The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Oh!’ The monk looked delighted. He had a lamp on the end of a slim pole, a lightbulb with a paper cover over it, and now he poked it out to light up Thaniel better. ‘How in the world did you learn Japanese?’

  ‘Um, excruciatingly. How come you’re still here?’

  ‘Someone has to look after the shrine.’

  ‘Right, right.’ Thaniel looked at the bulbs for a second longer before he remembered what he was meant to be doing. ‘Listen, I wonder if you could help. Er … with two things actually.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes. Thing the first?’

  Thaniel smiled. ‘How long has there been electricity like this? Enough to …?’ He motioned back at the village. The motorised sprinkler misted his sleeve.

  ‘Oh, on and off for months,’ the monk said cheerfully. ‘Them on the mountain of course. If you want to kill yourself, you can find rope in there somewhere if you look about a bit,’ he added, waving at the forest. ‘The rangers leave it up. Would you like a lightbulb?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Thaniel passed the lightbulb between his hands twice. It stayed lit all the while. ‘What do you mean, them on the mountain?’

  ‘The scientists. Whatever they’re doing, it’s been very pronounced lately. The ghosts seem terribly flustered by it; there are a lot more of them than usual.’

  ‘So it’s not the volcano?’

  The monk laughed. ‘How in the world could the volcano make ghosts? No, no, they’ve got machines, great big things. They’re doing it on purpose. I quite like it.’ If he was angry that the village was on fire, he didn’t mention it. He only pointed down, to where the ghost of a cat was curled up asleep close on Thaniel’s left, and then, anticipating the probable question, lifted up the real cat to show that it was all right. It had tiny rubber boots on.

  ‘They’re not always dead, the ghosts?’ Thaniel said, taken aback.

  ‘No, no. Sometimes, sometimes not,’ the monk said.

  ‘But then …’ But he couldn’t think what that meant. He couldn’t think what the hell kind of machine would generate free electricity across an eighty-mile radius. All at once he didn’t much like the idea of going up.

  All around them, the ash was still falling, and it was hard to think through; it looked like white noise. Quite often, it became too heavy for the pines and they tipped a lot of it down all at once into soft piles around the trunks. Where it puffed up, there were maddening half-shapes that didn’t look like people, but not like animals either. It was making Thaniel more jumpy than ever. He had never minded crowds, but these were crowds he couldn’t see or name, and a horrible tight dread was building in his ribcage. ‘Then what are they?’ he said.

  ‘Pssht,’ said the monk, not bothered.

  His nonchalance made Thaniel feel better. ‘Is it far up the mountain? To where the scientists are, I mean.’

  The monk looked anxious now. ‘You mustn’t walk in the dark, it’s bad at night. You’d better stay with me.’

  It would have been much more polite to go back and forth a bit, and pretend at least twice that he was fine, but suddenly he was so tired and so grateful he would have handed over anything for the chance to lie down. He said so, worried the monk would think he was being rude, and offered to pay.

  ‘Rubbish,’ said the monk. ‘I shall be glad of the company. You can play Go, can’t you? Oh, I’ll teach you, it’s easy,’ he added, with a wicked little spark. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve put up rubber everywhere. Safe as you like. I’m Daichi, by the way. You know, like Great Help?’ He traced out the kanji in the air. ‘Though really I’m Medium-sized Help now, on account of my age.’

  Thaniel laughed and introduced himself. The monk thought about it, said he wouldn’t be able to say Nathaniel in a million years and would he mind awfully if he just called him Natsu. Thaniel didn’t mind. It meant summer, and he liked the idea that the man thought he was summery.

  Thaniel lost four games of Go, slept unexpectedly well on a mattress on the floor, thanked the monk again and set out at half-past six in the morning. The monk made him take a lightbulb and wouldn’t let him pay for it. When Thaniel put it in his coat pocket, it stayed lit even with the insulation of the fabric. It looked like he’d picked up a star.

  The mist was dense, and the great pines were close-set, so the glow of the lightbulb didn’t reach far. Sometimes it was stronger and sometimes weaker, and then, suddenly, it went off altogether. The difference was amazing. The air felt light and clear. The pain in the roots of his teeth vanished. He could smell the pines, that lovely, resin freshness, and the soft saltiness of wet stone from the path. He sat down in the roots of a tree to enjoy it, and to get his breath back. The horrible foreboding feeling went away.

  When the electricity came back, it was sharp, a nasty twang that made every cell in him squeeze. He took another morphine tab.

  Something cold traced a soft, barely perceptible arc across the top of his spine. When he looked back, it was someone’s toenail.

  He almost dropped the lightbulb as he spun away from the tree. The body was hanging from one of the lower branches. There were others too, perhaps two dozen, all a good way apart from each other. Some were clear and some were only shadows. It took him a minute or so, standing and waiting for his ribs to unlock, to see that they were all shapes in the mist. None of them was solid. When he moved the light towards them, they had no colour. The mist had only furled into the imprints of people, like plaster into fossils. The nearest one swayed, but the rope made no sound. Very slowly, he touched its ankle. His hand passed straight through. There was only the dampness of the mist – just enough resistance to suggest some unusual quality of the air, just enough for him to have felt it when it brushed him.

  He stood for a long time watching the ghosts, but none of them did anything sudden. A long way off, crows hooted – they didn’t caw here – but that was all. His breath helixed away from him. He didn’t want to carry on. But going back would mean going past the hanging ghosts. He felt tight and anxious again, in a way he hadn’t since having nightmares as a small child. Maybe it was the altitude – altitude made you panicky, Mori said – but Thaniel didn’t think so.

  Eventually, he started along the path again. Once he was on the upper track, the lightbulb shone brighter. Steadily, over perhaps seven or eight hundred yards, the glow strengthened, and so did the sharpness of the ghosts. They weren’t all hanging. He saw a man in the mist spooling out a long string between the trees. One end of it was still tied around a tree beside the path, though the length of it had fallen and rotted away a long time ago in the damp.

  A flash of blue light flickered right across the sky. Thaniel was still wondering what it was when he felt something hot in his pocket. By the time he remembered his watch, it was burning. He pulled it out by its chain, his sleeve over his hand. It was too hot to hold. He put it down on the ground and knelt still. Where the chain sat over the damp moss, it steamed.

  It would have been sensible to leave it behind. But the watch was a little cache of old happiness, and while he should have let it go, even without any electricity, he couldn’t.

  Carefully, he tucked the watch into his wallet and waited to see if he could smell anything burning, but it seemed all right. It was hot, but only like a hot-water bottle. He slid it into his breast pocket to have the warmth over his lungs. Ashamedly, he decided he would rather burn than leave it.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Abashiri, Hokkaido, 19th January 1889

  Horikawa the gatekeeper was taking pot-shots out of the gatehouse window with an ancient rifle, aiming at the forest. Takiko arrived just in time to see an Ainu man jerk behind a tree.

  ‘Bloody savages,’ Horikawa said. ‘Bloody bear ceremony. What did the bear ever do to them?’

  She pushed the gate open with her shoulder and decided life would be much pleasanter if she just pretended he didn’t exist from now on.

  The owls were still on the roof of the Oracle tower. She stood and looked at them for a while. Yesterday she had wal
ked all around the tower, but there were no doors. There must have been a cell up there, but whichever way they had taken Mori up, she couldn’t find it. She had a heavy feeling that they’d walled him in. Today, she was here half an hour early to see if she could find a way in from the inside of the warden’s office.

  Just to make sure Mori was all right. If he was, he was staying put.

  There was no one at the desk in the guards’ office. Tanizaki had died in the night. A seizure. She heard it from the prisoners. They were chanting it on the fourth wing.

  ‘Well?’ Oemoto snapped. He was the tall man who Tanizaki had been teasing, and now he was prickly with anxiety. There were so many prisoners to so few guards now; he looked hunted. ‘Are you going to do the tea or was that only so you could make eyes at Tanizaki?’

  ‘I do it at ten o’clock,’ she said. ‘Keep yourself busy another couple of hours.’

  ‘Damn it, you’ll do it now! Do as you’re told!’

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ she said, and looked at the whip in his hand when he twitched it.

  She turned away from him, knowing he was going to hit her. When he did, it hurt incredibly. It felt like a hard smack over the back of the head. She didn’t feel the slashing sting of it until a moment later. She pushed her hand up through her hair. Her fingertips came away sticky. She looked back slowly. Oemoto’s expression was caught exactly halfway between shocked and brash.

  ‘No more of that,’ she said quietly. She had to concentrate hard to keep calm. She had known it was coming, but she hadn’t realised how furious she would be, or how powerful the urge to punch him in the face. She had to summon up everything Ayame had hammered into her for the stage. He had once screamed into her face to make sure she could stay as calm as a princess should. Even knowing it was pretend, it had been difficult at the time not to nut him. You had to put yourself behind a glass pane. ‘You can make your own tea.’

  The back of her skull still howling, she carried the bucket and cleaning things up to the warden’s office. She had a sharp sense of being a small person in among a lot of big, frayed, angry ones on short fuses. Of course, it didn’t change anything. What she had to do was the same. Find whatever it was Mori needed, decide whether or not she should help, find a ship, and bugger off home. It was simple. But it seemed further away than before.

  The key to the office was stiff. She expected the room to be empty, and she gasped, surprised, when she saw a man at Nakamura’s desk, typing. He lifted his hand and ducked his head, and then went back to the photographs and the numbers.

  ‘I’m just going to clean out the grate,’ she said.

  The man touched his own ear and made a slicing motion with one hand. Deaf. She pointed to the grate and mimed scrubbing. He nodded.

  Her knees cracked when she knelt down and pulled out the grate to look up into the chimney shaft, hoping for steps up. Nothing. It was far too narrow to fit a person.

  But, she could just make out another grate, well above this one.

  She glanced back at the man at Nakamura’s desk. He was typing again, not looking at her.

  ‘Hello?’ she called up the shaft.

  There was no answer. But after she had sat back on her heels, there was a crackle of paper, and then a paper crane fell down the chimney. It puffed into the ashes in the grate in front of her. She lifted it out slowly. There was writing on one of the wings. It was shaky.

  Help me

  Behind her, the door opened and the warden came through. ‘Morning, Miss Tsuru.’ He waved at the young man, who must have been here overnight, and motioned that he could go. The young man looked grateful and hurried to fetch his coat.

  She crushed the crane and dropped it through the spaces of the grate into the dark ash pit below. ‘Morning, sir.’

  ‘Oemoto’s in a terrible fluster downstairs. He positively burbled that you’ve been asking questions. About the tower.’ The warden pointed upward, and lifted his eyebrows. ‘I told him that was unlikely, since you and I had such a clear agreement about minding your own business.’

  She stood up carefully and brushed the ash off her knees. ‘He’s lying. He just hit me over the back of the head with that whip of his. I imagine he was afraid I’d tell you.’ She put her head down so he could see the blood, which had seeped stiffly into her collar.

  ‘Why did he hit you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t make the tea quickly enough.’

  ‘Is that really so? Because Mr Horikawa seems to think you took this work in order to garner … other kinds of business.’ She’d heard people say ‘whore’ with much less force. ‘And I know Mr Oemoto to be a very upright man.’

  ‘It is really so, sir, and Mr Horikawa is mistaken. All I do here is clean. And look at me, I’m old enough to have grandchildren.’

  He watched her for a moment. ‘I respect Mr Oemoto’s opinion a great deal, you understand; his father was very highly thought of in the army in his time.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, and didn’t ask what magnificently stupid thing Oemoto had done to end up posted to the arse end of the Arctic.

  ‘Another word from him and I shall have to dismiss you.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He paused, awkward. Sternness didn’t come naturally to him. ‘If he did hit you for nothing but tea, that’s dreadful.’

  ‘All the guards are feeling very strained, I think.’

  ‘Well, I’ll … overlook this claim about your nosing around if you’ll forgive him.’

  ‘How kind of you, sir.’

  ‘Well; off you go.’

  Takiko bowed her head and hauled the cleaning things downstairs again, even while the greater part of her howled to get up into that tower room. That trembling handwriting had stirred something slithering in her gut. Mori’s writing didn’t look like that – but no one’s did. It was how you wrote if you had to do it lying down, feeling sick. It was how dying people wrote.

  Mori had said he might die. He deserved to be in a cage, but he didn’t deserve to die in it.

  There had to be a way up, but she was never going to find it with Oemoto looking for an excuse to get her sacked.

  Down on the misdemeanours’ wing, the first one she’d seen on her first day, she counted along the cells until she found the door of the two men who had spoken to her about the cold and the Marquis de Sade. She tapped gently on the bars.

  ‘Hello, miss,’ the bigger man said, wary.

  ‘You know you said you’d kill for cigarettes?’

  She pushed her hand into her sleeve pocket and held up the new pack she’d brought from home today. It was a wrench, because she had wanted them a lot, but she’d live.

  He gave them a longing look. ‘What’s the plan then, ma’am?’

  ‘Well, if you could grab me and we’ll both scream a bit. And then if you could put Mr Oemoto in the infirmary for me when he comes to break it up, these are all yours. He’s just sliced my head open with that poncing whip he carries around.’

  The man had come to the bars to look at the cigarettes. He must have been mafia, because he was missing the ends of two fingers – they did that, if you didn’t do a job properly – and he had a tattoo on his arm. He looked puzzled. ‘Trust me to do that, do you?’

  ‘Course I do,’ she said. She didn’t, but just occasionally, trust was a force in itself. ‘I think we all know which side of these bars the psychopaths are on.’

  She saw him warm, just fractionally. She put the cigarettes down by the stove where no one could snatch them, went to the bars, and helped him find a way to grab her hair without hurting the new cut too much.

  At ten o’clock, she took Oemoto some tea in the infirmary, where the doctor was dabbing at the puffy mess that was one side of his face.

  ‘I’m ever so grateful that you rescued me,’ she said, making serious eyes at both of them. ‘I made you that tea. Good thing you like it so much really; you don’t look like you’ll be able to manage anything but tea for quite a while.’

  THIRTY-TWO


  Aokigahara, 14th February 1889

  After a long uphill climb, the path came out on the bank of a reservoir. The water was silent, and on the far side, a gaunt metal tower hummed and sparked with blue coils of static. Thaniel had to sit down for a while and watch it, because his chest hurt. He didn’t want to think about going all the way back. The walk up had taken hours.

  He hated reservoirs. He had grown up in woods that flooded sometimes into pools and ponds that had no clear edges, and after seeing water free to do as it liked, something felt wrong about a dam. The quickest way to the tower, though, was to walk across on the dam, so he did, feeling taut with the awareness of the weight of the water on one side and the huge steep drop to the river on the other. Somewhere, he could hear turbines. Below him, the water roared. It went into a narrow river, all white over rocks and falls until it evened out much lower down into a silver curve. On the other side it was dead quiet. There were no birds. Ahead, there was a much louder snap, and the air crackled.

  There was a gate at the end of the dam, and a gatehouse. Because it was the only tall thing but the mountain itself, there was an optical illusion around the tower from further away that made it look smaller than it was. It was colossal.

  ‘Stop!’ someone shouted. It made Thaniel jump. ‘Don’t cross the white line!’

  He looked down. Someone had painted a thick white line across the way in. Up in the gatehouse was a soldier who was pointing a rifle at him. He put his hands up.

  ‘I’m from the Ministry,’ he called back. ‘I’m here to see the director.’

  ‘I’ve not been told to expect anyone.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t, all the bloody telegraphs are down.’

  There was a pause. From the gatehouse, even in the mist, it would be obvious that he was a foreigner, but Mori’s imperial Japanese did its job and the soldier stepped back to talk to someone else.

  ‘He’s coming,’ the soldier said when he reappeared. ‘Don’t move.’