The Night Itself

by Zoe Marriott

  “He’s horrible,” I whispered.

  “Oh yes, he is. His wife intervened, weeping and begging him not to murder their offspring. Instead of flinging the children into the water to drown, she made her husband put them into a reed boat, in the hope that they would float to a new land where someone would find and care for them. But that was all she could do for the unwanted babies, for she knew that if she tried to keep them, her husband would never be satisfied until he had killed them and wiped their ugliness and his failure away.

  “The king and queen tried again for children, and this time their efforts were rewarded, and the queen had many good, strong babies that were lovely enough to satisfy her husband.

  “But just as their happiness seemed perfect, something went wrong again. The queen gave birth to a child that was too strong, too powerful, whose power was as great as the fire of the sun. And in giving life to the child, the queen died. Again the king raged and stormed, his fury fuelled by the agony of his grief for his beloved mate, and this time there was no compassionate wife to beg for mercy for the child. The king killed him, and in the same insanity of sorrow, he broke open the great gates of Yomi, the Underworld, where all immortal spirits dwell in eternal darkness, and began to call out for his dead queen, his lost wife, to come back to him.

  “For days the king wandered through the pitch-blackness of the Underworld, searching for the queen. Finally he found her, knowing her by the soft touch of her hand and the musical beauty of her voice, and his joy was great. But the queen was horrified that he had come, and told him that he must go back, must leave without her, for she had eaten the food of Yomi and could never now return to the lands of the living.

  “The king was not swayed by these words. He told her that his love for her was as wide as the ends of the earth, as deep as the bottom of the sea, and higher than the highest peak of the sky, and that he would never leave Yomi unless she came with him at his side. The queen was convinced of his devotion and agreed to travel back with him into the light again. In his happiness and his eagerness to leave that chill and shadowy place, the king forgot himself, and forgot that Yomi is dark for a reason. And so he lit a torch in order to guide them quickly from that realm of shadows. The moment the light flared the queen cried out. The king quickly turned to her, and then cried out himself, for he saw—”

  A loud bang at the bedroom door nearly made me jump right out of the bed. But it wasn’t a creature from the Underworld; it was my dad, angry with my grandfather for telling me “ghoulish” stories that he was convinced would give me nightmares. Banging on the door was Dad’s way of telling my grandfather to stop. If Ojiichan didn’t emerge from the room in a minute or less, then he’d come in and shout at us.

  After Ojiichan had kissed me on the forehead and wished me good night, he promised in a whisper that he would tell me the rest the next day. But the next day when I got up, I found Ojiichan lying in a boneless heap at the bottom of the stairs. He’d had a massive stroke.

  He was dead a day later.

  I know that no one likes hospitals. But ever since Ojiichan died, the way I feel goes beyond that. I hate them.

  The moment the police walked us into the A&E, it was pretty much all I could do to stop myself from running right back out again. I balked at the second lot of electronic doors as a gust of that sickening hospital smell smacked me right in the nose. Shinobu stopped just behind me, and I could feel the warmth of his hand hovering at my back, not quite touching me.

  “Are you all right?” he murmured.

  The sight of Jack’s anxious face turning back to look for me forced me to nod and take that step inside.

  They separated us almost at once. While Jack went to have x-rays as a matter of urgency – the female officer right behind her – I was left in the bustling emergency waiting area. There didn’t seem to be much else to do but sit down. As soon as I did, the male police officer sat in the seat next to me. Shinobu had stopped at the entrance, putting his back to one pale blue wall as he stared around at the hospital with wide eyes.

  I caught his gaze and tried to indicate to him with a jerk of my head that he ought to take the seat on my other side. The policeman gave me a funny look. But Shinobu hesitantly came forward and dropped down onto the uncomfortable plastic seat so it seemed worth it.

  We sat like that for about half an hour. The police officer asked me a few more questions – mostly the same questions, actually, but phrased slightly differently – noted down my answers in his little book, then finally decided to go and look for his partner.

  He didn’t come back.

  Sticking to my role as a mild-mannered, innocent, bewildered teen hadn’t taken much effort. It was pretty close to the truth anyway. But at least it had been something to concentrate on. The second the officer was gone, my brain started to go haywire.

  I’d come within an inch of dying an hour ago. Not dying in a car crash or some normal accident that could happen to anyone – murdered. Killed by a monster so awful that it shouldn’t even exist in people’s nightmares. Only it did exist in mine.

  Then I was remembering Ojiichan, lying in the bed in the High Dependency ward, and the dry rasping noises of his last breaths, the sight of the skin around his mouth crinkling up like tissue paper, that dull milky sheen on his eyes.

  Stop it, I told myself fiercely. That’s not helping. Just think about something else!

  Like what? Like the sight of Jack lying under that pile of metal debris? Like how it felt not to know, for a minute, if she was even alive or dead?

  “Oh God,” I whispered, putting my hands over my face. They blocked out the too-bright lights reflecting off the cold blue walls, but not the constant background noises of suppressed panic and pain that grated over my senses or that hospital smell that was choking my lungs. Why didn’t they spray some freaking air freshener? It smelled nearly as bad as that thing – that awful thing – and it’s cold, creeping tentacles. God, what was it? Could it possibly be real?

  Why did it come after me? Why did it want my sword?

  “Mio-dono?”

  It was freezing in here, icy blasts of air coming in through the door every time a new casualty arrived. I could feel myself shivering, but sweat was standing out on my face, sticky and uncomfortable.

  What is happening to me?

  “Mio!”

  I jumped, pulling my hands away from my face. The boy was crouched on the floor in front of me, staring up into my face.

  “Look at me,” he said, his voice low, a little rough. He leaned forward protectively. “I’m here. Don’t be afraid.”

  Reluctantly I met his eyes. There was real concern there, as if he knew me. As if he cared about me. Without understanding why, I felt myself start to relax a little.

  “Who are you?” I whispered shakily. “I don’t mean … I remember what you said, but who are you? Why—” I almost chickened out, then forced myself to say it. “Why have we been dreaming about each other?”

  Suddenly he had that wary, vulnerable look again. “You have seen me in your dreams?”

  “Yes. For a long time. Years.” I tried to figure out his expression. “I saw you fighting that monster. I saw you turn it into stone, and then I saw… I saw you …” Die. “… fall.”

  His lips pressed together. “The connection runs both ways then. Did you see anything else? Did you see what happened after that?”

  A green blade flashing down in the red light… I frowned as the memory jolted through me. “Not really. What did happen?”

  “Mio-dono, the last thing I remember that is real to me is the battle you saw in your dream. I was struck down, and I thought I would die and go to meet my ancestors. Instead … when at last I awakened, I was trapped. I know not where. There was no light. No nothing. Only confinement and blackness and cold. Endless cold. There was no time for me in that place. I might have been trapped for minutes or days or months or … longer. I faded in and out of awareness, and I wondered, when I could make space within
my suffering to wonder, if I was in Yomi, punished, or exiled, or forgotten by the gods.”

  “That’s – that’s horrible.”

  “But then something changed,” he said, leaning further into me. “I began to see things in the dark. See and hear and feel. I saw an impossible place, with buildings like mountains, where people spoke a strange, garbled tongue. I saw monstrous machines, and great wonders. And I saw…”

  “Me and Jack?” I finished, remembering what he had said before.

  “When you were together, yes. Mainly, I saw you. Felt you…” His eyes dropped to my lips. “I saw everything that you did. Heard what you did. I felt what you felt, and knew when you were sad, hungry, angry, afraid… It is from you that I learned to speak this language – English?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “I have seen this world before, through your eyes. Though it is very different being here in my own body. Being able to see and hear for myself, being able to touch…” His tanned fingers flexed on his knee, millimetres from mine. His hand was long and bony, and flecked with tiny white scars.

  “Then when you said you didn’t know how you’d got here or where you came from, you literally meant that. The last thing that happened to you was—”

  Death.

  He nodded, his face grave and set.

  “And then” – I snapped my fingers – “you’re free, and you appear here, just in time to save me from a horrible death?”

  His eyes flashed up to mine. A beautiful, slightly crooked smile spread over his face, lighting it up like a sudden blinding flash of the sun through thick clouds on a cold day. And just as suddenly, it was gone, leaving him thoughtful again.

  “Yes,” he breathed. “Just in time. Mio-dono, I was with you yesterday when you entered the dark room upstairs in your parents’ house and took out the sword – my sword. But I saw something you did not see. When you laid hands on it you … you burst into light, into white flames that swirled around you and through you. Almost at once you began to feel things and see things. Shades, shadows, things that weren’t there. Those flames did something to you. The sword did something to you.”

  “Wait. What about that guy? That guy who called himself the Harbinger. Was he real? Did I hallucinate him too?”

  “No,” Shinobu said emphatically. “He was real. Even in the cold and dark I could feel his power. I do not know what he is, but he is … inimical to humans.”

  “Then I got hit by that car,” I said slowly, following events back in my mind. “I thought I was going to die, but I heard a voice, telling me it would be all right. It was your voice.”

  He lifted his head again. His eyes almost nailed me to the seat with their intensity. “You were dying. I could feel it. I reached out and tried to pull you back. I tried with everything I had. I strained and fought the blackness as I had never had the strength to fight before. Something … cracked. Within me or within my prison. Energy spilled out – more white flames – and for a moment you and I and the flames were … one.”

  “Miss Yamato?”

  I leapt up as if my seat had burned me. A new police officer – not one of the ones who had brought us here – stood near by. Oh my God. He couldn’t see Shinobu, so it must have looked as though I was having an intense conversation with thin air.

  I forced myself to answer. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Your friend has had her x-rays. She’s asking for you, and I have some questions for you both. Then we can get you home. Come this way.”

  Despite the reassuring words, the man’s voice was strangely flat and metallic, like he was really furious about something and trying to hide it. I tried to check his expression, but he had already turned away from me and was heading past the rows of seats towards a door on the other side of the waiting room.

  “I think I’m in trouble,” I muttered to Shinobu as I followed the policeman, concealing the movement of my lips with a fake cough.

  “You have done nothing wrong,” Shinobu said. “They cannot punish you.”

  “Shows how much you know about the British legal system,” I said weakly.

  The policeman pushed the door open. He gestured curtly for me to step into the room ahead of him. Shinobu slipped in silently, and the door clicked shut behind us.

  It was an ordinary examination room, with a desk crowded with messy papers and an ancient computer, a curtain on a rail surrounding a high bed, and metal blinds over the windows. Jack was perched on the edge of the bed, looking bored. Her face lit up when she saw me. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Shinobu shouted.

  I spun round.

  He was frozen in the middle of the room, hands outstretched as if he had been trying to reach for me. His eyes were completely blank. Like a shop dummy. I looked at Jack to see if this really was my imagination, or something real again. She was caught mid-movement too, one foot on the floor, eyes glazed over.

  It was as if someone had hit the pause button on both of them.

  Someone?

  For the first time I tried to look straight into the policeman’s face. I couldn’t.

  Even in the bright fluorescent lights, even standing right in front of him, I still could not see him. My eyes just wouldn’t focus. It was like looking into a black hole.

  “What are you?” I whispered.

  He dissolved into darkness.

  The room filled with a wild, screaming wind that lifted me from my feet and threw me backwards into the wall. My head bounced off the plaster, and I cried out. I felt the katana rip through the material of my coat again, shredding what was left of the shoulder to pieces.

  I hung helplessly, feet dangling above the ground. Papers flew around me, shredding in the air. The blinds rattled like bones. My back and ribs screamed with strain. The wind was trying to push me right through the plasterboard.

  The seething mass of darkness was directly in front of me, warping and stretching, changing. It became a human torso in a long, black kimono, the fabric covered with strange patterns of gold. Something pale slid up into view, the shadows trickling away from it like water down a window. A face.

  Its proportions were strange, subtly skewed, too long and delicate to be right. Its eyes were closed, and its expression was blank. It was the man from Natalie’s party.

  The Harbinger.

  Nothing was holding me to the wall. He wasn’t even touching me. But I couldn’t get free. My breath gulped and sobbed as his power drummed at me, pummelling my skin, my bones, my hair, my teeth: Worship me, worship me, worship me…

  When his eyelids lifted his eyes were gone. There were only shining, white globes, rooted in his skull, burning into me.

  He held the unsheathed katana in one hand. The saya lay carelessly discarded on the ground at his feet. Tiny sparks of pale energy danced up and down the blade, bounced off his hand. I could feel the singing vibration of the sword reaching out to me, trying to find me, but something blocked it. He blocked it. He had taken my sword from me.

  “What a small, ugly thing you are,” he said, contempt and a vast weariness edging his voice. “But you are the last of your line, so I shall preserve your life. Since your family seem to have neglected your education, I now do you the honour of enlightening your appalling ignorance. Listen to me closely, for I am the one whom it is your purpose to serve. Never forget that. You belong to me. This sword belongs to me. Everything belongs to me.” He lifted the sword and allowed the tip to hover at the vulnerable curve of my throat. The proximity burned, as if he was aiming a laser at my skin. The katana was crying out for me, but I couldn’t move, and it hurt.

  “You are Yamato. You exist to protect the katana, as generations of your ancestors have done before you, stretching back to the day I first chose them. You will not fail me. If the sword is lost, you will die, hell shall open, and shadows and blood will devour this world. Do you understand?” The words reeled out of his mouth almost by rote, as if he had said them a thousand times before.

  I nodded, th
e tiny, pained movement the only one I was capable of. My fingers clenched and my toes curled as the constriction on my chest increased. I could barely breathe.

  The Harbinger sneered and turned away, removing the blade from my neck. He lifted the sword, pointing… Pointing to Shinobu.

  Shinobu jerked back to life. He took one look at the situation – me hanging from the wall, the man standing in front of me, the katana in his hand – and blanched. Fury filled his face. He leapt forward.

  The sword shrieked, the sound of its pain vibrating through me.

  Lightning sparked at the tip of the blade.

  Stakes of crackling white energy shot through Shinobu’s body. He let out a hoarse cry, doubling up in agony. No, no, no!

  “Don’t.” It took every bit of strength I had to force the word out. My voice was slurred and stumbling, as if I was drunk.

  More bars of light sliced through Shinobu, impaling him to the floor. His voice cut off as if he had no more breath, but I could still see him moving, struggling, his hands clutching at the lino floor. His head flung back and I could see the shape of his mouth stretched into a silent scream.

  “Stop it!” My back arched and was slammed against the wall. “Why?”

  The Harbinger made a tiny tut of disgust. “So very stupid. I am repairing the damage – the damage that you have carelessly allowed, girl. Be grateful you are the last Yamato or I would have punished you for that carelessness.”

  The bars of light sparked. Shinobu convulsed as if he was being shocked, his eyes rolling back in their sockets.

  Then he began to fade. Literally fade away. The colours seeped out of him, like a watercolour if someone spills liquid on it. I could see the pattern of the lino through his back. He was disappearing right in front of my eyes. White fire flared up on the katana’s blade, rippling along the shining black-and-white curve. The steel almost glowed with relentless solidity as Shinobu disappeared.