The Gathering

by Dan Poblocki

  He knew he had to get her out of the road—at any moment, a car could come speeding around the corner. He took her hand, figuring it might at least get her attention.

  The girl’s eyelids fluttered and then opened. When she saw him leaning over her, a look of confusion quickly transformed into terror. Eyes like mirrors, she opened her mouth and screamed again, and she and Marcus scrambled away from each other, crouching in the road as if about to spar.

  After a moment, Marcus remembered that he’d been the one who’d approached her. He took a slow breath and then held out his hands to show her he meant no harm. “It’s okay,” he said. “I was trying to help.”

  As he rose to his feet, the girl reached for the pink bag that was lying on the nearby shoulder of the road and pulled it close to her, as if he might try to steal it. Then she did the same thing to a small black makeup compact, clutching it in one fist.

  A second later, she whipped her arm back and then threw the compact across the road as hard as she could.

  It skipped like a stone upon water before disappearing into the dense scrub. With a sigh of relief, she wiped her nose with the back of her wrist, glanced up at Marcus, and shook her head.

  Marcus felt like he’d just met a girl who’d been raised by wolves.

  “I’m Marcus,” he said purposefully, as if she might not understand him. “I was down the street when I heard you scream. You were just lying here.” The girl blinked and then glanced around. She looked like she expected to see someone else there with them, maybe hiding in the brush. “I’m sorry,” he went on when he realized she didn’t plan on answering him. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You’re not the one who scared me,” said the girl, continuing to examine the trees.

  Marcus’s skin tingled. His mother had told him he might meet different sorts of people at Larkspur, but this girl was just plain weird. Then again, many musical prodigies were, so he knew he shouldn’t be surprised. He wanted to ask her, If I’m not the one who scared you, then who is? Instead he said, “Let’s get out of the road. Maybe you can tell me what happened.”

  She finally met his gaze and gave him a look that said she had no idea what had happened. But she stood and brushed herself off, and headed toward a stony path that veered from the pavement and edged into the woods. Marcus noticed the wall and the gate standing several yards back, as well as the word Larkspur, which was engraved in each stone pillar.

  “Oh,” he said, startled. “We’re here. We’ve made it.”

  The girl scowled at him. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “To Larkspur,” he said, blushing. “I’m sorry—isn’t this where you were headed too?”

  “Yes,” she responded unsurely.

  Marcus spent a moment observing the decay of the entry and the dark tunnel of trees beyond the wall. A soft and melancholy piano melody drifted to him on the wind from somewhere close by. It was the same tune he’d heard the musician behind the wall playing on the day he’d gotten his invitation to Larkspur. The girl didn’t notice the music. But then, he didn’t imagine that she would. No one ever did. “This isn’t really what I expected,” he said. “What about you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is it what you expected?”

  The girl looked confused. “I-I don’t know,” she stammered. “What’s your name again?”

  “Marcus Geller,” he said slowly. She must have hit her head when she’d fallen. Hard.

  “And why did you come to Larkspur House?”

  “Well, I was invited. Weren’t you?” She didn’t answer. His nerves kept him talking. “I’m cello mostly, but I like to experiment with other instruments too. Piano. Flute. Harmonica! Harmonica is so much fun.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the small steel instrument he’d stowed there before leaving Ohio. He held it to his lips and then performed a brief, jazzy riff. “What do you play?” he asked.

  “Play?”

  “Yeah, what instrument?”

  “I don’t play an instrument.”

  “A singer, then. Sweet! You look like you have a nice voice.”

  The girl’s cheeks turned the same pink shade as her bag. “I do?” Her voice was suddenly very soft.

  “Totally. I can tell these things. Listen, I dropped all my stuff when I heard … well, never mind. Would you mind waiting for me? When I get back, we can walk to the house together.” And then you can tell me what you were doing lying in the road. “It’s got to be just up that path, don’t you think?” The girl glanced over her shoulder and into the woods. Then, with her lips pressed together, she turned back and nodded. “You going to be all right alone?” Marcus asked. She straightened her shoulders and tucked her hair behind her ears.

  He interpreted that as a yes.

  After he’d taken several steps down the road toward his bags, he heard a muffled voice come from behind him. Glancing back, he saw the girl watching him. She’d said something that he’d missed.

  “Poppy,” the girl repeated. “My name is Poppy Caldwell.”

  The piano melody echoed out again, but it had changed, becoming more upbeat—not quite happy, but certainly not as sad. He instantly thought of it as “Larkspur’s Theme,” a song that belonged to this place. When he and Poppy reached the house, he’d have to find a piano and play it so she could hear it too.

  “Nice to meet you, Poppy Caldwell,” Marcus said with a smile.

  “And thanks,” she managed. “For helping me get up.”

  He gave her a quick salute and surprised a laugh from her. Okay, so maybe she wasn’t completely weird after all.

  Marcus had never been away from home for more than a weekend, and here he was, by himself in upstate New York getting ready to spend the year on a full scholarship at the prestigious Larkspur Academy for the Performing Arts. He was about to eat, breathe, and live music with a whole bunch of other talented kids who thought just like him, with no interference from his mom or his brothers and sister. He couldn’t believe it.

  Maybe, Marcus thought as he came upon his bag and large black case on the side of the road, there will be people at the academy who experience the world in the same way I do. Maybe I’ll meet others who geek out about Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, and Nina Simone as much as me.

  He found Poppy standing right where he’d left her: at the gravel path that led to the shadowy gap in the stone wall. She looked worried.

  “Ready?” he asked. Poppy nodded. Together they stepped forward. “So,” Marcus ventured, “do you want to tell me what happened?”

  Poppy bit at her lip for a few seconds. Then she said, “Could you tell me more about your invitation to Larkspur?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s the same one you got.”

  “That’s the thing,” she said as they crossed under the twisted iron railing and past the pillars into the shadowy tunnel of trees, “I’m pretty sure it’s not.”

  AFTER THE DRIVER her parents had hired left her at Larkspur’s gate, Azumi dragged her luggage deep into the woods and up the slow ascent, memories of her dark dreams scratching icy branches along her spine.

  The previous summer, Azumi and her sister, Moriko, had visited their auntie Wakame at her home just northwest of Mount Fuji on the island of Honshu. Auntie Wakame had forbidden the girls from entering the nearby forest on their own, since it was so common for even frequent visitors to become lost there. With its thick canopy of trees that hid the sun and the iron-filled volcanic rock that messed with compass needles, the national park was known as one of the most haunted spots in all of Japan.

  Azumi had promised herself she’d never go back to Yamanashi Prefecture again. But the farther she strolled up Larkspur’s driveway, the distance between the present and the past became shorter and shorter. Everywhere she looked, she recognized parts of the forest where Moriko had disappeared—lichen-covered tree trunks, dappled shadows dancing on the leafy ground, dew clinging to low-hanging, delicate mosses.

  Then, with a blink,
she was there. Back in Japan. Remembering that horrible day.

  “Come on, Azumi,” said Moriko, stepping off the clearly marked path. “Don’t be such a scaredy-cat.”

  “I’m not a scaredy-cat.” Azumi looked around in disgust. “I just think that Auntie Wakame might have a point. Anyone could be hiding in there.”

  “You can hide too. And while you’re hiding, I can look for more treasure.”

  “Treasure? You really think the garbage that the tourists leave behind is worth digging through?”

  “Of course! How else do you think an explorer ever finds anything of value?”

  “That’s deep, Moriko, Treasure Hunter.” Azumi scanned the nylon ribbons that crossed the demarcated trails and veered off into the forbidden parts of the woods, disappearing into the shadows. The ribbons came in all different colors, each of them bright so they could be easily spotted by a ranger or a visitor to the park. “Why are all these ribbons here?”

  Moriko looked over at her. “People drive out from Tokyo. Sad people. They come here to … say good-bye to the world. They tie these ribbons at the edge of the forest so that someone can find them after they’re gone. Some say it’s their ghosts that haunt these woods.”

  “Like in Auntie’s yūrei tales?”

  Moriko made her eyes wide, her blue hair changing shades in the dimming light. “Exactly!”

  Azumi shook her head, trying to look exhausted or annoyed—anything but the terror she felt bubbling in her gut. “No thanks. I’m not ruining my new sneakers. You go on. Have fun. You always do.”

  “Azumi!” Moriko called out. “I’m kidding! Don’t be like that!”

  But Azumi walked away. She hurried along the lonely trails back to their aunt’s cottage as the sun began to set.

  Her sister did not return to Auntie Wakame’s that night.

  Their parents traveled immediately from Washington. The search for Moriko was long and exhaustive. No one turned up a single shred of evidence. Not the Ministry of the Environment, not the local police and detectives, not the family.

  And Azumi never saw her sister again.

  The dreams started shortly after Azumi returned to the United States. It was as if the trees behind her own home had become spirits of the bodies that littered the Japanese forest, calling to her, the hush of a breeze meeting the branches outside her bedroom window like whispers in her head. Here. Here we are. Come and get us, child. Come and help us find our way home.

  Larkspur’s driveway made a sharp turn, and a giant meadow domed by a gleaming blue sky opened up before Azumi. All at once the forest and its shadows were gone.

  Perched on the crest of the slope, nearly two hundred yards farther up the path, was the grand structure that she’d first seen online a month ago.

  The Larkspur School.

  It looked quite different in real life. So much bigger. She took in its steeply pitched roofline and many gabled windows, its ivy-encrusted stone porches, the glinting windows that shone like ice against the dark stone walls, the turrets that lifted up like dark mounds of whipped dessert from the ends of what looked like passageways, and the soaring tower that appeared to spike straight through its massive granite heart.

  When Azumi reached the center of the porch, she knocked on the French doors, but no one answered. She opened one of the doors and peered at the shadows just inside. She heard nothing—no footsteps, no talking, not even the tick of a clock.

  “Hello?” she called out. “I’m Azumi Endo, and I’m here for school!” But no one answered. “Excuse me! Is anyone here?!”

  Azumi tossed her suitcase just inside the door and then sat on the wide stone porch she’d seen from the path. Someone would come by eventually. Until then, she’d take pictures on her phone to send to her parents.

  Moriko and Azumi had always been opposites. Several years older than Azumi, Moriko had pierced her nose and dyed her hair and listened religiously to their parents’ old punk-rock albums. Moriko’s classmates had looked up to her as if she were a superstar, a trendsetter, a kind soul, and a creative spirit. The memorial in the high school yearbook had taken up two pages.

  Azumi kept her own hair long and straight and black as night, as it was meant to be. Admiring a clean look, she didn’t put up posters on her walls. She always took off her shoes at the front door, just as her baaba had taught her. Azumi didn’t have a clue what her own memorial might look like if her friends were to make one, but she would have liked it to contain her seventh grade yearbook photo, the serious one in which she looked like a lawyer or a judge, her mouth downturned slightly and her eyebrow raised in a way that said, Don’t even think about it.

  When Azumi turned thirteen, she realized that she could never be as carefree as Moriko had been. But she could become a diligent daughter and please her parents in all the ways Moriko had refused to: with awesome grades, and the most goals during soccer matches, and classy friends who were as determined to succeed as she was. This was why her sleepwalking had been such a nightmare over the past year. She was losing control. Just like she’d lost Moriko. It made her want to scream.

  On her phone’s screen, Azumi noticed a figure moving near the line of trees, several hundred feet from where she’d exited the woods. Lowering the phone, however, she discovered nothing there but the breeze moving the dense, leafy growth, which caught the sun occasionally, making it seem as though someone had been watching her.

  She lifted the phone’s camera back up to take the picture anyway. When a black patch appeared in the same spot on the screen, Azumi inhaled a sharp little breath and looked closer. The patch wavered before the tree line, as if an impenetrable shadow were being cast on that spot from about six or seven feet above the ground.

  A human-shaped shadow.

  She took a picture, then zoomed in.

  Long, thin arms, sticklike legs, and a head that appeared way too large to be carried on such a gaunt frame.

  And eyes. Two sparks of gold, watching her.

  The image shuddered, and the screen went black.

  In her peripheral vision, Azumi noticed movement by the tree line. She stood, ready to bolt away. But then two kids emerged from the mouth of the woods. A boy and a girl. They were carrying luggage.

  Raising her hand over her head, Azumi waved emphatically to the two travelers. They paused on the path and waved back slowly. She had just lowered her hand, not wanting to look overeager, when she noticed that, off the path to their left, standing in the meadow where she’d first noticed its presence, the dark shadow had reappeared.

  Slowly, it turned its head toward the boy and girl.

  Watching them.

  About to pounce.

  As Azumi opened her mouth to shout out a warning, the shadow lunged.

  “Hey!” she cried. “Over here!”

  Don’t be such a scaredy-cat.

  … Shut up, Moriko!

  The boy and the girl stopped on the path, staring at her in confusion. Azumi waved them forward, swinging both arms up and back over her head. The dark thing was closing in on them, and they had no idea.

  “Hurry!” Closer. Closer. “Run!”

  Something seemed to click for the pair, and they took off across the grass, sprinting toward the porch. The shadow creature loomed large, gaining ground.

  “Don’t turn around!”

  They weren’t going to make it.

  Azumi dashed down the porch steps.

  In the meadow, the shadow’s golden eyes seemed to flicker with delight that Azumi was approaching.

  She concentrated on the boy and the girl, who were now only a couple of dozen feet away. “Toss your bag to me!” she shouted to the boy as he came up beside her. She grunted as she caught his luggage, but she managed to hold it tight. He wore another case strapped to his shoulders, something that looked like an enormous backpack.

  Azumi turned toward the house.

  A rushing, sucking sound came quickly behind them as they raced up the steps to the porch. Azumi didn’t lo
ok back, not even when she swung open the glass door and pushed the others into the dark entry. Slamming the door shut behind them, she scrambled to find a lock or a latch to hold it closed.

  She expected the shadow to barrel into the door at any moment.

  But instead … nothing.

  Through the window, she could see that the meadow and the porch were as empty as they’d been when she’d first arrived. No shadow. No flickering golden eyes. She tried to swallow a deep breath but released an embarrassing squeak instead.

  “What’s going on?” asked the boy.

  Azumi turned, breathless. “I-I’m sorry. I was certain I saw … ” She glanced over her shoulder again just to be sure. She felt her shoulders tense. “Something was chasing you.”

  “An animal?” asked the girl, staring wide-eyed out at the morning.

  “Well, yeah, it was an animal. A big animal. It looked … angry.” Azumi shook her head. “I can’t believe you didn’t see it. It was literally about to bite your heads off.”

  The boy stood by the window, wearing a slight grin, as if he didn’t believe her. “It must be hiding now.”

  “Obviously,” said Azumi. “I mean, it didn’t just disappear!”

  “I guess we should thank you,” said the girl. “For saving us?”

  “If you’re going to laugh at me, then next time, you can just save yourselves.” The boy and the girl looked like she’d just slapped them. Azumi shook her head, embarrassed that she’d allowed herself to say such a thing. “Anyway, my name is Azumi. Azumi Endo.”

  “I’m Poppy. And this is—”

  “Marcus.” The boy brushed his red curls away from his forehead and then saluted. He adjusted the straps of the thing he carried on his back, and Azumi realized from the shape of it that it must be a cello.

  “Do you know where we can find the others?” asked Azumi.

  “The others?” Marcus echoed.

  “The other students. The faculty. Anyone.” Azumi watched as Marcus glanced at Poppy, as if they knew something that she did not. “What is it? Did I say something funny again?”