Ghost!Kiku x Reader - Chapter 5

11-?-14

If I had only listened to Elizaveta, then I wouldn't be in this situation and he wouldn't be in danger.

-

'What the-?!'

(Name) turned around and twisted the brass doorknob, trying to yank the door open. She had no luck; the door was jammed shut.

Her eyes caught some words etched in to the blackened wood of the door through the dark. Before she could scoot closer to see them, she felt a pair of hands against the front of her shoulders and was forcefully shoved backwards to fall on her back. The breath was knocked out of her, and was instead replaced with a surge of fear that made her body feel like it was assaulted with freezing pin pricks.

Turn around.

'What?'

Turn around.

“Who are you?” (Name) said, calling out.

Turn around and face it.
Do it.
You're not possibly scared, are you?

“...”

She propped herself up on her elbows and looked around, ignoring the dull ache in her back.

Turn around, turn around, turn around, turn around, turn around, turn around, turn around-

With every word, (Name) could feel the voice gradually getting louder and more intense. Her head was now pounding and filled with unbearable static. She pushed herself up to her feet and put a hand to the wall to steady herself.

She shook her head and jerkily turned around like the voice commanded, glistening eyes wide open to face whatever it was might have been behind her.

It was just an empty hallway in front of her.

The dank hallway was wide and lit by a dim red bulb hanging from a wire that extended into a jagged hole in the water-stained ceiling. Red bulbs identical to the first one were spaced out very far apart until most of the hallway was dark in between each one.

Her head slowly cleared until she could no longer feel the pain. The taunting voice was gone, and it definitely didn't seem like it was embodied.

A pair of hands pressed against her shoulder blades this time and gave her a push forward. It was light, but it was enough to make her stumble. No one was behind her when she looked, so she gulped and walked forward on shaky and frozen legs.

(Name) related this moment to when she was walking towards the kitchen not too long ago to go clean the blood. Her legs shook just the same, and her throat felt like it was constricted enough that it was difficult to breathe.

Her scraping footsteps echoed in the gloomy hallway for what seemed like forever. She counted the painful seconds, and came to a halting three minutes before she approached a split off in the hallway. Three wider hallways branched off from the main one, each one seeming just as frightening as the one she was in.

She took a shaky breath and turned to walk down the furthest right path. A sinking feeling filled her until her legs felt like lead and were strenuous to lift.

She came upon a bright lit figure: a crooked, hunched over old lady that struck her as highly unsettling. She was about the younger girl's size, and reminded her of a pug with how many rolling wrinkles made home on her uncovered skin. The old lady was dressed in a loose, plain white dress with white flats, and was leaning against a thin birch cane.

(Name) could see her pale lips moving, but couldn't hear her, so she pushed herself forwards until she could hear the shaky and squeaking voice more clearly.

“Little dear... Could you be a doll and carry a poor old woman to the other side..?” the lady quaked, her voice sounding like she would kick the bucket at any moment.

(Name) stayed silent and pondered the request. She immediately passed it off as a terrible idea, seeing as how the lady was somehow shining like a white flame in the middle of a dark hallway. That was the only clue she needed for the younger girl to speed walk away from the lady and further down the hallway.

Weeps came from behind her.

A voice sobbed out, “All I wanted was to manipulate someone's ill kindness to carry me all the way to hell..!”

That was when she started to hear what sounded like ripping paper. A deafening screech echoed throughout her mind, causing the girl to press her two sweaty palms against her aching temples to try and make it stop. She tried to will it to stop as she pushed herself forward again. When it stopped, (Name) looked around to see that the thing responsible wasn't anywhere ahead, but when she looked back, she almost screamed if it weren't for her choking on her saliva.

In place of the glowing old lady was a demonic creature that towered over more than twice (Name)'s height, but was hunched over on all fours to curl underneath the ceiling. Its spindly limbs reminded her of a spider's, except they had many more sharp joints that jutted out and away. Shaded tentacles sprouted out from the bony back of the thing and whipped around in the air, a couple of them even started to snake forward to snatch the shocked girl up. The creature slowly worked its limbs to walk, as if getting used to them, and sped up until it was full on running at her.

(Name) promptly turned and made a break for it, sprinting down the rest of the suddenly unimportant hallway. She knew it was a bad idea, racing through unexplored territory that was buried deep inside of the freaky labyrinth of a haunted house, but it was hard to think rationally when one was getting hunted by a fiendish being-turned elder.

She saw a corner come up and skidded until she could make an efficiently sharp turn. The creature let out a terrible screech again, so (Name) looked back only to see the creature run straight through the wall before the turn. It disappeared, leaving only a light cloud of dust that left her confused.

'It's gone? That thing was definitely a demon, and I'm not sticking around to see if it comes back!' she thought to herself, turning back around and walking down the shorter hallway that she had turned in to. A mirror was set innocently on the wall a little ahead of where she was walking, so she quickly jogged to catch up to it. She wasn't sure why she wanted to look in the mirror, but something was telling her to. She made an excuse that she just wanted to check if she accidentally hit her lip sometime on her adventure.

(Name) turned to look in the mirror and notice that it was a bit dirty, so she used her arm to swipe away a good bit of the grime so that she could have a way to see herself. She checked for blood that may have dribbled down on her chin, but saw that her face was completely fine, and she didn't need to worry much about her hair. Once she started to straighten up to keep walking, she saw her reflection start grinning evilly, and knew that her face was completely stoic, if not at least confused when she saw herself. The reflection started to twist and she got out of there once she noticed.

She wasn't sticking around for spooky mirrors either, the girl did not want to be another idiotic cliche movie female. She had a feeling that it was best to just keep on walking.

Once she was farther down the hall after having sprinted away from the shoddy mirror, she slowed down. A faint stench managed to float its way up in to her nose and vaguely clouded her senses. She could identify it as the scent of some sort of old sewage. It was almost gone, she could tell, but it seemed that the smell was trapped in that one hallway, but it wasn't present at all in the musty one before.

(Name) walked until she reached the end of the hallway, where it just led in to a dead end. There were no other doors or hallways branching off, no stairs or anything. She seriously started to doubt the point of this one room, if only just to get someone even more lost in the forsaken house. Heck, she was even starting to doubt her choice in buying the huge place, the only upside being that it was amazingly cheap.

Her foot knocked in to something and heard a quiet crack, causing her to step back and look down at her feet. A lone light hung somewhere behind her, but was only close enough to where she could catch a glimpse of what she had just kicked.

A rotted corpse lay somewhat propped up against the wall in a sitting position, and the girl had a sense that it seemed a bit familiar. The hallway seemed almost ideal in keeping a dead body somewhat preserved, with such a cool and neutral temperature, no creatures around to disturb the bones. It hadn't scared her, other than leaving her with a cautious feeling that told her that she shouldn't be there. The body's skeleton was already brittle, and the girl was sure that she just broke its ankle.

Behind her, she started to hear a low, demonic growling get increasingly louder. Now that she noticed it, she hadn't known how long that it had been going on for.

'I'm dead, I am sooo dead. I should have never followed that damn shadow, I should have just ignored it and enjoyed my salmon! This was a really stupid idea...' she thought and slowly turned away from the corpse and towards the source of the sound.

(Name)'s hand flew up to her mouth as she let out a short screech, stumbling back . The creature that sprouted from that old lady from not too long before was suddenly racing out of the other end of the hallway. It ran at an amazing speed, heading straight for her with eyes glowing green and a dark, long, slimy tongue lashing from side to side.

(Name) fell back against the wall, next to the corpse. She slid down as her horrified and uselessly muffled screams mixed with desperate sobs. The creature had just about reached her as her teary eyes slammed shut to wait for her fate.