Obake Memories
By LeahNardo
Chapter One: Ghosts
I have a lot of memories of my old Master's studio. It was on the second floor of an old, crumbly building; the kind that looked like it would fall down around your ears if you talked too loud. We weren't prone to loud speech around Sensei anyway. It was the kind of thing that would earn you extra push-ups and clean up duty. I never needed any help in that particular area. I still bear the nerve damage of having spent many hours with my knuckles pressed into Sensei's shiny hardwood floors, buffed by countless bare feet and a lot of my elbow grease.
It was weird, seeing it again after all these years. I wondered if it was my eyes, now tainted by a more upscale part of town, that made it look so old and run down. Or, if it had always been this way, beat up and comfortable like an old sofa. It looked like it had still evaded the graffiti that plagued the rest of the block. Perhaps everyone around here gave it the same deference I did. After all, one doesn't often come by a haunted building in New York City.
What pulls us back to the places we once lived? I have very few happy memories of this area; it was a low point in my life. My father was jobless at the time, and my mom was working almost every hour of the day. There wasn't a lot for a skinny thirteen-year-old to do, except dodging gangs and watching younger brothers and sisters. I suppose I could have joined one of those gangs, though heaven only knows what awful end that would have led me to. I was kind of an outcast, living in the world of my imagination. That's what led me to Sensei, originally; my imagination. I remember it started when my younger brother came tearing through the front door, bellowing at the top of his lungs.
"You are not gonna believe what's only two blocks away from here!"
I was reading a book while I was supposed to be watching a pot of spaghetti noodles boil, none too thrilled at being torn from my imaginary realm. Even more irritating was the fact that the noodles that I was supposed to be watching were now bubbling gleefully over the top of the pot. I managed an "Oh, cripes!" and set to haul the noodles off the burner.
My brother, undaunted, tried again. "Guess what we're living right close to?"
I wasn't biting. "An Indian burial ground." I went hunting for a sponge to try and sop up the water pooled on the stove.
"Close."
That stopped me. "Whatever. Manhattan didn't have any Indians, you dork." Satisfied at my superiority of knowledge (as most teenagers are) I continued my search.
He pursed his lips, I imagine trying to deem if this insult was worth holding his tongue. Apparently it wasn't. "Well," he said at length, "it does have ghosts."
"What, Manhattan?" I asked absently.
"No, the building down on—"
"Success!" I held up the sponge.
My younger sister walked in, and looked down at me with the air of an eight-year-old queen. "How come dinner isn't ready yet?" She looked at the stove, and gasped. "Oh, you messed up the noodles, mom's gonna—"
"THERE IS A HAUNTED BUILDING ON 49TH STREET!"
We both stopped and stared at him, his little ten-year-old chest heaving in exertion, fists clenched. My sister, the doubting Thomas, put a fist on her little hip and demanded, "How do you know?" Dinner was quite forgotten.
Eyeing us both carefully to make sure he was now the center of attention, he leaned back on the table. He lowered his voice in a conspiritory fashion and hissed, "I SAW it."
I quirked an eyebrow. "It?"
He lowered his voice to a near-whisper and narrowed his eyes. "The ghost."
My little sister's eyes bugged out, and placing her other fist on her hip, leaned forward and struck a lecturing pose. "No such thing."
He looked indignant. "Says who?"
"Mom." She stuck her chin out. "You'll be in trouble if you try and scare me."
The situation degenerated from there. From "Mom doesn't know everything." to "I'm telling! And you're gonna be so grounded!" to my dad walking in and asking why dinner wasn't ready, which diverted everyone's attention back to food and the mess on the stove, and made everything that my brother had said go completely out of my head.
It wasn't until the next day, walking down 49th street toward the grocery store, that his words came back to me. I scanned the street for any potential ghost haunts. Nothing struck me as being particularly haunted-looking. The extent of my experience with ghosts was limited to cheap movies from the sixties, most of which also included the murders of the teens unlucky enough to have their cars break down near said haunted houses. Thrillsville. Still, the idea was enough to set my overactive imagination in motion with other horrible possibilities.
Suppose it wasn't a ghost, really, but some serial killer hiding from the law in one of the abandoned buildings? There were several near by, and I moved to the outside edge of the sidewalk, peering carefully into doorways as I walked. My worry gears went into motion. Suppose my brother wanted to go back and see if his "ghost" was still there? It would be just like him, I thought in irritation. Still, I knew very little that I could say would deter him. The little putz never listened to me. My thoughts had brought me all the way to the grocery store, and I placed them at the back of my mind as I pulled out my list.
I resumed thinking as I returned home by the same path, overfull grocery bag leaning precariously on my small chest. I was looking between a loaf of bread and a head of lettuce, and trying not to trip over cracks in the sidewalk (This made thinking somewhat difficult, as you can imagine). Maybe if someone older volunteered to go with him--not me, of course. I was about as weighty and intimidating as a matchstick, and just as wimpy. I would not be an effective defender (Not to mention I was chicken). My dad would not be taken by such flights of fancy, and my mom was too busy.
That left my reserves at zero. I didn't know anybody around here; we had only moved in a few weeks before, and the neighbor kids had not exactly made themselves amicable. I had scabs on my knees and elbows from the local gang for failing to carry any change on me. Suffice to say, I had no immediate friends to call on.
I ran through several other, less appealing ideas, and rejected them in turn. As I did, the coin purse I had the remainder of my parents' money in worked its way to the lip of the bag. Just then my beat-up sneaker snagged on a sidewalk crack, and the purse flew out. I cursed my bad luck, and tried to crouch down to pick it up (No small feat with a weighted grocery bag). I overbalanced, and the groceries went everywhere. Great, bruised lettuce. My mother would be ecstatic.
I picked up the groceries hurriedly, as I was kneeling right in front of the entrance to an alley; not an entirely safe location. I had a package of chicken in one hand, and a sack of nickel candies in the other (Paid for with my own stash of pennies) when I spied my coin purse being sniffed by a rough-looking Tom cat.
"Don't even think about it!" I snapped, and of course he didn't listen. He took off, the purse dangling from his jaws, post haste down the alley. I stuffed everything in the bag hurriedly, and ran after him without thinking, groceries in tow. "Come back with my money, you stupid hairball!"
My mother would kill me. I had almost twenty dollars left in there, budgeted for groceries for the rest of the week. There was no place else that food was coming from, and I would be trotted down to hell before I'd let a mange bunny on legs run off with it.
He disappeared into a doorway not twenty feet into the alley, and I stopped. I may be stupid enough to run down an alley in broad daylight, but into a condemned building? With aforesaid ghosts/serial killers? I gazed squinty-eyed into the dim, dusty depths of the doorway. It was too dark to make anything out.
I couldn't go home without that money.
I couldn't.
"Kitty?" I called into the yawning void.
Silence.
"Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!" I chirruped syrupily. "I really need my wallet back, you wonderful, sweet, pretty kitty, kitty!"
KLUNK! Something crashed inside. I jumped and started back violently, but nothing came sailing out the door at me. After a few heart-pounding moments, I stepped up to the doorway again. "Kitty? Is that you?" I called shakily. Just a box the cat knocked over. You know the cat's in there…it's just a cat…
You ever get the feeling you're being watched? I did, right then. By more than one pair of eyes, too. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! The sound of my own heartbeat suddenly seemed terrifyingly loud in the silent alley. I tried to breathe as quietly as possible for a few moments, listening. My neck prickled. I was being watched. Not wanting to peeve off any resident ghosts/serial killers, I called, somewhat louder than before, "I need my wallet back…uh, please? My mom's gonna be really angry with me if I don't get it!"
WHAP! My wallet hit me in the chest. I screeched and jumped back against the brick wall, dropping my grocery bag, which luckily didn't scatter everything. Before another thought could enter my head, I grabbed the bag and my coin purse and took off, not stopping until I reached the end of the block.
When I had crossed the street, I collapsed on the steps to somebody's house and just sat shaking for a few moments, trying to collect my frazzled brain. People walking by didn't look at me strangely. There are a lot of weirdoes in New York, I was just another one. I pulled out my wallet with trembling hands and opened it up. All of my money was still there.
Instead of reassuring me, it sent me into wild speculation. What kind of person gives a dumb kid their wallet back with all the money intact? A cat certainly hadn't thrown it. Had I seen anything move in the doorway before my wallet was thrown out at me? In my now terrified thoughts, I started to imagine some crawling, creepy—I shivered. Stupid, stupid, stupid! What if somebody had tried to grab me? What would I have done?
It was only after I regained my composure enough to walk home that I noticed my bag of candy was missing.
I didn't say anything to my parents when I got home. They'd be furious at me for losing the wallet, and then going after it like that. "You might have been killed!" My mom would say. However, I did corner my brother the first chance I got.
I backed him against the kitchen counter. "Where was that building you said was haunted?"
He looked at me funny. "I told you, over on 49th street."
"Yeah, but which building?"
A sudden grin lit his face. "You wanna go see?"
I nodded. I needed it proven that I wasn't nuts.
We walked outside after I bellowed to my parents that we would be back in a while, and we trotted up the street. I was all too aware that this was the one thing I really didn't want to be doing. I was now pledged, however, and backing out would mean I was a wuss, beneath the likes of my little brother. Such thoughts of status are unfortunately all too important for teenagers. The thought that should I be grabbed and, no doubt, killed, I would be relieved of my treasured status, did not occur to me at the time. Kids are kind of stupid that way; at least, I was.
I was thinking self-assuring thoughts as I tried to look brave. This is hard to do when your knees are knocking. I'm not a coordinated person to begin with, so the overall effect was terrible. I looked like an ostrich trying to do the Tango, and not having much luck. My brother took notice of this, and, being the tender and thoughtful soul that brothers often are, he needled my like a pitbull after a pork chop.
"Scared?" He leered.
"Of course not. Don't be stupid." I stumbled over a curb, and he laughed.
We were not looking down the street. This was unfortunate. If I had, I would have turned and, not walked, but sprinted in the opposite direction, to Hades with my brother and his thoughts of me. For, down the street stood a group of people I did not particularly want to see. This was the self-same group that had taken great pleasure in giving me all the scabs and bruises currently adorning my skinny body. I did not see them, in fact, until I had very nearly run them over. (I have many times before and since run over the wrong people. It's a great talent of mine.)
"Hey." A boy in a leather jacket grinned. He looked to be about sixteen.
My heart stopped for a moment as he strolled up to me. It was a short moment, the one right before I got knocked to the pavement.
"Hey!" My brother yelled, just before he got pushed out of the way.
The guy in the jacket leaned over me. "Got anything for us today, Princess?"
I hate being called Princess. I still do, to this day. It's the kind of thing your uncle calls you right before he pinches your cheek. It was then that I noticed we were right in front of the alley I had been in earlier. Fast behind that thought was the one of Oh I forgot to take my wallet out of my pocket my wallet and the money for groceries and, oh, No! They're going to steal it!
This brought out a kind of fighting spirit in me. The prospect of not eating for a while will do that to you. I had already had to rescue the flipping thing once that day. It seemed terribly unfair that I should have to do it twice. Still…
WHAM! My foot connected awkwardly to his kneecap, and he fell back. I was on my feet in a second. My brother stood frozen outside their circle.
"Run, you idiot!" I shouted, and managed to knock my way through the circle and into the alley. This was not the brightest thing I could have done, seeing as it left me very few options of where to run. However, in an emergency, I was not known to think stragistically. One must learn not to be picky when one is dumb.
I was, however, still in possession of enough of my senses to not run into the doorway I had previously had a close encounter with. I glanced behind me long enough to see that my brother was close on my heels, and then tore out of there as fast as my ostrich legs would carry me.
Why do they put fences in alleyways? It is absolutely amazing the amount of bounce a chain-link fence has, when run into at full throttle (I don't recommend trying this at home). I ricocheted off it like a super ball off linoleum and landed, quite painfully, I might add, on my back while connecting my head to the pavement. I also took out my brother in the process. I had, in one fell swoop, doomed us both. One neat, moronic little package.
I was less than thrilled. Actually, I was bemoaning myself to the fire escape above me, where, I swear to Pete, there was a little furry man standing.
Stop. Rewind. There was a furry little man on the fire escape.
I must have hit my head harder than I thought.
I blinked once, then again, but he stayed there. On the other side of the alley, on a balcony of the now-twice-cursed building, there stood, get this, a very large turtle. With a sword. You know, one of those pointy things they have in old Japanese movies like Shogun? Ha ha! The joke's on me! Not ghosts, not serial killers (At least I desperately hoped not) but little animal people adorned with sharp objects. The whole thing took on a kind of surreal quality from there on out (I'm sure the thwack to the head helped).
I found myself looking up at Mr. Leather Jacket again. He didn't seem quite so scary by comparison. In fact, he seemed downright laughable. So I laughed. Heartily. This, as you can imagine, did not go over well.
Just as he pulled back his big meaty fist to add to my bruise collection, something else connected to him. Or, I should say, to the back of his head. I didn't even see what happened to the others. It happened that fast. And, just as quick, I found myself lying in an alleyway, surrounded by people lying in weird, prone positions. It was totally silent. I noted that the furry man was no longer standing on the fire escape, and wherever he was, his turtle friend had joined him.
It seemed as good a time as any to have hysterics, so I did.
