The old meeting room in the old building was dimmer than usual, the sound of the rain echoing in the empty room. Exhausted after PE in the sixth period, I had come to pick up a spare umbrella and stayed. The few club members had gone home, and now I vacantly stared down at the wet courtyard. If someone saw me sitting in a place like this, staring out of the window on such a rainy day, I'd probably look just like a "ghost member" myself.
Purple flowers, damp with rain, grew wild as if entwining their way around the area from the courtyard to the old building. The flowers have apparently been growing here since before the old building was built. The clematis. In the language of flowers, it means "purity" and "a beautiful soul" - nothing at all like us.
Purple flowers... Now that I thought about it, they were the same colour as the diary. As absentminded thoughts filled my head I looked over at the droplets of water on the window, when I noticed a figure amongst the flowers in the courtyard. They were too far away to see clearly, but it was some weird person out in the rain without so much as an umbrella. Maybe they were lovesick.
I brought my face closer to the window, trying to get a closer look at the figure, when suddenly a dark shadow fell upon me.
"What, you still haven't gone home?"
Yoriko had sneaked up behind me. Maybe she'd come to get a spare umbrella too. It was still raining outside, and I was still tired. I made a show of stretching.
"Yeah, well, you know. It's not like I have to hurry home for anything special. What about you?"
Yoriko replied that she had been dragged into a discussion about her university choices with her teacher. "I guess that'll be me tomorrow," I thought, prostrating myself on the desk.
"Anyway. Did you hear the follow-up to that rumour about Senpai?" Yoriko asked in her usual whisper.
The way she said it made it sound like someone other than Yoriko was actually talking about something like that.
"Something has seemed weird about her for a while... I guess she hasn't been getting much sleep. I hear she told the nurse that she kept getting night paralysis, like she'd become a doll."
Senpai... I had no idea if the rumours about Ms. Hasebe were really related to the urban legend, but the gloomy man had been interested in the story, too. There was, after all, a case involving a doll and night paralysis within the Purple Diary.
There's an old photo of a doll inside the Purple Diary. You mustn't look at her downcast face - or she'll stare back at you.
The doll waits for someone to take her place. The face that looks back at you is that which was cut off someone who was imprisoned there long ago.
Those who meet the eyes of the doll's face will be struck with night paralysis every night from then on.
The paralysis slowly spreads through their limbs, until their wide-open eyes can no longer move - and then a presence will draw near.
The presence touches their immobilised body, beginning to manipulate it like a doll.
Their body is controlled against their will, their eyes, unpermitted to close, seeing everything.
An old lamp is lit each night. A piano plays a mysterious melody. Someone peers at the body, and then face, of the person who has become the doll... a woman in black.
Until she finds the next person to become her replacement doll, she will not leave it.
A woman in black - she appears in all of the cases connected to the Purple Diary, but there isn't a single story about her - as far as Yoriko and I know, anyway.
"Let's go hooome, Yuuko. If you're tired, we can go and get something sweet to eat."
Dragging myself up with effort and moaning at Yoriko's voice, for some reason I looked out of the window. The black figure was no longer amongst the purple flowers in the courtyard.