Tales from the Coffee Pot

THE SENSABAUGH TUNNEL

Sam Wells stared into the seemingly endless tunnel of darkness that stretched out before him, wishing with all he had that he could turn around and leave. Clouds of his frozen breath drifted up into the chilly October night, toward a starless sky obscured by thick rainclouds. His heart hammered madly in his ears, almost louder than the steady rush of creek-water that drooled out of the tunnel’s entrance, like the saliva of some ravenous monster waiting to devour him. There was a road in there, at least there was supposed to be, submerged beneath the half-foot of water that had claimed the Sensabaugh Tunnel as its own. Sam only knew that from the tales he’d heard. People would drive their cars through the tunnel, stop in the middle, shut off their engine, and run three times around the car so as to ward off the demon that was said to dwell inside. If you made it three laps, you lived to tell the tale, but any less than three and your soul belonged to the Devil himself.

At least that was how one variation of the story went.

The tunnel entrance was some ten feet high, maybe eight wide, and it extended two hundred feet through a hillside beneath a set of train tracks owned by the Clinchfield Railroad. The front wall around the tunnel was covered with all sorts of graffiti–peoples’ names, lovers’ initials, misshapen hearts, and the occasional pentagram–with even more spray-painted markings disappearing into the shadows deeper in. Sam leaned forward and tried to count just how many Star of David’s had been mistakenly painted on the walls in the name of Satan, but it was hard to tell from here. There were at least two on the–

A high-pitched shriek tore past his ear.

Sam jumped forward and nearly ran right into the tunnel, but the outburst of his best friend’s laughter brought him to his senses.

“Jesus,” Marcus Boone laughed, wiping his eyes, “if I didn’t know better I’d say Sammy here is scared!”

“No I’m not,” Sam muttered, turning his back on the tunnel as if to prove his point. Marcus stood before the headlights of his dad’s old Explorer, hands jammed in the pockets of his letterman jacket. He was stocky and square-faced, with a buzzed haircut that practically screamed “quarterback.”

Beside him, a brown-haired girl in a red and white sweater stood clutching her elbows against the cold air. Maddie Sanders suppressed her laugh and playfully elbowed her boyfriend in the ribs. “Leave him alone.”

“Hell, I wouldn’t blame him,” Marcus said, his expression becoming suddenly serious. “You all know the tunnel’s history, don’t you?”

“What history?” Maddie asked, as if she didn’t know. Which was ridiculous–everyone in the Tri-Cities knew the story.

Marcus shook his head and walked around to the driver side of his car. “Not out here. Too risky.” He looked over his shoulder several times and held a finger up to his lips before getting in.

Sam grinned and rolled his eyes, having heard the story a dozen times, mostly by Marcus. If nothing else, he was dramatic. Sam climbed into the back passenger-side seat as Maddie got in the front, and all three doors clacked shut at the same time. Marcus shifted the car into drive and let it ease forward with the high whine of old brake pads, pulling the three of them closer to the mouth of the tunnel with the slow deliberation of a roller coaster nearing the crest of its first big drop. The front wheels bumped over the tunnel’s lip and Marcus brought the car to a slow stop, reaching up to turn on the interior lights. They were dim lights, just bright enough to reveal the smudged shape of Marcus’ face as he turned to look at his two passengers.

“Back in the fifties,” he began quietly, “a man and his family lived in a farm house just past the end of this tunnel. They were called the Sensabaughs, and as you may have guessed this tunnel is named after them. Well, Mr. Sensabaugh spent his whole life providing for his wife and two kids, working every day in the mines to put food on the table. They were the perfect little family, never having any problems or tragedies to upset that balance, at least not until 1957.

“That year, there was an explosion in the mine Mr. Sensabaugh worked in, some kind of cave-in. He lost his entire crew that day, seven men who were buried under a thousand tons of rock and rubble. Mr. Sensabaugh was the only survivor. When he returned home, he wasn’t the same man who had walked into those mines earlier that day. People said he was different somehow, like seeing all his friends killed at the same time changed something in the man’s head.”

Sam snorted. “Yeah, that’ll do it.”

Marcus didn’t so much as crack a smile. “Some said he wasn’t a man at all, not after that day.”

“What was he?” Maddie whispered, as if the two had rehearsed the story a dozen times.

Marcus slowly looked to her. “The Devil.”

Sam grinned and looked out his window, seeing only his darkened reflection staring back at him. He quickly looked away.

“Mr. Sensabaugh became a shut-in for two whole weeks. Didn’t look for work, didn’t tend to the farm, didn’t go to church with his wife and kids. Just sat in the cellar by himself, staring at the corner of the room with none of the lights on and the door closed shut. His wife invited friends and family over to try and cheer him up, but Mr. Sensabaugh wouldn’t leave the dark. He just sat down there and screamed bloody murder if anyone tried to come down to bother him. He didn’t even eat or drink for those two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” Sam asked. “He’d be dead.” He realized he had taken the bait as soon as the words left his lips.

Marcus slowly turned his head to him. “He already was.”

Maddie covered her mouth.

“Mr. Sensabaugh did leave his basement after those two weeks, though. At midnight, some stormy October night much like tonight, he climbed up the cellar steps and went into his bedroom, pickax in hand. Without so much as a flinch, he raised it over his wife and bashed her head in, then went to each of the other rooms of the house and did the same to his kids. The cops found their bodies all mangled and bloody, but Mr. Sensabaugh had disappeared in the night without a trace. He was never seen again.”

“Dude, that’s just messed up,” Sam said. He tapped Maddie’s arm, making her jump. “You see what kind of sick freak you’re going out with?”

But Marcus was too engrossed in his own dramatic storytelling to pay him any attention. “Of course, he has been seen since then. Right here, in this tunnel. This is where he dwells now, either a ghost or a demon, whatever. It only needs two things to survive, the only two things that Mr. Sensabaugh wanted after that cave-in happened: quiet and darkness. Some say that’s why he came to the tunnel, because it reminded him of the mine where he died. That’s why when you drive through it, through his tunnel, you have to turn off your lights and kill the engine, then run three times around the car. Once for his wife, twice for his two kids. If you don’t, he’ll follow you home with his bloody pick, and the second you fall asleep BAM!”

Maddie screamed and Sam jumped back in his seat, but Marcus just laughed harder than he had the whole night.

“Asshole!” she hissed, repeatedly hitting his arm as he tried to regain his composure.

“You still with us back there, Sammy?” Marcus said between laughs.

Sam couldn’t help but laugh at his own fright. “Yeah, still here.”

“Good,” Marcus said, easing off the brakes. The Explorer rolled further inside, back tires bumping up over the lip, and they all plunged into the cool darkness of the tunnel. The sound of water rushing past the tires quietly rose up through the glass of the windows, like hushed whispers coming from the next room over.

“M-Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” Maddie stammered, clutching Marcus’ arm tightly. It was nearly impossible to see anything in the car, but the headlights probed out into the dark and reflected off the rippling surface of the creek over the road as it made its way past them, throwing up shimmering lines of light onto the tunnel’s ceiling. The light reached past the spray-painted walls, stretching as far as they could toward the far exit of the tunnel but never quite getting to the end.

“We can’t leave now, we’re already in his domain,” Marcus answered gravely. “We have to go on and finish it.”

Sam swallowed and watched out his window, seeing only a half-moon sliver of the headlight crawling along the wall as the car crept forward. He was up to two pentagrams, three Star of Davids, and a single out-of-place peace sign so far, and that was just on the right wall of the tunnel. He didn’t want to look out the windshield. He knew exactly what would happen: his mind would start filling in the dark canvas with all sorts of horrifying images lifted from late-night Sci-Fi thrillers. With the refracted beam of light moving over the painted wall, Sam’s world was defined and real, incapable of morphing into something scary. But ahead of the car’s headlights, the darkness had no bounds or rules. Anything could happen in those depths, and with his overactive imagination, Sam knew that anything would.

Several excruciatingly slow moments later, the Explorer’s brakes groaned and Marcus shifted the car into park.

“Here we go,” he whispered, and with that he shut off the engine.

The entire world snapped into silent, pitch-black darkness. Sam blinked his eyes several times and felt them instinctively grow wide with the sudden disappearance of light, like the dark was some living thing trying to pry them open wide enough to crawl inside and nest in his head.

“Now what?” Maddie breathed, her voice shattering the ringing silence.

“Now,” Marcus replied, “we run three times around the car, one at a time. Then we get the hell out of here.”

“That’s stupid.”

“That’s the rules. Who’s going first?”

Sam remained perfectly still and made his breathing as casual as possible, the way you do when the teacher asks the class a question but you haven’t been listening.

“Sammy?”

“Why don’t you show us how it’s done,” Sam offered.

“Okay. I’m not afraid of the dark.” The driver door opened and Marcus hopped outside, briefly filling the car with the dim glow of the interior lights, but they went dark as soon as the door clacked shut.

“He’s such a dumbass,” Maddie laughed, but her voice was strained.

“Yeah.” Sam had known Marcus since the fourth grade, back when they had played Little League together and spent the summers exploring the mountains behind their houses. Those days stood out in Sam’s mind as the epitome of a good childhood, leaving memories so strong he could practically smell the fresh-cut grass and old leather of his baseball glove.

Maddie had come into the picture in the ninth grade, after moving from South Carolina with her mom and two sisters, but she had fit right in at school and even moreso with Sam and Marcus. She started dating Marcus a year later, and ever since then the three had been one of those strange, three-wheeled relationships that felt like something out of a sitcom. None of them knew what would happen after graduation, and to be honest none of them wanted to think about it. Most likely, they would all go their separate ways to different colleges and pursue different careers, but there was always the hope that the friendship would still be able to live on, even if it became a twice-a-month hangout. But it would be fine.

A loud knock on Sam’s window sent him flinching back, and he let out an aggravated sigh at being scared a third time by Marcus. He might not have been afraid of the dark, but Sam sure was. One of those things he had just never grown out of, he guessed. In the dark, even the most innocent of shapes stood out like the outline of some predatory animal stalking you in preparation to attack. Which was admittedly a good instinct for survival, but it made it all the more terrifying for the survivor. Yet here he found himself, talked into tagging along to what was known as the scariest, darkest place in a fifty mile radius. Why on God’s green Earth had he agreed to go?

The driver side door opened and Marcus jumped in, his grinning face lit by the car lights until they turned off when he shut the door. “That’s three! Who’s next?”

Sam swallowed but his dry throat stuck painfully to itself. If he went last, he’d never hear the end of it from Marcus. Also, it wouldn’t surprise him in the least if he got out of the car and found himself locked out, Marcus cackling behind the wheel. Granted, even if he went second the same thing was likely to happen, but at least then Marcus wouldn’t be able to say that he had chickened out and made Maddie go before him. Either way he would have to step outside and run around the car, so it really didn’t matter when he did it. Sam wrung his hands together and reached for his door handle, having made up his mind. The sooner he got out and did what he had to do, the sooner his mind could rid itself of the anxiety of waiting to do it.

Maddie’s door swung open before Sam could find his handle. “I’ll do it.”

Sam dropped his hand, relieved and yet somehow even more stressed than he had been.

“Three times!” Marcus called after her as she shut the door.

A few seconds passed. “How was it?”

Marcus sighed. “Not too bad. Hard to see where you’re going, though. Creek’s against the wall and I waded right into it.”

“But you didn’t see anything?” Sam added a quick laugh to conceal his own fear, but he doubted it worked.

“Nope. Just heard the water.” Marcus laughed to himself and Sam caught the faint click of the passenger door being locked.

“Oh that’s just cruel.”

“She’s gonna lose her shit.”

A minute later, Maddie pulled on her door handle and, upon finding it locked, started frantically banging against the window. Marcus waited a few more seconds, cackling with the success of his prank exactly as Sam had imagined he would, and finally unlocked it. The door flew open and Maddie jumped inside, repeatedly smacking his arm even harder than she had earlier. “What is wrong with you?”

“See anything?” Sam asked, a bit too quickly.

“No,” she hit Marcus’ arm again, “but it’s creepy as hell out there.” She smacked him one more time for good measure. “And don’t worry,” she added bitterly, “I’ll make sure you don’t get locked out, too.”

“Thanks,” Sam muttered. He opened his door and reluctantly stepped outside, feeling the cold air of the tunnel wrap around his body like a wintry embrace.

“Three times!” Marcus reminded him, receiving another hit on the arm.

Sam pushed his door closed and immediately regretted it. The air was a good twenty degrees colder than it had been outside the tunnel, a result of the icy creek that flowed through it and filled the dark with a cold, moldy smell. His feet were still dry, so Marcus had at least been telling the truth about the water being against the wall. He could hear it rushing along from the other side of the Explorer, filling the long corridor with an eerie, whispering echo that emphasized just how long the tunnel was. The very air around him felt damp and frozen, but at least the water wasn’t around his feet.

Totally blind, Sam reached out touched the car, feeling his way toward Maddie’s window and around the front bumper. The whole time he stumbled ahead, he felt like there would be some unseen, low-hanging stone that he would slam his face right into, but there wasn’t. As he rounded the front bumper, he braced for the explosion of Marcus blaring the horn, but to his relief that didn’t happen either.

See? This isn’t so bad, he thought, feeling his way past the driver-side door. You’re already halfway to being a third of the way done, and it’s not even that scary. Like walking with your eyes closed.

As he passed the back door, his foot dropped into a hole that he quickly realized was full of the frigid creek water, soaking his shoe all the way through. So much for there being a bright side.

He rounded the back bumper of the Explorer and passed his own door, right foot squishing unpleasantly with each step. That’s one lap. By now his eyes had adjusted enough to just barely make out the end of the tunnel some hundred feet up ahead, but it was still hard to tell any detail. The exit was just a dark gray smudge against a black background. Just glancing down the length of the tunnel was unsettling to say the least. The stormclouds outside blocked any moonlight from hitting the ground, and Sam wasn’t sure if he was glad for that or not. His mind was already racing to fill in the blank darkness, painting the solid black with colorful dots and crawling static that morphed into demonic faces and inhuman figures, no matter how hard he tried to distract his imagination. But the dark was everywhere he looked. Even closing his eyes brought no escape from what his mind came up with.

Sam pushed the fear to the back of his mind as he passed Maddie’s door and started around the bumper, a grin spreading over his face once he reached Marcus’ window. He touched the glass with both hands and drew them back, laughing to himself at what Marcus’ reaction would be when he smacked them against–

Something splashed in the creek toward the tunnel exit. Sam froze in place, the grin fading from his lips as the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. A dozen scenarios played through his mind as to what had caused the splash. A dog had been sleeping in the tunnel and had just now decided to leave. A blockage in the creek had broken, sending a bit more water rushing inside all at once. Mr. Sensabaugh is coming. A branch had dropped from a tree due to the wind and landed in the water. Mr. Sensabaugh is coming. It had just been his imagination, and there really was no splash.

Mr. Sensabaugh is coming.

Sam again tried to swallow and again found his throat too dry. Marcus would know if he didn’t go three times around the car, he had probably timed out how long it would take. If Sam got back in early, he would never live it down, especially over some imagined sound he had heard a hundred feet away. He clenched his teeth and hurried past the driver’s door, the back door, and around the back bumper. He reached his own door to end his second lap, and that’s when he noticed it: the sound of the creek had become louder on this side of the car, where there was no water.

Thinking he had somehow gotten turned around, Sam stopped and felt around the car, his hand touching the passenger side mirror. He was still going the right way, but it was almost like the creek had switched to the other side of the tunnel.

It grew louder as he paused, the low whisper of the water breaking off into separate whispers. He could almost make out words, but they were too chaotic to grasp any real meaning. Sam was reminded of the sound that fills a classroom when everyone is taking a test and the teacher walks out for a minute, leaving the door open to hear if anyone talks. The class starts whispering all at the same time, each person’s conversation blending into a tangled mess of whispers. It was that same sound, a cautious, almost fearful collection of quiet voices all bleeding together and trying not to get too loud.

Fear surged through Sam’s body, threatening to send him into a complete panic. It’s just the water, nothing scary about that it’s just the water flowing around the car and I’m only hearing it louder now because my ears are adjusting to the

And then it stopped. All at once, the whole tunnel fell deathly silent. Not even the creek could be heard. It was as if the stream had just frozen in place, leaving behind a cold, dark silence. That sounded familiar too, for some reason, but Sam couldn’t quite figure out why. He started to round the hood, but just as he passed the bumper something moved in his peripheral vision. Shaking, he took another step around the bumper and felt his way along the driver’s door. And then he realized why the quietness sounded so familiar. It was the sound the class makes when the teacher is coming.

Sam slowly turned his head over his shoulder and looked behind him. A hundred feet away at the far end of the tunnel, two pinpoints of red glinted in the darkness, reflecting some unseen light the way a cat’s eyes do. He stared at them with horror mounting in his chest, too afraid to look away or even breathe. Several long seconds passed, with Sam looking at the eyes and the eyes looking right back at him, and then they blinked out of sight.

They reappeared half a second later ten feet away from him.

Sam bolted and threw open the driver side back door, leaping into the seat with a terrified cry. He pulled the door closed so hard he thought he might have cracked the window, but he didn’t care. As long as he was out of that tunnel and away from those eyes.

“Jesus!” Marcus yelped, turning around to face him. “What are–”

“G-Get us out of here,” Sam breathed, his entire body shaking. “Something’s out there.”

“Yeah,” Marcus laughed, “it’s Mr. Sensa—”

“I’m not joking!” Sam snapped. “Go!”

“Sammy, come on, we all went out there and we all know it’s more than a little spooky. But that’s it. Mr. Sensabaugh isn’t even real.”

“Maybe we should go,” Maddie said softly. She sounded afraid now, almost as afraid as Sam felt.

“Really?” Marcus scoffed. “You guys are really that freaked out by a dark tunnel?”

Sam moved to the middle seat, trying his best to get as far away from the windows as he could. Those eyes were real, they weren’t some figment of his imagination. They had blinked and then they had come closer. Now they were probably waiting right outside the door.

Marcus sighed and the car keys jingled as they turned over in the ignition. The engine coughed to life, but as soon as it had started, it died with a sputtering gasp. The headlights flickered down the tunnel, offering brief glimpses of the empty passage before they, too, shut off.

Terror clawed its way up Sam’s throat, savagely trying to escape the nervous pit of his stomach and fly away as a scream.

“Wh-what’s wrong?” Maddie asked.

“Old car,” Marcus muttered, turning the key over again. The engine simply coughed once and collapsed with a wheeze of flickering headlights.

“Is it dead?” she whispered. “Why would it be dead?”

“Did you see that?” Marcus asked suddenly.

Sam bit down on his knuckle and reluctantly looked out the windshield, like when you pass by a grisly accident and morbid curiosity gets the better of you. Cold tingles raced up Sam’s spine and settled on top of his head. “What is it?”

“I thought . . .” Marcus trailed off, not moving as he stared out into the dark tunnel.

Sam squinted and looked intently into the blackness, almost certain he had seen those eyes drifting up ahead of the car. Or was it just his imagination?

Marcus turned the key again, and this time the engine sounded like it was going to start. The headlights turned on and squarely hit the figure of a man standing in the middle of the tunnel ten feet ahead, a man dressed in dark overalls with piercing red eyes that reflected the light. His mouth was hanging open, unnaturally open, and as the lights dimmed out again he ran straight at the Explorer, vanishing right in front of the car as the headlights went out.

Maddie screamed.

Marcus let out a panicked cry as the two eyes paused just above the hood, like whatever they belonged to was peeking over the grill and peering inside the car. They flicked back and forth, studying Marcus and Maddie and eventually settling on Sam.

Sam closed his eyes as tightly as he could, begging himself to wake up from what had to be a nightmare. It wasn’t real, none of it was real, he was lying in his bed and any minute now he would wake up covered in sweat.

Something soft brushed past his right hand, and a low, choking sob rose up from the seat beside him. Sam kept his eyes closed and bit down on his knuckle until he felt warm blood run down his fingers. The crying stopped for a moment and Sam could hear the sound of clothes stretching closer as something leaned toward his ear, cold breath washing over his cheek.

“He doesn’t like the light,” it rattled, “he told me so before he killed me.”

Sam opened his eyes. An older woman sat beside him in the seat, her face dimly lit by some supernatural haze. She gazed directly at him with milky blue eyes, her mouth pressed into a thin, sorrowful smile. Her head looked like it had been bashed in with a pickax.

The scream exploded from Sam’s mouth just as the Explorer’s engine roared to life, filling the tunnel with overpowering noise and light. Marcus shifted into reverse and stomped on the accelerator, sending the vehicle flying backwards and away from the glinting red eyes of the thing that chased after them, black mouth open in a shriek of hateful agony that was audible even over the engine. The dark overalls slowed to a stop and retreated back into the tunnel, eventually becoming just a set of red dots as the darkness embraced him again.

The back tires of the Explorer dropped over the entrance lip with a teeth-jarring thud, the front ones following right after. Marcus wheeled the car around and nearly sent it careening into the creek-fed pool just outside the tunnel. Sam flew to the left and crashed against the door, only a little relieved to see that the woman had vanished from her seat. Marcus shifted into drive and floored it, tires squealing as they dragged the road beneath them and sped the car away from the tunnel. He didn’t slow down until they broke off the backroad and got back onto smooth, paved highway, and even then he didn’t go under sixty.

No one spoke the whole drive back, each of them too busy trying to process everything that had happened in that tunnel. An hour earlier, they had been three kids ready to laugh and scare one another in the dark, but now that they had truly seen what lie within the darkness, everything was different. The tale was real, Mr. Sensabaugh was real, his murdered family was real–all of it was real. They all stayed in that cursed tunnel that so many people had talked about when gathered around the red coals of a dying campfire. But how many people had actually seen it, had actually seen him? How many had witnessed the bloody eyes of the man who butchered his wife and kids, had heard the moaning cries of a family damned to roam the length of that tunnel? How many had felt the cold, dead breath of a woman trying to warn them of her husband, brains spilling out of her fractured skull as she sat there and wailed? When people talked about the tunnel they did so with grins on their faces and laughter in their words, but did any of them know what was really down there in the darkness?

Marcus dropped Sam off at his house and drove off with a simple “See you Monday.” Maddie was too terrified to even acknowledge that he was getting out. She just sat there staring at her lap, fingers twisting into knots as she undoubtedly replayed the scenes in her mind. Sam was seeing it too. Those red eyes were burned into his memory, and even when he closed his eyes he saw them staring back at him. Especially when he closed his eyes.

His parents were asleep as he crept up the staircase to his bedroom, but Sam wanted desperately to wake them up and tell them what had happened. He decided against it and closed the door of his room, leaving the light on as he crawled into bed and stared straight up at the plastered ceiling. That was almost as bad as the dark, though. The swirls and ridges above him morphed into shadowed images of the tunnel and of Mr. Sensabaugh’s dark form standing in the middle of it. They shifted into the broken face of the dead woman, and no matter how hard Sam tried he couldn’t get her voice out of his head.

He doesn’t like the light. He told me so before he killed me.

An hour passed and at around 2:30 AM Sam felt his eyelids growing too heavy to keep open any longer. Something still felt wrong, though. The chills hadn’t left his body since they drove away from the tunnel, and even now the hair on the back of his neck rose against his sheets. He fought sleep like it was a vengeful spirit, sending him skirting along the edge of delirium as his body fell deeper and deeper toward a terrified unconsciousness. When his eyes finally did close, he felt himself drifting off toward sleep, toward the impossibly distant dawn that would arrive hours later.

But then he realized why everything still felt wrong. Every detail about the tale had been true, down to the method in which the wife and children had been murdered. The red eyes, the wailing of the mourning wife, the whispers of the killed kids, all of it had happened exactly as the story had said. It also spoke of a single, simple rule that had to be followed by those who entered the tunnel. A rule that Sam realized he had broken.

He hadn’t gone three times around the car. He only made it two and a half.

The slow, creaking groan of his bedroom door filled his room, as well as the heavy, scuffing thud of boots stopping at the threshold. Tears streamed down Sam’s face as he opened his eyes, praying that it was just his mother coming to check on him as she sometimes did when he came home late. He raised his head up and looked across his room to the darkness of his open door.

Two red eyes stared back at him from the threshold.