Disclaimer: I do not own Ghost Hunt, or the characters used here, except for Mrs. Reynolds. Any resemblance to real people or places is unintentional. No copyright infringement is intended, etc. etc.
A Return Engagement, Chapter 4:
Mai wasn't sure what she had expected from the car trip to Tokai; Lin had estimated that the journey would take three and a half hours, and Mai had been apprehensive about spending that much time alone with Naru in a smallish confined space with no tea, no distractions, and no retreat. Particularly no tea. Naru could be distinctly peevish when denied his fix of steaming Prince of Wales in a proper china cup—she had the feeling that the two thermoses of lukewarm beverage she had prepared before they left, served up in the institutional grey plastic lid cup, were going to be deemed distinctly inferior offerings. She just hoped that tea-deprivation didn't turn Naru into a Mai-eating dragon. At any rate, she had thought cheerfully, the scenery would be pretty.
As Mai shakily slithered down from the passenger seat of the van and flexed her stiff fingers, she really couldn't say whether or not the scenery had been pretty. Her eyes had been pressed tightly shut the entire time, and her hands were sore from the white-knuckled clench she had kept on the arm rest the entire way. The trip had been much shorter than anticipated; Naru had beaten Lin's conservative estimate by almost an hour, and Mai had the windburn to show how he had accomplished it. Mai would have preferred boring. She would even have preferred awkward, tense, silence. Instead, Naru had been in fine form, pleased with himself for having reduced Lin to befuddled silence and pleased to be cruising along in the van without his keeper perched in the driver seat like a storm cloud, pointedly gazing at the speedometer, pushing his foot against an imaginary passenger side brake, and making comments like "You have a turn coming up ahead, Naru. You should start slowing down and looking." Mai could see where Naru would feel that Lin, a cautious driver, was cramping his style.
She now had a much greater appreciation for Lin's apprehensions. Some one ought to cramp Naru's style. Someone with a badge, and a car with flashy lights on it. Where the hell were the traffic cops? They had no business allowing a lead-footed menace like Naru on the road. Not even in a tiny subcompact, let along armed with an enormous black van.
On second thought, the cops probably had a well developed sense of self-preservation. They probably saw how fast he was going, caught the maneuver where he missed the turn and reversed to get back to the exit, and stayed far, far away, looking for an old lady on a walker to escort across a road, or a kid on a tricycle to give a citation to. She couldn't blame them—she didn't really think she wanted anyone dumb enough or gung-ho enough to take on Naru to be armed with a badge and gun and turned loose on society.
Naru had already left the van, and he stood contemplating the Reynolds' house, his arms crossed in front of his chest. Mai tottered over to stand beside him on rubbery legs.
"This house needs to be burned. There isn't any other solution," remarked Naru.
Mai's eyes widened. "The house is so haunted that you can tell that just from the outside?"
"Who said anything about haunted? It's hideous. Burning is the only cure for ugly this severe," he replied caustically. He continued to regard the house with disfavor. It was a very large house, three stories high, and clearly fairly recent construction, an exemplar of what could happen when a large budget met a complete lack of taste and restraint. The style represented an uneasy alliance of east and west, and the mix…hadn't gone particularly well. The heavy rectangular structure, constructed out of large blocks of some pale, heavy stone, boasted an elaborate entryway, a large wooden door surrounded by a frame carved from heavy dark wood in the form of an O-Torii¹. A matched set of small bronze koma-inu² flanked the shallow stairs leading up to the entry. Three tiers of balconies supported by massive wooden columns rose from the ground level, and the building was crowned by gabled roof of dark brown glazed ceramic tiles with incongruous flaring eaves, the apex of the gables crowned with onigawara, or ridge-end roofing tiles, shaped into sinuous forms that could have been either dragons or dolphins, or some strange hybrid of the two. The façade of the building was punctuated with large, paned glass windows, placed with perfect Georgian-style symmetry. The resulting building was, in spite of its height, dark and squat looking, with a weird combination of architectural details stolen from Sendai Castle, Tara, and an American correctional facility. Naru half expected to be greeted by African slaves in kimono with numbers stenciled across their backs.
The overprocessed, thirty something blonde who answered the door didn't match the décor at all—any of the varied parts of it. Naru had encountered her type before. Back in the States, she had probably been a manicured trophy wife, but the strain of their current situation had reduced her to an anxious wreck. He could see dark circles under her eyes, in spite of the careful application of concealer, and though her nails sported bright red polish, they were ragged, as though she had been chewing on them. Her clothes had been bought for a carefully svelte figure, but she had clearly lost weight, and they hung on her now gaunt frame.
Naru introduced himself in brisk, business-like English, explaining that he and his assistant (a brief gesture towards Mai) had come ahead of the rest of their team to begin the investigation, as he understood the matter was one of some urgency. Mrs. Reynolds eyed them with the dubious expression of a hostess who had unexpectedly had a witch doctor show up at a cocktail party. She mouthed polite pleasantries while mentally debating what to do with them, and Naru used the opportunity to observe the entryway.
The vast, high-ceilinged hallway lived up to the promise of the outside; it was the most pretentious atrocity he'd seen in a while. A single, wide staircase led up to broad landing, where a wooden statute of a male figure in armor perched on a pedestal. From the spear and pagoda clutched in the statue's hands, Naru deduced it was supposed to represent Bishamonten, one of the seven lucky gods, said to dispense wealth and good fortune. Other vaguely 'oriental' antiques decorated the hallway—a Chinese court robe in a ugly shade of mustard yellow, embroidered with fat clouds rested behind glass on one wall, while four panels that had once been part of a screen decorated another, portraying a battle in which oni mixed with warriors on horseback. A large Indian carpet woven with a mix of tan, beige, mustard, and brown covered most of the floor, and a glass-topped table filled the center of the space. The table bore a large urn filled with an immense arrangement of orchids and tropical fronds; the profusion of artfully arranged flowers made Naru think of a funeral home which had thoughtlessly mislaid the casket.
While Naru mentally catalogued the furnishings, Mrs. Reynolds continued to dither on in the background.
"I'm really not sure what Thomas thinks you can do….really, the best thing might be to return home, but he thinks….anyway…" Mrs. Reynolds voice faded out.
"We'll need a room that we can set up as a base, a center for our operations. Do you have a space that might suit?" interjected Naru.
"Um, does it need to be on the first floor?" asked Mrs. Reynolds. "There is a formal dining room through there that we never use—it's big, and has a large table." She gestured towards a doorway off to the left of the front door, and they all turned to look in the direction that she indicated.
Almost immediately, the noise began behind them—a steady thump thump thump, as though something was bouncing down the stairs. Naru whirled around just quickly enough to see an object fall from the final step, and roll slowly across the floor to stop right at his feet. The face of Bishamonton grimaced up at him, like a severed head.
Mrs. Reynolds shrieked, and collapsed in a dead faint, too quickly for Naru or Mai to react.
Well, thought Naru, that hardly took any time at all. Decapitating a luck god—definitely an apropos comment upon on our arrival.
Notes:
O-Torii: or Torii Gate, the gates forming the entry to a Shinto shrine, and is thought to mark the beginning of holy ground.
An imperial guardian lion, also called a Fu Lion or a Foo Dog, frequently found outside the entrance to a shrine, and is thought to have protective powers.
Author's Notes: Apologies for the long wait; the end of the semester pretty much killed me, and I was having trouble with this chapter—way too much description, and it required a bunch of research. At least the plot is starting to take off!