モモ – 起源 | ホラーストーリー

モモ – 起源 | ホラーストーリー

The gate groaned as Mark pushed it open. The rusted hinges screaming into the night like a wounded animal. A thick mist curled along the cracked path beyond, swallowing the forgotten graveyard into an endless sea of gray. The air smelled of damp earth and something fowler, something older. Mark adjusted the worn camera around his neck and stepped through the threshold. His boots crunched over dead leaves and shattered gravestones. Each step echoing too loudly in the heavy silence. Hollow Cemetery wasn’t on any modern map anymore. It had faded into myth, into ghost stories parents whispered to scare their children into staying close to home. Stories of shadows moving behind tombstones, of whispers calling from open graves. It was exactly the kind of place Mark was drawn to. At 32, Mark had built a modest career photographing abandoned places, ruined hospitals, crumbling churches, forgotten towns swallowed by time. His followers online praised the haunting beauty of his work. But Tonight wasn’t about content. It wasn’t even about art. It was personal. 3 years ago, his younger brother Nathan had disappeared. Last seen near an old graveyard. Police said it was likely an accident. Maybe he’d fall and gotten lost. But Mark never believed that. Nathan had been obsessed with local legends, desperate to uncover something real. Proof that there was more to the world than what people chose to see. Mark never found his brother. But tonight, maybe he would find something else. The mist seemed almost alive, shifting and curling around Mark as he ventured deeper. The trees bordering the graveyard loomed like gaunt sentinels, their branches clawing at the night sky. The headstones were crooked and cracked, many half swallowed by the earth. Names faded into nothingness, dates erased by time. Mark’s breath came in shallow puffs, his skin prickling with an unease he refused to name. The camera in his hand felt heavier with every step. Somewhere in the distance, a faint sound floated. Through the fog, a soft rhythmic tapping. Mark froze. It was faint, barely there, like fingers drumming on wood. He turned slowly, the beam of his flashlight cutting through the mist in a narrow cone. Nothing moved. No wind stirred the brittle grass. No insects churred. It was as if life itself had been siphoned away. Still, the tapping continued. Mark swallowed hard and moved toward the sound, telling himself it was just an animal, a trick of acoustics in the heavy air. He passed a series of child-sized graves, their tiny headstones leaning against each other like forgotten toys. A broken angel statue stood among them. Its stone face eroded into a blank eyeless stare. Its mouth seemed caught in a silent scream. Mark paused. He could have sworn the statue had been facing a different direction when he entered. He shook his head. Nerves. That’s all it was. The mind played tricks in places like this. The tapping grew louder, more insistent. It led him to a clearing near the graveyard’s heart, a place where the mist thickened into a churning opaque wall. An old gnarled tree dominated the center, its bare limbs twisting into unnatural shapes. Beneath it, the ground sagged inward as if something massive had been buried or had tried to claw its way free. Mark raised his camera, snapping a photo. The flash briefly illuminated something lying at the base of the tree. Something small. He approached cautiously. It was a music box, rotten, warped by weather, its lid a skew. A delicate porcelain ballerina twisted at top it. Her arms snapped backward at grotesque angles as Mark watched. The ballerina moved slowly, jerkily as if invisible fingers cranked the unseen mechanism inside. A broken lullabi wheezed out of the music box, the notes warping and splintering in the frigid air. Mark stumbled back, bile rising in his throat. His instinct screamed at him to leave now, but something about the music rooted him to the spot. But it wasn’t just sound. It was invitation. The mist behind him shifted, whispering in a voice he almost recognized. Mark, he spun around. No one. The graveyard had grown impossibly vast, stretching into forever. Tombstones shifted when he wasn’t looking. Trees bent closer. The ground itself seemed to pulse underfoot, a slow, throbbing heartbeat. Mark turned back to the music box. The ballerina had stopped moving. In her place, etched crudely into the rotting wood, was a word, come. The tapping resumed, but now it was closer, louder, like fingernails raking across the tombstones around him. Mark tightened his grip on the camera, forcing himself to breathe. This was what he came for, wasn’t it? To find something real. To prove Nathan hadn’t been chasing shadows. and maybe, just maybe, to find out what had really happened to his brother. Somewhere in the swirling mist, a figure moved, brief, flickering, gone before Mark could focus his flashlight. But he caught a glimpse of a white dress, torn and stained, dragging across the ground. Bare skeletal feet leaving prints in the mud. The tapping turned into scratching, then pounding. The graves around him trembled, tiny fissures cracking across their surfaces. Mark turned, every instinct screaming that he was being watched. Follow the music. Follow the sound. The camera around his neck clicked on by itself. The flash stuttered once, revealing a path through the graves he hadn’t seen before. A narrow twisting trail leading deeper into the mist. At the end of the path stood a figure. Not Nathan, not human. It wore a face Mark knew, a face it had stolen. But the body beneath it rippled and shifted like something half-formed and wrong. It smiled at him, and the music box began playing faster. The ballerina’s broken limbs jerking into a frantic, nightmarish dance. Mark took one hesitant step forward, his heart hammering against his ribs, and the ground beneath his feet groaned. The grave he stood on cracked open. Something inside moved. Mark stumbled backward as the earth beneath him cracked wider, spilling out a choking stench of rot. A pale hand, skeletal and twitching, clawed its way from the soil. Fingers scraped against the air, desperate for purchase. He turned and ran. The flashlight beam jostling wildly. The fog seemed thicker now, pushing against him like a wall. Shapes moved in the corners of his vision. Hunched figures that ducked out of sight whenever he tried to focus. The camera around his neck clicked and worred, taking photos of its own accord. Flashes tearing through the mist like lightning strikes. Marks skdded to a stop near a row of tall, crumbling mausoleiums. Their stone doors hung open like gaping mouths. Something about their dark interiors gnawed at the edges of his mind. He shouldn’t go near them. But the path, the one revealed by the cursed music box, led directly through. A faint familiar voice called out again. Nathan. Mark’s blood ran cold. He hadn’t said his brother’s name aloud tonight. The voice came from one of the mausoleiums. Low and pleading. Mark hesitated. Logic wared with desperation inside him. rationality told him it was impossible, a trick of memory and grief. But something deeper, hungrier, whispered otherwise. He crept toward the mausoleum, heart hammering so loudly he thought it might drown out the whispering mist. The heavy stone threshold was slick with moss. The air inside stank of dampness and iron like rusted blood. Mark swung his flashlight beam across the crypt’s interior. Stone shelves lined the walls, stacked with crumbling coffins. Bones peaked from splintered wood. In the center of the room sat a second disturbing object, a child’s doll, burned, eyeless, and missing its arms, perched at top a cracked coffin. It was turned toward the doorway as if waiting for him. Mark’s throat tightened. He stepped closer despite every nerve in his body screaming, “No.” The doll shifted, a subtle jerk of its head. Mark flinched back. The flashlight flickered and died. He slapped it hard. It sputtered weakly to life. The doll was a gone. Only a faint trail of small blackened footprints led deeper into the tomb. Mark staggered outside into the mist, chest heaving. The graveyard had changed again. Where before there had been a sea of headstones, now gaping pits yawned open, empty graves stretching endlessly into the darkness. Scraps of torn burial shrouds flapped from rusted fence posts. Mark pressed his hand against a nearby headstone to steady himself. It felt warm, pulsing, almost breathing. His mind reeled. None of this made sense. It had to be exhaustion, stress, latent guilt festering into hallucinations. But when he pulled his hand back, it left a bloody handprint on the stone. Not his blood. The mist parted briefly, revealing another figure. This one was unmistakably real. An old man stood by a sunken grave dressed in funeral black rags, face hidden by a wide-brimmed hat. He held a rusted shovel, the blade caked with mud or something darker. The man’s head turned toward Mark, his mouth stretched into a grotesque smile revealing teeth too sharp, too many. He raised a hand and beckoned. Mark staggered back, stumbling over broken stones. His instincts screamed at him to run, but his legs refused. The old man began shuffling toward him, dragging the shovel in slow, deliberate arcs through the dirt. Mark turned and bolted blindly into the mist. The graveyard blurred around him. Trees, graves, twisted statues melting together into a nightmare landscape. He found himself at the base of another massive tree. Its roots jutted from the earth like skeletal fingers. Hanging from the branches were dozens of worn, rotting nooes, swaying despite the still air. And at the base of the tree, the third disturbing object, an antique mirror, cracked and filthy, leaning against the trunk. Mark approached, drawn despite himself in the broken glass. His reflection twitched. He jerked back, heart pounding. His reflection didn’t mimic him. It moved independently, grinning wider, eyes dark and hollow. It lifted a hand. And in the mirror’s surface, Mark saw the old man standing behind him. Mark spun around. Nothing. The graveyard was empty, silent. But when he looked back at the mirror, the old man was closer. His shovel raised without thinking, Mark smashed the mirror with a rock. The glass exploded outward with a shriek like tearing metal. The world shifted. The ground beneath his feet rippled like water. Tombstones melted into twisted shapes. The mist thickened, choking until he couldn’t see his own hands. Voices whispered in his ears. Dozens of them merging into a sickening chorus. “Stay! Stay with us! We missed you!” A hand brushed his shoulder. Mark screamed, flailing, stumbling forward. He broke through the mist and collided with a woman. She yelped, tumbling backward. for a heartbeat. They just stared at each other, both wideeyed, both breathing hard. The woman looked about Mark’s age, early 30s, with a shock of red hair pulled into a messy ponytail. Mud streaked her jeans and jacket, she clutched a heavy old book to her chest. “You’re real?” Mark gasped, barely daring to believe it. She nodded, eyes darting nervously at the mist swirling behind him. “I think so. name’s Cara. You shouldn’t be here. Mark let out a shaky laugh. Yeah, I’m starting to get that impression. She glanced around, voice low. They don’t like it when we wander too far. The things buried here. They remember. Mark frowned. You know what’s happening? Cara hesitated, then held up the book. Its leather cover was cracked and brittle. The title faded into near nothingness. The Hollow Mirre Ledger. My grandfather kept records, she said, about the graves, about what they buried or tried to bury. Mark caught a glimpse of strange spidery symbols scribbled in the margins. Come on, she whispered. Before they find us, they moved together, half running, half stumbling over broken ground. As they ran, Cara explained in hurried bursts, generations Ago Holamir wasn’t just a cemetery. It was a prison, a dumping ground for things that shouldn’t have existed. Cursed objects, twisted souls, creatures born from nightmares. And five times over the last h 100red years, someone had accidentally unearthed one of these horrors. Each time something was released. Each time it grew stronger. Each time it took someone. Mark’s chest tightened. Nathan, my brother, he Cara nodded grimly. He woke something. They rounded a bend and came face to face with the fourth disturbing object, a coffin half buried and broken open with something slithering inside. From within the rotted wood, a voice, Nathan’s voice, and whispered Mark’s name. Mark stumbled toward it, heart shattering. He could hear sobs, weak and terrified. “Nathan. Nathan, I’m here.” Cara grabbed his arm, nails digging in. It’s not him,” she hissed. “It’s what took him.” Mark froze, realization hitting like a blow to the gut. Inside the coffin, the writhing shape giggled. A sound too high, too sharp, splitting into a hundred discordant notes. It wasn’t human. The lid slammed shut by itself with a wet, sickening squelch. Mark backed away, bile burning the back of his throat. The mist roiled, darker now, tinged with red, thick with the scent of decay. Carara pulled him onward. We have to find the last object. It’s the key. Mark barely managed to nod. He didn’t know if he believed her. He didn’t know if he cared. All he knew was that he had to survive. They crossed a collapsed fence, plunging into a forgotten section of the graveyard. Here the graves were deeper, older. The headstones bore no names, only crude symbols and claw marks. And in the center of a blackened clearing lay the fifth disturbing thing, a ring of human teeth arranged carefully around a shattered stone altar. The teeth gleamed wetly in the weak moonlight, arranged in a perfect circle. Inside the ring, something pulsed. A mass of writhing black tendrils endlessly nodding and unnoding. Carara’s face pald. That’s it. The binding. Mark stared, horror rooting him to the spot. The ledgers pages flipped wildly in Carara’s hands. The book seeming to fight her. She shouted over the rising wind. Help me. We have to destroy it before a scream tore through the night. Not Cara’s. Something inhuman and vast. The graveyard woke all around them. Graves split. Open hands, some skeletal, some grotesqually bloated, clawed their way free. Whispers rose into a deafening roar. Mark dropped to his knees, fighting the urge to wretch. The mist solidified into towering shapes. Figures stitched from darkness and bone, closing in. Cara screamed, struggling against the book’s violent thrashing. Mark crawled toward the ring of teeth. The tendrils within pulsed harder, sensing him, he raised the camera, now slick with blood that wasn’t his. He aimed. He clicked. The flash detonated like a thunderclap. The tendrils shrieked, a high brain spplitting sound, and the ring of teeth shattered outward. The mist recoiled, howling, the ground quakd, tombstones shattering, and for a heartbeat, just one. Mark thought he saw Nathan standing beyond the mist, whole and smiling. Then he was gone. The graveyard shuddered and shifted again. And Mark and Carol were left gasping amid the wreckage. But it wasn’t over. They both felt it. The thing wasn’t dead. It was simply free. The silence that followed the explosion of the teeth ring was unbearable. Mark knelt in the dirt, coughing, blinking through the dust and swirling mist. Beside him, Carara clutched the ledger to her chest, her face hollow, her eyes wide with something beyond fear. At first, Mark thought they had won. That whatever they’d unleashed had been driven back, maybe even destroyed, but the graveyard, it wasn’t still. It was watching. From somewhere deep within the fog, the sound of something breathing echoed. Heavy, wet, ancient. Cara staggered to her feet, grabbing Mark’s arm with a bruising grip. We have to leave now before it fully awakens. Mark scrambled up after her, his legs trembling. He wanted to believe her, to believe escape was possible. But as they turned to run, the earth buckled under them. A massive crack split the ground, a jagged black mouth tearing across the graveyard. From its depths came a feted gust of wind, warm and wreaking of spoiled meat. Then it began to rise. At first it was just a shape, a colossal shifting mass of darkness and bone and writhing tendrils so large it seemed to blot out the stars. Then it formed something almost human, a giant rib cage-like structure. Skeletal hands dragging itself from the pit, dragging all the mist, all the life toward it. Mark couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. This was no spirit, no simple haunting. This was something far, far worse. Carara’s voice was a thin thread of sound against the gathering roar. They didn’t bury monsters here, Mark. They fed the graveyard. Built it over a god they couldn’t kill. Mark’s mind reeled. The music box, the doll, the mirror, the coffin, the teeth. They weren’t random cursed objects. They were pieces of it. pieces of him. Each disturbing thing they encountered had been part of the entity’s prison. Bindings to hold it dormant. And by breaking them, they hadn’t freed themselves. They had freed it. A terrible sound shook the air. A wet, gurgling laugh that rattled Mark’s bones. The thing reared its hideous head, eyes like cavernous pits. Mouth a yawning chasm filled with countless rows of jagged teeth. Mark grabbed Carara’s hand and ran. The ground shuttered under their feet. Graves imploding. Skeletal remains sucked into the pit like dust. They sprinted through the rows of broken tombstones past the gnarled hanging tree, past the shattered mausoleum. The mist parted just ahead. A black iron gate half sunken into the earth stood open. Freedom. Hope flared in Mark’s chest. He could almost hear Nathan’s voice again, clear, laughing. They were almost there when Cara stumbled. The book tore itself from her arms, landing open on the ground. Pages flipped violently in the wind. Mark skidded to a stop. Cara, come on. But she didn’t move. She stared at the book, horror dawning on her face. The ledger. It’s not just a record. Her voice cracked. It’s a pact. What are you talking about? Carara’s hands shook as she pointed to the page. Written there in blood red ink were two names. Mark Holloway, Cara Winters. Mark’s stomach dropped. The names were still being written, fresh, glistening like open wounds. What does it mean? He started. The entity roared behind them. Carara’s eyes filled with tears. The graveyard. It chooses. It doesn’t just kill. It takes. It binds. It needed two souls to replace the ones we set free. Mark staggered back. No. No. There’s got to be another way. Cara shook her head miserably. One way. She reached into her jacket, pulled out a rusted dagger, its blade etched with the same strange symbols from the book. One must stay, she whispered. One must offer blood willingly to satisfy the hollow god. Mark’s heart hammered so loud he thought it might explode. He looked at her. Really looked at her and saw the defeat in her eyes. She had known. Maybe from the beginning. Cara. Before he could finish, Cara lunged at him, but not to attack. She shoved the dagger into his hands. I’m sorry, Mark. Tears streamed down her face. Tell them. Tell the others what’s waiting here if you ever get out. Then without hesitation, she turned and ran straight toward the heart of the graveyard, toward the beast. No, Cara. Mark screamed, surging forward, but the ground cracked violently between them. A canyon of rotting earth opened, swallowing the path. Mark watched in horror as Cara disappeared into the mist. Her small figure dwarfed by the monstrosity rising. Above her, the hollow god’s many mouths opened. Cara didn’t scream. She sang a soft, broken lullabi, lost quickly under the howling wind and the creature’s triumphant roar. And then she was gone. The graveyard shuddered one final time. The fog recoiled, pulling back from the broken graves. The mist over the gate lifted. Mark stumbled toward it, the dagger slipping from numb fingers. He didn’t remember passing through the gate. One moment he was in the graveyard. The next, he was stumbling out onto the cracked road outside, the night air cold and sharp. Behind him, the cemetery gates slammed shut with a thunderous clang. When he turned to look, the graveyard was gone. just a field of dead grass and mist stretching endlessly. No tombstones, no mausoleiums, no hanging tree, as if it had never been there at all. Mark collapsed onto the gravel, gasping, staring into the empty night. He should have felt relief, but all he felt was wrong. Inside his pocket, something squirmed. He jerked upright, reaching inside. His fingers closed around something smooth and cold. He pulled it out. The music box, the same one he’d found over Nathan’s grave. It was pristine now. Polished wood gleaming under the moonlight against his will. Mark’s fingers brushed the crank. The box opened with a soft click. The lullaby Cara sang poured out, impossibly sweet, unbearably sad. The tiny ballerina spun in lazy circles. And inside the lid, newly etched were the words, “One more dance, Mark Holloway.” Until the next is chosen. Mark dropped the box as if burned. The music didn’t stop. In fact, it grew louder, filling the night, echoing off the empty fields. The mist thickened around him once more, and somewhere in the distance, he heard the unmistakable sound of graves splitting open. The hollow god was awake now and it was hungry. Mark wandered the dead road for hours or maybe days. Time bled together. A dull smear of fog, cold, and exhaustion. The town was gone. The world he knew erased. Everywhere he turned, there was only mist. Only that damned lullabi whispering from the music box. No matter how many times he hurled it away, sometimes he thought he saw Carara, a flicker of her brown hair, the curve of her smile. But when he stumbled closer, it was always something else. Always something wrong. Eventually, he found an old gas station squatting like a wounded animal at the crossroads. Its neon sign buzzed weakly, open, though the windows were dark and broken. Mark pushed inside. The air smelled like burnt sugar and mildew. Shelves leaned sideways, their contents rotted or crumbling. An old radio crackled behind the counter, spitting bursts of static. Mark staggered forward. He didn’t care anymore. He just needed someone. Anyone. Behind the counter sat an old man, skin thin as paper, eyes cloudy, smiling too widely. “You made it far, boy,” the old man croked. His teeth were black stumps. Not many do. Mark leaned heavily on the counter. I need I need help. Please. The old man chuckled. It was a dry rasping sound like leaves being crushed underfoot. Help? He said, “Son, you already got all the help you’re going to get.” Mark shook his head, his vision swimming. There was a graveyard, something under it. We broke it open. and we freed it.” The old man nodded sagely, as if Mark had merely confirmed something he already knew. “Graveyards ain’t for the dead,” the man said. “They’re for feeding the ones that sleep.” Mark’s legs buckled. He slumped into a broken chair, trembling. “It’s following me,” he whispered. “It won’t let me go.” The old man leaned forward, his breath like rotted meat. “It can’t let you go. You’re part of it now. Seed and soil. Your soul’s been stitched to its song. Wherever you run, it’ll find you. Mark pressed his hands to his ears, but the lullaby still leaked through, seeping from the walls, the floors, his own bones. I didn’t want this, Mark shouted, his voice cracking. The old man shrugged. Didn’t matter. You opened the door. You danced the steps. You finished the pact. Mark shook, rage boiling in his chest. He wanted to scream, to fight, but deep down he knew it was already too late. The lights flickered. The air grew heavier, thick with the coppery tang of blood. Mark looked up. The old man was gone. In his place sat Carara, but not the girl he remembered. Her skin was pale as bone, her eyes black pits, her mouth stretched in a sad, endless grin. She beckoned. Mark stumbled to his feet, heart hammering. He staggered back out into the night, gasping for air. The world outside had changed. The gas station was gone, replaced by endless rows of graves, crooked stones under a blood red sky. The lullabi grew louder. Mark spun in a slow circle. Everywhere he looked, they waited. twisted figures with hollow eyes, dancing slow, broken steps across the dead earth, and among them, Cara and Nathan. Others he almost recognized, towns folk, travelers, strangers whose faces flickered between agony and ecstasy. All of them singing, all of them dancing. And overhead the hollow god loomed, vast and formless, stitched into the rotting sky, its many mouths drooling mist. Mark fell to his knees, the music drilling into his skull. He could feel the pull now, deep, irresistible, like a hook in his spine, dragging him toward the others, toward the endless walts. Tears streamed down his face as he fought at every muscle, screaming. “No,” he rasped. No, I’m not yours. But when he looked at his hands, they weren’t his anymore. His skin peeled away like smoke, revealing something black and rotting underneath. Seed and soil. He had been claimed the moment he stepped into the graveyard. All this time, he thought he had escaped. He thought he was the survivor. But survivors don’t hear the song. Survivors don’t see the cracks in the sky, the black rivers running under their feet. Survivors don’t belong to the hollow god. Mark screamed as the ground split open beneath him. He fell into darkness. Somewhere far away, a candle flickered in a window. A boy on a bicycle passed an old overgrown cemetery on the outskirts of a forgotten town. He paused, frowned, thought he heard music, faint and sweet, like a broken music box. He shook his head, shrugged it off, and kept writing. Behind him, in the shifting mist among the stones, two new grave markers stood side by side. Mark Holloway, Cara Winters. Their dates of death were fresh. Their graves empty from somewhere deep underground. The hollow god sang on. The dance would never end. And it was always always looking for the next partner.

Momo Short Horror Film