Part 3 \u2013 The Missing Names
Mara didn\u2019t sleep that night. She sat at her kitchen table with the laptop open, the tunnel\u2019s live feed running in one window and a spreadsheet in another. The white van\u2019s disappearance had shifted something in her mind \u2014 this wasn\u2019t a glitch, wasn\u2019t a coincidence.
It was a pattern.
She began pulling the last month\u2019s worth of tunnel entry and exit logs, cross-referencing every vehicle that entered but didn\u2019t appear on the other side. The list grew longer than she expected. At first, she thought she\u2019d find maybe a dozen anomalies. By the time the sun began to lighten the sky outside her window, she had forty-seven.
Forty-seven vehicles that had gone in and never come out.
She leaned back, rubbing her eyes. The list was strange \u2014 not just in its size, but in its composition. There were no high-profile cars, no luxury sedans or flashy sports models. Most were older vehicles: work vans, second-hand sedans, a few battered utes.
She began looking up the registered owners. That\u2019s when the unease deepened.
A man in his sixties who lived alone in a weatherboard house in Spotswood.
A woman in her forties who\u2019d been renting the same flat in Footscray for over a decade.
A delivery driver whose only listed emergency contact was a sister in Perth.
The more she checked, the more she realised: these were people who could vanish without setting off alarms. No large families. No high-profile jobs. No one who would make the evening news if they disappeared.
It was as if something \u2014 or someone \u2014 was choosing them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By mid-morning, she was back at the VicRoads office, running on caffeine and adrenaline. She tried to focus on her regular workload, but her mind kept drifting back to the spreadsheet.
At lunch, she printed the list and took it to Daniel in the control centre. He looked at it for less than ten seconds before pushing it back toward her.
\u201cYou shouldn\u2019t have this,\u201d he said quietly.
\u201cWhy not?\u201d
\u201cBecause if you do, you\u2019re going to start asking questions. And if you start asking questions, you\u2019re going to get answers you don\u2019t want.\u201d
She stared at him. \u201cDan, forty-seven vehicles have gone missing in less than a month. That\u2019s not a calibration error. That\u2019s not a glitch. That\u2019s\u2014\u201d
\u201cStop.\u201d His voice was sharp now. \u201cYou think you\u2019re the first person to notice? You\u2019re not. But the people who dig too deep into this\u2026 they don\u2019t stick around.\u201d
\u201cWhat does that mean?\u201d
He hesitated, then leaned closer. \u201cDo yourself a favour, Mara. Drop it. Go back to counting traffic flow on the Monash. Forget the tunnel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She didn\u2019t drop it.
That evening, she went to the State Library, telling herself she was just curious about the tunnel\u2019s construction history. She requested access to the archives \u2014 old planning documents, geological surveys, anything that might explain why the tunnel\u2019s path had been chosen.
Most of it was dry reading: soil composition reports, engineering diagrams, environmental impact statements. But buried in a folder of 19th-century survey maps, she found something that made her pulse quicken.
It was a hand-drawn chart from the 1850s, showing the land along the Yarra River before industrial development. The area where the tunnel now ran was shaded in dark ink, marked with the words: The Hollow Beneath.
In the margin, in faded brown handwriting, someone had scrawled: unstable ground, avoid excavation \u2014 whispers heard at night.
Mara traced the shaded area with her finger. The tunnel\u2019s route cut directly through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She left the library just as the sun was setting, the city bathed in a coppery glow. The streets were busy here, full of after-work crowds and the smell of food from nearby restaurants. But as she walked toward her car, she couldn\u2019t shake the feeling that she was being watched.
She glanced over her shoulder. A man in a dark jacket was standing across the street, half-hidden in the shadow of a doorway. He wasn\u2019t looking at his phone, wasn\u2019t talking to anyone \u2014 just standing there, facing her.
When she turned fully to look, he stepped back into the darkness and was gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That night, she added the map to her growing file of evidence. She stared at the shaded section marked The Hollow Beneath, the looping handwriting warning of whispers in the dark.
Her apartment was silent except for the faint hum of her fridge, but as she sat there, she thought she heard something else \u2014 a low, almost imperceptible murmur, like voices speaking just beyond the edge of hearing.
She froze, holding her breath. The sound seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, curling around her like a draft.
When she finally moved to close the file, she realised her hands were trembling.
Whatever The Hollow Beneath was, it wasn\u2019t just history.
It was awake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That night, she added the map to her growing file of evidence. She stared at it for a long time, the words The Hollow Beneath seeming to darken the longer she looked.
She thought about the forty-seven missing vehicles. About the fact that they all belonged to people who could vanish without much notice. About the white van that had been \u201cmissing\u201d for three days before she saw it disappear in real time.
And now there was this \u2014 a century-and-a-half-old warning not to dig where the tunnel now ran.
She opened her laptop and began searching for any mention of The Hollow Beneath in historical records. Most of what she found was vague \u2014 snippets from old newspapers about \u201cstrange noises\u201d heard by dock workers, a few references in colonial diaries to \u201cthe ground that swallows.\u201d
One entry, from 1861, caught her attention:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe men refuse to work the site after dark. They say the earth hums beneath their feet, and that the hum is not the sound of water but of something breathing. I have heard it myself, though I will not admit it to them. The sound is low, steady, and it seems to come from far below. I do not believe it is the wind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mara sat back, her skin prickling.
Breathing.
She closed the laptop and sat in the dark for a while, listening to the faint hum of the city outside her window. She told herself it was just an old superstition, the kind of thing people invented to explain natural phenomena they didn\u2019t understand.
But she couldn\u2019t shake the feeling that the tunnel had opened something that was never meant to be opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next morning, she decided to test something. She drove to the western portal of the tunnel and parked in a nearby lot. From there, she could see the steady stream of vehicles entering \u2014 commuters, delivery vans, the occasional truck.
She sat there for nearly an hour, jotting down the plates of random vehicles as they passed. Later, back at her desk, she ran them through the system.
Three of them never appeared on the exit logs.
Three vehicles, gone in the space of an hour.
She stared at the screen, her stomach twisting. This wasn\u2019t a slow trickle. This was constant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That evening, she called Daniel again.
\u201cI know you told me to drop it,\u201d she said, \u201cbut I can\u2019t. This is happening every day. People are disappearing.\u201d
There was a long silence on the line.
Finally, he said, \u201cMeet me tomorrow. Somewhere public. I\u2019ll tell you what I know.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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