A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) (15 page)

"Girls, please sit down,"
Mr. Yamato said, indicating two other chairs beside the one where Miho sat. Normally
they were reserved for students who had caused trouble or whose grades had
fallen, kids who needed the principal's personal attention.

Miss Aritomo closed the door,
but stood by it, presumably in case anyone else knocked. But Sakura didn't
think anyone else had been invited to this meeting.

Sakura sat down, but Kara didn't.

"Yamato-sensei, is there
any word about Hachiro?" she asked.

The principal's anger showed in
his eyes, but then he softened. "No, Kara. Nothing yet. Please sit down."

Still, she did not obey. Kara
turned to her father. "I can't do this. I can't just go to class and
pretend everything is all right. I need to be up on that mountain with the
search team. I feel like I've abandoned him. Either that, or you've at least
got to let me talk to —"

"Kara!" her father
said sharply. "Please sit down."

Sakura winced on her friend's
behalf. They would forgive her only so much, no matter how much they might
understand how agonizing it was for her to be able to do nothing but wait.

Forlorn, Kara went to the chair
and sat down.

"I'm sorry, Yamato-san,"
she said. "I forget myself."

Mr. Yamato acknowledged this with
only a nod. He glanced at the three girls, then at Kara's father, and finally
at Miss Aritomo. The principal leaned back in his chair.

"Miss Aritomo. Please go
ahead."

They all turned to look at the
delicate-looking woman. She also seemed tired, but somehow the vulnerability
this produced made her seem even prettier.

"Mr. Yamato, Mr. Harper,
and I have all done a great deal of research about Yuki-Onna in the past
twenty-four hours," Miss Aritomo said. "I know you girls have done
much yourselves. With deepest regret, I must tell you that there is nothing we
have found that suggests there is any way to destroy or even defeat Yuki-Onna."

Sakura stared at her in shock,
and knew the other girls must feel the same.

"What?" Kara said.
"You're just giving up, after one day?"

"If she really has come
because of the curse of Kyuketsuki . . ." Miho began.

None of them needed her to
finish that sentence, and the words trailed off.

"Yuki-Onna is a monster,
yes," Miss Aritomo said. "But she is also an elemental spirit. Once
she has been woken, she will remain for the entire winter, or as long as there
is snow on the ground. And if she
has
come because of the curse, you
three are in grave, grave danger."

"The curse included
Hachiro, too," Kara said, her voice sounding hollow.

Mr. Yamato interlaced his
fingers on top of his desk. "We know that."

Kara looked up at her father.
"We have to find him. No matter what."

"My only concern is
protecting my daughter," Mr. Harper replied.

Miho cleared her throat. "With
respect, Harper-sensei, Miss Aritomo just said there was nothing we could do to
stop Yuki-Onna. If she has come for us, we will all soon be dead."

Sakura stared, unable to believe
that Miho would say such a thing, and then she let out a long, shuddering
breath as she realized it must be true.

"Not necessarily,"
Miss Aritomo said. "We may not be able to stop Yuki-Onna, but there may be
a way to protect you from her, to hide you all. Mr. Yamato and I have found
someone who may be able to help."
"Who?" Sakura asked.

Mr. Yamato stood up from behind
his desk.

"That was our purpose in
calling you here. Come along, girls. We will take you to meet the
Unsui
,
the cloud wanderer."

Kara knew she had to breathe, to
calm down and sort out her thoughts, but she felt out of control in a way she
never had before. The mystery of the ghosts gnawed at her, even as she was torn
in two directions, needing to talk to Ren, but wanting to be searching Takigami
Mountain for Hachiro. Miho had put voice to her own feelings: with no way to
stop Yuki-Onna, they were all pretty much dead soon. Now, nothing mattered
except finding Hachiro. If they were going to die, she wanted to see him first,
at least to say goodbye.

But she rode in silence in the
back seat of her father's car, because she knew one thing above all . . . if
Hachiro was still alive, the only way to save him would be to also save
herself. Just because none of the ancient stories revealed a way to destroy
Yuki-Onna that did not meant it was impossible.

So, torn as she was, she tried
to breathe, to stay calm and tell herself that this was exactly what she needed
to be doing for Hachiro right now.

"I don't understand who
this man is supposed to be," she said. "'Cloud wanderer?' What does
that mean?"

Miss Aritomo had ridden with them,
while Miho and Sakura had gone with Mr. Yamato in his car, which her father now
followed, driving a curving road into the hills outside of Miyazu City.

Yuuka turned sideways in her
seat to look back at Kara. "An 'unsui' is a kind of monk. It means 'cloud
and water wanderer.' Normally it is applied to novice monks, often those who
are on a pilgrimage, searching from monastery to monastery for a master to
teach them. But Kubo is often called
the
Unsui, because he has been
wandering for his entire life in search of the master he believes will teach
him true purity of spirit, but has never found such a teacher."

Kara listened in amazement,
contemplating such a life.

"He must be so lonely."

Her father glanced back at her,
concern etched into his face, and then looked at Miss Aritomo.

"How did you and Mr. Yamato
find this man if he is always wandering?" he asked.

Miss Aritomo smiled. "He is
at least eighty years old. No one seems to know exactly how old. Though Kubo is
still the Unsui in the minds of the local people, and possibly in his own mind
as well, he does not wander far these days. He has a small house in the hills. He
grows his own vegetables and likes to fish. You might have seen him yourselves.
He is constantly riding his bicycle around Miyazu City, still wandering a
little every day, but never so distant that he cannot sleep in his own bed at
night. It seems he will never find the master he sought."

"And you know him?"
Kara asked.

Miss Aritomo shook her head.
"No. Mr. Yamato's grandfather played with him as a boy. Whenever The Unsui
would wander through Miyazu City, he would stop at the Yamatos for tea and then
be on his way, off to the far corners of Japan. When he reached seventy-five
years of age, he built his house."

"He built it himself? At
seventy-five?"

"So they say," the art
teacher replied.

They lapsed into silence, all
three of them alone with their thoughts. As the car climbed a road that ran
alongside a stream, she stared out at the gently falling snow and tried to
imagine that she could speak to Hachiro, and that he could hear her.

This will help
, she told
him in her thoughts.
This cloud wanderer can help us all
.

"Do you think he'll be able
to tell us why some of us are seeing ghosts?" Kara asked.

Miss Aritomo dropped her gaze.
"I hope so."

Kara stared at her. "You've
seen one, too?"

Rob Harper glanced at his
girlfriend with the same kind, worried look he had given his daughter. "More
than one."

"Yuuka?" Kara said.

"This morning," Miss
Aritomo said. "Just before dawn. I was up making my morning tea and looked
out the window from my kitchen. The streets were empty except for an old man I
saw walking by and a teenaged girl who seemed to be watching my house. It made
me uneasy; it felt as if she were looking at me. So I went closer to the window
to get a better look and I saw that neither she nor the old man had any snow on
them at all. It continued to fall, but it drifted right through them. And as
the sky lightened, I realized I could see through them a little bit, too. The
tea kettle whistled, startling me, and when I looked back outside, the ghosts
were gone."

Kara shook her head. She studied
the back of her father's head, watching his hands on the steering wheel. Up
ahead, Mr. Yamato had turned off onto a road that was little more than a rutted,
snow-covered path running alongside the stream, which was edged with ice on
both sides.

"Do you have any idea what
the connection is between Yuki-Onna and these ghosts?" Kara asked.

Miss Aritomo shook her head.
"No. But maybe the Unsui will."

She turned around in her seat to
face front, and bent to peer through the windshield. Kara looked as well, and
saw the brakes on Mr. Yamato's car glowing bright red in the white swirl of the
snow.

They began to slow, and up ahead
Kara saw a small cottage with a black, sloping, tiled roof and many sliding
doors, some of glass and some of wood.

The home of Kubo, the cloud
wanderer.

Light snow continued to fall as
they walked toward the front of the cottage. Remnants of the previous season's
garden made strange shapes in the snow off to one side of the house. On the
other side, the stream trickled by, a hushed burble that slipped over rocks and
beneath expanding shelves of ice. Across the field behind the house, the hills
rose further, covered in trees that must have made for a beautiful view in
summer.

In front of the house, a stone
walkway and wooden bridge separated two sides of a rectangular man-made pond
which winter had turned to ice. On either side of the pond were bare-branched
cherry trees. Snow coated the black tile roof, which extended out above the
wooden porch — really a walkway that ran the length of the house. Sliding
doors, some of wood and others of glass, made up nearly the entire front of the
house, but Kara knew from looking at them that they would all be removable. That
was the most interesting facet of Japanese houses . . . the way that nearly any
space could be transformed by the removal of doors or partitions to some other
purpose.

A bicycle leaned against the
side of the house, protected by the overhanging roof.

Mr. Yamato led the way,
determined and yet respectful, approaching the main door without hurrying. Sakura
and Miho hung back, waiting for Kara and her father, and for Miss Aritomo. Kara
found herself thinking about what an unsui was supposed to be. This monk had
wandered for almost his entire life without finding what he had been searching
for and had eventually found his way home. Instead of living out his waning
years in a monastic seclusion, he had chosen an even more solitary life.

Maybe in all of that
searching for the right person to become his teacher, he figured out that he
was his own best master
.

They went up two steps to the
porch. It reminded her of the sort of wooden walkways she'd always seen in old
western movies, where the façades of the buildings in every town were built
with walkways elevated a foot or so off the ground so that people didn't have
to walk through mud and horse crap.

Through a glass door she could
see that another walkway ran around the inside of the cottage, parallel to the
one outside. This was called a
rōka
,
and in good weather it would usually be open to the elements, the sliding doors
removed and the interior protected from the rain by the extended roof. More
sliding doors separated the
rōka
from the inside of the house, but these were made of wood and paper so thin
that it would allow sunlight to pass through.

Mr. Yamato rang a small bell
that hung by the door. Kara could not imagine that the old man would actually
hear the sound unless he were standing right behind the door, but just before
Mr. Yamato would have rung the bell again the door swung inward, snowflakes
dancing across the threshold.

"Yamato-san," Kubo
said. "Honorable friends. Welcome to my home."

The elderly monk stepped back to
let them enter, watching them as they stepped through the door one by one, his
stance and expression evoking a birdlike curiosity. His hair was thin and white
and long enough that he tied it into a knot at the back of his head. His beard
and eyebrows were shaggy and matched the color of the snow, as though he might
be a winter spirit himself, some male counterpart of Yuki-Onna. If he had been
wearing a kimono or any sort of robe, Kara would have thought she had stepped
back in time, or into some samurai movie. But the cloud-walker apparently
preferred more modern clothes. He wore loose-fitting tan trousers that were
ragged at the cuffs, a thick cobalt blue sweater, and a pair of black slippers.

His outfit made her smile, and
distracted her enough that it took Kara a moment to realize she had seen him
before.

The moment of recognition was
mutual. Kubo smiled.

"I take it you have seen
more ghosts," he said.

Kara took off her shoes in the
genkan, just as the others were doing, but she could not help staring at The
Unsui. It had been him she had seen riding his bicycle along her street in the
early hours of the morning, when she had been chasing ghosts and her father had
come out after her. A quick glance at her father told her that he had
recognized the elderly monk as well.

Tempted to barrage him with
questions, she nearly forgot to pay him the proper respect. Mustering her
self-control, she bowed her head.

"It is nice to see you
again, Kubo-san," she said. "I was surprised to see anyone on the
street this morning."

Sakura and Miho were staring at
her in confusion and Miss Aritomo and Mr. Yamato were watching her father,
obviously surprised that the Harpers seemed to know the old monk.

"I am restless when the
world is most quiet," Kubo said. "Old habits are difficult to break. Fortunately,
the fattest, tastiest fish are also restless in the quiet hours, and so I ride
to the bay to retrieve them for my plate."