***Mion in the Dungeon***
The main entrance to the Sonozaki underground torture chamber was a steel double door located outside the house among a small patch of forest cover. It brought one down some stairs, through a heavy wooden door, and directly into the honden (holy chamber) of the so-called "shrine." This was the stone room where I was tortured, while Oryo and my parents looked on complacently from the low platform on the right.
From that room, a single simple door supposedly led into the offertory chamber. However, in reality, it led to the underground dungeon. The earthen floor and walls made the place look like a giant burrow. It was a huge, round chamber with two levels. On each level were prison cells, dug into the hard ground and sealed with iron barred gates. (The honden room was on the first level.)
A shortcut to the dungeon could be found by entering the door behind the household shrine in Oryo's bedroom. It opened to a passage that traveled smoothly downhill. It led to another door opening into the dungeon room's second level. I knew all this now after I had been denailed in the underground chamber. As Haruka continued to possess me, we dragged Mion down to the dungeon.
We tossed my sister into one of the cells. Her body seemed heavy, and for the first time I noticed she was an inch taller than me and several muscly pounds heavier. Still, she had a great feminine form, her chest was slightly bigger than mine, and she had that overly sincere personality that made her friends with everyone. In short, Mion was a better woman than me. This upset Haruka. She stripped Mion down to a single white slip before feeling satisfied. There. Now the heiress looked no better than a w***e in a drunken stupor.
As we closed and locked the heavy iron door to the cell, Mion started regaining consciousness. At the same time, I started to revert to Mari. The switch might have happened because Haruka was still weak from being suppressed for so long. As for Mion, she seemed to have lost the menacing voice and aura she previously possessed. Groggily, she asked what was going on. She must have known, though, as Mari turned the key in the lock and smiled smugly at her.
"What is it, Mion? You never thought that you might end up being the one locked up?"
She narrowed her eyes seriously. "I order you, as heir to the master of the Sonozaki house: release me."
Mari could tell Mion was scared. Even when she tried to look at me sternly, she looked rather pitiful. As the family head, I thought, she should try to sound a little more arrogant. Of course, even if she put the necessary effort into intimidating Mari, it would only make her look ridiculous. She was the one trapped in a cell. Yes, at last Mari had Mion at her mercy. Now was as good a time as any to start our mad detective game. Mari wanted to interrogate Mion. She wasn't ready to torture her, but she wanted to rub her powerlessness in her face. Plus, Mari genuinely wanted answers.
"Stuffing Miss Takano into a drum and burning it was pretty straightforward," Mari began. "You wanted to make her feel a lot of pain and terror. It's sort of the same with Mr. Tomitake's freak death. How did you pull that off? Is there some drug that made him tear out his throat? Or perhaps you have a mechanism of torture that makes the death look like suicide."
"How the hell am I supposed to know?" Mion asked snappishly.
"It won't do any good to be defiant," Mari warned her through vicious, watchful eyes. "After going this far, I'm not going to back off easily. So let me ask you. The series of mysterious deaths in Hinamizawa known as the Curse of Oyashiro… is it a way for the Three Great Families to regain power in the village, following the dam wars?"
Mion broke eye contact and looked to her left. "I think so," she muttered.
"Why is the heir to the family being so vague about it?"
"The heir is nothing more than Grandma's public representative."
"Oh," Mari concluded coolly, "so the old Hag decides who is going to be cursed. Is that right?"
"Grandma does all the nasty stuff on her own," Mion said noncommittally. She sat on her knees in the dungeon, now looking more resigned than scared. "I just deal with public matters. I think Oryo probably has another agent who takes care of the darker tasks."
"But Takano and Tomitake had nothing to do with the dam wars," Mari reasoned. "Why curse them? Could it be, perhaps, because they broke into the ritual tool shed?"
Sitting upright abruptly, Mion demanded, "They broke into the tool shrine?!"
"Oh? I thought you knew."
Perhaps Mion truthfully had very little part in the killings, Mari and I considered. Perhaps my sister was never told why someone would be chosen as a victim. Still, she had already stated earlier than Takano and Tomitake deserved death because they invited the wrath of Oyashiro. In addition, what Mion said next cast her innocence into doubt even more. She breathlessly asserted that "of course they would be cursed" if they had really broken into the tool shed. Mari narrowed her eyes and glared coldly.
"But you know, Mion, this still doesn't add up. The rule is that each year, someone dies and someone else disappears as a sacrifice. After the foreman of the dam got cut up, nobody ever found his assistant. When the Hojo couple died, the wife's body was never found. When Priest Furude died the next year, his wife supposedly drowned herself, but again, there was no body. Then last year, Satoshi's Aunt was beaten to death and Satoshi went 'missing.' This year, two dead bodies were found. Why?"
It looked as though Mion had already thought about this and didn't want to admit the probable explanation. "I don't know for sure," she said in a hushed voice. "But… it could be that four people broke into the shrine. Two were killed, so maybe two more were Spirited Away by the Demon."
Ah, so she meant me and Keiichi would go next, just as I had feared. Mari turned and left Mion without another word. Although she clearly believed that the "curse" was deserved, and openly supported Oryo, Mion seemed ignorant of the actual process of choosing and killing a victim. The person to interrogate, next, then, would be Oryo. Haruka had moved her to the stone chamber in the underground torture chambers. She was slumped over in her wheelchair under the single bright lightbulb of the interrogation room. It was the same room in which I had been forced to tear out my fingernails a year before.
Mari felt herself slipping away, as Haruka selfishly tried to retake control. Since I had suppressed Haruka for so many years, it was no wonder she came back demanding to take over my body. I, as Shion, remained vaguely conscious. I watched myself, as Haruka, from afar. We were aware of a sense of twisted excitement almost comparable to arousal. We wanted to torment the hag. We might not kill her, but we intended to cause her great pain. Haruka kicked the old lady's wheelchair.
***Death of Oryo Sonozaki***
"Old Hag," we sang with dripping sarcasm. "Won't you kindly wake up for us, please?"
When the small old woman did not respond, we laughed. "Come on. Don't tell me you think you can get through this by pretending to be asleep. Mion already woke from the Taser and so should you."
We grabbed Oryo by her coarse, grey bun, and pulled her head backward to see her face. It looked like the face of a goblin. The hair not secured by her bun fell in dirty, scraggly strands around her ears. Her slightly open mouth was eerily toothless, her large nose reminded me of an ogre, and wrinkles covered every inch of her leathery face. But something felt "off." Oryo's eyes were partly open, revealing some white, but she clearly couldn't see or interact with her environment. Did the Taser affect her differently because she was so old? Could she already be…?
Haruka picked up a metal lighter and smiled. This method was sure to snap the Monster out of her unconscious state. We flicked the lighter on and held it just inches from Oryo's eyes. She still didn't respond. Slowly, Haruka moved the lighter closer to the old woman's face. Centimeter by centimeter, it moved, turning the skin around it red with burns. The flame made contact, and with a hissing sound and a small wisp of steam, it put out her left eye. The old Hag did not move.
"F*ck it, she's dead already," we swore.
Rage erupted inside me. It was inside Shion, Haruka, and Mari, raging like waters freshly broken free of a dam. Shion had the decency to feel some self-directed anger, since it was our fault we killed Oryo with too high of a Taser voltage. Most of the fury, though, was directed uselessly back at the old dead woman.
This wasn't fair. She couldn't just die. Not without telling us anything, thought Mari. Not without apologizing to Satoshi, thought Shion. And she could not just die without suffering, thought Haruka. This was too much to handle. Our blood felt like it was burning, our heart thundered in our ears, and vicious energy flowed through us.
Haruka grabbed the black "snake whip" where it lay curled on a hanger in the wall. It was about four feet long and an inch and a half in diameter. It felt heavier than expected, probably made of reinforced nylon cord. The two-tailed fall lash wasn't as long as that of a bullwhip but still exceeded six inches.
Without hesitating, Haruka uncurled the whip and brought it down on Oryo forcefully. The crack sound thrilled us. We reached back and lashed the old woman again. The first strike hit her head while the second slammed against her shoulder, tearing her kimono with the force. If only she had been alive to feel it… if only…
We kept going vehemently. Three, four, five, six… we lost count. The wheelchair shuddered under the weight of each lash. Every time the whip tore into Oryo's corpse, we shouted and grunted savagely. We flogged the old Hag's dead body till it was almost unrecognizable.
Finally, Haruka fell to her knees on the floor, panting. She still wasn't very physically strong. Then we heard those running footsteps begin again. They were the footsteps Rena described, accompanied by the terrifying feeling that someone or something stood behind me, watching me. Was this the third, or fourth, or was it the hundredth time? Haruka faced it more bravely than my other selves. She cried out to the spirit haunting us.
"Are you Oyashiro-sama? The one Rena experienced? Ha. HA! Idiot! Who would believe in you?!"
We threw the whip against the wall, determined to ignore the sounds of Oyashiro. We never stopped to consider it as a symptom. It was a symptom of something else besides an Identity Disorder. Haruka felt no real guilt for killing Oryo, and even now, she wanted to mutilate her further. We never thought these psychopathic acts could be a symptom either. We were so paranoid, and so sure we were right about everything, that we failed to see the warning signs.
Haruka and half-conscious Shion pulled Oryo's wheelchair out of the side room. We stood within eyesight of Mion, who was trembling in her cell. I vaguely remembered one of the scary stories the old Hag had told about this dungeon. So we asked Mion whether it was true. Was there an old well somewhere in the underground torture chambers? When Mion glared in answer, Haruka told her she could just go back to lashing "Grandma" if she didn't answer.
Obediently, Mion then indicated a cell several yards to the right of her own. Haruka stepped inside briefly and admired the huge pit, whose depth could only be guessed; the bottom was certainly not visible. We ironically asked Mion if she had ever taken a climb down there. Of course not, we sniggered, because this well was rumored to be a place to dump corpses. We started pushing Oryo's wheelchair toward that cell.
"Shion!" exclaimed Mion, abhorred. "Are you going to throw your own grandmother to her death?!"
"No," Haruka smiled. "We just want to dump her corpse."
We lifted the old Hag's face again so Mion could see. Blood on her torn kimono, burns all over her face, and oozing pink wounds where the pieces of flesh had been ripped away by repeated lashing—Mion caught only a glimpse of this before looking away and beginning to cry.
"It's too cruel," she gasped.
As Haruka began to cart the old woman's corpse away, Mion asked, "Why? Why are you doing this? Is it Satoshi? Are you trying to get revenge?"
We paused. "Hey, Mion," we said darkly. "Looking back, I think I had enough reason to kill the old Hag. It's not just because she was the one who killed Satoshi. It's not just because she abused me for years and years. It's also because she dared to lie to me when life and death were involved."
We whacked Oryo's corpse on the side of the head as hard as we could. "Didn't you lie about it too, Mion? Saying that all would be forgiven if I ripped out my fingernails? Yoshirou, Kasai, and Satoshi would be left alone. That was the deal. That's why I ripped out three nails! Shouldn't that have fixed everything? But the promise wasn't kept. Satoshi-kun was erased."
(A couple weeks after I had removed my nails, Mion had gone so far as to come see me and tell me that everything was forgiven. I had "distinguished" myself appropriately. She also said that the Sonozaki family knew nothing about what happened to Satoshi.)
"But it's true," Mion tried to tell me. "At least, I don't know anything about his disappearance."
"YOU'RE LYING!" Haruka roared, beginning to kick Oryo's corpse brutally. "You liar! You liar! You liar! Damn you, liar! Give me back my Satoshi! Give him back! GIVE HIM BACK!" Each word was accompanied by a ferocious kick.
The alcohol I had consumed just hours earlier lingered in my system, and I began to feel nauseous and get a headache. Reverting to Shion, I fell on my knees again. I struggled to make my angry, snarling breath return to normal. Finally, I succeeded. I faced Mion once more. She had her hands over on her head, eyes wide, with her body visibly shaking in terror.
"I'm sorry if I scared you, Mion," I stated. "I won't hurt you as long as you're telling the truth about not knowing anything. But if you lie to me, if you betray me again, don't blame me for what I'll do to you."
The underground dungeon reverberated with the sound of my laughter.
***Old Man Kimiyoshi***
Naturally, I couldn't sleep that night. I lay down for a little while in the futon Mion had set up for me. And with my head under the cover, I cried a little. I cried because I knew there was no way out of this mess except to go farther. I had already killed someone by mistake, so there was no going back. And I cried because, through the haze of my disorders, a part of me still loved Mion. She was like an extension of myself in my mind. She must feel so scared and hopeless. She must be sweating and craving for water in that stuffy dungeon. I cried because there was a monster, but the monster was me.
The sun was rising when the phone rang again. To my surprise, it was old man Kimiyoshi. The head of one of the Three Great Families, he was regarded as the village leader. In his everyday doings, he seemed like a sweet man with easy manners and a charisma that made others feel relaxed. However, I knew he worked with the Sonozaki family in their dark designs. Kimiyoshi had been present for my denailing. He was able to sit and watch a teenage girl torture herself to save the people she loved. His heart must be made of stone underneath the warm façade.
"I'm sorry to call so early," he said politely. "Mion, is your grandma awake yet?"
My heart skipped a beat. "No. She's… still asleep. She's tired from yesterday," I elaborated, regaining my calm. "It's probably good to let her rest."
"Then," said the old fellow cheerily, "would you mind taking a message to her?"
"Not at all." I hoped to hear something about the killings.
"Well, it's about yesterday. We decided to have an emergency meeting of the executive committee. Could you tell her it will be held this evening at five in the Furude Shrine Meeting Hall?"
"Yes, sir. I'll be sure to tell her."
I hung up the phone and smiled through my weariness and the daze of the disease. This was a perfect opportunity to find out more information. I would go to that meeting as Mion. Simply saying that Oryo needed rest should be excuse enough for her absence. The executive committee was a little different than the Village Council—the members were fewer, and they all had strong ties to the Three Great Families. They used to meet to discuss activism against the dam, but why were they still meeting? Could they be planning ways to kill me and Keiichi? There could be only one way to find out.
