Fox-Trot-9

  Spook 2: A Twitching SkullIn the darkness lurked a creature somewhere in Kotone’s dream, but she hadn’t a clue where it was. She sat up and surveyed her surroundings in the darkness, where the only avaible light came from her astral form. She got out of bed and walked through the limbo, wondering if she was walking through her own dream or someone else’s dream. She didn’t know where it was or even what it was, but her steps kept going in one direction as if some invisible hand beckoned her to follow, and so she walked and walked and walked.

  A silvery chuckle resonated through the dream space and echoed and pulsed inside her head in a maddening delirium of spiders and insects crawling inside her shirt and snakes slithering up her pants. She swatted at them, squirming her body, till she crumpled to the floor and rolled around, trying to swat away the tickling sensations writhing through her, yet the sensations wouldn’t stop. They wouldn’t stop, till she filled the darkness with her screams as her head pounded like drum beats from an evil drummer. Who was that drummer?

  Clutching both hands against her forehead, Kotone gritted her teeth and pushed herself back to her feet and marched towards whatever voice that was, whatever drummer that was, whatever creature that was. She focused her Catalyst powers to push herself, though with every step she took, she felt an unknown influence gaining on her the longer she forced herself to walk.

  Yet she kept herself going, one step in front of the other, keeping her body in motion.

  She refused to look behind her or even think about what lurked back there, like those damn creepypasta memes: anonymous e-mails of chain letters asking you to pass it on to someone else or cursed .jpg images such as SmileDog.jpg. She refused to look back, lest SmileDog.jpg lurked behind her with its toothy grin and its evil basilisk eyes. She refused to let its influence sink its cws deeper into her mind.

  Taking a deep breath, Kotone said, “You fucking bastard! Is that all you’ve got?”

  Another silvery chuckle resonated through the dream space and said, “You’ve come a long way, Kotone Takada.”

  Kotone gritted her teeth, looking around for the bastard. “Show yourself, damn it!”

  “But watching is all the fun I need.”

  “You harmed an innocent child!” she said, standing her ground amidst the swirling darkness manifesting around her. She dared that godless bastard to show itself, to quit pussy-footing around and face her, but she only felt its presence looming God knows where inside her dream space. Wait, was this even her dream?

  Or was it . . .

  She blinked back her qualms and closed her eyes, letting the darkness of her own eyelids enclose herself. She took deep breaths, steadying her thundering heartbeats into a steady rhythm, and used her mind’s eye to feel out the contours of her foe. If she just closed her eyes, what would she see? It all depended on her belief, didn’t it?

  Then that belief spread its arms around her in a bony embrace, and she found herself looking up at a tall man that she’d seen in that Tim Burton movie. Who was he? Jack Skellington? No, it wasn’t him. If it was, she'd be happy, she’d be giddy, she’d be smiling in delight. No, this was Jack Skellington’s evil twin with bloodstained cws and a twitching skull that grinned and gred from two bck-eyed pits of Hell through Kotone’s soul, pulling her into their depths.

  She recoiled from its arms, twisting from its grasp. She looked down and saw the bloody marks it left on the sleeves of her pajamas. She looked up at the thing, wondering if she was looking at it through her mind’s eye or through the ungodly depths of its own eyes.

  Had she fallen into those depths? She couldn’t tell. By God, she couldn’t tell! Was her Catalyst failing her?

  “Wasn’t this what you wanted?” it said.

  “No!” she said, backing away.

  “Your friends are waiting for you,” it said, grinning and gring and stretching out its arms to her. “Ayano is waiting for you.”

  “NO! Get away from me,” she said and turned to go, but where? Where the hell was this pce, anyway?

  “There’s nowhere to run,” it said as it approached her like a mother welcoming a divorced daughter into her arms. “There’s nowhere to hide. There’s nowhere to be happy except in my arms, for they’re waiting for you.”

  She closed her eyes again, blocking out the view of her foe wrapping its arms around her shoulders, yet in the darkness of her mind, her friends appeared with smiles on their faces. They welcomed her with open arms, telling her that it was going to be okay, that there were no hard feelings after she went away, that she would always be their friend now and forever . . . now and forever . . . now and forever as the flesh from their handsome faces melted off their skulls, revealing copies of that bastard's twitching skull that grinned and gred from those bck-eyed pits of Hell pulling Kotone into their depths.

  Yet she didn’t recoil. Kotone just stayed there in mute disbelief as the skulls of her friends champed their jaws amidst a cacophony of voices. And in the darkness of her soul arose Ayano’s voice beckoning her from God knows where.

  “Wha . . .” she said.

  ‘Your power . . .’

  “What?” Kotone said in the darkness. “What are you saying?”

  ‘Your power of unbelief,’ Ayano said, ‘is what repels that creature . . .’

  “Ayano?” she said. “Is that you?”

  And out of that same darkness replied Kotone’s own voice that said, ‘Sometimes it’s good to be a skeptic . . .’

  Kotone’s breath hitched in her throat as she realized the truth: it all depended on her belief, didn’t it? The creature was there, the creature was real, but Kotone was real, too. Whatever it could do with her memories, whatever it could do with her soul, she refused to let it sink its cws into her heart. Her heart belonged to her friends, to Amadeus and Megumi and Ayano, not to this fake bastard, this summoner’s pet.

  She gred up at Jack Skellington’s evil twin and said, “Who summoned you?”

  The creature grinned, and the darkness pulsed with the squee of children ughing in that old sitcom-like ughter resounding through Kotone’s ear drums. It was the ughter of an old broadcasting programs tuning in and out of focus through the air waves of a defunct radio station, like OldieKool 93.1 or Happy Vaudeville 94.7 pying at the Witching Hour at midnight or the Devil’s Hour at three o’clock in the Goddamn morning when everyone’s asleep except for that one unlucky kid who sees the Thing under the bed or the Thing in the closet or the Thing just beyond the door that was opening it creak by maddening creak. This creature was that Thing, and it was opening her mind with the sound of children’s ughter—

  (sughter)

  —churning up her stomach with icy fingers.

  “Who summoned me?” it said as the hideous squee of ughing children echoed through the darkness. “Why ask about that? Why not ask about the children? Can’t you hear their ughter? Doesn’t it make you want to ugh along like the good little girl you are?”

  And the hideous squee of children’s ughter—

  (sughter)

  —pulsed through the darkness and churned up Kotone’s stomach, for though she heard them ughing, it felt in the pit of her stomach that they were crying, crying for the mommas and poppas they would never see again, crying in the darkness of their bedrooms when they needed their parents to turn on the mp and tell them that there’s no Thing in the closet and no Thing under the bed and no Thing behind the Goddamn door. The sickening realization that this bastard took away these children from their homes and from their parents drove Kotone over the edge and squeezed hot tears from her eyes, because she had once been that unlucky kid who needed her momma or her poppa to turn on the mp for her. If these kids had nobody to turn on that mp for them, then Kotone would do it for them. Monster or not, this Thing was going down.

  “Unbelievable,” Kotone murmured.

  And the creature yawned with a gaping maw, unleashing a swirl of bats screaming like crying children.

  Kotone crouched, thinking on her feet, thinking on the edge of panic, and squinted her eyes against the swirl of bats smashing against her glowing shield. Her shield kept blinking at the impact of hundreds of bats hitting it, making Kotone lose her footing and drop to a knee.

  The weight of these impacts, hundreds of them, pushed her on her back leg, tottering her to one side. If she lost her bance here, it would be game over for her, so she gritted her teeth and strained her knees to get back up, fighting the impacts of the bats, fighting for a second foothold, fighting for those kids, fighting and fighting . . .

  Yet the struggle was too much. She lost her footing and lost her bance, and she fell to her side, dissipating part of her shield. Then she felt those impacts on her side like body punches with the sting of fangs cutting into her in little slices of pain. She winced and grimaced and strained to turn over onto her back, putting her shield over her body amidst the fshes of ceaseless impacts.

  The creature ughed, and the ughter of the children filled Kotone’s ears as they all sang,

  “Kotone-chan, Kotone-chan, Help us if you can!Though the mirror on the wall Couldn’t help at all,Kotone-chan, Kotone-chan, Can you help at all?”

  Tears streaked down Kotone’s face, on the verge of giving up the fight, on the verge of becoming that unlucky kid, on the verge of raising the covers over her head and hiding from the Thing in the closet and the Thing under the bed and the Thing just behind the door. And in the pit of her churning stomach, all she wanted right now was her momma and her poppa to tuck her in at night, maybe even tell her a bedtime story to chase the Things away for a while, till she found safe passage into the nd of Nod.

  “What’s the matter, Kotone Takada?” it said and ughed again, accompanied by the ughter—

  (and the sughter)

  —of the children filling Kotone’s ears and churning up her stomach into queasy knots. She kept crying, because she was now that lost little girl lying wide awake in her own bed without the mp on, without the touch of her momma’s hand to tuck her in at night, without the care of her poppa’s voice to soothe her nerves and chase away those damnable Things. So she cried for a time, reverting back to squeezing eyes shut, blocking the view of the Thing before her like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. If she closed her eyes, was it really there? It all depended on her belief, didn’t it?

  But in the depths of her despair arose a familiar voice, the voice of Ayano saying, ‘It’s limited by the power of your imagination . . .’

  Kotone opened her eyes to the onsught blinking against the remainder of her shield like firecrackers and eyed that godless Thing yawning like the pit of Hell itself. She rephrased Ayano’s words, speaking with the candle of her spirit flickering through the darkness, and said, “You’re limited by the power of my imagination, my disbelief!”

  And the grinning skull of Jack Skellington’s evil twin ughed through the darkness as the swirl of bats kept pummeling her shield, widening the cracks in it.

  So Kotone gritted her teeth and put her hands together into the shape of a gun behind her shield, breathing in and out in steady breaths, trying to clear her mind as she said, “Think you can fuck with me? Think you can fuck with the kids?”

  “Buying time, eh?” it said as another chorus of ughing children broke through the darkness.

  And Kotone cursed in her mind as the pummeling bats began spreading the cracks across her shield, breaking her only defense into a growing spider’s web. How much more could her shield take? When will her gun be ready? She had no clue, but she also had no choice. So in her mind, she counted backwards from—

  ‘Three . . .’

  “Then let’s bet on it,” she said.

  And the Thing roared with the ughter of the children as it said, “Then bet your life, Kotone Takada,” and the deluge of bats surged against her splintering shield, whittling it into dwindling tatters of light in the darkness.

  ‘Two . . .’

  And she gritted her teeth and committed herself, saying, “Your on, you bastard,” and on the count of—

  ‘One . . .’

  She took a deep breath, saying, “Die!”

  And fired.

  And just as the bats got through her shield, the bst of her shot boomed through the darkness like the wrath of God, like a meteor streaking through the night sky, and burst into a fsh of light. Kotone squinted her eyes shut, yet amidst the fsh arose a scream like that of every parent’s worst nightmare, like the screams of their children being taken, like their final screams when they close their eyes on the Thing’s twitching skull grinning and gring from two bck-eyed pits, pulling them into their depths.

  Yet when the screaming subsided into distant echoes, when the light dissolved back into darkness, Kotone opened her eyes on the st thing she wanted to see.

  It was the Thing with its bony hands over its left eye socket that was bleeding out long goops of fluid. It was the Thing gring back at her from its remaining eye socket, gring red in its depths like a cauldron of hate, heaving great big gasps because of its wound. And it was the Thing that now had a bone to pick with the one who managed to hurt it.

  And for the life of her, Kotone just y there, stunned that her shot hadn’t killed it, until—

  “Get up! GET UP!”

  —Ayano’s voice echoed through the darkness.

  So Kotone scrambled to her feet as it shambled after her in long skeletal strides. Kotone ran and ran and ran, looking ahead and seeing Ayano’s mirror just ten feet away and Ayano herself by the mirror beckoning her onward.

  She was six feet away, yet the Thing stretched its bony arms like cobras through the darkness, cutting the distance by fractions of a second. Then she was three feet away when she grabbed Ayano’s hand, yet the Thing’s cobra-like arms with their skeleton hands caught Kotone’s pants.

  Kotone tripped and fell, yet she still held fast to Ayano’s grasp. Ayano pulled her forward into the mirror, pulling her against the Thing holding Kotone by her pants. So Kotone slipped the waistband from her hips and filed her legs free of them as Ayano heaved her again through the mirror—

  Back into the waking world.

  Yet just as the reflection of that mirror turned bck, just as the Thing’s one-eyed gre appeared on the reflection, Kotone got to her feet and nded a swinging right fist into its one remaining eye.

  The monster screamed, shattering the windows in Ayano’s room and breaking the mirror into shards, till its image disappeared from the reflection.

  Kotone then felt pain in her shoulder, for she had never punched anything that hard in her life.

  That is, till Ayano deadpanned, saying, “You may want to pull up your panties.”

  Kotone blushed and yanked up her unmentionables, resisting the urge to hit her: “You, perv!”

  The End AnnouncementAdded on 4/29/25 (Camp NaNoWriMo, April 2025 edition) with Dante's permission, of course: This is a fanfic I wrote for Dante a few years back on Google Docs that shows two of her characters from Chronicles of the Paranormal, Kotone Takada and Ayano Natsume.