February 20XX
My parents had to go overseas on a business trip, and my brothers are out of town with their girlfriends doing goodness knows what (not that I wanna know), so they let me stay at my boyfriend’s place, since according to their standards, I was “too young” to have the house all to myself.
During Valentine’s Day, he and his family planned to go on a holiday at one of Borneo’s most popular resort hotels called the Rasa Ria Hotel. Pretty good, if you ask me, with the usual facilities and special services, and I have to admit I did have a good time despite the fact that my boyfriend and I lack a little privacy due to the fact that his miser of a father wanted to save costs by cramming all of us in one room.
Later that night, when the adults decided to have their nightly happy hour at the karaoke lounge, we were left in the room to have our own fun. We, devoid of booze—no thanks to his mother—challenged each other to a coffee fest, seeing who could drink the most coffee at one sitting—black without sugar, in fact. Needless to say, my caffeine-induced brain refused to fall asleep, even when the adults have returned and were snoring quietly on their King-sized bed. I'm not really that immune to coffee and it came as a package deal: insomnia and a nasty headache.
I got up to see if I could get any ice to ease my headache but we ran out of it. Seeing that no one stirred from their sleep, I stole the card key from my boyfriend’s mother’s wallet, took the thermos bucket and crept silently out of the room. There was an ice-vending machine just two floors below ours and I was thinking maybe I could get some ice there and maybe even try to dunk my head into the machine to see if that'll cure my headache, which is, of course, an absurd thing to do. As I reached that floor, I was glad to see the machine just right down the corridor and still on and working. I put the thermos bucket there and waited for it to fill up. I even grabbed a handful and rubbed the cooling ice onto my throbbing head. Ah, bliss.
That was when something really eerie happened. From the right side of the corridor, I heard a distant sound. At first I thought it was probably one of the workers pushing their trolley or something, but it didn't sound like that. It was more of a dragging of something heavy, like the sound of someone moving on the floor with only his arms, dragging along his immobile lower half of the body. The sound was getting closer and closer until I could almost feel it coming towards me. The machine was still filling my thermos bucket and I was panicking. I urged inwardly for the machine to hurry up before I grabbed the bucket and made a dash towards the lift. I pressed frantically as the dragging sound came nearer and nearer. I tentatively looked towards the direction of the sound but there was no one there, yet the sound continued to grow louder and closer to me. I could almost feel it next to me and closing in even nearer.
I practically jumped into the lift when the door slid open. I pressed my floor and slammed the close button as hard as I could. The door started to close for a while, then stopped abruptly in the middle and opened wide again. It stayed open for about a full 5 minutes (which felt like an eternity to me) before closing back again. That really freaked me out because even though I still couldn't see anything, I knew something was in there with me. There was something unsettling in that lift as it sent me up to my floor, as if it was trying to suffocate me with its presence. I went into a verge of hyperventilating when I heard slightly audible sounds of dripping water and heavy breathing surrounded me inside the lift. What's worse, the heavy breathing was just right by both of my ears!
It felt like forever when the lift finally reached my floor. I dashed out of it as fast as I could and ran straight to my room without looking back. Needless to say, I woke everyone up when I slammed the door shut behind me and my headache was gone almost in an instant. My boyfriend saw my ashen face and asked in concern what just happened, but no matter how I try, I just couldn't get whatever I saw into words. I guess the shock took over my speech capacity and I was at loss of words. He thought I must've been harassed by some crazy pervert for the next day, he lodged a complaint to the manager. It was later that I found out when my friend experienced the same thing that there had been a fatal accident or some kind in the past at that particular floor when someone fell and broke both his legs and died due to loss of blood when he was trying to get help.
I guess he didn't know he had already died and continued to ask for our help in vain.
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