InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Weird Story in D ❯ WiD ( Chapter 1 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

AN: If this is the first time you've seen my work chances are ripe that you won't like this particular story. It's not easy to get. It wasn't meant to be. I suggest you leave it last; look at the rest of my work, just to get a feeling for the style I use, then read this at the end.


“Weird Story in D” by Abraxas (2005-08-07)

The voice.

It calls me but I will not answer.

In the darkness, snug and tight against my body, I hear it. I hear it. I hear it come from everywhere. Where does it come from? That it should get closer and closer. Where does it come from? That I should hear it at all. It cannot be this way; it was not supposed to be this way!

Could I have been mistaken?

The voice.

Why does it call me? And with that intonation of terror –

I thought – at the very least I thought – within this realm I would be separated even from him, but now I wonder if he will follow me into the crack of doom. Is it fated destiny that our souls be so intimately intertwined? Through time and space we met – can it be that even across death –

No! You are a stupid girl, Kagome. Here, I am safe. Hear, within oblivion I am safe forever. And with the jewel. He will be happy; he will know now I am beyond Naraku’s reach for within this corner of existence his villainy will never tread. It fades. It drowns.

Here I am free!

The voice.

It calls me by name with that tint of fear.

And I will not answer.

Yet – I am overcome by the urge to reply.

But I cannot answer

Why answer, when it does not exist? It is not a voice with its own, separate existence; just an echo of a thing that once was but now exists no longer. It no longer exists because I am not part of the world where it belongs.

Outside this place nothing is. Inside this world I am cut-off; the way is plugged and shut behind me. I am enveloped by the warmth of the eternal mother – the light of the jewel – and I hear the staggering rhythm of the universe. Soon, the last fragments that were Kagome will be absorbed into the nothing and that which was truly me will be revealed. The voice – like the memory of the life that heard it – will be expunged from my being.

Yet the voice calls me – and now I, now I feel something move within this realm, crawling, prodding me. But I will not answer! I will hold still, very still and resist the urge for as long as Kagome remains alive.

All my life I have been haunted by those infernal, demonic voices and I will not allow them to afflict the afterworld.

In this limbo between death and life, I will be with the jewel. I know this to be true, no matter what the voice says.

No one – dead, alive – has had a deeper, more intimate connection to the Jewel of Four Souls. I was born with it – embedded in my flesh – and inside me it remained for fifteen years. And is it not so, then, how impossible it must be for anyone to imagine what that relationship was like for me. Only childbirth is equivalent. Still, until I fell into the well and it was removed by force – ravaged, as if that were the word – I lived unaware of its presence but not of its powers.

That tree; I always remember my mother standing under the spread of its branches. The look on her face, in her eyes. It seemed she was staring at something – or into something. What, I wondered, was she aware of? What, I pondered, did she see, feel? There would have been a time, once, when I lived inside her – when I would have known exactly. Perhaps a residue of that embryonic memory remained. But alas, gulfs of space and time and experience separated us from one another and she was a mystery.

I wanted to know!

I needed to know!

Day after day, I stood before the tree. Even while my little brother played and my friends came into and out of my life, I stood. I knelt. I meditated before that wise, old thing, praying that one day it might reveal its secrets to me. What a sad, pathetic thing to see. And just when I thought my efforts were in vain, the powers of the jewel matured and took root. I looked up, up from the leaf-trodden soil to the face of that god-tree and I saw –

It was – at first – a head with long, stringy hair like a cobweb and living, electric eyes. The visage was embedded deep within the trunk, enveloped by layers of woody flesh grown through the centuries. Could I have been so blind? But was it not true that even the bark hinted of its softened, distorted contours. And the suggestion of a long, shaft poking out of the body whose form and shape were emerging into view.

The face! The eyes! – looking away as if dreaming.

I screamed at the thought a boy could be alive within the tree – at the image of that figure transforming into a grotesque mixture of flesh and wood.

I do not recall fainting; I do remember waking up inside my bedroom. In the darkness and shadows. On the bed, still dressed in my old, school uniform. I felt cold and uncomfortable – and as I moved about the bed I noticed how sore and tired my body felt. It was as if I were a corpse returning to life. Yes, I suppose that would be the pain of it.

More and more of that night-time world came into view and I recall – vividly – that I was not alone. I heard a voice as familiar as my own and as alien as the gods – the demons. I peered down, down, down – it was coming from within my body. Terrified, I stood. Horrified, I tore off my clothes and looked into the space between my legs – it seemed to be the lips of the thing. I gasped as I saw, clearly and distinctly, a pair of eyes emerging through the entangled flesh and hair. Makeshift eyes, fresh and wet. At that moment, at that instant, that part of me that was dead – born dead – emerged into life with a spitting of blood to complete its ghastly birth.

What could I do? I was stunned beyond words. Yet, I summoned a will beyond my understanding. I reached down and poked into the eyes – the eight, red eyes – of the spider-like face. I screamed aloud as the pain coursed through my body and I fell to the floor, twisting, convulsing. But I was not afraid anymore because my lizard-like, cave-man mind knew whatever it was it could be silenced.

The spider-eyes were blotted out in blood and the lips that appeared to be fangs lost all of their menacing character. I was strangely satisfied. I conquered whatever it was that was trying to use my own flesh to betray me.

The voice.

Is it still there? Why is it still there?

When my mother stormed into the bedroom, she found me tumbling around the floor, the space between my legs bleeding red, hot blood. She was understanding and I knew, then, she had seen the very thing once before and now saw it again.

The power of the jewel is such a thing; it can draw consciousness out of oblivion like water out of rock. Is it not like a mother, in that respect? Eternal mother. But where ever there is life, there is death, too. One cannot exist without the other.

And it was inside me. But where did it come from, if not, like me, it formed within my mother’s womb. Maybe my mother had it, too, and her mother, back through the centuries. Maybe it was the burden of the women of our line to care for the jewel.

It was not until after it was removed – and I learned what it was – that the whole, awful truth sunk into my collective thought. That was when I started to look at my mother. At night, I snuck into her bedroom and while she slept, I knelt by her, I stared at her. What was happening? What was at work – what force – that could be bringing life out of that which was by nature lifeless. Life out of molecules, atoms. Life out of nothing. The jewel out of nothing. Space into time, mass out of energy, like the woven fabric of a spider web springing out of a single, central point.

The voice – the prodding – the world is shaking.

And the rhythm – I do not hear it anymore – only the voice that calls me.

But I will not answer.

The last, untouched fragment of the jewel rests exiled within the limbo between death and life. A place as close to us as the air and as out of reach as the galaxies. A place that by the gods’ eternal wisdom can be accessed only by woman. And that thing called Naraku will never reach it. It is denied. When he was a man he could have grasped it; but when his humanity was devoured he lost forever the ability to regain it. All of his plots and all of his monsters will never yield it anymore than he can become human again.

In a sense we already won. There is a secret pleasure inside of me realizing this. That Inuyasha and my friends have nothing to fear. Never have. Naraku is doomed. From the moment he was created he was doomed and if he were a million times stronger he would still be doomed. He exists – for the word lives is inappropriate – entirely within the realm of this world; he has no spirit, he has no soul and therefore no connection to that other world.

What a sad, pathetic thing, truly to be pitied – everything from the cells of algae to man is connected to the great, omnipotent mind of the universe except Naraku. Everything is eternal except him. Like the atoms – no, smaller still – he is something inherently inanimate and utterly destroyable.

I understand it now – it is clearer as the last, dim rays of memory fades –

But the voice calls me – and I will not answer.

If the womb was where the inanimate absorbed the life-force like osmosis, if it was the membrane through which creation proceeded – and if the jewel shard lay beyond it –

We are weak creatures, we human beings and in our collective fallibility can we not be excused? Forgiven? If we err in the worst, possible way? If, for the better good, we commit acts of unspeakable evil? It was my intent to end Naraku and his terror, but in the process, I know – I understand – it will seem as if I were no better for the bargain struck with my demons is just as ghastly, just as horrific as his.

Once again, once more, I entered my mother’s bedroom. I knelt by the bed and I begged for answers to come. And the answers came. A gust of wind, a flutter of eyes and a tongue I had not heard utter a word in years returned. I looked but it was not from me, it was from my mother! Something beneath my mother’s clothes was moving! Slithering like a snake back and forth. Like a tongue with its voice emerging out of it, out of the folds of flesh. In the midnight, on my knees, I was there not believing what I was seeing let alone what I was hearing.

The universe crawled through the portal betwixt life and death and was there, trying to answer me.

What could I do, weak, insignificant mortal? I ran out of there, into my room. But that was not far away enough. I ran into the well, back into the past. I fled, at last, into Inuyasha’s arms.

My body wasted, month after month, calling for something, aching for whatever it was it needed like it needed air, food and water. I found that thing it wanted was Inuyasha. It – I – wanted him inside me. Yet as the pleasure of the act surged through our bodies, I shrank away at the realization. We were in the act of making life, but life cannot exist without death. Nothing can be created without at the same stroke being destroyed. Were our carnal union consummated to its proper conclusion, something about Inuyasha would be dead. And I could not do that to him.

So it must be, that a man gives up his soul when he gives up his seed – that is the natural way. That is why making love is, really, making death. Like the male spiders eaten by the females. Onigumo gave up his soul to create Naraku, divorced from the world of woman, forever, eternally, the ultimate perversion. One side good; one side evil.

I returned to my time and to that tongue. That voice coming from my mother. Between her legs. When she greeted me at the temple. When she served me at the kitchen. When she bid me good night and good morning. I heard it – and I asked if everything was alright but no one could hear it. No one besides me.

How could it be that she was unaware of it?

She, of all of us, she must have known it was there!

At night, when the house was as quiet as a tomb, the voice beckoned. I struggled; I relented. I sat in front of my mother’s door and I listened to the tale it weaved. I resisted; I tried to fight but it grew bolder and louder every time I repressed it. And when I succumbed again it drew me closer to my mother’s intimacy like magnets attracting each other from a distance.

If just to silence it, I entered the chamber. I snuck up to the sleeping figure of my mother. The voice reacted to my presence as if it had won a victory, clamoring like a thousand drums distantly beating a staggering, cosmic rhythm. Over here, over here, it begged, growing more and more excited with its every plea.

I pulled aside my mother’s kimono and exposed her flesh.

Can you not guess what I discovered? What I found – is it not obvious? It was the self-same face I mutilated – and that my mother, too, mutilated – that face that all along was the jewel trying to speak to me. Wanting to reveal the whole of creation. The eternal feminine. At once I felt horribly sad at the grotesque disfigurement of its countenance: the eyes degenerated into a mass of matted hair, the lips sagged and wrinkled with age. What ever terror it once invoked it now lacked. What an anguished sight! And it had only wanted to express itself to the one person in this world it was the closest to!

Kagome, what did you do? What did you do?

But the voice was not mine, not the vision’s any longer.

And again and again I wept saying I was sorry.

I kissed the frayed, withered holes where its eyes had been and I promised I would be its eyes. I kissed its lips where they parted almost out of life and I whispered into its darkness, I promised I would be its lips. I would undo the damage I had done and atone.

To give up my soul so that the jewel lived again.

I would be the thing that died, I, Kagome!

In a flash I saw echoes of Onigumo in the cave, his lips moving as mine while we uttered devour me!

From my lips to my body I felt the visage embrace me with a warmth that was so, so completely familiar –

Inuyasha will live; Sango and Miroku will continue. By destroying myself, I bring peace. I know it will not be understood, dismissed as fundamentally wrong, but it is for the better good. Because I value my family and my friends – and the world – more than I do my own, insignificant life. It is – it was – the right thing to do. nothing I ever did ever was as right. And what a small sacrifice! I died already and I could do it again, forever. I could die forever. For Naraku it will be final, but for me it is not the end: within each death there is always a new life, a new beginning.

The voice – at last – it does not call me and I do not answer.

***********

When Inuyasha opened the door of the bedroom, he saw a sight he could not be impelled to comprehend. What force – what demonic mischief – allowed itself to be so played out? What, besides the inscrutable, patient evil of Naraku could have conceived such a visage? And what, exactly, could have driven Kagome to give in? To give in to the idea – the suggestion – of that admixture of flesh and blood immortalized before him? Like an orgy of the sickest, most perverted kind.

For there, on the mattress, was a scene that would be etched into his mind until oblivion blot away his very soul.

“Kagome!” he called one, last time in tune to the rhythm of the girl’s very own last-gasp. Almost as soon as he turned on the lights she must have been dead. Her mother, too, suffered the worst as it was her blood that soaked the bed, wet the floor, dripped into the kitchen below. And it was her scream that alerted Grandpa and Souta – but it was the odor of death that alarmed him.

Fighting against every urge to turn and run away, he lumbered like a half-asleep ogre into the main body of the chamber.

“Kagome, what have you done?”

Head-first Kagome had entered the world and head-first she had left it. Someway, somehow, she had inserted her skull from the top of her head to base of her neck into her mother’s sex.

He pulled her, tugging her by the shoulders a little at a time until she was free all the while calling her name over and over.

She fell back onto the floor dead – dead.

It was not meant for him to understand and he screamed and he stormed out of the bedroom as soon as he heard it speak through the gaping, bloody hole between the mother’s legs. And as he fled out of that house, out of that time and space, did he not hear that voice – laughing – as somewhere, out there, an ancient spider laughed maniacally.

END