Red String

002

"No one else can see me?"

"No, before that."

"You've got the wrong guy?"

Jun laughed. "What do you mean I've got the wrong guy? I can't have gotten the wrong guy. You're Hayden Chung." He fished out the assignment card from his pocket and read, "Hayden Chung, age twenty-two. You're the only son in the family and your father owns an IT firm specialising in internet security. You're a final year student in the Faculty of Computing and also the captain of the university frisbee team. You like blue, hate carrot cakes and have a habit of picking your nose when you think no one's watching."

"He picks his nose when no one's watching?" the ghost mused, looking thoughtful for a moment. "Well that's Hayden alright, but I'm not him."

"You're n-n-not h-h-him?" Jun stammered. A shiver went down his spine.

The ghost shook his head. "Nope. I'm Ryu. Takahashi Ryu."

"You're joking."

"Why would I be joking about something like that?"

Why would he be joking about something like that indeed? But if he wasn't joking, then it would mean that the ghost standing in front of him right now wasn't actually Hayden Chung. If this dude wasn't Hayden Chung, then where was the real Hayden? Jun felt his sanity slowly crumbling into tiny bits and pieces.

"How did you get here?" he murmured.

Ryu held out his right hand which had a cheery red string tied around the wrist. "I followed this string here. Do you have any idea what this is about? Am I in a dream right now? I must be in a dream, but it's a bit of a crazy one. Never had one like this before," he asked, tugging at the string with his fingers.

"You followed the—" Jun groaned. Of course, the dastardly string. All of a sudden everything made perfect sense. The assignments office hadn't made a mistake—he had. Instead of tying the string to Hayden Chung, he had gone and tied it to the wrist of this dude called Takahashi Ryu. And Takahashi Ryu wasn't meant to be finding the love of his life. He was meant to die.

Now he was royally screwed.

"Come here." He tried to grab hold of Ryu but all he got was a handful of air instead.

Ghosts were immaterial. Under normal circumstances he would have remembered that but his mind was too jumbled up right now to be thinking straight.

Picking himself off the floor, Jun raised his golden scissors and tried to snip the red thread from Ryu's wrist, but the string simply twanged and remained painfully intact. Tossing the scissors onto the table, Jun switched to using his fingers to pry apart the knot that he had personally tied in the first place, only to realise that he had tied one bloody good knot.

"Can't you get this off?" Ryu asked, trying his hand at undoing the knot himself.

"If I could, I would. Trust me."

Jun stared hopelessly at the red string around Ryu's wrist, and then at the other end of the string that was tied to the girl under the blanket. He must have been a fool for thinking that he could undo the knots after they had been tied. The red strings were indestructible. The only way for it to disappear was to let destiny run its course. This was why there were no instructions for undoing a red string in his little manual. The boss might have a way, but did he have the guts to go back to headquarters now and tell everyone that he tied the red string onto the wrong guy—and that guy was now a floating spirit?

Ryu looked down at the sleeping lump under the blanket. "So do you know what I'm doing here? This is a dream right?" There was no other logical explanation for why he had been able to float three stories up and walk through a wall to get into this room. The laws of gravity didn't apply in dreams.