Who: Haruko and Violet Where: The American Horror house When: Back when Violet invited Haruko over to play What: Two girls braving a scary house Warnings: Lots of serious spooky, disturbing stuff.
Haruko rocked back and forth under the buzzing, yellow lights of the local quickie mart. The old man behind the counter slowly scanned a bottle of sake and a six pack of Japanese beer without looking up. “Aren’t you going to ask me for my ID?” The pink haired girl pouted and the old man gave a laugh like there was dust stuck in his lungs. “Aaaah whatever.” She threw money at him, taking the booze in paper bags and stuck out her tongue. No response. Old Japanese men from the suburbs didn’t have the patience for pink haired weirdos. But really, who did?
Pushing open the glass door that rang jingle jangle with oversized brass bells, Haruko took a big step into the Passages Hotel and turned into Amy. Holding the paper bag with one hand, she put her finger on top of her imaginary earpiece. “Harry? I don’t know how I feel about going to a haunted house. Yes, I know. Yeah, I agree but-” She paused, letting the space cop lecture her about the importance of exploring new worlds as she followed Violet’s directions. “I don’t know anything about this girl, you didn’t give me time to look it up. Well maybe you should spend less time moping around!” The two of them laughed and Amy dropped her hand from her ear. It was crazy, talking to someone in her head like this, but it was the only way they knew how to communicate and it made them feel like badasses. This whole thing was weird, why not make it fun, too?
Standing in front of the American Horror door (though Amy and Haruko didn’t know that’s what it was), Amy took in a deep breath. Be careful she thought, without using the earpiece. It’s not like Haruko would listen. In fact, telling her to do so just made her act out like a child. Scooting inside, Amy vanished and the tall, pink haired 20 something stood in the hallway of the strange old house. “Oooooooh.” Haruko cooed, looking up at the old Victorian style. She was incredibly out of place with her yellow riding gloves, orange vest and goggles on top of her head. Haruko looked like a very convincing American girl cosplayer who had wandered far from her anime convention.
Violet had wandered away from the front door after Haruko didn’t show up right away. She didn’t know what kind of a name that was, but it sounded kind of cool, and she was bored. Tate wasn’t around, and she was still pissed at him, so it wasn’t like she wanted him around. Which was a total lie, but whatever. She’d gotten bored, and she’d flopped on the living room couch and spent way too much time looking at the coffee table and thinking about her trip with Tate into the house’s crawl space. That day had changed everything, and she tried not to think about it a lot, but sometimes she couldn’t help it. Like now, after all that stuff about Hannah, which totally wasn’t her fault, even though she thought maybe it was. What if the guy was someone from that strip club she’d made Hannah work at?
But no, Violet wasn’t going to start thinking about that shit, not when someone was actually coming over who wasn’t dead. And when was the last time that happened?
By the time the girl appeared in the entryway, Violet was smoking a cigarette, a black brimmed hat over her long, straight brown hair. She was dressed in jeans and Converse, with a floral dress overtop and a long sleeved gray shirt underneath. Eighteen, and looking even younger, and she had ipod buds tucked into her ears. She looked over when the newcomer appeared, and she smiled when she saw the getup. Ok, that was totally cool.
The music from Violet’s ipod was tinny, angry rock as she neared, and she stubbed the cigarette out beneath her sneaker in the entryway. Not like anyone was going to yell at her or anything. “Hey. Cool hair,” she said, calm and sedate, totally cool.
“Oooh thank you.” Haruko beamed and then whispered American girl to herself in that excited but oh-so jealous voice. Violet reminded her of someone back in the suburbs. A girl with long dark hair who smoked cigarettes and was very good at pretending to be cool. Both Violet and Haruko fit into separate teenage boy fantasies. Haruko was the wild, spacey older woman who could rock out to the stars and back. Violet was the calm, hard to impress girl next door with a rebellious side. The two didn’t normally get along, but desperate times called for friendship over cheap beer and good sake.
“I brought you presents.” Haruko slowly lifted the sake bottle so the top of the label showed, wiggling her eyebrows before stashing it back in the bag. “But, first things must come first. Find a spooky place for us to drink and tell ghost stoorriiess?” She felt less animated, but to someone who had been a real person their whole life, Haruko seemed to be brimming with a weird energy. Like she was a joke or a parody of a tired, old archetype on some late night anime.
Violet noticed the weirdness, but she’d always liked things that weren’t normal. Dark things, mostly, but strange things too, and the pink-haired girl was strange in that cool way. “How do you say your name?” she asked, even as she turned for the stairs. She could have led her up to her room, where bad stuff never happened. Violet thought maybe Tate made that a rule or something, so all the weird dead stuff left her alone, but if they wanted scary stuff, then it was either really up (the attic) or down (the basement).
The basement was scariest, so Violet led the way down the stairs to the dark room with the dark walls. The bare light bulb was turned off, and it flickered as she turned the switch on and flooded the basement with eerie half-light. Violet knew the lights might not stay on, but they could start that way. She walked into the tiny backroom, where there was a little girl’s teaset on an empty child’s table. That probably wouldn’t stay empty either, but Violet brought the cups back and pointed at the sake. “What’s that?” she asked, never having had any. She dropped down onto the floor, criss crossed her legs, and motioned for Haruko to join her.
“Haaar - ruuuu - kooo. Haruko.” Haruko sounded it out for her, proudly. She had a cute voice that seemed a little clouded with mischievousness and was accented like any America, but she said her name like a Japanese woman would. That was the funny thing about dubbed anime. They always tried so hard to say Japanese things the right way and if they did it enough, they tended to get it right.
The house was creepy, it just gave off that feeling like every wall had an eye closed inside of it, but the basement was something else. She couldn’t get a good fix on how big it was or how many gobbly ghouls snaked through the dim light. She felt her back go stiff like a wooden board and she smiled a little, liking the rush from being in such a strange place. “You’ve never really drank before, nnyrroooooon? Well, I think you should do it right the first time.” Haruko took a seat across from Violet and pulled the bottle of sake out along with the beer, crumpling up the paper bag and throwing it over her shoulder casually. “This is sake. Americans have it in their cute little sushi places, yes? It tastes like the earth and death, but it’ll give you all kinds of warm fuzzies in your tummy.” Haruko popped the bottle open and poured them both teacups full. She held her own cup up with her pinky out all danity like. “A toaaaast to you, Violet. Thank you for welcoming me into your home.”
Violet repeated the name, trying to copy the Japanese inflection but sounding very American in the process. She laughed, and it was a true laugh, the first one in forever, but there was no one around to hear, and so her “I hate the world” teenager act was safe. “I wonder if you can say Violet like that?” she asked, curious.
Violet watched Haruko pour the booze into the tiny cups, and she laughed again at the way the other girl lifted her pinky. Ok, she was cool. She could totally stay. Violet would just tell Tate not to hurt her or anything. He had this kind of bad habit of wanting to kill people Violet liked, so she’d have friends in the house and stuff. She lifted her own teacup, and she took a swig (sips were for girls) of the horrible stuff. She hated it. It was nasty, but she didn’t cough or retch. “That’s ass,” she said, but she was laughing again, and it was just so teenager that there was no doubt she was just a kid, dead or not. And maybe Haruko didn’t know she was having sake-tea with a dead girl. “You’re not scared of ghosts?” Violet asked, and the timing wasn’t coincidental.
Behind Haruko, two burned little girls were walking closer and closer, holding each other’s hands. That’s what you get for stealing teacups, Violet thought.
Haruko finished her sake and set the teacup on the ground, leaning back on her hands. She liked the feeling of the cool basement floor pressed against her palms. Comfortable without even trying. It’s a little like this Violet girl the pink haired anime girl thought and looked up to the ceiling curiously. “They aren’t exactly in my genre.” Haruko shrugged, eyes looking for spiders with their furry fingers. “But, I fought big fat stupid monsters, how bad could a little ghostie ghost be?” Haruko’s smile turned smug, as space cops tended to do, and she leaned her head all the way back to see the burnt little dresses and red, puffy scars on two small tiny things.
She felt like her whole body turned blue, cracked apart like ice and melted right there on the floor. With a swift scoot, scoot, scoot, Haruko moved to sit next to Violet just enough that their arms were touching. “Pour me another sake, please.” She whispered, all manners, staring down the ghostie girls. It occurred to her that the thing which made them so scary was how sad their doll eyes looked. Her suburb didn’t have real sadness. Just the selfish kind young people feel. “And, tell me their ghostie ghost story.”
Violet poured Haruko another cupful, and she handed it over to her scared friend. She didn’t say anything about the scoot-scoot-fear, though, because she’d been totally freaked too, when she’d learned the secrets of the house. She could still remember Tate taunting her, reminding her of her own claims of not being scared of anything, and she wasn’t going to do the same thing to the first maybe-cool friend she’d had in forever. Instead, Violet poured another teacupful, and she pushed it over to the little girls. They weren’t old enough to drink, but they still sat across from the two older girls, tiny legs crossed and burnt faces curious. They sipped at the sake and made faces of disgust that turned into whispers between themselves. Their mother, also burned, stood at the door behind them, watching.
“That’s Margaret, and that’s Angela,” Violet explained, pointing at the little girls. “Their father left them for another woman, and their mother set them on fire.” There was endless amounts of contempt for Larry, their father, in her voice, and there was no need to explain that the woman at the door, the little girls’ mother, had killed herself in the same way. “My Tate set him on fire too, their father, but he survived.”
Haruko gave a small wave to the little girls. “Why did the momma bear eat her own cubs?” She asked after a couple seconds. That was the strangest part of the whole story. Maybe the mother didn’t love her children as much as the daddy, so it worked as revenge? No, that was still too barbaric. Haruko sat up a little from her crouched, fearful pose and lifted the teacup to her mouth to down the sake like a shot. No time for dainty grace in times like these.
And, she was still a little frightened. The truly terrible thing here was if the girls suddenly sprouted tentacles or grew a monster out of their backs, Haruko would feel more at home. But, they just sat there drinking and chatting like real little girls.
“I think she wanted to hurt their father, so she killed the things she thought he loved,” Violet explained. “This house kind of makes people twisted,” she said, even though she had no proof, because that totally seemed to be the case. As for tentacles, there weren’t any, but the girls and their mother disappeared with the kind of flicker that only came in horror movies, and it was the kind of intentional thing that said a show was about to start. The light bulb overhead dinged and dinged, and then it went out and the basement was pitch black, cold nothing.
Violet had no way of knowing what was coming, but she wasn’t scared anymore, not of the dead stuff. A little red truck rolled slowly from the shadows, and it stopped at Haruko’s foot. Something growled, something inhuman and low to the ground, and Violet just sat there like it was totally normal to have a deformed thing crawling forward on all fours, hungry teeth and nightmares. She wouldn’t let him eat the girl beside her, but Haruko wanted to be scared, right?
“So, Violet. Did the house twisty turn you, too?” Haruko breathed and reached for one of the beers. She snapped it out of the plastic ring, clawed it open and chugged the whole thing like this was some frat party. The grumbly growl meant Violet could bury her response if she wanted to because Haruko was already on her feet and ready to fight. She was used to science fiction and mecha things that could be taken down with enough bullets or a perfect executed move, but Haruko could still fight better than any stupid ghost. If ghosts could even fight. Though, there was no point in beating them up since they’d always come back until their curse was lifted. Not fair. The whole house seemed to be swimming in curses.
“Want to play keep away?” She spoke to the monster, picking up the truck and dangling it out in front of her. Haruko grinned brightly, taking a couple steps away from Violet so the precious sake wouldn’t be knocked over.
“I think I was like that before,” Violet replied, because part of that was true. “Maybe being dead did the rest,” she added, watching the girl at her side chug down the beer. She didn’t stand when the girl stood, because she didn’t need to worry about staying alive. “Be careful. If he kills you, you’re totally stuck here,” Violet explained, watching as Beau neared and neared. Beau wasn’t normally mean, not unless he was angry about something, but the dangling truck did it, made him angry, and Violet wasn’t surprised when he lunged at the visiting girl. His chain, which usually kept him safely tied in the attic, hung from his neck, connected to nothing, and Violet stood, intending to make him disappear if Haruko looked like she was in trouble. “That’s Tate’s brother,” she explained. “He was locked up in the attic forever, and then Larry killed him.” Larry, with the burnt wife and daughters. That Larry.
Haruko moved like a bullfighter, playing chicken until the last moment before dodging out of the way with a laugh. “Don’t be angry little mole. We’re playing a game.” She told the monster like she was the king of the jungle gym. The emperor of the dodgeball court. The truck was back out in front of her for the hairless mole to try for again. This one had some sadness, too. The innocent kind that made a silent part of Haruko feel sorry for him. She didn’t know how to show sympathy and so it came out in teasing and playing. That’s how Mary Poppins did it, right?
“Wait a second, Violet.” Haruko turned her attention away from the angry, probably inbred, boy. “You’re dead. You died! You’re a spirit from beeyyoond! What a twist and we’re not even at the second act yet.” She gasped dramatically, eyes wide as her free hand held her mouth. “Time out, mole! Time-” Haruko waved her arms like a deserted man trying land a plane to save him, but it was too late. The hairless mole boy already made his charge and took Haruko down with him. “You win, you win! No tickling or maiming!” She giggled, kicking and pounding her fists on the ground as the truck rolled at her side.
Violet had to give it to her; Haruko was brave. She was pretty sure she would have peed her pants if something like Beau came at her in the dark. She scrambled onto her feet, and maybe she wasn’t as immune as she pretended to be, even if she was dead herself. But Beau, who craved human attention more than anything, seemed torn between killing Haruko (probably to keep her forever) or playing keep-away with her, and Violet just watched it unfold. “Yeah, kinda,” was her response about being dead. She never looked dead. She didn’t have any injuries to show, not like the burnt girls or the woman who walked around with the back of her head shot off.
“You can tell him to go away,” Violet told her new friend, as Beau’s teeth flashed in the darkness. She didn’t like saying it, because now it meant Haruko could make her go away too. And no one wanted to be made to disappear, no matter what they said about it. Apparently the house didn’t like her telling either, because a small thing dressed in white appeared in the corner. It was horrible, and it had even sharper teeth than Beau, and even Violet was scared of it. She almost called for Tate, but no, she wasn’t a wuss, so she just tugged on Haruko’s sleeve. “That isn’t dead, so you can’t make it go away.” Oh, she couldn’t kill it, either; that was the really bad part. Violet grabbed for the bottle of horrible tasting booze, and she took a swig before holding it out to Haruko.
Haruko wrestled with the drooling moleman for a little until she could tell the thing both didn’t know its own strength and didn’t care if it killed her or not. Her laughing quieted and she scrambled away from Beau, pointing to his truck. “We’ll play some other time, mole. I promise.” She nodded with a flash of pink hair and he seemed to gurgle a protest. It wasn’t up to him, though. “Go away.” The words stung without playfulness or teasing. And, for the first time at the old house, Haruko sounded almost mature. She closed her eyes instinctively, expecting Violet’s tip to actually be a very sneaky sneak trick, but relaxed with the heavy breathing and growling seemed to evaporate.
She opened her eyes slowly, reaching her arm out to snag the bottle of sake and take another swing. Her stomach was starting to feel warm. Her toes happy and full of little jelly fish fuzzies. Haruko put her arm through Violet’s, holding her close like two school girls conspiring against the world. “What is that? The biggest curse?” She whispered as if the white little thing couldn’t hear her.
“The first curse, kinda,” was Violet’s response, and she looked over at Haruko and smiled. “You’re cool,” she said, though it was a repetition of her sentiments when the pink-haired girl had walked into the house earlier. “He died, all butchered up, and his father sewed him up and brought him back, kinda like Frankenstein,” Violet explain, even as she tugged on Haruko’s sleeve. It was pretty obvious that Violet intended to run for it, ghost or not, and a final tug, tug, tug to Haruko’s sleeve was the split second advance warning that her new friend should follow.
“What’s your door like?” Violet called over her shoulder, even as she made a run for the dark stairs. Up, up, and she could hear the horrible Infantata crawling behind them. She skid to a halt at the top of the stairs, but she could hear sloshing from the bathroom at her right, and three bloodied murderers peeked out. Well, they’d wanted to wake the house, right? “Run,” she called to Haruko.
“Cool kids got to stick together, nyyrran.” Haruko smiled despite the terrible little angel in front of them and took one last look at it before sprinting up the stairs after her, holding onto the last of the beer by ringed plastic. The house breathed like a sleepy dragon that everyone mistook for a harmless rock. Filled with fishies that bite and lizards that burn all with their own problems that just stacked on top of everything else. Haruko wondered if Violet had some evil brewing inside of her that would turn this new friendship on its head. The pink haired space cop hoped not. She didn’t like being alone.
“Sleepy little suburb. Big iron factory that steams like clockwork. Lots of streets to vroom vroom. Robots and monsters that like to fight. Colorful. Silly. Madness.” Haruko called as she ran like it was almost a chant. An anthem of who she was. Of what happened when crazy violence went the other way than Violet’s American horrors. She laughed at the murderers, the bloated woman in the tub and whatever else wanted to cut her down. They could try to catch her, but they weren’t ready for her anime speed. No one ever was.
Violet wasn’t ready for the speed either. She watched Haruko run, and she laughed as her new friend wound up the stairs. “Last room on the right!” she called, because that was her bedroom, where none of the bad stuff was. Well, there were bad memories, but they were the sad-sweet kind, and nothing that would hurt them. Violet followed her in a few seconds later, and she slammed the door on the evil trio with a loud “get out!” which seemed to do the job.
Violet climbed on the bed after a few seconds of watching the door shake, clambering over the iron footboard with the remaining sake in her hand. She reached onto the nightstand, grabbed a pack of cigarettes and lit it, and then threw the pack on the center of the bed, in case Haruko wanted some. She took a drag, and she wondered what a door with silly madness looked like. “I bet that would be awesome,” she said honestly of Haruko’s world, and she pointed to the chalkboard on the wall. “Draw it. I don’t know if I can go through other doors.” But maybe she could. Because Tate had gone to that party, right? And if he could go there, then maybe she could go other places too.
Haruko set the beer down on the bed and picked up the cigarettes, checking the brand with a little curiosity. It wasn’t just weird that she was from a cartoon brought to life with real flesh and blood, it was weird she was from another country’s fiction. Sticking the cigarette in her mouth and then lighting it up, Haruko decided that she liked the change. It was a breath of fresh air after spending a decade in a room full of steam. “We should try. Don’t you think that would be fun? Take a little vacation from all the spooky spooks.”
She picked up some chalk, tossing it in the air a couple times before making her decision on what to draw first. “This is the factory.” Haruko began to draw what looked like a giant steam iron meant to straighten out wrinkles in clothes. “Well actually it’s more like a big meanie corporation that owns everything.” She drew little cartoony steam swirls around the iron then little houses under it. “I’m an undercover space cop you see. So I posed as a maid at this house where a boy lives who can make robots come out of his head.” She drew a cutesy version of a boy with black hair, a mean expression and a backwards cap. Haruko smiled once his face was done. Clearly showing some automatic affection for him.
The cigarettes were Marlboro, unfiltered reds, because Violet thought they were more badass than any other kind. Trying to go into another door would be fun, but she knew Jules wouldn’t want anyone knowing who he was out there. “It would be cool,” she admitted, longing for it in her voice. It wasn’t the same walking around in someone’s skin, like she had with Hannah. It wasn’t the same as going somewhere herself, somewhere that wasn’t the house. “But my person out there isn’t going to want anyone knowing who he is. Things are kinda dangerous for him. Maybe we can still work it out though,” she said hopefully.
But all thought of that flew out the window when the pink-haired girl started drawing really, really weird crap. Dead or not, Violet’s life was very much grounded in reality. “Wait. How do robots come out of his head? And does that thing really look like an iron?”
“Haven’t you ever watched cartoons?” Haruko asked, drawing her favorite robot that carried the heart of her favorite pirate. “An artist can make metaphors reality if he wants. He can make robots come out of boy’s heads just because he feels like it.” She finished her little sketches which looked like something out of a kindergarten class. Haruko didn’t seem to care, in fact she seemed like the type that enjoyed the attention from being a little off. “Though honestly, people treat me like a weirdo over there, too. I dropped in on this sleepy little suburb and baaam poof hissss.” She raised her hands like Godzilla stomping downtown Tokyo and then flopped on Violet’s bed.
Violet laughed, and it might have been the first real childish laugh she’d managed since before they’d moved out to California, before everything went to total shit with her jerk of a dad and the dead baby. “I want to go,” she said eagerly. Maybe she’d even stay. Wouldn’t that just piss Tate off? Her smile widened. “Would there be somewhere for me to stay if I went?” Because she still lived in a world where teenagers, like her, needed a roof and food and money, even though she didn’t really need to things anymore. Violet, she wasn’t very good at being dead yet. “Maybe next week or something?” Because Jules wasn’t Hannah, and he didn’t let her cross often.
“Yooou can stay at my conquered house. There’s no one there to kick you out yet and if they do show up they wouldn’t dare leave an American girl on the street.” Haruko stretched her arms with a flop flop. “Don’t worry, we all speak English over there. Anime has to be dubbed, after all.” Even before this whole door thing, Haruko had the vague idea that she wasn’t real and her whole life was just some crazy, awesome cartoon. And, besides the fanboys, she didn’t have a problem with that. She raised her head. “Everyone will think you’re a total badass. And, none of them will know you’re a spooky spook. Unless you want them, too.” Haruko inserted a dry, evil laugh.
Violet had never been the anime type, more prone to grunge and things that had happened in the 90s than in the present, but she didn’t care if anyone talked English or not. Getting out, really getting out (if it worked) would be the best thing ever. Maybe Tate wouldn’t be able to find her there. Maybe he’d worry. She knew that dying again had made something inside her want Tate to hurt like she did, but she couldn’t do anything about it, even if she knew it was there. But maybe living in an iron could change that. “Cool. Next week.” She popped open a beer to seal the deal, and she held it up to Haruko for a very grown-up toast.
Haruko smirked, sitting up on the bed to retrieve her very own beer. She liked this, even if getting along with other girls was a new thing for her. Mostly, other girls had the tendency to rival or turn into evil monsters, but Violet was already kind of a monster. The teenager was a ghoully ghoul that walked around in a house that could even scare a seasoned space officer. Popping her own beer open, she lightly hit it against Violet’s can. “Oh yeah,” Haruko’s mouth turned into a cheshire grin. “Fooley Cooley.”