“Like he said, I’m drunk.” My laugh was just bones knocking together, without any meat to cushion their clamor. Hateful, hollow. I gritted my teeth against their stares, began limping back towards the door. “I don’t know better. I’m tired.”
“You don’t have to go,” Faiz said again. Like that’d be exactly enough to make it all better, put me back on my leash. He said it with so much sympathy too. Too much, in fact, his expression greasy with it. And I stared at him, I could see where that compassion slopped away to reveal exasperation, irritation, disgust as old as the memory of us first exchanging hellos in school. “Really.”
I ignored him. “Come on, Lin.”
“Cat.” Faiz, still trying. Too little, too late.
I didn’t look back.
Footsteps charted the mathematics of their motions: a drag of fabric as Talia swept around the bell curve of her orbit, Faiz’s plodding shuffle falling a quarter-beat behind. Phillip’s footsteps crisp but hesitant, loud on the wood. Lin was the only one who moved like he wasn’t weighted down by sins, nearly noiseless as he padded along behind me.
Halfway:
“You know what? Fuck it.”
That was all the warning we were given. Lin’s stride became a run, and I turned in time to see him lunging for Talia’s veil. His fingers closed over the pearlescent gauze, the beaded trim. The fabric tore in ripples, like swathes of pale skin, sunlight gleaming through, soft as eyelashes. Lin’s cry of triumph choked to death halfway to its birth.
She hid nothing this time, the thing beneath Talia’s veil. My girl from the mirror. There wasn’t a face to remember because there wasn’t a face to find. Black hair tendriled across contourless meat, no features to be seen. Only suggestions. Only smooth flesh and that grinning mouth, those red lips stretched as far as they’d go, black teeth, and the smell of ink. As I gawked, Talia’s kimono bled itself of color, pinks and golds runneling from every layer, pouring into the dust at her feet so all that was left was white, the color of expensive chalk and bone left to cook in the sun.
The ohaguro-bettari began to laugh before any of us could think to scream.
6
Who the—what the fuck is that?”
Faiz made a noise that I’ve never heard, a whining sound that hitched in his lungs, expressed in gasps. The kitsunes turned. No more pretenses now. Painted tengu approached in staccato, ticking across the seams in the shoji, a stop-motion flock, their expressions mocking. Faiz hit the floor, crab-walked about two feet backwards, gargling obscenities in a throat that wouldn’t work.
Phillip crossed himself the wrong way three times before he looked over, eyes so wide that both irises were necklaced in white. Outside the room, through cracks in the walls and in the few places where the lantern-light would reach, I could see movement, subtle and swaying.
“Told you she was probably going to be possessed and everything was going to hell,” Lin said, more satisfied, maybe, than anyone had a right to be.
The dead girl, the thing in Talia’s place, Faiz’s changeling bride, white as a tongue of wax, let her laughter ebb to a giggle, low and coquettish. Demurely, she raised a sleeve to her mouth, her chin ducked, and moved towards Faiz, each of her steps causing a scramble back of his. He whimpered, head lolling.
“Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.”
“What the fuck is it saying?” Faiz whispered hoarsely.
“Dude, seriously. We’re both Chinese. Don’t know what Phillip is.” Lin jerked a thumb at the other man, voice thinned by hysteria. “But you’re the only one with a Japanese parent.”
“Something about a mountain.” I swallowed, too petrified to correct him. I spoke the language too, if barely at this point, the knowledge leeched by crisis. “A-a promise?”
“That’s helpful.” Phillip thumbed through his phone and whatever dregs of satellite data he could milk from the air, face contorted. His hands shook. “I’ve got a—shit, the fucking page won’t load. Why won’t this—ah, fuck.”
“Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu,” said the dead bride again, this time with no musicality, her delivery urgent, her voice abraded, like she’d spent too long screaming in the dark.
Then a memory filled my mouth: “If I were one that had a heart that would cast you aside and turn to someone else, then waves would rise above the pines of Seunomatsu Mountain.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” demanded Lin.
“That’s the poem. The thing she keeps repeating. It’s part of the poem,” I said. “She’s still waiting for her husband-to-be. After all these years, she’s hanging on to the hope he’s coming home.”