I think I’m a fortunate man. I haven’t lost that many people close to me to something other than “natural causes.” Usually, it’s some distant relative I knew nothing about or it’s a friend of a friend that I met maybe once. It’s not that I don’t care that some people die earlier than they should, or are caught in an accident, or exit on their own terms.
It hurts me just as much as anyone, but something at the back of my mind always says, “At least they are still here.”
That kind of thinking put me in a very fragile state. One day I lost someone I never thought I’d lose that way - my grandfather. As old as he was, he wasn’t willing to wait the few years he had left. He didn’t want to give those who loved him the joy of his company for the sake of his “escape.” His word for it, not mine.
Now, I felt all the emotions you would expect. I was sad one day, pissed off the next, and then just plain pretending he never existed. A lot of bad things started to happen after that and maybe it was just the reality of loss settling in my mind and making me do dumb things. That didn’t stop me from blaming him for everything. All the pain I felt, all the obstacles I faced. It all started with him.
Normally, that would be the end of my rant. I would bitch about his selfishness, pop a few pills to help me sleep and that would be another day in my miserable existence. I should say I never go overboard, I always take the recommended dosage, not a pill more. I’m depressed, not stupid.
It was one day after all the work was done that I got to bed late. I normally wouldn’t need pills after such a long day, the exhaustion would just catch up with me. Only, it became a habit and without really thinking, I counted out the pills and chased them down with half a glass of room-temperature water.
I groaned a moment later, realizing it was a waste of a dose. I just rolled over and let my body and the pills race to see who knocked me out first. I think my last thought was about my alarm clock and if it would be loud enough to wake me up.
I ended up waking before it could go off. 4 am.
I woke up in a daze early that morning. I felt different. Parts of me were still asleep and I chalked it up to me taking the pills a little too late into the night. I forced myself out of bed, avoiding the beams of light the morning sun was shooting through the gaps in the curtains. Staring at them too long made me sneeze…for some reason.
I also felt a little nauseous. Like something was wrong with me all over. We’ve all had days where we woke up and our brain was so out of it that we thought we were on a different planet. I woke up feeling like my body was different, that I didn’t quite remember it.
I went through the usual morning rituals until it was time to go. I pulled on a hoodie and cap, looked at myself in the mirror, and sighed. It was time to return to the routine. I opened the door to my apartment, stepped outside, and didn’t fully register what I saw. I turned around as I closed the door, twisting the key and locking it.
With a deep yawn, I took those first few steps down the hallway and stopped almost immediately. There was no hallway.
I’m going to do my best to describe what I saw, not because I struggle to remember. The image of that place is burned into my memory. I’m going to describe it in detail because I am hoping that it will be familiar to someone out there. Someone who might have seen it too. At least, I hope that someone else has and I’m not crazy.
I was on a suburban street. The door I had just locked was for a house, not an apartment. The house was this gray-green color, olive or moss green, something like that. It had a dark roof, a white chimney, and a separate garage. The path leading to the street was this beige, stone-inlaid tile…thing.
There were other houses, some wood slatted instead of painted concrete and brick walls like mine. Some had fences, tall metal ones with jagged spiked tops. The kind of fences I would imagine outside a military encampment, not your typical suburban house. There was a street…but it led into a dark tunnel on either side.
The most bizarre thing was the sky. The sun wasn’t really up and it wasn’t really there. It’s the hardest to describe, but imagine you are in a box without a top. You look up and see this rust-colored sky and beyond the lip of the box is the sun. Out of sight, but you know it isn’t the sun. It’s a light source, but it lacked any of that natural warmth.
Not that there was anything natural about everything else. It was all strangely still. Quiet. Empty and abandoned. The kind of surreal space that feels like it was once filled with life, but not anymore. A film set, but the actors had the day off.
I turned back to the house and tried to get back inside. The key wouldn’t turn, it didn’t even match the type of lock. It had changed.
I shouldered my backpack and looked around. I mainly looked at the neighbors’ houses. I looked through their windows from the front of my house - if it can be called my house. I didn’t see any movement, not in their living rooms or kitchens.
I walked onto the pavement and noticed then that I was mouth-breathing. It had grown louder and a little more labored. It was obvious that panic was setting in, but panic wasn’t what I felt. It felt like nothing had changed since I woke up. The parts of me that were asleep were still asleep, I had this all-over body fatigue.
That didn’t stop me from running towards the first sign of movement.
People were walking out of the dark tunnel. A lot of people. All of them were fixed on the tunnel at the end of the street. It was like watching one of those charity walks seeing the masses walking together, but none wore tight yoga pants, carried water bottles, or had a pair of earphones blasting music.
If anything, their expressions and the shambling way they marched reminded me of a prison chain gang from those old movies. A real sense of hopelessness. These were people who seemed to have given up on doing…anything else but walking. I would come to discover this much when I noticed someone walking up the pavement towards me.
It was this tall guy in a white tank top and dusty-looking jeans. He seemed strangely wrong to look at. It was as if my mind kept trying to make sense of what it was looking at. Again, if I can describe it better, the closest feeling to that mental short-circuit was how on some nights, before I go to sleep, everything feels out of proportion. Like I can’t even picture myself without having doodled limbs and a giant head.
Yet, there was one constant and that was his clothes. White tank top and dirty jeans.
He placed a hand on my shoulder before I knew it and guided me into the crowd. He even pulled me along until I was walking with them. The moment I started walking, he let go and returned to the pavement to walk alongside us.
“I’m not…a part of this,” I murmured. I turned to the closest person next to me. A middle-aged lady in a polka-dot dress. It didn’t fit her, but she didn’t look bad either. “Hi…hello? Um…can you tell me where we are walking? What’s…”
To this day, I can’t help but recall the pain in her eyes. She only glanced at me for a second, a split-fucking-second, and then looked ahead again. Tears started running down her cheeks and she moaned softly as if to say a name. It was just these wide brown eyes melting and looking at her was painful.
I was grateful when we entered the tunnel. The darkness was all-consuming, hiding our forms. I could hear people bumping against each other ahead. Grunts and hisses. Eventually, I was just walking blind. I started to bump into people, though I could make out some of their footsteps. It seemed they went slower in the tunnels and I didn’t mind. I tried to match their pace.
My breathing may have been labored, and my body may have ached, but somehow, I couldn’t slip into the panic the rest of me was having.
I didn’t think about it too much, I just didn’t see the point. I decided to keep walking through that dark tunnel. I stumbled sometimes, a lot of people did. There was this one moment where I stumbled forward and I put my hands up to catch myself in case I fell flat on my face. Instead, I stumbled into the guy in front of me, pushing him a little forward.
“Sorry,” I said, regaining my balance.
I heard this strange sound. I couldn’t sense his presence anymore. His footsteps stopped and I knew that nobody was there anymore. I wanted to say something else, but I didn’t know if I had any right to. After all, when you bump into someone and apologize, you’ve pretty much done all you can do. I wasn’t about to fight him for not saying anything or moving away.
I saw the light and after three minutes of steady walking, we were back outside. Quite a few people were marching ahead of me, but a lot more behind me. I saw the impossible man walking on the pavement and another one just like him walking on the other pavement. They must have known what was going on, so I figured I would ask the one who guided me into the crowd.
Nearing the edge, I was about to say something, but then all eyes were on the house. My house. It was the same street, the same sky. I didn’t pay enough attention to notice at first, but there it was. The moss-green house. The front door opened and a man walked out. His jaw dropped as he looked out at the world.
Two people broke out from the crowd and ran towards him, but the man in the white tank top didn’t let them. He stepped in front of them and pushed them back into the crowd with such force that they were sent flying. Several people were knocked down, but they got up and continued walking. The tall man was impossibly strong and surprisingly fast.
The tall man then grabbed the new guy behind the neck and guided him into the crowd, closing the door behind him. No screams, nothing. The old man was a fish out of water being guided back into the sea. That must have been exactly how I looked when I appeared.
I looked around to see if anyone noticed. I looked for the woman in the polka-dot dress, but she was nowhere in sight. I also realized that the crowd had thinned out just before we entered the tunnel again. I was still walking with them. I saw it when I turned to look back at the fading light. A brief flash of dark lines shooting from the shadows of the tunnels and occasionally pulling people up.
My body felt the fear. It knew it was in line at the slaughterhouse. That’s why everyone looked the way they did. That’s why they slowed down. It was quieter, perhaps making it more difficult to be attacked. Only, the slower you walked, the longer you were in the tunnel too.
I listened in that tunnel, actually listened. I could hear more than the soft footsteps of the crowd. I heard an odd whistle. It was of something passing very close to me - like a bullet just missing me, but softer than that. Even if they couldn’t hit us all the time, it was still a game of chance.
When I saw the light again, I felt an incredible sense of relief. I think my body acted on it and stepped a little eagerly. I shifted at the last moment, but something ran past the back of my leg. I crumbled to the ground just outside the tunnel. When I got up, I saw the back of my leg had been cut. The wound wasn’t anything serious, the blood would soon stop, but it was a close call.
The tall man stopped outside the tunnel to look at me. I quickly got to my feet and continued walking. I still felt drained, but some semblance of fear was still pushing me forward.
Nothing more happened for a while. No doors opened, no new people. The crowd just seemed to thin out. I started to take my time in the tunnels and make a conscious effort to be quiet, but it was only a matter of time. I knew that.
I tried calling for help, but there wasn’t any signal on my phone, which still read the time as 4 am. I had a few things with me, but most of it was useless. ID, passport with my study VISA, homework, work uniform, and a lousy packed lunch which I didn’t have the appetite for.
Yet, my time came.
I put myself at the front of the crowd and looked out towards the house. I watched the door closely. It was the same house, always the same house. The door opened and I ran. I thought the tall man was well behind, but no, he shot out of the tunnel and towards me the moment I stepped onto the pavement.
The new one stepped outside.
“Don’t close the door!” I yelled.
It worked. Well, I think my yelling scared her more than she listened. She was in shock, she hesitated. The tall man’s steps had grown loud. I decided to duck at the right time, but it snatched my backpack. It was easy to slip out of the slings and then dive towards the house. The woman tried to close it at the last moment, her eyes locked on the tall man instead of me.
I grabbed her hand and pulled her in with me. She resisted, but thank God for momentum because I carried her through with me. We crashed back inside her home, I flipped onto my back and kicked the door closed, shutting out that rust-colored hellscape.
For the longest time, I didn’t know what to think.
The woman was yelling at me in a language I didn’t understand. It was fast and hard to keep up with. She opened the door and ran outside. I screamed for her to stop, but then saw it was not that hellscape I had seen before. It was a sunny street, packed with people and cars. Beyond it was a busy beach.
Stepping out, I found myself walking along a beach in Spain.
I lost my phone in my backpack, but I still had my wallet and passport in my pocket. Some people spoke English and were able to help me get to the airport. I bought a ticket home before someone realized I didn’t have a VISA to visit Spain. That had me feeling real panic going to the airport, not that numb fear I felt in that…place.
No, I don’t think the sleeping pills had anything to do with it. I’ve been taking them for years and I’m pretty sure they would have added them to the side effects list if they did. It’s one hell of a side effect.
The only real reason I can think that it happened was this random fact I came across that matched my experience in a small way. It was some bullshit that at 4 am everybody is at their weakest and most likely to die in their sleep. Of course, that makes no sense to me, because what if you went to sleep later, or early…it just doesn’t scan.
But, I think I know how that rumor started.
I think it’s this place. The street, the tunnel…I think that’s what killed so many people and created this rumor. Only, I was lucky enough to escape with just a scratch on my leg and a sizable dent in my bank account. I don’t think I am the only one who could have escaped. Some must have made it out the same way as me…or took a look at the street and went back inside the house before closing the door.
I just don’t know for sure…but I think that is the place where people go at 4 am.