-Catgirl-of-Bavaria- : A little change of pace in this chapter, and very fun to write! Read and enjoy!
Chapter 13—A New World
She'd seen the scratches. She'd seen the scraped knees. She'd even seen the pants that were hidden in her friend's shallow hamper; they had freshly torn holes at the knees, fitting right in to the mystery of the girl's bloody knees, they were covered with grass stain. The bottoms of the legs were hemmed with wet mud.
Looking out the window, Shizuka noted the rain hammering the window in her best friend, Chihiro's room. Chihiro had gone off to freshen up in her bathroom in the hall, and Shizuka had noticed the pair of jeans in the hamper that wasn't there the night before. She sat on her friend's comfortable bed, glaring at the rain that assaulted the window, the stressed pair of pants in her hanging hand.
Yes, Shizuka's best friend was up to something. What, she didn't know. But she knew it had something to do with her daydreams, which remained pretty much constant throughout the six years that she'd known the poor girl. She was so easily distracted, came to school with troubled looks, and constantly got in trouble for day dreaming. Chihiro was the sweetest girl, but a complex one.
Shizuka placed the jeans carefully back into the hamper, buried under a single sweater that Chihiro had set on top of it in hopes of hiding her secret. She heard the footsteps of her friend in the bathroom, followed shortly by the opening of the door.
Shizuka glanced once more at the hamper, making sure it was the way she had found it. She didn't want Chihiro to know how worried she was about her. It was strange, she wanted to help her friend, but she could never come out straight and tell the girl that she worried over her distance from the human race.
"Sorry for the delay, do you need to use the bathroom?" Chihiro said politely to her friend, coming in the room.
"No, it's fine," Shizuka reassured her friend. "It was really fun, like always," Shizuka smiled, recalling the night before when they'd shared another collection of fun times worthy of bragging about at school when boredom kicked in during their extra hours.
"I'll see you later, Chi!" she called through the hallway as she walked towards the door to escort herself out. Chihiro and she were such good friends; they had even given each other keys to one another's house. The only precondition to using their keys was to call ahead.
Shizuka ran through the rain with her umbrella to her house down the street.
Seeing that no one was home, she decided to take a walk to town.
"I still have a bit of money to blow…" She told herself, grabbing what money she had left off her bedroom desk. She started down the decline to the road.
Watching as the cars zoomed through puddles of rain, her eye drifted over to the forest. The same spot Chihiro has been staring at. Turning her body to match with her eyesight, she wondered.
"What did she see over there?" she asked herself. "She was having a hallucination, I know it." Shizuka glumly told the ground. She was growing more and more concerned for her friend Chihiro by the day.
For a while before summer break started, Chihiro had always come to school, distressed and detached, sometimes even in a panic. People started to talk, saying that there was trouble in her family life.
Shizuka knew it wasn't true, Chihiro told her everything, and besides that, she had met her parents a number of times in the last six years, and the meetings had never been anything short of pleasant. They were nice, just not often home from work.
---
"Hey, Shizuka," the girl heard a voice calling her as she sat in a little ice cream café in town.
She had a strawberry ice cream cone in her hand, and she realized that she'd been eating it in a trance. She was taking a rest on the way home from the shopping she'd done that early afternoon. She had been out for four hours, and she noted it was three o'clock.
She looked up to see a boy from her school, Shugi, looming over her table. As much as a guy as short as Shugi could loom, anyway. What he lacked in vertical stature, he more than compensated with brazen taunting and sarcasm, and of course, his horizontal stature.
"Whaddya want, Shugi?" She asked, not bothering to hide her annoyance. This kid was always bugging her, mostly about her friendship with Chihiro. He said such rude things about her, it made her really want to hit him, even in school…Not only did he say things about Chihiro, but he said things to her as well. Sometimes Shizuka had to be physically held back from hitting the little tramp when he confronted Chihiro herself. She never understood why Chihiro just took it, Nearly everyone in their class had hit the guy at least once out of frustration for his personality.
"I just saw Window Watcher run like a freaking lunatic into the forest about an hour ago," Shugi bragged, as if he'd just accomplished some great feat.
"Oh, really." Shizuka yawned. He always made things like that up. "And for the record, 'Window Watcher' has a name, and I suggest you use it like a civilized person, before something unfortunate happens." She growled, her temper starting to flare just from being in his presence.
"Seriously, I did." Shugi nagged loudly, taking his own invitation to take a seat at her table. "She was running down the hill, or more accurately, falling, then she just stands at the bottom of the hill, staring at that overgrown pathway into the forest like the idiot she is…"
Shizuka had stopped listening. 'Staring into that overgrown pathway' echoed through her mind. No. She couldn't have…Could she?
The scratches. They could have come from the under brush trying to get through that little gap in the plants…The scrapes on her knees and the grass stains. She was always clumsy, she must have fallen down the hill…The mud on the hem of her pants. Obviously it had just started raining when she went out behind Shizukas back.
"Shizuka? Hey! Yoohooooo?" Shugi said annoyingly, waving his chubby hand in front of Shizukas face. Slapping it down, she glared back at him.
"When'd you say she ran into the forest?" Shizuka shot at Shugi.
"Oh, I'd say, an hour, hour and a half…" Shugi replied, contorting his chubby face in thought. He suddenly looked at her, his small piggy eyes widened. "W-wait, you actually believe me!"
Shizuka stood up, ignorant to any further conversation with the annoyance. The girl started walking away, throwing the remainder of her cone away on her way and bringing objection from the chubby kid behind her.
Chihiro had gone into the forest while she was sleeping. And now she'd gone in again! Something was drawing her to that forest, and Shizuka had decided right there to go find out what.
On her way to drop of her stuff in her house, she made sure that Chihiro wasn't home. Whipping out her cell phone, she called the girls house.
"C'mon, pick up….pick up…" She paced her room. "Prove that annoying little bastard wrong, Chi!"
The answering machine. Cursing, Shizuka threw her phone to her bed.
She hurried to her closet, and dug out some warmer clothes. A long sleeve black T-shirt with her favorite band name on it, her dry jeans, and a black hoodie. Pulling the hood over her head, she rummaged for her weather boots. She left her mother a note, claiming to be at Chihiros again, and sprinted out the door.
She ran down the grassy hill as fast as she could manage, and suddenly couldn't blame Chihiro for nearly splitting her knees open. Shizuka finally reached the little pathway to the forest, and shot through the tiny opening. In her rush, she felt a sting as the bush on her right decided to attack her cheek. Yes, this was definitely where Chihiro had gotten the scratches on her arms.
Wiping the blood that seeped from her cut and mixed with the rain, Shizuka stood up and saw that a cobblestone path that was overgrown in moss and weeds led her vision to a bend in the path, and continued for who knew how long, to who knew where.
Hoping to the heavens that Chihiro had stuck on the path, she followed it, in a hurried walk, waiting for it to end. Finally she broke into a run, not stopping for breath until she saw, looming at the end of the path, a big red entrance.
She sprinted closer, for inspection, slowing her speed until she stood just before the small mossy statue in the way. Looking at it, it reminded her of a woman with a huge grin on her face. Why it was just arbitrarily placed there, she didn't know.
Her attention turned back to the ominous building before her. Covered in vines, it looked old and beaten down by the weather. It had a sign, high above, but it was far from legible. Then her eyes met the tunnel just behind the little statue. Panting, the black haired girl looked around for any other place Chihiro might have gone around the structure. It was densely surrounded by trees of all sizes. She doubted Chihiro would or could squeeze through them, when there was a tunnel to the other side anyway.
Taking in some breath to calm her nerves, she walked towards the entrance. It loomed over her and seemed to howl at her in the rain and wind. There was something weird about this doorway, she could tell. Looking back, she did a double take. The statue was still looking at her as rain pattered on it's little grimacing face.
"Weird…" Shizuka muttered to herself. "Just freakin' weird."
She built herself up, and walked into the tunnel.
Shizuka listened to her footsteps echoing around her in the arched tunnel, the clack of her boots on the stone happily bouncing off the walls behind her. She could see the end of the tunnel, even faint flashes of lightning. She was glad for the momentary relief from the rain, but she knew she'd soon be out in it again.
"This really is a pointless building…It has no interior at all, except for this tunnel…" Shizuka muttered to herself. The wind howled through the tunnel, blowing her forward slightly, as if in rebuttal for accusing the structure of being useless.
Light filled her vision as she emerged on the other side, to find a spacious room, with high, plain, church-like ceilings, adorned with…park benches and bird baths?
She walked through the odd room, and found the door to the outside. She gasped in amazement to see that the forest had disappeared. Instead, there was a huge field, with grass that waved and battled the wind and the rain, and strange stones that reminded her of the two faced woman on the other side of the tunnel.
Lightning played across the open skies, followed closely by their companion thunders. Through the mist, the lightning illuminated a little group of buildings, like the edge of a small town.
"Funny…I don't remember there being a town over here…" She said, stomping off in the mud up the sloping field. Glancing back, she saw mountains behind the building she'd just exited.
"What!" She freaked out. "That's where my house is supposed to be…I knew there was something weird about that stupid building…"
The building, in response, howled back at her, and at the same time, told her it was four o' clock with four deep gongs. Checking her own watch, she exhaled breath.
"Well, at least I'm in the same time zone…"
She trudged on, crossing a little valley of what looked to be river rocks, before stepping onto some great stone steps. Another statue at the top of the flight was carved like a frog.
"These people sure do have weird taste in decoration…" Shizuka muttered, remembering the stones she'd already passed.
In the rain, she saw that it was a little town, but one that seemed to be lacking in people and occupation. Not one chimney emitted smoke. Japanese lanterns hung all over the street, lined them, really. Shizuka thought for a moment that there may've been some festival recently, for all of the festive lanterns that hung there. Everything was a café or a restaurant. None of them seemed to be open, or even in business. No one roamed the streets, and she couldn't see anybody through any windows. This was the place that fascinated her friend so much? An abandoned party town?
"Chihiro!" She called, cupping her hands around her mouth. "Chihiroo, where are you?"
Shizuka paced through various side streets, up oddly placed flights of stairs, finding more strange sculptures, including one that resembled a fish head. The confused girl even knocked on random doors, looking for her lost friend. She found herself wondering for an hour or so, until she found a vast stone stairway, leading to a tall Japanese garden lantern.
On her way to the stairway, she noticed an enticing aroma to her right, noticing the one restaurant that seemed to have a sign of life. Shizuka walked in, glancing around and calling for anyone who might be in charge.
"Hello? Anyone back there!" She yelled, leaning over the counter and barstools. "Hey! Come out if you can hear me!"
Several plates with heaps of various and sometimes strange looking foods called to her desperately with their aromas, but Shizuka merely frowned, discovering that the place was as empty as any other establishment she'd yet seen.
"Chihiro! It's me, Shizuka!" She called desperately through the rain and lightning, joining once more with the main path that led to the great stairway. "Anyone!"
Sighing, the tired blue-eyed girl trudged up the stone steps. Sitting on the top one, she gave another sigh and lay back on the wet stone, letting the rain fall on her face and cleanse her bloody scratch that she received from the bush.
"Where the heck is that girl!" She asked the sky angrily. It only replied with a burst of thunder that rippled the ground beneath her and made a loud rattling noise to her left.
She tilted her head to investigate, seeing a long bridge leading to an immense structure that nearly made her jaw drop. Lifting herself off of the ground, she stared at the thing, and concluded that the glass sliding doors that bordered the middle floors had to be the rattling objects.
Shizuka stood up, and walked slowly closer to the building. It was sitting on a small cliff that had isolated itself from the rest of the earth, jutting straight up and supporting this enormous building on top of itself. She noticed a small, steaming fountain to the right of the entry way.
"A bath house?" She whispered. She noticed that there appeared to be a sliver of smoke coming from the towering smokestack. This place was the only occupied one? "Maybe Chi is in there. It looks like a huge place…Huh? The sun's going down."
She noticed the significant change of brightness in the sky. Behind her, the large garden lantern began to glow.
"I hope the place isn't closing up…"
She began to sprint across the proud wooden bridge, and up to the entrance doors.
"Hello? Hello, I'm looking for Chihiro!" She shouted, knocking on the doors. "Chihir—" She nearly fell in as the doors opened, revealing some rather interesting and surprised-looking people.
They were dressed in nice little yukatas, and they stood not even taller than herself. Their heads were the most odd of all, their whole faces protruded from their head, and the shape reminded Shizuka of a lizards head.
"Ah, excuse me, I'm looking for a girl, named Chihiro..?" Shizuka asked, trying to divert her attention from the appearance of the odd people. They suddenly winced, and held their snouts, only briefly after looking at Shizuka in the face.
"Chihiro?" one of them repeated, disgust fringing his voice. "We haven't heard of anyone called Chihiro around here, Human."
Shizuka cocked her head, curious as to why they were being so derogatory towards the fact that she was obviously a human. She had no clue in the world what the heck they were, but she at least wasn't making snide remarks about it…
"But I followed her here!" Shizuka wrinkled her nose, waving away the insult for a moment. "She's around here somewhere, I…!"
The creatures suddenly turned to one another, their snouts still covered with their three-fingered hands, as they gave her their own glares.
"Ohh, Yubaba's not gonna like this…" Shizuka heard one mutter.
"Damn human, had to show up right now, before the rush! She's gonna stink up the whole place! Scare everyone away!" One was flustering behind his hands
"Yubaba? Who's Yubaba? " Shizuka asked. "And quit complaining, I don't stink!"
They ignored her, and continued whispering to one another.
"Did she eat any of the food in town? She ain't a pig…Not since Sen was here, has a human gotten past that café of food."
"Well, I guess we should just send her up to the boss, she'll know what to do…"
"AHH! The guests are beginning to arrive, what should we do? They can't see we've allowed a human into our midst! It'll destroy business!" Shizuka saw a particularly panicked creature pointing towards the other side of the bridge.
"Get out there and stall them. Make something up, just until we get the human up to Yubaba…"
Making way for a few of the creatures to run past, Shizuka grew tired of being ignored. Something on the other side of the bridge, however, caught her eye.
Suddenly the creatures that were talking about this 'Yubaba' looked pretty normal. Across the bridge, the little bath house creatures were making up excuses not to let in a strange assortment of other creatures, creatures that Shizuka couldn't even begin to describe, into the bath house. All because…she was there? Where exactly was she?
"Hello? The human girl's a bit confused, here…" Shizuka said in a voice that she heard as shaky coming from her mouth.
"You, come with me," a door creature commanded, as he turned and walked down hallways that forked into cubicles with varying sizes of tubs in them.
Workers, some who looked like normal people, some who didn't, stopped and looked at her as she passed. Whispers swirled around, forming rumors as she followed the strange creature through the strange bath house. One thing was crystal clear, Shizuka was not in Japan anymore…
"Foreman!" The creature leading her called to a desk ahead. A creature with the same oddly shaped head and a great orange mustache looked up from his work. "Foreman, we've got a human. Get Yubaba on the phone!"
Shizuka stood quietly as she tried to figure out what was going on around her, why she was in such a strange place, and if Chihiro had really come through the barrier and into this freaky bath house. Looking at her feet, she saw the floor. Through her feet?
"What the…" She lifted her hands, and could see the floor through them. Her large eyes grew wider as she looked at the foreman…through her hands.
"I'm disappearing!" She couldn't stop herself from crying out, making the foreman and the creature that led her to him look at her, unconcerned. She heard cackles coming from the spectators around her, employees who had stopped what they were doing to watch the human wallow in confusion.
"Hmm? Ah, yes, ma'am, she is disappearing, the process has begun!" The foreman cheerfully said into the phone.
'What process..!' Shizuka responded silently.
"Hmm….yes…Escorts?...Alright, done and done, Yubaba ma'am!"
"Wait! Where's Chihiro! Have any of you met a Chihiro! I followed her here!" Shizuka blurted more to the phone than to anyone. Maybe this Yubaba person knew where her friend was. She was desperate for information, and the creatures around her were no help at all. The foreman turned the phone back to his ear.
"Hmm, yes?...Tell her…Oh…OK…Human!" he commanded her. "Yubaba says she knows where you can find your Chihiro. You just have to let, ah…These girls, escort you to her office." He said, pointing to some random girls. They glared at him something fierce. "Orders from the top, slugs, now just do your job and get it over with!" he retorted.
Yubaba. Did Chihiro really know this person?
Shizuka allowed herself to follow the glowering "slugs" as the foreman had called them. They led her up several flights of wooden stairs, then across another proud bridge the overlooked the whole display of baths, each containing a different creature or group of creatures, each more strange than the last. She paid more attention to the bath house guests than she found was needed, and found herself falling behind. Hustling at a sloppy jog, she caught up to the slug-girls midway across the bridge. At last they reached a lift on the other side of the bridge, and the slugs let her to enter by herself.
"We're gonna leave you here. The lift will go all the way to the top, that's where you wanna go. Just pull the lever." They told her, boredom in their voices. She pulled the lever like they said, and watched them disappear behind the closing doors. She looked down at her hands, they had continued to slowly fade away.
"Where the heck did you lead me, Chi!" She asked the light at the top of the car.
The doors inched open at the top, just as the slugs had promised. Shizuka found herself in a strange hallway, full of huge urns and tapestries of intricate and colorful designs. The colors began to affect her stomach. She wasn't having a good day to begin with, but now this? She started down the cavernous halls, coming to a large door, with an odd, and quite ugly knocker. She put her transluscent hand on the door handle, and…
"What? Another stuck up human who doesn't think she needs to knock?" The door knocker scathingly retorted, sending Shizuka about a foot back in surprise. "I swear, you and Sen are truly one and the same…" The knocker added, rolling its ugly eyes around disturbingly. Shizuka hesitated, this was getting weirder and weirder by the minute…And who the heck was Sen!
Her shirt and jacket suddenly felt like it had been grabbed, and she found herself being pulled by some invisible force, a foot in the air, through several doorways that opened just as she was about to crash into them, and down another hall until the force threw her on her knees into a room that still annoyed her senses.
"Owww…" she whimpered, holding her knees.
"Quiet, you want to see this Chihiro of yours or not?" a cold voice that she recognized from the knocker commanded from a desk to her right. She looked to see a huge old woman's head, staring at her. This was Yubaba? An old lady with an oversized head?
"You…know Chihiro?" Shizuka asked her nervously, standing up. The woman grinned at her, her eyes flashing in the pulsating light of the fireplace behind the human girl.
"What do you know of the girl called Chihiro?" Yubaba asked her with a raspy voice.
"Well, everything," Shizukas face darkened "…Until I followed her to this place…now I'm not so sure…"
Yubaba laughed in her throat, looking down and scribbling something on paper.
"So, young Chihiro hasn't told her best friend about her adventures here?" She cooed with a hint of mocking. She turned her giant head again to look at the girl, who was beginning to blend into the fireplace behind her.
"I have a way for you to solve that little problem," The old spirit told her in a candy-coated voice, indicating her transparency.
"You…You do? How?"
With a wave of her large, clawed finger, Yubaba sent a paper through the air to Shizuka's hands, a pen following.
"It's a job contract. It'll give you back your disappearing body." Yubaba lied to the girl.
"I can't get a job here, I live in Japan! With humans!" Shizuka blurted. "I have to get home soon, I can't sign up for a job I can't hold up!"
"You're not going home for a while, dearie." Yubaba said, grimacing at the blue-eyed human girl. "Besides, it never stopped your friend Chihiro, and she was only ten years old!"
Shizuka was silent.
'Chihiro had a job with this old hag!' Shizuka glowered at the vulgar-looking rug beneath her, chewing nervously on her bottom lip. 'None of this is making any sense at all!'
"Are you going to sign, or do you want to completely fade away? Signing that is the only way to keep me from turning you into coal right now as well. I suggest you do it." Yubaba's wide and wrinkled mouth twisted into a grin.
Shizuka frowned underneath her damp hood. This old witch wasn't giving her a choice. How would signing a contract going to bring the rest of her body back? With a helpless sigh, the girl knelt to the fireplace, using the stone before it as a writing surface, signing her name on the paper, watching her almost gone hand work as she did it.
Standing up, she gave the paper to the woman. Looking the contract over, Yubaba found the kanji that formed 'Shizuka'. Hovering her other hand over the paper, she waved part of the girls name off of the paper.
"Shizuka, hmm?" She clasped her hands over the levitating kanji. "From now on, your name is Izu. You understand me?" Yubaba told her dominantly.
Shizuka looked at the woman, and nodded obediently, her eyes slinking off.
"You will address me as m'am, and nothing else, you understand?" Yubaba continued, playing with her prey.
"Yes ma'a—" Shizuka was interrupted by Yubaba motioning for her to be silent for a moment. They were both able to hear a faint crash, followed by growing footsteps running toward them. Shizuka stared at the witch, not knowing what to do or what to make of the noises. She really didn't know what to make of anything in this place.
Suddenly, the footsteps slowed and hadn't even ceased before the door flew open with a huge crash.