Hell
by
Kassandra Alvarado
Based around the urban legend, Tomino's Hell
Copyright 2016
Cover Art Designed by Author
The computer's voice, mechanical blips and whirs, translated the onscreen text. The words painted images, their canvas, a gory red jagged on the edges. The neo-crimson glow bathed the round smooth-cheeked face of the viewer. The edges of the screen flickered, fading in and out like a warped movie reel.
"Jigoku."
Stark black characters flashed briefly.
The viewer shuddered deeply; the screen went black, reflecting the small, disordered room. The thin walls of the apartment were plastered with paper. Drawings if one inspected closely. Childish. In smeared black crayon. Beneath, a thin mattress with soiled covers, emptied ramen cups and tea cans littered the floor.
***
The door opened to yellow police tape. "I'll be downstairs," said the super, keys jangling from meaty hands. He was an older man, close to retirement age. The building had been part of a city redevelopment project meant to revitalize older neighborhoods. With the current economic bust, the project had been abandoned when it was no longer lucrative.
Yoko bowed, murmuring her thanks. The police had been thorough in searching for her brother. They'd once been close, Satoru and she. Grew up together, attended the same school, were only a year apart in age. Yoko couldn't quite put her finger on a time when things had changed. From the garbled message she'd last received from him, she'd concluded that he'd become some kind of sick, neurotic stranger.
The super glanced her over and nodded gruffly. She'd probably disappointed him in her calm demeanor. Through the smattering of yellow plastic, she glimpsed the chrome leg of a desk, a pillow gutted on the floor. Gingerly, Yoko stepped inside, pushing the tape away from her like the webbing of many spiders.
The tiny apartment contained a kitchenette, a tiny bathroom and a single room. She'd been there only once to drop by a box of CDs he'd forgotten during the move.
Paper crackled; Yoko flinched. The sound unexpected after the relative quiet. The elevator car clanged to a stop on the same floor, two voices exited, talking excitedly. Yoko sighed, rolling her shoulders. She'd been too wound up after Satoru's disappearance. As her eye traveled over the room, noting the lack of personal belongings, something else caught her eye. The papers across from her had puffed up from the wall, no longer lying flush against the peeling paint. Yoko began pulling them off in layered strips, tossing aside cartoonish drawings of flowers in darkness. Vivid splashes of jagged red trailed from one artist's sketch paper onto a yellowed newsprint.
The last piece crumpled up in her fist.
Yoko gasped.
There were eyes with the blackest pupils she'd ever seen.
Eyes.
She shuddered, then thought herself silly.
The irrational desire to cover up the eyes wouldn't leave her. Satoru used to say she was the one who didn't make sense. Yoko swallowed, easing a practiced smile on her lips. It was all too easy to laugh at her fears. Over the next hour, she bundled up Satoru's mattress with its soiled sheets, boxed up text books on philosophy, psychiatry, placing them near the door where the super promised he'd dispose of anything she didn't want.
Yoko worked quickly with a cheerful tune on her lips. Some bubblegum pop she'd heard on the drive over. She'd cleared most of the main room, leaving his computer untouched. As Yoko moved toward the tiny kitchenette, she heard a ping and glanced over her shoulder. The bright glow of the computer screen washed over the wireless keyboard. She turned fully around, slowly walking toward the desk. The screensaver was a picture of them; piggybacking, all smiles, a perfect day.
Before she could touch the mouse; the screen winked off. Strange, she thought, shrugging to herself. Yoko resumed her study of the kitchenette with its hot plate, mini fridge full of soured, moldy looking food. A battered microwave occupied most of the counter space. A stack of mail sat gathered atop a large blue binder that caught her eye.
Yoko reached for it unthinkingly, sending a flurry of envelopes to the floor. It was a five ring, heavy binder with broken clasps sealing sheafs of note paper inside. Yoko flipped it open to the first crumpled page with writing scrawled across it. "Tomino's Hell?" She was familiar with the name. It had been a poem middle schoolers used to dare each other to read aloud. She herself had read it once silently, picturing the titular character of Tomino as a cute classmate or maybe a young child walking down the street to school. It was easy to imagine the origins of such a story weaved around a disturbing piece of fiction.
The poem was represented in its entirety, written in stanzas of four which seemed incorrect given the original layout she remembered. The same warning ran along the bottom of the text, 絶対に読んではいけない詩 implying misfortune would follow. She tried to smile, "what were you doing, Satoru-kun?" She flipped past the poem to a biographical sheet on its supposed author Saijõ Yaso. In the margins, Satoru had messily written his own thoughts as to the poem's origins. He'd been in contact with a folklorist including the man's number on a take-out receipt.
Yoko glanced at the scrap of paper, setting it aside. He had gone further than that, researching the Buddhist Hell of Naraka, including passages describing the torments of the lowest Hell, Avīci. Momentarily disturbed, she left the binder on the counter, bending to retrieve the fallen mail. Mostly bills, a birthday card from mom, fast food flyers...only one had been opened. It was a letter from Okinawa addressed in a tight, cramped hand to her brother. The name was one she'd seen before, almost positive as she hurriedly withdrew the contents that it was from the folklorist in Naha.
Her eyes eagerly scanned the letter which bore a date not long before her brother's disappearance. She had little hope it would shed light on the present mystery, but perhaps some kind of insight to her brother's strange fixation with Yaso's poem. Kotsubaki was terse, citing several examples of curses throughout history. Satoru hadn't been interested in ghosts or the supernatural. Her brother wanted the barest of facts for his essay on popular myth which the folklorist mentioned, offering his own findings. He too had been interested long ago, in the origins of Tomino's Hell; traveling extensively across Honshu, seeking out its beginnings.
Kotsubaki believed he'd found them in an ancient storyteller from a village deep in the countryside. He related the story as the old man had dictated, a legend passed around on cold winter nights of a boy...who lived in the village during a sparse summer and harsh winter. His parents had never gotten along, each one blaming the other for their lack of worldly possessions. Their fighting turned to abuse, the boy serving as a symbol of their union. He complained none, however, huddling for comfort in the hole in the floor where his elder and younger sisters were buried, for they too, had perished. One evening when the snares set in the frozen forest yielded nothing, the slatternly mother carried the sleeping boy from their meager hovel, abandoning him in the deep woods.
Now Tomino was a smart boy. He had learned the paths of the forest, knew the hidden tracks of animals and a for time, subsisted until the worst of the blizzard had passed. On frozen feet, he wandered back into the village, to the place he'd been born. Within, his mother and father had given into their baser hungers, removing from the earth, the bodies of his sisters. Tomino knelt in the snow, peeking through a chink in the
mud daubing that allowed him to witness their unbridled avarice. This, he thought, this was Hell.
Slowly, but surely, the thread of hatred ignited a fire in his heart. Consumed by hatred, sweet little Tomino lit a thatch and burned them all alive.
Yoko shuddered as the mental images of a burning child dancing in flames, faded from her mind's eye. Kotsubaki went on to say he felt had done all he could do, supposing that Yaso-shii in his own travels had heard the story from somewhere, choosing disturbing imagery to suit the child's Hell on earth. The folklorist remarked as always closing note on the five sins that condemned one to the lowest depths of Naraka, included the slaying one's parents.
The letter folded in her hands.
Yoko swallowed nervously, fiddling with her watch. Loud noises. She banged the drawers checking for silverware, finding only plastic spoons, forks, fast
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