This was all beginning to look like too much of a coincidence. Chiori frowned and turned the plushtoy over in her hands. She checked the back of it for an opening of some sort possibly for batteries. Anything to explain the way it had run away from them at the park. She didn't find a thing out of the ordinary.
It only stared back at her with that silly smile. With a click of her tongue and a squeeze of its belly for good measure, Chiori checked its chest for a soundbox.
Nothing.
Throwing a glance over her shoulder to make sure that no one was coming up the stairs, Chiori hesitated. She wondered what would happen if she put it back on the floor and left it there. She could pretend like she'd never seen it in the first place.
It was a tempting choice to make, but she was too curious to actually go through with it. She gave one more glance to the stairs before heading to her room with the toy in hand. She shut the door and put her bag down before tossing the stuffed toy onto her bed.
There didn't seem to be anything special about the lion. It was just lots of yellow fabric and bits of brown and white felt. It had a tiny little lion's tail and the brown felt circling around its head to make up its mane made it look similar to some kind of cartoon sun.
It was actually pretty cute. Chiori played with one of the white felt claws on its left paw and thought about what she should do with it now that she had it. She would probably have to put it back where she'd found it if one of the twins claimed it.
With a sigh, Chiori let go of the claw and bent down to rifle through her bag for a pencil and sketchpad. No reason to pass up the chance to make a good sketch of it while it was there. She set down the toy and settled on the edge of the mattress to draw for a bit.
Even without the call from earlier, Inori knew her mom was home as soon as she came in the house. The smoke from a lit cigarette coiled through the air above the brunette woman's head and the lenses of her sharp glasses caught light. It was much later than when her mom had initially called her and some of the lights were on in the kitchen, but the rest of the house was dark.
The door shut with a click and Inori's her greens eyes honed in on the lazy orange light of the cigarette dangling between her mother's slender fingers. At least one of the windows was still open. "You sure did take your time," her mother sighed, snubbing the cigarette in the ashtray and propping her chin on the heel of her palm. "Inori."
Inori's mother worked for the Japanese Public Security Bureau and often took long trips outside of town. Inori had stopped asking questions a long time ago. For years, ever since Inori's father disappeared, Jun Yuzuhara had become obsessed with her work. The woman was barely ever home, usually leaving Inori in the care of her aging grandmother.
Whenever she was home, she usually did little more than lounge quietly at the kitchen table. They hardly spoke one another and when they did they usually argued about whether or not Grandma Mei was "filling Inori's head with nonsense." Inori scoffed.
Her mom had never been able to see spirits like her grandmother. Jun had been raised solely by Mei, but she'd always thought her mother was insane and grew to hate the temple. When Jun was old enough, she moved as far away as she could and met Inori's dad. He was a foreigner and they never married, but one day he disappeared when Inori was five years old.
At first people thought he'd just ditched Jun and left her alone with their child, but an investigation lead to a whole lot of blood and no body. After that Jun grew distant. She moved back close to her mother to help care for the old temple, but was never actually around enough to actually do any of the work herself.
Inori balled her hands into fists and toed her shoes off by the door. "How long are you going to be here this time?" she asked. She moved past her mother towards the kitchen sink and stood up on the tips of her toes to grab a cup from the cabinet before turning the kettle on.
"Two weeks at the most," her mother replied absently, shuffling papers and transferring a freshly lit cigarette clasped between her teeth to her right hand. She barely spared Inori more than a glance. "You know I've been transferred farther out... it's probably only temporary."
Inori's hands shook as she turned on the burner, but she said nothing. She bit her tongue in a desperate effort to remain silent. Finished at the stove, she walked sedately past the kitchen table where her mother sat and turned the corner to head down the hallway towards the bathroom. She shut the door being very careful not to slam it and locked herself inside.
Her breathing grew erratic the moment the door shut, but she refused to shed a tear. She'd cried enough for the both of them in the past. The grip she held on the edge of the sink kept her standing and she blindly turned the knobs to get a stream of water flowing.
"Aw, look at you..." said a voice, familiar and raspy. It was acidic in nature. Inori's blood grew even colder in her veins as the color slowly drain from the world around her. "Do you wish your mommy was home more often?" The voice cooed "Do you wish she cared more about you than her job and your poor, poor, daddy?"
The wretched voice broke into peals of laughter at its own words amidst Inori's muffled pleas for it to stop. She looked in the mirror and her knees almost gave out. It was her own reflection talking. It stared back at her with pale and sightless eyes.
It was all she could do not to scream as the figure shifted between something akin to her own and something much more hideous, laughing all the while.
"Don't you just wish you could die?" it sang, holding up its oozing, brutalized wrists.
It stuck its hands through the glass frame and began to drag itself through. Its laughter warped ominously as blood filled the sink and toilet, spilling out onto the floor. It soaked into Inori's uniform as she scrambled back and she could no longer contain her cries as she slid to the floor in tears. The doppelganger grabbed her ankle and dragged her backwards, smiling a gruesome smile.
Outside of Inori's mind, her body moved without her control. It shut the medicine cabinet and stared into the mirror above the sink with a toothy grin.
The toy looked harmless enough to Chiori. It had stayed where she'd placed it all night and all day for two days, but it hadn't moved. She was beginning to think that perhaps it wasn't the same one from the park.
Yuzu liked to dress the toy up every now and again, paste flowers to its head to varying degrees of hilarity, but the youngest twin seemed to notice Chiori's own fascination with it as well. She let Chiori borrow it whenever she pleased after she caught her with it.
At the moment, Chiori had the toy set up next to her penguin and fox plushies at the head of her bed. She'd checked the toy all over from the top of its soft, round head to the white felt claws on the ends of its feet and she could honestly say that there was nothing visibly odd about it. She just couldn't figure it out. Chiori decided that she would just have to keep an eye on it for a while.
Whenever she awoke the following morning she usually always found it right where she'd left it. It always seemed to have shifted from its original placement at some point during the night, but it was even odder when she found it lying next to her door. It was alive, it had to be, but how could she prove it without sounding crazy?
She compared it with a sketch she'd whipped up a few moments before just to make sure she'd gotten every detail right.
Her phone chirped faintly and she jumped, digging through her messenger bag seconds after. Keiji and Inori were outside and Chiori scrambled from the room. After the door shut, the plushtoy waited a few moments before it unfroze from its lifeless position amongst the other stuffed animals and sighed deeply.
"I am so screwed."
Chiori often dreamed of strange things. Monsters that stalked the cities and shadows that loomed over buildings were the norm. Their white faces were warped into semblances of smiles and bleached as white as bone, but many of them carried an air of sadness about them. Regardless of their melancholy, they terrified her.
They chased her and sometimes they even caught her, but in the end they were just in her dreams. At least, she hoped they were only in her dreams.
Sometimes her dreams were filled with leagues upon leagues of endless black and trails of shattered glass. It was a path that she felt compelled to walk until her feet bled. The worst part of it all was the ever-deepening sense of fear she felt as she walked the dark expanse. The glass crunch loudly beneath her bare feet with every step.
You let her in!
The voice assaulted her mind unexpectedly, screaming, echoing in her head. She'd felt it squirming at the edge of her senses for a while, restless and agitated, but it wasn't until now that she couldn't hold it at bay any longer. They were so angry and terrible, more than one unlike before. The voices of a woman and a child, but there was also something else. They bombarded Chiori and made her feel like her brain was being sloshed around in her head.
The feeling that often clung to her after a nightmare was a numbness that gradually dissipated with time. The dreams left her with a chill in her skin and in her blood that would not leave no matter how many blankets she piled on at night. Her teeth dug so far into the flesh of her lip that she often left blood on her pillow.
Why, why did you let her in?!
Let who in?
Chiori realized at some point that she was being shaken and managed to open her eyes, Keiji grasped both of her shoulders in an effort to keep her steady. He looked concerned and he stared into her eyes before glaring at a student who stared at them from the somewhere over her shoulder. Chiori realized that they were standing right outside of Mashiba Middle School and that the bell would be ringing very soon.
It hadn't been long since the Temple. Chiori forgot for a moment how she'd even gotten where she was and she glanced at her surroundings in confusion. She pushed her hair back from her face and grimaced at how sweaty it felt.
"Chiori, are you alright?" Keiji asked. He pressed a hand to her cheek and hissed at how cold she felt. "Damn, your skin is like ice." He placed both hands on Chiori's cheeks, patting at her skin and pressing a hand to her forehead. In all honesty, his hands weren't much warmer and Chiori rolled her eyes before trying to bat him away.
Keiji persisted and pressed a hand to her forehead, frowning all the while "We need to take you to the nurse."
At the word "nurse" Chiori seemed to come to her senses. She pulled away from Keiji's hands, batting at them and rubbing at her face and hair. She shook her head a few times, waving off his concern before noticing how far Inori was ahead of them.
"Fine," Keiji relented, "but if you pass out or something, I'm dragging your ass to the nurse and there is nothing that you will be able to say that will stop me." Satisfied that she understood, they both caught up with Inori and entered the building.
Chiori watched Inori as they walked to homeroom. Her own drowsiness was forgotten for the moment as she took in the usually chipper girl's appearance. Inori's green eyes looked dull. Keiji noticed it too, but to him Chiori didn't look any better.
The voice came again and Chiori flinched, rattling the inside of her head with the force of its anger. It had always been just one voice, but now it was different. It pitched high and low, jarring, hissing in her brain so horribly it made her teeth ache.
You know who.
The voice in her head made her temples throb and she shut her eyes to try and ward away the pain. She could feel her hair sticking to her clammy cheek and the world around her grew dark and devoid of life. The chatter of other kids dulled to a faint whisper and the light grew dim. But it's daytime, Chiori thought fleetingly as everything began to go dim.
Like it matters.
When Chiori opened her eyes again everything was seemingly back to normal. The walk to homeroom seemed like it was taking forever, but they eventually made it just in time. Chiori glanced at Inori and took in her friend's haggard appearance.
Inori didn't move to try and go to her seat until Chiori was already sitting, but Keiji caught the green-eyed girl's wrist before she could get too far. Inori turned to look at him, her mouth opening to probably tell him to let go, but the words died on her tongue before she could get them out.
The look he gave her was severe, his mouth stretched into a thin line, but he said nothing. He didn't have to. They both already knew what he wanted to know but she wouldn't answer him.
Their lesson was already starting and Inori needed to get to her seat. She began to tug her wrist away despite Keiji's tight grip and he caught her hand next before it finally slipped away from him. He watched her walk to her seat, but she didn't turn around or acknowledge him.
He turned to Chiori, hoping that perhaps she had answers for him, but Chiori was already drawing. He eventually decided to wait until lunch to start grilling them and turned his attention to the chalkboard despite how hard it was to focus on anything but his friends.
Chiori pulled out a much smaller sketchbook from her bag and scribbled furiously while the teacher called roll. She just barely heard her name as it was called and raised her hand without taking her eyes off the page. She was feeling sleepy, but she didn't like the darkness that she saw behind her eyelids.
Despite how hard she tried, her eyelids were getting heavier and it was getting harder and harder to keep them open. The teacher's voice sounded like it was getting farther and farther away and Chiori blinked rapidly before all the noise finally faded into nothing.
The world hung upside-down and her arms hung limp as she slid to the ground below her or perhaps the ceiling. It was as if she'd been dunked in ice-water and Chiori gasped sharply from the shock, her eyes flying open as her back arched painfully beneath her.
You shouldn't be here...
What are you talking about? Chiori pulled herself up from the ground onto shaky legs and looked around. Goose-pimples broke out along the skin of her arms and legs. Her uniform felt damp, slimy, and cold and she wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to warm up. It didn't help.
The sound of glass crunching beneath her right shoe made her freeze and she slowly looked down after pulling her foot away.
It's dangerous, you shouldn't be here, she's listening!
The voices were starting to sound angrier, as if that were even possible, and she flinched away from it, tightening the circle of her arms as a harsh breeze blew past her. What are you talking about? I don't understand!
Tears brimmed in her eyes, threatening to spill over as she took a step back from the direction that she thought the voices were coming from, but she couldn't be completely sure. Most of the time it sounded like it was coming from all around her.
She can see you!
The darkness began to crack and crumble around her before exploding in a rain of glass. Chiori dropped to her knees from the force of it all. As the darkness melted away, buildings began to take form and Chiori was able to lift her head. She squinting through the tears that cascaded down her face. She recognized the structures before her as the Yuzuhara temple though the wood and rice paper had all been faded with time.
Don't you understand?! The voices whispered.
She is already inside your head!
It was as if something had been triggered. The shoji doors opened abruptly and a pair of pale and ghostly arms reached out from the deep darkness within. The building appeared to warp. It looked as if the building had eaten a part of itself and the wood groaned loudly from the strain before hundreds of hands sprouted from the surface.
They crawled over the roofs and floors, dragging the darkness behind them, and Chiori could just barely make out the forms of people surfacing from the black sludge. The figures and faces gasped wetly before being dragged right back in. At the sight of them, Chiori choked on her own saliva as bile attempted to work its way up from her stomach. She sobbed and curled in on herself.
They were all screaming. They cried out with their arms raised towards the sky and towards her. A woman screamed shrilly at the center as her body jerked violently in multiple directions. Blood roared in Chiori's ears as the voices continue to scream, urging her to get away. They screamed and cried out for her to run. The mass of limbs was getting closer and the smell of rotting flesh thickened. Chiori tasted blood in the air.
The sharp tang of iron gave her back some of her sense and she noticed that her hands felt wet. She raised her palms to examine them and found then covered in red. Blood ran sluggishly down her fingers and onto the dead grass below her feet. It appeared to be flowing from her wrists.
It's too late for your friend, abandon her!
Chiori awoke with a jolt, a silent scream lodged in her throat. She was in the girl's bathroom, but she couldn't remember how she'd gotten there or how long she'd been there. The lights were too bright and she had to keep a hold on the edge of the porcelain sink just to keep from falling over. Her legs felt like gelatin and something warm and wet slithered down the skin of her palm, trickling into the sink.
Red.
She pulled the exacto-knife away from the flesh of her wrist as if it burned her, hissing at the pain of the deep cut in her skin. It couldn't have been more than an inch long, was bleeding and it hurt. The laughter started moments later and Chiori jerked her gaze up from the blood to the reflection in the mirror. Her breath caught.
In the mirror was the reflection of a dead woman. She laughed in the face of Chiori's horror and her broken neck snapped loudly as she tilted her head.
The white of the woman's flesh pulled taut and something wriggled beneath the surface. Chiori's gag reflex chose that moment to kick in. She heaved and emptied her stomach in the sink and the laughter seemed to die down. The dead woman looked at the girl trembling before her with milky-white eyes and smiled cruelly as the mirror around her pulled like a living thing.
"The things in your mind keep me from you for now." She said, her voice like pins in Chiori's brain. "Since I cannot have you here, I will satisfy my hunger with another. It is someone very close to you."
Her smile grew wider and displayed teeth much too sharp to be human. A scream sliced through the air. It came from the entrance of the bathroom and Chiori looked away from the mirror to stare at one of the other girls from class.
She had short brown hair and wide brown eyes that were wet with tears. Her glasses slid down her nose as she screamed again and called for help. Chiori let the blade that she was still clutching clatter into the sink, spattering little bits of red.
Panicking, Chiori made a run for the doorway and shoved the other girl out of the way as she went. Something horrible was about to happen. The dead woman began to laugh again and the voices began to yell frantically to Chiori's head.
It's the blood!
The hallway in which she ran suddenly collapsed in on itself. The sound of the voices intensified and a deep red oozed from the walls. It ate away the white and slithered into the ceiling which gave way to a red sky.
Chiori realized at that moment that she wasn't yet free of her mind. Everything began to melt and Chiori sank into the red up to her waist. She attempted to wade through, but it was getting deeper and a sharp pain in her wrists made her pause.
All of the blood...it was coming from her wrists.
"Chiori, what are you doing?!"
Chiori came awake in a violent flurry of movement, her hands slamming into the desk in front of her. The entirety of the class flinched at the sound. She panted wildly and Keiji took hold of her wrists as something metallic clattered to the floor. Something ran warm and wet down her fingers. Her sleeve was getting wet, but she didn't care. Inori wasn't at her desk anymore.
Chiori couldn't even hear Keiji as she spoke to her. Her body shook and she tore away from him with strength she did not even know she possessed before bolting from her chair. Her teacher called for her and students made noise, but she couldn't hear them.
She slid into the hallway and turned on her heel before bolting down the hall as if the hounds of hell were biting at her heels. Keiji called her name while students stood from their chairs in confusion. Chairs clattered as they fell over.
She bolted past classroom after classroom until a pair of arms suddenly encircled her waist and jerked her back. They nearly pulled her off her feet. A sharp pain ran through her head and Chiori struggled desperately, just barely making out the sound of Keiji's voice next to her ear. There were other people coming and she knew that they would try and stop her.
With a prayer that Keiji would forgive her later, after she had time to explain, Chiori drew her head forward and snapped it back. There was a crack followed by the sharp smell of copper and Chiori broke free.
She made a mad dash down the hall and continued towards the bathroom as if she'd never been stopped. Nauseous with fear and adrenaline thrumming in her veins, Chiori nearly smacked into the wall as a result of how fast she was running. She slid through the door only to freeze immediately once she was inside.
Inori stood in the middle of the bathroom with her back turned and her hand balled into a fist. Blood dripped sluggishly from between her fingers. Chiori stared at her as Inori turned to face her. She looked pallid and her pupils were so dilated only a thin circle of green remained.
Chiori took a step forward and Inori smiled eerily as she raised her hands up. Her hand remained clenched in a fist but Chiori could still see the glint of metal. Inori giggled and Chiori realized what was about to happen. She lunged for Inori but she wasn't fast enough. The razor-blade slashed through the flesh of Inori's right wrist and blood cascaded down onto the white floors of the girl's restroom.
Chiori tackled Inori to the ground and pinned Inori's wrists but the green-eyed girl was so strong. She had always been stronger than Chiori, even when they were small. Inori screamed beneath Chiori like something wild animal and red smearing the floor, seeping into the fabric of their uniforms. Chiori didn't know what to do.
Her tears were near blinding and she couldn't even yell for help as Inori's skin began to get paler. As the blood pooled around them, Inori began to weaken, her lips tinted faintly blue. Chiori was finally able to wrestle the blade from Inori's blood-slick hand, but slashing her own in the process.
She threw the blade across the bathroom as hard as she could before grabbing onto Inori's wrist and trying to staunch the flow. It did little good, but it was something. Frantically, Chiori sobbed as she tore a strip of cloth from her own shirt to wrap around Inori's wrist.
The sound of footsteps reached Chiori's ears and she turned her head just in time to see the same classmate from her nightmare come into the bathroom.
The other girl froze at the sight of them before she began to scream at the top of her lungs. Chiori flinched at the sound, but she was grateful. It was something that Chiori couldn't do despite how much she wanted to in that moment.