by Unknown
Despite my best efforts to conceal the truth from my sister, I had forgotten that the local paper had decided to run an article on my spectacular victory. They even printed a photo of me receiving my trophy at the school assembly. I was probably the only kid at school who had to lie to their family about doing well at sports.
"I've never won anything in my life!” I said while hugging my trophy to my chest like a teddy bear. "You can't take this away from me!"
Shuro wanted to take me out for hamburgers to celebrate, so he was a little taken back by my sister's furious attitude.
“What’s with you Kanako?” Asked Shuro. “He won a race, you should be congratulating him, not laying into him.”
“Shuro,” said my sister. “The truth is,” her mouth began to open and close, and I thought it was finally the moment where my sister would come clean to her husband and I wouldn’t have to lie anymore. After a minute she managed to say “Daisuke has been taking drugs.”
Shuro’s eyes widened in shock and he sharply inhaled. “No, you can’t be serious," he said. "Daisuke would never take drugs, would you Daisuke?”
“Of course I wouldn’t, but then again maybe I would, perhaps,” I said. Sis was giving me her scary face and I wasn’t sure which lie I was supposed to follow along with anymore. “But they can never take away my trophy!”
“I don’t understand,” said Shuro as he began massaging his temples. “How did this happen?”
“It all started on his first day of school,” said my sister in her most dramatic storytelling voice. “He was approached by one of his classmates and led out to the back of the yard. There he started hanging out with a strange group of students, and was slowly introduced to the dark and dangerous world of performance enhancing drugs.”
“A group of students?” Asked Shuro. “Wait, you can’t possibly be talking about the exorcists?”
"No, they are the…the..ex…the ex-students,” said my sister. “Students who used to go to Dai-chan's school until the pressure of studying and coming first on sports day finally got to them.”
“Daisuke,” said Shuro as he grabbed me by the shoulders and looked directly into my eyes. “I know that always coming last can be difficult, but this is not the way.”
“Huh,” I said.
“It’s okay Daisuke,” said my sister dramatically. I didn’t know when she became so skilled at over acting. “We can work through this together, as a family.” She gave me a giant hug, but it was way stronger than normal and it felt like a threat.
Thanks to my sister I was subjected to an hour long lecture about drugs from Shuro and his print-outs from the Internet. I’d never taken drugs in my life, and I didn’t resist peer pressure in eighth grade to go smoke a cigarette behind the bus shelter to suffer through that.
Shuro was the closest thing I had to a brother/father and Sis made me feel like I'd let him down. I had instead let my sister down, but that wasn’t the point. Shuro was even talking about sending me to rehab at the local community center, and I knew that's where they sent kids from my school who were caught doing drugs in the forest. Hikaru thought it was a new kind of playgroup, and she had a one hour tantrum when we told her that she couldn’t come.
Sis had gone too far this time, so I confronted her on the veranda after Hikaru had gone to bed and Shuro was in the bath. I opened the sliding door to find her leaning over the railing and looking up at the stars. It was a clear night and the moon was large and bright. I was almost overwhelmed by its beauty before I remembered how angry I was.
I gave Sis my best angry face. My best friend in elementary school said that it just made me look constipated, so I had been working on it over the years.
My sister turned towards me. We locked eyes for a moment before she sighed and returned to looking at the moon. “Why are you giving me that look?” Said Sis. “I wasn’t the one who broke my word.”
“Hey I have every right to be-,” I said before I noticed the smell of cigarettes and a suspicious trail of smoke rising up from one of the pot plants. “Have you been smoking again?”
Sis sighed and pulled a packet of cigarettes and a lighter out from the foliage of the pot plant. “Okay, you caught me,” she said as she took one cigarette from the packet and light it. Sis once told me that she smoked when she was younger but had since given up. Now she never smoked unless she was stressed out. I always knew that things had to be bad when Sis started smoking. I wanted to scold her, but I had more important things to get angry about.
“I don’t get it, why do we have to keep lying to Shuro?” I asked. “He already knows about exorcists and monsters, so I’m sure that he’d be open to the whole super exorcist thing.”
“It’s not that simple,” said Sis.
“Sure it is, he plays video games all the time. I’m sure he's open to anything.”
“That’s what all guys say,” said Sis as she exhaled and blew smoke into the night sky. “Until they find themselves faced with a three foot rabbit monster, and all of a sudden they start screaming like a girl. Then the next thing you know they’re out playing around with some busty tramp that they met at a Halloween party, and you have to cancel your wedding.”
I wasn’t sure how to counter that, but it did explain why my sister’s ex-fiance may have left her many years ago.
“Is that why that dude left you Sis?” I asked.
“That’s not my point,” snapped my sister. “The truth is Shuro has never seen a real monster. To him it’s all just a bunch of stories I told him about my childhood. You grew up with father so you may have been more open to becoming an exorcist, but Shuro lives in a different world. To him the world is all numbers, meetings, Sunday dinners, and he seems happy that way. He won’t react well if we told him the truth about you.”
“You’re over reacting, we’re like best friends!”
“It’s like nothing I say ever gets through to you!” Said my exasperated sister. “You seem to have forgotten about how the organization wants to take you away, but they certainly haven’t forgotten about you. And they aren't going to anytime soon. Trying to explain everything would take forever and it would only make him worry. You’ll give Hikaru nightmares if we tell her you might be taken away.”
“It’s all cool Sis," I said. "If they try that you and Akito can stop them!”
“I don’t know if we can,” said Sis. She finished her cigarette and extinguished it in the pot plant soil like an ashtray. “Anyway, the truth is that Shuro thinks of you like a real younger brother and Hikaru adores you. What’s wrong with letting things remain this way for a little longer?”
“But they’re going to find out eventually," I said. "We can’t just keep on hiding it forever!”
“Yes, but hopefully by then they’ll be older and more prepared to accept the truth! Just give me more time Daisuke,” she said when she saw the look on my face. “I have been living in this world of monsters and exorcists far longer than you have, so just trust me on this.”
I huffed and turned to leave. I had lived with Sis for long enough to know that it was impossible to argue with her when she became like this. I could only trust her judgement and hope that she wasn’t wrong.
Chapter 11
Akito was trapped between a rock and a hard place, or more precisely trapped between my sister, Nina's brother, and the exorcist organization. The organization still called on a weekly basis to check up on me, and Nina’s brother often made threats about telling Shinta the truth. Sis in return often made threats about smothering Nina’s brother in his sleep, but Akito refused to follow through with her plan. Having to pacify all three of them was taking its toll on my teacher. He’d also been wearing the same clothes for a week and grown an inch long beard.
To make matters worse, most of his scriptures and materials had been shredded by the fox monster, so he had to painstakingly tape them back together one page at a time.
I decided that the best way to help Akito reassemble all his stuff (and uncover the origi
ns of my awesome powers) would be to ask “are you finished yet” every time I saw him. I thought it was a great way to motivate him to finish faster, until Akito snapped and slammed his study door in my face.
Sis suggested that it would be better to sit down and help him, but I was too busy hanging out with my friends and testing my new powers. Akito also seemed to be doing fine on his own. He'd taken to multi-tasking, and could be seen taping his files back together while watching everyone train, while holding meetings, and while eating breakfast. Sure his face looked tired and joyless, but Akito was always stern so I couldn’t see much of a difference.
I watched him tiredly tape a page back together at lunch, and I took a seat at the kitchen table opposite him. Akito liked to eat sugar with his cereal, but that afternoon he reached for the sugar bowl and poured the whole thing into his cornflakes without noticing. He then began to slowly munch on it without any reaction.
“Jump! Jump!” Cried Taisei next to me as he frantically tapped his cell phone screen. As the oldest in the group and Akito’s assistant, he was supposed to be helping our teacher repair his materials, but Taisei had quickly taken advantage of Akito's sorry state to return to his cell phone.
I thought Taisei had always been obsessed with his phone, but recently he'd become even more addicted. He could be seen playing it at every meal, and I could even hear him shout out in joy from the bathroom every time he leveled up in a game.
Kurumi looked annoyed at his recent behaviour, and I could see her rage begin to build from across the kitchen table. She’d tried several times to engage in conversation with Taisei, only to receive a short “yeah” in response. I could see her trying to enjoy her toasted cheese and ham sandwich, but Taisei’s constant commands to his game were more than she could take, and with a huff she got up from the table and stormed out of the room.
I thought this would have been enough to get Taisei’s attention, but he continued to stare at his game completely transfixed. I heard that he even spent money to get special items.
Akito, Taisei and I were the only ones left in the kitchen. I sighed and started polishing my medal. When they handed me the trophy at school assembly I’d naturally assumed that I could keep it forever, but apparently it was only for pictures and I wasn’t supposed to take it home. They forced me to return it and it had to be kept in the school trophy cabinet. I thought I’d been cheated, but that did explain why all the past winners were engraved down the side.
I complained to the school principal about how he'd deceived me, and he fished out a dusty gold metal from one of his desk drawers. It had 1995 women’s volleyball championship written on one side, but I was sure that my future decendants wouldn’t pay attention to such minor details when remembering what an awesome person I was.
“It’s here!” Shouted Akito and I jumped in shock. My teacher lept from his seat and furiously pointed to a taped up sketch of my back. “This is clearly the seal which is suppressing all your past memories. If we were to move this seal, even slightly to the left, then it should be enough to release some of your memories!”
He then reached out and grabbed Taisei’s shoulders. “Did you hear that Daisuke?” He said as he began shaking Taisei ecstatically. “That means we are one step closer to figuring out who you really are!”
“What are you talking about?” Taisei protested. “I’m not Daisuke!”
Akito then turned to me and blinked like he was trying to figure out who I was, and then he pounced. His face was inches from my own and I could see deep lines around his eyes that I’d never noticed before.
“Daisuke," he said. "This may hurt, but I promise that it will be over soon.”
Akito then pulled a knife from a tub of butter on the kitchen table and advanced towards me. But I refused to let any man who had spent the last thirty minutes eating cereal with a fork to come anywhere near me. I jumped onto the table and tried to fend him off with my foot as Taisei laughed. Fortunately my friend was kind enough to take pity on me (after filming a ten minute video) and kindly pushed Akito towards his study and bedroom.
“Kiyori,” said Akito while looking at Taisei. “When did you lose so much weight?”
“Look Akito, it’s your bed,” said Taisei as he unfolded Akito’s futon and laid it out on the floor. “Don’t you just want to sleep here for at least eight hours or so.”
“I can’t sleep in the middle of the day,” yawned Akito. He ignored Taisei and sat down at his desk. He pulled out a draw which was full of shredded pieces of paper and began to forage through them with glazed over eyes. “Headquarters can’t function unless I pay attentio-” He said before he passed out in his chair and began snoring.
* * *
Akito gathered everyone in the living room soon after his nap. He had also showered and shaved, so he looked more like my teacher instead of a crazy hermit who lived in the study.
Akito still planned to use a knife to loosen the seals on my back and unleash my hidden memories. He made me kneel down shirtless on a large piece of paper which was covered in a circle of painted seals. Akito claimed they were there to act as a barrier in case he screwed up and I suddenly went nuts, but he decided to make everyone come watch just in case it failed.
I know this should have made me nervous, but I was just ecstatic that the whole monster thing would finally be cleared up. I couldn’t wait to see the look on Akito’s face when he realised that I’d been right all along. I even asked Taisei to record the historic moment on his phone to show Shinta and all his minions at the organization. I was pretty certain they'd come begging me to be one of their super special agents or something. It wouldn’t be long before they sent me on top secret missions to exterminate dangerous monsters. Maybe I could even get revenge on the fox monster for forcing us to rebuild the living room.
“Just you wait guys,” I said confidently. “Soon you're all going to regret ever accusing me of being an Obake!”
“Just you wait,” said Nina’s brother. “You’ll be eating those words soon enough, right Hugo?”
“Yes, whatever you say Akito,” said Hugo who was too engrossed in his phone to notice anything going on around him. Apparently he’d discovered a new app to help meet local girls.
“Don't worry Daisuke,” said Souta with a smile. “We have your back. If you start trying to attack any of us, I'll shoot one of these charms through your heart before it's too late!”
“Thanks, I think,” I was unsure if I was supposed to be happy or terrified.
Itsuki was also prepared with a handful of charms, but unlike the others I'm sure he was hoping I'd go crazy so that he'd have an excuse to get rid of me. I'd grown used to having Itsuki as an arch nemesis, but I decided that I was willing to let him be my friend again if he did the right thing and groveled.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Asked Nina who was the only one in the room looking nervous. “What happens if he turns strange like before and starts destroying things again?”
“Then we use this opportunity to destroy Daisuke and return to headquarters victorious!” Said her brother.
“You’re terrible,” said Nina. “No wonder father doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Don’t worry Nina,” I assured her. “Last time I didn’t have control of my powers, but this time is different.”
“Yes, hopefully it won’t fail this time,” said Akito as he squinted at an upside down taped up photo of my back.
“Make sure to film the part where he turns nuts,” I heard Kiyori whisper to Taisei.
“This may hurt a little,” said Akito as he hesitantly held the knife against my back. I winced when the blade hit my skin. I expected it to be painful but it just felt like a needle prick.
“Do you feel anything?” Asked Akito as he slowly moved the knife.
“No,” I said. “I guess this isn't going to work-”
There was a searing pain in my back, and all of a sudden my vision went completely black.
* * *
W
hen I opened my eyes again I was no longer at headquarters, but staring into darkness. I wondered if Akito had screwed up and blinded me, but I couldn’t hear the others and I felt like I was somewhere else. It was difficult to explain in words, but it was a place I'd been a long time ago, but forgotten like awaking from a dream.
I could hear the faint sound of a breeze, and slow methodical dripping water like someone had left on a tap. My eyes soon adjusted to the darkness and I discovered (or remembered) that I was in a cave. I could feel the uneven stone beneath my feet, and the iron chains that were cutting into my wrists and ankles. They hung from the roof of the cave wall and forced me to stand.
My whole body hurt like I had been beaten, but I still struggled against the chains. They clanged like rusty metal and I could barely move an inch.
I was trapped.
I let out a growl of anguish and yanked at a chain with all my strength, which was a mistake. A shock wave hit my body and I screamed out in pain.
I collapsed and allowed myself to lifelessly hang there. My chest heaved up and down and I struggled to breathe through the agony.
“Those are anti-monster weapons,” said a voice from within the darkness. “You’ll find that even with your powers, you won’t be able to break them.”
I knew that voice.
There was no mistake.
I turned to find my adopted grandfather standing behind me.
His hair was tied back, and he was dressed in a black robe which resembled the one Akito wore when attending to the shrine. His face was serious and stern like the times when he would scold me for being a naughty child.
Except only this time I didn’t feel any affection towards the man who raised me as his son.
