Backlit by torch-glow, two shadows—Phillip and Talia, I’d recognize their silhouettes anywhere—rose and entwined behind the shoji screen to our right, and Faiz, elbows-deep before in our party supplies, halted to stare. Talia’s laughter flickered, girlish and eager, a darting breath of sound. I wondered then as I studied Faiz’s face, the uncertainty and his pinch-mouthed worry, if he knew that Phillip and Talia had been in lust once and found myself worrying how much that answer mattered.
“You okay?” I came to his side of the room.
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Faiz swung looks between me and the shadows on the shoji screen.
“No reason,” I said. “You just seemed tense, that’s all.”
“Long flight.”
“Uh-huh.”
His head kept metronoming.
“It isn’t too late to head back to Kyoto or something, you know—”
“Talia has wanted to get married in a haunted house since she was a kid. I’m not going to take that away from her.” He swallowed hard between each sentence, face calcified. “Not after what it took to get us here.”
“I don’t want to diminish Talia’s wants and dreams here but someone has to say it.” I tried for a smile. “Which freaking kid grows up wanting to get married in a haunted house? I mean, come on.”
The shadows on the other side of the shoji screen receded into tongues of slow-swaying ink, and Faiz couldn’t look away.
“Cat—” Finally, Faiz tented fingers and pressed them to his nose bridge, dropped his chin. “Whatever is going on with you, you have to stop. You can’t let Talia hear any of this. Do you know how much it took to convince her to let you come?”
“I know.” Like rote now, my answer and the arrangement of my fingers, hands bunched and pressed to my belly, held there under the roof of my ribs. It hurt to be made to shrink like this. “I know. You’ve told me. I don’t know. I just.”
“You just what, Cat?”
I thought of the rooms and the ossuaries they’d become: the books suppurating flat-bodied beetles, hollowed, hallowed in their decay. “I think this is all a mistake. Us coming here. Us being here. I think we’re going to regret it. That’s all.”
I walked away before Faiz could answer, could tell me again I’d been disappointing, and staggered out of the room. The air was warm, summer-wet in the plunge of the corridor. Someone’d lit a lantern at the very end, and its light bounced against a bronze mirror, my image blurred in the surface. I tensed, expecting another figure to manifest in the metal, a broken-backed body dropped over the second floor, something tall and pale and faceless.
Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.
No, that wasn’t right.
An image bled into place. If Phillip’s ghost was real, she would be enamel and ink and a birdcage body, its bones like filigree or fish spines, barely enough to cup its impatient heart. A girl in her bridal whites, jaw sharp as a promise. Her kisses close-lipped, without tongue or heat. Like a benediction or a prayer or an ending.
And her mouth, of course, from its teeth through to the tunnel of its throat: black.
A car screamed into the dark, wheels goring the soft earth outside the house, unmooring me from that reverie. I heard the sound of mud splattering thin walls. Music pulsed through the bones of the building: not quite dubstep, frenzied, cheerfully experimental. Too excited to have ever molded the Ecstasy-glutted into shambolic choreography, but that had always been a plus point for its most strident advocate. He never liked fitting in.
Lin, I thought. He was finally here.
*
I couldn’t let Lin see me in my previous state so I detoured to wash up, wipe the hauntings from the shadows of my eyes. Then, I went back to the appointed communal space—a room occupied by low tables and paper cranes, polka-dotted cushions we’d purchased from a yen store—to find not only Lin, but an icebox sweating on the tatami, its insides crammed with silver Asahi cans and bottles of carbonated yuzu. A massive cast-iron pot, black and sensible, ready to be engorged with protein and vegetables.
Open Tupperware littered the rotting tables, stuffed with even more ingredients: meatballs, pork tenderloin; glistening slabs of white chicken breast; tofu, cubed and marinated; whole fish preserved in cradles of frost, eyes glimmering and silver; sirloin, short ribs, ribbons of thinly sliced beef, even cuts of marbled wagyu; daikon, bushels of spinach, napa cabbage, as many varieties of mushrooms as I could name. In the corner, separated from the main selection, were livers and fresh hearts and tripe, offal so fresh they seemed on the verge of animating.