A/N: Written for the Green Room 2015 (Rlt), challenge #5 – the wacky laws challenge, and for the Diversity Writing Challenge, e50 – write about gaining an understanding for something.
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The Non-Existent Ones
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It began in the year 1973…or 1972 as most people now claimed. The triggering incident, they said. The death of the honour roll student that doomed generations to come.
In 1972, Yomiyama Misaki died in a house fire that also claimed the lives of his brother and both parents. A tragic story, made more tragic by the fact that he was well liked by his school, and loved by his classmates. His sudden death left a churning hole in them and so they filled it, by refusing to accept the death, by pretending he was still alive and talking to an empty spot where he should always stand.
And they saw nothing wrong with that. The rest of the year crawled by. They graduated. A picture was taken to commemorate that, and there was a sigh of relief amongst the more realistic of them. The weight of Yomiyama Misaki's death would fade as they spread into the world thereafter.
Except it wasn't to be. Not at all. Yomiyama Misaki's death wouldn't fade at all. It would only become more prominent, eventually being known as the trigger to the class 3-3 curse.
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1973 was when the curse showed its true face. Yomiyama Misaki returned and, for most of the year, they didn't even realise that was odd. In fact, they never realised it. Some years later, a librarian would make a hypothesis about who was now known as the "Extra" one, and in 1972 there had only been one death in class 3-3, one person it could have been.
What was sure was that there was an Extra one in the class that year. One more student than desks originally set out, and so they brought in an extra one and continued as though nothing was wrong. For how were they to know?
That year, between the students of class 3-3 and their immediate families, there were exactly eleven deaths. One for every month of the academic school year.
And when the graduation photo was looked at during the beginning of 1974, they realised that there were twelve students short. The student they'd brought the extra desk in for was not in the photo either.
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1974 was a fearful but ordinary year. A coincidence, people began to say. A one-time freak-accident. Or eleven freak accidents. They were remembering incorrectly about the extra desk. It wasn't significant. It wasn't even real. 1975 was similar.
1976 was another cursed year. They remembered the commonality in that extra desk too late, but it still didn't spare the thirteen people to die that year. The homeroom teacher, who'd miraculously survived both years, left the school. He came back a few years later after vocational training and became the librarian, where he would remain until 1998.
There were several more cursed years, and those not frozen in fear looked a little more deeply, searching for something, anything, that would stop the senseless deaths. They were deaths of every kind: accidents, illnesses, suicides – almost normal deaths to things so strange they seemed to only happen in fiction before then. It happened some years, and some years not. But when it happened, it went for a full academic year and claimed at least one victim per month and it seemed there was nothing at all to be done about it.
Until 1983, where the curse stopped unexpectedly after a school trip claimed two students August that year. But not before an ex-student of Yomiyama North Middle School died in July – a student that left behind a son just barely born. Somehow though, that tragedy was skipped by the librarian who'd begun a diligent record of the cursed years: a record that was visited by many students hence.
1983 was a famous year, though unfortunately nobody knew just how the curse had been stopped. They also didn't know who the Extra one was that year, and not even the librarian's notekeeping revealed it, as it had the last cursed year. The curse had just stopped and it only told them it could be stopped, not how or why.
But there was hope, and in 1984, the class of 3-3 gains an extra authoritative position: head of countermeasures.
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Before the position of head of countermeasures, there was nothing to protect them from the curse. Some could argue that the head of countermeasures didn't protect them from the curse either. But many changes occurred in the class in 1984.
Before that, when the curse was first realised to be a threat but one those not involved would still deny, the class of 3-3 was alienated from the school. There was always five classes, and so it was no trouble for the administration at all. Class 3-1 and 3-2 would join for sporting activity, and likewise wound Class 3-4 and 3-5. 3-3 would be left to their own devices, as though that would stop the curse from spreading.
Who knew if the curse could actually spread. Any death that occurred outside of the members of class 3-3 and their first degree relatives could quite easily be coincidence.
From 1984, more changes were made. The classroom was shifted to another building. The curse followed them and 8 students died, and 5 relatives. That measure was deemed unsuccessful, but nobody said they should move back to the original classroom. Maybe they were still hanging on to hope, or they simply saw the pointlessness of that action.
The head of countermeasures of 1984 died before he could come up with another change. He was April's victim. His replacement suggested a few other things before she became June's death. No-one else took the role that year. In April 1985, the head of countermeasures looked over the notes from his predecessors and implemented a few of them. An extra desk was brought from the old building and the person unfortunate enough to be assigned to it was ignored. There was no "Extra" student, because they ignored her and she agreed to be the sacrificial lamb if it spared them all death. And there was no death that year. Coincidence or the curse was defeated, because there most definitely had been an Extra. All desks, including the old one in the corner of the room, had been filled.
The next year there was no Extra, no curse. The third year they ignored the one in the back almost happily…until one of their own died April 30th.
The head of countermeasures enforced ignoring the one on the Extra desk. It worked once before after all. It had to be a coincidence. It wasn't. There was a death in May. Then two in June, one being the boy they'd been ignoring.
And then it was clear. Ignoring an extra person, balancing the numbers, wasn't a failsafe. But, unfortunately, it was all they had.
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There were many rules were written in the book the recorded the curse. Some were just regular superstitions but the students of class 3-3 couldn't afford any chances. Anything that might alter the flow of the curse, they would do. It was proven when they murdered their own classmates in 1998. But that is a story for another time.
One rule pertained to the unlucky black crow. "Cross over with your left foot if one is heard on the roof." It's assumed that many of the victims are ones that don't honour this, because there are many crows to be found in Yomiyama, and much bad luck. Crows are an omen of death as well, and, thanks to the curse, there's no shortage of that either.
The second pertained to a popular suicide spot. Those two began to warp as they slipped into the school. They were dampened down into injuries and failing tests – nothing as brutal as curses and gruesome deaths. There didn't seem to be a cause for that, except the students who graduated needed something to tell their family beyond the curse, something beyond the taboo that froze their tongues.
Even if it hadn't been proven, they were terrified to talk about it without a cause.
And then there were the rules that existed within that class alone, and for that class. "Whatever the class decides to do, it must be followed by everyone in the class." It pertained particularly to the countermeasures put in place, and most particularly of all to the only one that had worked so far: ignoring a classmate. Some students found it difficult, especially ones with no prior connection to the curse. Sometimes the student couldn't take the pressure of being ignored, or somebody else cracked. The year of 1996 was one such example. The ignored student wound up becoming January's death.
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And so 1998 came. For the first time since the method of ignoring a classmate in a class with an Extra was discovered, someone volunteered for the role to spare another student from its fate. Also, for the first time, a student transferred in.
It seemed a foregone conclusion that the transfer student would disrupt things, since he was not from Yomiyama at all and lacked all knowledge of the curse. And nobody told him. For everyone else, the discussions took place the previous year, when they were in the eighth grade and still safe. The transfer came too late for that. And the safeguards were already in place. They couldn't talk about ignoring their classmate because they'd have to back out of it themselves to do so. And so Sakakibara Kouichi entered Yomiyama North Middle School without a clue, and so he unknowingly broke the failsafe that year.
Or so it was assumed. Only two people knew he had, in fact, broken no safe guard at all. It had already failed, for he began school in May and there was a death on April first. In fact, he'd been in surgery that day and unconscious from anaesthesia for the rest of it, and couldn't have had any role in that death at all. He hadn't met any student from Yomiyama North Middle School until mid-April and the curse had dug into that year by then. It was only family circumstances surrounding the death in question, and the fact that it was related to the invisible one that year, that meant that knowledge was not known to the rest.
And so Misaki Mei was ignored by all except Sakakibara Kouichi who unknowingly broke the rule, and then he was ignored as well. It was a countermeasure taken to cover a broken countermeasure once it was clear with May and June's victims that the curse was rooted in their year. Four deaths – and then with their homeroom teacher as the fifth it was tossed aside. The countermeasures hadn't worked. The one thing they'd found that actually worked hadn't that year.
But that year turned out to be another fateful year. They found how to stop the curse. From a tape left behind in 1983 before memories of the Extra one fled their minds. To stop the curse, the Extra one had to die…
And that began the massacre of August 1998. Eight deaths before the true Extra one was found. The anomalies of that year finally revealed – there'd been an extra student because of the transfer student but that had nothing to do with the curse. The Extra one didn't get a convenient explanation like that. The Extra desk had been in the staff room, had been the fact that they had an assistant homeroom teacher that year and none of them had noticed. None of them had noticed because the curse was like that, slipping in to their unaware minds, rewriting the past to show nothing abnormal at all.
But it all unravelled, because the knowledge of the curse, and those deaths, were still there. They worked it out too late because so many people were dead that year – an almost record number, especially considering the curse had stopped five months in instead of eleven. The Extra one had wound up being the teacher from 1996 – the sister of the student from Yomiyama Misaki's year who'd died in 1983 as well. And the one who'd set her free was the transfer student, her nephew, Sakakibara Kouichi who'd broken their golden rule that hadn't mattered that year after all.
The rule of ignoring a chosen classmate was not abandoned that year, because the survivors had seen the cost of the alternative: the massacre of August 1998 that had proved not only their desperation, but also how subtly the Extra one slipped into the hoard.