Autumn Bridge (55 page)

After exerting so much effort to forget, Shizuka was now doing her best to remember. She was driven to do so because of the ghoul who haunted the tower. Whatever she might have known of him in the days of her knowledge and madness, she had expunged.

Who was he?

She had to remember before the seventh floor was built. If he was a friend, then she no longer needed to hide from him. If he was a foe, she needed to know his nature so she could defend herself from him. The ghoul frightened her, and she was no longer used to being frightened.

She had seen him for the first time the day she arrived at the castle. She was sitting in the room on the sixth floor of the tower, nursing her disappointment at the absence of the seventh, when she heard someone coming up the stairwell. A young man she did not recognize appeared in the doorway. He was no more than fifteen or sixteen years of age. The full-size swords in his sash seemed too large for him. His face exhibited signs of sincerity more than intelligence, and determination more than handsomeness. She was about to call out to him when she realized why he seemed odd.

He was transparent.

He turned in her direction and seemed to stare directly at her.

Shizuka froze. Perhaps her lack of motion, combined with the lengthening shadows of twilight, prevented her from being seen. Perhaps she was as transparent to him as he was to her, and being in shadow she was more difficult to see. Perhaps he was no more than a hallucination.

The apparition walked past her as if she were not there. When he reached the far wall, he began to rise in the air, his legs making the motions of ascending steps that did not exist.

Shizuka choked back her scream. She bit her hand to keep from gasping. She feared making the slightest sound that might attract his attention.

Just before he reached the ceiling, the creature spoke.

“Lady Shizuka,” he said. “May I enter?”

He apparently received permission from someone, for he bowed and, a moment later, disappeared into the ceiling.

Shizuka lacked the courage to move. She wanted desperately to get away from what was surely a demon, but just as desperately she did not want to attract his attention. She stayed where she was and listened. She heard nothing. For many long minutes, she was paralyzed by her fear.

Twilight gave way to night. The deep darkness of the new moon drenched the interior of the tower. Only the few stray rays of starlight that came through the clouds delineated one shadow from the next.

At last her fear of staying overcame her fear of moving. As quietly as she could, she shuffled toward the stairwell, clutching her kimono tightly so the layers of silk would not rustle against each other.

When she reached it and thought her escape as good as made, the second specter appeared. This one was a man in his early twenties. Swarthy, burly, with the confident swagger of a man who had killed other men, no doubt with the very two swords at his waist.

Like the first, he appeared out of the stairwell.

Like the first, he was transparent and ignored her presence.

But unlike the first, this one walked straight toward her. She backed away as quickly as she could, and just barely managed to get out of his way before he entered the room. He rose into the air in the same monstrous way as the first and, like him, paused and spoke a name that shocked her.

“Lady Shizuka. It is I.”

This creature, too, then disappeared into the ceiling.

Shizuka pressed back against the wall. She was trapped. She could not risk descending the stairs. If she met another demon, what if it passed directly through her? She was not confident her mind was strong enough to experience that terror and still cohere. Yet if she did not leave, it was surely only a matter of time before one of them, or another yet to arrive, discovered her and—

And what? Uncertainty added to her fear.

She hoped Hironobu would come looking for her. But she knew he would not. Her clever little speech equating kindness with manliness would force him through pride to give her the freedom he thought she desired.

In the room, near the ceiling, she saw darkness moving within darkness, a faint shadow of a human form descending steps. It reached the floor of the room and moved toward the staircase, and her.

She could shrink back no farther. Which one was it? Of the two, she was uncertain which she feared more. The worst demons were said to take upon themselves a benign aspect, the better to deceive and horrify. The younger in appearance, then, the boy, was more dangerous than the man. As he neared, it seemed that it was indeed the worse of the two, for the outline of his spectral form was smaller than that of the warrior.

The creature paused before entering the stairwell and looked out the window. He was not two paces from where Shizuka cowered against the wall. He turned into the starlight. She saw the gaunt and wrinkled face of an old man.

Shizuka screamed in helpless terror and ran into the stairwell. Caution destroyed by the shock of what she had seen, she half ran, half fell toward the ground. A demonic wailing pursued her all the way down. Only when she ran into Hironobu’s arms did she realize the wailing emanated from her own throat.

“Let none escape!” Hironobu ordered.

“Lord!” Samurai with drawn swords dashed into the tower.

Shizuka knew they would find no one, for no one was there, only ghosts.

Hirobonu held her firmly. “You are safe, Shizuka, you are safe.”

She clung desperately to Hironobu, her body trembling uncontrollably. No, she was not safe. She would never be safe again.

The instant before she screamed, she had thought she was seeing a third demon. Then in the old man’s face she recognized the boy, and the warrior. They were not three demons at all, but one and the same. He had caused his human aspect to age a lifetime in mere hours.

What would haunt her next? A rotting corpse?

A wave of bile surged up from her stomach. She locked her throat and held the bitter heat there for what seemed like a very long time before it seared the inside of her chest on the way back down.

Hironobu instantly fixed responsibility for the attack, which he supposed was by hired ninja, on a neighboring lord he had long disliked. Shizuka did not try to dissuade him. How could she? If she told him the attacker had been a demon and not a human being, and if he believed her, that would still not protect the enemy Hironobu had chosen. Once his suspicions were fixed, they always grew and grew until they attained the certainty of decisive evidence. A foul coward who would send a ninja would not hesitate to hire sorcerers to conjure up a demon. And if he did not believe her, if he doubted her sanity now, his responses could well be distorted when she shared her prophecies with him in the days to come. The outcomes she had foreseen would occur no matter what. But the surrounding consequences of those outcomes could be brutally different. She could not risk it. She had to let the innocent suffer and die.

That very night, Hironobu sent couriers to his chief vassals. Before the morning sun lifted the dew from the leaves, he and nine hundred mounted samurai rode off to the east to attack Lord Teruo. By then, the distress Shizuka had felt since the appearance of the demon had effloresced into high fever, chills, dizziness, and persistent nausea.

She retired to her quarters before sunset. She dismissed her ladies-in-waiting. They could do nothing to help her against any apparition. Like the nuns at the abbey, they would not have the slightest inkling of demonic presences. They would see only her behavior, and would simply think her mad. Guards remained in the corridor outside her bedroom. Since Hironobu had ordered them there, she could not send them away. She hoped she could restrain herself sufficiently that they would not hear too much.

If she had courage, she would not wait for the demon to come to her. She would go to the high tower and seek it out. But she was not that brave.

Alone, she was afraid to go and afraid to stay, afraid of sleep and afraid of wakefulness, afraid to meditate and afraid to give herself over to delusion. No place in the world nor any state of mind was a sanctuary.

When night came, her fever worsened. At last, overwhelmed by illness, fear, and exhaustion, she lay down. As soon as she did, she began to fade in and out of consciousness with deceptive subtlety. When she thought she was awake, she tried to move and found she could not. When she seemed to be asleep, she found herself thinking that she was asleep, which surely meant she was in fact awake. Yet, then, too, she could not move. The slightest shift of a little finger, the twitch of an eyelid, an alteration in her breathing, any change in the tension of her muscles — all were completely beyond her ability. As she struggled uselessly, she heard a distant, steady, high-pitched sound midway between a chirp and a whine. At first she took it for the singing of cicadas. But their characteristic cadence was absent. It was more like the dying peal of a temple gong, except instead of diminishing, it grew ever louder, ever more piercing. Was it a harbinger of the approaching demon? Again, she struggled to exert some control over her body, any control. Her external stillness belied the panic she felt, the terror caused more by fearful anticipation than by pain or paralysis. If only she could open her eyes, or clench a fist, or voice even a whisper—

Abruptly, the ringing ceased. In the same instant, she heard a voice outside her door.

“Why should I be afraid? It’s just a room, like any other.” It was a voice she did not recognize, the voice of a young man.

“Well, I am afraid,” Lady Sadako whispered. “Let us go elsewhere.”

“Coming here was your idea in the first place,” Kiyori said.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Lady Sadako said. She reached out and lightly placed her hands on his arm. She gently tugged at him and tried to draw him away before he opened the door. In the bright light of day, it was easy to laugh at the stories of evil, ghostly sorceresses. Here and now, with only distant stars and the slightest sliver of the waxing moon to light the world, ghosts and evil spirits did not seem so impossible.

“Please,” she said.

He hesitated. In truth, he was afraid, too. He was the only Okumichi of his generation. That meant he must be the one who would receive prophetic visions. From his reading of the secret chronicles of the clan, he knew that such visions had come to his predecessors in many ways and in many forms, some so ghastly that madness had been the result. Was he not tempting fate by visiting the former quarters of Lady Shizuka, the very sorceress who had brought the power of prophecy into his bloodline? But his desire to impress Sadako was greater than his fear. Why was difficult to say. At fourteen, she was a year younger than he, and seemed even younger. She was far from being the prettiest girl he knew. Her family was barely of sufficient rank to allow her entry to the Great Lord’s court. Yet, a mere character trait, her refreshing forthrightness, had won his affection as well as his admiration. Whenever she said something, he knew she meant it. Why that should attract him more than a beautiful face, a seductive manner, intimate skills, and clever words, he did not know. Perhaps there was something wrong with him.

“I have already said I would spend the night here,” Kiyori said. “The word of a Great Lord, once given, must be kept.” Because he had been Great Lord for all of three weeks, he was more emphatic about his status than he might otherwise have been.

“You didn’t exactly give your word,” Sadako said. “All you said was that you were not afraid to spend the night in the haunted part of the castle. And you only said it to me. And I believe you. Now, please, let’s go.”

“You may go,” Kiyori said grandly. “I have given my word, so I must stay as I said I would.”

He put his hand on the door and pushed. He hoped it was secured in some way that would prevent him from entering. But it slid open with ease. The room’s reputation was such that it required no locks. Priests and nuns cleaned this part of the castle daily, so there were no cobwebs, dust, or musty odor.

Sadako gasped and stepped back from the open doorway.

Kiyori looked inside. He saw nothing. But the shadows in the room made it even darker than it was in the hallway where they stood.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“Darkness,” she said, “an unnatural darkness. Please, I beg you, my lord, let us go.”

Sadako never called him “my lord” except in the most formal situations where it was completely unavoidable. She really was afraid. That knowledge made him behave more boldly than he felt. He stepped into the room and began to close the door behind him. As he had hoped, Sadako stepped in before the door shut. One of her hands was on his arm and the other was on his shoulder. He could feel her trembling body pressed against him.

“Be calm, Sadako,” Kiyori said, leading her deeper into the room. “Our eyes will adjust to the darkness. And the moon is rising. Soon, there will be more light.”

“There will be more light sooner if you open the door,” Sadako said, “or even if we stay near it.”

“If I open the door, I may be thought afraid. If we stay by it, again there is the appearance of fear. Here. We will sit by the alcove.”

“Isn’t that where people say she placed her bed?” Sadako stopped abruptly. Since she was still holding on to him, he had to stop, too.

“So people say. People say all kinds of things. It is best to trust one’s own judgment and not be influenced by the prattle of those who know nothing but speak much. Let us at least sit down.”

“It seems a little brighter now,” Sadako said, following his suggestion and seating herself. “But I still can’t see much of anything.”

“We forgot to bring bedding,” Kiyori said with studied casualness. “We will have to sleep on the bare mats.” Her reliance on him gave him a pleasing sense of confidence. He leaned back and began to stretch out on the floor.

And instantly plunged into impossibility. In one single moment, freezing cold and burning flames consumed him; the weight of the earth crushed him into a single infinitesimal point while the lightness of heaven pulled him apart into every direction of the cosmos; inconceivable pain racked his body and limitless ecstasy brought him liberation.