Chapter 11

This has to end. This has to end now. I stand here, writing this just outside that door, that door I crossed into before. I still remember vaguely yet hauntingly clearly just exactly what was inside. This may be, or actually will be, the last time I ever write into this journal. It has been calling me since that fateful event and I cannot resist it further. I noticed that as I came here, no one else was in the whole inn. Not Yuki, who has been watchful and helpful in my pursuits. Not Nina, who has always been my dear one and a constant source of warmth for me. Not Satsuki even, her playfulness and curiosity would be most welcome for me in this dark moment. I can feel something behind this door calling to me and I must answer it. Whatever happens from here on end, I cannot answer. I cannot guarantee that I will come back but even if this is so, I know I must do this. To what ends must a man go to seek what he seeks? But questions asked and wisdom sought, to no end a quest this leads. SO I must end this madness, if it can even be ended.

I think I’m losing all semblance of sense now. In some sort of mad, ethereal moment, I could almost swear that the lady in purple and I were all over each other. I felt nothing different actually, no signs of what I had gone through with that enigmatic figure. This whole place seems, at times, to be slowly encroaching around me, collapsing unto itself with me as the unfortunate epicenter of it all. This place seems utterly intent on consuming me or releasing me, as if it was torn between those two possibilities. As I sit down on my desk, I begin to look at anything and saw nothingness. Most everything seems false now, almost as if it was nothing more than an illusion. I would not, at all, be surprised if I woke up and found out this was all a mad, over-extended dream. Sitting down and trying to salvage what little is left of my faint creative abilities, I am at a loss. Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ and Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ all fail to spark me now whereas they once did it so well. I am starting to feel drained now, like a vampire’s victim.

And the lady in purple, I still know as little of her now as then but I now know her name. She has to be Satsuki’s little doll, she is Shinobu. She whispered to me the name herself but with no actual admission, I think I could still faintly be wrong. Now, as with Ichikawa-san, Reiko and Nina, she had begun to haunt me and the strange feelings I experience now chill me. I feel as if they are all looming over my head and right at the moment, my memories of my dream-like encounter with Shinobu feel faint and scattered. I will try and reconstruct them as soon as I can but at the moment, I can’t even begin to comprehend where to start with this. There are things that are set in motion, gears slowly grinding into their right place and this is so alarming. I make my moves to find they are blocked at every turn. Now, this may be coming to an end.

I fear that something may happen to me soon and that, before that dark time comes, I may need to think myself through this. Without any pretense, I present my case to what little sanity I feel I have preserved, what little semblance of Jekyll I have managed to protect within my own mind under the barbaric onslaught of my own inner Hyde. I now being to doubt the very reality of what has been happening, even the extreme sensations of my various moments of intercourse with the beauties of this place. Even the sharpest of senses can be fooled and from what I had seen, this may all simply be a lie. That part of the basement, that part of it that Yuki and Satsuki both warned me about, I persisted. I forced my way in, late at night whilst everyone was asleep and found myself looking in an image that could easily have been taken out of Dracula’s castle or the laboratory of Victor Frankenstein, even the place in the floor where Poe’s tell-tale heart was hidden. The unspeakable horror I found within, it chills me to even think of the memory of it.

From the moment I had entered, I had found myself in some mad, vicious, sadistic mind’s laboratory. Faceless bodies of women, all naked and all mutilated, were all over the place. Some were on the wall, ritualistically and inhumanly cut open with the flaps of skin spread out like some maligned, demonic form of wings. Their insides were still shown, their hearts I saw in horror, still beat albeit slower and fruitlessly, the blood constantly and endlessly dripping down like some horrific red fountain. Other were hanging upside down from the ceiling by meat hooks to their backs, their arms and legs bound together as if they were calves tied up before the slaughter. The blood was dripping from stab wounds on their chests and abdomens, the spears that wounded them still there, eternally impaling them. And others more were there as well, lovely young bodies wrapped together in one massive, erotic embrace and all of them were still. As I touched my hand to their skin, I was struck. They were cold and hard as frigid stone but looked so alive and as I dared inspect, they bore the physical sings of arousal. Yet, for all of these horrors, horrors which threatened to drive me mad upon my seeing them, I saw many more bodies on the floor, all faceless.

Then, I felt hands clasping on to my arms, my legs and my dress. The very bodies on the floor were clinging to me, dragging me down into what felt to me like an abyss of dead women’s bodies. They held on to me, clung to me with their vise-like grips and I had scarcely the strength to even keep standing. Yet, my will to live was great. Inside I felt determined by fear, fear of a fate worse than eternal life without eternal youth; eternal death. Despite this, as I tried to trek back towards the door, I was slowly being dragged under. Their hands began to run all over my body now and I could feel my arms and legs being bitten. Perhaps more of me had been defiled by those corpses when I finally succumbed and was bound under their mass, I do not know. For what felt like ages to me, I was immobile among those corpses, trapped and being constantly defiled. Finally though, I managed to reach out my hand and my face, seeing what looked like someone opening the door. I struggled against them, my hand desperately taking hold of a hand that reached for me. It was a warm and feminine hand but a steady hand, one that began to; with all the strength of it pull me from the abyss that threatened to consume me. I awoke on an unfamiliar bed, my clothes were torn and tattered, some parts of me were wounded with a little blood but otherwise, I seemed fine physically. The sight of that horror however, those restless dead souls, it will never cease to haunt me. It was Satsuki’s bed and she was there, sitting by my bedside, worried about my condition.

She looked down at me, brushing away the loose strands of hair on my forehead. “Are you alright?”

I shifted my body; I could at least still get up. I felt like I had been gnawed on, as if those corpses, those eternal dead were grabbing hold of and touching more than my arms. I seemed to fail to realize it but as I looked down to my breasts, there was some bruising and what looked like bite marks. I would not at all be surprised if, in those black moments when I was trapped under them, I was raped in a manner of speaking by them. Yet, I certainly didn’t feel it happen. In but moment since I saw the bruising and the wounds though, they vanished instantaneously. I had lost all marks of my ordeal and when I looked to Satsuki, she seemed unaware that anything hat happened. My madness seems to be coming, I know I was attacked by those corpses but the signs of my ordeal had gone and the memory itself was vague and unclear. I lay back down again and turned to Satsuki, who still sat beside me, smiling innocently. I also saw Nina on the other side, taking hold of my hand and her lips coming up softly to kiss my cheek. She was every bit an angel.

Satsuki left and came back with a glass of water for me. As I drank, she spoke to me. “We found you lying down on the basement like that, your clothes ripped up and asleep. I didn’t know what to do. It’s a good thing that two of the residents came to help me. Nina has been here from the start.” She stopped but then her expression changed, alerting me that she had forgotten a little something. “And the twins also did something to you together while you were asleep. Nina told me that it must have been a special kiss.”

I turned to Nina who was blushing profusely. “I…I had a special kiss from the twins too.”

A few hours passed there, I engaged them in truly pointless chitchat. It was pointless, save for the fact that I found it to be truly comforting, considering what has been happening to me. I needed some mild comforting and those two innocent things provided it for me. Now, I can feel the dread of their loss. I had not realized until now how I valued my own innocence once, innocence I gave up in favor of what I thought to be the true pleasures of this world. A mistake, I now see. I was happier in those times; more at peace with me one could say. Inside me, I can feel that pinging of regret. It pains me to see now the futilities of my existence, mistakes I can never correct and lessons I had learned far too late. A life wasted, time lost and never to be gained again, opportunities thrown away or ignored and loves that I could easily have done without. What is it about this place that makes one rethink their lives like this?

My childhood, my adolescent and formative years, all wasted in the wretched pursuit of absolute. An absolute I didn’t even understand. I thought that my writing would be my goal, my final aim but it has clearly not become so. In the track I have chosen, that field of fiction, I am lost and alone, unable to find the niche that people like me are damned to eternally search for. I had hoped that my realization of the nature of my sexuality, my strong inclination to lesbianism would help me attune myself, to focus my strengths and reduce my weaknesses. Instead, I have lost the sharpness of my strengths and have created a potent, all too exploitable set of new weaknesses for myself. A sword made dull, a pen made broken, a life made useless, Kanako, what have you been doing all this time? This is not what I had set out to become. I would be successful, loved, famed for my work. Yet here I am now, obscure and unknown, forgotten by those I loved and would have loved me had I been more forthcoming. My pretty picture of my future is gone. All that is left for me to do is to pick up the shards of a broken life, shards that would scar me.

I beget this journal now to whoever finds it. Make use of what little I have gathered, what meager information I found out about this place. May you find the way out of here, the path t salvation that I failed to do so. Yet, before I go, let me make my cases, my final thoughts on this, my fellow residents. They all know the truth, I am absolutely certain of it. They all know the truth but are bound to never reveal it. And in the last moments, as I began writing this, I noticed something that I could confirm it, I am damned and bound to this place. Chains that bind, chains that hold, this is the end for me. They are all bound, traveler and possible savior of us all, so be kind to them and likely, to me. Yuki, Rena, Yukio, Sachiko, Nina, Reiko, Satsuki and Shinobu, they are all trapped here. They will help you, they will approach you and they will try and find a way to have you choose them over others in the quest for salvation. I cannot anticipate the future; I fear that I may end like them. Be wary of what you feel in this place, they may just save you.

With this, I bid you goodbye. Once this door is turned, there will be no turning back…