Weren’t You Looking for Me?
By day it was merely unpleasant—too damp, too old, too badly ventilated, with mildew staining the lower walls and the smell of standing water embedded so deeply in the tile that no amount of bleach could cut through it. But at night it became something else.
The building itself was decades old, long past renovation and somehow still standing. The bathroom had no real windows, only hairline cracks in the wall where moonlight seeped through in thin silver slashes. Wind pushed through the vents with a low, hollow moan, and the tap over the final sink dripped at irregular intervals, each sound swallowed and reshaped by the tiled room until it seemed to come from farther away than it should have.
It was exactly the sort of place that accumulated stories.
And there was, of course, a story.
Years earlier, a female student had supposedly hanged herself in that bathroom after being assaulted on campus. According to rumor, she had been found long after midnight, tongue protruding, face gray, limbs stiff, hair hanging over her shoulders in black wet ropes. Administration had buried the incident, or so people said. Suppressed it to avoid panic. Which only guaranteed that the story survived in whispers.
Not many girls knew it.
Qing did.
And when she realized that fear could clear a line faster than any amount of elbowing and impatience, she used it.
That summer, she and a large group of girls had stayed on campus for training sessions. The heat was unbearable. The dorms were packed. The showers were always crowded. And Qing, who had a pathological hatred of sweat and grime, was in no mood to wait her turn.
So during dinner she raised her voice just enough for the whole table to hear.
“You know someone killed herself in the girls’ bathroom, right?”
Conversation stopped instantly.
It was one of those perfect openings social sadists live for.
Qing leaned back, savoring the effect.
“They say one girl transferred schools because she heard a baby crying in there. She got sick afterward and left within the week.”
A few girls stared at her.
A few more laughed nervously.
Qing went on.
“They say if you’re in there around eight at night, she shows up. Face white as paper. Tongue hanging out. Carrying a baby and crying.”
Then, because she enjoyed cruelty best when timed theatrically, she suddenly let out a loud shriek.
Three girls actually screamed.
One burst into tears.
The table dissolved into angry protests and frightened laughter.
“You’re horrible!”
“You did that on purpose!”
“One day you’re going to see something real!”
Qing grinned and tossed her hair over one shoulder.
“Ghosts only go after cowards. If she’s so real, let her come find me.”
It worked.
That night not a single girl wanted to shower in the old bathroom.
So Qing got exactly what she wanted.
⸻
At a few minutes past eight, carrying clean clothes, soap, shampoo, and the smug satisfaction of a successful lie, she headed down the corridor alone.
The dorm was louder than usual behind her—girls talking over one another to drown out nerves, doors slamming, someone playing music too loudly on a phone speaker. All of it faded as she approached the end of the hall.
The bathroom door stood open.
Inside, the air was colder than the corridor.
Not refreshingly cold.
Not even naturally cold.
Just wrong.
Qing paused at the threshold, then laughed softly at herself and went in.
The first thing she noticed was how empty it felt.
The second was that the dripping had stopped.
She set her things down at the sink and turned on the water.
Nothing happened.
She frowned and tried the next tap. Then another.
At last one of the shower heads sputtered, coughed twice, and released a weak stream.
“Of course,” she muttered. “Of course this place is broken too.”
She stripped quickly, annoyed now rather than nervous, and stepped under the thin spray.
The water was cold enough to sting.
Still, it was water, and after the sticky misery of training all day, even bad water felt better than none at all.
She had just started soaping her hair when she heard it.
A sound so faint at first that she thought it had come from the pipes.
Then it came again.
A baby crying.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just a thin, distant, tired little wail somewhere inside the room.
Qing went still.
Soap slid down over one eye. She blinked it away.
The sound came again.
Then stopped.
Her pulse sped up, but she forced herself to keep rinsing.
Wind, she told herself. Pipes. Someone outside with a radio. One of the girls playing a trick in revenge.
She reached for her towel.
That was when she noticed the water around her feet.
It had changed color.
Not all at once.
It was as if red had begun seeping into it from below, unfurling through the wash water in ribbons and threads until the shallow puddles at her feet turned the thick diluted color of blood.
Qing stared.
For a second she still tried to rationalize it.
Rust. Dirty pipes. Some prank with dye.
Then the smell hit her.
Hot metal. Rot. The unmistakable animal sweetness of blood.
She looked down.
Water was no longer running clear over her skin.
It was red.
Red down her legs. Red around her ankles. Red spreading outward over the cracked tiles.
Her breath caught.
She stumbled backward and hit the partition behind her.
There was no pain.
That frightened her most of all.
Because as she looked, the blood seemed to be coming from her body.
Not from a wound she could feel.
Just pouring out of her as though something inside had quietly opened.
Her throat convulsed with a scream that wouldn’t come.
She tried again.
Nothing.
The whole bathroom had become soundless except for that occasional thin infant cry and the wet whisper of bloodwater spreading over tile.
Her body began to shake.
Every instinct told her to run, but her legs had become useless, cold and heavy and detached from obedience.
She could feel panic rising toward madness.
Then something brushed her shoulder.
A strand of hair.
Not her own.
Something had fallen from above.
Slowly, very slowly, Qing lifted her head.
The woman was hanging directly over her.
Her body dangled from a rope thick as a finger, neck bent at an impossible angle, black hair hanging in ropes around a face drained of every living color. Her tongue protruded wet and red from between swollen lips. And from the corners of her eyes streamed tears the color of fresh blood.
She swung gently in the stale dark air.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Qing could not move.
The dead woman leaned lower.
Her mouth worked.
At first the voice seemed too broken to form words, just a wet dragging sound from a throat crushed long ago.
Then Qing understood it.
“You…”
“weren’t…”
“looking…”
“for me…?”
The final word came out almost tenderly.
Qing found her scream then.
It ripped out of her in one long ragged burst that seemed to shake the walls.
And still the dead woman kept swaying above her, smiling with all the awful patience of something that had waited years to be invited.
⸻
When the other girls came running in, they found Qing on the floor of the shower room, naked, half-conscious, clawing at her own throat until her fingernails drew blood.
There was no woman.
No rope.
No blood on the floor.
No infant crying.
Only a freezing stream from one faulty shower head and Qing staring upward with such absolute animal terror that three girls began crying before anyone had even touched her.
They said she had a breakdown.
They said she hallucinated because of exhaustion and heat.
They said she scared herself with the very story she had invented.
And maybe that was partly true.
But she left campus two days later without waiting for the training program to finish.
She never returned to that dormitory.
Never again told ghost stories for fun.
And for the rest of her life, if anyone so much as joked about old school bathrooms after dark, she would go white around the mouth and leave the room without a word.
Because some lies are only funny until something in the dark decides to answer them.