A/N: Thank you for the reviews! I appreciate them very much. I hope the story keeps your interest until the end. The ghost stories in this chapter were based on true-to-life experiences collected from local friends who have their "third-eye" open and acquaintances who have had their frightening and disturbing experiences of the paranormal. Then again, it's up to you to believe them or not, though we can just view this as just an exchange of ghost stories, can't we? Gomen for not updating any sooner but here's the second chapter.

Disclaimer: Characters depicted in the story aren't mine. They belong to Takeshi Konomi.

A Strange Weekend

Kentaroh Minami sighed and dropped his Gameboy beside him as he lay alone and bored on the bottom bunk on one of the double decked beds inside the room. The Yamabuki Reps were sharing rooms with Gyokurin according to their sleeping arrangement. And Minami, who preferred staying inside the room instead of roaming around the center, retired to his room right after dinner, clicked on the air conditioner, kicked his shoes off, settled himself on the bottom bunk, and focused his attention on the little gadget in his hand.

Not an hour passed when he got bored with the console. He sighed yet again. He never thought that playing Castlevania could get boring in the end. Imagine that. Castlevania.

Minami turned his head from the Gameboy and stared blankly at the mattress above him. The steady humming of the air conditioner and the stillness of the room was slowly lulling him to sleep, despite the fact that it was only eight in the evening which was too early for bed, wasn't it?

As he was about to close his eyes, he witnessed the mattress above him dip with weight, as if someone suddenly occupied the top bunk. Frowning, he slowly sat up, his eyes not leaving the mattress. How odd, he thought to himself. He was alone in the room, wasn't he? And he never saw nor heard anyone enter the room. Then what---?

To his utmost surprise, a cute, genki girl of ten, suddenly popped her head from the top bunk, her long brown curls forming a silken curtain as she hung herself upside down from the top railing as a child would when she wanted to peek at the occupant of the bunk below.

The girl smiled at him and greeted him a cheerful, "Oyasumi nasai!"

And her head promptly fell to the floor, her decapitated body hanging lifelessly from the top bunk.

Due to mostly shock than confusion, it took Minami quite a while to react. When he finally did, he screamed his lungs out. And with a springy, cat-like movement Kikumaru would surely envy, he dived out of his bed and shot out of the room without a backward glance.

Kunimitsu Tezuka looked up from his McBain novel when he sensed that someone was standing close behind him, when he felt that someone was rudely stepping in his personal space, looking over his shoulder. He swiveled around in his chair and scanned the room. He was alone; except for Akutagawa who was sleeping soundly on the top bunk of Hyotei's double decked beds inside their spacious sleeping quarters.

Oishi and Atobe weren't around. They decided to go to the recreational facilities offered in the center after dinner to stop themselves from getting bored to tears, leaving the Seigaku Captain with his detective novels in the room.

Gray eyes scanning the area, Tezuka took in the stillness inside the room, missing absolutely nothing as his sharp gaze darted from one corner to another. When he was satisfied that nothing was amiss, he set aside the strange feeling of someone watching him and returned to his book.

"Tezuka. . ." As he was about to continue reading, he heard a faint voice call his name, coupled by a soft feminine laughter. The sound echoed eerily inside the room, causing him to look up from his book again.

All of a sudden, the study table before him creaked as if someone sat on it.

His face remaining expressionless, he looked impassively at the table, pushed his glasses up his nose, and continued reading, promptly ignoring whatever was inside the room with him.

"One lousy billiard table, a ping pong table, and the rest are work-out apparatuses," Atobe said sourly, impeccably describing the amenities inside the Convention Center's recreational room, "What a total letdown."

"Good thing we're only staying here until tomorrow," Oishi shook his head. He, too, was disappointed to find how lacking the center was when it came to entertainment purposes. He couldn't even find a decent aquarium! "The tennis courts and the swimming pool are occupied by the other students to the point of overflowing," he sighed, "guess we're going back to the room, huh?"

Atobe shrugged his arrogant shoulders, "Didn't they say they were showing a movie in one of the halls?"

"Yeah," Oishi winced, "Titanic."

"Oh, please," the Hyotei Captain closed his eyes in exasperation as he led the way back to the east wing where their sleeping quarters was located. "I knew I shouldn't have come. This place is a complete bore. I should have---"

"Do you hear that?" Oishi cut off Atobe in mid sentence as he stopped in his tracks and looked around the long empty hallway. The Hyotei Captain frowned at being interrupted but he nevertheless kept quiet and listened. He looked at the Seigaku Vice Captain and raised an eyebrow to show his annoyance.

"Hear what?"

"Someone's crying," Oishi answered, completely missed seeing Atobe's irritated expression when he walked toward a closed door on his right. "It's coming from here," he whispered, pointing to the room, "maybe someone's hurt?"

"I don't really care."

"I'm going to check it out anyway," Oishi insisted and squatted before the door, leveling his eyes on the keyhole to see for himself that the occupant in the room was all right.

"You realize that you're peeping, don't you?"

Oishi ignored the egotistical captain's sarcastic remark and peeked inside. There he saw a girl in white crouched in a corner in misery, her back was to him, her shoulders shaking in grief. "It's that pretty girl I saw this morning," he backed from the door and stood up. "Now that I think about it, this is the same room that's facing the driveway where we got off."

"Ah, the cleaning girl. Yeah, I, too, saw her."

"I don't think she's just a cleaner," Oishi replied dryly and motioned toward the keyhole, "go take a look."

"You expect me to lower myself to peeking?"

"I'm asking you to take a quick look. If you think she'll be all right, then we leave. If not, we knock and ask her if she's okay."

"You're too caring," Atobe spouted the word as if it was offensive and looked disgustedly at the closed door, "it sickens me." And perhaps because he suddenly discovered an altruistic side to his nature, or perhaps because he was just plain curious about the crying girl, that he bent toward the keyhole and took a look inside the room. "All I see is red," he said after a short while and straightened up, "there's nothing there."

"Eh? Red?" Oishi asked, a confused frown marring his brows. He moved back toward the door and peeked in the hole again. And true to Atobe's words, all he could see was red. "Maybe she covered the hole with something?"

"Realized you were peeking, didn't she?" Atobe sneered.

"I was not peeking! I was just---"

"And what are you boys doing there?" A loud voice suddenly boomed behind them, causing Oishi to start up in immediate attention. He quickly spun around to face the newcomer while Atobe calmly pocketed his hands and watched Oishi bow low countless of times before the man. "S-Sumimasen!" The Seigaku fuku buchou apologized, his cheeks turning red with embarrassment at being caught peeking in a keyhole, "You see, sensei, we were just worried about the girl inside this room. . ."

"A girl? In this room?" The man they recognized as one of the speakers during the orientation asked in disbelief as he looked from them to the closed door and back again. "In this room?" He asked again.

This old man couldn't be hearing impaired, could he? Atobe thought and slightly frowned at him. Oishi, on the other hand, nodded his head. "Hai, sensei, she was crying and we thought---"

"Nobody's using this room," the man said quietly as he looked from Oishi to Atobe, "It's been abandoned for months now."

"But the girl. . . I just saw her this morning from the driveway. And she's inside right now."

"There really is no one using this room. It's best that you forget what you saw and---"

"You're not telling us that what we just encountered was a ghost, are you, sensei?" Atobe cut in with a smirk. Surely he wasn't trying to scare them with a stupid ghost story? He, too, saw the girl that morning looking at them from the window. And she was real, not just a figment of his imagination.

He, Keigo Atobe, never believed in ghosts.

"As a matter of fact, I am," the sensei replied with a solemn nod and pulled out a set of keys. He sifted through them until he found the right one. Unlocking the door, the man pushed it open and true enough, the room looked like it hadn't been opened nor cleaned for ages. The room smelled old and musty, causing both students to move a step back as dust flew around when the sudden breath of air entered the room. "Stories about a beautiful girl haunting this room had always run around the center ever since I first came here. Previous guests had also claimed of seeing her standing by the window or of hearing her crying inside."

Oishi, with a worried look on his face, looked at the impassive Atobe whose smirk now gone as he continued to gaze at the room. The Seigaku Vice Captain sighed and returned his gaze to the large room. Was this going to be another one of those scary episodes in his life? He had enough of the one with the cursed racquet back in Tokyo. And now this?

"And what's scary about the girl haunting this room," the man continued, hurriedly closing the door as if something would suddenly appear before them, "was that she has red eyes."

Kyosumi Sengoku yawned as he lazily slumped back on one of the cushioned chairs in the lobby. He had just finished a match with Ginka's Doumoto in table tennis, and won by a mile. Due to the limited recreational facilities, the matches were scheduled and each interested student was only given enough time for one match. Lucky Sengoku was quite disappointed that his match only lasted for a few minutes since his opponent didn't even put up an even fight. Then again, thinking about disappointment would just chase away luck.

"You look bored, Sengoku-kun," Mizuki remarked with a sly grin as he and Kamio entered the large lobby. "I just got rid of Kamio-kun's ennui here with an interesting story," he said pointing to a very pale, very disturbed Fudomine junior lagging behind him, "would you like to hear it?"

"Go crazy. Anything's bound to be better than silence," Sengoku shrugged.

"All right then," Mizuki smiled meaning fully as he sat on the cushioned chair across the Yamabuki student, "Did you know that Tachibana-kun can see. . . dead people?"

Kamio was about to tell Mizuki to stop when Sengoku laughed out loud, "What's this? A movie tie in of some sort?"

"Laugh all you want, Sengoku-kun," Mizuki replied, his smile widening a bit, "but it's the truth. This place is---"

"It's haunted!" Oishi's frantic voice drifted from the hallway and into the lobby, causing Kamio to snap to attention and whirl around just in time to see Oishi and Atobe pass by the large, open double doors of the lobby.

"It is not," Atobe replied in exasperation, "the old man was just making it up."

"She has red eyes, Atobe," Oishi persisted, "That's what we saw when we looked through the keyhole. Her eyes! She was looking straight at us!" Chills ran through Oishi's arm at the thought of a mere two-inch door as the only thing separating them from her. "You saw her this morning too, didn't you?"

Before Atobe could reply, Kamio ran after them down the hallway and demanded in a rather high pitched voice, "You know about this place?"

Atobe stopped and spun around to look at the Fudomine junior who appeared behind them. He then turned to Oishi and asked, "Someone you know?"

Oishi sweatdropped while Kamio sputtered incoherently behind them which highly amused Atobe. "He's Fudomine's Speed Demon, Akira Kamio," Oishi answered, "Momoshiro mentioned you had a doubles match with both of them before."

"Darned right you did!" Kamio couldn't resist saying as he walked toward the two, "You've even been hitting on Ann-chan!"

"Who?"

"Ann-chan!" Kamio repeated, "Tachibana buchou's imouto!"

When Atobe appeared thoughtful, Kamio continued, "You know? She's this tall," he leveled a hand to his chin, "and she's got light brown hair, and she wears hairclips on each side, and---"

"Ah, Momoshiro's fiery girlfriend," Atobe said, remembering how she dared to slap his beautiful face when he goaded her for a date with him and Kabaji. And then finding both her and Momoshiro playing street tennis a few weeks later, right before the Kantou Tournament.

"She is so not Momoshiro's girlfriend!" A vein pumped in Kamio's red head.

"Really?" Atobe asked with raised brows, "They were rather very familiar with each other when we saw them playing tennis together." He chuckled when he remembered that particular incident, "They were so engrossed with each other that it took quite a while for them to notice us."

"I knew there was something going on with those two," Mizuki suddenly materialized behind Kamio, his finger twirling a lock of curly dark hair as was his habit whenever he was planning something. "So it was really a date that time, eh?"

"It was not!" was Kamio's frustrated reply.

"Something might be happening between those two right now as we speak," Mizuki insisted, "And you can't do anything about it because you're stuck here."

"But that's not---"

"Lolly gagging around her while a rival's free to do anything back in the city?" Atobe interrupted and shook his arrogant head, "How sad."

"I'm telling you, they're not---"

"Momo has his hands full with Kaidoh being his rival," Oishi interjected thoughtfully. "I don't think he'll be happy with another one."

"Since when did that porcupine head become my rival?!" Kamio almost screamed in frustration.

"Ah, so you've giving up on your buchou's imouto?" Mizuki asked.

"I never said---"

"Are? Minami, what's wrong?" Whatever Kamio was about to say was cut off by the Seigaku fuku buchou as he watched the Yamabuki buchou walk toward them, his features pale and his body slightly trembling.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," Mizuki added meaningfully as he smirked.

"Eh?" Kamio commented without thinking, "Is it because of the hair? And here I thought his hair has always been like that, unruly sticking out on all places."

Coughing to hide a little chuckle, Atobe turned away from the group who had found Minami's current state entertaining and entered the lobby where he found Sengoku lazing around and looking up at the high ceiling. "What are you doing?" He was loathe to ask but he did nonetheless with a raised brow. He stopped a meter away from him, pocketed his hands in his trousers, and tipped his head backward to look at the ceiling.

"Counting lizards."

A long silence settled between them before Atobe replied, "There aren't any."

"I know," Sengoku took his eyes off the ceiling and met Atobe's bored gaze, "Isn't that strange?"

"How so?"

"No lizards means no insects," Sengoku explained, "which is rather impossible since we're on a mountain. It's like this place isn't normal, not real, like we know we're here but it doesn't feel like we're here. It's like we're in a dream sequence. And that's not all. I couldn't help but feel that someone's always watching us, spying on our every move. And I couldn't even sense luck coming inside the center, as if something we don't understand was blocking the outside world from us. So I reached a conclusion after all these."

"And that is?"

"The pair of shoes I bought recently for this trip was unlucky."

Silence.

"You lost me," Atobe replied.

"I know," Sengoku yawned and returned his gaze on the ceiling, "I'm bored."

Jiroh Akutagawa suddenly sat up from his bed, causing Tezuka to look up from his book. Akutagawa scratched his head and yawned as he climbed down from the top bunk. "Toilet," he muttered to himself, yawned again and stepped out of the room, leaving the room ajar.

Tezuka didn't bother getting up and closing the door after him. The nebotsuki (sleepyhead) would undoubtedly be quick anyway, since he left the door wide open.

Tachibana, who occupied the next room, was on his way to the lobby when he noticed that the Seigaku/Hyotei room was open. Normally, he would ignore the room and just get on with his business. But the place was not normal and what he saw inside stopped him cold.

A young woman with pale skin and long ebony black hair was draped over the Seigaku Captain's shoulders while he sat quietly by the window with a book in hand. The woman was resting her face beside the oblivious Tezuka's and was reading with him as she absently stroked his bronze colored hair.

"Tachibana," it took quite a while for the Fudomine buchou to realize that Tezuka had acknowledged him. And that he was already standing by the doorway. Tachibana's gaze quickly settled on the unknown woman as she slowly extricated herself from Tezuka, with a small wicked smile dancing on her beautiful pale face.

I will soon take him away. She seemed to tell Tachibana as she glided backward and disappeared into the wall behind her.

"Tezuka," Tachibana started quietly after he finally collected himself, "you shouldn't be here. You have to go. Now."

"I was invited for the seminar."

"I know but that's before---" he shook his head and tried again, "You shouldn't be here. It's dangerous." Especially now that an unknown entity was after him. "Your presence here can become a threat to everyone and that---"

"Eh? Fudomine's buchou?" Akutagawa suddenly appeared beside Tachibana, cutting the captain in mid sentence, "Did you want something?"

Tachibana contemplated if he should tell the Hyotei student what he saw but voted against it. It would only make him sound crazy, and no doubt Tezuka was thinking of the same thing. Besides, what could Akutagawa do? Sleep on it? He shook his head and answered, "No, nothing important." He turned to leave, but not before he shot Tezuka a final warning glance.

"St. Rudolph is a Christian school," Mizuki was saying as he and the rest sat comfortably in a cluster of cushioned seats in the spacious lobby, "Of course, that goes without saying," he amended quickly with little irritation when he saw Atobe raise an eyebrow which subtly meant 'That's quite obvious since the word Saint was attached to it'. Mizuki decided to ignore the Hyotei student's condescending manner. "And because of this," the data collector continued, "stories about headless priests walking around the campus at night are rampant."

Oishi, Kamio, Minami, and Mizuki joined Atobe and Sengoku in the lobby after Minami told them of his experience inside his room. He was swearing that he was never going to sleep there until Oishi helpfully pointed out that he and three others were going to occupy the quarters later that night.

The fear tended to ease up when there were more people around, did it not?

"Besides," Sengoku, a skeptic through and through, added jokingly when he heard what happened to his teammate, "I would be the one to occupy the top bunk tonight. So I would be the one sleeping beside a headless specter." And then he laughed.

The atmosphere lightened up a bit. Sengoku and Atobe's disbelief of such paranormal occurrences somehow influenced the others into not believing it themselves. Oishi and Minami may have experienced them first hand but they were willing to forget it if the others were. Besides, maybe they were just scaring themselves silly?

Minami and Oishi were starting to feel better already.

Until Mizuki introduced ghost story-telling. "We have this little chapel in school," he was saying as a wicked grin started to form on his lips, "and I hear it was one of the most haunted places in our gakuen." He sat back in his chair and started to twirl his hair around a finger. "Years ago, there was a senpai who had a frightening experience in the said chapel. It was exams week during that time and she had decided to pay a quick visit to pray for good results in her tests. Since it was early in the morning, she found the room all to herself.

"She knelt, closed her eyes, and clasped her hands in silent prayer. She had been like that for quite some time until she heard a sudden shuffling sound inside the chapel. She opened her eyes and found herself face to face with a bloody face of an old man staring straight at her. Fear paralyzed her and she could do nothing but watch as the old man opened his mouth and cried a weak 'T-Tasukete. . .' And then he disappeared."

"W-What happened to the senpai?" Kamio asked after a long silence.

"She fainted," Mizuki answered, "And that's how another student found her."

"And I take it the chapel was closed down after such an incident?" Atobe asked with detached curiosity.

"They didn't have to," Mizuki answered, "No student even wanted to go near it again."

"I have a story to tell myself," Oishi finally spoke up after a long while, with five pairs of eyes turning to him as he spoke. "My uncle, Akitaka Sensei, worked in a hospital up North. And this happened to a colleague of his.

"He was doing his usual rounds late one night. But that particular night, he had to go to the basement, to the morgue, to check on the attendant's list about a particular. . ." Oishi paused and shook his dark head, "Anyway, that's irrelevant. After he finished whatever it was to be done, he went straight to a bank of elevators and waited. When the doors finally opened, he stepped in and nodded to the only passenger in the car who was a hospital patient. Suddenly, a young girl dressed in her hospital gown came running from the morgue, waving her hand wildly to catch their attention, crying, 'Wait for me! Please hold the door!'

"But my uncle's colleague ignored her, stepped forward and pushed the button to close the elevator door. When the car started moving, his fellow passenger almost reprimanded him, saying, 'Er, that was that a little rude, wasn't it, sensei?' The doctor merely looked back at the patient and shrugged, 'That girl was pronounced dead earlier today. There was a red tag on her right wrist. That usually means that a patient's passed away.' His fellow passenger's eyes rounded then he held up his right arm and asked, 'Ah, you mean a tag like this?'"

The silence that followed the story was deafening.

"I bet the sensei fainted after something like that," Minami made a face and shook his head. "Imagine yourself being trapped in such a small place with a dead guy."

"Next to a cemetery, a hospital's one of the places most haunted by ghosts," Mizuki supplied. "People die in there almost every day."

"Ghost stories, huh? I have one of my own," Sengoku said somberly, surprising the other five by what he said, the grave expression on his face making them blink their surprise. And here they thought he didn't believe in ghosts? "My cousin works in Tokyo's Central Business District. His office is located on the thirty first floor of a high rise building. He's an architect and they usually stay late in the office to finish projects.

"I remember him saying that it was a Friday night when it happened. The rest of his colleagues had already left the office for a little night out in the city. He was left alone in the office, adding some finishing touches to the model they were presenting on Monday. It was past midnight when he finished and the building was empty except for the guards doing their rounds. Anyway, he was waiting in the floor lobby for the elevator to arrive. When the doors swished open, he pressed the button for the ground floor. The car started to move but to his utmost surprise, it started to go up.

"The elevator stopped on the topmost floor which wasn't even occupied to his knowledge. A young woman was waiting on that particular floor. He said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Black curly hair fashionably framed rosy white cheeks, her lips red and full, and her body was, he said, to die for. The woman smiled at him as she stepped inside the elevator. And they finally started to descend.

"My cousin was a little uneasy since he had heard of the ghost stories running around the building, especially about the elevator apparitions. And for the longest time he had worked in that building, he had never seen the woman standing beside him before. After all, what was she doing inside the building this late at night? He couldn't wait for the car to reach the ground floor. Just as they were reaching the 13th floor, the car suddenly stopped and darkness swallowed them both. My cousin, with cold sweat breaking on his face and neck, felt the hairs on his nape prickle. He was about to punch the call button when suddenly, a smell most foul permeated in the air. The stench of a decaying corpse assailed his nostrils and he almost gagged.

"Light finally returned and the elevator started to move again. He said that only about ten seconds passed but to him, it was the longest ten seconds in his life. Of course, he refused to look at the woman beside him, fearful of what he would see. He trained his eyes on the switchboard, silently counting down the floors. Five. Four. Three. . . And suddenly, the woman beside him softly spoke, 'Ano, gomen about a while ago, my stomach's been acting up lately. It must have been something I ate.'"

Sengoku waited in anticipation for each one's reactions.

"That was the most disgusting story I've ever heard!" Atobe was the first one to recover. And despite his best intentions to remain blasé, he laughed quietly.

"It was just a joke," Oishi shook his head in disbelief and started to chuckle while Minami sighed and rubbed his temples. He then laughed at his friend's humor. He should have known.

"For a while there, I thought. . ." Kamio scratched his head and leaned back on his seat. Then he laughed as well. "That really was gross, Sengoku-san!"

The only one who remained silent amidst the laughter was Mizuki. And the rest of the group noticed.

"Doshita, Mizuki?" Sengoku sobered up, "Didn't find the joke too funny, huh?"

Mizuki started when he realized that they were talking to him. He tore his gaze away from the open double doors of the lobby and shook his head. His face was a little uncharacteristically pale when he turned to the expecting group. "E-Eh? Uh, no. I was just. . ." He trailed off. "I think I saw Tezuka-kun walk by. With a young woman in white floating in his wake."