based on a true dream. not of wichita, though.

disquiet

The continuous pounding of the rain is what lulls you to sleep. Sometimes when it lets up a little in the middle of the night the change in rhythm will wake you up. I look over at the red numbers and I see that it’s almost 4:17. Ever since I first saw the creatures, I can’t help but wake up right before they appear.

The taste of black licorice tinged with vomit fills my dry mouth. A glass of water would be sublime right now but now I don’t dare stir during the four minutes and thirty-four seconds when they apparate. I would love to believe I’m imagining them, but Haruko’s seen them too. It’s why she never spends the night here.

When I first moved in, I was curious as to why the rent was so cheap. It’s not in a buraku or anything, and I’ve not yet seen any roaches. Now I think it’s because people get unsettled by these furry demons, by these chisa na tengu and they split right away.

I am not so easily scared. At first I will admit I was frightened, but the rigidity of their schedule and the fact that they’ve never made any attempt to harm me has turned a daily haunting into something like an experiment for me. There are several things that happen when they appear, and I’ve had no success in altering any of these ‘side effects’ that my apartment suffers.

The first thing is that the room gets really cold. I’ve measured it at 7 degrees Celsius (all measurements here are metric). This chill comes at 4:14 and lasts until a few minutes after they leave. It’s only in my bedroom and in the kitchen, and I’ve tried cranking the heater way up a while before the temperature changes but it always drops to the same level.

The second thing is that any lights I might have on will flicker off. The bulbs just burn out. The first week I went through many light bulbs before I figured out it’s just better to leave the lights off during this time.

Strange thing number three isn’t so dramatic as windows flying open and letting gusts of wind and rain in, but it is strange. Both the television in my bedroom and the one in the living room turn on by themselves and show static. Of course I tried unplugging them, but even that doesn’t stop this phenomenon. Sometimes a scrambled image of a girl’s face will intermingle with the static, but not always.

Once all these things have happened, the creatures appear. I said before that they apparate, but I need to explain this a little further so you don’t get the wrong idea. They don’t fade in and out of existence like ghosts. What they do is walk into the room (four legs) in a single file line and then find their favorite posts and sit there. They always come from just around whatever corner I’m near. I’ve tried finding the way they come in, but even when all the doors and windows are locked and I’m sure there are no open entries, they still manage to appear. I tried following them when they leave, but they’re just a step too fast and all I can hear is the scratch of their claws on the hardwood floor before they disappear back into the ether, leaving me alone with the steady pounding of the rain on my windows.

If I have the door closed, they can appear from behind furniture. After a few nights of searching around the furniture I got the idea of taking all the furniture out of the room and locking the door to see where they came from. I stood in the corner of the empty room so I could see the whole thing and it only took as long as it takes me to blink for them to all be sitting in front of me. They’re very crafty.

The first and only time Haruko spent the night here, I purposely denied her a description of the creatures. I wanted to know if her personal description of them matched what I was seeing every night. From what I told her before she saw them about the cold and the televisions she was very curious to know what was happening here or if I am in fact crazy. I am, but I know I’m not hallucinating these things.

We were sitting up in bed when it happened, and she gasped as soon as the room got cold and the bathroom light extinguished itself. The television is one of those old models with knobs for changing channels, so when it turns on it starts with the dot and then expands to the whole screen. Though it’s showing static, there’s never any sound and the remote is worthless.

Haruko’s nails dug into my shoulder and her breathing picked up as soon as the first one appeared in the doorway. She would later describe them as catlike but about half the size of a normal housecat. She told me their eyes were roughly the same shape and size as a human’s but pink where ours would be white. She went on to tell me that their fur is white and much longer and more rugged than a cat’s.

When she told me that, I knew she was seeing what I saw every night.

Their claws are retractable and about a centimeter long. They’ve got four finger-like appendages on each paw and two empty slits where a nose should be. Their ears, like their eyes, are disproportionately too big and I’ve not yet heard them make any sounds. The creatures’ fur is too long for me to make a guess at what gender they are.

The next question I’m asked is if they have a real physical presence. In other words, can you touch them? I’ve not yet tried. I may not be very scared of them any more, but I’m also not foolish. Because they usually come in a group of about twenty, if I upset the pack there’s no telling what damage they might do to me.

I did ask the fudosan if any of the other tenants ever complained about strange creatures or anything unusual about the apartment and he said I was the first person to stay here in four years, but before that he never heard anything about any creatures. So yes, I wanted to know why it was empty for four years and no, he wouldn’t tell me. I had to find that out from the neighbors.

You’d expect there to be some dark tragedy linked with my apartment, like a love suicide or a vengeful schoolchild slaughtering her parents and leaving a noroi manshon, but that wasn’t the case. It did turn out to be linked to a neurotic child, but not one who did anything so rash as killing her parents.

Her name was Sachiko and it seems the stress of school was just too much for her. She was the top of her class for her first year in koukou, but when she started her second year she got the flu and one of the side effects was insomnia. She got over the flu but the insomnia stuck around. During her classes she would nap and be too tired to be effective, so her parents let her take a vacation from school and even tried taking her on trips to Australia and New Zealand. None of this helped, and when she got back she was just as restless as ever.

Sachiko read books every night when her parents were sleeping. Later her father got transferred to a different city and they moved. That’s the story I pieced together from a few people in neighboring apartments and nobody could tell me any more than that about the family. Nobody else claimed to know anything about creepy little cat creatures, and I didn’t even get the impression that they really did and were hiding some secret from me. That was a disappointment, because I really wanted someone to discuss these little things with.

And then I met Haruko.

It was about two weeks ago, a month after I moved in and the day after this ridiculous rain started. I was riding the train home from work, watching said rain roll down the windows when I noticed something strange.

I was the only person on the train.

In Japan, with so many people, this is an impossibility, especially around 9pm when people are going home from the city after a hard evening of mandatory post-shigoto drinking. Yet here I was, all alone in this car and as far as I could see into the neighboring ones.

There weren’t even people outside or at the stations we passed. The doors would open, let nobody in or out, and then close. I was starting to get a little freaked out.

Another feature of these trains at night is that when you look out the windows, the glass reflects the inside of the car, giving you the impression that there’s another train right next to yours with backwards versions of all the same people. When I want to watch people without being noticed, I stare at their reflections in the window. It’s much easier at night, when the blackness takes away the distractions of the buildings and scenery outside the train.

It was in this reflection that I first saw Haruko.

Just a second before, I was all alone on the train, staring out the window at the reflection of this car, at the umbrella directly over my head in the rack, at the ad for the English language school where I work right by the door and I see her, sitting right next to me.

I think it has to be some trick of the window’s reflection, but sure enough, there she is beside me, almost touching me. We’re still the only two people on the train. When she turns to smile at me, the blood drains from my face and I go white as the snow on Fujisama.

Since this story isn’t really about me and Haruko, I’ll just summarize what happened after that. We talked on the train, went to a 24-hour noodle shop, and became nakayoshi very quickly.

After a few visits to her tiny apartment, I brought her to mine, we saw the feral demons, and here we are, back in the present.

Tonight is the night I’m going to make my most poorly-thought out move yet: I’m going to try and capture one. When I told Haruko of my plan, she begged me not to do it, but I have to. I can’t just let these supernatural elements toy with my sleeping patterns any longer. I have to find out what the hell is going on.

I prepare by getting a box the size of a small microwave and poking holes in it. I grab a big sushi knife from the kitchen, just in case something goes awry. I’ve got duct tape and band-aids and iodine in case I get clawed. These little bastards don’t stand a chance.