The Night That Never Ends
This night does not end.
The terrible premonition crushing down on her mind locked her legs in place as if they had frozen solid.
She slowly peeled her forehead away from the windowpane. A chill seeped from the glass-touched skin into her veins, but it did nothing to cool the foul heat boiling up from deep in her gut.
The tiles beneath her feet were cold as ice. She was completely naked. The tattered rags that had covered her body had long since been devoured by the tentacles.
One step. She backed away.
Squelch.
The translucent slime stuck to the center of her sole stretched like rubber before snapping free. A slick, crawling sensation wormed between her toes and sent a shiver racing up her spine.
She turned her head.
Gloop. Splash.
The sound of a massive lump of meat being forced into a mud puddle and stirred. From inside the space that had, only moments ago, been choking her throat and ravaging her body, something was still alive — still writhing.
That was when she remembered the bag she had left hanging on the door handle.
She drew a deep breath, breaking it into silent fragments so no sound would escape. Pressing her shoulder against the tiled wall, feeling the rough surface scrape her bare skin, she moved her feet back toward that terrible stall.
The air inside the restroom was far heavier and more humid than the corridor. A nauseating stench — the coppery reek of blood mixed with ammonia — stabbed at her nostrils.
She approached the first stall with care. The strap of the old canvas bag hanging from the handle swam into her blurred vision.
Then it happened.
Sssslip.
Something slid out through the narrow gap between the stall door and the tiled floor.
Tentacles — thick as a grown man's forearm, dark crimson in color. Countless nodules studding their surfaces scraped across the tiles with a dry skritch-skritch. Their tips rose stiff as snake heads, probing the empty air, stretching toward her feet.
Half a step. She retreated without a sound.
The tentacle tips groped the empty space where her toes had been a moment before.
It's looking for me.
There was no time to think. Her hand shot into the dark and snatched the canvas bag's strap from the door handle.
The rough fabric filled her grip, and in the same instant she spun and bolted for the corridor. The wet thrashing from inside the stall grew more violent — then, the moment she pulled herself fully into the hallway and pressed her body against the tiled wall, the movement gradually slowed.
She slid down the wall and collapsed onto the floor. The cold of the tiles climbed her bare back and bare hips.
She set the flashlight down and pulled the bag into her arms with trembling hands.
Her fingertips refused to obey as they fumbled for the zipper pull. Twice they slipped across the cold metal. On the third try she finally locked her grip and dragged it down.
Ziiip.
The bag opened. Folded pieces of fabric sat stacked inside.
Things she had packed to change into after work. Black underwear. A white T-shirt. A pair of short denim shorts.
The debris of an ordinary life felt, in this moment, like a lifeline.
She pulled out the black underwear first. The instant she reached both arms behind her back and flexed her shoulder muscles to fasten the hooks, a tearing pain exploded from deep inside the joints.
Her breath caught. She bit down hard on her lip and swallowed the scream.
Her shaking fingers finally found the clasp and hooked it. The elastic band cinching tight around her chest gave her a strange, physical sense of stability.
Next was the white T-shirt.
She gripped the fabric in both hands and lifted it over her head. She pushed her head through the narrow opening and pulled it down. Every time the cold cloth scraped across her dry back, her wounded collarbones, her bare chest, a raw sting flared as if living skin were being peeled away.
She shoved her arms through and tugged the hem taut down to her hips. As the fabric settled against her body, some of the clammy chill clinging to her skin seemed to ease.
Only the denim shorts remained.
Still sitting on the floor, she dragged one knee toward her chest with agonizing effort. Deep in her pelvis, near the joint where bone met bone, something sharp and wrong slipped out of place.
"Nngh…"
Her vision flashed white.
Forcing short, broken breaths, she shoved her leg into the pant leg. The rough, stiff denim scraped mercilessly over the tender flesh of her inner thigh and the swollen places that had yet to go down.
She got the other leg in, then braced against the wall and staggered to her feet. Her hands were rough as they hauled the shorts up over her hips and yanked the zipper closed. The moment she forced the metal button through, the tight cinch around her waist made the dull ache in her lower abdomen stand out all the more clearly.
Once she was dressed, she dropped back down hard enough to make a sound.
Her breathing was ragged. Cold sweat ran from her forehead and soaked her eyelashes.
She had no shoes. She hadn't even managed to grab socks. Even with clothes on and her body temperature climbing a little, the cold of the tiles against her bare soles still cut to the bone.
She dug through the bag again, turning it inside out.
One by one, she laid the things her fingers found onto the floor.
A heavy multi-tool and a folding utility knife. A plastic pouch of basic first-aid supplies.
A round, flat roll of electrical tape and two spare cylindrical batteries.
A palm-sized metal folding umbrella. And three energy bars in crinkling wrappers.
That was everything.
In an ordinary disaster, maybe. Against the thing still writhing inside that stall, these were nothing but crude scraps of metal and junk.
Not a single yellow paper talisman with red writing. No jangling bells. No keen-edged Shaman Knife left either.
Her gaze, staring into the empty bag, drifted naturally to her own palms.
She turned her hands over and spread them wide. The skin was blistered and swollen as if branded with a hot iron. Every time she bent her fingers, a searing heat flared and the skin pulled taut.
Down the center of her palm, following the deep life line, a long diagonal burn mark was already healing at an unnatural speed.
She slung the bag over her shoulder. The full weight of the strap pressing into her collarbone registered clearly.
She picked up the flashlight and slowly rose to her feet.
Before stepping fully into the corridor, her eyes turned back toward the restroom interior.
Three stalls with old wooden doors.
From the outermost one — the first stall, where she had been attacked — that unpleasant wet friction sound was still going.
She moved and stopped in front of the second stall.
She extended the hand holding the flashlight and carefully pushed the center of the firmly shut wooden door.
Creeeak.
The rusted hinges screamed as if splitting apart, and the door opened a crack.
The flashlight beam cut through the narrow gap and lit the interior.
That was the moment.
The instant the light touched the toilet bowl, a black mass lurking in the dark thrashed violently.
Every hair on her body stood on end.
"Ah—!"
Before any conscious decision could form, her body moved on pure reflex. She yanked her extended arm back hard and slammed the door shut.
BANG!
The wooden door crashed against the frame with a deafening noise. Almost simultaneously, a massive weight from inside slammed into the door head-on.
BOOM!
The tremendous impact transmitted through her palms nearly threw her backward. She planted both feet hard against the floor and threw every ounce of her body weight — from shoulder to palm — against the door, pinning it shut.
Beyond the wood, something scraped. Wet sounds of thrashing against tile roared and heaved.
She held her breath. Inside her ribcage, an irregular pulse hammered against her bones.
Ten seconds. Twenty. Time that felt like eternity.
"Hah — hhk…"
The violent battering from within gradually subsided, and an unpleasant silence settled once more.
Here too. Those slick things were lying in wait.
She carefully took her hands off the door and stepped back.
Only the innermost stall remained — the third.
She advanced slowly. Sharp cold crawled up through the bare soles of her feet with every step on the tiles.
The door of the last stall stood slightly ajar. The black gap looked like a maw waiting for prey.
She eased the flashlight beam into that narrow crack.
The light cut through the dark, swept the wall — and illuminated something hanging in midair.
Her breath stopped.
A thick pipe near the ceiling. From it, a rope, and hanging by the neck — the form of a female student.
Her uniform skirt hung with neat, orderly pleats. Her blouse was spotless, without a single speck of dust. The skin of her dangling arms and calves was bloodlessly white and smooth. There was no stiffness, no trace of rigor mortis — none of the usual signs of the dead.
Strangest of all was her face.
Not twisted in agony. Eyes not bulging. Lids gently closed, as if she had simply fallen into a deep sleep — a peace so complete it was chilling.
Only one place was different: her throat.
Centered on where the noose had touched, the skin had blackened and died in a hideous band of discoloration. As if decay had raged furiously in that single strip of flesh and then, at some point, simply stopped.
And wrapped tightly around that blackened, rotting throat was something else.
A thick leather choker, catching the flashlight beam with a dark red gem set dead in its center.
The hand holding the flashlight began to tremble.
On the surface of the red gem where the light struck, a strange luster shimmered — as if a drop of blood had beaded there.
Slowly, as if entranced, she took a step forward.
A sound struck her eardrums — whether hallucination or real, she could not tell. A voice. The hanged girl's tightly sealed lips did not move at all, and yet a clear, shaped whisper drove itself directly into her mind, resonating inside her skull.
Another step.
Warning klaxons screamed through her head, but her right hand was already cutting through the air, reaching out. Before the rational judgment that she must not touch it could travel from brain to nerve, her cold fingertips had already made contact with the surface of that dark red gem.
Fwaaah—.
In an instant, her entire field of vision drowned in blood-red.
A crushing pressure clamped around her throat.
Her airway sealed completely. Lungs starved of oxygen screamed and swelled inside her chest. Blood surged backward from beneath her jaw up into her brain, pressure building as if her eyeballs would burst from their sockets.
She clawed at her own neck with both hands in a frenzy.
But there was nothing to grab. No rope. No leather strap. An invisible, massive force was crushing her windpipe shut.
She raked her nails down her own throat. The pain of raw flesh tearing and blood welling was nothing compared to the horrific suffocation of a blocked airway.
Ghk — hhk…!
She tried to scream a scream that would tear her vocal cords apart, but all that escaped was a thin, metallic wheeze, like air leaking from a punctured hose. Consciousness began sinking fast into a red-black void.
How many seconds had passed? Minutes?
At the far end of a place where the sense of time had completely collapsed—
She closed her hand around the choker.
Snap.
Something broke. And with that sound, the overwhelming agony crushing her windpipe evaporated in an instant, as if it had never been.
"Haaah — hhk — haah…!"
Her knees buckled and she collapsed face-first onto the tiles. Rough air poured into her lungs like a waterfall. She coughed hard, bracing both hands against the floor.
With trembling fingers she felt her own throat. Long nail marks scored the skin, but no foreign object remained to press against her airway.
Head bowed, she slowly opened the palm of her right hand where it rested on the floor.
The thing that had, until moments ago, been cinched around the rotting throat of the girl hanging in midair. The leather choker with its dark red gem sat in her hand, cold as death, without a trace of body heat.
Gasping, she lifted her head.
She looked up again at the corpse of the hanged female student suspended in the air.
Nothing remained on the blackened, necrotic throat. In the place where the choker had been wrapped, only a deep scar remained — proof of the suffering she had endured.
Just now. That.
Had it been the pain this hanged girl felt in her final moment? Had the horrific suffocation she herself had just lived through been the last thing this girl saw as she died?
And why — with a face so peaceful?
How, while enduring agony that should have made her eyes bulge from their sockets, had she hanged herself without so much as a single facial muscle twisting?
Questions chased one another, but there was no one left to answer them.
For now, she roughly shoved the unknown leather choker into the pocket of her denim shorts. The metal fittings digging into her thigh actually helped clear her head.
As she turned to leave the restroom, the corner of her eye caught a mop leaning at an angle beside an old cleaning supply cabinet.
Without hesitation she walked over and seized the mop handle. She planted her bare foot on the blackened cloth head against the floor, gripped the shaft in both hands, and yanked upward with everything she had.
Crack-snap — the plastic joints shattered, and the old cloth scraps fell away.
What remained in her hands was a long, solid wooden shaft roughly the height of a person.
The surface was rough enough that splinters threatened to drive into her palms, but the weight of it was satisfyingly heavy.
A hundred times better than wandering empty-handed through the dark.
She adjusted the bag strap so it wouldn't slip from her shoulder, planted the wooden shaft against the floor like a cane, and carefully stepped out of the restroom.
The corridor air wrapped around her body — cooler by far than anything inside the bathroom.
She had taken only a few steps toward the descending staircase when she stopped.
Something kept flickering strangely at the right edge of her vision.
Ugh — did dust get in my eye?
Thinking something had gotten into her eye, she raised a hand and rubbed hard.
Zzzt. Zzzt.
The flickering did not stop. Instead, it began spreading across a wider swath of her field of view.
Like the static snow of an old CRT television hit by signal interference. Ash-gray, sizzling noise overlaid itself semi-transparently across the physical space in front of her, shimmering and crawling.
She shook her head, trying to focus.
The color of the crackling static began to shift, bleeding gradually into red.
A deep, vivid blood-red — dense enough to scorch the retinas.
KREEEEEEEEE—.
At the same time, a piercing microphone howl exploded from the old speakers running through the building's walls, loud enough to shred eardrums.
She flinched, eyes squeezing shut against the needle-sharp noise stabbing into her ears.
Ding — dong — deng — dong.
A school bell, its pitch grotesquely stretched and warped as if the tape had melted, filled the long empty corridor with a hollow, eerie echo.
Her right hand clenched so hard around the wooden shaft that her knuckles went white.
The red noise that had been scrambling across one side of her vision began, slowly, to harden into letters of a definite shape.