The trains were late.
Tokyo Station buzzed with restless footsteps and muttered complaints, but no one truly noticed the silence hanging between the rattle of announcements. The kind of silence that doesn't belong in a place of constant movement.
Rika noticed.
She stood at the edge of the platform, her black dress dripping rainwater onto the concrete. The others shifted impatiently, staring at their phones, shaking umbrellas, muttering about the delay. None of them looked down the tunnel, where darkness pulsed too thickly, as though the night itself had seeped into the tracks.
Rika's eyes narrowed. She could hear it already.
Teke… teke…
The sound was faint, like metal scraping against stone, echoing in her skull more than in her ears. It grew louder with every heartbeat, a rhythm broken and sharp, as if something was dragging itself closer, hand over bone, bone over rail.
The crowd remained oblivious.
She stepped back from the platform, retreating toward the empty corner near a vending machine. No one looked her way. She might as well have been invisible, a shadow slipping out of notice.
The sound grew clearer.
Teke… teke… teke…
A whispering legend among schoolchildren, told with laughter to mask their fear: a woman cut in half by a train, who crawled on her elbows, dragging herself with terrible speed, hunting the living to tear them apart and make them like her.
A story.
But stories had weight.
And tonight, this one was real.
Rika raised her hand behind her back. The air thickened, and the faint outline of the book began to glow, hidden from all eyes but hers. The whispers of captured ghosts stirred within, like a hundred restless voices pressed against glass.
"Quiet," she murmured to the book. The voices subsided.
The tunnel went black.
The overhead lights flickered, then died completely, plunging the station into a suffocating gloom. Panic stirred among the crowd. Murmurs rose, then turned to gasps. A child began to cry.
And then they heard it.
Teke… teke… teke…
A woman screamed.
From the tunnel, a figure erupted—dragging itself at unnatural speed, arms pumping, elbows cracking against the floor. A torso only, her lower body gone, intestines trailing like ink smeared across the concrete. Her hair whipped in wild strands, and her eyes glowed with hollow hunger.
The crowd never truly saw her—not clearly—but the human mind recognizes horror even when it cannot comprehend it. People shrieked, stumbling back from the platform, scattering in terror.
Rika alone stood unmoving.
"Teke Teke," she said, her voice low, steady. "Your story ends tonight."
The spirit shrieked, a sound like metal on glass, and lunged. She crossed the distance in a blink, dragging herself with speed no body should hold. Her clawed fingers slashed the air, inches from Rika's face.
But Rika had already willed reality to bend.
The air thickened around her, rippling as if invisible walls pushed outward. The ghost's claws scraped against nothing, sparks of shadow bursting where her hands struck the barrier.
Rika's eyes glowed faintly, reflecting the unnatural shimmer of her power. She raised her hand.
"Into the book."
The tome slid fully into existence now, hovering just above her palm, its pages fluttering violently. Words appeared, black and writhing, as though written by invisible claws. The book pulled at the ghost like a vacuum, tendrils of shadow unraveling from her body, sucked into the endless white of the pages.
Teke Teke screamed, her torso twisting unnaturally as she tried to crawl away, elbows slamming against the concrete with frantic force. "No! I won't vanish again! I won't—!"
But Rika's command was absolute.
Reality tore. The sound of scraping elbows split into silence as her form was dragged, screaming, into the book. Her hollow eyes glared at Rika in the final moment before the page snapped shut with a sound like thunder.
And then it was over.
The lights flickered back to life.
The crowd blinked, dazed, confused. Some muttered about power outages, others shook their heads, laughing nervously at their own panic. No one spoke of the sound. No one remembered the thing they had almost seen.
No one but Rika.
She touched the book lightly, her fingers brushing its cover as it faded from sight once more, slipping into the fold between reality and unreality. The weight on her back grew heavier. Another spirit sealed. Another page filled.
But her satisfaction was short.
Because as the crowd began to calm, she heard it again.
Not the scraping elbows of Teke Teke. Not the whispering wails of the newly bound spirit.
Her name.
"Rika…"
It drifted from the far tunnel, soft, drawn out, as if the darkness itself was speaking. The same voice from before. The one that had resisted her will.
Her throat tightened. She glanced into the tunnel, but the rails were empty, the shadows ordinary. The trains would come again soon. The people would move on as if nothing had happened.
But Rika knew better.
Whatever whispered her name wasn't just another ghost. It wasn't a legend. It was something older, heavier. The same presence that had stolen her parents.
And it was waiting for her.
She turned away, walking toward the exit as the first train finally rumbled into the station. The crowd surged forward, carried by the rhythm of normalcy. None of them noticed the girl with wet hair and sharp eyes, carrying a book too dangerous to exist.
But the shadows noticed.
The voice noticed.
And for the first time in years, Rika felt the faintest smile tug at her lips.
She was getting closer.