Author's note: Hi people, this is my first outsiders story. I got the idea from a Japanese show called "The Real Ghost Story (ほんとに怖い話)." Please read and review. There might be some mistakes here and there.
August 1970
It happened when I first moved into Nakamura's House in Nagoya, Japan.
It is a big, 2-story house built of bricks. It is not a traditional Japanese house, but it definitely looks different from the houses back in the US. These thoughts came to my mind as I stood against the wall outside of my room.
"Just wait for a couple minutes and we'll get all these trash out." Mr. Nakamura said as he and the other college boy, who also home-stayed at Nakamura's House, carried a medium size box out from the room. Suddenly I heard the sound of an ambulance roaring sharply outside.
"That's probably going to the Keishin Hospital near by. You might feel the siren annoying at first, but you'll get use to it." Mr. Nakamura reassured. Behind him, I saw a figure "glided" through the back of the room.
You ought to meet Kathy's brother. He glides as he walks…One of Two-Bit's description of someone slipped into my brain as I went check inside the room. Not too surprisingly, I didn't see anyone because Mr. Nakamura and the boy just left the room with the box. Maybe I just imagined seeing that gliding figure. I thought, smiling bleakly. I wished it was that simple.
"Uh, you can keep a couple of these empty cardboards if you want to." The college boy said to me in a strong Japanese accent.
"Ok, thanks. I can use them as bookshelves."
After dinner, I spent the entire evening unpacking and straightening things. When I looked at the clock, it was almost 2 am. I decided to shut the light off even though I wasn't very tire because of jet-leg.
The pillow case and blanket were brought from Tulsa, and they smelled like my old room. Thinking of this made me feel a little nostalgic. I was thrilled when I received the scholarship from Oklahoma Cultural Exchange program and the admission letter of Nagoya University. I was proud of my achievement, but I couldn't deny that I was homesick at that moment. Maybe it's all a dream. I thought absently. In the morning, Soda and Darry would tickle me to death, Two-Bit and Steve would be yelling in our living room, and we would join them in few seconds, and then maybe Soda would let me drive to DX…
A heavy knock on the door interrupted my nostalgia. "誰ですか？(who is it)" I asked. No one answered. I got up and opened the door but saw no one standing outside. As I began to wonder, I heard the sound of ambulance came from outside. "Glory…" I cursed under my breath. The knocking sound was still going on.
"なにやでの…what the friggin' heck…" I stepped into the dark hallway, trying to find out where the sound came from.
There are 4 rooms in this house. To my surprise I went into nostalgia again. From the spot I was standing, I could close my eyes and imagine I was in my house in Tulsa. There were Soda and Steve knocked against the wall as they tried to rip each other in pillow fight…
I realized that the sound of knocking came from inside my room.
In the morning, I woke up at least half-an-hour later than other people because no one came tickling me.
"おはようございます(good morning)。" I greeted Mrs. Nakamura, who was standing in front of the soup boiling on the stove.
"おはよう、Curtis-kun. Why don't you sleep for longer since you still have jisaboke (jet-leg)?" asked Mrs. Nakamura.
The dinning room was noisy with all the boys chatting. Two of them tackled each other to the nearest sofa. "Boys will always be boys." Mr. Nakamura murmured behind the news paper.
"Please help yourself." Mrs. Nakamura put a bowl of porridge in front of me. "I hope you are okay with Oriental-style breakfast."
"Arigatou." I said.
"Hey." A brown-hair boy sitting across from me uttered. "Did you sleep well last night?"
"Yes, but I stayed up pretty late."
I remembered his name was Alex Brekkon. He is a half American and half Japanese who grew up in California. He had been in Nagoya for a year.
"That's good. Did anything weird happen?"
"Eh, well, I thought I heard some knocking came from no where…I don't know. I didn't see anyone when I opened the door."
Alex uttered a soft sighed. "Just as I think..."
"What are you talking about?"
"Well, I don't want to startle you, but…that room is kind of weird. It was a while ago. Once when I woke up and went to bathroom in the mid-night, I heard some knocking came from inside that room. I was gonna go check, but to my surprise, the door was half-way opened. You know, Mr. Nakamura usually leaves the door shut unless he needs to move stuff in or out of the room.
Ok. When I tried to see inside the room, I saw a figure, seemed like a kid, trudging his way across the room."
My eyes widened. Hesitatingly, I told Alex about the figure I saw in the afternoon a day earlier.
"So there's more than one of those things in that room." Alex concluded. "You better watch out, buddy."
"But how?" I meant it. I was taught to keep an eye on who would ran out and jump on me when I walked on the street, but I doubted if a blade would help if I got jumped by a… ghost.
"Well, maybe don't stay up too late. I think you'll be fine as long as they don't know that you're looking at them."
It has been a week since I came to Japan. As I promised Soda and Darry, I was writing my first letter back to Tulsa. While I was giving the letter a final check, I heard the siren howled again. As it was like in the past days, the weird knocking sound immediately followed the siren.
My heart turned cold. Thinking of Alex's warning, I put down the letter and went to bed.
The knock continued in the darkness for an hour or so. Sometimes it quieted into a whisper, and the next moment it turned to into a heavy pound.
"Damn it." I cussed, feeling fright spread through my veins like electricity. I was quite familiar with this feeling because it always happened when I woke up with a nightmare, but the thing is, I haven't been woken by nightmares in the past year, and the freaking knock weren't in dreams.
I forced my eyes shut, but the harder I tried, the tighter my eyelids became. At the same time, I also heard a different sound behind the knock. It sounded like footsteps.
The rhythm of the knock was parallel with the beat of my heart. I felt myself getting numb, but I saw something moving across the room out of the corner of my eyes.
I adjusted my position to see the moving object. It was a male figure, not the gliding one though, trudging passed the closet. It trudged as it walked because only one of its foot had a clog on.
My heart tightened like every time I was scared by nightmare. How much I wished Soda was sleeping next to me, how much I wished his arm was across my shoulder, how…
I turned away, avoiding eye contact with the figure as it turned around in the corner, and then I jumped out of my skin. A ghastly face lay one foot away from mine. Half of the face was rotten that it looked like a skeleton. Its gown was ragged, and it only wore one clog.
"Bloody murder--" I screamed those words for the first time in two year.
I moved into Alex's room the following day, and my old room became storage again. Mr. Nakamura told me that there used to be a bomb shelter around the area during the Second World War. "It wasn't rare that people died in bomb shelter, and the shelter might even been hit by a bomb," said Mr. Nakamura.
I asked him how it could be related to the siren. As you know, it was not very easy for me to work out that sentence in Japanese.
"Well, maybe the meaning of the siren, you know, it is heading to the hospital. Perhaps they knocked because they were asking for help." Mr. Nakamura answered ponderously. "Eh…I'm sorry that it bothered you…"
That was the most awkward apology I've ever heard, but I didn't blame him. He couldn't do anything about it because the ghosts were not home-staying like us. I guessed they still knocked on the wall whenever the ambulance roared by…