Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances

by Amanda DeWees

  “You are asking the right questions, Yuki-chan.” Fox fluffed her luxuriant tail. “Baku the nightmare-eater can ease the tormented dreams of your American soldier.”

  “And the price?” She braced herself.

  “Baku the nightmare-eater is a hungry spirit. Baku may not be sated with only tormented nightmares.” Kitsune lashed her tails as she leaped into a clump of bushes. “He also has a taste for dreams.”

  * * *

  The trip to the shrine was a bust. At least, as far as Spencer’s quest to un-haunt himself. The voices still whispered in his ears on the way down the mountain, only quieting when Yukiko captured his attention with their picnic lunch and the presence of the snow monkeys.

  The voices quieted when he confessed his growing feelings for her, and she returned them.

  The shrine guardian told him to adjust his beliefs and find the source of his haunting. He was pondering the meaning of the advice on the way back from heeding nature’s call when he spotted another narrow road down the slope, one along which they hadn’t traveled. He spotted one of the ubiquitous wooden signs with the onsen symbol on it, and something fluttering beneath it. Curious, he slipped his way down the hillside to the sign and smoothed the fluttering paper flat.

  Be prepared to adjust your beliefs, the guardian had said. On the paper, a grainy image of his own face stared back, below Japanese kanji and their English counterparts. “Have You Seen This Man?”

  He didn’t tell Yukiko about the flyer. There was a simple explanation—he’d gotten lost up the mountain and checked in at the wrong inn. Toshiro was understandably concerned. It should be a simple thing to inquire about a telephone and inform the other hotel of his whereabouts.

  He heard the distant rumble of a diesel bus making its way down the mountainside while he and Yukiko trekked back to the ryokan. Undoubtedly, a similar one would be parked outside their own dwelling. But when they returned in the long shadows of twilight, the inn was exactly as they’d left it. Before entering the pool of light cast by the lantern outside the front door, Yukiko turned to him. “Thank you, Supensaa-san, for a wonderful day, and your precious gifts. I must be Nakai-san—maid of the room—to you henceforth.”

  “I understand.” He should be relieved that she hadn’t entirely cast her traditions to the wind, but he couldn’t help but feel his chest deflate, thanks to the part of him that wanted to be a lovesick idiot and hang the consequences.

  * * *

  Obasan found her in her small room after she’d prepared Spencer’s bed. She lay face-down on her own pallet, cursing her softening heart. The modern dress she’d bought in Tokyo was laid out on her storage chest, and the boots sat in their box, so their soles would not touch the tatami. “Yukiko-chan. Your time is fast approaching. Do what you must.”

  She lifted her head. “You warned me of this.” The dress was supposed to be her wedding dress, to entice a hapless man. A hapless, modern man.

  Her aunt bowed her head. She floated above the tatami, barely visible because of the presence of the man in the guest room. “And you have summoned what you hoped for.” She drifted over to the ornately carved chest. “Wear the modern dress to please your modern man.”

  Yukiko stared at the hateful white garment. At the time, it had been a symbol of defiance, with its modern styling. Now the white color reminded her that she would be widow before she became mother. The gauzy sleeves resembled desperate hauntings of ghosts weakened to nothing more than the remnants of grief. “I will not.”

  “All youkai know the rules. In times past, men enslaved us and we tricked them.”

  “Times have changed.” She had enticed her man. The gaijin who had followed her all the way up the mountain. Who had stumbled into her inn, and smiled his way into her heart. The man who visited her shrine and gave her fresh, new stories in exchange for her well-worn ones.

  Obasan put a kind hand on her shoulder. It felt no more solid or comforting than a breeze that found its way inside the collar of her yukata. “Yes, but people have not. Mankind could destroy us if they knew our secrets, and covet us if they knew our powers.”

  “All men are not evil!”

  “They are but men.” Obasan sighed. “We are unique in that we need men to give us daughters. The first among us tried to break custom, and grieved the loss of her family to the end of her days. This way, at least we have our daughters and our mothers.”

  “It is a half-life!” Yukiko rose from her bed and stormed to the door leading into the night. “I want better for my daughter!”

  Chapter 6

  Inside the main area, a single setting was placed out for the evening meal. Spencer couldn’t be too disappointed that Yukiko wasn’t there to serve his meal—he hoped the okami had given her the night off after the long day. He retreated to his room after thanking the innkeeper for dinner.

  The Lafcadio Hearn book sat on the table next to the tea tray. He sat under the kotatsu, driving some of the chill from his body, and pushed it aside in favor of pulling out his notebook. He spent some time compiling his notes on the stories Yukiko had told him, clarifying some parts while they were still fresh in his mind and in her voice. After that, he turned his attention to the admonishment from the shrine guardian. Finding the origin of his haunting.

  For some reason, approaching it as if he were writing a paper about a story that happened to someone else gave him a clarity he hadn’t been able to grasp. By the light of a kerosene lantern, he scribbled down notes about the night of the storm. Notes turned into journal writing and before he knew it, he was scribbling so fast his hand cramped as he tried to capture it all—images, feelings, descriptions, details.

  The light burned down low and he lifted his head, blinking like an owl. Full night had fallen, and outside the snow had started up again. His leg screamed in protest when he tried to move. He closed the notebook and struggled to his feet.

  He shuffled his way through preparing for his nighttime soak in the hot spring, and when he entered the bath, nothing but a small candle illuminated the onsen. He slipped into the hot water and sighed.

  A splash came from the other side of the spring. “Supensaa-san.”

  “Yukiko!” His mood instantly lightened.

  He heard the quiet splash as she slid into the water and tried not to think about her naked body so close to his. “I trust you hid my gifts from Okami-san’s prying eyes?”

  The dancing notes of her laughter floated in the mists rising from the water. “Yes, they are safe.”

  “I am glad. I can get you more, when I return to the city, if you like.” He knew he was being bold, but he couldn’t help himself. “You can come visit me.”

  “You have already given me so many new stories, Supensaa-san.” A note of regret crept into her voice.

  He wanted to banish it. “I have more. Dozens. Hundreds of stories from all over the world. Even here in Japan.” He stumbled over the words.

  “Do you know the story of the Snow Bride?”

  “I know several.” He told her the story of Snegurochka, the Russian snow bride. “She fell in love with a man, but when she left her forest, she melted into mist.” He thought for a moment. “That’s not very happy. I know another story of a snow girl. The spirit of winter was so moved by the plight of a childless couple that she transformed into a baby girl so they could have a daughter.”

  “Do you know of such a tale here in Japan?”

  The Hearn book had a short tale in it. “Come to think of it, yes. The snow bride in your country fell in love with a young and handsome woodcutter. She could have killed him, but instead, she swore him to secrecy. She disguised herself as an ordinary girl and became his wife later on.” In the darkness, the tale didn’t sound as flat and simple as it had been when he was reading it on a train with lighted advertisements and the bustle of the city around him. He found he could well imagine a lonely cabin and an immense forest, with only the wind for company and a small fire holding the snowstorms at bay. The wind blowing open
a door in gusts, and the swirl of dancing snow outside on a lonely, moonlit winter’s night. A man might think he saw a lovely young woman out there, moving through the trees.

  “Did she…melt?”

  He remembered the sad end of the tale. “The husband broke his promise to the snow witch. When he told his wife what he had seen as a young man, she became enraged and revealed herself. She couldn’t stay with him, but she couldn’t kill him, either.”

  “Why not?”

  Her question didn’t really sound like a question and he was about to ask why she needed him to tell a tale she’d probably grown up hearing. But something stopped him from asking, and he simply finished the tale. “The tale says that she had given him ten children, and she could not take their father from them. But bound by her curse, she couldn’t stay, either. She vanished on the winter wind, never to be heard from again.”

  “It is a sad tale.”

  “Yes.” He shifted in the warm waters, moving closer to the partition, and wished there were a way he could reach around the divider to take her hand. “But only if you look at it that way. She and her husband had many years of happiness, and ten children.” He thought of the guys that didn’t get to go home in the unit. Some of them had wives. Some of them had kids they’d never even gotten to meet. “Sometimes you don’t get forever. There’s something to be said for being happy with the time you have.” He lifted dripping fingers out of the water and flicked the droplets into the darkness. “I am happy with whatever time we have, Yukiko-san.”

  * * *

  Lightning flashed above him and thunder rattled his eardrums. Sweat soaked his clothing and every sound, every flash, convulsed his muscles. Flashes lit up alternating seconds, freezing them in time. Toshiro's look of horror. The tree exploding.

  What am I missing? Why do I keep coming back here?

  He was dreaming, he knew he was dreaming. He could feel icy winter wind on his flesh. But the weight of the loudspeaker backpack pinned him down. Blankets. Blankets on top of me, keeping out the cold.

  It’s the night. That night. The night it all started.

  But he was alone, in a wooden shed, with only the wind for company and a small fire holding back the snowstorm. And outside, a woman terrible in her beauty danced.

  You feelin’ it, Spooky? Toshiro’s voice murmured in his ear and he tensed, looking for anything out of place that might warn them—the reflection off a sniper scope, or a trip wire, or something on the jungle floor that looked too neat or too messy.

  His foot came down on something that gave way. Mud?

  No.

  A body.

  The lightning lit up Toshiro's face. The broad leaves of foliage.

  The face behind Toshiro's.

  A million volts jolted through him. Every single muscle twisted and screamed. He dropped to the ground.

  Not the ground. He fell on top of the body.

  The Vietnamese soldier, hardly more than a kid. Dressed in black, soaked through, and thoroughly dead.

  Yet staring up at him from behind Toshiro's panicked face, just before his friend flew backward with the force of the electrical shock.

  The face of the Vietnamese soldier formed in front of him now. Spencer gasped in shock, and the ghost mirrored his movements. Its mouth opened, and instead of breathing in, Spencer felt the air in his body go out. Deprived of oxygen, drained by the ghost, he wheezed.

  I'm sorry! I didn't see you there! I didn't kill you!

  But he carried a funeral on his back.

  His leg burned, all along the red fury of the jagged, lightning-strike scar that ran from his knee to his ankle. The spot just above his boot throbbed. He stared into the eyes of the angry ghost and felt sorrow, even as he gasped for breath. The ghost's features belonged on a boy, not a soldier. Too young.

  The snow witch hovered above him, ready to steal his warmth and freeze him to death. “Too young,” she said.

  He woke up with a gasp. Snow had blown into the room, leaving a sparkling trail on the tatami mats. Nevertheless, he was soaked in sweat as if he’d just been in the jungle all over again. I saw it! I saw him! The whispers in his ears grew loud enough to drown out the pounding of his heart. The dead soldier. Spencer buried his head in his hands and choked back grief. He hadn’t seen the soldier there. He put his foot down on the dead Vietnamese boy and then the lightning jumped from the tree to him, attracted by the loudspeaker rig. The ghost rose up behind Toshiro for the funerary chant. The lightning fried the rig before the funeral was over.

  He’d been carrying the funeral, and when it failed to finish, he carried the ghost instead. “Oh, kid,” he said to the air. “I’m so sorry.” No field report or medical diagnosis would solve this one. “I’ll put you to rest. Somehow.”

  He left the warmth of the futon and got up to close the screen. In the light reflected from the moon, he caught a glimpse of the Hearn book in the corner. Fully awake now, he found the page where the story of Yuki-onna started and used a flashlight to read the text.

  The clues had been there, if he only bothered to look. The clues were all there in the jungle that night. They were in the broadcasts we made and the flyers we printed. We used their ghosts. Of course their ghosts would use us.

  The shrine guardian had cautioned him to adjust his lack of belief. If one were true, why not the other? And if the other were true—he looked down at the woodcut of the snow woman—he’d better understand that story as well as the ones he used in combat. His life might depend on it.

  Or worse, his heart.

  * * *

  Sleep deserted her this night. A strange restlessness held her in its grip from the onsen onward. She had heard the tale of the first of her kind, and thought it misery and caution and tragedy, but Spencer had offered her a different interpretation and it troubled her. Obasan had laid out the modern dress again, but she turned away from it. Once she set her feet upon that path, there was no going back.

  Yukiko did not know where the flustered feeling came from. She wandered the garden instead, keeping close to the misty spring that fed the baths and hoping for wisdom from the night sky. The panel slid open and she waited to hear Okami-san’s scolding.

  “You can’t sleep either.” Spencer’s deep voice sent a chill up her spine and prickled her flesh.

  “I am sorry if I have disturbed you.” She spoke the words turned away from him, looking down into the spring that fed the baths so that he could not see the heat blooming in her cheeks. “The comfort of our guests–”

  He stepped up behind her and his big gaijin hands closed around her wrists, pulling her hands away from her ears with gentle inevitability. “There are no other guests here, are there?”

  His voice was a soft murmur in her ear. Though his body didn’t touch hers, the cotton of his yukata brushed against the back of hers and it might as well have been their bare flesh. She felt the inexorable pull reeling them together. No, no, no! This mustn’t be! “The others—there are motor buses...excursions to many places on the mountain–”

  “But this ryokan has no buses, does it?” He held her hands away from her body so she couldn’t wrap them around herself. “There are no signs in the town pointing the way to this inn.”

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “We are a small inn, with room for few.”

  “My friend Toshiro couldn’t even find this place, could he? It’s not on any map, and no hiker has even stumbled upon it by mistake looking for the shrine.”

  Tears prickled against her eyelashes as she shook her head. They froze as they fell from her lashes, turning into tiny crystals of ice.

  “All the signs were right in front of me,” he murmured. “I didn’t want to see them.”

  “There are…no signs…” Her voice had no strength beyond the sigh of wind.

  “If I say it out loud, you’ll take me, won’t you?” His breath tickled the side of her neck.

  “You mustn’t say it,” she whispered. “Please don’t say it. I ne
ver meant–”

  “I never meant to look into your eyes and fall in love, sweet Yukiko-san.” His lips were at her ear, teasing the delicate shell with the lightest of touches. “What I want to know is if you chose me.”

  She turned her head. His lips were so close. His eyes, behind the glasses, had darkened from their amber-glass color to smoky honey. A firework exploded behind her ribcage. “I chose you! I didn’t mean to–”

  “That’s all I wanted to know.” He closed the gap between her mouth and his.

  Yukiko melted under his kiss. Fox could be heard in the bushes, and the wind moved the treetops far above, and beyond that, the winter winds made the rocks on the mountain top crack and boom. Or maybe that was just her icy heart, letting him in.

  As he moved the collar of her kimono aside, she saw a streak in the moonlight. Kitsune leapt from a tree bough to the clay roof of the inn. Three tails lashing back and forth, Fox dropped from the roof to the rain barrel, tipping it back against the wall just enough to block anyone from sliding the door open to the garden.

  She cupped his cheeks in her palms, feeling the roughness along his jaw and the shape of his cheekbones. He pressed forward and she gave way, collapsing onto the bench while the stream burbled and sang in her ears.

  Every cell in her flesh-and-blood body sang with the touch of his hands. His lips blazed a trail down the column of her throat while her fingers un-threaded the ties of his yukata.

  His body was strange, hairy, and utterly compelling to her, having hard angles where hers had soft curves. And her curves fit so snugly against his angles. “Yukiko,” he murmured, meeting her lips again. “I promise–”

  “Be silent.” She shrugged out of her kimono and shivered at the cold air on her bare skin. “Do not make promises you cannot keep.”

  “You don’t know me well enough yet.” His smile was tender, but at the same time, his eyes smoldered with the promise that she would soon know him very well indeed.