We were somewhere in the mountains of central Italy, chasing rumors about a tunnel that people claimed could “borrow your memories.” A railway project had unearthed it accidentally—a forgotten section carved centuries ago through volcanic stone. The workers sealed it off after three men went missing inside and one came out babbling in languages no one could recognize.

Morizumi insisted on investigating at night. He said certain entities only stirred when the human mind was “closest to forgetting itself.” I told him that sounded like the tagline for a pretentious art film. He didn’t laugh.

The tunnel’s mouth yawned before us, black and damp, shaped less like a passage and more like a wound. The air smelled of iron and old rain. I switched on the camera. The temperature dropped immediately.

“Still think this isn’t haunted?” I asked.

He glanced at me, calm as ever. “It’s worse than haunted. It’s dreaming.”

I asked what that meant, but he was already stepping inside.

The deeper we went, the less the air felt like air. It pressed against us, thick and humming. The tunnel was silent except for the sound of water dripping somewhere deep within. Then came the whispers—barely audible, threading through the dark like static.

At first I thought it was wind. Then I recognized words.

My name.

“Shigure…”

I froze. The voice was soft, familiar. My mother’s. I hadn’t heard her say my name like that since I was a kid. I turned toward the sound—nothing but walls. My flashlight flickered.

“She’s not here,” Morizumi said quietly.

“How do you—”

“It’s trying to remember you.”

That’s when I noticed the walls. The stone was shifting, rippling as though breathing. Faces formed and dissolved in the rock—some strangers, some… not. I saw my own reflection in one, except the eyes were wrong.

We reached the chamber at the center. There was no floor, just a shallow pool of still water. Morizumi knelt beside it. His reflection didn’t match his movements.

The water rippled, and then the reflection smiled at him.

That’s when I heard a low hum, almost like a sigh. The entire tunnel seemed to inhale. The faces in the walls opened their mouths. My flashlight shattered.

Everything went black.

I don’t remember what happened next, only that when I came to, I was lying outside the tunnel, dawn just breaking over the hills. Morizumi stood nearby, hands in his pockets, looking at the sealed entrance.

“What happened?” I asked.

He didn’t look at me. “It tried to make us stay. It feeds on what people forget. But I made it sleep again.”

“Sleep again?”

He finally turned. “You can’t destroy something that dreams. You can only make it forget the dreamer.”

I checked my camera later. Every file was gone except one—a single photo taken from inside the tunnel. It was dark, but if you brighten the image, you can see two silhouettes. One of them is Morizumi.

The other one is me.

Except I’m still holding the camera in the photo.