A/N: For the record, there are six chapters in this story.
Chapter 3
It was 9 AM when Maki awoke to the disagreeable sound of Kiyota snoring in his face. Opening his eyes, he realized that Kiyota had been clinging on to him like a pillow—for who knows how long.
He flung Kiyota's arm off him, and sat up.
"Good morning, Maki," said Fujima.
He and Hanagata were sitting on the couch, sipping a cup of tea. It looked like they had been up for a while, since they had already showered.
"How long have you been up, Fujima?" Maki rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.
"About two hours now," said Fujima.
"And you've been sitting there watching us sleep the whole time? That's a bit creepy."
Fujima laughed.
"Don't worry, we've only been here about ten minutes."
"Sendoh up yet?"
Fujima shook his head, and glanced down at Sendoh, who was asleep at his feet.
"So you just got up and made yourself tea?"
"Pretty much. I'm sure Sendoh wouldn't mind."
Sendoh stirred.
"Good morning, Sendoh," said Fujima affably.
"Yo."
Everyone was awake and refreshed by 10 AM. Except Rukawa, of course, who continued sleeping.
"You guys heading home now?" said Sendoh as they walked out into the foyer.
"Yeah," said Maki. "Wouldn't want to overstay our welcome."
Sendoh laughed.
"There's no danger of that. And it looks like the power is back on."
He flipped the switch to the foyer lights on and off to make sure.
"Cool," said Fujima, hand on the handle of the front door. "My house next week."
"Sure thing."
"See ya, Fujima."
They rest of them filed out of Sendoh's home not too long after.
Sendoh sighed, and returned to the living room to clean up and put everything back in its place.
Rukawa stirred.
"Good morning, Rukawa?"
It was a false alarm.
Sendoh put the blankets and pillows back into the storage closet upstairs, and swept popcorn off the floor and seats in the home theater, before turning his attention to the nuclear apocalypse in his backyard.
"Holy fish in a bucket," he said despondently.
Garbage bags of various colors and sizes lay gutted on the grass and among the flowers. Mud, water, and organic waste mixed together to form a gray-black sludge that oozed over every visible surface.
He grabbed a pusillanimous rake from the garden shed, and donned a pair of gardening gloves. For extra protection he tied a plastic bag over each of his shoes. Then he began working on the yard.
It was noon by the time Sendoh had raked away everything that didn't adhere inextricably to the grass and flowers. It was a clear day, and the sun heated the yard till vapors of water mixed with the odor of garbage began rising from the earth.
Sendoh retched.
"This will have to do," he said aloud to himself. "I'll let nature take care of the rest."
He replaced the rake and gloves in the shed, and put all the garbage he had managed to collect into the trashcan. Then he went inside, and took a long shower.
When he returned to the living room, he found that Rukawa had awoken. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, staring absently at pictures of Sendoh as a kid on the opposite wall.
"You're awake," said Sendoh.
Rukawa turned to look at Sendoh, and nodded.
"For how long?"
"I heard you swearing outside."
Sendoh smiled sheepishly.
Rukawa showered, ate a little something out of Sendoh's fridge, and played a little one-on-one with him in the neighborhood basketball court.
A quiet week passed.
That Friday, the group met up at a bus stop close to Fujima's house. Fujima had said that he would meet them at the bus stop, since his house was some distance off from the main road and a little difficult to find in the dark, if one did not know the way already.
It turned out that Fujima's house was in the middle of nowhere, and the walk from the bus stop took nearly half an hour. It was a little brick house in the middle of a dark wood where it seemed inconceivable that it ever got to see any sunlight.
"Charming place," said Maki drily.
Fujima smiled.
"It's quiet and inexpensive."
"How often do you wake up in the morning to find dead bodies in your yard?"
"Not too often," he said.
Maki wondered if Fujima was being ironic, or if he had really awoken, at least once, in the morning to find dead bodies in his yard.
"You live here alone?"
"I do," said Fujima. "My parents live way up north, and like I said, it's inexpensive here."
"You're brave," said Sendoh.
Hanagata put an arm around Fujima's shoulder, bending awkwardly in order to make up for the 19 cm difference in height.
"That's why he's my best friend, you see," he said. "Kenji Fujima is intrepid. I have often stayed over in the summer just so I could sleep outside in that hammock over there amidst nature's horrors."
"I would love to do that sometime!" said Kogure.
Hanagata shook his head.
"I have called eternal dibs on the hammock, and it's just not the same if you're not absolutely alone."
"Do you know how old the house is?" said Mitsui.
"I think my landlord said it was built in 1876," said Fujima.
Mitsui whistled. It echoed eerily around the dark wood.
"Cool!" said Kogure. "Let's go in!"
The walls inside were all exposed brick, giving the rooms and the corridor the appearance of a dungeon. Dim lights hung at intervals from the vaulted ceiling of the narrow corridor that extended straight from the front door to a large window on the other side of the house. The corridor was lined with doors to other rooms.
"Cozy," said Sendoh, looking at his reflection in a faded old mirror next to the front door.
"A lot of the furniture and upholstery came with the house." Fujima chuckled. "According to my landlord there isn't one square foot in this house where someone hasn't died, though I suspect that's a bit of an exaggeration."
Kiyota swallowed.
"I hope we're not sleeping over."
"I'm afraid you'll have to," said Fujima. "The bus you rode here was the last bus out of this place tonight. The next bus only gets here at 6 AM."
Sakuragi felt faint. He placed a hand on the wall for support.
"Careful, Sakuragi," said Hanagata. "Someone died over there once, leaning against the wall just like that."
Sakuragi jerked his hand away from the wall as if he had received an electric shock.
Everyone laughed. Except Rukawa, of course.
"So what're we watching tonight?" said Jin.
"I thought it would only be appropriate to watch When the Clock Strikes Two: the sequel to When the Clock Strikes One."
"Sounds like they didn't put much effort into coming up with a name," said Jin.
"When the Clock Strikes One: Part Two: The Three… something or other," said Mitsui with dramatic gestures.
Kiyota whimpered.
"I hate you guys," he said.
"Not as much as I hate them," said Sakuragi.
"Don't worry," said Kogure. "We'll watch a Disney movie next week."
Mitsui retched.
"I hope you're not serious."
Kogure winked at him in response, indicating that his intention was to smuggle in a ridiculously scary movie in a Disney DVD case.
"The TV's this way," said Fujima, opening one of the doors in the main corridor.
Fujima's TV hung on the wall in his bedroom. Mitsui, Sendoh, and Jin laid siege to the bed before anyone else could, Hanagata sat down in an old rocking chair in a corner of the room, and everyone else sat down on the floor.
"Ready?" said Fujima, putting the DVD inside the DVD player.
Fujima had turned out the lights, so the only source of illumination was the light from the TV. The brick walls made the room look like the inside of a furnace—or the vestibule to Hell.
When the Clock Strikes Two picked up where the first movie had left off. The little girl who had woken up at the end of the first movie with dead glassy eyes and rotting gums was named Anna Dean. She was seven years old, and her parents were awfully vexed by her peculiar behavior. Anna had no friends, never smiled except when she was inflicting pain on other creatures, and experienced frequent seizures in the middle of the night.
Her parents took her to a Catholic priest to have her exorcized, but an invisible force lifted the old priest off the ground as he was about to finish reading an apotropaic passage from the scriptures, and pinned him up against the ceiling, as if gravity had suddenly changed direction. Anna was sitting up in the bed, and grinning maniacally up at the priest, hurling imprecations at him with a blackened tongue in an unknown language. Her voice seemed magically processed to sound like multitudes of different voices speaking in concert in varying pitches. The priest's last thought was that Anna was an inversion of all that was good in the world. The old man was no match for such extraordinary evil. He died while still held up against the ceiling, and fell to the floor only after Anna had passed out from the exertion.
When she awoke it was as if she had never been possessed. She smiled up at her mother, whose heart melted at the sight of her daughter smiling with love for the first time. She made friends, had hobbies, and led a perfectly normal life after that. Until high school. She was taking a shortcut through a cemetery late one evening after volleyball practice, when she tripped over the root of a gnarly old tree, and fell across a freshly dug grave, managing with great difficulty to avoid falling in. As she got up, she read the epitaph on the headstone: "Anna Dean: May 9, 1980 to November 23, 1996. May her tormented soul rest in peace." She gasped, for it was November 23, 1996 that day. An unnaturally strong wind caused her to lose balance, and fall straight into the grave. A storm of dried leaves and twigs was sucked into the grave after her, filling it up completely. A flash of lightning, and a slab of solid rock appeared over the grave, sealing Anna within forever. The headstone and the epitaph were gone. The grave was unmarked.
The screen went black. The words "November 23, 2007" appeared on the screen in wispy letters, like smoke curling into rings.
Anna's grave was cracked and overgrown. It was the eleventh anniversary of her death. Cracks began to appear in the grave. Then the tombstone shattered, and a cadaverous arm shot out of the earth, followed by another arm. The being in the grave hoisted itself out of the earth with creaky motions, face obscured entirely by a mass of long black hair. A breeze caused the hair to part slightly, revealing a single eye bulging out of its socket, black and glassy. The other socket was empty. The being swayed on the spot after it had climbed out of the grave. A flash of lightning; then Anna Dean was transformed into her living self, complete with the clothes she had been in when she had stumbled into her own grave. Anna smiled into the camera, transitioning into the next scene without easing up on the smile. She was on the arm of a guileless high school boy. They were on their way to prom. The nightclub they were going to was dark, which meant that the boy's death would not be discovered till the end of the evening, when Anna would be long gone, seeking out other men to kill. The movie ended with Anna standing over a man on his bed with a long knife. The shadow on the wall behind her was that of her ghost woman form.
Rukawa had fallen asleep over an hour ago. Sakuragi and Kiyota were hugging their knees and whimpering on the floor at the foot of the bed. Kogure was grinning from ear to ear, and Hanagata was so moved that he stood up and applauded. Jin smiled weakly. Maki chewed on the end of his shirt collar, and Sendoh was massaging the back of his head, since the last jump scare had caused him to start, and hit his head hard against the steel headboard of Fujima's bed.
"There's a third movie in this series, if I'm not mistaken," said Kogure.
Hanagata nodded.
"It's called When the Clock Strikes Three, predictably enough. I'll try renting it next week."
Rukawa awoke when Fujima turned off the TV, and turned the lights back on.
"I liked this better than Part One," said Mitsui. "This one had a more consistent storyline, and didn't flit from one moderately scary episode to another."
"I thought this was scarier than the first movie," said Jin.
"I think a lot of people find the idea of demonic possession scarier than run-of-the-mill ghosts and ghouls in the attic," said Maki.
"I wonder what Part Three is going to be like," said Kogure. "I wonder if I can email the creators my own idea for a movie."
Maki scowled in mock displeasure.
"If they had any sense, they would pretend they never received it."
Mitsui grinned.
"Knowing you, Kogure, it would probably be filled with lame jokes and anticlimaxes."
He was still upset with Kogure for last week's practical joke at Sendoh's house.
Fujima had been awfully silent the whole time. He looked a bit green.
"What's the matter, Fujima?" said Maki. "I thought you liked scary movies."
"Don't get me wrong," said Fujima, swallowing. "I love scary movies. But I can't stand gruesome stuff like intestines spilling out and that kind of thing. That scene with the mailman made me want to throw up."
"I think a bit of fresh air will do us all some good," said Hanagata. "Let's go outside, and take a walk."
"Let's not," said Sakuragi.
"I'm not going anywhere," said Kiyota.
"What did I tell you guys last week about strength in numbers?" said Maki.
Once again Sakuragi and Kiyota found themselves inveigled into doing something they didn't want to do.
They went outside, and took in the cool evening air. The next house was half a mile away, so there wasn't any light save for the dark blue glow of the night. A strong wind rustled up some leaves on the dirt path that wound around Fujima's house and disappeared between the trees in the distance. A stray black cat darted across the path at one point, startling everyone except Rukawa, who was fond of cats. A church bell chimed in the distance. It was midnight.
"I actually don't think we should go too far," said Maki, who was beginning to have misgivings about wandering into total darkness in the middle of nowhere.
They made their way back to Fujima's house after walking a short distance between the trees.
"There are three bedrooms. We're going to have to sleep two persons per bed, I'm afraid. I'm going to lay out a spare mattress in the living room. It's twin-size, unfortunately, so it's only big enough for one person. There are two couches and a rug. We're probably going to have to draw lots to see who sleeps on the rug."
"No need for that," said Maki. "I can sleep on the rug."
"Nyahahahahaha!" said Sakuragi. "Looks like you really are an old man."
A vein throbbed in Maki's temple.
"Don't test me," said Maki. "Unless you want to spend the night alone in a closet."
Sakuragi began apologizing profusely.
"Please don't put me in a closet."
"Hanagata and I will sleep in my room. Sorry, Toru, but it's too cold outside to sleep in the hammock."
Mitsui and Kogure paired off, and took one of the guest bedrooms. Jin and Sendoh took the other.
Maki regretted having volunteered to sleep on the rug when he realized that he would end up in the same room as Sakuragi and Kiyota. He ultimately declared in a dangerous tone that Rukawa should get the mattress, so that Sakuragi and Kiyota wouldn't have to fight over it.
Rukawa's regard for Maki grew.
Fujima's house was beautiful in the morning. The red brick walls harmonized perfectly with the surrounding verdure, and there was a greater variety of birdsongs than in the middle of the city.
"I now see why you like this place so much," said Maki, waving briefly to Fujima as he and the rest of the group departed down the dirt path toward the bus stop.
Thursday rolled around sooner than anyone realized, and the group received a note from Hanagata at each of their schools.
Dear guys,
Tomorrow we won't be watching a movie at my place. Fujima and I have got an even better idea. See you at my house at 6 PM sharp. Bring flashlights.
Hanagata.
Fujima reached Hanagata's house at 4 PM.
"Is everything ready, Toru?" he said when Hanagata opened the door to let him in.
"Almost. There are a few rough edges that I need to smooth out."
"Good." Fujima grinned. "I can't wait."
Most of the group arrived before six, except Rukawa, who stumbled onto Hanagata's doorstep at 6:10, having overslept.
"Everyone's here," said Sendoh. "What was it you had planned, Hanagata? And why did you ask us here so early?"
"I asked you to be here at 6 PM sharp, because we're going to this place outside the city."
"Back to Fujima's house, you mean?" said Mitsui.
Fujima frowned.
"My house is technically not outside the city. I can show it to you on a map if you like."
"We're not going to Fujima's house," said Hanagata. "All I'm going to tell you know is that it's like a campout. I have an uncle who works with historical buildings. He's the one who made this possible."
They headed down to the train station, and got off at a bare platform far outside the city limits. On the other side of the platform was an old estate with twelve-foot iron gates at its entrance.
Hanagata took out a large key from his pocket, and unlocked the gates, and followed a stone path through the garden up to the old red mansion at the center of the estate. Ivy obscured the walls of the first floor, and the large windows were dark and unwelcoming. Nevertheless it looked like the Tourism Department had been punctilious in the upkeep of the estate.
"What is this place?" said Jin.
"You'll see," said Fujima. He could hardly contain his excitement.
Hanagata pulled out a second key from his pocket, and unlocked the front door. The door swung open of its own accord.
They stepped into the building, wrinkling their noses against the smell of damp earth and age.
"This building has no power supply, so we're going to need our flashlights. Did everyone bring a flashlight like I'd asked?"
All except Rukawa had.
"Well, I suppose it wouldn't make a whole lot of difference to you anyway," said Hanagata drily.
Fujima shut the door, and locked it.
"Welcome to the Mackenzie Estate," said Hanagata. "William Mackenzie was born in 1732. That's also the year George Washington was born, by the way. He came to Japan in 1758. He was a merchant from England, and he wanted to use Japan as a trading port for opium smuggled in through China or some such thing. He was one of the richest people living here at the time, and was well respected by all. He died in 1774, leaving this massive estate to his four children. This mansion was used as a medical facility for injured soldiers during the Second World War, and is also known as the House of Death."
Shivers ran down everyone's spine as they became aware of the spookiness and historical significance of house.
"We'll be spending the night here. My uncle knows a guy in the Tourism Department who owes him a favor."
Sakuragi gasped.
"Spending the night? How could you expect me to do something as stupid as that?"
"Fucking fuck no," said Kiyota. "There is no fucking way I'm spending the night in this rundown old building."
"Sh," said Hanagata ominously. "You don't want to piss off the spirits."
Kiyota was silenced.
"Anyhow," Hanagata went on. "Follow me."
He led them through the corridor into a large central hall, and pointed his flashlight at a portrait that hung on the wall over an ornate wooden table.
"This is William Mackenzie."
The man in the portrait looked like he could have been any old Englishman. He wore a traditional eighteenth-century wig over his round face, and had a monocle over one of his beady little eyes. Hanagata then shined his flashlight on the table, where a long sword lay in an ornate gold scabbard that had turned black with age and was dented all over.
"Are there any ghosts around here?" said Kogure. "Please tell me there are ghosts around here."
"They say that at night you can hear footsteps in the attic. Your best bet would be sleep on the fourth floor tonight, if you want to catch a glimpse of whatever it is." Hanagata laughed.
"I wanna go home!" Kiyota wailed.
So far the whole thing seemed pretty exciting to all except Kiyota and Sakuragi. Kogure was taking pictures of anything that looked like it might have a spirit trapped inside it, and Rukawa and Mitsui were gazing keenly up at the faded tapestries draped over the walls. Maki was squinting up at the high ceiling, which was made entirely of wood, and carved ornately so as to resemble the ceiling of a cathedral.
"Oh, there's something else I forgot to tell you about this house," said Hanagata. There was a mischievous glint in his eye.
tbc.