The Blue Door on the Fourth Floor

In the summer of 2019, I was working as a junior accountant at a shipping firm in Kobe. Our office occupied the entire fourth floor of a weathered building near the port, a place where the salt from the sea had eaten into the window frames and left white streaks on the glass. Every morning, we would gather in the central meeting room, a glass box in the middle of the floor, and wait for our manager, Mr. Fujimoto, to begin the day.

Mr. Fujimoto was a meticulous man, always five minutes early, his footsteps a steady rhythm on the linoleum corridor. We knew his walk, the slight drag of his left foot, the jingle of his keys. That Tuesday, however, the footsteps came later, and they were different – slower, heavier, as if someone were walking on their heels. They stopped just outside the meeting room, and a shadow fell across the frosted glass of the door.

We exchanged glances. ‘Fujimoto-san?’ called one of my colleagues, a young woman named Sato. The door remained closed. ‘Are you alright?’ another asked, but there was no answer. Instead, we heard a wet scraping sound, like a sponge being wrung out, and then a low, guttural sigh. A terrible smell of spoiled fish and stale cigarette smoke seeped under the door, making our eyes water.

I stood up, my heart pounding. ‘I’ll check,’ I said, though my throat was dry. I walked to the door and pressed my hand against the cool metal handle. The moment I touched it, the entire room went silent, and the lights flickered. Through the frosted glass, I saw a dark shape that was too tall to be Mr. Fujimoto, its shoulders hunched, its head tilted at an unnatural angle. Then the shape pressed its face against the glass, smearing something dark and viscous across it.

Suddenly, the door rattled as if something on the other side was shaking it violently. ‘Open up!’ a voice barked, but it wasn’t Mr. Fujimoto’s – it was a rasping imitation, like a toy with a broken speaker. I stepped back, and the rattling stopped. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then we heard the sound of footsteps walking away, fading down the corridor.

We were all frozen. Nobody spoke for what felt like minutes. Eventually, Sato broke the silence. ‘That wasn’t him,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve heard that voice before.’ She told us that the previous week, she had stayed late and seen a janitor on the fourth floor – a man in a blue uniform, his face hidden by a cap. He had been talking to himself in the hallway, repeating a phrase over and over: ‘The fourth floor is mine.’ She had dismissed it as the ramblings of an odd worker.

We tried to call Mr. Fujimoto’s mobile, but it rang and rang. His office was across the hall from the meeting room. After a tense half hour, we decided to check his office. The door was ajar, and the light was on. Inside, his desk was empty except for his coffee cup, still warm. But on his chair was a puddle of dark water, and in the center of it, a single blue door handle – the kind from the old janitorial closet at the end of the corridor.

We found the janitor’s closet later that day, the blue door locked. Our boss, a gruff man named Nakamura, used a master key. When he opened the door, we saw that the closet had been stripped bare, and on the back wall, written in what looked like dried blood, were the words: ‘He waits beyond the blue door.’

We never saw Mr. Fujimoto again. The police investigated, but they turned up nothing. A week later, I quit my job. But before I left, I went to the fourth floor one last time. The meeting room was silent, and the corridor smelled of disinfectant. As I stood by the elevator, I heard the familiar sound of footsteps – clok, clok, clok – coming from the blue door. It stopped, and a voice, muffled, called out: ‘You left your pen.’

I ran. I didn’t look back. But that night, I found a blue pen on my nightstand, one I’d never seen before. I threw it away. But when I woke, it was there again, with a note in Mr. Fujimoto’s handwriting: ‘I can’t leave. Neither can you.’