Chapter 1: Taking the Lantern

The lantern’s handle was cold, heavier than I expected. Its flame flickered, barely lighting the faces around the Circle. I hesitated, unsure, but cleared my throat. “I don’t believe this, but someone I once knew – a soldier, just home from some place I couldn’t pronounce – told me a story that still freezes my blood,” I began. “He never believed in hauntings, either. But you’ll see why he changed his mind.”

Chapter 2: We Thought the House Was Empty

It was the summer of 1976, and the sky over the interstate was black with storm. The soldier’s car hydroplaned into the parking lot of a faded diner, one of those places with yellowed windows and a flickering neon sign, halfway between anywhere and nowhere. He stepped inside, boots squelching, uniform jacket still damp with unfamiliar rain.

Inside, the place felt preserved in dust: red vinyl booths, a waitress with a beehive hairdo, and a jukebox silent in the corner. The only other customers were two men hunched at a table, a teenage girl watching the rain, and a tired couple picking at pie. The storm was too fierce for anyone to leave; thunder rattled the windowpanes.

Over coffee, the soldier half-listened as the two men swapped stories. The older one said, “We thought the house was empty, years ago. Then we heard the bell. Thirteen times.” The soldier tried to laugh, but the sound stuck in his throat. The others lowered their voices; the soldier felt his skin prickle. The legend was about an old subway line, right beneath this patch of highway, sealed off after something happened in the forties. No map showed its entrance. But on nights like this, locals said, you might hear a bell tolling underground.

The soldier thought it was nonsense. But lightning flashed, and for a second, he glimpsed something at the window: a pale, blurred face, pressed to the glass. His coffee sloshed, hand trembling. He told himself it was just the storm – until the first bell sounded, deep and metallic, from nowhere at all.

Chapter 3: Thirteen Tolling Bells

The bell’s toll was low, almost beneath hearing, but it vibrated in the bones. The soldier looked at the others: they had all gone still. One. Two. Three. The count grew, a leaden certainty behind each clang. By the seventh, the air itself seemed to pulse, and a cold dread seeped beneath the door.

“That’s it,” whispered the girl, her eyes wide.

The soldier tried to speak, but the bell kept tolling. Thirteen times, each one heavier than the last. When it stopped, the silence was suffocating. A single drop of water fell from the ceiling, but no one moved.

“Maybe it’s the tunnel,” the older man said, voice thin. “They say if you hear all thirteen, you’re marked.”

“Marked for what?” the soldier asked, and the others only shook their heads.

Then came the footsteps – soft, measured, crossing the linoleum behind the counter. The waitress had gone pale, her hands trembling as she clutched the coffee pot. “We’re not alone,” she murmured.

Thunder crashed, the lights flickered. The soldier saw the face at the window again, pressed close, features blurred and wrong. But only for a heartbeat.

Someone – maybe the teenager – suggested they follow the sound, see if the legend was real. The storm made escape impossible. The soldier, against all reason, nodded. Something inside him refused to let the bell’s mystery go unanswered.

Chapter 4: The Subway Mouth

The group gathered raincoats and flashlights, the soldier’s army-issue jacket their only real armor. The old men led them outside, across the muddy lot, past a chain-link fence bent by years of neglect. The rain was icy, soaking them in moments.

Behind the diner, past a tangle of thorny bushes, they found a rusted iron hatch, half-buried by weeds. No sign, no marker – just a ring set in the concrete. The tingle of static filled the air. It took all of them to wrench the hatch open. A breath of freezing air rushed out, damp and ancient, smelling of earth and candlewax.

A set of stairs led down, swallowed by shadow. The soldier led the way, boots echoing on metal treads. The others followed, their flashlight beams trembling. At the bottom, the tunnel opened into darkness, the walls tiled in cracked white, water dripping from the ceiling.

As the last person stepped off the stairs, the hatch above slammed shut with a clang. The flashlights flickered. Down here, the storm was just a distant rumble. The air was cold, thick with the scent of rot and something metallic. A faint, static crackle seemed to follow them, and already the soldier wondered if they’d made a mistake they couldn’t undo.

Chapter 5: Footsteps Without a Source

They walked in single file, boots squelching in puddles. The soldier’s breath floated before him, mist in the beam of his flashlight. The tunnel stretched ahead, curved and endless. Each step echoed, but soon, the echoes multiplied.

It wasn’t just their footsteps. Somewhere ahead, and again behind, came the soft shuffle of shoes on wet tile. At first, the soldier blamed old pipes or his own nerves. But the sound grew, matched their pace, then lagged, then advanced. Sometimes it ran parallel, just out of sight.

The others grew silent. The girl clutched the soldier’s sleeve, her hand ice-cold. The air hummed with tension. Water dripped, and the static hiss grew louder.

Someone whispered, “Did you see that?” No one answered. Shadows shifted on the walls, stretching into strange shapes. The soldier’s heart pounded, but he forced himself forward. The tunnel seemed to breathe, the ceiling lowering with every step.

A sudden, sharp tapping echoed – not footsteps this time, but a distant, frantic knock. The group halted. The soldier counted: thirteen knocks, slow and deliberate, then nothing. The tunnel swallowed the sound, and the footsteps returned, closer now, but still unseen.

The soldier remembered the face at the diner window, and realized with icy certainty: it had no face at all.

Chapter 6: The Toy Phone

The tunnel forked. To the right, darkness pressed tight. To the left, a faint glimmer of red and yellow. Drawn by curiosity, the soldier approached. On the wet tile lay a child’s toy phone, the kind with a plastic receiver and a cartoon dial, its colors faded by years underground. It shouldn’t have been there.

He reached for it, fingers shaking. The plastic was cold, almost sticky. The others stared, speechless.

Then, abruptly, it rang.

The sound was tinny, impossibly loud in the tunnel’s hush. The soldier nearly dropped it. The ring kept on, shrill and insistent, echoing off the tiles. After a moment, he pressed the receiver to his ear, heart hammering.

A hiss of static, then a child’s voice, far away: “Come downstairs. It’s still empty.” The call ended with a sharp click.

The group recoiled, horror dawning on their faces. The toy phone’s dial spun, stopping at thirteen. The soldier placed it back where he’d found it, hands numb. As they turned away, the phone rang again, but no one dared answer.

From deeper in the tunnel came the sound of footsteps, deliberate and unhurried, closing the distance between them and something they could not see.

Chapter 7: The Faceless at the Window

The tunnel bent, and suddenly they were in a wide, circular chamber. The ceiling was cracked, letting in faint patterns of water and grime. In the center stood a broken ticket booth, its glass smeared with old handprints.

A window looked out onto a black void. The soldier stepped closer, compelled by dread. Something hovered on the far side of the glass – a figure, tall and featureless, its head tilted at an unnatural angle. No face, not even a hint of eyes or mouth. It pressed its hands to the glass, palms splayed, as though testing the boundary.

The others cried out, stumbling back. The soldier couldn’t move, couldn’t break the gaze he couldn’t see. The figure’s fingers twitched, leaving streaks of something dark and wet on the inside of the glass.

Suddenly, the lights in their flashlights flickered, plunging the tunnel into near-darkness. The figure vanished from the window. An instant later, footsteps sounded behind the booth, slow and heavy. The soldier spun, but there was nothing there except a faint, cold breath on the back of his neck.

He realized, with a cold clarity, that the thing knew their names. He could feel it pressing at the edges of his mind, trying to slip inside.

Chapter 8: Blood That Doesn’t Belong

Panicked, the group fled the chamber, plunging deeper into the tunnel. The walls seemed to close in, the air thickening with every step. Water pooled at their feet. The soldier’s flashlight beam caught a smear on the wall ahead – a streak of blood, still wet, bright against the dirty tile.

He touched it, then snatched his hand away. The blood was warm, and when he looked at his fingers, the stain was not his. None of the group were bleeding, but the smears continued, forming broken trails along the wall.

The older man muttered, “No one’s been down here for fifty years. That isn’t ours.” The girl whimpered, pressing close.

A metallic tang filled the air, sharp and wrong. A sense of being watched intensified. The soldier saw, or thought he saw, more handprints in the blood – but with too many fingers, or shapes that bent the wrong way.

The phone rang again, further down the tunnel. The soldier heard his own voice echo, tinny and warped: “We thought the house was empty.” He dropped the flashlight. In the darkness, footsteps approached, impossibly close.

He pressed his hand to the wall, feeling the sticky blood, and suddenly the tunnel felt alive, pulsing beneath his palm.

Chapter 9: Losing Your Name

The group stumbled on, their numbers somehow smaller. The air warped, thick with static and dread. The soldier tried to remember the faces of those with him, but their features had faded, blurred at the edges.

The tunnel twisted, turning in on itself. The soldier’s own name felt distant, hard to recall. Every memory surfaced sluggishly, details slipping away. He clung to what he could: the smell of rain, his uniform, the diner’s neon sign.

Each time he blinked, his reflection flickered in the wet tile – but the face was less and less his own. The footsteps grew louder, overlapping with his heartbeat. In the hush, a voice whispered, “Give it up. It’s easier.”

The others began to repeat themselves, speaking in circles. The girl asked for the time, over and over. The older man traced the same name on the wall, letters running red with blood.

The soldier felt the tunnel’s indifference, vast and cold, pressing on his mind. He realized, with a flash of terror, that if he forgot his name here, he’d never leave. The tunnel would keep him, like all the others.

He forced himself to speak his name aloud, voice raw and cracking. The tunnel recoiled, just for a moment, and he moved forward, dragging the others behind.

Chapter 10: The Endless Night

They found themselves back where they started – the broken ticket booth, the smeared glass, the blood on the walls. The tunnel looped, impossible and wrong. The toy phone sat in the center of the floor, ringing insistently.

The soldier picked it up. This time, the voice was his own, but hollow, inhuman: “Come back. We are waiting. Leave your name behind.”

The faceless figure appeared in the window again, closer this time. Its hands pressed the glass, and from the other side, it mimicked the soldier’s movements. He felt a coldness slide through his body, as if something was reaching out for him from beneath the floor.

He realized then that the only way out was to hold tight to who he was, to resist the urge to answer, to refuse the tunnel’s invitation. The others faded behind him, their names already lost.

He staggered back toward the stairs, each step a battle. The footsteps chased him, always just behind, sometimes in front. He never looked back.

Chapter 11: The Irony of Escape

The soldier clawed his way up the stairs, shoving at the hatch until it burst open. Cold rain poured in, washing the blood from his hands. He gasped, dragging himself into the parking lot. The diner’s neon sign flickered in the distance.

He ran, breath ragged, not daring to look back. Inside, the diner was as before – the booths, the waitress, the pie. But the people he’d left the tunnel with were gone, their seats empty, names already forgotten.

The soldier tried to speak, but found he couldn’t recall his own name. The waitress handed him a cup of coffee, her hand lingering on his for a moment. “Rough night?” she asked, but she seemed not to recognize him.

He glanced at the counter. There, impossibly, sat the toy phone. It rang once, twice, thirteen times. No one else seemed to hear it.

He picked up the receiver, desperate. His own voice whispered, “We thought the house was empty.” The line went dead.

Outside, the storm passed. But the soldier knew, with a cold certainty, that a part of him was still in the tunnel. And he would never get it back.

Chapter 12: Back to the Circle

The lantern guttered low as I finished. My voice was thin, words echoing in the hush. “The soldier never did find peace, or his name. Sometimes, on rainy nights, folks say you can still hear the bell toll thirteen times, and footsteps with no source. And if you ever find a toy phone in a place it shouldn’t be, don’t answer. Not unless you’re ready to leave something behind.”

I set the lantern down in the center. Silence pressed in, thick and cold. After a long, shivering moment, another hand reached out for the lantern, ready to speak.