The Waking

by Thomas Randall

  The WAKING

  Dreams

  of the

  DEAD

  THOMAS RANDALL

  For Fiddlestick’s best friend,

  Allie Costa

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Akane Murakami died for a boy she did not love.

  Rain dotted the surface of Miyazu Bay and spattered the leaves of the trees on the shore. The night sky hung low with a gray blanket of clouds, as though at any moment it might tear open and spill down a deluge that would wipe all of Kyoto Province from the map. Akane felt no remorse at the thought. If Monju-no-Chie School vanished in a flood, erased from the earth by the fury of ancient gods or a mistreated planet, it would be better for her. Better, perhaps, for all of them.

  She pushed her long, wet hair away from her face, fresh droplets of rain sliding under the collar of her shirt. Akane knew she looked a mess, but this did not trouble her. After all, who would see her out here on the shore of the bay, at night, in the rain?

  The storm had soaked through her school uniform and it clung uncomfortably to her. At first she had plucked at it, but now she had become used to the cloth plastered against her body. The weight of her sodden clothes dragged at her, but Akane barely noticed. The rain fell and the wind made her shiver. No doubt this exposure would lead to a bad cold, but she was beyond caring.

  Beyond caring about anything.

  She had tried to be a friend to Jiro. Only a friend. He had beautiful, almost hypnotic eyes and strong hands from playing baseball. The girls at school fell all over one another trying to get his attention and Akane understood why, but she could not bring herself to fall in love with him. He made her laugh too much. Jiro was such a boy, so full of swagger and attitude. His parents had bought him a motorcycle for his last birthday, and his father had ridden it up to school one weekend so that Jiro could race it around and show off. They weren’t allowed anything but bicycles at school, so that day, Jiro had been everyone’s friend. Yet when he’d sat astride it, basking in the attention of the girls and other guys who envied him, he seemed so foolish.

  Akane knew Jiro was no fool. He did well in school and had a talent for art that went far beyond the manga that she liked to read. His paintings took her breath away. But when others were around, he had to lift his chin and behave as though he felt he deserved to be the center of attention.

  She teased him mercilessly. On his sleek red motorcycle that day, he had looked small, like a child pretending to be Akira, racing across the streets of some post-apocalyptic city. Jiro took her teasing shyly, smiling, when he would have been angry at anyone else. He spent time with Akane whenever he could, away from school and the other students. They walked along the bay and visited the ancient prayer shrines and wondered, together, about the ancestors who had lived on Miyazu Bay, who had lived and loved and shed blood there. They had talked about baseball and art and about books, for Akane loved to read.

  Jiro became her closest friend, but she could never have fallen in love with him. In time, though, she understood why he behaved so differently around her than he did around other girls. Others had suggested it and Akane had always brushed their words away.

  But tonight he had kissed her.

  Jiro loved her.

  Akane felt like a fool. She ought to have seen it, but even if she had, she would never have believed it. The look of hurt in his eyes when she had pushed him away, had gently explained that she did not think of him in that way, still stung her. She might not be in love with Jiro, but she cared for him deeply and hated being responsible for what she could only imagine he must be feeling now.

  He had left her there, on the bay shore, as the rain began to fall.

  Now she hugged herself and watched the sprinkling of raindrops upon the bay. The quiet of the storm held a beauty that made her hold her breath. The wind rippled across the water and rustled in the leaves of the trees, a gentle hushing sound that lent her comfort.

  She did not want to go back to school. Not ever. But she had no choice. Soon, the soaking clothes and chilly wind would be too much for her and would drive her inside. Until then she would stay here, not far from an old prayer shrine where local people sometimes still burnt candles.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the night and the storm.

  For several more minutes she watched the rain fall and gazed at the dark, jagged silhouette of the black pines on Ama-no-Hashidate, the spit of land that jutted out into the bay.

  At last she turned to make her way back up the long slope that led up to the school and her dormitory beyond. The rain had been falling hard for perhaps an hour and the slope had become soft and muddy underfoot. Akane slipped and fell to one knee, planting a hand to keep herself from sprawling face-first. Her knee squelched in the mud and when her hand struck the ground it squirted up to splatter her jacket.

  She felt like crying. Instead, she found herself laughing.

  As she climbed to her feet, she slipped again but this time did not fall. Already her shoes were ruined. Pushing her wet, slick hair away from her face, she looked uphill toward the lights of Monju-no-Chie School. Minutes before, she had wished it demolished, but now she felt grateful to see the glow of the windows. It would be warm and dry inside.

  Off to her right, something squelched in the mud. Akane glanced in that direction and, at first, saw nothing. But then the darkness moved. Her breath caught in her throat as a patch of night deeper than the gray-black storm resolved itself, and then others began to appear in the storm around her. They reminded her, for just a moment, of the black pines outlined against the night sky on Ama-no-Hashidate.

  “Who’s that?” she said. “I was just coming back. I—”

  The silhouettes gathered around her. Now she could see the rain trickling down their faces and they were close enough that she saw them, recognized them.

  “He says he kissed you.”

  The girl who spoke the words had chocolate brown eyes and a round face that might have been lovely had it not been twisted with a cruel sneer. Her hair had been pulled tight in a ponytail, tied with a yellow ribbon.

  “He says he can’t ever love me because his heart is full of you.”

  Akane shook her head. She held up her hands, trying to explain. The girl slapped her so hard that the sound echoed like a whipcrack along the path. Akane drew a stunned breath and held a hand to her cheek, stepping back. But the girl followed her and this time struck her with a closed fist. The blow connected with the side of her head and Akane stumbled backward, slid in the mud, and fell. The rain-soaked dirt and grass was cold on her bare legs and as she slid, her skirt was dragged up. Akane reached to try to hold it down, hoping the girl would just go away now, satisfied with having humiliated her.

  The first kick took her in the lower back. She shouted in pain, and then another girl kicked her in the jaw. Spasms of pain shot through her skull, and then the kicks and punches began to rain down upon her. In the dark and the storm and with her face now smeared with mud, she could not make out their faces anymore. One girl stomped on her right breast and Akane screamed. She felt a rib break. When she raised her hand to try to defend herself, a black shoe came down on her hand, snapping fingers.

  Her mind shut down then. The blur of rain and pain, the storm of blows, swept her away on a wave of regret and confusion.

 
; Fists bunched up in her long hair, fingers twining there, and then some of those dark silhouettes—those faceless shadow girls—dragged her down to the water. Hands gripped her, six or eight or ten of them, and hoisted her off the ground. Akane managed one last scream, ragged from where she had been kicked in the throat, and then they hurled her into the shallows just offshore.

  Frantic, bleeding, and broken yet desperate, she tried to drag herself from the water. Rising up, she saw the silhouettes of those black pines and knew she faced the wrong direction. When she corrected her course, those other black silhouettes greeted her. A foot came down on her head, pressing her face under the water, into the soft bottom of the bay. Struggling, she gasped, swallowing dirt and detritus from the bottom and breathing in water.

  Drowning.

  The whole of Miyazu Bay seemed comprised of her tears. Even the sky wept as she died.

  For a boy she did not love.

  1

  They’re going to love you.”

  Kara glanced up from tying her shoes to see her father standing in the open doorway of her bedroom. He had always been tall and thin, so much so that her mother had sometimes called him “the stork,” but dressed in a suit and tie, he had somehow lost his usual awkwardness.

  “You look nice,” Kara offered.

  “Nice? That’s the best you can do? I think I look dashingly handsome.”

  She smiled, arching an eyebrow. “Don’t push your luck.”

  He stepped into the room, his expression turning serious. “Are you nervous?”

  Kara rolled her eyes.

  “Stupid question, huh?” her father asked.

  “Very,” she said, and then she relented, letting him see just how anxious she really was. “I’m going to screw it up. I know I am. I’m going to insult someone without even knowing it, or embarrass myself so badly I’ll have to hide in the bathroom.”

  “So, pretty much like any other school year, huh?”

  Kara launched herself off the bed to punch him in the arm. “That’s not nice.”

  “No. But it’s funny.”

  “It isn’t a day for funny. It isn’t a year for funny. Everyone in Japan is so serious all the time,” she lamented.

  “Not all the time. Just most.”

  Professor Rob Harper reached out to take his daughter’s hands. Kara took comfort in his touch and looked up into his kind blue eyes. There were small laugh lines all around them— lines he’d earned—but it had been a long time since her father had really laughed. A long time for both of them. Come July, it would be two years since the car accident that had taken her mother’s life and changed everything for the husband and daughter she had left behind.

  “They’re going to love you,” he said again, more emphatically.

  Kara sighed. “They’re going to be polite. That’s what Japanese people do.”

  A look of uncertainty swept across his face. He cupped her chin in his hands. “Hey. Tell me you’re just having first-day jitters. Otherwise—if you’ve really changed your mind—we’ll go home. Nobody says we have to do this.”

  Butterflies had been flitting around inside her since they had arrived in Japan and moved into the small house in Kyoto Prefecture, both of excitement and panic, but they had never been as bad as they had gotten this morning.

  “First-day jitters,” she said. “I promise. Massive, gigantic jitters, but they’ll pass. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. But I’ve been dreaming about this all my life, Dad, and I know it means a lot to you, too. I’m good. I’m going to be fine. You just have to promise me one thing.”

  Her father smiled. “What’s that, honey?”

  “Stop talking to me in English. You promised we’d only speak Japanese.”

  He slapped himself in the forehead. “D’oh!”

  Then he stood a bit straighter. “My apologies, daughter. We’ve worked so hard, how stupid of me to forget.”

  “You have many things on your mind.”

  With a smile, he reached out and tucked an errant lock of her hair behind her ear. “See? You are ready. They’re going to—”

  She fluttered her hand dismissively. “Love me. I know. So you say.”

  “I need to get to school for the teachers’ meeting. Are you sure you don’t want to walk with me?”

  “I’m sure. I want to arrive just the way the other students do, and that means without my father, the professor.”

  The new professor, she thought. English language and American Studies. The gaijin professor.

  He bent to kiss her forehead. Some girls might have recoiled from such parental affection, especially at Kara’s age.

  But she knew how fragile her father’s heart was—just as fragile as her own—and she would never spurn him in that way. Kara might be sixteen years old, an age when a lot of her friends back home were doing everything in their power to get away from their parents, but all she wanted was to stay close to him. She only had one parent left, and she had vowed not to lose him.

  “Enjoy the day,” he said. “Live and learn.”

  Kara smiled. To most people, the phrase “live and learn” represented a rueful acknowledgement of mistakes they had made and the lessons that resulted. But Kara and her father had turned “live and learn” into their private mantra. The words held no regret for them. They were a philosophy. A way of life.

  “Live and learn,” she replied.

  Her father gave her one final glance in which she could see his concern for her breaking through the hopeful, encouraging air he had put on for her benefit, and then he went out.

  She listened for the front doors to slide open and closed, and then went into the small kitchen. They had cleaned up together after breakfast. Kara poured herself a small glass of water and sipped it as she tried to slow her frantic pulse. She breathed evenly, almost meditating, and found that it helped. For ten long minutes she paced the small house, rearranging items in the obsessive neatness they had achieved for the sake of local culture.

  In front of the mirror, she unleashed her ponytail and then swept her blond hair up again, tying it back with a red elastic. Any time she caught sight of her reflection while wearing her uniform, she got a giddy feeling. Her school insisted girls still wear the sailor fuku, a navy blue sailor suit with white trim. The skirt came down to just above her knees and she wore a white blouse with a red ribbon tie underneath the jacket. Memories of Sailor Moon cartoons came to mind, making her smile.

  Kara took her bento—the lunch box all the students used— and slipped it into her book bag, then went to the door. Taking a deep breath, she stepped outside.

  A shiver went through her and goosebumps formed on her skin. If the school had been any further away, she would have gone back inside to put a heavy coat over her uniform. On the first of April—first day of a new school year—Kyoto Prefecture was still quite cold. Even so, the day was beautiful. The sunlight shone brightly on the small houses along the street. Miyazu Bay reflected back the blue sky with a purity that made her catch her breath. Kara had loved the house she had grown up in back in Massachusetts, but leaving an American suburb behind for natural beauty such as this was like waking up in some magical kingdom. She would endure almost anything to be able to wake up to this view of the bay every morning.

  Taking solace from the day and from the view, she found a calm place within herself and started down the street toward the school, whose grounds sprawled beside the bay. Monju-no-Chie School looked more like a temple than any school Kara had ever seen. More than anything, it reminded her of the fortresses of warlords in the movies she’d seen about feudal Japan. Imposing, but it was much cooler than the almost industrial-looking schools they had seen in Tokyo and Kyoto City. Inside the walls of Monju-no-Chie, though, things weren’t much different. Strict rules. Japanese propriety. Hard work.

  Kara could live with that.

  Actually, she’d been dreaming about it for years, romanticizing the country’s history and mythology and spirituality at the same time as
she ate up the new pop culture spreading across the world from Japan. Coming here had been a huge decision for both Kara and her father, a new beginning in a place they’d always talked about living, speaking a language they both loved. Nothing could make her forget her mother or loosen the tight knot of grief that her heart had become, but that loss had made Kara and her father realize that dreams should not be postponed.

  They were starting over.

  As she walked toward the bay, she stared at the terraced pagoda peaks of the school, and her heart began to hammer in her chest. Her throat went dry. Her new uniform skirt itched, her ribbon tie hung askew because she hadn’t fastened it right, and her book bag felt heavy even though it was only the first day of classes.

  Yes, she had wanted this for as long as she could remember, wished for it the way other girls wish to grow up to become princesses. But she hadn’t given enough thought to what it would be like being the only gaijin girl—the only foreigner, the only westerner, the only American—at a private school with a view of the Sea of Japan. Made her feel pretty stupid, considering how many hours she and her dad had spent talking about it, but nothing could have prepared her, really.

  The first few weeks, she’d felt like Dorothy after she’d just crashed her house in Oz. Adjusting to life in Japan had been hour by hour, an evolution—maybe even a metamorphosis— wandering around Miyazu City and the bay with her camera or sitting down by the Turning Bridge with her guitar. Now, with school starting, it would begin all over again. The gaijin girl. The few other students she’d met in town had been polite but not exactly welcoming. When she’d tried to talk to them about manga or music, searching for common ground, the conversations had been short.

  They’re gonna love you, her father had said, so many times. Once they get to know you. Once school starts.

  Lonely and unsure, Kara had still found her love for Japan growing. Ama-no-Hashidate—the natural spit of land that connected the two sides of the bay—had a beauty like nothing else she’d ever seen. Whether on a perfect blue day or a cool, misty morning, the view transported her to another place, another age. And the city might not be Tokyo, but it came alive at night with music and color. During the day, the ancient places still echoed with the clang of swords and the chants of holy men.