…Would you mind listening for a moment?
I cannot say for certain that any of this is true. I only mean to pass along what has been passed along — nothing more, nothing less.
It concerns the Seikan Tunnel. That long, long undersea passage connecting Aomori to Hokkaido.
From what I have heard, those who go in for late-night maintenance work sometimes experience something they cannot quite explain. It is whispered among the workers, passed quietly from one to the next.
It happened one winter, apparently. The exact date is unclear — sometime in November or December, deep in the night. A maintenance worker was alone, inspecting a section somewhere in the middle of the tunnel. I won't give his name, but he was a veteran — someone long accustomed to that kind of work.
The tunnel has its own particular atmosphere, even on ordinary nights. A thick, clinging dampness unlike anything above ground, and a smell that drifts from nowhere in particular — iron and seawater, mingled together. He was used to it. It never bothered him.
That night, too, he walked along the wall with his torch, checking the concrete joints one by one, carefully. Somewhere in the distance, the ventilation fans droned low. A thin film of water seeped across the floor beneath his feet. It was the same as always.
Then he passed a certain point, and all at once — the sound was gone.
The hum of the ventilation, gone. His footsteps, gone. Even the sound of his own breathing — gone. He described it as though his ears had been stoppered, and yet at the same time, as though they ached. That kind of silence.
He stopped and looked around. In the beam of his torch: the familiar concrete wall. Nothing out of place. And yet something felt — wrong.
There was a shadow on the wall.
Not his own. When he moved the torch, the shadow did not move with the light as it should have. It was set slightly deeper into the wall — the shape of a person, simply there. Still. Not swaying. Facing him — just facing him, without moving.
He said he was too frightened to make a sound. He knew he had to run, but his legs would not obey. He had no idea how long he stood there.
When he came back to himself, the sound had returned. The ventilation was droning again. He could hear his own breath again. The shadow was gone.
He abandoned the work and made for the exit — nearly running the whole way, and it was no short distance. But when he finally stepped outside and checked his watch, almost no time had passed since he had entered. He felt certain he had been in there for over an hour. The hands had barely moved.
Apparently, something similar has happened to several others. Not always in the same spot, but in every case, the same two things: that moment when the sound disappears, and the shadow. Those details, at least, are always the same.
A number of people died during the tunnel's construction. Some of them, it is said, were never recovered — they remain inside the walls to this day. That much, at least, is known.
But what lingers with me is this — that the shadow was facing him. Not watching, some have suggested, but waiting.
What it is waiting for, no one seems to know.
…Though perhaps, by now, someone does.
