The Muderous Intent

 This story has been translated from Japanese into English by me, Saya.

"I feel so tired these days but I can't get any sleep at all...."
It was 10 days ago that I heard these words uttered by my girlfriend.
Then the day before yesterday, she said, "It seems I'm really tired. When I was lying down on the bed yesterday I had sleep paralysis and couldn't move my body at all (she laughed weakly)."
Certainly, as a construction worker, her work demanded more muscle than my work.

It was this same girlfriend who gave me a call past 11 in the evening. Looking back, she sounded quite strange.

"N (←my name)! Come over here right now! Please!"
Her place was an apartment complex, about 10 minutes from my house by drive (she lived alone).
"What's the matter? OK, I'll be there in a heartbeat."
 Two or three minutes into driving, I again received a call from her, but she was being way over-the-top hysterical:
"(Sobbing) Where are you?? Hurry!! Please!!"
"I'm nearly there. I'm hanging up."
I tried to hang up (well, it's illegal to use a phone while driving) but she continued, "Don't hang up! Please keep talking to me until you arrive at my place... (she was sobbing like crazy)"
"What's going on? I won't understand a word you're saying if you keep on crying like that. Have you had a nightmare?"

And so on and so on. We kept on talking until I finally arrived at her apartment complex.
Her room was on the 7th floor. I immediately got on the elevator and pressed the 7th floor button.
The door closed and the elevator started moving ー

"WHAT?"

The elevator's door was partly glass and therefore I could see through to the other side; and I saw my girlfriend standing there with a mobile phone pressed to her ear.
In a panic I hit the "open" button again and again. But the elevator had already started going up, so of course it wouldn't open.

And later I was glad it didn't.

The second floor: My girlfriend, standing there with the phone pressed to her ear, was looking at me with glazed-over eyes.
The third floor: My girlfriend, standing there with the phone pressed to her ear, was glaring at me.

I saw her on every single floor until it got to the 6th floor, each time wearing a different expression on her face.

But all I heard from my phone was the sound of her crying. As you would expect, I was speechless...
When I arrived at the 7th floor, there was no one there.
Relieved, I got out of the elevator and went to her room; she was still crying.
I asked her why she was crying, and she told me the reason:

She said that yesterday (right now that's already the day before yesterday), while she lay on the bed she had sleep paralysis, and saw a woman standing by her side who smiled at her and said "I'll kill you" and disappeared.

Then before she called me (that's yesterday) and just after she turned off the light she heard,
"I'll kill your boyfriend! I'll go over to him right now and kill him!" The loud voice echoed throughout the room... (I was shocked)

I stayed at her place until the next day. Then, because it was time for me to go to work, I went back to my place first where, on arriving, I discovered numerous scratch marks on my front door. 
I was in a hurry so I couldn't do anything about it then, so I just went off to work.

On the way back from work, my girlfriend called me and told me something very disturbing...
"Today around noon, I saw a strange woman who glared at me and clicked her tongue as she walked past me."
A cold sweat broke out on my skin. Why me? Was it a so-called iki-ryo?**

Now I really want to go and tell the person that she must have been cursing a wrong guy....   


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**Iki-ryo (生霊): Literally, "living spirit." It is a spirit of someone still alive which may sometimes haunt other people.