Disclaimer: I do not, nor will I ever own Mononoke. I am merely toying with its main character to suit my own fangirl-ish tendencies.
Author's Note: Sorry about the delay, as always. Hope you enjoy this chapter! It's a little shorter than the last chapter, but that's because I found a reeeeeeeally good stopping point.
As always, thanks to my beta, ElisiansBane, for working with me on this story. You are awesome!
Himitsu Shinu
Chapter 4
Albany, New York
February 10, 2011
9:42 AM, EST
There was a surge in the lights. First, the room became so bright that he had to close his eyes. Then, a moment later, everything was plunged into darkness.
"What the hell was that?" he heard Agent Burke mutter a few feet away. "Power must've gone out." He heard the agent feel his way towards the door. A latch clicked and hinges creaked as the door was opened.
"Anyone know what caused that just now?"
"No," a voice from outside the room said. It was the other agent. What was her name…? Ortiz.
He got to his feet.
'If you would,' he thought. The presence in his mind stirred.
'Hnn.' There was a shift of energy in the air, and the handcuffs on his wrists opened with a soft click. He caught them before they could fall to the floor and gently set them down on the table. 'Be sure you take better care of our body this time.'
'I will. Don't worry about me.'
'It's not you I'm worried about.' The voice fell silent.
He slipped past Agent Burke and the people out in the hall without being noticed. The Sword was close; he could feel its energies reaching out towards him. It was simply the matter of navigating the building and retrieving it before they got the lights back on.
No… they couldn't have been turned off. He could still hear the fluorescent lights humming gently above him, yet the room was pitch dark. And shouldn't there have been windows at some point?
Oh, right. It was the mononoke. He had forgotten they could do things like blotting out all light sources. Sudden darkness was often effective for sending humans into mass panic, but for him, in this case, it could possibly work in his favor.
He pressed himself against one wall as someone blindly stumbled past.
"What happened?" another person from down the hall was shouting.
People all over the building were calling to one another. Confusion, bewilderment, and panic were beginning to rise.
It seemed as though things were going to get very bad very fast.
Finally, he came to a door. It took him a moment to find the handle, and when he did, he found it was locked.
'Care to help?'
The voice in his head sighed. There was, once again, a shift of energy, albeit a reluctant one. He heard a click, and the door swung open. 'One of these days I'm just going to ignore you and let you do this on your own,' the voice commented dryly.
As he stepped inside, he almost trod on the prone form of whoever was responsible for keeping this room secure.
'Humans…' the voice in his head muttered. 'Probably was frightened by the dark and knocked himself out on accident.'
'No…' he replied. 'I can smell blood.'
'So the thing has killed already. Fast, this one. You're going to have to watch yourself this time.'
'I know.' He stepped over both the body and the blood that was surely pooling around the corpse by that point.
"Where are you…?" he whispered to himself. "There." Still moving in complete darkness, he made his way to a shelf near the back of the room. Sitting there amidst other items that were of no use to him was his backpack. Inside, he knew, was the Sword.
He wasted no time in reclaiming his belongings and taking hold of the Sword. And the moment his fingers closed around the Sword's hilt, the darkness lifted.
David jumped when the lights suddenly came back on. Or rather, it seemed as though he had been blindfolded, and the blindfold had been abruptly torn away. Alex was standing in front of him, as were who he assumed were Mr. and Mrs. Coyle and their granddaughter Alicia, all three of whom had been involved in the previous Painted Face Murder case. Detective Travis, who exited the room at the same time as David, had, it seemed, gone off somewhere.
Alex gasped. "David…"
"What?" He looked over at her to see that she was pointing into the room he had just left.
The room was empty.
And there were a pair of handcuffs lying innocently on the edge of the table.
"Did anyone see him leave?"
"No," Mr. Coyle scoffed. "It was pitch dark; I'll bet you that nobody saw him. Bastard probably used the power outage to escape. Hell, he probably made the whole thing happen!"
"Tom!" Mrs. Coyle scolded. "Language!"
"And how do you suppose he did that," Alex shot back, clearly irritated by the man. "He's been confined since late last night, not to mention handcuffed and under watch the entire time. There is no possible way that he could have done anything to have caused this."
Just then, Officer Carson came running towards them, a radio in his hand.
"Agents! You should come quickly!" he called to them. "Something's happened!" Carson turned to look at the Coyles. "I'm sorry about this whole mess. Someone will be with you in a moment to see you home. Agents, if you will."
The followed Carson to a room in another part of the building. It was the room where all personal effects of detainees were kept, as well as any evidence that had been collected. Lying face down in the middle of the floor was a man, most likely the officer in responsible for keeping an eye on that room. The man lay in a pool of his own blood.
He was dead.
What was most disturbing was that the dead man's throat seemed to have been cut out. And not just cut; it almost looked as though it had been clawed out by something.
David tugged a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and pulled them on as he knelt down next to the body. As he turned the corpse's head to get a better look, he nearly fell back in alarm.
The face was missing.
What was unusual was that there were no wounds on the face of any kind. It was as though someone had taken an eraser and wiped his features away, leaving a perfectly blank surface.
"My God," David whispered. "Alex, come take a look at this." Alex walked up behind him and bent down. She gasped.
"How is that even possible?"
"Because the thing that did this is not human."
Alex and David looked up to see the Man with the Painted Face standing in the doorway behind Travis. He had, it seemed, reclaimed his personal items: a ratty old backpack, violet headscarf (which had been wrapped around his head like a bandana, effectively restraining his long, pale hair, and an old, stained trench coat that he currently wore. Held tightly in his left hand was the strangest looking sword anyone had ever seen. It was a short blade, still sheathed, not even two feet long. Its sheath was of dark red wood, edged in gold and studded with gems. The hilt was decorated with what looked like some kind of shrunken monkey's head. Or was it an ogre…?
"You! How did you get past us without us realizing it?" David demanded, getting to his feet and glaring at the man.
"You were distracted," the man replied. "As I said, it was not a human that did this."
"What do you mean, 'not human'?"
"Exactly what I said."
"Alright…" David replied skeptically. "Assuming you're not lying—"
"I do not lie." A momentary scowl flickered across the man's face before returning to neutral.
"Assuming you're not lying," David repeated. "Then what did kill this man, if it wasn't a human?"
"A mononoke."
"Of course." David threw his hands into the air out from frustration. "You know what I think? I think you just want to blame a ghost on all this because you either don't have a clue, or you're the one who killed this man!"
The man blinked. "I did not kill this man," he replied calmly. He stepped forward and knelt down next to the body, pushing David aside. "Hnn." He examined the body's lack of face with his long, tapered fingers. The man's nostril's flared slightly and he narrowed his eyes as the tips of his fingers passed over where the eye sockets ought to have been. He muttered something under his breath that David wasn't able to catch.
Everyone in the room jumped when a scream from another part of the building rent the air. The Man with the Painted Face leapt to his feet and charged off in the direction of the scream.
He barreled through the hallways as fast as he could, not caring that he was knocking people aside. The sound of screams and the scent of blood led him back to the room where he had been questioned by Agent Burke. Huddled against one wall was the girl he had saved in the last mononoke attack. What was her name…?
'Later,' the voice in his head urged. 'Think about her name later. We have work to do.'
On the floor lying face down were two people; a man and a woman. Blood was pooling around both forms. He guessed that the mononoke had done the same thing to them as it had the police officer in the other room.
"I see," he whispered to himself. "This mononoke has neither a face… nor a voice…" He raised his eyes to find himself staring into the shadowy mass that could only be the mononoke. It hadn't seemed to notice him just yet. Instead, it was focusing its attention on the girl. "You are a forgotten soul."
Chink.
The jaws of the Sword's face snapped shut. The sound of it rang unnaturally in the hallway. The echo, it seemed, caught the mononoke's attention. It turned to face him and began to approach. Three faces floated into being on its shadow-like body. The faces were heavily distorted, yet eerily recognizable as the faces of the people it had killed. The faces' empty, soulless eye sockets narrowed as if daring him to do something.
"Get back!" he shouted, pulling a small jar of salt from his bag. He opened the jar and pulled out a pinch of salt.
"Get back," he said again, tossing the salt at the beast. It recoiled when the salt touched it, making a low hissing noise as it did so.
"What the hell?" a voice from behind him shouted. He didn't take his eyes off of the mononoke, but he recognized the voice as belonging to Agent Burke.
Another man ran up to the scene, this time from the opposite direction. Panting, he skidded to a stop when he saw the mononoke.
"Detective Travis, get back!" the female agent, Ortiz, shouted from the same direction as Agent Burke. The man called Travis whimpered and pulled out his gun.
One shot was fired.
Two.
A third.
All three shots went straight through the mononoke. It turned to face Travis. A wide slit beneath the stolen faces opened in a vicious, silent snarl. Travis dropped his gun and backed away, but before he could turn tail and run, the mononoke lunged, enveloping him in a suffocating, deadly embrace.
"Move!" he shouted to the four people behind him. "Get in that room! NOW!"
They followed his order without question, all hurrying to get inside the small interrogation room a fast as humanly possible.
He tried not to listen to the blood-curdling wails of the human detective as the mononoke fed. He blocked it all from his mind as best as he could while he spilled the remainder of his salt in front of the door to the interrogation room. Once he was done, he stepped inside, and slammed the door shut behind him.
Once inside, he pulled his paper seals out of his backpack and began applying them to the walls. The walls were covered in scraps of white paper in moments, each one gaining its black ink design. As the screaming outside the room had stopped and none of the seals were turning red, it was clear that the mononoke had moved on.
"We should be safe here for a while," he said, settling down cross-legged in one corner of the room. Even while sitting, he did not relax even for a moment. Instead, he kept glancing up at the hundreds of paper seals that plastered the walls, making sure that they were not turning red. With one hand, he fished around in his newly reclaimed backpack for his scales. When he found one, he took it out and balanced it on the end of his finger.
"What is that?" Agent Ortiz asked. She sat on the other side of the small room with the girl –Alicia! Yes, that was her name— held tightly in her arms.
"Scales," he replied. He twitched his finger ever so slightly, causing the scales to rise into the air, where they hovered for a moment before flipping upside down and settling in the very center of the ceiling. "They measure the distance between us and the mononoke."
"How do they work?"
He blinked. "I don't know…" It was true. So many centuries, and he had never once questioned how his precious scales worked. They had just been something he had always accepted without a second thought.
More scales followed the first until they covered the ceiling.
"So? How far away is it?" Agent Burke asked from where he sat next to his partner.
"Not far," he replied, looking up at the scales. "But it will not come for us just yet."
"How do you know?"
"Experience," was the simple reply. "After killing so many in such a short time, it will need to rest before it can attack again."
"How long?"
He glanced at the male agent. "Do you want a hopeful guess? Or a realistic estimate?"
"Both, I guess."
"It is possible that we have an hour, maybe two before it tries to break the barriers I have placed. Any more than that would be wishful thinking." He paused, gauging the mononoke's whereabouts. It was moving around on the other side of the building. "Thirty minutes would be a more likely span of time, however."
Alicia whimpered.
"Which is why," he continued, "there are two things that I need to know as soon as possible."
"You need to know?" The Officer –what was his name, again? Carson; that was it— scoffed from his corner near the door. "More like we need to know. What the hell is going on here?"
He fished around in his backpack again and almost smiled when his fingers met the familiar surface of the Sword of Exorcism.
"I need to know…" he began as he pulled the Sword out of the backpack. "The mononoke's makoto and kotowari. You must tell them to me now, before it comes back."
Author's Note: Another chapter, over. Please review! I thrive off of constructive criticism, but feedback of any kind is appreciated.
