novelraw Chapter 42: Beginning
Chapter 42: Beginning
Thursday early morning, the night was dark as ink, smudged by countless fragmented lights, like a yet-to-dry ink wash painting.
In countless corners of Tokyo, the lingering office ghost story dread brought by last night's 'Yamishibai - Paper' hadn't dissipated, and a new fear ceremony had already quietly inaugurated.
In the Midnight Diner, Mizukami Sho wasn't watching the television, merely lowering his head to wipe a Yanagiba knife. The blade reflected the light, cold as the chilling gleam of the moon. Yet this couldn't conceal the turbulence in his heart.
Or rather, precisely because his heart was in turmoil, he purposely wiped the Yanagiba kitchen knife to mask the panic within.
And just outside the bar counter, the customers were all as if immobilized, their gazes locked fixedly onto that old television in the corner.
【Yamishibai - Video Tape】was broadcasting.
The story's stage was a typical Japanese-style washitsu room. On the last day of summer vacation, three middle schoolers wearing school uniforms were gathered around an old-fashioned VCR. Their faces carried a mix of boredom and thrill-seeking typical of puberty.
"...It's said that this video tape can project ghosts oh," one of the boys said attempting to be mysterious, stuffing a black video tape without any label into the machine.
On the television screen, there was first a burst of noisy static, and then the image stabilized. It was a graveyard. The camera shook, extremely resembling the grainy texture of a home video.
There was nothing there."Tch, boring." One boy yawned.
But just at this moment, the pupils of the boy who took out the video tape violently shrunk. Pointing at the screen, his voice carrying a trace of imperceptible trembling: "Hey... look, right there... is that a shadow of a person?"
On the screen, behind a tombstone, a blurry white silhouette flashed by.
"Where?" The other two didn't care.
"It's really there! It... it's getting closer! Getting closer and closer!" The boy's voice began to turn panicked.
The white silhouette on the screen was like an out-of-focus ghost, rapidly approaching the lens with an illogical, leaping posture.
Then, precisely at the instant it was about to occupy the entire screen, it suddenly disappeared.
"Look! Did you see it?! It's gone!" The boy violently turned his head, wanting to seek verification from his companions.
Yet from behind him, two icy, overlapping voices faintly sounded.
"What... did you see?"
The boy turned around stiffly.
Huddled in the corner, where were his classmates?
Those were two completely pale ghosts with black liquid flowing from their eyes, grinning silently at him.
The End.
...
Friday early morning, inside a large room at the Shinagawa Taxi Dispatch Center filled with swirling smoke.
The drivers weren't playing cards, neither were they complaining about those drunk clients who talked big.
Merely gathered around the television, as if awaiting some sort of destined judgment.
【Yamishibai - Tomoya-kun】broadcasted.
On the streets after school, a high school girl wearing a sailor suit saw a few children sitting in a circle, pointing at the ground.
"What are you guys playing?" She asked curiously.
"We're playing with Tomoya-kun ah." The children looked up, their pure and innocent faces carrying a trace of eerie excitement. They pointed to a human-shaped shadow on the ground resembling splashed dark ink, "Big sis, want to play together?"
The girl smilingly declined.
The next day, she encountered those children again at her doorstep.
"Big sis, Tomoya-kun said, he wants to come find you to play."
Because the girl had to work part-time, she declined once again.
At dusk, when she dragged her exhausted body home, the doorbell rang.
It was those children again.
On their faces, the daytime excitement was gone, leaving only a dead-silent calmness.
"Big sis, we brought Tomoya-kun... over oh."
The girl impatiently shooed them away and locked the door. But when she walked into the living room and looked up, the blood in her entire body instantly solidified.
Only to see on that pure white ceiling, a massive human-shaped shadow was slowly writhing like a living creature.
Tomoya-kun... came.
...
Saturday night was the final tranquility before the storm arrived.
Countless homes in Tokyo, countless university dormitories, countless sleepless souls deep in the night all focused their gazes upon that small screen.
What they awaited was the final chapter of this two-week-long feast of terror.
【Yamishibai - Pain Possesses the Body】
In the countryside during summer, the cicadas chirped clamorously.
Three elementary school students wearing shorts were huddled together, using an old telescope to peep at another allegedly haunted house in the distance where "pain possessing the body" appeared.
A timid child left first.
The remaining two were still there.
"Look! There's movement!" One child holding the telescope lowered his voice and exclaimed.
Only to see from that house in the distance walked out several blindfolded people. As if sleepwalking, they lined up and walked slowly. And behind them, there was a somewhat unidentifiable tumor-like thing continuously quivering.
"Quick let me see!" The other child impatiently snatched the telescope.
He aimed the lens at that haunted house, yet discovered those blindfolded people were gone.
"Huh? Where did they go?" He confusedly turned the telescope, searching around.
The lens swept across the fields, swept across the woods, swept across that small dirt path leading to the house they were in.
Then, his movements violently froze.
He saw it.
Through those lenses magnified dozens of times, he saw those blindfolded, twisted silhouettes, at some unknown time, had already arrived right in front of them.
They began to twist right inside the lens of his telescope!
The End.
...
Thus occurred the scene on Saturday early morning inside the Suzuki Section at the TV Tokyo Production Bureau Headquarters Building.
"Late-night animation 'Yamishibai', final episode viewership rating: 6.01%!"
"Late-night animation 'Onibo Samurai', sixth episode viewership rating: 5.87%."
The dust settled.
That magnificent castle piled up by capital and resources, at the final moment, was thoroughly crushed by that seemingly inconspicuous "slideshow" in an overwhelming, almost humiliating manner.
Inside the Iwata Section, there was a deathly silence.
Whereas inside the Suzuki Section, that emotion suppressed for an entire week, akin to a volcano, finally erupted with a roar at this moment.
"Won! We won! We are Ichiban! The true Ichiban!"
Minamura Hoshi and Haseji Kakeru acted like two madmen, tossing the documents on the desk high up. Those pieces of paper fluttered in the air like confetti at a celebration.
Suzuki Kiyoto looked at the revelry before him, his old face similarly streaked with old tears at this time.
He walked to that corner, in front of that young man who from start to finish merely watched all this quietly, and patted his shoulder heavily. A thousand words ultimately formulated into a single sigh carrying endless emotion:
"Nohara-kun, this era... perhaps it truly belongs to you young people now."
"You overpraise me, you're being too humble, Suzuki-san." Nohara Hiroshi merely smiled, his gaze calm and profound.
He knew all this was just the beginning.