TWENTY-NINE
Tokyo, 13th February 1889
Thaniel snapped awake. Someone was leaning right over him. Their noses were almost touching. He could feel that tiny electric warmth that came a fraction of an inch above human skin. It smelled of ash. The taste of it settled right in the back of his throat.
He couldn’t open his eyes or move. He lay exactly still and had to tell himself it was a nightmare while he screwed together the courage to sit up.
The person, the thing, grabbed his shoulders and squeezed. He spun over to the side and bumped the hearth, on his hands and knees and with all his tendons singing with the urge to run.
No one was there.
The fire was smoking badly and the room had filled with soot. Thaniel pitched the water jug over the grate, then pushed open the window as wide as it would go. He was choking now, the ash like cement when he swallowed. Once he was calm enough to listen, he heard how his lungs were wheezing on deeper breaths. He crossed the room and bent to see the door latch. He could sleep in the translation office. There was a couch down there and the air would be better. His shoulder hurt and hurt. Lying on the floor hadn’t done it any good.
It wasn’t until he had opened the latch that he saw his own shirtsleeves. When he did, the strength went out of his hands. Across his shoulders, very clear in black soot smoke stains, were two handprints.
Thaniel checked everywhere – under the bed, in the wardrobe, behind it, outside in the corridor – but there was no one. The legation was silent. Not even the servants were moving about now. He stood in the open doorway, waiting to calm down.
He eased across the corridor and opened Six’s door. She was asleep; so were the twins. He closed it again and didn’t want to go back into his own room. But he couldn’t wear this shirt either, so he left his door open and changed, painfully slowly because he could only move one arm, looking around all the time, his heart straining, and came straight back out again. Absurdly, crossing the threshold and onto the differently coloured wood of the corridor floor felt like reaching safe ground. Still no sign of anyone else. Despite the new shirt, he couldn’t stop rubbing at the places on his upper arms where the black handprints had been. He stood out in the dim corridor, lit by nothing but snowy moonlight, trying to decide what to do with himself. He couldn’t imagine sleeping.
There was no reason he couldn’t do some work. It was sedentary and boring, two things that would probably be quite helpful.
Light spilled reassuringly from the translation office. Mrs Nakano had forbidden Kelly lamps, because of the flames, but she had provided lightbulbs. They were tied onto the metal pipes now with neat little coils of copper wire, and they worked perfectly. He sat down at his desk and felt much easier bathed in electric light. It was shocking how fast he’d got used to the dim whale-oil lamps here, with their greasy smell that put him in mind of an oven that needed cleaning. The brighter light made everything clear and ordinary. The stacks of newspapers, the two telegraphs, Pringle’s little geisha doll, the clean papery smell of any office where nobody smoked. He sat still for a while and let it soak in.
He translated a few bits and pieces from the Foreign Ministry. Telegraph messages had come in through the day. The first wave were party invitations; the second, sent in the afternoon, more sombre congratulations that everyone had carried on through the ceremonies despite the disruption.His stomach snapped itself into a knot when the telephone rang . The bell was deafening white in the silent office. He snatched it up. He hated the telephones and on principle he never used them. Vaulker had had them installed because he said it was civilised, but Thaniel couldn’t think of anything less civilised than making a terrible noise at somebody until they answered you. Everyone else on the Tokyo lines must have felt the same, because nobody ever telephoned unless they wanted to be rude.
‘Hello?’ he said.
‘Prime Minister’s office,’ said an exhausted clerkly voice in Japanese. ‘Is Mr Steepleton there?’
‘Speaking. You know it’s two in the morning?’
‘Hold for the Prime Minister,’ the clerk sighed.
Thaniel pushed his hand over his forehead. There was a click, and then Kuroda’s shale voice said, ‘Did I wake you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Shame. Just calling to make sure you know you’re a fucking useless sow. Mori must have put you there because you were supposed to save Arinori.’
‘Yes, it’s definitely all my fault. What have you done with Mori and Takiko Pepperharrow?’
‘I haven’t done a damn thing. I thought you’d got jealous and murdered them both.’
‘I’m pretty sure you’re the one with that kind of record. Where are they? Are they all right?’
‘Take that tone with me again and I’ll tell your Foreign Office you got your insipid little heart broken and now I’m missing a high ranking samurai and his lady. No? Didn’t think so. Coward,’ Kuroda said, and banged his receiver down.
The bullet wound was burning as if someone had washed it out with vinegar.
Kuroda was lying about Mori. Arinori and his wife had been right; if Kuroda really hadn’t known where he was, he would have turned half of Tokyo upside down. Thaniel sat looking hard at the telephone, thinking about how you went about finding someone who the Prime Minister didn’t want found.
He’d go to Yoruji in the morning. Diplomatic immunity was handy when you had to duck a police cordon. He wasn’t going to think about what he might or might not find there. He was no use to anyone if he let himself turn into a hysterical mess. Least of all Mori, who was probably fine, and who would probably consider any effort to be found by some hulking gaijin he used to live with barely more acceptable than stalking.
Mrs Nakano must have heard the telephone, because she came in with coffee and the silver bowl of icing sugar. In place of the lid, she’d put a lightbulb on the kettle. It cast a friendly glow.
‘Did you see one?’ she said.
He looked up. ‘Did I wake you up?’
‘No, no, lad, I was watering the door-hinges.’ She didn’t pause to explain what she meant. ‘You had a fire lit. Did you see one?’
‘I … no, I just had a nightmare.’ Which he must have. When he went back upstairs, there would be no soot handprints on his other shirt. He was ill, injured, and someone had been killed in front of him yesterday. It had been a nightmare.
She gave him a schoolmistress look and left. The floorboards squeaked something savage, because at some point through the day, the nails must have overheated. Someone had taken them all out and put them in a glass vase on the floor, over which there was now a heat shimmer. As she passed through the dining room, she picked up a watering can from the corner, and watered the door-hinges. They steamed.
It was possible to make quite a good coffee-flavoured icing in the saucer, so Thaniel tipped out some of the coffee and then sprinkled the sugar into it as softly as he could with his left hand. Some of the sugar missed the plate and snowed onto the desk instead, exactly where the draught could catch it. It skittered off the edge and into the air. He watched it twist.
But the ordinary twisting was disrupted before it could fade off to nothing. It was outlining the perfect shape of a hand, in nothing but the air. He could even read the manufacturer’s mark on the button in the sleeve. It was from Shirokiya’s, the big department store opposite the bank in Ginza.
Thaniel flinched back but it only hung there. The sugar fell gradually and the image faded.
He took the silver bowl up again and blew over the surface of the sugar, then held his breath so that he wouldn’t disturb it while it fell. The sugar billowed into the air and showed other buttons, a waistcoat, a watch chain, hands hidden in trouser pockets and then the neat sweep of Arinori’s hair. He was looking out the window. As Thaniel watched, the sugar ghost sighed noiselessly and turned away. He stared at it, then threw another spray of icing sugar at it. It seemed not to see him at all, and only stood propped in the doorway, reading over ghost papers.
‘Hello?’ Vaulker sounded puzzled, but not like he had been asleep.
‘Can you come down to the office a minute?’
‘Steepleton? Do you know what time it is?’
‘It’s quarter-past two in the morning,’ he said, still watching the icing sugar. The ghost was still there, just. He could feel his pulse squeezing right inside his skull, but the instinct to get out was fading more the longer the ghost did nothing sudden. ‘There’s something here you should see.’ He had to swallow, because he could taste the icing sugar, sweet but dry. ‘Right now.’
Vaulker came down still fully dressed. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Hold on, let me – find it again,’ Thaniel said unevenly, because he had just seen a flicker in the sugar. He tipped the rest of the bowl into the air. It furled at once around a shape. Arinori was still looking through the papers. They were government memoranda. The icing sugar clung more to the white of the paper than to the black ink, so the letters were outlined strangely. ‘Can you see that?’
Vaulker stepped around to see it better. ‘That’s … what in God’s name is that?’ He glanced at Thaniel. ‘Can it see us?’
Thaniel shook his head.
Vaulker clenched his hands, but he went up closer to it. ‘Hello?’
The ghost didn’t say anything, or show any sign it knew they were there. Thaniel and Vaulker glanced at each other, both of them waiting for it to turn and scream at them.
Thaniel blew softly and watched the sugar particles spin. The patterns were natural until they reached the ghost, when the motes veered across the outlined surface like they had been magnetised. He drew his fingertips through the shape and looked away to see if he could feel it. There was a tiny, tiny crackle. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been concentrating. They both jumped when the ghost moved, but not towards them, or not as if it knew they were there, only to the desk.
‘I should fetch my camera,’ Vaulker said unevenly. He didn’t move.
Thaniel drew his hand through the ghost again. The sugar parted and then moved straight back again into shape. It was hypnotic. ‘No wonder they were seeing things in the kitchen. Flour everywhere.’
‘But this can’t have been happening for months. We would have noticed,’ Vaulker murmured.
‘Would we? How often do you throw powder into the air?’ Thaniel had never felt so stupid. At Mori’s house, the little gardener, Hotaru, had seen ghosts in the particles of quicklime. The salt burners saw them in the smoke. ‘Jesus, and the fires. It’s the smoke. The servants lay the fires, of course they’re the ones who see what’s in the smoke.’
Vaulker drew his teeth over his lower lip. ‘What the hell do we do? Go to the mission church?’
‘I don’t … think it’s that kind of ghost.’ He brushed it again, and this time it gave him a static shock that made him clench his hand.
‘What was that?’ Vaulker asked tightly.
‘Electricity.’ Mori had said Yoruji was haunted in bad weather. Christ. ‘How long has the weather been stormy? Since November?’
‘Yes. Maybe the middle of November.’
‘Which is when the staff began to complain.’
Vaulker lifted his eyebrows. They both glanced at the window where the fire on Mount Fuji was still clear.
‘Iron in the ground all around Fuji, isn’t there?’ Vaulker said. ‘Was it you who said that was why this weather is so electrical? Something to do with electromagnetic something-or-others when the volcano’s active?’
‘The Met Office says that. I don’t know if iron in the ground could really cause all this, though, no matter how stormy the weather is. It would have happened somewhere before, wouldn’t it?’
‘Perhaps it has, perhaps that’s why some places are haunted and others aren’t.’
Thaniel dug his fingertips into his own shoulders again. Black handprints. One of them had touched him – shocked him awake with that static snap. His skin, all of it, as one organ, prickled.
‘Dad,’ Six said from the door.
He paced forward, into the ghost, to displace the last of the sugar. He would have shown it to her in daylight, but however clockwork-minded she was, it wasn’t sensible at two in the morning. ‘Nightmares, petal?’
‘No. There’s a fire outside.’
‘It’s on Fuji, it’s miles away.’
‘No.’ She pointed towards the canal. It was hard to tell quite how far away the fire was, but she was right. Vaulker’s reflection came up behind them too.
‘One of the warehouses on the canal?’
‘Must be.’ Thaniel lifted Six up, less because she needed any reassuring than because he did. Like always, she didn’t lean against him and only sat girder-straight.
‘Look how bright the city is,’ Vaulker breathed.
He was right. The whole city was alight, so bright that there were orange reflections on the undersides of the clouds. It looked unlike itself. At night Tokyo was usually a place of leaning wooden gates half lost above the lamps, and then sudden, new stone places. There were great dim expanses that were the parks, points of candlelight moving on the river where the night bargemen arranged cargo crates ready for the morning. But now it was brilliant. Thaniel could see the shapes of the streets swooping alongside the canals. Half of Tokyo must have bought lightbulbs in the last couple of days. It looked like the inside of a phosphorescent hive.
Something exploded in the building that was on fire. The bang rattled the windows and they stepped back. As they did, some of the junior diplomats came down the stairs in an anxious, excited cluster.
‘There’s another fire on the other side,’ someone said. ‘Ow, Jesus!’
‘What?’ said Thaniel.
‘The – bloody door handle. It’s red hot. Even through the towel.’
‘Is there … not a cotton factory down there somewhere?’ Thaniel said slowly.
‘The tea-towel is smoking,’ the junior diplomat reported.
‘The cotton factory is next to the building on fire,’ Six said to him in the quiet way she had when she was worried she wasn’t meant to be speaking.
‘Christ – get back from the windows. Everyone. Now.’
There was a rush for the back rooms just before a much bigger explosion blew the windows inward. He snatched Six up again and looked back in time to see the silk curtains catching fire on the in-furl. They went up like they were soaked in oil, still swimming in the hot air and the floating cinders. Blackened rags frayed away and settled over the papers on the desks. He saw a sheet begin to burn, still upright in a Corona typewriter.
A quarter of an hour later, they were sitting in raggy groups in the dining room of the Dutch legation, while the Dutch diplomats’ wives came round with hot drinks and blankets, and sweets for the children. Six seemed to think it was an interesting variation on an ordinary night. Thaniel didn’t understand why that was all right but going down the corridor the wrong way wasn’t. She’d got the other children together and now they’d made a fort under a table. He was still seeing after-flashes of the explosion, and as they popped and spun on the edges of his vision, they sounded like xylophones.
The Dutch had listened to their servants a lot earlier than the British. There was brand new linoleum on the floor, lightbulbs looped around the rafters, and rubber stitched over all the door handles and hinges. Buckets of sand waited on either side of every door and window.
‘Steepleton,’ Vaulker said, and then stopped short. Thaniel was sitting with the Dutch doctor, who had made him take off his shirt. The doctor was lifting bits of glass out of his shoulders with twee
zers. ‘Christ, you’re black and blue. Did you – fight the man who killed Arinori?’
‘No, the carriage crashed, before. The horses spooked.’ He hadn’t noticed before – he hadn’t looked at himself – but he was bruised right down what he’d been thinking of as his uninjured side. With the twang and burn of the bullet wound, he hadn’t felt any other pain, not even from the glass shards.
Vaulker looked like he wanted to say something, but another explosion went off close by and they both jumped. ‘What the hell was that?’
Much longer than the explosion was the crash of a falling roof. It took whole seconds.
‘The fire crews demolish houses to stop fires. All the houses are wooden. There’s no other way to control a fire until it reaches one of the canals. Are you all right?’ Thaniel added, because he was starting to think that neither of them was. He didn’t usually startle easily, but the noise just then had fired a jolt right up and down his spine. He was shying at smaller sounds than that too, as badly as a hare. ‘Have you even sat down?’
‘What we saw …’ Vaulker began. He crumpled down beside Thaniel, all the creases in his skin and his clothes outlined in soot smudges. ‘If it’s caused by this weather – well. We need to know if it’s going to get worse. And particularly if it’s to do with Fuji. If this is a sign the volcano is about to go off, we have to evacuate.’ He was speaking very quietly. He glanced around the room after he’d finished, and when Thaniel followed his eyes, he saw that some of the Dutch diplomats were talking in the same way, low, heads close. Nobody wanted to say volcano loudly. The room was full of children. ‘The Dutch Minister has just sent someone to wake up that fellow who runs the Met Office, but I don’t think they’ll be allowed to say even if something was about to happen. Chaos at the docks.’
Thaniel nodded. ‘You want to go, in case?’
‘Francis Fanshaw will have my head on a plate if I evacuate everyone and nothing happens. I haven’t got much goodwill capital with him at the moment, I suspect.’ He flicked his eyes up at Thaniel.
‘I haven’t told him anything,’ Thaniel said. ‘If no one’s noticed you weren’t at the promulgation, good. What are we doing, then, if not leaving?’
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Page 25
