Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Beyond the Looking Glass ❯ Teaser 3: The Mansion ( Chapter 4 )

Beyond the Looking Glass

 

Teaser 3: The Mansion

 

Excerpts from the journal of Professor G_____, found by officer Takanawa at the Matsuei Mansion on October 13, 2003:

 

 

October 2, 2003

 

A lot has happened in the last couple of days. Our equipment is going haywire and we are now seeing that figure in almost ever mirror. Can they not leave the mirror? Are they trapped there? H is terrified of the spirit, but it hasn't done anything more than watch us. It seems friendly enough, simply following us around like a lost puppy dog. I can't help but think of it as `our' ghost, if that is what it is and I am still not convinced. It could be a psychic echo, like H thinks. J still believes that it is all in our minds, but he didn't sleep last night and I can tell he is even more afraid than O or H. O doesn't sleep so well anymore and he has developed a cough, probably because of the dry air up here. I offered to go back into the village to get him some medicine, but J said that would destroy the experiment. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he's just as obsessed with out mirror visitor as H and S are. Right now I am pouring over the notes we originally took on the mansion. When we had first arrived, we had thought that we might witness something, a small spark, but now, our expectations have been met and surpassed. I can't help but think of the people that have died in this place, though. I do not think the mirror ghost killed them, it seems unlikely since we are still alive, unless it is just playing with us, like a cat with a mouse, before we are devoured, but there is something about that sad chiming of the bell that makes me not want to believe that. That bell makes me feel so lost, I want to help the mirror ghost, but I can't until I find out who it is and what it wants.

The Matsuei Mansion certainly has a rich history. It was built sometime in the fourteen hundreds as a place of Shinto worship, back then it had no name and, according to several folklorist journals, it was a crime to speak of it in the village. I am not sure specifically why, but it appears that some Priests were keeping the villagers away and called it a `sacred place' at the same time their actions showed some fear. In 1432, there was a terrible occurrence, a sketchy witness report claims that there was some sort of explosion in the village which caused the deaths of everyone who lived there and that explosion had originated from this mansion. That seems unlikely, however, since the place remained intact. Yet, even the people in this place died. There is no doubt of that since there are more detailed reports about the state of the bodies and how they were literally ripped to shreds. Until 1575, the temple remained untouched, legends of a curse keeping everyone away. In 1575, the Matsuei family laid claim to the temple and turned it into a home. The family was massive, their origins reaching from England to Russia to Japan. People in the village whispered about them, calling them mixed blood, but they were also afraid of the power that the Matsuei held. The head of the family was a man named Hirotaka, a very rich, powerful man, who, in his later years, became quite insane from dementia, though the people in the village seem to think it was the house and not a mental illness. No one knows why, but Hirotaka fell to the same fate as the priests and holed up in the mansion, never coming to the village, his family sending servants for their supplies. There are rumors that he continued the work of the Shinto priests after finding something in the house. Up until 1897, the Matsuei lived in the house, generation after generation, isolated in that place, until the head of the house, a third Japanese, third American, third German man, lost his son for some reason and he and the rest of the family left for Germany. Even when the Matsuei had occupied the mansion, there had been many deaths there. The peculiar thing is the number of deaths, 67 people in eleven years and the last to die in that year was always a member of the Matsuei family. Ritual sacrifice comes to mind in this case. Just to calculate is a terrifying thing: from 1575 to 1897, that is a 322 year span, over two thousand people had died in that place or disappeared after visiting there. The sick thing is that the 67th person was always a child. Such a thing… I cannot even begin to comprehend it. To think that the thing stalking us could be one of those children makes me want to weep. Since the Matsuei have left, there have been over three hundred deaths and disappearances.

 

As I have said before, this mansion is massive and it is unclear which rooms existed in the temple and which were built later when this place was converted into a home. There are many rooms since the entire Matsuei line lived here together. Many of these rooms seem to have a certain purpose, though what that could be, I am not prepared to speculate, and several of these rooms aren't even on the house plans! Through gossip alone, there is talk that there is a secret room underneath this place that had been built by the Shinto priests. However, this is not on the plans, but that means nothing to me. The long hallway of ropes is not on those plans, either. It is a huge stretch of hallway, spanning two miles and seems to go on forever when you are walking it. From the rafters, hundreds of ropes are hung. There lays some truth behind our theory of ritual sacrifice in this place and there are both legends and journals from folklorists saying that sacrifices of the old Shinto order would hang the sacrifices from those ropes for ten days.

There is an old well in the courtyard. The courtyard itself is quite beautiful with wild cherry trees and more of those strange vines with red flowers. The well is indeed an old, stone thing and has long since dried up. Legend says that the sacrifices were buried in a secret passageway that connects to the bottom of that well and their graves were marked by hundreds of pinwheels that turned even in the stillness. It was probably ritual for the priests to empty the water when they buried their sacrifices, but if such a place exists, we do not wish to search for it, since the trip down the well is a long one, especially in the darkness and it looks treacherous. The scratches along the inner walls of the well are a testament to that. It looks like some poor soul fell down there at one point.

On the first floor of the mansion is a huge room with tatami mats that have dark stains on them. When we found this room, H believed, and still does, that there was a massacre in there and the stains are old blood. I am not so sure, but the idea frightens me. When we explored the second floor bedrooms, I found a peculiar thing in one of them. There are several stone locks to secret rooms and some we have managed to solve. One of these `passageways' led to a third floor and a room above the bedroom. It was a cell, hard wood creating a prison with only small gaps to see out of and no windows. J believed that at one point the house served as a place to store prisoners of the village, but when we opened it up, we found dolls and drawings and toys and books, not advanced enough for an adult. The idea that children were once sacrificed in this place returned to me and I had to leave the cell immediately.

Yesterday we explored the head of mansion's old room. It is a large bedroom filled with beautiful red paper lanterns and a large mirror. It was an opulent room, fitting for someone with great wealth and I imagined how beautiful it would look with the lanterns lit, but didn't dare waste our lighters. On the second floor was a room that, oddly, had small wooden dolls with red and black dyed straw for hair that had ropes tied around their necks and were hanging from the ceiling. However, that is not the strangest thing about this room, there is also the matter of the side wall. The entire mansion, considering the era of which it was built, is made of stone and wood, not metal. The wall no longer truly exists; it has been blown back, the supports curled outward like the teeth of a tremendous mouth. It was that that struck me as strange, a force that could curl wood in that way. However, when I asked J about it, he informed me that no force in the scientific world could bend but not break wood. I wonder if a ghost did that, but it seems so… violent.

 

 

End Teaser 3