered around all night, looking creepy and sad and angry. Then she started stealing kids from their beds, and she’d eat them! Eat them all!”

As she said the last sentence, she raised her voice on purpose, and Farouk almost had a heart attack as he jolted up with a gasp and took shelter behind Christoffer. Christoffer, although equally scared, tried to play it cool.

 “What a stupid story. Why would a monster from Greek mythology even be here, in our neighbourhood? Stop making up stuff just to scare Farouk—”

“But I’m not making any of this up!” she interjected.

“Everyone knows you’re a bookworm,” Christoffer said. “You’re just telling us stories you’ve read! Anyone can see that, so stop pretending!”

Betül, “I didn’t read about it anywhere! I swear! I heard it from someone!”

“Really? Like from whom? Come on, go ahead. Tell us!”

Farouk, sensing the growing tension between those two, with his weak and antsy voice, then tried to intervene. “Hey, uh, maybe we should go home now? It’s getting dark and—”

“I-I promised not to snitch!”

“Promised!?” snapped Christoffer. “Since when do you keep your promises?”

“Are you saying I don’t?”

“Just admit it, Betül! You’re just making stuff up to scare us!”

“I already told you—”

“Guys, listen to me, it’s getting really dark and—”

“Shut up!” they both said in sync.

And for a while, the heated conversation continued back and forth with neither of the two backing off or throwing in the towel, not until the streetlights on the playground turned on and they found themselves way past their curfew, at which point it was too late to rue the day because Farouk’s phone now rang and pulled the three friends back to reality.