A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) (16 page)

He gestured toward the others.
"Please, come in."

Kubo walked along the r
ōka to the nearest of the
shōji
— the thin paper doors — and slid it open. Another step up brought
them into the old man's
i-ma
, or living space. The house Kara lived in
with her father had movable partitions and sliding doors called
fusuma
,
which were somet
hing like shōji but
thicker. The layout of the house could be changed to suit any purpose, and each
room except for the kitchen and bathroom could become bedroom, living room,
dining room, or office with very little effort. But most of Kubo's cottage was
taken up by a single large i-ma. Tatami mats covered the floor in square
sections. At the center of the room was a large table that she recognized as
the sort that came with an electric heater beneath it that would emanate warmth
to those around it.

"If you will make
yourselves comfortable, I will serve tea," Kubo said.

"We would be most grateful
for something to warm us," Mr. Yamato replied.

Kara knew that respect and honor
were paramount in Japanese culture, but still she was impressed by the
reverence that Mr. Yamato showed to the Unsui. The old monk had been a friend
of his grandfather's, but she thought his deep respect came from a deeper
acknowledgement of the spiritual nature of the old man. Or maybe she was
reading too much into it.

Miss Aritomo busily arranged
pillows and indicated where the girls should sit, and then the adults sat, too,
so that by the the time a fusuma slid aside and the old man shuffled into the
room, slippers shushing on tatami mats, they were all settled there. Kara
watched the way he balanced the tray, thinking someone should help him. And yet
the cups did not rattle and the teapot did not seem too heavy for him.

Kubo set the tray upon the table
and went back to slide the door closed.

When he had settled down on a
pillow of his own, he poured tea for his guests. No one spoke. Kara felt the
urgency of Hachiro's predicament, as well as the sense of peril that hung above
them all thanks to the curse of Kyuketsuki, but no one would rush him. She used
the time, instead, to study the old monk.

Despite the whiteness of his
hair and beard, she would never have guessed his age to be above seventy, and
even then only becaues of the lines on his face. They seemed more like echoes
of all of the smiles and curious frowns of his life than like wrinkles. Physically,
he seemed almost as fit as her own father, who could not have been more than
half Kubo's age. And the simple way he dressed warmed her to him as instantly
as had his smile upon greeting them.

But now, as he regarded each of
them in turn, she saw a sad gravity in his eyes.

"Please," Kubo said,
picking up his own tea cup.

He sipped, and the rest of them
followed suit.

"Master Kubo," Mr.
Yamato began, "we are honored that you have invited us into your home, and
humbled by your hospitality. My grandfather liked to say that he never had a
better friend than Kubo, and I hope that we will continue that tradition
between our families."

The Unsui smiled. "I have
no family, Yamato-san, and your grandfather was a better friend to me than I to
him." The old monk tipped a wink at Miho, who smiled shyly. "I got
your sensei's grandpa in a lot of trouble, once upon a time."

Mr. Yamato smiled as well.
"Any help you can offer would be gratefully received."

Kubo flapped a hand in the air,
once again reminding Kara of a bird.

"I require no gratitude,"
he said, as though offended. "If these snows have brought Yuki-Onna to our
city, I will do all that I can to help. I have not heard of the Winter Witch
appearing in my lifetime, though my grandmother claimed that her mother's most
handsome brother had been taken by the Woman in White one cruel December."

Kara held her breath. With those
words alone he had commanded their attention. A year ago she would have heard
the story as nothing more than superstition and folklore, but now she took it
as a given that others had encountered Yuki-Onna before.

"Do you know how we can
make her go away?" Kara asked.

Kubo sipped his tea. The others
all ignored theirs, waiting for his reply.

"I do not know of any way
to drive her back to the spirit world," The Unsui said, and Kara felt her
heart sink. "If the weather turns and the snows melt, then she will vanish
with it."

"But that might not be
until spring," Sakura said.

Kubo nodded grimly and sipped
his tea again. Holding the small cup in his hands, he surveyed his gathered
guests.

"Tell me the story of how
you believe we have come to this moment. Leave nothing out."

Mr. Yamato and Kara's father
looked at Miss Aritomo.

"It began with Kyuketsuki,"
the art teacher said. "Kara, you should tell it."

Kara shook her head. "No. It
really started with Akane, and that isn't my story to tell."

Sakura fidgeted, glancing around
as though searching for an escape from this moment. Miho pushed her glasses up
on the bridge of her nose and tucked a lock of her long hair behind her ear,
retreating into her old shyness, her sympathy for Sakura making her unwilling
to push the matter.

At last Sakura looked up at
Kara, who pleaded with her silently. But they all knew that Sakura would have
to tell it. Too much was at stake for her to refuse The Unsui's request.

Sakura looked at Kubo. "My
sister's name was Akane Murakami," she said. "And she died for a boy
she did not love."

It pained Sakura to tell the
story. When she had finished, she sat in numb silence and listened to the
others unspool the rest of the tale. Kara began with her arrival at
Monju-no-Chie school and talked of death shrines and cats and nightmares. Miho
talked about the Noh play they had intended to do in the fall. Mr. Harper and
Miss Aritomo told the story of the Hannya that had possessed the art teacher
and nearly killed them all. And they all shared the telling of the blizzard
that had killed Sora, with Mr. Yamato explaining the efforts of the police and
other searchers to locate the missing boys.

Through all of their words,
Sakura only listened. She thought about Akane, and how she had made peace with
her sister's death, and a truth began to take shape in her mind, sharpening and
clarifying itself with every passing minute. She had come to terms with Akane's
death, but would never be able to make peace with the fact that her sister had
been murdered. She had let her anger go and given in to her sorrow, but now
that her parents had finally begun to break out of the spell that grief had put
them under, Sakura's own anger had begun to resurface.

It had been hard enough to stand
at her sister's funeral and know she would be gone forever, but she had moved
on the best she could.

Yet how could she move on when
the echoes of Akane's death continued to wreak havoc upon her life? All of
their lives. As she listened to the stories being told, it only drove home even
more that her sister's murder was the axis upon which all of this death and
anguish spun. How could she move on, as long as the curse of Kyuketsuki loomed
over her?

The answer was painfully
obvious.

She couldn't.

The voices around the table had
fallen silent. Everyone watched Kubo, the air thick with expectation. Sakura
studied his thick, wiry eyebrows, perhaps the most expressive part of his face.
They had dipped into frowns and leaped with smiles throughout the visit thus
far. Now, though, those eyebrows gave no hint as to his mood.

When at last he began slowly to
nod, Sakura felt a small flame ignite within her, though it took a moment for
her to recognize it as hope — the hope that one day soon they could put
all of this behind them. She had become accustomed to being cursed, and even
begun to accept that they might have to all leave Japan to escape it, and to
leave Miyazu City right away to get away from Yuki-Onna . . . though she wasn't
sure that would even work.

"Master Kubo?" Miss
Aritomo said, prompting the Unsui.

The old monk looked at her,
those bristly eyebrows came to life again, tilting downward in a solemn
expression of contemplation.

"Yes," he said. "There
may be a way."

"Please, Kubo-san,"
Kara's father said quickly. "Tell us."

"In a moment," Kubo
said.

He unfolded himself from the
floor and stood, hurrying to the same door he had used when he had made them
tea. Moments later, he shuffled back in and across the tatami mats with one
fist closed and the other holding lengths of black twine.

Seating himself once more upon
the pillow, he laid the twine across his lap and opened his clenched fist. Upon
his palm lay four stones of a dull gray hue. They would have been entirely
ordinary except for two characteristics that all four shared. Each had a single
hole directly in its center, and each was a perfect circle. They varied in
size, but not in the perfection of their roundness.

"These come from the stream
beside my home," Kubo said, as he strung the first of them onto a length
of twine and handed it to Kara's father. "Emperors have been born and died
in the time they have spent there, the water wearing them smooth. The holes I
have made myself."

They all watched in confusion as
he strung a second and handed it to Miss Aritomo, and then a third, which he
gave to Mr. Yamato. The fourth he strung and then tied the ends of the twine to
keep it from falling off.

"I don't understand,"
Mr. Harper said.

"Go on," Kubo said,
gesturing to Kara. "Tie them around the girls' necks. They are simple
charms, but will help protect them from Yuki-Onna."

"They're rocks!"
Sakura found herself saying, and more sharply than was proper. "What
should we do, throw them at her when she comes to kill us?"

The Unsui sat up straighter,
expression darkening, and suddenly the kindly old man had been replaced by a
great master.

"I have wandered in flesh
and spirit for longer than you three girls have breathed the air of this world.
There are things in it which, even after all you have seen, you will likely
never understand — a delicate balance between earth and sky, between body
and mind, between seen and unseen. And the unseen requires faith."

Ashamed, Sakura lowered her
head. "Forgive me, Kubo-sensei."

The old monk smiled. "Of
course. Now listen, and behave. The stream made the stones round and smooth,
but I put the eyes in them —"

Mr. Yamato tied one around
Sakura's neck and she held it between thumb and finger, realizing that by 'eye'
Kubo meant the hole in the center.

"There are old words, old
prayers, that can provide protection, and I have spoken those words over these
stones myself. They are defenses. Wards against evil. Ancient spirits do not
see humans for their faces, but for their essence, and your essence can be
hidden
behind masks or with the help of certain charms."

Sakura immediately thought of
the masks they had worn when they had stopped the Hannya, and understood at
last how the masks had helped them. From the look on Miho's face, she saw that
her roommate had made the same connection.

"But we can't wear masks
all of the time," Kara said. "In school or in the city, for instance."

The Unsui nodded. "Exactly.
But with these . . ." he gestured to the necklaces. "If Yuki-Onna
comes for you, even if she stands in the same room with you, she will be blind
to you. Her terrible gaze will slide away from you, slip off of the stone or
through its eye. She may know something is there, but she will not see you, and
that will give you time to escape her."

Sakura saw Mr. Harper take Kara's
hand and squeeze, obviously relieved and hopeful but also so frightened for his
daughter. She almost wished her own father were here, but if he had been, she
knew he would never have believed, or understood. This was something she had to
do on her own.

"The fourth is for your
friend Hachiro, when you find him," Kubo said, handing the stone on its
string to Kara.

Kara lit up. "Then you
think he's alive?"

Kubo nodded once. "He may
be. If so, he may need this."

"But, Master Kubo, this
cannot work forever," Miss Aritomo said. "If Yuki-Onna can't be
stopped or driven away, more people will die. Even if we save these girls, the
demon is still on the mountain and it may be a very long winter."

"And Hachiro is still up
there," Kara said quickly, looking around at her friends and then her
father. "But with these . . . wards . . . we could help look for him and
Yuki-Onna wouldn't know we were there."

Kubo raised both hands to calm
them. When he had their attention, he poured himself another cup of tea and
lifted it to his lips.

"I have not heard any story
where Yuki-Onna was defeated or banished," he said, before sipping his tea
and putting the cup back down. "But this is different from the tales I
have heard. Such spirits are ancient and faded. They are quiet now, drifting
into the past like smoke rising into the sky. It was not simply the death of
the woman during the winter's first snow that brought Yuki-Onna here. It was
the curse that Kyuketsuki placed upon you, the call for vengeance which that
demon sent out into the spirit world. The power of Kyuketsuki's curse seems to
have helped guide and summon both the Hannya and Yuki-Onna, given them the
strength to manifest. If we can break the curse —"

They all bolted upright.

"You can break the curse?"
Miho squeaked.

"It may be possible,"
Kubo allowed.

The adults all exchanged
glances. Miss Aritomo took Mr. Harper's free hand, gazing at him hopefully.

"Then Yuki-Onna would go
away?" Mr. Yamato asked.