Masaru Kanzaki ☆ Cursed Sight

Masaru is six, and his first memory is a nightmare.

In the backyard, he sees a pair of crimson eyes glow in the dead of night through his bedroom window. His parents dismiss him in the morning. A cat, a dog, something less domestic passing through their Tokyo suburb. He lacks the vocabulary to explain why it wasn't that, how he knows in the panicked depths of his stomach that was no mere animal.

---

Masaru is eight, and he enjoys his last night of peaceful slumber.

A gentle scritch, scritch, scritch on the window, on the second-story window of his bedroom. His fingers shake as he draws back the shade, morbid curiosity propelling him past alarm.

Wide--so wide, unnatural and enveloping--eyes peer back at him. Crimson. A nightmare returned; it recalled his notice of it. Its long nail scratches at the glass.

---

Masaru is eleven, and it does not frighten him to look back.

Whatever it is--it and all of its friends he's seen gather below his bedroom window--he discerns that they cannot enter into the house on their own. They merely wait for him to come to them, or to be invited inside.

Months and months ago, his mother opened the door late at night, well past when he had already begun to see them appear. He sobbed and begged her to close the door, to stay safe indoors. She exited onto the deck, picked up the bracelet she'd forgotten there earlier, and locked the door back up. She didn't understand why he wept into her embrace and pointed outside at nothing, at nothing at all.

---

Masaru is fifteen, and he never goes outside after dark.

Friendships prove difficult to maintain when he’s committed to, as some acquaintances joke, the bit. But he’s serious; of course he is.

They’re always there. It doesn’t matter where Masaru is. If he looks outside, he sees them without fail. It upsets his parents. He only sees relatives when they come to Tokyo to visit. He never joins a club or does any extracurriculars. The creatures lurking in the dark carve an entire possible sphere of youth out of his life. When his little sister is born, he knows his parents fret because what if Masaru’s affliction is somehow genetic, what if she somehow claims to see invisible monsters in the dark.

What if, what if, what if.

This is why Masaru stays inside once night falls. It’s the surest way to avoid them. Just don’t give them the chance to do whatever they do. They can’t come inside unless he invites them in.

His body is safe, even if his dreams aren’t.

---

Masaru is eighteen, and he knows what they do now.

His little sister, Aimi, is six. She sleeps soundly at night, an ideal child by most measures.

Like seven years ago, Aimi opens the deck door to reclaim a cup she left out on the table. Their mother is doing the dishes and asks Aimi to clean up after herself properly.

Masaru expects nothing, shouldn’t expect anything.

But those crimson eyes blink and turn to fix on his little sister, innocent and vulnerable and delicious.

He doesn’t see it, can’t through the blood. It’s the first time he’s ever been so close and yet he only bleeds and bleeds through the gash sliced down through his eye. He pushes Aimi back inside and collapses after her, body alight with shock and pain.

He loses an eye. No one understands how. His classmates keep their distance even more than before.

---

Masaru is twenty-four, and he may have found connection.

He thinks they’re crazy, and they think he’s crazy. Or maybe that’s his socially anxious mind injecting assumptions because when is the last time he had anything resembling a friendship.

Things Going Bump.

It’s a strange, little forum he stumbles across, tucked away in a forgotten corner of the web 1.0 era. A tight group of users frequent it. They talk about things familiar to Masaru, things no one else has ever remarked on to him.

There are creatures who emerge only in the dark. Hungry, but patient creatures.

eri23_0 mentions how her mother died. The creatures only seem to crave the flesh of those who can see them back, but they can be cunning. Like when one approached Aimi, one preyed on eri23_0’s mother, but where Masaru was stupid and lucky, eri23_0 didn’t move from safety. They consume everything, she says. Everything. Officially, her mother isn’t dead.

Just missing.

---

Masaru is twenty-five, and he is a frequent poster on Things Going Bump.

He’s crazy. They’re crazy. Only with each other do they find solace. No one knows exactly what the creatures are or how to combat them. They support one another and give advice on how to live such restrictive lives for reasons their friends and family can’t understand.

kafkaaa’s husband left her. He couldn’t reconcile what she insisted was real but invisible to him with reality. He hopes she seeks help. The forum laughs bitterly.

4r1m4m0 experiments. He puts out raw meat just before night falls. They never take the bait, never seem curious. They only want those who can see them back. eri23_0 jokes they did definitely eat her mother, so maybe they just like their meat bloody. No one laughs then.

They are Masaru’s friends. Maybe the only ones he’s ever really had.

---

Mamoru is twenty-nine, and he makes a mistake.

He holds down an office job as an accountant. His reputation is, admittedly, divisive. While he readily does overtime, he refuses any offers to go out after work and makes excuses to avoid retreats. He will stay overnight in the building rather than go home with minimal convincing, but going out for drinks is impossible. His coworkers have no idea, and even if they did, they would never understand. He understands that now that he approaches thirty after living his entire life like this.

Doing overtime is easy. There’s shitty beds provided because Japanese work culture is inconvenient and brutal, except this works well for Masaru. He can safely stay overnight in the office if necessary (and it looks good to his boss). Social activities are a unique challenge that he solves by dodging them completely. His small social network exists on an internet forum for the insane.

As much as someone like him can, Masaru is functioning.

Until he fucks up.

Years and years of ingrained instinct fight against him, but Masaru is stupid. Like with his sister, like when he lost his eye, but now he knows that he is the one being baited when his coworker steps outside for a smoke at 11 PM after staying late to make a deadline and those crimson eyes turn sharp toward the prey that precedes prey and Masaru sees it coming through the glass doors, closing in toward the glowing red ember at the end of her cigarette and--

Masaru is twenty-nine, and he is going to die.

His coworker’s body falls limp to the ground, a meaty thud and a final thrashing writhe as her nerves go dead. His left arm, sliced so clean as to make a butcher envious, joins her corpse. He scarcely feels it, much like when a creature took his eye. One more piece of his body lost, and this time, he failed to even justify its sacrifice.

A pity he won’t be able to say farewell to his online friends, to tell eri23_0 to not feel guilty for her mother. There’s nothing that can be done against these creatures.

His coworker temporarily occupies the creature. It must be confident it can feast and still chase him down. Maybe it’s entitled to that ego. Masaru is rendered stupid by shock and blood loss. He should turn around back into the building he ran out from, but no, he can only think to lean heavy on the nearest wall and follow it. He leaves a grisly crimson trail for the creature to pursue.

Even on the sidewalk of a main road, there is no escape, not outside. His only regret is--

Ah. There’s a person.

His only regret is that they might see him devoured, that they might be consumed next.

“S...orry,” he mumbles, soft and hoarse.

---

Masaru is twenty-nine, and he is still alive.

The night sky is dark above, stars blotted out by the shine of Tokyo. He hasn’t seen this plain, not filtered by windows or by pictures, since he was too small to recall. His stump of an arm bleeds freely, but somehow, he isn’t dead.

His eyes wander to find a person he expected to join him in death. Tinged with hysteria, he laughs.

“What the hell,” he says, less a question and more a statement for his entire life.