"When She Says 'Osuwari', Sit." by Abraxas (06-06-08)
Noguichi was not comfortable. To be sure, he was cool and calm and, until he heard that sound, he had been passing the time in a contemplative, Zen-like state while reading "The Golden Pavilion" by candle-light. And it should be added that it was not a shock: he what it was, what was happening and what would be happening. It was just that until that moment the idea existed only as an abstraction – now, now that mere, human word was transformed into reality, the weight of its consequence was a thing too much to bear.
Suddenly, as if a switch were flipped, the house attained a new and terrible dimension. With the alarm and with the silence that followed, at last the place could not be distinguished from a tomb.
Once the solitude of the living room provided a welcome escape out of the world; now the quiet of the autumnal scene magnified the dread of the situation. The windows all about were bare though shut and lent the chamber the light of the sky – the after-glow of the evening sun, its orange-red rays long since withed into blue-gray twilight. It could have been beautiful, even romantic, were it not for the macabre nature of the other features that the intrusion magnified: the disuse and decay, sheet-covered furniture, the mounds of dust and spider webs that quivered with newly-caught victims.
One physical discord was followed by the next as the oppressive queer motif could not be denied any longer. From the moving shadows and the creeping darkness to the whispering of the air, cold and bitter, that vented through his hair every now and then, it was too late, far too late, to be normal. To return the way it was. Every thing, every where transitioned into a state where the wildest form of evil was possible and any thing could be happening any time. The most personal and intimate things could not be trusted as even the very clothes he wore, that costume, felt heavy and alien and itched in very, uncommon ways.
Noguichi stood and the chair beneath creaked a reply. It creaked earlier when he sat upon it and when he shifted about it as he thought and read. Then he did not care; now, of course, just the sound of his heart and his breath filled him with portents of doom.
"But it's just a house," he told himself aloud.
And it was just a house, abandoned and thought to be haunted.
But what were his teacher's words?
"It is haunted but by forces that are very much human."
He struggled to find the cause of the fear. It was not the twilight, not the ghoulish forms of the covered-up furniture, not the rats and the spiders, it was not the house. It could not have been the tangible stuff of life for those things could be seen and felt – they were real and, then, could not have been a threat. The fear – yet – was formless: it was the idea of what haunted the house. The notion of torture and abnormality allowed to exist within its walls and infuse itself into its atoms.
He had not noticed the corruption of it until that instant when the sound, like a magician's spell, transformed the spirit of the house and revealed the bottomless nature of its inhumanity.
Out of the chair, he walked from the living room to the hallway. He tread with his arms wide open for it felt oddly comfortable to move that way within that outfit. Cloaked by the still and murky air, he wished to fly across the threshold instead of lurching through it. And there, as the sound above returned and echoed below, it seemed as if the architecture emotionally-allied itself with his position of terror – as if nature too rebelled with horror against the intrusion – for at once as he advanced step by step the floorboards quivered as though afraid.
The rumble persisted and was punctuated with a moan and a weak, dull groan. It was followed by a low and abrasive scrape – his heart skipped a beat – it was so normal, so ordinary, that he recognized it immediately. It was the racket of a person crawling out of the bed.
He shut his eyes and gulped – all that while he hoped it had been lie yet it was true, all that time he had not been alone – he clutched at his clothes that hung from his shoulders like a weight attached to his neck. He wanted to speak, call 'Hello?' or 'Who's up there?' but he remembered the instructions were to be quiet no matter what. Rather, to calm his nerves and spurn him onward, the teenager recalled one of the motivations of the jobs: "Seventy-five hundred yen a day, seventy-five hundred yen a day," he whispered within his head.
