The Night Parade (19 page)

“I owe you even more now. Whatever you want, just name it.”

Maeda laughed through the pain as the shape of the house appeared through the trees. “A glass of water would be nice.”

Saki left her on the steps outside and kicked off the garden shoes. The village was so small and the house was so far up the mountain that Grandma never locked her door. Saki hurried to the kitchen to pour a glass of water.

Maeda took the glass with one hand and caught Saki's wrist in the other. “You're still taking me, aren't you?”

Saki opened her mouth, but the lie withered on her tongue. She'd already ruined too many lives in the last few days; she wouldn't let anyone else suffer. Even if Maeda could walk, the spirit world was no longer parades and adventures. The darkness that had taken over was far too dangerous for any mere human.

Saki looked out at the forest, her mouth thin with guilt and worry. Maeda released her with a pained smile.

“That's just my luck. Next time then. Just be careful, okay?”

Saki couldn't think of anything clever to say. If she was wrong, there wouldn't be a next time. But Maeda believed her. She had to start believing in herself, mere human or not. In lieu of words, Saki flashed the other girl a peace sign and disappeared back into the house.

In the corner room, the clothes she'd worn to bed had been washed and stacked in the corner. Her phone, Grandpa's metal charm dangling from the side, sat on top. Saki rifled through each pocket and turned over every piece of bedding, but the pouch of flat marbles was gone. Even a search of her brother's things yielded nothing. Either her mother had taken the marbles before she'd brought Saki to the doctor, or they never made it back from the spirit world at all. There was no time to fret over the loss. Marbles or not, she would make the climb.

Saki opened the sliding door to the walkway. The forest was purple in the last rays of the sun, and soon darkness would descend over the mountain.

The geta with the shadow straps didn't appear, and there was no guide to lead her up the hidden roads. A voice at the back of her mind told Saki that the door was closed forever, but she squashed the thought and began the hunt for a new pair of shoes. The garden slippers she'd borrowed from Maeda were two sizes too big, and her own shoes were missing from the front entrance.

At the back of the house, the bins of junk from their afternoon cleaning sat underneath the walkway. Saki leaned over and pulled out two mismatched straw sandals. They were worn out and some of their straps were shrunken, but her feet were small enough to fit.

The scratchy straw reminded her of the object spirits. They'd said that an object gained a soul on its hundredth birthday, and that the objects remembered the people who had been kind to them. She didn't know how long the sandals had been in Grandma's storeroom, but it was worth a try. Before she strapped them to her feet, she held the sandals to her chest and closed her eyes.

“Please,” she whispered. “Help me get to the shrine. I need to make sure everyone is safe. I want to make everything right.”

She tied the old straw to her feet. The fiber was itchy against her skin, not at all like the wooden geta, but they did the job. Saki slid off the walkway. With one last guilty glance at the house, she turned to search for a path up the mountain.

The tanuki's back road was gone, and Saki couldn't find the Pilgrim's Road either. Behind her, the way to town was quiet, but it was only a matter of time before the doctor noticed she was missing.

She hurried over to the path she'd taken on her first day in the village, the human path that led up to the plain, old, tumbledown shrine. Her trials had started there. That was where she'd seen the black tendrils for the first time.

After the fox had left her alone in the grove of the tree spirits, she'd seen them again. At the edge of the grove, through the forest darkness, the fallen tree's infection leaked from the real world into the spirit world. It lay dead on the hallowed ground of the shrine, tainting the purity of the entire mountain.

When her grandfather was still alive, nothing would have been allowed to rot so long on sacred ground. Even if the village only used the shrine once or twice a year, he had made sure that everything was in balance.

The Welcome Fire was supposed to invite the souls of the dead to share the world of the living, but Saki had picked the branch of a dead tree for the invocation. The evil spirit was right. She'd opened the gate.

Despite her fever, Saki loped up the mountain path. Any gate that was opened could be closed again, and an invitation could always be revoked. Tonight was the last night of Obon. If she couldn't save the spirits she'd already lost, at least she could stop the evil spirit from doing any more damage.

In the human world, the torii gates looked small and frail. Whispers followed Saki from the woods, but she would not let herself be scared. She reached the last gate before her strength ran out, and she stumbled to the stone water basin.

She washed with shaking hands. After each palm was clean, she brought the ladle of water to her lips and rinsed her mouth. From the gate behind her, she sensed a heavy nod of approval, but when she turned her head, the movement was only a shadow of the leaves on the gate.

“It's you, isn't it?” she said aloud and smiled at the gatekeeper, invisible to her human eyes on this side of the veil. Saki bowed her head. “Thank you for your vigilance.”

Moonlight filtered over the shrine grounds. She'd been here with the tengu. The buildings were smaller in the human world, but the style was the same. If she looked around a rock, she was sure to find a slug or a toad.

As Saki made her way to the back of the shrine, panic fluttered in her stomach. The branches of the healthy sakaki trees swayed in the wind, and an insect buzzed by her ear. She slapped the bug away, but the buzzing grew stronger, shaking her down to her bones.

“Relax,” she told herself. “It's just a tree.”

Her hand slipped into her pocket and rubbed her grandfather's charm. In another heartbeat, some of the fear fell back, and she pressed on through the grove.

Long before she picked the dead tree's form out in the dark, she felt its malevolence rippling through the woods. It lay fallen at the edge of the grove, the space around it barren and lifeless. She forced her feet forward. The straps of the straw sandals dug into her skin, and the pain kept her from losing herself in the waves of fear. The silver spirit's words came to her again.

You must hold close to courage. Do not fear the night.

As if breaking through a nightmare, Saki marched straight toward the dead log. Age and termites had eaten away at most of its branches, but one still remained, wedged beneath the weight of the tree and the earth below.

She grasped the branch with both hands. The bark was slick with rot. She dug in with her nails and pulled, but the wood refused to yield.

Insects darted across her skin. They pricked and buzzed, taking her blood but not her nerve. She braced one foot against the log and pulled again. Part of the branch tore away from the tree. She heaved back once more, all of her weight behind her.

The bark under her foot crumbled with the pressure. Her leg plowed into the heart of the rotten tree, burying her to the ankle. She kicked to get it out, but something in the tree held her inside, the rot wet and cold against her skin. She didn't dare let go now.

With a cry, Saki pried her foot free. Filth soaked the straw sandal, and a thin film lay over her bare foot. From the hole in the bark, a dark shape moved. A black tendril wriggled out, only a finger's breadth from her hands.

She dug her heels into the earth and pulled the branch with all of her strength.

“You don't belong here!” she shouted. She wouldn't let the darkness infect her world as well. The rot stopped with her.

Through the buzzing of the insects, the trees of the sakaki grove rattled their leaves. Saki blinked away tears of frustration. With her eyes half-closed, she thought she saw small white hands fall against her skin. A surge of strength rushed to her aching arms.

The rotten branch snapped off, and the force threw her back onto the ground. She scrambled to her feet, branch in hand, and wiped her hair away from her face. A streak of tree rot from her hands smeared against her cheek.

The black tendril in the bark was gone. The chill on her ankle prickled where the liquid rot met the night air, but all around her, the forest had quieted. Even the cicadas had ceased their endless cries. Saki took a breath and silently thanked the living grove for its help.

The stillness remained. Not a single leaf stirred. No sound met her ears but her own panting breath.

A noiseless figure snaked along the ground. A dozen more tendrils reappeared at the spot where she'd broken off the twig. As they built onto one another, they stretched out, groping over the earth to search for their missing piece.

Saki took a step back.

More tendrils poured from the sides of the log. From every rotten sore in the bark, every crack and crease, hundreds of slithering shapes appeared. They wove together until the mass grew tall enough to block out the moonlight.

Saki turned and ran.

The wave crashed behind her. The tendrils shot along the ground, running into the tiny buildings of the shrine. Saki darted back to the main path. The black tendrils cut her off. She changed directions so quickly that one of her straw sandals flew off into the woods. Without any weapons or any other way to fight, all she could do was flee. She had to survive long enough to burn the branch and end this.

The grove, the shrine, and the path were lost. That left only the woods. Saki turned downhill and charged. The tendrils followed, but as they moved farther from the shrine, their movements slowed. Saki spared a glance back and saw nothing but the still woods.

She turned down the mountain once more and slowed to a halt. Between two trees, another girl was waiting.

“You shouldn't be walking on that foot,” Saki called, but the breathless reprimand was swallowed up by the forest. She squeezed the branch and took another step when the wet, putrid smell in the air made her pause. “Maeda?”

The girl lifted her head. Saki met her own face, the dark brown eyes she stared into every day in the mirror, the same sweat-damp clothes. A perfect copy, except for the black veins twisting and writhing beneath the skin.

“How did you…” Saki flicked a glance over her shoulder for only a split second. In another instant, the creature's rotten breath brushed her cheek.

“You took a bit of me. It's only fair.”

Saki jerked away. She scrambled back, her eyes never leaving the uncanny figure, until her spine slammed against the bark of a tree trunk. The living ghost followed with certain steps and a too-sharp smile.

“Where are you going? It's all gone,” said the creature. It had taken her voice too. “That's the way of nature. Life to death, day to night…you to me.”

“You're wrong. It was my mistake. Please don't punish anyone else for it.”

The creature was close enough that Saki could see the tendrils pulsing under its stolen skin. “But was it really a mistake? Give up, little girl. You'll be—”

Saki shoved the creature away. It tumbled downhill and slid to a stop, facedown in the underbrush. Saki's whole body was trembling as she crept around the tree trunk.

The leaves began to stir. The creature sat up again and stared at her with a face plagued by slick black tendrils. The wiggling worms wove the copy's jaw back together. It had not yet finished when the creature spoke again. The voice it had stolen rasped with layers of muted screams.

“You had the chance. Now after I've sucked the marrow from the spirit world, I'll taste a bit of yours.” Its jaw opened, half-latticed with tendrils. A thick black sludge dripped down its chin and hissed onto the forest floor. “How many treats have you been saving for me in that big house down below?”

The house.
Maeda was there, helpless. Her parents and her brother would return soon. Grandma… She couldn't live if she let anything happen to them.

Saki finally turned her back and ran uphill. She pushed again for the shrine and whatever desperate hope remained as a fresh, raw panic pumped through her blood.

The creature in her skin was waiting at the clearing. The black tendrils slithered along the ground near its bare feet, encircling the shrine. They looped behind Saki, cutting off her only means of escape. She skidded to a stop, her breaths in wild gasps.

She'd lost the marbles, but there was one last weapon she could use against a spirit. Saki snapped her grandfather's metal charm off the phone and flipped open the screen.

“If you're going to be me, you'll be needing this.”

The phone cast a pale electric glow as she lobbed the plastic at the imposter. The figure froze. The plastic case struck the darkness at its heart. In another instant, the human shape burst into a mass of inky tendrils. They recoiled but did not retreat.

Saki held the rotten branch in one hand and her grandfather's charm in the other. The metal was warm against her skin. It lit something inside of her, like the glow of the butterfly messenger.

The Path of the Gods…a road beyond the shrine…the sure of heart.

More than ever, she was sure.

Saki charged behind the shrine buildings and up toward the mountain peak before the tendrils had a chance to regroup. She was past the last boundary when a beam of moonlight shone through the forest onto the hidden path.

Leaves slapped her in the face, and branches scratched at her arms, but she ran too fast to feel the pain. She couldn't hear a sound outside the thundering of her own heart, but she could smell the stink on the air as the darkness approached from behind.

It took only one misstep. She stumbled and slid backward. She risked a glance over her shoulder, and her breath froze in her lungs. The black tendrils were in full pursuit. They'd chained together and flooded the path behind her like a swelling tide.