Source
https://kakuyomu.jp/works/16817139558323866579/episodes/16817330669161425709
It was 3:30 in the morning.
I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to go to the convenience store.
There are two convenience stores near my house, but one of them is not open 24 hours.
So, if I want to go shopping late at night, I have to go to the other one, which is a little further away, past the overpass.
That’s the convenience store where I work three nights a week.
The late-night shift is usually staffed by foreign exchange students and old men in their 70s.
I exchanged a quick greeting and bought a hot milk tea before leaving.
Niraji san, the exchange student, is 21 years old, one year older than me. He came to Japan to find a job.
He’s a respectable person, I think. If I were told to do the same thing, I’d probably lose my mind and run back home. Not just at convenience stores, but in customer service jobs in general, you get people who seem like they were insects in a past life. Quite frequently.
To begin with, I’m the kind of person who can’t even imagine leaving the Kanto region.
Even though I’m trying to leave, whenever I try to escape, all I can think about is being left behind on a dark road at night.
I want to be the one to leave, but for some reason, I’m still afraid of being left behind. What a stupid story.
I take a sip from the bottle before it gets cold.
I leave the convenience store, walk to the left, pass under the overpass, turn at the first pachinko parlor I see, and continue down the road to reach that apartment building.
As I passed under the overpass, looking at the height restriction sign, I dropped the cap I had been trying to close.
“Ah…”
Drinking while walking was a bad idea. I sighed and bent down to chase after it.
As I reached for the orange cap, I saw it stopped by the tip of a red stiletto heel and looked up.
There was a woman.
I blinked in surprise.
At least, there shouldn’t have been any sign of a person there just a moment ago.
Even though the underpass was dimly lit and dark, it wasn’t so dark that I couldn’t see anything.
I’m sure there was no one there, I thought.
She was a slender woman wearing a white sleeveless dress.
Her long black hair reached down to her abdomen, covering her face.
First, the current season crossed my mind.
Mid-December. The temperature was seven degrees Celsius.
Next, my mind labeled the woman as suspicious.
It was more realistic than thinking she was a ghost.
Finally, I noticed the stiletto heels at her feet and the back of her head facing me…and furrowed my brow in confusion.
The tips of the stiletto heels were facing me. At the same time, the back of her head was also facing me.
Logically, her neck should be twisted…
I couldn’t rule out the possibility that she was wearing a wig or hiding her hair style.
But I couldn’t imagine a woman who would go to the trouble of dressing up like that on a cold winter night.
Well, maybe she was a malicious YouTuber.
In fact, that would be preferable.
The woman is still standing in front of me. She doesn’t seem to be moving at all.
Should I turn around and run away? Or should I stay put and wait for her to leave?
I don’t know what might provoke her. Whether she’s a ghost or not, the only thing I can do is try to calm the situation down. But I don’t know how. I’m stuck.
I stood there awkwardly for several seconds,
“Don’t you know?”
As I tried to pull my feet back and run away, the woman muttered above my head.
Her voice was like water forced through a twisted pipe, broken and wet.
“Don’t you know?”
Her slurred voice echoed calmly in the cold darkness.
“Yuna chan, don’t you know her?”
I was certain that responding with words would be a bad idea.
“Sumie Yuna chan.”
Was ‘Sumie’ her last name?
Unfortunately, I had never heard it before.
“Don’t you know?”
As I looked up, her head twisted awkwardly—then, in the next instant, it fell off.
Fortunately, I didn’t see her face.
“If you don’t know, please tell me.”
The skin on her neck was stretched tight.
Her right hand, with a broken little finger, skillfully supported her head.
“If you don’t know, please tell me.”
Her left hand scratched her head.
Her dry black hair was messily tangled, and I could see her fingernails turn bright red.
“If you don’t know, please tell me.”
The moment the red fingertips reached out toward me—I sprinted down the street as if jumping back.
Milk tea spilled everywhere. My down jacket got wet, but I had no time to care.
The sound of heels stepping out echoed. There was no room to look back.
“Yuna chan, Yuna chan, Yuna chan, Yuna chan.”
I threw the plastic bottle and sprinted straight to the apartment building.
I turned the corner at the pachinko parlor, ran straight ahead, took out the key while running, and rushed into the entrance.
I couldn’t relax while waiting for the elevator.
I didn’t feel like using the stairs. Encountering it in the middle of the night would be the same as going back there now.
I was on edge until the last moment before getting on the elevator, but I didn’t hear the sound of heels. At least, not to my ears.
“What the hell was that…!”
With my back to the door, I sat down in the entranceway.
As I caught my breath, I recalled a story I had heard from a friend amid my confused thoughts.
I think I heard a story about meeting a woman in a white dress on a dark road sometime ago.
It wasn’t recently. Since that incident, I’ve been recording my friends’ stories in my smartphone’s notes.
As far as I could tell from the records, there were no such things in the recent “ghost stories.”
It was probably one of the earlier ones.
Still.
“……..Is this really a true story…..?”
I’m certain that the ghost stories she tells are 100% made up.
I’ve seen with my own eyes that supernatural beings exist in this world, and I know about the strange phenomena that fill this apartment building.
But when she tells her stories, I listen to them thinking they’re “not real.”
I don’t think that just because “I heard it from a friend” is a lie, everything else must be a lie too. The fact that she mentions a fictional friend has nothing to do with whether the ghost story is true or not.
Still, I believe that all the stories I’ve heard over the past six months are made up.
It’s a strange feeling that I can’t quite explain, but for some reason, I just know it when I hear them…
The stories my neighbor tells are all made up.
There’s no sister who went missing and drowned somewhere, no pregnant woman with a strange appearance, no dog that talks in the voice of a dead classmate coming to school, and no doll hanging from a doorknob.
Everything is just a made-up story.
It’s not a true ghost story, but a made-up one.
But the woman in the white dress did appear. Probably the same one she was talking about.
“What was the story about again…”
I took off my shoes, placed my hand on my forehead, and muttered softly.
If the story said something like, “Anyone who meets her will die” then even that might become true.
For now, I wiped the dirty jacket roughly and sat down on the bed.
I sat down without hesitation, and something that had been bulging in the corner fell to the floor with a thud. But I left it there.
I don’t have time to worry about that now.
I remember hearing she says, “It’s a story I heard from a friend…” several times.
A white dress.
Red stiletto heels.
A twisted neck.
Sumie Yuna.
The unusual appearance catches the eye, but the most significant clue in the narrative is the phrase “the woman who asks about Sumie Yuna.”
In her stories, proper nouns rarely appear.
The name alone should narrow it down, but even after thinking about it for a while, “Sumie Yuna” didn’t ring a bell.
I do remember hearing a story about a woman wearing a white dress and red stiletto heels with a twisted neck, but…
Incidentally, as far as I can recall, it wasn’t a story where you died just from encountering someone.
It was just a story about encountering the woman at night and realizing that her neck was twisted, not that her long hair was hanging down in front of her.
Still, it was scary enough.
“Sumie Yuna, huh?”
I took out my smartphone and typed in the name for now. Since I couldn’t figure out the kanji just by hearing the sound, I first looked it up in hiragana and then tried a few different combinations.
I also tried adding “ghost story” and “accident,” but nothing seemed to match.
I don’t get it. I have no idea.
And when I don’t understand something, it’s best to just forget about it.
Maybe it was the tension and relaxation, or maybe it was the strain on my brain, but I was starting to feel sleepy.
Maybe I should just go to sleep and think about it when I wake up.
With that thought, I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, but then—the intercom rang.
I opened my eyes.
For some reason, I just stared at the ceiling for a while.
Did someone come downstairs?
Are they at the door?
Or is it just my usual bad mood?
I didn’t know which it was, but either way, it was unpleasant.
This apartment building has an automatic lock, but the intercom doesn’t have a monitor.
The only way to find out who came was to pick up the receiver and talk to them.
Lying on my back and staring at the ceiling, I didn’t have the courage to get up and check the front door, nor did I have the courage to pick up the receiver.
Once the sound faded away, I even began to wonder if it was just a hallucination.
I waited silently, holding my breath.
In the end, nothing happened, but I couldn’t sleep at all until midday.
◇ ◆ ◇
“Hey, that woman in the white dress you told me about before, was that a ghost story from around here?”
The next day, in the evening.
Having gone to bed at an odd hour, I woke up at an odd hour and, unusually, went out onto the balcony and spoke to my neighbor.
Usually, when there’s something to discuss, the balcony window is knocked on. I don’t know how they do it. Once, when I went out too early, I saw an arm stretching out and then slowly retreating back behind the partition. I don’t know.
Anyway, I wait ten seconds before going out onto the balcony.
My friend is a supernatural being, but she can come out without any problems even during the day. My friend, who stretched out her mouth, answered my question with a puzzled look.
“It’s a story from Kanagawa, so it’s not from here.”
“…I see.”
Kanagawa, huh. That one.
Well, urban legends are rumored in various places, so maybe ghost stories can also shift locations?
But then again, I don’t believe that it actually happened in Kanagawa in the first place. I didn’t believe it.
I feel like it’s a problem that goes beyond the location.
I had no idea how to rationalize it, no matter how I thought about it.
My neighbor asked me in a light tone as I let out a small groan.
“Why?”
“…Well, yesterday, I encountered something similar to the ghost story you told me.”
I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I should be honest, but in the end, I told her the truth without embellishment.
If I encounter someone else with a different story in the future, I’d like to know what precautions to take.
When I glanced over, I saw an eyeball peering at me from inside a tube-like mouth extending toward me.
I reflexively shifted my gaze away.
It was definitely something I shouldn’t have seen.
I kept averting my eyes for a few seconds.
I could sense that the eyeball, which had been staring at me intently, had slipped away to the other side.
Then, a mechanical voice, devoid of emotion, echoed.
“Wrong.”
“….What?”
“The order.”
…..What order?
I didn’t have the courage to ask.
Apparently, the order was wrong.
And for my neighbor, that seemed to be something he couldn’t tolerate.
I heard a sound like metal being struck together coming from next door.
I had no idea what the sound was, but it seemed to be some kind of threatening noise.
Feeling uncomfortable, I just waited silently for words. I vaguely understood that it would be bad to speak carelessly.
I pride myself on being quite perceptive about when not to speak. It’s a skill I developed dealing with my mother and my former boss.
Incidentally, if the relationship continues to be at its worst, it converges into a pattern where “no matter the situation, the moment I speak, their mood becomes the worst.” Once it gets to that point, it’s over.
I didn’t want it to end, so I stared down at my clasped fingers, and a few minutes later, I heard the sound of someone tapping on the partition.
My neighbor, who was sitting next to me, shrugged dramatically and muttered somewhat boredly.
“If you want to know, ask Inohira.”
“What?”
“About Sumie Yuna.”
Inohira is Kando san’s older brother.
My neighbor thinks I was hired by his older brother to come here. So, it wasn’t particularly surprising that Inohira san’s name came up.
My neighbor is unaware of Kando san’s existence. I don’t really understand why, but there must be some reason for it.
“I don’t really want to know that much, but…is there anything I should know?”
“No.”
Her voice didn’t sound like she was telling the truth.
I think she’s lying.
Since there was nothing else I could do, I decided to send a message asking if I could ask Kando san to find out for me.
◇ ◆ ◇
Later, Kando san sent me a screenshot from a messaging app.
It seems that Sumie Yuna was a resident of this apartment building.
[Sumie Yuna?]
[The resident of Room 705.]
[She’s been here for about five years.]
[She was in fourth grade at the time.]
[She used to live with her mother.]
[Later, she started living with her mother’s boyfriend.]
[And now they’re all living together.]
[Including her mother.]
It was an explanation that was both understandable and incomprehensible.
However, I did understand that there was some meaning behind the door of Room 705 being open.
Beyond that pitch-black darkness, all three of them are still there.
I checked again, but there were still no news articles about it.
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