Written in blood

Ashley Ling Yi Teng sat in the cafeteria corner, her usual spot away from the lunchtime crowds. She gripped her thick notepad, its pages filled with hundreds of lines in her familiar scrawl. For her, this was more than a habit, it was an obsession. Every detail she noticed, every quirk in a person’s mannerisms, every shift in the school’s atmosphere. She documented it all. Observing and writing kept her grounded, as if her words could contain the chaos of her world.

She could be inconspicuous, hidden in plain sight as her classmates laughed, chattered, and walked past without a second glance. But Ashley didn’t mind. There was power in knowing, she thought. She knew things no one else noticed, like how Mr. Peterson, her English teacher, absentmindedly scratched his head every time he explained irony, or how her classmate Illisha always looked to the left when she lied. It made Ashley feel unique, in control.

One afternoon, she flipped to a fresh page, prepared to jot down her observations from math class. As she settled her pen to write, her eyes froze on a strange marking scrawled across the page: “Write here, and you’ll regret it.”

The letters were rough, slanted, as if scratched hurriedly in pencil by an unfamiliar hand. A chill ran down her spine. It was unsettling, but surely just a prank. Maybe someone had managed to get their hands on her notepad and thought it’d be funny to leave her a warning. Shaking her head, she shrugged off her unease, grabbed her eraser, and rubbed the words away.

Ashley chose that page to vent her frustration about her least favorite classmate, Illisha. The two had been rivals for as long as she could remember, Illisha, with her perfect grades and condescending smirk, always a step ahead of Ashley in class, in sports, in popularity. Ashley’s pen dug into the paper as she wrote about Illisha’s loud laughter, her showy attitude, the way she seemed to flaunt her life as if daring others to envy her. She poured every bit of resentment into those lines, each word bringing her a sense of relief, a strange, quiet thrill.

She was midway through a sentence when the cafeteria filled with the sudden, unmistakable sound of a gunshot. The chaos of lunch instantly fell to an eerie silence as everyone froze, confusion and horror etched across their faces. Ashley’s heart skipped a beat as she looked up, searching for the source of the sound.

There, near the front of the cafeteria, Illisha lay sprawled on the floor, her hand still clutching a spilled tray. Her head was turned at an unnatural angle, her face pale and lifeless. Ashley’s stomach dropped as screams erupted around her, classmates stumbling away in terror. Illisha was… dead.

Her mind swirled as she looked down at her notepad, the page filled with Illisha’s name, with hateful words, and she felt a sharp stab of terror. Could it be? No, it was impossible. Just a coincidence. It had to be.

That night, Ashley sat on her bed, the notepad lying open on her lap, her fingers tracing the faint outline of the warning she had erased. She told herself it meant nothing, that it was just an eerie prank, and yet, the image of Illisha’s lifeless form haunted her. She had written down her anger toward Illisha, and moments later, Illisha was dead.

It was foolish, she knew, to believe her words had power. But the thought gnawed at her. To test her theory, she flipped to a fresh page and wrote down something harmless: an old oak tree outside her window. She’d grown up with that tree, its roots twisting through the ground, its branches reaching high, a familiar presence outside her room. Writing about it felt safe, something that couldn’t possibly lead to harm.

But barely a moment after she finished, a loud crack shattered the quiet night. She ran to her window, eyes wide, and saw the mighty oak leaning unnaturally to one side. The trunk had split open, the bark fractured, and the great tree toppled to the ground, crashing into the earth with a rumble that seemed to shake her entire room.

Ashley staggered back, her mouth open in horror. This was no coincidence. Her notepad wasn’t ordinary. It was a curse. Her heart raced as she flipped to the next blank page, her fingers trembling.

The words stared back at her in the same crooked, unsettling scrawl: “Believe me now?”

She recoiled, dropping the notepad as if it had burned her. It hit the floor with a dull thud, lying open, taunting her with its dark message. Ashley’s mind spun, terror seeping into every corner of her thoughts. She couldn’t keep this, couldn’t risk writing in it again. The notepad was evil. She was sure of it. Without another thought, she picked it up, marched to the trash bin, and threw it away. She watched it land on top of yesterday’s homework and an empty water bottle, a strange sense of relief washing over her. It was gone. She would simply stop writing in it, and this nightmare would end.

The next day, determined to put the incident behind her, she went to the local store and bought a brand-new notebook. The shiny, unmarked pages brought a sense of calm. She felt like she could finally start over. The next morning, as she sat in her first-period class, she opened the notebook, ready to begin her new routine.

But as she flipped to the first page, her breath caught in her throat. The letters were there again, scrawled in the same eerie handwriting: “Can’t write anymore, can you?”

Her heart pounded as she slammed the notebook shut. This wasn’t possible. She had thrown it away. She had bought a new notebook. And yet, here it was, mocking her. She couldn’t escape it. The cursed notebook was bound to her somehow, following her like a dark shadow, waiting for her to make a choice she knew she couldn’t escape.

Days passed in a fog of dread. Every time she flipped to a new page, the words would appear, taunting her with phrases like, “I’m waiting.” “Write something real.” The scrawl crept into her dreams, haunting her as she lay awake in the dark, her mind racing with thoughts of the power her words held.

One evening, exhausted and defeated, Ashley sat in her room, staring at the notebook. She couldn’t stop wondering what it wanted from her, why it had chosen her. She knew it was dangerous, knew it was a curse, but a strange, fatal curiosity gnawed at her. Maybe if she tested it one last time, the curse would release her.

In a moment of reckless desperation, she pressed her pen to the page, her hand trembling as she scrawled, “Ashley Ling Yi Teng.” She held her breath, waiting, her pulse pounding in her ears.

At first, there was only silence. Then, a sharp, deafening gunshot shattered the quiet. The echo seemed to hang in the air, stretching as if mocking her final act. A sudden, blinding pain spread through her chest, and she gasped, her hand flying to her heart. She stumbled, the room spinning as the pain intensified, her vision blurring.

As her knees buckled, she glimpsed the notebook lying open on her desk. The words “Goodbye, Ashley” were scrawled across the page in dark, taunting letters, and then, as her vision faded, the letters shifted, as if written by a hand she couldn’t see. The last thing she saw before darkness took her was her own name, smudged and fading from the page, like the life slipping from her body.

Weeks later, a young boy found the notepad on the sidewalk, lying blank and innocent. Curious, he took out a pen. "Elijah Tim," he scribbled, the name of his younger brother. Moments later, in his house, a gunshot rang out, and a toddler toppled out of his cradle.

Reviews

[Ern M. Yoshimoto]

this one is very psychologically haunting. it is not a silly ghost story, rather a tale that reflects back the evil inside us. Ashley Ling Ye is a flawed character, but she is also an outcast, and her resentment towards her peers is understandable. but that doesn't make it right to hate. that the bad deeds committed in our hearts comes back as bad karma is something that resonates with me. in fact, this is a quintessential Asian horror story.