This is not a proper ghost story.
I know what most of you have come for, and I apologize if I mislead you. There are no ghosts, ghouls or tall faceless people with tentacles that live in woods and abduct children in this telling. Despite that, there might be things in it to interest you anyway. You be the judge.
Like some of us, I was a daredevil when I was a cub. No challenge too great, no problem too high - y'know, that sort of thing. But pride goes before a fall, so I suppose it was just a matter of time before I encountered THE dare: the one that marks a turning point between being daredevil and what we used to arrogantly refer to as `normies'; a.k.a boring people without an iota of excitement in their lives. That's the usual way of things, I'm afraid. You either die as a daredevil in some stunt nobody in their right mind will wish to attempt, or else wise up and abandon your reputation for a less dangerous existence. This is the story of my personal Waterloo.
It all began with the Doom Drain.
Silly name, I know. Then again, we were all roughly nine or ten so the name sort of stuck. The drain itself was nothing much to look at; merely your standard sewer pipe running through a small hill and then out the other end. It was large enough for an adult to shuffle through in an awkward crouch, so perfectly sized for kids. I can remember loitering in groups at the mouth of the pipe, chewing gum and trading collectable cards the way we all used to do. It made for a pretty good clubhouse since there was enough space to stand up in - my fingers could barely scrape the ceiling if I reached up high, and the air inside was pleasantly cool compared to blistering summer heat outside. All these made the Doom Drain our top hangout of choice; albeit with one unspoken yet unanimously met condition:
You did not walk more than 30 steps into the pipe. Hanging out at the mouth of it or just a few feet inside was okay, but Walrus help any foolhardy cub to break the 30-steps rule. In the way of these things, nobody actually knew when the rule started or how anybody discovered the absolute `safe' limit. It was all based on hearsay and things overheard from `a friend of a friend'. Similarly, the doom that was supposed to follow from flouting this rule was never explicit. We knew no more than what everyone else knew, and weren't particularly interested in pressing our luck. I was never the most philosophical of kids, and the question of what happened to those who risked venturing further in never did occur to me - not until Mitch Savours got me to do exactly that.
It was a typical summer evening, slowly deepening into dusk. Fireflies were beginning to show, and it would soon be time to head off to our suppers. We were all drowsy and high off the general promise of summer stretching out before us and school a distant memory. It was in this spirit of things that Mitch, chewing a blade of grass in feigned casualness, dropped the following bombshell upon us:
``I've done it, you know.''
``Done what?'' I was lying on my back on the cool metal floor of the pipe, staring up at its ceiling. It was almost pretty. There was still enough light to seep through the cracks, almost like stars in a night sky.
``Taken more than thirty steps in. I've done it, and what's more, I can PROVE it,''
``Liar-liar, pants on fire,''
``I'll do it right now, if you like,'' he seemed entirely serious. ``I'll walk all the way through, then wave at you from the other end,''
``Sure,'' Now this sounded more interesting than amateur stargazing. I hopped off the pipe to make way for Mitch to climb in. He was wearing heavy shoes, the kind that made loud echoes with each step. It made me wonder if he had planned this. With those shoes on I would be able to hear every single pace he took into the tunnel loud and clear.
``Alright, here we go: One. Two. Three...''
Mitch's voice faded away the further he got, but the echoes of his footfalls more than made up for it. They were my only indication of his progress, since his body blocked out what little light there was filtering in from the other end. I soon found myself counting along to myself, growing ever more tense as it grew closer to that forbidden number.
``Twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty...''
No noticeable change after hitting the dreaded number. The tunnel was still pitch black with Mitch blocking out any light from the other side. ``Forty-one, Forty-two, Forty-three...''
I was peering keenly into the pipe to catch any trace of his progress, and so my heart nearly skipped a beat when darkness receded all of a sudden somewhere around `sixty' - something that could only have happened if Mitch was out. But even if that were the case, I should've been able to see him climb out, not disappear like a magic trick. Besides, he was still walking the pipe. The clank of his footsteps told me that much.
Fortunately, there was no cause for alarm. The light at the end of the tunnel was soon obscured again, and it wasn't long after that before I saw an arm waving to me from the other side. The entire trip had taken about a hundred steps, according to my count. Mitch had made it.
Case closed? Well...not really.
See, here's the problem with dares. It's not really a dare if you have no witnesses to back you up. Mitch was my friend, so I hardly counted as a witness. And so, it bothered me something fierce that we had conquered the local legend but nobody would believe it. Which of course, led us to -
``You keep saying Mitch has done it, but nobody even saw you...''
``I was there - ''
``You're a little kid. You don't count,''
Now that stung - hard. There's few things more annoying to a kid than being told how young he is. ``It's true!''
``In that case...I dare you to do it,''
And just like that, I was lost. ``You're on! Now?''
``Halloween night after trick or treating, since you think you're so hot. The moon will be full, it'll be bright enough to see - for us, at least.''
Was that a chuckle? Didn't know, didn't care. I was stoked. The whole school, I was told, would be in attendance to witness my triumph - a triumph that I already knew was possible, since I had seen Mitch pull it off so easily before. For some reason however, my friend didn't seem to share my excitement. ``Why'd you go and do that for?''
``Because it's a sucker bet, duh. You've already shown me the legend is fake, remember?''
``I...'' Was that a blush of red on his face? Mitch definitely looked uncomfortable, the way he would look when he hadn't done his homework for the day. ``I just think it's a dumb dare, is all,''
``It won't be dumb when I win it,''
And that's all I would say on the matter. Although he tried various ways and means to talk me out of it, I refused to be dissuaded. My reputation was on the line after all. The entire school would be here to watch. I couldn't back down.
The night of the challenge approached. I was ready. Mitch...decidedly less so. But I would hear no word against it, dragging him down with me to join the rest of the schoolyard at the Doom Drain - which vaguely took on the semblance of a hungry mouth in the moonlight. Didn't scare me, though. I knew it could be done. Had concrete proof. This was going to knock their socks off.
``Count off as you go in, so we can hear you,'' A necessary requirement, unfortunately. My shoes weren't the heavy-duty ones like Mitch's had been. No matter.
I hop in and start walking. ``One, two, three...''
Then, out of nowhere, somewhere around step twenty-eight - ``Travis! Dude, turn back! For Walrus' sake, come back! You can't, there's a...''
The voices of the others' drowned him out; some concerned, others catcalling. It was the jeers that affected me most. Some part of me decided that Mitch was just being selfish, not wanting me to replicate his awesome achievement. Screw him. ``Thirty, thirty one...''
Huh. Well, that was certainly strange. Moonlight or no, it was dark as pitch in this tunnel...up until the point where the sudden shift in light was almost blinding. I squeezed my eyes shut against the glare and continued walking, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, not too worried about tackling the challenge blind. It was just a tunnel after all. A strangely breezy section of tunnel, but still a tunnel for all that. There were no obstacles in my path, nothing to trip over or bump into. I'd open my eyes again when my vision returned to normal. No sweat, right?
With both eyes shut the glare was muted to tolerable level on the inside of my eyelids. Though I could not see anything, the floor of the tunnel seemed to have changed between step 30 and step 31, a sensation that I could feel through the soles of my shoes. It was still metal, or at least felt like metal...just not the same material that the pipe had been. Something about it unnerved me, and privately I was relieved when the metal transitioned back to the familiar floor of the pipe that I was used to somewhere around step 60. The glare had receded again as well, enough for me to risk opening my eyes.
As it turned out, I was closer to the other end of the pipe that I'd thought. The exit was no more than a few steps away; I would've stumbled over the lip and fallen if I'd kept my eyes shut for just one more moment.
Mitch met me at the other end of the tunnel, his face deathly pale, almost like someone who has seen a ghost. ``Dude, you...wha--? How?''
``What do you mean `how'? Didn't you go this way twice, there and back? Can't believe our count was off, though. I thought it was a hundred steps, but it's just sixty five. Well, gotta get back, the others are waiting...''
He caught my sleeve in a grip of iron before I could turn around and take a single step into the pipe. ``Hey, what are you--?''
``Come with me,'' there was no humour in his voice. ``You have to see this,''
Confused, I followed my friend - this time around the hill instead of through it. The landscape flattens out as we go, and from somewhere I hear...sirens? ``Is that...the police?''
``I called them,'' Mitch sounds reluctant, but also unapologetic. ``And also our parents. I had to,''
``You what?! You're gonna get me grounded, man!''
``Shut up,'' he dragged me by the shirt collar, ushering me onward to where the ground breaks away. ``Shut up and look,''
I shut up. I looked -
Two identical pipes jutted from opposing sides of a massive crater quarry excavated into the middle of the hill. One was the pipe I had clambered out of. The other...the other -
The other was on the other end of the crater, above a dizzying drop that would've killed anyone on impact. And spanning the two broken ends of pipe...
--a single girder; the sort that is used for construction. It hung from a crane, swaying ever so slightly in a nonexistent breeze: a single bar of metal, narrower than the balance beams at the school gym that I never did manage to master. The same narrow bar of metal that I had, somehow, walked thirty paces from one end to the other above a fifty foot drop into a quarry of sharpened rock; with my eyes closed, to the safety of the pipe on the other side.
I looked at the site of what could've been my death, then to Mitch. Back at the fatal drop, then back to Mitch again. ``I think I'm going to faint now.''
And with the sound of anxious shouts and our parents' voices in the distance, that is exactly what I did.
--
I pieced it together later, out of bits of fact and conjecture here and there. The Doom Drain was never one pipe at all, but two - their ends perfectly lined up to give the illusion of continuity for someone staring from one end to the other. There had been several accidents already; accidents which I supposed led to the urban legend of how 30 was the absolute safe number of steps a person could take. Work had begun on the quarry to seal up both ends of pipe for good to prevent any more unforeseen accidents, which was why the crane and girder had been there in the first place. Mitch's `achievement' had been a sham. Apparently, the bit where I'd seen him `disappear' was when he carefully exited the first pipe (he knew about the drop apparently) and signaled to his brother to climb in on the other side and continue - all while kicking with his heavy shoes at the pipe so I would think he had kept on walking.
I was the talk of the school for the rest of the year, and grounded by my parents for at least that time. Everyone kept telling the tale of my incredible death-defying stunt. Of how I'd conquered the Doom Drain by navigating a girder from one end to the other...all without even knowing what I was doing; without even knowing that the drop was there.
A good thing too, because I think if at any point in time between step thirty-two and step sixty, had I even been tempted a little - and there were LOADS of temptations, believe me - to open my eyes...
Boom. Splat. Too bad, so sad...
Anubis loves fools; or so that's what my grandfather always says. Well, there must be some truth in that statement. I was a special kind of fool that day, to warrant his attention on me.
And that is why I don't take dares anymore.
