Jacob’s voice was little more than a whisper. “No.”
“Listen. I’ve had dreams myself, lad. Felt as real as a bullet in the back.”
Jacob smiled faintly. “You think I’m going mad?”
“I think dead is dead. No matter how much we wish it weren’t.”
Jacob caught the tone of caution. He got up to go, paused at the screen. “She said last night: I’m not what you think I am. Does that mean anything to you?”
Coulton rubbed at his whiskers, raised his eyebrows. “Fuck all,” he said.
“Yeah.”
But after the younger man was gone, and the screen was slid shut, Coulton sat unmoving in the dim glow of the lantern and thought about it. He knew men who’d been afraid during the war who used to dream shadowy figures standing over their cots at night. He thought of the feeling he’d had for weeks now, of being followed, of little things being moved in the night. He remembered the flicker of something at the edges of his vision, on board the ship, in the streets of the old quarter, here in the inn itself. As he lay down to sleep he thought of something else, something one of the old talents had said once to him, in the parlor at Cairndale. She’d said every light makes a shadow and there can’t be one without the other and there were stories told, old stories, about a dark talent, a talent that stayed in the shadow side, in the gray rooms beyond the orsine. The drughr, it was called. It appeared in dreams.
“Ach. Most likely it’s just a story though,” she’d added, unhooking the poker and raking at the coals in the dark. “Most likely it doesn’t exist.”
Get a grip on yourself, man, he told himself now. The drughr’s just a story. And a story can’t hurt you none, can it?
He shut his eyes in disgust.
14
HOPE IS A CLOCKWORK HEART
Komako, seething, took her sister back.
Back, out of the witch’s garden, to the old theater, bundled and shivering, Teshi’s gray face hidden in the folds of her actor’s cloak, and Komako steering her all the while through the dark parts of the streets. It had been a lie, all of it: the witch had no cure. Not for her. Not for Teshi.
Her face was pinched with fury. But she stayed quiet, for her sister’s sake, only their wooden geta clattering as they stumbled through the muggy neighborhoods. She couldn’t stop seeing what she’d seen, the dust curling over the man’s beautiful fingers like smoke, dancing across his knuckles, and the other one, the silent one with the eerie auburn whiskers, who’d kept near the door, watching, listening, his eyes too old for his face.
Once, when Teshi was still very small, Komako had heard a sound from the old master’s dressing room. A lady—a geisha—had come to visit him. The sisters had not seen her before. She was very beautiful. Her face was white and her kimono blue and gold and her delicate pale fingers fluttered like birds. She was tuning a samisen with a fierce concentration. On the kotatsu lay an unwrapped bundle of songbooks. The strings were melancholy and gray. But when she began to sing an emptiness opened inside Komako and the sound of the geisha’s singing was an echo of some darker thing deep within. She felt Teshi’s hand on her sleeve. They hardly dared to breathe. As she peered out from their hiding place, she thought it was like the geisha sat behind glass, so removed was she from the world, moved by it but not a part of it, and when Komako at last looked away she saw the master was crying.
That is how it seemed to her now when she looked at her little sister. As if she were behind glass.
Back at the theater, she put Teshi, shivering, into their small closet room and covered her with a blanket. She stirred the coals in the brazier. All that night she worked distractedly, brooding, unsure of herself. She snuffed lanterns while actors were still in the rooms, she spilled a bucket of washwater across a floor, she dropped a box of old masks during the first performance, making such a clatter that she’d hid under the stairs to keep from getting beaten. She slept badly, her dreams strange in the heat, and the following afternoon, still distracted, she tried to lose herself in her tasks. A junior stagehand found her and Teshi on their knees, kimonos folded up at their thighs, Komako grunting, Teshi moving slowly as if not of her own volition, both of them scrubbing the floor of the gloomy costuming room with a brush. The man handed Komako a small gray pouch.
“A gaijin left this for you,” he said. “He gave no name.” He fixed her with a long searching look, as if trying to understand what she might be involved in, then left.
Komako felt a surge of dread. The wrappings at her hands were wet and she wiped her wrists on her apron. The floor around her gleamed. She could hear the theater filling with voices. On the far side of the room Teshi, on her knees, was watching, a curtain of hair fallen across her face.