Occultic;Nine: Volume 1

by Chiyomaru Shikura

  Which meant, of course, that if her will was weak, the curse would fail.

  I never told any of my clients that the curse was certain to succeed.

  I turned on the lights and received my payment.

  The client smiled slightly, satisfied, and left the shop.

  “A woman’s story is always a sad thing, isn’t it?” I took the cork off the bottle on the table, then took out the paper inside and carefully moved it to a small box.

  I had no intention of looking at the information about the target myself. I wasn’t the one who placed the curse. I was simply an agent. The work was done by a devil.

  I put away the customer’s untouched cup of tea, and then took out my tablet PC from the drawer in the table.

  It didn’t really go well with the gothic feel of the shop, so I probably shouldn’t have been using it so much. But since I received so few customers, lately I’d stopped caring.

  I touched the tablet to bring up my email app. The House of Crimson had a home page, and that was actually where I interacted with most potential clients. I made sure to check it at least once a day.

  Just as I thought, I had a message waiting for me.

  The title was straightforward: “Request for Black Magic Execution.”

  My policy was to just glance through request emails, and most of the time, to discard them. Hardly any of them ever paid.

  The home page said that clients were required to visit my shop in person, but sometimes I got messages like this anyway.

  Today’s email came with an image attached.

  I looked at the sender’s name before I opened it.

  “Fukuzo... Moguro?”

  Even I knew who that was, and I wasn’t exactly up-to-date on popular culture. It was a character from a decades-old manga.

  This was clearly a false name. Either they didn’t want me to know their real name, or they were simply playing a prank. There were actually a lot of people who didn’t like shops like mine and would play tricks like this. That was probably all this email was.

  The message text was just a single line.

  “Death.”

  Very simple. And thus, very easy to understand. I liked that.

  I decided to open the attached image.

  When I opened it, I bit down hard on my back teeth without even realizing it.

  The cold temperature in the room seemed to drop another few degrees.

  It was an upside-down pentagram drawn in bright red lines. The inversion made it a demonic symbol. And in the center of the pentagram were letters drawn by hand.

  “〒666 Isayuki Hashigami.” I knew that name, too.

  It was a scientist who’d been all over the TV and magazines lately. He was a middle-aged gentleman, with distinctive long hair that went down to his waist. Despite his age, his black hair was beautiful and lustrous, and it left a strong impression even on a girl like me.

  His job was to introduce the media to all kinds of different occult ideas. What made him interesting was that despite his role as a scientist, he was a believer in the occult, who said that he could scientifically prove the existence of ghosts.

  The public had started to pick up on his existence, and the media was having its first occult programming boom in a long while because of him. He was popular enough that there were probably a lot of people who wanted to see him dead.

  How disgusting.

  That was my first thought as a person who called herself a black magician.

  I could feel a strong aura of hate in these rough, hand-written letters, the kind of thing that was difficult to discern via digital text.

  It was easy to extract their meaning.

  “666 is the number of the Devil... or perhaps, the cost of his chosen package?” The number 666 appeared in the bible, and it had been used as the number of the Devil since ancient times.

  The House of Crimson used it as well. The most expensive black magic I offered was the Devil’s Ritual, and its cost was 66,6000 yen. It was written on the home page as well.

  But what was 〒?

  “The postal mark.” The mailbox for this shop was downstairs. Had someone left something there? I wasn’t able to hear the footsteps from that far away.

  But then what had they left?

  Money? Or something else?

  The awful premonition I felt kept growing stronger. It was like a ghost was licking the crook of my neck. It was extremely unpleasant.

  I stood up from my chair, shivering from the cold. If something was in my mailbox, I couldn’t just leave it there.

  I opened the door, which led directly to a series of steep steps.

  I grimaced. There was the strong smell of something rotten. I remembered the last customer talking about a terrible smell. Maybe that was why she had the handkerchief to her face.

  I’d arrived here shortly before noon. No one had visited the shop until her.

  Had someone been here during that time? From upstairs, the mailbox looked like it was filled with something black. It definitely wasn’t a package. It was something much worse.

  I slowly walked down the narrow stairs, taking care not to trip.

  The smell almost made me vomit. I put my hand over my mouth, but it didn’t make a difference at all.

  I somehow made it to the bottom and out into the street.

  The tiny street where I had my shop was off of the main area. Most of the shops around it were bars, and since the sun hadn’t set yet, their shutters were still down. That meant there was no one here.

  Just a few meters away, I could hear the bustle of a busy street, but...

  It felt like I had wandered into a tiny portal to hell that had just opened near Kichijoji Station.

  I gulped and turned to face the mailbox. Even from the outside I could see that it was stuffed tightly with something black.

  I opened it up, trying my best not to vomit. The handle was slick with some kind of liquid. It was dark black— blood.

  When I opened the mail box, the stuff inside spilled to the ground.

  It was a lump, like vomit, but different. It was the size of a soccer ball, and soft. It was...

  “Human... hair.”

  The ball of hair was wet with black blood, and glistened in the light.

  There so much of it. If all of this came from one person, he must have had very long hair.

  I grabbed the ends with my bare hands and picked them up.

  And then I realized...

  It wasn’t just hair.

  The hair was growing out of what looked like the mesh frame of a wig. The frame was the color of skin on one side, but on the other side it was slick and pink.

  —It was human flesh.

  This wasn’t a wig.

  Which meant it could only be one thing.

  All this hair belonged to one person, and someone had ripped off their scalp.

  I immediately thought of someone with long hair.

  —Professor Hashigami.

  I could feel the depth of the hatred possessed by the person who had left this here, and I was confused.

  If they were capable of ripping off the professor’s scalp, then why did “Fukuzo Moguro” need me to put a curse on him?

  But there was one thing I did know.

  This was a job. The hair I needed for the catalyst was proof of that.

  My knees started to shake as I thought about it. I sat down on the stairs, cradling the ball of hair with both hands.

  “What a terrible obsession... It makes me want to throw up.”

  site 04: Miyuu Aikawa

  Friday, February 12th

  “Show me your vision.”

  It felt kind of like telling someone you loved them. That’s what I always thought. The tiny, whispered message I always spoke to start my streams was kind of like a love letter to someone I’d never met.

  I looked at the laptop in front of me. It was showing the page for the program I was broadcasting. The screen was filled with comments from viewers, flowing f
rom right to left.

  “Glad to have you back!”

  “Myu, you’re so cute!”

  “Tell me your real name!”

  “Are you a real fortune-teller?”

  “Looking forward to today’s stream!”

  “She’s a fake.”

  “That voice is so hot.”

  “Oh, she’s a slut, huh?”

  I almost sighed aloud when I saw them, but stopped myself. “Right, right. Stop messing around. And who the heck calls someone a slut just over seeing their face?”

  “Myu! You forgot your introduction!”

  I could see my friend Chi in the corner of the room, frantically scribbling on a whiteboard. She was my best friend, and she always helped me with the show. It was actually her idea to do it in the first place.

  I switched gears and pulled the hood up over my head. I adjusted my bangs a little, and winked towards the camera inside my laptop. The image of me on the screen winked as well.

  “Hi there. Hello to all you first-timers, and to the rest of you, how was your week? I’m Myu, your host. Thanks for coming to see today’s ‘Myu’s Nicco-Nico Live Fortune-Telling’! I’m so happy you did. Since you’re here, have some fun!”

  Myu was my name on the show. Of course, it wasn’t my real name. My real name was Miyuu Aikawa. But I thought it was a pretty cute nickname. I actually really liked it now. Maybe I owed Chi, since she came up with it.

  I took a quick look at the number of viewers. Whoa... already over 10,000. I’d only been in front of the camera for a minute or two!

  It was kind of creepy when I thought about how most of them were men, though. About ninety percent of my show’s viewers were men, which was pretty unusual for a fortune-telling stream. It was even scarier to think that by the time it reached 50,000, I’d basically be doing my fortune-telling in front of a packed house at the Tokyo Dome. Best not to think about it too much.

  I’d started doing this stream at home after Chi’d gotten the idea and dragged me into it. But I’d ended up being really popular, and the first time my viewer count hit 50,000, I’d gotten a message from Niconico’s staff. After that, they promoted me, and my stream became official. Isn’t that nuts? I find it a little hard to believe myself, but it’s all true.

  More comments came after I finished my introduction.

  “You’re so cute, Myu! So cute!”

  “Wow, this girl is so cute!”

  “She’s looking cute again today.”

  “I want to lick her.”

  “Her voice is so hawt.”

  “I want to lick her hair.”

  “I want to lick her neck.”

  “I want to lick her eyeballs.”

  “I want to lick her ear canal.”

  “Guys, shut up with the licking, lol.”

  “Don’t lick me, my little puppies! It’s super-creepy!” I chuckled.

  More comments came back, and they were even creepier this time.

  “I love a tsundere!”

  “I’ll lick you more!”

  “I want to lick inside your nostrils!”

  “I’m fine with being creepy!”

  “Thank you for the cold stare.”

  “Insult me more!”

  “Umyu, I’ll delete anymore creepy comments, okay. Seriously, I’ll show no mercy.”

  I didn’t really like putting up with stuff like this. I just wanted to focus on testing my fortune-telling power.

  Well, I didn’t really mind all the attention. But lately, there’d been nothing but noise in the comments. That made it impossible to focus on my fortune-telling, so it was pretty stressful. Not that there was any point in complaining, I guess.

  I slapped my cheeks to help myself focus. “All right, are you ready for some fortune-telling? Oh, but should I tell you a little about this program first?”

  The plan was to just say what I wanted to say in as cheerful a manner as I could say it. That way, when it was all over, I could just forget it. That was the policy I’d decided on with Chi, and I was going to stick to that decision.

  “Okay, first, a quick explanation. This program stars me, the self-proclaimed fortune-teller, Myu. I’ve decided to call all you viewers my ‘little lost puppies,’ so keep that in mind. And I’ve got a revolutionary way for you puppies to get in contact with me. Just call me on my phone! Who will be chosen? Only fate can tell you!”

  Of course, this wasn’t my personal phone. It was just a number I used for the show. I had two cellphones now. During the first episode, I’d used my real number, but Chi had told me that it was dangerous.

  “So is everybody ready? Here’s the number!”

  I typed the phone number in with my keyboard, and then turned on the phone.

  A moment later, it showed up in the special streamer comment box on the screen.

  At the exact same moment, the phone began to ring.

  “Wow, you guys are too fast.” But the call quickly stopped and went to voice mail. This was deliberate.

  I had the phone set to go directly to voice mail after three rings. During those three rings, I’d decide if I would pick it up or not. I didn’t really have any reason why I’d answer one call and ignore another. It came down to how I felt at any given moment.

  I decided to ignore the phone for a moment. Instead, I took the cards I used for fortune-telling out of my hoodie’s pocket and put them onto the table. The cards were similar to tarot cards, but a little different.

  —Those cards are the mirror of your heart. They are your animus.

  Dad’s words flashed through my mind, and I sighed, softly.

  “All right, let’s talk to our first little lost puppy for today!”

  The calls were coming in fast. The phone would ring, then go right to voice mail, and then ring again. I looked at each number as it appeared on my caller ID, and waited for the right moment to pick one.

  It was important to keep the viewers a little anxious. That was something I’d learned over my past twelve broadcasts.

  “Okay, I’ve got it! Push the button!” I pressed the button and answered the call that had just come in. I set the phone to speaker mode and started to talk.

  “Hello? This is Nicco-Nico Live Fortune-Telling. You’re on.”

  “Oh, huh? Oh, hi. Wow, I actually made it through!” I could hear an excited male voice on the other side of the phone.

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Oh, call me Mochi-Mochi Pon-Pon. Thanks for talking to me, Myu.”

  “Of course. Thanks for your call.” I bowed to the camera.

  “All right, Mr. Mochi-Mochi Pon-Pon, tell me what I can help you with.”

  He wanted some help with a love interest of his.

  There was a person he liked at his company, but he was sure that they weren’t interested in him. It was obvious that if he asked them out, they’d hate him. But he wanted to work up the courage to do it anyway. Should he work up the courage to do it? Something like that.

  It was a pretty standard request, but from the tone of his voice I could tell that he was pretty desperate.

  If he was talking about a co-worker, did that mean that Mr. Mochi-Mochi Pon-Pon was out of school? Somebody like that was seriously asking me to help him with my fortune-telling?

  Would I be able to help him?

  “Okay. Time for Myu’s Nicco-Nico Fortune-Telling to begin!” I shouted.

  Then I picked up the stack of cards. I shuffled them, then laid them face-down on the table.

  Normally fortune-tellers used the Major Arcana from a deck of tarot cards. But I was different.

  I’d made these cards myself. They were all very poorly drawn. Each depicted a tiny girl and a dog with the body of a man, who I called Dogman. I’d drawn every image with crayons when I was little.

  Dad had actually taken pictures of them to preserve them. And these cards were printed from those photographs.

  There were twenty-two in all. When I was young, I’d drawn the same number of pictures a
s cards in the Major Arcana, without the slightest conscious idea of what I was doing. I’d taken to calling them the Dog Arcana now.

  I kept shuffling the cards on the table. I started feeling a small, pricking pain deep in my chest.

  —I always did.

  The pain in my chest was just an illusion, but I was scared. Each time I told someone’s fortune, I felt like... like I wanted to run away.

  Like, what if the result was bad? What if I told them something bad, and messed up the futures of the people who wanted to know their fortunes?

  It was easy to say that since I was just telling someone what their future would be like, I wasn’t really responsible for what would happen. But from the perspective of the people I was talking to, that would just sound like an excuse. Right at this very moment, I was in a position where I could ruin somebody’s future. That’s why I was scared when I told fortunes.

  But...

  But I kept doing it. I had to.

  I finished my shuffling and brought the cards back into a deck. Then I drew ten cards from the top and laid them face-down on the table. They were laid out in roughly the same shape as the Kabbalah, or Tree of Life, which connected the ten Sephirot.

  I remembered a while ago, a professional tarot reader had gotten mad at me and told me I wasn’t doing it quite right. From their perspective, it must have looked like I was doing it wrong.

  But just as the Tree of Life was formed by the ten Sephirot, I put a each card in its position.

  All ten cards were face-down. Which ones I turned over depended on the nature of the request.

  Since this request had to do with love, I should probably choose the Fourth Sephirah. I took a short breath, and then put my fingers on the card in the second row down on the right side of the Tree.

  “Open, Chesed!”

  Chesed was the Sephirah of kindness. It also symbolized holy love.

  I didn’t really have any reason for saying the name aloud. But Chi had told me that it would be better to have some kind of cool catchphrase, so I did.

  I looked at the screen and saw a huge flood of comments.

  “There it is!”

  “That catchphrase is so cool!”

  “I’m in love!”

  “She sounds like an otaku dork, lol.”