The Night Itself (10 page)

He bowed solemnly. “You are welcome.”

As the medics bustled around, stopping the homeless man’s bleeding and checking Jack’s skull was intact, the two police officers started peppering us with questions. I met Jack’s eyes once, and she nodded slightly. That was all it took. Our answers were identical.

“Did you see your attacker?”

Yes. It was a woman.

“Can you describe her?”

She had long, red hair. She was youngish, probably in her thirties. And wicked strong – she threw us both around like we weighed nothing. Maybe she was on drugs or something?

“Did you know her?”

No, she was a stranger.

“Had you ever seen her around before?”

Nope, sorry.

“Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”

Maybe, but it was all so fast and scary, you know? We never really got that good a look at her.

I kept waiting for one of them to single out Shinobu for a question. He loomed behind us, a giant, kimono-wearing shadow, apparently torn between watching the EMTs work, and staring at the buildings, the road, the police cars and ambulance. Even the streetlights. It was like he’d never seen them before. I wanted to reach out and reassure him somehow, but I didn’t want to draw attention to him. He already couldn’t have looked more out of place if he’d tried. He seemed … lost.

We got lucky. Maybe they assumed he didn’t speak English or something, because the police ignored him the whole time. So did the medics, which was strange considering they insisted on giving me a check-up, even though I told them I was fine.

Finally the paramedics loaded the homeless guy into the ambulance – he’d lost a lot of blood, but he was going to be all right – and asked the police to bring me and Jack to the hospital so that Jack could have x-rays. Jack argued about that, but half-heartedly enough that I knew she must be feeling pretty bad. I helped her to her feet, and put my arm around her.

One officer – a woman – walked ahead to open the door of the police car for us. Jack took two steps and staggered as her boot caught on an uneven bit of paving. She weighed a lot more than I did and my knees were still shaky anyway; for a second I thought we were both going to do a face plant. In a flash Shinobu was on Jack’s other side, propping her up effortlessly.

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

We got to the car. I loaded Jack in and went to follow her, then noticed that Shinobu was standing back, obviously confused about what he was supposed to do next. A motorcycle whizzed past us and he flinched and reached for the red sash at his waist as if he expected to find a sword there. I took hold of a fistful of his kimono sleeve. “Come on,” I said firmly, trying to tug him after me. “You’re going with us.”

At first it was like tugging on a steel banister attached to a concrete wall. He stood motionless, staring at the car, and at the vehicles passing on the road. His fathomless eyes were confused and wary. Despite the towering size of him – he must have been over six-feet tall – there was something strangely vulnerable about him right then.

I stopped pulling at his sleeve and closed my hand around his arm, squeezing gently. A little electric thrill sizzled across my palm. “Shinobu?”

He looked at me. Some kind of weird understanding flashed between us:
It’s all right. I’m here. You’re not alone in this
.

He nodded wordlessly. He let me pull him into the car after us.

I took the middle seat. It was a good thing I was small. With two large and extremely muscular people book-ending me, there wasn’t much room left in the back. Being squashed against Jack wasn’t really a novelty, since she and I usually got the same Tube or bus home from school. Having my shoulder and thigh pressed into the boy’s was something else altogether. My skin tingled everywhere that was in contact with him, like he was giving out some form of radiation that only I could feel. It made me too aware of him.

The male police officer climbed into the passenger seat and looked at us in the rear-view mirror. “Are you two all right back there?”

“Two?” Jack repeated slowly. “But—”

A couple of small puzzle pieces clicked together in my head.
No wonder no one asked him any questions!

I grabbed Jack’s hand and squeezed it hard. She snapped her mouth shut. We both turned our heads to stare at the boy. He looked back at us gravely, eyes shadowy in the dim interior of the car.

“We’re fine,” Jack said. “Thanks.”

The female officer got into the driver’s side and the car pulled away from the kerb, following the ambulance into traffic, where it immediately got stuck. Under the sound of the engine idling, Jack whispered, “Can they not … see you?”

“I don’t believe so,” he admitted. His voice was low, but definitely not a whisper. I looked at the back of the officers’ heads. Neither of them so much as flinched.

“I noticed earlier that they were looking through me. You were too occupied to realize,” he said, in answer to our shocked faces. “I don’t know how. Or why it is that you can see and hear me, when they cannot.”

Jack put her hand over her eyes with a groan. “Maybe I hit my head harder than I thought.”

“Are you going to be sick?” asked the female police officer urgently. “I’ll unlock the back door so you can lean out.”

“No – she’s just got a headache,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

“Who is this guy?” Jack muttered. “Where did he come from? What really happened back there? I think my skull is going to pop if someone doesn’t tell me what the eff is going on.”

“Look, you have to know something about all this,” I said quietly, looking at the boy out of the corner of my eye. “You knew who we were, our names even. How did you know that?”

Shinobu’s expression was bleak. The chill of it made my tingling skin go numb. “You will think I am insane.”

That was eerily similar to what I’d been saying to Jack right before everything went to hell. I bumped his knee gently with mine. “After all the stuff I’ve seen in the past couple of days? I’m pretty sure
I’m
insane. So just spill it. Whatever it is.”

He swallowed audibly. “I have seen this city and all these strange and wondrous things before. I have seen the both of you before. In my dreams.”

“
O
nce upon a time, when all the lands that floated on the sea were new,” Ojiichan had said, “two powerful beings came into existence as suddenly as sparks of lightning blazing to life among the stars. The first being was to be a king, and he was handsome and commanding. The second was to be his queen, and she was beautiful and gentle. And these two fell in love, of course.”

“Of course,” I muttered, my feet jiggling restlessly under the covers. Normally there was nothing better than one of my grandfather’s stories at bedtime, but that night I wasn’t interested in fairy tales. “Ojiichan, you said you’d tell me about…” I hesitated, then pointed at the ceiling. “You know.”

One who remembers. One who endures. One who is hidden
.

Mine
.

Ojiichan raised his eyebrows. “And so I will. Are you going to listen? Or would you rather we read about Peter Rabbit?”

I snorted with laughter at the threat, flopping back onto the pillow. “No, thank you.”

He smiled. “Then no more interruptions. Now, for a time, the two were happy with only each other for company, but at last they decided that they wanted to have children; children that would be as perfect and beautiful as they were themselves.

“It was here that for the first time something did not go as planned for the king and queen. Perhaps it was the queen’s desperation or the king’s arrogance, but their first children were not perfect, not beautiful. Their son was born without bones, and him they called Leech Child. Their daughter was horribly deformed, and her they called Faint Island. The queen wept over her poor children and their suffering, but the king… Oh, the king raged and stormed and cursed, and, at last, disgusted and unable to stand the sight of these imperfect children any more, he made to cast them into the sea.”

“He’s horrible,” I whispered.

“Oh yes, he is. His wife intervened, weeping and begging him not to murder their offspring. Instead of flinging the children into the water to drown, she made her husband put them into a reed boat, in the hope that they would float to a new land where someone would find and care for them. But that was all she could do for the unwanted babies, for she knew that if she tried to keep them, her husband would never be satisfied until he had killed them and wiped their ugliness and his failure away.

“The king and queen tried again for children, and this time their efforts were rewarded, and the queen had many good, strong babies that were lovely enough to satisfy her husband.

“But just as their happiness seemed perfect, something went wrong again. The queen gave birth to a child that was too strong, too powerful, whose power was as great as the fire of the sun. And in giving life to the child, the queen died. Again the king raged and stormed, his fury fuelled by the agony of his grief for his beloved mate, and this time there was no compassionate wife to beg for mercy for the child. The king killed him, and in the same insanity of sorrow, he broke open the great gates of Yomi, the Underworld, where all immortal spirits dwell in eternal darkness, and began to call out for his dead queen, his lost wife, to come back to him.

“For days the king wandered through the pitch-blackness of the Underworld, searching for the queen. Finally he found her, knowing her by the soft touch of her hand and the musical beauty of her voice, and his joy was great. But the queen was horrified that he had come, and told him that he must go back, must leave without her, for she had eaten the food of Yomi and could never now return to the lands of the living.

“The king was not swayed by these words. He told her that his love for her was as wide as the ends of the earth, as deep as the bottom of the sea, and higher than the highest peak of the sky, and that he would never leave Yomi unless she came with him at his side. The queen was convinced of his devotion and agreed to travel back with him into the light again. In his happiness and his eagerness to leave that chill and shadowy place, the king forgot himself, and forgot that Yomi is dark for a reason. And so he lit a torch in order to guide them quickly from that realm of shadows. The moment the light flared the queen cried out. The king quickly turned to her, and then cried out himself, for he saw—”

A loud bang at the bedroom door nearly made me jump right out of the bed. But it wasn’t a creature from the Underworld; it was my dad, angry with my grandfather for telling me “ghoulish” stories that he was convinced would give me nightmares. Banging on the door was Dad’s way of telling my grandfather to stop. If Ojiichan didn’t emerge from the room in a minute or less, then he’d come in and shout at us.

After Ojiichan had kissed me on the forehead and wished me good night, he promised in a whisper that he would tell me the rest the next day. But the next day when I got up, I found Ojiichan lying in a boneless heap at the bottom of the stairs. He’d had a massive stroke.

He was dead a day later.

I know that no one likes hospitals. But ever since Ojiichan died, the way I feel goes beyond that. I hate them.

The moment the police walked us into the A&E, it was pretty much all I could do to stop myself from running right back out again. I balked at the second lot of electronic doors as a gust of that sickening hospital smell smacked me right in the nose. Shinobu stopped just behind me, and I could feel the warmth of his hand hovering at my back, not quite touching me.

“Are you all right?” he murmured.

The sight of Jack’s anxious face turning back to look for me forced me to nod and take that step inside.

They separated us almost at once. While Jack went to have x-rays as a matter of urgency – the female officer right behind her – I was left in the bustling emergency waiting area. There didn’t seem to be much else to do but sit down. As soon as I did, the male police officer sat in the seat next to me. Shinobu had stopped at the entrance, putting his back to one pale blue wall as he stared around at the hospital with wide eyes.

I caught his gaze and tried to indicate to him with a jerk of my head that he ought to take the seat on my other side. The policeman gave me a funny look. But Shinobu hesitantly came forward and dropped down onto the uncomfortable plastic seat so it seemed worth it.

We sat like that for about half an hour. The police officer asked me a few more questions – mostly the same questions, actually, but phrased slightly differently – noted down my answers in his little book, then finally decided to go and look for his partner.

He didn’t come back.

Sticking to my role as a mild-mannered, innocent, bewildered teen hadn’t taken much effort. It was pretty close to the truth anyway. But at least it had been something to concentrate on. The second the officer was gone, my brain started to go haywire.

I’d come within an inch of dying an hour ago. Not dying in a car crash or some normal accident that could happen to anyone –
murdered
. Killed by a monster so awful that it shouldn’t even exist in people’s nightmares. Only it did exist in mine.