So, this year hasn't been too productive so far. About the only thing I've finished is a sex guide under my pseudonym.
But yesterday I felt the desire to write something, anything. Started it in work and finished it today, just scribbled away until something came out. Would that be the right terminology? Similar to how an artist doodles, a writer scribbles?
Anyway, wrote a short story. Enjoy:
Tunnels & Tall Tales
In South Belfast there stands an innocuous looking tunnel. It is there to provide a shortcut away from the criss-crossing roads that weaved around the King’s Hall: A road-cum-bridge that stretched like a crescent moon and allowed safe travel north from one stretch of the Lisburn Road to another, a main road allowing the reverse journey, a path under the bridge that led to the Boucher Road and the stretch of road to the east past the Malone Presbyterian Church that took you to the Malone Road.
In truth the tunnel was defunct. There were sufficient footpaths that allowed you to bypass it in exchange for thirty extra seconds. A small price to pay for piece of mind, for you see, it was rare to see someone attempt the trek through the tunnel.
Day or night, standing at one end found you staring into an empty tube as if looking through a broken kaleidoscope. Even should you look to Google Maps for guidance, it would give you directions around the tunnel. Not even Google Maps dared advise you to enter.
The tunnel was roughly one hundred and fifty metres in length, smoothly rounded as a cylinder with both ends chopped off, made from granite and limestone with cement groundwork, with a cramped circumference that gave it a height of just under two metres; A parent would struggle to carry a young toddler atop their shoulders.
Snippets of sunlight tried to breach through but most failed thanks to the road-bridge that blocked the majority of the midday sun, leaving the centre of the tunnel shrouded in shadows throughout the day and in full darkness at night.
A bus had stalled beside the tunnel one day, filled with schoolchildren from the nearby Malone College. They had been heading for an activity day at a nearby squash court when the bus had popped a front tire and ground to a halt. Their teacher was outside, furiously gesticulating alongside the bus driver while talking into a phone.
Inside the bus, one girl seated roughly in the middle, though nearer the back than the front, had grabbed the attention of those around her seat. Her name was Jane and she was born for these moments, lapping up the attention as if she was on stage.
She had started by pointing at the tunnel and screaming. After being told to shut up by the teacher outside, who had yelled at her through an open window that people walking by could hear her, the girl had started talking about how it was the tunnel, that tunnel.
She was talking: “Let’s say you entered during the day, like poor Stacy Kemper. When you enter it, your shoes, regardless of material, will clack loudly against the ground. Doesn't matter if you're in heels, trainers, people have even tried taking off their shoes and walking in socks, but it'll just sound like someone's tap-dancing in there.
You can reach one end from the other in no more than a minute but it feels like a lifetime. Time doesn't work right in there, it's sucked away so a second drags on for a minute and a minute causes grey hairs.
If you try to keep walking, you’ll find your steps aligning with your heartbeat, both rapidly rising as you see the cloying tightness of the approaching shadows in the centre. Some of those shadows apparently appear to flicker or move but they say that's just your imagination and fear.
See how you can't see deep into it? When you hit the shadows in the centre, you’ll find it like walking in treacle. You’ll swear the shadows were playing with you, wisps of black swathing around your legs, your vision betrayed by flickers of movement at every corner, your body unsure of where to step next.
That’s when you’d hear it, a thundering crunch of descending rock, long before your eyes could adjust through the gloom, you'd barely get to catch sight of the sunlight evaporating behind a solid block of granite rock.
They say Stacy screamed when it happened to her and tried to run forwards, hoping to squeeze under the rock before it slammed shut, but she didn't make it. That's when she turned around and found the same sight awaiting behind, another rock door closing, trapping her in. Two directions with the same outcome. There’s nowhere to go and within seconds she was enveloped in pitch-black.
No doubt her panic was at fever-pitch as the shadows developed personalities of their own, dancing around her weeping body, pillorying her with their slight limbs and swallowing her fear like wine at a banquet.”
“What the fuck does pillar ying mean?” said one boy in a gossipy tone to a girl seated next to him.
“Open a book sometime,” was her reply, before she turned a cold shoulder to him and continued listening to the girl.
“Bitch,” he said, though quiet enough to go unheard.
“Don’t worry though,” Jane was saying, “she didn't have long being tormented before she started to hear it: drip-drip-drip. It started as a solitary drop, as if from a leaky faucet, but soon that faucet broke off and a torrent of water burst free. She could feel it around her ankles, her socks rapidly soaking as it rose higher and higher, bouncing ineffectually off the rocky walls at either end and simply rising in place.
Within seconds the water had risen to chest-height, then shoulder, neck, until she couldn't help but taste it, swallowing in a mixture of air and water and choking the water part back out. She tried to scream but the doors were soundproof so it was pointless.
She tried paddling for her life, just enough air left above her to keep gasping at. She probably thought she had a momentary reprieve to think of an escape plan but that was quickly dashed as she heard the hissing sound.”
“Snakes?” asked a girl.
“No,” replied Jane, “think lobster. She started to feel the encroaching heat of slowly boiling water, the point-blank ferociousness of a white-hot heat rising from below, as bubbles began rising to the top of the water. She couldn't see but the bubbles were popping all around her. She could feel them brushing against her face.”
“How do you know any of this when she was trapped inside?” asked a boy with an almost accusatory tone, “how can you have seen what happened?”
“Well,” replied Jane, “I can only presume how she felt but it doesn't change what happened,” and she ignored any follow-up questions so she could continue her story. “When the tunnel opened again after a few more seconds, it was empty. There may have been a hint of steam or a small puddle of water – nothing a Belfast weather reporter couldn’t easily justify – but there was no other evidence of her existence. She was gone, the perfect vanishing act that would make any magician jealous.
Of course the papers didn't report it. There was nothing to report, just another runaway girl who never came home. She probably got page sixteen of the Belfast Telegraph, then page thirty with a small plea from the parents, at most a five minute segment on The One Show. People quickly lose interest when there's no new news.”
“Bullshit,” cried out someone in the back of the bus, a boy’s voice, “how come no-ones ever seen the tunnels close? It’d be all over the news.”
“Simple,” said another girl in defence of Jane, “obviously it only happens when no-one else is around.”
“How would that even be possible?” said someone else in a nearby seat, a young girl with long blonde hair and a fashionable flower hair-tie pinning it all together.
“I've seen people walking through it all the time,” yelled someone nearer the front.
“By themselves?” asked Jane.
“Well, no,” he replied.
“Exactly,” said Jane triumphantly, “it's only when you're alone, that's when it gets you!”
“No, that bit is actually true,” said a boy nearer the front, his freckled face peering around the corner of his seat at the group that had assembled around the middle of the bus, “but it's not some stupid kind of horror story, that’s not true.”
“Fuck off, specky,” yelled a boy from the back. The bus burst into laughter.
“No, no,” said Jane, “let Phillip tell us, the truth is out there,” the phrase spoken so theatrically it could have been uttered to a skull held in the palm of your hand.
“I’m telling you,” continued Phillip undaunted, “it was built in the thirties, during the war. It was supposed to be like the German’s gas chambers. Any prisoners of war who got captured were going to be put in there and drowned. Except the rock doors are actually made of really fancy metal that closes silently and the whole thing is watched over by someone – or some team – who always have their finger on the button.”
Phillip believed he had succeeded in getting their attention, even those who disliked him were appearing to listen with rapt attention. Phillip was not a good judge of character.
“Once the war ended and the enemy never reached our shores, the military sold it to the government. They used it during the troubles to keep both sides at even numbers.
Once that petered out, parliament sold it to Bill Gates. He has someone assigned to the control panel twenty-four hours a day. They scan everyone who walks through it, check your search history, your browser preference, your operating system. Those who don’t run on Windows are the ones who get targeted.
When isolated, Bill gives the order and swoosh, down come the doors and up comes the water. It doesn’t stop, it continues until you’re drowning. The last thing you hear is the laughing voice of Bill Gates as he screams ‘Bet you wish you had windows now, don’t you!’”
Silence filled the bus for a few seconds, before a rock was thrown from the back and someone yelled, “Shove that up your windows you specky git.” The bus burst into a fresh round of laughter.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” cried Phillip, pouting now and choosing to return to his seat and stare out at the road rather than address them further.
“You're both wrong, though bits of it are right,” said a boy who was seated in the back corner of the bus, his mop of hair covering down to his eyes except for the few times he brushed it aside, where it stayed for a few seconds before falling back down. His name was Jack and he rarely spoke. When he did, it was words spoken softly, without timbre, yet those who listened often said that his words were wise beyond his years. If not for his love of swearing, he could almost have passed as the most mature of them all.
“What bits are right?” asked another boy.
“The tunnel does get dark,” said Jack, “it gets really fucking dark, and those shadows appear all the time, but they're not shadows, they're people.”
A couple of gasps came from around the bus, some laughter too.
“You mean ghosts?” said Jane, a finger nervously twirling her curly brown hair, “but they don't exist.” Her twirling intensified.
“Just up the road here,” said Jack, “is Musgrave House. They call it a private hospital but you fucking know what that means right?”
He paused, though it was clear he had no interest in hearing answers, he just wanted to ramp up the tension before he continued on.
“It means there's no reports when they do or don't fix you. Everything is on their own fucking books. Did none of you wonder why it's right next to Balmoral cemetery?”
A few people reactively lifted their feet, an old wives tale about avoiding the dead from grabbing you from their graves below always in the back of their mind.
“That's for the mistakes, the cemetery, that's where they put them after they've privately worked on them. You go in there with a leaky nose and instead they fill you with strange chemicals that knock you out and cause your hair to fall out and give you accelerated cancer.
That tunnel was one of their experimental chambers. That place is called Stockman's Lane, that's because back when it was built there was nothing but farmlands and sodding fields all about the roads”
“Then why did they build a tunnel?” asked someone who kept low in their seat, unidentifiable should they have asked a stupid question.
“For fuck sake,” said Jack, “for the sheep and cows and other animals the farmers took from field to field of course.” He swished his hair out of his face. “They don't know how to look left and right for traffic, even if cars could only travel ten miles an hour in those days, it'd still knock a cow on its hind legs in an instant.
So they built a tunnel to get from up there to down here and they called it Stockman's Tunnel. Musgrave House got wind of this and turned it into a medical facility. When the farmers walked through, the doors would close and they'd do all sorts of weird fucking things: Burning them and jabbing them with needles and watching the cows go insane and try to eat the farmers, shit like that.”
“That's so gross,” shouted a girl, “why would they do that?”
“For science,” replied Jack, “they were testing new medicines. Once Belfast got a bit too advanced, became a city, they thought the risk was too fucking high so they shut it all down.
It's just a tunnel now, but the murdered farmers and animals still roam up and down it late at night, thinking they're taking the animals to the new field when actually they're travelling to and from a cemetery.
When someone walks through when the ghosts are travelling, they think they're getting experimented on again. They go fucking nuts, grabbing you and clawing at your guts. If you can't get away in time then they completely rip you to shreds. The cows and pigs and sheep eat you up and shit you out and all that's left is some dirt in the tunnel that the sweeps clean away the next morning.”
“You're all idiots,” said a girl up near the front, “who believes in ghosts these days?”
“Makes more sense than a wartime defence system or medical experiment tunnel,” said Jack defensively.
The girl stood up and walked down to the middle of the bus, taking a seat that was offered almost reverentially to her by a sweating boy, the common response she received in school, her popularity and beauty preceding her need to speak. Still, she spoke well and spoke often, her name high on volunteer work and test results: Penny.
“You know the King's Head pub nearby?” asked Penny.
A few heads nodded their knowledge of said pub.
“Back when it was first built there was no tunnel, just a lot of roads and pavements. Men used to go to the pub and get inebriated and then try to walk home. They'd invariably end up staggering on to the road and getting themselves ran over.
The government blamed the King's Head and threatened to close it down. The establishment said they'd fix it and built the tunnel in response, a way for drunken men to get home without getting run over.
Except, these drunken men would go into the tunnel and it got so dark near the centre that they'd get sleepy, think they had returned home already, and would lie down and take a nap.
Soon enough there were whole groups of inebriated men sleeping in the tunnels. Some of them were homeless and took to the tunnel like a new home, a roof over their heads before their next drink.
Again the King's Head was blamed. Now they were causing a homeless crisis, creating bad publicity for Belfast and making the whole place look ugly.
The King's Head put an advert in the newspaper for a 'Night Steward'. The job role specified that it would be necessary to 'inspect assigned locations' and included the 'reporting of any grievous offences'. One of the main requirements an applicant required was a strong physical aptitude as 'heavy lifting may be necessary'.
My grandfather's brother's friend was the first one to get the job. He told my grandfather's brother how part of his job was to secretly herd the drunken men away. If they wouldn't move peacefully then he had to kick and beat them until they moved, even had to physically lift them and toss them out the other side of the tunnel if they wouldn't get up.
That same friend quit the job after a couple of weeks because, and I quote, 'they started asking me to get too violent, I was scared I was going to end up killing one of them.'
Whomever took the job afterwards clearly had no problem because the homeless problem cleared up within a few weeks, drunk men stopped sleeping it off in the tunnels and things quietened down. But believe me, go speak to any old homeless guy or old drinker at the King's Head and they'll tell you that the second steward did more than move people, he was a straight up serial killer.
Once things calmed down the serial killer steward wasn't needed any more. He was fired but kept his thirst of violence alive by stalking the tunnels late at night. Anyone foolish enough to head in there risked being pulverised.
Even though he'd be in his sixties or seventies by now, people will still tell you to avoid that tunnel. There's something supernatural about his strength even at his advanced age, he could snap your arm like a twig if you got careless.”
“You just said ghosts were stupid but now you're saying there's a supernatural geriatric serial killer on the loose, you're stupid,” said Phillip, one of the few not to find Penny irresistibly charming, “your story is full of inconsistencies.”
“Like yours is any better,” replied Penny.
“Yeah,” agreed Jane, believing herself to be Penny's best friend, “shut up, no-one asked for your opinion.”
Just then, their teacher reappeared on the bus with the bus driver in tow.
“This isn't looking good,” she said, “unfortunately we don't have time to wait about or walk to the squash courts now so we'll have to return to school. Can't have you missing your afternoon classes. Everyone file out and follow me.”
There were a few groans and a lot of stamping of feet but the class left the bus and congregated at a nearby traffic light. The teacher had already pressed the button to cross the road and was waiting for the green man to appear.
After crossing the road in single file, there were a lot of hushed whispers, then one or two squeaks of horror as the teacher walked up to the tunnel then, shockingly!, turned into it, her feet clacking off the ground as she headed further in.
The class managed to shuffle to the entrance but no one person was brave enough to take those first tentative steps inside.
The teacher turned around and yelled back: “Keep up, guys, we need to make good time here.”
“Look,” said Jane, “there are puddles all around the tunnel entrance, what'd I tell you.”
“It's Belfast,” said someone else, “it rains all the time. There's nothing unusual about that.”
“But look,” said Jack, “you can clearly see the wisps near the centre.”
“That could be fog, or smog, or just a trick of the light,” replied Phillip, peering around at where the granite and limestone ended and the steel door must begin.
“Look,” screeched Jane, “at the other end. Past Miss Jones, someone's there!”
“That's just a shadow,” said one of the boys, “from a tree or a dog or something.”
“No,” replied Jane with great strain as she tried to stop her teeth from chattering, “it's definitely a person.”
“It is, it is,” agreed a girl, “it's shaped like a human.”
“Excuse me,” said a voice from behind the hustled group, “are you going through or not?”
The children turned to face the man who had spoken, saw his thick white beard and moustache, the well defined arms and legs, the healthiness of his features even behind the wrinkles that showed him to be of an advanced age.
Screams rang out as the children ran, any way the pavement took them, any way except the tunnel.