Underneath the Red Trees

CHAPTER 49: NIGHTMARES

Screams echoing. Fear. Terror welling up. Consuming like a suffocating heat... A shining glimmer appeared in the vision of a child. Blood splattered to the floor of an old house. Dismembered bodies made a child shriek. Tears flowed, like the blood seeping into the floorboards...

Kaguya gasped. For a moment, she couldn't breathe. She composed herself. It was just a dream... she repeated that to herself over and over again until she felt the air return to her lungs.

She was covered in a thin sheen of sweat. The dream had left her cheeks stained with tears and her heart shaken. She let out a heavy breath and pulled her messy hair back. In and out. In and out. Until her breaths evened out.

Old memories still haunted her. Those nightmares followed her even now, in her second lifetime. Perhaps she would never escape them.

5:27 flashed in animatronic red letters on the digital clock beside her bed. She wouldn't be able to go back to sleep again.

The rainy season had ended only a couple days ago.

She grabbed her phone. 24 July. It was her birthday today. She was twenty-three years old. Twenty-three and still suffering from night terrors as a result of her past life.

There was a shadow in her room. A person that was not there. A person that would never be there again. She smiled ruefully. Being haunted by one's past life was truly a form of torture. She sometimes wished she had been born detached. It would have been an easier way of living, but that was not the fate she had been dealt. 

Sachiko stepped through her portal, into the Red Room. It was empty. Not unusual. Void and desolate, save for the armchair which was occupied by a certain Break.

Sachiko leaned on the backrest and found the Face Eater with his eyes closed, resting. Sachiko often found him like this. She was the only Break that could enter the Red Room at will. For one so ominous and terrifying, the Face Eater looked uncharacteristically peaceful as he slept.

Sachiko prided herself on the fact that the Face Eater favoured her. She knew very well that she was special. After all, she had seen his true face. Well, not seen, but she had borne witness to it. She had felt it under her fingers. The Face Eater did not show anyone his true face. Anyone that asked would spell their own doom with that request, but he had shown her. She had not even asked. He had done it on his own whim.

The Face Eater's eyelashes quivered. Slowly, they slid open to reveal those eyes, one of black, one of red.

Sachiko grinned, "Did you sleep well?"

Breaks did not need sleep, or food, or any necessities that humans depended on, but some of them still clung to old human habits as a way of clinging onto life. Many Breaks believed the Face Eater was the only one who was above that, but he was not. In fact, he clung to this, to sleep, and to the feeling of human pain, harder than any Break did.

There were certain things that a humans needed to become a Break. A life of suffering, malice in their hearts, and almost always a twisted mind which was standardly a result of their torment.

The Baron, for example, had been tormented by the man he worked for once. He had been the real baron. After becoming a Break, the Baron took his revenge by eating his tormentor and dawning his favourite clothes. He still wore them to this day.

Sachiko had become a Break over seventy years ago, right after the end of World War II. Her husband had drowned her. Love had been her downfall. She had loved her husband too much to realise he was going to kill her. Her revenge had been taken out on her husband and his lover. It rarely happened, but Sachiko's abuser survived her wrath. Sachiko had killed her husband's lover and stuffed the woman like an animal. She ended up feeding the woman's meat to her husband. Her husband was arrested for two murders a year later and sentenced to death. Sachiko had not killed him, though.