Komako grabbed Teshi by the shoulders, spun her around.
“You can’t do this!” she cried. “You can’t just come out here without me! It’s not safe, Teshi. Do you hear me?”
Her sister peered dully up at her, her eyes very dark. “I’m so cold,” she whispered.
Jacob had stopped some feet away and was standing in the rain, his hands on his knees, his face lifted to watch her. Gasping, his black beard dripping.
“I have to get her out of here,” Komako called over her shoulder. “She isn’t safe here.”
But there came then a sudden spill of light, from the opening door of the coffin maker’s. Voices. Someone in the mah-jongg den above slammed a window shutter back, peered out. She glimpsed movement from the shrine next door, the darkness there, and without thinking she stepped at once in front of her sister. They were widows, fathers, sons who’d lost their families to the cholera.
“Komako…，” Jacob hissed.
But his warning was already wasted. The grieving poor, the angry grieving poor, in rags and ragged straw hats, were already on their feet and leaving their vigils to step out into the rain, some of them now with torches, some with sticks, one man with the teeth of a rake held high.
* * *
At that precise moment, far across the old wooden city, Frank Coulton sat cross-legged in his shirtsleeves in the dead middle of his room at the inn, a paper lantern hanging from the crossbeams overhead, its shade casting a faint orange glow over his thinning hair and his big wrists and the battered leather traveling trunk standing open and empty against the far screen. He was gripping a loaded revolver in one hand, a pair of brass knuckles in the other, like he was of a mind to pray over them. All over the floor, over every surface, he’d sprinkled a fine silver dust.
Come on, you bastard, he was thinking. Show your bloody self.
He’d left the shoji screens on all three walls standing wide, in invitation. He closed his eyes, he breathed, he strained to listen in the gloom.
He’d let Jacob go to the kabuki alone, two hours earlier, had let him confront the girl alone, in part because it seemed an easy enough task, charm being a thing the lad carried in his pockets the way other men carried loose coin. But mostly, though, it was because Coulton had a task that needed doing, this task, and he wanted to be on his own to do it.
After all, it wasn’t every day you set out to kill a drughr.
Because that’s what it was, a drughr, and he’d come around to believing it, to believing in the unseen thing that stalked Jacob and himself. He didn’t care how crazy it sounded. The drughr hadn’t infected his own dreams, not yet at least, not like Jacob talked about, but he’d sensed its presence at his spine, a slow creeping dread. He knew little about the old stories, stories of the dead who’d never died, who’d crossed over into the gray rooms, still living; wielders of the dark talents, physically monstrous, impossibly strong; creatures that could pass through doors, and walls, and even human flesh; dream creatures and so, like dreams, invisible by the light of day.
Aye, should be easy enough, then, he thought dryly. What could go wrong?
And he gripped the revolver harder.
Two things had happened in the days after finding the girl that made Coulton believe what followed him was real. The first was at the base of the inn stairs when he turned back suddenly, having forgotten a list of supplies he’d wanted, and as he hurried back up the stairs he’d brushed something with his shoulder. He’d stopped and reached out a hand into the emptiness while the landlady, below, peered up at him, expressionless. The second was a murmuring in the corridor outside his room, in the dead of night, a low urgent muttering the words of which he couldn’t make out, just as if he were overhearing one side of a conversation. He rose catlike and quick in his nightshirt and drew back the screen and stepped out into the moonlit hall. It was empty.
He didn’t tell Jacob. If something invisible was stalking them, it could overhear anything at any time. But he began, from that moment on, to think about how to confront the monster.
His plan was simple. He had two desirable outcomes. The first would be the killing of the thing. But even if he only enraged it, provoked it, so that it revealed itself to him, that would be a success. He needed to know what it was.
And so he sat in the weak orange lantern light, waiting. He was afraid and it wasn’t a feeling he was used to and he didn’t know what to do with it.
An hour passed.
Nothing came.
And then, suddenly, somehow, it was in the room with him.