The Girl from the Well

by Rin Chupeco

  Both are also dead. Scraggly Beard’s eyes are rolled so far into his head that only the whites are showing, and Glasses suffers from deep claw marks that rake across his face and tear through his clothes. Like the Mohawk, both their faces are putrefied, decomposing.

  “Hiroshi!” Acne Scars is running toward him, and Shaved Head is relieved to find him still alive, though every inch as terrified as he. “What’s going on, Hiro?” he wails. “Yasushi-chan’s dead! I…” His voice trails off as he stares down, shocked, at the two other dead boys at his feet.

  “There’s nothing we can do for them now! We gotta get out of here!” Shaved Head dashes down the stairs, Acne Scars tripping and stumbling behind him. The old man and woman are still sitting by the table, though they are now clinging to each other, terrified by the commotion.

  “Did you do this to fuck around with us, you old prick?” Shaved Head grabs the old man’s shoulders and shakes him hard. Acne Scars loses his balance, landing noisily on his rear by the small wardrobe. The old woman shrinks back, covering her eyes with her withered hands. “Answer me!”

  But the old man does not look at him. He is looking over his shoulder at something that drains all the blood from his face.

  Slowly, Shaved Head releases the old man and turns.

  The wardrobe door has opened, and another pair of arms encircle Acne Scars’ neck. Half my body leans out, my hair brushing against the boy’s cringing face.

  Acne Scars’ gaze is locked onto Shaved Head’s, realization dawning alongside terror on his ugly, pockmarked face.

  “Hiroshi,” he whimpers. It is the last thing he will ever say.

  I

  dr

  ag

  him into the confines of the wardrobe, the door sliding shut behind us.

  Shaved Head sinks to his knees. The tiny wardrobe rocks hard against the wall as terrible screams ring out from within. For some minutes these continue, until they finally cut off abruptly.

  For a long moment there is silence.

  Then from inside the closet the scratchings start up again. So do the low, gurgling sounds.

  Shaved Head runs past the frightened couple and snatches a metal baseball bat.

  “I’m not afraid of you!” he shouts. “I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna kill you!” Crazed, he brings the bat down on the sides of the wardrobe with a strength that belies his lanky build. “I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna kill you!” Over and over again he attacks it, and the cheap wood slowly gives way.

  He smashes the doors, battering at the wardrobe until the frame shatters from the repetitive blows, until the hinges break free and the plywood splinters to reveal that there is nothing inside the wardrobe but clothes—not Acne Scars, not anything else. But the boy does not stop. He grabs at the sides of the wardrobe and pulls it down onto the floor, destroying it completely.

  Shaved Head pauses, panting heavily from his exertions. “Did I kill it?” He wheezes and then starts laughing hysterically. “Hahahaha! I killed it, didn’t I? I killed it! Sonofabitch!”

  He levels a kick at what remains of the wardrobe, still giggling maniacally. “You’re not going to get me, bitch,” he crows. “You’re not going to get me!”

  But his laughter falters when he hears the scratching again despite everything to the contrary—a scratching coming from underneath the broken planks of wood.

  Frenzied, like a man possessed, he begins to pull the heavy pieces of timber away from the floor. When most of the wood scraps have been discarded, he burrows into the pile of clothes, pawing through them until something snags his foot, forcing him to land on a

  body.

  It is the body of the dead girl, arms folded across her naked chest.

  Her eyes open. Her bloodied hands reach up to cup either side of the boy’s cringing face, almost caressingly. She even smiles.

  But those same bloody hands tighten inexorably around him, and Shaved Head is yanked forward into her waiting mouth.

  It is hours before either of the old couple can be persuaded to leave their table. But when the aging man sweeps the strewn clothes away with a trembling hand, there is no trace of either the boy or the dead girl.

  • • •

  It is her decision.

  Unlike other souls that I have saved, this girl does not glow, does not rise up to the sky. Unlike with other souls, the prolonged violence of her death has warped her into the creature of malice standing before me.

  Unlike other souls, she is much like me.

  She has not changed. Her skin still bears the marks of the torture she went through in the moments before her death. This is clear in the lacerations on her body, in the ruins of her face. Like me, she has exacted her revenge against her tormentors, but her loss of innocence from such actions ensures that she cannot cross into the light. Like me, she cannot leave and is instead doomed to wait forever on dark shores, straining for glimpses of stars.

  She understands this. Still, a smile curves along what is left of her mouth. She bows to me, for even spirits can understand gratitude, and turns to leave, the night soon swallowing her up.

  I should not feel sorrow that she chose of her own volition to take the same path I now walk. But I do. I am beginning to understand that there are better things than retribution.

  I, too, leave this terrible place, this little apartment of bodies. There are no souls to save here. Anything worth redeeming left this place many, many years ago.

  Instead, I wait for the break of dawn. I find an empty shed washed clean from the stink of the living and slip back into hibernation. Briefly, I contemplate returning to Tarquin’s apartment instead, but I do not. For the first time in as long as I can remember I feel unclean. Impure.

  Uneasy.

  So it is in this little shed in Tokyo that I wait for Callie to arrive.

  • • •

  Tarquin Halloway and his father are there when she steps out into the waiting area of Narita International Airport in Tokyo, and Callie is stunned by how Tarquin looks. She expected him to look sick from their email exchanges where Tarquin recounted his health, sometimes deprecatingly, but nothing prepared her for the hollowness of the tattooed boy’s cheeks or the pallor of his skin or the feverish brightness of his dark eyes. Despite his now-frail condition, there is energy to the teenager still, and he closes the needed distance to exuberantly throw a thinner arm around Callie’s shoulder.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, his smile a mere ghost of what it could have been. “I look fantastic.”

  “Oh, Tark!”

  He laughs at her fears. “Don’t worry. I’m a lot stronger than I look. But I’m glad you’re here, cuz.”

  “He’s been growing worse every day,” his father tells Callie later, as he drives the rented car into the thick of Tokyo. Tarquin is nestled against warm blankets in the backseat of the car, fast asleep. In spite of what he says, his burst of enthusiasm exhausted him quickly. “I’m at my wit’s end what to do. I’ve been to several different doctors and they’ve run two dozen tests, but no one seems to know what’s been making him sick.”

  It is the woman in black, Callie knows, but she does not tell the father this.

  “I’ve gotten two rooms at the Garden Rose Hotel. The hospital is only a block or so away, so we can be there quickly, in case one of the doctors calls again.”

  After unpacking, Callie heads to the room across from hers, where she manages to wake Tarquin long enough to spoon hot chicken soup into him, while his father conducts business with his mobile phone. By the time he is done, Tarquin has drunk most of the nourishing meal, in between halfhearted protests that he could feed himself without her assistance, and fallen back asleep.

  “He sleeps most of the time now,” his father says, worried. “They have the results of his most recent blood test, and they still haven’t found anything wrong with him.�
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  “Maybe it’s not as serious as it looks,” Callie says, trying to be encouraging, though she knows the deceit of her own words.

  “I hope so.” The man sinks into a nearby armchair. “God, I’m tired myself. I’ve been running around Tokyo all day, settling Yoko’s affairs and trying to finish the rest of my work in between talking to doctors. I’ve got several meetings with Mitsubishi and Itochu in the next few weeks. I don’t think I’ve had more than a few hours’ sleep since arriving here.”

  “Maybe a rest in the countryside would help both of you,” Callie suggests.

  “Yes. Whenever he feels better, Tarquin pores through every guidebook and map of Aomori we can find. I think it’ll be good for him, too. Thank you again for coming with us. Tarquin’s been looking forward to the trip.”

  “Did Aunt Yoko have family there?”

  “I’m a little fuzzy on that myself. Yoko never talked much about any relatives she might have had. I know that her parents died before we’d even met, but if she had any other siblings or cousins, other than the older sister she mentioned, I’m as much in the dark as you are. She never liked talking about her past, insisting that she was done with that part of her life.”

  The man gestures, and Callie sees with a start that the urn bearing the ashes of Tarquin’s mother stands atop one of the room’s dressers.

  “Yoko mentioned in her will that she wanted her ashes scattered at the Chinsei shrine near Osorezan. I’ve never heard of the place. I’ve asked a couple of people, but the closest thing to a temple that they are aware of is the Bodai Temple on the Osore grounds. I suppose we can always ask some of the locals at Mutsu once we get there.”

  The man’s phone rings and he excuses himself to answer. As he talks, Callie steals across the room to gaze down at the small urn on the dresser. She wonders briefly how Tarquin must feel, traveling with his mother in this macabre manner.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she tells it softly. “I don’t know what I can possibly do. But I promise to do whatever I can to help protect Tark.”

  She turns away, back toward the room.

  Something rattles behind her.

  Callie looks back just in time to see the lid slide off the urn, dropping with a noisy thump onto the carpeted floor. From inside, a jumble of hair rises out of the opening, inch by slow, protruding inch. As she watches, horrified, a drooping eye emerges from underneath that matted hair, and then next, a gaping mouth. It is

  Yoko Halloway’s head

  peering up, and Callie claps a hand over her mouth, stifling the urge to scream. But the dead woman’s eyes seem every inch as pleading, a peculiar desperation in that bloodied face. Her torn lips move wordlessly with an entreaty that Callie neither hears nor understands, before the head falls out of the urn and hits the floor, rolling toward her.

  “Callie?”

  The girl jerks back into the reality of the room, only to find Tarquin’s father peering down at her anxiously. “Are you all right?”

  In the older man’s presence, there is nothing out of the ordinary. The seals on the urn’s lid remain perfectly in place. Yoko Halloway’s head does not stare up at her from the floor.

  “Are you all right?” the boy’s father asks again.

  No, Callie thinks. No. I am not all right.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mutsu

  The journey to Osorezan comes in stages.

  From the Tokyo station, they take the Shinkansen train to a place called Hachinohe. After the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, a certain kind of quaintness seems to settle around this little city. The faintest smell of brine permeates the air.

  Tarquin had been sketching all throughout the train ride, his papers filling with small scenes of rural life. Fishermen hauling in the day’s wages and the busy and noisy throng of markets are captured in strokes of his pencil. Rather than become fatigued by the train rides and the constant switching of stations, the teenager appears more energized than when he was in Tokyo, and he takes shorter, quicker naps each time.

  “You’re really good at this, Tark,” Callie says, going through his works. “Oh. Is this…?” She holds one up, where he has drawn a simple sketch of a dark-haired, solemn-looking girl, wearing a kimono dotted with fireflies.

  “Did that one this morning.” Tarquin flashes her a sheepish grin. “I’m not obsessed with her or anything like that. But when you told me about that geisha with the butterfly kimono, and then that dream I had—I couldn’t get the image out of my head.”

  They spend half an hour stretching their legs and pay for packed obento lunches from a nearby convenience store. Inside, the clerk is watching television, turned to an English-speaking news channel. Callie does not listen at first until she realizes there is something unusual about the day’s report.

  “We’ve received word that police discovered four bodies this morning in the San’ya ward of Tokyo in what they describe as ‘horrific’ deaths by persons currently unknown. Police have confirmed earlier reports of the victims appearing to have both been drowned and also severely mutilated, making it one of the worst murders in Japan in the last several years.

  “All four were students at a local high school. Authorities are searching for two other students last seen with the victims and still missing. No other details have been forthcoming, but we will provide updates as soon as we receive official statements from the police superintendent.”

  The victims appear to have both been drowned and also severely mutilated.

  The obento store owner sighs. “Youths nowadays,” she says sadly in heavily accented Japanese. “Not what they used to be.”

  Trembling, Callie can only nod.

  They switch trains and board the Aoimori Railway, which Tarquin’s father explains will take them to Noheji next, an even smaller town than Hachinohe. Winters here are long, broken only by short, cool summers, and a faint chill blankets the area, though it has yet to snow. From here they take one final train ride to Shimokita. Callie balks at the exorbitant fees Tarquin’s father pays each time, but the man is unconcerned by the expense and assures her she owes him nothing. As the train leaves the station, Tarquin persuades his father to explore the train further with him. Invigorated by the new sights, the boy has color returning to his cheeks.

  Callie declines the invitation. She is unused to the constant motion of modern locomotives and wishes to remain in her seat to recuperate. As they leave, Callie stares out the window as the scenery changes from woodland to green space to farmland and back again, watching people work at their fields harvesting rice (fifty-eight) or herds of cattle grazing at will (seventy-nine). From a distance, the diminutive shapes of small fishing boats pass (forty), silhouetted against the sparkling waters of the bay.

  She turns her head and sees me on the seat before her.

  I have never been to the northern part of Japan, but something in the rustic countryside, the sway of thatched roofs, and the endless fields is more familiar to me than the gray stone skyscrapers and the artifice of color in Tokyo. This reminds me of

  (home)

  the life I once led.

  Perhaps because of this sense of calm, I do not appear to her as a dreadful onryuu, a massless thing of hair, of torn cotton and skin. Instead, I look out the window from my seat as a young girl in a simple homespun kimono. My hair is coiled in a bun, and the darks of my eyes are now a soft brown, the whiteness of my face now a palette of pink flesh. There is a marked contrast between the hideous appearance of an apparition that I have worn for so long and the simple normalcy of the girl I once was and whose shape I have now resumed, however briefly. I say nothing for the moment and continue to watch trees and rice paddies pass as the train hurtles on, waiting for her to make the first move.

  “Your name is Okiku, isn’t it?”

  Without looking back at her, I nod slightly.

 
“The same Okiku from Himeji Castle?”

  Another nod.

  She says nothing for some time. I imagine that conversing with the dead is always difficult for the living.

  “Did you kill those boys that were in the news today?”

  I smile.

  “Why are you doing this?” She knows the answer but seeks to hear it from my own mouth.

  There is a long silence before I surprise even myself by speaking with a wistfulness I thought I had lost and could no longer feel.

  “I loved my lord,” I say in a voice barely above a whisper. It is not an answer to her question, but it is something I have wanted to say out loud for so long, and the truth of those words comforts me.

  “Did you kill all those people because of him?”

  “I am a servant. I had a simple life. A happy one. I contented myself with loving my lord without hope of return. But he betrayed me to his retainer, and in that moment, I realized I had wasted my life loving an undeserving man. I died with regrets. But I could not leave.”

  “Tark’s been sick for a while now… Was that your doing?” The accusation in Callie’s voice is apparent.

  I turn to look at her then. “No,” I say, a little angry that she would presume to think this. “I would never hurt him.”

  She is quiet again, acknowledging the truth in my words. “What can I do to help you?”

  “There is nothing you can do. There is only me.”

  Another drought of silence.

  “I take from them,” I finally say again, and the strength of my anger surprises me again, “because they do not deserve life.”

  “Why do you help us?”

  I finally turn my head to look at her. I do not know what she sees looking back. Calliope Starr is a strange girl, to be willing to face me when anyone else would have feared. But I have often found that people are strange because they have something most others lack. “Because I do not wish to see you or Tarquin come to harm. Because I…”