I’ve been in Arizona for the last month and the scariest place I’ve been is a set of railroad tracks.
You’d think it’d be somewhere in the desert where there’s miles of nothing in every direction. Shapeshifters and chupacabras popping in and out of shadow among sagebrush and creosote bushes, red eyes glowing between the arms of saguaros.
Instead, it’s along the stretch of tracks that run south to Picacho, split east along the Gila River. It didn’t happen on accident, either. What we did was use an app to show us something scary on purpose. Because why wouldn’t you, right?
The thing is, I didn’t expect it to actually work.
This was a sort of date night, if you can call it that. We didn’t go anywhere fancy. We ate dinner at home, even. Alex and me in our dark little cave with plates of deconstructed sushi: salmon and rice and seaweed strips. We were kind of dressed for the occasion. So, why not, right?
Getting scared shitless is kind of romantic, I guess, yeah.
The two of us held hands in the car, laughed like this was all some big adventure. Like two school kids about to carve our initials into a tree. There wasn’t enough darkness in the night to blot the streetlights sparkling in her eyes, and I wanted them to light our way forever.
We eased into a neighborhood and she grabbed my hand, pulled me toward the arterial street that connected the two sides of the city. The cars were so close it threw wind that tousled our hair. I directed Alex to the inner part of the sidewalk while she looked at the map on her phone. Stretched it with her fingers to see how much further we had to go.
The way the app is supposed to work is through intention. And quantum computers, or something. The gist is that once you’ve thought of something—focused on something with all of your willpower—the app spits out a random location on a map. Head to the pin and wait, see what shows up.
All over the internet you can find videos of people rolling up in some back alley, somewhere the app has taken them, driving down a deserted road in the middle of the woods, where some—thing—shows up. Something too hard to see in all the darkness our phones can’t process. What you can make out, though, are definitive shapes: Shoulders, legs. Something hunched over, running, alongside a car, the full moon in view over the mountains.
But Alex is used to this stuff. Doesn’t even bat an eyelash at the outline of some misty figure crossing the street, hearing disembodied voices in another room. She just shrugs like this is just another day at the office. Like this is the way world works.
Maybe it does.
Me, my heart was beating out of my chest, my stomach knotting up, even if I was pretending to play it cool. I had no idea what to expect, is what I mean. And our mind, it spits out the worst things in the world. With all the stories read on the internet, the images your imagination conjures up are more horrible than the most terrifying paranormal stories. So, I just gripped her hand tighter and puffed my chest out at the night like the big bad boyfriend I was supposed to be, trying to protect her from all the things she didn’t need to be protected from. The things I was too scared to ever confront on my own.
This was basically her job, after all. And I totally wasn’t the one that screamed at the cockroach that skittered across our path, either.
Later, someone asked why the hell we’d walk toward the darkness?
Because the first victims of a horror movie aren’t exactly all that irrational like we think they are. And, obviously, it’s because we’re edgy. That makes sense, right? The couple in all black and tattoos? Yeah, we’re totally just one step away from cutting pentagrams into our palms and dropping blood into a bowl of some witchy concoction. We need that thrill in our lives because social media only makes you want to pull your hair out. It’s a different kind of rush, you know? Plus, what’s that thing they say about love? That it makes you kind of irrational?
I don’t know how much more I can beat a dead horse with this joke.
Anyway, my friend who asked about the darkness, what I did instead of saying anything was just shrug into the empty bedroom I was in. Because why do we do anything ever, if not to simply see what happens?
Which isn’t exactly an answer, but it’s the thing that kept us going. Following the map.
We took a left down the walking path that followed a canal and watched tiny bats skim the surface of the water for bugs. The night was warm and quiet, the way my memory of summers felt as a kid. It was just us and the freedom of being alive. Nowhere to be except right where we were, together. Occasionally we’d pass muffled voices drifting from someone’s backyard and I’d grip her hand tighter and pretend like I wasn’t holding my breath. The way a scared deer tenses up, freezes, before bolting between the trees.
“Are you scared?” Alex asked, really drawing it out, pulling my arm in closer and squeezing.
I turned and looked over my shoulder. Swallowed hard, and said no, watching the busy street get further away, the sound of cars and safety fading.
The map brought us to a bridge where the train tracks intersected the canal. By this point the streetlights in nearby neighborhoods was the only light we had. Maybe an occasional backyard floodlight. I could see my hand in front of my face, yeah, but if you asked me how many fingers you were holding up I might not be able to tell you.
It was dark, is what I’m getting at.
So when that single light flickered on ahead, growing brighter, coming toward us, the first thing I did was try not to shit my pants.
The next thing I did, because I was being all brave, was to kind of inch forward, ready to put myself between whatever this was and my girlfriend. Really, I wasn’t doing anyone any favors; I’m 145 pounds soaking wet, if you want to know how not tough I am. But I was trying to be the protector, so that whatever was coming toward us would get me first. Hopefully giving her a chance to get away. Jump in the canal and swim to safety, or something.
For a couple minutes we waited. Watched that little light hovering in the air. Alex and I traded glances, both of us tensed up. Maybe it was just me gripping onto her so hard that it felt like both of us. Do we keep walking? Do we turn around and give our back up? Instead, we did neither and just stared at whatever this was.
What rounded the bend wasn’t anything except some normal, not-scary guy on a bike, though. He didn’t even look at us when he passed. Just kept on down the pathway toward the road where we’d come from.
If he would’ve dinged a little bell as he passed I might’ve screamed.
It was weird timing, I have to admit. I even thought for a second that maybe this was the odd thing the app was guiding us toward. Some chance encounter that wasn’t really anything other than just tension, which I think let me relax a little bit.
But when Alex looked down at the map again, we saw that we still had a five minute walk down the train tracks, further into darkness.
Thinking back, it didn’t occur to me that we could’ve turned around right then. We didn’t have to walk any further. We didn’t have to let that audible ping from the app drag us along the railroad ties, toward that blanket of velvet that crept up the embankment toward us. But we turned on our flashlights and pressed forward, trying not to lose our footing in the darkness.
Where the ping changed tone, told us we were right on top of it, was where the trees and brush grew thick against a concrete wall at the backside of someone’s property. Graffiti peeked through the foliage, silver and black and green. We stood there listening to our hearts beating in our ears. It was that and the crickets screaming around us.
“Is this it?” I asked.
And then a twig snapped.
We both shined our lights toward the noise, where the gravel of the track ballast sloped down the embankment to dirt. Where all the trees and brush were waiting, hiding something.
I felt Alex turn, her feet twisting in the rocks.
“There’s someone down there,” she said, aiming her flashlight back in the direction we’d come.
At the junction of the canal, I could just make out the shape of a head and shoulders against the night sky. It didn’t move, didn’t waver, even. I shined my light back to the trees and bushes, half expecting something to be standing there too. Like we were being ambushed and this app had set us up to feed our souls to some super computer in another country.
“What do we do?” Alex asked about the person guarding our exit.
We did what they do in every horror movie ever: we walked toward the shadow. every person in the theater would be groaning right about now. But, really, the only other option was running further down the tracks, hopping over someone’s back fence and booking it through some neighborhood.
“Let’s say hi,” she said out of nowhere, and kept pulling me forward.
Both of our lights pointed in that direction, like we were going to intimidate whoever this was then. We talked louder, the way you do to overcompensate nerves, tried to reason what we were going to say once we reached them. That if we talked loud enough, maybe that alone would scare them off.
By the time we got close enough, though, we realized that it was just—a man? Standing there on his phone?
We didn’t say hi, didn’t exchange greetings. I’m pretty sure he didn’t even look at us. The guy just stood there next to his bike with his backward hat, his phone screen illuminating his face. What made sense to me was that this was some sort of drug thing. He was waiting for someone else to drop off weed, or something, but got us weirdos instead.
So what he did was he got on his bike and left. Leaving us alone to talk about how strange the night was shaping up to be.
We sat on the tracks for a while and listened to the muffled sound of dogs barking in a house nearby. The distant rush of a car revving. We held hands, gripped hard, like we were two kids running away from home. Following these tracks to greater opportunities than whatever mold this town was trying to fit us into.
After enough of the heat, the mosquitos, we dusted ourselves off, linked arms and headed back to the car. About twenty feet from the tracks Alex casually said, “I saw something.”
“What do you mean?”
She laughed and we kept walking.
“What?” I pressed, “What did you see?”
“It was this, I don’t know, ten foot tall shadow thing on the tracks.”
I stopped walking.
“Seriously?”
I turned around and did what every horror movie audience would scream at me for doing, and hoofed it back to the tracks. This character is for sure dying this time, the whole theater just knows. But no way was I going to miss seeing something like that if we were right there. After the night we had, the edging we put ourselves through, I needed to see something weird.
“Are you going to take a picture?” She called after me, “Take two!”
At the tracks I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I squinted into the dark where we’d been standing not even ten minutes before, told myself there was something there. Had to be. I couldn’t have missed it, no way.
I held my breath and snapped two photos. I think I even closed my eyes when the flash lit up my surroundings, so that what I remember when I took the picture was just the gray color of the back of my eyelids.
At the car, Alex told me that what she'd seen was tall and thin, walking slow down the tracks toward us. Like a predator stalking prey.
And what we caught on the camera were a pair of glowing eyes. Not the way a cat’s eyes reflect light, but like the eyes themselves were emitting it.
By the time we got home it felt like we’d gone to see some horror movie, the way the adrenaline of the scares wear off. The safety of your house, your space, taking over. We talked about the night in bed, laughed about it, even. Didn’t think twice when we turned the lights out and we were just shapes in the dark like everything else.
Nothing’s changed much in the weeks since that night. The only real difference is that I still sometimes wake in a cold sweat. Sure those eyes are going to light up the window from where that shadow figure is standing. Shifting in the rocks next to the bedroom. Hunching over and leaning in, like to burst through the glass, grab us both and drag us out into the night.
It’s the reason we’re in the car again, letting the app take us to a new location. To find answers.
In a random back alley, the tiny office in some abandoned warehouse, we’ll let the app lead us to something else. Some shadow in the dark that’s just black mist. We’ll ask if it knows what we’re supposed to do here, let it point us to somewhere in the Superstition Mountains where people go missing every year. They say the locations the app spits out are random every time, but what it feels like is something closer to sending us spiraling inward to a mouth. To something hungry and waiting.
The first time we pressed that button was for the thrill, yeah, but the last time we press it, it’ll because we can’t stand the nightmares anymore.
I love going on adventures together with you. You have a true gift with words. I felt like I was there all over again! But- You’ve got to give yourself some credit for going back to snap that photo. A ten foot tall shadowy humanoid figure would send any normal person running! 🖤
I've been grinning like an idiot the whole time I've been reading this. You're definitely setting your self up to get eaten by something. Great job.