Tuesday 30th October
Most of the preparation the next day involved Akihiko and Miyagi producing plastic bags full of lighters and matches at lunch and pushing samples of each into everyone's hands.
"You two have some serious smoking problems," said Hiroki, stealing a few extra lighters and stuffing them into his pockets hurriedly. No one else was paying attention to their little table in the canteen anymore – they had initially been a bit of a novelty at the start, with the peculiar mix of people, but it had worn off swiftly – but Hiroki didn't think it was a good idea to get caught carrying such a hefty mix of potentially arsonist material anyway. He could just imagine the uproar.
"The man at the shop was exceptionally suspicious," said Akihiko, tapping his own blazer pocket where Hiroki knew the boy's cigarettes lived. It bulged suspiciously, indicating that Akihiko had probably stocked up on those too while he was in the shop. "But he likes me so he gave me a few extra on the proviso that I try not to burn anything down."
"This is going to end so badly," said Misaki, tucking his lighter into an inner pocket. His blazer was slightly too big for him, but his guilt was written large on his face instead. He and Nowaki had been unsure of the plan when Akihiko had introduced it, even though they saw the need to implement it they lacked what Hiroki thought of as the killer instinct. He knew he possessed it, and that the scrappy little Shinobu had it in gallons. Miyagi, underneath his idiotic exterior, had a sharp edge and Akihiko was simply a little nuts. The events of yesterday had stripped away a bit of the blond's natural defences and left him especially difficult to deal with, although Hiroki was trying to be a bit nicer about it because of the fight they'd gotten into.
"We all know what we do if we see it?" said Miyagi. He had his arm cast over the back of Shinobu's chair, in a mildly possessive, protective gesture. Shinobu still looked terrible as well – grey face and with bruises on his wrists and a matching circular set on his ankles that he had described with a choked voice – but he had bolstered his spine with the delivery of their weapons and now sat there with a mild scowl on his face, listening intently.
A wave of agreement went around the room and Miyagi nodded happily. "Good. I don't think we'll be in danger until late afternoon, early evening. Remember there'll be more people around tonight and we'll be staying later as well, so be careful of anyone else finding out."
Another wave of agreement.
"And stick with someone at all times! I don't want another yesterday happening!" He rattled his fingers on the table, and looked to Akihiko. "You're really sure about this, Akihiko?"
"Can you come up with a better idea?" Akihiko blinked slowly and tapped his cigarette pocket again, probably craving to light one up. He'd had several on the walk in in the morning, and had slipped outside mid-morning to have another by the smell of him.
"Well, we don't have any other choice," said Miyagi.
They had stared at Akihiko as he had purred out a smoke laden breath and started to rumble his theory.
"When have we see this thing? When it's been dark. It turns the lights out before it even appears. I spotted it waiting outside my window in the evening. Miyagi, when did you see it?"
"Evening time," Miyagi had said, a thoughtful look dawning on his face. Hiroki struggled to follow along, mildly peeved he hadn't managed to catch up before the older boy.
"I saw it at midday," said Nowaki, apologetically.
"Where was it standing?" Akihiko had brandished his cigarette like a conductor's baton, stabbing it out.
"Across the road." Nowaki had paused and then added. "In the shadows…"
"Precisely." Akihiko had subsided, grinning sharply.
"It stepped into the light though. And we've seen it in the light as well. On Thursday and Friday too."
"It can stay out briefly, but it doesn't like to." Akihiko had puffed another lungful of smoke out. "And have you noticed what it associates with?"
"No, just tell us!" Hiroki had exclaimed. Akihiko had shot him a brief look for ruining his narrative and continued as if there had been no outburst.
"It came out of taps twice. It stinks of rotting and stagnant water. It reduces itself to liquid when you damage it!" Akihiko had been more animated than Hiroki had seen him for a while. "It associates with water. And what beats water? What beats darkness?"
Everyone had been silent for a long time, before, to Hiroki's surprise it had been Misaki who spoke. The boy's eyes had been lit up with the realisation.
"Fire," he had said.
It hadn't been until Akihiko had opened his lighter and smiled into the flame, that Hiroki had actually considered his friend might have lost a bit of his mind in this terrifying process.
"Fire," Akihiko had said, flicking his thumb again so the lighter sparked and lit once more. "And if it reacts the way that its remains did…"
Hiroki had felt his own face split into a wicked smile as well. This could be their salvation.
The stalls still needed to be finished – they had forgotten about the remains in after the events of last night and had only managed to tidy away their mess before heading home – and they worked hard for the two hours of detention.
Akihiko wasn't one for physical labour - it was never something he needed to do, being a Usami – but he did his best to show willing. This mostly meant holding things as Misaki pieced them together, or hammering what he was told to hammer. By the end of the two hours, both his thumbs were bruised, he had splinters and cuts all over his hands and he was so intensely on edge he jumped every time someone came in to see if their stall had been finished. While he couldn't say he was much of a help, he was proud that he wasn't an entire hindrance.
In the end, they finished all of them, putting down hammers and nails and grinning at each other triumphantly. However there was little rest for the wicked – Miyagi and Hiroki had to organise the literature club stall, and Nowaki and Shinobu had to heft the baseball stall between them to get it out of the hall and to the outside concourse. Akihiko didn't envy any of them – most of the stall were being set up outside, and even in the now bright spotlights around the playground, the dark was suspiciously close.
Nothing had happened so far. That made Akihiko much more nervous.
He had no club to attend and help organise for; sometimes he went to the literary club with Hiroki, just for the sake of it, but there was no real attraction for him in any of the groups. Instead he followed Misaki to the cooking room that the cookery club was preparing in. Firmly, Misaki stopped him from lurking in and making a nuisance of himself, telling him to go annoy Hiroki instead. Akihiko paused in the corridor outside the room and seriously thought about it – he didn't want to be standing out here alone, in the muffled quiet and with a row of dark windows at the bottom of the hallway. But Misaki would be alone if Akihiko went, and that was such a terrible thought he nearly bit through his lip. While there were others in the room, none of them knew about the thing and that was nearly as bad as being alone.
Akihiko sat down against the opposite wall and flicked out his lighter. His was only half full – he'd upped his cigarette intake lately – and he wondered if he should have taken another. But the thing's remains had seemed intensely flammable, lighting with only a touch of hot ash, so he would probably be fine, right?
"Akihiko-kun!"
Dropping the lighter and scrabbling for it briefly, Akihiko looked up to find two girls advancing down the corridor towards him. He tucked the lighter away and stood up.
"Aikawa-senpai," he smiled at the girl and his grin only flickered slightly when he recognised the other. "Kajiwara-chan."
Kajiwara Minami was a petite young lady, and Akihiko, as gay as he was, had enough of his father's blood in him to appreciate a pretty girl. He understood why Takahashi Takahiro would be attracted to her, and while it didn't matter so much to him anymore, it still rankled a bit.
"Please, call me Minami," said the brunette and Akihiko did his best not to flinch when the lights flickered above them. "Oh, the lights in this school are dreadful!"
"You're not scared of the dark?" asked Aikawa-senpai, nudging her friend cheekily with an elbow.
"Don't be silly!" laughed Minami. "We went to that haunted house last week remember?" She looked up at Akihiko and smiled at him, encouraging him to join in with the fun. "Aikawa-senpai spent the entire time clinging to my elbow!"
"Her bark's worse than her bite," said Akihiko, wincing when the lights flashed again. His ears were straining for the sound of footsteps again, his eyes focused on the windows at the end of the corridor for the darkening of the night that indicated the monster was approaching.
"The pair of you, bullying your senior!" Aikawa-senpai was Miyagi's year, while Minami was Akihiko's: nevertheless the girls were best friends and a small force to be reckoned with. Akihiko had always liked Aikawa-senpai in some small way – she was good conversation and had a deep interest in literature as well. Minami, he supposed, was probably not any worse – she was perfectly lovely and didn't treat him like a toy or a doll or another pretty thing like a lot of the girls did. As he decided that he wouldn't hate her, a flash of something dragged his attention to the windows again.
Something dark had moved out there. Akihiko's hand returned to his blazer pocket.
"Waiting for Misaki-kun, eh?" Aikawa-senpai dug her sharp elbow into his ribs and he gasped, nerves twanging sharply. She mistook his jerk for shock that she had realised and cackled easily. Minami was smiling wickedly as Akihiko stared at them. "I think you two are really cute together."
"Ha ha," said Akihiko. He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. "I forgot you were rabid about gay men."
"Double the fun," said Aikawa-senpai. Beside her Minami burst into hysterical cackles and Akihiko forced himself to smile along. "So you really are..?"
"A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell." Akihiko mustered all his reserves of his charisma and flashed the girls a smile that made them both blush.
"Bathroom!" twittered Aikawa-senpai. "We'll talk to you later, Akihiko-kun!"
"I can't wait," growled Akihiko, sinking back down to the ground as they clipped away. Girls exasperated him, and not in that fun way that indicated he would eventually find them attractive. Boys were much easier.
His eyes were dragged back to the windows. Nothing was moving anymore, but his mind returned to the thoughts that had been plaguing him before Aikawa and Minami had showed up. Yes, he hadn't seen the monster at all today and it makes him nervous. He knew he hurt it yesterday – that scream couldn't have been mistaken for anything else but pain, and he knew it knew who hurt it, and it had already proved itself capable of differentiating between people, when it hunted them out and followed them home. Would it come for him? Would it stick to preying on Shinobu? Was there a risk it would go for Misaki? Perhaps it liked victims small? Then again, if, as Akihiko had suspected quite some time ago, if it had dragged Igarashi-sensei off to its lair and consumed him, then that didn't make sense.
Puzzling things out like this soothed the other thoughts in his head – they had been thrumming about his mind like a band saw since last night. Cigarettes had pacified the anxiety somewhat, but it had been a long time since he'd last had one.
Just as he was considering heading outside and finding a quiet spot in the light to smoke, a muffled scream rang out. Terror made him jerk, and he looked about, trying to locate the source. Was it Misaki's classroom? No, definitely not – people were already poking their heads out of the door anxiously. Akihiko met Misaki's gaze and then realised who it was who was screaming.
One of the girls.
He bolted, running down the corridor and slipped around the corner, maintaining his balance by bouncing off a wall. The sense of mind bending dread worsened as he approached the girls' bathroom, but he refused to let it stop him.
The door resisted the impact he threw against it, and he had to take a step back and throw himself at it again, bruising his shoulder in the process. Inside the room was pitch black and and gloomy, stinking and cold. He tripped over a sprawled form inside the door and he reached out, hoping he wasn't going to grab any embarrassing parts of female anatomy, and dragged a lighter body up.
Minami was bleeding heavily from a wound to her head, blood smeared down her face and the door. Akihiko met her terrified, muzzy gaze and whipped around, pushing her out through the door unceremoniously. He turned back into the gloom and stepped forward, crashing into a line of sinks and then bouncing off a row of stalls instead.
And then he blundered directly into something that tried to clutch him. It wasn't entirely normal, sticky and clutching and covered in tendrils and Akihiko punched it as hard as he could.
Teeth closed on his hand, and he lashed out with the other hand, feeling his fist smack against hard fangs. Something snapped – whether it was in his hand or one of the thing's teeth he wasn't sure – but he punched again, and again, and again, and then he was released and able to stagger back. His feet slipped from under him, and he sprawled onto the floor, smacking his head hard on a sink as he fell. His wounded hand – already throbbing with a heat that indicated the monster hadn't been brushing its teeth lately – fumbled clumsily in his blazer and his thumb struggled to flick the wheel of his lighter.
The lighter sparked, but refused to light. Akihiko's thumb was too mangled to make a better attempt at it, but what other option was there? The thing was reaching for him – one arm longer than the other, where it was clearly regenerating the limb Akihiko had chopped off yesterday – and there was no escape.
Someone threw the door open and threw an entire packet of matches into the room. The little ball of fire bounced towards the thing, and the thing struck out wildly one last time, catching Akihiko a blow across the cheek and laying him out flat. There was a wet gurgling sound and the air above him began to clear of the deep darkness that was the creature's aura. Akihiko stayed very still for a few moments, just to reassure himself that nothing was going to bite him, and then sat up.
The floor was covered in blood, and Aikawa-senpai was sprawled in the corner, eyes closed and face pale. For a heart-stopping second , Akihiko thought she might be dead, but he crawled over to her and groped about her neck for a pulse. The throb there was strong, if fast, and her breath puffed lightly on his cheek, so he turned his attention elsewhere.
"Help?" he suggested, hoping the person who had lobbed the matches in was still outside. Seconds later, Misaki burst in and stopped dead. "This is going to be fun to explain," said Akihiko, tucking his lighter back into a pocket. Misaki's expression only served to agree with him.
Misaki sat in silence in front of the vice-principal and tried not to look too guilty. Beside him, a blood-stained Akihiko was lying like a champion, well-bandaged right hand tucked in a makeshift sling against his chest.
The vice-principal was a beefy man, built along the line of Igarashi-sensei but with a few more teaching skills, and he didn't look particularly moved by the state of the students in front of him. He focused intensely on Akihiko as he spoke, but this didn't seem to put the boy off in the slightest.
Misaki had summoned all his courage, burst into the girls' bathroom – leaving Minami to clutch her head outside and cry – and found the fight was long over. Akihiko's right hand had been a mangled mess, and Aikawa-senpai had been very much unconscious; the box of matches still burnt like a little beacon amid the carnage. Misaki had doused the box with handfuls of water from the sink and then chucked the smouldering remains into a rather ruined looking toilet stall. The toilet itself was sfine, but a lower portion of the wall was in pieces, displaying an array of now leaking pipes beyond.
He snapped back to the present time as Akihiko finished his tale.
The vice-principal shifted slowly in his chair, and then said, "You mean to say that a rat did this?"
"Yes, sir."
"A rat?"
"Or some sort of animal. I just saw the teeth and then it ran away."
"Through the wall?"
"It must have chewed its way through," said Akihiko, as honestly as Misaki had ever heard a person speak. As of now, it would be their testimony standing alone – Aikawa-senpai and Minami had already been taken to the hospital. It was bad luck that there were still plenty of teachers in the school this late to supervise the last minute prep for the Halloween festival – if this had happened any other day, they might have got away without such close questioning.
"Right." The man sat back in his chair and transferred his gaze to Misaki. "Takahashi, do you agree with this?"
"I didn't see much," he said, nervously, hoping that the tremor in his voice would be explained by the carnage that had been wrought instead of his lies. "I just saw Minami lying in the corridor and then heard Akihiko calling for help."
The vice-principal rubbed his forehead with a big hand and said, "So you, Usami, hear screams and rush off to be the hero. You burst into the girls' toilets, and find Kajiwara-chan sprawled on the floor bleeding from the head, and Aikawa-chan unconscious beside the sinks. They are being menaced by a large rat…" He sighed and shook his head. "Which then proceeded to maul you in a most spectacular fashion before Takahashi burst in and scared it off."
"Essentially yes," said Akihiko.
"And I wouldn't believe any of that wild story, Usami, except for the wounds on your hand." He glanced up and grimaced as he added, "And your face."
Misaki got the sneaking suspicion the man was busy calculating how much he was going to have to pay out to keep the Usami family sweet.
"Can't explain those otherwise," said Akihiko, smiling in a brittle fashion.
"Huh." The vice-principal shook his head again, and stood up to usher them out. "Fine. Until we talk to Kajiwara-chan and Aikawa-chan, I shall assume your story to be true. We've called your home, Usami; there's a limo coming around to take you to the doctor's. Takahashi, the school will pay for a taxi to take you home. And both of you?"
They drew to an anxious halt, Misaki's hand millimetres from getting to the door handle.
"Tell no one about this. This Halloween event is important to the student body, and I won't have it ruined over a… rat."
"Our mouths are sealed," said Akihiko, firmly. He elbowed Misaki in the ribs and the younger boy echoed the sentiment and let them out of the office.
They padded down to the front doors in silence, so Akihiko could take a position outside and beg Misaki to light a cigarette for him with sad, blue eyes. Ever a sucker, Misaki obliged, grimacing at the stink of burning tobacco that arose from the lit smoke.
"A rat?" he asked after a minute of watching the evening breeze play with Akihiko's hair. A chunk of the silvery blonde strands were gummed down with blood and one of his eyes was partially swollen closed.
"Best thing I could think of. I'm not taking the fall, especially not when I've got an array of wounds like this." He twitched his bandaged hand and Misaki had to look away – the monster had mangled the limb nastily enough to bare tendons and ligaments and already the bandage was soaked through with blood. Misaki had found it telling that the less well injured girls had been given an ambulance ride to care, but Akihiko, bleeding heavily from hand and face, had to wait for his family to offer him help. "I don't think Aikawa or Minami are going to remember any of that, to be honest."
"I wish I could forget it," said Misaki. He could see the lights of a car drawing closer, and squinted in order to see a triangle of light on top of the roof. "My taxi's here. I'll stay until your limo gets here?"
"Go home," said Akihiko softly, bending his head slightly to give Misaki a gentle kiss on the forehead. "Takahiro will be worried, and you look like death warmed over."
"Says you, the man who's bleeding everywhere!" Misaki looked about, trying to judge the depth of the darkness around them. It wasn't the terrifying abyssal darkness that the monster summoned, but the normal gloom of night. He could hear happy voices echoing from the back of the school still, including Kamijou's fearsome shouting, and the atmosphere was clear and calm. "I don't want to go," said Misaki, more quietly. "I didn't do much to help while you were in there…"
"You threw the matches in," said Akihiko, puffing on his cigarette again. "If you hadn't had done that, I would possibly be missing a lot more of my face." He nodded towards the driveway, as a silken engine purred closer and stubbed out his cigarette against the wall. "And there's my ride."
"You'll be all right?" Misaki shadowed the boy across the carpark, to the flanks of the obnoxiously yellow taxi and the gleaming black of the limo. "I could come to the hospital with you? Oh!" Like an afterthought he remembered the rest of the group, probably still preparing at the back of the school. "I should tell the others!"
"Misaki," purred Akihiko, the half of his face that was mobile twisting into a wry smile. "Don't worry. Hiroki will suppose I left to mess around with you."
"Usagi-san," whined Misaki, suddenly too tired to play these games anymore. He felt like a stroppy little child – he wasn't the one still losing blood, and he wasn't the one that had battled the monster off, but he was the one doing all of the complaining and Akihiko was still capable of teasing him. It wasn't fair…
Just before the Usami butler got out of the car, Akihiko leant in to whisper in Misaki's ear. "Thank you for worrying about me." Misaki's heart nearly leapt out of his chest and he stumbled back into the side of the taxi. "See you tomorrow."
"Bye," warbled Misaki, watching as the butler fussed over getting Usagi-san into the car. The limo pulled away much faster than it had arrived and Misaki fumbled his way into the taxi's back seats. He gave the driver his address, and bowed his head into his hands. The thing had nearly killed three people today.
And it wasn't even Halloween yet.
Oh Em Gee…. This took really longer than I wanted to write… And I've noticed I do a lot of Akihiko's POV, more than strictly is his fair share. Oh well, don't care – he's my fave. (It's past my bedtime, can you tell yet?)
