The Waking

by Thomas Randall

  Her wet, matted hair hung in curtains that blocked the moonlight, so it almost seemed that Ume had no face. The illusion made Kara shiver.

  “I’m sorry!” Ume wailed, lowering her head further as though waiting for the executioner. “Please, I’m so sorry.”

  Miho and Kara’s destruction of the shrine had scattered scraps of letters and photos all over the place, and the breeze had blown them across the slope, down toward the water. The ketsuki stalked toward Sakura and Ume, carefully choosing its path so that it did not step on a single scrap.

  “Sakura, please!” Miho cried.

  Kara and Hachiro and Miho all fell silent then, staring as Sakura stood defiantly in the path of her own heart’s vengeance.

  Sakura closed her eyes and raised up the scrap she had been holding. Its glimmer revealed it as a photograph, but they were too far away to see the image.

  “I can’t forgive Ume,” Sakura said. “I never will. I do wish she would die, and if you were Akane, I would not stand in your way.” She sobbed and her hand shook, but she did not lower the picture. “But my sister would never hurt the people who care about me. I knew the truth when Jiro died. She didn’t want to be his girlfriend, but he meant so much to her. She would never have hurt him. But I didn’t want to know it. I wanted so badly for you to be her.”

  The ketsuki took another step toward her but then only crouched, watching her, shivering. It seemed much smaller than before.

  Kara thought Sakura would destroy the photo, tear it in half and cast the pieces to the wind again. Instead, she turned and walked the few steps back to Ume. Sakura reached down and picked up Ume’s hand, forced the girl to take the photo from her.

  “You gave me this pain, Ume. Now I give it back to you, and you can live with it. I’ll go on, for my sister, and I’ll have her with me always. And you go on with your guilt, and I hope it’s with you always. I pity you.”

  The ketsuki screamed and collapsed. It struggled to stand, limping back toward the place where the shrine had been but was no longer. It fell in the spot where Akane had died, mewling and writhing.

  When at last it went still, all that remained of it was the cold, dead body of the red and copper cat that Kara had watched die there weeks before—Kyuketsuki’s first victim at Monju-no-Chie School, and its last.

  Hachiro limped up beside Kara, blood weeping from a scratch on his face, one hand clutched against the slashes on his chest, and put an arm around her.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  She nodded, amazed by this guy who’d been brutalized but who seemed concerned only about her own welfare. Kara stood on her tiptoes and gave him a quick, soft kiss. The punctures in her side and back bled, but she’d live.

  Miho went to Sakura. They’d been best friends, but just watching them now, Kara could see the distance all of this had put between them. And yet, with just a few steps and open arms, Miho closed that distance. She put her arms around Sakura—the shy girl now strong, the rebel now tender and broken—and hugged her close.

  Just a few feet away, Ume still knelt on the ground, sobbing quietly. She had her arms wrapped around her knees and her face buried there, hidden. In one hand she still clutched the photograph that Sakura had given her, tilted in the moonlight so that at last, Kara could make out the image. The picture was a shot of Akane and Sakura in their school uniforms, arms around each other, heads leaning together. The sisters had the same smile.

  “Is it over?” Sakura asked, hopeful.

  “Yes. It’s over,” Miho said.

  As one, Miho and Sakura, and Kara and Hachiro, turned their backs on Ume and started to walk toward the school and the dormitory beyond. The police would drive by soon. Twice an hour, they’d said. They would notice the open door of the dormitory and find Mr. Matsui’s body. Eventually they would find Ume, crying, and the girl would confess . . . or Kara and her friends would tell them of her confession.

  What would happen then, she had no idea. But for the moment, Miho was right. It was over.

  Yet even as the thought entered Kara’s mind, the wind picked up.

  The breeze eddied and swirled and whipped at her clothes and tugged at her hair, and the torn bits of notes and pictures danced and skittered across the grass, moving in tighter and tighter circles. It grew stronger still, dragging pieces of cotton and the cloth skins of stuffed animals into its inexorable pull, and the gathering fragments began to build something.

  A silhouette. A shape. An effigy.

  At first Kara thought the fragments were constructing the image of the ketsuki, but then a sick feeling clenched in her gut and she felt the wave of grief that she’d felt before, and terror stole her breath away. She felt the presence of the demon, even as the wind finished sculpting it out of the remnants of Akane’s life.

  “Oh my God,” Sakura whispered.

  Miho said its name. “Kyuketsuki.”

  Its hideous face looked very much like the Noh mask they had seen, but uglier, more massive, and when it opened its papiermâché mouth, the long knifelike fangs within did not look like paper at all.

  Nor did its eyes, when they opened. They were cat’s eyes, like the ketsuki’s, but they gleamed a sickly, putrid green.

  Hachiro held Kara tightly, braced as if to run, to carry her away if need be.

  And the demon spoke.

  “Fortune has smiled upon you,” it said, voice a flutter of torn paper in the breeze. “I can only reach my hands into the world by chance, on those rare occasions when a window is opened. You have closed that window. I swear to you that if I should ever find a door, you would all suffer such agonies as even your nightmares cannot contain.

  “But the doors have all been closed since the world was young, and I cannot touch you as I would like. Still, you must be punished for your interference, so I put my curse upon you. Little remains in the world now of the darkness of ancient days . . . but what there is will come to you, and to this place. All the evil of the ages will plague you, until my thirst for vengeance is sated.”

  And the air went still, and the debris fell and fluttered to the ground. A moment later, the wind kicked up again, but it was only the natural breeze from across the bay, and the torn pages and photos began to disperse again.

  But the scent of cherry blossoms lingered.

  EPILOGUE

  On a chilly, crystal blue morning, eight days after the darkest night of her life, Kara Harper sat on a stone wall in view of the Turning Bridge and strummed her guitar. Her fingers moved along strings and bounced from fret to fret with little conscious thought. She’d run through all sorts of songs that her hands knew so well, they didn’t really need her mind or her voice to participate. “Normal Sea” by Common Rotation, “Waiting for the World to Change” by John Mayer, a handful of Beatles and James Taylor songs that her father loved, and even the acoustic version of Pearl Jam’s “Evenflow” that she’d been playing for years.

  Now she just strummed, idly, watching the people who waited for the Turning Bridge to swing back into place so that they could cross over onto Ama-no-Hashidate. But playing the guitar was like singing for her. When Kara thought she was only humming tuneless notes, a song would come out of her mouth as though the radio in her head had been playing all along and she had just turned up the volume. Likewise, her hands surprised her by discovering that they were not simply strumming, playing the opening notes of The Frames’ “When Your Mind’s Made Up.”

  Quietly, under her breath, she sang along.

  When she first spotted the thin girl in the blue skirt and long gray coat, with her white socks and black shoes and the white bow clipped in her hair, just above her right ear, she did not even look at her face. In those clothes the girl, all alone, seemed to have wandered away from some kind of church tour group. Only when the girl kept walking, away from the Turning Bridge and up the path toward the stone wall, did Kara look curiously at her face.

  Her eyebrows went up, and then she smiled.

  “Sakura?”
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  With a shrug, Sakura paused and presented herself like some actress on the red carpet who’d just been asked what fashion designer had made her outfit. Sakura actually spun around once.

  “Total transformation,” she said in Japanese. But she continued in English. “My mother thinks clothes can change a girl. She thinks we are what we wear. Good girl clothes means good girl Sakura.”

  Kara strummed quietly, studying her friend. “How’s that going?” she asked in English.

  Sakura sat down beside her, reached inside her long coat and withdrew a packet of cigarettes. She tapped one out and flicked open a lighter Kara hadn’t even seen her produce, putting flame to the cigarette’s tip.

  “I’m still Sakura,” she said. “If the school uniform did not change me, why should this? First my mother wanted me to be more like Akane, and now she wants me to be more like her. I told her it was hard enough trying to be like me without trying to learn to be someone else. She didn’t understand. Thought I was trying to make a joke.”

  Kara put her fingers over the guitar strings, stilling the music. She gave Sakura a sad smile and switched back to Japanese.

  “I’m going to guess she didn’t think it was funny.”

  Sakura pointed the cigarette at her. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”

  Kara laughed. “You’re not as paranoid as people say you are.”

  Eyes mock-wide, Sakura looked around. “People? What people?”

  They grinned at each other and then fell into an easy companionship. Kara played and Sakura smoked. It occurred to Kara that they must look very odd together, the proper Japanese girl in her pristine clothes and the blond gaijin girl in blue jeans and a Boston College sweatshirt. People would look at them and wonder. Kara liked that.

  They had spoken on the phone and via instant message regularly throughout the days since Mr. Matsui’s murder, but they had not seen each other even once in that time. Furious with her and terrified for her, Kara’s father had not let her leave the house for the first three days unless he was with her, and by the time she had been free to go anywhere on her own—during the day, of course—Miho and Hachiro had both been taken home by their parents.

  Sakura had never gone home, but the principal had restricted her to the dormitory and Miss Aritomo had stayed with her whenever she wasn’t at the police station answering questions. That arrangement had lasted for two days, and then her parents had finally arrived. They had been out of the country, out of contact, but had become miraculously findable when, instead of merely being in danger, their daughter had been arrested for assault.

  So many times, Kara had wanted to say, “At least they came.” But the words never made it as far as her lips, mainly because she knew they would be hollow and bordering on deceit. Though who she was trying to deceive, herself or Sakura, she was not quite sure. Sakura’s parents had come to be with her, that much was true. But neither their daughter nor anyone else involved—even Kara’s father—thought for a moment that they had come for any reason other than to save face. They defended their daughter because if she was indeed guilty of a crime, that would be an embarrassment to them.

  It had apparently never occurred to them that their neglect of their surviving girl did more to dishonor them than anything Sakura might have done, or would ever do.

  “Are you officially innocent, then?” Kara asked.

  “As innocent as I’ll ever be,” Sakura said. “Thanks to you and Miho and Hachiro, they don’t have any reason not to believe my version.”

  Kara cringed inside. She had hated to lie, but no one would have believed the truth, and so they’d all had to manufacture a version of that long, terrible night to account for its events without any hint of the supernatural. Given her troubled history and school record, neither the police nor the school board had any difficulty believing that Sakura had snuck out a first-floor window that night.

  Sakura had wanted to visit her sister’s shrine, as she had nearly every night, to say a prayer for her. There, she discovered that the memorial put together by so many students had been destroyed, nearly every scrap of paper and every photo torn up. Furious and anguished, she had searched the site for a picture of herself and her sister that she had left at the shrine. She did not realize that Ume had followed her, out the window and down to the bay, until she heard the other girl laughing.

  Sakura claimed Ume had admitted destroying the shrine and gloated about it. To give the story the ring of truth, Sakura confessed to the police that she had attacked Ume, that she had been the one to throw the first punch, but that she had no doubt that Ume had come there to harm her. They fought on the shore and then in the water. Ume had tried to drown her and had confessed in the ferocious heat of that moment that she had murdered Akane.

  And then they had heard screaming from the direction of the school.

  Sakura told the police she had left Ume there by the water and gone running back up to the school and then around to the field, where she had found Miho, Hachiro, and Kara frantically screaming for help and using their cell phones to call the police after having discovered the torn, bloody corpse of Mr. Matsui.

  Kara had snuck out of her house and gone to meet Hachiro, desperate to say good-bye to him before he left for home the next day. They had feelings for each other, and she had been unable to sleep, thinking that she might never see him again. Discovering Sakura missing from her bed, Miho had gone in search of her and run into Hachiro, and she agreed to try to distract Mr. Matsui so that he could sneak out and say good-bye to Kara.

  In the foyer of the dormitory, Hachiro and Miho had been surprised to find the door open and Mr. Matsui gone.

  At the same moment, as she walked across the field, Kara had found the bloody remains of Mr. Matsui. She had screamed and then heard a roar. A black bear had charged her from the trees. She had run toward the dorm but not been fast enough, and it got its claws into her.

  Hachiro had grabbed an aluminum baseball bat that he and his friends had left near the door the day before and rushed out. He had struck the bear several times, and it had raked his chest with its claws before finally retreating. He told the police he believed he had injured it badly, that it had been staggering.

  Then Miho had seen Mr. Matsui’s body and begun to scream, even as Kara called the police.

  As far as Kara was concerned, the whole thing sounded like the biggest pile of bullshit she had ever heard. Mainly because that was exactly what it was. But they had certain things working in their favor.

  Ume confessed to murdering Akane and gave the names of the other students who had been there that night and taken part. In defending themselves, those girls—the ones still alive— had all agreed on one thing, which was that Ume’s confession was one hundred percent true. She had murdered Akane.

  So when Ume told the truth about what she had seen that night—the demonic beast that had tried to drown her before being driven off by Hachiro and the others—what else could people think but that she had witnessed their skirmish with the bear and her mind had twisted it into something worse? The girl had admitted to murder and that she’d been unable to sleep, haunted by nightmares and guilt.

  “She snapped, I guess,” was how Kara’s father had expressed it.

  The police were still calling Jiro’s death a suicide. Hana had jumped off the school roof, but she had been there the night Ume murdered Akane and it seemed obvious that guilt had consumed her and driven her to take her own life. As for Chouku, when questioned, one of Ume’s soccer girls—who had also been present for Akane’s murder—had recalled Chouku saying she thought they should all go to the police and tell the story. They couldn’t prove it, but with that scrap of information, the police suspected that Ume had murdered Chouku as well to protect herself.

  No one ever mentioned that Jiro and Chouku had been drained of blood. Hachiro, Miho, Sakura, and Kara had compared notes over the phone, and none of them could recall anyone putting forth a theory as to how Ume was supposed to have kil
led Chouku. As absurdly unlikely as the official version of that night’s events might be, it was a puzzle in which all of the pieces fit together. The absence of blood in the bodies of two dead teenagers was an extra piece, and the puzzle had no room for it, so the police had discarded it.

  The police had told Miss Aritomo, who told Kara’s father, who told Kara, that a black bear had attacked two men on Takigami Mountain and that their dog had killed it. The story had to be either a massive coincidence or an outright lie on behalf of the police, perhaps an attempt to calm fears at the school and in the town.

  At first, Kara had been amazed that anyone would accept such a story and chalked it up to the Japanese sense of order, the need to have an explanation for something that was inexplicable. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized that the police in American cities and towns also probably concocted stories on a regular basis to set people’s minds at ease. How many times had she seen something on the news about some suspected serial killer, where it seemed the cops had known for ages that the murders were connected and the guy was out there hunting people, but hadn’t bothered warning anyone? Murders went unsolved all the time, and nobody was panicking about killers living among them.

  Of course, when the cops back home invented stories to explain something they could not understand, it didn’t involve the supernatural. At least, Kara didn’t think it did.

  And then there was Sakura.

  Despite Ume’s confession to murder and Sakura’s tale about the girl ruining her sister’s memorial shrine, the police had wanted to press charges against her for assaulting Ume that night. But Sakura’s parents were influential people. Their eldest daughter had been murdered and the police had not had a single suspect, and now the murderess had confessed and their younger daughter—defending her sister’s memory—was to be charged with assaulting the girl who had killed Akane?

  Embarrassment and fear of public humiliation had taken their toll. After days of hesitation, the police had dropped the charges.