Chloe's farewell had been tense. Her warning about "dangerous curiosity" resonated in (Y/N)'s mind as the darkness of the night enveloped him. Every step moved him further from normalcy and closer to a truth that refused to stay hidden. But before diving into the dark subway, (Y/N) felt the need to explore another darkness: that of the internet.
Upon arriving at his apartment, he turned on his computer. He knew it was a window to a library of information, and he hoped it would also be a window to the answers he needed. Chloe had said the subway was "a strange place, subject to legends" and that "there are things that move beneath the tracks." What kind of legends?
With a shiver, (Y/N) opened his browser. He started with simple searches: "abandoned subway legends," "central metro horror stories," "central station disappearances." At first, only old newspaper articles about line construction or minor accidents appeared, and the occasional urbex (urban exploration) blog with blurry photos of graffiti.
But (Y/N) knew he had to go deeper. He remembered seeing discussion forums about paranormal topics or "creepypastas" where people shared strange experiences. He searched for local forums and threads about "haunted places" or "unexplained phenomena" in the city.
Soon, he found valuable information. An old thread on a little-known forum, titled "The Tracks That Never Sleep." The date of the last post was almost a year old, but the comments dated back a decade. He started reading.
The first posts were typical: sightings of shadows in closed tunnels, strange noises when the subway wasn't running, the feeling of being watched. But as (Y/N) delved deeper, the stories became more unsettling:
User "GhostHunter77": "I once snuck into the abandoned section of Central. I swear I heard whispers in the air, as if hundreds of voices were speaking at the same time, but I couldn't understand a single word. I felt a cold that went right to my bones. I ran out of there."
User "UndergroundDreamer": "My brother worked in subway maintenance years ago. He used to talk about people getting lost in the tunnels. They didn't disappear completely; they were found days later, disoriented. But he said their eyes were vacant, as if they had seen something that stole their soul. He was never the same after one of those searches."
User "Alex_P.A.": (Y/N) stopped dead in his tracks. The name. "Alex_P.A."? Could it be Alex? The date of the post was two years old. "I went into an abandoned train car near Central Station. I saw something. It's not just shadows. They are looking for me, they want to devour me. They are whispering that if I return I will finally be at peace."
(Y/N)'s pulse quickened. "Finally at peace." The same phrase Chloe had mentioned. And the abandoned train car. This was no coincidence. Alex had been investigating. Or worse, he had been contacted by that thing.
He read one more post, a particularly disturbing one from "UrbanExplorerX":
"UrbanExplorerX": "I ventured into the deepest section. My flashlight started to fail. I heard a whisper, not of the wind, but of something alive and enormous. I felt a terror so profound that I thought about... throwing myself onto the tracks. I barely made it out of there. That place wants to take advantage of you. If you hear a whisper, don't go."
(Y/N) leaned back in his chair, his heart pounding. The rumors. The forums. The warnings. It all pointed to the same thing: the subway was not a normal place. It was an entity. And it had an appetite.
Alex's "imperfection." Chloe's emptiness. (Y/N)'s recovered vitality after his accident. All the pieces fit into a sinister pattern. The subway didn't kill people; it stripped them of something, leaving them empty or using them for its own purposes.
He turned off the computer, the screen light slowly dying. The darkness of the apartment grew denser, now charged with the whispering voices from the forums, the laments of the explorers, and the echo of Alex's "peace."
Autor:
I really don't know what I'm writing; my original plan for this novel was quite different