The Old Railroad Tunnel Was Warm in Winter
Brandon Drake's Personal Log – October to December 2025
Saved on local encrypted drive (D:/B_Drake/Archive/Field_Notes_09) Automatic cloud backups: DISABLED Sector recovery key: 994-Alpha-X
Oct 14
The replacement carburetor for the old Troy-Bilt leaf blower finally arrived from that warehouse in Indiana. Took two weeks. Two weeks for a stamped piece of aluminum and a rubber gasket that doesn't even sit flush against the intake manifold. Spent four hours in the driveway trying to tune the idle needle until my wrists smelled like stale unleaded gasoline and the neighbor's German Shepherd started barking through the fence. The dog has this wet, hacking cough that makes you think its lungs are full of gravel.
Raked three bags of maple leaves before the pull-string snapped right at the hub. Absolute garbage engineering. Left the whole mess on the north lawn. It's supposed to rain tomorrow anyway, so they'll just turn into that black, heavy mulch that rots the grass blades by spring.
Martha texted around five. She wanted to know if I had the serial numbers for the old surveyor tripods we bought at the state surplus auction last winter. I told her they were in the green bin behind the oil drums. She didn't reply. Typical.
Finished the leftover meatloaf from Tuesday. It was dry around the edges where the foil didn't tuck under the pyrex dish. The refrigerator light bulb went out too. The small victories of modern living.
Oct 19
Rain came. Then the frost. The kitchen window has that hairline fracture in the bottom left corner — the one I noticed three summers ago during the hail storm — and now it's whistling every time the wind comes over Blackwood Ridge. I stuffed a greasy rag from the workbench into the gap but the draft just pushes right through the weave.
Spent the afternoon going through some old digitized railway trade journals from 1897. Mostly boring stuff, steel production numbers, that kind of thing. One line caught my eye about the Blackwood bore though. Just a single sentence saying the eastern approach had "met expected geological resistance, necessitating a minor alignment correction."
Alignment correction. That's corporate speak for we hit something we didn't expect and it was cheaper to walk away.
My knee's been aching since the temperature dropped below forty. The old meniscus tear from college. Whenever the humidity climbs before a hard freeze it feels like someone's driving a screw straight into the joint. Need more ibuprofen if I remember tomorrow.
Nov 03
Mailbox was full of flyers for winterization services. Some outfit from the county seat offering to blow out sprinkler lines for eighty bucks. A scam. Anyone with a compressor can do that themselves.
Daniel sent over some scanned pages from an old railway surveyor's private ledger, a guy named Henderson who apparently died in an asylum around 1912. Handwriting's awful, purple copying ink faded to grey.
One entry from October 1897 talks about the masonry crew finishing the stone portal, and Henderson mentioning the air inside was warm — sixty-some degrees — while it was near freezing outside. He figured it was an underground spring. Said the men worked stripped to the waist in there, breathing easier than usual for how deep they were.
Doesn't add up geologically, not around here, but the old-timers on the ridge still talk about the "Smoker" — steam you can supposedly see rising through the trees a mile off once the first real blizzard hits.
The dog next door is still coughing. Sounds worse today.
Nov 11
Ordered a new thermal camera from the industrial catalog. Forty bucks just for signature delivery. The old one's got dead pixels down one side that throw the readings off whenever you pan.
Martha stopped by after her shift at the water plant, brought her tripod and a box of old surveyor stakes from her garage. We went over the old track charts at the kitchen table.
"The grade's too steep for a normal bypass," she said, tracing the line where the tracks veered off. "They went from a clean climb through the mountain to this awful switchback. That's stupid, Brandon. A coal train would've stalled on that loop every time it rained."
"They used helper engines," I said. "Found the crew sheets for it."
"But why bother," she said. "You don't abandon a six-hundred-foot bore through solid granite over a 'minor alignment correction' and then pay for extra engines for thirty years straight."
"Maybe the rock was rotten."
"It's Blackwood granite." She knocked her knuckles on the table. "Doesn't rot."
We're going up Friday. Cold front's coming down from Canada, should be good conditions for the camera if there's really heat coming off that hole.
Nov 14
Courier never showed yesterday. Drove twenty miles to the sorting facility myself in the sleet. Clerk couldn't find the tracking number for fifteen minutes because somebody typed a zero as a letter O. Told him to check his screen instead of his phone. He didn't appreciate that. Nobody takes pride in anything anymore.
Camera seems solid though. Tested it on the kitchen sink, found an uninsulated pipe elbow behind the drywall losing a few degrees before it reaches the faucet. Explains the lukewarm dishwater.
Twenty-four tomorrow morning, wind chill down to sixteen.
Martha called around eight, her truck wouldn't start. Told her I'd pick her up at seven. She said she'd bring coffee. Told her to bring sugar too, that instant stuff tastes like burnt grass.
Nov 15 – 08:30 AM
Parked at the old timber siding off Route 9. Gravel path's completely overgrown now, black locust and briars scraped the paint on my truck's door. Martha didn't even notice, too busy fighting with her boot laces with gloves on.
Genuinely cold this morning. That metallic taste in the air right before heavy snow. Breath came out thick and grey and hung there a few seconds before the trees took it.
Ran into Richard near the park boundary, sitting in his green county truck with the engine idling loud, belt squealing. Rolled the window down maybe three inches.
"You two got no business up here today," he said. "Storm's coming early, gate closes at noon."
"We'll be out by eleven," I said.
He looked at my case, then Martha's tripod, and spat out the window, the nicotine freezing almost before it hit the leaves. "That old ditch. Told your father twenty years ago there's nothing in that hill but bad air."
"It's just a structural check for the historical society," Martha said.
"Deer don't go in there," he said, not really looking at us anymore, just staring down the logging road. "Coons don't either. A warm hole in the rocks in November ought to be crawling with something. That one's empty. Always has been. Ain't natural."
"It's a draft anomaly," I told him. "Pulls air from the lower cave system."
"Sure," he said, and rolled the window back up without another word.
Old people. Forty years in a state truck and they start making up ghost stories to kill the time between checks.
Nov 15 – 11:15 AM
We found it.
Hidden behind a wall of dead hemlocks that came down across the old right-of-way, you'd never see the masonry line from the trail. Big rough granite blocks, a horseshoe arch, "1895" carved into the keystone under a crust of black lichen.
Richard was wrong about one thing, though. It's not empty. There's steam coming off the top of the arch, slow and steady, and right around twenty-some feet out, the snow just stops. Bare dry gravel. Not muddy, just dry pale stone, and the second you cross that line the air changes, like walking through a doorway into somewhere warmer.
Martha pulled her gloves off right away. "Brandon, feel this."
"I feel it." My face was tingling. The wind was still hammering the ridge behind us but the air out of that tunnel mouth was dead still, thick, and it smelled clean somehow. Like a closed-up room in summer.
I got the camera going. Screen calibrated with a click, and outside was all one flat cold color, but the arch itself lit up bright.
"That's not a normal draft," Martha said, already setting up her tripod, moving fast. "This is way past what the ground temperature should be around here."
"Let's get some readings from the entrance," I said, and walked in.
One step and the shivering just stopped. My ears, which had been stinging, suddenly felt hot, like blushing. Air was heavy in my chest but it felt good, like coming in from the rain after a long shift. Took my hat off and dropped it on the ballast stones.
"Brandon, look at the screen," Martha called from the entrance, still fiddling with the tripod head.
"What am I looking at."
"The heat's not coming from the back," she said. "It's a line, about fifty feet in. Like a wall."
She was right. Deeper in, the tunnel was actually cooler on the display. The heat was bunched up in one irregular block right ahead of us, glowing on the screen, but with my own eyes there was nothing there but wet rock and old iron tie-rods.
"We should check the rock face," I said. My voice sounded strange to me. Slower than usual.
"Wait, hold on," Martha said. "Battery just dropped to one bar. I charged it all night."
"Probably a bad indicator," I said, and kept walking. "Come on, it feels amazing in here."
Nov 19
Didn't write for three days. Hands have been stiff, like the joints need oil. Can't get the temperature right in the house either, furnace kicking on every twelve minutes, blowing hot dusty air, and I'm still sitting here with my coat on. Skin feels sort of greasy all the time now.
Daniel called from the county archive last night, bad reception, every third word eaten by static.
"Brandon? The 1897 ledger... it's a mess." Line hissing like a bad radiator. "The Italian crew. The names, they aren't on the final county release. Eleven men. From Abruzzo."
"They cleared the tunnel though, right?" I asked.
"No," he said, signal dropping and coming back. "There's a note from Henderson. Coroner filed something but it got pulled. They paid someone off. Built the wall right up against the collapse while the shift was still — they could hear the tools hitting rock from the other side, Brandon. Bricklayers just kept going. Eighteen hours. Bricked them in to keep the bonds from tanking before December. Whole bypass was just a cover story for the New York banks."
"They left them," I said.
"Backfilled the entrance with gravel and walked away," Daniel said. "Eleven men."
I looked out the kitchen window. The neighbor's dog wasn't barking anymore. Just lying on its side under the porch, not moving.
Nov 24
Spent Thanksgiving alone. My sister called three times, let the machine get it. Everyone's voice sounds too fast lately, too shrill, like they're all running out of air.
Martha came by at noon, didn't come inside, stood on the porch with her hands jammed in her parka pockets.
"I went to the doctor, Brandon."
"You get a cold?"
"My feet." She wouldn't look at me. "Skin's gone grey on my toes. He said it looks like frostbite. Asked if I'd been hiking without socks. I had my boots on the whole time."
"Clinic doctors are idiots," I said. "They just want to write a prescription."
"He took my temperature. Ninety-four point six. Thought his thermometer was broken. Kept me under a heated blanket two hours and it wouldn't come up." She finally looked at me, eyes bloodshot, yellowed at the corners. "I feel warm though, Brandon. The whole time. Like I'm standing next to a radiator, but my knees won't stop knocking and I can't feel my heels."
"It's just the weather doing something to everyone's circulation."
"We shouldn't go back there," she said, stepping off the mat onto the gravel. "Something's wrong with the air. The readings didn't look like heat coming off something. They looked like heat going into something."
"You're overthinking it," I said, and shut the door before she could say anything else.
House felt freezing. Checked the boiler in the basement, pressure gauge in the red, pipes vibrating hard enough to shake rust loose. Air out of the floor vent was hot enough to singe my arm hair but when I put my hand on my own chest I couldn't feel a thing. Just a dull weight.
Dec 01
Went back alone. Martha texted saying her legs wouldn't carry her down the stairs. Whatever. She never had much stamina for real fieldwork anyway.
Trail was buried under crusty snow but the approach was clear. Dry zone had gotten bigger, maybe fifty feet across now, the edge of the snowline cut almost perfectly straight, like it had been shaved back with a blade.
The heat inside was incredible. Like a greenhouse in July. I took my coat off at the boundary and left it lying in the snow, looked ridiculous out there, and walked in wearing just my shirt, sweating within a minute.
Went in maybe three hundred feet. Flashlight died fast, just like Martha said it would, but you don't really need it. The heat pulls you forward better than light does.
Got to the retention wall. Rough brickwork, done in a hurry by men working with kerosene torches while something was happening on the other side of that stone.
Put my hand against it.
It was warm the way skin is warm, not the way a stove is. There was a slow pulse in it, running through the mortar.
Thump.
Thump.
Wasn't really a sound. More like pressure, somewhere behind my ears, matching my own breathing a little too well.
Pulled my hand back and the skin on my palm had gone grey. Not dirty. Just grey, like the blood had left it. Tried to pinch my finger and couldn't feel it, like wearing gloves I didn't have on.
But I wasn't cold. That's the thing I keep coming back to. I felt good. Like floating in warm water after a long day. Air in my throat tasted almost sweet.
I can hear them behind that wall. Not words. Just breathing, a lot of it, slow and together. Eleven men, since the winter of 1897, no coats, no fires, just rock pressing on their chests this whole time.
They've been cold a long time.
I've got heat to spare.
Dec 06 – 05:10 PM
Sitting against the wall now. Laptop says one percent but the screen hasn't died yet, though the letters take a second to catch up when I type.
My fingers are black now. Whatever this is has gone up to my elbows, they look dried out, stiff, wrong. Can't feel my legs. They're just weight down there on the stones.
But my chest still feels like a furnace, and I can feel it going out of me in slow waves, into the brick.
The bricks are moving. Not falling, just sliding against each other a little, slow, grinding. There's a gap opening up and it's not rock behind it, it's just dark, and it's pulling something out of the air.
Out of my mouth too, I think.
Camera's on the ground by my hip, still pointed at me. I'm not really showing up as a person on the screen anymore, more of a dark smear where a person should be.
It's still nice in here though. Feels like August. Feels like the farm in Ohio when I was a kid, heat coming up off the road until the horizon starts to shimmer.
First brick came loose a minute ago. Didn't fall. Just moved inward, slow, like something on the other side pulled it in gently.
I can feel hands now, through the gap. Not sharp, not grabbing. Just resting against my neck, the way you'd hold something you'd been waiting a long time for.
The letters are getting hard to read on my own screen now, my hands won't really do what I tell them, but it's fine, it's warm, it's
Would you have walked into the warmth, or trusted your gut like the deer did? Tell me in the comments.💬💬 I read every single one.
Read more from Scary Verse:
North Ridge Log: Never Let the Count Reach 411 — https://www.scaryverse.in/2026/08/north-ridge-log-never-let-count-reach.html
The Ultrasound Said There Was Nothing There — https://www.scaryverse.in/2026/08/the-ultrasound-said-there-was-nothing.html
