A/n: Something I cooked up for Halloween, but it's a bit late. This story is random. If you make it to the end without thinking 'what a random and odd fic,' I applaud you. Should you actually make it to the end, please review. I like reviews, I have so few. Anyway...
*
Seiryuu's Haunted House of Horrors
By Evil Hunter
*
The rain is pounding hard against your back, your eyes are blurred by leaves and mist rising up around you as the freezing autumn winds tear through your skimpy Halloween costume.
You wander aimlessly through the empty-- deserted streets, no longer bothering to keep your eyes up to look out for passing cars; there are none, not at this hour, not in this weather, not on this day. It past eleven o'clock an hour ago, but you care not; you've been fighting with your friends and family again, and if they worry about you on this miserable hallow eve, so be it. You'll walk around until you feel like going home. Nothing will stop you.
Still, it is very cold out, and you're only dressed in that Japanese school girl's uniform your friends talked you into wearing.
You look up and around, hoping to find a place to stay and warm up slightly, but you see none. Sighing, you trudge though the streets, ignoring the numbing in your fingers and the freezing on your lips and concentrating on the tapping sounds of the road and rain, keeping you head bent low to keep debris out of your eyes.
You haven't noticed that your mind has begun wandering to thoughts of warm food on large platters when you bump into someone and fall down hard onto the sidewalk. A man in a wet brown jacket stops briefly to look at you before racing off the way you came, and soon his form is lost in the rainy haze.
You pick yourself up slowly. The knock down has given you enough of a jolt to realize your fingers hurt when moved and you see, from the dull light of a nearby street-lamp that they are ghost white.
This does not bode well with you.
You have only started to jump around in a wild frenzy when you trip over something on the sidewalk and fall soundly on your face. Feeling irritated and more than a little upset, you turn viciously on the object, only to be dumbfounded at finding a small, red book on the pavement, dry but dampening quickly.
You jump to your feet, ignoring their feeble protests to remains down and pick up the book, holding it close to your chest in an attempt to keep it dry. After looking around for a roof or some form of shelter, you speed towards a tree and sink down into its temporary cover. You take in a long breath and open the book, hoping that whatever is inside will ease you from the frozen hell that has been this day and kill some time. You begin to read.
*
Far away now, a man stops dead in his tracks and feels around in his jacket. His eyes widen behind a set of black-lens glasses and he begins to mutter a string of dirty language. Looking around his feet and even getting down on his knees, he finally jumps to his feet and begins to back-track his steps.
"I lost the book," he mutters angrily. "When did I lose the book...?"
He is too far away to notice a bright blue glowing as someone is pulled into the Universe of the Four Gods.
*
You blink your eyes open very slowly, very carefully. The last thing you remember is a bright glowing and a strange pulling sensation, and a fall, and a very big headache. No, correction, that headache is now, and it hurts to pull yourself up from your back and sit upright.
When you trust your eyes not to make the world spin, you pry them open and look around. You are in a small clearing in what looks to be a forest, and it is just turning dusk. Despite feeling a bit weak in your knees you stand shakily up, and pointedly ignore the thumping in your head. You can do without that.
The day is losing light fast and you, in all your glorious knowledge of the wilderness, decide to trek through the wood and find an adequate place to stay the night and sleep. You head in the direction opposite the setting sun and walk out of the clearing, into the thickened bush. You are shaking violently; your cloths are still very wet from the rain and what little sun that was left is blocked by the dense grove.
You have been walking from that clearing a long time and your feet have just started to ache when you see another clearing through the woods, and in it, an old, dusty and apparently abandoned Chinese-style mansion. And just in time, too; the rain seems to have followed you from one land to the next and it is pouring down on your previously dampened head. You race toward the house.
You are soaked to the bone twice before you reach the door of the house. You are about to open the door upon your arrival but you knock on the wooden door, so as not to be rude or thought a burglar.
Knock. Once. Knock. Twice. Knock. Thrice.
You nearly cry and jump back in surprise at the sound of a high-pitched scream after the third attempt at knocking. Your pacing heart and running blood ease slightly (very slightly) when you see the door's creaking hinges were the cause of the 'scream' and a remarkably short man is standing at the opening, waiting. His face has been bent down and you cannot see his eyes, but as he brings his head up and looks to you, you wish that he had kept his hollow and yellow eyes down and out of your mind forever. You find that you cannot turn away from his tawny stare; it seems to be pulling you in, much like that feeling not an hour ago, and you barely register that you have moved at all when you hear a scream again and the door is closed. You are inside the house now, and the man with the intense hollow eyes is gone.
You literally jump twice you height when you feel a tap on your shoulder, and turn around quickly to find yourself staring eye-to-eye with a child. You relax, feeling that have once again been easily frightened when you notice the five-year-old child is your level...
You jump three times your height when you look down and notice the child is hovering in the air. You look back and forth at the boy but never it never gets any clearer. How could someone hover three feet above the floor? His wide red eyes narrow as his small mouth turns upward; one scrawny arm, folded into the other, reaches out and points behind you. His eyes never leave yours.
Time has barely past when you break away from his stare and look to where he is pointing. In the dust that surrounds the house like fog you see a dark red door, and turn back to your young and floating host. His smile widens slightly and he slowly hovers towards the door, pausing once to bid you come hither before turning his back and leaving you, dumbstruck, to follow after him in a quick trot.
When you have caught up with him, your guide steals a side-glance at you and smirks. You feel distinctly uneasy about this...
The red door swings open widely when you and your guide arrive; he turns his neck to you, his small smirk still in place, and speaks in a voice that is a whisper,
"Fear."
And then he turns his head forward and floats into the darkness of the room behind the red door, and you are left to follow once again.
The door swings shut with a majestic creak and thud, and you are left in temporary darkness.
You feel slight movement behind you but pay no attention to it. It is only when you heard a deafening CRACK and are blinded by none-stop flashes of lightning that you realize it might have been a good idea to get away from the movement behind you.
Quick as the flashes of light you are grabbed from behind and dragged unceremoniously from the room, a hand placed over you mouth to stop your screams, another pinning your arms behind you in a tight bone-crushing clutch. You try to scream but no sounds come out. The last thing you see in the black and white flashes of light is a woman, but anything other than cannot be made out. Your captor is pulling you out of the room and into another, leaving the flashing room for something worse.
You feel the grip on your arm lessening as you are dragged down dark halls; screams of pain, cries, hopelessness and fearful echo through your head but for the moment you are far too scared to care about them.
You captor tears his hand off your mouth and jars open a metal door, pushing you inside and slamming it shut behind him. You can see faint wisps of blue and gold before heavy steps die into shouts and yells and you are left alone.
Or so you think.
Behind you the sounds of something breathing and salivating are taking up more and more space in your fear-stricken mind; a gentle rustle of chains is all that warns you to stay close to the door as a monster jumps towards you and swings widely with its claws. It snarls and barks and slashes at the moldy air to try and get to you, but you are cowering too close to the door to be touched. The eyes of the beast, red and savage, are enough to convince you to stay as far away from the hairy animal as possible, but the bloody fangs protruding from his mouth and enormous black hooks on his hands have frozen you to the steel frame. The chains are pulled to their fullest as it tries to dig its teeth into you, and from here, the hinges bound to stone are being torn out...
You hear a clank from the outside of the door and look up to see eyes, red eyes, staring at you through a rectangular food hole. The eyes are at first searching, then as they spot you, menacingly happy. You begin to wonder which is worse, the monster in here, or out there.
You aren't given the choice as, with a final jump, the hinges that bind the animal are loosened enough to swipe at the door, and you. You feel the horrendous burning as three claws dig into your right shoulder. Charging again, it lifts its arm, wet with blood down on your head. You cringe and are suddenly pulled back as the door you were leaning on opens. You tumble out of the cell and, with all your strength, hurl yourself toward the door, closing it. You see marks forming in the door and hear snarls emanating from the cell and turn up into the face of your former guide. He smiles at you, and you feel incredibly uneasy, but decide that, at least for the moment, you are alive.
For the moment.
You decide to stay close to your floating escort and walk briskly to keep up at his speed. You both journey down the cell you were recently dragged through and you for the first time register the horrible smells of mould and something rotting. It gets stronger and stronger until you pass a bared cell door, and the smell, although not completely gone, disappears enough to let you breathe once more. You turn to see that your guide doesn't seem to care about the reeking black-stone rooms, and if anything, he looks happy when he breathes, disgustingly so. You shudder. This guy is very, very scary, but you decide that his company is better than being torn to shreds and eaten.
For the moment.
You have been walking for a very long time and you have only begun to wonder just how big this house really is when your guide stops in front of another red door and points to it. You shake your head ferociously. No more red doors. Echoing down not far away you hear the distant but very loud hurl of metal churning, and a jaw-slitting roar. You then decide to open the red door and face whatever it holds, rather than face beast again.
The door does not budge despite your strain to open it, and the sounds of running footsteps, four of them, reach the ears of both you and your guide. The door swings open and you run in, shutting it hard behind you. Your guide has somehow floated in before you forced the door shut and you suddenly realize that you are in a richly decorated room. Curtains of red velvet hang from marble walls and, in the center of the floor, a table full of things to eat it piled up high.
You hadn't eaten before your fight with mother six hours before your fight with ex-friends, and still ate nothing before you were pulled into this world and you certainly haven't eaten anything here, so you ignore your low-fat diet and jump at the table. You don't bother to look at what you're eating as you ram food into your mouth and barely chew. The food tastes delicious and it is warm and you, who have been freezing for about as long as you haven't eaten, can't get enough.
You notice something strange when you finally look up and find your guide is missing. You shrug and pull up another something to eat when you notice, to your utter disgust, that you have taken in a handful of roaches.
This does not bode well with you.
You jumped from the table to find the insects have crawled up your legs. You brush them off as best you can but you are surrounded by them, they have infested the room, they are on your clothes, in your hair, in your mouth...
You screaming and yell and dance around, trying to kill and remove the roaches. You manage to squish many roaches, too, for they are so numerous they cannot run away fast enough from you. You run around the room, spitting out roaches and hearing them crunch under you feet when suddenly, there is nothing. You feel yourself falling, falling, falling fast into a darkness that you fear and you scream again, but no one answers. Air rushes through your hair and burns your eyes so you close them, but you can't seem to notice the difference; it is as black in your mind as it is in the pit you are in.
You scream and scream some more until your voice is horse and that is when you feel your body smack down onto a soft, dark floor. You are cold and can see and you look around, but notice nothing. You hear movement behind you and spin around fast enough to see a red something hide behind a blackened wall. You hurry after it.
You walk carefully through the hall. The walls, you notice, are made of cloth, black cloth, and it feels rough on your palm. You are wary, very wary. After going through what you have it's no wonder.
You stop when you hear a sound coming from behind a wall. Someone laughing, faintly...
You search the floor and find something to pierce the fabric with. You find a stone, sharp at one end and cut through the material enough to see a man cowering in a corner, his head down, rocking back and forth on his heels and chuckling slightly to himself.
You stand there staring for a while. He doesn't look up, he simply stays down and laughs. What strange behaviour. You turn your back to him as you make to leave when he shouts, no, screams,
"DON'T!"
And suddenly the halls are bursting with people, all laughing, smiling, wide-eyed, happy, deranged. They all look dead; perhaps they are, what do you know, but to you it merely appears that they are all crazy. They advance on you, they yellowed eyes bright, when they all suddenly fall on the floor and twitch, scream, and you dance over them all to run away from the mob of people.
You pass the end of the fabric walls and run into yet another red door. You narrow your eyes at the door. You know from previous experience that it will not move for you, but you still tug at the dull copper handle. Nothing moves. Figures.
You sit with your back against a wall and put your head in your arms, wishing to get away from this place and be home, eating your weight in candy. You sigh. This day has been, in all meanings on earth, hell. You want to go back.
You are so busy thinking about home that it takes him three times before your notice a tapping on your shoulder. You look up and into the child face of your former escort. You have a mind to give him something very unpleasant when you feel something hit your back lightly.
You look up and see around things that appear to be... floating. Like your tour guide hovering next to you, only at the moment he, too, seems to be wondering what a still lit candle in doing in the air. Your eyes are wide as they ogle books, chairs, torches, pots, pans, tables, food, vases, dishes, statues, a stray rat and even a person, one of those mad people, suspended in the air.
You cast a glance at your escort and notice his back is turned from the objects. He appears to be trying to open the red door behind you. His eyes narrow into cat slits and his face is contorted in concentration, but... nothing happens.
And then they attack.
The items that were floating all around you are smashing against the gray stone walls encircling the doors, and although none directly hit you the debris from destroyed porcelain and glass is enough to make you pull your school-girl jacket above your head to save it from the onslaught.
Smash. Crash. Clink. Clang. The items are now coming closer towards you; bigger pieces of the ruined material are hitting you and can hear the breakables hitting the walls at speed enough to make you wince. You shudder to think about the unbreakables.
From the cover of your uniform jacket you steal a look at your escort. Unlike the previous times when he has been missing while you suffered through diverse horrors, this time he is floating next to you, back facing the assault, face toward the door, head bent and eyes closed, muttering.
A vase smashes in front of your face and you cover it once again, blocking your sight and lessening your hearing in doing so. The offensive objects have not stopped ramming into the walls, and, if anything, they are getting closer and deadlier. The lack of breakables in the mansion has left whatever is hurling the objects at you with a heavy, mostly metal army.
You feel the first of the metallic murderers graze your shoulder, which has already being injured tonight, when a long, loud and welcome scream interrupts the attack. You look up in time to see your guide as he floats into the room behind the door. It begins to creak shut but you, not willing in the slightest to be left to brave the levitating articles, jump through. You fling yourself head first into the room and role over onto your back, an act which surprises and knocks the wind out of you.
You jump to your feet and raise your arms, standing in what you think looks like a kung-fu fighting stance. And you blink.
You are standing outside in the clearing where you found that house, with one major problem; as you turn to stare behind you, you notice that the mansion is no longer there...
Suddenly, you feel a sickening seizing of your body and you are blinded by a faintly familiar light. Your body is pulled apart and pushed back together and you see nothing. With a hard, loud thud you find yourself sprawled on ground under a tree, rain racing down behind you. You see the book, that red book you were reading before you passed out lying open on its back. You shiver internally. What a horrible nightmare...
You hear, mixed in with the patter of the rain, soft thumps of footfalls on the stone walk. You sit up on your knees and find yourself now staring at a barely familiar figure. His movements seem to you to be both fast and slow, and you don't hear at first when he speaks. You ask for him to repeat that.
"I'm sorry, miss," he says, "but I ran into you earlier. You wouldn't happen to have seen a book I dropped when we collided, would you?"
It takes you time, but you slowly nod your head and point to the book sitting under the tree, miraculously dry. He nods to you and picks it up.
"Thank you," he says, "I don't think you understand how much this book costs. Thank you for keeping it safe."
You nod again. His quick movements make your head hurt and he seems to be talking funny... the world is spinning... He looks at you oddly and helps you up.
"Are you alright?" he asks. "You don't look so good. I'll call a cab, pay for it, too. The least I can do for keeping my book okay."
You barely register that you are leaning on him for support; you are shaking, the world is jumping around and you can't hear. Wheee...
The man hails a cab for you and puts you inside. "Where do you live?" he asks, and you somehow grunt out the road. He pays for your fare ("Keep the change,") and speaks to you through the open door. "Safe journey," he says. He is about to close the door when he notices something on your arm. Nodding to it, he says, "You'd better get that looked at. It looks nasty," and closes the door.
You look down at you arm. Funny, you didn't feel anything wrong with your arm, just your head and stuff. Your jacket is ripped and torn; your hands are blue, but what the man was talking about is somewhere near your shoulder, and is bleeding. You rip off you shirt a bit and look at the wound. He was right. Three small gashes... They do look nasty...
*
"Great show, everyboshi," said Amiboshi from his place in front of the door, eating candy from the snack dish.
"Every... boshi?" said Miboshi, raising one eye skeptically. "What-" A look from a still-psychotic Suboshi silenced Miboshi and whatever he had previously thought to express. He rolled his eyes and muttered, "Good pun." It was a comment ignored.
"We should do this again some time. It was really fun," Amiboshi continued. "I think we really scared her."
"You... think?"
Look. Silence.
Tomo nodded his head from his place next to Nakago, in a corner of the dark room. "It was a great performance, wasn't it? One my best, I'm sure," he said. His mouth turned up slowly in a grin. "I scared her the most, with all those roaches," he said. Miboshi shook his head.
"She was most afraid of Ashitare," he said. No one listens to him, and thusly, no one replied to his comment.
"No, I think I scared her really good," said Suboshi. "She couldn't wait to get away from me, she was so scared."
"You threw stuff at her," said Tomo. "It's the wrong kind of scared. It's not 'fear-for-my-life' fear we were trying to get, it's 'this-is-my-worst-nightmare' fear!"
"I still got her good," he muttered, walking over to sit next to Amiboshi and raid the candy dish.
"I think Nakago-sama should have gotten a larger role in this," said Soi. "He was only there long enough to bring that girl into Ashitare's chamber. And," she said, "he was definitely the one who scared her the most."
Suboshi ignored her praise of Nakago. "Speaking of Ashitare," he began, "who here caught him and put him back into his cell after he broke out?"
Silence. A sudden tension arose as each Seishi stared at the other, exchanging identical looks of 'Oh, shit.'
Miboshi's eyes widened larger than their normal size and he turned his heads slightly to stare at a low growling behind him. From his place on the opposite side of the room, Nakago slowly took out his whip and gave it a good, hard crack.
*
End.