Namahage

Aoi the small child wanted to disappear, to be swallowed up by the darkness of the clothes cupboard. Seeking safety at the back of the cupboard she crawled deeper and deeper inside and then crouched in the confined space. Finally, she sat holding her knees to cover her face, cowering in fear. Clenching both hands with all her might, hiding from the namahage – the demon. Her thumbs were locked tightly between her sweating palms and four clenched fingers. This continued strained effort was making her knuckles visibly red and bright white as the blood was being trapped by abnormal pressure and prolonged clenching.

“Hide those thumbs! The namahage will get you!” They wailed. Those screaming voices yelled out inside her petrified head.

Aoi listened intently to the slightest sound of the namahage inside the house. She listened to the giveaway signs of the straw rustling made by the movement of his mino skirts. The stomp of his feet, searching the small house, searching for the small child named Aoi.

They said the namahage had first come to her country from another land beyond the huge seas. They came years ago with the red invaders feasting on the newly grown crops of rice. But everybody knew their real hunger was for naughty little girls – girls that misbehaved. The namahage had never left Aoi’s country of birth, they hid underground and only came out each year at the time of the harvest festival. Their menacing red faces and black eyes searching, their large bulbous bodies hungry for rice and a taste for a pure sweet innocent child.

“If you don’t behave yourself Aoi, the Oni, the demons will be after you. Namahage himself will smell your bad blood. You will see, Aoi. Just wait and see.” Her parents scolded her at the moments she misbehaved. She ignored their warnings, but their words were always remembered, and in those moments of solitude, those words came screaming back to haunt her.

She now regretted holding her chopsticks upright in defiance to her parents, bidding her always to place them solemnly, gently upon the chopstick holder. Laying the eating utensils to rest, an important dining etiquette, a sign of thankfulness for food consumed. Instead Aoi threw the chopsticks into the rice bowl and ran disobediently from the table.

Now she was hopelessly alone in the house at the mercy of the namahage.

Alone in the house with no one around to protect her, to reassure her that everything would be alright. To soothe her and tell her the namahage remained underground, sleeping, and there was nothing to worry about.

She was about to unclench her fists when she heard the bump. The closing of the front door of the house. There was no more than a millisecond delay on hearing the bump, as her heart sank, and then agonizingly started to pound, a silent scream leaped into her mind “It’s the Oni! It’s namahage coming to get me!” Aoi re-clenched her fists. There can’t be any gaps – she thought, the panic and fear thumping in her ears. No gaps for namahage or any oni to enter her body, take her body.

Then she remembered that it can’t be the ugly and disformed namahage, her parents had placed two piles of salt at each side of the front door, it was impossible for him to enter the house. Impossible – her last grains of confidence defiantly posed.

The sound of thump of a large foot on the stairs, and the creak of the wooden step under pressure sent new waves of panic, through her frightened trembling mind. Why did her parents leave her alone in the house without a companion?

“You’ll be fine darling! We won’t be long. Don’t forget your chores, bring those dry clothes in from the outside line – okay?” They shouted from behind the closing door.

Aoi ignored her mother’s request, as the plea to bring the dry clothes inside the house disappeared into the avenues of her teenage forgetfulness. Discarded like the falling autumn leaves to join the repeated seasonal event and become dust on the forthcoming winter winds.

With each creaking sound of the staircase step namahage climbed the stairs to the upper floor.

“They can smell naughty girl’s blood, there’s no escape!” They shouted in Aoi’s head.

“I promise to be a better-behaved girl, I promise!” Aoi screamed back inside her head answering the mocking voices. Only to be met by a chorus of laughter. “Namahage is coming to get you!” The voices sneered.

The creaking floorboards, the groaning stairs under the weight of the large and heavy namahage stopped.

“Where is he?” Cried Aoi full of fear as the blood drained from her body, she wanted to run, and escape her circumstances, as she listened for the slightest sound outside the cupboard door. There was no escape, she was trapped, at the mercy of namahage.

She smelt his evil presence before he appeared. Her nostrils twitched as a pungent smell of old rancid rice, combined with alcoholic fumes of sake reached her sense of smell. The rotten odours penetrated every inch of the small cupboard, and the confided space made the bad smell more potent.

The ghastly smell was followed by an effervescent green mist started lapping like invading tide water under the cupboard door. It climbed and wafted higher as it escaped the close confiding space between the bottom of the door and floor. Increasingly, the door itself started to become invisible to her eye, as the misty green smoke completely congested and covered the entrance door to her hiding place. The green mist crawled along the floor, as the wooden floorboards disappeared under the layers of smoke.

Aoi stared in horror as the green mist approached, and as the mist became less dense, she gradually came to realize the smokey vapour concealed yet a more dangerous threat. It revealed a huge slithering tongue with the colours of green and red, but on the edges, it was a mottled black. The tongue wriggled like a snake, it was searching in the cupboard, searching for Aoi. The mist was just camouflage, to conceal the deadly tongue, the reddish tip sometimes stopped and hovered as though it was smelling the air, trying to locate its victim.

Slowly it moved towards the back of the cupboard. Aoi’s mind, body and soul froze. She waited for her fate, as her last thoughts were pleading with her parents to pardon her misgivings as a mindless juvenile.

The crimson face of namahage appeared from behind the green mist, its crazed mouth wide open with its tongue ready to pounce. Its black eyes glinted, knowing that its prey had been located there was no escape.

Aoi suddenly awoke from her nightmare sweating in panic. She immediately looked at the bedside table; the candle had extinguished long ago. The rice cakes gone, and the sake; a memory on someone’s palate.

As she gathered her crazed and battered mind away from the terror of her nightmare with every second slowly becoming a dreadful memory, she continued to stare at the bedside table.

The nightmare was being replaced by yet another frightening realization. “Who had indulged himself? Was it the namahage! Was the nightmare real?”

Or had it only just begun.