Out of Character:
By the time the young ronin stumbled from the doorway of the drinking den, the roadside lanterns had long since been lit. His face flushed a bright beetroot red in the sudden chill, and his breath reeked of stale sake as it steamed from half-open mouth. Bright young eyes blinked once as banners fluttered in a stiff breeze, barely focused as they darted here and there into the cloudy darkness. Grumbling loudly over his shoulder at those of his mates with pockets deep enough to still be drinking, he began to make his way along the well-swept town boulevard.
None watching could in any way consider his journey an elegant one. He lurched and tottered like a stormbound seasick sailor, weaving unsteadily from wall to wall and from one side of the street to the other. More times than once he very nearly tripped over his own arms, or over the hem of his tattered robes, or over the threshold of a nearby villa. He followed an instinctive path home, towards his shack some thirty minutes distant in the nearest village, towards the embracing warmth of the straw mattress that awaited him there..
Across the rickety wooden bridge out of town he stumbled, his clogs rattling a merry out-of-time tune upon the seasoned planks. The tinkle of the river below played a crystalline counter-melody to his efforts, and he paused for a moment to appreciate it, straining a sweaty head out over the waters to better soothe his throbbing ears, blinking again to clear his vision of the foggy drunken veil.
Then he saw them.
Small shapes on the riverbank, playing amongst the gravel. Goblinoid in form, with long thin beaks and glistening plates of water upon their turtle-like heads. Their wide unnatural eyes gleamed like saucepans in the darkness, and as he looked down upon them, he could swear that they turned as one to face him… and bared rows upon rows of sharp slender teeth in disdainful hunger.
This time he did trip over his own feet, in his panicked haste to duck out of sight.
Kappa!
The thought sprung unbidden through his muddled mind, referring to the trickster water imps so famous in Nipponese folklore. He had to get away from here, before they caught him, and dragged him into the water, and inserted their beaks into his backside, and slurped out his intestines like so much warm noodles…
Dread flooded his wits, and adrenaline lent strength to his tangled limbs. The night echoed once more to his scrambled clatter as he fled inland, away from the water, away from the danger. Was it only his imagination, or did the wind carry mischievous twitters to his ears as he left the river behind?
No.
It carried the kappa’s mocking laughter, and more.
Grasping hands snatched at his shoulders and thighs as the early autumn breeze suddenly turned frigid and blustery. His vision exploded in a cloud of black feathers, as he stumbled through a nesting murder of crows that blocked his path a moment earlier. Buffeted on all sides by hammering winds and beating wings, he lost his balance and stumbled to the damp earth, digging his fingers into the clay-like loam and holding on for dear life.
Tengu!
Dire thoughts streamed into his addled mind, old wives’ tales of those spirited away by the feathered wind and left to wander in the middle of nowhere, emerging from the wilderness after decades of solitude only to find that all traces of their previous life had already passed on without them. Renewed panic turned into full-on flight. With a sound halfway between a scream and a mewling whimper he scrabbled clear, headlong into the shelter of a bamboo grove. The wind laughed at him again as it broke against the walls of his newfound prison, rattling the bars as he cowered and trembled beneath its might.
Then it died away, slowly and reluctantly.
Cocooned by deathly silence, slowly the young ronin peered forth from between the tall stalks. Tense grey clouds hung low over the nightscape, roiling with shapes that could only be nue. No doubt the heavenly beasts and bringers of misfortune and illness waited to ambush him as soon as he left cover for open ground.
With jerky movements he cast his gaze about him once more. Town lights dimpled the eastern horizon, wavering like lost beacons of hope to the shipwrecked traveller, while those of the village where he lived cast a much fainter glow in the opposite direction. The dirt highway between the two lay before him, untravelled and empty, a dangerously exposed ribbon winding its way between tall grasses of rice paddies just before the harvest and the occasional bamboo grove or copse of slender trees such as the one in which he hid. His vision bleared as his blood-stained eyes calculated its daunting length. Something, anything, to salvage his current situation…
Oh, but it wasn’t untravelled or empty! A noble’s procession, headed in the same direction as he! Two palanquins, headed by lantern-bearers, and stone-faced escorts with swords at their waist! He would not be allowed to join their ranks, but if he followed them at a respectful distance, perhaps it would deter the nightmares above… keep his head attached to his shoulders…
He waited.
Waited until his nerves tingled with suppressed electricity and his fears turned to ashen dust upon his tongue.
Waited until his mind turned to jelly with the tension, and pinpricks raced up and down his crouched legs.
Waited until the stately slow-moving procession had passed him by, and he could wait no longer…
In an explosion of pent-in frustration he burst from the copse. But he his sake-muddled wits had misjudged the distance, and his cramped limbs made far too much noise in the stillness of the night. The procession stopped as one to look at the intruder, and the young ronin froze in fear. They would be well within their rights to cut his head off where he stood, and judging by the way the nearest samurai’s hand went to his sword…
“What is it?” a melodic voice asked from one of the palanquins, and a dainty white hand brushed aside the bamboo curtain. Glitteringly beautiful eyes peered out from the depths of the pooled darkness: mesmerising, hypnotising, electrifying…
“A young man,” a second girl twittered from the other litter, her voice as light as spring rain and its humorous tint just as refreshing. The ronin’s gaze flicked to whence it had came, and once again found himself entranced by a stray moonbeam illuminating the nape of a slender neck through the raised veil…
“A young man!” the first girl exclaimed with delight, her voice echoing closer this time and accompanied by the flowery scent of an exquisitely expensive perfume. “But I must see him!”
“Juzo!” the second voice ordered, and suddenly the ronin found himself flanked by heavy-set men with expressionless miens. But the voices had worked their magic upon his mind, extending delicate tendrils of desire and temptation into the furthest reaches of his head. He found himself almost wishing to be led forward, to be forced upon one knee in front of the ladies so that they could have their pleasure of him…
A brief trick of the light, a whimsical vagary of the clouds that for only a mere five seconds allowed the full moon to shine down upon the countryside in all of its unadulterated glory, saved his life.
In the purity of its bright luminescence, he beheld the truth.
The voices did not belong to women.
The first had the features and form of a seductive flower of the night, but beneath her intricately patterned kimono he could see the bulge of her spinneret, and the glitter of her poisonous fangs marred her smile… a jyorogumo, a spider woman, who would seduce him with her lute only to suck out his insides for food.
The second also had the face and body of a young maiden, except that the neck that joined them filled the litter with its length, and lustrous black hair flowed and wound about the bamboo curtain of its own accord… a rokurokubi, a snake woman, who would capture him in her coils and slowly drink her fill of his blood.
The ronin swallowed compulsively, throat bobbing in fear. He wondered if he merely dreamed the developments, wondered if he opened his eyes and pinched his cheeks he would wake in his bed and laugh it all off…
But the vise-like grip on his upper arm…
He turned fearfully towards the stern-faced escorts…
… and found himself staring into the grimly vicious visage of an oni, a guardian ogre.
Not just one, but every last one of the swordsmen, even the lantern bearers, wore the same terrifying mask.
He screamed. A shrill, strident shriek at the top of his lungs. Somewhere he found the strength to wrench his shoulder free. Somehow he kept his footing as he barrelled clear, head down as tears streamed uncontrollably from his face, not daring to stop for fear that the oni gave chase.
He was certain that they too laughed at him as he fled.
But he didn’t care. He ran. Ran like a rabbit with hunting dogs upon his tail, ran like a mouse seeking shelter from the predatory hawk. Sweat drenched the goosebumps upon his spine, and his lungs burnt with the efforts of his exertions. The ribbon of dirt flew past beneath his feet as he focused on one thing and one thing only… he had to get away from there.
At length he came upon a teahouse in the middle of the road, a simple structure halfway between the town and his village. He often stopped off here for his midday meal, and knew its proprietors by sight. The small building represented the closest to sanctuary he would find for miles around.
“Open up! Open up!” he bellowed, pounding at the wooden doorframe between glances over his shoulder to ensure that the chase hadn’t caught up with him. The clouds overhead seemed awfully close…
“Open up!” he screamed again, and this time the door crashed inwards at his bidding. He stumbled inwards a couple of steps, surprised, only to find himself staring at the hunched back of the old woman who ran the establishment. “Let me in, please, they’re coming after me…”
Sobs strangled the rest of his words from his throat as the old woman turned to greet him… her face a blank slate of smooth skin, her features wiped completely clean.
“Who’s after you?” the reedy voice asked innocently.
The ronin, however, had already fled back out the open door, screaming once more at the top of his lungs.
Again he ran, bolstered by the desperation of a man who had no choice and no option but to run. A high-pitched wail followed him as he raced past the verdant paddies, and only after he completely ran out of breath did he realise the voice belonged to himself. So he shut up and continued to run, wheezing uncontrollably as he struggled to feed oxygen to his tiring limbs, somehow managing an occasional moan through uncontrollable tremors.
Finally he fell to his knees in the midst of a thick grove, tall grasses tickling his anguished brow in callous scorn. His head throbbed and his vision swam, torso engulfed in a raging inferno, alcohol pouring from his body in rivulets of stinking sweat. One hacking gasp after another wracked his body as he struggled to regain his composure, struggled to wrap his mind around the nightmares…
Lanterns in the night. Bright wavering wisps of blue flame cast ghostly light upon the looming trees and grasping undergrowth, the souls of the departed come to claim one of their own.
The stench of death lingering in the back of his nose and on the tip of his tongue. A lumpy mass of necrotic flesh the size of a daimyo’s warhorse shuffled past the edge of his vision, headed towards the graveyard on the village outskirts.
The keening whistle of the wind as it built up strength once more, filling his ears and his head with piercing agony. Painless gashes tore at his skin, cutting deep into his flesh but drawing no blood.
Intense terror, coupled with the faintest of hopes, gave his wearily paralysed limbs one last burst of strength. Another minute or so, and he would arrive at his village. His home lay on the outskirts nearer to him; if he could just reach there, if he could just cross the threshold and cower upon the reed mats beneath his straw duvet…
Ignoring the mud monsters grasping at his legs, ignoring their hungry whispers for his flesh, he stumbled forth once more. Tottering steps gradually built momentum into one last headlong flight, hair and robes dishevelled and his breath now escaping as steamy whimpers. Clouds hung low over his head, the wind tearing at his limbs and whistling malevolently into his ears, and supernatural presences surrounded him and laughed at his blind panic.
Something burning, something brilliantly bright in the night sky. A flaming wheel hung over his head, rotted wooden spokes circling a disembodied head frozen in an eternal grimace. The legendary wanyudo, guardian of the boundaries between this world and the next, come to steal the souls of those who got too close. He had to keep moving, had to keep away from this newest monstrosity, had to get home…
Nearly home…
The taste of freedom on his lips. The overwhelming relief in his heart. The impatient enthusiasm transcending his drunken stupor as he reached out to open the door…
And then something reached out of the darkness and tore his head off.
Just like that.
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