Chapter 4

The door swung open.

Rukawa trained his eyes on the doorway, and waited with bated breath for ghoul-Sendoh to step into the room and strangle him. Or drink his blood. Or just give him a glimpse of his distorted grinning face, which was enough to drive any well-balanced person to madness.

The corridor was pitch black. The moonlight that entered through the narrow window fell just short of the doorway, so that there was no way to see if anyone was standing in it.

Five minutes passed. No one entered.

Rukawa was beginning to wonder whether the door hadn't just swung open of its own accord on account of a faulty lock, when he heard something that made his heart stop. It was the groan of muscle stretching unnaturally—a hideous rubbery sound like that of styrofoam twisting itself it to its limit. It sent goosebumps down Rukawa's spine.

He sat up in bed. He was absolutely certain now that there was something outside the door. Sendoh?

He heard the groan of muscle again. Then a black silhouette crawled into the room on all fours before Rukawa could mentally prepare himself for a paranormal visitation. The silhouette was partially bathed in moonlight. It was black and devoid of features. At first Rukawa thought it was a large dog, and looked around the room for something with which to scare it off. The only thing within his reach was his duffel bag. A well-aimed throw would have the desired effect.

The dog wasn't growling, which was a good sign. It meant that it wasn't aggressive—wasn't out for the kill. Rukawa stepped out of bed quietly to shepherd the dog back outside. He was a cat person, but there was no reason the same tricks couldn't be used to good effect on a dog to win it over.

He was in the process of crooning softly to the thing on the floor when he noticed something that made his blood freeze. He saw that the thing on the floor before him wasn't a dog at all, but a human torso mounted by a human head, charred beyond recognition. It had no eyes and no nose—just charred skin over a blackened skull. All of its limbs were missing. Where there should have been limbs there were just stumps.

The stumps twitched. The body writhed and inched its way forward on wormlike spasms of its spine, producing in the process the sickening groan of muscle stiff with rigor mortis. The smell of burnt flesh filled the air with every movement of its muscles.

Rukawa's instincts took over. He dashed out of the room, past the writhing thing on the floor, and shot down the corridor like a criminal in the night. He took the steps three at a time, slippers clapping noisily against the floor.

He collided with someone at the bottom of the stairs.

"Hey, Rukawa."

It was Sendoh.

"Get away from me."

He shoved Sendoh against the wall and dashed out of the residence hall. He didn't stop running till he reached the koi pond.

Sendoh had given chase after him. He stood panting on the other side of the pond.

"What do you want from me?" said Rukawa, feeling the bolder with the pond between him and Sendoh.

Sendoh waited to catch his breath before venturing to respond.

"Why were you running from me?" he said.

Rukawa regarded Sendoh keenly for a minute. He decided that Sendoh wasn't possessed at the moment.

"It wasn't you," he said. "There was something in my room. A body…" Rukawa trailed off, feeling rather stupid saying the words when the thing wasn't before his eyes.

It took Sendoh a moment to process the information.

"Was it a burnt and dismembered body?" he said carefully.

Rukawa raised an eyebrow.

"You've seen it, too?"

"No, but I guessed."

Rukawa said nothing in response, notwithstanding his surprise. Sendoh owed him an explanation, and he knew it.

"The woman I told you about the other day," said Sendoh. "She's not a ghost. She's a real flesh-and-blood person." Sendoh gave an embarrassed cough for ever having entertained the thought that she was not of this world. "I wanted answers, so I went into the main building. I used Jin's keys to get in. He'd dropped them earlier in the evening, when Maki was taking us on his tour around the campus. I meant to give them back, but I forgot, what with all the emotionally charged conversation about Kainan going under and all that. At any rate, once inside, I found the woman exactly where I'd seen her."

Sendoh paused to let the first part of his story sink in. He began walking around the pond toward Rukawa, hoping the latter had calmed down. Rukawa took an instinctive step in the opposite direction.

"Her name is Hikari Mizuoka," Sendoh went on. "She's had quite a tragic life. She was a student here at Kainan in the early eighties, and had shown great promise academically. She ended up going to one of the best universities in the country. Everyone thought she'd make it big someday. She got married right after graduating to a rich businessman who traded in exotic seafood. He spent half the year in Europe and America and half the year in Japan. He was a real scumbag. Thought Hikari was his inferior because of her humble origins, and treated her no better than a servant—often worse.

"One evening he had a couple of his business partners over for dinner. They sat around drinking late into the night. One of them made inappropriate advances toward Hikari. She tried pleading with her husband to make him stop, but her husband, far from admonishing his partner, joined in."

Sendoh inhaled sharply and decided that he could not go on except elliptically.

"It was awful. Hikari described the event in more detail than I'm comfortable repeating. Later that night, when the three men had passed out in their drunkenness, Hikari slit their throats with a kitchen knife. She wasn't charged with anything, but her husband's family got possession of the house and everything she had ever owned, leaving her with nothing. She's been out on the streets ever since. She breaks into Kainan and sleeps in the classrooms every now and then. From the looks of it, she's been doing this for a while, which would explain all the ghost stories Maki and his fellow students have come to associate with the school. Rukawa, she's certifiably insane. It's understandable, after all she's been through."

Rukawa said nothing. The only sound was the soft gurgling of the artificial spring on the edge of the pond. He half expected the burnt corpse to float up to the surface at any moment, but the koi were all he could see, floating in suspended animation with their eyes open—asleep.

At length he spoke.

"Where's the woman now?"

"Hikari's staying at a motel down the street," said Sendoh. "At my expense. Thought it was the least I could do for her after all she'd been through. I'm hoping to prevail on Kainan to make a more permanent arrangement for her. She was, after all, one of their star students."

"And…" Rukawa hesitated. "What about the burnt corpse?"

Sendoh frowned.

"Hikari told me of a student who had been brutally murdered and set on fire when she was at Kainan. She refused tell me more, so I've been trying to find out more about the incident from old newspaper articles. The security guard at the library a couple of blocks from here happens to be a huge fan of Ryonan." Sendoh laughed modestly. "He's been letting me unofficially access their newspaper archives after business hours."

"That's where you've been disappearing to every night?"

"Correct." Sendoh nodded. "That's where I was this evening as well. I finally found the article about the murdered student."

Rukawa swallowed.

"What did it say?"

"There was more than one article about the crime, obviously, given how sensational it was; but only one of them made mention of his name and the fact that he was a student at Kainan at the time."

"Kainan must have paid them off to keep it quiet."

"That's what I think, too. The student's name was Toshiro. The newspaper clipping was so old that it was impossible to make out his last name. He went to Kainan around the same time as Hikari. He fell into bad company—really bad company—selling drugs in the street and all that. I'm not surprised Kainan wanted to distance itself from someone like that. One day Toshiro got into an quarrel with another member of his gang. They had both been vying for the position of leader after the previous leader had been killed in a shootout elsewhere in the city. The gang split into two factions behind Toshiro and the other presumptive leader. Toshiro was the only member of the gang who hadn't dropped out of school, so it was a simple matter for his rival faction to plant an ambuscade for him. In their confession to the police, they said they'd ambushed him while he was returning home from school late one evening, and killed him. Then they dismembered him and dumped his body into a trashcan, which they proceeded to set on fire. Realizing that they had failed to do a clean job of getting rid of the evidence, they dumped his body into the harbor. It was found in the sewers almost two months later. It was a really grisly affair."

Relating the story had a cathartic effect on Sendoh, who was disturbed as anyone would be to discover that people were capable of such evil.

Rukawa thought back to the corpse in his room and shuddered. He didn't know whether the backstory made the ghost less scary or more. The backstory sounded vaguely familiar. Then he remembered something Maki had told them during the tour the previous evening.

"Isn't this the same story Maki told us yesterday? About the student who mysteriously disappeared?"

"I'm almost certain," said Sendoh. "Which means that Kainan did a really good job of covering it up, since everyone seems to think it was the work of a ghost."

"It's a good thing Mitsui-senpai left his gang when he did," said Rukawa by way of taking his mind off the corpse. Toshiro's story did indeed bear striking parallels to Mitsui's, though Mitsui's gang had only ever been involved in petty street fights and acts of intimidation. The difference, no doubt, between an ineffectual Shohoku gang and an elite Kainan gang, Rukawa thought with a morbid mirth.

"How on earth did you learn about the incident?" said Sendoh. "I mean, if you dreamt about a burnt and dismembered corpse, then you must have heard about the story somewhere. It can't just be a coincidence."

"It wasn't a dream," said Rukawa with a hint of irritation. "I actually did see a corpse in the room. And a ghoul. You were the ghoul."

"Come now, Rukawa." Sendoh scoffed. "That's mean, even for you."

"I'm not kidding. I really did see a ghoul."

"I guess I'm going to have to ask Hikari about it later," said Sendoh, looking into the distance in the direction of what Rukawa assumed was the motel. "I'm still not prepared to buy your story. There are a lot of things we don't know about the world, but I'm pretty sure dead people can't walk. You've probably been getting less sleep than you're used to over here. Let's head back now, shall we? Try to get some sleep. Maybe some basketball tomorrow morning will help clear your head. I know I need it."

Rukawa followed Sendoh back to the residence hall. He was mired in self-doubt. Was everything he had seen these past couple of days—from the flashes of evil in Sendoh's face to the corpse in his room—just a hallucination brought on by sleep-deprivation?

No, Rukawa had been sleep-deprived before. It usually made him slow and irritable throughout the day, but he had never had hallucinations before. Moreover, he hadn't felt slow and irritable at Kainan. Bored, yes, but not unusually irritable. Which meant that whatever he was laboring under now was not sleep-deprivation.

And hadn't Mitsui sensed something strange about Sendoh, too? Or was that just cigarette withdrawal?

Was Sendoh really possessed or not? And if he was, was the ghoul just doing a really good impression of Sendoh right now? Trying to throw Rukawa off guard by pretending to be skeptical about its own existence while it waited patiently to make him its dinner?

Was the story about the woman—Hikari—true?

These were the questions that tormented Rukawa as he curled up in bed for the second time that night. The smell of burnt meat seemed to hang in the air, but Rukawa was able to convince himself that that, if nothing else he had seen and heard in these past couple of days, was in his head.

There was only one person who could help him. He couldn't believe that he had allowed the thought to enter his mind. But he knew that only Kogure knew enough about the supernatural to help him understand what was really going on. Only he would listen to Rukawa's concerns without laughing at him or sprinting to the telephone to report him to the nearest psych ward. Rukawa just had to catch him in one of his less manic moods.

His second-last thought before he drifted off to sleep was that he would tell Kogure everything in the morning.

His last thought was that it was he who was possessed—not Sendoh.

tbc.


A/N: I'm not wont to write so many cheap horror tropes one after another. I thought the last chapter had sort of a Stephen King feel to it. This chapter has transcended that and become something altogether uncharacterizable. But I suppose I might as well go the whole distance now. The reader would be well advised to brace himself for more cheap scares.