Chapter 6
Kiyota was tense throughout the train ride to the Mackenzie Estate. It had been warm and sunny not an hour ago, but clouds had suddenly gathered in the sky, as if to herald unfortunate things. Kiyota was not sure he could handle another paranormal episode.
"Do you have any idea where you might have lost your keys?" said Sendoh as the train pulled into the stark old station outside the estate.
Kiyota, Sendoh, and Rukawa were the only passengers in the car this time, and there was not a soul on the platform when they got off the train. It was a windy afternoon, and the tall trees shielding the mansion from the eyes of outsiders swayed noisily, showering the earth below with dried leaves.
"I have no idea," said Kiyota, swallowing as he paused at the gates, and looked up at the mansion. Its brick-red edifice, blackened by age and rain, looked like something that had risen out of the Earth's mantle of its own accord. That large window on the third floor was probably the one he had stood in front of early that morning—where he had turned around to see…
Kiyota shook his head. He had to stop thinking about that experience, or he would never go back to normal. At any rate, a ghost or demon or whatever would have to be pretty fucking stupid to try anything funny in broad daylight.
He flung wide the gates with relative intrepidity, surprising Sendoh, and even Rukawa.
"O-okay then," said Sendoh. "Let's do this."
The entrance hall of the mansion looked a lot bigger than when they had been part of a larger group, and their voices seemed to echo off the walls and high ceiling with a greater hollowness than before.
"Huh?"
Sendoh's eyes shot up to the second floor at the top of the grand staircase, where he could have sworn he saw a woman leaning over the balustrade, calmly surveying their unwelcome progress through the entrance hall. But when he looked up, there was nobody there.
"Must be a trick of the light," he said to himself. "Kiyota? Where are you going? I thought we were heading upstairs."
Kiyota had walked ahead of them, past the staircase, and into the hall that enshrined William Mackenzie's bewigged portraiture.
Sendoh followed him in long strides, and found Kiyota standing right under the portrait, staring down at the old sword in its dented old scabbard. Before he could comprehend what was going on, Kiyota lifted the sword off the console table—which could not have been an easy thing to do, given its size—unsheathed it noisily, and slashed William Mackenzie's portrait across the middle. A samurai couldn't have given that hapless Englishman a more professional dissection.
"Kiyota, what are you doing?" Sendoh gasped, not sure if he should approach someone who was holding a five-foot broadsword in one hand, and apparently knew how to use it.
Then Kiyota suddenly froze. The sword fell out of his hand, and landed noisily on the stone floor, as if he had suddenly lost the ability to wield it. He turned around, and looked at Sendoh. His eyes were wide, and he looked pale—as if all the blood had drained out of his face.
"What… what happened?"
Sendoh's eyes were wide with shock. Even Rukawa, who normally did not condescend to acknowledge things that went on around him, was looking at Kiyota with the sort of look on his face that he normally reserved for basketball players who had surpassed his expectations.
Kiyota turned around to look at William Mackenzie's portrait, and gasped when he saw the gash in the canvas.
"How did this happen?"
He looked down at the sword at his feet.
"Did I… do that?"
Sendoh nodded slowly.
"Um," he said at length. "We've got to get you out of here."
"But my keys—"
"We'll grab them, and get the fuck out of here. Something's not right about this place."
"And now it looks like you disrespected McDonald."
"It's Mackenzie, Rukawa."
"H'm?"
They went out into the entrance hall with an air of purpose, and had scarcely begun ascending the marble grand staircase, when a door swung shut somewhere above them, ringing out in the atrium like a gunshot.
"What the actual fuck?"
Then another door. Then another. At least a dozen doors on the second floor had swung shut in this manner by the time the three of them reached the top of the grand staircase. The doors to all the bedrooms were shut as before, so whatever possessed the spirits to make their presence known seemed to have passed for now.
"It might have just been the wind," said Sendoh.
Then something caught his eye.
"That window," he said sharply, looking straight down the second-floor corridor at the window at the other end. "The curtain's gone."
The white curtain that had billowed peacefully over the window the previous night was no longer there.
"Maybe they decided that the place needed a makeover?" he said with a weak laugh.
"Not funny," said Kiyota. "Now let's go find my keys."
"I wonder if there's some kind of special provision in the spirit world that lets them show up at odd hours like this," Sendoh said to Rukawa as they ascended a second staircase to the third floor.
Rukawa shrugged.
Kiyota, as before, walked ahead of them with surprising energy. Multiple encounters with things not of this world seemed to have given him a keen insight into the habits of Our Undead Brethren, and he seemed to know exactly what to do.
"We're here," said Kiyota, stopping at the doorway to Mackenzie's bedroom, unwilling to step inside.
"Are we going in?"
Sendoh attempted to push past Kiyota into the bedroom, but Kiyota blocked the doorway with his arm.
"Something doesn't feel right," he said. "I don't think we should go in."
"But your keys," Sendoh protested. "I can see them on the rug over there."
"I do, too," said Kiyota gravely. "But something tells me we should not go in there."
"You should tell them that we're on a schedule here," Sendoh persisted. "We mean no harm. We're just here to grab a miserable set of keys, and then we'll be off. For good."
"Tch," said Kiyota with contempt. "I don't get to speak to whatever it is that's trying to communicate with me. I just listen."
A crash.
The thread holding Mackenzie's second portrait up on the wall had apparently snapped, and the portrait had fallen straight down onto the headboard of the four-poster bed underneath. It swung slowly around its base, and fell facedown with a soft thud onto the bed.
"Okay," said Sendoh. "That was weird. So weird, in fact, that I'm inclined to believe that this has all just been a string of crazy coincidences. I mean, I thought ghosts were supposed to be subtler than that."
"Apparently not," said Rukawa simply. "Let's get the keys, and leave."
Kiyota held his breath for a few moments.
"Okay," he said finally, releasing his breath. "I think it's safe to go in now."
He walked into the bedroom, and bent down to pick up the keys.
"There, see," said Sendoh. "That wasn't so bad. Now let's get the fuck out of here."
"Wait," said Kiyota. He strode up to the bed, and without warning punched a hole through the back of William Mackenzie's portrait.
"Sometimes I think I don't really know you," said Sendoh as they walked out of the bedroom.
To their relief, they managed to make it out of the mansion in one piece. The next train wouldn't be here for twenty minutes, so they sat down on a concrete bench on one end of the platform.
"Do you think it was a ghost?" said Sendoh, the spikes in hair swaying in the wind like the great trees above.
"I don't know." Kiyota frowned. "It sure as hell felt like it."
"Maybe it's just the stress of being in a place like this," said Sendoh. "A place that has seen much violence and many tragedies over the ages. Hanagata's stories no doubt primed you for such experiences, and your imagination took over from there."
"I don't know," Kiyota repeated. Earlier today he was prepared to sock Hanagata in the face for doubting him when he had insisted that he had seen a ghost. Now he wasn't sure that he hadn't simply been hallucinating, or hadn't simply let his imagination get the better of him when he came into the grip of a real but mundane bout of illness. "This place is fucked up."
"I am inclined to agree," said Sendoh. "I don't know what Hanagata wanted to prove by bringing us here. I would much rather have spent the evening at his house, watching When the Clock Strikes Three, or even a romantic comedy."
The train arrived before long, and they spent a quiet hour on board, before they arrived at Ryonan Station.
"Hey look, it's Hanagata," said Sendoh, glancing out the window.
All three of them disembarked.
"I was hoping you'd be on this train," said Hanagata. "How did it go? Did you find your keys?"
Kiyota nodded, and handed the keys to the Mackenzie Estate back to Hanagata.
"I think we forgot to lock the house, though," said Sendoh sheepishly.
"W-what?" Hanagata's jaw dropped. "Now I'll have to go back again, and lock the place up."
"How did your interview go?"
Hanagata sighed in exasperation.
"They picked Maki over Fujima, and kind of laughed me out of the room."
"Harsh."
"Yes," said Hanagata darkly, thrusting his hands, with the keys, into his pockets.
Then Sendoh related to him their weird experience from earlier.
"W-what?" said Hangata, jaw dropping all over again. "You're saying both portraits are ruined?"
He covered his face with his hands, and groaned.
"My uncle's going to kill me, and even if he doesn't, I'm pretty sure the Tourism Department is going to hand me a lifelong ban for this."
"It was a shithole anyway," said Sendoh cheerfully.
"Okay, okay," said Hanagata, composing himself with some effort as they walked down toward the park with the basketball court. "I can get some tape, a ball of thread, and… Who am I kidding? I'm never going to be able to fix this."
"If you ask me," said Kiyota. "I think the old geezer was asking for it."
"How do you mean?" said Hanagata when he realized that Kiyota wasn't attempting to be a smartass.
"Well," Kiyota began. "Suppose I accept that ghosts are real—and I know I may have said some things in the past about supernatural experiences—but suppose I accept that ghosts are real, and suppose I was the ghost of William Mackenzie. Now I'm lying there on my deathbed, surrounded by my four treacherous children, who conspired to kill me. And I tell them, 'I'm never going to forgive your good-for-nothing asses. I'm going to linger on in this place after I die, and make you regret doing this to me.' Then I die, and I exact revenge on my children, kill a few other people on the side to let everyone know that I'm not kidding around—and then what? I realize that sticking around after I've died was a pretty fucking stupid thing to do. I'm stuck in this shitty old house that's crumbling all around me, while my wife and everyone I've ever known and loved are having a blast in the afterlife. I want to be in the afterlife, too. So I wait until a group of dumb fucking high school basketball players decides to spend the night in my house, steal the keys out one of their pockets, and then force them to come back. Then I make the one whose keys I stole destroy both my portraits, which are presumably the only things tying me down to this world—not to mention shitty works of art—and then I float up to the afterlife, a happy man."
A minute of silence.
"Wow, Kiyota," said Hanagata. He was genuinely impressed. "I am genuinely impressed. William Mackenzie must have been really fond of those portraits, if they were what was preventing his passage into the afterlife."
Kiyota shrugged.
"It's just an idea."
They entered the park. The sound of a basketball being bounced and the squeak of basketball shoes issued from the direction of the basketball court.
"Tch," said Rukawa in disappointment. "Looks like someone's already there."
When the court came into view, they saw that it was only Mitsui and Sakuragi playing one-on-one (or at least attempting to, since Mitsui was running rings around the redhead), while the rest of the group watched from the side.
"Toru," Fujima called out cheerfully when he saw his teammate walk in through the chain-link gate on the other side of the court. "And Sendoh and Kiyota and Rukawa."
Fujima was conspicuously standing some distance apart from Maki.
"Where's Kogure?" said Sendoh.
"He's still studying," said Mitsui, stealing the ball from Sakuragi with minimal effort, and scoring a layup shot.
Sakuragi let out a cry of consternation.
Hanagata then proceeded to tell the rest of the group of the events at the estate.
Sakuragi stopped dribbling, and let the ball roll off to the side of the court, where Rukawa promptly picked it up, and commenced playing one-on-one with Sendoh.
"You mean the wild monkey came face-to-face with a ghost, and it didn't eat him?"
Sakuragi was beginning to have serious doubts whether the world was truly a just place.
"You know what?" said Kiyota suddenly. "I don't really think I'm scared of ghosts anymore."
"Oh?" said Hanagata, a smile playing on his lips.
"I think I want to give When the Clock Strikes One a second chance," Kiyota went on. "After having paranormal experiences in real life, what could a movie possibly do to me?"
Maki ruffled his hair.
"Spoken like a true member of the Kainan basketball team."
Mitsui shook his head.
"Ghosts aren't real," he muttered.
Sakuragi clenched his teeth. He would be damned, if he let the wild monkey make him look stupid.
"Oh yeah? I was never scared." He laughed loudly. "I was only playing along, because you were the only one who looked like he was going to wet his pants whenever we watched a movie. The Genius felt sorry for you, that's all."
Kiyota ground his teeth.
"Oh yeah? Why don't you prove it, then? Why don't we watch When the Clock Strikes Three tonight, and see how fearless you are?"
"That's actually not a bad idea," said Hanagata. "It's only Saturday, after all. We can watch When the Clock Strikes Three at my place tonight."
"I'll text Kogure, and ask him to rent the DVD," said Mitsui, pulling out his cell phone.
It was 7 PM by the time they reached Hanagata's house. Kogure was standing outside.
"I found it," he said, holding up the DVD triumphantly.
When the Clock Strikes Three was the final installment in the series. It picked up where the previous movie left off. Anna Dean was bound to a large wooden cross with leather belts, and was wheeled into an old cemetery of some sort. A ring of people in black-hooded robes stood around a stone shrine, holding candles, and muttering incantations under their breaths.
Anna began howling, and struggled to break free of her bonds. Her face was contorted into an ugly grimace, and she bared her teeth at the people wheeling her in, including her parents, who stood solemnly on either side of her, not looking up at their daughter's face. They were a lot older than they had been in the previous movie, since they had aged like normal humans.
One of the dark-hooded people turned around.
"Bring the girl to the center," he said in an old man's voice, and the hooded people parted so that Anna could be wheeled into the center. She was positioned right in front of the shrine, which seemed give off low tremors in response to Anna's proximity, rumbling in the night with a hollow sound that attempted to undercut the hooded people's chants.
"This shrine is a relic that keeps alive the being that has taken over Anna Dean's physical body," the old man said to the parents. "Destroying it will release the being from its earthly bonds, and allow it to find repose in the afterlife."
Then the old man joined his brethren. The chants, Anna's howls, and the rumbling of the shrine all grew louder in concert. Then the shrine began to give off a dim red glow, as if the stone were being heated from underneath by a fire.
"Diedrich," said the old man to the hooded person to his left. "Bring forth the hammer."
The man named Diedrich reached for a large sledgehammer behind him. Its head was made of black metal, and its body was carved with various arcane symbols.
"Destroy the shrine."
Diedrich struck the shrine on its side with the sledgehammer, causing sparks to fly. Anna began howling, blood streaming down her face from her eyes like tears. The chants of the hooded people shot up to a fever pitch as Diedrich struck the shrine again. Cracks appeared in the stone, glowing white-hot in the night. A third strike, and the stone broke in half, and toppled over. A shadowy figure rose from Anna's body, taking the form of the zombie hag from the two previous movies, and disappeared into the night with a wistful sigh.
The chants ceased. Anna stopped howling, and lay unconscious on the cross.
The old man lowered his hood, and smiled at the parents.
"Your daughter has been returned to you."
Anna's parents clasped each other's hands, and wept.
The final scene showed Anna and her family a couple of years later. Anna's parents sat on a couch, and looked lovingly down at their daughter, who was playing on the floor with her one-year-old son. Life was back to normal for them, even if it took a while to get there.
"That was actually a bit tame compared to the first two," said Maki. "I was expecting the ghost to fight back, and ruin the ritual."
"It was interesting to note the similarities to Kiyota's experience," said Hanagata. "William Mackenzie's two portraits were like the stone shrine in the movie, and destroying them allowed him to pass peacefully into the afterlife. Kiyota, it appears your theory has been confirmed."
Mitsui snorted.
"Yeah, the same way Shrek confirms that donkeys can talk."
Hanagata ignored him.
"Where's Sakruagi?" said Fujima.
"He left halfway into the movie," said Mitsui with a laugh.
"What a pussy," said Kiyota with a smirk.
"My place next week," said Kogure as they headed out.
"What're you thinking of watching?" said Fujima.
"I'm thinking of getting that Disney movie I talked about. Maybe Pocahontas."
"No, seriously," said Mitsui. Then his smile died. "You're serious?"
"Yeah," said Kogure. "I just feel like watching something a little different after that spate of horror movies."
"We're going to have to tie you up in a corner, then," said Maki.
Rukawa coughed softly behind Sendoh.
"What about our one-on-one?"
"Now? It's almost eleven."
Sendoh saw that Rukawa didn't care.
"Okay then," he said with a sigh, and departed with Rukawa to play basketball by moonlight.
And everyone else went his own separate way, to deal with worldly responsibilities for another week.
end.
A/N: This is the end. Hopefully it wasn't too over-the-top or too underwhelming.
This chapter was written entirely from scratch, because there was never really anything supernatural in the original story. (Anticlimactic, I know.) Somehow I never could (still can't) write supernatural things convincingly.
I have two other previously published Horror/Humor fics: Nights at Kainan and An Unforgettable Vacation, which I will consider editing and re-uploading, if people want me to, even though they seriously suck.