Hello^^

The next chap comes much faster than I expected. Well, right now I really have much fun writing this story and that's the reason for the fast update :)

I hope you'll enjoy!

I don't own uraboku or any characters out of it.


Takashiro is the owner of the castle. And he lets them stay there until the storm's over.

"Do you have a phone here so we can contact our families?" Masamune asks politely, but the man shakes his head, his eyes wandering over their pale, frozen faces.

"The line's gone dead due to the storm. That's nothing unusual in this area when such bad weather occurs..." he explains.

"So Internet doesn't work, either?" Senshiro asks with a frown on his face.

"All the electronic gadgets don't work"

They change gazes.

"Are you hungry? I'll tell my cook and my employees to make something to eat. And night's arriving soon. I believe you want to stay here the night? The storm won't be over till morning"

Yuki meets the silent stare of Luca. The man doesn't look comfortable at all. Rather distrustful he watches the owner of the castle.

"Is it really alright for you to let us sleep here?" Aya asks doubtfully. "We're a bunch of strangers…"

"Oh, you're not the first group of youths who came here" He turns around. His blond hair looks like long fine twines of gold. "I'll see you tomorrow morning. Good evening" He walks the stairs up into the first floor… the second floor. Then he's gone and so are his footsteps. They're left alone in the entrance hall.

"Shall we really stay here?" Touko asks; her eyes are narrowed and flicker with anxiety.

"Are there any other options left?" Shusei answers.

The siblings and the brunet start a quiet but rather friendly discussion, while the others either listen or sit down on the carpet, their nerves completely shot. Tired and exhausted, Yuki sits down next to his bag, hugging his knees. His tongue feels heavy, just like his eyelids. All he wants now is a hot bath, something warm for dinner and a soft bed. The voices of the discussion get louder. No surprise; Hotsuma and Kuroto joined in and are about to start a fight again. He watches the two. There's an antipathy and a tension between them, almost tangible. They don't listen to each other and they don't want to understand each other. Their words become furious and nasty and are meant to hurt.

"Stop it, you two!" Aya and Touko shout angrily, but it's like they'd shout against a wall of bricks.

Their voices get louder and louder in Yuki's ears; he pulls his knees closer to his chest and a heavy cloud of irate thoughts settles in his weary mind. He closes his eyes but the voices don't disappear, they get louder and louder and yell and yell at him

"Yuki" Luca lets him startle.

The man stands next to him. He looks up to him. Then he follows his gaze to one of the three doors opposite the entrance door. A butler has appeared. He has black hair and wears glasses. His clothes are black, except his white shirt and gloves. Even in his uniform he looks richer than them.

"Good evening to all of you. My name is Fuyotoki. Takashiro-sama told me that you are to spend the night in our castle"

He doesn't seem to expect an answer. Hotsuma and Kuroto still kill each other with their gazes and the others are in no mood to talk anymore.

"Let me show you your rooms. Please follow me" He turns to the stairs. The youths take their bags and start following him upstairs.

"We have enough rooms for all of you. No one has to share a room with someone else"

No one replies at that. It's a weird feeling Yuki starts to have. The thought of being separated from the others somewhat frightens him. Separated in this big, empty, dark castle that was nowhere mentioned on the maps. They follow the butler through huge wing doors and enter a long corridor with lots of doors on each side. Further away, the corridor leads to the right and to the left and probably continues.

"Here we are. The sheets are all freshly washed. The last rooms on this floor are the bathrooms. You may freshen up a bit. Dinner will be served at 7 o`clock in the right room you can enter from the entrance hall. Do you still have any questions?" They shake their heads and thank him. Then he disappears downstairs again.

"So, let's see…"

They open the doors to their rooms. They all look quite the same after comparing them a bit. There's a big double bed in each room, sofas and couches, a table with a vase full of flowers, huge windows with thick, dark red curtains and a dark blue carpet. The walls are crème white.

"Wow… that looks expensive…" Masamune muses as he enters the room he wants to stay in.

The others still stand in the floor, unsure of what to do. The others look at each other silently. It somehow reminds one of a school trip, in a really creepy kind of way.

"Oh man, this is starting to piss me off" Hotsuma mutters and rips the door to the next door open. "I'll stay here. See ya later"

With that he bangs the door close. The others go open their own doors.

~~B*L*O*O*D*Y~~M*A*R*Y~~

Yuki is surprised as he notices that Luca takes the room right next to his. But he feels happy at that. And maybe less frightened. He sits down on the big bed. The mattress is soft and fluffy. On the corridor it's getting quieter.

Oh well…

He wonders what the others might think about now. Maybe they think of their families. Or their friends. He opens his bag and pulls out something dry and fresh to put on. Then he changes his clothes, deciding to take a bath after the dinner. Then he lies down on his bed. He still has more than an hour until dinner starts. He closes his eyes.

It's a scream that wakes him up from his shallow slumber. He sits up and the room is spinning around him. Someone has screamed! He jumps up from the bed and runs to the door, almost falling over his own feet. He opens the door and Tsukumo passes him as he runs to the bathrooms.

"What happened?" Shusei asks him concerned, whose room is opposite of Yuki's.

"I'm not sure…"

They hurry after the white-haired boy. Tsukumo rips the door to one of the bathrooms open.

"Touko!" he says alerted. Yuki and Shusei stop right behind him. There the girl stands, staring at the big wash basin in the completely white tiled bathroom.

"Look at- look at the water!" she squeaks and she rushes over to her brother's side.

"What happened?" Senshiro, who appears next to Yuki, asks. "I heard someone screaming…"

The rest of the group appears at the door to the bathroom. Yuki approaches the basin. The water which still rushes out of the faucet is… red. And in the basin, a few spiders drown in the water.

"Yuki?"

"The water… it's red…"

"First, it wasn't! Suddenly it became all r-red and the spiders crawled out of the drain" Touko says, horror in her voice. Tsukumo holds her closer. Yuki plucks up his courage and closes the faucet. The water and the drowning spiders disappear.

"…Creepy…" Kuroto mutters, opening the door to the other bathroom. "I'll go check here…" It stays silent for a few seconds. "Everything's fine" he says then.

They stand in a circle. Each having a weird feeling in the stomach. "I'll go downstairs already. This corridor sucks" Hotsuma says; his voice sounding much less fierce than his words.

"I'll come with you" Shusei replies, surprising the others a bit.

"Do whatever you want…" The two disappear at the stairs.

"How long does it still take until dinner?" Masamune asks Senshiro.

"Twenty minutes"

"Shall we go downstairs, now, too?"

They shrug; a few of them even nod and start to move.

~~B*L*O*O*D*Y~~M*A*R*Y~~

Yuki doesn't; at his room he walks through the door to get his shoes. But as he crouches down to tie them he slows down in his movements. There's no one else on the corridor anymore; they're all downstairs already. A flash enlightens his room for a second, before the thunder quavers through the house and right through his body, making his bones and muscles ache. It's unbelievably loud. The rain and the hail hammer against the windows, dying to get inside. He turns around, a shiver running down his spine. Suddenly, he feels really cold. He stands up.

On the corridor, it's dark. Someone switched the light off before going down the stairs. Yuki doesn't know where to put it on again, so he has to find the stairs alone. Well, not such a difficult task, but he feels weird… as if something was trying to grab his ankles or so. He turns around. And he waits, staring into the almost-darkness. He waits quite long. And it feels like the breath of something else was hitting his skin. Or is it just his own? He steps forward. There's nothing. He reaches out one hand. Then he steps forward again.

There's something….

His breath gets louder in his ears, louder than the thunder, louder than the rain. Louder than his heart.

Suddenly there's a large hand that comes to rest on his shoulders. His instinct kicks in, the side of him that loves and does Martial Arts takes control and he's about to knock whomever it is down.

"Yuki!"

"Uwah! Luca!"

His fist stops a few inches in front of the man's cheekbone. His heart hammers against his chest now, far worse than the hail outside. He hasn't noticed his muscles in his back and his stomach being clenched all the time. As he relaxes them he feels them hurting.

"What were you doing?" Luca asks, looking bemused at his fist.

"Oh, uh, sorry…"

He lowers his fist and the hand disappears from his shoulder. He looks behind him. Like before, there's nothing. "I…thought that…" He stops, feeling stupid. And embarrassed. Luca looks at him and there's no emotion in his eyes. Like silver rooms in which all the doors are locked.

"Nevermind. Let's go downstairs"

The man turns around. "If you say so"

In the dining room the others sit around a large table already. Pots and plates and pans stand there, waiting for them. Delicious scents lay in the air. Yuki sits down next to Kuroto. The boy looks intently at the pot right in front of him. He hears his stomach rumbling. They don't quite talk; they all stare at the food and wish for nothing but to start eating already. Then Fuyotoki appears.

"You may start eating now. If you wish for something, just knock at the door over there" He nods to a simple door in the right corner of the dining room. "Help yourself"

All at once they reach out and load their plates full. Even Shusei, who isn't one to eat much, has a full plate in front of him. And for a long while, all one can hear in the large, pretty dining room is the sound of the youths eating hungrily the delicious food. As if they have been close to starving.

The mood lightens up. Yuki feels a heavy, depressing feeling disappearing from his chest. He hasn't noticed it before, but now he is able to really smile again, as the siblings joke around and Senshiro and Masamune tell some funny stories. Not even Hotsuma and Kuroto are in the mood to pick a fight again. They ignore each other, which is much better than what all of them had to endure the past hours and days. Kuroto stays completely silent most of the time; Hotsuma sometimes makes a perfect comment in his dry humored way so everyone would start to laugh and he himself would grin slightly. But, like Kuroto, he's surprisingly silent.

Later they sit there, the pots and pans have disappeared, Fuyotoki has brought them some cans of coffee and hot chocolate and plates full of cakes and cookies. The conversation turns lively; gone are fatigue and exhaustion, the hour is exacting and so are the words they share; they get to know each other better and that's a feeling Yuki has missed till now.

They don't get to know anything about each other's lives, though; what they get to know are things they only realize when they look closely and listen carefully. And, thinking about it... Maybe it's not that good knowing too much about each other.

~~B*L*O*O*D*Y~~M*A*R*Y~~

It's a thrilling atmosphere. The bad weather outside, the rain and the hail and the coldness trying to creep into the castle, the secrets living in this rooms, the knowledge that they're caught here; it's all so really exciting and something you don't get to feel often. In those moments, you feel like your life could go on like that forever; far away from home, together with people you've hardly known, in an area where it's dangerous and you don't seem find your way back home… it's an adventure. A journey you can't see the end of. A story worth remembering.

But something about this place… does it let them let their guards down without noticing? The conversation now circles around scary experiences they've made already. Aya tells them about when she was a child, she has known a girl. She died in a car crash. The evening before that incident, the girl went over to her house and gave her a self-made drawing of a car. She said "Keep it for, me, ok? See ya" the next day, she died as a car hit her. It was the same car she had painted on the picture she had given to Aya.

"You know what? On a sleepover two years ago we played Ouija. And we really had a ghost! You remember it, Tsukumo?" Touko says.

"Yes. It was creepy"

"Totally! A few of my friends couldn't sleep after that. They told me that they had the feeling of someone touching and grabbing them all night! It was the ghost!"

"Well, actually it's all just some weird movements of the muscles in the arm" Senshiro muses.

"Who knows…"

"Does anyone know about the Wendigo?" Masamune asks.

"No, what's that?"

"It's a spirit that can possess you or you can turn into a Wendigo entirely. You have a terrible hunger for human flesh then" the university student explains.

"That's disgusting" Touko says.

"There're no such things as Wendigos" Hotsuma says, his chin resting in his palm.

"...Really?" Shusei asks in a low voice, so only a few of them hear him.

"All this creepy stuff is bullshit"

"Any proof?"

"Yeah" Suddenly, he straightens up. "Do all of you know about Bloody Mary?"

"Of course. Step in front of a mirror and say her name three times. If you haven't done anything wrong in your life, she won't kill you" Aya replies.

"Exactly. So, shall I go try?"

"Better you won't" Yuki mutters.

"Why?"

"I agree with Yuki. Are we children or so?" Kuroto says.

"Oh please, are you scared?"

"How old are you, twelve? Doing that stuff isn't funny anymore" the boy responds, anger boiling up in his eyes.

"Just let him try if he wants to. It's just a story for small children after all" Tsukumo says, trying to loosen up the conversation again.

"They act as if they've all completely forgotten about Tachibana's death already" Luca mutters next to Yuki. He startles. And then he lowers his head in shame. Now that the man mentions it… he, too, hasn't given the dead bus-driver any thought since they've arrived here.

"Hey guys, stop it, ok?" he says to the two boys. "Can we change the topic now, please?"

"I'll show you, there won't happen anything" the blond sixteen-year old hisses, ignoring Yuki.

Then he rushes out of the dining room into the entrance hall, where a large mirror is hanging at the wall. Kuroto storms after him. They let the door open and then they hear the voice of Hotsuma: "Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary"

And in the first floor a window bursts.


To be continued...

I hope you liked the chap. Please let me know if you liked it or not

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