InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Scarecrow ❯ Chapter 1

Scarecrow

by nhn

 

And the road was like a ribbon

And the moon was like a bone

He didn't seem to be like

Any guy she'd ever known

- Tom Waits

 

I.

 

Life, ill-deserved, ill-gained, is slipping away from me. I am a priestess, or was a priestess, and should be at peace with my imminent death. But I am made a fool, my madness is that of a drowning woman, and my desperation makes me cast aside my dignity for the chance of even another day on this earth.

 

I have enough of my soul to regain my consciousness, my will, but not enough to live for very long. One soul is not enough for two people, and Kagome had taken away the bulk of the spiritual force which animates living things.

 

I have been dying for three days. I hunger, but cannot eat. I thirst, but cannot drink. When I drink water, my mouth remains dry. When I force myself to eat, I vomit. When cold winds blow I feel no chill; when the sun shines I feel no warmth. I do not bleed. In my weakness I have fallen many times, and my clothes conceal the spiderwebs of cracks that radiate from my knees, my elbows, and my buttocks. The spectral blood that manifested at my first moment of cognizance, at the moment I nearly killed Inuyasha, did not come from this body. That injury, the deep gash in my shoulder, had mostly healed, but a sliver remains. It may heal completely if I regain my strength, but until then I cannot help but pull aside my shirt each night and horrify myself. There are no viscera inside me. I do not know what is inside me.

 

With no stomach, no organs, I require energy from something other than food. If I shall live, I shall live to be a parasite, drawing spiritual energy from those who are fortunate to eat and drink and breathe.

 

Before I parted ways with Tsubaki, I learned some forbidden things. Was one of those a technique to seek and capture the souls of dead women? Perhaps nothing so specific, but I could improvise. But to do this I need to reach my village, to find my books and refresh my memory, and more important than that, I must cast a spell that requires physical and mental stamina which I cannot amass now, as I am constantly on the brink of collapse. I will likely not make it to my village in this current form, and more importantly Inuyasha will surely find me there and capture me. That road is closed to me now. I do not have the strength.

 

There is another way to procure the life energy which would regain my strength, repair my wounds, and give me the chance to return to my village and take what I need without being found. But even death seems preferable to that humiliation.

 

These were my feelings until felt the strange sensation in my chest, and realized, with indescribable despair, that I had failed to rid the world of the Shikon Jewel. I could feel it everywhere, from every direction. What little of Kagome's soul remained in me stored some of her memories, and with intense concentration I confirmed the events which I had already guessed. It manifested within Kagome, far in the future, in a world where demons were too few and too fearful to use the jewel. I succeeded in sending the Shikon Jewel to a place where it would be safe, and that bitch brought it back here, like a stupid dog fetching a grenade. More than that, she shattered it to pieces, making it all but impossible for me to sense the distance or direction of any one shard.

 

I knew I could not die until I had reassembled the jewel and found some more effective way to destroy it. I find some pleasure in the idea of capturing Kagome, binding her hands around the jewel, and burning her alive, so that she would know my suffering, the suffering she had so callously undone. But I know there is no punishment that would satisfy me.

 

I was weak, impossibly weak, when I found myself close enough to a fragment of the jewel that I could focus on it and ignore the hundred other shards that blanketed the country in a homogeneous, directionless aura.

 

As I rested on a bench at the post station, I saw the houshi emerge from the brothel, with one woman on each arm. They parted ways at the turn of the road. I made no hurry, as once I was able to focus on the shards the monk carried they were a beacon that I could follow in the dead of night. He put two miles between us before I made my decision to follow.

 

II.

 

I would never have survived the encounter if she had not been so close to death. Her movements were clearly those of practiced care, and ironically it was her ability to be so stealthy that allowed me to detect her. Any human or animal has a natural rhythm to its movements, even if the vast majority of its sounds are at the very threshold of hearing. But there is no rhythm when a person is moving carefully, following the curve of branches and the direction of the grass, so as to disturb absolutely nothing, and then - because she is dying - her body is suddenly beset by weakness, and she loses balance for a moment, and leaves shake briefly but violently when she grips the thin branch of a sapling to steady herself. This sound, and sounds like it, attracted my attention, and having been approached by a demoness many times before in a similar manner, I was able to prepare myself.

 

I made no visible reaction to the noise she made, but after waiting long enough to allay her fears of detection, I edged closer to the bottle of alcohol. I took the bottle in my right hand, and with my left I steadied myself against the edge of the hot spring. As I did this my fingers slipped into my traveling bag, which I had laid out in such a way that I could secure the jewel shards. I palmed them while pulling out a single sweet dumpling - a leftover from my meal at the brothel - and slipping the entire contents of that hand into my mouth. I was able to swallow the dumpling while working the three shards into the pocket of my cheek, because I am exceptionally talented with my tongue. I downed the last of the sake and covertly spat the shards into the empty bottle, which I set aside.

 

I did not drink that entire bottle this evening; if I had I'd be unconscious. But perhaps the size of the bottle, and my general demeanor, led this intruder to think I was intoxicated. Even if I was not, I was in a hot spring and naked, and that was a pretty difficult position to defend from. From the occasional snap of a twig, or scrape of zori sandals on an exposed tree root, I could mark her movement down the valley and closer to me. By then I knew for certain it was a woman, or the guise of a woman, from her smell. Which is not to say she smelled poorly, or strongly, just that my nose - like all my senses - is hyper-sensitive for women. On the contrary, she smelled wonderful, as all women do, and I looked forward to her coming close enough to allow me more than the slight bits and hints of scent carried to me on the edge of the breeze.

 

As she came closer, there was the graveyard smell as well, which is the sort of thing that never surprised me. All women loved my body, which is a thing I cannot blame, but demon women mostly wanted to consume me, often in ways that would not allow me to survive. I humor them most times. Sometimes I can at least get her naked before she loses patience and reverts to her true form, which is more times than not a creature that is not human enough to maintain my arousal. Only once was I lucky enough to come across a demoness who retained her pleasing form, and she was satisfied with what I gave her, that is, my seed. She did not entrance me fully; I cannot be satisfied with a single woman for more than a brief period of time, and no spell of human or demon can change that. If there was an area of the world where succubi were more common, I should most certainly go there and conquer them one by one.

 

Now she makes her presence known. I am aloof. To come to me while I am bathing shows disrespect; I match her disrespect in my expression and my lack of greeting. She draws her bow, and the arrow is lined up with my upper chest. She is at the edge of the pool.

 

I look her up and down. She is a priestess, but her tabi are dirty, the bottom of her red hakama is coated with wet strands of grass, and the sleeves of her white hakui are frayed. Her hair is tied back and her face is very businesslike. She might be a living human being, but I don't think she is.

 

“Give me the jewel shards,” she said.

 

“No,” I said.

 

Oh, the look women give you when you infuriate them like that! How dare I refuse! What rude sort of person would resist robbery?

 

“You are unarmed,” she said. “Don't be foolish.”

 

“That is not true,” I said. The spring was about mid-chest height here, but behind me was a ledge, and I stepped backward onto it. “In fact, I have a very powerful weapon,” I said. I now stood in knee-deep water, and because she had disturbed my bath, I was of course naked. Because the priestess was a pervert, she of course thought I was referring to my penis. Chaste women are like that - everything to them is innuendo; they think of sex constantly and they protest this sort of behavior loudly because it reminds them of their own urges.

 

Her cheeks blushed and her eyes narrowed in fury. It was instinct for her to look, an instinct that her priestess training could not completely kill, and before her conscious reaction of anger could manifest, her unconscious reaction of lustful desire appeared and disappeared. I recognized her facial movements, her true face, and that face looked down to me, who was at that moment masculine but vulnerable, and the corners of her lips moved to something dangerously close to a smile. At that moment I had already defeated her. Knowing this, she shot me with an arrow.

 

But the weapon I referred to was in fact the Kazaana, and I had already unleashed it when she released, so that the arrow was drawn harmlessly into the curse. I sealed the curse quickly, but not so quickly that the woman was not caught up in it, and when the winds subsided she had been drawn so far forward that she windmilled her arms and stumbled into the steaming onsen.

 

She had the presence of mind to cast her bow and quiver to the dry rocks behind her. She fell feet-first, going completely underwater for a moment and then finding the surface with flailing arms and sputtering breath. The fall had peeled her skirts from around her legs, and air trapped within ballooned them around her chest. It took only an instant for her to gain the foresight to push them back down, and the angle from which I stood was less than ideal, and the heat of the water combined with the disturbance of the miko's entrance made the water around her somewhat turbid, but despite all that I saw, if only briefly, wide hips, smooth thighs, and the suggestion of a completely hairless cleft between her legs. She turned to reach for the ledge, and as she moved her skirts did not, and I saw, if only briefly, that she had a firm ass.

 

She pulled herself out of the pool without my assistance, which of course would have involved substantial groping. As she lay on her side, catching her breath, I also left the bath and, stepping over her, I invited her to sit beside my fire.

 

 

III.

 

In truth, I do not think I need to breathe. I can hold my breath for a very long time, so long that I grow bored and stop. But the fear of drowning is a strange thing.

 

My clothes are so heavy I can barely move. He sits at the fire, not exactly watching me, but by no means turning away. The fire is beside a rock outcropping where he had placed his robe; he washed his clothes before he bathed and dried them there. He pats the fabric, stands up, and folds them. He is still naked and his half-erect penis bounces comically as he walks. He has made a place for me to dry my clothes. He sits again.

 

He is not subtle. He wants me to strip for him. He is aroused at the thought. He wants me naked when I lay my clothes beside the fire. He will not offer me his own clothes, which are dry, but he will offer to share body heat.

 

If I were a living woman, I might have no other choice - the weather is temperate and the fire is warm, but not warm enough to spend very long in sopping wet clothes. However, aside from the weight of my robes, I feel no discomfort - my skin knows neither cold nor irritation. I stand, walk as steadily as I can manage, and ease myself onto the stones on the other side of the fire.

 

Here I had placed my traveling bag, before accosting the houshi, and from it I draw a bottle of alcohol.

 

IV.

 

She made several mistakes, and though any one of them was likely to arouse my suspicion to the point of foiling her plan, the combination of them was enough to make her attempts foolish.

 

While it is not unusual for a woman to offer to pour a male companion a glass of sake, it is very unusual for that sake to be her own - especially if she is a priestess. While it is possible that she might have purchased a bottle with the intention of bringing it to a particular grave as an offering, it's rare for any grave to be more than a few minutes' walk from a sake-seller, so for a priestess to carry a bottle on an overnight journey was something I had not seen before. This was not enough to cause me to refuse the cup she offered me. But it was enough to cause me to sip very carefully. In fact, I only pretended to drink, letting only the smallest bit touch my lips, rolling them inward to touch my tongue.

 

Her second mistake was to try to conceal poison with a clear sake. The filtering process removes much of the flavor, such that the bitter taste was obvious and plainly an adulterant. Ah, but what sort? I tipped the cup to spill the entire contents over my face, making it impossible to tell how little I actually drank, and swallowed saliva.

 

“I apologize,” I said. She quickly refilled my cup.

 

Now for some acting. I coughed violently. She made no reaction. Rubbed my throat. Nothing. I let my hand wave up and down, as if it took too much strength to hold the cup upright. The corner of her mouth moved almost imperceptibly. Now I lowered my eyelids and slackened my face, as if falling asleep. She risked a smile.

 

A sleeping potion, then. Interesting.

 

I was still for about a minute. “I'm sorry, I'm suddenly very sleepy,” I said, and I stretched out, dropping the sake cup as if I'd forgotten it was in my hands. “Please mind the fire.”

 

Falling over would have been more dramatic, but in case I needed to fake sleep for a long time I'd rather lie down comfortably first. I clasped my hands behind my head and allowed my eyes to open just a crack, so that they would appear closed in the firelight.

 

She put away her poisoned alcohol and I counted about three minutes before she made her move on the shards. There was a water bottle beside her; she washed the shards, wrapped them in fabric, and placed them in a pocket in the hem of her shirt. Apparently my ruse did not fool her.

 

What next, then? Would she simply leave with the shards? Or did she fear I would chase her, and would she try to impede me?

 

V.

 

His acting is terrible. When he dares open one eye a slight bit to see what I am doing, he is not subtle. The poison is not working, but he pretends that it is working, and I don't know why.

 

I don't know how the houshi obtained the shards, but they belong to me and they are mine to take. If I should recover them, and if I should administer the houshi a sleeping potion to avoid a difficult confrontation, I should not feel like a criminal, and indeed I don't.

 

The houshi is motionless on the bed he made of his robes. His head is turned toward the rocks where he dried his clothes, the place where I too should dry my clothes, and the place where I would need to strip and be naked to accomplish this. His robes are simple and cut in the Indian style, by which I place him as a follower of a Soutou Zen sect. The color of his kesa - which I now realize he had carefully placed to serve as his pillow - suggests he is a monk of the lowest rank. He most likely left his temple the day of his ordination and has been traveling ever since. His behavior would suggest he has spent those years trying to convince men to give him their money and women to give him their virginity, and that his success - if any - was due to persistence rather than skill.

 

I see that he is young, fair-skinned, muscular, and (at this moment) flaccid. I see the beaded gauntlet on his hand that conceals the weapon he used on me, the winds of Hell which he unleashed for barely a second, so quickly that I thought I imagined it at first. I know that, like me, he is cursed, and carries Hell within his body.

 

I know it is unlikely I will have the opportunity for this sort of kinship again in the near future.

 

I know I am more desperate now than I have ever been before.

 

At first I do not know for sure what I am going to do with the houshi, but I know that it is something that will take time, and something that will be messy, and for this reason I should remove my clothes so that they may dry and so that they shall not be soiled. I remain in the shadows as best I can, not only for modesty but also to prevent him from seeing the damage to my skin and realizing I am not exactly alive.

 

I circle the fire, and when my back is toward it I kneel beside him, and though it is too dark for me to see his face in my shadow, I feel certain his half-closed eyes are focused on my breasts when my hand slides a sealing arrow from the quiver beside his head, makes a fist around the shaft, and drives it into his left bicep. His eyes open wide and he realizes I have paralyzed him.

 

I tell him, “I am going to take life from you,” and I tell him, “You will not die.” I will soon reach my village, and from him I only need enough to animate my body for a few more days. I take my traveling bag into my lap and search through it.

 

I came across several abandoned homes on my path here, and at one of those I procured a clamshell of liniment which had not yet dried out. I have no use for it but I still have the compulsion to collect medicines that I might use on other people. From its odor I know this balm relieves injury by encouraging blood flow and numbing the area.

 

Underneath the liniment I find the knife I was looking for. I hold it in my hands for moment. Bleeding a person is not difficult; all I must do is make a half-dozen small, shallow cuts on the underside of his forearm, and let the blood drain into a cup. But drinking that blood is another thing entirely, and I realize I will not be able to do it.

 

There is another means of drawing out his vitality and inserting it into my body. It is demeaning, but I choose it because it is human.

 

VI.

 

My arm burns, and I have no strength, no voice.

 

From her traveling bag she procures a container of medicinal-smelling salve, and she scoops out the translucent white gel with two fingers, and without expression she smears it over my genitals.

 

I see myself become hard, but I feel nothing, not when she works me with her hand, not when she squats over me and guides me into her body. The fire illuminates every inch of her and I realize her body is not flesh.

 

If I should say her skin is porcelain, I would mislead you. Her skin was like pottery, chipped and cracked and gouged, and in places the cracks are so deep and so wide I can see inexplicable darkness within her form.

 

If I should say her body was sculpted, I would mislead you. Her breasts are not merely firm, they are stone, and when she moves they do not bounce or shake, or move in a direction that conflicts with the rest of her figure. If I should say her nipples were hard, I would mislead you. I think they could be nothing but hard, but they are small and flat and only a shade darker than the white mounds to which they are fixed. I think they may be painted on.

 

If I should say her body was smooth, I would mislead you. Below her skin there was no outline of muscle or tendon, no suggestion of bone or sinew within her. She had no body hair, which was unusual but would not have been alarming, except that the skin under her arms and between her legs was as colorless and textureless as the rest of her. I knew she did not grow to be a woman, and then decide to hide this evidence of sexual maturity by taking a razor to her intimate parts and shaving them clean. I think she was made this way, like a doll, and her creator did not bother putting hair on the places that would normally be concealed by her clothing.

 

With no black nest of curls to conceal her womanhood, I should see engorged labia and glistening flesh, but even though she exposed herself to the firelight and to me, I saw no such comforting features. The curve of her belly and the apex of her thighs led my eyes to a pubic mound with no contour that might suggest a vulva, except for a shallow gouge that - in my estimation - led from where her clitoris should be to where her vagina should be. The latter spot was where a perfectly round hole was drilled into her, and here she had captured my cock and inserted it into the void within her.

 

She rides me slowly, not with passion, but with meticulous effort, and if I must read her expression I would have to say she was bored. I want to speak. To tell her that this is not necessary. That if she needed my seed, I would offer it freely.

 

But I think that might be a lie. I fear what is inside her. I fear the smell emanating from the wounds in her brittle flesh. I fear the dirt and bones and ashes that my manhood is now blindly burrowing through. I fear the souls of vengeful women that have unfettered access to the head of my cock. I have a high tolerance for horror, and a low standard for sexual encounters, but if given the opportunity to have intercourse with a creature of clay and human remains, I would almost assuredly decline.

 

I think her expression mirrors my revulsion. And still she presses her mouth to mine, takes my breath, makes my mouth dry.

 

I think she took me because she could not ask me. I think she could not abide being as vulnerable as I am now. I think she could not make a sexual union with a living soul unless she could assure neither party could feel pleasure. I realize the efficiency and purpose of the medicinal salve - it stimulated me so that she would not need to make my arousal enjoyable, and it made me numb so that I would not feel her body. I think perhaps I should be thankful for the latter effect.

 

Though I feel the tightness of climax, I feel no orgasm, no satisfaction, and I experience the sensation of fluid emission with frustration. I wonder if she is hollow within, if my seed is not arrested by reproductive organs or any other pelvic receptacle. If so, I am spraying thin ribbons of ejaculate which reach as high as her upper chest, and then splatter the inside contours of her back, her breasts, her abdomen, her buttocks. As she moves she is changing the angle by which I enter her, pointing my erection in every direction and distributing my seed up and down her insides, painting the rough baked clay surface with the fluid she has forced me to produce without the relief of sexual gratification. I imagine I fill her in a way that would not be possible if she were a living woman.

 

She slides off of me, slowly, and the gap between her legs does not close immediately. Blood spills onto my belly.

 

“Though you broke my maidenhead, this blood is not mine,” she says to me. Her insides are so inhospitable, so dry, so rough, that even with the lubrication of her numbing salve she had abraded my penis to the point of bleeding. The only blood in her was what she had taken from me.

 

My blood. My breath. My saliva. My semen.

 

She does not leave immediately. She sits and waits for her clothes to dry. I see her heal, I see her wounds close and the cracks of her skin fade. She stands, and I see strength in her limbs, relief in her expression, a vital glow in her skin. There is a dangerous beauty in her movement, and a strange enticement as she stands naked before me, inviting me to watch, and traces fingers across all the places which were cracked and flawed a minute ago and are now immaculate. Modesty was long forgotten, and having already stripped herself bare, I suspect the indignity of exposing her inhuman wounds was in some way allayed by the thrill of displaying her inhuman beauty.

 

I think her tactile inspection of her repaired flesh was completed long before my visual inspection was done, and yet she continued to turn and contort, to turn her back to me and bend over, to face me and brush aside her hair when it fell over her breasts.

 

Her clothes are dry now, and I watch her dress. After she has collected her weapon, her traveling bag, and my jewel shards, she kneels beside me and pulls the arrow from my arm with practiced care. She does not need to tell me not to follow her.

 

I recover, and I sit up, and I assess my wounds, and I realize that she had no reproductive orifice until she used me to make one. Proof of her virginity has adhered to the sweat of my belly and thighs - fragments of pottery which I collect in my palm, and pinch and roll between my fingers, and somehow cannot force myself to discard.

 

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

-T.S. Eliot

 

END