Letters from Okinawa 14

Mini Horror Story

Threshold
Main Text
The white is fading from the tips of my nails.
In the morning, I looked in the bathroom mirror. My own face felt terribly distant. The sound of water droplets falling from the faucet echoed deep in my ears, like metal being struck. The intervals between them were growing slightly longer.
At the end of the hallway, there is that room.
The door is always open, just by the width of a finger.
The smell of rusted keys. The smell of damp tatami mats. The air leaking from there is cold. Every time I pass by, the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I shouldn't look. Even as I think that, my gaze is already tracing that thin line of darkness.
Something moved in the corner of my vision.
No, it didn't move. It is simply 'there'.
A blackness deeper than a shadow. It stares at me intently without making a sound. It has no eyes. It has no form. Only its gaze pricks at my skin.
I look at my own feet.
My shadow was sinking deep into the wooden floorboards of the hallway. As if it were being sucked into the underside of the floor.
I take a step forward.
Half of my body is no longer in this world.
I sit at my desk and grip my pen.
I look at the words I supposedly wrote in my notebook... I cannot read them.
They looked like ancient symbols used by a tribe from a country I have never seen. The ink lines were wriggling slightly on the paper, like living black insects. The meaning slipped through my mind and vanished. Even though I wrote them. Whose words are these?
Behind me, there was a faint sound.
—Splat.
A small, damp sound, like moisture bursting.
I turn around slowly.
At the end of the hallway, I felt that the gap of the half-open room was slightly wider than usual.
From there, something like a black finger began to crawl out over the threshold. No, it wasn't a finger. It was the tip of a nameless 'shadow' that had seeped across the boundary into this side.
There was no fear. Only a nameless anxiety, like a cold wind blowing through the depths of my chest, was growing.
I dropped my pen. I couldn't even hear the sound of it rolling.
I stood up and, as if drawn in, walked toward that half-open room.
With a low creak, the door opened completely.
Inside the room was an endless, deep darkness. Yet, from its center, I could hear a voice.
—Waa, waa.
It was the crying of a baby. All alone, rolling on the dark floor, crying.
My feet crossed the threshold without hesitation.
In that moment, I felt my body completely dissolve into the darkness of 'the other side.' My nails, my skin, and all my memories up until now, everything unraveled and vanished. I am no longer the person I was.
Yet, strangely, I was not afraid.
I reach my hand into the depths of the darkness. My fingers touched a small, warm presence.
In my arms, having lost my language and transformed into a different creature, the baby's crying stopped instantly.
When I looked up, beyond the half-open door, the hallway of the 'original world' where I had been until just a moment ago looked terribly distant and small.
I will never return to that hallway again.
With my new body, holding the small, certain weight in my chest, I quietly sank into the depths of the darkness.

#Threshold
#LongHallway
#DeepDarkness
#UnknownLanguage
#BabyOnTheOtherSide
#RebornMe