Man possessed the potential for evil if, and only if, he surrendered his learned mind to the primitive instincts of fear, violence, and anger of the beast within.
—Dr. John L. Flynn
"God and Mad Scientists:
Dissecting The Island of Dr. Moreau"
YOU MAD?
Chapter One
Who was this monster?
He was driven onto his back on the hot floor, his blistered skin splintered by wood. The room was bright and sweltering, though actually fairly cool compared to the dark little oven he had spent the last two and a half days in. Just him and the girl he was in love with keeping watch through the door-crack — watching the monster watch them.
Now it was straddling him, a leg on either side of him, a Cyclops. He could smell its sour breath. It was going to slash him open — going to gore me, he thought, graying in and out of this horrible scene. It would probably eat him, too, as it had one of his very best friends.
(and oh god was this monster really my friend?)
Thick strings of foamy white slobber depended from either end of the monster's gaping mouth. One gummy red eye fixed on him as, snarling, the beast prepared to strike.
A voice was calling him. A soft, cautious voice.
"Kei-chan…?"
Maebara Keiichi woke up on the floor of his bedroom, crying out in a cracked, horrified voice and slamming his head repeatedly against something. How long was it before he finally realized that he was no longer asleep, that he wasn't cornered by that one-eyed thing? How long before he realized he had slid out of his futon at some point and crawled across the room in his sleep, that he was on his hands and knees in the corner, butting his head in the place where the walls came together, doing it over and over like a lunatic in an asylum?
He didn't know. He couldn't know. He knew that at first he couldn't move out of that corner because it felt safer than the wider room would have done. He was afraid that if he moved from that corner that monster would come bursting into his room, shrieking its low guttural scream, foamy slobber flying back from its lips in gooey white whips, its remaining reddened eye rolling madly, eager to finish what it had started. He knew he was shivering all over, cold and wet from the waist down, because his bladder had let go.
A cicada burred, and then unwound into silence.
Keiichi's head snapped up toward the bright window from whence that sound had come. And that was his call back to reality.
A nightmare. A dream. OH, God help me, it was just a dream. Moaning gratefully, he sank downward, unconsciously assuming that apology position that is common in Japan. Absurd enough as this morning was already, Keiichi didn't find himself ashamed that he'd peed himself. Rather, he embraced the wet patch on his shorts with his legs, as it further confirmed the unreality of the terror he had just experienced. Monsters? Monsters? There are no monsters, Keiichi, you funny little man, you.
After a moment he decided he'd better shift himself. Because though the reality was that he wasn't about to be killed by some mad animal, the greater reality was that it was Monday (everybody get down on Monday!) and if he didn't get moving fast he'd be late for school. Worse than that, his mother could pop in any minute now to wake him and see that her fifteen-year-old son had made wee-wee in his shorts.
To hell with both possibilities!
As he rose, trembling and unsteady, to his feet the nightmare's grip on him already began to loosen. By the time he was in the shower it was one-half gone. By breakfast three-fourths. By the time he met his best friend (one of four), Ryugu Rena, on the way to Hinamizawa School the dream had vanished completely. He remembered waking up in the corner with his shorts wet, and that was all.
Gravel skittered and crunched under their feet as the pair of them went on their merry way, chatting about how they had spent the weekend — Keiichi at a funeral in Tokyo, Rena dump-rooting. After living in the city for so long Keiichi's eyes were slow in getting used to Hinamizawa's bald and barren look, entire fields of scrubby crabgrass, naked trees, streets of gravel instead of hot top. The biggest difference was the cicadas. Hinamizawa was one cicada kinda village. When his thoughts turned to the cicadas Keiichi found himself thinking of a certain phenomenon he'd once read about, that every so years they were supposed to come crawling out of the soil, truckloads of them, and mate. This was just a regular summer in Hinamizawa, and stepping outside was like stepping into a thrumming UFO. What, he always wondered, must one of those summers in Hinamizawa sound like?
Keiichi was recalling a funny incident that occurred at the funeral — hey, maybe it was possible to laugh at one of those — when he realized Rena was no longer right beside him. When he looked over his shoulder he saw her lagging a bit behind him.
Was I walking too fast? It didn't feel that way.
Seeing this as the perfect opportunity to get Rena's gullible little goat, he called, "Better hustle, Rena, or I'll just leave you behind."
"Awww, Keiichi-kuuuun! Why won't you slow down…slow down…? Pleeeeease?"
A funny little retort came to his tongue. It died away when he looked over his shoulder again. Rena was trying to catch up to him, but her face was pinched with effort, and her movements seemed…sluggish. Also, there was a Band-Aid on her cheek. Concerned, Keiichi slowed down to let her catch up.
"Are you feeling alright?"
The question didn't immediately reach her. Then she looked up at him, her expression so openly surprised it would have been comical under other circumstances. Then her hand went up to her forehead. "I must be getting the flu or a summer cold, I think."
"Huh. And I thought you didn't even know how to catch one of those."
"Ohhh, Keiichi-kun!" Flushing, Rena stomped her foot. Her blue eyes glittered angrily and her cheeks puffed out. "You…You…"
"Oh, alright, I take it back." He made a great show of rolling his eyes in mock exasperation. Then his hand plunged into his pocket. "Here. Accept this as my apology."
He was holding out a colorful little box of Danimals-brand animal crackers; they had been handing them out at a street corner in Tokyo after the funeral. Across all four of its sides chibi zoo animals capered and cavorted in a fluffy jungle.
Rena dropped her anger in an instant. She squealed and Keiichi winced, checking his ears for blood.
"EEEEEEEEEEE! IT. IS. SO. CUTE!" She eagerly accepted the box and crushed it against her cheek, nuzzling it. "I'm gonna take it home with me!" she said, as she declared with all of the adorable things she encountered, and a thin string of drool dropped from her pursed lower lip. The sight of her drooling now made her look cute enough to be taken home herself; in less than a week the sight of her drooling would terrify you to the point of ruining either your underwear or your brain (as surely as hers would be decomposed by then) or both.
A few blocks later they met Mion at the water mill.
The senpai, whose hair color made Keiichi think of the dentist (he never quite dared tell her this to her face), saw them coming at Rena's lagging pace. She called, "Oi, get steppin, lead-feet! This old man ain't getting any younger!"
"What old man?" Keiichi asked her. Now he and Rena were caught up with her.
Mion blinked. "This old man."
"I've been meaning to ask you this — but why do you always refer to yourself as an old man?"
She grinned. "Why, 'cos it's better to be an old man than a young fool." Putting her old coot voice to full grind, she elbowed Rena. "Ain't that right, jo-chan?"
Rena flinched and held her side, feeling mild contempt toward Mion for causing her pain when she was in enough of it already. It was an irrational emotion and quite strong, but then it receded and she grinned with Mion. "Right…!"
Mion tipped Keiichi a wink. "She's only unenthusiastic 'cos she can't take an old man home with her."
And why would she want to? He was presently imagining Rena nuzzling and drooling over an old man — a fat old man who was hairy everywhere, except his head.
"Yer lookin mighty green there, shweetheart," Mion said to Rena, trying to sound like Humphrey Bogart but sounding more like Sonozaki Mion with a head cold. Then she sounded more serious. "Really, though, you don't look too swell."
"I don't feel too swell. I got a cut on my face while at the dump on Saturday."
Keiichi hesitated. News to him, this. He went on walking…only to hesitate again. He looked around, realizing neither girl was any longer beside him. He glanced behind him to see them walking close together, talking.
Again: Was I walking fast? And again, he didn't think so.
"Ahh," Mion said sympathetically. "I've worried about that happening to you eventually."
Keiichi wanted to say he did also, but this conversation didn't seem open to his input. Was it just him or had Mion and Rena bowed their heads close together?
"Have you disinfected it?"
"I put A and D ointment on it."
They almost looked…conspiratory.
Okay, stop it, Keiichi ordered himself, snapping his head forward. She put ointment on it. That means the cut will heal and you have nothing to worry about.
But the cut wasn't the issue here.
"Is — is it bad?" Mion asked. "Could I see it?"
Keiichi looked over his shoulder again, his gaze centering on that Band-Aid on Rena's right cheek. Yes, he worried about her epic adventures in the Dumpoid Belt, as he liked to call Hinamizawa's dump. All kinds of vile creatures haunted places like that…vile creatures with even more vile diseases. If she got hurt by one of those critters he wanted to make sure she was healing alright.
Rena's eyes touched his and then immediately went back to Mion. "I'll show it to you later."
"Huh. Well okay, then."
And soon they were walking with him again.
Very strange.
"I probably just had a cold or something," Rena added.
"Care for a Tylenol?" Mion produced a small bottle from inside her vest. "This old man is always prepared."
"Why do girls carry around painkillers, anyway?" Keiichi asked. His mom did, as did several girls at his old school in Tokyo.
Rena and Mion blushed, and they refused to tell him.
It was neither a cold nor the flu Rena had.
She loved the dump. She loved its endless opportunities to induct a new doo-dad to her cute collection. And — oh, how the joys never ceased! — whenever she came back the next day there were more cute things to be found. It was as if there was a Dump Fairy that came by every night and scattered these treasures — an old teddy bear with one eye missing and its cotton entrails spilling out of its midsection, or a cereal box with an adowable mascot on it — just for her to find. The dump was to Rena what thrift shops and garage sales were to old men.
Rena was a collector. That was what she told herself whenever she struggled to open her trailer door because something in her collection was in her way. Just a collector, and that was fine, that was pretty much okeydokey. The world was full of 'em. Some folks collected stamps. Others collected baseball cards or comic books or coins. Rena collected cute things. And she could not, absolutely COULD NOT bear the idea of being parted from one of her precious objets.
Just a collector.
But not really.
To tell the truth, there was a demon that ran in her family, if you could pardon the pun. This demon was present in her grandma, whom Rena had been unallowed to visit since she was nine. Before then she had visited her grandmother frequently. There had been one visit, when she was seven, when she had stumbled upon Grandma's closet. It had been packed to the gills with figurines, old VHS tapes, photo albums, cards and other pieces of paper. Letters or bills or something. When Rena opened that closet the figurine of an angel playing a trumpet, which had been teetering along the edge of the top shelf for some time, took its suicide dive to the floor, where it shattered. Jeezly-crow, did Rena catch Dutch with her grandma for that one.
Since then her grandma's collection seemed to multiply and take over her house. First the closet, then the hallway, the bathroom, the kitchen, her bedroom. The reason why Rena's father no longer took her to see Grandma was because he felt a growing girl like her didn't need to have to wade through piles of vermin-infested trash to hug her grandma hello. Also, a part of him feared that if Rena saw what her grandma had become she might become like that as well.
At seven, Rena had opened a closet door to the Narnia of a hoarder.
Perhaps, in 1983, it was "correct" to say that Rena was a collector. But, in — say — 2003, she might be identified as a hoarder and put on a program on A&E or TLC.
Rena also collected batteries, though this was something that had grown on her mind far less than her cute collection (she would spend entire class periods drawing her trailer in her notebooks, and often she dreamed about the trailer, too). She had a drawer in her desk full of dead batteries. AA, AAA, C, D, nine-volt. They came from flashlights, her Walkman, her transistor radio, and various other things. Oddly, she just couldn't bring herself to throw them away. This had begun as a small quirk and then shot up and grew, much like the fabled beanstalk, into a full-blown fear.
There had been one valiant effort to throw them away, and that one valiant effort was all it took to convince her that she needed these batteries. She brought a handful of AAAs to the garbage can, intent on getting rid of them because, when you got down to it, what point was there in keeping dead batteries?
She raised her hand to pitch them, and that was when the storm broke.
Cold iron bands snapped themselves over her chest, squeezing the breath out of her lungs. Shocked, she clapped her other hand to her throat, felt it working, trying to get a breath. She tried to cry out, couldn't, had no air for it. Her vision grayed and fuzzed, and she could feel her pulse beating frantically in the thin skin of her temples. She realized then that she was
(going to die I'm dying oh god oh god OH GOD)
unable to do this. She lowered her hand and the iron bands loosened immediately. She gasped in air, the color returned to her vision, and she was fine, she was pretty much okeydokey.
But jeepers, that had been the most horrible moment in her life, vying with when she learned her parents were splitting up and her mom was pregnant. If this was what happened when she tried to get rid of some stupid batteries she didn't want to know what would happen if she tried to give up her cute collection.
When asked why she always went to the dump of all places her response was: "Because cute things are cute, no matter where you find them."
Yeah. The dump was fine, the dump was pretty much okeydokey. Except for the rats. Rena, like most if not all human beings, hated rats.
She had unconsciously worked out an agreement with the dump's native vermin: you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone. So far they had adhered to this settlement…until June 12, 1983.
The rusted door screeched as Rena turned it, ramming her shoulder as hard as she could to get the door open. She slid inside her trailer carefully, minding the snow-globe on the floor and the cymbal monkey on a shelf next to her head. The door squeaked as she closed it behind her…and then — was that right? — she heard another squeak.
She blinked, and looked around slowly, wondering if she was just hearing things. She wasn't.
Squeak.
Her breath caught in her throat and ice chips scattered up her spine. Not a rat! Anything but that! She was looking around quickly now, and her hand strayed to the hatchet she had leaning against the wall. She didn't intend to cleave the little wretch, just use the blunt end to sweep it out the door.
Squeak.
Her eyes, tripled in size with fright, swept over the floor. Rena was unaware that the rat was actually above her.
Squeak.
She looked up finally just a tad bit too late. The grayish-black rat, which had been on a high shelf this whole time, squealed as it spilled downward…
…right onto Rena's face.
She shrieked (no iron bands this time, no sir) and swung her hatchet pell-mell, knocking over the cymbal monkey, actually decapitating the poor thing. Its truncated body landed on the floor, and it began to clap its cymbals together. Ching-ching, ching-ching. Rena shrieked again and that was when the rat bit her cheek, sank its teeth deep, actually coming away with a little bit of her flesh. Sharp pain burst there and Rena began to cry, her tears mixing with the freshets of dark blood streaming down her face.
The rat fell off her to the floor.
Squeak.
And Rena bisected the bastard.
It was dead with one stroke of her hatchet, but Rena kept at it, madly, hacking it over and over, her teeth ground together, her eyes glittering with tears of rage, blood flying and splattering from her wound. Its body twitched each time the hatchet fell on it. She couldn't stop. She was consumed with anger, fear, and relief (she was alive, it was dead, it was all over now, so help her Oyashiro-sama).
When she was finally done, when she had at last cooled what was so hot inside her, one would not have been able to tell that that chopped up hunk of bloody flesh had once been a rat. She sucked in air, feeling her lungs get bigger than they ever had before. She set aside her hatchet, looked at the blood splattered on her clothes, and fresh tears came. For the next forty-five minutes she sat on the floor with her handkerchief pressed to her cheek, sobbing miserably. After that the wound seemed to have clotted and she got up to do what she had come here to do: dump-diving.
Later that night she noticed her wound was oozing a bit. She dabbed vitamin A and D ointment on it and applied a bandage. She did not go to the doctor in Okinomiya that night or Sunday, the day after. Instead she went to bed, unaware that ointment would not heal this wound, unaware that in that rat's bite was a disease that could fizzle your central nervous system to gritty soot. On Saturday, June 12, 1983 Ryugu Rena was pre-rabid.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Hello, dear readers. It seems I finally got around to writing a Higurashi fic. Submitting a story to the games section of this site feels odd, as I've never played the games. What I have under my belt is season one of the anime and half of the Kai anime (personally, I don't think Kai isn't nearly as good as season one).
I got the idea while reading Cujo, a book by Stephen King about a mad dog. I thought, Dude, what if one of the Higurashi characters got rabies? Rena, I think, would be the scariest if she got rabies, partly because her laugh scares me the most (sorry, Shion fans), and partly because of that hatchet *shivers* The idea was solidified further after re-reading The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells, one of my favorite books.
Obviously, this contains character death. If you don't like character death, then why the hell do you watch Higurashi?
Subscribe to this story and/or review, if it behooves you. If I made a mistake somewhere in my writing, with grammar or the story itself, feel free to tell me.
Until next time. Au revoir.
NEXT CHAPTER: Satoko tries to trap a tiger on a boring afternoon. Instead she traps a Keiichi.
