Hey, can I tell you something?
It's about the old Sekiyama Tunnel… I can't say for certain it's all true, but I've heard the same story from too many different people. So tonight, I wanted to quietly pass it along to you.
Apparently there's an old tunnel deep in the mountains outside Sendai, somewhere past the Sekiyama Pass. Abandoned now — nobody uses it anymore. At night it's pitch black out there, barely a trace of city light for miles… and a few years back, four university students drove out to see it.
They set off past one in the morning, telling themselves it was just a dare. As they climbed the mountain road, the temperature outside kept dropping, little by little. It was the middle of summer, windows all the way up, and still the inside of the car went cold. They noticed. But they laughed it off — *it's the mountains, that's all* — and kept going.
They stopped the car about fifty meters from the tunnel entrance. The headlights caught the old concrete mouth hanging in the dark, and beyond it — nothing. Truly nothing. As if the darkness inside was swallowing the light whole, leaving only a black hole where the road should have been.
One of them — a girl in the passenger seat, the one people always said had a sensitivity to these things — went suddenly quiet. One moment she'd been joking around with everyone else, and then, just like that, she wasn't.
When they looked at her face, it had gone pale. Her lips were pressed into a thin line, and she was staring straight ahead through the windshield. Without a word, she reached over and gripped the driver's arm. *Turn back*, she said. Just those two words.
Her voice was trembling, they said afterward. But what frightened them more than that — what they couldn't stop talking about later — was how cold her hand was. The middle of summer, and her hand was cold as ice.
Nobody asked any questions. They turned the car around, drove back down the mountain, and not one of the four spoke a single word until they were back in the city.
They ducked into a family restaurant, slid into a booth under the fluorescent lights, and finally — when they'd steadied themselves a little — they asked her. *What did you see?*
She started to cry. And then she told them.
*There were people in the grass. A lot of them. All of them staring at us. But they weren't standing. Every single one of them was half-submerged in the ground — just… watching.*
Half-submerged. Watching. What do you think that means?
But that's not even the worst of it.
Because then she said: *I couldn't look at the rearview mirror. Not once the whole way back. Because something was following us. The entire drive down the mountain. The whole way.*
The entire drive. All the way down.
She never said what it was. Not to the end.
And then there's this — a separate account, from someone who actually went inside the tunnel. Just past the entrance, they heard a sound: a dull, rhythmic knocking against the concrete walls. Not from outside. From inside the walls themselves.
At first they thought it was water dripping somewhere. But then the intervals started to change. What had been steady and even began to quicken, little by little — as though whatever was making the sound had become aware of them.
They turned around. And from somewhere deeper in the tunnel, a voice reached them.
A voice that seemed to be calling a name. Someone's voice. But whose, they couldn't tell — low and indistinct, barely more than a murmur.
There's a rule about that tunnel, apparently. You must never turn toward the voice. What happens if you do… no one will say, not clearly.
Only this: the person who was there that night, the one who almost turned at the sound of it — they said that in the very instant they began to turn, they felt something touch the back of their neck.
Cold fingers. Thin. Pressing slowly, gently, against the skin.
They don't remember anything after that.
When they came to, they were lying outside the tunnel.
The tunnel is still there, they say. Somewhere in those mountains, its dark mouth hanging open, waiting — the way it has always waited — for no one in particular, and for anyone at all.
