Welcome to the Haunted House

Yukimi Ogawa

 

Ichi tries not to stare at the children as they scream, squeak or hide behind the body of their parent, bigger sibling or friend. “Behind them” is no safer than in front of them; Mirror creeps up from behind them all, so that when they turn they still find Ichi’s hollow smile right there.

Most of the time, it’s the sense of We did it! as she exchanges quick glances with Mirror that gives joy to her, rather than the screams they win.

She doesn’t know how she knows that this is her job. She remembers waking up in twilight, and the next thing she knew, the master was saying to the curious humans who gathered around them: “Come and experience the extraordinary Haunted House! Monsters, ghosts, every kind of horror you can dream of, and all real! We’ll open at nightfall; come back with all the courage you can pluck up.”

And she cannot help but get the feeling that she has gone through this before. The children, the adults, their temperature surging and dropping in crazy patterns; their sweat-ridden breaths filling the space. The cooperation, the shared feeling of achievement, with all these trinket monsters that surround her.

After midnight, when the children have gone to bed and only a few adults dare come into the Haunted House from time to time, the monsters of the House have enough time to chat with each other. “We are looking for our former owners,” Lute says, all considerate, fidgeting with one of its strings to put out a note that’s obviously out of tune. “That’s why we need to see many humans like this. It must be that.”

“Oh, I hope our former owner does recognize us, though?” One of the Dishes rattles. “Surely we are no longer what we were before we came here—and when was it? Why is it that none of us remembers how or why we ended up here?” Everyone falls silent for a moment, none of them having an answer to offer to that.

Again, Ichi thinks she’s heard a conversation just like this before—or maybe two. When? Where? And another strange feeling nudges something, somewhere inside her wooden skull. She counts the Dishes, there are three. The number feels wrong, somehow.

When the nudge in her head feels too much, she goes to see the master. The master looks down at her, in a form roughly passable as human, just in case a guest unexpectedly comes in to talk to them. Under their heavy coat and the large hood, the master is a flock of small feathery things, like starlings, like moths. “Have I forgotten something?” Ichi asks, and even as she says this, comes another nudge: I have asked this question before.

The master smiles, with eyes and mouth made of down and rachises. “Ichi doll, you are older than others and made of more flexible materials, that should be why you remember better than the others.” The master of the House touches Ichi’s white cheek with their fluttery edges. “Don’t worry, you’ll forget all of this in the morning. You always do.”

Ichi nods, unable to find anything to say to this. Why would she have to worry if she remembers? Why should she forget? She heads back into the chatter of her fellow monsters. Without humans around to scare right now, Lute strums its stupid tune, to the rhythm Cracked Pot and Weaving Loom make. Umbrella pirouettes to this crazy music, opening its canopy to full and bumping into everything around; everything laughs.

The Dishes trot over to Ichi. “We were saying,” Dish One tings. “If we stand in a line, the drawings on us look like they make up one big picture.” As they demonstrate, Ichi sees the point, too. A landscape done in blue. “But then, don’t you think here, something is missing?” One points at the space between Two and Three. Yes—a pond abruptly ends at the end of Two, and on Three she can only see a rock that might be standing over a pond.

“Don’t worry,” Ichi says, despite herself. “Everything will be fine in the morning.”

Dish One stares at her, as Two and Three exchange looks. “Good to hear. Thanks,” One says after a moment, though what it’s thanking her for, it has no idea.

 

 

The Haunted House closes at one, because it’s not safe for humans to be around monsters at the Darkest Hour—two a.m.—even with these trinket monsters. Just when the monsters start to wonder how much time they have left before their own bedtime, right outside the front door to the House, the master appears, without their coat.

“It’s a moonless night tonight, my little monsters! Let’s have a party!” the master exclaims.

The monsters cheer, and they all go outside to join it. Even Ichi’s sawdust-filled chest swells with joy. Under the distant stars, her fellow monsters start singing—the songs they don’t know where they learned. And dance: Umbrella its favorite, obtrusive dance, while others get more space and spin around each other. Even Ichi trots around, her steps unsteady on her wooden sandals that make a funny noise.

And then—

At the corner of her eye, she sees a strange movement. By the time she fully looks at it, the master is in a form like a huge, black mouth gaping, a ghastly emptiness against the starry sky. While she wonders what that means, a part in their fluttery mass, at the bottom-most edge near the ground, start wriggling out like a tentacle, before the master grabs Umbrella around its torn canopy with that tentacle-like arm, pops Ichi’s little friend into their hollow. And crunches, crunches, crunches.

Ichi screams as she realizes what just happened, and others look her way and then the master’s way, following her gaze. One by one others start screaming, too, as they see Umbrella’s hands and foot sticking out of the horrible mouth and then disappearing into the blackness. “Umbrella! Umbrella!” The sawdust almost rises to her throat. “Umbrella!”

The master crunches on a little longer, before their shape curves into a thin crescent, sealing the hollow over Umbrella, making a content, a smiley mouth. “Don’t worry, Ichi. I told you. You all will just forget everything in the morning. Don’t you worry.”

But she screams on, even as the master melts back to their usual fluttery mass and slithers away. She is somehow aware, though vaguely, that while she screams, other monsters can concentrate on trying to console her, and don’t have to think about something that’s just too horrifying to think.

 

 

By the time Ichi is too tired to scream on, others seem exhausted, too, from trying too hard not to let their thoughts drift in the wrong direction. They all look exhausted, Ichi notes—Mosquito Net looks even more threadbare than usual, Lute is splintered just a little around its neck. Dish Three’s edges are slightly ragged, chipped. They all sit in silence. The sky slowly grays; morning is coming.

Ichi shudders, as something almost irresistible tries to drag her eastward. She looks around, bewildered by her own self, only to find others stand and start walking towards east. As the light gets stronger, so does the urge. And again, something inside her sawdust chest says: she’s been through this before, too.

It’s like when sleep pulls down your eyelid; it’d be so much easier, if you just let it be. Ichi shudders again, but when the urge is doubled by the exhaustion from a long time of screaming, she lets it carry her. Almost. As the morning gray hits the ground ahead of her, beside her Weaving Loom sways its unbalanced body, and its shoulder hits Ichi’s arm. She yelps and falls sideways.

Her white, wooden hand pops out of the socket at the end of her fabric arm and skittles away, back into the House through the open door. Someone careless must have forgotten to close it behind. A little light-headed, Ichi goes back into the House, after her hand. She wishes Lantern was still here, to help her find the hand by casting its weirdly wobbly ghost-flame. It’s really dark inside. The master doesn’t allow any kind of light inside the House, except for Lantern. The master hates lights, their body with too many surfaces, too exposed.

The master.

She feels the unpleasant taste of sawdust surging up to her throat again. Umbrella. Did that just happen? Or was she dreaming? Is she dreaming?

Disheveled, Ichi looks around, and finds something small and white glimmer in a corner, behind a fake tombstone. She stretches, but it’s a little out of reach, and she wishes she had Umbrella to help her here with its long shaft. It’s always willing to help. Was. Somewhere, around the back of her torso, she hears a thread snap. No. There is no Umbrella.

She coaxes her robe into a kind of rope, and manages to catch the hand with it. She’ll have to ask Sewing Kit to help mend her where the snapping just happened, and also strengthen the hand-socket.

Her hand back in place, she straightens her robe and looks back at the door. The sun is almost up. “Hurry Ichi!” she hears Dishes call her in chorus. Why should she, though? And where to?

She trots back towards the door—

—But before she reaches it, she sees the burst of morning light over the horizon. The door is closed—she’d shut it, just out of habit—and she peers out through the glass pane on the upper side of the door. Dish Three looks back at her.

And the sun sweeps her fellow monsters off the surface of the earth.

No, that’s not exactly what happens. The bodies of the monsters, all the trinkets, are still there on the ground, but she can feel that their souls have evaporated out of them. They stand there in their mid-movements: walking, running or about to leap into the air. Three is still looking her way with its hollow eyes.

Ichi is unable to move. Not even a twitch of her hand.

 

 

The dirty pane on the door protects her from the first light, but after a half hour or so the sun starts scathing her black hair and eyes, so she slumps away into the dimness behind the fake tomb. She doesn’t know how long she’s stayed there. When she looks up for no reason, she sees the sun has inclined into the west, from the color of the sky visible through the pane on the door. She crawls up, peers out. Three is still looking her way, seeing nothing.

Ichi slowly opens the door and walks to her unmoving fellow monsters. The sun goes down, completely, behind the hill. She is about to poke Lantern’s accordion face when she hears a sound. Reflexively she faces east and freezes.

The House’s master comes gliding over the ground, all wings and feathers. With their numerous terminals the master picks up the trinkets one by one. Ichi wants to scream—is the master going to do the same to all others, after Umbrella? But the master only tucks her into their fuzzy body, where she settles among the others.

Upon reaching Dish Three, though, the master stops. And looks at Three and then at the closed door of the House. Frowns a little.

Ichi holds her breath inside their downy body.

Then the master shakes their own mass a little and collects Three, too. From the back door they reenter the House, into the master’s own quarter. There, the master places the monsters’ bodies on the floor, and flutters their body like a small night over each monster at a time, rustling out their own strange feather language.

Something soft like butterfly scales fall silently on the monster over which the master hovers. And the monster stirs awake.

Ichi tries her best to look hollow like she does in humans’ presence, while she watches other monsters. When her turn comes, the powdery stuff feel all tickling and tingly that she has trouble staying calm, but she fakes coming half-awake just the way others do.

“Okay, all. Come awake!”

At the master’s words everyone yawns and stretches. Ichi does the same. When Dish Three leaps onto its feet opposite her, the master looks at it.

“How do you feel?” the master asks it.

Three blinks its twinkling small eyes at the master. “What? I don’t know!”

“Okay.” The master nods. “Now everyone, help me prepare for our guests.”

 

 

When the human guests have come and gone, and the monsters have some time among themselves, the conversation about why they are traveling, or why they are here in the first place, springs up from nowhere in particular.

“I think a woman looked at me as though she knew me!” Mirror clinks. “And Ichi! A girl looked at you in a strange way! She must be your former owner!”

“Yes!” agreed Sewing Kit, going through Ichi’s seams. “I saw that, too! You must go say hi to that girl, Ichi!”

Ichi only smiles. The conversation chatters on, but now nothing about it has that sheen of hope it used to have, to Ichi.

They don’t remember. When the master does that resurrecting, re-souling, whatever it does—and it does that every night, probably—none of the monsters remember a thing. Even that horrifying image of their fellow monster’s body crunched, crunched and crunched.

You’ll forget all of this in the morning. You always do.

 

 

Every morning after that, Ichi escapes the evaporation. Thankfully, it is not like the master eats one of them every night—if they do, the Haunted House will be empty soon. Still. She feels the weight of the memory now pressing heavily into her: sawdust inside her chest is damp and cloggy, and her wooden face, hands and feet are scratched all over; her hair feels dry, unkempt strands gone wild here and there. Her fellow monsters seem unchanged, untroubled, since that last moonless night.

One night there is an addition of Parasol to the House. Parasol is brightly colored, and its canopy is not torn like Umbrella’s. Ichi tries to determine if the soul in Parasol is the same one as Umbrella, concentrates on its conversation with others. But the mere effort makes a strand of her hair come off.

Parasol is not Umbrella.

Maybe the evaporating, and going through the ritual of the master’s re-souling and, forgetting everything along the way, is just something necessary for the monsters to keep being what they are. Without memories that dampen them, the fear that weigh them down.

Ichi looks up, as the master comes in to the monsters’ side of the House, just before opening up for the humans. “Ichi,” the master says, their voice somewhere between perturbed foliage and shrieking starling flock. “You look ill.”

Ichi cannot answer this.

“Well. I have news that may cheer you up, Ichi,” the master says, buzzing a little around the edges. Excited. “Last night a human child misplaced something on the way back to town from here. It’s a doll.” Ichi stares at the master. “Not quite like you, but you can play sisters, perhaps. The mismatch might give the guests a more terrifying image.”

And then a fear is too much in her chest that every joint of her body cracks, as she realizes: it’s a moonless night again, tonight.

 

 

“Are you cold, Ichi doll?”

She looks up and meets Mosquito Net’s eye, as it dangles from the beam just above her. It did this—the dangling—when the human children were still only recovering from the shock of being between Ichi and her reflection on Mirror, and their frantic movement pleased the monsters quite a bit. And Ichi realizes she’s been shaking, amidst those cheerful fellow monsters. They have no idea. How can she tell them why she is shaking so hard? How can she share this horrible truth with her fellows, when she knows knowing it will only hurt them?

Ichi looks around and finds everybody looking at her, worried. They have no idea. She feels the distance expand, that unfillable gap between herself and everything around her. Back when she kept almost no memory, she was just like them. Now, a horrible thought tightens her chest: what if they don’t even believe it when she tells them?

But if she goes tonight, the master will just keep on consuming her trinket friends, and there will be no end to all of this.

She looks around, and takes a deep breath.

 

 

Night deepens, and a little after midnight the master closes the gate. “Anything wrong, my dear monsters?” the master asks. “Some of the humans said you came too close to them. You never did that before, did you?” The monsters say nothing, because of course, there has never been a before for them. The master is probably too excited, because… “Well. Since it’s a moonless night, let’s just forget everything, and dance, dance and dance!”

The monsters cheer. They all go out into the night, following the master, who has left their protective coat behind in their quarter. The monsters loosely circle around the master as they go spreading over the ground in front of the House. Ichi comes out last, taking the space between the master and the House, on the other side of her fellow monsters.

The monsters dance, celebrating the light-less night. Lantern slowly comes near Ichi, as Broom sidles up and holds Ichi as if being playful. From behind them comes Sewing Kit trotting, swinging its hand of scissors above it. The master looks up at the dark sky, their rachises spiking in endearment.

Now’s the time.

Of course they’ve all been quite preoccupied during the night. They needed to steal one thing from one of the human guests. One thing that the master would never tolerate in the House.

Broom holds Ichi higher up, and she is now a little higher in the air than anyone else—even the master. With its hand Sewing Kit opens Ichi’s chest; there is a swirl of sawdust. Lantern blows the oil it found left in itself, just a little bit, but enough for the already flammable sawdust. Ichi holds the lighter—that one thing they had to go through a lot of trouble to get—in front of her open torso. And her chest explodes.

The light is simply too much for the master. The master falters, yelling, shrieking, utterly confused. On the other side Mirror reflects the light and brightness doubles. At the moment’s impulse Ichi takes off from Broom and dives into the sea of feathers which is the panicking master. Their downy terminals catch fire first, and the firmer feathers and rachises follow. The two, Ichi and the master, burn and burn, bright and hot, her sawdust and its down exploding here and there from time to time. But then she feels she is running low on fuel. “More!” she cries. “More!”

“But…” Mosquito Net looks horrified. “But Ichi, I don’t know what’ll happen to you!”

“No no Net, you back away! Just give me—”

“But Ichi!”

“Umbrella!”

They have no idea what this word should mean to them. But somewhere deep, very deep inside them, something stirs. Umbrella.

And then without thinking, Broom snaps its bristles and throws them into the flame. Mosquito Net absorbs what little oil is left in Lantern with its ends, rips them off and adds them to the fire. Parasol does its best to send air by flapping its large, untorn canopy fabric over the burning two. Snap, bang, ping. Boom. Strange sounds echo, as everyone tries to help with everything they can spare.

Blast.

Mosquito Net tries to throw more in, but the Dishes stop it. Non-flammable things are now doing their best to not let go of the flammables. Without knowing, they know they cannot bear another loss. At the corner of her eye Ichi sees them, and finds herself relieved because her friends are safe, more or less. She feels something in her slipping away, and she does not wish for others to experience this. Is this what Umbrella might have felt as it was consumed by the master? The master is burning all around her, together with the bits from other monsters. Ichi is aware that her wooden parts will hold longer than the master, but how long, no way knowing that.

And then from within the fuzzy darkness around her comes the master’s temporary face, zooming, twisted and warped. Ichi flinches, just like the human guests of the House. “Do you even know what you’re doing?” the master’s voice is almost ashes now, and Ichi has to strain to hear them—even now, she has to hear them; it’s their master, after all. “Without me they cannot go on. They’ll turn into dust in the end, without my making them anew, letting them lift the weight of their memories off their bodies. Eating them once a month is just an inevitable sacrifice for their futures. Do you know what you’re doing?”

Ichi grinds her teeth. But through them she says, “All I know is we trinket monsters love each other, master.” Her own voice echoes as if from a long distance. “Even if you regard us as nothing but trinkets. And I don’t want to lose another one to you. This is all I know. All we know.”

At that, the remnants of her master shudder, and back away, just a little.

And with her wooden hands slowly burning on, Ichi embraces the last of the master.

 

 

“Experience the horror,” she calls to the human guests, with her voice a little cracked, a little like starlings’ cries. “The extraordinary monsters, all real.” But the guests are already experiencing the horror, they think—the master of the House looks more terrifying than the things the House’s flyer promises. She is bald, her skin strangely charred, marred, and inside her oversized robe, in her chest, something seems to perpetually buzz, giving the humans an image of a half-dead entity, maggots eating their way in and out of her body.

The master goes back into the House and looks around at the monsters. She is not yet quite used to the new structure of her body: her torso made from a part of Mosquito Net and Parasol, stuffed with the former master’s remnants; her legs and arms consist of bits of Broom, Lute and Loom; her eyes are glistening fragments from chipped Dishes and Mirror, her jaw formerly the curving edge of Cracked Pot. All sewn together clumsily with the hands and limbs of Sewing Kit.

“Master.” Broom comes to her. “I just heard one of the humans laugh at me as they peeped in, and they said I was too short for a broom. I think I need more bristles. I used to have more, didn’t I?” Then it frowns. “But when was that?”

The new master sighs. “Well. Okay. Let’s do something about it later. Tonight, can you just bear with it the way it is?”

“Of course I can. But master, why am I so short? Why so scarce? What happened to this ragged end of me?”

The master of the House smiles and touches that ragged end of it. Of course, after letting them offer these bits, in order to let them stay, the only thing she could do was to use the remnants of the master’s feathers and remake them all. Let them let go of the weight of the memory of that horrible fire—even if the remaking made her weaker by day. Now she wonders what happens if she goes on like this, without consuming another monster for nutrients. But of course she cannot bring herself to even think of that deed. “It means you are a sweet, kind trinket, and I’m really proud of you.” And then Broom beams. “But our job here is to scare the guests, so it won’t do if they laugh at you. I’ll think of something to do about it, I promise.”

Broom nods and scurries away to its post. Tomorrow, Broom will not remember the promise she just made. Even so the promise will be kept, every promise ever made will be kept here, at least till the day she falls.

She looks across the room to see Lantern and Lighter snuggling. She wonders, maybe, there used to be a Flint Stone to pair with Lantern. Before the former master forbade any light source from the House. Lighter’s oil has been thoroughly drained for safety. She wonders, maybe, the former owner forbade fire for the monsters’ safety, as well as the master’s own. She’ll never know.

That night. That last night that she was one of them, and was feeling weak and didn’t know if her fellow monsters would believe her, they all said: “Ichi, we are not going to let you go alone. We stay us forever. We’ll do anything to keep us us forever.” The memory is warm, and bitter, too, in her feathery chest. Now she realizes the former master was playing their role in their own way; she has her own role to play, in her own way.

For one last moment, she looks back at her monsters. Their eyes are mixture of love and respect, and fear. She smiles at them all, and wonders what her smile means to them.

She opens up the House, to welcome the guests.