Written for the Beyond the Camera's Lens Christmas Exchange. The recipient listed Ren Hojo and Tomoe Hirasaka among their favourite characters, and somehow that led to this.

"It's not that I mind you ordering things," Ren said, "but when you fill the entrance up with crates..."

"It's only two crates, and I'm moving them now," Rui said, and started up the stairs with one. Ren resignedly picked up the other.

"What are they, anyway?"

"The publishing company is digitising their archives, so I said I'd help catalogue and index the files."

"Sounds like I'm not giving you enough to do."

"Sounds like you're not paying me a living wage!" she called cheerfully over her shoulder.

The crates took up most of the floor-space in the spare room. Rui opened the first, and together they gazed down at the jumble of printed books, notebooks, old magazine copies and loose sheets of paper that began to overflow as soon as the lid was off.

"They don't need to digitise the archives, they need to burn them," Ren remarked, and plucked out a notebook that caught his eye. It was handwritten, with no name on it that he could see. The first half was mostly lists of books and authors, but as he flicked through to the end, he found a handful of hastily jotted story ideas, and even some opening paragraphs.

"This is going to take longer than I thought," Rui was saying, leafing through a stack of typed sheets as thick as her wrist. "When they moved out of the old building they must have just thrown everything in together..."

"This is familiar," Ren muttered. He was leaning against Rui's desk, reading the red diary properly now. "I feel as if I've read it before. What is it?"

"I don't know yet," Rui said patiently. "Put it back with the rest and I'll try to find out."

"No, I'll find out myself. I'm hanging onto this."

"Didn't you say you were going to work on your manuscript today?"

"I need to do more research before I can start."

Rui rolled her eyes. "All right. I'm going to get started now, so let me know if you need anything."

For the rest of the week, Ren was engrossed in the diary. He'd read it from cover to cover twice, and three of the short story extracts in particular kept niggling at his memory. He was sure he'd read them before. It was interesting, too, how many of the titles listed in the beginning were books he had come across in his research; there were even some he already owned. He and the mystery author shared an interest in folklore, psychology and regional history.

"I think it was written by a woman," he said over dinner, with the diary open on the table beside him.

"If you're getting a crush on her, I should warn you, most of the things from that crate date back to the 80s," Rui said. "I think this would go faster if you let me look at it, sensei."

"I'll figure it out myself. I think I'm nearly there."

"By the way," Rui said, after bringing Ren tea the next day, "if you can stand to drag yourself away from that diary for two seconds, I found a couple of things featuring your favourite author."

"Who?"

"Junsei Takamine."

Ren stared at her as something clicked into place. "Takamine?"

"They published most of his novels, and he submitted to some of their subsidiary magazines. Come down and have a look if you're interested."

Ren was already up, but not to go to Rui's room, or to the bookshelf in his study, or even the one in his bedroom that was stuffed to bursting with pulp paperbacks. He went up to the attic, where half the toys he'd ever played with were still under white cloths. In a box of old magazines and pamphlets, he found what he was looking for.

"I had an uncle who used to buy these horror magazines and save them for me," he said to Rui, who had followed him up the ladder and was half in, half out of the attic space. "This was a special edition they put out in memory of the editor."

"In memory?"

He held up the magazine to show her the three black and white photographs: the novelist Junsei Takamine, the editor Koji Ogata, and the third, the one whose name had been hovering on the edge of his mind ever since he had picked up the diary.

"They used this issue to publish a few of her stories. I read them over and over when I was young. They were good, but I was also interested in what had happened to her."

Rui took the magazine, stiff and crinkled with damp, and read aloud: "'Junsei Takamine, Koji Ogata and Tomoe Hirasaka all disappeared while conducting research in the Himuro mountain region. Nobody has seen or heard from them since.' I feel like I've heard of that before."

Ren smiled wryly. "Solve one mystery..."

"Maybe you should become a detective and investigate."

Sighing, he got up, brushing dust from his knees. "Maybe, if I ever get this manuscript finished."

"Still," she said, as they descended back onto the second-floor landing, "it's a coincidence, isn't it? That you read her stories, and her diary was the first thing you picked up?"

"Tell them at the publisher's," he said. "Tell them they sent a ghost by accident."