The Night Itself (3 page)

My hand shot up to catch it.

“Zenshin Kotai Okuri-Ashi!”

I responded automatically to the command, my body melting into the forms I had practised every day since Ojiichan had signed me up for kendo when I was five.

A while later we heard the garage door go up on the other side of the garden wall and then the deep roar of the car’s engine. I waited for the next instruction to come from Ojiichan, but he stood perfectly still, his head held slightly to one side as if he was listening. I tried to hear what he could, but all I could make out were the normal, dull London sounds and Mum and Dad’s car getting quieter and quieter.

When the sound of the engine had faded completely, Ojiichan sprang to life. “Quickly, Mio. Come with me.”

As I tagged along faithfully behind him, my grandfather nipped into the empty garage, taking a metal pry-bar out of the box of tools there. Then we went back into the house and climbed the stairs to the attic.

I’d never been in there before, because Dad said it was dangerous. It didn’t look dangerous. But it was dark, and cobwebby, and unpleasantly cold after the bright sunshine outside. Ojiichan left me by the door while he waded through piles of boxes and broken furniture. I stood very still, worried about what creepy-crawlies might be on the floorboards – I was still barefoot – and rubbed goose-pimply arms.

“Got it!” he whispered.

He’d found a tatty old metal box, covered in peeling white paint. The paint was streaked with dark, bubbling marks, like burns. Long and thin, probably taller than me if it was stood on its end, the box had been shoved out of the way in the space under the sloping attic window.

That? That’s what we came all the way up here for?

Ojiichan heaved it out, sending up clouds of dust that made him cough and sputter, but didn’t stop him from using the pry-bar to bust off the massive padlock holding the box closed. The shriek of metal seemed to echo around the dim space for hours as he bent to open the lid. His tall, lean body went utterly still again for a moment. This was a different kind of stillness. I couldn’t say how I knew that. I just did.

Finally Ojiichan let out a long sigh. He folded himself down in front of the box and turned his head and beckoned to me. All the tension – tension I hadn’t even really noticed before – was gone out of his face. Lines smoothed away. Eyes lit up not with laughter but something else that I didn’t know the name for. He looked completely relaxed. Happy.

“Mio, come here, love. Come and see this.”

I gingerly picked my way towards him, trying to squash a disloyal feeling that playing in Auntie Fumi’s garden with Benjy would have been way more fun than this. I peered over his shoulder. All I could see were layers and layers of thin, brittle-looking fabric starting to go yellow with age and covered in faded embroidery. The embroidered words were Japanese, I thought, although I couldn’t read them. What was it? A dress, maybe? Why would Ojiichan care about that?

“What is it?” My voice, bouncing off the low ceiling, sounded too loud.

He reached into the box and folded back the material.

And everything changed.

Drifting dust turned to gold in the shafts of sun coming through the dirty skylight. The air around me – the
insides
of me – filled with a high, musical singing that made my hair stand on end and my bones hum and my veins tingle. I knew exactly what I was looking at. A Japanese long sword.

Katana…

“Do you like him?” Ojiichan asked.

I nodded wordlessly, my heart stuttering so fast it was hard to breathe.

“Would you like to hold him?”

I nodded again.

Ojiichan lifted the glittering black-and-gold shape out of the box. He carefully eased the curving black sheath, covered with golden flowers, from the blade. “Careful now, Mio. He’s heavy. That’s right, both hands together.”

The sword should have been cold, but it wasn’t. The black silk hilt wrappings were warm against my chilled palms. Warm as a living thing.

“Oh,” I sighed. “It’s so… It’s … beautiful.” Beautiful wasn’t the right word. But I didn’t have the right word for what it was.

The singing inside me reached out, and I could feel the sword respond to it. The metal started to sing too, throwing the feeling back to me until my whole body resounded with it. Energy pulsed where my hands gripped the hilt – pulsed with the same rhythm as my heart.

“He is yours, Mio,” Ojiichan said.

Mine?

It felt like the time I’d pushed the roundabout too fast and gone flying off, only this time instead of landing with a hard, painful bump and skinning my elbows and knees, I carried on flying. Ojiichan put a steadying arm around my shoulders, telling me it was all right, it was all right, it would pass in a minute, just breathe…

“This sword has been in the Yamato family for five hundred years,” he said. His voice was barely a whisper, even though there was no one to overhear us. “He has been passed from one Yamato heir to the next on their sixteenth birthday, without fail, for nearly ten generations. This sword is the greatest treasure and the greatest burden of our family.”

Treasure?
Mum and Dad had taken me to see the Crown Jewels once. I would have swapped every pretty, glittery jewel in those glass cases for what I held in my hands now. But what was so amazing was that I didn’t have to. Because this was ours. It belonged to us. To
me
.

Mine
.

Even with Ojiichan holding me and the tip of the blade resting against the edge of the metal box, my arms were already trembling. My muscles burned. But I could not – would not – let go.

Ojiichan was speaking again: “We don’t know everything about the sword, but we do have some stories that were passed down along with him. I will tell you those soon. For now, know that he is very powerful. There are others – bad people, bad things – who search for him. They must never, never find him. It is our honour to keep him safe. Our purpose. That is very important. He is the
One who remembers
. The
One who endures
. The
One who is hidden
. He must always be hidden. You are your father’s only child; the Hidden One will be yours when you are sixteen years old. Yours to guard and protect.”

Mine!

“You mustn’t tell anyone about the sword,” Ojiichan was saying. “And you must never, never touch him – not even look at him – unless I am here. Not until you’re sixteen. Not for any reason. Do you understand? Mio? Look at me. Look at me!”

I turned wide, blurry eyes up to him. “I—”

“Promise me on my life, on your mother’s life, on your own life.” He cupped my cheek in one of his warm, papery cool hands. “Swear to me that you will keep the sword hidden, no matter what. You will not come back here for him without me. You will never speak of this to your father. If you can keep those promises, the sword will be yours when you are sixteen.”

He wouldn’t make me swear unless it was important. If it was important, then I had to do what he said. “I–I promise.”

Ojiichan never did get to tell me his stories. He never got to take me back into the attic again.

And I had the Dream for the first time that night.

There were times when I nearly forgot about that day. Bad stuff happened afterwards, memories that I wanted to forget. It would have been easier to lump it all together and just let it fade away. But every time I was in danger of forgetting my grandfather’s promise to me, every time the memory of our family’s secret treasure was beginning to blur and distort with time…

The Dream would come back.

In these last two months before my sixteenth birthday, the Dream had tormented and teased me until I felt like I was going crazy. The more I struggled to remember, the more easily it slipped away. But the Dream made me remember those other things so clearly. My grandfather. His promise to me. The sword…

Even though I’d not touched it since the day my grandfather first showed it to me – not even dared to enter the attic on my own, let alone open the box – I still wanted it.

The closer I got to my birthday the stronger that wanting became.

I knew it didn’t make sense. I was scared of how irrational and how powerful my feelings were. It was just some dusty old heirloom. Ojiichan was dead and no one else knew about it, or cared. I shouldn’t care. What if I marched up there right now? So what? No one would notice. I’d look at it for five minutes, then close the box and walk away again. It was a sword. Just an old sword. Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it?

Why couldn’t I stop remembering that I was nearly sixteen and
it was supposed to be mine
?

When you wanted something that badly, all the cogs in the back of your brain started working together to convince you that it was OK – sensible, even logical – to take it. Then we got invited to Natalie Depaul’s Christmas thing and in the middle of arguing with Jack about costumes, suddenly there it was. The perfect costume, and the excuse I needed to do the stupid thing I knew, deep down, I really shouldn’t do.

So that was why, half an hour after leaving Rachel in her mum’s kitchen, Jack and I were both in our costumes, hair done, make-up on – sneaking upstairs to the attic.

“You don’t have to come with me,” I said, casting a look at Jack’s outfit. It wasn’t exactly designed for cat-burglary. She was wearing a black bustier with fluffy, black wings strapped over her shoulders, a pink, puffball skirt, pink-and-black stripy tights and black biker boots. Jack never did anything halfway. But at least it meant no one was going to be staring at me in my kendogi. Kendogi are pretty low-key because they’re designed for ease of movement and comfort and basically consist of a pair of ultra-wide-legged, pleated trousers – black, in my case – and a short, kimono-style top, also black. I’d tied a white, silk scarf around my waist, and I had my red shinai carrier looped over my shoulder. I thought I looked pretty good, even if my hair was a little too short to be a classic Rukia. Although it was annoying to realize that the old uniform still fitted me perfectly. Why couldn’t my chest have expanded a bit in the last year?

“Don’t worry, Maverick. I got your back.”

“Oh my God. Jack,
Top Gun
quotes are not cool, OK?”

“Sez you,” Jack shot back as we reached the top of the stairs. “You’re the one who’s going out dressed as an anime character.”

“Touché. Now will you please stay out here? I can brush pretty much anything off my costume, but if you get dust and gloopy cobwebs on yours you’re going to look less Fairy Gothmother and more Emo Girl.”

“Perish the thought.” Jack leaned against the wall and crossed her arms as I eased the squeaky attic door open. “Hey, if you’ve still got your shinai, why are you stealing this old sword from the attic? You know no one at the party is going to care if you’ve got a real sword or not, right?”

I hesitated. Jack didn’t know about the Dream. No one did. It was too weird. Too …
personal
. Anyway, nothing she said was going to make a difference. Not now.

“First off, it’s not stealing. Ojiichan gave me the sword, totally fair and square. Second, it’s beautiful and it’s going to make my costume look amazing. And third, I just…” My voice trailed off.

“Just what?”

“I want it, OK? It’s
mine
.” I snapped my mouth shut.

Jack’s dark eyebrows went up. “Whoa. Getting a little intense there, Mimi.”

Since I couldn’t really defend myself, I settled for sticking my tongue out at her. Then I walked into the attic, snapping on the single, bare overhead bulb. “Fourth of all, shut up and keep watch. I don’t want Rachel snooping around me.”

The heavy door groaned shut behind me.

I’d been up in the attic a few times since Ojiichan brought me here, helping Mum fetch down decorations or bits of furniture. It wasn’t spooky, even if it was dusty. I knew what everything was; that twisty shape on the left was a hat rack that used to be in the waiting room in the basement, the grey jumble under the window was my crib, filled with old toys that I’d grown out of early. I edged between the cobwebby leftovers of Yamato family life, drawn unerringly to what looked like an empty space in the corner under the window, where the roof sloped down.

Cautiously – because despite what I’d said to Jack, I didn’t want to spend twenty minutes getting dust off me – I crouched and reached out into the shadows, my fingers searching, searching…

There
.

Cold metal, peeling paint. A dangling padlock on a jagged, broken latch.

“Got it,” I whispered as I pulled the box out.

Excitement and guilt warred inside me. I took a couple of deep breaths, aware that my hands were trembling.
One who remembers. One who endures. One who is hidden
. Ojiichan’s voice rang in my head.
Promise me. Your father must never know…

Dad’s on the Eurostar by now
, I told myself firmly, forcing my shaking fingers to curve around the top of the box.
You aren’t breaking any promises. He won’t ever know. It’s fine
.

I’m practically sixteen
.