A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series)

by Christopher Golden, Thomas Randall

  "It really is you!" she said.

  "Yes," Akane agreed.

  But Sakura felt her joy shatter, felt the darkness flooding into her heart, and she stepped back from Akane, shaking her head. After all, she knew. The school was too small, the world too quiet, the light too surreal.

  "You're only a dream," Sakura said, and even asleep, she began to dread waking. Grief wracked her with sorrow.

  Akane reached out and held Sakura's face in her hands, held her tightly so that they were eye to eye, and she shook her head.

  No, she said, without speaking. I am here. You are dying, but I am here with you.

  "Like the other ghosts?"

  Akane nodded, and now what flooded into Sakura's mind were not words at all. They were images, moments, spilling out of her head and shifting the landscape around them. Sora's ghost on the mountainside, in the falling snow. Daisuke on the train. She had not been there to see Daisuke's ghost, but she could imagine it vividly . . . or perhaps it wasn't imagination at all. Perhaps the image came from Akane.

  "I don't understand," Sakura said. "What does this have to do with Yuki-Onna?"

  Akane smiled. "Winter ghosts. She's a ghost herself, in a way, the spirit of the woman who died on the mountain during the season's first snowfall. And when Yuki-Onna comes, and the snow falls, the spirits who have not yet moved on can rise with her."

  Sakura shook her head. "But why haven't you moved on?"

  "I wasn't ready to let go," Akane said. "None of us were. It was too fast, too soon. We had people here to look after."

  The world shifted around Sakura. Akane still stood in front of her, but now they were little girls again, no more than eight and nine, and they were in the bedroom they had always shared growing up. Music played, but as it happened so often in dreams, Sakura could not make out the tune. She inhaled the scent of ripe plums yet again.

  "I've been looking after myself," Sakura said.

  A terrible sadness filled Akane's eyes. "Not very well."

  Sakura felt cold. Her chest hurt with every breath. Pain swept in, lancing through her side and clutching her skull in an iron grip, and slowly sounds began to filter into her bedroom. Pokemon lined shelves on the walls. Her little Catbus purse hung from the back of a chair.

  They had been so happy here.

  "Am I really dying?" she asked, her voice so small inside her own head.

  Akane smiled. "Not today. I told you, I am here to look after you. You need strength. You need to heal. You need life, and I can give you mine."

  Sakura recoiled, shaking her head. She didn't like the sound of that.

  "No. What do you mean, life? Akane, what do you —"

  The carpet became a muddy slope by the bay, the room vanished around them.

  "You need to live," Akane said.

  She reached out to touch her sister's face, her hand passing right through flesh and bone, and . . .

  Sakura woke, inhaling sharply, pain clamped around her skull. Her eyes darted back and forth but she could barely move. Machines beeped. She tried to speak but her voice failed her.

  She closed her eyes tightly. Her thoughts were blurred but she wondered if this was what it felt like to die.

  And then she opened her eyes to see the ghost of her sister, Akane, standing over her bed. Sakura felt something break inside of her. For days, others had been seeing ghosts and all she had wanted was to see a ghost of her own, to be in the presence of her sister one last time.

  "I miss you," Sakura rasped weakly.

  Akane did not speak, only shook her head with that smile.

  Though she had put aside so much of her rage and grief already, Sakura had been holding on to a small, burning shard of fury, hidden deep inside. Often she had hidden it even from herself, because this anger was not directed at Akane's murderer, but at Akane herself, for leaving. It made no sense and it was not fair, but Sakura had nursed the pain and anger for a year and a half, ever since Akane's death.

  Now she felt it leave her, and fresh sadness filled her. She wanted to apologize somehow, but already her strength was fading and the darkness swirled around the edges of her thoughts again, unconsciousness about to claim her once more.

  Whatever toughness Sakura had tried to nurture in her outward image, whatever rebelliousness might be in her nature, in that moment she felt her heart laid bare.

  "I love you," she said, tears welling in her eyes.

  Akane reached down to touch her face, bent to kiss her forehead, and even as Sakura's eyelids flickered and she began to drift off, she thought she saw Akane begin to vanish. It seemed almost as if the ghost were vanishing into Sakura, and as this thought occurred to her, a surge of new vitality flooded through her. The pain in her head abated dramatically, if not completely.

  "Akane?" Sakura whispered, touching a hand to her chest.

  The ghost had disappeared, but Sakura thought she knew where her sister had gone. She didn't know how, but she knew why. Her sister loved her, and something had to be done about Yuki-Onna. She could feel the thoughts in her mind, although they did not feel like her own.

  Though the pain in her head had abated, still she felt exhausted, perhaps from the painkillers, and sleep began to claim her again.

  As consciousness slipped away, she felt sure that she smelled ripe plums.

  Kara and Miss Aritomo had originally planned to go all the way to the observatory on Takigami Mountain to summon Yuki-Onna. They worried that if they did not go far enough up the mountain that they would not truly be on it, and then the summoning might not be successful, and then Kubo and the others would have no chance of finding Hachiro and Ren. It was Kara's father who had prevailed upon them to compromise. Halfway up from the parking lot to the observatory and no further . . . about the point where Sora's ghost had first appeared. If they could draw Yuki-Onna there, it would bring her even further from wherever she was keeping the boys, but leave Kara and Miss Aritomo closer to the car.

  Nobody bothered to point out that the car would be poor protection from the Woman in White. She could freeze the windows so hard that the glass would be brittle as eggshell. Or smash them out with a gust of wind.

  Better all around, Kara thought, if Yuki-Onna did not attack them at all.

  She knelt in the snow, rubbing the smooth stone ward that Kubo had given her between her thumb and forefinger. The leather thong around her neck smelled nice and she relished that for a moment, then let it drop.

  "This is the strangest ritual I've ever heard of," she said aloud, shivering as an icy breeze blew up, glancing around to make sure that was all it was.

  From a small stand of pines off to the right of the path, a polite voice replied.

  "Master Kubo is the Unsui," Miss Aritomo said, poking her head out from between two thick pines. "He would not mislead you."

  Kara stared at her. Miss Aritomo had once had a great love of Noh theater, until an attempt to perform a Noh play at school — combined with the curse of Kyuketsuki — had led to one of the most famous demons of the Noh stage coming to life and possessing her body. Now, though she still advised the Noh Club at Monju-no-Chie school, her passion for the art seemed diminished.

  Today, however, she had worn a mask from her vast collection. Masks were an integral part of Noh theatre, vital to performance and storytelling. Kara knew she must have seen this particular mask before — with a wisp of white beard, green horns, gold and black eyes, and a bright red tongue, it had to be a demon or evil spirit — but she could not place it or remember its name. Not that the name mattered much. Kubo had said that the wards would be powerful, but that spirits saw the essence of a person, not really their face, and that masks might help hide the person's essence.

  It wouldn't hide Yuuka, but it might buy her a few minutes of confusion if the Yuki-Onna discovered her hiding there. Kara had wanted to take the mask for herself and give Miss Aritomo the ward, but no one would agree. She and Sakura and Miho were cursed; they — and the boys in whom the Winter Witch had t
aken such an interest — were the ones who needed the most protection. But it frightened Kara to have Miss Aritomo there with only a mask to hide her.

  She prayed that Kubo really did know what he was talking about.

  "What are you waiting for?" Miss Aritomo said. "You need to begin."

  Kara glanced at her cell phone, saw the time, and knew that Yuuka was right. Kubo, Miho, and Mr. Yamato were on the mountain, waiting for Yuki-Onna to leave the boys behind. It was time to begin the summoning.

  She took a deep breath and let it out. Her every exhalation plumed into icy mist in the air. The sky hung low and gray, thick with unfallen snow. But she knew that the storm could begin at Yuki-Onna's merest whim.

  Working quickly, Kara scooped snow from the ground and fashioned a crude snow-woman. From her pocket she withdrew two black stones Kubo had given her, which she pressed into the snow for eyes, and then a small swatch of white silk, which she wrapped around her snow-woman's neck as a kimono.

  With a thumb-tack she pricked her finger and she squeezed out a few drops of blood, which soaked into the snow-woman instantly. Several more drops dribbled onto the snow around it, and then Kara reached into the pack she had brought and withdrew the book. It had come from Mr. Yamato's library, but there was nothing at all special about it. The title translated as Popular Japanese Folktales and the contents were just as boring and ordinary as described. This was no grimoire full of arcane rites, but something taught to school children.

  Kubo had said that it didn't matter what the book was, as long as the story was about Yuki-Onna. There were dozens of incarnations of the story, but this was apparently one of the most common.

  Kara held the book open to the first page of the story in question and dripped three more tiny splashes of blood onto the paper. Then she picked it up, and began to read aloud in Japanese.

  Telling Yuki-Onna's story.

  Giving it life.

  Kubo had told them all that in the absence of real worship, storytelling was the modern world equivalent. The blood, the snow-woman . . . they made the story an offering, and such things were so few and far between in the twenty-first century that they would turn the story — when told aloud — into a powerful summoning. Yuki-Onna would not be able to stay way. Curiosity alone would have compelled her, even if the power of the summoning did not.

  And so Kara read:

  "Two woodcutters were on their way home one very cold evening when a great snowstorm overtook them. When they arrived at the ferry, they found that the ferryman had gone away, leaving his boat on the other side of the river. It was too cold to swim, so the woodcutters took shelter in the ferryman's hut. They had nothing with which to build a fire, and so could only cover themselves with their coats and lay down to rest and wait out the storm, which they though would end soon.

  "The old man quickly fell asleep, but the boy lay awake a long time, listening to the howl of the wind and the battering of snow upon the door and roof. At last, in spite of the cold, he too fell asleep.

  "He was awakened by a scattering of snow upon his face —"

  Kara paused, frowning deeply, for the wind had picked up. She glanced about, heard some shuffling in the pines — though Miss Aritomo stayed well hidden this time — and only then did she notice the snowflakes that floated gently down to alight upon the pages of the open book.

  Swallowing her fear, she continued to read.

  Her hands shook as the temperature dropped sharply. It was working. If she kept reading the sky would churn and the storm would blast through and them Yuki-Onna would be there. Kara took a deep breath and she thought of Hachiro, and of Ren, and of the people who had already died because of the Woman in White. For several seconds she closed her eyes, halting her reading, trying to muster up her courage, so afraid that she would end up like Sora, frozen solid, dead in an instant.

  "Why did you stop? Keep reading," a voice like the sighing of the wind said, just beside her ear.

  It was not Miss Aritomo.

  Miho leaned against a tree, its knots and bare, broken branches jabbing her back. She had sat on the ground in the snow for a while, but it had gotten too cold for her. The snow did not seem to bother Kubo, however. The old monk sat cross-legged in the snow, barely seeming to make an impression. His eyes were closed and his expression one of utter serenity. His hands lay open and palm upward on his lap, and if it were not for the straightness of his spine, Miho would have thought he had fallen asleep.

  Mr. Yamato stood a short distance away. The principal had gone from anxious to jittery. He held an unlit cigarette between his lips and from time to time he would take it out and hold it between his fingers, just as he would if he were actually smoking it. When they had first come up the mountain, the old monk had warned him not to light it, and so instead the principal used it as a personal comfort, like a child might hang on to a favorite stuffed animal.

  They had driven north and come up to the base of Takigami Mountain from that side. The climb was a bit steeper and the forest there thicker, but it was not really that much more difficult than the observatory side. What drew tourists to that spot was the convenience of it, the well-kept observatory and the nearness to the rest of Miyazu City, not to mention the view.

  Kubo had guided them up through the trees, sometimes following established paths and other times forging his own trail through areas of the mountain that showed no sign of human intrusion. The silence on the mountain made Miho uneasy. She felt as though spirits lurked behind every tree, watching them pass as they journeyed further from civilization and from safety. She told herself that was just in her head, that she was just being paranoid, but she knew that a girl with a curse on her had a good reason to think that everything was out to get her.

  From time to time, Kubo would stop, give a little croaking cough, and then spit into the air. At first Miho had flinched in revulsion and worried about the old monk's health, but then she noticed that each time the Unsui performed this tiny ritual, he would watch the way the wind took his spittle, studying it as a tracker would study the prints of an animal on the ground. Several times he had stopped for several minutes, closed his eyes, and seemed to be listening to something Miho could not hear.

  Not listening, she had decided after a while. Feeling.

  Those weren't the only peculiar things Kubo had done in their search for Yuki-Onna, and the place she kept Ren and Hachiro. The monk had taken out a sheet of rice paper, torn it into tiny shreds, and blown the pieces out of his palm in order to watch them swirl away on the breeze and skitter across the snow. Some small writing had been scribbled on the paper, but she had been unable to make out even a single character. Kubo had chanted softly under his breath and then, each time, taken a swig of what he said was plum wine from a small ceramic flask. He claimed that this was part of his search for Yuki-Onna and, watching him, Miho actually believed him.

  Perhaps twenty minutes after they had started up the mountainside, Kubo had seemed to lock on target, somehow. After that it was not a matter of searching, but of rushing. The old monk moved with speed and agility, skipping over fallen trees and ducking beneath jagged branches so swiftly that both Miho and the cigarette-craving Mr. Yamato had difficulty keeping up, losing sight of Kubo several times as they followed.

  The higher they climbed, the colder the air. But there was more to it than that. If Miho looked carefully, she could see that in some places the snow seemed more significant, the trees frosted with ice. Every time she studied their path ahead and tried to guess where Kubo would lead them next, she was correct. Yuki-Onna was a creature of winter, and she left her mark.

  Perhaps an hour had passed since they had come up a steep rise where an outcropping of stone jutted from the snow, walked past a few bare trees that seemed to lean together into a kind of arch, and found Kubo sitting just as he was now. The old monk had looked up at Miho and spoken a single word: "Call."

  Miho had done as she was told, using her cell phone to call Kara and tell her to get in pos
ition for the summoning. Kubo had explained that no return call would be necessary; if the summoning worked, he would know, and sense Yuki-Onna's departure.

  But for Miho the waiting was torture.

  She pushed away from the tree and walked over to Mr. Yamato. He held his unlit cigarette down low as if to hide it, though that was impossible. Obviously the principal did not wish anyone to know that he smoked, so Miho did him the courtesy of pretending she did not see it.

  "I wonder —" she began.

  Kubo thrust himself from the ground so abruptly that he startled them both. The cigarette fell from Mr. Yamato's hand and Miho uttered a squeak of surprise, reaching up to reassure herself that her glasses would not slip off.

  The old monk turned to them, grim and commanding. "We must hurry."

  And then he was off, darting through the trees, and Miho and Mr. Yamato ran to catch up to him. Branches whipped at Miho, the forest blurring around her, her entire focus on following the cloud wanderer, whose shoes barely seemed to touch the snow. Mr. Yamato breathed heavily as he struggled to keep pace with her, but he began to fall behind almost immediately. Miho did not slow to wait for him; if she had, she would have lost Kubo's path.

  For several long minutes they ran, and before Miho truly understood what had happened, she realized they had entered a storm. The wind blew. Branches swayed and cracked. Snow whipped at her face. Terror seized her. The storm had come on even more suddenly than the one during their field trip, when Sora had been frozen to death.

  But then the truth struck her. This storm had not found them, they had found it.

  She came around a thick stand of evergreens and nearly collided with Kubo. He stood and stared at a formation of ice and snow. It had the shape of a giant ant hill, but twisted and pitted and scoured by the wind. A large, dark, cave-like hole yawned in the face of the thing and Miho could only stare at it.

  The snow had begun to subside. Did that mean Yuki-Onna had left?