Part 1 || 11 | Momo

A Tale of an Empty School

In Renwald High School, the door of an empty toilet stall opened inside the women’s restroom, from which three muse officers exited and went to the sink faucets to wash their hands. Then Momo manifested a blank omamori charm, placed it on the door, and said, “Search,” and she snapped her fingers. The hiragana flashed on the charm and spread its neon light over the walls and floors and ceilings of the restroom and out beneath the threshold of the door, expanding into hallways and classrooms. It would then reach the library and the cafeteria and quad area and expand outward towards the gym building and its pool and the basketball and volleyball and tennis courts and the long field of grass skirting the perimeter fence around the school encompassing the football and soccer and baseball fields with the track and field in the middle.

As they waited for the spell to encompass the school grounds, Sakura looked back at the stalls and said, “Are there ghosts here?”

“Maybe,” Momo said. “Why do you ask?”

“Well,” Sakura said, looking at Momo and then back at the stalls, “I’ve heard of this ghost girl who haunts the women’s restrooms at school.”

“Wait,” Momo said, thinking of the elementary schooler in a white shirt and a red skirt with bobbed hair, “are you talking about Hanako-san?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Is she here with us?”

“Nope,” Ryder said. “She wouldn’t be at this school.”

“How do you know?” Sakura said.

“Because she’s in Japan, and we’re in the U.S.,” Momo said. “Also, she only lives in the women’s bathrooms on the third floor of Japanese schools.”

“And this school only has one floor,” Ryder said.

“Are you a fan of hers?” Momo added.

“Mayyyybe,” Sakura said.

When the neon hologram encompassed the entire school grounds, Momo’s eyes flashed a neon green, and she said, “Our target’s not here either.”

“Where could she be then?” Ryder said.

“Maybe out shopping, I don’t know,” Momo said. “At least this school isn’t completely empty. There’s a ghost we could talk to while we’re here.”

“A friendly one?” Sakura said.

“Eh, we’ll see,” Momo said, manifesting another omamori charm and placing it over the first one and closing her eyes. And in her mind, she saw the shadowy impression of a ghost walking from the gym building towards the quad area. “Come on.”

So Momo opened the door, led Sakura and Ryder through the halls and into the cafeteria, and opened the heavy double doors into the quad area, where they spotted the ghost of a boy loitering in a corner by the entrance of the gym building. But once the trio approached, the ghost looked their way and ran through the closed double doors in the direction of the blacktop area encompassing the basketball and volleyball and tennis courts.

“Wait, we just wanna talk!” Momo yelled.

But the ghost didn’t wait, much less talk. So the trio of muse officers brandished their sidearms and gave chase, Momo sprinting ahead of Sakura and Ryder and passing right through the double doors and out onto the blacktop of the basketball courts, but there was no sign of the miscreant ghost in the area. Or maybe there was, but with the sun glaring down on the blacktop in the shimmering heat haze of a late-August morning, obscuring the ghost’s outline from view, Momo couldn’t tell where the runaway was.

So she holstered her gun in her leg holster as Sakura and Ryder caught up to her, both breathing hard.

“Holster your guns,” Momo said.

Ryder said, “Do you think he’s harmless?”

“And scared,” Momo said. “Holster your guns, you two.”

Sakura and Ryder traded glances, but they both holstered their sidearms.

“Now what?” Sakura said.

“We’ll split up,” Momo said. “Sakura, Ryder, you two search the volleyball and tennis courts, while I search the basketball courts. If the ghost is still here, we’ll talk to him like we’re friends, and hopefully he’ll come around. Oh, and Sakura,” she added, “don’t damage school property, okay?”

“I won’t do that,” Sakura deadpanned.

“Just making sure,” Momo said.

With that, the trio split up, Momo staying in the basketball courts, while Sakura headed into the volleyball courts up ahead, and Ryder stalked further off into the gated tennis courts on the east side of the blacktop area right up against the perimeter gate. While her partners searched those areas and called out to the ghost, Momo raised her hands in the air, saying, “I won’t hurt you, okay?”

She received no response.

“We just wanna talk,” Momo said, looking at her surroundings. “We only have some questions we wanna ask you, and they have nothing to do with why you’re here.”

Again, no response.

Then Momo checked her watch that read 10:34 a.m., looked around the basketball courts for any sign of the ghost, and said, “We don’t have all day, you know.”

Yet there was no response.

So she said in her mind, “Sakura, anything on your end?”

“Nothing so far,” Sakura said through her mind.

“Ryder, anything on your end?” she said.

“Nothing,” Ryder said through her mind. “If he’s still here, he’s keeping his distance from us.”

“Maybe he’s scared,” Momo said.

“Or maybe he’s a pervert,” Ryder said.

“Oh, really?” Momo deadpanned, looking around the basketball court for any sign of the designated ‘pervert’ around her. “How’d you figure that, huh?”

“Oh, just a hunch,” Ryder said, and Momo pictured her petite twin-tailed partner shrugging her shoulders. But on thinking over Ryder’s words, off-the-cuff as they were, Momo looked back at the double doors of the quad area, where they had spotted the ghost loitering by the entrance of the gym building.

Which gave Momo an idea.

So Momo headed back towards the double doors, saying in her mind, “Ryder, Sakura, I’ll lure him into the girl’s locker room in the gym building, so you two better catch him.”

“Sis, are you serious?” Sakura said.

“Damn straight I am,” she said.

“No way!” Ryder said.

“Hey, it’s your idea, Ryder,” Momo said, passing through the closed doors and turning right through another set of heavy double doors, through which she headed down the tiled entrance past the toilet stalls and through the locked double doors of the locker room. When the motion lights came on, Momo headed towards a bench by a row of lockers facing a row of shower heads along the opposite wall full of tiles and floor drains. She looked around and waited for several minutes for the ghost to appear, then gritted her teeth and proceeded to strip.

She took off her leg-holstered gun and placed it on the bench, slipped her shoes and socks from her feet and placed those on the bench, removed her jacket and T-shirt and placed them on the bench, and then unfastened and unzipped her jeans and pulled them down her legs and walked out of them and placed them on the bench. Now down to her bra and panties, she waited for another few minutes for the ghost to appear.

Yet the ghost was a no-show.

“Ryder, Sakura,” Momo said, “are you in position?”

“We’re all set,” they both said, then laughed.

“This isn’t a laughing matter!” Momo said. “Have either of you seen any sign of the ghost anywhere?”

“Nope,” Sakura said.

“You’re not sexy enough,” Ryder said.

And both twin-tailed she-devils laughed like hyenas.

“Oh my God,” Momo said. “I am sooo gonna kill you two! Just you wait,” and she took a deep breath and exhaled before she unfastened her bra strap behind her shoulder blades and was about to slip them down her arms—

“What are you doing here?” a voice said.

—before she pressed her forearms over her breasts, turning around and glaring at the ghost of a barefoot high school boy, dressed in slacks and a long-sleeve shirt with a baseball cap over a head full of brown hair, standing in the aisle in front of another row of lockers and benches. In any other context, Momo would have smiled and waved at this ghost boy walking down the street, innocent and cute, but the current circumstances were downright outrageous and disgusting.

“I should be asking you that!” Momo said, then to her partners in her mind: “Anytime now!”

Then two zaps hit the peeping Tom of a ghost on the side of his stomach, encasing him up to his armpits in a giant black dahlia blossom inside an even bigger sakura blossom. Then the twin-tailed duo of Ryder and Sakura emerged from the lockers, passing through the benches with their guns aimed at the boy, Ryder saying, “Hands up, perv!”

“Don’t even think about looking!” Sakura added.

So the designated ‘perv’ raised his hands and squinted his eyes shut like a good little ghost boy, sweating ectoplasmic droplets from his forehead.

Then Sakura went over to Momo and helped her fasten her bra strap, saying, “Are you okay, sis?”

“Thanks, I’m fine,” Momo said and proceeded to dress herself. Once she was done putting her shoes on and strapping her gun holster around her leg, she walked up to the boy, still with his eyes squinting shut. “Open your eyes, kid.”

So the ghost boy opened them, looked at Ryder and Sakura still pointing their guns at him, gulped, and said, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You could’ve avoided this if you hadn’t run off,” Momo said, then to her trigger-happy partners: “Okay, that’s enough. Put away your guns now.”

So Ryder and Sakura holstered their guns.

“We’re just here to ask some questions, okay?” Momo said, crossing her arms around her bosom.

“Okay,” he said.

“And put your hands down.”

He dropped his hands and looked away.

“Have you heard of Judy Windermere?” Momo said.

“Nope,” the boy said.

“Have you seen a girl with bobbed brown hair and brown eyes who wears glasses in this school?” Momo added, going off this morning’s briefing in Muse Inspector Nathaniel Coleman’s office back at the Muse Bureau building.

“Maybe,” the boy said, “but there’s a lot of girls who fit that description, you know.”

“What if I tell you,” Momo said, hoping to trap the boy with her next question, “that she appears here between midnight and 5 in the morning?”

“Nope,” the boy said. “I haven’t seen any students at this school outside of school hours.”

Then Momo thought about the mention of what the eye-witnesses felt and saw during their entrance exams, as well as the passages she and her partners had read this morning, and said, “Have you ever had the feeling of being watched? Or have you ever seen a pair of disembodied eyes? Or have you heard of any rumors of anything to that effect?”

“No, no,” the boy said, “but the last one . . .”

“Is that a ‘yes?’” Momo said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“What do you mean by ‘maybe?’” she said.

“During school hours,” the boy said, “I heard some rumors in the cafeteria and in the quad area about seeing fox eyes, but that’s as much as I’ve heard.”

Momo looked at Ryder and Sakura, both of them sharing a knowing look that meant they were onto something, so Momo went on, saying, “Was there anything else you heard that sounded odd or out of place?”

He shook his head, saying, “Nothing besides the rumors.”

“What other rumors have you heard?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“If you don’t know,” Momo said, “then why did you come here in the first place?”

“Because I’m site-bound,” the boy said, averting his eyes beneath the bill of his baseball cap. “I used to be a freshman here, till a bully pushed me in the quad, and I hit my head. I died on my way to the hospital.”

“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” Momo said.

“It’s okay,” the boy said. “I’m a guardian spirit now, so even when I don’t know their names or faces, I still look after the outsiders like me.”

“Scaring away bullies?”

“And keeping the peace,” the boy said, “which reminds me. You never answered my question before.”

“Which is?” Momo said.

“What are you doing here?” the boy said.

“We came here to investigate something,” Momo said. “That’s all you need to know, kid.”

“Well, okay, that’s fine,” the boy said, “but don’t you know where you are?”

“Of course,” she said. “We’re in the girls’ locker room.”

Then Ryder and Sakura began snickering.

Momo looked back at her miscreant partners, saying, “Why are you laughing?” Then she turned back to the boy and added, “Is there something I should know?”

“Actually,” the boy said, snickering as well, “this is the boys’ locker room.”

“WHAT?”

Ryder and Sakura broke out laughing.

Then Momo glared at the two twin-tails she-devils, saying, “You two knew about this?”

Now the pair of she-devils were bowled over, laughing with their hands on their knees, tears in their eyes.

“We were gonna tell you,” Ryder said.

“But we decided not to,” Sakura added. “Sorry, sis, but the look on your face is priceless!”

Momo gaped at the brattiest pair of partners in the world, who kept laughing up a waterfall of tears from their smiling eyes, saying that Momo stripping in the boy’s locker room was definitely going into this week’s report.

Which pushed Momo over the edge.

Momo sprinted after her bratty partners, leaving the poor ghost boy still up to his armpits in a giant black dahlia blossom within an even bigger sakura blossom.

“Um,” the boy said, blinking. “I’m still here, you know.”

But the girls were long gone by then, leaving the guardian spirit of Renwald High School in the boy’s locker room, a big example of a wallflower if there had been other boys present who could see ghosts.

Meanwhile, for the next half hour, Momo rage-played tag with Ryder and Sakura, shooting at the running targets and making giant peach blossoms on the walls and concrete pillars and cinder block planters in the quad area, more peach blossoms on the blacktop area, and even more peach blossoms further out into the grassy field. Yet for all of their running and juking left and right and splitting up and scrambling all over the field, the 3rd Grade Muse Ryder Ellabellabelle and the probationary 4th Grade Muse Sakura Yume were up against a 2nd Grade Muse, who had a few tricks up her sleeve.

After half an hour of running after two hyperactive brats, a huffing and puffing Momo summoned a blank omamori charm and said, “Faster,” and snapped her fingers. Everything slowed down as Momo summoned two more blank omamori charms and snapped her fingers yet again, setting both charms glowing, priming them for a spell. Then Momo took off in a blur, kicking up dust and blades of grass in the wake of her speed, cutting off both girls and reciting a spell in her mind (“Blossom trap!”) and tagging both charms against their stomachs—

Which resulted in two bratty partners getting snatched up into the enclosing petals of a pair of giant peach blossoms, which rolled on the field like two inflatable plastic balls rolling down a hill. When the peach blossoms rolled to a stop, their petals opened up, revealing two dizzy-eyed girls unable to get back on their feet for the next half hour.

In the meantime, Momo thought of the ghost boy, hoping he wasn’t encased up to his armpits in two giant blossoms anymore. Yet before she had both giant peach blossoms containing the pair of troublemakers floating behind her, she heard the boy say, “What happened? Are they okay?”

Again Momo turned around and saw the boy looking down on the two girls lying, dizzy-eyed, atop the petals of both giant peach blossoms.

“They’re out of it right now,” Momo said. “What’s your name, by the way?”

“Matthias Golding,” the ghost boy said, holding out his hand for a handshake.

“I’m Momo Yume,” Momo said, shaking it. “And that’s Sakura Yume, my sister and probationary partner,” she added, pointing to her sister, then pointing to the petite Ryder: “And that’s Ryder Ellabellabelle, my partner for two years now. She’s a ghost just like you.”

“Like me?” Matthias said.

“Yep,” she said. “And since you’re a spirit guardian of this school, I wanna deputize you for the case we’re currently investigating.”

“Why me?” he said.

“Because our target attends this school,” Momo said.

“You mean this Judy girl?” Matthias said.

“Yes, Judy Windermere,” Momo said. “I’ll have Sakura enroll in this school to keep track of Judy, but two heads are better than one. Will you help us?”

“Sure,” Matthias said, smiling.

“Glad to have you aboard then,” Momo said, smiling as well, relieved to find a willing ghost to help out.

“It’s my pleasure,” Matthias said, then looked away like a bashful boy, which Momo found cute. “Oh, and sorry about earlier. I didn’t mean to walk in on you.”

“Oh, a gentleman, are you?” Momo said, then laughed. “The Muse Bureau could use good guys like you.”

As such, Momo and Matthias talked some more. Then, after Ryder and Sakura woke up and Momo had them air out their differences between themselves and Matthias, Momo had her partners introduce themselves to their newly deputized ally and then had Matthias lead them on a guided tour through the halls of the school, familiarizing Sakura with the rest of the premises of Renwald High School. All the while, Momo explained to Sakura and Ryder that Matthias will act as another pair of eyes and ears for their investigation, in which Sakura and Matthias would keep track of Judy during the school day, while Ryder and Momo would keep track of Judy outside of school.

After that, the trio left Matthias to his duties overlooking the school grounds, entered the same women’s restroom they entered beforehand, and headed inside the same toilet stall, opening and closing the door behind them. Once they were all inside, Momo placed another omamori charm over the stall door and said, “Open,” and she snapped her fingers, and the hiragana on the charm flashed.

A Tale of a Full House

The door of an empty stall opened inside a women’s restroom in the Muse Bureau building, and three muse officers filed through and exited the stall, then washed their hands at the sink and exited the restroom. On entering the reception area just past the floating double doors of the Muse Bureau’s main entrance, Momo stopped, turned around, glaring hellfire at them, and said that she will do all the talking in Nathaniel’s office and that in no way was there going to be any mention of Momo in the boys’ school locker room at the target’s school, neither in written nor verbal form whatsoever. And she punctuated this, placing her hands on their shoulders and pinching their trapezius muscles just below their necks, making them wince and grimace and nod at her demands of secrecy.

With that, they went to Nathaniel’s office, where they received the envelope of the eye-witness reports about Judy’s case. Then Momo asked her superior if he had a bead on Judy Windermere’s current location.

“She’s not at home?” Nathaniel asked.

Momo shook her head, saying, “We went to the target’s school to see if she was there, but she’s not there, either.”

“All right, give me a sec,” Nathaniel said, summoning a pop-up screen showing a map of the Markham district and a holographic keyboard. He then typed Judy’s full name and hit the return key, which zeroed in on her location as a blinking red dot in someone else’s house in the Riddell Court cul-de-sac on the other side of the block from Judy’s house. “She’s at a friend’s house, and there seems to be four others there, too.”

“Four others?” Momo said. “Are they having a sleepover with friends or something?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Nathaniel said and enlarged the diagram of the house, so that four blue dots appeared beside two red dots. “See the blue dots?”

“Blue dots? What does that mean?” Momo paused, rolling the fact that only familiars were detectable as blue dots, then realized who they were and glared at Sakura. “Where did the Jacks go last night?”

“I don’t know,” Sakura said.

“Didn’t you pick them up?” she said.

“I did! Believe me, I did.”

“Then how did they end up there?” Momo said, pointing towards the floating screen that showed four blinking blue dots with two blinking red dots, signifying Judy and her friend.

“Geez, how am I supposed to know?” Sakura said. “They were inside the deck the last time I checked. Argh, when I find them, I’ll give them a piece of my mind!”

“It might not have been their fault,” Nathaniel said.

“What do you mean?” Momo said.

“Judy’s been disappearing and reappearing for a week now,” he said, “which could also mean that those around her might be affected in the same way.”

“But the Jacks were in our house,” Sakura said.

“Which shows the extent of Judy’s influence,” he said. “That’s why the Chief brought you those shotguns. Anyway, what else did you find there?”

“At the school?” Momo said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“We found a site-bound ghost there named Matthias Golding,” Momo said. “I’ve deputized him for this case.”

“Has he seen or heard anything?”

Momo remembered the incident in the boys’ locker room, banished it from her mind, and said, “Mostly rumors from the students about fox eyes.”

“Fox eyes?” the Muse Inspector said, taking out a notepad and writing down ‘fox eyes’ and circling it. “Anything else?”

“That’s it for Judy’s school,” Momo said.

“What about her house?” he said.

“I detected four books scattered around the house,” Momo said, “and after we checked them, we found synchronicities between the text of those books and the circumstances of whatever happened inside that house.”

“And what are they?” he said.

“The first one,” Momo said, “was a Sherlock Holmes omnibus with a bookmark at the story, ‘The Adventure of the Empty House.’”

“And the second one?”

“The second one,” Momo added, “was from the novels of Sax Rohmer and Bram Stoker and a short story from an omnibus of H. P. Lovecraft. In all three books, they were all opened to passages with eyes as a motif, so we think that the witnesses actually saw something.”

“Did you try to confirm it?”

“Yeah,” Momo said as a shiver ran up her spine at the thought of those two red eyes burning in her mind. “We detected the residue of those eyes in the back patio.”

“I see,” he said, paused for a moment, wrote down ‘eyes in back patio’ on his notepad, and circled it. “When you do your nighttime stakeouts, take precautions.”

“We will, sir,” Momo said.

“Is this really that dangerous?” Ryder said.

“Not immediately so,” the Muse Inspector said, “but the potential for collateral is much greater than normal, so be careful with this one, got it?”

All three girls gulped and said they got it, while Momo rolled the possibilities through her head, all of them grim. For all she knew, this was going to be one of those crazy cases where shit could hit the fan like in the botched Trevor Waltman case, though she prayed it won’t turn out like that. Yet in her mind, Momo knew it could happen, knew the way a four-eyed middle school kid knew that the bullies were waiting for him in the quad area, knew the way an anxious child knew his parents had been fighting the moment he stepped foot inside the quiet no man’s land of his house, knew the way a mother knew her son or daughter was hurt from the way the chills raised tingling goosebumps on her forearms, for Momo was feeling those chills even as she fisted her hands to hide the trembling.

“Are you okay, Momo?” Nathaniel said.

“Yes, I am, sir,” Momo said.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded.

With that, Nathaniel summoned three five-pointed seals beneath the feet of the three muse officers, and they disappeared from his office in a flash of light.

END OF PART 1