Chapter 27: Hiding In Plain Sight
A predator knows how to hide in plain sight; A lion will camouflage with the Saharan grass next to a herd of grazing zebra; A bolas spider will emit chemicals akin to female moth pheromones to lure prospective male moths towards its web; A thousand year old cursed spirit will split his essence into twenty fingers and scatter himself to places forgotten by man, ready to be made whole. Predators understand that to hunt their prey, you must first lower their defenses. Give them a false sense of security. Dupe the fools into believing they are safe and sound and the danger has passed when it lies waiting on their doorstep. Hungry.
Satoru didn't trust the finger outright. He wasn't so naive as to think it could ever be that simple. His plan was to monitor. Cursed objects had to be monitored for twenty-four hours when found. Kumari was strong, but if anything were to go wrong she wouldn't stand a chance, and his wife's behavior only made him more suspicious, hence why he took the finger home (and maybe also to appease his inquisitive nature). Hannah thought nothing of it when they returned. It'll be gone in the morning, she thought and cozied up beside her husband on the futon later that night. Satoru would take care of everything. He always did.
So she thought.
From the time she was small, since the tender age of five or six, Hannah had been hearing voices. One hears many voices when inheriting The Sight. Mostly last breaths and dying screams. A curse cackling by the carnage of torn bodies. All You of them disturbing and violent and horrible. So why would this be any different?
It rasped somewhere far in the distance. Thames. Over the pine crested peaks of Mt. Takao, the mokoshi penthouse roofs, and the torii gates. Thames. It blew across the school yard, rustling passed the trees, billowing near their house, sighing through the eaves, through the walls, just outside Hannah's bedroom. Rattling her eardrums.
She heard claws scrape across the floor, repeating a name no longer hers.
Thames.
Satoru's arm was wrapped snugly around her torso, holding her dear, yet she had no trouble breaking free and rising from the floor, leaving him sound asleep on the futon. "Mmph," he grunted and stirred at the feel of something missing, but then switched positions and grew still once more, snoring contently on their shared pillow.
Somnolent, Hannah stood and walked towards the entrance, a thin nightgown strap hanging loosely off her shoulder. The door slid open by its own accord, but she did not return to the only person who could grant her safety. Out to the beyond she wandered.
Each step felt lighter than air down the tatami woven corridors, the shoji panels. Door after door after door, adjarring without interruption, her silhouette a mere shadow across the many lantern-lit halls. The voice beckoned louder. Thames. It wanted her. She would answer.
She came to a halt at the twelfth door, riddled in spell-tags. The incantation Satoru recited could be traced back to the earliest of jujutsu, some say since before the monolithic Jōmon began texturing their clay with bands of rope. Ancient jujutsu was the purest form of sorcery for good reason. Untainted. Indomitable. Satoru had mastered the secret incantation quicker than his predecessors. Nothing on heaven or earth should've been able to cross those barriers and remove those spell-tags.
Hannah did so without lifting a pinkie.
The barrier didn't object to her presence, and the paper tags unglued themselves, one by one, scattering to the floor like a pile of white autumn leaves. The door slowly parted. Inside over by the corner was the sealed box. That's it now, come here. Come to me. Five steps and she was hunkered down in front of it like a curious Pandora, nescient of the evil she was about to release upon the world. She flicked open the notches.
The floor beneath collapsed.
Hannah felt she was falling…
falling.
falling.
Her bare feet hardly made a splash in the blood water, wading just above her knees. Something ripe mushed between her toes. The air stank heavily of decay and iron. Though her eyes were transfixed by the large blackened ribs scaffolded above like an animal enclosure.
On a mound of bones, human and beast, buttressed and stacked high, was a notch arranged into a dais. The eery crimson light, emanating from God knows where, began building in strength, and the bone-filled graveyard started to unveil its secrets. She saw the outline of a figure seated atop the bones. Something like four monstrous arms, two sets of eyes, tattoos, and a mouth where a stomach should've been.
Regaining her wits, Hannah's head began to throb. Her knees quaked. Blood ceased circulating to her legs from the cold water. She couldn't feel the oxygen exit her lungs, nor her heart crumble and un-crumble like a reused plastic bottle.
"W-Where am I?" she croaked.
She saw one of its two mouths twist into a wry, sinister grin and suddenly felt she had unintentionally signed her death certificate. That's not human, she thought. Not anymore. An alien life form. A freak of nature. Demonic.
"Woman." the four-armed demon drawled above its mountain of skeletons, man and beast. "Did Uraume send you?"
Hannah stayed silent, struck paralyzed from the waist down.
"Are you a challenger?" it spoke again.
Tendrils of fear clamped around her throat. "A what?" she said dumbly.
The demon gave out a snorting laugh, "Guess not," and rose to its feet. In a flash, it was standing in front of her, frame hulking and grotesque, roughly seizing her face between a mass of blackened claws, hooking a thumb to her lower lip. Hannah drew mute. The malevolence in its four vermillion eyes was a raw, insatiable sort.
"Weak," the demon crooned, and stretched its mouth into that awful, predacious grin that conveyed unspeakable harm. Something knife-point sharp tapped her lower back.
The last thing Hannah heard were cruel peals of laughter before the world was swallowed inside a scarlet sea.
...
A goodnight's sleep was a hardfought luxury for a jujutsu sorcerer. Not that it mattered much. Satoru sucked at sleeping anyways. Always had. Always will, so it didn't take much for him to become gradually aware that the primal, gut-wrenching screams ringing in his subconscious were not a figment of his dreams, but real.
Oh so terrifyingly real.
The Six Eyes wielder could recall the time he witnessed the late cauterization of a grown bull, back when the estate was in the business of raising livestock. Most dehornings are performed when the bull is a calf to reduce infection and long-term pain: chemical solutions,"tubes," saws, keystone dehorners, you name it. But the rancher they hired cared little for the well-being of their cattle, and thought axing the bull's horns with an old splitting maul and cauterizing the wound with a branding iron was the method of choice; highly illegal. Satoru watched him tie the bovine's head down in a compromising position and with zero remorse start chopping. The agonized lowing that left the animal with each forceful thwack of the maul. The blood. Satoru couldn't remember much of what he did afterwards, other than running to Makoto in tears. He freed all the estate's livestock the day he became clan-leader, suppressing childhood trauma he hadn't told a single soul.
Now twenty years later, Hannah's tormented screams reminded him of that one bull.
There was no escaping it.
Wide awake and panicked, he twisted himself over to see his wife thrashing wildly on the bedding, her screams not of fear, but of pain; vocal chords cracking and clicking from too much exertion. She couldn't catch her breath.
But what alarmed him most were her eyes. Hannah's frightened eyes were like two dying stars, glowing a bright, ember red, inflamed and leaking a flood of tears, staring wide open.
He grabbed her by the arms, shaking, voice pleading for her to wake up, but every attempt failed. She scrambled to get away, wincing whenever his fingers came too close to touching her back.
This did not go unnoticed. Holding her at an angle, Satoru ever so gently slipped a hand underneath and felt his body grow cold at the sensation of something warm and sticky soaking the satin nightgown, the tang of rust. He began praying, Please be sweat, please be sweat, and slowly removed his hand.
The palm was coated so thickly in blood you'd think it was fresh paint, staining the once white futon into a dark, sickly grenache that would never wash out. With trembling hands, Satoru mustered the courage to flip her over and see what his heart earnestly wanted to deny.
Bile rushed to his throat. It was worse than he could've imagined.
Gashes like a jagged cuneiform were scrawled all along the expanse of her back; phantom claws, five tallies each, plowing deep into the skin, digging for purchase. Hannah sobbed more violently than ever. Her pallor was like stained glass left exposed to sunlight, faded and drained of color. Blood. Blood everywhere.
To his frustration, Satoru's eyes detected nothing wrong. He saw no neon trail, no grimy residuals, an invisible enemy he could not see and could not fight; a true ghost. The band of gold on his finger started burning.
What is this?
Hannah's strangled cries were growing weaker by the second, either from fatigue or something far more life upending. Her lips took a bluish hue from the oxygen not circulating to her brain and the rest of her body, hazel eyes glassy. If he didn't act now, she'd be gone forever.
"Stay with me, Hannah."
Satoru scooped his wife in his arms, her cries faint and disoriented, and ran like hell out the door.
"Please, don't die."
AUTHOR'S NOTES
For this chapter's notes, please visit AO3 (Same name).
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