Cursed Bunny(26)
The daughter shouted in a piercing voice, “Let me go!”
Having just barely pushed his son out of the room and locked the door, the man now turned to her. His daughter looked him in the eye and shrieked once more, “Let me go!”
The man saw the glint of the fox’s golden eyes in his daughter’s pale face.
The doctor’s knife sliced into her belly. Her scream once again shook the house to its foundations.
By the time the son had broken through the door of his twin sister’s room, the doctor was already trying to take out the baby from her belly and the womb it was in. Covered in blood and roughly digging away at the man’s daughter with his knife, the doctor was past the point of seeming human.
The son lunged at the doctor and began ripping at his throat.
As the man approached to stop him, his son cried out like an animal and this time, lunged at the man.
The servant girl holding down the daughter screamed, and fled.
The man fell on the floor, hitting his head. His son mounted his chest and strangled him.
By the time the man opened his eyes again, the blood that overflowed from the bed had drenched the floor he was lying on. What met his eyes was the white, icy gaze of his daughter, whose body had gone cold, her shredded belly open to the air.
After his daughter’s funeral, the man quit his business and holed himself up in his house.
His son and the baby were nowhere to be found. The son did not even appear at his twin sister’s funeral.
The man’s servants took care of him at first. That the man’s daughter had died after a long sickness and his son had left home in shock after her death was all they knew about what had transpired. Which was why, when a mad former servant girl occasionally broke into the house, screaming strange things as she tried to get into the daughter’s room, they would try to wrest her from the door.
But not too long after, there were stories about how the servants had seen “something” in the house. At first, there were rumored glimpses of this “something” around the dead daughter’s room. Then it was seen in the corridors, the master bedroom, the servants’ quarters, the kitchen, and near the stables.
That “something” was beautiful. A soft, golden glow that undulated slowly, leaving behind a faintly glittering fog in its wake. This golden fog was cool and pale, making one want to approach it when gazing at it, or place one’s hand inside it when next to it.
Anyone who was seduced into going near the beautiful golden fog became insane.
The moment one bent over and touched the golden traces on the path, the golden light paused and turned around. It had eyes and a mouth and was bleeding from its split belly, and it extended its long, white, almost clear arms toward spectators and rummaged inside them with its long fingers that were as white as the moonlight and cold as the snow on a winter mountain, muttering:
My baby … Where is it …
When fear and iciness suppressed any response from the victim, the ghost of the daughter would scream in a voice that shook the entire house.
My baby … ! Where is it … !
Even after the ghost of the daughter disappeared, those seduced by the gold glimmer would stare off into space and keep shouting about a golden ghost, or wring their hands and scrape their face raw while screaming about needing to wash the blood from themselves, or see the sunlight outside and yell, “Gold, it’s gold!” before jumping out the window, or inexplicably go into the forest in the middle of the night and be found dead the next morning with their necks caught in snares that were meant for foxes.
The servants fell away one by one; they either went insane, were forced to leave, or chose to run away.
In that large house, the man was left all alone.
Every night, the man was visited in his bed by the golden, translucent ghost of his daughter, bleeding from her eyes and lips and torn-open belly, asking him the same question over and over again.
My baby … Where is it …
The man didn’t know where the baby was and therefore couldn’t answer her. His daughter’s ghost would ask again.
My baby … Where is it …
Until daybreak, the pale, golden specter of his daughter, with her bloodied face, would stand by the man’s bed, and just as she did on the day she died, she would drip cold blood from her sliced belly, drenching him in his bed as she asked and asked again the same question.
My baby … Where is it …
A few months after the last servant had fled, the villagers, half in curiosity and half out of a sense of duty about having to do something about this unfortunate house, ventured into the compound, where they found the man lying on his bed, reduced to skin and bones, yet somehow still alive.
“Please let me go …”
These were his last words. And this story is what has been passed down.
There is an epilogue. Some years later, in a place very far from there—for example if the man’s house was in the north-western region it would be a village in the south east—a strange something appeared on a mountain trail on a snowy, late winter’s evening.
The days are short in the winter and the mountains go dark quickly. But this something was glowing faintly. On the snow-covered mountainside, it sat hunched over and busily moved as if preoccupied with some task.
The person who witnessed it had lived his whole life in a village nearby, and in all his years of going to the mountains, he had never seen such a thing. Curious, he approached the pale thing from behind and looked down at what it was doing. Not long after, he screamed and ran down the path he had come on.