Obon Night

Written By: N.Z. Thorne

A palm slammed hard across a countertop. The sound of the impact pierced through the repetitive blare of store music and echoed through the desolate refrigerated aisles.

“Ugh, I am ready to go home already!”

The loud protest came from the tenth register. Slouched over the counter was a young man in his early twenties. He adjusted his baseball cap, its brim shadowing a pair of heavy, tired eyes. His black apron bore the crisp, embroidered emblem of the Saigon Market. 

“Relax, Gabe.” A burly older man stocking shelves near Gabe's lane chuckled, looking up. “You’ve only got thirty minutes left until closing.”

“Screw that! I'm shutting it down now, Edgar—no one’s coming in anyway,” Gabe spat, flipping the switch to kill the light above his register. 

“Yeah, well, maybe you can slip out before you run into Saito,” Edgar warned, grinning.

“Oh, right. He gets all weird this time of year. Something about Obon Day or whatever—it’s so annoying,” Gabe said, as he grabbed a spray bottle half-filled with cleaning solution and misted the conveyor belt in front of him.

“You know how he is. Old-school Japanese guy, set in his ways after a lifetime growing up over there. Cut him a little slack, kid.”

“I suppose,” he muttered, wiping down the belt with a wad of paper towels before spritzing the monitor with glass cleaner.

Edgar flung the final box beside his feet into the shopping cart next him. “Well, that’s about it for me up front. I’m off to go sweep some more of the back aisles. See you tomorrow, kid.”

Gabe pitched the wadded-up paper towel into the garbage bin sitting at his workstation. “You know it. Catch you later, man.”

They traded tired waves as Edgar disappeared back into the labyrinthian aisles of the market. For the next twenty minutes, Gabe went through the motions; the routine was as natural to him as breathing: tallying up the cash drawers, cleaning the registers, and turning them off for the night.

Once he finished, he walked down to the break room and punched out of his shift, signaled by a satisfying chime from the terminal. Grabbing his jacket from the locker, he was halfway to the front exit by the time it took him to zip it up. He could already taste the quiet solitude of his bedroom when a voice cut through the barren expanse of the market.

It was Saito, and he was waiting by the double doors, blocking any chance of a swift escape.

“Heading out, Gabriel? Remember to be careful out there.”

Saito was old, but he moved through the market with an effervescent energy, always quick to crack a joke. But every year on this day, a stark change settled in his demeanor, shown in the deep lines of concern across his face. Gabe knew the old man was serious. It did little, however, to quell the irritation of being lectured at after a long shift.

“I know, Saito... you told me the same thing last year and the year before that. Word for word.” He offered a weary smile as an attempt to soften his annoyance. “And like I keep telling you, you don’t have to call me Gabriel. No need for the formality.”

Saito's face remained hard and unyielding. If anything, the grooves in his forehead became even deeper. Seeing Saito begin to spiral, Gabe raised his hands in surrender.

“Don’t worry, old man. I’m going straight home. I promise.”

The gesture did little to calm Saito’s nerves. He stepped forward, his concern sharpening into a frantic certainty. 

“I tell everyone this, every year! You think this is a joke?” Saito’s voice dropped into a rasping, gravelly whisper.  “Obon night is not just a holiday, boy. It is a thin place. The one night the dead don’t have to stay where we put them. After midnight, the streets no longer belong to the living.”

The smile left Gabe's face. Any sense of amusement evaporated with the realization that he had to listen to the man's ghost stories once more. He'd had enough of them from his first week working at the market two years ago, but tonight, they were just a roadblock standing between him and his bed.

“I’m aware,” Gabe said snidely. “I’ll be careful.”

Saito grabbed his shoulder with a surprising strength.  “Straight home. No detours. No stopping to look behind you. Do you understand me?”

Gabe gave a stiff nod—more to break Saito’s grip than to agree. “Yeah. Got it.”

He pushed open the powered-down heavy glass doors and was instantly blasted by the biting night air. After hearing Saito lock the doors behind him, Gabe adjusted his cap with a faint, mocking smirk. The old man's lost his mind, he thought. This isn't Japan.

His sneakers slapped rhythmically against the asphalt, echoing across the empty lot. Immediately he felt something was off; usually the area buzzed with late-night traffic, but now it sat dead quiet. 

Once he rounded the bend toward home, a creeping weight came over him as he walked, while his eyes darted toward the wooded thickets at his flanks. Where skeletal branches stretched into the dark and the rustling leaves whispered humanly in the wind.

Your imagination is getting the best of you, he thought. It’s just the wind. It's just the trees. His mantra continued until a fracture in the darkness grabbed his attention. In the distance, a sharp, orange-red neon light pierced the gloom.

“Well, that’s new...” he said, surprise etched on his face.

In the two years of walking this route, he’d only ever seen passing cars. Exhausted, he wondered if it was a trick of the light—a lingering retinal burn or a sleep-deprived hallucination.

But as he moved forward, the illusion solidified. The neon glow bled across the cracked sidewalk. Moving closer to it, a rich, savory scent hit him—seared protein and caramelized fat triggered a sudden, painful hunger. Steam rose from the grill as he reached the edge of the light. 

There, tucked against the sidewalk where only weeds had grown hours ago, stood a compact, gleaming Japanese food cart.

“What the hell? Since when has this been a thing?” He leaned closer, realizing it was a ramen cart.

Crimson paper lanterns swayed, casting a bloody glow over photos of varieties of ramen taped to the glass of the concession window at the front of the cart. Above it, a neon sign hummed, its orange-red kanji characters bleeding into the dark with a beguiling glow that bypassed every warning in Gabe’s mind.

Resting on the wooden bar top was a single bowl of ramen. The amber broth was rich, and the noodles coiled with precision.

Aside from the cart's inviting presentation behind the concession window lay a cavern of total darkness; a cold dread swelled from within him. Every nerve screamed a frantic alarm as his survival instinct, buried under years of retail monotony, went unheard. Red flags waved in his face, and yet...

“What's wrong with me?” he muttered. “It couldn't hurt to just... take a look.” Curiosity snapped the fraying tether of Saito’s warnings as Gabe's legs moved, surrendering his weight to the lanterns' glow. 

He reached out and parted the coarse fabric of the noren curtain, stepping into the cart's borders. He claimed the middle stool. His movements felt scripted, like an actor walking up to his mark.

There he sat, alone, with the paper lanterns and the sign's low hum as his only tethers to reality. The bowl sat on the polished wood, while an aroma of rich broth wafted up from it, acting as a balm for his nerves and taunting him with its culinary secrets.

As he stared into the swirling broth, a bizarre clarity washed over him. Every grueling shift, every missed bus, every solitary trek down a dark road had converged right here. 

“Go ahead. Take a bite.” A low, sandpaper-like voice drifted from the void behind the concession window, vibrating through the wooden counter.

He felt his weight coldly lighten by the offer, then instinct pulled him back; his shoes skidded on the pavement, nearly falling off his seat before he grabbed the bar top. He secured himself and then scanned the area for the owner of the voice.

That’s when, in the darkness, a pair of eyes ignited a pure white; beneath them split a brutal, pale grin of teeth too straight and too numerous for a natural smile. 

“I'm... I'm not hungry right now, actually,” Gabe stammered, raising his hands like a man held at gunpoint. “Thanks, though. I gotta get going, or I'll miss my train home.”

“Go ahead. Take a bite.” The voice rose again, ignoring his refusal completely as the invitation resonated inside his skull.

“No, really. I can't. Sorry, pal!” Gabe snapped, forcing a hard edge into his voice as he tried to swivel off the stool.

The moment he turned, he was met with the pale visage of a young man sitting on a stool adjacent to him—where no one had been seconds before. Deep gashes across his chest leaked blood down a crimson-stained white hoodie, and a permanent, weeping grin was crudely carved into his cheeks.

“What's wrong? It's good. You'll love it,” the young man said. “Go on... try it.” The voice was a flat, tinny recording that didn't align with his still lips.

“Go ahead. Take a bite.” The voice from the shadows repeated.

Gabe tried to speak, but nothing came out. Driven by survival instinct, he pivoted away, trembling violently as he tried to dismount the stool once more.

But standing directly behind him was a third figure, blocking his escape like a monolith. He was in his mid-thirties, with milky eyes, draped in the sodden silk of a feudal-era kimono. Water cascaded from his sleeves and hem, pooling at his feet. The stench of stagnant salt rot and mold clung to him.

“You won't regret it,” the Drowned Man's voice echoed in Gabe's head. “It won't hurt to be like us.”

“NO!”

The word tore from Gabe's throat as he shot off the stool; swerving around the drowned man, hope flared as he sprinted away from the cart, only to slam face-first into another wall of unyielding flesh.

Gabe was thunderstruck at the figure standing before him. Its dark apron bore the Saigon Market logo—the same uniform Gabe wore. Its tall, lanky frame, pale freckled skin, and mop of ginger hair belonged to his coworker, Ethan.

But Ethan's face was in ruins. The bottom half of his jaw had been violently shucked away, leaving a gaping hole where his chin should have been. Tattered skin and sinew dangled like weeping willow branches, and his exposed tongue swayed freely in the night air like a flailing red snake.

Ethan had gone missing last year, and now Gabe understood the horrible truth. His stomach rolled as he backed away, raising his hands in useless defense as the monstrous form of his friend lurched forward.

“Try it.“ Ethan’s voice emerged as a mouthless resonance that vibrated from his exposed throat. “You won't regret it.”

Gabe backed away from Ethan till he bumped into the middle stool of the ramen cart, causing him to fall backward onto it. He watched helplessly as the drowned man, the youth with the carved grin, and the remains of Ethan closed in around him. They didn't attack. They simply stood in a tight semicircle, smothering him in a whirl of all-encompassing din.

“Try it... you'll like it.”

“Go on... it won't bite.”

“You won't feel a thing.”

“Go ahead... take a bite.”

At the back of the cart, where the shadows gave way to the creature's eyeshine Its uncanny smile began to fracture further, stretching with a sickening, wet ripping sound. Gabe could feel it salivating from the raw terror that seeped out from his very soul.

Then, slowly Gabe’s arm drifted toward the bowl. His fingers enclosing around the cold porcelain spoon with a grip that wasn't his own.

He fell upon the bowl with a sudden, violent hunger as he discarded the spoon and began to shove fistfuls of noodles down his throat, nearly choking on every other mouthful. His teeth ripped through the tender meat with ease before finally reaching out to grab the sizable bowl with both hands, tipping it back, and swallowing the amber broth down to the last drop.

The entity’s delight was palpable; its ivory grin widening as the last drop vanished, Gabe set the bowl back on the bar, his hands shaking violently in the suffocating silence until the darkness behind the counter stirred.

Two charred, skeletal hands slid from the void as the chef emerged into the bloody glow of the lanterns. An Edo-period kimono hung off its bruised frame like a funeral shroud, smelling of stagnant smoke and ash. Its smoldering, bark-like skin peeled with every movement. Its unyielding smile loomed closer. Without a word, the figure leaned over the bar and lifted the empty bowl with clinical efficiency, clearing the space for the next patron.

As the entity retreated, truth settled in Gabe’s gut like lead. This wasn't a restaurant. It was an assembly line—and he was just the latest soul processed. Panic surged through him as a cold dread tried to break down his mind. But before the spiral could take him, the silence broke.

The voice returned, long since stripped of any human illusion—a cold, inorganic rasp like grinding tectonic plates. It was a distorted mimicry of speech, all the more alien for its attempt at familiarity.

“We’ll be back… to collect the payment.”

“Hey! What the hell does that mean?” Gabe frantically lunged forward, slamming his palms against the bar top.  “What payment? For the ramen? Answer me!”

The entity didn’t offer the dignity of a response. The monstrous, grin began to recede. It drifted, hovering as it was swallowed by the ink-black depths of the cart. It was gone. Gabe turned to look for the mangled young man, then behind him for the Drowned Man and the ruin of Ethan that had trapped him at to the stool. But when he looked around, he found that the sidewalk was completely empty. There was no sign of any of them.

“What the hell? Where are they…?”

Gabe didn’t wait for anything to answer. He jumped off the wooden stool and raced toward the train station, his sneakers thundering against the asphalt. He ran until his lungs screamed for the taste of oxygen, desperate to put miles between himself and that cursed light of the paper lanterns.

Eventually, he stopped to look over his shoulder to gauge the distance he had put between him and the nightmare. The road was a dark, unbroken ribbon. The orange-red neon, the paper lanterns, the cart itself—it had all vanished.

Then, off in the distance, car headlights pierced through the darkness. Slowly, the empty street dissolved back into a stream of normal, flowing traffic.

“Shit…”

Suddenly a pain erupted from his arm. His eyes darted down and saw branded into his skin a bold black string of kanji, fresh and still raw. He quickly pulled out his phone, opening it to the translation app, the camera blurred as it struggled to focus on the characters.

“Payment Today,” the screen displayed as it flickered.

He stared at the screen, dumbfounded at the meaning behind the brand. The debt and what he had experienced were too much for his mind to process. He wanted to scream, to wake up, to believe that it was all an elaborate nightmare, but the heat from the black mark left no more room for doubt.

On the verge of breaking down, he shook his head, then after a while turned to walk toward the station. His steps felt heavy with dread. He didn't know if he was truly going home or being led somewhere else into the darkness where debts were settled and payments were collected.

And so he walked on, his stomach full of a last meal, a courtesy from the dead on the one night they were permitted to walk the earth once more.

Obon night.

N.Z. Thorne loves horror stories of any kind and strives to make stories that he would be interested in reading. Another one of his most recent works is a three-part horror science fiction short story, Scavenger4022, that can be found on r/cryosleep.