“This,” Lin muttered with too much glee, “is how supervillains are born.”
3
The food was everything its aroma had vowed: decadently complex, delicious to the last sip of broth, the savoury decoction of marrow, meat, and greens almost too umami to finish. But we did. We ate until our stomachs bulged and the alcohol lost some of its effect. In between, Lin convinced us to sample his cheese, carving slivers of Danablu and jalape?o-infused Camembert for anyone who’d look at him twice. The leftovers he used to make a Hong Kong–style baked rice, melting mascarpone over pork and sweet-salty shiitake.
We devoured that too. The room laid strewn with wrapping paper. Faiz and Talia had bought us gifts: statuettes of deepest jade, the green of an ancient lake. They were each of them shaped like a woman, her head bowed as though sacralized by grief. Her legs faded into a half-finished column: she is being buried alive, buried by a lord’s hope, buried to hold steady the weight of her master’s manor.
Hitobashira.
I stroked a restless thumb over my effigy’s cheek. There were neither eyes nor mouth on her, no way for her to scream or see. How’d they known to gather these? I wondered. The trip was billed as a surprise. Had Talia known? Had Phillip, our golden boy, god-king of small towns, perfect Phillip who no woman would reject, coyly spoken to Talia beforehand?
“We should play a game,” Talia purred, eyes lidded and drowsy with mischief, crooking her fingers at Faiz. He stood up and went from lantern to lantern, extinguishing their flames. Our shadows arched to the ceiling. “It’s called Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai.”
“Excuse me?” said Lin.
“Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai,” Talia repeated, pronunciation paced for intelligibility. She looked at me then, really looked, harpooning my attention with the steadiness of her regard. “A Gathering of One Hundred Ghost Stories. I think?”
“Or weird stories,” said Faiz.
“Ancient samurai started this game as a kind of parlour game to see who the bravest of them were. They’d light one hundred candles in the room. Each samurai would tell a ghost story, extinguishing a candle at the end, and the winner would be whoever survived the ordeal without flinching.”
“Or going to the bathroom?” said Lin.
“Uh. Sure,” said Faiz.
“So, what’s the point of the whole ritual anyway?” said Lin.
Talia was on her feet now too, walking a reverse circuit from her fiancé, her shadow growing longer as she extinguished the lanterns limning the parabola of her route.
Until at last there was one lantern remaining, its flame twitching, throwing shapes over the walls. From up the stairs, candlelight fell unevenly.
“What do you think?” Talia’s smile was sly. “To make a place where spirits would be welcome. Now, come on.”
We went up. Someone had lit one hundred red candles in a room that must have belonged to a second wife, a concubine who had lost her lustre, a room too small and too spare to have homed someone who mattered, a chapel sacred to the incidental. If the owner was ever beloved, it was grudgingly, resentfully: an act of reluctant duty. The room’s only grace was an oval mirror, taller than plausible, its frame made of black ceramic, seamed with gold arteries.
“This isn’t creepy at all,” said Phillip.
“You talking about the room, the ceremony, or the fact that Talia packed a hundred candles in her bag without any of us noticing?” said Lin after a quick glance around him, Talia nowhere in immediate sight.
“All of it?” Phillip’s reflection had no face, just a thumbprint on the bronze mirror. It could have belonged to anyone, anything else. “Like, this feels unholy.”
“And the fact you could purchase access to a historical site without having to fill out any kind of paperwork didn’t?” Lin drawled, shoulder laid against a pillar, no color to the latter any longer, not unless ancient was a hue. “If there’s anything unholy, it’s the heights that rich white men—”
“I knew I shouldn’t have taken time to fill you in. And come on, it’s not like I’m doing it for myself.”
“You’re doing it for Talia, I know,” said Lin.
A beat that went too long. “And Faiz too.”
“You’re still sweet on her, aren’t you?” said Lin, face cracked into a grin. He pushed from the wall.
“Jesus hell, Lin,” I said.
“What?” He threw a shrug, hands tossed up so quickly that his fingers, if they had been birds, would have broken in the violence. “We’re all thinking it. The stupid little figurines that Talia gave us. This was supposed to be a surprise elopement. How did she know, dude? Come on. Tell me.”