Chapter Text
Scaramouche's hand rested against the edge of his history textbook as he immersed himself in an account of the turbulent Bakumatsu period, reading about samurai assassinations, disputes between clans, and the young Emperor Meiji, who would soon change the course of the entire country.
Beside him, on his previously perfectly made bed, [Reader] was disrupting the order entirely, lying on her stomach with a shōjo manga spread out in front of her. Yet another clichéd romance, as he had already noticed. No wonder she came up with idiotic ideas like asking him if they would get married when they grew up when she spent her free time devouring stories written by romantically frustrated middle-aged women.
The room had been quiet for the past several minutes, which was unusual enough that Scaramouche had completely stopped paying attention to [Reader]. It was only after some time that he noticed she hadn't turned a page in quite a while. He glanced at the black-and-white comic spread out in front of her and, despite himself, read a snippet of dialogue between the characters. He had seen the same passage three times already, so if she really was following the text, she must have memorized it by now.
Unless she wasn't paying attention to the words at all.
At last, she lifted her head and flinched when she met his gaze. For several heartbeats, she remained completely still, as though she had been caught doing something she definitely wasn't supposed to be doing. Scaramouche was already opening his mouth to ask what she had been thinking about so intently, but she spoke first.
"Have you heard of The Hollow Manse?"
The boy furrowed his brow.
"That horror movie that came out recently?"
"Yeah. Have you seen it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I have better things to do."
[Reader] puffed out her cheeks like a pufferfish when he pointed meaningfully at his history textbook, as though that alone were a sufficient argument.
"I heard the movie is really good. My classmates have been talking about it for the past few days!"
He closed the textbook, leaving a finger between the pages to mark his place. The mention of her classmates caught his attention. After what had happened recently, when she had stood up for him and objected to the unflattering rumors, her reputation in class had clearly taken a hit. It wasn't difficult to guess why she had suddenly become so interested in this particular movie.
He rested his chin on his free hand.
"So what?"
[Reader] lowered her gaze for a moment before gathering enough courage to say aloud what Scaramouche had already figured out.
"I want to see it."
"You can't."
Her expression immediately fell. She sat back on her heels and blinked several times, staring at him in disbelief.
"Why?"
"Because it's rated eighteen."
"That's why you have to watch it with me! My twelve years combined with your seventeen gives us way more than eighteen!"
"That's not how age ratings work..."
"But if you watch it with me, it'll be just like watching it with my parents! And you can watch stuff like that with your parents, right?"
Scaramouche let out a heavy sigh. If the movie really was as disturbing as the reviews claimed, his presence wouldn't magically make the ghosts and other terrifying things any less fictional. Still, he understood perfectly well where her request had come from. He glanced at the textbook lying in front of him, then closed it completely.
"You'll regret it later. You've never watched a horror movie like this before."
"Everyone has a first time! And if my classmates managed to handle it, then so can I!"
He gave her a deeply skeptical look, which she endured with the stubbornness unique to children. She had no intention of changing her mind. Scaramouche had learned more than once what she was capable of when she really wanted something: she would ask, pester him, and come up with increasingly ridiculous arguments until, eventually, he gave in just for the sake of peace and quiet. He might as well save himself the trouble and agree to her request now, especially since he didn't believe she would make it through the entire movie anyway. All that confidence she was displaying so convincingly would probably disappear the moment something truly terrifying appeared on the screen.
"Fine. We'll watch it." The moment the magic words left his mouth, [Reader] immediately lit up. "Just don't blame me afterward."
"I won't, I promise!"
With a wide smile, she sprang off the bed and headed for the living room. Scaramouche glanced at the manga she had abandoned, then shook his head slightly. He wondered how long it would take [Reader] to change her mind. Twenty minutes, thirty at most, was his guess.
By the time he finally reached the living room, [Reader] was already sitting on the sofa, rocking from side to side like a battery-powered mascot.
"Hurry up, Scara! At this rate, your mom will be home from work before we even start!"
He stopped and shot her a dark look.
"One more word and you're watching it alone."
[Reader] straightened up like a rod and ran two fingers across her lips, letting him know she intended to keep her promise. He scoffed under his breath, but eventually opened U-NEXT and typed The Hollow Manse into the search bar. With the remote in hand, he sat down on the sofa and then handed her the cotton blanket lying on his side. She snatched it up immediately and wrapped it tightly around her legs before settling more comfortably against the back of the couch. Neither of them had turned on the lights beforehand, so the room was left in semidarkness, illuminated only by the glow of the television.
The movie opened with a family moving into an abandoned estate and gradually uncovering the history of their new home. Every now and then, [Reader] leaned forward whenever something on the screen particularly caught her attention. After a while, Scaramouche noticed that he was doing exactly the same thing. He had expected an average horror movie that would start relying on cheap jump scares after a few minutes, but the filmmakers had shown a little more ambition: empty hallways, creaking floorboards, and room after room swallowed by silence built tension without resorting to constant screams or dramatic music. At first, Scaramouche watched with indifference, but with each passing minute, he found himself checking the clock less and less often.
[Reader] remained calm throughout the first few scenes. It was only when a door somewhere behind the female lead suddenly slammed shut with a loud bang that she flinched. Scaramouche glanced at her, but a moment later, she was staring at the screen again.
A little later, the protagonist began to hear footsteps above her. At first, the sound was barely audible, almost blending in with the creaking of the old house, but as the woman climbed the stairs toward the attic, it grew increasingly distinct. [Reader] went completely still and held her breath. The glow from the television reflected in her [color] eyes. Scaramouche only noticed because she pulled the blanket higher around herself.
The protagonist's footsteps came to a stop. The woman on the screen paused at the top of the stairs, tilting her right ear toward the sound. Nothing happened. Nothing except the curtain swaying lazily beside the open window. [Reader]'s shoulders relaxed slightly, but then a shadow appeared behind the curtain, prompting the girl to grab Scaramouche by the sleeve.
He immediately seized the opportunity.
"Turn it off?"
"No!" she protested, quickly pulling her hand away. "I'm not scared! I was just checking if you were asleep."
He scoffed, keeping his eyes on the screen.
The movie continued without pause, growing darker with every scene. Ever since the characters discovered that the layout of the estate was changing, the story had taken an increasingly sinister turn. New, mysterious rooms began to appear, their furnishings and decor belonging to entirely different eras. Some doors led to corridors that resembled labyrinths, while others opened onto places that hadn't existed there before. One of the supporting characters disappeared after entering a bedroom. The director never showed exactly what had happened to him, but the sounds coming from behind the closed door left very little to the imagination.
When he briefly looked away to glance at her, he noticed that her fingers were gripping the edge of the blanket so tightly her knuckles had gone pale. During the next frightening scene, she edged so close to him that their shoulders touched, staring at the screen without blinking, as though looking away for even a second might allow the dark force from the movie to seep into their reality.
Suddenly, the screen was filled with a face as black as coal. Its cracked surface crumbled away in tiny pieces, revealing bloodshot, milky eyes devoid of even a trace of life. A moment later, blood splattered across the wall, and the head of another character rolled across the floor with a sickening thud.
[Reader] let out a tiny, mouse-like squeak and immediately hid behind Scaramouche’s arm, which she raised in front of herself like a shield.
“Okay, I’m really turning it off this time,” he announced. With his free hand, he began feeling around the couch for the remote. Before he could find it, however, [Reader] shook his arm.
“N-No, I’m still watching.”
“Yeah, and you’re shaking like a leaf.”
“I-I can make it to the end!”
“Yeah, sure.”
She didn’t loosen her grip around his arm, though she did let it fall instead of keeping it raised in front of her eyes. He could have left it that way, but after a while, her fingers began digging into his skin harder and harder, so he yanked his arm free with an irritated scoff. This forced her to watch the rest of the movie through the gaps between her fingers, though every time he glanced at her, she immediately lowered her hands.
Soon, another unsettling scene began, and [Reader] edged closer to him, apparently without even realizing it. By the end of the movie, she was practically leaning against his side, yet she stubbornly remained silent instead of asking him to turn off the television, much to his frustration.
Eventually, the mystery of the estate was solved, the ghost disappeared for good, and the end credits began to roll across the screen. [Reader] remained motionless for several seconds, staring at the television as one name after another scrolled past. Only after a long moment had passed without anything else happening did she slowly exhale and toss the blanket aside.
“Well, it was actually a pretty good movie,” she declared with an energy she hadn’t shown in the past hour and a half, but he was kind enough not to point that out. “I thought it would be scarier.”
Despite her words, she reached for the remote, ending the movie before he had a chance to say anything. For a moment, he watched her with an expression that made it perfectly clear he had no intention of getting into an argument with her about what had just happened. There was little point. If she wanted to remember that evening as an impressive display of bravery, he saw no reason to shatter the illusion.
“Well, you can be proud of yourself.”
She smiled with satisfaction, apparently convinced that she had just proven her point. Scaramouche had no intention of taking that little moment of triumph away from her, especially since, in just a few hours, she might experience her very own horror story, directed entirely by her imagination.
All it would take was a floorboard creaking in the middle of the night.
~~~♥~~~
She wasn’t scared—or at least, that was what she kept telling herself, both while watching the horror movie and while getting ready for bed. The movie had been frightening at times, and the scariest scenes kept coming back to her whenever she let her thoughts wander. But at least she had watched it all the way to the end! So she had absolutely no reason to be nervous about going to sleep, right?
Unfortunately, knowing something and actually feeling it were two entirely different things...
That evening, she paid more attention than usual to the sounds around her: the creaking of the floorboards, the quiet hum of the refrigerator, or the wind brushing against the windowpanes. She lay beneath the covers with her eyes wide open. She knew the shapes she could see in the darkness, and yet it was becoming harder and harder to believe that the chair was really just a chair. Even the school uniform hanging on the closet made her uneasy—she could no longer tell whether it had moved because of a draft or whether there was something else in her room.
She tried to think about other, more mundane things, like what she would have for breakfast tomorrow, but she couldn’t get the ghost’s face out of her head. If the adults in the movie had barely managed to deal with it, what chance would she have?
She shook her head and turned onto her side, pulling the covers all the way up to her nose until only her eyes remained visible. The difference between her home and the mansion from the movie was enormous, after all. She knew that perfectly well. They didn’t have any mysterious rooms, endlessly stretching corridors, or ghosts lurking behind curtains or doors. It was all just her imagination playing tricks on her.
[Reader] squeezed her eyes shut, but a few seconds later, she opened them again, deciding that it was better to be safe than sorry. She would rather keep her eyes open in case some ghost actually decided to show up that night. She listened to the sounds coming from throughout the house, with the ticking of the clock hanging in the living room rising above all the rest.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
The monotonous sound gradually lulled her to sleep. Her eyelids grew heavier and heavier, her breathing slowed, and exhaustion slowly began to overpower her fear. Eventually, sleep claimed her.
“[Reader]... [Reader], wake up, or you’ll be late for school!”
Yomogawa’s piercingly loud voice came through the door, only slightly muffled by it. Jolted brutally awake, the girl sat up and rubbed her eyes. Why hadn’t her alarm gone off? She glanced at the nightstand, but the familiar cat-shaped device was nowhere to be seen. After a few moments of frantic searching, she found it underneath her pillow and let out a groan when she saw the time. There went her chance of getting a little more sleep...
With a decisive motion, she threw off the covers. She quickly put on her school uniform, brushed her hair, and stuffed her things into her bag, all the while deliberately avoiding looking in the mirror. The faint shadows beneath her eyes betrayed the fact that the previous night had been far from restful—she had spent roughly as much time asleep as she had lying awake, listening to sounds coming from the house and outside her window.
She had so little time left that she had to give up on making a bento. Her mother gave her some money to buy something from the school store, so [Reader] slipped it into her bag and dashed out of the house like one of the manga heroines she loved so much. All she was missing was a piece of toast hanging from her mouth to complete the scene, but she didn’t have time to look for one either.
At the street corner that had unofficially become their usual meeting spot before school, she didn’t see Scaramouche. Maybe he had assumed she’d overslept and gone ahead without her? Although she understood why he hadn’t waited, she still felt a small pang of disappointment. She quickly shook it off and hurried toward school. The last thing she needed was to be late, especially after the recent scolding she’d received. She really didn’t think she could handle another one!
By the time she reached school, she had regained at least some of her confidence. The bright daylight left little room for her imagination to run wild. She no longer had to worry about unsettling noises or suspiciously glance toward shadowy corners. She had survived that awful night after watching a horror movie, and, more importantly, now she finally had something to talk about with her friends. The thought alone was enough to lift her spirits a little.
She made it to class on time, but the opportunity to talk didn’t come until the break. As soon as the teacher left the classroom, the students began drifting toward their usual spots and falling into their familiar groups. This time, [Reader] didn’t even glance in Sayaka’s direction or at her friends. Instead, she turned her attention toward the class representative’s desk, where Ayaka was talking with her vice-representative, Himura. The two of them were laughing about something [Reader] couldn’t hear.
For a moment, she considered simply walking past and waiting for one of them to bring up the movie herself. She knew their names and had exchanged a few words with them, but she wasn’t close enough to any of them to just walk over and join the conversation without feeling awkward. After what had happened with Sayaka, [Reader] wasn’t even sure anymore what her classmates really thought of her. For all she knew, they had already decided she was “a troublemaker” or “the girl who starts fights.”
But she couldn’t let all that suffering from last night go to waste! She had endured that terrifying movie, then spent half the night listening to every creak and rustle. Was she really supposed to keep something like that to herself? What would she even tell Scaramouche afterward? She would never hear the end of his teasing. So, before she could hesitate again, she was already walking toward the class representative’s desk.
“Ohayo, Himura-san! Iinchō*!” she called, forcing herself to sound casual. It came out a little more nervous than she had intended, but she pressed on. “What are you two talking about?”
“Ohayo, [Reader]-san.” Ayaka smiled at her. “We were talking about the homework.”
“Oh! And how did it go? Those problems were pretty difficult, weren’t they?”
The day before, she had asked Scaramouche for help with math before settling down to read her manga. If they hadn't done their homework together then, they probably wouldn't have had enough time to watch the movie later.
"Just the last two. I managed to finish the rest while we were still in class. I was explaining to Himura-san how I got my answers because apparently she got a different one."
"And I still don't understand where I went wrong."
"I told you, you mixed up the order of operations."
[Reader] listened to their exchange, occasionally trying to add something of her own. The conversation was going smoothly enough, but it was a long way from being a casual chat. She couldn't shake the feeling that one wrong word would be enough to lose not only Ayaka's and Himura's goodwill, but also that of the other students in the class, who kept glancing in their direction every now and then.
After a moment, she remembered the movie, and a fresh wave of hope washed over her. If she played her cards right, perhaps she could finally stop being the class loner.
"Oh, right! Have you seen The Hollow Manse?"
The title that had been on everyone's lips for the past few days caused a small stir. Ayaka, as befitted the class representative, remained perfectly composed, with the unshakable calm of a member of the royal family. Himura, two other girls, and a boy, however, all showed an interest in the subject.
"You're talking about that horror movie?"
"Oh, it was so scary!"
"I can't believe you watched it. That's not a movie for girls."
[Reader]'s mouth fell open a little wider. She hadn't expected her question to cause such a stir, but she definitely preferred it to dead silence.
"Believe whatever you want," one of the girls who had joined the conversation replied. [Reader] tried to remember her name, but came up blank. "I watched it with my brother yesterday, and he was more scared than I was."
"Really? I watched it yesterday too, with... someone." At the last moment, [Reader] caught herself and quickly changed the subject. "What scared you the most about the mansion?"
"Everything! But I think those changing hallways were the worst..."
"Oh, definitely. The worst part was near the end, when they found the library!"
"The library?" the other girl repeated.
"Mhm! The one whose door disappeared later, so they had to go through the balcony."
A brief silence fell, one [Reader] hadn't expected at all. She would have thought she'd said something wrong if not for the expressions on her classmates' faces and the uncertain glances they exchanged.
[Reader] furrowed her brows slightly.
"What? Is something wrong?"
"No," Himura replied quickly. "It's... that was scary too."
The girl studied the vice president for a moment before looking at the others. They were still trying to look confident, but it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to believe the act. Himura suddenly became very interested in fixing her hair, while the boy glanced toward the door as if hoping the teacher would return any second and force them to change the subject.
"You watched the movie, right?" [Reader] asked.
"Of course!" the boy replied immediately, before letting out a nervous laugh. "But I can only speak for myself..."
"What happened after the protagonists found the hidden room?"
[Reader] put her hands on her hips, like a teacher questioning students who hadn't prepared for class. The silence that followed her question stretched on for dangerously long, and it was more than enough of an answer. She didn't feel confident enough to scold them for lying, but fortunately, she wasn't the only one who had seen through the whole charade.
"They wanted to look cool, but they actually didn't watch the movie," Ayaka said with a small, pitying smile.
"I watched it!" Himura insisted.
"Yes, the trailer."
"Ugh..."
[Reader] could barely believe her ears.
"But you were talking about the movie earlier like you'd actually watched it!"
"Well... we know what happens in it, don't we?"
"Exactly! So it's practically the same as watching it."
[Reader] looked from one person to another, slowly putting all the pieces together. The movie they supposedly had watched had actually turned out to be a trailer, a single clip, or a story told by an older sibling. None of them had watched it from beginning to end like she had.
She thought about the dark mansion, the ghost, and the blood-curdling screams. She had gone through that nightmare because she was convinced that her classmates had gone through exactly the same thing. Now that the truth was out, she was overcome by a peculiar mixture of disbelief and embarrassment. She suspected that if she told Scaramouche about it, he would undoubtedly tell her to treat the whole situation as a lesson and not believe everything other people said next time. She didn't have to share this information with him, but who else was she supposed to tell? She could probably endure his lecture.
It would be worse if one of the girls mentioned to their homeroom teacher that she had watched an adult movie. Then she'd be in for another scolding, and that was something she definitely wanted to avoid.
She should probably prepare herself for the worst in advance...