“Haunted”
Thanks, Amber of Mile Long Bookshelf for first featuring this story.
Did you hear the one about the haunted d-mat booth?
It was in China, I think. There was this girl, and she was gay. Her parents didn’t like it, so she was planning to run away with her girlfriend and start a new life somewhere else. But the girlfriend told her at the absolute last minute that it wasn’t going to work out. Sometimes you hear that the girlfriend had decided she wanted to date guys instead, but that’s probably a status-quo-reinforcing embellishment of a kind these kind of stories always get stuck with, whether the rest is true or not.
So the girl is in a bad place. She can’t go back home because her parents have disowned her and her friends think she’s crazy. She’s standing in the d-mat station, dumped by the love of her life. She’s never felt more abandoned and alone. What does she do?
She goes into the nearest booth and slashes her wrists.
It’s late at night in Nowhere Central. A while passes before anyone finds her, so there’s no chance of saving her. She’s dead and . . . well, if I said “gone” this wouldn’t be a ghost story, would it?
After the memorial services are over, people start noticing odd things when they use the booth she died in. It takes them to the wrong destination–always Berlin, the place the dead girl planned to go to with the girlfriend. If it does send you to the right place, it’ll leave your luggage behind so you have to come back for it. Sometimes you’ll find messages in your stuff–sad little notes in the girl’s handwriting, asking you not to go. A few unlucky people get much more than that . . . .
You know how d-mat copies people? The original is taken apart and a new one steps out at the other end; it only looks like you’re moving. Well, the haunted d-mat booth does the same thing, only how can you take apart a ghost? You can’t. So the ghost stays behind in the empty booth and it comes out the other end and follows you home. No matter how many people use the booth, some take what’s left of the dead girl with them. The jilted-est, heartbroken-est, loneliest dead girl in the world.
They say the only way to get rid of this supremely clingy ghost is to stand in front of a mirror and say three times, “I love you, I’ll never leave, I’m sorry.” The dead girl gets what she wants and she goes away. But the booth remains, and it’s still haunted. If you’re unlucky enough to go through it one day, you’ll know what you have to do.
