The old attic, once my hideaway of forgotten heirlooms and yellowed paperbacks, had become a prison. The grimy window offered no light now. Only a warped reflection, distorted by age and something unseen. Dust floated in the stale air, but it no longer danced. It hovered. Watching.

I huddled in the farthest corner, knees drawn tight to my chest, my breath held shallow. I hadn’t slept in days. I couldn’t. She’d never let me.

Haruka.

Her laughter sliced through the silence—a high, lilting chime, like wind through cracked porcelain. It wasn’t the laughter of a child. It was too deliberate. Too knowing.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” I whispered, the words sticking to my tongue like glue.

But Haruka had never been a girl. Not really.

We found the doll first—her doll. An old ichimatsu doll in the attic trunk, wrapped in silk and tucked inside a lacquered wooden box. Eyes painted so carefully, too real. Too sad. A tag hung around its neck in faded brushstroke hiragana: シャーロット, Shaarotto. The handwriting wasn’t Grandma’s.

Mom said she brought it back from Japan in the seventies, while stationed overseas. A souvenir, she’d said with a strange look. “I always felt like it watched me.”

The attic had grown colder since we found it. And louder.

Haruka appeared that night. Pale. Filmy. Her hair long and stringy, damp as seaweed. She wore a faded kimono, the hem torn and stained, her feet bare and bloodless. Her face—half-hidden behind strands—was not a child’s, though her size suggested it.

She didn’t blink.

“Let’s play,” she’d said in perfect, accentless English, her voice a whisper from inside my skull.

Since then, she never left.

Yūrei. I remembered the word from a book I read once. Spirits tethered by trauma—by rage or sorrow or duty. They could linger forever, anchored to objects, people, wrongs.

Haruka had crossed oceans to be here. But this attic was now hers.

I tried to ignore her. Tried rituals from half-remembered forums: salt circles, charms drawn in chalk. I even burned sage stolen from a neighbor’s pantry.

Nothing worked.

She liked to move things. Keys, toys, teeth. She liked to whisper in languages I didn’t understand, then laugh when I flinched. She hated mirrors. She shattered three.

I didn’t tell anyone. Not after Mom stopped coming upstairs.

Not after I saw her eyes, empty and wide, just outside the attic door. She never blinked either.

Now, Haruka hunted me between the eaves and rafters, her touch like frostbite, her footsteps soft as moth wings.

A floorboard creaked behind me. Slow. Intentional.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

The temperature dropped—like stepping into a crypt. A familiar scent wafted in, thick and sweet. Chrysanthemums.

Cold fingers curled around my wrist. They didn’t grip. They clung.

A hush, like breath on a temple bell, spilled across my ear.

“You forgot the rules,” she whispered. “I never stop playing.”

The shadows shifted. The dust rose.

And behind the old trunk, something bowed.