This is a story from when I was a second grader in elementary school. That day, on my way home from school, I was playing with S, a boy from the same class. S wasn't my absolute best friend, but we were close enough that I had been to his house a few times, and he had come over to mine as well.
The two of us were on the grounds of a deserted, old apartment building. We were sitting on the concrete walkway in front of a row of doors on the first floor, playing some kind of game. (I can't remember clearly what we were playing.) But after a while, I started feeling like there was something up on the second floor of the apartment, and it began to bother me so much that I couldn't ignore it.
Right about then, S muttered, "I wonder what's... up there?" It wasn't just me who felt a strange vibe; he was picking up on that eerie, indefinable atmosphere too. Both of us were too curious about the second floor to let it go, and S stood up, saying, "Let's go take a look."
He started climbing the iron stairs attached along the wall, making clanking sounds as he went, and I followed right behind him.
The moment S reached the top of the stairs, turned the corner of the second-floor hallway, and disappeared from view, I stopped dead in my tracks midway up the stairs.
Nothing unusual had happened, but an alarm bell of some sort began blaring loudly inside my body. It felt as though something deep within me was forcefully commanding, "Stop right there!"
I stood frozen on the stairs for a while, but S didn't come back. I didn't hear his voice either. I thought about heading up again and started to take another step, but my body wouldn't move. It wasn't like physical sleep paralysis; I was struck by an intense psychological sensation screaming, "You must never go any further!!"
Scared out of my mind, I completely ignored S and just went straight home. The next day, S didn't come to school.
A day had passed, the fear had faded a bit, and with my simple-minded child's brain, I just figured, "He probably stayed home because of a cold or something."
However, a week went by, and S still didn't show up. Finding it genuinely strange, I asked a classmate, "What happened to S?" The classmate just gave me a puzzled look and asked, "Who's S?"
I asked others, but everyone gave the same response: they had never heard of a boy named S. Come to think of it, even though he was absent, our homeroom teacher never once mentioned S's name, and someone else was sitting at the desk S used to use.
When I got home, I told my mother, "S stopped coming to school." She gave me the exact same blank look and asked, "Who is that?" Even when I said, "You remember, the boy I brought home before?", she insisted she had no memory of him at all.
As an elementary schooler, time passed, and I gradually forgot about S—who hadn't been my absolute closest friend anyway—and eventually graduated from elementary school.
Then, one day when I was in junior high school, I suddenly remembered S. Wondering what had happened to him, I asked a few friends about S, but as expected, nobody knew who he was.
The apartment building in question had already been torn down, and the entire area had been turned into a cardboard factory warehouse. I thought about going to look for the house where S lived, but even though I could remember part of the way there, I couldn't for the life of me recall the exact location.
I checked my elementary school graduation album at home, but S's name wasn't in the directory at the back either. Driven by a helpless sense of dread, I pulled out my family's photo albums and searched through my elementary school pictures. But S wasn't in any of them.
He wasn't in the group photo from our field trip to the forest park in the spring of second grade, either. I vividly remembered sneaking into a restricted area of the park with S and a few others during that trip and getting severely chewed out by our teacher, so S definitely should have been in that group photo...
And here I am now. From time to time, I still think about S, and to this day, it remains completely baffling to me.
S definitely existed in my memories. I remember his face, and I can state for a fact that hanging out with him a few times was an event that happened in the real world.
Where on earth did S go? Why did everyone's memories of S vanish into thin air?
Sorry for the long post. But even now, I find the whole thing utterly terrifying.
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