Moult and Purify

Weeks of non-stop rain had made the overgrown stone steps slippery. The moss and vines stuck to my feet, making each step feel more perilous than the last. Nana followed closely behind. With us were professor Mitsuharu Amamiya and his post-graduate students Yukiko Hasegawa and Nobuo Shirotaki, walking a short distance behind Nana and taking photographs of the area and writing down notes.
Although professor Amamiya was a professor of linguistics, his interest in the abandoned shrine went much deeper than the indecipherable writing on the strange red prayer flags we had told him about; he wanted to get to the bottom of the matter and his two students had already begun writing a book detailing the mystery, intent on solving it so that they could make a bestseller. It took some persuading before Nana and I agreed to return to the shrine, but eventually we gave in, knowing that if we didn't, we would never get closure.
For four years, our thoughts had been plagued by the carnage we witnessed. For four years, both of us had been having nightmares where we descend the path on the other side of the shrine. In our dreams, we follow the path into a cave and wake up in cold sweat just as we hear movement. The good dreams between us in the last four years could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
As we ascended the stairway through the thick vegetation, it was not lost on us that the forest around us was eerily quiet.
The first time we visited this shrine, we had not paid attention to the fact that there was no torii on the path leading up to it. In fact, aside from a small wooden sign that had only the word shrine painted on it, there was no clear indicator that it was a sacred place at all until you came to the top of the hill and saw the shrine itself.
Professor Amamiya looked around and remarked, "This place is missing many features one would expect a shrine, even one this small, to have... I wonder, has it been desecrated or could it have been built like this?"
I noticed Nana was already well on her way to the back, clearly determined to get this over with as quickly as possible. Although I didn't want to leave the professor and his students, I had no choice when she ignored my pleas to wait. I ran after her past the shrine.
Nana stopped at the entrance to the path. When I got to her, I saw that she was shaking and tears welled up in the corners of her eyes.
"Hey," I said, taking her hands in mine. "It's going to be fine. We're here, we'll find out what's down that path and then we can go back home. We can do this."
"I just can't help but think about our classmates and Ms. Ōsawa... I don't understand why only the two of us survived."
"Maybe we can find out."
Yukiko caught up with us and leaned against the trunk of the first tree with prayer flags on its branches. She adjusted her glasses and gazed down into the darkness. The sun had not yet gone down, but down the path, underneath the impenetrable canopy, there was barely any light. We would need our flashlights right from the get-go. Even knowing that we may face something supernatural, at least I took some comfort in the fact that Nobuo was a tall man trained in mixed martial arts.
As soon as the professor laid his eyes on the prayer flags, he yelped in some kind of an indeterminate emotion. All of us could clearly see that the characters on them resembled kanji but were illegible, but he immediately recognised them.
"This makes no sense!" he gasped, a look of utmost disbelief spreading across his wrinkly face as he began to slowly stroll down the path. "These characters... it cannot be, yet... these are the same characters used by my daughter!"
Although we had been corresponding extensively over the course of the last two years, it was news to me that he was a father. "Your daughter?"
"Yes, our dear miracle child. My wife and I could not conceive, so we decided to adopt. We visited an orphanage and one girl was immediately drawn to us as much as we were drawn to her. A woman had left her at the orphanage as a newborn baby. The girl had a birthmark resembling a star on the left side of her forehead, so they called her Hoshiko. As her speech developed, it had become clear that something was wrong. Often, she would use seemingly meaningless words and make many grammatical mistakes. They eventually gave up on trying to correct her. Because of this, nobody wanted to adopt her. We felt bad for her and wanted to give her a home, a fresh start. It was only after she had lived with us for some time that I realised all of her mistakes were consistent, as if interference from another language."
Tears welled in the professor's eyes. He took a deep breath and continued. "Both as a linguist and as her father, I encouraged her to express herself freely in this other language. She began to scribble symbols that were meaningless to everybody except her."
By now we had reached the bottom of the hill. The serpentine path continued deeper into the woods, still delineated by the red cloths patterned with the strange characters the professor was telling us about.
"With time she learned to speak and write Japanese without issue, yet retaining the knowledge of her childhood doodles and the strange vocabulary she had used. In fact, as she became more proficient in Japanese, she also became more proficient in what she called the language of the stars. I was intrigued. I wanted her to teach me this mysterious language, and she did."
I was so captivated by the professor's story that, for a moment, I nearly forgot about the gruesome deaths of our classmates and our teacher following their journey down this very path four years ago. Glancing at Nana, I could tell that she had also become transfixed and fallen into the transient fearless state of distraction that I had just awakened from.
"What I found was that while the language's phonology and grammar are for the most part similar to Japanese, it does demonstrate some major differences — six vowel sounds instead of five, two liquid consonants instead of one, polypersonal agreement — but the differences in vocabulary are much more obvious; there are quite many words whose sound and meaning match their Japanese counterparts to varying degrees — in exactly the way one would expect of cognates or loanwords from an early form of Japanese — but the bulk of the lexicon is unique, and I have even identified potential words shared with various other languages. Simply put, there is no way my daughter could have invented this language of the stars on her own as a child."
"So, then," Nana squeaked under her breath with a confused and possibly concerned expression, "Where did it come from?"
Professor Amamiya let out a hearty laugh. "I have no idea! She says it comes to her naturally, but that's all she knows either. Anyhow, these flags we are following simply contain ambiguous formulae for spiritual protection."
Silence fell once again, the only sound that of our wet footsteps on the crunchy soil and the only source of illumination our flashlights. Every once in a while, I thought I heard shuffling in the bushes and quickly turned to see nothing but vegetation. If it wasn't just my imagination and there really was something lurking in the dark around us, it kept its distance.
~
Finally, the thick vegetation gave way to a clearing. Although it was definitely the same clearing I had seen in my dreams, it appeared vastly different; in my dreams there were no manmade structures, but seeing it now, we came face to face with a tall gate fashioned in the likeness of a snake's gaping maw, standing on the other end of the clearing.
The underlying shape was like any old torii, but the entire frame had scorched seashells embedded into it as scales, two large pieces of obsidian for eyes on the beam at the top and two stalactite fangs on the lower beam. The dirt road past its boundary took on a red hue and was delineated by moss-covered stone lanterns.
Before it, the clearing itself was skirted by a loose rim of ten stone pillars as tall as men, all bearing vertical inscriptions in the language of the stars. Engraved below the rounded tops of each of them were stylised faces with large bulging eyes and aquiline features. On the ground between the pillars, bones had been piled up; all of them were shattered, but I thought I recognised fragments of human skulls.
Professor Amamiya gasped. "This is absolutely exceptional!"
"And creepy," Yukiko mumbled.
It was beautiful, too. The last rays of sunlight scattered over the trees and between the stone slabs, painting the clearing in dancing glimmers and shadows, and the sound of cicadas echoed all around us. It was as if, in stark contrast to the surrounding woods drenched in darkness and eerie silence, this clearing resonated with the symphony of life. Yet, its beauty did little to alleviate the impact of the realisation that this was a place of death — which the professor confirmed once he translated what was written on the nearest pillar.
This monument was erected by the venerable Saduram Um-Hulan-Ki on the first day of the second year for the purpose of commemorating the ten devotees who sacrificed their bodies to the Snake Goddess on the first year.
"What kind of a name is that? Were the builders of this place not Japanese?" I asked.
The professor thought for a moment. "Certainly the language on these monuments is not Japanese, but perhaps this language of the stars was only a sacred or ritual language rather than one spoken in daily life. It is possible they adopted religious names, used alongside their real names. While it is interesting that the faces on these pillars are more reminiscent of Indonesian or Mesoamerican art than anything found elsewhere in Japan, without doubt there is a Japanese component to everything here."
As Nobuo and Yukiko began photographing each of the monoliths, I pulled Nana aside and asked her if she was okay. She seemed earnest when she said she was. I was also lulled deeper and deeper into what I presumed to be a state of security with each passing second. This place may have once served as a site for ritual sacrifice, but it seemed long since abandoned.
By the time the two students had finished taking detailed pictures of the scene and the professor had written several pages of notes, darkness had fallen and even the clearing had become as eerily quiet as the rest of the forest.
It was then that I noticed the gangly figure standing in the treeline next to the path we had come from. How long it had been standing there, I had no idea. The others had clearly not seen it yet, and for a second I considered not saying anything. However, as I stared into its glowing eyes and it stared back without blinking, fear began to grow inside me once again. This was not a person, nor was it like any animal I had ever seen before; its body shape was overall like that of a tall and skinny man but its arms hung loose as if the shoulders were dislocated and it leaned forward at an angle that no human spine would be capable of sustaining. I couldn't tell whether its skin was dark red and grainy or if it had no skin at all.
"Uh," I mumbled, "Do you guys see that?"
Yukiko's scream triggered a change in the creature's demeanour.
Before her scream was over, it also screamed. It sounded like a hissing snake, a screeching cicada and a whistling kettle all at once. Before the chills down my spine had run their course, the thing lunged forward. Its movement was bizarre; its arms stuck close to its body, swaying slightly as if disjointed or paralysed, and its head tilted back with the mouth wide open. Nobuo yelled, telling us to run, and we did.
As we passed underneath the gate, Nana and I clasped each other's hands and squeezed as hard as we could. Nobuo and Yukiko were just ahead. The professor was behind us. We kept running without stopping until the professor tripped and fell on the red sand. I ran back to help him up. The thing was nowhere to be seen, but as soon as he was up, we kept running.
~
The mouth of the cave seemed to howl as it came into view from behind the trees. I had seen this cave so many times in my nightmares that seeing it in real life felt only barely different. What was different, just as with the clearing, was that humans had left their distinctive mark on it: two three-feet obsidian statues depicting cicadas guarded the entrance and a golden plaque bearing yet another inscription was inlaid on the rock wall.
Those who enter must leave their dreams behind.
Nobuo began nonchalantly snapping pictures, undisturbed by the inscription. The rest of us discussed its possible meaning, as well as what that thing that chased us was. There was no clarity to be had through speculation.
"Do we go in?" Nobuo broke up the chatter, himself already halfway inside.
I didn't want to. Nana didn't, either. The professor and Yukiko were also apprehensive, but in spite of that, the decision was made to proceed. We had to.
Our footsteps were dampened by the moss covering the cave floor. Prickly vines covered the walls, stalactites and stalagmites abounded and there were even gnarled trees with twisted branches reaching towards one another. The air was humid and a musty stench floated around us. Insects of all kinds swarmed on the ground and buzzed in the air. Rats skittled between the roots and loose rocks. This cave was teeming with life.
From somewhere deeper in the cave, ghastly croaking sounds echoed towards us. I had never heard any animal make similar vocalisations before; it sounded more like people choking and wheezing than anything else, yet they were clearly not human voices.
"What's that?" Nana whispered, her fear-soaked eyes darting back and forth between the rest of us. She was visibly trembling.
Yukiko quickly responded, perhaps only in an attempt to comfort her, "Thinking about it, I remember seeing a video on the internet about deer in America that made such sounds."
"Deer? In a cave? And even if they exist in America..."
She didn't have an explanation. None of us did. While the sounds of even Japanese deer were somewhat similar, I had a hard time imagining noises like this coming out of anything that walked on four legs.
A horrifying possibility popped in my head. "What if there are more of those things, like the one that chased us? Making those sounds?"
"I thought about that too," Nana gulped.
We tried our best to ignore the noises and pressed on. Venturing deeper and deeper, the smell in the air grew more and more sickening. By the time we saw the first puddles of water, the moisture had become an observable mist. Surrounding the puddles was some kind of yellow sludge and the water was stagnant with a red tint. It was as if the earth itself was festering and bleeding.
After some time, a large chamber opened up before us. On the cave floor were several pits full of dirty-looking brown water with black specks on the surface. Hot acidic-smelling vapour was steaming up from them. Between the pits, the ground was dark red and mire-like with an oily appearance. More bubbling yellow sludge oozed from countless fissures. Massive flowers, with pouches almost resembling featureless human heads surrounded by ragged low-hanging blood red petals larger than my hands and sprouting tentacle-like vines, grew in clusters around the roots of drooping black trees full of burls.
Worst of all, half-submerged in the foul hot springs, five man-sized leathery cocoons hung by cobweb-like strains from the roots of the trees and the vines of the flowers. They twitched every now and then. They were clearly the source of the croaks and moans we had been hearing for some time now.
I tried to suppress my gag reflex. Everyone else was retching, too. The putrid stench was overwhelming. Being in this chamber made me feel like my bones were vibrating. My ears started ringing and my eyes itched.
"This must be the land of the dead," the professor muttered solemnly. "Or, at least, what people in the past conceived of as the underworld."
No one else said anything. Even if this was hell, we kept treading forward. The professor was leading the way with Nobuo and Yukiko close behind, Nana and I at the back.
When we came near the cocoons, they began flailing about wildly and whatever was inside them squealed as if in pain. Yukiko shrieked and dropped her flashlight in one of the pits. She backed up and bumped against Nana. The three of us almost fell in.
"Careful...!" I grumbled and grabbed onto Nana even tighter than before.
At the back of the chamber, the cave split into three downward-sloping corridors just wide enough for a person. The ground and walls within each were covered in vines. On the wall, a plaque bearing an inscription.
To return, one must moult and purify.
As soon as the professor had translated it, I felt a knot turn in my stomach. Did it refer to some kind of a ritual — one that our teacher and classmates had performed, causing them to grotesquely lose their skin? Had they followed the path all the way here? They had mentioned seeing a large number of dead bodies, but there were none to be seen here now. In any case, how could a group of human beings moult? Was it, like the doctor in the nearby town had suggested back then, a virus of some kind?
The professor turned to look at us, then back at the entrances. "Which one?"
"Well," Nana said, "The one in the middle is steeper, and I have a feeling like we should go as deep as we can. I can't explain it, but it's like an intuition from the nightmares?"
I hummed in agreement. That was the same gut feeling I had, like whatever we had come here to find would be at the very bottom of the cave system, and somehow I knew the way better and better the deeper we progressed.
And so, we entered the central passage. We could still hear the groans of the cocoons behind our backs, but they were getting increasingly muffled by the thick vegetation as we made our way forward and downward.
We had been walking for nearly an hour by the time we finally reached the chamber that both Nana and I immediately sensed was our destination. Small red flowers, akin to spider lilies but misshapen, dotted the floor. Thick dried-up vines hung over the walls and were draped across the branches of mangled dead trees. Each wall had several wide crevices in it, but even if we had wanted to advance, they all led upwards at angles too steep to climb. It was eerily silent. Right in the centre of the chamber stood a bare stone altar with a pentice supported by four pillars.
The professor inspected the altar and declared that there was what appeared to be dry blood all over it.
"Now what?" Nobuo sighed. His tiredness and impatience were understandable. All of us were physically exhausted and mentally on edge.
As much as I had thought about this place, I hadn't even thought about what it was that we were supposed to do here. Nana and I had never discussed it, either. The only thing I knew was that I was too hungry to think straight. "Let's eat and figure it out?"
We sat on the stone floor in front of the altar and unpacked our meals. The realisation that we were essentially picnicking was so amusing that I burst out laughing. For the first time since we began our descent, we took our minds off our mission and talked about other things.
We were still eating when I began to feel dizzy. The others said they did, too. I tried to get up, but it was impossible. We were aimlessly fumbling about on the cave floor in a daze. Before I could even consider why this was happening, I collapsed and everything melted away into an ever-darkening spiral as I blacked out.
~
Just as the spiralling darkness had engulfed me, so did a spiral of light, revealing a festive scene. I sat up and found myself surrounded by an exquisite garden lit up by the handheld paper lanterns of people passing by. All of them wore clothing similar to but not quite traditional Japanese style, distinctively featuring decorative reeds and golden embroidery. I followed them with my eyes, watching them walk up the hill. Their bare feet made barely any sound as they pressed down on the stone steps. Nobody was in any hurry, conversing cheerfully in a language that was at once incomprehensible yet strangely familiar.
Quickly, the realisation of where I was hit me: these were the very same stairs leading up to that very same shrine. Before I could even begin to wonder what was happening, by the side of the stairs halfway up the hill, I saw her.
I saw Nana, only I knew she was not Nana; her eyes were greener than the forest itself, blooming brighter than the flowers she was sat upon, her hair such a lustrous deep black that it mirrored the night sky and her skin so fair that it appeared to glow in the twilight of the setting sun. She also wore a clearly traditional-looking dress, one that was bright red with various strange glyphs embroided into it in black and white alongside motifs of snakes in gold, and with large feathers of rainbow colours lining the neck and smaller feathers lining the sleeves.
The last time I saw her was in the dream I had at the nearby town after visiting the shrine — a dream in which she kissed and caressed me before I was awakened by Ms. Ōsawa shedding her skin. Seeing Nana's doppelganger again, the moisture of her lips and the warmth of her fingers returned to my mind. Nana's lips, Nana's fingers; they had felt the exact same, even before I had so much as held hands with Nana.
Then, she had welcomed me with a smile. Now, she smiled at everybody passing by her. I immediately took note of the fact that they were all greeting her, many offering her a flower and laying it on the ground beside her.
I almost felt at home. It came naturally to me to join the line of people walking up to the Nanaesque girl. I wondered if she would remember me.
Once my turn to greet her came, I did as everybody before me had done and bowed inconspicuously. "Good evening," I muttered, my voice quivering slightly. I wondered if she would even understand me, as all of the others had spoken to her in that language I did not know and so had she when she responded to them.
A few seconds of silence passed as she looked at me with an expression I thought of as inquisitive. Then, a radiant smile opened on her beautiful face and she spoke in her ethereally soothing voice, "I did not expect to see you again. After what happened, I was sure you would never return here."
"I kept having nightmares. Nana has them, too." Even though I felt like this was also a dream, somehow acknowledging it out loud felt inappropriate. She seemed so real. All of this seemed too real.
"Indeed," she said with a muted giggle. "You thought that by returning here, you would find the answers to your questions. That the Snake Goddess would grant you freedom?"
Again, the words snake goddess. I wondered if perhaps this was a cult of some sort, in which case this girl would be... what, exactly? Their leader? I would have had to ask to be sure, but how could I ask something like that?
She must have taken note of my confusion because the next thing that came out of her mouth was the closest thing to an explanation that I could have hoped for without asking for one. "Here, on this night, we offer our thanks to the Snake Goddess for healing those wounded in this year's battles. She provides us with this lush environment where cicadas and hares are plentiful, so that we never have to know hunger in summer nor winter."
"I see," I mumbled. The only thing I truly understood was that this was not the world as I knew it. That, I understood why. She had mentioned battles. I had seen that many of the men bustling about had scars on their faces and a few were missing an eye or an ear or even a limb. This was a time of war, but with wounds like those, it was very obvious that it was not modern warfare. These were scars left by swords and spears, not guns and bombs.
Somebody behind me grunted something I took as meaning I was taking up too much of the girl I now presumed to be a priestess of some kind's time, and that it was their turn to greet her and time for me to be on my way.
Walking up the hill, I soon saw the shrine in all its glory. At once terrifying and beautiful scenes of the afterlife were painted in bright colours on its walls and one motif stood out: a snake acting as a psychopomp, guiding the dead into the underworld and appointing heroes as tormentors of sinners. Around the shrine, three concentric circles were made up of some kind of waist-high golden rods stuck on the ground with small cicadas made of jade or emerald on their tips. There must have been dozens if not hundreds of them, whatever they were, worth millions if not billions.
I saw people walking counterclockwise along the inner edges of the circles, and not knowing what else to do and not wanting to appear disruptive, I quietly followed in their footsteps. The function of this procession seemed to be to let everybody truly take in the mythological scenes adorning the shrine's walls. Upon reaching the end of the third cycle, the course headed down the slope behind the shrine, towards the path leading to the clearing with the commemorative pillars. Towards the cave.
~
Making my way to the pillars with the festive crowd was significantly less scary than it had been with Nana, the professor and his students. The atmosphere was completely different. It felt almost treacherous, as if I was betraying them by beginning to lose sight of the memory of the bones piled up around the monuments and the words written on them. That knowledge lingered at the back of my mind, but I could not possibly imagine this same festival taking a turn in the direction of human sacrifice of all things.
As the crowd gathered at the clearing to stand still surrounded by the pillars, I too stood still on the sidelines. Before long, six men emerged from the path carrying a gilded palanquin with a grand assortment of flowers stacked on its roof and bouquets dangling on ropes lining its sides. On its sides, red curtains concealed whoever was within.
Once they reached the treeline and the first of three rows of men took their first steps to the clearing, they all began chanting what sounded like "Ipikimeti piha butu hamunu mitun noru, eminie mitu butun, emi ipik pido hula-mihamu kutun gubugitan igoraman udagusagiha kuzuan", assuming the strongly emphasised syllables were the ones at the beginnings of words. I had no idea what any of the words meant, but it sounded profoundly ceremonial.
The floral palanquin made its way through the crowd and to the gate fashioned into the resemblance of a snake's head. There, the men carefully laid it on the ground in front of the symbolic passage and stepped aside.
The curtain was pulled back. A moment of stillness. Then, its passenger emerged. As expected, it was the same girl the people had offered flowers to — the girl I had to remind myself not to think of as Nana, no matter how much she looked like her. She began singing in the mysterious language. First softly, then opening up with powerful expression and transcendental intonation. Even without understanding the words, tears welled in my eyes from the first phrases and by the end streamed from my eyes like waterfalls. Hearing her voice — the same voice Nana had — sing with such mastery and emotion was almost unbearable. I wished I could hear Nana sing like this. This thought made me uncomfortable. Why was I wishing for more? Was I not already as happy as I could be with her?
After the last syllable, sung as a high note with deep vibrato, rang out from her mouth, all the people raised their arms and shouted "Kababitan nububamra!" before, as if in a frenzy, stripping down to modest white undergarments and throwing the rest on the ground.
I watched with a growing sense of puzzlement as the crowd trampled on the clothes they had just taken off while singing a cheerful-sounding tune. My attention had been drawn away from Nana's doppelganger, and it caught me off guard when her mellifluous voice suddenly penetrated my ear like a breath of fresh air and her fingers brushed my cheek.
"You must have suffered," she said. "Such vivid nightmares... have they taken their toll on Ms. Terushima as well?"
"Yes." A part of me wondered how she knew about Nana, which was a strange thought to have when looking at her was like looking at her. At the same time, it felt natural that she would know about her for that very reason.
"The Snake Goddess could set you free... but for that, you must moult and purify."
"Sorry, but what does that even mean?"
Her eyebrows twitched as if it was surprising that I didn't know. "The ritual that frees you from the cycle of birth and death. Performing it, you would no longer be bound to this world and would be reborn one last time to live your last life until its natural end. It is, however, a most painful process both physically and spiritually. To even begin the ritual, already upon entering the cave of the Snake Goddess, you must have made peace with death or else you will be left to roam the world as an agonised husk for all eternity."
I understood now that that was what our teacher and classmates had done. They had gone to the cave and started the ritual, likely thinking it was nothing but the forgotten superstition of some sect lost to time, and for that they shed their skins and became mindless puppets acting on pure instinct of pain. It was a terrifying fate. Had that thing that chased us in the woods, too, been somebody who performed the ritual sometime in the past, perhaps decades or even centuries ago?
"Wait a minute," I blurted. "Can I ask something?"
"Of course."
"Our teacher and classmates became skinless. If I undestood right, that means they tried to do the ritual? How could they have known about it? It's not like there were instructions written anywhere in the cave..."
She looked at me and smiled like I was a child. "All who make offerings in the shelter of the Snake Goddess find themselves here. They, like you, must have brought food to the cave. You are not the first lost traveller I have instructed. It is one of the duties of the priestess to help travellers make a choice. Those who wish to remain here are welcomed, and those who wish to return to their old lives are guided to the right path. Those who fail to complete the ritual, however, will not remember their time here as they wake in their dying bodies."
I had so many more questions, but before I could open my mouth again, a man ran right past me to the priestess and shouted something repeatedly — "Tatêk, tatêk!" — and pulled her aside. She had a startled expression on her face and began to shout the same thing to everybody at the clearing.
She quickly glanced back at me once, yelling "Run!"
A whistling noise, followed by a jolt of sharp pain in my left shoulder.
~
The arrow hung by a thread of skin. Thick blood poured down my arm and dripped to the ground. I was frozen in place, unable to even process what had just happened. I only screamed when somebody yanked it out. Looking at the teenage boy who pulled the arrow out from my arm, I felt bad for screaming over such a minor wound; he had a grisly scar spanning from the corner of his left cheekbone to the top of his nasal ridge, and where his left eye should have been was only an indentation of skin healed over the empty socket.
He shoved me towards the treeline and began running, yelling something in the language that seemed to be spoken by everybody here. I followed him, keeping up as best as I could but falling behind ever so slightly with each step. From time to time, he turned to look at me and shout what I presumed were calls to hurry up.
All the trees in the dark looked like they were alive, reaching down to grab me. The exhaustion and hunger made me dizzy but I kept running. I had to. Whatever was going on, it was not good. Occasionally some of the people who had been at the clearing ran past me in different directions, but all away from where we had come from.
From somewhere to my right, screams echoed through the woods. Not just one or two people. It must have been a dozen, men and women, crying and howling in agony. Every once in a while, an arrow flew by some distance ahead. I was too scared and focused on running to look, but I knew whoever was shooting them could not be far.
Without warning, I saw the boy I was following vanish right before my eyes. I almost froze but knew I had to keep running. To keep following him. I ran, past the spot where I thought I had seen him disappear, until suddenly the ground gave way and I fell down.
I looked around and saw that I was lying face down in something like a wide and deep trench with angled walls and thick foliage covering the entrance. Only a little bit of moonlight seeped through. Dozens of people sat still all around. I recognised a few of them from before. Two elderly men and an elderly woman were sitting between me and the boy.
The screams above continued throughout the night, getting less frequent as the hours passed. By dawn they had been overtaken by the sounds of birdsong. We had been sitting still without making a sound all night. I didn't want to be the first to break the silence, so I waited. I didn't know if some had managed to sleep, but for me that had been impossible. The boy had closed his eyes at some point, and only opened them after one of the nearby old men stood up with a groan.
"Itip minabi," the old man sighed. He continued, but I could not understand a single word and hoped he wasn't talking to me even though I had been the one he looked at when he began speaking. In between looking at the boy and the other elderly people, he glanced at me more than once.
When he was done talking, the boy said something to him and got up. He walked over to me and gestured for me to again follow him.
~
He led me to a village within the woods. Only one road in and out, starting from the cave and winding between the hills. It seemed like the entire community was built with access to the cave in mind. At the boundary of the village was a fence, in it only one gate with small low-hanging bells that made a chiming sound upon entrance. Far from a bulletproof defence, but it was obvious that its presence was not merely symbolic.
Crying people carried dead bodies in all day. At least two dozen had been killed during the night. Everybody was in mourning. Throughout the day, men were making preparations for what I presumed would be a counterattack. They brought various pre-modern weapons to an elderly shamaness of some sort and she performed a ritual with them that I could only assume was a blessing. I had never felt as out of place in my life.
It wasn't until the sun had set that the girl who looked like Nana arrived. She sung a wailing dirge that could be heard long before she walked in barefoot, accompanied by the same men who had previously carried her in a palanquin. Only, one of them was missing. It was fairly self-evident that he had not survived the onslaught last night.
In the midst of the myriad other arrangements she oversaw, she arranged for me to sleep at the house of a family at the edge of the village far from the entrance. I could not with enough humility thank them nor apologise for the inconvenience, and I was relieved beyond belief to hear that they had not lost any members. If they had, intruding their home would have been unthinkable.
In the morning, after only an hour or two of dreamless sleep, I was woken up by the family's daughter. She explained to me — slowly with a chunky sing-song accent and plenty of grammatical mistakes, which was as adorable as it was cumbersome — that the priestess had told me to meet her at the clearing first thing in the morning.
Apparently to the girl's chagrin, her parents insisted that I eat breakfast with them first. It was a simple dish of roasted cicadas and some kind of fruit, which I would have felt considerably more uncomfortable trying under different circumstances but it turned out to taste much less remarkable than I would have expected one way or another.
At the clearing, fifty or so men bustled as they sharpened their blades and arrows and put on armour. More men were trickling in from the direction of the cave, and more yet had already gone wherever their enemy forces were. I thought I could hear faint sounds of battle in the distance, but I couldn't be sure if I was only imagining it. The thought that the clang of swords and the shouts of warriors was really close enough to hear was making my stomach tense.
Nana's doppelganger instructed me on how to perform the ritual and told me to hurry before I got caught in the crossfire.
The same boy who had pulled the arrow from my arm accompanied me to the cave. Before we entered, he used the fire from the lanterns held by the cicada statues at the entrance to light his torch.
Everything inside was just as it was in the real world — or, rather, as it did seem to be the case that this was just as real, my world — with the sole exception of the smell and the hot springs that it emanated from; instead of a stomach-turning stench, the cave was filled with a sweet scent and instead of filthy muddled liquid, the water in the pools was clear and glinting.
When we reached the dead end at the deepest depths, he laid the torch on the altar and spoke. It took me a second to realise I understood what he said. "May the Snake Goddess guide you home." I didn't have time to respond before he already disappeared into the dark. He must have known the cave like the back of his hand if he was able to retrace his steps without light.
I looked at the altar and saw the large golden bell Nana's doppelganger had told me to ring once I was ready to commence the ritual. I took a deep breath and rang it.
As soon as the sound of the bell had rung out, a loud hissing noise pierced the silence and echoed around the cave. Its source slithered into view from a crack high up in the wall: an enormous snake, its head the size of a grown man's torso.
~
Slowly, I undressed without breaking eye contact. The massive head swayed left and right, a forked tongue peeking from between the colossal jaws ever so often. Its eyes were constantly shifting across the colour spectrum as the light from the torch reflected from them. Its scales, too, were glinting with barely perceptible hints of every hue of the rainbow.
When all of my clothes were on the cave floor, the snake opened its mouth wide. I stood still and waited. It moved closer, the monstrous gaping maw hovering above me as if to swallow me whole. I wanted to move. I wanted to run. I was trembling all over. But, against all of my instincts, I stood still and waited. I did what the priestess had instructed me to do. The foul-smelling saliva streamed all over me like a waterfall. I let my whole body be coated in it. It made me wince, then gasp in pain. It felt searing hot and freezing cold at the same time, like my skin was both boiling and frosting.
I waited for the sign. The priestess had told me I would know it when I saw it, but as seconds passed and turned into minutes — or at least it felt like it — and nothing was happening, aside from the blistering pain over every inch of my body getting worse with each moment, I began to lose hope. Had I missed it? Was I doomed? Panic was beginning to consume me. I could no longer stand still. My breathing was heavy and every breath felt like I was inhaling sand.
Then, I saw it. It wasn't something in front of my eyes, but inside my head: I saw my mother. She was waving at me through the window. I giggled. Memories flooded me, from that very first vague fleeting image from when I was a little boy to the second I lost consciousness in this very cave.
Nana Terushima... I remembered the first time I saw her. We were 15, then, entering high school. Our lives ahead of ourselves, full of possibilities. We only spoke a few times, briefly, until that fateful trip four years ago. I never thought I had feelings for her before that night, only the same butterflies that every boy got around her, but in hindsight I knew I had fallen for her on the very first day of high school.
She walked into the classroom with her near-black hair flowing down to her shoulders, the morning sun lighting up her face. Her tousled fringe cut to just above her eyes — which were a rich shade of deep chestnut brown and quite round with slight plump below them — swung a little as she stepped over the doorstep and a warm smile spread on her naturally lush lips, which parted just enough to reveal a hint of protruding canine teeth. There was a small beauty spot on her left cheek under the corner of her eye. The way her voice shimmered when she greeted a friend from middle school filled me with a sense of unjealous happiness, yet hopelessly wishing that one day she would speak to me with such delight.
I had known that, in all likelihood, Nana would never acknowledge my existence. I had assumed that because she was impossibly cute, bound to be popular, she would be shallow and uninteresting as a person. My impression changed over the months first because she became one of the top students in our class, then because I learned that on many days after school she went to the nearby river to draw. I never saw any of her drawings in our school days until we grew close after that fateful night. The following weeks had been hellish for both of us, but having each other helped us get through it.
It was only now that it truly dawned on me that our relationship was owed entirely to the fact that everybody else in our homeroom class had died.
The understanding that my happiness — which was also Nana's happiness, but would it have been if things had gone differently? — made me break down in tears. My immersion in the sweet stream of memories was shattered and I collapsed, the cave floor scraping the skin from my knees. This was the push I needed.
I dug my fingers into my chest and did as Ms. Ōsawa had done, tearing my skin open. The pain was unbearable, but I had to keep going. I tugged and thrashed, pulling the wound wider and wider. I screamed non-stop. The snake was hissing, still salivating on me. I wrenched and wrothe, more and more, peeling myself.
However long it took, by the end I had no concept of time. All I could feel was agony. I could no longer scream, nor cry, only wheeze. My vision was blurry but I saw the passage leading back to the sparkling springs. To complete the ritual, I would have to immerse myself. They were less than an hour's walk away, but now they may as well have been on the other side of the world. It took all my strength just to drag myself a distance less than one full step.
Attempting to do it again, I was able to scream again. I could hear myself and was horrified. I no longer sounded human. The anguish, both physical and mental, had stripped me of everything that had made me the person I had been. I could not even remember my own name. I could not remember why I was doing what I was doing. All I remembered was that I had to make it to the water.
Inch by inch, I crawled through the corridor. Inch by inch, I knew the pools were ever so slightly closer. Inch by inch, I dragged my skinless body forward.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I reached the end of the corridor and made it to the cavern with the pools. I braced myself for more pain before pulling myself over the edge of one of them. The water burned. In comparison, the snake's saliva had been like the tingling of a numb limb. I struggled to stay afloat, in vain. I sank below the surface.
~
When I woke up, a wave of pain swept throughout my body. It passed my head and the pain was over. I could not see anything but I could feel that I was enveloped in some kind of viscous slime. I could feel that even my lungs were full of it. Breathing it in was unlike any sensation I had ever felt before, truly sickening but vomiting would have been no different from breathing out. It was ice cold. Moving was strenuous and all around me I could feel something leathery.
A cocoon.
I was determined to break through the organic walls wrapped around me, doing everything I could to claw at them and kick at them but nothing was enough. Eventually, I gave up. I laid still, sucking in the disgusting fluid and choking it out, floating in the weightlessness. I shivered all over.
Nana. The first coherent thought — a memory — that entered my unborn mind. I remembered the warmth of her voice, the warmth of her smile, the warmth of her skin against mine. I remembered everything. The fluid began to drain. I took everything in, all the old memories that seemed completely unknown to me, and they became immediately familiar. They were my memories. Had the ritual worked?
I burst through the ruptured opening in the cocoon and into the water. It felt bitter and scalding hot to my new skin, but it was only refreshing after the unimaginable suffering I had endured on the other side.
Climbing out of the pool, I vomited harder than ever before, spewing out every last drop of the black fluid that had filled my lungs. Then, I coughed, feeling dizzy.
Once I was sure there was no more left, I inhaled the fetid cave air as if it was a seaside breeze on a spring evening. Everything looked the same as it had before, only now as I looked at the cocoons, I saw that there were four left intact. None of them twitched anymore and there were no sounds coming from any of them. Had I been inside one of them all along, even when we first came here? If so, did that mean the others were inside the rest of them? What were the implications of that? This was all beyond my comprehension, but to explain the number of the cocoons, that was all I could think of.
I had no idea what I was supposed to do now. Was I to wait for the others to hatch? Or was it a coincidence, and I should look for them in the cave? The rational part of my mind said the latter but my instincts screamed the former. So, I made a compromise. I would go to the chamber at the bottom of the cave, and if they were not there, I would immediately come back and wait for the cocoons to hatch.
The heat and humidity of the cave had felt suffocating before, but now it felt barely different from a hot summer day. I wondered if it was because of my lack of clothing or because of the new perspective given by the ordeal, or a combination of the two. Many things made their way through my mind as I made my way through the central passage down to the depths of the cave a third time.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw in the chamber at the bottom. On the bare stone altar, five flayed bodies were piled on top of each other. On the ground, a pile of their skins. Even with my empty stomach, something rose up inside me and made me choke. There was no doubt about it, these were our bodies. I was looking at my own dead body. On the same pile, the dead body of my girlfriend, and the dead bodies of the professor and his students.
Somebody — or something — had to have piled them up. Whoever or whatever had done it, I didn't want to find out so I backed away and returned to the cocoons.
After some time, one of the cocoons began to throb. Before long, a body splashed into the water. I was tense the whole time, having to wait for the layer of black sludge to wash off to see who it was. When it did, my eyes filled with tears and I laughed in a mix of disbelief and relief. It was Nana.
~
For a month, we stayed at the guesthouse in the nearby town and went back to the cave every day to see if the rest of the cocoons would hatch. They never did, although they did occasionally twitch and make noises.
When we checked in at the guesthouse this time, it was almost a shock that the same elderly couple was still running it. We tried to get them to tell us how they had survived that night four years ago, in vain. They pretended they had no idea what we were talking about.
On our stay, we ran into both the police officer who had at first been dismissive and the doctor who had been outright unpleasant. Neither of them was willing to speak with us. The only thing the doctor said was that it was a matter of great importance that we would not tell anybody about the cave or anything that happened here.
In the other world, Nana and I both had performed the ritual. What struck both of us as odd was that while our experiences had been similar, they were not identical; she had also been instructed by a priestess, but her appearance and character had been quite different. It had taken Nana over a month to convince the bitter old lady to explain the details of the ritual. Not only that, the situation had been much worse as far as the conflict was considered. Armed guards were posted at the entrance of the village and troops went out every night, often bringing back captured enemies and on a handful of occasions also the heads of slain ones to put on spikes around the fence — which the village elders and priestess had disapproved of, but without taking action to actually stop it — as well as other trophies of war.
The only conclusion was that we had entered that world at different times. We spent many evenings discussing the details, of which Nana naturally had many more. She had even learned some of the language spoken there.
We wondered what the reason professor Amamiya and his students were not reborn was. Had they failed to complete the ritual? Had they died before ever getting a chance to even begin it? Had they decided to stay in that world? Or was it a coincidence that there remained three cocoons? Many people in town gave off an air like they knew, but nobody was willing to answer any of our questions.
Had we gotten answers to any of the questions we'd had in mind when returning to this place? We now had some idea about what had happened to our classmates and teacher, but we could still only speculate as to how it had come to happen. The only closure we gained was that we no longer had those nightmares that had tormented us for four years.
Out of our late-night discussions came a new burning question: had our teacher brought us here by accident, or had the events of that night been her plan all along? It felt wrong to accuse her of something like that, but in the flood of returning memories that had washed over us inside those cocoons, a memory of one event that had seemed fairly unremarkable at the time had resurfaced from both of our subconscious minds: not long before that fateful school trip, we had seen a woman with a star-shaped birthmark on her face at our school, talking to our teacher.
~
Tracking down Hoshiko Amamiya was easy. She had a blog with thousands of followers, and from there we found that she taught weekly visual arts classes in Saitama — focused on sculpting and painting — and had her own gallery in the outskirts of a residential area next to a park, exhibiting both her own creations and those of her students.
We almost began to second-guess the worthwhileness of contacting her, incredulous at the idea that a visual arts teacher could in any way be connected to whatever it was that happened in that strange small town in Tottori Prefecture. However, after having experienced such bizarre and horrifying things as we had, and even more importantly for the sake of those who died, it would have felt wrong not to pursue the only lead we had that could lead to an explanation, even if it was a long shot. At the very least, we should inform her of her father's passing.
For the sake of inconspicuousness, we decided to attend one of her classes. Afterwards, we would confront her.
The classes were held in a little atelier tucked away within a narrow alley. Finding it on the ground took a bit of effort, but when we did, I could hardly believe my eyes. It just seemed too on the nose; the wall around the entrance was decorated with snakes and cicadas, painted in a cute style but it unmistakably evoked the imagery of that faraway place.
"Welcome!" a velvety voice exclaimed from inside. It was professor Amamiya's daughter, with a soft sparkling smile on her foxy face. The birthmark was only barely noticeably peeking from under her side-swept fringe.
Five other people attended the class. She instructed everybody to paint a portrait of the person sitting next to them, circling around the room offering advice on techniques and colour choices and such. I was surprised at how relaxing it was.
After the class, as the others were leaving, Nana and I approached Ms. Amamiya.
"Excuse me," I began.
She turned to look at me and then at Nana. Before I could say anything else, she let out a short sigh and spoke in a tone that sounded somewhere between irritated and concerned. "You're the survivors, aren't you? Let's go somewhere more private to talk."
We followed her to her gallery a few blocks away. She gestured for us to enter, and we did.
The door slammed shut behind us. I heard the lock click. A bright white ceiling light flashed on, illuminating the paintings and sculptures all around us. Within seconds, a door at the far end of the hall opened. From the open door, a skinless figure stumbled out. Then another. More and more.
"What the hell?!" Nana yelled, pounding on the locked door. "Let us out!"
Flayed people dashed towards us, shrieking unintelligibly. I grabbed Nana's arm and made a run for it. We had no idea where to run. There were doors at the sides near the centre of the space, and in a panic we went for the one on the left. Running closer to the skinless filled me with dread. Just as we reached the door, they were barely a few strides away. I pulled on the handle, my hands slippery with sweat. Nana's screams telling me to hurry filled my head. It budged, creaking. I tore at it with all I had, swinging it open.
I shoved Nana inside, grabbed the interior handle and jumped after her. The door closed but it had no locking mechanism. "Keep going!" I urged.
We were in a wide hallway with more art, on the opposite end a bay window consisting of three large panels. Large enough to exit through. A clay sculpture of a person with a rock for a head caught my eye. I grabbed it and ran after Nana, who was already halfway there. Behind me, the sound of the door creaking open and ghastly moaning.
I threw the rock at the middle window. It made a soft thud. Not even a crack. I picked it up and threw it again. Same result. Third time, barely a scratch. The groaning was getting close and Nana was crying and screaming.
I gave up on throwing the rock, resorting to hammering at the glass over and over and over again as hard as I could. With each hit, the cracks spread, slowly but surely. I could only hear my own heartbeat, in synch with the rock against the window. All other sounds were drowned out.
Crash. Finally, a way out. I reached for Nana and felt my hand become wet. "Nana!" I gasped. She was covered in blood. The skinless crowd was biting into her outstretched arms, and scratching her. She was holding them back with her own body. "Let her go!" I howled, smashing them on their heads with the rock. They bit into her again and again, dug their fingernails into her flesh over and over, but I managed to wrestle her away from them and fall backwards through the broken window.
"Help!" I yelled, dragging my badly wounded and barely conscious girlfriend, trying to pull her up but unable to stand up myself. The attackers were flopping down to the ground, now crawling after us. "Help!"
The park was empty. Nobody would hear my screams. I had to act fast with determination, think practically. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done, but I let go of Nana so that I could climb up on my feet. The moulted men and women tried grasping at her, some of them also fumbling to get up. I took a hold of her and pulled with all my strength, picking her up. I was exhausted from running and beating the window, but I felt a surge of energy seeing how much difficulty those chasing us had making it to an upright position.
I ran. I didn't care where I was running in this unfamiliar area, beyond the fact that I was running in the opposite direction from where we had come. I saw people in the distance, walking on the other side of the canal to my right. I yelled, but they didn't pay attention. I was still too far. I kept running along the canal until I reached a bridge. I yelled again, and now people turned to look. "Help! She needs to get to a hospital!"
An old lady scuttled to us and wrapped her sweater around Nana's bleeding arms while a teenager called an ambulance. I was practically frozen, sitting on a bench. I could only stare at Nana with an uncertain emptiness in the pit of my stomach. It was my fault that she was hurt. If I had been faster or stronger, we could've made it out sooner.
When the paramedics carried her into the ambulance, I heard commotion somewhere out of sight. I pictured the skinless horde roaming the streets and shuddered.
Category:Dreams/Sleep
Category:Beings
Category:Places
Category:Dismemberment
Category:VerminGoat
Category:Longpasta