↳ 𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴

WARNING: SPOOKY STORY ( Borrowed from Reddit )

I started sleeping with my bedroom door open…

I recently moved into a new apartment with my dog, Marbles. It’s not a nice place, by any means, but it’s the only option I had. I’m just starting a new job, and I barely have enough money to cover rent, ramen, dog food, and a Netflix subscription. So, I settled on this small dirt cheap apartment on the outskirts of town, partly because it’s cheap and partly because it’s pet friendly. No, it isn’t ideal, but it’s only temporary while I save up some cash.

The apartment is small, with only three rooms. The first room you enter is the kitchen/living room, with a hall way in the back. The door at the end of the hall leads to the bathroom. In the hallway is a door on the right side to the bedroom. I don’t have any furnishings or personal belongings, so the apartment remained very bare. I never bothered to worry about sprucing the place up because it was just a temporary home.

We had been in the apartment for a few weeks and everything had been fine. As we really settled in to the place, Marbles took a liking to the couch in the living room. It wasn’t my couch, it came with the apartment. Well, Marbles started sleeping on the couch at night. That said, Marbles likes to get up and relocate in the middle of the night. She would get up and come to the bedroom door and hope to get inside. I always sleep with the door closed, so she would start to whine and paw a the door. Marbles had long nails that she hated getting cut, so you could hear her walking throughout the apartment if you were awake, and it made her pawing pretty loud. After a few nights of this, I just started leaving the door open for her. From then on she would come and get in the bed with me at all times of the night. This never bothered me. Many more weeks went by with nothing note worthy happening.

Well, one weekend my Netflix binging session lasted much longer than usual and I was still up at 2:00 in the morning. I was just wrapping up Stranger Things season 2 when out of the corner of my eye, I saw it. In the doorway to the hall, there was something peaking at me. I turned to look directly at it. It looked like the top half of a face, peeking from the left side of the doorway. The only thing I could see were two eyes, beady and black, staring at me. I was frozen, not sure if it was fear or shock stopping me from moving. I blinked. It was still there.

After a few more seconds, I started panicking and yelled out “Who are you? Get out!” For a few more seconds it kept staring, and then slowly began to pull away and out of view. Once I could no longer see it, it took a few moments to regain control of my body. Once I had, I jumped up and slammed the door, locking it. Marbles, who had been laying on the bed with me, was now sitting up and alert.

I called the police, and told them someone had broken into my apartment. After a while, I heard them knocking on the front door. Eventually, I mustered the courage to step out from the room and run to the front door. They investigated, and the landlord was called. No one was found in the apartment, and when the police had arrived, the front door was still locked from when I got home. There were no signs of breaking and entering, but I insisted that I saw someone. The police did one more sweep of the apartment before leaving, telling me that there was nothing more they could do.

The landlord, to whom I must give credit, swapped out the locks the next day, giving me all new keys. He told me that it was possible a previous tenant still had a set of keys to the room, and had come in. The thought unnerved me, but the more I thought back on it, the less human the thing seemed to be.

It took a few weeks and many sleepless nights to go back to normal, if you could call it that. I told myself that I could handle the stress, that we would only be here a little while longer. During that time I also bought a baseball bat which I now kept beside my bed. Now, I still kept the door to the bedroom open at night, but only slightly ajar so Marbles could slip in or out. I didn’t feel comfortable seeing the doorway where that thing had been.

One night, Marbles came in and hopped up on the bed like she usually does. She settled down and rested her head on my thigh, a common occurrence. I had been asleep, and never bothered to open my eyes. I started drifting back off to sleep when I heard a sound. It was a familiar sound of scratching on the floor. It was Marbles’ nails on the floor as she walked. It came from the living room and was approaching the bedroom door. I was facing the side of the room with the door, and I opened my eyes. Marbles was there, pushing the door open and coming in. A chill ran up my spine.

Slowly, I looked over and down at the bed… it was there. The thing was resting its head on my thigh, looking right into my eyes. For a second I got a look at it, it had a humanoid form, but it was impossibly inhuman. It’s face was horrific, with those beady black eyes, long greasy black hair, and a mouth without lips. It’s body was elongated, and it looked as though it was made up of only bones with skin wrapped tightly around them.

It’s face started to creep closer to mine, and I was finally able to move. I threw the blanket over the thing and jumped out of the bed, running to the front door. I could hear it scurrying behind me, along with Marbles running behind. When I got to the door, I turned to see both Marbles and the thing following. Marbles made it to the door first, and once she was out I slammed the door closed. I heard and felt the thing slam against the door, scratching and banging against it. I could also hear it’s raspy breathing. Eventually it all went quiet.

My phone was still inside, but after a while one of the neighbors opened the door after frantic knocking. They phoned the police for me. The police weren’t as friendly this time, but I told them I trapped the “person” inside my apartment. After a long search of the entire apartment, the police found… nothing. I couldn’t believe it. They scolded me, and told me that if I called for this again I’d be arrested. I felt like I was going insane.

Refusing to go back in alone, the landlord accompanied me while I packed up all my belongings. I wasn’t staying here any longer. My parents had an extra room they offered me, and it was going to take a long time before I felt comfortable being alone again.

I’m typing this all out from my parents house, laying in the guest room. Well, a few paragraphs ago I noticed something. Over in the corner is a closet with folding doors. It’s slightly open, and in the crack of the doors I can see two beady black eyes staring right at me…

WARNING: SPOOPY STORY ( 4 of 4 )

Slowly, step by step, I walked up the stairs of the school. Nobody was allowed to be there after nine p.m. so there were no teachers or other students around, but since I knew the school well it wasn’t difficult to break inside. I finally got to the top of the stairs… There was a metal door leading it the roof top, I swung it wide open. It was winter at this point, and a cold breeze hit me straight away. It chilled me to the bone. There was a full moon and I could clearly see the whole rooftop area. My sister was already there and just as I had asked her to be, waiting with her back to the door. I hadn’t expected her to come. She was leaning on the rails of the roof staring down at the school grounds below. I walked towards her.

“I wanted to talk to you in private, I figured school would be the best place.” Surprisingly, my sister replied straight away.

“I guess..”

This was the closest thing we’d had to a conversation for as long as I could remember. I stepped closer to my sister as she continued to talk.

“So, what did you want to talk about?”

Without hesitation I threw myself at her, she had her back to me and I caught her completely off guard. My sister flew into midair and fell downwards off the room, down and out of sight. After seeing the suicide note that I placed in my sister’s room nobody suspected foul play. My sister hardly ever spoke to anyone, hardly ever laughed… it seemed perfectly plausible that she had been depressed and taken her own life. The was the beauty of my plan. Maybe with my sister gone, the four other ed who had been making my life hell would now lose interest in tormenting me. If that happened I’d finally be able to get on with my life. Go back to being a normal student again. From the time of my sister’s death and her funeral it had already been a few weeks. Feeling nervous, I stepped back into my classroom. All of my classmates ignored me, except for one girl, the leader of the bullies, the girl with the chestnut hair. She smiled and winked at me.

“Hey, are you alright?” She asked. I was taken aback by this display of compassion from her. Although my heart was now beating faster than it ever had I made sure not to show it. I remained expressionless.

“I’m fine… it’s not like I cared about her.” Even though I said this, I had been feeling remorseful. Yes, we were like air to each other but she had been my twin sister.

“Hey, that’s great, so you’re gonna find a part-time job now, I guess?” That was strange, why was she talking about a part-time job all of a sudden? I couldn’t hide my surprise and she laughed when she saw my confusion.

“Haha, what? Did you think we’d take pity on you? If you want us to stop, you’re gonna have to make a contract. Just like your sister did.” What the hell was she talking about? The bully looked genuinely surprised that I didn’t know what she meant and that my sister had never told me what she had done. “She really never told you, huh? Haha, we were bullying your sister at the start. Had nothing to do with you. We only stopped ing with her because she agreed to pay us off. Told her we’d find a new victim instead. Oh I still remember her face when we said we’d picked you…” she told me how much I would have to pay her and her lackeys to stop this torment. Then she patted me on the shoulder and with another wink said, “Good luck from today! We’ve already found a new target instead of you…provided you pay us on time that is.” Now I understood everything, why the girls had started bullying me when I hadn’t even met them before. Why my sister was always with them. Why my sister had been leaning against the rooftop rails with her back to me… as if she was asking me to push her. Maybe she had been in greater pain than me all along.

In that moment I blanked out. Next thing I remember I’m being hauled into a police car by two armed cops. I was absolutely covered in blood. The human body is a very fragile thing. It’s amazing the damage you can do to somebody with just one pen.

And that was the story of Akazuki as told by the woman in the red dress. I couldn’t help but interrupt the story as I brought her another cup of coffee. How did she know all of this? It turned out that the woman in red had been a friend of Akazuki’s… at least before she started getting bullied. To avoid unnecessary trouble she stopped hanging out with her, but after she found out what happened she felt extremely guilty. Akazuki had been placed in a psych ward after being deemed mentally unstable. The woman in red paid her a visit and heard the whole story from Akazuki’s own mouth. The woman sipped at her coffee.

“Ever since that incident all reports of bullying were taken extremely seriously and anyone found to be a bully was punished severely. Anyway, my whole point is this, it’s stupid to say the school’s haunted.” With a pale face one of the young girls pointed out that what happened there was as good a reason as any for the school to become haunted. I had to agree this was one of the most gruesome tales I’d ever heard in my life. But to that, the woman simply snapped…

“What Akazuki did was perfectly natural given what happened at least. I mean, wouldn’t you have done the same thing in her shoes?”

WARNING: SPOOKY STORY ( 3 of 4 )

Like I said, we were pretty much just air to each other. As implied by my past grades in school we were both top of the league, there were times our exam results were first and second in the whole school. So it was only natural that we ended up going to the same high school. That was the best high school in the district. Our relationship didn’t change during high school. I actually enjoyed it there, but only for the first semester. Even in a school full of students who scored top grades there were bullies and rebels. Problem was, these bullies were smart.. whenever they carried out their evil deeds they’d make sure it wouldn’t be found out by their peers or faculty members. Even when they were found out they generally got off the hook due to their excellent grades because obviously straight-A students can’t be evil can they?

It started when I came back from the summer break, the bullying that is, for some reason they started paying attention to me at school. I don’t know what I had done but there was nothing that I could do. During lunch or after school, they’d come to my classroom and take me to some inconspicuous location and punch me, kick me, hit me… Like I said, they were clever, they made sure to avoid bruising my face or arms. There were five bullies in total. One of them was a girl with chestnut colored hair who just watched as three others pummeled me senseless, she just pointed and laughed while giving the other girls orders. She was obviously the leader. There was also one other girl who came along to watch the show. My sister.

It didn’t make sense to me, my sister hated these types of girls just as much as I did. After ignoring for each other for so long why would she try and break me now? I’d only known the friends I made at the school for three months. As soon as they found out that I was being attacked by the rouges at school they almost immediately stopped hanging out with me. Fearful that they’d be targeted for simply associating with me. In the end, I found myself alone at school. They violence continued for months and months. They started getting more creative in the ways they’d hurt and humiliate me. The worst days were when their chestnut haired leader was in a bad mood. Sometimes, I was stripped and thrown into a pond. When I fell to my knees out of breath she grabbed me by the hair and pulled me to my feet.

“Not yet,” chestnut would say, and the violence would continue. All the while my sister would be staring at me coldly without a flicker of emotion on her face. It was as if she was starting at a rat or a cockroach, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I thought about telling my parents but they already had plenty to worry about with their work. Besides, they’d almost certainly take the side of their favored daughter. My sister must have started bullying me in the first place because she knew I wouldn’t talk. There was nothing I could do about the situation. If I told my teachers there was a chance the bullying would just get worse, it was possible the teacher would think I was lying. Particularly because the bullies were perfect students during lessons. There was absolutely nothing, nothing that I could do.

Every day when I got home I’d desperately try cleaning the bloodstains off my shirt before my parents came home. I sobbed as I furiously rubbed my shirt. What had I done to deserve this? One time when I was scrubbing, I hear my sister coming up the stairs. She must have gotten back from her part-time job early. I pictured her face, cold as ice, staring at me as the bullies beat me over and over again. How could it be that she was enjoying her life at school so much when I was in this state? She was part of the tennis club, a part time job and a ton of friends. Why did my life have to be so terrible, we were twins. I ended up hating my sister more than the other bullies, simply because she was enjoying her life so much. The violence just kept intensifying. One time I nearly died from drowning because I was just too tired and injured to resist as they dunked my head underwater. I could only think of one way out. I began my preparations, I wrote a note with just four words… ‘mum.. dad… I’m sorry’

WARNING: SPOOPY STORY ( 2 of 4 )

I have an older twin sister. Sometimes, I get asked things like, ‘do you feel pain when your sister gets hurt?’ ‘do your parents get confused between the two of you?’ stuff like that. People seem to have this idea that twins are connected somehow on a deeper level. More so than regular siblings, but not us two. We didn’t hate each other per se, but we didn’t really care for one another either. We never argued, or talked, or interfered with each other’s affairs. We might as well have been thin air to each other.

Now my sister was much more able than me when it came to pretty much anything. Athletics, academics… okay, it wasn’t like she was miles ahead of me, but she was always slightly better even if the difference was small. From a young age I was constantly deemed the less able one, sometimes, even the simpleton. During childhood, my parents would always say things like…

“Your sister can already ride her bike, why can’t you?” I probably learnt it twenty minutes after her, but this small amount might as well have been the difference between heaven and earth. If I scored 95% on a math test I never got a pat on my back from the teacher, or even just a reassuring, ‘well done’. No. I’d been sitting by myself with my paper staring at my sister being champion of the class for getting 98%. Then again, I didn’t really envy my sister and she didn’t brag about being better.

WARNING: SPOOPY STORY ( 1 of 4 )

Hidden away in the rich part of town is my cafe and the luscious interior of the cafe along with the relaxing jazz music that we play makes this a popular joint for students and housewives with too much free time on their hands. There’s even a terrace which is often filled with people reading books, chatting and drinking coffee… sometimes something a little stronger. It was November and a trio of young girls entered the cafe and they’d been allowed to leave school early due to finishing their midterms exams that day. They were complaining about how they went.

“Well this is … Jesus I’m going to have to repeat a year.”

“Oh come on, you couldn’t have done that badly, I’ve never heard of a student repeating a year at fourteen.” A fresh batch of squabbling ignited fueled by the stress of exams and the annoying air of confidence one of the girls was giving off. She was obviously the smarter of the bunch.

The nattering subsided after ten minutes and eventually the girl settled on a new topic of conversation, namely what schools they were planning to progress to. In the Japanese schooling system high schools are commonly split between chugaku, which is lower secondary, and koukou, upper secondary. What high school you attend can greatly affect your chances of getting into a good university. Still eavesdropping in on their conversation the two… well… less gifted students started teasing the smarter one. Telling her how the best school in the district, the one she would likely be going to, was haunted. The rumor was a famous one, apparently, after a student committed suicide at the school other people started to die horrible deaths on the school premises. Witnesses often swore they saw the dead student at the scene of the crimes. What a load of . It wasn’t uncommon that people claimed places where suicides occurred were haunted, in fact, in Japan you can find an apartment at a comparatively cheaper price if a misfortune has occurred there. Losing interest, I was about to turn away and tend to my duties when I heard a shout.

“Now wait just a minute,” the voice said, turning toward its source I realized it was one of the ladies sitting on the opposite end of the cafe. The woman left her book in the table and walked over to the three young girls. Sitting down with a grunt she scratched at her long dark hair rigorously. For that brief interval, everything in the cafe seemed to revolve around this little strange woman in a red dress.

She opened to speak, “I’m sick and tired of all of these lies about my old school being haunted. If you three would be so kind as to stop spreading such idiotic rumors I’d be more than happy to tell you what actually happened there.”

I couldn’t help but listen in to the whole story from behind my counter, I was just as interested in finding out the truth behind the rumors as these three young girls. The story itself wasn’t about this quirky woman in the red dress though, it was about another girl that she knew at the school called Atkazuki. For the purpose of this story, I’ll retell the story I overhead from Atkazuki’s perspective.