Hey everyone. I’m pretty new here and seeing all these stories made me think about something fairly unexplainable that happened to me in my childhood that I thought you’d all enjoy. I’m not much of a writer, but I hope I’ll be able to write well-enough to get this story, or collection of stories, across.
When I was 12, almost ten years ago now, my brother moved out of our home to go to college. That left me with the duty of walking our dog Sully. He was a border collie mix, and you could tell by the way he kept the whole family in a cluster behind him, getting more and more anxious the farther anyone got from the group. He was getting old in age by then, we got him when I was four, but he still had plenty of energy, and you could see his ears perk up whenever someone even muttered the word “walk”.
I wanted a dog so bad as a kid, and one day we just got in the car and got him as a surprise. He somehow had even more energy back then. One time as a puppy he tore up the cushions of the couch, getting him kicked out to the backyard for the day. I felt bad for the little guy, so I snuck out and played with him outside. We had a tiny wooden playhouse in the backyard, a swing on the side and a lookout point from the top, the roofs colored a slowly fading red. I’d run up the stairs of the fort and he would follow me, all the way down the slide.
At first, I hovered around the area near my home when walking Sully, past the cookie cutter houses of suburban America. My mom eventually told me I had to stop crossing the street near my house, though. There were an obscene amount of drivers that would go well over fifty through our street, despite the school that was right around the corner. Our town was very low on cops at that point, so there was basically nothing we could do. Eventually they set up speed bumps on the street, but on the exact opposite side of us, so it didn’t change much. I decided to start walking on the trail then.
Running all the way behind my house and the houses behind mine was a walking trail. There was an entrance right near my house, so I’d walk through there and try to call out to anybody who happened to be in our backyard. The trail sloped down further ahead, revealing a large metal pipe that ran under it. I never knew what it was for, but I always assumed it was water or sewage or something because of the faint sound of shushing water I heard near it. Along it was graffiti of whatever it is the artist was trying to get across, I couldn’t tell you. Me and my older brother used to go out and slowly walk across the pipe. When I went across first, my brother would always threaten to push me if I didn’t go faster, but I was so scared to fall I made sure that each step was directly in front of the other.
After the pipe, you go back up on the trail until you reach the exit I’d take to loop around back to my house. It was around then my anxiety started to kick in more and more at home, so I really appreciated the time outside. I didn’t always take my old iPod with me. Sometimes I just went along and enjoyed nature, my dog running through the grass and birds chirping somewhere above me. It was my favorite time of the day, just a moment for solace.
A weird thing I started to notice while walking started with a game I’d played. I would close my eyes and see how far I could go without opening them. After a while, I’d inevitably get too paranoid about running into something that I’d open my eyes and see how far I went. This was basically my nap for the day when I was really exhausted from school. One day I challenged myself by playing this game when going down the slope. I thought the worst that would happen is that I’d quickly correct myself if I began to trip. I closed my eyes and began to walk, holding my arms out to my sides for balance.
The usual sounds of birds chirping or my dog’s collar shaking were seemingly traded for the quiet sound of my breaths, in and out. As I walked further and further, nervous about how I would be perceived by anyone else walking the trail, I realized that I hadn’t felt myself walk downward at all. I walked a bit faster to try and make the slope, but I didn’t feel the gradual pull of gravity no matter how far I went.
Worried that I somehow went off the path, I opened my eyes to find myself at the bottom of the slope, next to the pipe. I know for a fact that not one of my steps was below the other, but somehow I still traveled down the hill. Another day, I tried playing the game again. I found a direction going through the valley, looked around to make sure no one was looking before closing my eyes, and began putting one foot in front of the other.
Again, all other sounds seemed blocked out besides my ever louder breathing. After a minute or two, I felt I walked enough and was starting to feel very scared, so I opened my eyes and turned around. I was on the other side, past the pipe. I went down and up along the trail and didn’t feel a thing. It felt like I was just walking on a perfectly level ground, in a perfectly level place. I decided not to think too much about it.
One day in autumn when I was walking Sully, he just stopped out of nowhere. Usually he’d stop and stare at any dog, cat, or other wildlife that crossed his path, but this time, he seemed to just stop.
For context, interspersed along the trail were these manhole covers in the ground. They were inside of a stone base, perfectly square, rising up a few feet off the ground, and were usually vandalized. On the side of each of them was a painted number, written in a black, simple font. I’d try to stare down them, but you couldn’t see anything. All the visibility you had of what could be behind was small holes poking through in a grid pattern. When Sully stopped, he was staring right at one of these, perfectly still. The number on the side was 3632. I followed his gaze and was perplexed as to why the manhole was catching his attention when we both saw it so much walking through that it might as well have been a trail marker or checkpoint.
Sully started to run right to the manhole, pulling me along with him. He barked and barked down the hole, and I looked around to see what could possibly be causing this reaction. The sound of Sully came echoing right up through the manhole faintly as I tried to pull him out of his seeming trance. I got him away and started to continue our walk when I faintly still heard the sound of a dog barking in the distance. Slowly tracing the source of the sound back to the manhole, I put my ear above the cover and listened closely.
Somewhere from wherever the manhole leads, I could swear I heard the faint sound of barking, more shrill than any bark Sully could make. The sound wasn’t right though. It didn’t sound like the regular noise a dog would make when acting territorial. It sounded like the bark a cartoon dog would make, like if a dog was actively trying to replicate what humans think they sound like. It was too rounded if that makes sense, and there didn’t seem to be any emotion to it, just an effort to be heard. It sounded like a stock dog sound effect. I stayed for a bit to listen, but Sully pulled me along, wanting to continue along the trail. I rationalized it as the echoes of Sully, but I always embarrassed myself by moving a bit closer to the manhole everytime we passed it after. I never heard anything.
After that, I began to leave my iPod to charge more and more so I could pay more attention to the trail. The peace I used to feel while walking it had left an intrigue for any sort of mystery I could think of. Has that bush always been there? Did new graffiti get added to the pipe last night? Is that other dog walker in on it? I’ve always been a sucker for a mystery, in this case, were those sounds I heard from the manhole really from some monster I couldn’t see? Most of those clues I followed led to nowhere and, in the case of the dog walker, a lot of embarrassment and apologies, but one seemed to actually be something. I began to notice that everytime I entered the trail, I would hear the exact same bird call, or at least close to the same. I looked up to find a group of white birds, seven of them, in v-formation, flying overhead.
I looked up everytime I entered the trail afterwards, and there was always that same group of white birds. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I spent a week obsessing over these birds. I mapped their path, each slight left and right, as they moved above me. I looked through bird books trying to identify what type of bird they were before realizing they were way too far for identification. One day I considered shooting one down with my dad’s rifle, but only for a moment before realizing how stupid that would be. I’d get dangerously close to tripping and dying because of how much my head was literally in the clouds. Following their path, I found they stopped when they all dived into a tree near the end of the trail. They would be flying normally and the moment they’d pass the tree, they’d turn and dive for it. I walked past that tree everyday for months from any time between sunrise to sunset and I’ve never seen a bird leave that tree before.
During the spring months, rain would pour down on the trail and make temporary ponds of water and mud, so cloudy you couldn’t see an inch through it. Sometimes Sully would try to walk through them and I’d have to pull him out, knowing my dad would be upset by the water he brought in. Another common sight on the trail was garbage. A variety of junk was left along the path, including bottles, cigarette boxes, clothing, and even a full couch one time. Often, these two things would beautifully coexist via garbage lazily floating around the pond. Me and Sully were walking through the trail once when we saw one of these makeshift ponds, no life making its home inside. Surrounding the swamp, however, were high chairs designed for babies to be able to reach the table during dinner.
They made a semicircle on the opposite side of the water as me, and they all faced towards the center of the pond. Taking a moment to stare at the odd sight, Sully occupied himself by splashing in the water. I got him out quickly and tried to get some of the water off him when I realized that he had something in his mouth: a small, child-size arm, seemingly plastic. I wrestled it out of his mouth and, as if on cue, another piece of a doll rose from the rain: a leg. Then a torso, then a head. Soon, tens of baby doll parts began to float towards the surface, mud covering their eyes and bodies. A fully together doll emerged right near my feet. I reached down to pick it up and threw it against a fence. It noisily collided with the fence. Its hand flew off of it and landed in the grass. Hoping nobody heard that, I quickly ran away.
We were out late for back-to-school night once, leaving me to take a flashlight and walk Sully along the trail in the dark. As you can imagine, a trail you already are a bit jumpy about gets a lot worse when you’re only lights to see where you’re going is the moon and the beam of light that only travels a few feet forward before dying out. I brought my iPod that time for comfort, playing on repeat a couple of songs I slowly downloaded onto it.
I walked down the slope and heard the noise of water rushing through the pipe much more clearly than usual. I looked over to it and saw a bright blue light emanating from beneath it. I stopped dead in my tracks, the leash going slack as Sully turned back to look at me. I tried to rationalize it at first: our neighborhood wasn’t in a great city, and it wasn’t uncommon to see homeless people set up camps along the trail’s path, some even resting on the protection the manhole covers’ platforms gave from the wet mud below. I just assumed that this was a light from one of these camps, that if I went to investigate it, all I’d find is an unlucky guy just trying to get some sleep for the night.
The closer I came to it, however, the more unlikely that seemed. It was brighter than any light I’d seen from whatever could be lighting a camp for the night, and it covered the underneath of the pipe from side to side in a polka-dot pattern, like a disco-ball or a makeshift disco-ball with a strainer and a lamp without its shade. I walked through the slightly muddy grass to reach the base of the pipe. From there, I let go of the leash, telling Sully sternly to stay where he was. I got on my back and kinda crab-walked into the space inbetween the ground and the pipe. Underneath the pipe, holes the size of a fist lined it, about six inches away from any hole near it, uniform like the holes of a shower-head, but in this case, the water didn’t flow downward. Instead, the bright blue water rushing through the pipe at speeds like that of a river never leaked a single drop through the indents.
I lifted my index finger slowly into one of the cracks and the force of the water flew my finger back, slamming it against the wall of the pipe. Pain rippled through the finger as I pulled it out, but the water just seemed to pull it back in. Slowly, more and more of my hand got caught in the rushing water, a red pain traveling from my fingertip down to my knuckles and palm. I tried and tried to pull myself out, but the water pulled me further and further in, my wrists scraping blood along the edges. I lifted up my legs to push off of the pipe and, with all the power I could muster, pulled my hand free of the pipe. The hand was clearly broken and scraped along the side where I released it along the pipe. I quickly got up off my back, hitting my head on the pipe. Stumbling out now, I grabbed Sully’s leash and ran back home.
I didn’t want to bother explaining what happened, especially seeing as how I wasn’t even sure if it could have possibly happened, so I just said I tripped. We put an icepack over it and let it rest. When I went back along the trail a few days later, I reluctantly checked the bottom of the pipe. Surprisingly, the leaks were still there, but no water moved through it, not even the sound of rushing water I used to hear. I don’t know how to put this, but I guess it felt like a betrayal. I trusted the peaceful nature of the trail up until that point somehow. Now I wasn’t sure.
Although I never heard anything from the manhole again, it still held Sully’s attention. He’d whine whenever we’d even pass by it, apprehensive about something. That’s about when his behavior began to change. He became more sluggish and tired, not running as much on walks. Then, one day, I pulled out the leash, expecting him to come excited to walk, but he didn’t come. I looked around the house, in every room and all around the house, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I asked my mom and she went through the whole process I went through before realizing like me that Sully just wasn’t here. We looked and looked until I decided to look inside the old, faded playhouse in the backyard. Opening a small door and crouching down to enter a small play area, I found a tunnel.
It wasn’t big enough for me to crawl inside, but I peered my head down to see what direction it went. Towards the fence. On the other side, on the trail, I began to hear the faint sound of a dog whining. My first instinct was to run back inside and reach under my parent’s bed and grab his rifle case. I opened it up, but the rifle wasn’t inside.
Running back out, I climbed over the fence and saw the other opening of the tunnel, close to the trail. Further along the trail, I heard even clearer the sound of Teddy, barking at something. I quickly ran down, realizing something blocking my path. The valley where the pipe is was completely flooded, to the point that I could only see the top of the pipe. The water was murky. I couldn’t see anything through it. There was no way to get around besides looping through the neighborhood, but I was starting to feel desperate. Holding my arms out to my sides and taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and began to walk through the water, except I felt no water touch me at all.
This time when playing the game, I didn’t hear my breaths. All I heard was Sully crying ahead. I tried to block it out. I closed my eyes tight and tried to pretend that everything was okay, that this was perfectly level ground, that I would make it to the other side, but every slight sway and trip brought me back to reality. I wanted to open my eyes, I wanted to see what was around me, but I knew if I did, I would be at the bottom of the water, and I’ve never been a great swimmer. So I kept walking and walking until eventually I felt like I had to have crossed.
Opening my eyes, my feet suddenly touched the water before landing back on the trail. I was on the other side of the flood, the water ankle deep. I adjusted myself before continuing to run, closer and closer to the source of the crying, to where Sully was, until I was running straight to the manhole cover labeled 3632. Above it, standing on the stone platform, I could hear him barking, yelping, begging me to come down and save him. Getting on my knees, I pushed my fingers through the small holes of the cover and pulled it up, only to find dirt.
The manhole went down a foot or two, through the stone podium, before stopping at dirt, the same level as all the land around it. When I pulled it open, Sully’s cries stopped. I couldn’t hear him at all. I looked around me, but couldn’t see him anywhere. Putting the manhole cover down, I walked back towards the flood, confused as to how far I was walking, until I realized it was gone. There was no slope, or pipe, or flood. The trail just continued perfectly level.
I went back home in defeat. We put up missing posters for Sully around the neighborhood, but he never came back home. I went back on the path a couple weeks later, and the valley with the pipe was back, no evidence of a flood or even holes underneath the pipe. I never went back on that trail after that day.