Cute Little Bottle
who came to my house after that.
They were all eaten by the house.
They were all deceived by the sweet smell of food and my smile.
Though such a thing would never conveniently appear before them, their childish hearts easily accepted the comforting allure. Just the way I had.
The house itself used what it knew to kill my friends with ease, and it did so in a variety of ways.
Crushing them between the walls was the simplest way. From time to time a lucky child would escape and run down the hall, but a knife from nowhere would quickly take care of them. The house had always had such traps in place.
Every time the house ate a person, it voiced its gratitude - thank you, thank you - and I was embarrassed of my past self for failing to carry out my job as a witch.
Regret? Guilt? I felt no such things.
Because I wanted someone who would love me.
Yet they weren’t pebbles, but white bones. People’s round skulls. Perhaps the big question was whether these were on the level of pebbles, or if they had indeed been a person’s life.
Human souls, for now, were currency.
Just as I exchanged the souls of father and mother for the spell of this house, I needed more souls to receive things from the demon.
When I stepped outside that day, I saw my fingertips splotched with red. Even though there had never been symptoms of my sickness there before.
I didn’t know any exact numbers, but I was recompensed for feeding him humans.
The remainder, so to speak, went toward offerings to the demon to grant my wish.
“Not really an offering. ’s just a transaction.”
“Heya,” the crow greeted, flapping open its wings.
“Just leave the medicine and go.”
“Sheesh. I’d advise against trying to make her angry,” he angrily replied, but he made no implication that the crow was a nuisance. It felt as if the cat and the crow were long-time acquaintances.
The crow flapped his wings a few times, then took off from the window. I shut it firmly with irritation. Though I needed not touch it directly; the things of this house moved as I willed.
“Nope. He’s just so noisy,” I coldly said.
I just called him the crow demon.
Demons, having no defined form, evidently possessed animal corpses to do their work.
“Does that crow have a witch, too?”
“Well? You don’t know?”
“…”
I ignored the cat and went on with my work.
Did the crow have a witch of his own? If he did, that meant there was someone else living much like I was.
Because she would have chosen the path of working for a demon to fulfill her desires, as well. What good would it do for me to intrude into someone else’s life, as she carried her own separate emotions?
Simply by their connection to a demon, witches lived in their own worlds. To impede upon that would cause nothing but trouble. At least in my case.
Did demons use witches for their own purposes? Or did witches use demons for their own purposes?
“Could you be hiding them?”, I asked the black cat.
Whenever I picked up a book in this house, I was provided a book at about the right difficulty for me to read. Which meant that I wasn’t allowed to read books I shouldn’t be yet.
A spell to make people see illusions, a spell to peer into a person’s heart, a spell to control someone’s body…
Yet the black cat seemed interested in instilling fear, something that was quite apparent from this house of deadly traps.
“Hmm. I guess I just like that kind of thing. And…”
“They’re tastier that way.”
“Yep. So good luck.”
What a layabout. Still, I trembled slightly.
Because no one loved me in my sickness. I could put up a temporary illusion, but once my true appearance came out, they ran in fear.
If only I could mold their hearts, then I would gather lots of them, and I would make it real. That was all.
Every time a person died, the roses around the house seemed to multiply.
Perhaps these red flowers were made from blood, and not metaphorically so.
Though it wasn’t too different from what I had been doing. I drank tea, read books, and gazed outside.
Every time I passed a mirror, I checked my reflection. The girl there appeared very healthy.
“Hey, how much longer?”
As the seasons changed, so did the forest, the flowers in the garden wilting and blooming anew. The twinkling stars overhead changed not in alignment, only in position.
That adult human had been a child that, long ago, I let escape on a whim.
I hadn’t grown an inch. What’s more, my hair and nails hadn’t grown either.
Witches don’t die, the black cat had said. I faintly wondered if this was what it meant to live forever, smelling the aroma of a newly-bloomed rose.
I had lived here a long time and learned many things, but my seven-year-old brain forgot much.
An open book full of blank pages appeared on the desk before me.
What to write? Without even thinking about it, the feather pen began moving on its own, smoothly writing things down.
In that way, even my current thoughts would compose words on the pages.
Playing children.
Adults passing through to hunt or do business.
I manipulated the forest with much expertise. I looked down over the whole forest from high up in the sky with magic viewing. I cleared a path like a winding thread to lead people to my house.
Growing bored of the house’s traps, I played with the black cat’s magic. Sometimes I would involve myself.
Some people fretted, some were angry, some insulted.
I gazed at them with chin in hands as if watching a play. Their curses went straight through my ears.
But suddenly, I had a thought.
Could it be that I was known?
On purpose?
Ah. Perhaps he was right.
I don’t particularly know what I was thinking in those moments, but thinking back on it, it was true.
Perhaps I wanted to be known.
Perhaps I hated living unknown to anyone. I was lonely. I wanted everyone to come play.
The black cat smiled with a mouth dripping with red.
Yes. I wanted friends. Friends who would die for me. It was like a game of tag - though I was the only one who was it.
I spun in front of the mirror. Well? Does it suit me? The black cat always just said I was cute, which was boring.
Like a daily ritual, I sank into the red sofa and waited. When the time came, a sweet medicine appeared on the table before me.
I stuck my fork through the strawberry on top and watched the juice flow out.
I should say that I didn’t exactly enjoy killing people. I killed them in brutal ways, but I didn’t like to do so.
Absolutely, he loved to see people suffer. He delighted eating souls soaked in despair.
I couldn’t distinguish those tastes myself (I didn’t have any desire to taste them), but he complimented me for the better ones. Simply put, they were more profitable.
That was why I came to kill people in those ways.
I had no interest in it, myself. I grew used to the smell of guts, but that was all.
The cook assisted me in this. Though he was a bit lacking in the head department (in both senses), and sometimes nearly cut me by mistake.
He could cook anything. Unfortunately, I had little interest in cuisine and only ate cake and pastries, so he may have been a little bored.
So, no. I didn’t like to kill people.
Who, indeed. To someone reading this diary, no doubt.
“Are you writing a diary?”
“Well, huh. Can I read it?”
Of course, I would be lying to say I didn’t like the sense of elation when the house ate a human.
I noticed him at the window, calling “Heya.” The crow’s thick, ear-piercing voice couldn’t be good for my heart.
And when it came to the ungraspable, there was also the clocks of the house.
It was just like a heartbeat. Invariant to the owner’s consciousness, it would not be budged from its fixed rhythm. It was the house’s pulse -
The crow poking my cheek brought me back to reality. He seemed to be done carrying in his medicines.
“You’re like a doctor,” I told him. “Eh,” he said.
“Hmph.”
But asking a demon further about such things wouldn’t get me anywhere.
“Isn’t it a bit strange how you eat people, yet have the power to cure them?”
Feeling I’d hit upon something, I raised an eyebrow. “Is it a problem for demons if humans are sick?”
His dirty voice and speech made my face scrunch up.
I felt unpleasant thinking that these demons had their hands in everything.
I put my teacup up to my mouth, then realized.
Wasn’t that what I’d written in my diary earlier?
“Whoop!” The crow fled out the window in a seemingly intentional haste.
“Hey! No teasing Ellen.”
The crow glared at him and spoke in an intimidating voice.
“W-What?!”
“H-Hey, Ellen, don’t ignore me!”, the cat pathetically said behind me. I heard the crow laughing as he flew away.
“Boy, you’re mean. Why didn’t you help me?”
Even if the black cat’s body was wounded, he had a stock of replacement cat corpses.
“…”
I ignored him and walked away.
…Why had I not helped you?
But I didn’t say it.
Because I was a witch. A witch couldn’t say such pathetic things. If I started to whine, you would abandon me. Well, though I didn’t think he actually would.
I walked down the hall, not looking back, as the black cat followed. Soon enough, he was up on my shoulder, saying trifling things.
Muttering that to myself, I ignored what he said. Even though I was completely in the grasp of demons, I acted like I lived alone.
His giant body ugly and patch-filled, wielding a knife dripping dark red blood, he asked in a stupid tone of voice.
Hm.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Hey, how much longer?”
I heard many rumors about wars starting and ending.
Or maybe it was centuries.
That was the rumor that spread.
Outside the forest, secret efforts were made to try and kill me. Some who visited came explicitly to kill me.
Their deaths instilled fear and sorrow in the ones who remained, and it summoned new humans to the house.
It was fully covered with red roses in bloom.
My beloved roses. I wanted to leap right into that red bedding. I lamented not being able to do so.
That noisy black bird’s cry.
As the demon’s medicines increased in number and type, they couldn’t just fit in cupboards anymore.
I left the medicine room and stood in a long hallway.
…I wondered where it came from. Well, perfect.
“Yikes! What’re you doing?”, the black cat asked, intrigued.
I grabbed him under his front legs and lifted him up.
“…Ellen?”
I was smiling as usual, so he returned it, but it seemed somehow awkward.
…Suddenly, my face returned to normal, and I threw the cat into the river.
Splash.
Only bubbles came up to the surface where he had fallen in. There wasn’t even a bone left. I snorted my nose at the smell.
I slipped away through the wall.
It had gotten much bigger than when I first arrived.
Next, I peered into the marble hall. Residents with uncertain forms were playing piano, while others pulled up chairs to listen.
…Those residents of the witch’s house.
I passed them by, and vanished into the darkness of the hall.
I am Ellen.
Before I became a witch. I could remember it like it was a picture. In a dirty room, looking into smoke and crying. When I remembered that smell, it became hard to breathe.
The trouble was when I thought about what would come next.
I wanted it at any cost. But that was no good.
I obeyed my soul.
Ah. This is how it should be.
But just what is love?
Kind hands to wrap around me?
I wanted to cry the more I thought about it.
But none of it left anything inside me. It just passed through my body and vanished.
Because I had yet to obtain it.
…I was the witch named Ellen.
“Ellen,” it read.
I took it and flipped through the pages. But nothing had yet been written in it.
There sat a black cat with a different face from before.
“Are there any books about the witch who lived here before?”
It wasn’t payback for dropping him in the poison water earlier. He was always vague and unwilling to answer when it came to the previous witch.
I couldn’t possibly read all the books in here.
Where were they stocked from? Perhaps the knowledge of the people who died here took the form of books.
Since they were all people fed to the house, they all had the same ending.
“I wouldn’t say so. It’s all about how you get there. Besides…”
“Everybody dies at the end.”
I was surprised at how much it disturbed me. I was still being dragged into the fact of never dying.
Tsk. I escaped through a gap in the bookshelves.
I wasn’t sure if it was entirely right to call him a boy, as his chestnut hair fully covered his face, making it impossible to see.
I couldn’t particularly remember the voices of everyone I’d played with, and they all seemed to blend together. But just looking at his kitten-soft hair seemed to calm my heart.
At times, I would overhear him talking to himself when I came in. I sat in a chair some distance away and gazed at him with my chin in my hands.
Around him were encyclopedias and storybooks. Can you not read? Do you want me to teach you?
Hold on. Why did I know that?
…I couldn’t remember.
After thinking for a while, I gave up, got out of the chair, and left the room.
I visited the room with the big tree.
Apparently, because they had frightened me, the black cat moved the ladies somewhere else, somewhere dark.
It was a bit of a pity, but with those curiously-shaped plants gone, the garden scenery seemed improved.
Passing by those hedges, I proceeded to the stone passage.
The cold touch of the stone ran through my soles.
I looked down as I walked and recalled how I was always barefoot.
As I walked, I saw lines of iron bars to my left.
In a sense, the demon’s leftovers. Like breadcrumbs or apple cores, they took form and stayed in the house.
At that point in my thoughts, I stopped in front of a cell.
In the back of the cell was a man with one arm chained.
He said nothing. I didn’t want to ask him anything. He hid his breathing and sat like a statue.
I found it hard to breathe. My chest heated up. I tightened my grip on the bars.
…Father’s pipe.
I picked it up and stared.
I gently held the pipe in my palm. Gently. I didn’t think of crushing it.
I stared at my empty palm for a while, finally looking back into the cell, then preparing to go back the way I’d come.
There was another cell next to father’s.
A woman’s room, with a sweet smell different from father’s
The interior of the cell was pitch black. The door was firmly shut and showed no sign of opening. I had no intention to, either.
Just being in front of the cell threw my heart into disarray, and I quickly took off.
Back in the room with the great tree, the black cat was sitting on the bench underneath with tea.
I sat down next to him without saying anything. Placing the teacup and saucer on my lap, I drank the tea.
The flames of the torches on the wall swayed. A long forelock fell into my eyes, and I knit my brows.
I really was living for a longer time than I should have been.
To what extent was it stopped? Had the ugly swelling of my face and legs spread to my entire body?
I shivered at that point.
I could leave the house when I was healthy. Once the demon granted my wish, I could.
I turned to the black cat’s voice, but he wasn’t sitting there anymore.
I closed my eyes and surveyed.
…Sigh. Won’t someone different come?
I was seemingly an enemy that had to be defeated. I was likely the target of someone’s vengeance. Everyone came to the forest to kill me.
They all had their determination, their firm resolve, but once they entered, that was the end for them. They were eaten alive. What a joke.
Why was it thought that I should be killed?
And I found that yes, I was evil. I had killed innocent people, thus evil. I had killed many, thus evil. So I had to be killed.
Hmph. I thought about what I’d done. And about what I was going to do. Yes, from your point of view, perhaps it was so.
Evil, because I kill innocent people? Aren’t you trying to kill me? Then how are you not evil?
…What a pain.
I spoke as I strangled them with rose vines.
And you just decide what kind of person deserves to be killed as you please.
But it’s only humans who do those idiotic things.
They don’t need a reason for everything. They want to do it, so they just do it.
But he’s not going to save you. If I was going to receive divine punishment for doing what you say is evil, I would have been struck by lightning long ago.
And thus you and I have both suffered.
The black cat poked his head out of a rose bush.
“But you won’t talk much with me.”
“I dunno. Anything?”
I promptly terminated the conversation and left.
The black cat leapt out of the bush and followed.
I visited the stone passage again.
The pipe, which had broken and left no trace, was now back to normal in father’s hand.
From the neighboring cell, I thought I heard a woman’s laughter.
Perhaps because it was important that I treat my memories with care.
I could read my diary to remember, but by the time I’d turned the next page, I’d already forgotten.
“Can’t be that big a deal if you can’t remember, can it?”
The black cat was suddenly there coiling around my feet.
“Don’t have to think about all that stuff. You’re a witch. You eat people and have your wishes granted.”
Right.
I nodded at the demon’s whisper and raised my head.
“Hey, how much longer?”
Of course, neither had the magic of the witch’s house left me.
But because I didn’t want to see my true form.
Even with the demon’s medicines, it would not be completely stopped. There was no doubt my original body was becoming uglier by the day.
I was careless, no doubt.
It was early morning, and a white mist shrouded the forest.
I invited the man up to my room. His sword must have been somehow special. He sliced me with it, and I went flying out the window.
As I fell, time seemed to slow down. I saw a flying crow stop. I thought I heard the black cat yelling.
The magic surrounding me vanished.
He was flustered to see me writhing. He was watching me carefully with his sword at the ready all the while, yet he seemed surprised.
Impossible. Was this me?
The roses covered me as if protecting my body, but without my magic, it was pointless. Only able to crawl along the ground, I must have appeared to the man as an swollen, ugly girl indeed.
My father who didn’t look at me. My mother who abandoned me. And the people who ran from me. My crumbling skin, the proof of my lack of love.
The all-red girl in the man’s sights began to cry.
I didn’t expect to garner any sympathy by crying. I knew that this man would never be thrown off by such a thing.
The man brandished his sword, assured of victory.
Why are you getting in my way? Why are you being cruel to me? Reminding me of painful things. All when I’m sick. When I’m suffering. You people should just exist to be eaten by me.
The man swung his sword down, and my head flew off. My vision flipped upside down.
When I woke up, I was lying face-up in bed in my room.
I checked my neck and found no seam. Still, I couldn’t think of what had happened as a dream.
Indeed, the man had cut my head off. But I had no memory of the demon reattaching it.
I tried to get up, but my body was stiffened with pain.
I shouldn’t have felt any bodily pain under the protection of the magic.
I drank it down in one gulp and took a breath. But my heart was still restless. I felt very bad.
“Went home?”
I looked up in thought.
“Now that he’s left, seems nobody’s gonna come near for a while.”
“Why? Didn’t you make it that way?”
The black cat laughed low.
Saying that wasn’t going to help me remember. I wasn’t sure if I should get angry or laugh.
But it was strange.
It was odd. Why? Surely not because I had my head cut off. As much as a witch’s body is wounded, it should be able to go back to normal.
My vision blurred, and the beautiful patterns looked like dancing snakes. It amused me. Yet it didn’t inspire a smile, but rather nausea.
I curled up and started coughing. I grabbed the sheets with sweaty hands.
I had no need to sweat under the effects of the magic. Why - why was my body falling apart?
For a few days afterward, I groaned in my bed.
I remembered when I saw my true self, and my swollen red skin. Remembering that made my heart go cold.
…But what if it’s the heart that’s wounded?
I felt like this idea had an air of truth. I opened my eyes slightly.
I was sweating in bed. My hair stuck to my ceramic-like forehead. As healthy as I looked, on the inside I was a rotting mess.
My mouth moved before I could think. I didn’t check where the black cat was and just asked.
No response came. But I thought of the silence as response enough. I was sure the cat heard me.
“I feel like I’ve seen myself about to disappear. That time, I felt like I was being taken away. …If I go on feeling like that, I’ll be done for, I thought. It must be a lie that it could go on like that forever.”
“Well.”
“Is that your desire, for it to be that way?”
Ridiculous.
“You won’t die because you don’t really think you want to.”
I hadn’t known that for centuries. Perhaps now I had my hand on a secret door. I forgave the black cat for it.
“You can. But there’s one requirement.”
“To despair. That is what it takes for a witch to die.”
“What’s this?”
I slowly sat up, unable to take my eyes off the little bottle. A little bottle with a cute design, like one for perfume, sat on my bed.
I had a slight expectation.
I brought it up to my nose.
I looked at the cat in surprise. His eyes were wide open.
Anger? At what?
I hadn’t done such an animalistic action in a long time. I felt I was acting more human lately. And that was surely a sign of weakness.
But - my gaze returned to the bottle.
The bottle contained mother’s sweet aroma.
The aroma that always surrounded my pastry-making mother. The aroma that wafted from her short-cut nails. The aroma that comforted me as she held me to her chest. The aroma of that woman who bewildered father.
I had completely buried mother away. There was no calmly smiling mother in my memories. I had torn apart the picture of my mother and smeared it with bloody paint.
But I didn’t think the black cat was lying.
My hands sweat.
I didn’t know. It was all done unconsciously. The cap came off slightly.
And just after -
The moment when the sweet scent may or may not have reached my nose.
My blood went cold, and I hurried to tighten the lid. I tightened it as much as I could and threw it.
With each roll, light reflected off the design, and I thought it looked pretty - but I felt absolutely awful.
That was the end of everything. My vanishing. The bottle told me that without mercy.
I didn’t want to die.
After seeing death before me, sticking to life seemed much more attractive.
“Geez, you didn’t have to throw it.”
Instead of screaming, I cried.
They ran down my cheek and wet the pillow. Soon the water went through the bed to the floor, spreading across the house.
The cat looked down on me.
“Will you die?”, he asked, as if asking “Will you eat?”
My eyes wet with tears, it might have looked like I was crying with joy. Perhaps I was actually happy.
It eased my heart considerably to know that I could die anytime.
To him, it didn’t seem to matter if I died or not.
Ah, yes. He was a demon, after all. Even my soul was just another meal to him.
My wounded body was heavy, but my heart was light.
The poison water running down the hallway was now clear.
There was an extra shelf. A shelf just for this bottle, I suppose.
I gave him a sidelong glance.
Why hadn’t he told me before? Did he think it would break my heart? Was it because I didn’t ask? Don’t tell me we had lived together long enough that we’d actually deepened our trust.
I spoke with clear annoyance at how he’d kept something from me all this time.
“I hate you, you know.”
I walked barefoot through the river of tears that flowed down the hallway. The black cat followed a few steps behind.
“…Did the person who lived here before die?”
I’d just sort of imagined she became happy, but it was possible, even likely that she died without her wish being granted.
“She’s alive,” he readily said.
“She just, you know… quit.”
I turned my head around and asked with my eyes.
“Killing people with the house.”
But he could still tell I was interested. Leaving a gap to stress the importance, he spoke.
I stopped and turned up to look at the tall ceiling.
I pursed my lips and said:
“Yeah.”
It seemed strange to say it.
As the black cat said, fewer people came into the forest after the man who cut off my head left.
Instead, the rumor that the witch had been killed spread.
There were hunters and businessmen, playing children, and occasionally people just passing through or getting lost.
Since my sickness worsened, I started to hear a ringing in my ears. I couldn’t sleep a wink.
Such was how I waited for prey.
The crow demon said it would be difficult to stop my sickness from advancing further.
I was effectively the patient of a doctor who had given up on me. I wasn’t particularly depressed. I’d long known I had a sickness that couldn’t be cured.
The eyes the crow looked at me with then… I don’t know if they were sympathetic or tired. He had his usual bad attitude, left the medicine, and departed.
When would the black cat give me the spell to cure my sickness?
Because it was something I would reach as long as I didn’t give up.
Don’t struggle so much anymore. It’s annoying. Maybe it does hurt.
But what point was a scream no one heard? What point were tears no one saw?
When I reached out, I felt someone pulling me into a world of dreams. But it was only an illusion, and my arm fell like a puppet whose strings were cut.
Those eyes that wanted to sleep, enveloped in the sunlight.
But the times had changed greatly.
Rather than people who hunted animals with bows, there were now people who hunted with these long tubes.
W