Chapter Text
:"A boy child rides upon your back. Take him away
through a mirror dark and blessed with cracks."
The void beyond Hell Gate still called, empty-bellied. The outsider’s penance had done little to calm it, his presence in the village unforeseen, brief. Less than a makegood, he had been a disruption to the intended ritual, having come in search of the twins that now stood between its teeth.
From where all three had come, none of the village heads questioned. Nor was it any of their concern. They themselves belonged to ancient lines that had, generations before, been drawn to Zawazawa Village by that same force of predestination. Their lives, like their fathers’ lives, had been shaped indelibly about the Hell Gate ritual and its continued practice, its complete minutiae. They were entrusted with a great and honorable burden, to guarantee that the Hell Gate would remain forever closed, that the void that lay beyond would never spill over into the world of the light.
Twins. One single soul torn in two, made to walk the earth apart. An impossible existence, something of another world. It is through their bodies, through their strange stance between the spiritual and the physical, that the abyss is lulled back to sleep, and the Hell Gate can again be slammed shut. The first instance of the ritual went unrecorded, but the second, and so forth, were historied in extensive note by the founding members of each family, the Washizu, the Ichikawa, the Urabe.
They were cleansed in body and cloth, made to pass under the clearest of moonlight on separate but parallel paths. They would meet in the room of the grand altar, where one would be made to strangle the other, and, in death, restore their cleaved spirit. The body of the deceased would be surrendered to the void behind the rock, and the paper seal would hold for another generation.
Once before, the ritual had been left incomplete and a terrible earthquake razed the village to the ground. Ever since, it was a sworn duty until death for the village heads, to secure the twins for their sacrifice, to guarantee their utmost safety until the ceremony’s conclusion.
That is why the coming of the outsider brought along so much commotion. His presence was a threat to all that the village held dear, their entrusted, ancestral role as guardians, custodians, caretakers of the Hell Gate. He was a policeman, having come of his own accord, drawn in by the stories spoken in the cities about the people of the woods, and the strange, irresistible magnetism of the abyss. The twin boys had been effectively surrendered to the village, their disappearance gone unnoticed, or, better to say, disregarded by all the adult eyes of the city. That is, but for the eyes of the policeman. Yasuoka. He had given his name, walked around flashing his badge into the crack of every door, demanding the attention of any who would listen. He was escorted about town, shown behind each partition, the underside of every tatami mat, even taken through the rows of gravestones that linked Zawazawa Village to the endless succession of years. And still he was not satisfied. He brought out accusations, and his pistol, brandished it about like a guarantee. He said he had come into the village alone but he would not leave the same. No power on Earth could deny him this. The boys would be found alive and well, or every grave would be disemboweled, every log in the shrine temple turned to firewood, every idolled deity reduced to a shit pile.
In his words hid his fate. The heads of the village had plenty before dealt with the interference of the outside world: prying hands and eyes. A lone policeman with no ties to the world, he was perfectly suited for sacrifice. It would not satiate the calls of the abyss for long, but it would at least suffice until the boys could be prepared in their roles. Even those ritual twins fortunate enough to be raised in the village often faltered when that honored night’s moon shone the plates of their faces, and they knew that they were two mirrors between which death’s reflection danced endlessly. It was a mountainous task to take death in one’s hand - nigh insurmountable when it was the death of your own double.
But the boys, better than all those whose long trials were recollected in scrolls, took to their duties without the slightest resistance. It was as if they longed for nothing more in life than to skim the pond of the abyss, dip their limbs beneath the cool film, and engulf themselves completely in the hell beyond. Their lives were set upon a sort of deathward axis. And in this they earned the total respect of the village heads.
Akagi. Hirayama. Names that would be etched in stone along the altar shrine, names that would hold through time, through calamity. Never would two more perfect lambs walk willingly to slaughter.
The Ichikawa house was two-storied, with old sheet walls that stretched along an L-shape foundation. In the time between rituals, children of the village would scatter amidst its countless hideaways, corridors, closets, filling themselves full of ghost stories about the family members that had spent their years between these walls. The boldest of the groups would sometimes turn to gossip about the shrine twins, the tales told of secret doors tucked away behind old chests, the echoed cries of lonesome spirits who still wandered the earth without their mirror companion. These were not stories to share around grown-ups. It was considered sacrilege, and would earn you a fist upside the head, and a night with no dinner. The ritual and its participants were to be respected, no matter the passing of years.
The elder Ichikawa was almost a spirit himself, a thin, aged member of the village with long strands of ashen hair and frigid nails filed to a lengthened point. His face carried wisps of age, like sheer fog, though he was completely hairless but for his scalp. Amongst his family, it was the duty of each generation’s eldest, one that brought with the admiration of the village. Two males would be sired as heirs, as soon as time and body would allow, and then the firstborn would be castrated and stripped of his sight in a public performance. The younger, spared (or in the village’s mind, denied) would helm the bloodline to come, his spirit condemned to remain embodied, anchored to the earth, through his off-spring. This performance was to prepare the boy for his ritual role, to assure the sanctity of his position, his entrustment with the cleansing of the altar twins before their passage to the shrine.
When the boys Akagi and Hirayama arrived he immediately set to work on suitable wear for them, taking their exact measurements so that a fitting yukata could be sewn in time. He was made to confine himself in doors, lest his sexless purity be spoiled in some way by a wandering demon. His skin, thus, turned to a hue like thin paper - he could read the wirings of blood beneath his wrist like strokes of ink. He spoke only when spoken to. When he was alone with his responsibilities in the family study, it was as if the room sat unoccupied. Not a sound could be heard even if one stood just behind the bannister.
The boys did not invite much conversation. They had barely muttered more than their names since first stepping foot in the village square, still dressed in tattered school clothes - collared shirts and pleated shorts. They could not be more than 13; though, with their frail figures, signs of an impoverished living, they seemed almost years younger.
They had hair much like Ichikawa’s, though shorter and still with the viscosity of youth. It was the color of a summer day’s cloud, white and clean and endless. The only way of telling apart the two was in how their hair was worn. Hirayama’s was forever struck up like a matchstick flame, and he would squint his eyes whenever he was brought to read. In another life, he would be given glasses, and he would make himself into something of a scholar, so as to prove his eyes, though faulty, were deserved.
Akagi’s hair sat above his eyes like the scruff of a dog. Some time before he had abandoned the city, someone had taken care, with gentle hands, to trim his hair short, so that no strands would fall below his brow. But time had passed and now he looked something like an oni . Those same children that ran about the Ichikawa house feared Akagi most of all; they avoided his stare even more than that of the village adults. They worried that those hands that would soon strangle Hirayama (they were certain Akagi would be the twin to survive) would one day turn upon them, and that they would too be lost in the Hell Gate.
Even when seated in Ichikawa’s study, while the elder worked, the two would never part from each other’s hand. And it was always Akagi who held the tightest grip. The second word he had spoken since arriving was to rebuke a villager that had tried to separate the two, for even just attempting to find them separate bedding. Their attachment brought unease to Ceremony Master Washizu, who felt that such a codependency went against the ritual’s ultimate end. But the boy seemed to understand the full weight of the village’s demand, or at least never made any attempt to run. Hirayama, the same. Though their words were equally few, it seemed that Akagi’s motions, his glances, grunts, spoke for the pair.
Hirayama seemed to value the company of the village elders more than his twin. He would drag Akagi to Ichikawa’s desk to stare at the many scrolls unfurled across, he would tap on the elder’s shoulder whenever the two needed a meal. But it was in his withdrawal that the heads of the village came to favor Akagi, and all his resolute solitude. His spirit was unlike that of any other martyr that had come before, and spoke to legends that had taken root in the mere whispers and scribblings of the ancestors: a demon child that would be the complete embodiment of the impossible abyss of the Hell Gate, impenetrable darkness sealed in flesh and blood.
They were tasked with inking the names of previous ritual twins, to honor the infinite sacrifice of those that came before. It would take them the night. Ichikawa would sit and monitor, direct them away from distraction. Their eyes traced the tips of their brushings, along the eloquent strokes of antique kanji the boys had never been made to study. Old names of boys, girls (girls mostly), who, with their double, had taken steps under moonlight towards that ceremony altar, towards the annihilation of the body and its cursed disconnect and the eternal reunion that came through the release of the spirit.
“Akagi - do not let your ink stray onto the mat. Or you will clean it after,” said Ichikawa, still straight forward in seiza . His especial role in the ceremony’s proceedings, his divorce from sight, the same sacrifice taken up by all the eldest men of his lineage, made him best suited for guardianship of the boys. He could tell the pattering of their feet up the long steps of the house, down the cobbled village streets, apart from any other’s. He could set a lineup out of a stampede, he knew the wear and plop of each village child’s sandals, and he knew which ones chose to scurry about the town without. Such is to say, he knew Akagi had a habit of going astray with his brush.
“You should follow your brother’s hand. You know it well enough.”
Akagi did not respond, as was expected. His eyes raised to Ichikawa’s words, then glared, and lowered, at the silence that followed. He moved his brush closer towards the center of the scroll and went back to his work. In an hour’s time, when their night had concluded, he would pocket the inkwell and brush and bring the pair back to his room. Ichikawa would know, of course, but he would hold his tongue, allow the boy his small rebellion. Then he would see, in the morning, the result. Lines upon lines upon lines of text in perfect hand, across the floors, walls, and ceiling of his study, and of the hallway outside, and up and down every inch of Hirayama’s bare self. Demon Child. Demon Child. Demon Child.