How to Rewrite Ghost Stories - Chapter 7

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Natty

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈

Episode 7: Mangnyang 2 Tunnel (2)

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“Ah, how are you driving? Seriously?!”

“How can you hit the brakes inside a tunnel? Are you crazy?!”

Curses, protests, ringing bells.

“What are you doing, driver?”

“Is there something ahead?”

Braking inside a tunnel was insane. The kind of thing where you would have no excuse even if someone grabbed you by the hair while you were driving. Along with everyone’s complaints, the driver-call bells rang. Ding-dong. Ding-dong.

“Hey!”

“Damn it, I’m wide awake now.”

“Was there an accident?!”

There was no answer. The bus lights flickered. Even the people who had been protesting seemed to sense the strange atmosphere and gradually lowered their voices, glancing around.

A subtle chill hung in the air.

“Please remain seated.”

A voice that sounded almost mechanical came through the speakers, mixed with terrible static. It cut out several times, then began repeating at an incredible speed.

“Please remain seated.”

“Please remain—”

“Is the announcement system broken?”

“Driver, turn that off! What’s going on?!”

Someone shouted, but there was no response. The announcement continued without end. Each time it repeated, it grew faster, until panting began to mix in.

Hhihik. Hhik. Hihik.

“Driver!!”

“Is, is the driver dead?”

Someone muttered it, and the words instantly crushed the whole bus into silence. No one dared to go forward. There was only the sound of people holding their breath and the announcement, panting as it repeated the same words.

‘It’s a ghost story.’

This was probably the tunnel ghost story the Depth Gauge had shown me. Before I could feel excited about filling in something new, a more practical concern came first.

‘And there are other people here...’

Until now, if things went wrong, I had been alone. If you died in a ghost story, you died in reality too, right? If you were lucky, at least a body would remain. If you were unlucky, it would be an ending where you disappeared and no one could even find your body.

This wasn’t a situation to act rashly.

“Why did we suddenly stop?! Are you taking responsibility if I’m late?!”

‘Ah, damn.’

While I was thinking, a middle-aged man sitting diagonally ahead of me sprang from his seat and headed toward the front of the bus. I thought I should stop him, so I rose from my seat.

“Arghhh!!”

A scream of shock and terror tore through the bus. The man staggered backward and tumbled down the bus steps.

At nearly the same time, the bus driver, who had not moved at all until then, finally stood in the aisle.

More precisely, only part of the bus driver stood there.

The driver’s head was melting away. Where the head should have been was a deep, black hole. It swirled as it swallowed the driver’s eyes, growing farther and farther down toward the throat.

From where the driver’s mouth should have been, with only the lower jaw left, came an announcement that sounded prerecorded.

“I will now check your tickets. Please remain seated.”

Inside the bus, where there was nowhere to run, even breathing stopped. It was instinctive fear. The primal, overwhelming fear of death that said your head might fly off the moment you moved, made a sound, or tried to protest to that driver.

The hole that had swallowed the driver’s head wriggled as though it were alive, then swallowed the driver whole, upside down.

As if there were a black hole inside the body, pulling everything in.

The lower jaw vanished. Organs throbbed between the neck bones and ribs. Muscles, veins, flesh, and nerves stretched open one by one before being dragged inside.

‘What kind of ghost story is this?’

Had something else mixed into the tunnel ghost story? Remembering the crawling hand from Bloodwater Valley, I quickly opened my phone.

Even without a signal, my blog still opened.

So I really had entered a ghost story.

When I searched for “Mangnyang 2 Tunnel (忘梁),” several ghost stories came up.

【True Story】 Anyone know Mangnyang 2 Tunnel? There’s an old tunnel you end up in if you take the wrong national road while heading to Iksan. That’s Mangnyang 2. It shows up on maps, but hardly anyone actually knows about it. If you get caught passing through, you’re screwed. They say they disturbed a seonang stone while digging the tunnel during the Japanese colonial period. A seonang stone is basically a guardian stone that protects a village, but they just pulled it out. You think they would have cared about warnings from the villagers? After that, water filled the tunnel, equipment broke down, and people died. In the end, they pulled out all the machinery and dug it by hand. Breaking rocks with pickaxes, praying, building stone cairns. That’s how Mangnyang 2 Tunnel was made.

RE) It’s barely used now. After Mangnyang 3 was built, it became a backup road. Regular cars can barely get in, and only extra express buses pass through. But apparently there’s a strange mirror inside. It looks like a rearview mirror, but it’s angled downward.

RE: RE) └Holy shit, I know that one. My brother got into an accident because of that mirror.

└└The one stuck in a really weird direction on a pole that looks like a streetlamp around the middle of the tunnel? My brother got out because his car broke down, and got into an accident there.

└└└It was bad enough that he still limps and was exempted from military service. When he woke up, he said there was a woman hanging from that mirror. He even saw a psychiatrist for a while.

【The Tunnel Where You Die If You Enter on Blue】 I did my military service around Gangwon Province. Not at a GOP, but somewhere near the rear area. There was this really old tunnel nearby, so I’ll tell you the story. At first glance, it was just a narrow, ancient national-road tunnel with traffic lights. Long story short, blue light means no, red light means go. The senior soldiers took it seriously, so at first I thought they were messing with me. I was like, “Can’t I just go through?” Told them to quit bullshitting. Yeah. But the first day I asked, they chewed me out so badly I thought I was going to die on the parade ground. Nobody would explain it.

Later, after I became a sergeant, I found out there were seriously a ton of accidents there. Especially around the curve inside the tunnel. Lots of people said they had hit something in front of them, but quite a few said a woman had fallen onto their hood. At its worst, emergency calls came in about once a month, people saying they had hit a woman in the tunnel and asking what to do. But when they got there, there was nothing. Obviously, because they hadn’t hit a person... Every single one of them said, “But I went in on blue T_T.” Scariest experience of my whole army life.

└RE) I’m in a unit near there too, but this is my first time hearing about it. What intake were you?

└└RE: RE) More than ten years ago. A new tunnel opened, nobody used that one anymore, the reports stopped, and it just got buried. Yeah.

‘Okay. I think I know where to start reasoning from.’

But Mangnyang Tunnel was supposed to be on the way to Iksan. Why had it suddenly merged with the road to Yeosan City? Yeosan was a newly developed city so large that people were talking about designating it a special city, with brand-new highways running everywhere.

The most plausible theory was that I did not necessarily have to go to the closed Mangnyang Tunnel. Once the conditions were met, the ghost story was overlaid onto a place that existed in reality.

I did not know whether that was true for other ghost stories, but judging from the one in front of me, it seemed that way.

I did not know what color the traffic light had been when we entered. I would need to find another method.

‘Even if I have to break a leg, would finding that mirror and opening a way through be the fastest option?’

I glanced outside.

Where would the mirror be? On the right? The left? What did it mean that it was stuck in such a strange direction?

“...?!”

Then something that looked like a flashlight beam began flashing wildly beyond the rear windows of the bus.

The melted bus driver remained where it was. The people who had been covering their mouths and breathing heavily also turned toward the flashing light with terrified eyes.

“D-did someone come to save us? Maybe the police...”

“Let us out, please...”

“Wait. What is that?”

It was not the police, firefighters, or tunnel management officials.

To begin with, it was not light.

It was a person.

People running and screaming flickered bizarrely in the darkness, glowing pale before sinking back into it. People could not glow, but each time they flashed, I could see them clearly.

The people running toward us were all in miserable condition. Their faces were covered in blood, their clothes were torn, and the person at the front was running with one shoe missing.

The moment our eyes met, they waved frantically and screamed.

“O-open the door!!”

“Save us!!”

“W-what do we do?”

“Shouldn’t we open the door?”

“Sir, open the door!”

“Are you insane?! Are we in any position to help anyone right now?!”

The people in their seats could not bring themselves to pass the melted bus driver and go to the driver’s seat. The middle-aged man, who had fallen down the steps and could reach the door handle, did not look like he intended to open it.

“Open the damn door! Answer me!!”

The person at the front, screaming desperately as they ran, stumbled.

“Please...!”

The moment they raised their head, the upper half of it vanished into the darkness.

Something sticky and soft flowed down like a long shadow.

Crack.

The sound of bones splitting and flesh tearing. The person’s body was ripped apart from the bottom up and pushed into the darkness, as though someone were peeling wallpaper from a wall.

Their shoulders disappeared, and one arm fell to the ground. Things spilled from the torso. Something chewed on one leg.

It snapped.

Crunch.

Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

Even with my ears covered, the sound rang clearly.

Crunch crunch.

It sounded like chocolate breaking. Or like soft meat crumbling together with crispy flakes.

Even the clumps of blood scattered on the ground vanished into the darkness, as if something had licked a bowl clean.

One person melted away like cotton candy in water.

Gulp.

Another was grabbed by the foot, flipped upside down, and dragged into the darkness. Every time the faint light flashed, their shape collapsed. Arms, chests, jaws, everything mixed together and scattered across the ground.

Then, silence again.

Only the bus remained in the quiet, clean tunnel. The flickering tunnel lights glowed faintly.

“What... what is happening right now...?”

“Mom...”

A high school student sitting near the front began to sob.

This was insane.

I counted the people inside the bus first. One middle-aged man sprawled at the front, one student, three young people who looked like a group of college students, four passengers who appeared to be traveling alone, and me.

Ten people in total.

“Fuck, explain what’s going on!”

No, why did something keep happening whenever I tried to think?

Maybe he had lost his mind from the insane situation. Or maybe his anger was overwhelming even his fear of ghosts. The man who had fallen down the steps started shouting again and shoved the bus driver hard.

“Are you trying to kill all of us too?!”

I shot to my feet.

I had to stop him.

It was not because I was some kind of saint, nor because I had a sense of duty. I just had a feeling that I had to, and the simple fact that I hated seeing people die propelled me up.

“Sir. Please calm down. I don’t think provoking it will help.”

“Who are you?! Are you with th-this thing too?!”

Of course not.

People paralyzed by fear never listened to reason.

“No. I don’t know anything either. But it’s obvious that we should not touch it. So please step back...”

“D-d-don’t tell me what to do!!”

The moment the man pointed a finger at me, his hand touched the bus driver again.

“Uh... huh?”

The man raised his arm.

His hand was gone.

Below the elbow was a black, congealed cross-section. His hand had disappeared as though it had never existed in the first place.

Then, gulp.