The Waking (6 page)

She stopped to look at the shadows of the old shrine, moonlight filtering down through the branches above. Though part of it had been built from stone, the shrine had a wooden frame, and she knew the wood itself could not truly be ancient. Time and weather would have ruined it many times over the centuries, but someone—monks, maybe—had rebuilt it just as frequently. Even now, candles burned inside lanterns, and their ghostly light flickered with every gust of wind.

Kara took a deep breath. Somehow the shrine eased her mind. The monks who’d first built it, and the people who prayed here, worshipped very differently than she did, but she believed that they probably prayed for the same things she would. Peace and love, patience and courage. Those were things everyone needed, no matter what god they believed in.

A ripple of laughter came from behind her and she turned to see a quartet of figures hurrying up the walkway toward the front of the school. More students returning from cram school.

A tiny sound came from the shrine—out of the corner of her eye she saw something moving—and Kara spun, breath hitching, heart racing. But the small thing that moved out from the shadows and flowers of the shrine was only a cat.

“Oh my God,” Kara said, lapsing into English. “You scared the crap out of me.”

The cat arched its back and gazed up at her, eyes glinting in the light of the moon and the flickering candles. Kara smiled and knelt down, reaching out for it. She preferred dogs. Cats always had that imperious attitude, like they were the rulers of the world, and occasionally allowed humans to open a can of tuna for them and change their litter. She half-expected it to hiss or scratch, so she moved her hand slowly and was surprised when it allowed her to stroke its red and copper fur.

“What are you doing out here, pretty?” she whispered.

But already the cat seemed bored. It slid toward her, brushed against her legs, and then started down the path that led to the bay. To the right there were woods, and to the left, the neighborhood around the school and the road that led to Miyazu City. The school stood silently behind her, and down the gentle slope ahead, the water lapped against the shore.

The cat trotted toward the water and Kara followed, mainly for the serenity the bay provided. She needed to get back before her father started worrying about her, but first she wanted to enjoy the spring night and the moonlit bay for a few minutes. The cat seemed to have the same idea.

But Kara had another reason for coming down here. One that did nothing to soothe her. She’d been pretending to herself that this was only a stroll, to check out the grounds and figure out if anyone else liked to wander after dark. Though parents and teachers discouraged kids her age from dating—it got in the way of school—Kara knew that wouldn’t stop teenagers. They might not be hooking up at parties, but there had to be at least
some
action going on with all the hormones swirling around.

But she’d known all along it wasn’t just a stroll. And she didn’t really expect to find anyone stealing kisses by the bay.

Not with the other shrine that had been put together on the shore of the bay, at the edge of the woods. Photos and stuffed animals and cards written in
kanji.
Bits of calligraphy. Flowers for a dead girl.

Did Akane come down here with a guy?
Kara wondered.
Did whoever did it mean to kill her, or just bully her somehow, and she ended up dead?
Her father had warned her, even given her articles to read about the bullying that had become such a problem in many Japanese schools.

She’d wanted to think that anyone could have discovered Akane on the shore, maybe tried to rape her or something, and then killed her. A group of college students from the city. A fisherman. Anyone. And she supposed that was possible, but glancing around, it seemed unlikely. Who would come down to this spot except for students?

The question echoed in her mind, frightening her. Had Akane been murdered by her own schoolmates, and if so, had they graduated . . . or were there still killers at Monju-no-Chie School?

The cat shook her from her thoughts, brushing against her legs again before gliding down to the water’s edge. The wind caused tiny waves that slapped the shore, and the cat darted away in surprise. As though annoyed, it cast a glance at the bay over its shoulder, then walked over to investigate the shrine Akane’s friends had built in her memory.

Head low, sniffing the ground, tail swaying, it moved from a bouquet of decaying flowers to a pink pillow, sewn with silken hearts and ribbons. After a few seconds, the cat moved around the edges of the shrine.

Abruptly it hissed, arching its back.

Kara frowned, staring at it. The cat began to yowl and shake its head, and then it cried out the way she’d only ever heard cats cry while fighting. While injured.

It stiffened and slumped to the ground.

Kara’s mouth hung open. “Kitty?”

The cat did not move. Not so much as a twitch of its tail.

Slowly, she walked over to where the cat lay on the ground. Its chest did not rise. Kara thought about dead things she had seen in the road, and she saw in the cat the same stillness, sensed the absence of life that she associated with dried, desiccated creatures, their fur or feathers flattened down like a rose pressed between the pages of a book.

She lifted one hand to cover her mouth, horrified, but quickly dropped it. That hand had touched the cat, and if it had some kind of disease, who knew what might happen to her? She needed to get home to wash up.

She shivered but could not turn away. Staring at the cat, she pushed out a foot and nudged it with the tip of her shoe.
Dead
. She hadn’t really needed confirmation, but there could be no doubting it now.

Crossing her arms, she stared one last moment, about to turn away.

The tail twitched.

Kara yelped and jumped back, eyes wide, watching as the cat stretched, and then rose. Now she did cover her mouth, all fear of disease forgotten. It moved differently, lower to the ground, and it swung its head around and
looked
at her. At
her
. Its eyes glittered in the dark.

In the spot where it had lain dead a moment before, the cat let out a stream of piss. Kara wrinkled her nose, first in disgust, and then in revulsion at the rank stink that rose from the ground. She gagged, covered her mouth with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and backed away. Maybe her first thought had been the right one: disease. Nothing healthy smelled like that. Nothing natural.

The cat looked at the shrine to Akane’s life and death and hissed.

It darted at Kara. She cried out and staggered back, but the cat ran right past her, headed up the slope, toward the school.

On the short walk home, Kara broke into a jog and entered the house breathless. Her father had fallen asleep at his desk. Though she didn’t want to wake him, she sat for a few minutes in that room, just to be near him, to feel safe. In her mind, Kara could still see the cat’s eyes, the way it had stared at her, had noticed her. That look would haunt her tonight. She only hoped it didn’t keep her from falling asleep. The sooner she got to sleep, the sooner morning would arrive. Sunrise, when it came, would be very welcome.

4

T
he first drop of blood is in the genkan, where the students store their street shoes during the day. Kara notices it only because she steps in it, which is when she realizes she is barefoot. A rush of guilt shivers through her. If anyone comes and sees her walking in the school without slippers on, she will be in trouble.
What would be worse, wearing her street shoes into the school or no shoes at all?

She slips on the blood, smears it on the floor. Frowning, she lifts her foot and stares at the bottoms of her toes, painted red.

Behind her, back at the entry doors, something moves and Kara flinches. She doesn’t want to be here, but going out that way seems a terrible idea, so she walks deeper into the school.
The lights are off, and yet she can see. On the stairs is an arrangement of candles and flowers, as though someone has set them up to create an atmosphere of romance, but all she can think is that it’s a shrine.

To what, or whom, she doesn’t know.

Something shifts at the far end of the hall to her left, in the shadows. For a long moment she watches, trying to make out what it is, and then, just as she turns her attention once more to the candles—which are in a new arrangement now, a new pattern spread all across the stairs—something darts across her peripheral vision, dark and low to the ground.

Kara stumbles up several steps, knocking over a candle.
Eyes wide, she stares down at the melted wax as it pools on the step. Flame licks the wood and begins to spread. She reaches down to snuff it with her fingers, but when she touches the step, the wax and flame are gone. Instead, she touches something sticky and warm and red. Blood.

Soft laughter comes from behind her and Kara turns. A small parade of girls shuffle through the genkan. It must be them laughing—the sound comes from that direction—but still it seems unlikely, for they have no faces. No eyes. No mouths.

Trapped, for a moment Kara doesn’t dare move up or down the stairs. Then a breeze flutters the candlelight and she glances around to find that the blood is gone and only a single, large candle burns at the top of the steps, as though to light her way.

With the rustle of laughter below, she starts up, away from those no-face girls. Her own breathing is strangely loud, echoing off the walls as though to smother her, and she can’t stand being in the stairwell anymore.

At the top of the steps, she finds herself in the hallway of the house where she’d grown up, back in Medford, half the world away. This feels right, natural, and her fear abates. Down the
hall, the door to her parents’ bedroom is open and a butterfly of hope flutters in her chest.

Kara runs for that open door, not wanting to admit to herself
what—or who—she believes she’ll find in her parents’ bedroom. The hall feels longer than it should, and at the end is a window she doesn’t remember, with candles of various sizes and colors arranged on the sill, flames dancing.

She reaches the bedroom, grabs the frame, and turns to look inside.

It isn’t her parents’ bedroom at all. It’s her homeroom, back at her old school. Lying across the desk is the body of a Japanese girl, her sailor fuku plastered against her body, hair matted with blood. But she has no face.

Kara screams and no sound comes out. A sudden terrible certainty fills her and she reaches up, fingers searching, to find that her own features are smooth and dry. No mouth. No nose. She no longer has eyes, yet still, somehow, she sees.

On a desk in the far corner, by the windows, sits a cat with eyes that flicker like candle flames. It watches her, arches its back, and then leaps to the floor. The cat begins to pad toward her, or so she thinks, until it stops at the teacher’s desk and begins to lap at the blood that pools on the floor there.

Still silently screaming, Kara staggers backward, breath coming in gasps. Everything around her shifts, changing. Now the inner wall of the classroom is comprised of sliding doors, like in Monju-no-Chie School. She bumps into one, shoves it aside, and stumbles into the corridor. It isn’t her home anymore. She’s back at her new school, outside Class 2-C, and all she can think of is getting out.

Kara runs. She passes one classroom, but through the sliding doors she can see the shore of Miyazu Bay, water lapping over the legs of the desks, though this is the second floor. Quaking, she passes another classroom, and its walls and windows and desks are spattered with blood. No-face girls are collapsed on the floor and over desks like abandoned marionettes. A dead boy hangs from the ceiling.

She can’t breathe and turns to run, but now there are cats at the top of the stairs. Too many of them. They move from the shadows, out of classrooms, and down the hall behind her, and then she is surrounded. Their feet leave bloodied red paw prints on the floor as they close the circle around her.

Again, she screams . . .

And wakes.

Kara drew in a gasp of air, as though she’d stopped breathing while asleep. Her heart hammered in her chest and she sat up, clutching fistfuls of her sheets as she stared around her bedroom. In the corners, shadows lingered. The light that filtered through the shutters over her windows cast only gloom into the room. Early morning, then, barely dawn. Too early to be awake, but she didn’t dare lie down for fear she might fall back to sleep and back into that dream.

“God,” she whispered, and swung her legs out of bed. “Not again.”

Three days since school began, and she’d had the same nightmare for three nights in a row, disturbing her sleep. She ought to have been glad it was morning, but she still felt so tired that it might be worth risking more bad dreams if she could sleep a little longer. Or maybe not. The nightmare was awful.

She ran her hands over her face and got up, sliding back the shutters to have a look outside. Despite the gloomy light, there were very few clouds in the sky. When the sun stopped peeking at morning and came fully over the horizon, it would be a crystal clear day, warm and blue.