5
Chapter 005. The Nightmare of Room 1313 (2)
Before long, the clock had reached 8 p.m.
It had been an hour since the Pizza Night celebrating the first day of moving into the dormitory had begun.
The atmosphere must have been good, because the hallway was still quiet.
Clack, Clack—!
Amid that deathly silence,
I gathered up the true feelings and fears hidden behind the mask Leo had left behind and drove them into the typewriter one letter at a time.
RAT-A-TAT—DING!
The protagonist’s name was Leo.
It was written in the first person.
A freshman who had moved into Room 1313 of John Jay Hall at Columbia University, a wealthy and arrogant New Yorker.
That was right.
The protagonist of this short story was a doppelgänger modeled entirely after my roommate, Leo Garfield.
My intention was to bring the distance between the real Leo Garfield and the protagonist of the story as close as possible, allowing Leo to experience the character’s experiences as though they were his own.
――――――――――――――
⋮
I grimaced as I received the dormitory key.
Room 1313.
An unlucky number.
When I opened the door to unpack my belongings, I immediately turned on jazz music, pretending to be cool. I wanted to desperately ignore the ominous feeling coming from this room.
A little later, my roommate entered.
An old shirt, an Asian guy, and······ a typewriter.
I clicked my tongue inwardly.
A scholarship student who’s a real fighter. He’s off my list of connections.
I looked down on him and spoke casually.
“I’ll take the window side. The side near the door should be more convenient for you, right?”
He simply······ stared at me.
There was something unsettlingly frightening about his gaze.
All kinds of voices clamored inside my chest.
Don’t let him look down on you. Leo.
Don’t lose control.
Be strong. Straighten your chest.
⋮
――――――――――――――
TAP······ TAP, TAP!
Leo Garfield.
The scene where he looked at me and secretly dismissed me as an Asian try-hard and a nerd.
The moment when he silently screamed at the RA’s ‘ghost joke’ while pretending to be composed on the outside, boasting that this was Columbia, not some cheap state college campfire.
Moment by moment, I dug into the emotions and fears Leo had revealed, writing them onto the page in the first person.
Yes, Leo. You think you’re the one wearing a mask.
CRRRR-SHNK!
When I changed lines, the carriage slid smoothly to the left and let out a cheerful sound.
But think about it carefully. You’re not the one wearing the mask. The mask······ is wearing you.
If someone wearing a mask does not realize that they habitually wear one,
if they unconsciously keep pulling it out to cover their vulnerable bare face,
can you really say that they are ‘wearing’ the mask?
No.
They are a slave to the mask.
The flash fiction I was writing now was an axe sharpened to make him realize that.
Of course······ simply transferring the fears I had heard from him onto paper exactly as they were would not make a novel.
That would just be an accusation.
Leo went down to the Welcome Pizza Night after mocking his Asian roommate.
After he made useful connections with cool and talented freshmen and, swept up in the excitement, stepped into the elevator,
I stopped my hands for a moment and smiled quietly.
The real fun starts now.
Even while enjoying Pizza Night to the lively music of the band, the ominous feeling of Room 1313 remained behind like sticky tar.
It was time to amplify that feeling and mold it into a nightmare.
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⋮
I stood in front of Room 1313, fiddling with the key.
“Phew······ that was fun.”
But the party was over.
Now I had to spend the night in this damn room with that stubborn Asian roommate.
Click—
“This is really unpleasant······ huh?”
The room I entered after opening the door was pitch-black.
But my roommate was not asleep yet.
He was sitting motionless at his desk in the darkness.
“Leo, you’re back?”
“Y-yeah. You’re still awake?”
“I was just about to go to sleep.”
My roommate slowly stood up and pulled the paper out of his typewriter.
Writing in an ominous room from the very first day.
What a freak. Creepy.
But unexpectedly, my roommate approached me and held out a manuscript.
“A housewarming gift for Room 1313.”
The Nightmare of Room 1313
The letters stamped out by the old typewriter spread across the page like ominous stains.
⋮
――――――――――――――
An invitation to a nightmare.
The Leo in the story begins suffering from all kinds of strange phenomena as he reads the manuscript handed to him by his roommate.
His reflection does not appear in the mirror.
Instead, his roommate wears his mask and acts as him.
“F-fuck. Isaac, can’t you just stop this?”
Eventually, Leo runs away.
Outside Room 1313.
But beyond the door, another Room 1313 appears instead of the hallway.
No matter how many times he passes through the door, he cannot escape Room 1313.
“Please, please······! Let me out!”
When Leo finally breaks down and begs,
the roommate wearing Leo’s mask asks,
“You want me to let you out?”
“Please······ I’ll do anything······!”
The roommate mocks him.
“Leo, you’ve never entered this room.”
“······What?”
Leo cannot understand.
Me, my body, I’m clearly inside Room 1313······.
“You really don’t understand anything, do you?”
“Huh?”
“You think that shell is ‘you’?”
Layer by layer.
Peeling away the masks and shells he had wrapped himself in, exposing the small and fragile core beneath—
I raced toward the final sentence.
Eventually.
clik··· clik······
“The End.”
When the axe that would shatter Leo’s mask was complete.
Click—
“Phew······. This really is uncomfortable······ huh?”
Leo appeared, carrying the faint smell of alcohol and cheap pizza.
“Leo, you’re back?”
I pulled the paper from the typewriter, gathered up the five pages of the manuscript I had just finished, and approached the guy who stood frozen in surprise.
“A housewarming gift for Room 1313.”
“······Huh?”
“Read it while you sober up.”
I sat down on my bed and began watching his reaction.
* * *
This bastard······ is he messing with me right now?
Leo let out an incredulous laugh.
A housewarming gift.
Did he write some kind of poem? Or maybe······ a love serenade or something?
Leo shuddered.
Don’t tell me this guy is into that kind of thing?
But when he glanced over, his roommate, Isaac Moon, was simply staring straight at him with pitch-black eyes from which no emotion could be read.
As if I were some kind of ant······.
Leo swallowed nervously and deliberately raised his voice.
“I don’t know what you wrote, but I’m not going to give you some fake compliment just because you expect one.”
He sat on the desk chair and unfolded the manuscript.
The first paragraph.
No, the moment he read the first sentence,
“······What?”
His drunkenness began to fade.
I grimaced as I received the dormitory key. Room 1313. It was an unlucky number. When I opened the door to unpack my belongings, I immediately turned on jazz music, pretending to be cool. ······
Leo’s expression gradually hardened.
At the RA’s ghost joke, I screamed inwardly, but outwardly I calmly snorted. “······You’re quite the joker, senior. This is Columbia, not some cheap state college campfire.”
The situation before going down to Welcome Pizza Night.
His own thoughts and actions had been typed out without a single word being different.
“This······ bastard, what is this? Why are you making me into a racist and a coward? If you have a problem with something, say it to my face—”
“Leo.”
Leo, who had been rambling in protest, suddenly found himself unable to speak.
He simply knew.
This kind of protest wouldn’t work on that guy.
Because······
He knows. He knows everything.
Leo had done his best to hide his true feelings.
He thought he had been pretty good at it.
But that guy, Isaac, had seen straight through everything and written it down ‘exactly.’
It wasn’t a guess.
He hadn’t simply made a lucky assumption.
“Just read it all the way through. It’s only a story.”
Only a story? This?
Leo couldn’t agree with that.
Leo, you’re back? ······A housewarming gift for Room 1313.
When the story reached the moment when he arrived at the room after the party ended, a chill ran down the back of Leo’s neck.
Everything had been ‘real’ only moments ago.
How?
As if he had seen the future?
It feels like I’m completely playing into that guy’s hands.
Overwhelmed by a strange sense of pressure, Leo turned the page.
“Gasp······.”
Up until now, it had been frightening because his hidden thoughts had been laid bare.
But from here on, the space called Room 1313 itself began transforming into something sinister and repulsive.
Leo Garfield, staring into a mirror that did not reflect his appearance.
His roommate wearing his ‘face.’
Room 1313, from which he could not escape no matter how hard he tried.
And then.
You think that shell is ‘you’?
The moment Leo’s eyes reached that sentence,
the letters began to writhe.
Black ink rose from the surface of the paper and stretched long tentacles toward the space between Leo’s eyebrows.
Grab—!
Who are you, Leo Garfield?
“······Guh.”
An elite? You’re not pretending to be cool because you don’t want people to look down on you?
“N-no······ I, I’m just—”
All you have is a false mask.
The manuscript mocked him and stripped him bare.
When the outer shell of the cool elite was peeled away, the fear hidden inside emerged like blood seeping through.
I’m scared. I’m scared of this room! Ghosts! A-and······ I’m afraid of being ignored, afraid that people will discover how pathetic I really am!
Leo frantically threw the manuscript onto the floor.
“No, stop! Stop it! Stop······!”
That wasn’t enough.
He stomped on the manuscript again and again.
“Haa······ haa······ Damn it, this is just······ just writing.”
He caught his breath and raised his head.
Then he glared at Isaac.
“You bastard······!”
He tried to curse him.
He was going to condemn him as much as he wanted, telling him that there was such a thing as having a sick sense of humor and asking why he had to mock someone like this.
“You, you······.”
But not a single word could make it out of his throat.
Brown hair tinged with copper, a face covered in freckles.
Leo’s own face had become a plastic mask and was sitting over Isaac’s face.
“Why? Do you still think that something as trivial as this mask is ‘you’? Of course not.”
Isaac removed the mask.
Where Isaac’s face should have been was completely empty.
“Leo, look carefully.”
Pitch-black darkness.
Inside it, a small, unimpressive child was curled up tightly, trembling.
“This is you.”
······!
“Argh!”
When Leo opened his eyes with a scream, his body was drenched in sweat.
The room was dark and silent.
Damn······. I must have fallen asleep because I was so exhausted while reading that horrible thing.
Relieved, Leo wiped his forehead.
Then a voice came from the darkness.
“No.”
Leo froze.
“You still don’t understand?”
His roommate, Isaac, stood at the foot of his bed like a ghost in the darkness.
“Just as you can’t escape Room 1313 that you never entered, you can’t wake up from a nightmare you never fell asleep in.”
Inside that empty face, the small and fragile ‘Leo’ was looking at Leo.
“Aaaaaah!”
Then a voice struck him like a slap across the cheek.
“······Decide, Leo.”
Leo barely managed to draw a breath and opened his eyes.
He was not in his bed.
Nor was he in the darkness.
He was simply kneeling and collapsed in front of his own desk inside the room.
The five pages of the manuscript were scattered around his feet.
Overcome with shock and terror, Leo pointed at Isaac.
“You, you······! What the hell are you?”
Isaac smiled faintly.
“Me? Isaac Moon. Freshman in English Literature. I write horror novels.”
“Horror······?”
“You probably think of cheap pulp fiction when you hear ‘horror novel,’ but horror is remarkably good at shattering things like masks.”
Then everything I’ve experienced until now······ was the fear I felt from reading this guy’s novel?
Crazy. Horror novels? Aren’t those just stories with ghosts or psychopathic killers and things like that?
Isaac lightly patted Leo’s shoulder.
“Connections in the Ivy League are great, but we’re roommates who’ll be sharing a room for a semester, right? Let’s get along.”
Leo thought of the people he had met and exchanged names with at Pizza Night.
A direct descendant of Theodore Roosevelt, the son of a Wall Street tycoon, a genius who had published a collection of poetry while still in high school······
He felt ashamed of himself for joking around with those people and acting smugly as though he had become someone important.
They’re nothing. Not compared to this guy······.
Gulp—
Just as Leo looked up at Isaac with a mixture of awe,
Knock, knock—
“It’s Mike. Can you open the door?”
Isaac opened the door, and the RA of the thirteenth floor poked his face inside.
“What’s going on? I thought I heard some kind of scream.”
Leo quickly spoke.
“C-can you change my room? I really can’t sleep in this room with an actual ghost!”
But Mike merely chuckled and dismissed it as a joke.
“You’re the first person to take my joke this seriously. You’re a good one, huh? Anyway, sleep well.”
The room was once again left with only the two of them.
Leo spoke.
“Isaac, can I use the spot near the door?”
“Sure.”
“Uh, also······ could we leave the lights on tonight?”
Leo’s face burned with embarrassment.
But after having already had his bare self completely exposed, he had no mask left to pick up and put back on.
He was scared to death.
This was no time to hide it.
But······
“And, and one more thing.”
“?”
“Do you have anything else you’ve written?”
Why did he keep becoming curious about this guy’s writing?