Liang gave a slow nod, and hesitantly left, leaving Rock alone with the ghost of the weeping girl, crouched just by her own body.
Well, okay, they weren't really alone if Rock was honest. There were other ghosts in the room, but none of them were as expressive. None of them paid anyone or anything else any mind. The weeping girl, however, caught his eye for some reason. Most likely because she wasn't wandering aimlessly with a dull look in her eyes. He couldn't actually see her face from here, as she was curled over, face buried against her legs as she sobbed and mourned her own passing.
Before anything else, Rock decided to be true to his word, and write a message. He tore a small piece from one of the class notices and picked up a pen that someone had left on the teacher's desk - some cutesy purple thing with a bear head on the end and pink hearts all over it, he didn't know how long it had been there, but after a test scribble or two, it wrote with no difficulty - and simply wrote 'We'll spread the word if we see anyone. See you here later. Rock and Liang.' That was good enough. It was enough to just say 'someone else is here, someone else has seen this'. He wouldn't be sure if the others knew about the whole closed spaces and different dimensions thing. He didn't think he could explain it himself anyway, so he turned away from the desk, and from the notes, and found himself approaching the ghost girl.
As if she could sense his approach, the girl tensed, then looked up, seemingly frightened of the man approaching her. Rock carefully walked around the body on the floor, and crouched down beside the ghost.
"Hey..." He didn't ask if she was okay. It was clear she'd been stabbed to death, and it was very clear that she wasn't ever going to be okay again. The girl stared at him for a long time, and then said
"You can see me."
"I can see all the ghosts here." He answered honestly.
"They stole my pen."
Huh? "Who did?"
"Those two boys from before. They took my favourite pen. It was a gift, and they took it!"
"The...the purple one with the bear on it?"
The girl gave a slight nod.
"Well, it's still on the desk, they just wanted to borrow it to-"
"They didn't borrow it, they didn't give it back! They didn't think they had to, because I'm not alive like they are. Living people can be so selfish..."
"Everyone here is scared. Sometimes, we don't think about people who are dead when we might die too." He got up and fetched the pen, bringing it back to the girl. "I'm sorry they didn't bring it back to you. Here you go."
The ghost stared at him, and he frowned before pressing the pen into the corpse's hand, careful not to touch the body with his own skin. The ghost now stared at the pen, and Rock began to think he should just leave, and then the girl said, in a quiet voice "Thank you."
"Don't worry." He stood up and raised a hand to wave goodbye.
"You're nice."
"...Yeah. Sorry."
The girl watched him, and then said "I don't want anyone else to see me like this."
He looked down at the body. He wouldn't want to be seen like that either. "Can I...do anything?"
"...Hide my body..."
Okay, no. Not if it involved moving the body. No way. "I...I'll see what I can do."
"Thank you. I know it's not a nice thing to ask, but you're the only one who can hear me, and you're nice..."
"...It's okay, I...I understand." And if he thought about it, he guessed he did understand. The body wasn't pleasant to look at, and he wouldn't want random people staring at his body if he were to die...
Bad thought. Rock should not think about the possibility of his own death. "I'll see what I can do." He promised again, looking around as if something he could cover the body with would just suddenly appear.
"Are you lost?" It was the sound of Liang's voice, somewhat muffled through the door, asking that question that pulled Rock's attention away from the ghost. He slowly walked over and opened the door.
"Liang?"
Liang barely spared him a glance. "Wait! Um...young lady?"
Young lady? Rock moved to stand beside him, trying to see who he was talking to. Again, ghosts milling around the room blocked his view. Despite this, he did see one of the especially young figures in the distance, not milling around aimlessly like the others. A little girl in a tattered red dress. Standing there, looking around with her back to them, like she wasn't sure where she was.
"Why don't you just go up to her?" Rock asked.
"I don't want to scare her. We're strangers to her, and much bigger than she is. She turned away from me when I called out to her. I think she's wary of me."
The girl glanced back. Her dark hair covered her face, but Liang could see one eye peeking through the greasy curtain. She looked him straight in the eye, then turned and ran down the corridor. Not as if she were scared of them, but more like..."She wants us to follow her." Liang took off after the girl before Rock could say or do anything. With a sigh, he followed.
The little girl didn't once look back to check they were following, or respond to them calling out to her. Rock assumed she was a normal little girl, trapped here just as the two of them were. She was probably leading them to someone who was hurt or stuck, hoping they'd help her. Why she wouldn't talk to them, though, was another point entirely. Rock supposed it was because she was shy or afraid. She looked no older than eight or nine, if he had to guess, so he could understand her being terrified. The little girl led them around a few corners, and with one more turn, the girl disappeared from sight.
Instead of the girl, they found themselves in a thin, foul smelling corridor. Of course, the whole place smelled foul, but something about this place smelled of fresh death, a smell Liang could, unfortunately, distinguish. At the end of the corridor, at another turn, someone was crouched, peeking around the corner.
"Tsukumo!" Rock called out, running to the other inmate, who jolted to attention before turning and placing a finger over his mouth, a universal signal for 'shut the hell up'. Frowning, Rock crouched next to him. "What's up?"
Tsukumo wasn't quite sure how to respond. He was naturally very tense, and after a moment he turned back to the corner, to whatever he was looking at before. "They're...playing with it." He managed to choke out.
"Playing with what?" He moved forward just enough to see around the corner, and saw what Tsukumo was staring at. Three children, stood by a red splat on the wall. Two of them were playing a game of tug of war with some kind of rope, while the third was dipping her hands in the red and then smearing them on the one clean patch of wall. Finger painting.
"What's that they're pulling on?" Rock asked, still not entirely sure what he was looking at.
"Intestines." Liang replied softly from somewhere over his shoulder. And as soon as he said it, Rock began to make sense of the scene. The red was blood, the unidentifiable lumps were bones and organs, and indeed the thing the children were tugging between them was the intestine of whoever that person used to be. For a brief moment, among the milling ghosts, he thought he saw someone he knew, but before he could be sure, he had turned away from the scene to vomit over the opposite wall. Of course, he'd seen the other dead bodies there, and they'd been horrific - he'd felt quite ill earlier as well - but there was something about this one, it being so much fresher, and so unrecognisable as a person, that really made reality crash down on him. They were in a place where people had died, where people were dying. It wasn't just haunted with old spirits who had died long ago, people were dying here and now, as they spoke. They were in a situation where they themselves could die at any moment, and finally accepting that as the truth was a cold and maddening thing.
Behind him, he heard Tsukumo and Liang talking. They kept their voices low.
"I...I don't want to see it, but I can't look away."
"It might be for the best to keep the spirits in view. Did they do that?"
"I don't know. It wasn't there before, and then it was...I didn't see it happen, but..."
"...Have you seen anyone else from Nanba?"
"Other than you two?" He heard a shuffle as Tsukumo moved away from the corner of death. "I haven't seen anyone. No-one alive, anyway...and no-one from Nanba."
"I see. Same with us. Well, we've seen a note from Upa." He heard more movement, and then there was a hand on his back, and another brushing his hair away from his face. Liang's next words were spoken from right by his ear. "He said we should meet him in the classroom...um...which one was it? 2-A?"
"1-A." Rock corrected. Then frowned. "I think. Did we go up or down after there?"
"No, no, I think you're right. It was on the first floor. Are you okay?"
Rock took a deep breath through his mouth, made sure he wasn't going to vomit again, and nodded.
On their way back to 1-A, they discovered that Tsukumo hadn't really learned much about where they were. He couldn't find a way out, or any windows that opened. Liang did his best to explain the multiple dimensions thing in a way Tsukumo would understand, and stated that it was a good sign they'd found each other, considering they'd been told they were in a different dimension to anyone they knew to begin with. As long as they stuck together and kept moving, kept looking, they'd figure it out. He was still trying to be optimistic, at least for the others. Rock had to try the same.
No-one new had been in 1-A, and nothing else was added to the messages. They collectively considered waiting there for a moment, but decided against it. They needed more information about this place. They didn't feel comfortable waiting around. They needed to be sure no-one was in any danger.
Also, Liang needed to use the bathroom.
After a little bit of pretty aimless wandering, the three of them found themselves on the top floor, stood outside the bathrooms. The door on the right was boarded up and sported an 'out of order' sign. The door on the left opened with no resistance, and Liang didn't bat an eye as he stepped inside.
"Uh...Liang?"
He looked back over his shoulder. Neither Rock nor Tsukumo seemed willing to enter the room.
"What?"
"...That's the girl's bathroom."
"It's also the only bathroom. It doesn't matter anyway - this place is abandoned, aside from the people who trapped us here and their victims. People might be hiding in here. We might find someone we know. Especially those two perverts from Building 3."
The others seemed to agree, but still didn't follow him in, and he shut the door behind him before walking to the stalls.
There were five cubicles. Three were smashed in, and under the rubble of the second, he could see an arm. The remaining two, the doors had been torn off, and over the toilets lay piles of bodies. Teenage girls, mostly, in varying stages of decay, flies and maggots crawling across their flesh and buzzing in the air nearby. A quick look over confirmed that it was very unlikely that anyone Liang knew was among the deceased here, and he decided to walk out again, not wanting to spend more time than he had to in the presence of all that death.
"That was quick." Rock commented when his friend came back into view.
"Is there something wrong?" Tsukumo asked, taking in the expression on Liang's face.
"...No. It's fine. These ones are out of order as well, though." He doubted those two would react well to 'there were hundreds of corpses in there and I'm pretty sure the one with no face was a kindergartener'.
"So where do we go now?" Asked Rock
That was a good question. With the exception of the hallway with the splattered body, and things otherwise inaccessible without going through there, they'd explored just about every part of that school they could get to, or at least Rock and Liang had. It seemed their only real options were to wait at the classroom for someone else to turn up or walk down that path, provided the ghost children were gone. Wandering aimlessly wouldn't be much help any more. Perhaps it was time to come up with a plan. "Back to the classroom. We'll try and figure out a proper action plan from there, think properly about our options and priorities."
"What are our options?" Tsukumo asked as the three hesitantly walked to the stairs.
"...Not great. Our options are not great."
As they reached the top of the stairs, another earthquake shook them. Liang, already taking a step down, overbalanced and barely avoided tumbling headlong down. Behind him, Rock and Tsukumo also had trouble keeping their balance, and the former found himself falling against the latter hard. They landed in a tangled heap on the floor and stayed there until the shaking stopped.
"Damn earthquakes..." Liang muttered as he got to his feet. The last time there had been one like that, they'd been shunted into a different dimension.
Wait.
"It's over..." Rock sat up.
"Rock, does anything look different up there to you?"
He cast a look around. "There's a flyer on the wall now...
"We've jumped dimensions again. We may need to check around old places again."
Rock groaned. "So where are we going now?"
"We should stick to the plan of going back to 1-A."
Tsukumo tapped Rock on the shoulder. "You can get off me any time."
When the group made their way back to classroom 1-A, they found the biggest difference between this dimension and the previous one. Where there had previously been a solid wall was now a hallway ending in a door. "That wasn't there before, was it?"
It was a moment before Liang responded. "That first ghost said there was a second wing."
"You think that's the second wing?" Rock asked, walking toward the door.
"It must be. Question is, why is it only visible now?"
Rock pushed the door open with a shrug. "You think it might be a trap?"
"I think here, everything could be a trap."
As the door opened, the sound of the rain became all that clearer. Beyond the door was a walkway leading to another building. The second wing. The walkway had high rails either side, presumably to keep the children from straying into the forest. The rails came up to Liang's chest, and were connected to a canopy or roofing above them, keeping the rain mostly off the walkway, but for a leak or two.
"We're outside..." Tsukumo muttered, sounding surprised and relieved. "There's a way out of here."
"The ghost we spoke to said there was no escape. He also knew about the second walkway though..."
"Guess he wasn't right about everything, then."
Rock slid open the door to the second wing and let Tsukumo enter before him before glancing back and realising Liang had stopped about halfway across the walkway. "Uh, Liang? You coming?"
"I'll join you in a moment." He was stood at the rail, looking out at the forest.
"Why? You see something?"
"Nothing useful." He shifted his weight, looking uncomfortable. "I still have to go, is all."
"There's...there's probably a bathroom in the second wing."
"...I...can't hold it. I'll go out here and join you in a moment."
Rock looked out at the forest, and ghosts of people who had died out there glared back at him. "Don't go into the forest."
"Hmm? Why not?"
"I just...I think it would be bad."
"What can you see?"
"...More ghosts. They look really angry."
Liang nodded. "I'll stay close to the building." He would rather have been able to find somewhere a bit more secluded than by the school walls, considering he would have to remove almost his entire jumpsuit, but it honestly didn't matter that much. Plus he hadn't really wanted to go into the forest to begin with. He could see some of the corpses on the edge, and certainly didn't trust it. "You two see if you can find anything. I'll join you in a moment."
"Okay. Yell if you run into any murderers. Or ghosts. Or murder ghosts."
"I will."
With that, despite not feeling okay with it, Rock went inside and the door shut behind him. Liang took another look at the railing. A more normal person, a person who hadn't undergone such intense physical training, would have had a lot of difficulty climbing over it, but for him it was an easy vault. He landed without difficulty on the grass on the other side, then something caught his eye. Movement. When he looked, he saw a figure at the edge of the forest. A little girl with her hair in pigtails. She had a sort of blue light around her, and it didn't take a genius to realise what that was. She sported some brutal-looking injuries, most notably the complete absence of her right eye, and was almost certainly not actually alive. She had been one of the children playing tug of war with someone's entrails before.
He hesitated. Took his eyes off the girl for a second, and suddenly, they were nose to nose. She'd covered all that distance in the blink of an eye, her small hands reaching for his shoulders as she screamed something at him. A question he couldn't work out.
She didn't have a tongue, he noted as he saw her mouth open. He stepped back, thinking the best thing to do would be to get back inside, and his foot slipped against the wet mud. He fell back, hitting his head hard against the railing. He reached up blindly, grabbing part of the rail and using it to haul himself up as the ghost watched him and reached for him again. He was pretty sure he'd let out an involuntary yell when he'd fallen, and wondered if that had alerted Rock and Tsukumo or not. The girl repeated her mournful question as he pulled himself back over the railing. It was garbled, presumably because of her missing tongue, but the more she repeated it, the more he could understand.
'Where is my eye? Give me back my eye'
She was reaching for his eye. That was what she wanted. He observed her for a moment as she stood just beyond the rail. And then she stepped forward, and stepped through the rail as if it wasn't there.
Of course. She was a ghost, after all.
Liang walked calmly to the second wing, shutting the door behind him. The entryway of the building was empty. "Rock? Tsukumo?" He walked to the middle of the room, trying to figure out where they might have gone. There were two doors leading out, one to the left, one to the right. "Guys?" They had to be in earshot. Rock had said to call out if he needed help, so he needed to be able to hear. Unless he was too stupid to think about that. Sighing, he decided he would just have to go looking for them. He went to the right, and heard the front door open and shut behind him. Logically, that was most likely the ghost girl giving chase. He picked up the pace a little. He couldn't exactly drop-kick the ghost kid in the face if she presented a real threat to him or anyone else.
The second wing was three storeys high. The bottom floor held nothing special. Shoe cubbies, a girls' toilet (unusable, of course), a few cabinets, and some dead bodies. The second had some classrooms and the boys' toilet, though that was also blocked up, this time with protective charms. The other doors, he opened long enough to see if the others were in there, then moved on. The third floor was nothing but a locked door that claimed to be the principal's office. No sign of the others. They can't have gone back to the main building, though. They would have had to have passed him to do that. He found that walking through the second floor allowed him to loop around to the left door from the entryway. He'd not seen the ghost girl, but he was sure he'd heard footsteps behind him the whole time. Feeling nervous, he walked to the door again, startling when a cabinet fell behind him. Shaking away the nerves, he tugged at the door, and it didn't budge. Frowning, he pulled again. Nothing.
Unusual. That door opened without any issue before. With a sigh, he took a step back, aimed a kick at the door, and cursed when all that achieved was a sore foot.
It looked like he was trapped.
No comments:
Post a Comment