Quote:
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." – William Faulkner
The world shrunk to the size of a receipt. The roaring boiler, the two bodies slumped in the shadows, the approaching footsteps—everything faded into a dull, distant hum. Thembi's entire consciousness was funneled into that small, thermal-printed slip of paper. The numbers 01:55 burned into her retinas. The words EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTIVE PILL were not just text; they were a key, turning in a lock deep inside the nightmare, opening a door she wasn't sure she wanted to walk through.
Lerato. At a pharmacy. At nearly two in the morning. Why?
Flash: The kiss in the dark. The taste of cigarettes and someone else's beer. Whose lips?
Flash: Sbu's tense face at the club. "You're spiralling, Thembi." Was it concern, or was it guilt?
The implications blossomed in her mind like a poisonous flower. Lerato and Sbu. The thought was so cliché, so painfully mundane, and yet it explained everything and nothing. It explained Lerato's fierce defense of him, her insistence that Thembi apologize. It explained the secret, shuttered looks she'd sometimes catch between them. But it did not explain Kagiso's body. It did not explain the flame, the whisper, the Forgotten Hour.
It just made the maze more complex, the shadows deeper.
A heavy footfall on the concrete stairs, one flight up, snapped her back to the present. The sound was crisp, deliberate. Not the random scuffling of a tenant looking for a storage unit. This was a search.
Panic, a cold electric current, jolted through her system. She crumpled the receipt in her fist and shoved it deep into the pocket of her hoodie. She looked frantically between the two bodies. There was no time to move them. The rusted metal door was her only option.
She scrambled towards it, her shoes crunching on grit and dried leaves that had blown in from somewhere. The graffiti—"JHB UNDERGROUND"—seemed to pulse in the low light. She grabbed the rust-caked handle. It was freezing cold and rough against her already cut palm. She pulled. Nothing. It didn't budge.
No. No, no, no.
Another footstep, closer now. She could hear a low, muttered voice. Male.
She threw her whole weight against the door, bracing her feet on the concrete floor. A sharp, metallic groan echoed through the basement, sounding impossibly loud. She froze, heart in her throat, listening. The footsteps paused. They had heard.
Terror gave her a final, desperate surge of strength. She pulled again, her muscles screaming, her breath a ragged sob. With a shriek of protesting metal, the door gave way, swinging inward a foot, just enough for her to squeeze through. The darkness beyond was absolute, a solid wall of black that smelled of wet stone, decay, and ages of neglect.
She glanced back one last time at the two shapes in the gloom. Lerato's head was tilted forward, as if in prayer. Kagiso's sequins caught a sliver of light from a distant emergency exit sign, winking at her like a malevolent eye.
Then she slipped through the gap.
The door swung shut behind her with a heavy, final CLANG that felt like the sealing of a coffin. The sound of the basement—the boiler, the footsteps—was instantly muffled, replaced by a silence so profound it had weight and texture. It was a living silence, pressing in on her eardrums. The only thing louder was the frantic drumbeat of her own heart.
She was in utter, perfect blackness. She fumbled in her hoodie pocket, her fingers brushing against the crumpled receipt before closing around her phone. She pulled it out, her hands shaking so badly she almost dropped it. The screen lit up, a sudden, blasphemous rectangle of light in the primordial dark.
She was standing on a narrow concrete platform. Ahead, the light from her phone faded into nothing, unable to penetrate the gloom. To her left, a set of steep, metal stairs led down into the abyss. The air was cold and damp, and a slow, rhythmic dripping echoed from somewhere far below.
Thump-thump-wheeee…
The thought of the music from above was a distant memory, a sound from another universe. This was a different kind of dread. Slower. Older.
A voice, muffled by the door, reached her. "...see anything?" It was a man's voice, deep. Unfamiliar.
"Just a lot of dust. Check behind the boiler." Another voice. Higher. Authoritative.
The police. They were here. In her basement. A torch beam swept past the缝隙 of the door, a blade of light slicing through the darkness for a moment before moving on.
Thembi pressed herself against the cold, damp wall, trying to become part of it. She held her breath. The voices faded, moving away from the door.
She was safe. For now.
But safe in what? She pointed her phone down the stairs. The light revealed rusted handrails and steps littered with debris. This was it. The ghost line. The myth. A forgotten vein running beneath the city.
Why did you let her take the picture?
The whisper in her mind was so clear, so external, that she physically flinched, her phone beam jerking wildly across the walls. It was that voice again, from the edge of her memory. But now it had words. A sentence.
A picture. What picture?
Flash: The grainy photo on her laptop. Her hand. The Zippo lighter. The darkness.
Had someone taken a picture of her? Was that the whisper's meaning? Why did you let her take the picture? Let who? Kagiso?
A new memory, sharp and sudden, lanced through her.
Flash: The back seat of a car. Not an Uber. A private car. The smell of that cheap cologne. The Kwaito music on the radio. Kagiso was there. In the front passenger seat. She was turned around, her phone held up, its flash illuminating the dark interior. A picture. She had taken a picture. Of Thembi. And someone else.
Who was in the back seat with her?
Thembi strained, pushing against the black wall in her mind. She could almost see it. A shape. A profile. The feeling of an arm around her. Not Sbu's. The scent was wrong.
Then, another sound cut through the dripping and the silence. It wasn't a memory. It was real. It came from deep within the tunnel, down the stairs.
A rhythmic, dragging sound. Like something heavy being pulled over gravel.
Scrape… drag… scrape… drag…
It was slow. Methodical. Getting closer.
Thembi's blood froze. She pointed her phone beam down the staircase, but the light died before it reached the bottom. The sound was coming from that darkness.
Scrape… drag… scrape… drag…
It was accompanied by a low, wet, breathing sound. An asthmatic, gurgling inhalation.
Every hair on her body stood on end. The police were on the other side of the door. Whatever was down here was in front of her. She was trapped between the justice of the world above and the unknown horror of the world below.
The dragging sound paused at the bottom of the stairs. The wet breathing was louder now. She could hear a faint, phlegmy rattle.
Then, a voice, rasping and broken, floated up from the darkness, a voice that was both familiar and utterly alien.
"Thembi…" it gurgled. "You… left… me… in the… dark."
It was Kagiso's voice.
A wave of pure, unadulterated terror, the kind that stops the heart and shreds the soul, washed over her. It was impossible. She had dragged Kagiso's cold, stiff body. She had left it propped against a wall. It was not here. It could not be here.
But the voice was real.
The dragging started again. Scrape… drag… A foot appeared on the bottom step, clad in a scuffed designer sneaker. Then another. A slow, agonizing climb had begun.
Thembi stumbled back from the staircase, her back hitting the rusted metal door. There was nowhere to run. The thing that was wearing Kagiso's voice and shoes was coming up the stairs, dragging something heavy behind it, and she was about to see its face.