The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  While she was talking, she was opening a box. Thaniel wanted to ask if she could hurry up. His shoulder hurt with a bright fresh pain that felt like the stitches might have come undone, and thinking of all those stairs back to the surface made it worse.

  ‘It’s a really common thing to hear here, superstition about owls. Some people think they’re lucky, some people think they mean you’ll die soon. But they definitely indicate some kind of change.’

  Thaniel nodded. Grace’s box was full of chalk dust, and a little pair of bellows. She pressed them together, and dust blew across the pool.

  ‘What the researchers found in the trickster stories was that owls always preceded the appearance of the trickster. Obviously it could just be a narrative device, but I don’t think it was. I don’t think our ornithologist thought so either.’ She sighed. ‘I think he found something. I think that’s why he tried to run away.’

  There were clouds of chalk over the water now. The chalk plumed and danced. He wanted to say he would help her with the bellows, because she looked thin and exhausted, but he was fighting off a wave of dizziness. He could feel his shirt catching on all the glass cuts.

  She pointed. ‘Watch the chalk.’

  It was forming patterns. A network of lines outlined themselves in the white dust, quite broad, like owl-sized tunnels. For a while nothing moved but the dust. Then one of the strange air-tunnels sharpened, and an owl ghosted down exactly through it, took a fish from the water, and flew back up through another.

  ‘What was that?’ Thaniel said.

  ‘That,’ Grace said, ‘is what a future ghost looks like. That tunnel in the air, that line. It’s where the owl will fly. You see?’

  Thaniel thought about it, then decided that in five seconds’ time, he was going to reach out and touch her shoulder. A very thin, feeble little line appeared in the chalk dust between them. Grace nodded.

  ‘Yes. We can do it too, but not half as clearly as the owls do. I think it’s because we decide things vaguely, most of the time. But say you could perceive the future – even just the immediate future – you’d know what you were doing far more precisely. You’d know the variables. You wouldn’t just decide to cross the road, you’d know exactly when and where you’d cross, because you’d know where all the carts were going to be. Much more specific, much clearer. A much more definite future. I think the more inevitable the future, the clearer the future ghost. Look at this.’

  She flicked a sovereign coin. It fell down a very clear coin tunnel in the whorling chalk, and then, right at the last second, the tunnel split into two fainter ones. Heads and tails. The coin landed heads. The ghost trails all vanished.

  ‘Gravity. Certain. Always,’ she said. ‘Followed by exactly even chances, which are fainter because they have only a fifty per cent chance of actually occurring.’ She sighed. ‘This is exactly how Mori works, isn’t it? He perceives possible futures. This is what he’s seeing.’

  ‘Yes.’ He hesitated. He had conditioned himself so well never to talk about Mori that it was a struggle now. ‘Sometimes you can … Six was angry with him not long ago. She threw a dice, and if it landed on a six, she threw a firecracker. But even when the dice didn’t land on a six, Mori still heard the firecracker. The – potential firecracker.’ Prising the memory away and giving it to Grace left him feeling hollow.

  ‘Because the dead future takes a little while to fade,’ she said. She was watching him ruefully. They hadn’t divorced just because Thaniel had fallen in love with a watchmaker. It was as much because Grace had always thought – as far as he could tell – that it should have been her Mori was intrigued by, not some nobody from the civil service.

  Thaniel looked away at the owls. They were mesmerising. Some were grey, but some were a deep, coaly black. They might just have seemed unusual out in the forest, but in here, beside the ice and the deep, silent pool, they couldn’t have looked more preternatural if they’d tried. ‘But how are they so clear about where they’re going, then?’

  She nodded a little. ‘There’s no light at all in this cave without the lightbulbs. So how do they know …’

  ‘… where the fish are,’ Thaniel finished. Another owl swept down, though another chalk tunnel. It caught its fish so neatly that it only just disturbed the water.

  ‘Exactly. What if it’s not that the owls hear their prey extraordinarily well – what if they can sense where the fish intends to go? Like Mori would do?’

  ‘Christ.’

  She glanced up, tentative. ‘Of course nothing is proven yet, but what if all those trickster figures in the stories were people like Mori, and what if the owls follow them because they mistake a clairvoyant’s very clear, very defined lines of intent for those of another owl?’

  ‘God, you’re right. There are always owls at Filigree Street. I always thought it was because we were near Hyde Park. Mori never said anything.’

  She tipped her head, philosophical and tired. ‘It’s only a hypothesis. Owls, for Christ’s sake.’ She looked up at him properly for the first time. ‘What happened to him? How did they get him? I’ve been thinking about it for months, there’s absolutely no way he wouldn’t know what Kuroda intended for him. Unless he walked into it willingly.’

  Thaniel nodded a little. ‘He walked into it. He knew something was wrong when we got here. I tried to ask, he said it was fine. He sent me away.’ He had to cough, and tasted iron this time as well as chalk. He hoped it wasn’t blood. He had to get down off this mountain and back to Tokyo before he keeled over. The morphine seemed not to be doing anything much. ‘And I went, like an idiot.’

  Grace drew her teeth over her lip. ‘He didn’t tell you anything.’

  ‘No. But something’s gone wrong. He wouldn’t let anything happen to Six, even if he was away. I’ve seen men who were looking at her too closely get run over by horses. I’m not joking.’ He told her about the carriage crash and Willis, and the windows exploding inward at the legation.

  Grace had been nodding gradually while he spoke. ‘You think he’s dead.’

  He couldn’t say it. ‘I think none of this feels like him.’ He turned away, coughing again.

  He must have looked bad, because he saw real alarm go across her face. ‘Christ, you’re ill … come on, enough of all this. No more chalk.’ She took his elbow. ‘We’ve got staff cabins. Let’s get you fed and settled for the night.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  Yoruji, 15th February 1889

  That morning, Kuroda had been at a coal warehouse. It was empty because the labourers had fled, but haunted with black ghosts formed from the pitch dust. The Ministry had organised the trip to prove to the increasingly skittish general public that the ghosts, in themselves, were harmless. Photographers from the newspapers had come to take pictures, and everyone had been laughing and cheerful. It was the most haunted place Tanaka could find, with about ten ghosts. Even the journalists who’d so enjoyed laying into him when he was in the Navy had said, not even grudgingly, that it was a good thing to do for people. Kuroda had been having a good day.

  Once the photographers had gone, Tanaka had taken him quietly to one side, and said that they had a problem.

  ‘So the lads are keeping an eye on Yoruji,’ Tanaka said, uncharacteristically oblique. He looked grim. ‘They’ve been noticing ghosts in the snow. Like a lot.’

  Kuroda frowned, because he had never known Tanaka fuss before. ‘Well, that’s to be expected, isn’t it? Yoruji is closer to the mountain than Tokyo—’

  ‘No, but like a lot a lot. The men are getting nervy. So I went up this morning to have a look round, just to reassure them, sort of thing. Just chucked a bit of flour around.’ He paused. ‘There’s fucking hundreds of ghosts. I think – for some reason, that place is recording pretty much everything that happens there. It’s not just the odd random thing. I looked round for fifteen minutes and I saw … well. It’s like a giant sodding ghost phonograph. I think it might have recorded things we don’t want people to see.�
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  ‘How clear?’

  For the first time since Kuroda had known him, Tanaka looked uncomfortable. ‘I can’t describe it. I think you need to see, sir.’

  So Kuroda had cancelled the afternoon’s appointments.

  Tanaka had set up little fans and chalk packets in the ceilings all through Yoruji. They feathered down a soft snow of chalk, outlining any ghosts and falling in a strange, soft blanket on the nightingale floors. It held the marks of everyone’s bootprints beautifully. Someone gave Kuroda a cotton mask on the way inside.

  Like Tanaka had said, the ghosts were everywhere. In every corridor, at every corner, by every pool and balcony, they overlaid each other in silent crowds. The same people appeared again and again, Suzuki and Mrs Pepperharrow, Mori; Kuroda even saw a glimpse of himself, walking the other way. Every single one was a perfect recording of a lost instant months ago, years ago, all overwritten across each other. The more recent ones, or what he thought must be the most recent judging from the way people’s haircuts and clothes changed, were the clearest. That made sense. New recordings over the top of old ones.

  Kuroda’s stomach clenched. He walked carefully through the chalk, through two of the little gardens, and to the old smoking room. The smoking room Mori had locked up, ever since the Countess had died. It was still locked. He kicked the door in. Tanaka followed. Silently, he threw a new packet of chalk into the air.

  The Countess was there. Running, like she was chasing him down the halls of the years.

  Kuroda slammed the door shut. ‘He knew,’ he said softly. ‘He fucking knew, Tanaka, he kept that room locked so nothing else could overlay it.’

  Tanaka put one hand on his arm, very carefully. ‘All respect, sir, but that isn’t our biggest worry now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The most recent thing that happened in the dining room,’ Tanaka said softly. ‘It’s there. Clear as the morning.’

  ‘But muddled up with everything else that ever happened in that dining room, surely?’ Kuroda said, sharper than he’d meant. A foul tattoo needle of panic was starting to prick at his lungs.

  It was ridiculous, how easy it had been to convince himself that he had outgrown fear. Of course he hadn’t. He had just grown so big that there wasn’t much in the world to fear anymore, but here was one of those things. He felt as though Mori had dumped him back in time to that first shameful morning he’d gone into battle in the Navy, white and sweating and absolutely certain he was going to be blown to pieces. That terrible fear, the one he’d convinced himself was childishness, was just as vivid now as it had been then.

  Tanaka was shaking his head. ‘It’s blasted everything else. It’s like – it was so violent or so important it formed much clearer—’

  Kuroda pushed past him and strode back to the dining room. The chalk dusted down, and showed everything that had happened to Mori. Kuroda had ordered it, but seeing it gave him a nasty twist. Tanaka was right. Those ghosts were clear, and the ones they overlaid had faded to a sort of white noise crackle in the background.

  ‘What the hell has he done to this place?’ Kuroda said at last. ‘How did he do this? How did he make it record everything like this? Nowhere else is like this, not even in Aokigahara.’

  Tanaka was nodding a little. ‘I don’t know. But the thing is, I don’t think he did it on purpose. It records him even when you wouldn’t want to be recorded.’ He paused. ‘Come and look at this. It’s – peculiar.’

  ‘Tanaka, I don’t know how much more peculiar I can look at today.’

  ‘Please,’ Tanaka said, unexpectedly humble.

  Kuroda set his teeth. He had thought the most difficult, nervy part would be taking Mori, but he was wrong. He felt like a spring deep in his gut was winding tighter, and tighter. He kept expecting something to explode in his face. He hadn’t slept for days. It was the owls – the bloody owls were there always. They sat on all the window sills, tearing into little mice or squirrels, watching him, as if they expected something interesting.

  Tanaka led the way through the labyrinthine corridors, among the crowds of ghosts, to a room that looked out over the hot pools. There, right in the doorway, were another pair of ghosts, and again, they had impressed themselves more strongly somehow than anything else. One was Mori, and the other was his musician. They were just talking, kneeling close together.

  ‘I really don’t need to see him have sex,’ Kuroda snapped.

  ‘No,’ Tanaka said. ‘He doesn’t. Watch.’

  Kuroda could already see what Mori was saying. You learned to lipread quite quickly on the deck of a ship.

  —boring. I just want someone to invent…

  They argued back and forth a bit, something about microscopes, and twice Steepleton glanced around as if he could feel someone looking, but that was just Yoruji, or Kuroda thought so, until he saw him say,

  Is someone watching?

  And then Mori looked right at them. It was unmistakeable.

  ‘Does he know we’re watching?’ Kuroda said slowly. ‘Can he see us?’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ Tanaka said, very quiet. ‘They reckon future ghosts are possible, though, don’t they, up on the mountain?’

  Kuroda nodded.

  ‘We could be making ghosts in the past now. The electricity’s cranked up pretty high, and this place … seems to be a hell of a lot better than anywhere else at taking an imprint.’

  The silence crackled. The chalk sifted down, and Mori’s ghost got up and went away. Steepleton stayed still for a while, and then curled down small as if Mori had punched him in the gut.

  Kuroda knew the feeling. He had increased his security detail at home, at the Ministry, everywhere, and he had four bodyguards with him now, but, like an imbecile, it hadn’t even occurred to him that he might just have walked smack into a trap here.

  ‘If,’ Kuroda said softly, fighting hard to keep his voice level, ‘he’s been seeing us all along, if our ghosts were visible to him in the past, then we are not safe. He could have set something up. We have to get out. He’s a watchmaker, for fuck’s sake; what if there’s a clockwork bomb in the cellar?’

  Tanaka shut his eyes for a second. ‘Yes. Right – everyone out.’ He raised his voice to carry through the house. ‘Everyone out now!’

  Two of Kuroda’s bodyguards caught his shoulders and hustled him fast towards the front door. Tanaka ran to keep up.

  There was no bomb. Nothing exploded. No one was hurt. They all stood out in the snow, and the house stayed just as it had been, the timbers cackling as they settled in the cold.

  ‘Burn it down,’ Kuroda said at last.

  ‘We don’t know if fire will destroy the ghosts—’

  ‘Then at least it will be harder to look for them.’ His heart was cantering. ‘If one single fucking journalist takes a photograph …’

  ‘We’ve not let anyone in. Just in case.’ Tanaka looked wearily glad he’d got that right, at least. ‘Problem with gas lines, we said.’

  ‘Perfect, then no one will be surprised if it burns.’

  Tanaka hesitated. ‘People will start asking questions, though, when Mori doesn’t turn up to ask where his house has gone. The Duke will know something’s happened to him.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Where’s the body?’

  ‘In that graveyard in the woods. No one would look in a grave.’

  ‘Good. Let the fire die down, then take it to the Duke. We found it here when we heard about the fire. Let him come up with his own theory. Then keep this place cordoned off. Gas leaks, investigations, whatever.’

  Tanaka nodded. ‘One thing though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mori’s gaijin. He’s a diplomat. He could come in here and ignore any police, any cordon, and we can’t touch him. He’s going to hear about this. He’ll come looking. He knows it might be us, as well.’

  ‘Hit him over the head with a brick and drop him in the sulphur well, then. Bloody hell, Tanaka, have some initiative,’ Kuroda said, knowing he
was being unfair. Tanaka was built of initiative.

  Tanaka was shaking his head. ‘Sir, we can’t risk killing a diplomat. The British would come here straightaway with cameras, looking for any ghosts that might show what happened to him, and we wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop them.’

  ‘No, you’re right.’ Kuroda sighed. ‘Fine. Keep up the cordon. If he comes, you go straight to the Duke. Tell him we think Steepleton did it. Jealousy. He went back to Yoruji to move the body when he realised the place had burned down, in case people started looking too closely. He might be a diplomat, but he looks like he’d mug you and steal your shoes. The Duke isn’t going to listen to a word he says, even if he has it all bang on.’

  Tanaka puffed his breath out, relieved. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Yoruji burned fierce and brilliant once Tanaka’s men set the fires. Kuroda stood watching at the edge of the woods. After a while, he caught himself knocking his hat against a tree over and over again. He’d begun to do it to dislodge the chalk dust in the brim, but never stopped. His internal spring was wound up more tightly than ever. Something was going to happen, and Mori was just making him wait, and wait, and wait.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Aokigahara, 15th February 1889

  The cabins were tucked along the tree line, just on the far bank of the dam. A soldier opened one and gave Thaniel the keys, and a wooden box full of rice and vegetables.

  The cabin roofs, heavily insulated under thick sheets of rubber, went down almost to the ground. Thaniel had expected an empty room inside, but there was a futon and blankets in the cupboard, a piano, phonograph, and shelves of books, all about bird-watching. The only thing to say that nobody had lived there for a while was a deep dusty smell, and the wallpaper that was peeling near the door. He pushed the paper down absently, then paused when the wall underneath felt too springy. It was insulated with a thick sheet of rubber too.

  He went to see what was in the phonograph. He wound up the handle and waited. Handel bloomed out into the little room. It wasn’t until he saw how bright the colours looked that he noticed how dark it was getting outside. He took the monk’s lightbulb from his coat pocket and set it on the low kotatsu table. The filament made a gentle buzz, which haloed the glass. It was homely.