"Dr. Kohaku Kagewaki's Plants" by Abraxas 2010-09-24
Hojo was feverish with a need to know - a curiosity that brewed for months and months. After his parents rented the basement. After what followed the stranger's each and every visitation.
It was a house that survived the war. The family restored it and added a basement which served as a kind of shelter. The cellar was concrete from top to bottom with windows. A door connected it to the alley. A hatch allowed it communication with the kitchen.
He had been inside of it with his parents as they shuffled their belongings in and out of it. Exploring the chamber with friends they discovered another point of access - a wooden door-like cover above the floor and below the ceiling. It was a crawl-way between the basement and the yard.
He walked across the kitchen. He reached and passed through the exit. Then, onto the patio, he lurked about the yard to find the vent.
It was behind a bush. He peeled away the screen and crawled into the shaft beyond. Only a perfect wall of black greeted the boy yet he kept going with the zeal shared by explorers about to strike.
Hojo had been haunted by the stranger and those disturbances that accompanied his visitations - it was time to fight and that meant to unmask what ever it was that happened there.
He did not know what to expect.
It was hard to describe just what happened each and every night that stranger paid the basement a visit. He tried to explain it until his parents mistook it as nightmare. They simply did not understand. His room was right above the basement. Their room was at the top of the house.
He always knew when the stranger came and went as his shadow crossed his window. The door opening and closing shook the wall next to his bed. What happened next often consisted of feet shuffling about ... of equipment getting dragged across the floor here and there ... of cages rattling, jumping, falling. Lately, after he pressed his ear to the floor, was he aware of yet another sound - a low, brutal sound like an animal's vocalization but muted.
The relationship between the boy and the stranger did not exist until the night of the mistake. Hojo wandered from the bed to the bath in the middle of a session the stranger conducted. When the business concluded the figure left the basement and instead of walking away felt about the house by the window.
Hojo lay still while the shadow lingered by the window. It tried to look into the room. It seemed to be there an eternity.
Afterward, for weeks and weeks, sometimes when Hojo peeked out of the blanket he saw a shadow suddenly appear and a low, dull red fill the room. It remained so a minute then the figure entered the basement to work.
Hojo remained motionless until the event ended.
It went too far.
The cover at the end of the crawl-way was free.
He pushed it just enough to peek. At the distance moonlight filtered through windows onto walls. Tables, along the walls, were covered with pots. Lamps, atop the pots, washed the plants that grew within. An eerie blue light was devoted to a pot with a flower. A fan funneled a breeze as it swivelled.
He caught a glimpse of something.
A cage! He almost shrieked at the sight of it - at the knowledge it was real not imagined. He panicked and the cover slipped and shut. Then he pushed it aside just a crack. Maybe it was a trick? A dream? It could not be what he thought it was - yet his eyes verified what his mind feared it to be.
He was drawn to the cage because he could not accept it.
The creature inside of it circled. It reached through the gaps. Frantic. Desperate. At first it was a shapeless, formless mass then, little by little, it became real. Body. Legs. Head. Face!
At last, eyeball to eyeball, the creature jumped as if jolted. It uttered a hideous though muffled shriek as it pressed its face, its flesh, through the gaps. It launched itself about and shook the cage toward the boy.
Hojo stepped aback and the cage tipped and crashed.
He could not see it through the shadow and darkness that enveloped it at the floor. Instead it was the sound of it - of the cage rattling, of the creature fighting - that suggested the restraints were broken. The last sound of struggle came as the collapsed into a heap of metal.
Hojo shrieked and fled toward the crawl-way. He flung the cover. He entered the shaft. The creature pounded against the wood. Hojo held onto it as the onslaught commenced. A few lapsed caused the cover to give way but he fought and kept that territory safe.
The beast turned its attention to the doorway. That exit, without a defense, did not withstand the attack. The boy did not wait until its demise - he crawled the length of the tunnel and spilled onto the yard.
Then, frantically, breathlessly, he returned to the kitchen locking its door and crawling on hands and knees back into bed.
Somehow his parents slept through that - he did not know whether to be relieved that he was OK or scared that he could have been killed without anybody's notice.
He slid into his room while the creature broke out of the basement. The boy peered through the window absorbed by the sight. The beast escaped! And then! And then! As he followed the creature he noticed that the stranger was standing in front of the doorway where he could have been watching everything...
Hojo dropped and slunked tight against the wall below the window. He tried to be invisible to anything spying within the alley. He could not see, only hear, the stranger kick the creature away while it tried to attack. The beast fled. The stranger stayed. Indeed, the figure only moved toward the window until shadow blocked the moonlight.
The last drop of terror came as a hand patted the window.
It was too much - Hojo screamed and his parents clamored down the stairs.
Nobody spoke about what happened that night. Not about the stranger. Not about the creature. Maybe a word was said about the pots of cleome they found everywhere within the basement. And that was that.
Still ... many a night were spent below the blankets wondering where that beast could have gone, where that shadow could be hidden. But it was the shadow that haunted Hojo's nightmares even though Dr. Kohaku Kagewaki was never seen or heard of again.
END