Kayo stared at the location where the konpeito was once scattered. The place was practically licked clean. "W-what's a futakuchi-onna?"
"A woman who has a second mouth hidden beneath her hair," the medicine seller explained. "The second mouth consumes whatever it can reach, the hair reaching out to feast, while the woman rarely is seen eating."
"That explains the kitchen," Kayo reasoned. "All the missing food Ms. Tsuma said had gone missing. But does that mean the mononoke's been hiding in the kitchen?"
"It's unclear as the truth or the reason of the futakuchi-onna currently remains hidden," the medicine seller filled in the remaining thoughts. "The story thus far hasn't revealed the true nature of the mononoke and how it came to be just yet. There is more left unspoken. Perhaps you would wish to speak, Miss Tama."
"There's nothing more about Yoshino!" Tama insisted.
"Were there others?" the medicine seller pressed.
"No!" Tama replied quickly, glaring at him intently.
She was definitely hiding something, the medicine seller had reasoned, but she was also clamming up much as Lady Tori had done with the inugami incident. However, unlike before, the others seemed more willing to talk and discuss the situation. Perhaps Yoshino's death truly was an accident, but it was a piece of the greater picture at play here.
The three locations - the inn, the tea house, and the mahjong parlor - were all interconnected in the creation of the mononoke but the truth still hadn't been revealed. The two men had begun to clam up, silenced by Tama's sharp glares as they stared at the mahjong tiles littering the floor. Perhaps they were content on being consumed for something that did happen, but a mononoke's reason wasn't always quelled by consuming the offenders.
Tucking his feet beneath him, the medicine seller sat back down with the taima sword tucked into his obi and his hands resting politely on his lap. Nervously, Kayo settled back down next to him. The silence was unnerving. She shifted on her knees, trying to be patient. Opening her mouth to say something, she stopped when she felt the medicine seller's hand on her knee. She closed her mouth, returning to silence, patiently and nervously waiting.
The floorboards creaked again, the hair invading to seek out more food. The strands of hair picked apart some mochi bit by bit, drawing the pieces back down into the floor before disappearing again.
Kayo could see how much the other three were sweating. She was certain it wasn't just the heat. It was terror. They were watching the hair reach through the floorboards and seek out food. The mononoke wasn't being aggressive at the moment, but there was no telling when it would attempt to attack again. They knew something, yet the medicine seller wasn't interrogating them. He seemed to be waiting until one of them finally spoke.
But he was definitely better at waiting than she was. Kayo shifted a bit uncomfortably, watching the gathered people as well as listen to the creaks in the floorboards. She tried to not be afraid but she felt like her skin was crawling.
"There were others!" Junsuke blurted out.
Kayo fell backwards in surprise as the innkeep broke the silence.
"Mr. Junsuke!" Tama hissed.
"There were many more!" Junsuke continued, the pressure of the situation getting to him. "Dozens upon dozens! They were just girls sold to us to pay for their family's debt. We tried to keep them happy, but it's so hard when their parents did that to them."
Kayo gasped, clasping a hand over her heart. "How awful."
"Not all of them were prostitutes, only some of them were!" Junsuke insisted. "But not all of them lived long.." He pursed his lips, clearly concerned over their wellbeing.
The medicine seller listened to him speak wordlessly, his hands still resting on his lap as he watched the movement of the mononoke hair peek in and out of the floorboards.
"There's more to this, isn't there?" Kayo pressed on first, scooting just a little closer to the medicine seller as the creaking of the floorboards crept closer.
"I…." Junsuke hesitated.
"It was Miss Tama's idea!" Hiroshi broke his silence.
"What?!" Tama hissed.
"You kept those girls locked up!" Hiroshi accused her. "They were slaves to your partron's desires! Even Yoshino! If you had treated them better instead of imprisoning them in your basement, we wouldn't be in this situation!"
"Like you aren't guilty too!" Tama hissed. "When the authorities came sniffing around, you hid them here, too!"
The floorboards cracked, the hair tendrils bursting back into the room. The mononoke attacked with much more than just a few hairs seeking food. It was a lock of hair the width of a grown man. The tendril lashed forward, quickly ensnaring Tama in its grasp. It grasped the woman so tightly it knocked the breath from her lungs before dragging her down into the darkness below before she had a chance to scream.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" Junsuke cried, rolling into a ball and cowering. "I wanted to take care of them but I'm just as guilty! I fed them and ensured they had space to breathe and employed them properly but there were just so many! Why did we take so many of them in? We caused this!"
The medicine seller jerked a hand, covering the gap in the floor with a net of ofuda papers to block the return. "What happened to the girls?"
"Ms Tsuma found us out!" Junsuke replied quickly.
"There's no way Tsuma is somehow linked to this!" Hiroshi insisted.
"How could she not be?!" Junsuke shouted into the tatami. "We don't know how she survived!"
Kayo gasped in horror. "Was she..."
"No, definitely not a prostitute! She's my wife," Hiroshi insisted. "She…"
"It was Miss Tama's idea," Junsuke uncurled himself, tears streaming down his face. "She was worried that we'd be discovered so she…. The girls didn't die of disease or anything else. Miss Tama slaughtered them and Ms. Tsuma saw it."
Kayo buried her face in the medicine seller's shoulder. She couldn't handle this truth.
"So Miss Tama had Ms. Tsuma handled," Junsuke continued. "Mr. Hiroshi distracted Ms. Tsuma in the kitchen and Miss Tama struck her in the back of the head with an axe."
The taima sword chattered in confirmation.
"The mononoke's truth, the means it was created," the medicine seller confirmed.
"The pain she must've felt," Hiroshi knit his brow, "from seeing what we did and then we tried to kill her. Why did I ever get myself entangled in this? I've lost the love of my life. It's my fault. Just consume me!"
No tendrils reached through the ground but a side door that hadn't been barricaded jimmied open. Tsuma stood at the doorway with an empty silver tray, her hair moving as if it were tentacles. "Why does everyone look so sad?"
Her hair folded up into her normal updo as the bell charm that once hung in the doorway fell to the ground. "That's where that went. It must've been tangled in my hair."
"My dear Tsuma." Hiroshi stood up. He padded over to her, drawing her into a deep hug. "This is all my fault."
"What do you mean, my dear?" she peered up at him. "Are we losing the parlor?"
"I may have lost you," he replied simply.
"But I'm right here," Tsuma insisted.
Kayo unburied her face from the medicine seller's kimono. "Does she not-"
The medicine seller placed a finger on Kayo's lips to quiet her. He could tell that Tsuma didn't realize she was a mononoke, at least partially so. She had likely died during the incident, returning as a mononoke unable to cope with what she had seen.
Hiroshi drew Tsuma closer, wrapping his arms around her. "Because of what we did, because of those girls…. We'll never be able to play mahjong together again."
"Girls….?" Tsuma questioned, dropping the tray. She wrinkled her brow in thought before the realization struck her. "That…. That wasn't a nightmare?"
"It wasn't," Hiroshi confirmed.
"All that blood, those cries and screams….." Tsuma buried her face in his kimono. "I hear them every night. I try to reach out to them, but I can't save them. I wanted to save them all! Why did they have to die? Why didn't you stop them?!"
"You've married a fool," Hiroshi replied.
"Every night, I live through that nightmare, the regret that I couldn't protect them," Tsuma sobbed. "I heard them before, all those girls trapped downstairs. I brought them food when you weren't looking. I never asked, but I didn't want them to suffer. Then all that blood, the stench of death. I was so sad for all of them."
The taima sword chattered in confirmation for the mononoke's reason. "Relea-" The medicine seller shoved it further into his obi.
"It's my fault you're suffering from such regret," Hiroshi could feel himself shaking. "It's my fault you've become a mononoke. Mr. Medicine Seller, can you end her endless suffering?"
"I can," he confirmed. "Ms. Tsuma, please follow me into the hallway."
She pried herself from her husband's grasp, placing a gentle kiss on his cheek before following the medicine seller outside and sliding the door shut behind her. "Why did he have to do that? Why didn't he stop them?"
"Humans are capable of terrible things," the medicine seller replied, pulling the taima sword from its sheath. His white hair billowed out behind him as the other self took over. He made no aggressive move towards Tsuma, nor did she lash out towards him.
"Was I wrong in trying to save them?" she questioned. She stared at him as he didn't reply. She stared at the floor for a moment, her heart in a knot. Everything she'd seen, everything she'd felt, it was all welling up inside of her.
"You aren't here to judge the living, are you?" She pursed her lips, a tear rolling down her cheek. Her heart ached, screaming out in pain and all she wanted to do was quiet it. She couldn't understand why Hiroshi and the others would do this. She tried to help the girls, but the guilt of being unable to do so ate her alive. "Please, relieve this suffering. I want to believe I did the right thing."
He turned the taima sword to her. She didn't fight him at all. She just wanted peace. She wanted the pain in her heart to end.
…
Kayo couldn't be happier to leave that skeevy mahjong parlor behind them. She gripped her round uchiwa fan in her hand, a troubled look on her face.
"Miss Kayo," the medicine seller broke the silence as they neared the city's edge.
She stopped, turning to look at him for a moment. "Yes?"
He could see she was clearly troubled, and that actually concerned him. He wasn't quite accustomed to caring what others felt around him. He simply uncovered a wrongdoing and righted it by relieving the mononoke from its pain. That was simply how it was until Kayo began to travel with him. He listened to the tales of atrocities, barely fazed by them at all as he focused on the truths of the situation. Yet Kayo was human. She was affected by this.
"Are you certain you wish to continue traveling with me?"
She knit her brow, worried where he was going with this.
"There are tales ahead of us, ones that may be worse than what we've heard here," he continued. "Can you handle this way of life?"
She stared at the uchiwa for a moment. She wasn't certain she could quite handle how cruel humans could be, certainly not with the calm way he usually did. This incident shook her much like the bakeneko incident struck her to the core, and it wasn't fear of the mononoke. It was the horror of what had caused it.
She rubbed at her face with one hand. "Is she still suffering?"
"She is not."
"Good," she stated simply.
He paused for a moment, studying her expression. She seemed content with the answer, and that was enough to confirm she wished to continue on the path ahead of them. It wouldn't be easy, but he never expected humans to fully handle all the truths he heard. Yet Kayo was stronger than most he'd encountered. She jumped at every shadow that moved, but she could handle some pretty serious situations when the situation called for it. "Then let us press on. There are still mononoke left in the world."
"Then let's find a way to help them all," Kayo nodded.
Yes, she certainly would be fine. A smile tugged at the edges of his lips as he turned to travel down their path.
...
Author's notes
About the cast's names:
Tsuma – possibly means wife
Tama – Jewel. Ironic with her rough personality
Yoshino – a popular prostitute's name with no particular meaning
Junsuke and Hiroshi are popular men's names in the Edo era and are more modern than most of the ones I use in this story. I tend to like Sengoku era names. Shhh.
