Part 2 – The First Disappearance
Mara told herself she was imagining things. Data anomalies happened all the time—misaligned timestamps, faulty sensors, corrupted logs. But the thought gnawed at her.
The next morning, she arrived at the office early, before most of her colleagues. The building was still half-dark, the hum of the HVAC the only sound. She logged into the traffic monitoring system and pulled up the previous day’s tunnel data.
The discrepancy was still there.
She drilled deeper, isolating the missing vehicles by registration number. Most were ordinary sedans, a few utes, the occasional delivery van. Nothing unusual—except that when she cross-referenced the plates with VicRoads’ records, she found that several belonged to people who hadn’t renewed their licences in years. Others were registered to companies that no longer existed.
It was as if the tunnel was swallowing ghosts.
By mid-morning, she’d convinced herself she needed to speak to someone in person. She called her friend Daniel, a traffic operations supervisor who worked out of the control centre near Docklands.
“Hey, Dan. You got a minute?”
“For you? Always. What’s up?”
“I’m seeing some weird numbers on the West Gate Tunnel feeds. Vehicles going in, not coming out. You noticed anything like that?”
There was a pause on the line. “We’ve had a few… anomalies. But it’s probably just sensor drift. Happens when the calibration’s off.”
“Sensor drift doesn’t account for the same cars disappearing day after day,” Mara said.
Another pause. “Look, Mara, I’d keep that to yourself. Management doesn’t like people making noise about the tunnel. It’s the Premier’s pet project. You start throwing around words like ‘disappearing cars’ and you’ll find yourself reassigned to counting bicycles in Brunswick.”
She hung up feeling more unsettled than before. Dan wasn’t the type to spook easily, but there’d been something in his voice—something tight, like he was holding back.
That afternoon, she decided to take a walk along one of the old freight routes, the kind that had been choked with trucks before the tunnel opened. The change was startling.
The air was cleaner, the constant diesel haze gone. The asphalt looked almost new without the daily punishment of heavy vehicles. But the street felt… abandoned.
She passed shuttered shopfronts, their “For Lease” signs curling in the sun. A tyre shop that had been there for decades was closed, the windows dusty. A corner café sat empty except for the owner, who was wiping down the same spotless counter over and over.
“Quiet day?” Mara asked as she stepped inside.
The man gave a humourless laugh. “Every day’s a quiet day now. Used to have truckies in here from five a.m. Now? I’m lucky if I get ten customers before lunch.”
“Guess the tunnel’s working,” she said, trying to sound casual.
“Working too well, maybe. People vanish when things get too quiet.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged, but his eyes flicked toward the window. “Old Mick, for one. Came in here every morning for twenty years. One day, he drives through that tunnel on his way to the port. Never seen again. Cops say he probably moved up north. But he left his dog behind. Who does that?”
Mara felt a chill creep up her spine.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying the café owner’s words. People vanish when things get too quiet.
At 2 a.m., she gave up on sleep and padded into her living room, switching on her laptop. She pulled up the tunnel’s live feed. The cameras showed the usual late-night trickle of vehicles—mostly freight trucks and the occasional taxi.
She watched for nearly an hour, her eyes growing heavy, until something caught her attention.
A white van entered from the western portal. She tracked it through the first few cameras—Portal West, Section A, Section B. But when it should have appeared on Section C, it didn’t.
She rewound the footage. The van was there one moment, gone the next. No swerving, no slowing down. Just… gone.
Her pulse quickened. She checked the exit feed. No sign of it.
She ran the plate through the VicRoads database. The van was registered to a small plumbing business in Altona. She called the number listed on the file, half-expecting it to go to voicemail.
A man answered on the second ring, his voice groggy.
“Yeah?”
“Hi, this is Mara Vance from VicRoads. I’m trying to confirm the whereabouts of one of your vehicles—a white van, registration YQH-472. It was last recorded entering the West Gate Tunnel tonight.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“That’s… not possible,” the man said finally. “That van’s been missing for three days. Police said they couldn’t find it anywhere in the city.”
Mara’s skin prickled. She glanced back at the paused footage of the van disappearing mid-tunnel.
It hadn’t been missing.
It had been taken.