The White Lady of The 3rd Floor

When it finally ended, Chris said his sincere goodbyes to the three men, who all responded in kind, before getting into their luxurious cars and leaving.

Well, it was good while it lasted.

Now, all he had left to do was to call himself a taxi to get him back to the hotel.

Or... maybe not? Why not take his time, and walk around a bit? It wasn't like it was raining or anything. The sky was clear, though completely dark, and although they'd taken their time talking about all of the future projects they would do together, it was clear that it would stay so for some time.

The morning was still far away, and, anyway, it wasn't like he had anything else to do once he'll get there, so sleeping the whole day wouldn't be a problem. At least he'll get there sober.

So, knowing that this was probably the alcohol in his brain influencing him more than anything, he started his stroll in the rough direction of the antique building and its supposed spectral occupant.

He simply couldn't help himself. Something was pulling him there, drawing him to it. He undoubtedly saw someone there, and the story the old man had told sparked a flame of curiosity in him. He just had to enter it himself.

It was a longer journey than he had expected. After about two dozen minutes of nothing but walking, he even started to feel himself getting sober, almost unfortunately quickly so if you'd ask him. Nevertheless, he finally saw that building again.

A chill ran down his spine as he stared at it. Sticking out on the horizon, with pure darkness and dead silence as a background, the century-old school building truly looked like a hunting ground for the dead. From where he was standing, it was situated exactly between two rows of buildings, a lone structure avoided by civilization and surrounded by nothing but emptiness, with this making it look like nothing less than a gate to hell itself.

Which, according to Kaichō-san's story, was exactly what it was. And he was still walking towards it.

Step by step, minute by minute, he was shortening the distance between him and the frightening building. Ten minutes later, he found himself on its premises, petrified and with a thin layer of sweat covering his forehead.

Was he really about to do this? If he got caught, this could get him in trouble. He didn't care about some random chick or her friends or whatever, who for some reason chose to randomly break in into this abandoned school, but he very much didn't like the idea of spending even a single night in prison.

Not to mention the atmosphere. The one all around, and, really, just the feel of this place. This was almost certainly just his mind playing tricks on him, but he could swear that the quiet environment had somehow gotten even quieter as he reached the building that had captivated him as his taxi passed by it in a couple of seconds, a couple of hours ago. The sheer silence and overall stillness of everything were making him feel like he was suffering sensory deprivation, and he felt a sick feeling creeping upon him.

But, no matter what, his curiosity was simply too strong, especially after what the Chairman had told them. Not to mention that the alcohol in his system still affected him.

Also... did he see right?

Taking six steps forward, towards the entrance, to get a better look at it...

Yes! The door was open. Just slightly, but it was opened, and that was all that mattered.

All right. Now, he knew that he just had to go in, at least for a moment or two. Just when he thought that he'd have to go in by breaking the fine-looking windows on the ground floor and making them look just as pitiful as their cousins on the higher floors, he noticed that he can just walk right in like a normal human being. This had to be some kind of a sign. Besides, what was the probability that this door will be opened the next time he'd be there?

Suddenly seized by a burst of courage, he waltzed towards the door, opened it even further, and stepped in into the unlit building.

And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, said wave of courage had dissipated. He was now in a completely unlit, pitch-black, century-old semi-abandoned building, alone and petrified.

Thankfully, even in his terrified and still-inebriated state, he quickly remembered that not only did he have his phone in his pocket, but also that this building, at least the floor he was on, was still being used, though he strongly doubted that any of those small businesses had moved any important parts of their business there. Quickly turning on the flashlight, he found the light switch in seconds. Thankfully, it was just a few steps next to him. Turning the lights on, he enjoyed watching the entire floor be bathed in yellowish light, before turning the flashlight back off.

He had now made it just about certain that, if anyone was keeping their eyes on the building, they'll be calling the cops on him. Well, as much as he hated the thought of being sent to a jail cell, he was already there, so, what could he do at this point? It wasn't like he expected to be there for long, anyway.

It was... actually kind of stunning.

The halls, the walls, in their texture and the overall architecture, were quite obviously from their bygone time, but the entire floor was filled with modern appliances. Some of the plastic chairs were strewn about and the doors to the offices even seemed like they were only bought this very year. Beautiful. This was what he loved when he couldn't have just the old and traditional. A perfect mix of old and new, tried and experimental, modern and antique.

Still, of course, overwhelmed by curiosity, he took a good look at some of the office doors.

The one closest to him was used by something called "Kawasaki Accounting", which, if he had to take a guess based on their name, was an accounting company. The insides of that office sure looked like something used by such type of an establishment. A couple of computers, paper notepads, pens, pencils, and so on. The usual stuff, and of course, it was all set in an office whose architecture ultimately came from over a century ago.

He saw pretty much the same in the two rooms closest to this one. One belonged to some recent initiative started by the city, being a local information center for it. Quite a wise choice, given how well-known this 20th-century school likely was as a local landmark.

The other belonged to a real estate company, but inside, it looked quite similar to the accounting one, the only difference being more maps, computers, and, generally, a feeling that this particular space was being taken care of by a company with a much higher annual revenue than the former.

There were five other, obviously regularly used rooms, scattered by the walls, but he didn't care about them at the moment. He'll take a look at them on his way down.

Now, he had to go up.

Passing by those rooms on the way toward the stairs, a gust of wind suddenly hit him, making his skin crawl as it made its way past him. There must've been an opened window somewhere, but he didn't see where, or maybe it was coming from one of the broken ones upstairs, but even guessing where the wind was coming from was difficult. It seemed to, weirdly, whirl around him?

Shaking his head after the wind disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, he continued on his journey and finally reached the shiny and clean, yet old and weak-looking wooden staircase.

The first step he made there produced exactly as much creaking as he had expected. After five or six more steps, however, it was just background noise, and he didn't care anymore.

Seeing the second floor as he reached it was a spookier and creepier sight than he had expected. There was some source of light providing dim illumination to the cramped hallway, giving the entire place a bizarre and rather otherworldly aura.

A sudden anxiety gripped him as he reached the edge of the staircase.

The feeling was barely describable. At first, it was like those weird, momentary, slimy feelings one feels when waking up or falling asleep. What are called by scientists, and random twats trying to sound smart, hypnagogic and hypnopompic states. Those slimy membranes which everyone experiences whenever they move between the worlds of the dreaming and the awake.

Then, when that feeling passed as quickly as it did whenever he had met with it ordinarily, lying in his bed, a sudden, prey-like terror and fear, much stronger than he had expected, gripped him. Right away, he started frantically looking around, searching for anyone coming to confront him, or maybe even arrest him. He was technically trespassing, after all, at least as far as he knew. The surreal sight of the second-floor hallway itself, his current goal to reach, covered in dust, cobwebs, random junk, and flickering shadows which seemed to randomly change in size, shape, and intensity while the dim light remained steady and unchanged, didn't help to calm him down in the slightest.

Nevertheless, and maybe unfortunately, he persisted.

His heart rate decreased, and he scaled the few remaining steps in front of him, the weird feelings of terror, just like the gust of wind from before, disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared the moment his feet touched the hallway. Now, he found himself standing between two wooden, cobweb-covered, broken chairs laying on the ground, one merely old, and the other ancient-looking.

There was barely a single piece of furniture, barely a single thing really, out of the hundreds strewn all over the hallway, to which all of those adjectives didn't apply. The sight of the floor confirmed his belief, and now he wasn't sure whether this wasn't something the old man had mentioned before or whether his mind had simply made an elementary mental calculation by comparing it to the frequently-used first one and the, supposedly, cursed and effectively inaccessible third one, that this floor was being used as a storage area. Whenever something wasn't needed downstairs but could be useful in the future, somebody would bring it here, put it away there, and leave as quickly as possible to not attract the attention of the dark forces supposedly dwelling upstairs.

Given the number of such things littering the place and the apparent age of many of them, it had most likely served this role for multiple decades already.

He didn't even know how he'd describe the place. "Chaotic", really wasn't enough to do it justice. The hallway had it all. Chairs, tables, pencils, stacks of paper, used tissue, broken glass, kitchen utensils, and an uncomfortable amount of wooden and iron stakes of uncertain origin which seemed to be ready to pierce him the moment he made a single bad movement, and much more.

In stark contrast to the chaotic mess covering the floor and filling the hallway, there was the static, dim light the source of which he still couldn't even guess, which filled the dusty air and indiscriminately illuminated everything on this floor.

"Nice Gate to Hell visuals," Chris quipped to himself, still looking at the right end of the hallway where the weird light was coming from.

Right after he did so, he heard a thunderous boom to his left, which made his heart skip a beat and left him just barely able not to soil his pants. Reflexively jumping a bit at the sudden, loud sound right behind him in the semi-abandoned building he was pretty sure he had no right to be in, he accidentally kicked into the ancient-looking chair next to him, immediately and effortlessly shattering it to pieces.

"The fuck was that," he breathed out after calming himself down. Right after that, he very slowly, very cautiously looked behind him, feeling once again like a hapless little boy fully convinced that a monster so hideous and terrifying that he couldn't even imagine how it looked, with these being memories he only now realized he even had.

Just as in those freshly-resurfaced memories, though, there was nothing.

No monster.

Just the dusty, wooden staircase leading to the place where he would, supposedly, meet that monster. With a sigh, he turned his head around, only to make a peculiarly well-timed discovery.

Somehow hidden from his sight up until now, there was one more source of light along with the hellish lamp hidden somewhere behind the horizon. Taking his first steps forward ever since stepping off of the staircase, nearly shattering an old and most definitely cobweb-filled vase after walking into and nearly flipping over the similarly-old table it was placed on, he could now see that the faint light seemed to come from the barely-opened doors to the women's toilets.

Discovering a toilet room right after almost crapping himself. Now, that was a novel experience. Were it the door leading to the men's ones, which, as he now could see, were right next to the women's ones, that was opened with light similarly dim to the one filling the hallway already sneaking out of it, this would be perfect and leave him certain that somebody was messing with him.

Who could've left that light turned on? He wasn't sure whether some of the rooms he saw downstairs weren't bathrooms, but even if not, would someone actually go here to take a leak instead of just going out and finding some tree or, at most, taking a quick journey to some nearby establishment? This place looked flat-out dangerous for walking around. With all of the stuff that must've accumulated on the surfaces of, well, everything there, he could quite easily imagine that even a tiny, accidental surface cut, which was basically a certainty if you tried to move here, would quickly send someone to an ICU with ten different pathogens ravaging their body.

Not to mention how creepy this place was, of course, but that was a whole different chapter.

His attention once again turned towards the staircase leading to the upper floor, this time caught by what seemed to be light, repeated creaking coming from somewhere up it. He immediately moved into action. Barely thinking about what he was doing, he quickly scanned the floor for the safest way there and immediately waltzed through it and onto the staircase.

If walking the stairs before was like having a liminal, half-awake and half-asleep experience, moving through this staircase was like being deep asleep. Not even dreaming, just sleeping. Just a few steps up, the dim light from down there already just barely touched his eyes, and in combination with the dead silence all over, he might as well have been comatose or undergoing sensory deprivation.

It was when he reached for his phone that he realized it. How could there have been creaking before? Never mind the unexplainable bang. Now that he was actually walking on it, without him even trying, his footsteps were so quiet that they wouldn't even awaken an easily-startled baby sleeping right next to him. He had no idea how it was that those particular stairs were so well-kept and of such high quality, but having nearly gotten a heart attack just minutes before, he was thankful for any quietness and stillness.

Now, if he had only found out what had caused said sounds that nearly killed him, he would be completely OK.

What the opened toilet door had almost managed if not for the sex that was meant to pass through it, those stairs did. By now, he was completely convinced that someone was messing with him.

Was that even that much of an out-there idea? If there was one thing Japan had always excelled in, which he had gotten quite familiar with in his line of work, it was bizarre gameshows and other tv shows. What was the chance that some company would just pass on using a clueless, foreign porn producer as the unwilling star of some haunted house-style show, scaring him for the laughs of their viewers? What if that was the true reason why the old man and the others had met with him in the first place?

Very well. Why not have some fun as well, then?

With a renewed vigor in his step, he proudly and confidently entered the third floor, the supposedly haunted and cursed place the mental image of which had only been getting steadily darker and more terrifying in his mind the whole night, and which he knew he was about to visit eventually no matter what from the moment he had seen that bizarre, surreal figure slowly walk across it.

He looked around into the omnipresent darkness.

There was nothing and no one. The entire place was completely dead.

Except... yet another sliver of light sneaking out of a barely opened door?

Chris carefully approached it, the illumination thankfully strong enough for him to see where he was going. Curious, he of course peaked in and snickered at the sight that was revealed to him. He expected a lot of things there, but a silent, black-and-white movie being played and projected onto the wall by a device he couldn't see from the opening wasn't one of them.

It took him just a couple of minutes to recognize the antique piece that was being played.

"Taikoki judanme? Talk about a blast from the past," he exclaimed at whatever person or persons he was sure was messing with him. "Gotta say, you have exquisite taste, but..." he paused as if entranced, staring at the antique film, one of the oldest in this country.

Were those scenes even in the extant print?

"Thank you, it is my favorite," was the sudden and unexpected reply he had gotten, from a voice the sound of which made him feel like blocks of ice were being pushed against the nerves in his back.

Of course, he reacted by screaming. Quite loudly so, before adding in falling onto his ass and back and frantically crawling away from the seeming source of the echoing, terrifying, feminine voice, which was in the pitch-black darkness on the other end of the hallway.

Soon, he saw a shape forming in that darkness. A human-like one. More specifically, a feminine one, with slender limbs, a thin waist, long hair, and shiny, icy blue eyes.

And an incredibly pale visage, only reinforced by her blindingly white kimono with a few scattered red, flowery decorations.

Her near-monochrome coloration was so eye-catching, he almost didn't notice the truly creepiest thing about her, that being that she was floating in mid-air.

"Calm down, Christopher, calm down," she spoke.

Well, "spoke." While her mouth did seem to move, her monotone voice wasn't coming from there. Instead, it was coming from all around him, keeping its bone-chilling tone as it echoed against the walls. Most horrifyingly though, he could also hear it inside of his head, as clearly and intimately as he could hear the voice that featured in his inner monologue. Creepily, that particular iteration of the specter's voice had an almost eerily calming quality to it, which he could already feel having the undoubtedly-desired effect on him.

"True, you are free and liberated to scream and cry however much you want," she conceded, a smirk as terrifying as her voice plastered on her face, as she slowly floated closer and closer towards him. "Know, however, that all of your screams, cries, and pleas are meaningless. No one will hear you, no one will come to save you, not even if you wait until rain rises from the ground to hit the heavens, or the sun rises from the west."

Only when she said so did he realize that he had been screaming the whole time. Truthfully, he should've continued, and very much had the full right to, but was now finding himself quickly overcome with an unnatural calmness and acceptance of his situation. Her words reverberated in his mind. They were like mental medication, forcibly calming him down and numbing him to what was going on as they did so.

He calmed down.

Steadying himself, his gaze still on her slowly approaching form, he asked, "What do you want?"

"I just want to have a bit of fun," was the pale figure's reply, followed by a shrug of her shoulders. Specifically, her shoulders shot up before returning to their place in a sort of elliptical motion, lighting fast, morphing her spectral, gas-like body in a way that almost got him to scream again.