The Girl from the Well

by Rin Chupeco

  The obaasan has stopped chanting, and so have the other mikos. With hands that now betray themselves by their trembling, the old woman sets the doll down beside Tarquin’s head. Brief sighs erupt from around the other mikos, sounds of relief. Tarquin does not get up from the floor, however, and stares at something above him. The strange tattoos around his body have finally disappeared.

  “It is done,” the obaasan says with finality. Callie stares at the boy’s prone body, unsure why Tarquin does not move, why he does not look like he is breathing.

  “Tarquin-kun,” Kagura says, “the ritual is over now. You can get up now. See? The tattoos are gone.”

  And still Tarquin says nothing. The satisfied look on the mikos’ faces changes abruptly to one of concern when he does not move. His chest does not rise and fall, and he does not blink.

  “Tarquin-kun?”

  Saya crouches over the prone boy, frowning. And then she gives a small cry of alarm and turns one of his wrists over.

  There is one remaining seal on the boy’s body, throbbing frantically against his flesh like a heartbeat. It is the seal on Tarquin’s left wrist, the same seal bearing Callie’s blood. Callie, the only victim to survive the woman’s curse.

  “What has happened?” The obaasan is shocked, trying to rise to her feet.

  “The seal is still here!” Saya sounds panicked.

  “That is impossible! It should have disappeared along with the others unless…unless…”

  The obaasan’s hard gaze now swivels toward Callie’s stunned face.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” Callie does not need to understand the woman’s Japanese to glean its meaning from the fury of her lips, the anger in her eyes. “It was your blood on this seal!”

  “I…I don’t…”

  “You should have told us, Callie-chan!” Kagura wails. “You should have told us it was your blood, your seal! Everything that bears witness to the ritual must be pure and untainted. You should have been forbidden to watch!”

  “I’m sorry! I…I didn’t know…”

  There is a loud gasp, and the obaasan suddenly stumbles, her face deathly pale. She is clutching at her stomach, where the hilt of a stone knife protrudes. She tries to speak, but blood flows instead from her mouth, and she falls onto the wooden floor.

  “Machika-obaasan!” Forgetting their duties, the other mikos rush to the old woman’s side, unmindful of the pool of blood that is spreading from her in spirals, growing larger and larger until it first brushes and then soon immerses itself in Tarquin’s hair. The boy’s mouth falls open, and a harsh, choking sound comes from his throat.

  It is Amaya who is first made aware of the danger. “No!” she howls, attempting to lift Tarquin and bring him away, but by then it is too late. Blood drips onto the boy’s back, onto the final untouched seal that reappears on his skin without warning, before just as suddenly dissolving back into nothingness.

  The darkness steals into the room, blocking out the daylight outside, and with it comes cold, mocking laughter.

  The ritual has failed. The woman in black

  is

  free.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–ONE

  Sacrifice

  First come the

  screams.

  In the darkness they come from everywhere and nowhere, all at once.

  And then come the terrible sounds of

  bodies,

  the crunch of bone against wood and stone.

  And then there comes the

  silence.

  When the shadows lift, she stands within the ring of dolls, beside Tarquin’s prostrate form. The dolls that once surrounded the circle have been thrown with such force that one embeds itself in a wooden wall and another is flung outside and into a tree.

  The mikos resemble broken dolls themselves. Saya has been tossed several yards into the next room, and only her feet peek out from underneath a shattered wooden screen. Amaya has been driven into the doll glass display. She lies unmoving on the floor, red bleeding out from her head, and many of the dolls have tumbled out, burying her silent form.

  Kagura lies in a crumpled heap off to one side, her arms and hands cut and torn from flying glass that has sliced into her skin. She is groaning softly, the only one of the mikos to offer proof of life. Parts of the roof have caved in, wood and heavy debris burying the back rooms.

  Even Callie, huddled in her corner, the farthest away from the woman’s fury, is not without casualty. A heavy wooden plank has fallen from the ceiling, crushing her ankle.

  But it is the old woman, the obaasan, who suffers worst. She is stretched out on the floor on her stomach, her eyes staring into the wood as the blood seeps from her wounds, pooling around her. In her hand she clutches the ichimatsu doll that should have been the woman in black’s new prison, though the doll itself is burned nearly beyond recognition, its head lying some distance away.

  The woman in black is laughing. Callie scrambles forward despite her injured leg in a desperate bid to protect the unresponsive Tarquin, but an unseen force repels her, pushing her backward. It feels like an electric jolt sizzling into her skin, and she cries out in pain, clutching at her arm as a small burn mark appears across it, shaped like a human hand.

  The mask is gone. The woman in black stands before them, and the body that once belonged to the miko named Chiyo is a disfigured tragedy. Her bright, sunken eyes look out from the hollows of her face, and her lipless mouth is pulled back to reveal horrible brown teeth, sharp as a canine’s. Her hair is a mottled black, a symphony of disorder and disease. Clumps of it fall away from one side of her head to reveal gleaming, ivory bone.

  “Tark!” Callie cries out.

  The boy does not respond. He is twitching ever so slightly, but his mouth is slack and his eyes lackluster, caught up in the ancient malady, in the web of power the woman in black spins around him. But the creature does not bother to look down at the boy, at the sacrifice she has inhabited for most of his life. Instead, her eyes are on Callie. With painstaking slowness, she lifts a putrefied foot and steps out of the broken circle, to where the girl cowers.

  Callie realizes why. The lone seal on Tarquin’s body still beats in a silent, horrible cacophony on his left wrist. To be completely free, the woman in black must finish what she started in the Smiling Man’s basement.

  Holding her injured arm, Callie scrambles away, crying out when pain lances up her foot. She attempts to stand and fails, as the woman in black closes the distance with slow, measured steps, leaving scorched marks along the floor with every step. She stands between the girl and the sliding doors leading outside the shrine, and so Callie has little choice but to crawl over the salted doorway into the next room, desperate to find another way out.

  But the woman in black is so very near that Callie can see the frozen expression of hate on what is left of the dead miko’s face. She can hear the chopped, ragged

  moans

  rattling in the corpse’s throat, so soft they can almost be mistaken for breathing. She can smell death in that towering form.

  The next room has no exit. Crying, Callie presses her back against the wall as the masked woman approaches, cringing as the woman’s long decayed hands reach out for her face, nails long and sharpened.

  It is then that I

  drop

  from the ceiling, between Callie and this dead miko.

  The woman in black draws away, the hissing more apparent, while I stand and do nothing but look back at her with pupil-less eyes. The shadows around the woman rise, lashing at the air like an angry viper.

  I do not back down. I do not move away.

  She changes prey and lunges at me. I slide away, and she passes harmlessly through. She spins around as I reappear behind her and grab at the dead woman’s hair, tearing through the stringy mass with ferocious satisfaction. Her snarls grow louder, and s
he swipes at me with a clawed hand.

  I have never been attacked by spirits of my own kind before, and so I do not know what to expect. The cut the black-robed miko administers is not physical in nature, yet it sends a sharp, biting agony through me all the same. I have lived hundreds of years longer, but the dead miko has housed numerous demons and spirits within her during her short lifetime, and their combined strength stems from thousands of years of enmity. They are like poison running through her body, fueling it and giving her decayed form existence.

  And power.

  I give ground, and the dead miko senses her advantage. She lunges again, the momentum sending us both hurtling into the wall, but I alter direction in mid-fall, so that we pass through the mirror instead.

  The human eye is not built to follow the movements of the dead, and all Callie views is a series of blurs between the woman in white and the woman in black. But while I pass easily through the salted mirror, the dead miko does not. The glass slams into her, and the earth reels from the force, strong enough to send more of the roof tumbling down. The reflected surface with its sea salt prevents her from leaving, a restriction determined by the ritual long before she appeared, and it does not apply to me.

  But Callie has not been stagnant throughout this fight. She is crawling back into the main room. She ignores the injured and the dead, and hunts instead for the ritual dolls lying strewn about.

  “One.” She gasps out, finding one doll and setting it down nearby, within easy reach. “Two.” She picks up another, sets it down beside the first.

  The salt from the mirror has burned into the dead miko’s eyes. She is snarling, and her rage makes her even more dangerous. When I emerge from the floorboards, she is on me in an instant, tearing into me again, and the

  pain

  from her

  hands

  is overwhelming. I fight back, grabbing at her feet, and she falls. Immediately, I am on her, my fingernails burrowing into the hollows of her eyes. She is screaming and no longer in triumph.

  “Seven!” By now there are dolls lined neatly along the floor, a disturbing contrast to the carnage and blood nearby. And still Callie painfully crawls on to the eighth, which has been thrown outside the shrine, caught in the low branches of a nearby tree. Grabbing onto some tall shrubs, she lifts herself up, hobbling on one foot and attempting to reach up for the doll.

  Another scream echoes through the air, and it makes me pause. Tarquin is awake and in pain. He is pawing at his eyes, hands contorted in agony. I remember that his ties to the dead miko remain, and that the sufferings I inflict on her body that she can endure may also be those that he cannot.

  The dead miko takes the opportunity to strike back, as I hesitate in my indecision. With surprising strength, she sends me hurtling into the opposite wall, the wood actually tearing from the brutality.

  “Please please please.” It is Callie. She is tiptoeing as far as her injuries allow her to, but her fingertips only brush against the sole of the doll’s foot, still out of reach. “Oh please oh please oh please oh please…”

  Sharp hurt burns in the calves of her legs. The dead miko has latched onto Callie’s foot. I can hear the girl screaming. The woman relishes the cries. The doll falls to the ground, jarred free by the violent motions, but the girl has been dragged away, pressed against the shrine well with the dead miko looming over her. Black bile pours from the gouges I have made in her eyes, now burning in triumph. She pulls her hand back, nails razor-sharp, prepared to deliver the final, killing blow.

  “No!”

  It is Tarquin. He is awake and has taken hold of the stone knife, its bloody tip set against his neck.

  “You thought of killing me once, before Okiku stopped you,” he pants. “But you couldn’t risk it, could you? That’s what they do at the Obon festival—they burn the possessed dolls. To ‘kill’ them. That’s why Mom’s been trying to kill me for the last several years. If I die now, I can at least take you to hell with me.”

  “Tark,” Callie chokes. “No!”

  The dead miko twitches in his direction.

  “Shut up, Callie. Let me handle this.” The boy’s grip firms, and the knife begins to slice through his skin.

  No!

  Something knocks his hand away, the knife skittering to the floor.

  From inside the well, arms come up to wrap protectively around Callie at the last instant, shielding her when the dead miko strikes. When the ghost makes another attempt, I catch her hand easily with my own, and crush it. The hand disintegrates, crumbling into ashes, and she falls back. I move, placing myself between Callie and the spirit, as pure water falls around my form. The dead miko is a creature of fire, and it is with fire that she is at her deadliest. But I am a creature of

  water, of the movement and

  flow of

  tides and rivers, the

  depths of stagnant pools. I,

  too, can be deadly.

  Callie crawls away, now bruised and bleeding heavily, but I continue my attack, slashing at every part of the dead woman that I can reach. The well must have been purified by the other mikos, or was consecrated to kami at some time in the past, for the waters burn their way through the dead miko’s body flesh whenever my nails score; sizzling like acid, stripping away her physical flesh. It is then that I see the demons festering inside the dead miko’s body, the repugnance of creatures that have feasted on her mind and body for so long that not even a glimmer of who she was and what she could have been can be seen. I look in and I see

  hate, creeping hate little sputters mad mad feed must feed will feed always feeding

  hungry screamscreaming ripping twisted twisting never fear all fear hating hating

  all always hating little corners little corners rip through quivering skin laugh

  clawing fester sour little skin corpse quiet skin hate we hate hate die die die die

  true madness.

  I see now that even the dead miko’s face is a mask, her body a farce for the demons hiding within to play at human. It is a fate worse than even the one I have endured, but I have little time to feel pity. These demons of filth howl from beyond the miko’s undead husk and look out at me through the empty shells of her eyes.

  Not even the severity of her wounds can distract Callie. Clutching at her side, where the cloth of her kimono is now stained a crimson red, she half staggers, half limps to the eighth doll, finding it and adding it to the line of dolls she has started. Now, she counts again.

  “One sacrifice! Two, three, four, five!” She places her hand on every doll as she goes down the line. The dead miko is unaware of her intent, but I comprehend her purpose. The woman continues to struggle, unable to break free from my grip, but the water from the well has given me strength, and she is powerless to escape.

  “Eight sacrifices!” And then Callie turns to us, locked in our dreadful battle. Perhaps we will spend the balance of our existence in this manner—one unable to break free, and the other holding on at the cost of everything else.

  She points at the dead miko, and fear bursts through her voice. “Nine! Nine sacrifices!”

  It is a truth that the other mikos, even the old woman, for all her wisdom, have overlooked.

  Words in themselves have their own power. When Callie named the ninth sacrifice, the power in those words transferred itself to me.

  And I

  respond.

  The small demons that feed around the dead miko, the shadows that call attention to her presence, are the

  shivering whimper feed feeding hate hatred hating

  creeping seek seeking flesh flee snapping hate

  first to fall. I tear through them like shredded paper, my teeth ripping through. Then it is the larger demons’ turn, the ones that lurk behind her eyes, and I plunge my hands through those twin

  whisper whispering screamin
g screaming mine mine

  arms legs tear limbs fear hate hate mine flee mine

  sockets, rending everything I find. Finally, I attack the mask herself. I rip through the husk, into centuries of forgotten filth and malice. I plunge my hands into the dead miko’s stomach, rending and rupturing

  hate hate hate hate die why die die why die die die

  die die die die die why die die die die die die die

  all that I can until, against all odds, I see a faint shimmer of light, a whisper of innocence, a small, forgotten firefly trapped for years within that seething mass.

  Somewhere within that malignant spirit, little bits of Chiyo Takeda still cling, waiting for the day she is free to finish the task she set out to do. Perhaps it is because of her close resemblance to her younger sister, Yoko, that I see a little of Tarquin on her sad, youthful face. She looks at me, and I know what she is asking.

  And so does Callie. She stumbles forward, the stone knife in her hands, but she only takes a few more steps before her strength finally gives out. She drops down, the blade skittering to rest by my feet.

  I

  pick

  it up.

  There is regret in Chiyo Takeda’s face, grief at her failure, yet hopefulness for a last chance at redemption. I carry out her last request and plunge the stone knife into the dead miko’s heart.

  “Ten,” I hear Callie whisper.

  And all around me the air

  explodes

  into

  little

  fireflies.