"Voices in the Soil":
I met Daniel online through a forum for young entrepreneurs. My name’s Jamal, twenty-two at the time, living off odd jobs while sketching out app ideas on a secondhand laptop. He messaged me about a post I made—my stock-trading concept—and said he liked my ambition. Then he made an offer: he’d invest a little if I helped him with a personal project at his place.
“It’s digging work,” he typed. “Good pay. Private. You in?”
I needed the money, so I said yes.
He picked me up at a bus stop on the edge of town. Before I could buckle in, he handed me a blindfold.
“For security,” he said in a tone that was calm but non-negotiable. “Can’t have people knowing where I live.”
I tried to play it cool as the car rolled on—left, right, gravel under the tires—until we stopped. He guided me inside, down a flight of stairs, into a basement that smelled of dirt, mildew, and stale sweat. When he finally pulled the blindfold off, I saw piles of junk everywhere: boxes, frayed wires, trash bags stacked almost to the ceiling.
“This is home base,” he said, gesturing to a hole carved into the concrete floor. A narrow tunnel dropped away into darkness. “We’re building a bunker. North Korea’s getting bold. Missiles could hit any day.”
I nodded like it made sense. He handed me a shovel and a headlamp.
“Dig straight. Branch left when I tell you. I’ll bring food and water. Use the bucket for bathroom stuff—I’ll handle it.”
The first few days were tolerable. The earth was cool and damp beneath my hands, and Daniel would call down the shaft every so often.
“How’s progress, Jamal?”
“Ten feet today,” I’d shout back.
He’d lower sandwiches and water bottles tied to a rope. No phone signal down there, and he made me leave my cell upstairs “to charge.” At night, I’d curl up on a thin mat, listening to strange mechanical hums vibrating through the dirt.
On the third night, everything went black. A sudden power outage. My headlamp died too—no backup batteries.
“Daniel!” I yelled into the void.
Nothing.
I crawled blindly along the wall, dirt crumbling under my fingers, breathing dust. Minutes stretched into what felt like hours before the lights finally flickered back. Daniel appeared at the opening.
“Circuit tripped. Happens,” he said. “You good?”
I nodded, but something inside me tightened.
As the weeks went on—I kept returning because the money really was good—things shifted. I’d hear faint scratches far down the tunnel, rhythmic, like another shovel biting into earth.
“Someone else down here?” I asked once while he dropped cold pizza to me.
“Nah, just echoes,” he said too quickly, eyes flicking away.
But one afternoon, my shovel struck something hard. Not stone—something else. I scraped it free and unearthed an old, dirt-caked shoe.
“Daniel, come look,” I called.
He lowered a basket, hauled it up, and later brushed it off with a strained smile.
“Probably construction debris. Keep digging.”
Sleep got harder. Once, a whisper drifted through the vents—thin, trembling.
“Help… out…”
I tried convincing myself it was wind. Pipes. Anything.
Then my things started disappearing: my glove, my water bottle, the notebook I kept time in. Days later, they’d reappear in places I swore I hadn’t left them.
“You messing with me?” I asked.
He just chuckled. “Tunnels mess with your head.”
One evening, curiosity got the better of me. While Daniel was upstairs, I explored a finished section of the tunnels—wood-reinforced beams, dirt walls, a strange maze-like layout. I found a small room he’d mentioned: shelves of canned food, blankets, tools. In the corner sat a locked chest.
I pried it open with my shovel.
Inside were papers, IDs, clips of photos—smiling young guys like me. Names scribbled beneath each one:
“Doug — good worker, left early.”
“Askia — reliable.”
A cold spike ran down my spine. Who were they? Why keep a list?
That night, the power died again. Darkness swallowed everything.
“Daniel!” I shouted.
Silence.
Heavy footsteps thumped overhead—slow, dragging, nothing like his usual steps. Dirt sifted down onto my face as I held my breath in a side tunnel until the lights hissed back to life.
“All fixed,” he called down. “Get some rest.”
I planned to quit the next day, but I needed one last paycheck.
While digging that afternoon, a harsh chemical smell drifted in—burning plastic, hot metal.
“Smell that?” I texted on the old tablet he’d given me.
“Probably nothing,” he wrote back.
But the smoke thickened, stinging my eyes.
“Get me out,” I messaged again. No answer.
Panic surged. Smoke poured in from the shaft. I dropped my shovel and sprinted for the ladder. Halfway up, a blast of heat roared from above. I could see flames licking across the basement floor.
“Daniel! FIRE!” I screamed.
He appeared, face ghost-pale.
“Climb!”
I scrambled, slipping, choking. He grabbed my arm at the top and yanked me onto the burning basement floor. Trash heaps blazed around us, flames leaping higher each second. He fumbled with a door I’d never seen before—hidden behind stacked junk—and shoved me through it into the open air.
Neighbors were gathering already. Sirens wailed closer.
Firefighters found the tunnels—miles of them—stretching beneath the yard and farther. And deeper inside… human remains. Another digger, they said. Trapped in a collapse months earlier. Daniel never reported it.
“Accident,” he insisted. But after the blindfolds, the isolation, the secrecy… it felt intentional, like he’d been testing limits. Seeing how long we’d last buried under his world.
I left the state within a week. But at night, the dreams still come: endless dark tunnels, the scrape of another shovel just out of sight, smoke curling through the dirt, and someone whispering my name from deep underground.
Daniel was charged—but the fear remains. I know how close I came to becoming another name in his box.
"Into the Dirt":
I had moved into that quiet suburb only a few months earlier, chasing the quiet I thought would fix the wreckage of a brutal year at work. The place felt safe—too safe, maybe. Identical houses, trimmed hedges, neighbors waving from driveways. The kind of street where nothing bad was supposed to happen.
My house sat right beside Victor’s. He was the only one on the block who didn’t smile or wave. Middle-aged, wiry, eyes always scanning. He drove this old beige van with no windows on the sides, the kind that felt out of place among shiny SUVs and family sedans. I figured he was just private. Some people like their silence.
Then the noises started.
It was late—past midnight—when I heard the first one. A faint scraping, metal dragging against dirt, coming from somewhere beneath the floorboards. I froze, coffee halfway to my lips, listening. When I pressed my ear to the hardwood, the sound cut off like someone had sensed me.
I tried to shrug it off. Old houses settle. Pipes shift. But the next night, it came again. Same time. Same rhythm. Scrape… pause… scrape, scrape… thud.
By the third night, I was freaked out enough to call my buddy Alex.
“Think I’ve got something wrong with my foundation,” I told him. “Or something’s digging down there.”
“Digging?” he laughed. “What, moles with pickaxes? Check your creepy neighbor. That Victor guy gives serial killer energy. I drove by once—swear I saw him unloading boxes at two a.m.”
I chuckled, but it stuck in my brain like a splinter.
After that, I started noticing little things about Victor’s place. How the basement light glowed till dawn. How shadows crossed past the tiny ground-level window when no one should’ve been awake. How the van disappeared all day and came back at odd hours.
And then came the moment that changed everything.
One morning, I saw a young guy climb out of Victor’s van. Early twenties. Thin. Backpack slung over one shoulder. Victor kept a hand on the kid’s back, guiding him inside. The kid looked nervous—glancing around, tugging his straps. He never came back out. Not that day. Not the next.
I didn’t know his name yet—Jamal. But I kept thinking about him as the noises under my floor grew louder, heavier. Like someone was working down there. Hard.
Then my backyard dipped.
Literally—like the ground had exhaled. A soft depression in the grass near the fence line. Fresh. Wrong. I poked at it with a stick, the dirt crumbling away, revealing a hole. Cool, stale air drifted out, carrying the smell of must and old earth.
My heart thudded.
That night, the scraping sounded directly below me. No pretending anymore. I grabbed a flashlight, went outside, and found the hole wider than before—old soil giving out as something below pushed upward.
Against every survival instinct I’d ever had, I tied a rope to the fence post and lowered myself in.
The tunnel felt like it belonged in some claustrophobic nightmare. Damp walls, dirt brushing my shoulders on both sides. Fresh tool marks everywhere—whoever dug this worked with purpose. And fear. The kind of fear that makes a man carve his way underground.
Thirty feet in, the tunnel opened into a chamber—big enough for a small room. A mess of shovels, pickaxes, overturned buckets of dirt. Canned food stacked on crates. Water bottles. Extension cords running deeper into the black.
And voices.
“Keep going,” a low voice murmured. Victor. “Just a bit more today.”
A second voice—weak, exhausted. “Victor, this is deep enough. When do I get paid?”
Jamal.
My blood iced.
Victor’s tone sharpened. “Soon. The bunker must be perfect. North Korea could strike at any moment. We don’t have time to question orders.”
Orders. Like someone had given them to him from inside his own twisted mind.
I killed my flashlight and pressed into a side tunnel, barely breathing.
Jamal protested again. “Just let me call home. You blindfold me every time. I don’t know where I am. Upstairs is full of trash—boxes everywhere. I can barely walk through.”
“You agreed to the conditions,” Victor hissed. “For national security.”
Metal scraped. Earth thudded. They worked while I stood in the dark counting every heartbeat.
After what felt like an hour, they climbed out—wood creaked, voices faded. When I finally flicked my light back on, I crept deeper. I found a sleeping bag, a plate of half-eaten food. Jamal had been living underground.
Then I heard it—a soft whimper from another tunnel.
“Help…”
My skin crawled.
I crawled through a narrow passage until it dead-ended at a wooden board. I shoved it aside—and there he was. Jamal. Pale. Sweaty. Clothes caked with dirt. His eyes went wide at the sight of me.
“Who… who are you?”
“Your neighbor,” I whispered. “I heard you.”
He swallowed hard. “Victor won’t let me leave. Says I know too much. He checks on me constantly. Please—please get me out.”
I helped him stand. His legs trembled.
We had barely started back when a smell hit us—acrid, sharp.
Smoke.
It drifted in faintly at first… then heavier. My eyes burned. Somewhere in the maze, something sizzled and popped.
“It’s the cords…” Jamal coughed. “He overloaded them—”
Then flames crackled behind us.
“Go!” I grabbed his arm. “Move!”
The tunnel shrank around us, smoke thickening like a living thing. Our breaths rasped loud. Dirt rained from above. Every second felt like the ceiling could collapse.
Then a shout tore through the smoke.
“Jamal!”
Victor.
His voice was frantic, furious—and getting closer.
We pushed harder, scraping elbows and knees raw. My light flickered. Jamal stumbled.
“Almost there!” I lied. I wasn’t sure we’d make it.
Finally—the chamber. And the hole leading up to my yard.
“Climb!” I hoisted him. He scrambled to the rope, coughing, and disappeared into the night air.
I grabbed the rope next—just as a hand clamped onto my ankle from below.
“You can’t leave!” Victor’s voice was ragged, desperate. “It’s not safe out there! The world’s ending! You don’t understand!”
His grip tightened. The firelight behind him twisted his features into something feral.
I kicked. Once. Twice. He cried out. The grip slipped.
I climbed. Hauled myself out. Rolled onto the grass.
Jamal dragged me to my feet and we ran for my door.
Inside, shaking, I called 911.
Fire trucks screamed down the street. Police stormed the yard. They dragged Victor out of the burning tunnel entrance—alive but raving, spitting warnings about nuclear fallout and conspiracies. The tunnels stretched farther than anyone imagined, some approaching the foundations of other houses.
If the fire had gone on ten more minutes, half the block might’ve collapsed.
Jamal sat with me on the curb, wrapped in a blanket. He kept staring at the flames, like part of him was still down there.
He moved away not long after, but we keep in touch. Every time he messages me, he says the same thing:
“You saved my life.”
But late at night, when the house is quiet, I still hear echoes—scrapes from below that aren’t really there. Or maybe they are.
Because sometimes, when the wind shifts, I swear I feel cool air rising from the dirt…
as if the ground hasn’t quite settled over everything Victor buried.
"The Locked Door":
I never imagined that buying that rundown rowhouse on North Marshall Street would mark the beginning of the most terrifying chapter of my life. It was 1986, and I was twenty-five—fresh off a messy breakup, clinging to the idea of a “new start” in Philadelphia. The whole block felt worn but dependable, a long stretch of faded red and brown rowhomes with dented gutters and chain-linked porches where kids balanced on rusted bikes after school. My place—3522—had creaky floors, peeling wallpaper, and windows that whistled when the wind hit right. But it was mine. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I had a place to root myself.
Across the street lived Raymond.
He was in his early forties, tall, soft-spoken, with neatly combed dark hair and a quiet, polite smile. Every time I stepped outside, he’d lift a hand from his porch—always sitting in the same faded lawn chair, always watching the street like he was keeping tally of who came and went. He told me he owned a small market downtown, did mechanic work on the side, stayed busy. “Gotta keep your hands occupied,” he said. “Idle hands make trouble.”
He seemed harmless. Kind, even.
A week after I moved in, he brought over a casserole—still warm, wrapped in foil. “Welcome to the neighborhood, Emily,” he said through my screen door, voice gentle enough that I remember feeling embarrassed for ever finding him intimidating.
“Thanks, Raymond. Really.” I smiled because I was alone and because it was nice to have someone notice I existed.
We chatted a few evenings that month—quick porch conversations, the kind neighbors trade when they want to be friendly without getting too personal. He talked softly about his army years. “Did some underground construction work,” he told me one night, tapping his boot on the porch rail. “Invisible work, mostly. Tunnels. Shelters. Learned how to reinforce dirt so it doesn’t crush you.”
I laughed awkwardly. “Guess that’s… useful.”
He smiled back. “More than you know.”
He invited me to his church. I went once. The service was simple. The people kind. But Raymond kept looking over at me—never smiling, just… watching. Like he was making sure I was following along. Afterward, he introduced me to a young woman named Debbie. Early twenties, with stringy blonde hair and eyes that darted around like she was waiting for someone to grab her.
“Raymond’s been like a dad,” she said, her voice shaky but grateful. “He helps girls like me. Gives us a place to stay when we’re down.”
“That’s really generous,” I said.
She nodded but didn’t meet my eyes. “Yeah. Real generous.”
I asked where she lived. She hesitated—then murmured, “Nearby,” before slipping behind a group of church ladies.
Things stayed relatively normal for a few weeks. I settled into my routines. Work, home, cheap dinners, old movies. Life felt simple again.
Then, late one night, I heard a sound that cut right through my half-sleep.
A muffled scream.
Not loud—more like someone shouting through layers of walls or blankets. I sat upright, listening, heart pounding. It came again. Desperate. Strained.
I went to the window. Raymond’s house was completely dark.
“It’s an old neighborhood,” I told myself. “Pipes. TV. Arguments.”
I forced myself back to bed.
The next day, I saw Debbie at the corner store. When I asked if she was okay, she practically flinched.
“Me? Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”
“I heard something weird last night. Sounded like someone yelling near Raymond’s place.”
She froze, milk halfway into her basket. “Oh. That. He’s got a dog in the basement. Big thing. Makes weird noises.”
“A dog?” I frowned. “I’ve never seen it.”
She swallowed hard. “You won’t.” Then she hurried out.
Her lie clanged in my head the rest of the day.
That night, I heard the scream again.
Clearer.
I called the police non-emergency line. Two officers came by at dawn, knocking on Raymond’s door. He answered looking freshly showered and confused.
“Noises?” he said, eyebrows raised. “Probably my furnace. Old thing bangs like crazy. Go ahead, check it.”
Twenty minutes later, the officers told me everything seemed fine.
I nodded, embarrassed. But deep down, something remained unsettled.
After that, Debbie disappeared. I didn’t see her at church, or the store, or anywhere. When I asked Raymond about her, he barely blinked.
“She moved,” he said. “Got work upstate.”
I didn’t believe him. His eyes told a different story—hollow, irritated, like my question was an inconvenience he wasn’t expecting.
Two weeks passed.
The screams didn’t stop—they just grew fainter, as though whoever was making them had moved farther underground. I barely slept. Every night, I lay awake waiting for the next thud, the next cry.
One warm afternoon, I was pulling weeds from my front garden when Raymond crossed the street with a toolbox.
“Emily,” he said lightly, “can I borrow you for a minute?”
I stiffened. “For what?”
“My basement light’s burned out. Ladder’s wobbly. Just need someone to hold it.”
My instincts screamed no, but I didn’t want to cause a scene. “I… guess.”
Inside, his house smelled different than mine—damp, metallic, like earth after heavy rain mixed with something sour and stale. The living room was pristine, Bible placed perfectly on the coffee table. Nothing out of place.
We went downstairs. The basement was unfinished, concrete walls sweating with moisture. A single bulb hung overhead.
I held the ladder while he replaced it. Simple enough.
But then my eyes drifted to a far wall.
A heavy metal door. Industrial. Bolted and padlocked. The paint around its frame was scratched raw.
“What’s that?” I asked casually, pointing.
Raymond paused mid-step. “Storage. Old coal chute.”
“Looks new.”
“Had to reinforce it. Lots of kids in the neighborhood.”
His laugh was thin. Forced.
I started to turn away when I heard it.
A soft thump.
Then a whisper. Faint but unmistakable.
“Help…”
I froze. Every hair on my arms rose.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered.
“Hear what?” Raymond stepped toward me, his expression sharpening in a way that made my stomach drop. “Emily… you shouldn’t poke around.”
I backed away. “I’m going home.”
“Emily—”
But I ran. Up the stairs, out the door, across the street, slamming mine shut behind me. My hands shook as I locked every bolt.
That night, the screams were clearer than ever. “Please, no!” I called the police again—this time frantic.
“There’s a locked room in his basement,” I insisted. “Someone is inside.”
They checked. Again. And again Raymond smiled politely. Again, they found “nothing.”
I stopped sleeping.
I went to Raymond’s church and quietly asked about Debbie. An older woman leaned close.
“Raymond takes in troubled girls,” she murmured. “But some say he keeps them too long.”
“Keeps them?” I hissed.
“I don’t know more than that. Just pray, dear.”
I filed a formal report the next morning. I begged a detective to investigate the door.
He said he’d “see what he could do.”
Friday night changed everything.
I heard pounding—slow, rhythmic thuds echoing faintly through the floorboards. Not screams. Not cries. Someone trying to get attention.
I went to my backyard with a flashlight, heart hammering. Through a gap in the fence, I saw Raymond in the dark yard. He was dragging a woman—a limp, unconscious woman—toward a side entrance.
Her bare feet scraped the ground.
“Raymond!” I shouted without thinking.
He jerked upright. His face twisted, finally showing what he’d been hiding.
“Emily,” he growled, “go back inside. This isn’t your business.”
“Who is that?!”
“She’s drunk.” His voice grew sharp. “I’m helping her.”
But she wasn’t moving.
I ran inside, grabbed the phone, dialed 911 with shaking hands. “He’s dragging a body,” I cried. “Please hurry.”
The sirens were the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.
Police flooded the street. Raymond came outside, hands raised, insisting it was all a misunderstanding.
But then they found the key.
Behind the metal door was a nightmare carved into the earth—a hand-dug tunnel, reinforced with wood planks, eight feet deep, stretching under the house like a coffin meant for the living. Six women were inside. Six. Chained to the walls, filthy, starved, bones visible under bruised skin. Some naked. One pregnant.
The smell hit the officers first. Then the silence—broken only by quiet sobbing.
Debbie was there. Barely conscious. “Emily…” she whispered when they carried her out. “He said he loved us… said he’d save us…”
One woman had died—Josefina. Raymond had disposed of her in acid.
Raymond confessed everything. He’d been building the tunnel for years. Luring vulnerable women from bus stations and shelters. Promising help. Promising salvation. Locking them away when they trusted him most.
After the trial, the city bulldozed his house. Mine too, eventually. They wanted the earth sealed forever.
I moved away. Far away. But some nights, when I’m alone, I still wake up to the sound of faint thumps under the floorboards. And every now and then, if the air is still enough, I swear I smell damp earth.
Debbie called me once from the hospital. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I didn’t think anyone would come.”
I still don’t know what to say to that.
I don’t think I ever will.
"Blindfolded to Nowhere":
I had this close friend named Jamal—one of the only constants in my life. We met back in elementary school in Silver Spring, two kids who bonded over basketball games on cracked asphalt and trading Pokémon cards during recess. By the time we hit our twenties, life had pushed us in different directions, but somehow we always circled back to each other. He was the ambitious one, the dreamer, the guy who talked a mile a minute about business ideas and shortcuts to funding his eventual startup. I used to tease him that one day he'd pitch an investor while sprinting to catch a bus.
Last summer, he called me up sounding more charged than I’d heard in years.
“Bro, I got something big,” he said, voice vibrating like he was pacing. “This job I found? It's gonna set me up. Like—actually set me up.”
I laughed. “Yeah? Doing what?”
“Construction,” he said, but it came out too fast. “Digging, building, private contract. The guy’s loaded, pays cash. Just… can’t say too much yet.”
That edge in his voice wasn’t confidence—it was secrecy, the kind that prickled my skin.
“Where is it?” I asked, leaning back in my chair.
He hesitated. “He drives me there. Blindfolded.”
I sat up. “Blindfolded?”
“Security reasons,” he said. “Don’t trip. The guy’s eccentric, but he’s harmless. Trust me. I’ll fill you in soon.”
He hung up before I could push more.
For the next few weeks, he sent short updates—photos of dirt on his boots, texts about digging “another section,” or saying the boss was “weird but harmless.” I told myself he’d pull out if anything felt wrong. Jamal wasn’t stupid.
Then the messages stopped.
A week passed. No calls. He didn’t respond to mine. His parents said they hadn’t seen him, but they weren’t panicked—he’d told them he sometimes stayed on-site. Still, something settled in my stomach, heavy and cold.
I remembered him mentioning the guy rented cars to pick him up. So I drove to the rental agency and bullshitted about being a worried relative. One clerk—an older lady with sharp eyes—remembered Jamal.
“Skinny tall man picked him up a few times,” she said. “Quiet. Didn’t smile.”
She checked the log. I took note of the plate. A friend from DMV owed me a favor. Within an hour, I had an address: a quiet corner of Elmwood Lane.
The kind of suburb where people edged their lawns with military precision. But the house tied to the plate looked like a tumor in the middle of it—grass up to the knees, trash bins overflowing, paint peeling in strips, curtains drawn tight.
I parked a block away and walked up the driveway, heart hammering. The porch boards sagged under my weight. I knocked.
A minute later, the door cracked open.
The man standing there looked like he lived in a permanent state of disarray—late twenties, hair wild, glasses smudged, clothes wrinkled. His eyes flicked over me like he was memorizing my face.
“Can I help you?” he said flatly.
“I’m looking for my friend Jamal,” I said. “He said he was working here.”
His stare deepened. “I don’t know any Jamal.”
“He described you,” I pressed. “The blindfolds. The digging work. Just tell me where he is.”
A tension pinched his face. Then he stepped back. “Come inside.”
Every instinct screamed no, but worry shoved me forward.
Inside, the house was… wrong. Hoarder-level chaos. Piles of newspapers, broken electronics, old snacks, wires crisscrossing the floor. The air was stale, tinged with something chemical—like burnt plastic and mold. Only narrow paths cut through the junk, twisting like maze corridors.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing at a chair buried under clothes. “I’m Alex. Your friend… he’s downstairs working. He’ll be up soon.”
“Downstairs?” I asked. “Why didn’t he come home?”
“He helps me build a shelter,” Alex said, eyes darting toward the hallway. “A bunker. For when the war starts. Missiles, EMPs. People don’t understand, so it’s private.”
I scanned the room—danger everywhere. Wires plugged into wires, overloaded sockets, extension cords looping like vines.
“This place is unsafe,” I said. “Why all the secrecy?”
He didn’t blink. “Security.”
Before I could speak, he walked off down the hallway. “Wait here.”
I waited a minute. Maybe two. Then I heard it—a faint scraping, metal on dirt, echoing from below. And something else: a low mechanical hum.
My pulse thudded. I stood and followed the path he’d taken.
The hallway opened to a door left slightly ajar. Beyond it, stairs descended into dim yellow light. The scraping grew louder.
“Jamal?” I whispered.
No answer.
I went down.
The basement swallowed me in clutter even worse than upstairs—rusted tools, bottles of chemicals, buckets of dirt. And in the center of the concrete floor: a hole. Jagged, raw. Three feet wide. A ladder dropped into it. Ropes dangled like veins.
From below, the scraping continued.
My legs moved before my brain caught up. I grabbed the ladder and climbed down.
It was deeper than I expected—twenty feet, maybe more. I landed in a narrow dirt tunnel, its walls braced with crooked wooden planks. Extension cords ran along the ceiling, powering flickering bulbs spaced far apart.
This wasn’t a bunker. It was a network.
Branches split off in multiple directions, like arteries. Some were half-dug, others reinforced. Dust hung in the air thick enough to taste.
“Jamal?” I called again.
Then I heard it—voices.
“One of the circuits blew again,” Jamal said, strained and faint.
Alex replied, “It’s fine. Keep working.”
I rounded a bend. There he was. Jamal. Shirtless, covered in soil, dark rings under his eyes. Swinging a pickaxe into the wall while Alex shone a flashlight over his shoulder.
“Jamal,” I said.
He froze. Turned. His face went pale. “What are you doing down here?”
“You disappeared,” I said. “I had to find you.”
Alex whipped around, anger twisting his mouth. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Jamal wiped sweat from his forehead. “Bro, you gotta get out. This place is a death trap.”
As if summoned by his words, a burst of blue-white sparks erupted from one of the cords overhead. A loud pop. Then the bulbs flickered… and died.
Darkness slammed down.
My phone slipped from my hand, hit the dirt, and skittered away.
A smell filled the air—chemical, sharp, burning.
Smoke.
“Fire!” I shouted.
Jamal grabbed my arm. “The ladder—we have to move!”
The tunnel collapsed into chaos. We stumbled blind, coughing, tripping over loose boards and tools. Heat pressed in behind us. Smoke poured through the narrow space like it had been waiting.
“Where’s Alex?!” I coughed.
“He knows another exit,” Jamal choked. “He’s probably already up there!”
We reached the shaft by memory and desperation. I clawed up the ladder, lungs screaming. Jamal climbed after. Flames flickered through the basement as we emerged—clutter igniting like tinder. The stairway out was a hellish funnel of smoke.
I shoved through collapsing piles of junk, eyes burning. The front door loomed like salvation.
I burst outside, gulping clean air.
Then I turned.
“Jamal?” I gasped.
He wasn’t behind me.
I ran back toward the doorway, but a blast of heat forced me back. Fire roared through the house, devouring everything.
Sirens grew louder. Firefighters dragged me away.
They found him later.
Still in the tunnels. Trapped under smoke and flame in that insane maze Alex had carved under the neighborhood.
Alex survived. Called it an accident. Said Jamal “worked there willingly.” But the blindfolds, the secrecy, the unsafe wiring, the labyrinth under the house—none of that was accidental.
Police dug through the property. They found tunnels stretching farther than anyone expected. Under multiple lawns. Maybe more.
The house was condemned and boarded up, but I still drive by. Sometimes at night. The street’s quiet, but there are moments—when the wind dies and the dark settles heavy—when I swear I hear faint scraping from underground.
And I wonder how many more tunnels Alex built.
Or if some of them still have people inside.