novel Silence on the coffee table. If he dreamed they were visionless images of faces he’d seen during waking. Acquaintances, fellow learners, the security guard at the museum. The images took on a distorted, wooden quality of ukiyo-e prints, there were his mother and father...old...his father youthful in an old photo with his arm slung around the shoulders of a jowly youth - so familiar and Rokuzayemon’s reminiscences.
“You’re like him, still searching for the Kohiyoye princess’s past.”
Rokuzayemon hadn’t said those words - had he?
In the twisted quality of dreams, the student lost his ability to reason memory from fantasy.
“Her name was excised for a reason.”
Marta with her lined face and withered body danced naked upon the burning bodies of the judges. “Marina-sama is a special child.” A wise woman uttered among the rising chants of Te Deum from the fiery heavens. The grotto stood within sight, a great stone rolled over its deep entrance and long thin fingers stretched through the aperture into the light - Miserere nostri Domine, miserere nostri!
- flames devoured Rokuzayemon’s eyes and the student started awake with a soundless exhalation of terror; morning had finally come. Trepidation weighed his steps moving with the enfeebledness of an elder, he had his tea and breakfast at some side cafe he hardly remembered setting foot in. The route to Nagasaki was relatively straightforward with little hitches for the unsuspecting traveler, the large city by the sea welcomed all walks of life to rediscover its history rebuilt after its decimation.
The student took in little remembering nothing of his arrival. A heavy fog had descended into his mind and from its cause, he could discover little escape from the depressive influence. Marina - he reminded himself, passing by a memorial mention in a guidebook for the local sights. Unzen...the truth...Marina’s truth...sometimes he felt as though she had guided him step by step with the gentle pressure of her hand on his leading him deeper into the mystery of her life and eventual death.
Why was death eventual?
Marina’s emotions had seeped into his psyche allowing him to share her pain, her few memories. Although it would all come to an eventual climax, the student with rucksack over his shoulder containing trail bars and a few bottles of water, took the first of the trails through the forest; he found himself wishing his connection would endure. A fool’s hope maybe and he shook his head to clear it. The path became angular in some places rolling over natural grassy hills, gnarled tree trunks bore the scars of human error before preservation had caught on with the rest of the world. The student weaved under these branches, sheltered from unfamiliar sights, here, the shady glens beckoned him for a moment’s rest under their spreading canopies of lush verdure. Shadows deepest where the sun’s rays couldn’t penetrate, but he felt no fear only a kind of wistfulness as though he recognized the land much-changed. As a stranger would, who’d journeyed long from his homeland and returned years later to find the area different.
He was certain it was here.
That certainty carried him far into the densest part of the forest where the trail had disappeared, wandering through to the openness of vast fields and the gradual slope of the mount. The student crouched low through the gap of overhanging leaves, their cold clamminess magnified by the heat of the day - for a moment, he fancied they were hands with long thin talon-like nails raking the sides of his face - and pulled back, landing hard on his rear.
Imagination, the sensible mind scoffed, fear wiped in an instant by the rustle of the leaves parting briefly in the motion of his hand. He’d seen it - a large volcanic stone half-submerged into the ground, a smaller boulder that must’ve taken many men to move had been settled against the entrance. A few shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy above, illuminating the grotto with a kind of sacred radiance that made him exhale sharply.
The grotto..., He must’ve walked through the compound and bamboo grove without any trace of their ever being there. Those were gone...but something had remained. The student dusted himself off and walked into the tiny clearing. Closer now, he could see the weathering of the volcanic rock as the centuries had left their mark. Mossy lichens grew thick and abundantly across the forest floor yet curiously perhaps due to some difference in the biological composition of the soil, ceased growing in a perfect circle around the stones.
The student laid his hand on the boulder curiously cool to the touch; sweat ran down his neck. The gap from the dream had disappeared, his hand slid lower and he placed his thin shoulder against the stone and pushed back with all his strength. The student groaned, sweated and shoved until his shoulder was bruised black and blue, but nothing gave. The boulder had been placed at an angle and its base had become buried by loamy earth. Only the grains of dirt were disturbed by his exertions.
Yet, he did not give up.
Seeking out a sizable limb from a fallen branch, he proceeded to dig with his bare hands through the soil. It couldn’t be enough that he’d found the grotto from his dream, he had to find more - even if it was an echo of that spiritual peace he’d felt in Marina’s presence, still imprinted into the porous rock.
He dug and dug until his fingernails tore and bled, then he stopped and washed with a bottle of water from the pack. When that was over, he placed the limb end beneath the lip of the boulder and heaved with a noticeable difference in exertions. The stone face shuddered, shifted sideways with a rattle of breath that could’ve come from a human’s lungs.
The gap was just large enough for a slim person to fit through - the student tested the boulder and found that little would dislodge it from its place of rest. He peered into the inner darkness and wished he’d thought to bring a flashlight. Flipping his cell phone open, its meager light barely touched the gloom. The student eased himself forward onto his hands and knees, sideways through the aperture, grunting, he pushed through into the cold dirt of the grotto floor. Strangely the walls seemed close, thick, stifling even in the stillness of his few breaths. The student pushed himself up into a sitting position, hastily waving the slight glow of the cell phone before his face.
The path wandered into the slight curve of ancient lava, beyond that, the tiny chamber of the grotto lay. Gathering his wits about him, the student eased forward, keeping his eyes straight ahead. Little air had penetrated the saturnine depths of the grotto, its putrefaction alone filled his lungs with indescribable loathing.
His sneakers rolled over detritus, crunching with sharp cracking sounds seemingly small bones. Had an animal crawled inside and died? The student shuddered and waved his cell phone down but he could see nothing. The hand he’d had following the wall dropped sharply away into nothing and the faintest remnant of the memory of candle wax welled up within his nostrils.
“Miserere nostri Domine, miserere nostri,” he whispered, dropping to his knees. He seemed to hear the refrain of a thousand anguished cries to God, merciless beating of small fists upon the bare rock - and he closed his eyes in anticipation of the vision to follow - but, there was nothing in that cold hush of the stale air settling - nothing, but a curious almost burning sensation of a hand coolly settled over his own.
The student glanced around but saw he was still alone. His sigh was deep, saddened. Here of all places he’d believed Marina would come to him - a fool’s dream indeed, for the dead remained eternal dust. Rising, he’d walked a few steps to the resumption of the wall to guide him out when he stopped cold - gripped by the surety that someone else was there in the grotto with him.
“Marina?” He called solitarily across space and raised the light to shine over the bowed figure seated before the place of worship. “Marina...?” Hushed, with a touch of reverence. The woman in floor-length black turned and it was a glimpse he wished he had never seen. The student’s screams echoed resoundingly in the stone chamber magnified deafeningly by the acoustics of bare rock. The cell phone fell from his hand, bouncing across the floor disappearing in the overwhelming darkness brought on by the being’s advance. Stumbling in his tu
rn of flight, he fell upon the ground and scrambled away, clawing the dirt and crushed remnants of shattered bone.
He dared not turn around, never wished to look upon that horrific face again - and struck stone - he thrust his hands out into the warm air of late September and forced himself through, tearing cloth and skin - nearly sobbing he fell out into the dirt and moss of the outside world. The sun had descended low in the sky, shadows fell deeper over the glen and a deeper darkness waited -
- watching from the bloodied gap.
The student never looked back and ran from that place of ancient memory. Haggard, battered, he checked out of the local motel he’d booked a room in thinking before to stay longer, now, he only wanted to return to the world of human companionship. He suddenly abhorred the idea of being alone and went straight away during the last open hours of the museum. Director Omura was coming out of his office as the student walked in. The old man passed his gaze over the young man and shook his head.
“Come,” he placed his hand on the student’s shoulders and led him inside the room of leather bound chairs and wall to wall shelves of old books. Cold tea was offered with a box of dry sweets from the local bakery. The student sat
Her Portrait in Black Page 4
