4:13 AM - Keigo's Apartment
The smartphone felt unnaturally heavy in Keigo's trembling hand, its screen now dark and innocent. He navigated to the call log with clumsy swipes, his breath catching when he found... nothing. No outgoing calls. No evidence he had ever contacted the police.
And yet the voice—his voice—continued to reverberate through his consciousness with perfect clarity:
"I'm calling to report a murder I'm about to commit."
"This can't be happening," Keigo whispered, his words hanging in the too-still air of his apartment. "Am I losing my mind?"
The phone slipped from his grasp, hitting the floor with a resounding thud that seemed to make the entire room shudder in sympathy. Keigo's eyes widened as he perceived a subtle ripple pass through the floorboards—as if the very structure of his home had inhaled sharply at the disturbance.
Was the room... breathing?
Keigo staggered backward, disoriented. His apartment felt wrong—the dimensions distorted in ways his mind struggled to process. The hallway stretched impossibly long, the ceiling hovering uncomfortably low, as though the entire space had been subtly reshaped during those moments his attention had been elsewhere.
"It's just fear playing tricks," he tried to reassure himself, his voice small in the warped space. "Just my imagination."
But Keigo had worked in true crime long enough to know when something was fundamentally wrong. This wasn't imagination—this was violation. The boundary between reality and nightmare had been compromised, and he stood at the threshold, unwillingly bearing witness.
He stumbled toward the living room window, desperate for the comforting familiarity of Shinjuku's neon-drenched skyline. The rainbow electronic glow that never fully disappeared, even in the darkest hours before dawn, had always grounded him, a constant reminder that life continued its rhythm outside his obsessions.
But what reflected back at him wasn't Tokyo at all.
A Window Between Worlds
The glass had become a portal to somewhere—somewhen—else entirely.
Through the window, with perfect clarity, Keigo could see inside Arakawa Hajime's study. Not a photograph or a memory, but the actual room, rendered in three dimensions with unsettling precision. Every detail matched the crime scene photos he had obsessively collected—the antique wooden desk cluttered with case files and half-finished notes, the brass ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts arranged like fallen soldiers, the distinctive bloodstain pattern on the hardwood floor where the legendary detective had spent his final moments.
How do I know those are his final moments? Keigo thought with sudden clarity. The photos never showed this angle.
A chill crawled up his spine as he realized he was seeing something no crime scene photographer had captured—this was the view from inside the room, as if he stood in a corner of Arakawa's study, watching the scene unfold in real-time.
Keigo's heart hammered against his ribs as he took an instinctive step back. His reflection remained in the window, but with horrifying detachment, it no longer mirrored his movements. The reflection-Keigo simply stared back, eyes sunken into bruised sockets, lips stretched into a knowing smile that extended far beyond the natural limits of human expression.
"What do you want from me?" Keigo whispered to his distorted doppelgänger.
The reflection offered no verbal response. Instead, it slowly raised one hand—a theatrical, deliberate gesture—and dragged an invisible blade across its own throat. The effect was immediate and grotesque; blood sprayed across the inside of the glass in a crimson arc, dripping down in thick rivulets that seemed to pulse with malicious life.
Keigo's hands flew to his own throat in panic, fingers searching for a wound that wasn't there. He was intact, unharmed—physically, at least. But as warm liquid trickled between his fingers, he looked down to find his hands coated in fresh blood that had appeared from nowhere.
"This isn't real," he gasped, the metallic scent filling his nostrils contradicting his desperate denial. "It can't be real."
Memories That Never Were
The world tilted sideways, and Keigo's consciousness fractured like a dropped mirror. Memories—vivid, visceral, and completely foreign—flooded his mind with the unstoppable force of a tsunami:
He stood over a porcelain bathtub, watching crimson swirl into pristine water. A body lay submerged, features distorted by the rippling surface. His hands were wet, sticky with cooling blood. A sense of satisfaction settled in his chest—not pleasure, but the clinical pride of a job completed with precision.
"Evidence never lies," he heard himself say to the corpse. "But people can be made to confess to anything."
The scene shifted, bleeding into another false memory:
An interrogation room, sterile and oppressive. Across the metal table sat a woman with mascara tracking dark rivers down her cheeks. Her hands trembled as she reached for the glass of water before her.
"Please," she begged. "I didn't hurt anyone. I loved him."
Keigo leaned forward, his voice a gentle whisper that somehow carried more menace than a shout: "Confess, or I'll rewrite you. Your entire existence will become nothing but this moment, this room, this accusation—forever."
Her eyes widened with incomprehension, then terror as something in his gaze convinced her he could deliver on this impossible threat.
The memory dissolved, replaced by yet another:
A prison cell, concrete and steel and despair. Keigo sat on a thin mattress, the familiar weight of Arakawa's autobiography in his hands. He opened to a random page, then another, then frantically flipped through the entire book. At the bottom of every page, in place of Arakawa's signature, he found his own name written in handwriting he recognized as his own—yet had no memory of inscribing.
The fragments overlapped, past and present merging into a palimpsest of horror. Keigo clutched his head, trying to separate what he knew to be true from these invasive false memories.
"They're not real," he whispered, pressing his palms against his temples. "I never did those things. I'm not a killer."
But a small voice in the back of his mind whispered: Aren't you? How would you know what you've done in a world where memory itself can be rewritten?
The Visitor
4:29 AM
A gentle knocking pulled Keigo back to the present moment. The sound was soft, almost tentative—like someone unsure of their welcome.
He froze, ears straining in the silence that followed. It was far too late for casual visitors, too early for morning deliveries. His podcast listeners didn't know his home address. He had told no one about the book—hadn't even mentioned it in his latest recording.
Who could possibly be at my door at this hour?
The knock came again—but this time, the sound originated from within the apartment.
Keigo's blood ran cold as he spun toward the source of the sound. His front door stood slightly ajar, though he distinctly remembered checking the locks after returning home. The narrow gap pulsed gently, as if breathing in time with the apartment's subtle distortions.
As he watched, paralyzed by indecision, something slid through the opening—a single sheet of paper that glided across the floor with unnatural purpose, coming to rest at his feet. The edges of the page glistened wet and dark in the dim light.
With reluctance born of terrible certainty, Keigo bent to retrieve it. The paper felt warm to the touch, the liquid at its edges unmistakably blood—fresh, not yet fully dried. Written across the page in elegant calligraphy:
"Chapter 3: To Rewrite a Murder, One Must First Kill the Writer."
"No," Keigo breathed, the single syllable carrying the weight of his mounting dread. "I won't be part of this."
He took a backward step, then another, desperate to distance himself from this latest manifestation of the curse. His foot slipped suddenly, throwing him off-balance. Keigo caught himself against the wall, then looked down to discover the source of his misstep.
A pool of dark liquid was spreading across his floor—warm, viscous, and unmistakably blood. But not his own. He remained physically unharmed, despite the psychic violations he'd endured. The crimson tide flowed from the direction of the bathroom, seeping under the closed door in rhythmic pulses.
Something wants me to go in there, Keigo realized with mounting horror. The narrative demands it.
The Scene Reconstructs Itself
4:35 AM
Everything within Keigo screamed resistance. Every instinct urged retreat, escape, denial. Yet his feet carried him forward against his will, drawn by the gravitational pull of the curse's design. He understood with perfect clarity: the story wouldn't release him until he had witnessed what it needed him to see.
His hand reached for the bathroom doorknob, trembling but unstoppable.
"I shouldn't look," he whispered, even as his fingers closed around the cold metal. "I know I shouldn't look."
The door swung open with theatrical slowness, revealing the scene precisely as the book had described. The bathtub was filled to the brim, water blackened with a noxious mixture of ink and blood. Near the drain, a single human eye floated, partially submerged—its iris a perfect match for Keigo's own distinctive hazel color. The pupil seemed to contract slightly as Keigo's gaze fell upon it, as though still capable of reacting to light.
A wave of nausea crashed over him, but the worst revelation awaited in the mirror above the sink. There, written in reverse kanji so that it would read correctly when viewed in the reflection:
"犯人" (Culprit)
Keigo raised his eyes to meet his reflection, but the face that stared back belonged to Arakawa Hajime—not the composed, enigmatic detective from news footage and interviews, but a grotesque parody. This Arakawa was in advanced decomposition, skin sloughing away from yellowed bone in wet strips, throat carved open in a second, gaping smile that pulsed with each word he spoke.
"Keigo," the reflection whispered, the movement of its ruined lips lagging just slightly behind the sound, creating a disturbing dissonance. "Do you want to know why I confessed?"
Keigo shook his head violently, backing toward the door. "You're not real," he insisted. "None of this is real."
The reflection's destroyed face arranged itself into what might have been a smile. "Reality is just the story most people agree to believe," it said. "But I never was the real culprit. The book writes itself—and the writer is always the next victim."
"I'm not the writer," Keigo protested. "I didn't create this."
"Didn't you?" the reflection asked, its voice carrying a note of genuine curiosity. "What is a reader but a co-creator? Every word you absorb becomes part of you. Every story you embrace rewrites you, in small ways or large."
Before Keigo could respond, darkness swept over his vision like an eclipse.
Through Dead Eyes
Reality shifted without warning, and suddenly Keigo was no longer himself.
He inhabited Arakawa's body, peering through the legendary detective's eyes. Rain lashed against the study windows with apocalyptic fury, transforming the glass into a shimmering curtain of water. Arakawa's hands—Keigo's hands now—trembled visibly as they gripped an expensive fountain pen, scratching the final sentences of his autobiography onto heavy cream-colored paper.
These aren't just confessions, Keigo realized from within Arakawa's mind. They're incantations. Spells written in ink and blood.
A presence drew Arakawa's attention—Keigo's attention—to the window. In the rain-streaked glass, a reflection watched that didn't belong to anything in the physical room. A shadow figure, vaguely human-shaped but with a face that continuously shifted and changed, a kaleidoscope of human suffering.
Keigo recognized the faces that cycled across the entity's features—they were the innocents Arakawa had framed throughout his career. A woman weeping silent tears as she was led away in handcuffs. A teenage boy screaming protestations of innocence as a courtroom turned against him. An elderly man spitting curses at the detective who had orchestrated his downfall.
With movements that felt simultaneously forced and inevitable, Arakawa rose from his chair. His body moved with the jerky quality of a marionette as he retrieved a knife from his desk drawer—the same knife that would later be found beside his body, bearing his own fingerprints.
No, Keigo tried to scream from within Arakawa's consciousness. You don't have to do this!
But Arakawa couldn't hear him. Or perhaps he could, but no longer cared. With mechanical precision, he raised the blade to his throat and drew it across in one swift, decisive motion.
Blood cascaded down his shirt front, staining the white fabric crimson. Arakawa's knees buckled as his life drained away. But before consciousness faded completely, his gaze locked once more on the window.
In the reflection, the shadow entity held the knife, its ever-changing face frozen momentarily in a smile of pure satisfaction.
I understand now, Arakawa's fading thoughts whispered to Keigo. The book doesn't just record deaths—it causes them. And now it's chosen you.
Awakening to Nightmare
5:00 AM
"No!"
Keigo's scream tore through the silence as he jolted back to consciousness, finding himself sprawled across the cold bathroom tiles. His clothes clung to his skin, soaked through with blood that gleamed wetly under the flickering light. He patted himself down frantically, searching for wounds, but found none.
Not my blood, he realized with mounting horror. Then whose?
His fingers were clenched around something solid—a knife. Not just any knife, but the exact make and model from the Arakawa crime scene photos. The blade gleamed with fresh blood.
Beside him on the floor lay the autobiography, opened to a page he didn't remember reading. The book's pages fluttered gently, though no breeze stirred the stagnant bathroom air. As Keigo watched, transfixed, words materialized on the previously blank page, forming with the deliberate precision of invisible hands:
"To escape the story, write your own ending—in blood."
The implication settled like lead in Keigo's stomach. The curse wanted him to continue the cycle—to become both victim and perpetrator, just as Arakawa had been.
His phone vibrated against the tile floor, screen illuminating with an incoming call. No number displayed, just a blank white screen. With resignation born of exhaustion, Keigo answered.
"Hello?" His voice emerged as a rasp, barely recognizable.
"You have 24 hours to kill someone," his own voice replied from the other end, tonally identical yet somehow colder, more calculated. "Or the book will kill you instead."
The line went dead with a decisive click, leaving Keigo alone with the ultimatum.
The Diverging Path
5:05 AM
Every muscle protesting, Keigo pulled himself upright. The mirror above the sink now reflected his true appearance—disheveled, blood-soaked, hollow-eyed with exhaustion and terror. But his reflection no longer mimicked his movements. It stood perfectly still, watching him with the patient attention of a predator that knows its prey is cornered.
The weight of the curse pressed against Keigo's consciousness like a physical force, compressing his thoughts into a single, terrible choice: either he found someone to frame—to sacrifice to the narrative—or the book would erase him from existence, replacing him with the version of himself that had already embraced the role of killer.
"There has to be another way," he insisted to the empty bathroom, voice breaking. "Every story has multiple endings."
From the hallway, a slight movement caught his attention. The twisted woman from before stood silent sentinel at the threshold, her backwards-facing head tilted at an impossible angle. Her presence now seemed almost comforting in its familiarity—a known horror amidst so many emerging terrors.
In her outstretched hand she held a fountain pen—antique, gold-nibbed, and instantly recognizable from the crime scene photos as Arakawa's personal writing instrument. The tool that had inscribed the cursed autobiography into existence.
"Who will you frame, Keigo?" she whispered, though her lipless mouth never moved. The words simply materialized in his mind, intimate as his own thoughts but carrying the unmistakable cadence of an external consciousness.
Keigo stared at the offered pen, understanding dawning with terrible clarity. The autobiography wasn't merely documenting crimes—it was generating them, creating an endless cycle of killers and victims, each reader becoming the next author in an infernal collaboration that stretched across time.
"What if I refuse to write?" he asked, surprised by the steadiness in his voice. "What if I break the pen?"
The twisted woman's expression didn't change—couldn't change—but Keigo sensed a ripple of something like amusement emanating from her.
"Then another will write you," she replied. "The story always continues. Only the names change."
Keigo's gaze dropped to the knife still clutched in his hand, then returned to the pen the woman offered. Two instruments, two paths—both seemingly leading to destruction.
Unless...
A fragile ember of hope kindled in Keigo's chest as a third possibility occurred to him. Perhaps the true escape lay not in refusing to write, nor in writing what the curse expected—but in rewriting the rules of the narrative itself.
"I understand now," he said, stepping forward to accept the pen. "Every story needs an ending."
The twisted woman's presence seemed to flicker with something like uncertainty as Keigo took the pen from her outstretched hand. For the first time since this nightmare began, he sensed that events were unfolding in ways the curse hadn't anticipated.
"Thank you," he told her, closing his fingers around the pen. "You've shown me what I need to do."
In the mirror behind him, his reflection finally moved—but instead of mimicking him, it shook its head in warning. Too late. Keigo had already made his choice.
The story continues in Chapter 4: The Author's Rebellion