Hey, are you listening? I need you to hear this.
You know that story about the payphone behind Matsuyama Technical High School? An old glass booth, they say — standing in the shadow of the school building where the streetlights barely reach, just sitting there quietly in the dark.
I heard this from a local kid last autumn. I can't say whether it's true, because I never went to check. But the way that kid's voice was trembling when they told me…
I'll call him Kenta. He was a second-year in high school, and he went on a dare with a friend around eleven at night. October — the kind of night that's just starting to turn cold.
Once they rounded the back of the school building, the town's light just dropped away entirely, dark enough that you couldn't see your own feet. And there it stood — the phone booth. The glass was filthy, laced with cracks that spread like cobwebs across the inside. But the telephone itself was still there. That, he said, was what made it worse.
His friend shone a phone flashlight at it first — and that's when something appeared in the glass.
A face. A woman's face.
Eyes closed, head tilted slightly down, mouth just barely open. Not standing behind the glass — more like pressed into it, fused to its surface. When his friend moved the light, the face followed. It didn't disappear.
His friend said "don't look" and ran. But Kenta's legs wouldn't move. Not from fear, he said — it was more like something was pulling him. His hand reached out for the receiver on its own.
He still doesn't know why he did it.
The moment he lifted the receiver, something cold touched his ear. Cold in a way that made no sense for October. Metal, but not like metal — he described it as a wet kind of cold, like something damp.
And then he heard it.
A voice.
Crying — but not the way people cry. It was like someone who needed to cry but couldn't, and couldn't stop trying, over and over again. A thin, hitching sound. Hyu. Hyu. Something catching deep in the throat, coming through the receiver.
That was when Kenta finally felt afraid. He threw down the receiver and ran.
For three days after he got home, he couldn't answer his phone. Every time it rang, that sound would start up again somewhere behind his ears.
That would have been enough on its own.
On the fourth night, his mother came to him and said, "What's wrong with you? You haven't been picking up." Kenta told her it hadn't been ringing. His mother went quiet.
"It was ringing. It's been ringing from your room. This whole time."
There is no phone in Kenta's room.
After he told me all of that, he said one more thing.
"I don't know… if I put the receiver back."
…Yeah.
I don't know whether that payphone behind Matsuyama Technical is still there. But if what that boy left behind that night wasn't only the receiver —
When I think about it like that, I just…
…yeah.
