Welcome to the Ghost Story Gallery
There is a genre in web novels called the ghost story.
Horror is popular for plenty of reasons, but the essential pleasure this genre offers does not stop at simply jabbing a finger into your fear. I don't know whether anyone else would agree with me. Still, the true charm of it lies in this: the horror can be overcome.
Think of ordinary horror and you'll see what I mean. Once a ghost or a monster appears, all anyone can do is scramble to run or hide. Read a pure horror anecdote, a classic ghost story, and the tale usually ends without anything resembling a clear answer. You were never going to win. That is why they leave you stifled, unclean.
Ghost stories inside web novels are different. In the end you reach the truth, or you hunt the thing down yourself and put it to rest. The methods are endlessly varied, and there is a real catharsis in beating back a terror that, by every right, should simply have swallowed you. That made them more fun than the ordinary hardships novels usually dole out.
"......"
My reasons for liking the genre were much the same. No matter how horrifying the situation became, if the protagonist was in it, I believed it could be solved. I kept reading on the anticipation that belief gave me — the way you trust that a shonen manga, however bleak it gets, still has a happy ending waiting somewhere ahead.
"Ah, what the fuck is this?"
So if a web novel showed me an open ending this unknowable, of course I was going to lose my mind.
"Give me a break."
There was a web novel I read all the time. A man is possessed into the world inside a ghost story and tears the truth of that world apart. The ending was absolute shit.
"So nothing got resolved? Not one single thing?"
Literally not one plot thread, not one scrap of foreshadowing, was ever paid off before it crashed into a bad ending. Of course I felt filthy. Why write an ending like that in the first place?
"This one I genuinely cannot let slide."
So I put everything I had into a comment, and I meant every word of it.
It was a popular work anyway. There was no way the author would ever read a comment like mine. I had only written it to vent at least some of how wronged I felt. I was sure that was all it was......
The reply had come from the author. The point had slipped strangely sideways, though there didn't seem to be any malice in it. Even so, it felt grotesque.
Why grotesque? That, I couldn't really say. If it had been some petty battle of nerves, or the usual opening move you see in a possession story, I think I would have been fine with it. A comment asking, out of absolutely nowhere, whether I liked ghost stories just felt wrong. That was probably why.
I left a reply, doing my best to act as if I didn't care.
And yet all that came back was another strange answer. Only then did real panic hit me. A beat too late, goosebumps raced over my whole body, and I reflexively flung my phone onto the bed.
"What?"
Why nothing but the same question, over and over...?
Wrongness. A wrongness that fierce. It climbed my spine like a spider flexing its legs. For no good reason I scrubbed hard at an arm that hadn't done a thing.
"......Come on."
Just an ominous bit of imagination. Surely.
I slapped my own cheek to pull myself together, then picked the phone up again and checked the replies.
Shock clamped my mouth shut.
"Insane......"
The comments were anything but normal. That they kept being posted to me at all was already abnormal, but the truly strange part lay somewhere else.
"......No way."
Were these replies to the thoughts I'd just been having?
No. It had read my mind?
"......"
Something had gone wrong. I didn't know from where, but it had gone wrong in a very big way.
......This was bad.
Too late, I set my fingers to the keyboard and left a comment.
Consciousness snapped back without warning.
Something was wrong. I hadn't fallen asleep. I hadn't fainted. I didn't even have a memory of losing consciousness in the first place. A moment ago I should still have been writing comments. And yet I had woken up?
Where?
"What the—!"
I jerked upright on reflex, and only afterward realized I had been lying down. Why had I been on the floor...?
What was happening. A chill I couldn't name crawled over my skin.
First, I looked around.
"Where is this?"
Shabby chairs and desks packed the room. What met my eyes was the perfectly ordinary interior of a high school classroom. At the very front stood a green chalkboard, dust settled across it in shapes like a pattern. It was old enough to be cracked, though nothing was badly broken. It still looked usable enough.
I walked slowly toward the board. I needed to check whether anything important was there. Unfortunately, there was nothing special about it. The dust that had looked like a pattern had only piled up that way by chance.
"......"
I turned, carefully, and looked behind me. Wooden lockers stood in overlapping rows, every one of them as worn as the chalkboard. Dust lay so thick it practically buried them. For a second I mistook the lockers for white. Stepping closer, I saw chunks of stone had fallen across the tops. Each one was fairly large.
Without thinking, I tipped my head back — and found myself staring at a ceiling already on the verge of collapse.
"Goddamn it."
I had no idea what kind of place this was. But if I stayed in a classroom like this, it was going to get me killed. I ran for the door. It was a sliding door, and I tried to shove it open at once. Strangely, it wouldn't move. It was shut fast.
"Wh-what?!"
I understood that the situation was serious. I was coming to understand it more with every second, and thanks to that a contagion called fear bloomed up and covered my mind.
"......"
My whole body shook on its own. My head wasn't right. I couldn't even tell whether the judgments I was making were sound. I was just that scared.
Wh-what do I do now...
What was I supposed to do?
Knock, knock.
A knock, from somewhere, just then. I ran toward the sound on instinct and shouted with everything I had.
"I-is someone there?!"
Please, let there be someone. If there is, save me. Help me.
The moment I closed my mouth, everything around me went still. I swallowed dry without meaning to, glanced wildly around, and tried once more to put my thoughts in order.
A hallucination?
Or else... An ominous imagining rose up, but I decided to ignore it as hard as I could. For now I needed to find the next thing worth investigating.
Last of all, I went to the window set in the wall. It was shattered so badly that it looked dangerous just to look at. The shards were sharp enough that getting close was difficult, and merely seeing them made me hurt, as if a piece had already gone in.
Bracing myself to get cut, I looked outside.
"......"
Fuck. I shouldn't have looked.
What was wrong with that sky? It had gone past dark. There was nothing out there but black. No — forget the black. What were those clouds? It was too dark to see them. But they weren't clouds. They were shapes. Something was floating in the sky? And it wasn't a plane? Anyone could see this wasn't normal. I was losing it.
"......Ha."
I struck both cheeks with my hands. I had hit hard enough that the pain lingered, and thanks to that I could pull myself together.
Get a grip.
I could not afford to let my mind go now. The moment I actually lost it, that would be the end. I had no idea what was coming, and here I was already trying to give up. I needed to calm down as far as I could.
"Hoo."
I drew one long, deep breath, sorted the chaos in my head, and caught my trembling hands. Now I needed to judge the situation.
"......"
Without hesitating, I picked up one long shard of glass. At first I thought of using it as a weapon, but there was no safe way to carry it, so I had to scrap the idea at once. Instead I simply studied the shard.
"......They're all the same shape?"
At first I had assumed they were pieces scattered when the window broke. But every one of them was identical in size and in shape. These were not shards made by breaking a window. Someone had set them here on purpose.
Why? Why would anyone?
I genuinely didn't know. There was no reason to leave specially made pieces of glass in a place like this.
Thinking about it now won't get me an answer.
There was something more important anyway.
Is there a way out?
The door was locked completely. From what I had seen through the window, the drop was four stories at the least, so escaping that way was impossible too. I couldn't just fall with no plan. One mistake and that would be the end of me. I had to think carefully.
"Ah. Fuck. Seriously."
Why was this happening to me? I did remember the last thing before I came here. I had complained to the author of the web novel I was reading, and out of nowhere that author had left those strange comments. And when I came to, I was here. I could see how it connected. I had been reading web novels for a long time, after all.
"This is a transmigration, isn't it."
Which meant I had been dropped into that ghost-story web novel I had been reading, and the situation I was in now had to be a ghost story. The moment I realized it, a hollow laugh burst out of me.
"I really don't want to just drop dead like this."
Ghost-story web novels usually work by gathering evidence and reasoning your way through, which means the reader, same as in a mystery, can figure out the answer too.
"......I don't have a goddamn clue."
I had investigated everything there was to investigate, and still no method came to mind. Was I just this stupid, or was the situation itself unreasonable? Probably both.
"There was no incident like this in the original, goddammit."
If you transmigrate, you're supposed to start with the upper hand in information. I don't even have information? I let out a sigh. I couldn't just stand here. As one last act of resistance, I made up my mind to smash the ceiling if I had to.
That was the moment.
Ting!
An uncanny chime rang in my ear. It was faintly unpleasant, and I knew I must not ignore it. I turned at once toward the sound. Please let this be a way out of here. Or at least something that would help...!
"......"
The fuck?