Kara searched for her eyes in the dark. “Hachiro told me Jiro had nightmares about Akane, but in them, Akane had no face.”
Sakura flinched and glanced at Miho.
“I’ve had dreams like that, too,” Kara went on. “Girls with no faces. And Akane coming up out of the bay,” she said, relieved to be speaking the words aloud. “And one night, I was down at the water, near the . . . the shrine people made for her, and I saw this cat.”
As she told the story of watching the cat walk over the shrine and drop dead, only to stand up again a moment later like nothing had happened, she watched both girls’ eyes widen.
“Akane,” Sakura whispered. “I told you guys.”
Sakura seemed almost pleased, and the thought made Kara shiver.
Miho stared at her, then turned to Kara. “It might just have stumbled. It might have laid down. I know I wasn’t there, but if it got up again, Kara, it wasn’t dead. I’ve been trying to tell Sakura that Akane’s not haunting anybody, and that story doesn’t help. Anyway, I haven’t had any dreams like that.”
“I know,” Kara told her. “But Sakura has.”
Sakura hesitated but finally nodded. “Ever since school began,” she confessed. “And they keep getting worse. When I wake up, I’m not just afraid, I’m angry, and all I can think about is Akane, and missing her and grieving for her starts all over. Every night.”
Miho shot her a look of heartbreaking sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”
“But why am I having them?” Kara asked. “I wasn’t even here.”
“I don’t know,” Sakura said. “Maybe because of that night with the cat. But I do know why Ume is having them.”
Kara didn’t have to ask. Sakura had made it clear that she suspected Ume knew more about Akane’s death than she was telling.
“Do you really think your sister is haunting us?” Kara asked, thinking of all of the no-face girls in her dreams and the terror she felt when she awoke from them.
“Not just haunting.”
Miho stared at her. “No, Sakura.”
Kara turned to Miho. Suddenly she looked far too old to be wearing Hello Kitty pajamas. “ ‘No’ what? You think Akane’s doing more than haunting?”
Miho exhaled, seeming to deflate into surrender. “Sakura thinks it is Akane’s spirit, taking revenge. She thinks a ghost killed Jiro and drove Hana off the roof.”
Kara stared at her, then looked at Sakura again. “I’m sorry. Dreams or no dreams, I can’t believe that. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Sakura laughed. “You’re in the wrong country, then. Japan is full of all sorts of ghosts.”
“I don’t mean to be cold, but Akane can’t come back and take revenge. She can’t come back at all. She’s dead, Sakura. Dead and gone,” Kara said, wondering at the emphasis in her own voice, and at the fear.
Sakura lay her head back on the pillow, staring up, and from that angle Kara could no longer see her eyes.
“Then how do you explain all of this?” Sakura asked.
“I can’t,” Kara replied.
“That’s right. You can’t.”
Kara still had questions, but the conversation clearly seemed over. The other girls lay in the dark, not speaking, waiting for sleep to arrive. While Kara felt trepidation at the thought, she realized now that, nightmares or not, Sakura looked forward to her bad dreams, for in them, however briefly, she could be reunited with her sister.
Within just a few minutes, she heard Sakura’s breathing deepen and the slow rhythm of sleep overtaking her. Perhaps ten minutes passed, and then she glanced at Miho, who lay on her side with her eyes closed and seemed also to have fallen asleep easily.
How they could simply shut off the conversation and not want to talk it over, try to figure out what was really going on, Kara did not understand. Perhaps they were simply afraid and in denial.
Kara frowned, noticing an odd, sweet smell in the room. A flower smell. It took her a moment to place it—cherry blossoms.
The scent grew quickly until it was almost overpowering, like hugging an old aunt who wore far too much perfume. She glanced around to see from where the odor might have come. In the dark, gleaming with moonlight, the Noh masks on the walls were hideous and unsettling. Kara felt like they were watching her, laughing at her. She rolled onto her side, turning toward Miho . . .
. . . who lay in bed, not asleep after all. Her eyes were open and her breath came in quick sips. She stared, face contorted with such fear that Kara gasped, chilled, heartbeat quickening. Her skin prickled with terror and she didn’t want to turn, did not want to see what had so frightened Miho.
But she forced herself to look.
The cat sat just inside the open window, on the wide sill, its copper and red fur raised in hackles.
It hissed, long and slow, and it watched them with human eyes. After that first night, by Akane’s shrine, Kara had told herself she had imagined those eyes . . . the dark eyes of a girl . . . eyes that reminded her of Sakura’s.
“Do you,” Kara managed, her voice ragged. “Do you see it?”
Miho did not reply, and when Kara looked at her and saw tears glistening on the girl’s face, she knew it had been the stupidest question she had ever asked.
The cat arched its back. It hissed again, jaws opening wide to reveal fangs like a serpent’s, long and yellow and glistening wet, as though with venom.
Miho screamed.
Kara joined her, as though she had needed that confirmation of her terror, that permission to lose control.
They scrambled from beneath sheets and blankets and clung to each other, moving toward the door.
“Sakura!” Miho screamed. “Sakura, wake up!”
Startled by their screams, Miho’s roommate nearly fell out of bed. But when Kara looked back to the open window, only the moonlight remained.
“What happened?” Sakura demanded.
“You saw it,” Kara whispered to Miho, holding the girl’s hands in her own, the two of them huddling together. “You saw it, right?”
Miho nodded. “Yes. The eyes. Oh, the eyes.”
Kara looked to the window again. The cat had really been there, and now it had gone.
But to where?
Something woke her.
Kara opened her eyes and inhaled sharply, as though surfacing from deep water or a nightmare. Yet she couldn’t remember any dreams at all. The events of that night had been terrifying enough.
Shifting slightly on the futon the girls had put out for her on the floor, she looked out the window. Morning still only hinted around the edges of the sky, just beginning to glimmer with the onset of dawn. The smell of cherry blossoms had vanished from the room, but her memory of that powerful scent lingered.
Drawing the blanket tighter around her, she closed her eyes but soon discovered that sleep would not be quick to return. Early or not, she felt entirely awake.
With a sigh, she opened her eyes again, and then remembered the impression she’d had a moment ago that something had woken her. Kara lay there and listened to her surroundings. Miho snored lightly but Sakura slept in silence, so much that Kara had to turn and watch her a moment to make sure she hadn’t stopped breathing. It took a moment before she confirmed the rise and fall of her chest.
As the sun rose, a gray-blue hue spreading across the sky, the wind picked up. She could hear it rushing by outside, but the windows did not rattle. The old dormitory building creaked a little, but she heard nothing that could have stirred her, not even footsteps padding down the hall outside on the way to the bathroom.
Listening to the gentle sounds of the morning, she felt her eyelids growing heavy again and let them close. Even if she couldn’t fall back to sleep, she wasn’t ready to get up yet, and she didn’t want to wake her friends.
Her body rocked back and forth. Kara felt herself swaying. The motion entered her subconscious and she dreamed herself in a small boat atop undulating water, the rolling waves tilting her side to side.
Kara
.
The sea became rougher.
“Kara.”
She moaned, the boat and the waves vanishing. Vaguely aware of some reality intruding upon her peace, of hands shaking her, she curled in upon herself, limply batting at the offending grasp.
“Kara, wake up!”
Her body felt heavy and cramped, so tired, but she forced herself to open her eyes. Squinting against the sunlight that washed into the dorm room—and how did it get so bright?— she glanced up to see Miho bent over her, a stricken expression on her face. Without her glasses, she looked almost like a stranger.
In the back of her mind, she felt a spark of worry. What had upset Miho so much? But she still felt tired and sluggish and closed her eyes again.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Just wake up,” Miho said.
The urgency in her voice finally made Kara throw off the gauzy blanket that sleep had wrapped around her brain. She blinked rapidly and looked at the window again. Last time she’d awoken, it had barely been dawn. From the look of the sky, hours had passed.
It took her a moment to realize that she and Miho were alone in the room. Sakura had gone.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
Miho bit her lip, tucked a stray lock of her silky hair behind one ear, and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. And then, in English: “Something bad. Something really bad.”
Footfalls raced past the room out in the corridor. Down the hall, someone shouted. Kara sat up and saw that the door stood open a few inches. Voices came to them from elsewhere on the floor, too many speaking for her to make out many specifics, but she heard something about a doctor and an ambulance.
And she heard weeping. Sobbing.
Two girls hurried past the door, whispering to each other.
“Miho, tell me,” Kara said, rising to her feet and reaching for her jeans. She slid them on and zipped them, then went to the door, but Miho didn’t follow.
“Chouku is dead.”
Kara caught her breath. Chouku was one of the girls on this floor—one of the soccer girls. The police could say all they wanted now about suicide or about how none of these things were related, and the school administration could try to pretend nothing really was wrong in order to save face, but nobody would believe that now.
“Is it murder?” she asked, her voice soft, cracking on the last word.
Miho nodded, gesturing toward the door. “Sakura is out there. I don’t want to see it again.”
From somewhere in the distance, beyond the walls of the dormitory, Kara could hear the high-pitched keening of an ambulance siren. She hesitated a moment, looking at the shattered Miho, and wondered what would become of her friends. Would this, at last, force Miho and Sakura’s parents to pay attention to them? To come and see their daughters, and maybe take them home? Selfishly, she feared such an outcome. But for their sake, she hoped so. Sakura had been crumbling for days, brittle from lack of sleep and her lingering grief over Akane. And now Miho seemed frayed to the point of breaking.
Kara pushed her hands through her blond hair, snatched a rubber band from Sakura’s desk, and tied her hair back in a ponytail. She pushed the door open and stepped out into the corridor.
Most of the doors on the floor were open, girls in pajamas and nightgowns standing, framed in their horror, looking further along the hall toward a cluster of students crowding outside a door four rooms down. Girls wept, some with their hands over their mouths. Others whispered to one another. One girl—Chouku’s roommate, Kara figured—sat on the tile floor, long legs drawn up beneath her. The sobbing Kara had heard before came from her. A statuesque, athletic-looking girl, she was only vaguely familiar to Kara. They did not share class or an after-school club, so she would only have seen her in the morning or during o-soji.
Another girl sat cross-legged in the corridor in front of her, holding the weeping girl’s hand in her own. Perhaps because she wore purple pajamas with butterflies on them and sat hunched over, hair falling across her face, it took Kara a moment to realize this was Ume.
Further along the hallway, at the top of the stairs, Sakura leaned against a balustrade and watched all of the shock, horror, and sorrow unfold. She had no tears and no fear.
No, for her there’s only satisfaction,
Kara thought.
She shivered, horrified at herself for even considering such a thing. And then she wondered why the thought had come to her, and if it had arisen because that truly was what she saw in Sakura’s face. Not for a moment did Kara believe Sakura wanted anyone to die, but the girl wouldn’t mourn, either.
Unseen, or at the least ignored, Kara made her way down the hall past the pale, drawn residents of the dorm until she came to Chouku’s room. Ume and Chouku’s roommate didn’t even look up at her.
“They’re all over her,” a voice said from inside the room, frantic and on edge. “Yes, everywhere. And I think she’s like the other one. So pale.”
Kara entered the room.
The only person alive in that small chamber was Miss Aritomo, the art teacher. She faced the window, her back to Kara, her cell phone clapped to her ear, and at first she didn’t notice that anyone had entered.
Chouku lay on her stomach on the bed, a sheet covering her up to her shoulders. Spots and streaks of blood marred the white sheet, but Kara saw no other sign of blood anywhere in the room. The girl lay totally inert and her flesh was a bluish-gray, verging on white, almost as though she—like Jiro—had been dredged up from the water. Yet she had died here, in this room, and only last night. For her to have gotten so pale, so quickly . . . there had to be another explanation.
I think she’s like the other one
, Miss Aritomo had said.
Which made Kara think of the conversation she’d overheard between the art teacher and her father, about Jiro’s body being drained of blood.
“I don’t know what kind of animal, but I’m telling you, they look like bites to me,” Miss Aritomo said firmly to whoever listened on the other end of her phone call.
The teacher reached over, back still to Kara, and lifted the sheet, providing a quick glimpse of Chouku’s naked corpse. All over her body, from heel to calf to back to throat, there were hundreds of tiny punctures, arranged in half circles like the bite marks of a small animal. She had to have been bitten dozens of times, and yet the only blood in the room was smears on her pale flesh and spots on the white sheet.