FIFTEEN
Yokohama, 19th December 1888
Thaniel had the same dream he’d had on the ship: that someone was in the room, watching him. It snapped him awake. His watch said half-past four in the morning.
He sat up and raked his hair back from his face. The bedding was all traditional, just a thin mattress and sheets set up on the floor, which was good, because you could surround it with books and cups. He sipped some water and gazed around. Even though he could see that the room was empty, he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was there. The feeling was so strong that he got up with a candle to scrutinise the paper walls for eye-holes hidden among the paintings of cranes and trees. He didn’t find any. But even while he was looking, he kept catching maddening flickers right at the corners of his eyes. Even Mori, who had such a mathematical mind that he barely understood the point of art galleries, had said this place was haunted. And all those prayer cards in the garden; and Hotaru. Something was wrong about the place, whether it was ghosts or not.
He went to look at Six. She breathed silently, and he had to kneel with his hand on her shoulder to know that she was. She had set up her mattress by the balcony door, which was open. The air was freezing and she’d already given herself a cold this year, but she was claustrophobic at night. He tucked her in better, wishing she’d consent to having a dolly or a bear he could put in with her. She looked neglected without. He propped the generator manual up against the edge of the door where she would see it if she woke up.
Bright light shone through the whole room.
It was coming from next door, like the echo of a foghorn. Just on the other side of the paper wall, Mori’s silhouette was very clear. Thaniel could see his eyelashes. Katsu was curled up flat on his chest, tentacles shifting sometimes. The light was too much for candles or the soft oil lamps. It was the lighthouse.
Mori shifted uneasily. Katsu clung tighter to his arm to keep from falling.
From somewhere in the house, faint but clear in what was otherwise absolute silence, someone rang a small bell, and then there was another and another, until just for a second, the whole house was full of the sound. Mori jerked upright like someone had kicked him. It made Thaniel jump.
The lighthouse beam went out again. Mori sat frozen. He was holding his breath.
Thaniel touched the paper, which scratched against the telegraph-roughened tip of his forefinger.
Mori jolted back from the screen. If he had heard a dead thing rattle and hiss, and seen it scratch decaying fingertips against the translucent paper, he couldn’t have gone faster.
‘It’s me,’ Thaniel said quickly. He went outside and round to Mori’s open door. ‘Wake up.’
‘I’m awake,’ Mori whispered.
‘Nightmare?’
‘No, I’m fine.’ Mori was breathing again, but not much. He was holding himself still and terse. Thaniel knelt down next to him, meaning to take his hands, but Mori brushed him away. ‘Don’t – don’t,’ Mori whispered. He glanced at the door and Thaniel looked back with the sudden certainty that Six was there, but the threshold was empty except for the soft furling of the steam from the hot pools. ‘Go back to bed.’
Thaniel did as he was told, his heart squeezing, shut the door, and stood still on the verandah while he waited to stop feeling like he wanted to vanish into the ground.
The second the door was closed, he heard moving fabric and the inner door of Mori’s room open and shut. Nothing on the nightingale floor, but then a tap on another door, and, very quietly, so quietly he wouldn’t have heard if he hadn’t been listening for it, Mori’s amber voice said ‘Pepper’ and another door opened and shut.
Thaniel walked out to the hot pools, which steamed in the cold night. Where the moonlight striped across them, there were curling patterns in the vapour.
He must have been caught in the flinders of the nightmare still, because for a split second he saw someone outlined in the steam before it blew apart again. His ribs hitched. He sighed at himself and knelt down on the edge of a pool to scoop a handful of hot water across his face.
None of his damn business if Mori wanted to talk to his own wife in the night.
He stayed by the pool, breathing the steam. Inch by inch, the sky lightened. It turned violet and then pink, and then almost blue. He got dressed properly. He’d meant to spend the whole day asleep and not talking to anyone except the piano, but though it had sounded like heaven yesterday, the whole idea was purgatorial now. He found Suzuki, who gave him a train timetable, and set out for the railway station.
The British legation wasn’t far away. From Yokohama to the big Tokyo terminus station at Shimbashi it was an hour on a brand new train. Shimbashi was the size of King’s Cross and heaving with people at nine o’clock in the morning. The name meant Newbridge, and there was indeed a great new bridge across the river, churning with carriages and rickshaws and overfilled oxen carts, everyone going in whichever direction they felt like. As Thaniel came out from under the high brick arches of the station, a herd of students came the other way. One of them was wearing a fez.
It wasn’t until he was in that ordinary, chattering, anonymous crowd that Thaniel realised just how much of a relief it was not to feel like he was being watched. A weird pressure on the back of his neck had lifted since he’d left Yoruji. He rubbed at the bones there. No wonder people thought the house was haunted.
From Shimbashi to the legation was a short ride in a cab. It was in a borough to the west, Kojimachi. It was all big open spaces, parks, and brick buildings. But quite close, sometimes in clear view down the broad and clock-towered streets, there was another Tokyo altogether – a leaning, rambling, tangled clutter that looked much older and much less polished.
‘This is the nice part of town,’ the cabbie said, wrinkling his nose at the crowd of curving roofs away down the hill while Thaniel paid. He had stopped at the top of the grand sweep of the legation’s gravel drive, outside the front doors. ‘No need to look that way, hey?’ He sounded a lot like a Whitehall chauffeur might have if a foreign envoy had found Anglo-Saxons still camped in Clerkenwell.
Thaniel didn’t say that the cluttered places looked much more fun. He thanked the man and turned towards the legation. He was almost at the steps when someone said, a bit half-heartedly,
‘Foreigners go home!’
There were two men holding a banner that drooped in the middle. They were dressed in the traditional way he’d expected Kuroda to, purposefully rough and scruffy, kimono sleeves tied up despite the cold. They must have been freezing.
‘Morning,’ he said, interested. ‘What are you protesting?’
‘Foreigners,’ one snapped. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ He even came up and gave Thaniel a push.
It was like being shoved by a quail. He had to bat the man’s small fist aside with his knuckles. ‘Steady on. Foreigners generally?’ he added, halfway up the steps.
‘Foreign oppression!’
‘All right. I’ll see you both later.’
‘See you,’ the man’s less angry friend said, gloomily.
‘Fukuoka!’
‘Sorry.’
Inside were chandeliers and deep silk rugs. At a glance it might have been somewhere in London. A pair of palms leaned over the main doors and the walls were full of oil paintings, the gilt frames shined up and glittering. The nearest door led to what looked like an office, full of men too young to be diplomats but who almost certainly were. He tapped his knuckle on it.
‘I’m looking for the Secretary,’ he said. ‘Is he in?’
‘And who might you be?’ someone said in a pompous voice.
‘I’m the new translator from London.’
The young man straightened, flustered, then got up. ‘Yes, of course – we didn’t expect you until after New Year – very keen, aren’t you? Good train, I suppose? You’ve come from Yokohama, did your wire say? Nice down there.’
Thaniel inclined his head. ‘Steepleton,’ he said, to give the bo
y a chance to get onto a normal conversational track.
‘Pringle, Pringle,’ he said, holding out his hand from much too far away. ‘Hajimemashite and so forth.’
Thaniel smiled and waited until he was near enough to take it comfortably. ‘Yeah, yoroshiku onegai. The Secretary?’
‘Yes, sir, of course, I’ll show you. He’s just through here,’ he said, walking Thaniel to the door even though it was in obvious view. Then he retreated back to the office. The second he was inside, just out of sight, he let all his breath out in a rush. ‘God, I thought he was someone’s servant!’
‘You absolute snotweasel, he can hear you,’ someone else laughed.
Thaniel pretended not to have heard and tapped on the Secretary’s door, then opened it when another cultured voice told him to come in.
The man behind the desk didn’t stand up. He was Thaniel’s age, but blond and handsome.
‘You’re Steepleton, are you? Didn’t I just see you get in a fistfight by the front door?’
‘Well,’ said Thaniel. ‘A quarter of one.’
‘What a good start.’
Thaniel waited. Things seemed to be going this way increasingly in the last couple of years when he met someone new at work. At first he’d thought it was his accent and that he didn’t sound educated enough, but eventually he’d realised it was just because, while he hadn’t really been paying attention, and through some alchemy to do with eating properly and Fanshaw chasing him down to the boxing club, he’d become a big man. Nobody wanted to feel loomed over by an immediate subordinate. It was annoying, he could see that, but he wasn’t going to apologise for having not been punched in the face by a nationalist.
‘I’m Tom Vaulker,’ the Secretary said at last. ‘Well, have a seat. I must say, it does seem hysterical for Francis Fanshaw to send someone just to sort out a ghost problem.’
Thaniel sat. He knew from dispatches that Vaulker was very paper-presentable, except that he hated Japan. He was doing his obligatory nine months before a nicer posting in Berlin. If someone was bullying the staff, he was a good candidate.
‘It’s more that we were worried that it isn’t a ghost problem,’ Thaniel said.
Vaulker ignored him. ‘Immaculate timing though. We’ve just had another man give his notice. Apparently saw the ghost of his late wife, again. In the kitchen, as usual. Very distressed. Apparently she went missing a while ago in … somewhere called …’ He checked a form. Thaniel wondered if he knew he’d said apparently twice. ‘Ow-kee-ga …?
‘Aokigahara,’ Thaniel offered. The sun was pouring in and he could see through the paper.
‘I won’t try,’ Vaulker decided. ‘Anyway, it’s near Mount Fuji. Now, he’s not wholly making sense, but I think we can excuse him that, given his wife is missing.’ He had bright blue eyes and they ticked unevenly over Thaniel to make sure he wasn’t going to make fun of the idea of shock. ‘But he seems to think her spirit is unquiet. They never found the body, apparently—’
Thaniel decided to kick the table leg every time another apparently came along.
‘—so she’s unburied – if she didn’t just do a bunk – and I think he’s angling for us to make the police investigate properly.’ He looked up again. ‘I wonder if you can wangle that? I can’t find a damn soul among the police who speaks English.’
‘I don’t think the police will investigate a disappearance in Aokigahara, sir,’ Thaniel said carefully.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s the suicide forest. People go there to hang themselves.’
Vaulker dropped his hands onto the edge of the desk, which made his cufflinks clink. ‘What a charming country this is.’
Thaniel smiled. He had never known, before he worked for the Foreign Office, that there was a hierarchy of countries according to Whitehall. If you did the standard diplomatic circuit, it usually began somewhere like Khartoum, and up a rung would be Peking, somewhere that was more war-nibbled than war-ravaged, but still wasn’t good enough to have a proper embassy instead of a legation. It was Germany and America everyone wanted, or Paris, where you could have glamorous tiffs with the other side about secret military plans. It looked, on the surface, like it was about acceptable weather and significant international clout, but Japan had English weather and fabulous amounts of money, and it was still lower down the whole thing than Khartoum.
His theory was that it was about how much translation you had to do before you could talk about anything interesting. The Sudan was horrible but people there spoke English.
‘I don’t know, it seems sensible to me,’ Thaniel said. ‘Polite really, not to do it on a railway.’
‘Polite …’ Vaulker touched his own temple and seemed to give up. ‘Look, he’s only spoken to Pringle, who’s probably poked himself in the eye with the wrong end of the stick. See what you make of it. Fellow’s name is Nakano, I think he’s still in the kitchens. His mother’s the head cook. You can catch him if you go now. Ridiculous as it all is and past the point of caring as I am.’
Thaniel nodded once.
Vaulker seemed to notice the absence of any sympathy. He shifted uncomfortably. ‘While you’re here – how do you say the forest name again?’
‘Aokigahara. “Aoi” means blue, “ki” is tree, “hara” is plain.’
‘Blue?’ Vaulker sounded almost interested. ‘Is it?’
‘No. There wasn’t a separate word for green until after they’d named everything,’ Thaniel said, feeling sorry for him.
Vaulker slouched again. ‘Have you brought all your things? Are you staying with us from now on? I wasn’t expecting you until after New Year; your contract doesn’t start until the third of January.’
‘No, I’m staying in Yokohama. I just thought I’d come in and introduce myself.’
‘Yes, very thorough. Talk to Nakano, would you. Apparently he’s leaving in half an hour – what was that? What just banged the table?’
‘I didn’t see, sir,’ Thaniel said, and then went to find his own way to the kitchen.
Perhaps because there had been one going spare, and certainly not because it especially fitted the place, the legation had a bell tower. The kitchen was directly below, tucked up and then down two tiny, unnecessary sets of steps. Thaniel only found it because he followed the smell of coffee through the dining room. The dining room couldn’t have been more grand. It had huge floor-to-ceiling windows, beautiful draped curtains, and long tables; designed, he suspected, to look like the Oxford and Cambridge colleges the diplomats were coming straight from. The kitchen was low-ceilinged and the windows were long slits high in the walls. They weren’t open, so the room was full of steam.
There were four people inside and none of them were working. An old lady was trying to calm down a weeping man, and two girls were staying quiet and awkward, pouring more tea for everyone. They all looked round when Thaniel tapped on the door.
‘Are you lost?’ the old lady said. She had a gravel voice and a cigarette in her hand.
‘No, ma’am, I’m the new translator. My name’s Steepleton. I heard that Mr Nakano was upset and I wanted to see what was going on.’
She tipped back speculatively. ‘Well, aren’t you unusually good-mannered.’
‘I think I’m normally mannered, but Mr Vaulker seems like a …’ You couldn’t really say ‘unreserved cock’ in Japanese. It didn’t translate. ‘Difficult person. May I sit down?’
‘Suppose you do,’ she said, and nodded to one of the several spare seats. They were all high stools. The table was covered in flour.
‘So what’s going on?’ Thaniel asked Nakano, who had dragged his sleeve over his eyes.
‘I saw my wife over there.’
‘She went to Aokigahara?’
‘Yeah.’ He was staring at the edge of the table. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘Well, you did hit her a lot,’ the old lady said, unmoved.
‘Mum,’ one of the girls whispered.
‘Eh,’ she said, and breathed ou
t a lungful of smoke. ‘He should feel lucky she didn’t hang him from a tree. Classy woman.’
‘Mum!’ the girl said hopelessly.
More smoke. Thaniel had to make a tectonic effort not to laugh. Nakano had shrunk with shame.
‘And it’s not the first time you’ve seen things in here?’
‘Where d’you think everyone is?’ the old lady said, motioning at all the empty stools with her cigarette, which looped a nearly perfect smoke ring. ‘Started November. We’ve lost one a fortnight since. You can’t expect people to put up with that kind of thing.’
‘What did they see?’
‘Ghosts!’ Nakano snapped.
‘Mm,’ said Thaniel, careful not to show that he had already sided with the old lady and the dead wife. ‘Whose ghosts?’
‘Just – I don’t know, do I?’
‘Drink your tea,’ the old lady said at Nakano. She dipped her cigarette towards Thaniel. ‘I’m Marie Nakano. Ginger snap’s mother.’ She nodded at her son, who went an angry red. ‘We don’t know whose ghosts they are. Ririka was the first one we recognised. She was standing right where you’re sitting, staring at nothing like she’d got all the world on her shoulders. The others, no idea. People, ordinary people. None of them did anything frightening, but the young people, well.’ She blew smoke again.
‘What were you doing when you saw her?’
She shrugged. ‘Making bread.’
The two girls exchanged a glance.
‘What was that for?’ Thaniel asked them.
The old lady sighed. ‘They think the spirits disapprove of this place. Foreigners on their ancestral ground and so forth. That is, naturally, a load of shit,’ she added, more at them than him, and blackly. ‘We’ve had foreigners in and out since I was your age and only ghosts since November.’
‘Can we call an exorcist?’ he asked.
They all looked surprised.
‘Expensive,’ said the old lady.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Page 12
