Yuki had pulled an all-nighter studying, her tiny apartment silent except for the soft scratching of her pencil. At 2:47 a.m., her laptop flickered. A small red window appeared at the bottom corner of her screen:
“Do you like the Red Room?”
She frowned. It didn’t look like an ad. No close button, no text branding. Just those words on a blood–colored background. She clicked the corner to close it. It appeared again. Bigger.
“Do you like the Red Room?”
Annoyed, she unplugged her Wi-Fi. The window stayed. Now it filled a quarter of her screen, a slow pulsing red like a heartbeat. Then her speakers crackled. A child’s voice whispered, barely audible, as if standing behind her instead of in the laptop:
“Do you… like the red room…?”
Yuki spun around. No one. When she looked back at her screen, the entire monitor was red. No icons. No controls. The only text was a new message:
LShe liked it.”
A list of names began to scroll, random at first. Then students from her university. Then someone she knew who had gone missing last year. Then names she recognized from news articles titled Unexplained Death. Her mouse jerked on its own and highlighted the next empty line. Her name appeared, typed slowly, letter by letter. The screen pulsed again.
“Do you like the Red Room
Her room light flickered. The white wallpaper of her apartment began staining from the bottom corners—thin red lines crawling upward like veins. The ceiling dripped a dark, syrupy liquid. Yuki stumbled backward, but the floor squished beneath her feet like wet carpet.
She grabbed her phone. No signal. The screen turned red too. A voice whispered from inside the walls. From behind the mirror. From under her bed.
“Answer… the question…”
Yuki finally screamed,
“No!”
Silence. Then a soft, wet scraping sound behind her. She turned, and the wall itself slithered open like a mouth. Something unseen dragged her inside. Her scream gurgled and vanished.
When the landlord unlocked the apartment a week later due to complaints about the smell, the entire room was painted in thick crimson streaks. The laptop still lay open on the desk. The red window pulsed quietly.
“Yuki liked the Red Room.”
