Akamizu - 赤水 - Chapter 1 "Red Water"
Title: Akamizu - 赤水
Author: Zion Shadowlet
Beta: butterflysaga
Characters: Uruha, Aoi, OCs
Pairing: Aoi/Uruha
Genre: Horror, Romance, Supernatural
Rating: NC17
Summary: After the sudden disappearance of his fiancé Usagi, Kouyou travels to a remote town to find her in a place known ominously as “Akamizu” where she is in the powerful grip of a strange man who has taken up residence there. But what the young Kouyou doesn’t expect is that he too will fall to the mysterious charm of this horrific place.
Warnings: Vampire Fiction. This isn’t your twilight style vampire story though. If you want a beautiful glamourized vampire story, this isn’t it.
The man wore a large, wide rimmed black hat; It was dirty and old and contrary to what would have been polite, he hardly considered to remove it when he sat down across from the young and anxious Takashima Kouyou. Instead, he had pulled out a long fragrant cigarette and lit the edge-it was the cheap sort that smelled and looked like a stick of aged Indian incense. Throwing himself back into his chair with the cool air of a Film Noir actor, he lifted up his chin towards him, revealing his haggard countenance, littered with the perpetual shadow of remaining facial hair that he had haphazardly attempted to shave from his face. Kouyou could see beneath his bushy grey tipped brows, two large black eyes that had strangely, an almost helpless bovine kindness to them. Private Detective Yano was his name and true to the stereotypes, he wore a dingy trench coat that on his chubby frame, looked strained and ready to snap. Kouyou however was too anxious to really notice these things and from the moment Detective Yano sat down, the young man was ready to believe anything that came from that tired and slack mouth.
“Do you know what the undead are, young man?” he uttered with an almost actorly flair.
Kouyou flinched a bit in surprise and stood up straight. In the crowded café, he wasn’t sure if he had heard him correctly. “Undead?” he muttered back at him.
“Yes,” he replied affirmatively and leaning forward, almost to the point where his chest was lying down upon the café table, he whispered to him in an excited and mysterious voice “The undead. Surely, you have heard of them. Seen them in movies, read about them….you know, what I am talking about, right?” his brows lifted into his forehead, allowing the grey autumn light that flowed in through the windows to gather dramatically into the bowls of the his eye sockets.
“I am paying you, don’t play with me,” Kouyou nearly whined. “This isn’t funny.”
“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” he repeated and shook his head back and forth, back and forth. “You are right, this isn’t funny.” Excitedly, he shifted in his chair, nearly knocking it and the table over. Awkwardly, he straightened himself out. “I’ve been looking into this for days. I haven’t slept Mr. Takashima. Oh, no and why would I?! I would be INSANE if I did.” As he enunciated the word “insane” his eyes grew wide into two perfect circles. His cool manner that he had begun with crumbled all around him and like a nervous fool, he laughed almost madly. “I wouldn’t have believed it either, Mr. Takashima. No. No. No. No. I would have thought the man who would have told me this was perfectly INSANE. INSANE. INSANE. INSANE. But I’m not crazy,” he pointed to himself self-righteously. “No, I’m not at all. I can tell that there is something in you that believes me. I can tell by your eyes, Mr. Takashima. So listen to me. There is such a thing, such monsters as they talk about in books and in fairytales-OH NO, BUT IT’S NOT THE SAME!” He was beginning to attract the attention of the café’s staff and the other patrons, but neither he nor Kouyou cared. Before the young man now, he considered that he was watching the mental breakdown of a man that only weeks ago seemed in his right mind. Lowering his voice into a tense whisper, Detective Yano continued “The Undead is really a wrong way of talking about them. Even vampire doesn’t quite fit. It’s not nearly as glamorous or CLEAN as that. They are truly visceral monsters, considered with the flesh.” Yano nervously looked around the café as if he were being hunted. Under his breath he continued as if all along he had been speaking to himself. “The drinking of flesh… the ripping of flesh…. the company of ROTTING flesh.”
“YANO!” Kouyou shouted at him. “I didn’t hire you to talk to me about monsters. I hired you to find my fiancé, Kaima Usagi. Do you remember her?” he spoke slowly as if he were talking to someone who could hardly speak Japanese.
“The girl? Yes, the girl…well, this has EVERYTHING to do with the girl.”
“What are you talking about?” Kouyou was growing angry with the man’s antics.
“You and her family are wrong. Usagi, that little running rabbit,” he chuckled at his tasteless pun on the girl’s name. “She wasn’t kidnapped. She didn’t go to get fresh air. She went there like a mindless insect being drawn to a burning lightbulb.”
“What are you talking about….” Kouyou’s ears buzzed as the strangeness of the moment was beginning to overwhelm him. It felt as if him and this crazed man were encapsulated in an airtight plastic bubble and the two of them, together were swimming at the bottom of the sea. The insanity of it all by virtue of the power of its sensationalism drowned out the common sense of reality, leaving Kouyou at the mercy of a confusion that was bordering on panic. Usagi. What happened to her? Something must have happened to her. Monsters were impossible but what if this man was interpreting something else as a monster? What if it was a murderer that he was talking about? What if it was some twisted cult? The questions and the speculations ran throughout his brain as the blood pounded in his chest: Rapid, Violent, Loud.
“You don’t get it, do you?” Yano sat up almost as if he were victorious. “Usagi left to go to the monster, Mr. Takashima. She went to be with him. She went to be eaten by him. She went to be killed by him.”
Through Kouyou’s lips, he muttered a small “what?”
“In the South, far from here, where it never snows. In Kyushu. In the trees. Near a small town called Maya, there is an old mansion that the locals called Akamizu.”
“Akamizu?”
“Yes. That is where it lives. It and all the women….including our rabbit.”
“Usagi is there?”
Cryptically, Yano leaned back into his chair and resumed the pose of a cool Film Noir actor. His eyes, however were still nervous and fearful. He added coldly with the intention almost for dramatic effect: “If the fox hasn’t already eaten our little rabbit.”
In the intensity of the foliage, the sunlight that trickled in was like water slipping through the cracks of a vase. And the wind was still, so much so that the trees themselves seemed to be inanimate and solitary as if they were lifeless stone. And the hot air, repugnant with the scent of aged and rotting flesh weighed as if it were made of the same stuff as tension, leaving the forest soundless save for the rustling of the girl’s naked feet through the grass and the small plants as she slowly treaded up the hill towards Akamizu.
Two pale and bare ankles. Against the white of her skin, the tiny trickle of blood streaming downward like a stray ray of sunlight through the density of trees.
Usagi wore what was left of her clothes, a tattered salmon colored dress that she had bought last Christmas season at one of the more fashionable stores in Tokyo in a world and reality that was so far away now that it seemed like a dream. Now the lacy collar was ripped to shreds and between the maze of their design were dried drops of blood. Other than this lone dress, she wore nothing else. Her hair that was once straight and shiny was now filthy and knotted, matted with that same red substance.
She hasn’t seen her face in days. Not that she cares anymore.
Akamizu. Akamizu and her God. That was her life now and without protest, she knew too that it would be her death. At any moment, she knew that he could kill her and she knew too the unavoidable fact that he would and that he had every intention to one day take her life. So be it. It was his to take as he had taken the lives from the bodies that now littered the outskirts of Akamizu and its bold crimson walls. They were once people before they were piled there, stacked on top of one another, decomposing in the heat. But Usagi never thinks of these things. She never thinks about anything but Him now. Only Him.
Months ago, in the depths of summer, she had dreamt about Him. Or so she believed. She woke up one night, startled and sweating and in her heart; she had the irresistible urge to travel south. No, she hadn’t seen him in her dream. She had seen instead the image of Akamizu and it’s ancient red walls through the thickness of the forest as if she were passing by it like a disembodied ghost and she felt inside of her an intense emotion. In her dreams she heard nothing; she only received the intensity of words. Instead of hearing “I love you” she felt their resounding effect the way one starved for affection would. Never before in her life had she felt such an emotion, an emotion that racked your entire being and possessed your soul.
In the dream, she continued to float. Above the entrance, she saw a gold sign and the words Akamizu above the entrance of that grand mansion. Aka, Red. Mizu, Water.
Then the sensation overwhelmed her. The sensation of utter pleasure, threading through her body like hidden stream beneath the earth, infiltrating the parts of her that she had hardly knew could be pleasured. In her toes, the tips of her fingers, around the circumference of her thighs, throughout the entire organ of her sex and around her throat. Pleasure. Pleasure. Pleasure. Erupting finally in an orgasm that forced her awake.
She sat up. Her chest pounded. Her body trembled. She dripped everywhere. From her skin, sweat. From her mouth, spit. From her eyes, tears. She had lost control of her body and she wet herself. She sat in a pool of her own hot urine. And suddenly, even though it was weeks before her time, she bled between the legs. Sensing this, she gingerly lowered a shaking hand downward and touched herself there. Bringing the white fingers now tinged with blood up two her shocked eyes.
No one needed to tell her anything. She understood as if it was the supreme truth.
And it was simple.
Go South to Akamizu.
The mansion had seen better years, some as bloody and horrific, some serene as the stream that flowed behind it through the forest. The villagers had many stories about Akamizu and the young man, Kouyou, hitchhiking into town heard very few of them upon arriving. He was to find that the locals were rather tight-lipped.
With a backpack on his shoulder, he looked around at Maya. It was a small place as he had expected. Even though it had been modernized with telephone poles and cables in the air and cars on the street, Maya seemed to be suffocated by these things as if they were trying to hold something back about this town. And as soon as he climbed out of his ride’s car, he felt the tension in the air come down on him as if it were trying to push him down into the earth.
But Kouyou paid it very little attention. Just an old town, with old traditional wooden buildings. The inn was easy to find even though it hardly looked different than the other Japanese style houses. There weren’t many places to go and the sign for it stood out prominently in the unperturbed sky of the small town. The innkeeper smiled pleasantly at the young man as he entered. “Nice to meet you” he said. And after Kouyou returned the greeting, the man added as if the topic interested him greatly, “We don’t get many blondes here!”
“Oh,” Kouyou made a small smile and looked down awkwardly.
The innkeeper with exquisite manners wasted no time getting tea for his guest and a place to sit. “Sir, if you don’t mind me asking,” he said once Kouyou was settled in. “How long do you plan to stay here in Maya? I only ask because I want to make sure that we can give you proper accommodation. You see,” he looked down. “We don’t get many visitors here in Maya-let alone men. The last one that came was a strange man from Tokyo and he was lacking in manners you see….and the locals didn’t take to him if you understand what I mean sir…You see…um…What is your purpose here?”
Kouyou as if he were ignoring him looked up at the innkeeper’s old and tanned face and asked in a blunt voice “What is this Akamizu place?” He stared at him with expressionless eyes as he awaited his reply.
The innkeeper stammered, taken aback by his directness. “Excuse me, sir?”
“I came here to go to a house called Akamizu. I need to get my fiancé back. Apparently she is staying there with some man.” After his talk with Detective Yano, the belief in his extreme tales has dissipated with every new approaching second. Across from him in that café, Kouyou was arrested by the intensity and bizarreness of his story but away from him, Kouyou returned to reality. Something had happened to Yano here in Maya or at Akamizu that made him lose his mind and speak insane things.
“Not just some man…” The innkeeper mumbled to himself. “Sir…you see…Sir…” he took a deep, uncomfortable breath before raising his eyes reluctantly to Kouyou’s blank but strangely beautiful face. And for a second because of this peculiar prettiness, the innkeeper felt a pang of sympathy for this ignorant outsider. “Akamizu is a dangerous place and the man that lives there is a dangerous man. You shouldn’t go up there and confront him. Even if you love this woman, you must believe me that she is as good as dead and that she will never come back with you if she is still alive and even if you manage to sir, you see…she will never ever be the same.”
“I don’t have a choice,” Kouyou continued seemingly unaffected by the innkeeper’s ominous warning. “I promised her parents that I would bring her back. I know she has fallen in love with someone else and that’s fine. I don’t care if it hurts her and she screams at me. I have to bring her back to her parents like I said I would.”
“Sir…you don’t understand. Go back to wherever you came from…”
“Where is it?”
“Sir…It’s too strange to explain…” The innkeeper looked down as if he were ashamed. In the dimly lit receiving room of the tiny inn, the small man seemed to shrivel up. His white t-shirt soaked with sweat and the wrinkles on his earthen face deepened.
Kouyou wasn’t going to ask anymore. He looked down at the tea the man had given him and went silent for a moment. “It’s okay. Let me just stay here for awhile and ask around.”
You can’t expect him to believe so readily the Innkeeper thought to himself. The other outsider that had come, the one who called himself Yano had been even more combative and pushy. Were they here for the same girl? He didn’t think to ask. It didn’t matter anymore. Once one was up there in Akamizu, you became all the same. There was no difference between the women that the man there had kept. Under his spell they ceased to have an identity and became instead the physical representation of desire. But the Innkeeper didn’t know about these things. He didn’t know about the purity of that desire directed at that one single man. He didn’t know about the sanctity of his presence or the ritual of their devotion to him. He hadn’t been up to Akamizu in many years and when the man had come here to Maya, he had spoken to the Mayor in the dead of night, a bag of money in his hands and a wild depraved look in his eyes. He needed that abandoned mansion. The innkeeper hadn’t been there for that meeting but he had heard about it many times. And every retelling of the event produced even taller a tale until the image of that man became a blur of confusion. No one knew his name.
But one thing was certain to the townsfolk of Maya. The Man of Akamizu was a demon. And he had turned that decaying mansion with its chipped red paint and its old stones drowning in ivy and moss into a temple of evil. Maybe the people were being punished in some way. They couldn’t be certain. Women had come through town like ghosts, walking mindlessly towards Akamizu but never any of the women and girls in Maya. They were forbidden to and the man, in respect for the town’s silence, never approached them.
“I’m going to go walk around,” the young man suddenly said, breaking the innkeeper out of his reverie. “Thank you.” He set the teacup down on the table and stood back up. “Is there anything you can tell me about the place though?...Before I go.”
The innkeeper perhaps trying to return to a sense of normalcy said, “It used to be owned by Samurai family but that was long ago. Before he came, it was rotting up there empty…” Rotting. He had heard stories from people that had braved to come within several meters of the place and they said that it smelt of rotting flesh.
“When did he come?”
“3 years ago…”
“Do you know how old he is?”
The innkeeper shot the outsider a peculiar look. “I don’t know. They say he looks like a young man much like yourself.”
Kouyou cocked his head to the side. The way the old man had answered sounded as if he were trying to infer something. What, Kouyou wasn’t sure. “Okay…” He nodded and turned around. “I will see you later.”
Outside, there were few people in the streets and those that passed him, bowed politely but hurried away from him. Somehow they knew that he had come for Akamizu, every stranger had. But there was one person that was willing to talk to Kouyou: an old woman tending to the garden outside of her home. Kouyou walking past stopped and greeted her, immediately asking her about the mansion and its new inhabitant.
“Ahhh that place…of course…” she stood up as straight as she could but being as old as she was, her back was sill curved and she gazed up at the young man’s beautiful face as if merely looking was a taxing experience. “Young pretty women came through Maya to go up to Akamizu. He is a love demon I believe…”
“Excuse me?” Kouyou’s eyes widened.
“Mhm…All of them…Young…Pretty Women…They go up there in search of him. I don’t know what they do in that abandoned place…it can’t be in good shape unless he fixed it but you know, that doesn’t seem likely…cause he isn’t like a normal person…Some people here you know believe he really is a demon or an old forest god or something like that…I myself…I myself don’t know what to believe or think. But I believe my eyes…I believe that women come here to go to him. How and why….No, that I don’t know…What did you say was the reason you were asking about the place?” She looked up at him confused.
“I didn’t…Um…I am here looking for my fiancé.”
Quickly the old woman replied. “Go home. There is no use. She will never leave him.”
“I’ll drag her back…”
“He must be beautiful…” The old woman went on as if she were in a state of dementia.
“You’ve never seen him?”
“The old Mayor was the only one who has seen him…but he died shortly after the man came…heart attack…something like that…”
“How is that no one has seen him? Doesn’t someone deliver his food?” Kouyou was beginning to get very confused. What was it about this town? What sort of strange insanity has possessed it? It must be some kind of fear and panic that has swept through that has made them talk like this or act like this. He had read about it somewhere or seen it on television-or so he thought. Things like this happen in small towns where the people are gullible, he reasoned with himself. Yano succumbed to their insanity. You mustn’t.
“No one delivers him anything.”
“He doesn’t come down to get anything?”
“No.”
“Do you think he farms up there?”
“You can’t farm up there. The terrain is all rocky.”
Kouyou sighed frustrated. “So what does he eat?”
The old woman as if something devilishly funny had been brought up smiled at him knowingly with an incomplete row of brown teeth and said slowly and mockingly “I have no idea.”
[A/N So this is chapter 1 of the Halloween fiction I promised all of you. Yes, I know I said it was going to be a one shot but honestly, I am not concerned about length right now. It's already late... >.< Let me know what you think, y'all. Different right?]
Author: Zion Shadowlet
Beta: butterflysaga
Characters: Uruha, Aoi, OCs
Pairing: Aoi/Uruha
Genre: Horror, Romance, Supernatural
Rating: NC17
Summary: After the sudden disappearance of his fiancé Usagi, Kouyou travels to a remote town to find her in a place known ominously as “Akamizu” where she is in the powerful grip of a strange man who has taken up residence there. But what the young Kouyou doesn’t expect is that he too will fall to the mysterious charm of this horrific place.
Warnings: Vampire Fiction. This isn’t your twilight style vampire story though. If you want a beautiful glamourized vampire story, this isn’t it.
The man wore a large, wide rimmed black hat; It was dirty and old and contrary to what would have been polite, he hardly considered to remove it when he sat down across from the young and anxious Takashima Kouyou. Instead, he had pulled out a long fragrant cigarette and lit the edge-it was the cheap sort that smelled and looked like a stick of aged Indian incense. Throwing himself back into his chair with the cool air of a Film Noir actor, he lifted up his chin towards him, revealing his haggard countenance, littered with the perpetual shadow of remaining facial hair that he had haphazardly attempted to shave from his face. Kouyou could see beneath his bushy grey tipped brows, two large black eyes that had strangely, an almost helpless bovine kindness to them. Private Detective Yano was his name and true to the stereotypes, he wore a dingy trench coat that on his chubby frame, looked strained and ready to snap. Kouyou however was too anxious to really notice these things and from the moment Detective Yano sat down, the young man was ready to believe anything that came from that tired and slack mouth.
“Do you know what the undead are, young man?” he uttered with an almost actorly flair.
Kouyou flinched a bit in surprise and stood up straight. In the crowded café, he wasn’t sure if he had heard him correctly. “Undead?” he muttered back at him.
“Yes,” he replied affirmatively and leaning forward, almost to the point where his chest was lying down upon the café table, he whispered to him in an excited and mysterious voice “The undead. Surely, you have heard of them. Seen them in movies, read about them….you know, what I am talking about, right?” his brows lifted into his forehead, allowing the grey autumn light that flowed in through the windows to gather dramatically into the bowls of the his eye sockets.
“I am paying you, don’t play with me,” Kouyou nearly whined. “This isn’t funny.”
“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” he repeated and shook his head back and forth, back and forth. “You are right, this isn’t funny.” Excitedly, he shifted in his chair, nearly knocking it and the table over. Awkwardly, he straightened himself out. “I’ve been looking into this for days. I haven’t slept Mr. Takashima. Oh, no and why would I?! I would be INSANE if I did.” As he enunciated the word “insane” his eyes grew wide into two perfect circles. His cool manner that he had begun with crumbled all around him and like a nervous fool, he laughed almost madly. “I wouldn’t have believed it either, Mr. Takashima. No. No. No. No. I would have thought the man who would have told me this was perfectly INSANE. INSANE. INSANE. INSANE. But I’m not crazy,” he pointed to himself self-righteously. “No, I’m not at all. I can tell that there is something in you that believes me. I can tell by your eyes, Mr. Takashima. So listen to me. There is such a thing, such monsters as they talk about in books and in fairytales-OH NO, BUT IT’S NOT THE SAME!” He was beginning to attract the attention of the café’s staff and the other patrons, but neither he nor Kouyou cared. Before the young man now, he considered that he was watching the mental breakdown of a man that only weeks ago seemed in his right mind. Lowering his voice into a tense whisper, Detective Yano continued “The Undead is really a wrong way of talking about them. Even vampire doesn’t quite fit. It’s not nearly as glamorous or CLEAN as that. They are truly visceral monsters, considered with the flesh.” Yano nervously looked around the café as if he were being hunted. Under his breath he continued as if all along he had been speaking to himself. “The drinking of flesh… the ripping of flesh…. the company of ROTTING flesh.”
“YANO!” Kouyou shouted at him. “I didn’t hire you to talk to me about monsters. I hired you to find my fiancé, Kaima Usagi. Do you remember her?” he spoke slowly as if he were talking to someone who could hardly speak Japanese.
“The girl? Yes, the girl…well, this has EVERYTHING to do with the girl.”
“What are you talking about?” Kouyou was growing angry with the man’s antics.
“You and her family are wrong. Usagi, that little running rabbit,” he chuckled at his tasteless pun on the girl’s name. “She wasn’t kidnapped. She didn’t go to get fresh air. She went there like a mindless insect being drawn to a burning lightbulb.”
“What are you talking about….” Kouyou’s ears buzzed as the strangeness of the moment was beginning to overwhelm him. It felt as if him and this crazed man were encapsulated in an airtight plastic bubble and the two of them, together were swimming at the bottom of the sea. The insanity of it all by virtue of the power of its sensationalism drowned out the common sense of reality, leaving Kouyou at the mercy of a confusion that was bordering on panic. Usagi. What happened to her? Something must have happened to her. Monsters were impossible but what if this man was interpreting something else as a monster? What if it was a murderer that he was talking about? What if it was some twisted cult? The questions and the speculations ran throughout his brain as the blood pounded in his chest: Rapid, Violent, Loud.
“You don’t get it, do you?” Yano sat up almost as if he were victorious. “Usagi left to go to the monster, Mr. Takashima. She went to be with him. She went to be eaten by him. She went to be killed by him.”
Through Kouyou’s lips, he muttered a small “what?”
“In the South, far from here, where it never snows. In Kyushu. In the trees. Near a small town called Maya, there is an old mansion that the locals called Akamizu.”
“Akamizu?”
“Yes. That is where it lives. It and all the women….including our rabbit.”
“Usagi is there?”
Cryptically, Yano leaned back into his chair and resumed the pose of a cool Film Noir actor. His eyes, however were still nervous and fearful. He added coldly with the intention almost for dramatic effect: “If the fox hasn’t already eaten our little rabbit.”
In the intensity of the foliage, the sunlight that trickled in was like water slipping through the cracks of a vase. And the wind was still, so much so that the trees themselves seemed to be inanimate and solitary as if they were lifeless stone. And the hot air, repugnant with the scent of aged and rotting flesh weighed as if it were made of the same stuff as tension, leaving the forest soundless save for the rustling of the girl’s naked feet through the grass and the small plants as she slowly treaded up the hill towards Akamizu.
Two pale and bare ankles. Against the white of her skin, the tiny trickle of blood streaming downward like a stray ray of sunlight through the density of trees.
Usagi wore what was left of her clothes, a tattered salmon colored dress that she had bought last Christmas season at one of the more fashionable stores in Tokyo in a world and reality that was so far away now that it seemed like a dream. Now the lacy collar was ripped to shreds and between the maze of their design were dried drops of blood. Other than this lone dress, she wore nothing else. Her hair that was once straight and shiny was now filthy and knotted, matted with that same red substance.
She hasn’t seen her face in days. Not that she cares anymore.
Akamizu. Akamizu and her God. That was her life now and without protest, she knew too that it would be her death. At any moment, she knew that he could kill her and she knew too the unavoidable fact that he would and that he had every intention to one day take her life. So be it. It was his to take as he had taken the lives from the bodies that now littered the outskirts of Akamizu and its bold crimson walls. They were once people before they were piled there, stacked on top of one another, decomposing in the heat. But Usagi never thinks of these things. She never thinks about anything but Him now. Only Him.
Months ago, in the depths of summer, she had dreamt about Him. Or so she believed. She woke up one night, startled and sweating and in her heart; she had the irresistible urge to travel south. No, she hadn’t seen him in her dream. She had seen instead the image of Akamizu and it’s ancient red walls through the thickness of the forest as if she were passing by it like a disembodied ghost and she felt inside of her an intense emotion. In her dreams she heard nothing; she only received the intensity of words. Instead of hearing “I love you” she felt their resounding effect the way one starved for affection would. Never before in her life had she felt such an emotion, an emotion that racked your entire being and possessed your soul.
In the dream, she continued to float. Above the entrance, she saw a gold sign and the words Akamizu above the entrance of that grand mansion. Aka, Red. Mizu, Water.
Then the sensation overwhelmed her. The sensation of utter pleasure, threading through her body like hidden stream beneath the earth, infiltrating the parts of her that she had hardly knew could be pleasured. In her toes, the tips of her fingers, around the circumference of her thighs, throughout the entire organ of her sex and around her throat. Pleasure. Pleasure. Pleasure. Erupting finally in an orgasm that forced her awake.
She sat up. Her chest pounded. Her body trembled. She dripped everywhere. From her skin, sweat. From her mouth, spit. From her eyes, tears. She had lost control of her body and she wet herself. She sat in a pool of her own hot urine. And suddenly, even though it was weeks before her time, she bled between the legs. Sensing this, she gingerly lowered a shaking hand downward and touched herself there. Bringing the white fingers now tinged with blood up two her shocked eyes.
No one needed to tell her anything. She understood as if it was the supreme truth.
And it was simple.
Go South to Akamizu.
The mansion had seen better years, some as bloody and horrific, some serene as the stream that flowed behind it through the forest. The villagers had many stories about Akamizu and the young man, Kouyou, hitchhiking into town heard very few of them upon arriving. He was to find that the locals were rather tight-lipped.
With a backpack on his shoulder, he looked around at Maya. It was a small place as he had expected. Even though it had been modernized with telephone poles and cables in the air and cars on the street, Maya seemed to be suffocated by these things as if they were trying to hold something back about this town. And as soon as he climbed out of his ride’s car, he felt the tension in the air come down on him as if it were trying to push him down into the earth.
But Kouyou paid it very little attention. Just an old town, with old traditional wooden buildings. The inn was easy to find even though it hardly looked different than the other Japanese style houses. There weren’t many places to go and the sign for it stood out prominently in the unperturbed sky of the small town. The innkeeper smiled pleasantly at the young man as he entered. “Nice to meet you” he said. And after Kouyou returned the greeting, the man added as if the topic interested him greatly, “We don’t get many blondes here!”
“Oh,” Kouyou made a small smile and looked down awkwardly.
The innkeeper with exquisite manners wasted no time getting tea for his guest and a place to sit. “Sir, if you don’t mind me asking,” he said once Kouyou was settled in. “How long do you plan to stay here in Maya? I only ask because I want to make sure that we can give you proper accommodation. You see,” he looked down. “We don’t get many visitors here in Maya-let alone men. The last one that came was a strange man from Tokyo and he was lacking in manners you see….and the locals didn’t take to him if you understand what I mean sir…You see…um…What is your purpose here?”
Kouyou as if he were ignoring him looked up at the innkeeper’s old and tanned face and asked in a blunt voice “What is this Akamizu place?” He stared at him with expressionless eyes as he awaited his reply.
The innkeeper stammered, taken aback by his directness. “Excuse me, sir?”
“I came here to go to a house called Akamizu. I need to get my fiancé back. Apparently she is staying there with some man.” After his talk with Detective Yano, the belief in his extreme tales has dissipated with every new approaching second. Across from him in that café, Kouyou was arrested by the intensity and bizarreness of his story but away from him, Kouyou returned to reality. Something had happened to Yano here in Maya or at Akamizu that made him lose his mind and speak insane things.
“Not just some man…” The innkeeper mumbled to himself. “Sir…you see…Sir…” he took a deep, uncomfortable breath before raising his eyes reluctantly to Kouyou’s blank but strangely beautiful face. And for a second because of this peculiar prettiness, the innkeeper felt a pang of sympathy for this ignorant outsider. “Akamizu is a dangerous place and the man that lives there is a dangerous man. You shouldn’t go up there and confront him. Even if you love this woman, you must believe me that she is as good as dead and that she will never come back with you if she is still alive and even if you manage to sir, you see…she will never ever be the same.”
“I don’t have a choice,” Kouyou continued seemingly unaffected by the innkeeper’s ominous warning. “I promised her parents that I would bring her back. I know she has fallen in love with someone else and that’s fine. I don’t care if it hurts her and she screams at me. I have to bring her back to her parents like I said I would.”
“Sir…you don’t understand. Go back to wherever you came from…”
“Where is it?”
“Sir…It’s too strange to explain…” The innkeeper looked down as if he were ashamed. In the dimly lit receiving room of the tiny inn, the small man seemed to shrivel up. His white t-shirt soaked with sweat and the wrinkles on his earthen face deepened.
Kouyou wasn’t going to ask anymore. He looked down at the tea the man had given him and went silent for a moment. “It’s okay. Let me just stay here for awhile and ask around.”
You can’t expect him to believe so readily the Innkeeper thought to himself. The other outsider that had come, the one who called himself Yano had been even more combative and pushy. Were they here for the same girl? He didn’t think to ask. It didn’t matter anymore. Once one was up there in Akamizu, you became all the same. There was no difference between the women that the man there had kept. Under his spell they ceased to have an identity and became instead the physical representation of desire. But the Innkeeper didn’t know about these things. He didn’t know about the purity of that desire directed at that one single man. He didn’t know about the sanctity of his presence or the ritual of their devotion to him. He hadn’t been up to Akamizu in many years and when the man had come here to Maya, he had spoken to the Mayor in the dead of night, a bag of money in his hands and a wild depraved look in his eyes. He needed that abandoned mansion. The innkeeper hadn’t been there for that meeting but he had heard about it many times. And every retelling of the event produced even taller a tale until the image of that man became a blur of confusion. No one knew his name.
But one thing was certain to the townsfolk of Maya. The Man of Akamizu was a demon. And he had turned that decaying mansion with its chipped red paint and its old stones drowning in ivy and moss into a temple of evil. Maybe the people were being punished in some way. They couldn’t be certain. Women had come through town like ghosts, walking mindlessly towards Akamizu but never any of the women and girls in Maya. They were forbidden to and the man, in respect for the town’s silence, never approached them.
“I’m going to go walk around,” the young man suddenly said, breaking the innkeeper out of his reverie. “Thank you.” He set the teacup down on the table and stood back up. “Is there anything you can tell me about the place though?...Before I go.”
The innkeeper perhaps trying to return to a sense of normalcy said, “It used to be owned by Samurai family but that was long ago. Before he came, it was rotting up there empty…” Rotting. He had heard stories from people that had braved to come within several meters of the place and they said that it smelt of rotting flesh.
“When did he come?”
“3 years ago…”
“Do you know how old he is?”
The innkeeper shot the outsider a peculiar look. “I don’t know. They say he looks like a young man much like yourself.”
Kouyou cocked his head to the side. The way the old man had answered sounded as if he were trying to infer something. What, Kouyou wasn’t sure. “Okay…” He nodded and turned around. “I will see you later.”
Outside, there were few people in the streets and those that passed him, bowed politely but hurried away from him. Somehow they knew that he had come for Akamizu, every stranger had. But there was one person that was willing to talk to Kouyou: an old woman tending to the garden outside of her home. Kouyou walking past stopped and greeted her, immediately asking her about the mansion and its new inhabitant.
“Ahhh that place…of course…” she stood up as straight as she could but being as old as she was, her back was sill curved and she gazed up at the young man’s beautiful face as if merely looking was a taxing experience. “Young pretty women came through Maya to go up to Akamizu. He is a love demon I believe…”
“Excuse me?” Kouyou’s eyes widened.
“Mhm…All of them…Young…Pretty Women…They go up there in search of him. I don’t know what they do in that abandoned place…it can’t be in good shape unless he fixed it but you know, that doesn’t seem likely…cause he isn’t like a normal person…Some people here you know believe he really is a demon or an old forest god or something like that…I myself…I myself don’t know what to believe or think. But I believe my eyes…I believe that women come here to go to him. How and why….No, that I don’t know…What did you say was the reason you were asking about the place?” She looked up at him confused.
“I didn’t…Um…I am here looking for my fiancé.”
Quickly the old woman replied. “Go home. There is no use. She will never leave him.”
“I’ll drag her back…”
“He must be beautiful…” The old woman went on as if she were in a state of dementia.
“You’ve never seen him?”
“The old Mayor was the only one who has seen him…but he died shortly after the man came…heart attack…something like that…”
“How is that no one has seen him? Doesn’t someone deliver his food?” Kouyou was beginning to get very confused. What was it about this town? What sort of strange insanity has possessed it? It must be some kind of fear and panic that has swept through that has made them talk like this or act like this. He had read about it somewhere or seen it on television-or so he thought. Things like this happen in small towns where the people are gullible, he reasoned with himself. Yano succumbed to their insanity. You mustn’t.
“No one delivers him anything.”
“He doesn’t come down to get anything?”
“No.”
“Do you think he farms up there?”
“You can’t farm up there. The terrain is all rocky.”
Kouyou sighed frustrated. “So what does he eat?”
The old woman as if something devilishly funny had been brought up smiled at him knowingly with an incomplete row of brown teeth and said slowly and mockingly “I have no idea.”
[A/N So this is chapter 1 of the Halloween fiction I promised all of you. Yes, I know I said it was going to be a one shot but honestly, I am not concerned about length right now. It's already late... >.< Let me know what you think, y'all. Different right?]