Nuppeppō - Chapter 2: A Long Way to Fall

A cozy tale of horror.

---

The night after the funeral, Seimei sat once again in his tidy study. He poured a cup of sake and placed it, untouched, in front of the empty seat across the desk. He carefully gathered all of the medical scrolls he had been using and placed them each in their correct place. Then he slid aside a hidden lacquered panel at the back of the scroll shelf.

The panel opened with a soft click, revealing a hidden cavity stuffed with what most people would have identified as deeply forbidden material. These were not the charming little volumes of astrological observances or spiritual navigation for which Seimei was justly famous. These were scrolls so old the ink had turned brown, so forbidden that even knowing their name required you to apologize to your ancestors. Here were texts on necromancy, on soul-binding, on the macabre mechanics of what one could achieve with a body after the spirit has departed. And in the warm, bright silence of his study, Seimei began to read something very cold, and oh so very dark.

Please children, do not think too poorly of Seimei for this. Faith, as you may well know, is a most precious thing. It is rather an established fact in certain circles that with a modicum of faith even as small as a mustard seed one can face any challenge, weather any storm, and quite literally move a mountain. But, you see, Seimei was not a man of faith, he was a man of science and of magic, and where faith is absolutely free, magic always comes with a very, very steep cost.

Seimei hardly ate. He rarely slept. His hair grew out, and he swept it back tufted behind his ears. He grew quite a luxurious mustache, and forgot to trim it. His already vulpine features became more wild and feral. In the earliest days, Yoshihira tried to tempt his father out with a parade of increasingly pathetic breakfast offerings: a bowl of rice with a smiling face pressed into it, an attempt at tamagoyaki so lopsided it resembled a collapsed bridge, even, at one point, a single unadorned pickled plum perched atop a folded note that read, in a childish hand, “Father, it is my utmost wish that you would eat this humble offering.”

Seimei read the note, considered the plum, and placed both gently on the altar of his wife’s shrine.

As the weeks of study turned into months, Seimei hardly noticed when one morning Yoshihira awoke with a very familiar fever. His footsteps grew slower. His voice, so usually wild and bright, became a hoarse whisper. He stopped inventing games. He stopped eating. He began to nap, and then to sleep, and then to remain in his futon long after the sun rose.

My children, if you have ever watched a candle gutter and die, you know exactly how Yoshihira faded, and to his everlasting shame, Seimei did not notice until it was almost the end.

One moonless night, Seimei rose from his desk, his eyes as dry and red as sunbaked clay, and called for Yoshihira. His son, who by this point was too weak to rise from his futon, naturally did not respond.

Seimei looked for him, found him, and for a moment, the mask of this great man, the world’s most celebrated onmyoji cracked. He knelt in front of Yoshihira and pressed a cold, trembling hand to his son’s cheek. He whispered something so soft that only the boy heard it, and whether it was a spell or a prayer or a simple apology, I could not tell you. Then Seimei stood, picked up his son, and carried him into the study so that the work might continue.

Now, most stories would have you believe that the night before a forbidden ritual is dark and full of portent, but in truth, the only portent in Seimei’s tower was the relentless sound of brush on paper, the scraping of tools, and the faintest, unceasing mutter of incantations fully understood and wholly infernal. The candles burned low. The air was thick with the smell of cedar ash, iron, and faintly, of salty tears.

Desperation had entered the tower of the virtuous. The prospect of losing both those he held dear had finally coerced Seimei into action, and, at the precise moment when the night is neither yesterday nor today, act Seimei did.

Seimei knelt in a circle of salt and iron shavings, his posture straight, his eyes closed. Before him lay a wickedly sharp knife in a bamboo sheath and a small bronze mirror.

In one of his ancient scrolls, Seimei had read that if one was so inclined, they might sacrifice one of their eyes to raise a lost soul from the ether. This was fortuitous in that Seimei had two perfectly healthy eyes, one for each member of his family.

With great ceremony Seimei unsheathed the knife, its blade no bigger than your smallest finger.

He did not hesitate.

With a single, practiced gesture, Seimei slid the blade beneath his own right eye and levered it out. He performed the act the same way he had dissected countless specimens in the past: detached, precise, even curious as to the result. The pain must have been immense, but Seimei did not scream or flinch the way you are flinching now. Instead, his remaining eye went utterly blank, as if all the pain had simply been rerouted to somewhere very far away.

He dropped the severed eye onto the bronze mirror, where it landed with a wet and deeply unsatisfying plop.

Blood ran down his cheek in a single dignified line, only pausing to stain his once immaculate robe.

He recited the words.

The candles bent inward. The salt smoked. The eye was enveloped in a ball of shadows. The iron filings vibrated in little, anticipatory shivers.

Seimei glanced from the window to the door with his remaining eye, unsure from which direction his wife would appear.

For a moment, nothing happened.

And then—

On the face of the mirror, the ball of shadow uncurled. It gathered into itself, condensed, then bulged outward; it took shape, it bloomed with color, until standing on the surface of the mirror was something most unexpected. A spider, no bigger than a plum pit, deep blue and gleaming with a shimmer that caught the candlelight in every possible direction, perched in the exact center. A small jumping spider with eight eyes, two quite oversized, and a rather surprised look upon its face as it gazed directly, unwaveringly, up at Seimei.

Seimei looked back.

He waited for a voice. He waited for a sign.

The spider wiggled its forelegs in a manner that could only be described as “adorably expressive.”

Seimei’s face underwent a transformation. First, there was confusion. Then fury. Then an overwhelming, incredulous despair. For one wild moment, he looked like he might crush the spider out of pure spite.

Instead, he screamed, “A familiar? My eye for nothing but a bound familiar?!”

And then, as if an overwound string inside him had finally snapped, Seimei began to laugh. The sound of it echoed through the hollow tower and into the cold night. A laugh so high and so broken that it frightened the spider, and the spider, unsure of its place in the order of things, crept to the edge of the mirror and peered up as if seriously considering the distance to the door.

Seimei, still gasping with laughter, reached out and with a delicacy that would have impressed a jeweler, scooped the spider up in his palm.

He regarded it. It regarded him.

“Look at this,” Seimei said, voice trembling on the edge of madness. “I gave one eye and received eight in return. Quite a bargain,” and with no further ceremony he lifted the spider and tipped it into his now empty eye socket. With the oddest sense of rightness, Seimei felt it settle against the raw bone, a small pressure, an impossibly soft tickle, but not the pain one would expect. The spider for its part found the hollow to be a perfectly serviceable home, warm, dark, and sheltered. Following its newfound instincts, it nestled into Seimei’s skull and began to weave itself a silken sleeping sac.

My Children, I feel as a responsible adult I really must pause here to tell you, if you ever find yourself so overcome with grief that you are tempted to cut out your own eye and perform unspeakable rituals with it, may I suggest that there are, in fact, better ways to take your mind off of things. Gardening. Petting small fuzzy animals. Perhaps competitive beetle fighting.

Now, after losing a beloved wife, an eye, and now facing the imminent loss of his son, some of you may believe that Abe no Seimei would accept the universe’s judgment with noble resignation, tidy his affairs, and spend Yoshihira’s remaining days together. But Seimei was not the type of man to give up after a single failed experiment.

His scrolls were full of fell rites and Seimei intended to try them all.

First, there were the blood sigils. On the third night after Yoshihira was moved into the study, Seimei drew three perfect circles around the boy’s futon, each inscribed with a different pattern of archaic kanji using his own pierced index finger as a living calligraphy brush. The blood did not bead or run; it clung to the tatami like red mercury, spell-perfect and terrifying in its clarity.

That night, the tower was filled with nothing but the sound of Yoshihira’s ragged breathing, and by morning, Seimei had already cleaned the circles away.

When the magic of men proved useless, Seimei turned to the magic of things that were decidedly not. He made a pilgrimage to the riverbank at midnight, carrying a cask of sake and three lengths of braided straw. There he called upon the river kami, who, as the old stories insist, is always listening, especially when the moon is high and the water is black.

Seimei stood barefoot in the cold mud, chanting the invocation over and over, and pouring his own blood into the churning water until he almost passed out. The kami accepted the sacrifice with a ripple of satisfaction, but gave Seimei nothing in return. The spider, perched in Seimei’s eye socket, shuddered at the cold and the waste of it.

Undeterred, Seimei returned to the tower and performed the next ritual, and the next after that. In each attempt, blood was spilled, and all of it Seimei’s. This is an important lesson children that is sadly often forgotten these days. As all of the ancients knew, there is power in blood, and for a man there is none more powerful nor more loving than this, to give up your life for those you care about.

As the nights and the bloodletting continued, once, and only once, did the spider try to intervene. During the fifth night, when Seimei’s chanting had spiraled into pure animal noise, the spider pressed her forelegs against his cheek, trying in its own small way to remind him that his son was still very much alive. The boy lay not too far away, listlessly watching his father’s frantic workings and desperately craving his attention. Seimei did not react, or if he did, it was only to tilt his head slightly so the spider would not get caught in the spatter of ink as he drove the brush harder into the paper.

And so the experiments continued, each failure recorded and filed, until the day came when nothing more could be tried.

It was a bright and sunny day when Yoshihira finally died. Outside birds sang and grasshoppers frolicked regardless of the nearby tragedy. Yoshihira had not spoken in two days. His eyes, once so bright with mischief, stared at the ceiling with glassy indifference. Seimei sat beside him, stroking his son’s hand, as composed as a man could be after all he’d endured, and all he was losing. The spider, for her part, did not move. She simply watched, all eight eyes fixed on the boy as if by refusing to blink she could hold him in this world a little longer.

When the last breath finally left Yoshihira’s body, Seimei was ready. Despite the madness and the pain, Abe no Seimei was first and foremost an onmyoji. If there was one thing in this world he knew, and knew well, it was the trapping and binding of spirits. In the time it took the boy’s soul to realize it was free, Seimei had already captured and bound it, as one must, into a physical object which had absorbed a great deal of the departed’s affection. In this case Yoshihira’s favorite toy, a lacquered and mischievously grinning wooden cat.

The room went terribly, terribly quiet.

Seimei picked up the toy, cradling it in both hands as if it were a living, breathing thing. He stared at it for a long time with a sense of absolute, untranslatable loss. The spider, peering from his socket, watched too, and if it is even possible for a spider to cry, then she did.

It is sadly a very common fate in this world to find that after all your cleverness and all your effort, you are left holding exactly the thing you did not want.

If you ever find yourself in such a situation, dear children I hope that you will not give in to despair. My fervent wish is that, like Seimei, you would never give up, and would seek another solution. Although I must say, I do also hope that you would not seek a solution in quite the same way Seimei did next.

---

Thanks for reading. This story is a work in progress which I hope to some day publish. As such I welcome all comments and constructive criticism.

If you find you enjoy my work and would like to read more, my first published novel, Grumble and Gasp, is currently available on Kindle and Amazon.

Want to know if I killed off your favorite character? I probably didn’t, but how can you be sure? Stay tuned. New chapters drop every week!

---

Subscribe to Whimsy and Woe: Side effects may include inappropriate laughter, mild to moderate existential dread, and goose-chase nightmares.
Do not consume Whimsy and Woe if you are allergic to tears, snails, or kumquats.
Ask your doctor if Whimsy and Woe is right for you.