“If this is a joke, it’s a really sick one,” Omoyo said, glaring at the picture of Yuna, which was defaced with red marker to spell the word, “Curse”. “Who would do something like this?”
“We should take this to a teacher,” I said. “I’ll go look for one right now.”
I turned to leave, but before I could, Yuna caught hold of my sleeve and tugged it. When our eyes met, she shook her head and then typed into her phone.
“No, don’t,” she said. “It’s just a prank. There’s no need to get a teacher involved. I don’t want to make a big deal out of this.”
“It seems a bit too mean-spirited to be just a prank,” Mirai said. “I think it would be better if we told a teacher about this.”
“That’s right, Yuna,” said Omoyo. “We don’t know what whoever put that picture in your locker is capable of. And how’d they even get a picture of you, anyway? Where was it taken?”
Minus the word “Curse”, one thing that stood out about the photo was that Yuna appeared really happy and cheerful. Her smile in it was definitely the biggest I had ever seen her make. Most of the smiles I’ve seen her make were all small and slightly strained. But there was one more thing that stood out and that was her clothes. She was wearing a school uniform, but not one that I recognized. Akira, however, appeared to have seen it though.
“Is that a middle school uniform?” he said as he looked over Yuna’s shoulder.
Yuna nodded and then hurriedly slipped on her outdoor shoes before rushing to the exit.
“Hold on, Yuna!” Omoyo called out. “I still think we should tell a teacher about this!”
But Yuna acted like she didn’t hear and stepped outside.
With no other choice, we all ran after her. Once we were out of the front gate, I turned on my Psy-Armor and happened to glance back at the school. That was when I spotted her again, the ghost from the cemetery. She was standing by the main building’s entrance, like always, staring at us.
As per Yuna’s request, I made no mention of the photo after getting back home. It seemed like she didn’t want to worry my parents. So over the dinner table, all we talked about with my parents were the things we did for club, like me helping the kendo club and meeting the grandson of the Sakamotos. Mom looked especially pleased while I talked about the kendo practice. She was always nagging at me to get more exercise.
Well, I say I talked, but only very briefly. I’m not usually the talkative sort. And that night, I was even less talkative because my mind kept wandering to thoughts about that ghost.
Ever since she showed up, strange things have been happening, like with those fires that’ve popped up around the neighborhood. It made me wonder if maybe she was behind them. I also suspected that she had something to do with that photo Yuna found in her shoe locker, because it can’t be a coincidence that she would show up at around the same time the photo did. And she always seemed to have her eyes on Yuna whenever she showed up. It looked as if she had some kind of grudge against my cousin or something.
“A grudge,” I muttered to myself while sitting on my bed with my computer on my lap. “Could that be what this is all about?”
I wondered if maybe the fires the last few days could be the ghost practicing for the real thing, which is a plot of revenge against Yuna. Maybe someone on her side of the family did something a long time ago that earned a grudge from an evil spirit, and that grudge fell on Yuna as the last surviving descendant or something.
Of course, I was just randomly guessing. There was no way for me to know for sure if that’s true without asking Yuna. Thinking about it as I randomly surfed the internet, there was actually a lot I didn’t know about her. That was made obvious when I saw that photo.
Like I mentioned before, I had never seen her smile like that before, and it looked like she was surrounded by a lot of friends at the time the photo was taken. She must have been really popular back at her old school. I could only assume without confirming that whatever happened before she came to live with us really changed her a lot.
As I randomly clicked news links, I happened to come across an article about the latest fire, which happened outside of a public restroom in a park. I got a sore spot reading the article because I was at that park just a few days earlier with the rest of the Community Service Club, cleaning it. It made me a bit mad that all that hard work making the park clean and beautiful came to nothing thanks to that fire. Some of the grownup volunteers even went to the trouble of repainting painting that restroom building, which had become blackened by the inferno.
While scrolling through the page, I discovered a picture taken during the fire, and my breath was taken away the instant I saw it. Standing among the crowd of eyewitnesses watching the fire burn was the ghost.
That does it, I thought. The ghost really is behind those fires. And she’s sure to come after Yuna next. Before that could happen and our house get burned down as a result, I had to do something.
So I spent the next hour looking up how to exorcise ghosts. I was determined to get rid of it before it could strike again.
One of the things I found from my internet searching was that salt could be used to ward off evil. So, while everyone else was asleep, I snuck into the kitchen and filled a Ziploc bag with the stuff. It came from a jar so I was sure no one would notice some missing.
Typically, ghost hunting should take place at night time. But as my past experience has taught me, the particular ghost I was hunting was more of a daytime haunter. Thus, I decided to look for the ghost in the morning.
I filled a backpack with the salt I pilfered, a phone charger, and my wallet, grabbed my phone (fully charged) and took a long umbrella with me. The umbrella would serve as a substitute for my wood sword which I used to carry around with me but stopped when the Piper’s reign of terror came to an end.
“Alright!” I said to myself after double-checking the contents of my bag. “All ready!”
After saying bye to my parents, I went out the door and began my patrol of the neighborhood. I probably sound like a little kid as delusional as Mirai with all that said, but whatever.
As I strolled down the maze of roads and white, graying walls of my neighborhood, I noticed there were a lot more people out than usual. Each street had at least one pair of people walking about. Some flashed friendly smiles as I passed by, others eyed me with unpleasant looks that I took as reflections of their wariness. It didn’t take a great detective to figure out what all these pairs were doing. They were likely volunteer patrols to stop the fires from happening or catch whoever’s making them.
I sighed, wondering if I should give up the hunt for the ghost. I know I hadn’t gotten very far in my search, but I had a sinking feeling that if I continued to just wander around, I could get mistaken for the arsonist. People have attacked me over misunderstandings before after all (*cough* Shikouyama *cough*).
After a bit of deliberating in my head, I decided to look through one more street before heading home. In that street, I encountered an elderly couple. No, not the Sakamotos. This is another elderly couple I regularly see during my weekend volunteering with the club. I forget what their names were, but the old man was tall and scrawny, and is usually wearing a sweater vest over his white dress shirt. His wife was a tiny bit shorter and dressed in a Hakama outfit like what the Kendo club people wear during practice. Now that I think about it, I think I heard that the old lady used to run a dojo which she handed over to her son after retiring.
“Good morning!” I said to them.
“Oh! Aloha Boy!” went the old man. “Ni hao!”
He started speaking in a string of Chinese-Cantonese, but as always, I needed his wife to translate. Another bit of trivia I learned about the couple was that even though the husband could understand Japanese just fine, it seemed something in his past affected his brain so when he was hit with old age, he could only speak Chinese.
“Out on a walk?” his wife asked.
“Uh . . . yeah,” I said. There was no way I could tell them that I was hunting for a ghost.
“Oh, well it’s good you’re living healthy,” the wife said. “But you should be careful. There’s rumors of an arsonist running around.”
At the mention of the arsonist, the husband scowled and grumbled something. I didn’t know Chinese, but I happened to catch the word “Piper”. With a stretch of the imagination, I guessed he must have said something like, “Honestly! First we had a serial killer like the Piper running around, now we got an arsonist burning up the neighborhood. Just what is the world coming to?”
I replied back, “Yeah, I heard. But shouldn’t you be careful too?”
The wife chuckled.
“Oh, you don’t need to worry about us,” she said. “We’re stronger than we look. And you’d be surprised by the things we went through when we were your age.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Well, okay. See you later, then!”
I bid good-bye to the old couple and hurried away.
While lamenting the time I lost with this brief ghost hunt, which I could have spent grinding on a game’s seasonal event, I made my way back home. Unwilling to waste anymore, I brisk-walked when I stumbled upon Yuna and Omoyo together down the road. Figuring that they must have set up time to hang out by themselves, I decided to leave them alone when I noticed a third person following closely at their heels.
It was the ghost. And in her hands was a pair of scissors.
No comments:
Post a Comment