(Art: “The Rescue,” by Mai-sensei)
“I had to meet Mika. I didn’t have a choice? Did I?” Shiomi’s voice was so forlorn and full of despair.
I had to answer even though I didn’t think she was asking me, “No, you didn’t have a choice.” I knew enough about idols to know that dating fans never worked out in their favor. The resulting scandal was almost a sure career killer.
She didn’t acknowledge my reply and instead stared out into the dark. We were rolling through a mixture of dark tree-lined road; a raised roadway looking down on a dark valley; and sections with unlit buildings. It was as depressing as her story.
There were no signs of people or cars, not even derelict ones. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen animal life since entering the Senryukyo Tunnel. No dogs, cats, bats, or even moths dancing in the dark. The closest thing to life were the distorted shadows our headlights cast amid the trees.
During a straight stretch, I looked at Oogle Maps to see if this was the way I should go, but static and weird characters played across the screen. No, I realized I shouldn’t have come this way, but it seemed too late to go back.
“You want another cig?” Shiomi eventually asked.
“No, but you can go ahead.”
“I’m out.”
I got the hint. “You’ll find another pack in the glove box. Go for it.”
She got out the pack, but instead of opening it, she looked at it, reading the label, “Camel Lights.” She turned it over, examining it. “I don’t get you. Why are you so nice to me? I’ve been nothing but a bitch to you.”
She opened the package and got out a smoke, then continued, “Thanks, I notice. You’re sweet. It’s been a long time since anyone was nice to me.”
“That’s sad,” was all I could think to say.
We had left most of the buildings behind and had traveled for several kilometers through thick forest. A rising wind sighed through the trees and our tires rattled on the uneven surface of the road. I thought about putting music on to help me stay awake and distract myself from thoughts about Shiomi’s past.
The CD case was in my hand when I spotted roadside graves ahead. I dropped the case and reached up uneasily, touching the charm around my neck. I eyed the shadows our headlights created amid the grave markers.
“Don’t look,” I hear Shiomi from next to me.
Despite her warning and my apprehension, nothing happened. I breathed a sigh of relief, perhaps too soon because almost immediately, yellow blinking lights appeared ahead of us. They reminded me of candle lanterns.
I tightened my grip on the charm as images of spectral figures with funeral candles flashed through my mind. Or maybe cultists come to perform obscure and bloody rites. Who or whatever it was they stretched across the road, blocking it.
“Don’t stop, don’t swerve, don’t look,” Shiomi’s words came back to me. I wasn’t sure I could drive into something that looked human. What if it was actually living? Someone, like us, waylaid into this other space.
As I got closer, the semblance of life evaporated. There was an inanimate regularity to the blinking and the way they stretched unmoving across the road.
I slowed down in response and crept forward through a wide intersection into a dark hamlet, and then stopped at the edge of a bridge. On the far side, blocking the road, were orange-stripped construction barricades with yellow flashing lights. Beyond the barricade were drifts of dirty snow blocking the highway. I could see a dim figure standing among the drifts. It was the first human, besides Shiomi, I had seen in over an hour. Thankfully, this one wasn’t wearing a kimono. The last thing I wanted to deal with was Mikawa-san or even Hanayome-shin.
I was considering the situation when my phone rang.
“Don’t,” Shiomi said and reached for my hand, but it was too late. I had the phone next to my ear and could hear a man’s monotone voice. Outside grit, picked up by the wind, rattling against the windshield, but I could still clearly hear the voice.
“Go home. You don’t belong here.” The voice said, then the phone went dead.
“Do you hear her?” Shiomi said.
“Her?” I asked, confused. It had been a man’s voice.
“Listen,” Shiomi replied, but all I heard was the wind, the rattle of sand, and then the car door opening. Before I knew it, Shiomi was out of the car, facing the barricades.
“Mika,” she called. “You’re here.” If she said more, the wind carried it away.
Why hadn’t I seen this coming? I wish I could have said that her recent friendly, chatty behavior had put me off guard, but I hadn’t even thought about it. My anxieties and thoughts about the complexities of our relationship had consumed me.
I fumbled with the door handle, and when I’d gotten the door open, a gust of wind caught it. The door slammed in my face, just missing my fingers. I swore and tried again.
Once the car door was open, I staggered out. The air pushed against me, attempting to drive me backward away from the bridge. Ash and grit stung my face and made a dry rattling sound as it raced across the ground. It suddenly occurred to me that this was Mikawa’s voice, just as Hanayome-shin’s voice was like the wind in the trees. Mikawa’s voice hid in hollow, dry, rattling sounds. With that realization, I began discerning words in the tumult of noise. “Go back. Shhhesses miiinne, miiiine.”
I pushed through the wind while protecting my mouth with my arm. I tried to shut out the sound of Mikawa’s voice, but now that I recognized it, I couldn’t. “Shiiiooomiii, cooommee to meee. Wee belonggg togettherrr. You’rrree minnnne.”
Shiomi was halfway to the barricade, but moving slowly like in a dream. The wind battered at both of us, but while I struggled vigorously against it, her efforts were lackluster. Between the two, I caught up with her as she reached the barricade. I could hear Shiomi speaking over the wind and the droning of Mikawa’s voice. “Wait for me. I’m coming. Mikawa, don’t go.”
Now that I was standing at the barricade, I could see what had appeared to be snowdrifts were ash. Beyond Shiomi, I could see a man; He wore dull navy workmen’s overalls with a name tag of strange glyphs stitched to it. But what caught my attention was his face, or lack of it. Instead, there was a swirling vortex that seemed to suck the very color and essence out of the surrounding darkness. My consciousness seemed to leach, fragment…
a symphony…
into a cacophonic
tapestry of
nothingness.
I jerked my eyes away, and the fragmented whispers in my mind receded. What I had seen was horrific and utterly beyond my understanding.
It must have been for just a moment because Shiomi had only moved a step further, and I grabbed her arm, preventing her from slipping past the barricade. She resisted weakly, but I held on. There was nothing good here for either of us.
She turned, glassy-eyed, and explained. “I hear her, I hear Mika. She’s calling me. She is out there.”
All I heard were the echoes of the void, the sound of the gritty wind and something slithering through the ash, a dry rustling sound that raised my hackles.
I avoided looking toward the noise or understanding what it might be saying. Instead, I pulled on Shiomi’s arm, leading her toward the car. She pulled against my urging for a second, then said, “Please.” After that, she meekly followed.
The wind had shifted directions, and the sand drove into my face. The ash hissed loudly around my feet, an angry sound. “Shhhine, Shhhhine, Shhhhine.” At least the silence of the void had receded.
(Art: “Time Space Man, 時空人”, by Mai-sensei)
Then we were back at the car. I pushed Shiomi in, slammed the door, and ran to my side. She could have escaped at that moment, but she remained slumped, defeated, in the passenger seat.
I made a U-turn in the intersection and once I faced back the way I’d come, I floored the gas pedal. The car bucked and then surged as the wind buffeted it, trying to hold it back.
“Shinnne, Shhhinne, SHINE.”
I kept my foot on the accelerator and the car broke free, vibrating as I sped up. The boxy Tanto wasn’t designed to accelerate this way, but I remembered the road immediately in front of me was straight. I wanted to leave the faceless man and whatever else might be at the barricades behind. Only death, or worse, waited there.
The road remained straight long enough for me to be moving dangerously fast, then I hit a sharp turn. I swore it hadn’t been there before. The railing to the right flashed by too quickly and the side of the vehicle missed it by inches.
I needed to slow down. We wouldn’t make it around the bend at this speed. I braked, and I cursed the old balding tires as they slipped in the light layer of ash on the road. My focus was riveted on my driving as I fought to keep from going into a skid. Time slowed, and my hands went numb. “Into the skid. In the skid.” I imagined Tomo’s voice and the lessons he had drilled into me when I was studying for my license.
Too much, I had overcorrected, and we fishtailed the other way. Again I thought, “Into the skid.” This time I got it right and straightened the car out, narrowly missing the embankment. But I was around the bend. To the right was a turnoff, which I gratefully turned into and parked.
Now that it was over, I sat white-knuckled, shaking, and breathing heavily. I had never been so grateful for Tomo’s drilling.
Once my breathing and heart rate returned to normal, I noticed my hands tingled, so I shook them. Now that I was calm, I sat and listened. The wind had stopped and silence had descended again, except for the sound of the engine idling and the soft crying next to me. “Mika… Mika…”
I looked over, expecting her to be upset about our last brush with death, but she had righted herself from the tangle our ride had left her in and sat huddled in her seat, head down. When I reached out a hand to comfort her, she shrugged it off. So I left her alone for a moment and then tried again, this time offering her a Camel. She accepted it, but remained quiet.
I took out a Pianissimo for myself and lit it. Inhaling slowly, I stared into the night. The cigarette tasted foul, the peach flavor cloying in my mouth. I’d had far too many tonight and instead of being calming, it jangled my nerves.
Then in a bitter voice, I heard Shiomi complain, “Shit, why didn’t you just leave me? I was about to join her, and you had to fucking interfere!”
“Don’t swear at me!” The situation was wearing on my nerves, or I might have let it pass, but the swearing grated. It clashed with the image of Shiomi I kept trying to build in my mind. I was tired, my cigarette tasted foul, and I had just risked my life for the third time. And for what, an ungrateful woman who didn’t have the sense to see her lover was a rotting corpse!
“I’ll swear if I want to, White Knight-sama. I’d be with my girlfriend right now, instead of wandering around these desolate hills, if it wasn’t for you. You’re as bad as Mika, riding in on your fucking white horse and fucking my life up! I hate you! Damn it, I hate you!”
I mentally did a double-take. I was getting yelled at for saving her from her dead ex, who, as far as I could tell, had been a nasty piece of work when she was alive.
But Shiomi had me pegged right. I was still thinking of myself as a white knight rescuing a fair damsel. Only the damsel didn’t want to be saved. She never had, and I kept expecting her to be grateful.
“Since I can’t convince you your Mika is dead, I must look like an interfering fool. But once we get to your aunt’s, you can say goodbye and never see me again. Happy.” My voice sounded bitter in my ears.
“You’re just abandoning me too!” Her anger had turned into a wail of angst.
“No, you wanted to go.” The illogic of her complaints had me whipsawed. It wasn’t helping that she had pointed out my “white knight” complex. It deflated my righteous indignation.
“The only person who ever stayed with me… wanted me, was Mika,” she continued. There were tears in her voice. “My aunt is only going to take me in because I’m family. She’s like the rest, despises me. She’s going to remind me how I threw my life away trying to be an idol. I wish I was dead.”
What was I going to say? Despite everything she had said and done, I felt this woman’s pain. At the moment, it lay raw on the surface. I’d felt this kind of pain. The pain of not fitting in, despised by my family. But while I had been lucky and things turned out okay in the end, things had only gone downhill for her. I hadn’t heard her full story yet, but I knew it didn’t end well.
The wonder was she hadn’t walked out of my life before. It made me think. Somewhere deep down she must know that Mika was dead and joining her was a terrible idea.
I looked at her face and against my better judgment I knew what I was going to say, “Shiomi, I won’t abandon you. We’ll work things out at home.”
Yabai, Tomo was going to kill me if she agreed to this, so I hastily continued, “Only you have to behave. Help around the house, don’t take other people’s things, especially Tomo’s. Be respectful. And it would help if you didn’t swear or drink so much.”
She was quiet again, and all I heard was the soft crackle of her cigarette. Then she spoke, almost in a whisper. “I’ll try.”
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Note:
Tomo seems like an understanding guy. Maybe he won’t have a fit at Ume coming back with Shiomi. Or maybe he will. I hope you will pick up the next chapter to find out.
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Story by Nara Moore
Twitter/X:@nara_moore
Mastodon: sakurajima.moe
WordPress: Josei Yuri and Paranormal Romance
Art by Mai-sensei
Twitter: @Maiisheree