| By ShonenChicoBoy | Genre | Rating | Reviews | Updates |
| More from ShonenChicoBoy | Horror, Drama | PG | None | None |
My first view of Temu was of a sparse settlement clinging to the sides of a lone hill at the head of a deep valley. A narrow wetland, serving as the town's only point of access, twisted like an eel through the mountains before stagnating in a silver basin at the town's outskirts. From the hill's peak the black, needle-like tower of a shrine pierced cloudless blue skies, casting a lone shadow over the village below. According to the rumors, Temu's residents had been steadily falling ill, with no explanation as to the cause of their disease, and I could only assume the nature of the malady to be a spiritual one.
After arriving I was introduced to Doctor Huang, the local physician. He seemed a dull, aging man, and the distinctive droop of his shoulders suggested he carried an invisible burden: perhaps a lifetime of fruitless effort. Nevertheless, I immediately identified with him, as a spark rekindled in his dark eyes when I introduced myself as a spiritualist. It put me at ease to know he had recognized me as a fellow intellectual, as if we shared an intrinsic bond due to our mutual pursuit and reverence of knowledge. I quickly bridged the subject of the village's sickness, and asked him to describe its symptoms to me.
"Why don't you come and see for yourself?" he asked instead.
He led me to a house that rested in disrepair at the border of the swamp, but the woman who opened the door to Doctor Huang frowned when she saw me.
"It's all right Shanu," the doctor said as he explained my purpose in being there.
"Is he here to help?" she asked, her mouth a thin, hard line.
"I'll try to shed any light I can on the problem," I offered without making any promises. She raised an eyebrow, but allowed me to enter.
The patient was seated at the kitchen table: a boy of about eight named Tam, Shanu's son. Doctor Huang carried out a basic physical examination while his mother and I observed. I immediately noticed the boy's sallow complexion and listless gaze. Tam followed Doctor Huang's instructions without a shred of life to his manner of expression. His speech was monotone, his movements robotic. Shanu stood by nervously, arms crossed over her chest. Finally, the doctor had Tam remove his shirt, exposing ribs that showed through paper-thin skin. My pulse quickened when I saw the dark spots that mottled his back, which I mistook to be necrosis. But there was no foul odor, and the pockmarks traced up the spine before spreading out in a star-shaped pattern. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the nodes consisted of minuscule, blackened cysts.
I collected both a surface swab and a blood sample from the area of infection, but I did not risk extracting one of the spore-like nodes for fear that they were connected to the spinal column.
"How long has he been like this?" I asked.
"Nearly a month," Shanu answered, and I could tell it was difficult for her to speak about his condition.
Tam stirred when he heard his mother's voice. He reached out to me, grasping my wrist. His fingers were ice-cold, yet his grip was weak. I took his hand in mine and felt for his pulse: weak and fluttering. A knot formed in my throat. It was obvious that Tam didn't have much time left.
After we left Shanu's house, Doctor Huang privately confided to me that, at best, Tam would live for another week.
"This isn't the first time one of the villagers has shown these symptoms," he explained. "I've tried various treatments and medications but... nothing seems to be effective. All cases eventually result in death."
"Have you any idea as to what's causing the disease?"
The doctor frowned. "My tests haven't shown anything conclusive, but I suspect the answer lies with the swamp. I've told the villagers to stay away from the wetlands but—" He then turned and looked at me directly.
"At any rate," the doctor finally said, "Why don't you stay with me while you're here? I live at the old herbalist institute at the top of the hill. You could even make use of my study and equipment for your research."
I thanked him for his hospitality, and he gave me a toothy grin.
"It's best that you're there anyway. We wouldn't want to risk our only spiritual expert becoming infected as well, would we?"
The climb to the top of the hill was arduous, and I understood how the doctor had remained so spry despite his age. The straight stone steps finally ended at a rounded gate, and upon entering I saw up-close the shrine I had first spotted from a distance. The temple itself lay in disrepair, with faded clay tiles threatening to flake from the roof at any moment and dark, boarded up windows staring at me through empty sockets. Spiritual sites typically served as indicators of the surrounding area's condition. This one spoke of degeneracy.
"The shrine isn't used anymore," the doctor commented after following my gaze. "No one here is really religious. I'm only here on account of the old greenhouses, myself."
He was referring to the round, tarp-covered buildings that where nestled neatly into the shelves of the hillside leading up to the shrine. They were fed by an elaborate system of pipes, which ran from tarps suspended above the ground.
"To collect the rainwater," Doctor Huang explained.
We were greeted by his daughter, a blind girl of perhaps seventeen, who dashed out from the house excitedly as we approached.
Yumei was small for her age, and frail. Her ivory skin contrasted sharply with her midnight hair, but her eyes were permanently clouded over with a gray film. While as colorless as her father, she was vibrant, like a flower caught just before it blossomed, on the cusp of transitioning into a beautiful woman. She hugged the doctor tightly, trying to communicate something to him with unintelligible whimpers. "She's also mute," he told me, and I could see that she had the mind of a child a quarter of her age.
"We have a visitor," the doctor told her. Yumei turned her unseeing gaze in my direction, but was ultimately uninterested in my presence.
"I'll show you my study." Doctor Huang offered, undeterred. Taking Yumei by the hand, he led me through the greenhouses. The doctor and his daughter made an odd picture. He seemed alive in her presence, as if he had assumed a younger version of himself. He helped her step over the loose wood boards that crossed the middle of the floor, filling her ear with chatter about nothing, simply to make her laugh. I plodded along behind them, more intrigued by the various species of plants, many exotic, that lined each side of the main walkway.
"Do you have an interest in botany as well?" the doctor asked.
"Vaguely, although my expertise lies in Spirit World flora."
"Ah, well, the plants here come from all over the world," he said, "I use them to isolate certain, unique chemicals for use in pharmaceuticals." I nodded, appreciating the modern side the doctor brought to traditional medicine.
The greenhouses were interconnected, and we stopped when we came to the largest in the center. Unlike the others, it only housed one specimen. The plants filled neat, rectangular boxes spaced evenly around a tiled platform in the center of the room. Gray, diluted sunlight illuminated a small circle around us, but the plants remained obscured in shadow. The air was cool and damp, and a faint, cloying scent filled my nostrils, almost too sweet.
"What species are these?" I more closely examined one of the flowers, but was unable to recognize them as they were closed tightly in palm-shaped buds that hung limply from their stems.
"These are a rare type of amaryllis that I've cultivated over the years," Doctor Huang replied.
"They look like lilies," I said as I noted the black stamen that protruded from the base of the flower's heads, extending like claws.
"They are sometimes called that," he acknowledged, "But it's taxonomically incorrect."
Yumei let go of her father's hand and crouched down beside me, finally taking interest in what I was doing. She reached out, feeling for one of the closed lilies, and ran her fingers along the stalk, gently.
"Do you like them?" I mustered the nerve to ask her. "The flowers?" She smiled, although it was a somewhat broken, eerie smile, and then reached out to touch my face. I nearly started back.
"Don't be alarmed," Doctor Huang said. "She's only seeing what you look like." So I stayed still as her fingers traced over the features of my face. Her touch was as delicate as when she had brushed over the flower, but I noticed that she too was cold... As cold as the boy Tam had been.
"You see, Mokichi," the doctor continued to explain. "These flowers are my life's greatest work."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Yumei hasn't always been blind," he told me. "When she was young, she became deathly ill. While she eventually recovered, the fever caused her to lose her sight. These flowers contain a strand of toxin that if correctly extracted and chemically processed, could be the key to stimulating ocular nerves."
I watched as Yumei reached out towards the flowers again.
"I wanted to give her at least this much, since she's— " he broke off, but then continued. "You understand that, of course..." he trailed off into silence, as if he had forgotten all about me. Yumei seemed to notice as well. She returned to his side, reaching up to place her hands on each side of his face, taking note of his frown. He shook himself, becoming aware to the real world once more, and smiled as he mirrored Yumei's gesture, cupping her chin in his hand gently.
I awoke that night due to a presence lurking at the back of my mind. My sleep had been restless, and at last I turned towards the window. The moon shone brightly, and the dark sentinel greenhouses rose starkly from the grassy lawn. There was something standing at the window: A face pressed there at the threshold: gaunt, skeletal, and staring with unblinking, impossibly dark eyes. But then the curtain caught the breeze, and whatever I had seen vanished as the shadows shifted.
Yet the strange vision left a distinct impression on my mind. A cold weight settled into the marrow of my bones, and I knew that whatever I had seen had not been a dream.
The floor creaked. My breath started to come harder, leaving the back of my throat raw. Against my better inclinations, I got up to find the source of the disturbance, and stepped into the hall.
The old house was bathed in blue light that seeped in from outside. The door to Doctor Huang's room was closed, but I saw that Yumei's was open and I started towards it, to see if she was still inside. The floor creaked again, and when I turned I saw a white cat standing at one end of the hall.
For a moment we held each other's gaze, and it judged me closely through its slitted green eyes. At last it dashed away, and I followed it, which led me to Yumei. She was sitting on the edge of the patio with her back to the door and her face turned towards the moon, soaking in its light. The cat settled at her side, and she stroked its silvery fur. When I stepped outside she turned, but shook her head and held her finger to her lips. Then, she pointed towards one of the greenhouses.
Through the silk screen I could see some shadow moving through the dim interior. Its movements seemed human at first, but it moved too quickly from one end of the structure to the other, flitting back and forth. I watched as it stalked through the first greenhouse and moved on to the next, as though searching for something inside.
"Who is that?" I asked. But when I turned to see what Yumei's response would be, I found that she was gone. The figure in the greenhouse had vanished as well, leaving me and the cat alone. It blinked at me once more, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up as I realized I could see the shadow of the pillar behind it through its slightly translucent body...
The next morning, I descended the bare, lonely stairs, made treacherous by the thick layer of fog that had rolled into the valley during the early hours before dawn. I had made up my mind to collect water samples from the swamp. In addition, it was difficult for me to remain in Doctor Huang's study, as I had found myself glancing towards the door, expecting it to be opened by the figure in the greenhouse...
I first stopped at Shanu's house. She opened the door when I knocked, but only a few inches. I quickly told her my business for being there.
"I was looking at the samples I took yesterday, and I think I've identified the cause of your son's sickness."
Her gaze, which had been wandering behind me as though looking for someone who could be watching us, finally settled on me, and I went on.
"I think he's been infected by a kind of spore, a spiritual hybrid..."
"Where is Doctor Huang?" she asked.
"He's still at the institute," I said.
"Tam's worse," she said flatly, and I was taken aback. Suddenly, the hard, dull pain of past regrets took shape in my chest like a cancerous tumor, and the spark of hope I had found earlier under my microscope withered away. I felt helpless as I realized that my research was merely that. If I didn't soon discover an antidote to the poisonous spores I had found in Tam's blood then...
"How much longer do you think he can hold on?" I asked, realizing that the shadows under her eyes were from long, sleepless nights spent watching her son to ensure he kept breathing.
"Maybe three days." Shanu dropped her face into her hands, and I thought she would start to cry. Instead she sighed, and then squared her shoulders.
"Listen," she said, and there was a fervent, desperate strength beneath her voice. "You can't trust Doctor Huang."
"Why not?"
"He told me the medicine he gave me would help Tam's spots go away," she pulled out a bottle from her pocket and showed me the small, white pills. "But these are just pain killers."
A small seedling of doubt took root in the pit of my stomach.
"Whatever he's hiding, it must have something to do with Tam and all the other who've–and all the others. Otherwise, he would have done something by now."
"Why didn't you get help earlier?" I asked.
"The telephone lines went out during the flood, right around the same time Tam got sick," she said. "I couldn't leave him."
"I understand," I said, my responsibility becoming clear to me.
"Please," she said. "You have to do something. I'm... I'm losing him."
"I'll get to the bottom of this," I assured her. "And I will find a cure... I promise."
Part of me wanted to return immediately to Doctor Huang's study in order to press forward with my findings, now an urgent task. But I knew that there was only one way to confirm my theory. And that confirmation would be found in the swamp.
The fog was even thicker in the wetlands, trapping the heavy scent of mud and masking the path in front of me. In the distance the uneven black lines of the telephone poles stuck up like broken ribs from the swamp, pointing in every direction.
A little ways in I thought I saw an old woman. She was standing in the middle of the path, and as I neared her, recognition dawned upon me.
Hers was the face I had seen the night before.
The old woman's form was grotesque, and glowed with an ephemeral, vagrant light. While I had seen many spirits in my experience, none I had seen had ever been so uncannily human. Cold needles of dread pressed into my spine.
The spirit raised her hand, beckoning to me, drawing me deeper into the swamp. I took a step back—and my foot caught on the thick mud, causing me to stumble back. At first I panicked, fearing I would be sucked in to the bottom of the bog. But the water was shallow, and the ground beneath me was firm enough for me to stand. I soon got my bearings about me, but a cluster of flowers had taken the place of the old woman, barely visible in the midst of the fog. They appeared to be lilies, marked with stripes of black down their white petals and surrounded by floating motes of light. As I drew closer, I again noted a strange, cloying scent, like that of rotting flesh.
The flowers were rooted somewhere beneath the murky surface of the swamp, and it was difficult to perceive where the black stems ended and their shadows began. The reflection of the white underside of the lilies formed gaunt circles on the water's surface, and I slipped my hand underwater and grasped the stems, pulling hard to uproot them. The mud moved around me, as though I had pulled an entire patch of the swamp's bottom free along with the clump of lilies.
And then, at my feet, a face gazed up at me from the water, its features blanched and smoothed by watery decay.
They buried the dead man in the cemetery on the outskirts of town. Shanu, who was an earthbender, opened the ground which swallowed him. After she smoothed over the surface of the grave she stood there, much longer than any of the other villagers, and I knew she was thinking of the much smaller hole she must soon dig for another...
I considered what she had said about Doctor Huang, and small inconsistencies began to gnaw at my mind. Not only was the spirit of the woman in the swamp troubling, but so too was the fact that the results of my tests had been quick—results that should have been evident to Doctor Huang as well. The more time I spent in his lab, poring over the samples I had gathered, the clearer it became to me that I would have to confront the doctor directly.
That night, I again awoke to the sound of creaking wood, and discovered that Doctor Huang was missing from his room. I found him dragging a heavy object towards the main greenhouse. Careful to tread as silently as possible, I crossed the lawn and entered after him.
A scene of haunting beauty greeted me. The flowers had opened to the moonlight, spreading their ghost-like petals to cover the floor in a mantle of white. They glowed with a soft luminescence, and spectral particles danced in the air. The flowers were the same as those in the swamp—the ones that had been growing from the decayed flesh of the dead man.
Doctor Huang was digging in one of the flowerbeds, chopping into the earth rhythmically with a spade. Lying beside him was the oblong object wrapped in white cloth, already smudged with soil. A black-spotted hand poked through the fabric, and for the first time I realized the rectangular flower boxes were the same length as a human body. It all became clear to me, as clear as the moonlight pouring in through the open cupola of the greenhouse.
The doctor saw me, and a moment of mutual understanding passed between us. It was a pragmatic, scientific acknowledgement of the obvious.
"They're beautiful, aren't they?" he gestured at the lilies around him. "They don't absorb sunlight, you see, and so they only open at night. The blue light comes from their bioluminescent spores," he explained. "And did you know these flowers have a different name?" he asked. "Sometimes they're referred to as Death Lilies, from the fact that they will only sprout from decomposing biological matter."
"How long have you been in the business of grave robbing?" I asked directly.
His smile had vanished, replaced by a cold, sinister grimace. I saw his gaze flicker to the body lying beside him.
"You knew all along that the flowers were poisonous, didn't you?" I pressed, "And that their spores have polluted Temu's water supply."
"I had no choice!" he pleaded, more to himself than to me. "I had to cultivate them, to carry out my research to the very end of my means."
"Even though those means involved murder?"
"The villagers would have died anyway," he said, and then sighed. "If only you hadn't come—" he raised the spade above his shoulder. "I don't want to do this, you have to understand. You must understand. I'm close, so very close..."
He swung the spade at me with surprising agility, and I ducked to the side. Still, there was a sickly sound of metal thwacking into flesh, and when I rolled to my feet I realized that someone else had been in the greenhouse.
Yumei.
The blow had caught her on the side of the head, and I knew from the concave dent in her skull, her limp form, and the blood streaming from her ears and nose that she had been killed instantly.
The doctor knew it too. He wailed. Falling to his knees, he cradled his dead daughter in his lap, pressing her to his chest, whispering sweet nothings in her ears...
And then he looked at me, his hatred, desperation, and delusion all spilling over along with his tears.
"You," he hissed, and I thought he would again reach for the spade. But instead he stood, carrying Yumei in his arms, and fled from the greenhouse.
Doctor Huang carried Yumei all the way down the steep flight of stairs leading from the shrine. I could see his lanky form and disembodied movements in the watery moonlight, but he disappeared when he entered the bank of fog below. I pursued him nonetheless, knowing he would head towards the swamp: his only route of escape.
I followed the doctor until, led either by the darkness or his own madness, he strayed from the path and into the depths of the swamp. I called out to him, but he did not look back.
It was then that the phantom specter appeared. White, withered arms rose from the water, reaching up to grasp the doctor by the throat. I could barely see the form of the ghostly old woman in the fog, but I heard Doctor Huang struggle as he was pulled, slowly, into the water. He thrashed violently, crying out for help, but his screams were soon smothered as he was dragged beneath the swamp.
Yumei's body was left to float on the surface, her dark hair spread out around her like the crushed petals of a flower, her face and unseen eyes turned upwards as though soaking in the light from the veiled moon.
And, turning back towards Temu, I met with the unblinking gaze of a white cat.
End.
See more
For the collective works of the author, go here.