The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Forest Phantom 
by Suzie Lockhart 

Everything in my young life had led to this moment…

I still recall the day the Okaasan of the most prestigious Okiya in the area grabbed my hand, pulled me to my feet, and simply said, “Come.”

I’d been a nine-year-old street urchin and wasn’t about to deny a potential opportunity for food. As she half-dragged me through the streets, my stomach rumbled with the sizzling food from street vendors. Colors blurred from peddlers offering their wares.

My own mother had abandoned me in a market nearly two years prior. Most likely she was tired of the stigma; my presence in her life was a thorn in her side. Half-white children of soldiers were treated somewhat better, but the brown skin inherited from my father stood out. Not to mention eyes the color of the sea—a pale gray blue. Some in our culture even believed eyes with blue marked the presence of evil.

The events of that day stood with me forever. I had not gotten the meal I had hoped for, but the sticky white rice filled my belly. I had to clean up after geisha’s entertaining; Okaasan allowed me to drink any leftover tea, and I did. I had a decent tatami mat to sleep on.

A year later I began training for the day I would be sent off to the highest bidder. At that time, I was unaware I was working in a brothel instead of an Okiya. My skin and eyes were not sought after by gentleman. Instead, the man who had won, bought my virginity.

He took me by train, and it was exciting at the time because I was too young to understand that once we arrived at his elaborate minka, he’d planned to rape me. He was a very rich man, but quite unattractive. He wore pungent cologne that made my nose wrinkle.

He wasted no time. He immediately cut a section of my elaborately wound hair to put in a ‘trophy case’. He tore off my lovely kimono.

I was a strong girl, and fast. I kicked him in a manner I’d once seen a woman on the street use to debilitate a man making unwanted advances, and I ran.

It was snowing, and the fabric strips and hadajuban I wore froze around me as I shivered, until all at once spirits of other women surrounded me, warming me as they penetrated me, changing me. I glimpsed my transformation in a window; I was crystallized. Made of frost but not cold, and as that horrible man finally recovered and chased me, I discovered I could change form, haunting him, appearing as women he’d killed.

I somehow knew they’d been waiting for a girl to escape his clutches, and transform into an apparition that would be known as Yuki-onna, the phantom of the forest.

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Fiction © Copyright Suzie Lockhart
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Suzie Lockhart:

Morbid Metamorphosis:
Terrifying Tales of Transformation

Metamorphosis occurs every day as caterpillars become sweet fluttering butterflies, tadpoles become gorgeous frog princes and chameleons become one with the beauty of nature – but you won’t find any of that here.

The transformations you’re about to witness are unnatural, sometimes gruesome and deeply psychological. They will make you question reality and take your mind places it was never meant to go.

Terrifying Tales of Transformation from Greg Chapman * Roy C. Booth & R. Thomas Riley * Terri DelCampo * Dave Gammon * Nancy Kilpatrick * Rod Marsden * Jo-Anne Russell * M.J. Preston * Stacey Turner * Tina Piney * Suzanne Robb * Franklin E. Wales * Donna Marie West * Suzie Lockhart * Cameron Trost * Daniel I. Russell * Simon Dewar * Amanda J. Spedding * Ken MacGregor * Erin Shaw * Gregory L. Norris * Nickolas Furr

Available on Amazon!