“That or she’s saying it ironically,” declared Lin. “Which, I can tell you now, worries me because that sounds like the recipe for an angry fucking ghost.”
He paused.
“Or angry ghost fucking.”
I bayed my laughter, sudden and delirious. At the sound, Phillip’s phone slid from his trembling fingers, cracked open on the floorboard. Glass shimmered. The ohaguro stopped, a broken wind-up toy. No breath, no shiver of muscle, candlelight washing golden blue over enamel skin.
“Fuck,” Phillip repeated and we all stared as one at our ghost.
She chittered and the kitsune in the walls answered, applauding in perfect silent synchronicity, their fur flushing burgundy from nose to curling tails. Their eyes grew cataracted, a film of silk. I couldn’t stop staring. Then, the ohaguro began to laugh.
“Where’s Talia?” Faiz whispered.
The ohaguro stopped and, jerkily, she cocked her head.
“Where’s Talia? Where the fuck is Talia? Where is she you fucking—” Faiz choked down that last word, but the swallowed bitch still hissed through the air. He stumbled upright, slipped on sweat, nostrils and mouth and eyes dripping clear mucus, a slickness pearling along his chin. “Give her back. Give. Her. Back.”
The words stuttered together, warping with agony. Over and over and over, until he’d tortured the meaning from the refrain, until it was a croak hollowed out of his belly. Give her back. Give her back. Giveherback. Giverakgiverakgiverak.
“Jesus, man. What do you—” Phillip started.
Faiz hit her.
His fist bore into her sternum, through it. But there was no crunch, no wet pop of bone concaving, no sound to speak of. Nothing but softness, the ohaguro’s body bending into the impact, swallowing his arm to the elbow. For a moment, I thought she might have a mouth buried in the mound of white silk, that we were a sliver of a breath away from hearing Faiz scream himself bloody.
But he only stared at her.
“Please.”
She stroked his cheek with the back of her alabaster hand, wove her fingers beneath his jaw, slid her thumb across his lips before popping the digit into his parted mouth. I thought I saw his tongue move, see Faiz suckle at the extremity, red muscle laving over her pale, pale skin. That laugh again. Girlish, gorged with knowing. The rest of us stood rooted, transfixed by the obscene tableau.
“Please,” Faiz moaned around the curve of her thumb.
The ohaguro vanished.
*
But the kitsune stayed.
The tengu did too.
The ceiling ripened with bodies, yokai bleeding from the other rooms to come gawk; first oozing through the cracks in the architecture, slithering rills of wet ink, before regaining three-dimensionality. They leered at us from the wood and the paper, faces and palms pressed against what now felt like a sheeting of glass. It was as though we stood in a vivarium, had always stood in display, surrounded by children but unconscious to that truth until now.
But even that impression gave way.
Slowly, as more painted bodies—some no more than scrawled lines, others magnificently detailed—crowded the ceiling, it began to distend, almost as if it had turned gelatinous. Under a pustular overhang of grinning onlookers, our group turned to each other.
“Now what?” Lin demanded.
Faiz sat keening into his hands, a broken howl that wouldn’t stop or waver, no matter which of us came over to whisper platitudes into his ear. He convulsed with his misery, scratched at his cheeks until the skin tore into translucent ribbons, embedding itself under his nails. Blood ran in thick stripes, muddying his hands.
“I don’t know,” I said, chugging water. The taste of it made me think of the pond, of algae and silt and bodies, bellies curdle-pale and soft, curving out of the murk. Wide piscine eyes flashing beneath the surface, silvery with mucus. I gagged and spat petals of duckweed, slick tangles of black hair. “What the—”
“Looks like we hit critical mass for supernatural stuff.” Lin giggled, high and weird. I winced at his pitch, each burst of lunatic laughter like a nail pounded through my temple.
“Stop it,” I said.
No one listened to me. Faiz kept crying, Lin and Phillip argued about something, and the yokai continued to stare, whispering to themselves. I could hear them now, pieces of conversation that didn’t quite slot together, spoken in dialects older than the house itself and bursts of cutting-edge slang. Here and there, English as punctuation, barely intelligible. Almost none of it made any sense except for the words bride and hello and wet, repeated so many times they soon began to resemble a heartbeat.