Chapter 1

"Help me."

It seemed impossible that only seconds, hours, minutes or maybe even days ago, Suzume Akahoshi was chatting with her friends, fixing up the haunted house for the culture festival and trying not to get the others to argue with each other.

How did she get here? How did she get trapped in this rotting hellhole that the spirits around her had called a school?

"Somebody please help."

She had grown tired of walking, searching for anyone that wasn't dead or rotting away in the corner. She missed all of her friends. She missed Ami Yamamoto, her best friend, so much. She would've given anything to be with any of the six students that came here with her. Sadly enough, they probably weren't even in the same dimension as she was.

The ghost she encountered when she had first awoken had told her she couldn't find her friends, no matter how hard she looked. Apparently, they were trapped in a series of closed spaces, and to find each other, they had to figure out a way to move from one closed space to another.

How complicated.

She shouldn't have believed that to find each other was hopeless. She needed hope in this place, so much hope, just to figure out how to escape. She couldn't lose herself and be found as a rotting corpse years later like the other unfortunate souls.

"I beg you, please help me."

She had searched through so many classrooms, only to find messages left behind by the dead or the dead themselves. Not one living soul had been seen throughout the places she had traveled through.

All she wanted now was to go home. Why was there no ray of hope available to her? She needed hope. She needed her friends. She needed a living being.

But it was that same need of hope that made her enter a classroom that looked entirely different from the others. Her eyes searched through the room, and spotted a key sitting on top of the teacher's table, with a little ghost boy sitting close to it, weeping.

The key was what she needed. She had to get it, and hopefully find someone in the room that the key opened the lock to.

But the weeping spirit….

He was bathed in a red light, and she suddenly felt scared of him. All the spirits she had encountered were covered in blue light, and they were nice to her, pitiful of her current situation.

"Someone help me, please."

Suzume was startled to hear the boy suddenly speak. She slowly walked over to the edge of the room, cautious of the spirit. The girl really didn't want to go anywhere near him, but she was terribly desperate to find anyone. And her desperation of company outweighed her fright of the that was glowing red.

She quickly grabbed the keys from the table and started to run away from the spirit, who had now looked up and taken notice of her.

"Are you going to help me?"

Suzume chose not to reply, and continued to run towards the door. I'm almost there, she thought to herself, glad that nothing bad happened to her yet. She then slammed the door behind her, and entered another classroom, hoping that anyone would be there.

"Is anyone here?" she called out, her voice echoing throughout the room. There was nothing but silence replying to her question. Of course no one's here. She thought to herself, and was about to leave the room when she heard a groan.

"Ugh….my head…..wait…what the…? Where the hell am I?" Suzume recognized the voice immediately; it was one of her classmates, Ryoko Takeda! "Takeda-san!" she yelled, and ran over to the other girl in the room. Her arms were quickly wrapped around Ryoko's neck, and were removed as quickly as they appeared.

"Whoa, Akahoshi. Before you get all emotional, would you please tell me where I am." Suzume's newfound classmate said, quite annoyed. "We're in Heavenly Host Elementary school, which is filled with corpses and ghosts. We have to-" Suzume replied, but was cut off by the sound of the door creaking open and the lock clicking.

"What-what was that?" Ryoko stuttered, grabbing Suzume's hand, shivering. "I don't know. But I think we're locked in." she replied, trying to force the door open.

"You should've helped me."

Suzume froze instantly at the voice of the spirit she had seen in the other room. "Takeda-san. You asked where we were, didn't you? And I said there were ghosts here. If you don't believe me, the proof is probably right behind me." She stated, her voice full of fear as a red glow suddenly appeared in between the two girls.