Phantom – Part Two
This night. Walk the dead.
In a solitary style and crash the cemetery gates.
-My Chemical Romance,
In sync with her normal
routine, Sango woke up the next morning as soon as the sun made it impossible
to stay asleep any longer. At least it was supposed to be a nice day; another
bout of overcast skies wouldn't serve to keep her chipper and merry.
Of course, she had no
inclination to be chipper and merry, anyway; no matter how much she tried to
ignore it, the visitation from the night before was still fresh on her mind.
She thought about it as she lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling as the
gradually brightening sky threw shafts of sunlight across it and stretched the
shadow of her light fixture into an elongated oval. It was quite unfortunate
that she couldn't manage to banish the memory of the ghost as easily as she'd
banished the very idea that he existed. After all, did she remember every
single thing that she'd done in the last ten years of her life? The last two,
even? How, then, was it completely improbable that she'd seen that nameless man
before?
Sango remained in that
pensive state for quite a while, finally brought out
of her ruminations by the buzzing of her alarm clock. She always set it to go
off at ten-thirty, unless she had somewhere to go (which was a depressingly
rare occurrence). Irritably, she slapped at it twice before getting it to shut
up, then sat up and swung her legs out of the bed. For some reason, her head
was throbbing slightly, and she rubbed her temples for a moment before slipping
her house shoes on and standing.
As much as her head hurt,
she was actually glad for the feeling. It made it all the much easier to
attribute the ghost sighting to some sort of drug that had been slipped into
her coffee. It was either that, or Sango was finally going insane.
Needless to say, she
preferred to believe that her best friend had slipped her narcotics.
Shuffling her feet
slightly, Sango walked into the kitchen and rummaged in a cabinet until she
found a clean cup. It was old, bearing the insignia of Tokyo Disneyland and a
few pictures of cartoon characters that Sango couldn't even identify. She'd
taken her younger brother there a few years back, but now, of course, he was
too old for such things. A college student, Kohaku
was too busy studying to even consider going to a theme park with his sister.
Setting the faded cup onto
the counter, she bent at the waist and opened her small refrigerator,
extracting an almost-empty half-gallon carton of orange juice. Studying it,
Sango frowned slightly, then shrugged and poured the contents into the cup
before tossing the carton in the general direction of the trash can. Not even
bothering to see if the carton had actually landed inside, she took her cup and
crossed the hallway into her small study.
She called it a study when
it was, in fact, a media room. A laptop, a small television, and a Gamecube that had seen better days occupied this particular
area. Slipping into her desk chair, she leaned back comfortably and took a
small sip of the juice before setting it onto the desk beside her laptop. She
then bent down to plug the end of the laptop cord into
the wall, figuring that she could at least check her e-mail before heading out
for the day.
Sitting up, Sango rapped
her head against the underside of the desk and, predictably, began to curse
colorfully. Rubbing the back of her head, she used the chair's wheels to
backpedal away from the desk before sitting up again, her eyes watering. That
did not help her headache at all. What was worse, she'd knocked over her
orange juice, and the cup slowly rolled across the desk before falling to the
carpet. Luckily for her, though, the direction of the spill was away from all
things electronic.
With a sigh, she got to
her feet and retrieved a cloth from the bathroom. Upon re-entering the study,
though, she became distinctly aware that something was different. Very different.
Her laptop had been moved
well out of the way of the spill, and her chair was pushed neatly underneath
the desk. The discolored
Sango stared at this scene
for a moment, the cloth slipping until it was held only by her fingertips.
Then, deep in denial, she shook her head and told herself that she was being
silly. Of course she'd have moved her laptop away from the spill, and she could
have picked up the cup, too. After all, people normally couldn't remember
automatic actions; completely sane people often couldn't remember whether or
not they turned their stoves off at home because they performed the action
without thinking.
She wasn't fooling herself
at all.
Kneeling beside the spill,
she began to mop up the spilled juice, mentally muttering to herself. Just as
the cloth began to turn faint orange, someone spoke from behind her.
"What, no 'thank you'?"
Not even turning around,
Sango said, "Go away. If I don't believe in you, you don't exist. Don't
you things thrive on memories or something like that?"
The ghost moved closer,
stopping just a hair's breadth from Sango's kneeling
form. A wave of cold assaulted her, and she shivered. "Do I feel like a
figment of your imagination?" Sango turned, ready
to bite out a scathing remark that would hopefully cause the spirit to vanish
as he had done on the previous night. He peered calmly back at her, a rather
lewd smile on his face.
It took Sango a few
moments to determine the reason behind that smile. Since she was facing him
now, her front was facing him, and his semi-transparent hands were planted
directly on her breasts. Of course, Sango couldn't feel his hands on her as if
he were human; it was more of a cold, tingling feeling. It was the principle of
the thing, however. With a shriek of "Pervert!",
she lifted the hand that wasn't holding the cloth and swung her hand in a
vicious arc, connecting with his cheek.
Well, so she would have
wished. Actually, her hand went directly through his face, and immediately, her
entire lower arm was experiencing the same chill as her chest was. With a wry
grin, the ghost removed his hands and held them up in a gesture of surrender.
"You-!" Sango spluttered, her rage
stopping the rest of her words halfway out of her mouth. Because of this, she
just opened and closed her mouth uselessly for a few seconds before shouting,
"Don't do that!"
The ghost actually had the
audacity to look slightly put out. "Well, it's not like I can feel
anything. The more interesting aspects of the female form are lost to me
forever, you know. It's a little drawback that one experiences when dead."
Crossing her arms
protectively (and futilely) across her chest, Sango tried to glare but only
managed to lower her eyelids slightly. Was this what her world had turned into
- being groped in her own home by a handsome specter? "I think it's the
least of the favors that you can do for me," the ghost went on, lowering
his hands now and looking oddly at home among the mild clutter.
Sango finally managed to
push herself to her feet, her eyes narrowed and her arms crossed now with more
annoyance than protection. "You're still on about that, huh? Listen, I've
given it a lot of thought, and there's no possible way that I could have killed
you. I've never met you before, and I'd appreciate it if you left me
alone."
"Impossible,"
the spirit answered immediately. "I've told you, that's
the one thing that I do remember."
"But if you don't
remember anything else," Sango replied, forgetting her pact not to
acknowledge the spirit's existence, "how do you know that what you're
remembering is fact?"
The ghost looked at her
for a while, giving her a very clear view of his disturbingly human violet
eyes, then gave a shrug. "If I'm to be honest
with you, I don't."
Sango tossed the
semi-saturated cloth onto the floor, where it landed half-draped over the spill
(which would probably stain, she thought fleetingly). "You're impossible,
Ghost. Get the hell out of my hou-"
Sango had to blink a few
times before what she had seen finally registered in her mind. As she’d been
watching, the spirit had slowly become more and more transparent, until he’d
vanished from sight completely. Rubbing her arm as the cold feeling slowly
dissipated, she realized something with a jolt.
This wasn’t her
imagination. She was being haunted by someone that she didn’t know, and as of
now, there was nothing that she could do about it. He didn’t respect her
privacy - hell, he didn’t respect her body - and there was nothing that
she could do to be sure that he’d leave her alone for good. After all, he was
haunting her because he was sure that she’d killed him-
In the process of opening
her laptop, Sango froze. “That’s it,” she whispered to herself. If he was
around her just because he believed that, if she could find his real killer, it
should follow that he’d move on to haunt that person...
“Ghost!” she shouted,
looking around as if expecting to see the summoned ‘man’ appear immediately,
sort of as if he were her personal servant. When he didn’t appear, she put her
hands on her hips, truly irritated at his failure to appear. “Hey,
“Fine, then,” she muttered
to herself, retrieving the cloth from the floor and trotting to her room to
deposit it into the dirty clothes hamper with a sigh. “If he won’t come, I’ll
do it myself.” Returning to her study, she plopped back into her chair and
stretched back, yawning slightly and cracking her knuckles as she set to her
original intentions.
Even so, she kept glancing
over her shoulder every now and then, checking to see if the ghost had
appeared.
---
After her obligatory
e-mail check, which yielded nothing of great importance, Sango had dressed
quickly and almost haphazardly. Spending less than a minute shuffling through
her closet, she ended up wearing dark gray jogging pants with pink stripes up
the side and a pink tank top. The top was significantly lighter than the
stripes in the pants, but that was the least of her worries.
The library was farther
from her home than the museum was, and it was for this reason that Sango
decided to take her bicycle. It was a beautiful day for riding; the air was
scrubbed clean from the previous day’s rain, the remnants of which had all but
evaporated except for small puddles here and there.
Sango was glad to find
that her bike wasn’t dripping wet and, within minutes, she was flying down the
sidewalk with her ponytail flapping behind her. In mere minutes, she rode past
the coffee shop where Kagome worked, and recalled that the younger girl wasn't
working that morning. She made a mental note to give Kagome a call and ask how
her classes had gone.
Splashing through a
particularly deep puddle on the deeply pitted sidewalk, Sango finally turned
into the cul-de-sac that served as the library's driveway. The large building
was in the shape of a half-circle, sitting rather close to the curb. The large
windows facing the street were framed with clusters of low bushes. These same
bushes were planted on either side of the large, painted red door.
After chaining her bike to
the rack near the door, she pushed the door open and entered. Unlike modern
libraries, this one prided itself in its antique feel. Shunning bright
fluorescents, the library was lit by specially crafted lamps that encased the
flame in nigh-unbreakable glass, and would resist all attempts to alter the
height of the flame. Even so, the lamps were so situated that the librarians'
combined efforts could easily supervise them. Well-placed mirrors reflected the
light and provided more illumination as well as a nearly overwhelming sense of
hugeness.
Letting the door close
softly behind her, Sango moved toward the long front desk where a bespectacled
woman sat. The pale light of the lamp beside her threw her face into odd
relief, but she was undeniably pretty. Her long, straight hair was piled atop
her head in a stereotypical bun, and she was bent over a rather large book.
"Excuse me,"
Sango said quietly, approaching her and managing a friendly smile. The woman
looked up with a friendly smile.
"Yes?" she
asked, slipping a bookmark between the crisp pages and looking up expectantly.
Sango absently rubbed her
arms; the day was humid, but the temperature inside the library was quite cool.
It probably had something to do with protecting the books. "I'm looking
for a newspaper article. It should have appeared in Tokyo Shimbun,"
she said confidently.
The librarian slid her
chair back and reached into a low drawer, pulling out a small ring of keys.
"Do you know when this article was published?"
Sango thought for a
moment, then shook her head slowly. She had no idea
when the ghost had died, and therefore had no idea what years that she should
comb through for news of his death. If he had truly been murdered, then there
should have been a report of it somewhere. “I’m not sure,” she told the
librarian, then added, “but I think it would have been
within the past five years.”
“I see,” said the
librarian with a nod, pushing her glasses up further onto her nose. “We are an
old-fashioned library, so the two earliest years will be on microfilm, but the
other three can be searched for at the computer terminal in the archive room.”
She stepped from behind the desk and motioned for Sango to follow her.
The pair wound through
shelves crammed tightly with literature, finally reaching a door near the back
of the building. Opening this door with a heavy-looking bronze key, the
librarian ushered Sango inside. The room smelled of disuse and faint mold,
owing to the stacks of newspaper that decorated the low tables. They were
obviously merely for decoration; there seemed to be no organization to them. It
was evident that this room was rarely used from the thin layer of dust coating
the computer in one corner and the microfilm reader in another.
“I’d recommend starting
with the computer and working your way backward in time, moving to the
microfilm when you must,” the librarian said, moving to a metal cabinet near
the door. The cabinet was obviously better organized than the rest of the room;
in moments, she’d pressed two rolls of microfilm into Sango’s
hand. “I’m sure that you already know this, but please do not remove these from
the room. When you finish, you may leave them at the front desk.” With the
obligatory spiel done, the librarian excused herself from the room with a
shallow bow, the heavy door shutting behind her.
Rubbing her arms again,
Sango sighed and slid into the seat at the computer. This was the easy part; it
would take her no time to search through the virtual entries for the word
‘murder’.
Judging by the clothes
that ghost-boy had been wearing, Sango figured that he couldn’t have died all
that long ago. She limited the search to those in the last three years, clicked
the ‘search’ button, and was immediately deluged with thousands of articles.
“Oh, gods,” Sango sighed
to herself, and quickly changed her search terms to include the exact phrase
“young man” as well. Now, when she clicked ‘search’, she received almost a
round nine hundred. Well, it was better than nine thousand,
that was for sure. Taking a deep breath, she began to work her way
through the hits.
---
“...the striking story
of a young man falsely accused of the murder of his lover,
premieres on
There was a solid thunk as Sango’s head hit the
desk next to the keyboard. She was a little less than halfway through the
returned articles, but she had yet to come across much that referred to
something that wasn’t related to the arts or another country.
“This would be so much
easier if I knew his name,” she snarled into the desk. Her eyes stung
with fatigue, and she wondered just how long she’d been there, trying to find
something, anything, about the person who’d become the ghost that was haunting
her. When she’d left her house, it had been a quarter past eleven; checking her
cell phone, which was clipped to her side, she saw that it was now almost four
in the afternoon. The library closed in a couple of hours.
Rubbing her face with her
hands, Sango calmly told herself that there was no way that she’d be able to
get to the microfilm that day. She wouldn’t even be able to get through the
rest of the internet queries that day.
“What are you up to?” a
voice asked from behind her. Sango halted halfway though a stretch and turned
around so quickly that she almost upended her chair.
The voice had come from
the other side of the room, where the microfilm reader sat. “Who-” Sango began,
moments before her eyes fell on the figure perched weightlessly atop the
reader.
The ghost sat there, an
inscrutable smile on his face. Sango was vaguely aware that he seemed much more
there than he had before, more translucent than transparent. In the dim
light, he looked far more like a stereotypical ghost than he had before. There
were no lanterns in the room since the fire hazard was a bit higher with the
old papers scattered around; all of the light came from the computer screens
and a single shaded lamp in the corner. Because of this, the slanted rays of
light actually caused the ghost to cast odd, barely-there shadows.
The moment of eeriness
lasted only a moment, then the ghost hopped weightlessly from the top of the
machine and took a few steps toward her. "Sango?"
She cleared her throat,
remembering that he was expecting an answer from her. That moment, seeing him
in such ethereal lighting, had reminded her of just how real her problem was.
"I'm doing research," she answered finally, turning back to the computer
screen and beginning to click around once more and trying to look busy. Of
course, this tactic failed to accomplish anything.
A gust of cool air hit Sango's cheek as he leaned over her shoulder, peering at
the screen. Her shoulder tensed, but she didn't turn around. After a few long
moments, the specter finally spoke up. "What are you up to?" he asked
again, a slightly cold edge in his voice.
"I'm trying to find
out who killed you," Sango replied succinctly. Bluntness was probably best
in this situation. "I know that it wasn't me, and I figure that you'll
leave me alone once I find you someone else to haunt."
The coldness over her
shoulder vanished, and its absence was so sudden that Sango couldn't help but
turn around. The ghost stood just behind her, his arms crossed over his chest
and his eyes still trained on the computer screen. His expression was once more
unreadable. "Well, that's rude," he said stiffly. "I'm here,
sure of only your name and your connection with me, and you immediately try to
prove that my entire existence is a lie."
"Fair enough,"
Sango snapped. "It is."
The spirit looked at her
then, his semi-transparent violet eyes adding another level to his
otherworldliness. He didn't speak, just contemplated her until she began to get
slightly uncomfortable. "Wh... where have you
been, anyway?" she asked finally, as the silence between them grew
painful. "I would have told you what I was doing sooner if you'd answered
when I'd called you."
"Right. First I'm a liar, and now, I'm a
butler," he shot back, but the look of hurt that his eyes had carried just
moments earlier was already fading. "I couldn't answer you. I couldn't
even hear you," he said seriously. "When I affect the real world,
like when I moved your stuff around this morning, it kills my energy. I don't
know where I go when I leave here..." he paused to shiver, an odd sight,
"but I just know that I don't like it. There's no light. As soon as I
could, I brought myself back into this world, into this very room."
He spread his arms out to
his sides, as if inviting her to study his form. Of course, she couldn't help
but comply, and she noticed the differences in his appearance even more clearly
than normal. The purple of his t-shirt was more vibrant than it had been
yesterday, and his hair had a glossy sheen that it had lacked before. She'd
already noticed his eyes, but she realized for the first time that he was
barefoot. "I'll just keep getting dimmer and dimmer until I'm pulled...
away," he finished vaguely, dropping his hands to his sides.
Sango pinched the bridge
of her nose with the fingers of her right hand. "So... when you're not
here... you're there?"
"Not really,"
the ghost said with a grin. "I am a ghost, after all. I don't have
to be visible to exist."
As if to illustrate this
point, he suddenly vanished.
Sango looked around,
thought she knew it was futile. If he didn't want to be seen, chances were that
he wouldn't be. She turned to the computer again, contemplating whether or not
to continue or stop for the day, when icy fingers wrapped around her neck from
behind. Alarmed, Sango raised her hands to her throat, but they touched only
her own flesh. The sensation didn't vanish, however, and she was beginning to
panic until she felt another touch. This one happened to be on her left breast.
"Ghost-boy!" she
snarled, lashing out backward before remembering that there was no substance to
hit. As a result, she upended her chair and went tumbling backward into one of
the dusty, almost rotting piles of newspaper. The feel of the hands
disappeared, but she could definitely hear the sound of the ghost's laughter.
She was about to begin a
long-winded rant, but before she could even begin, the heavy door swung open
and in walked the librarian. Her glasses were now perched on top of her head
instead of in front of her eyes. "Are you all right?" she asked,
sounding rather concerned even though a small smile quirked the corner of her
mouth. "I was shelving books nearby and I heard you shout."
"Fine," Sango
growled out, climbing gingerly to her feet and setting the chair up, rolling it
back under the desk. "I think I'm done here," she sighed, gesturing
to the rolls of microfilm. "Will I be able to come back and look at these
later?"
"Of course," the
other woman answered with a polite nod. "We will be closed for much of
this week for inventory, but we'll be open again on Friday."
Sango sighed inwardly. Friday. Today was only Tuesday, meaning that there would be
nothing that she could do about her haunting issues for quite a while.
"Thank you," she said finally, grabbing up the microfilm and handing
it to the librarian. "I'm leaving now."
"I hope you find what
you're looking for," the librarian answered cheerfully, stepping aside to
allow Sango past. Retracing her steps through the shelves, Sango sighed again
as she exited the building, the warm air reminding her of just how cold it had
been when the ghost had touched her. Shaking her head, she walked over to where
her bike was chained and gasped as, when she touched the chain, she felt that
it was almost freezing. "What the..."
Upon closer inspection,
she noticed a small slip of paper wedged into one of the chain links. Kneeling,
she plucked it out with some difficulty. The link was very small and the paper
had had to be rolled until it tore in a few places, but that was of little
consequence. Smoothing the paper between her fingers, she read the note three
times without really understanding it.
Then, with an almost
hopeful look around, she stuffed the paper into her sock (the pants that she
was wearing had no pockets) and unchained the bike, riding off swiftly. Her
head pounding, she hoped that this new information would help.
The note had been written
in large, shaky letters, almost like those of a child. Obviously, the pen that
had been used had kept slipping into the ghost's fingers. It had read:
Sango-
I remember. My name,
that is. It's Nakano Miroku.
You can still call me
Ghost-boy if you want.
Your phantom,
Miroku