The Violet Hour

Woodbury, Minnesota

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The Violet Hour
© 2014 by Whitney A. Miller.

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Always for Reid.
Thanks for showing up to that party in Silverlake.

Undertow

Purity. Death.

Our train neared Harajuku Station. A frisson of electric anticipation rolled through the Ministry kids. Pressed between the throngs of mid-day commuters, we trembled like grape clusters on the vine. All of us had reason to be nervous, but only I had reason to be afraid.

The voice had invaded my mind yesterday with a vengeance. It was my first episode in years, as if arriving in Tokyo had opened some kind of mental floodgate. I was stupid to think the meds had gotten rid of Her. First came the buzzing in my brain, as familiar to me as breathing. Then came the visions. The occupation. The harder I resisted, the more She writhed and bloomed.

Cleanse. Kill. Suffer.

I scrambled in my bag for Subdueral and surreptitiously swallowed two. The VisionCrest doctors had tried to suffocate my symptoms with prescriptions since I was knee-high, and finally the Subdueral worked. The official diagnosis was
“it’s nothing a little blue pill can’t fix.” Anything to appease my father. The Patriarch had no defects. Except his daughter.

But now the voice was back with a malevolence that all the Subdueral in the world couldn’t stifle. She was stronger. Like She hadn’t been stifled at all, just biding Her time.

She was part of me. I couldn’t escape Her, but I wouldn’t let Her have what She wanted. Not now and not ever.

The train car shuddered and Dora glanced at me, rolling her round-as-quarters eyes from behind her naughty schoolteacher glasses. “Watching how Mercy acts around him makes me want to poke my inner eyes out,” she said.

Up ahead of us, I spotted them. Mercy Mayer tossed her hair, catching my eye. A studied indifference tugged at the corners of her mouth. Her hand slid along the curve of Adam’s biceps with intent, her fingers slipping beneath the hem of his white T-shirt. A patchwork of angry new tattoos sleeved their way up his arm. His gaze followed Mercy’s, and for just a second he saw me—really saw me. Then he looked right through me again. The indifference on his face was real. A fist of crushing disappointment lodged itself behind my sternum.

A man in a suit jostled me into the surly looking skate punk standing in front of me, who turned and glared from above his hospital mask. Instinctively I grabbed for Dora. Her father, Prelate Elber, had been promoted to the Ministry when we were ten, and she was my own personal miracle. I’d been clinging to her
screw this
sarcasm ever since.

“D, this crowd is making me manic,” I whispered.

My muscles strained as the thing inside me reared Her head, feeding off my insecurity. I should have faked sick. Stayed locked in my hotel room. Instead, I’d indulged my curiosity and now it was too late. I was losing control and I had no idea what would happen if I couldn’t keep Her caged. A bead of sweat rolled past my temple. I had to get out of this train car, out of this crowd, before She broke free.

The train slid to a stop at the station. I squeezed Dora’s arm tighter.

“I need to bail, D. Just for a few minutes so I can catch my breath. Give me cover?”

Her pupils zeroed in. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen me have a panic attack. I hid behind a ruse of social anxiety. I didn’t dare tell anyone the truth of what was really happening inside my brain. Keeping that secret was tantamount to survival.

“Bail where? In case you haven’t read the memo, we’re in the middle of the Socialist Republic of Japan. There are for sure plainclothes VisionCrest Watchers with us,” she said, cutting her eyes toward a particularly unlikely looking grandma. Normally easy to spot, the Ministry’s elite force were rumored to sometimes go undercover.

“Yoyogi Park’s just outside the station. I just need a few minutes to chill out. Let the goon squad catch up to me—it’s not like I care,” I said, feeling the walls closing in.

“Easy-peasy Japanesey, is that it?” Dora asked. “And miss all the Harajuku shenanigans?”

Before I went mental, this excursion to see the Harajuku chicks rock their gothic Lolita had been my idea of heaven. Now the only thing I cared about was lulling Her back to sleep.

Obliterate.

“Exactly,” I agreed, my palms sweating. “I need this, D.”

Exsanguinate.

“It might really be dangerous. You’re Harlow Wintergreen, as you might recall,” she warned.

We both knew there had to be a reason we were on this trip, one other than our academic edification, but this was as close as we’d come to discussing it. In an unprecedented move, thirty of us had been sent out on a publicity tour for the Ministry, the elite inner circle that surrounded my father, the Patriarch of VisionCrest. As children of the chosen few, our faces had been shielded from public view all our lives, and suddenly we were being paraded around Asia for everyone to see. It was weird. Curious onlookers snapped pictures with their phones and shielded polite whispers behind their hands.

“It’s a park, not a piranha pool,” I said. “Besides, nobody knows my face. I could be any VisionCrest brat.”

Dora scrutinized me for a moment, then smiled. I’d convinced her.

“I bet you a bubble tea that Brother Howard bursts a blood vessel when he realizes you’re gone,” she said.

The doors slid open and passengers surged around us in every direction. Brother Howard, our teacher and chaperone, waved his ridiculous flag. It featured the VisionCrest logo—the All Seeing Eye—and he’d been parading around with it all week, drawing extra attention to our already conspicuous group.

“See you in a few.” I squeezed her hand, then darted into the throng.

“If this keeps us from visiting the sixty-foot Gundam statue, it’s on your conscience,” Dora yelled as she hopped off the train behind me. Seeing a five-story anime robot was Dora’s idea of a life-altering moment.

I shoved my way through the people on the platform, determined to ditch any Watchers who might be tailing me, at least until I could get a grip.

Purity
, the voice that was mine-but-not-mine whispered in my ear.
Death
.

I was a ticking time bomb. And I was about to explode right in the middle of the Tokyo rush hour.

HARAJUKU MADNESS

The tide of commuters carried me out of the station and
up the stairs to the Yoyogi footbridge. As the rush of people thinned, bodies breaking away in every direction, the voice receded, momentarily muted by a dose of fresh air and sunshine. I took a deep breath, feeling the
dub-thrub
of my heartbeat against my rib cage.

I glanced over my shoulder. The VisionCrest crew snaked out of the station in the opposite direction, a tartan-uniformed centipede. I caught sight of Dora’s rainbow-striped socks. She was laughing and joking with our classmates—classmates too afraid to talk to me. It made me jealous and sad all at the same time; it was so easy for her to be herself, yet still fit in. My heart tugged as they headed toward Takeshita Alley’s zigzag of shop fronts and flashing rainbow signs without me.

I fell in behind a pack of vamped-out teens in black dusters and bouffant wigs. Their proudly displayed freak flags made mine feel a little more normal. The voice was a barely discernible whisper. The terror had subsided, at least for the moment.

Boys and girls littered the pathway into the park, playing their boom boxes and posing for one another. I wasn’t all that out of place in my VisionCrest uniform and sunglasses—wacked-out Asian schoolgirl was a popular motif. I spotted a secluded bench under a stand of near-naked cherry trees; the last battered blossoms clung to branches thin as witches’ fingers. An expanse of dishwater grass blanketed the ground. It was the perfect vantage from which to observe the absurdity of normal kids desperately straining to be anything but, while I wished for exactly the opposite.

I wasn’t used to being outside the VisionCrest compound’s gates, much less the United States. They’d told our group that we were coming here for a “cultural immersion,” but I knew for a fact this was a lie. I’d overheard Prelate Mayer selling my father on the trip as a safety measure—she said that since the kidnappings had escalated, the only safe place for Ministry children was in the public eye.

Over the past year, VisionCrest devotees had been disappearing at an alarming rate. It started with our general population, but quickly escalated to the Ministry’s inner circle. The Ministry was keeping it on the hush, but I knew these were not defections, as they claimed publicly. They were abductions. Why, and by whom, nobody seemed to know. I wanted to tell Dora what I knew, but something kept stopping me. Like saying it out loud would make it real.

I reached into my bag, my hand closing around the reassuring spine of a book. Solid, real.

A Khmer History.
Not exactly light reading.

One of the few things my father (or the General, as Dora and I liked to call him behind closed doors)
would say about my roots was that he’d found me in Cambodia, that sun-scorched land where the Khmer civilization—the most powerful in the history of the world—had flourished and perished. I was clearly of Asian descent, but with green eyes and freckles. Adults were always telling me how “exotic” I was. I didn’t want to be exotic. I just wanted to be normal.

In pursuit of normalcy, I pored over any text that might help explain how I could make Her stop, how I might decode the evil inside me. Neurology, physiology, astrology. But none of them could explain Her voice or how to get rid of it. History was about the only stone I’d left unturned.

She was back, and I had nothing. I was out of time.

Purity. Death.

The me-but-not-me voice snuck up behind me
.
Tapped me on the shoulder.

Kill.

No. I snapped upright, as if someone else might hear the intruder raging in my head. My fingers itched against the splintered bench; I knew instantly what my hands wanted. To wrap themselves around the powder-white neck of a particularly beautiful Harajuku girl loitering only feet in front of me.

No
, I insisted.
I won’t let you have her.

We both knew it wasn’t up to me. The voice seized control of my mind.

I examined the delicate girl.

It wouldn’t take much to crush her voice box. To squeeze the life out of her. To dig my thumbs into her eyes until they snapped free from their optic nerves. To make her pay.

Inside, I screamed for the invader to stop. Even though I knew the evil wanted to see it through to the bloody finish.

I was an abomination.

The Harajuku girl was taunting me. A life-size doll. An enormous powder blue wig perched atop her head, and ringlet curls cascaded in elaborate piles around her porcelain face. She looked like a tiny Beethoven. Peek-a-boo hands fluttered to her pursed lips, shielding her giggle from a boy with skinny leather pants and red contacts in his eyes.

Hunger rumbled in my brain.

Kill. Kill. Kill.

The energy of my thoughts pinned the Harajuku princess down—she was a butterfly, and I was her shadowbox. She looked over.

The rest of the world fell away.

She walked toward me.

An aura struck. Squiggly worms began to cha-cha-cha across my cornea. It was the ten-second warning that the voice was going to strike me with a vision, soon to be followed by a migraine the size of a Texan’s belt buckle.

Everything around us was an old film reel, catching fire and melting from black to white. A pyrotechnic array of glowing orbs.

It was only us.

Me, her, and the intruder rasping in my brain.

Purity. Death. Kill.

Frilly cupcake dress. White knee-highs. Satin top-hat tucked under the crook of a skinny arm. Translucent worms corkscrewing their way across my visual cortex.

I bit down on the meaty part of my tongue, trying to draw myself back. The tinny taste of blood filled my mouth.

The Harajuku girl sat down beside me on the bench.

Was this really happening, or was it only in my head? Was I really going to do something this time, or was it just my imagination? I couldn’t tell.

I was afraid.

My hand floated up to the soft curve of her throat; my fingertips curled around it, matching themselves to vertebrae. My thumb bounced against her beating pulse.

The high sheen of a fever glossed the Harajuku girl’s skin. She clutched at her abdomen, slumping forward. As if my touch had transferred some horrible virus.

Flecks of raspberry froth crept over the edges of her lips. Scarlet boils bubbled beneath the surface of her skin, bursting from the pale expanse of her bare thighs.

Kill.

My free hand slid up her apple cheek, my fingers anchoring behind her ear. My thumb hovered over her terror-wide eye.

I didn’t want my body to do that, but I was no longer its master.

The girl’s fringed lashes skittered open-closed like frantic spider legs. Her chest heaved.

No. Please. Stop
, I begged the thing inside me.

My thumb pressed against the sweet firmness of her eyeball, savoring the pop like an overripe cherry.

A bloom of blood vessels burst forth from the whites of her eye.

I could hear the tinny, faraway sound of squealing laughter, friends carrying on with an oblivious Sunday.

The girl and I were locked in a Kabuki embrace.

A storm of pain.

For a moment, I broke through. I wanted to help her, save her from the thing inside me. Tell her to run.

The urge was extinguished by the voice.
Kill.

Pressure sprang free against the fleshy pad of my thumb, a rubber band breaking loose. Her milky eye dangled free from her skull. Nails raked down the tender skin of my forearms, my flesh tearing like tissue paper, blood seeping from the burning skin. I knew from experience that the marks would remain.

The girl dropped to her knees in front of me and vomited blood onto my lap. Tiny scarlet spots sprayed my shins. I could feel the warmth of each slippery dot shivering against my skin. I wanted to help her, but the voice wouldn’t allow it.

Wounds opened on the girl’s soft-curved skin, then putrefied; the stench of spoiled meat weighed the air.

Her top hat tumbled to the ground. She tumbled after it.

The Harajuku girl lay in a pool of her own blood, seizing like a fish robbed of water. One dislocated eye floated on the surface, the other met mine for a last look.

A fat red tear slipped from its corner.

The girl exhaled.

Everything was still except for a round trail of blood cutting its way down her cheek. I watched it fall.

Death.

My brain had been hijacked by terrible things before, visions of the unspeakable deeds I’d fought not to commit. But none so ripping real as this.

Years of Subdueral had dulled my ability to fight back. The invader had lurked patiently while I was numbed into submission. And then She pounced.

I was undefended. She was invincible.

The seams of my sanity split in two. Consciousness gave way to blackness.

While I was submerged, something else happened.

Strong arms scooped me up, cradling me, bringing me home. I buried my face in sun-warmed skin and soap: the smell of safety. The earth floated beneath me, and I was innocent again.

Later on, I would recognize the incident for what it was.

A keepsake. The beginning of the end, with love from Japan.