“Okay,” said Lin.
“No.” Faiz’s hand shot out, rattlesnake-quick, to trap the smaller man’s wrist in his grip. Pain spasmed across Lin’s face. I could hear the crunch of ligament as his palm folded into itself, thumb pushed so far inland that a muscle juddered in Lin’s forearm. But it didn’t look like Faiz was out to injure; his expression stayed dreamy, almost drunk. He squeezed and Lin made a noise low in his ribs. “We have to do this together.”
“Let go,” Lin growled.
Phillip, refereeing: “Be reasonable. If they want to leave—”
Faiz shook his head. The hairs on the nape of my neck tufted. Nausea welled as he turned his attention to Phillip and me, head drooping at an angle. His eyes—
Read a hundred books on horror, and you’ll find that every last one possesses at least one mention of someone’s eyes gone strange, unfocused and unsettling to witness. I’d always thought it sounded kitschy, hammy, a lazy trope implanted into the creative subconscious by sub-par mentors, pure Hollywood dross. But the look tenanting Faiz’s eyes remedied those preconceptions. All the lights were on, and all the ghosts were home too. It wasn’t the face of a killer, or the face of a suicide, but someone too exhausted to be either, which was somehow all the worse. When you’re tired enough, you’ll do anything for sleep.
“We have to do the ritual,” Faiz said, no variation in intonation.
“What?”
“The hitobashira ritual. We have to do it. It’d give Talia back. I know it.”
Lin’s voice spiked. “We’re not burying someone to get your fucking girlfriend back.”
“I’ll be the sacrifice. She’s my fiancée. I’ll . . . I’ll be the one to do it.” Faiz somnambulated through phrases: enunciation gone, the crispness of his voice diluted by misery.
“We’re not burying you,” I said. “We’re not going to bury you alive. That’s just not happening.”
“He’s crazy,” Lin whispered, expression inscrutable. The space between his thin brows creased. “Plum-stirring mad, although I suppose anyone who was forced to stir plums for hours would go mad. Is that how the line goes? Plum-stirring mad? Plum mad? I don’t know. It’s such a weird whatchamacallit, don’t you—ow.”
“Faiz,” I said. “Dude, I know what you’re thinking. I know you’re scared for Talia. I understand it hurts. I understand.”
Every hurt I’d ever experienced, every pain accreted from a twenty-four-year pileup of rib-rupturing mistakes distilled into stilted sentences, a look on my face that I hoped said exactly what I needed to say. Faiz stared, the pink tip of his tongue held between his teeth, and slowly, his expression drained to agony.
“You don’t understand any of this.” He spat, choppily, nearly in tears again, the pitch of his voice going stratospheric towards the end. The yokai applauded. Of course, they’d love it. “You’ve never had a proper relationship. You don’t know what it’s like to need someone, to love someone, to—to give a shit. You don’t know because you’re always too busy running away to whatever new fucking thing you have waiting. You don’t understand. You never—”
“Okay, that’s enough.” Phillip, trying to run interference again, but there wasn’t a need. Faiz fell to his knees, Lin’s arm finally surrendered, and banged his fists against his ears, crying freely, the sound a scream chaptered into sobs. Phillip followed him down to the tatami, which was no longer pure, no longer clean, rot spiraling through the straw as Lin rubbed at his wrist, the long pale column of his arm boxed in finger marks.
Noting my attention, Lin flicked his gaze up, wrote a circle in the air with a trembling finger, mouthed the word crazy. I couldn’t tell who he meant. Faiz or him or me or the entirety of our codependent coven, our audience besides, the blind damning the blind, a theatre of dead fools. I swallowed vomit, thin as gruel and warm. My vision had ceased to gyre but it wouldn’t stop bobbing, and I felt like I’d been anchored to the bottom of a pond, looking up through a mirror of green water. I thought of girls nibbled by fish and freshwater prawns, their ribs like combs, how long it’d take for a corpse to be whittled to bone by such a harmless menagerie. I thought of death again, and unclean things stirring in the mud.
“Do we even know there’s a book there?” I heard myself say.
“Of course there is. We saw them when we got in. This place, this place is rotten with books. There were libraries everywhere. We’re going to have answers there. I know.”