Chapter 2
Chapter 2
Matsumoto, Nagano
May 3, 2013
6:09 P.M.
Ohta Ichigo
I cautiously stood straight after some time in a fighting stance.
Nothing else happened after the strange events earlier, and the mysterious cold subsided to manageable levels. However all was not well, for there was something else in the room with me.
A motorcycle suddenly roared outside, followed by someone faintly screaming ‘Ao.’ The next thing I knew I was hammering the door with one hand and yelling for Mom’s help, while frantically trying to twist the frozen doorknob open with the other hand.
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Matsumoto, Nagano
May 3, 2013
6:09 P.M.
Ikeda Kurumi
I saw the accident in slow motion.
Ao was halfway across the street, chasing the damn rat who stole my ATM card when light shone from one end of the street. And then a motorcycle came into view, coming straight for my daughter at high speed.
Ao managed to notice the motorcycle and was getting out of its way, but she didn't completely succeed. Some part of the motorcycle, probably the handlebar, hit Ao’s left shoulder. The impact twisted her in mid-air and then slammed her face down on the hard asphalt.
The motorcyclist never slowed down. It continued speeding into the distance without a backward glance at the young child that they just hit.
I screamed my daughter’s name and ran, paying no attention to anything else but my poor Ao. Within moments, I was kneeling beside her and throttled my memories for any first aid advice. After a few seconds I finally decided to have a look at her shoulder. I had only started to move her right limb when she suddenly started crying.
I quickly removed my hands away.
“Oh my poor baby, I’m sorry. Ao, listen to Mama. Where else does it hurt? Can you tell Mama?”
Ao wasn’t able to reply. At a loss, I looked around, shouting for help. Half a minute later I saw a few Self Defense Forces personnel in Type 2 uniform rushing out from the base’s entrance. At the front of the group was Father, Sergeant First Class Ohta Hayato. A tall, lean man who looked just like an older Ichigo but without eyeglasses.
In a few seconds he and three of his comrades reached us. Father then quickly gave orders to them. One soldier would call the nearest hospital, another one would render first aid to Ao, and the last one would direct traffic away from the accident. After that he turned to me and yelled in the same manner as he did to new recruits of the Ground Self Defense Forces undergoing basic training, something that I knew about thanks to Ichigo’s efforts to help me and my parents learn about the world of the Self Defense Forces.
“Kurumi, how did my granddaughter get herself in the middle of the street?!”
If I was in a normal state of mind, I would’ve been cowed into silence by the yelling that made Ground Self Defense Forces recruits flinch in fear. And the slowly growing crowd of onlookers both civilian and military won’t help make me talk.
I wasn’t in a normal state of mind.
“We were chasing someone’s pet animal after it took my ATM card!” I screamed back, complete with wild gesticulations. “I tried to jump on it, but it dodged! Then Ao chased after it into the middle of the street, where this bastard on a motorcycle came from that direction, hit Ao, and never looked back after hitting someone!”
Father stared at me in the same manner as someone looking at a stupid person for several seconds before he made his next move.
“And how did this pet animal get your ATM card? Isn’t it in your wallet?” Father asked less angrily, still loud, and in the manner of someone humoring a stupid person’s whim.
“My wallet dropped from my pocket. To be honest I didn’t actually see the moment it took the ATM card, I just saw it holding my ATM card in its mouth while running away.”
Father stared at me for several more seconds before he gave a reply that was full of condescension.
“Kurumi, I’ve heard a lot of excuses in my time as a drill sergeant. Many were funny, many were not. This isn’t a funny one. Do you think I’m a simple minded idiot who believes everything that was told to him?”
Before I was able to reply an object suddenly hit my right eye. As I howled and put pressure on the eye I heard a man, a foreigner by the sound of his accent, speak from the right. At the same time I felt, in the manner of being the person who was experiencing it and not someone else, an astounding amount of anger and embarrassment and worry. And then there is the stench of something burning.
“I deny any responsibility for your daughter’s accident! I’m not the one who deliberately tried to hit your daughter! It’s that motorcycle driver – hey! Maybe this is an assassination attempt! What’s the most recent thing you heard from that small time politician your mother in law has for a father?!”
Alarmed and angered at what I just heard, I looked for the mysterious speaker. Instead I saw soldier and civilian alike scrambling away from a spot on the road that was glowing red and bubbling from an unnatural heat. And on that spot, I saw the rat who stole my bank card, standing on its hind legs and glaring right at me.
And at the same time I had a brief hallucination, of a dark skinned Indian man dressed in a colorful outfit and golden ornaments and toting a musical instrument of some sort, standing at the same spot as where the rat was and also glaring at me.
I stared at it with my left eye while slowly moving my hand away from my right eye. Moments later, when I was sure that my right eye was won’t hurt anymore, I started blinking and then I started to pinched myself to see if I was dreaming.
“Oh, and don’t blame me for your stupid card! I threw it back at you! Look at your feet!”
I looked down and saw my ATM card by my feet. That was when I realized that my ATM card was the object that hit my eye earlier.
After I picked it up and placed it back in my pocket, I looked back at the rat to see it looking around at its surroundings, while tapping its feet in the manner of someone who is extremely worried by something and muttering the phrase ‘What do I do,’ over and over again.
I took that moment to look around at the bystanders.
Most of the people on the street kept a big distance between the very unnatural rat and themselves, with some of them even taking out cellphones and taking pictures or videos of the rat. The only exceptions were Father, who interposed himself between Ao and the rat, Ao herself, who in between sniffles was looking on from the corner of her eyes, the medic, who was so completely concentrated on my daughter that he might not have noticed what was happening, and me.
“Alright, alright. Let’s improvise,” the rat suddenly said.
The rat quickly –
Someone suddenly –
-clapped its paws together.
-grabbed my left foot.
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Matsumoto, Nagano
May 3, 2013
6:11 P.M.
Ohta Ichigo
“What did you do to the door lock Ichigo? It won't move!”
“Nothing Mom. I did nothing to it,” I glumly replied while sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the door.
Mom was currently trying to open the cold door lock with her key. But to her surprise and my despair, it was as if the thing was forged from a single piece of iron instead of an assembly of precisely machined brass pieces.
“Well then. Our only option now is to knock down this door. Just stay put while I call Hayato.”
As I listened to Mom’s receding footsteps, I sighed and then glared at the malfunctioning door knob.
I was quite sure that something happened to Ao, since the voice that shouted earlier on was Kurumi’s. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to go to my daughter and my wife because of this door. And I couldn’t even open the curtains to take a look at what happened on the street below, because they were also impersonating a single piece of iron.
And as for the unnatural cold, it had shifted to the other side of the room, as if watching out the windows to the street below…
‘It’s safe to assume that the cold is related to the door and the curtains, no? And if I remember those ghost stories on TV right...’
I was grasping at straws, but for Kurumi and Ao, I’m willing to make a fool of myself.
I stood up and tried to put myself in the proper mood. Moments later I started.
“Pardon me.”
All of a sudden I felt the sensation of being watched, which made me feel happy because my suspicion had just been confirmed.
Without a moment's pause I quickly bowed down to pay the being my highest respects.
“To whoever is in our room, if I had offended you in any way before now then I'm begging you to forgive me, even without knowledge of what I did wrong. I swear that I will make amends, pray for your souls at a temple, or something. All I ask for is that I be let out of our room to see to my wife and daughter.”
For a few moments I waited. Then all of a sudden I felt the gaze move away from me. Feeling alarmed and slightly insulted by the snub, I bowed lower and repeated myself.
“Please. I know that something happened to my daughter and wife down there in the street. I need to go down there. So please just open this door, or the window. I must see to my family's situation.”
Moments later I felt the being snub me once again. This, along with the overwhelming worry I had over the status of my wife and daughter, made me angry.
“What is up with this impersonation of a haunted house?! Amusement?! If so, then you had your fill of laughter! Can I go now?!”
All of a sudden a fist entered my field of vision. It hit me in the cheek and sent me reeling backwards against the wall. After a few moments of blinking the stars out of my vision and putting my eyeglasses back onto place, I finally saw what punched me.
It was the ghost of a middle age looking man, dressed in a dark colored kimono consisting of nothing but patches, and armed with a yari.
“Mind your manners, kid. Your elders are still deciding what to do.”
A second later my left fist went through the ghost's face. And then my right. And then I screamed right in his face.
“Look me in the eyes and tell me that you can keep showing proper manners when you are in my position. Tell me, can you?!”
The dead man’s eyes looked straight at mine for a few moments, and then they broke contact with me, full of shame.
“No.”
It was only when I backed away from him that I realized I had cornered the ghost at the windows. And when I took a look at my sides, I saw that there were more ghosts in the room than the one I just screamed at.
There was one ghost dressed almost like the one in front of me but with the addition of a headband with the famous ‘Namu Amida Butsu’ chant. There was one wearing what I recognize to be armor from the times of the Warring States. Another one was wearing a uniform that I think was that of the Shogunate army during the Boshin war. Yet another one was wearing the dark blue uniform once used by the IJA. And then there were three ghosts wearing costumes that I was sure weren’t culturally Japanese.
Except for the ones wearing the army uniforms, who were armed with bayonet tipped rifles, all of them were armed with various kinds of spears. However, I was so angry I felt I can take them all at the same time.
“Look, is there any reason to keep me imprisoned in my room, without any knowledge on what happened to my wife and daughter?”
The ghosts spent a few moments looking at each other. Then the ghost wearing the IJA uniform suddenly spoke up, looking from one fellow ghost to another.
“Honored ancestors, I don’t know about your thoughts but I know mine. It is yelling that the foreign kami is going to do something more foolish than what he was planning to do earlier.”
One of the ghosts wearing the non-Japanese costume gruffly asked him something, in a language that I didn’t understand.
“What else?” the ghost replied with a smile, “Give my four times great-grandson a ride downstairs.”
He quickly clapped me on the shoulder before I was able to react to his statement. The next moment I found myself in front of my home, watching a crowd of Self Defense Forces personnel and civilian bystanders loosely gathered in the middle of the street. And in the middle I saw Kurumi being shouted at by Dad.
I forgot my questions about this self proclaimed ancestor. I was about to run forward when he suddenly pulled me back.
“Ichigo, listen to me. When you reach Kurumi, grab a part of her body and don’t let – damn! Run!”
I ran. I shouldered past some people, I saw some people moving away from a spot on the ground, I saw my daughter on the ground, I saw Kurumi and Dad staring at something, I felt a premonition of not seeing Kurumi and Ao for some time.
And then I tripped, fell down at Kurumi’s feet. And then I grabbed one.
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Matsumoto, Nagano
May 3, 2013
6:12 P.M.
Ikeda Kurumi
I yanked my foot away from whatever grabbed it, shrieking in surprise. A moment later I calmed down upon seeing who it was.
“Sorry for scaring you love,” my bespectacled boyfriend sheepishly said from the ground, in his indoor attire of a blue jogging pants and a white cotton shirt.
Before I was able to respond, a certain tremulous voice brought my mind back to pressing matters.
“Ma, Pa, hurts. Hospital?”
Ao was laid on her back atop a stretcher, looking at us with a face full of tear tracks, dirty bleeding scratches and a bloody nose. Her torso was covered by her sweater so I couldn’t see any damage, but my mother's intuition was saying it was bad.
“Ao, what happened to you?” Ichigo asked as he got up on his feet and went to her. I quickly followed, worried that he might move her body without a medical personnel’s advice.
“Bad man hit…hit…huh?”
The woozy look on Ao's face and the slowly increasing speed of her breath was turning my worry into gibbering panic.
"Oh damn," Ichigo cursed as he kneeled beside her.
"What? What is it?!" I shrieked behind him.
"She has a concussion, and her ribs are cracked or broken. Her left shoulder has broken bones, torn muscles and damaged nerves. A lung is in the process of collapsing. Oh, and before I forget, something near her heart is about to bleed any moment now, and those kinds of bleeding are almost instantly lethal."
I slowly looked to my right, my entire being filled with terror at the litany of my daughter's injuries, to see the rat, that cursed and disgusting rat looking at me smugly.
"And how exactly do you know all that?" Ichigo hissed, and in so much anger that he didn’t pause at the sight of a talking rat.
"Because I, the great I, can look inside your daughter's body with the power of magic," the rat replied in a belittling manner.
As Ichigo furiously stood up, the rat continued.
"No, no, no, no. Take a little look at your surroundings first, the both of you."
Ichigo took a glance, which quickly turned into a stare filled with shock and dismay as he turned on the spot. Curious, I finally paid attention to my surroundings…and got rewarded with the sight of a fully lit and completely silent street.
"Where's everyone?" I asked as I looked around, desperately searching for the sight of soldiers who could protect my family from this rat.
The rat started chuckling.
"Wrong question, Ms. Ikeda Kurumi. The right question is 'where are we'?"
'Where are we? Did that self proclaimed magical thing just say 'where are we'? Oh no. Oh no.'
"Kamikakushi," I muttered in horror as I looked at my fiance. A moment later he took hold of my left hand and squeezed it tight.
"That's right. Spirited away, just like the Studio Ghibli movie. And unless you do as I say, Ikeda Kurumi, I'll keep all of you here until your poor daughter dies."