by Yusuke Kishi
The canoe stopped right in front of a brazier, and I was temporarily blinded after being in the dark for so long. I swayed unsteadily on my wooden clogs.
With Satoru’s help, I managed to disembark onto the dock.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
Suddenly, a memory from a Summer Festival over ten years ago swam into focus. Maria and I dancing around delightedly in our new yukata.
“Our yukata match!”
“Yeah, we’re twins!”
I still remember what they looked like. Mine was blue with white dots and red goldfish, and Maria’s was white with blue dots and red goldfish.
She spun gracefully in her clogs. Her movements were so beautiful that I could only stare.
“Let’s go!”
“But if we’re not careful, we’ll get caught by the monsters.”
“It’ll be okay. We can use the magic words.”
“What magic words?”
“The moms were talking about it the other day. It’s called a mantra. I’ll teach you.”
Since we didn’t have cantus yet, the world appeared full of wonder and danger. But we firmly believed that once we were grown up and had our powers, nothing in the world would frighten us.
Maria ran off ahead. As I watched her retreating figure, I suddenly felt helplessly lost, and reached out, shouting her name…
“-ki. Saki?”
Satoru’s voice brought me back to the present.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just spaced out for a moment.”
“Oh. …let’s go that way. There’s some sort of show going on there.”
I took his hand and started clip-clopping down the street in my clogs.
Although the wide streets lining the canals were brightly lit with braziers, blackness extended into the distance on either side of us. It was as if we were walking on a bridge suspended above the land of the dead. The illuminated path was safe, but if we ventured off into the darkness, we would never be able to return.
As far as I can remember, I had never missed the Summer Festival, and I’ve experienced this strange feeling each time.
Along the path were other people heading to the festival. Everyone was wearing yukata and clogs, and holding paper fans. Happy sounds of talk and laughter echoed all around, but to me they just seemed as meaningless as the rustling of the wind.
I saw the monsters ahead. Both wore straw hats and had covered faces, and one wore a tengu mask that completely hid their identity.
The two monsters offered the passersby wine. We took the paper cups and drank the wine in one swallow. It was sweet sake. I began to feel a little tipsy just from that.
“Look, the lanterns are coming.”
He pointed at the clusters of lanterns being carried on long poles. In the ancient civilization, each pole was carried by one person, but the ones we had now weighed over a ton, making that was impossible. Every summer, each of the seven towns design and build their own lantern, but Withertree had not participated since the disaster twelve years ago, so Hayring usually built two lanterns to make up for it. This year, the town of Withertree was making a comeback, and there were eight lanterns in all.
The giant lanterns came slowly down the path. The one right before me was from my own town of Waterwheel. The lanterns were decorated with pictures of various waterwheels. Overshot, backshot, undershot, breastshot…
A number of monsters ran behind the lanterns. They were all short, almost child-sized. All wore hats and animal masks instead of the usual cloth masks.
“Look, the child-monsters.” I pointed, but they had already run out of Satoru’s sight.
“Children? Weird, since when did they have children dressing as monsters?”
“But they just went by. Over there.”
A loud bang announced the arrival of the first fireworks of the night. A brilliant flower of light bloomed in the dark sky. Then came the second, and the third. The colors and shapes reminded me of chrysanthemums and peonies. A cheer went up a twinkling golden lights fell like cherry blossoms. These were done with pure pyrotechnical skills, no cantus involved.
“…beautiful,” I whispered.
“Yeah.” Satoru put his arms gently around my shoulders.
Following the fireworks, a traditional band struck up a tune that echoed all around us. The unique sounds of the flute, drums, and gong brought forth the heady ambience of the Summer Festival.
What was I doing here?
I asked myself this as we continued to walk.
It hadn’t even been a week since I learned of Maria’s death. In that time, I had kept myself busy with work and the festival had hardly crossed my mind.
Still, everyone attended the Summer Festival. Apart from those who were sick or looking after children at the day-care centers, no one shut themselves in on this day. I couldn’t bear the thought of spending this time alone.
There was another reason I had accepted Satoru’s invitation to the festival. The seasonal festivals in Kamisu 66 all followed a theme. For example, the Demon-chasing, Planting, and Illness-dispelling festivals during the spring dealt with plentiful harvest and health. The summer festivals were to worship our ancestors and pray for happiness in the next world. In other words, this was the night when the worlds of the dead and the living were in close proximity.
If Maria wanted to see me again, I was sure she would show herself somewhere at the festival. That subconscious thought was probably the reason I decided to come.
As I got closer to the open square that was the center of the festival, the performance tower and stage decked out in red and white banners came into view. Although there was still some time before the main event, most people were already tipsy on wine and having fun catching goldfish or throwing darts at the game booths. These games were difficult without cantus, but there was an unsaid agreement among everyone not to use our powers on this night. The performers and lantern bearers were the only exceptions.
“Hey wait, I want to get some cotton candy,” Satoru said as he headed toward a booth.
I looked around aimlessly and spotted a little girl wearing a yukata.
Maria… It couldn’t be. I blinked. But her red hair pinned by a silver barrette looked just like Maria’s when she was young. Even her yukata, white with blue dots and red goldfish, looked exactly like the one she used to wear.
I walked slowly toward the girl. But when I was about four or five meters away, she suddenly took off running.
“Wait!” I shouted, and started chasing after her.
She ran away from the festival center and toward the darkened canals.
“Maria!”
I ran as fast as I could, but in my haste and unfamiliarity with wearing clogs, nearly tripped over. I caught myself with cantus and looked up, but the girl was already gone.
“Saki! What’s wrong?” Satoru’s voice came breathlessly from behind.
“Sorry. It was nothing.” I turned to face him.
“Nothing? Then why did you suddenly take off like that?”
“I…”
I couldn’t say I was chasing after a hallucination. Now that I looked, I had run much farther than I thought, and the area around me was mostly deserted.
“You just shouted ‘Maria!’ didn’t you?”
“You heard?”
“Yeah. Did you see her?”
I looked silently up at the pitch black sky. In addition to being the night of a new moon, the stars were obscured by a thick layer of cloud.
“…I don’t know. It might have only been a kid who looked a lot like her.”
Still, even just looking at her from behind, the similarities were too precise to be coincidence. But if Maria had wanted to meet me, why did she run away? It was almost as if she were leading me here.
There was a faint buzzing by my ear. I jumped away from it instinctively.
“A mosquito,” Satoru said, sounding disconcerted.
Spotting it in the light
of a brazier, he flicked it away with a twanging sound.
“Why is there a mosquito here?”
Usually, there are no flies or mosquitoes inside the Holy Barrier. Especially not mosquitoes, since everyone hated the thought of having their blood sucked and killed them on sight.
“Maybe it came in when someone headed out into the mountains.”
“On the night of the festival?”
Were there people who got drunk enough to go wandering outside the Holy Barrier on this night?
“Um, or maybe Inui and his team are back.”
A week ago, the Wildlife Preservation officers had set out with the grand goal of killing two hundred thousand members of the Robber Fly colony within three days. But it hadn’t happened. Yakomaru’s entire army had vanished, as if they had sensed that the gods of death were coming after them and gone into hiding.
“Could that be it…”
After my experience in summer camp, I knew that sleeping out in the open, eating rationed meals and whatever could be scrounged up in the forest was extremely tough. So they might have come back into town to restock and recharge. But I also got the feeling that Inui’s team wasn’t the type to leave a mission incomplete .
“Well, let’s go back. The firedrawing contest is about to start.”
Firedrawing was using cantus to create beautiful pictures out of fireworks shot into the sky. Every year, the most powerful cantus users competed against each other to the wild cheers of the watching crowd. It was the highlight of the Summer Festival.
“Okay…”
Thinking back on it now, I still don’t know why I turned to look behind me. It was as if I were being controlled by someone. What I saw made my blood run cold.
“Saki, what’s wrong?” he asked, sounding perplexed.
“Over there…!” I pointed toward the canal with a trembling finger.
“What? I don’t see anything.”
It had only been for the merest second. But I had seen it, clear as day.
“They were standing there. Maria, Mamoru, and the faceless boy…”
The three of them had been standing on the surface of the water, looking intently at us from a distant world. It was a perfect depiction of the phrase “passing from this world to the next”.
“Saki.” Satoru held me in his arms. “…I feel the same way. I want to meet them again if I can, even if they’re just ghosts.”
“I’m not imagining it. Trust me.”
“I know. You saw them. But you were expecting to see them before we even got here, right? You can try to hide it, but I already know.”
“How?”
“Your yukata. It’s so dark and plain it almost makes me look gaudy by comparison.”
His yukata was also dark blue, but with pale stripes.
“You look like you’re in mourning.”
He had hit the nail on the head, and I couldn’t respond.
“It’s okay. You truly wanted to meet them, right? That thought was so strong your mind projected their image on the water.”
“…yeah.”
I guess there was no other way to look at it. But then who was the little girl who had led me here, away from the festival?
For a while we stood there, unmoving, his arms around me. Satoru seemed to be waiting for me to calm down.
I looked past his shoulder toward the festival grounds. It looked as it always did, full of light and people. There was already a crowd waiting for the firedrawing contest to begin.
But the monsters were still offering wine. The little monsters with covered faces. They had to be children, right?
It wasn’t until a man who had downed a cup of wine in one gulp suddenly collapsed on the ground that I realized something was horribly wrong.
“Satoru!”
The monsters scattered at my shout.
“Saki? What’s wrong?”
He probably thought I was freaking out over nothing again and hugged me even tighter.
“No! Let go! That guy just passed out! Over there!”
Satoru finally let go and turned around.
“What happened?” he gasped.
“He drank the wine the monster gave him and…”
I ran over to the fallen man. He had been foaming at the mouth and writhing in pain just a second ago, but was now completely still.
“He’s dead. …he wasn’t sick or anything. It was poison,” Satoru said after smelling the man’s mouth.
“Poison? But, who…?”
“Didn’t you say it was the child-monster?”
“Yeah.”
The fear in his face scared me.
“No human could have done this. It was a queerat.”
“Queerats? That’s impossible. They could never openly revolt against humans; they know that would be the end for them!”
“The must have somehow found out that they were about to be exterminated and decided to launch one last attack.”
“So the Robber Flies…”
The image of Yakomaru’s face appeared in my mind–his glib tongue and cunning, beady eyes.
“Let’s go! We have to warn everyone.”
As we took off running, the sky was filled with bursts of light and sound. One. Two. Three. The peonies and chrysanthemums were transformed into swirls of color, spinning like windmills in dazzling, complicated patterns.
A great cheer rose from the spectators. The firedrawing contest had begun. No matter how loudly we shouted now, no one would hear us.
I couldn’t levitate like Maria. But if I didn’t find a way to get above the crowd, we were all going to die here.
Suddenly, there was a thunderous roar that shook the earth itself. It wasn’t a firework going off. The sound was loud enough to break windows.
Deafening shrieks came from the crowd.
Satoru grabbed me by the shoulder and yanked me back.
“Run!”
“But…we have to warn-!”
“It’s to late for that. They’ve already started attacking. There’s nothing we can do.”
I backed away, ignoring his overly calm assessment of the situation.
“Everyone at the square…”
“It’s okay. All the powerful cantus users are there. The queerats won’t be able to do anything.”
I felt better at his words. No matter how you look at it, cantus-wielding humans could easily defeat the queerats and their primitive weapons.
We ran away from the square, but less than a hundred meters later, I felt a peculiar prickling on my scalp. Looking up, I could tell that the sky was filled with streaking arrows, but all I could actually see were faint silhouettes. It was as if they were painted completely black.
Next, hundreds of arquebuses fired simultaneously. Angry roars and shrieks of pain rose in an overwhelming cacophony. I sank to the ground and covered my ears. The townspeople were being killed by the queerats… I couldn’t think of a single thing I could do.
“Get up! Run!” Satoru grabbed my wrist and started dragging me away.
Then, faint sounds came from our escape path. A clanging sound of metal on metal. The sounds of muffled footfalls came closer and closer.
Queerats… I froze and held my breath. Satoru put in finger in front of his lips and gestured with his hands.
They came. More than I had imagined. Two or three hundred of them, moving ponderously with their bodies low to the ground.
Two strokes of luck saved us from being spotted instantly by the queerats. First, we were downwind. If we hadn’t been, they would definitely have noticed us with their sharp sense of smell. Second, we were both wearing dark clothing that blended in with the surroundings and made us hard to spot at a glance.
In that small window of opportunity, he killed them.
The queerats at the center of the formation burst into flames.
Piercing screams cut through the air and the other soldiers froze, their shocked faces lit by the fire.
“Go to hell!” Satoru snarled.
“Bastards…!” Satoru viciously crushed the burnt remnants of the queerats. Blood sprayed through the air and bones snapped loudly.
“Stop already.” I tried to hold him back.
“Low-lifes, maggots…how dare you kill humans!”
Satoru didn’t seem to hear me at all.
I remembered the last time he was like this. We had been trapped underground after the Ground Spiders attacked. When he regained his cantus and we started to counterattack… Satoru was only a twelve year-old boy at the time, but it was as if I had seen a glimpse of the fiend in him. The memory made me break out in a cold sweat.
Right now, his face was hidden in shadow, but I have no doubt he was wearing the same expression he had back then. A strange mixture of unstoppable anger and bloodlust…
“They’re dead already. We’ll be in danger if we don’t get out of here!”
Finally, Satoru seemed to calm down. “Right, let’s go.”
We had only gone a couple steps when he stopped again.
“What?”
“The group I just killed isn’t the one that’s attacking at the square. These guys were here to ambush the people who tried to escape. With these numbers, it’s likely they were just the vanguard and there are more coming. So if we run this way, we’ll probably meet even more queerats. It’ll be dangerous, but our best bet is to go back toward the square.”
“But…”
“It’s okay. Some might have died in the surprise attack, but humans won’t be killed that easily. We might be gaining the upper hand already.”
His prediction was right on the mark.
The queerats’ strategy, a blitz attack in the middle of the night, was likely more intended scare us than do any real damage.
First, they dress up as monsters and offer normal wine with cups of poisoned wine mixed in so as to sow the first seeds of panic when people started dropping dead at random.
Then by timing their guns with the bursts of fireworks, they create an even greater disturbance over a larger area.
