The days have sure gotten a lot shorter, Mayuka Yoshizawa thought as she stared into the sky.
Not long ago, it was still bright outside at six o’clock, but not anymore. It was deep into the fall season now. As she headed home from English tutoring, she clutched her lesson bag and picked up the pace.
“Better hurry on past!” she told herself. “The main street is just ahead, and that’s where Officer Iwata’s police station is.”
If only she hadn’t heard that story at school, she wouldn’t have been scared of anything…
“Hey, have you heard about the haunted mansion behind Tenso Shrine?” another student from Class 5-1 asked during lunch break. “You know, that stylish, old-fashioned building. It’s got vines running all over the walls, and there’s a rooster decoration on the roof of the tower…”
“Yeah, I know the one! When the wind blows, the weather vane always makes a creaking sound like it’s crying.”
“My brother told me that, every now and then, you can hear ghosts moaning from inside.”
Apparently, almost everyone knew this story. But as it happened, Mayuka passed by that building every time she went to her English tutoring class, and she hadn’t known anything about it.
“You know what I heard?” said the first kid, voice hushed. “That it’s been abandoned for ages, but just in the last few months, the windows have started lighting up with a ghostly glow at night!”
The students all covered their mouths with their hands to keep from screaming.
“Someone was murdered there years ago, and their death day is just around the corner. Everyone says it’s the dead person’s ghost, creating balls of fire that float through the halls…”
Once again, the students all shrieked silently into their palms.
Mayuka blinked with surprise. “What’s a death day?” she asked.
All her friends looked at her in exasperation. “What do you think, Mayuka? It’s the anniversary of the day a person died. In other words, the day the murder took place!”
She was almost to the haunted mansion.
Mayuka squeezed her bag harder and tried to pass quickly without looking up at it, but some invisible, irresistible force made her stand still and raise her eyes toward the building.
Beyond the rusted metal gate and surrounded by large, lush trees loomed an old European-style mansion covered in vines. A faint breeze rustled through the leafy tendrils and made them appear alive.
The silhouette of the tower on the roof jutted into the navy-blue sky, and the beak of the rooster weather vane seemed to be pecking at a sliver of crescent moon.
Eeep!
Mayuka held her breath.
There was a white light hovering in one of the second-floor windows!
Her eyes locked onto it. She felt paralyzed.
The small light bobbed left and right. Then it stopped moving near the center of the window and started to grow larger.
Oh no, is it looking this way…?
Chills began to crawl up and down Mayuka’s spine—and then a dark shadow suddenly writhed into the light!
“Aaaaaah!!” she shrieked, then she took off running for the main street, practically stumbling over her own feet.