Yukiyo’s parents did straighten up when the news came on, but Yukiyo only glanced up in casual interest. The streets were quiet now.
“…report that six more murders took place within this past week…”
Yukiyo blinked and sat up.
“Each victim was a child or teenager, and all bore the same trademark cuts across the mouth, as well as stabbing injuries to the chest and stomach…”
“Six more!” cried Yukiyo’s mother.
“They were wrong,” stated Yukiyo’s father, shaking his head. “This criminal is still out there.”
Yukiyo’s mother looked at the way her daughter was sitting up on the couch, halfway off as though she were going to flee at any moment.
“Don’t worry. You’re not going anywhere. We will make sure you are safe. Understand? We will not let anything happen to you!”
Yukiyo stayed stiff as her parents hugged her, staring at the screen, although there were no images.
“How…” she said in barely a whisper.
She lay awake, covers pulled up to her neck, and stared at her curtains. The window was closed, but she knew gravity had a way of making them move on their own. They were long and dark, just like someone’s hair. Something right then and there told her she was not alone.
Outside, the streetlights hung white glowing pearls perfectly aligned down the rows of houses. Yukiyo lifted her head up a little, just enough for her to see the small slit of window revealing the outside. She could see someone standing directly under the streetlight in front of her house, almost as tall and thin as the pole and blending in with it perfectly. Yukiyo sat up all the way and got out of bed, creeping to her window to have a better look. Whoever it was stood out of the streetlight’s beam, shoes touching the exact place where the sidewalk met the grass. Yukiyo could not make out the face or any part of them at all, but she felt that magnetic pull that caused her to slip her feet into her shoes and leave her bedroom.
She felt the metal grasp on her heart as well, cold and tight in fear, but it was the magnet that brought her outside. She wanted to see for herself, although she already knew who was waiting for her. She just couldn’t tell if it was a surrender or a showdown.
Yukiyo went out the door and edged her way across the lawn like the individual blades of grass were all needles, stopping before the sidewalk. She kept her eye trained on the person in the shadows. She recognized her long hair, her long coat, and the mask she wore across her face. She looked at her eyes, not as Halloween white as the contacts she bought in the costume store, but rather so pale they were colorless, life drained out of them as it was already drained out of her. Yukiyo’s heart thumped in her chest, and she watched the woman raise her arm, showing Yukiyo what she already knew was behind her back. It was longer than the one she had. She opened the scissors an inch and pointed the whole thing at Yukiyo.
“I am Kuchisake-onna…”
Her voice was distant, like chimes mingling with the wind. Yukiyo felt the thumping rise to her throat as she nodded vigorously.
“You are, you are.”
“I…am Kuchisake-onna. You are not.”
“You are! Not me! I won’t do it anymore!”
Kuchisake-onna raised her scissors and opened them all the way. Yukiyo’s breaths escaped in short whimpers, and she spun on her heel to run back in her house, only to find that The Slit-Mouthed Woman reappeared right in front of her way.
“I’m sorry!” Yukiyo cried. She took off down the sidewalk, panting and looking behind her. She did not get far before The Slit-Mouthed Woman appeared in front of her path again, and Yukiyo fell against a tree trunk in another yard. The Slit-Mouthed Woman approached her slowly, very slowly, until she was as close to her as she wanted to be.
“I…am Kuchisake-onna,” she said again, and this time she removed the mask. Yukiyo pressed herself against the tree as she was exposed to her real face. The scars were ugly, jagged chunks of skin rotted together, like a gummy smile without teeth. There was no more blood. Kuchisake-onna leaned her face closer as Yukiyo dug her fingernails into the tree, staring at that grin she thought she came close to recreating.
“Do you think you are pretty?” she asked Yukiyo.
“Yes, yes I do!” Yukiyo cried, realizing a second too late that the spirit had changed her routine. Before she could come up with a more favorable answer, Kuchisake-onna did not hesitate to show her the scissors in the best way she knew how.
Yukiyo did not have the time to cry out as the blades sliced her cheeks open, her own hot blood running down her chin and neck as she slumped down the tree.
The Slit-Mouthed Woman stood over her and, before she finished the job, delivered the last line to Yukiyo she herself heard the last time she was alive.
“Who will think you are pretty now?”
About the Author
Jackie Sonnenberg lives for things that go bump in the night…
Jackie is currently writing a book collection called “yresruN semyhR” giving Nursery Rhymes horrifying retellings. She is active in the Horror industry as both an author and an actor, working in a haunted house every Halloween season and a year-round haunted attraction! She lives in Orlando, Florida, where she and co-worker friends operate Zombie Outbreak, a unique attraction combining a haunted house and laser tag. She works as both an actor for the attraction and the writer that provides the backstory, one chapter at a time.
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https://www.facebook.com/authorjackiesonnenberg
Website:
http://www.jackiesonnenberg.com/
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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3268117.Jackie_Sonnenberg
The Sound of Deep Waters
By Jennifer Loring
After three days of driving and staying in cheap highway motels—the owners of which had long since abandoned carpet cleaning and painting and substituted locked gates and rusted padlocks for pool maintenance—Lisa, her husband, and their daughter finally rolled into the resort town of Lake Passage just as the bloated red sun died bleeding behind the horizon.
“I’m hungry!” Angel whined. She had kicked the back of Lisa’s seat for nearly the entire thousand-mile journey.
Lisa gritted her teeth so hard she thought she cracked one. Angel. The fucking irony.
“We’ll eat as soon as we check in.”
It was Jeremy’s brilliant idea to drive instead of fly. He thought Angel should see other states, but what was there to see except corn fields, cows, and the gray welt of asphalt stretching endlessly before them? The Nintendo 3DS had entertained her for the first few hours, and she fell asleep a couple of times, but after that, Angel subjected Lisa to her incessant seat-kicking and questions. She was, despite Lisa’s best efforts, still a child. It wasn’t her fault. If anything, Lisa had only herself to blame. If she had just…
No point following that train of thought. She’d punished herself with regret long enough. Angel was six already. Time to let it go, like everything else. She could not mold Angel into Jessie.
Lisa unfolded the sheet of blue construction paper on her lap. “What the hell is this?” she had demanded when she found it crumpled up in the mailbox fifteen minutes before they left on this godforsaken “vacation.” Angel naturally denied any involvement. Jeremy glanced at it and shrugged it off. Neighborhood kids, probably, some kind of cryptic political message or band promotion like those pasted to telephone poles around the city. Lisa imagined their creators didn’t intend them to communicate with the outside world so much as with each other, a vast secret network of anarchists, musicians, and artists determined to tear it all apart from the ground up. Rip away the comfortable façade and expose the brutal reality of existence. She’d been an idealist once, too.
“You actually brought that with you?” Jeremy laughed. “Did you crack the code yet?”
God, she hated him sometimes. Maybe that was her real problem with Angel, the fifty percent of her genes that belonged to him. “It’s not just garbage or
some kids making a statement.”
“Lisa, don’t. Don’t go there. Please.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Well don’t.”
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from yelling at him which, according to him, was all she ever did anyway. Lisa folded the paper back up and tucked it into her messenger bag.
Situated in the center of a vast lake and severed from the mainland except for a ferry that ran every two hours from six a.m. to ten p.m., Lake Passage was the lone outpost of civilization amid one of the country’s last remaining forests. It had grown popular with celebrities simply because getting there presented a challenge, and thus only the most determined paparazzi proved themselves worthy of the journey. No surprise some alleged doctor had cashed in by building a “wellness center” for the rich and addicted on the island’s north coast. Rumor had it she was more guru than physician, and the whole operation was a front for one of those New Age cults.
The ivy-strangled brick ruins of what had been a Revolutionary-era fort, then a tuberculosis hospital, and finally a “public hospital,” a nice little euphemism for “insane asylum,” dominated the rest of the cliff overlooking the northern shore. The state had converted part of it into a historical museum. No one seemed to know what to do with the rest.
As soon as Jeremy drove the car onto the ferry, Angel propelled her feet into Lisa’s seat with such vehemence that Lisa pitched forward. She braced herself against the dashboard and twisted around, her fingers clenching and unclenching.
I could kill this fucking kid. I really could.
She twisted in her seat. “Do it one more time, Angel, and we’re going to have a serious problem.”
“Don’t threaten her.”
Angel smiled smugly and crossed her arms.
“Don’t undermine my authority, Jeremy. Maybe if you bothered disciplining her once in a while, she wouldn’t act like such a monster.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” he said in his most patronizing tone. “But don’t you dare call her a ‘monster’ when she’s sitting right here.”
“I said she acts like one.” And by the way, go fuck yourself.
Angel smirked. “I want to see the water now. Daddy, get me out of the car seat.”
Each word she spoke jabbed at Lisa like needles into an uncooperative psych patient. And Jeremy, rubbing it in her face that Angel’s mere presence made her long for the things she wanted and could not have. That it was unfair to expect Angel to fulfill the role Lisa had prescribed for her. And maybe she would have accepted it if they weren’t forever engaged in some inexplicable tag-team battle against her.
“Just a second, sweetie.” Jeremy unbuckled his seatbelt and climbed out, then walked around to the passenger side back seat and unfastened Angel. Lisa remained in place, counting each breath. These people could not possibly be her family. And they weren’t, not really. Not with one piece forever missing. She supposed everyone, to some extent, lived in a state of futile longing.
After a few minutes, when Jeremy had taken Angel’s hand and led her to the side of the ferry, Lisa left the car and wandered to the opposite side, then closed her eyes as cold spray misted her face like tears.
Lisa and Jeremy unloaded the trunk. She opened Angel’s door and pulled up the handle of the red polka-dot Hello Kitty plastic suitcase. Angel let out a world-weary sigh. “Finally,” she said and dragged the suitcase toward the lobby entrance. Jeremy winked at Lisa. At least someone found her attitude amusing.
“She’s going to hate it here.” Lisa approached the front desk, not much caring if the attendant or anyone else took offense. Hell, she hated it here. And Jeremy knew damned well why, the insensitive shit. As usual, he feigned ignorance.
“Thought it would be nice to get away from everything. Maybe we’ll see some celebrities.”
“I wanna see One Direction,” Angel piped up.
Jeremy patted her head. “Maybe we will, sweetie. As soon as Mommy’s feeling a little more…agreeable.”
Lisa flashed him her finest “eat shit” smile as he retrieved his credit card from his wallet and slid it across the counter.
“Why don’t you guys get settled in, and I’ll grab dinner for us?” he said.
“Why don’t we just order in?” Lisa countered.
Jeremy stuffed his wallet into his back pocket and shrugged like a teenager caught with his father’s Penthouse. “Thought I’d say hello to a few of the locals. I know you two are tired.”
Who is she? Lisa thought, then realized she didn’t give a damn. That ship had sailed months ago, when she discovered she could barely tolerate the sound of his voice, let alone sex with him. “Yeah. Okay. Come on, Angel. We’re going up to the room while Daddy gets dinner.” Lisa hoisted the duffel bag over her shoulder. Even if she and Jeremy went away for a week, they never needed more than one shared bag. Once Angel came along, it turned into three times as many. Jessie hadn’t needed so much of everything.
“I want to go with Daddy.”
“I need you to help me unpack.”
“I want to go with Daddy!” Angel released her suitcase and folded her arms over her chest, her pouting lips and shining eyes telegraphing the imminent tantrum. Lisa was tempted to let her go, let Jeremy deal with her for once, but he’d already strode halfway across the parking lot. Typical.
“Angel, I need you to be a big girl, okay? Everyone’s tired and hungry, and Daddy already left. You can take a nap while we wait for him.”
Angel snatched her suitcase handle and pounded her fist against the Up button. The kid knew exactly how to get under Lisa’s skin. Like she was born to do it. “I hate you,” she whispered.
It took every ounce of Lisa’s will not to respond in kind, but she prevailed in the end. She refused to become her own mother, who had frequently proclaimed her hatred of her children.
Lisa slid the card key into the lock and pushed the door open. Angel shoved past her before she’d even flipped on the light. She claimed the bed at the far end of the room by jumping on it without taking her shoes off.
“Angel.”
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Lisa glanced at the deepening purple sky beyond the balcony doors. She’d promised Jeremy no more dark thoughts. She sighed and unzipped the bag, then tucked their clothes into the dresser. Sometimes ignoring Angel was the only strategy, the only thing that spared Lisa’s sanity. Sometimes she believed it was exactly what Angel wanted.
Lisa arranged the toiletries in the bathroom before unpacking Angel’s clothing. Another entire bag contained all the toys she insisted on bringing with her, despite the fact they’d be gone only a week. After a temper tantrum in which Angel flung herself face-first onto the driveway, Lisa had relented. Angel’s deceptively sweet face bore a yellowing bruise in the center of her forehead and a crusty red abrasion down her nose. They’d received an unsurprising number of dirty looks wherever they stopped on the way here.
The kid’s a bad seed.
If Lisa hadn’t given birth to her, she wouldn’t have trusted Angel to be hers. There were times when she thought aliens must have inseminated her. Her slightly more rational side insisted the Ob/Gyn unit had accidentally switched her real child with this imposter. But she’d never laid a hand on her. Angel is just a child, Lisa repeated to herself and turned the hatred inward.
Yes, she admitted it; sometimes she hated her own child. Angel made anything else unfeasible. Because Angel was not her loving, lost Jessie.
Angel had stopped bouncing on the bed. Now she stared out the balcony doors, her neck craned so she could gape at the sky. “Mommy, there’s something funny up there.”
“It’s probably just a satellite. Those are the things that give us the radio in the car, and GPS—”
Angel shook her head. “It’s a hole, Mommy. There’s a hole in the sky.”
Angel was always seeing or hearing things no one else could, and Lisa suspected they had a real problem, of the psychiatric variety, on
their hands.
“Angel, that’s impossible. It’s just…” She crouched and gazed into the smooth, velvet night. Stars speckled the dark expanse above them, the Milky Way a vague smudge and everything exactly as it should be.
Except for the small black void hovering over the parking lot.
“What the f—”
Her cell phone jingled. Lisa rooted through her purse, dug out the phone, and pressed Accept. “Hello?”
“Lisa, it’s me.”
She glanced at the clock on the bedside table. An hour had slipped by already. “What’s wrong? Is it the car?”
“No. This is going to sound crazy. I know this place like the back of my hand.”
Lisa’s stomach fluttered as if a hundred cocoons had burst open. “What is it?”
“There’s only the one road from the ferry into town. I followed it, and…I ended up right back at the ferry. I didn’t turn, or…”
“Jeremy,” Lisa dropped her voice and shut herself in the bathroom so Angel couldn’t hear, “what the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s like the town isn’t there.”
“This is insane. You’re just tired.” She rubbed her eyes as though he could see her making her point.
“I’m not tired, Lisa. Is anything weird going on there?”
She exhaled. “Yeah. The sky…I don’t know. It looks like there’s a hole or something. But I’m sure it’s just some weird astronomical thin—”
“I’m going to the police.”
She suppressed a laugh. Who was overreacting now? “Jeremy, they’ll think you’re crazy. What are you going to tell them?”
“I’ll call you back in a little while. Don’t go anywhere.”
13 Night Terrors Page 34
