Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances

by Amanda DeWees

  Like the cold mountain wind, she was out of the kitchen again. Outside the door leading to the lobby, she paused with one deep breath before entering with all the poise and grace of lessons drilled into her from the time she took her first shaky steps as a toddler.

  She approached the stranger’s table and the tray suddenly felt heavy in her hands. He was gaijin-big! Up close, the size of his hand could easily cover her whole face. She opened her mouth, but found her voice caught in a cage in her throat, no more than a whisper permitted out.

  She stood silent and frozen, at a momentary loss, until the stranger looked up. “Hello.”

  Yukiko dropped her eyes as soon as she caught his. Gazing into this stranger’s foreign devil eyes had already caused her enough trouble. So why are you here, little bride? “With great hospitality,” she said, not expecting him to understand a word. “I would like to serve our honored guest some tea.”

  “Domo arigato. I would very much like some tea.”

  Her chest gave a sudden start. Her hands covered it well, but his perfect Japanese shocked her. The rules of hospitality dictated that her honor rested upon performing impeccable service even if her guest did not appreciate or understand. She served him sweets, then prepared the tea in the traditional way. And he knew how to take it.

  Beneath the layers of her dress, Yukiko’s heart raced. At the end of her service, she bowed. “It has been my greatest honor to serve you tea.”

  “The honor is mine. The tea was excellent.”

  Again, he spoke flawless Japanese. She placed the tea items back on the tray for clean up with shaking hands. His next words destroyed her composure completely.

  “Thank you for accommodating a foreigner with your excellent English.”

  Her hand slipped. The bamboo whisk fell onto the tray with a clatter. The gaffe heated her cheeks with shame. But I am not speaking English!

  She knew a few words—had insisted, in defiance of the Grandmothers, on learning their strange alphabet with the same symbols that merely indicated sounds and not concepts. She knew enough to read the western magazine that described the other bride. She knew enough to read about the western fashions, music, and mannerisms that crept into the countryside from the city.

  But to speak it during hospitality? Never! Hospitality was not foreign!

  “Pardon me. I’m sorry. I did not mean to offend.”

  She shook her head once. Unable to help herself, she peeked up again and met his eyes. Brown, like hers, but not at all like hers. Too wide, like foreigners’ eyes were. But kind and warm. Warm enough to draw her in and swallow her up if she allowed it.

  And what was he doing with his mouth? Smiling! A big, wide grin that could very well terrify a more fearful girl, but somehow made his features—too-big nose, wood-brown hair, hairy face—appear more attractive.

  He is not beautiful! He is foreigner-ugly! Strange-looking, with the stubble of beard starting on his cheeks and chin, and those glasses that made his eyes look even more comically oversized.

  But those eyes were not cold. The fine lines at the corners crinkled when he smiled. In the lamplight, she could see a tiny net of criss-crossing white lines along the side of his face. Scars from something in his past, no doubt.

  And all of a sudden, he had a past. A past she wanted to learn about. Her chest burned hot. The solid weight of flesh and bone that prohibited her from fleeing in a whirl of snow sent her heart and soul strange messages of flushed skin and erratic heartbeats that made her even more conscious of the solid way her knees touched the wood floor and the collar of her soft yukata brushed the nape of her neck.

  She rose, the tea tray clutched tightly enough in her hands to make her knuckles as pale as ghosts. “It is now—my honor…” Her voice sounded high and breathless. “I will—prepare your room for sleeping now.”

  * * *

  Spencer knew Japanese hospitality was a complex art form. His studies in folklore and superstition had exposed him to a number of cultures all over the world for whom hospitality was one of the most critical, the oldest, and the strongest of traditions. Anthropology would say there was something in humanity’s earliest awareness that said that taking care of other humans was critical to survival. But Spencer didn’t feel very human right now. In point of fact, he felt like a balloon. A balloon full of laughing gas and love songs and cotton candy.

  He forgot about his leg. Forgot about the voices. Forgot to be annoyed at Toshiro for getting here first and getting at all the snow bunnies on the slopes. Forgot to hate the war. Because she floated through the simple movement of pouring water and the sound of water hitting the cup became tinkling bells. The way she moved her kimono sleeves out of the way cut a path between heaven and earth itself. Every ripple of her bound hair and every flutter of her lashes fascinated him.

  The green tea warmed his belly, but he forgot he had a belly. He forgot everything, including his name, because she was looking at him and the tiniest flush of pink stained her cheeks and he was far too occupied with drowning in her eyes.

  But then she stood up and looked away again and he remembered he had a body, and problems, and weariness set over him. “Thank you.” He wanted to say more. Beautiful lady. Captivating goddess. What’s your name?

  The hostess re-entered the room, her eyes catching on the younger woman and her tea tray. The hostess’s face remained mostly expressionless, save a tightening at the corners of her eyes as she watched the younger girl pass through the door. But it could have been a trick of the light, because the woman bowed and gestured to him to follow her.

  His hostess led him through a different door to a narrow hallway leading left and right. “Onsen,” she said, sliding the second screen back to reveal the hot springs the area was famous for. There was no sign of the young woman.

  He realized the inn had been built around the actual spring itself. Smooth rocks lined the edge of the pool in a semi-circle that ended in a wooden partition. His hostess pointed to the washing bench to the right of the pool. “Otoko,” she said. Man. One of the first things Spencer did after returning to consciousness in the hospital was learn the local lingo for the john, and how not to end up in the ladies’ room.

  The rules here seemed to echo the bath houses in Tokyo. Wash before entering the hot spring. This also seemed to be the showers for the place. Bins for clothes rested on shelves, wooden sandals rested on low racks, and small stools stood next to wash basins. Nothing fancy, but it would be pure luxury compared to a base camp shower tent in the jungle where you never really got clean, and you never really got dry, either.

  Tokyo bath houses posted a schedule for men and women to bathe separately, but the natural spring here was clearly large enough to accommodate both sexes in separate parts of the pool. Good. He wouldn’t have to wait for a soak.

  She pointed to the partition. “Onna.” Woman. “Not to enter, please.”

  “I understand.” Spencer nodded.

  She led him further down the hallway to another door. “Here is your room.” She slid open the panel to reveal a wide, shallow room. The opposite wall was made up of translucent shoji screen to allow light in during the day. It was partially open to a small balcony facing the snow-covered mountainside. He was disappointed not to encounter the young hostess making up his bed. But it had only been a few minutes, and she wasn’t magic, no matter how much she looked it.

  A thick blanket lay over a low table and he could feel the slight heat from a kotatsu radiating from it. The hostess pointed out the next door down the hall. “Toilet.” He spent some awkward moments thanking and bowing to her before he stepped into the room.

  Once he was alone, he found a house robe and shed his clothing, careful to remove his slippers before stepping on the tatami mats in the room’s main area. He sat under the blanket and let the charcoal brazier’s heat warm his scarred flesh while he read a little more of Lafcadio Hearn’s text on Japanese folktales. The hike up the mountain hadn’t been difficult—anything with dry feet was
a vacation as far as he was concerned—but the drugs were beginning to wear off and stiffness wasn’t far behind.

  Toshiro was nowhere to be found, and in fact, the silence in the paper-thin walls made him feel like the hotel’s only guest—only occupant, even. It couldn’t be true—there was a festival going on in three days’ time and all the inns should be full to capacity. But if the other guests were not around, then it was the perfect time to visit the onsen. After all, the hot springs were the reason he’d been approved for the five-day in the first place.

  The first time he and Toshiro had gone on weekend leave, back when their psyop unit was stationed in Okinawa, Toshiro taught him the ins and outs of Japanese boarding house etiquette. Back in ’Frisco, he’d said, his parents were trying to start a ryokan-like bed and breakfast for tourists.

  He was used to showering with other people around—the Army didn’t afford much privacy, and in the zone, you got used to having someone watch your back at all times—but he was grateful for the solitude this time. The jagged scar on his leg, red and angry-hot, felt worse when other people’s eyes were on it. He prodded the thick scar tissue with a finger. Completely closed, or he would not be in the bath at all, and for all intents and purposes, healed. The nerves behind it were either dead or repaired, and the muscles all connected to the right places. But he still felt something wrong, still dreamed he was bleeding out on the jungle floor.

  He completed his rinse-off and entered the onsen. It was outdoors, partially covered by the roof of the inn, and partly open to the sky. On a clear night, one could see the stars, and on a clear day, the valley below. When he picked up a “modesty towel” from the shelf and saw the modest size of the fabric, he was grateful for the partition separating the women’s bath area.

  The hot spring itself smelled of sulfur and salts, but it wasn’t rotten-egg unpleasant. The open air carried the worst of the chemical odors away on cold night air. Below him, the snow-covered valley lay in darkness, with thick snow falling around him. He struggled over the smooth, rounded rocks at the edge while keeping one hand over the towel covering his johnson. The wind changed direction, and a sudden swirl of glittering snow wrapped around his body and chilled his bare buttocks.

  His leg weakened and he dropped into the pool with a splash. The hot water fizzed with his disruption, but he could have sworn he heard a woman’s laughter.

  Chapter 3

  Yukiko entered the stranger’s room. Her movements were swift as she pulled out the futon bedding and arranged it, sandwiching the warmed kotatsu quilt between cushion and covering. She plumped the pillows and left a tray of green tea and sweet bean buns on the table.

  At the edge of her hearing, she could hear the Grandmothers whispering. It was not polite to listen, but noise itself did not obey the rules of good manners. She could not help but hear the splash of what could only be the stranger entering the onsen.

  Typical. Of course a foreigner would not know how to become one with the waters.

  Then she heard the laughter of the Grandmothers, and could not help but overhear how they spoke of danbe—a dangling thing—and chinchin—whose meaning she knew very well, even though unmarried women should not. Her face heated and she was grateful to be involved in industrious work. So grateful that she slipped her feet into clogs and went out the kitchen door to walk on the cliff near the gardens and let the cold night air quell the fire in her cheeks.

  But even out here, where the only chinchin tinkling sounds came from the spring before it entered the bathing pool, she still felt too warm, too imprisoned in her body.

  A rustling from the low-growing evergreens sheltering the stone pagoda interrupted her thoughts and a vulpine nose poked out. “Pleasant evening to you, Snow Bride.”

  Yukiko’s eyes widened. “Kitsune-san!” She bowed low to the fox as the rest of her furry body wriggled out from under the juniper bush. “You have returned from the North.”

  Kitsune hopped up on a low wooden bench next to the stream. “Yes. I miss my husband in the valley, and the Princes in the North quarrel incessantly. The food is the most interesting thing among them.”

  “You mustn’t speak that way!” Yukiko admonished her irreverent friend. “They speak for all our people.”

  “And they all sing the same song in different flat keys.” Kitsune licked the snowflakes from the fur of her hindquarters, both of her tails twitching in counterpoint. “Run from the world of men, for it is fearsome and youkai are no longer its masters.” The fox showed her opinion of that with a delicate sneeze. “They were not pleased to hear of your adventure into the city.”

  “As displeased as they are with your marriage?”

  “Not so. I am an old and wily fox, my dear, and I count many priests from here to Hokkaido among my friends. You, on the other hand...”

  Dread leadened Yukiko’s limbs. “I cannot make a good match with a strong man when youkai are not permitted contact with the people!”

  The tip of Fox’s tail twitched. “Indeed? I believe there is someone here this very night.”

  Yukiko’s blush came back. “A stranger! A foreign devil! And the Grandmothers speak of his strange foreign body like—like–”

  “Like Grandmothers?” Kitsune’s sly tone rippled with amusement. “Yuki-chan, how could he have arrived here at all if not for the Grandmothers lifting the mists?” The fox stretched her forepaws along the edge of the bench, raising her rump high in the air, where a third tail had already begun to grow, as befitting her years. “Unless, of course, there is something…unique about this foreigner. Does he have Yamato blood?”

  Yukiko scoffed. “He is a white devil, through and through. Yet he speaks our language like a native.”

  Fox glanced over her shoulder and barked a laugh. “Of course he does not! I hear his foreign tongue.” She shook herself and a cloud of fur fluffed out from her body. “It is you who understands his words.” She showed vulpine needle-teeth in a grin. “What will you do with your gaijin now that the Grandmothers have brought him to you?”

  “My duty, of course.” Yukiko rubbed at the spot on the back of her head where her hair comb dug into her scalp. If indeed the Grandmothers had brought the foreigner to her for her Bride duty, then she would have no choice but to comply—her nature would force the issue sooner, rather than later.

  “I must return to the valley,” Fox said. “My husband thinks I am catching rabbits for our dinner. I should like to not lie to him.”

  Yukiko had envied the shape-shifting fox her affection for a human man in the valley. Perhaps she envied Fox her ability to walk between the world of the youkai and the world of men. Or perhaps she envied Fox her husband, who understood his wife’s nature and loved her anyway.

  “Interesting.” The fox hopped up to the top of the stone pagoda. “That the Grandmothers should even allow foreigners here at all. Perhaps times are changing, after all.”

  Yukiko tilted her head. “What?”

  Kitsune leapt into the trees, her parting comment floating down from the branches of the evergreens along with drops of falling snow. “Only that doing your duty with the gaijin will leave you with a daughter who is half-devil herself. If she survives.”

  * * *

  Spencer couldn’t keep his legs from twitching under the fluffy blanket that covered him. The pallet on which he’d slept was surprisingly comfortable—anything not dripping wet and infested with mosquitos and not olive drab was luxury, as far as he was concerned—but his dreams were not.

  Toshiro’s face in the dark of the jungle, filled with horror and lit with lightning flashes, burned itself on the backs of his eyelids. Spence couldn’t say how it was possible to be haunted by someone who was still alive, but something kept dragging him back to that moment in the jungle, with the screams of howling ghosts coming from his backpack, when the lightning struck, the gunfire stuttered pop-pop-pop, stinging past his ear like swarms of vengeful insects.

  We stopped to readjust the straps on the battery pack. The
storm was coming in and we needed to cover the equipment with ponchos, otherwise it’d short out and electrocute us. I knelt down next to Takeshi.

  He remembered the damp and the mud and the not-quite-solid feel of the ground beneath his knee. Takeshi huffing as he struggled out of the battery pack strapped to his chest. The tiny spark as the wires crossed and the pop-crackle of static underneath the recorded grief wails. The pressure behind his sinuses from the storm adding to the headache from the noise, from forcing his eyes open, trying to hear or see any indication of Charlie before the enemy saw him.

  He remembered the strange smell in the air that made his nose prickle. The brilliant flash and the explosion of the tree a few yards to his right as the lightning hit it. How the sparks fountained up from the tree and the thunder rolled as the branches cracked apart. Takeshi’s face, awe and horror crossing it, illuminated in flashes from the lightning. Something about the flash-image wasn’t right.

  What did I miss? What did we miss? There had to be something—the jungle, the surrounding night, the storm, anything in that flash-bang tableau illuminated over and over again. Bright as searchlights, bright as day, something that would have told us there was going to be fire, and there was going to be blood.

  Because something in that strobe-light night had pierced his leg, dropped his body under the weight of the forty-pound speaker, and kept him from becoming one of the howling ghosts screaming into his own ears.

  * * *

  In the morning, he rose and made his way again to the onsen. So far, he hadn’t encountered another living soul…and the dead ones whose voices whispered in his ears must have found some temporary respite. He struggled into the hot spring and found one of the submerged wooden seats. He stretched his bad leg out in front of him and leaned his head back. The smooth stones that made entering the pool difficult served as very comfortable headrests and he leaned back and closed his eyes.