The Mulberry Line

In the fall of 2015, my friend Elena and I were working late shifts at the Honeycutt Community Center, setting up for the annual festival. The center was an old converted schoolhouse on the edge of town, and its parking lot backed onto the abandoned railroad tracks locals called the Mulberry Line. The tracks hadn’t seen a train in decades, but the county hadn’t bothered to tear them up, and saplings and weeds had grown up between the ties.

That night, we were finishing up around 8:30, after the last of the volunteers had left. The air was unseasonably muggy for late October, and the parking lot lights buzzed with that sickly yellow glow. Elena said she was hungry and wanted to grab a bite at the 24-hour diner on the other side of the tracks, but the quickest way was to cut across the trestle. I hesitated. The trestle was a rickety iron structure that spanned a narrow gully, and it had always given me the creeps. But Elena was already walking, and I didn’t want to look like a coward.

We climbed the mild embankment and stepped onto the ties. The wood was rotten in places, and the gaps between the rails seemed wider than they should have been. The gully below was choked with dead leaves and discarded bottles. As we walked, the metallic smell of rust filled my nose, and I noticed that the trestle seemed to hum under our feet, a low vibration that didn’t match our steps. I stopped and put my hand on the rail. It was cold, even for the season, and the vibration persisted.

Elena laughed and said I was being jumpy. She pulled out her phone to check the time, and the screen flickered. She tapped it, and a single word appeared on the screen in a font we didn’t recognize: ‘LISTEN.’ The screen went dark. We both stared at it, and then we heard it—a faint sound, like a long, slow whistle, but coming from where? The tracks ahead vanished into darkness, and the sound seemed to be moving towards us, growing louder, but the pitch was wrong. It was a whistle, but it was human, like someone blowing into a glass bottle, but too deep, too resonant.

I grabbed Elena’s arm, and we started running back towards the parking lot. The ties were uneven, and I stumbled twice. Behind us, the sound grew into a full-throated roar, but not a train. It was more like a thousand voices all exhaling at once, and then a whisper, clear and close, spoke directly into my ear: ‘Don’t wait.’

We burst back onto the parking lot, gasping, and the sound stopped dead. The air was still, and the night was silent except for the distant chirp of crickets. Elena looked at me, her face pale in the lamplight. She said she heard it too, the word ‘LISTEN’ and the whisper. We stood there shaking, and then we noticed something on the ground near the embankment: a small, folded piece of paper, yellowed and brittle. I picked it up. It was a note, handwritten in shaky cursive, that read: ‘The trains still run here, but they run in the dark. If you hear them, do not wait. Move.’

We never took the shortcut again. Weeks later, I found out from a local historian that the Mulberry Line had a notorious accident in 1962: a freight train derailed, and the conductor, a man named Elias, had been trapped in the twisted metal. According to the old newspaper article, before they got him out, he kept whispering something to the rescue workers. The article didn’t say what, but a recollection from a retired firefighter mentioned that he kept repeating ‘Don’t wait, don’t wait, they’re still coming.’

Now, whenever I’m near those tracks after dark, I feel that vibration in my bones. And sometimes, when the wind is right, I hear a low, mournful whistle that doesn’t come from any engine. I’ve learned to listen. And I never wait.