Spirits of the Noh

by Thomas Randall

  Kara brought her guitar around in front of her and held it steady, for the first time considering it a potential weapon as she hurried through the darkest part of the night.

  When she emerged from that narrow space onto the moonlit field behind the school, she did not breathe a sigh of relief. Only when she had made it nearly halfway across and saw Hachiro come out the front door of the dormitory did Kara allow herself to relax, and to smile at how much she’d let her imagination get the better of her.

  Afraid of the dark, she thought. Big loser.

  But even as the words entered her mind, she dismissed them. Maybe it really had been her imagination, but she couldn’t blame herself for being afraid of the nighttime.

  Hachiro waved and started across the grass. Kara hurried to meet him.

  She’d gotten close enough to see the smile on his face and the gleam of his eyes, and then a scream split the night, echoing, drifting toward them on the wind.

  Kara and Hachiro both spun toward the sound. It came from the school, but not the building itself. As the echoes died, Kara narrowed her eyes, pinpointing the origins of the scream. It had come from the darkness on the west side of the building, near the school’s driveway and parking lot.

  “Come on!” Unslinging her guitar, Kara set it on the ground and took off at a sprint.

  Hachiro grabbed her arm. “Wait! We should get someone!”

  “There isn’t time,” Kara said.

  The voice cried out again—a girl’s voice—but now instead of a scream there were words, a torrent of Japanese swears, and pleas to leave her alone. Blinking in shock, Kara realized that she knew that voice.

  “Miho,” she whispered.

  This time Hachiro didn’t try to stop her. They ran together across the field, barreling along a track worn into the grass by students walking back and forth. Hachiro took the lead, his legs much longer than hers, but Kara had speed and managed not to drop behind much farther.

  Thoughts of missing students and whispered curses crowded her brain and she pushed them aside, focusing on Miho—smiling Miho, hair pulled back on one side, rolling her eyes heavenward whenever Sakura or Kara behaved inappropriately. Keeping that image in her mind, Kara pushed herself harder, breath coming fast, legs pumping under her.

  Miho came whipping around the corner, arms outflung as she changed direction, angling toward the dorm. She slammed into Hachiro and the two of them fell in a tangle of limbs. Miho cried out in a mixture of surprise, pain, and fear, and as Hachiro groaned and tried to extricate himself from her, she began to fight him, trying to get free, perhaps to keep running. Her eyes were wide and she kept glancing back the way she’d come, into the darkness alongside the school.

  “Stop,” Kara said, dropping to her knees beside them and reaching for the other girl’s hands. “Miho, it’s okay. It’s us. It’s—”

  Her words froze in her throat. She’d looked into those shadows as well, the darkness from which Miho had just emerged, and she’d seen something there. For just an instant, Kara’s breath had caught, and she’d seen a silhouette in the shadows, swaying as though blown by the breeze, or like a snake summoned from its basket by a flute in some old cartoon. Had it been a woman? She thought so.

  Yet now it was gone, the silhouette vanishing, swallowed by the deeper shadows.

  “Kara?”

  She looked down. Hachiro had managed to free himself from Miho’s flailing arms and now the girl sat beside him, eyes frantic, gazing from Kara to the darkness and back again.

  A hiss came from the darkness, and then the soft shush of something moving along the ground. The small hairs on the back of Kara’s neck stood up and gooseflesh pimpled her skin.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered.

  And then the sound was gone, and the shadows were only shadows.

  “You saw it, didn’t you?” Miho demanded. “I heard it on the grass, coming after me. I knew it was there. I only caught a glimpse, but …”

  She shuddered.

  Hachiro stood and reached a hand down for Miho. Kara only spared a glance at them, focusing instead on the shadows.

  “I saw … something. Kind of felt it, too,” Kara replied. She thought of her fear from a few minutes earlier, the sense that someone had been watching her, but now she thought that had truly only been her nerves. What had just been here, after Miho, had weight and presence. It felt … the only word she could think of was sinister. An old-fashioned sort of word, but it fit.

  “It was chasing you?” Hachiro asked.

  Miho nodded. “I was coming from Kara’s house.”

  As she offered this, her gaze darkened with some unpleasant memory, and Kara thought she saw anger there.

  “Why were you at my house?” Kara asked.

  “Later,” Miho replied. “Right now—”

  “We have to get inside,” Hachiro said, as the three of them started back toward the dormitory, glancing repeatedly over their shoulders toward the place where Kara had seen that ghostly silhouette.

  “I’ve got to get home,” Kara said, suddenly realizing her predicament. To get back to her house, she’d have to pass through the very same shadows through which someone or something had just chased Miho.

  “You could call your father,” Hachiro said. “Ask him to come get you.”

  “And when he asks why?” Kara wondered.

  “You tell him. Or you lie,” Miho said. “But you can’t walk home through that alone, and I’m not going back.”

  Hachiro held up a hand. “I’ll walk you,” he said, looking at Kara with a gentle half smile. “Let’s just get Miho safely into the dorm, and—”

  “No,” Kara said. “Then you’d have to walk back alone. And besides, it’s got to be close to curfew now as it is. I’ll call him. I don’t feel like asking him for anything right now, but he’ll come get me.”

  “What will you say?” Miho asked.

  “I’ll say maybe he was right, that I shouldn’t have gone out alone after dark, that I’m scared. The truth, basically. Only without monsters.”

  Miho hugged herself, glancing back at the darkness as the three of them walked across the field toward the dorm. Kara and Hachiro kept Miho between them. When they reached the place where Kara had put down her guitar, she picked it up and slung it over her shoulder.

  “When you’re ready, we should talk about it,” Kara said.

  “Not yet.” Miho shuddered. “Wait until we’re inside. I want lights and locked doors. I want to hide under my covers.”

  Kara understood, and fought the urge to try to comfort Miho with humor. Reminding her that her sheet and blanket weren’t much protection wouldn’t be funny right now. If ever.

  “I thought I saw a girl,” Hachiro said, whispering as he pulled open the door of the dormitory and stood back to let them pass. “Or a woman.”

  Miho shook her head. “That wasn’t a woman. No matter what it looked like.”

  8

  Kara’s father picked her up in front of the dorm, shooting a stern look at Hachiro as the boy escorted her to the car. It was a total Dad look, and Kara wanted to shout at her father. What, did he think Hachiro had caused the fight they’d had earlier? That he had done something to upset her enough that she didn’t want to walk home? Stupid. She knew that all guys could be stupid sometimes, that they lost the ability to interpret what their eyes were showing them, but it still frustrated her hugely when her father turned out to be one of those men.

  Yeah, Dad, she wanted to say, Hachiro is the problem.

  Sigh.

  Hachiro carried her guitar, put it into the backseat, and headed back into the dorm with about three minutes to spare before curfew. Kara sat in silence beside her father as he turned the car around and drove the almost absurdly short distance back to their house. She had figured he would assume her silence stemmed from their fight, and Kara let him go on thinking that. She wasn’t ready to explain.

  “Look,” he said, reverting to English. That was getting to be a habit n
ow, whenever things between them grew tense. “I should have talked to you more about what’s going on between Yuuka … I mean, Aritomo-sensei … and me. But, honey, you can’t pretend you didn’t see this coming. You were the only one who did. I wasn’t looking, and you know that. You know it. And you seemed to want something to happen with us—”

  Kara heard the pain and confusion in his voice and knew she had caused it. Her heart gave a painful twist.

  “I did,” she admitted, sticking to Japanese. “At first.”

  “And now?” her father said, returning to Japanese as well, as if in reaction to her. It seemed safer, somehow, the foreign language putting distance between them.

  He pulled the car in beside the house and killed the engine, then looked over at her expectantly. What did he want her to say?

  Whatever it was, it would have been a lie.

  “Now I need to sleep,” she said. “It’s been a weird night.”

  She opened the door and he reached over to touch her arm. Kara glanced sidelong at him. The pleading look had left his face, and now he only seemed frustrated.

  He went back to English. “I’m dealing with these feelings as they hit me, honey. Same way you do. I can’t consult you on them before I even know what I’m feeling.”

  Kara forced herself to smile. “I know that,” she said, relenting by returning to English as well. “Come on, let’s go in.”

  That seemed to satisfy him, but Kara had said it only to end the conversation. She needed time alone—time to think. The instant she was inside the house she made a beeline to her bedroom and shut her door. She’d left her guitar in the car, but no way would she be going out to get it before sunrise.

  Miho lay in her bed, covers pulled tight around her, feeling vulnerable in just her T-shirt and underwear. A small fan buzzed at the end of her bed, where she had clipped it to the edge of her desk. The windows were shut tight and locked. Living on the third floor ought to have given her a sense of security, and once upon a time it had. No longer.

  The small reading lamp on her desk remained lit. Sakura had known better than to protest. Especially after the whole thing with Ren. Miho had confronted them while they waited for Kara’s father, and told them of her humiliation in front of Ren. Both girls had been hugely apologetic. According to Kara, Miho had “gone so quiet” about her crush on Ren that they had thought she was over him. She had been so angry at them, but that had sprung from her own embarrassment. Her friends loved her and would never have knowingly put her in a position like that. Miho knew that.

  It all seemed so foolish now. In comparison to whatever had chased her out there in the dark, and the sheer hunger she had felt emanating from it, a little humiliation was nothing. Someday, she might even find her fumbling flirtation with Ren funny. Not tonight, though. Tonight, nothing was funny.

  Miho took a deep breath and shifted under the sheet. In the dim glow of that tiny light, she watched Sakura sleeping, grateful for her presence. She could never have stayed in the room by herself.

  Mustering her courage, Miho closed her eyes and hated the darkness behind them. It took her back immediately to the hissing she’d heard in the shadow of the school, away from the moonlight, and the fear that had rushed into her heart returned. She’d been marching back to the dorm from Kara’s house. Had she heard something, noticed something in the shadows? Probably. All Miho knew was that her anger had slipped away and she found herself listening intently to the darkness coalescing around her.

  Something had slithered in the grass. Soft hissing began, mixed with hitching breaths that might have been quiet laughter. She’d frozen and turned, her eyes struggling to adjust to the night. Against the wall of the school she could barely make out a patch of darkness deeper than night. At first she thought it was a person, a woman maybe, from the hair, but then it moved ever so slowly, inching nearer, and turned its head, and she saw the monstrous silhouette of its face, ridged and smooth, jaws opening wide, the tiniest glint of moonlight catching on the wet, black spikes of its teeth. It wanted her. She felt that very keenly.

  The hissing noise issued from its open mouth, and Miho screamed. Letting out a stream of swears and pleas, she had run, careening out of control along the side of the school, just above the parking lot, and then emerged into the golden glow of the moon and collided into Hachiro.

  And what if he hadn’t been there? she thought now, alone in bed. What if Kara and Hachiro had not been around? Where would you be now?

  Her eyes opened and she stared over at Sakura, who slept so soundly in her bed. Miho clenched her jaw tight, unwilling to say her roommate’s name, though she longed for company, for someone to talk to. It confused and frustrated her that she felt so grateful to her friends, when the curse that nearly claimed her tonight had been Sakura’s fault to begin with. If not for her …

  That’s not fair, she thought, stopping herself, biting her lip, fighting tears. She turned her back on Sakura’s sleeping form. Miho loved Kara, and Sakura was her best friend in the world. It had been friendship and loyalty that led to her being cursed—to the curse upon them all—and how could she blame Sakura, when it had really all begun with Akane’s murder?

  With a sigh, Miho shifted her legs, trying to find a comfortable position, and closed her eyes again. She wished for her mother, and the very wishing filled her with a deep melancholy. In the spring, she had faced evil. Real, true evil. But she had been with her friends at the time, and they had survived. Never during that experience had she wished for her mother. But tonight she had been alone out there, and the thing had been chasing her.

  Not that her mother would bother coming to visit. Miho hated to complain about her parents, since Sakura’s were so much worse. They actively disliked her, and didn’t want anything to do with her. The Murakamis had sent Akane and Sakura off to boarding school to be rid of them, and cared so little that when Akane had been murdered, they had left Sakura there. Miho knew that her own parents didn’t hate her, or want to be rid of her, necessarily. They hadn’t put that much thought into it.

  No, her mother wouldn’t be coming. Until morning, at least, the only thing keeping her safe was Sakura’s presence and the little light burning at the end of her bed. As these thoughts settled deeply into her mind, Miho wondered what might have happened to her, and where Daisuke and Wakana were now. They had all discussed it—she and Sakura, Kara and Hachiro—and they all hoped the two had really run away like young lovers in some teen romance manga story.

  But the connections were there.

  Daisuke and Wakana were part of the Noh club. They had been involved in the upcoming production of Dojoji, and so was Miho. Whatever had been out there in the dark, it had chosen the Noh club as its prey. But what the hell was it? Kyuketsuki had laid the curse upon them with carefully chosen words, summoning whatever remained of the supernatural in Japan to plague them. It could be anything, but then why focus on the Noh club?

  Again she closed her eyes, and the hissing remained with her, like a snake.

  With a sharp intake of breath, she opened her eyes. Her fingers could still remember the shape of each of the masks she had been working on for Dojoji, including the demon spirit who took such horrid vengeance on several of the major characters.

  The serpent-woman, Hannya.

  In the glow of that small light, Miho prayed.

  The Hannya, Kara thought, standing in the kitchen with a glass of pineapple juice in her hand. The small window over the sink gave her a view into the street and she stared out at the house across from theirs. A quiet night. All of Miyazu City would be sleeping perfectly well tonight, except for Daisuke’s parents, Kara and her father, and Miho, of course.

  By now, Miho would have figured it out.

  She took a sip of juice, relishing its sweetness, and listened to the darkened kitchen for sounds that didn’t belong there. The hum of electricity. The creak of old wood, shifting in the wind. Nothing out of place at all. But Kara felt like a jolt of electricity had shot t
hrough her and was racing around inside her veins on some endless loop.

  The Hannya. Really, it made a weird kind of sense. Unintended ritual had summoned Kyuketsuki, beginning with the murder of Akane, followed by Sakura’s rage and grief and Ume’s guilt. Then the curse of Kyuketsuki had called out to the lingering remnants of ancient evil in Japan and focused its attention on her, Sakura, and Miho. The curse had made them a kind of magnet. The Hannya would likely come for her and Sakura eventually, but for the moment it seemed to be following its own instincts, which was to prey upon those who’d summoned it—the Noh club. Miho met both criteria, so she was doubly in danger.

  Kara set her glass down on the counter, frowning. Those who’d summoned it. Miss Aritomo had chosen the play to begin with. She would be in danger as well.

  Something had to be done. The trouble was that they had no proof of anything—no evidence that Daisuke and Wakana had not run away, or that the Hannya existed. The only reason that Kara even knew the story was because Miss Aritomo had chosen Dojoji for her first Noh production at the school. Even then, Kara probably never would have read the play itself except that she and Sakura had thought it would make a good manga and had started to do the research to prepare.

  No one would believe them. But in Sakura and Miho’s room—with Hachiro watching for her father’s car down in the lobby—Kara and the girls had agreed on a course of action. Ever since, she had been trying to think of another plan, but they weren’t characters in a manga—schoolgirls turned demon hunters or something. The Hannya was real, and none of them wanted to meet it face-to-face.

  Just do it, she thought. Follow the plan.

  With a sigh, she rinsed her glass and left it in the sink, crossing the darkened kitchen and living room.

  Step one.