Hyakki Yagyou

Chapter Five: Cigarette, Intimacy

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum – 

Kept beating – beating – till I thought

My Mind was going numb –

-        Emily Dickinson

December 8th, 2:30 pm

The website remained quiet for full fifteen hours after everyone saw on the news that Suzuki Yumi-chan had passed away, hours and hours before she was able to send those messages. It was clear to everyone not prone to conspiracy theories and believing in the supernatural that the system was under some kind of strange maintenance when the video appeared. A system bug or something of the sort.

No one gave this a thought but everyone was equally shocked that the girl killed herself. She was always a cheerful girl, wasn't she? Made everyone laugh.

But weren't people like that the saddest, Asuka figured?

When she woke up in the hospital, she was completely confused. What happened? Where was Yumi? Who got her to the hospital? All questions turned out to have an answer. The drug she had taken, as the doctor told her, had a strong hallucinogen. Asuka was worried that the hospital staff may call the police but in the end, no one did.

She thought it was only a logical sequence of things – you see a person has taken drugs, you call the police. The police come to question the person. The person possibly loses their job.

It was at that point that she was glad the doctor did not bother making a phone-call to the police department. If she lost her job, Asuka would have nothing. She had money left for this month and then what?

She would end up homeless, on the street, freezing has ass off. Fine, winters were not as cold there as they were in Kushiro but still! The point was made.

The hallucinogen would have explained her… Delusion about Yumi wouldn't it, she wondered? Somehow, her mind split into two. The first part cursed Aoyama for mixing his drugs. Why on earth would he do that? How much did he charge that crap then? He probably doubled the amount of money for this, whatever it was.

The second part wondered why she had such a vivid, morbid hallucination of Yumi killing herself by jumping in front of train… And then she found out, via the news, that this was exactly how the poor girl’s life ended. Hit by a train, luckily not as hard as to have her body mutilated but still… It did its job.

Yumi, website’s probably most cheerful member, was gone.

A freaking sixteen year old.

Somehow, suicides became a part of people’s daily lives, ironically enough, in this country. Someone was doing something wrong, she figured and no one was stopping to figure out what the wrong part was.

She sighed.

At around midnight, it was announced that on December 8th, Yumi’s funeral would be held. It was only proper that all of them went to attend it. They did not have to talk to each other. They had a vow, after all, of never meeting in person. Who knew if a website as secret as this one, with a mysterious (if not suspicious) admin, was even legal?

They would just attend the funeral, express their condolences and leave. If the family asked, they were either friends or people who sympathized and felt terrible about the case, thereby feeling obligated to visit the grieving family.

Everyone agreed. By 2 am, almost everyone said they would attend: Emi-chan, Keita, admin, Ryu, Yui, she (Asuka), Kenji and that creepy guy whose name Asuka could not remember but she never talked to him much anyways. The rest of the members said nothing but somehow she felt everyone would come.