Ink

Chapter 10

I grabbed my ticket and hopped on the Roman bus down to Toro Iseki. I’d stayed behind to clean the classroom and had to make up time. It was way too humid to bike anyway. I wiped my face with my handkerchief.

Since Monday, Tomohiro had been grinning at me. His tall figure had loomed in the doorway of our classroom at lunch. He’d waited patiently as the class went from chatting, to noticing, to mumbling and whispering, and finally to tapping me on the shoulder. I’d walked over to the door slowly, the eyes of my classmates burning into my back. Tomohiro seemed to enjoy my embarrassment, which didn’t surprise me.

“Are you coming on Wednesday?” he said when I reached the doorway. I could hear the whispers mounting, so I slipped into the hallway and out of sight. Okay, except for the row of windows along our classroom that was suddenly crowded with faces.

“Tomo, we always go on Wednesdays,” I said in a hushed voice.

“I know,” he said. “I just want to make sure you’re going.”

“Of course.”

“It’s the last time before summer break,” he said.

“I know.”

“I promise I won’t draw a turtle.”

“Good,” I said, looking over my shoulder at my classmates.

Their heads dipped below the windows.

He lifted my fingers in his, and the sudden touch made me turn. He flipped my hands over in his, looking for the bite mark where the turtle had snapped me.

“I’m okay now,” I said, staring at the top of his head as he scanned my hands gently.

“Good,” he said and lifted my fingers to his mouth. His smooth lips brushed over them softly, and the students at the windows whooped like idiots. Then he let go and turned down the hallway, his leather bag slung over his shoulder.

It wasn’t just the last time we’d go to Toro Iseki before summer vacation. They’d finished the renovations, and the site was opening to the public at the beginning of August.

Tomohiro would have to find a new safe haven to practice his art. So far, we’d come up with Mount Fuji and Antarctica.

I ducked under the chain-link fence and into the mini forest. The breeze pushed the humidity against my body in waves.

Then I heard the chimes.

There were at least forty of them hanging in the tree above me, little Japanese wind chimes tinkling in the hot gasp of wind, their papers floating and rippling as they twisted back and forth. Most furin chimes in Japan were bright summer colors, but these were black-and-white with jagged edges, so I knew Tomohiro had drawn them into existence. Some of the chimes sounded mournful, likely the drawings that had gone wrong, but the sound of them all jingling together was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard.

He was sitting in the grass, his notebook balanced on his lap. I watched him for a moment before he realized I’d arrived. He looked up at the sky, the clouds drifting lazily above. He’d loosened the tie around his neck and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. The top buttons of his shirt were unbuttoned, exposing the defined edges of his collarbone.

He seemed lost in the sound of the chimes, and I hesitated, listening to them, too.

Then the pollen of the flowers caught in my nose and I sneezed. He whirled around, his eyes wide until he realized it was me.

“Okaeri,” he said, and as much as I’d felt awkward when Diane said it to me, when Tomohiro said it I got goose bumps.

“I’m a bit late,” I apologized.

“I’ll say,” he said with a laugh. “Come see what I’m drawing for you today.”

I walked forward and sat beside him in the grass. He opened his notebook, and a half-finished sketch draped across the page. I stared with wide eyes.

“You’re serious.”

He just grinned and pulled the cap from his pen. I rested my hand on his arm.

“Don’t you think people will notice that?”

“In Toro Iseki?” he said. I just stared at him. “Katie, this is our last chance to try this. We won’t have another opportu-nity like this for who knows how long. I want to try.”

“You’re totally crazy,” I said. “It could trample us.”

But he placed the nib of his pen on the paper and started filling in the sketch. He drew in the eye, a dark pool of ink on the page. He filled out the ear and the mane, the muzzle and the long, strong flanks that whizzed across the page as he drew them. The sketch tossed its head and turned to bite a fly off its withers.

There was a gentle thud in the grass, and another, and then the horse stepped out from behind a Yayoi hut. There was a ghostly, vacant look in its eyes, and its mane was as jagged as Tomohiro’s hurried pen strokes.

Tomohiro drew faster and faster, his own eyes growing vacant and strange like the horse’s. He was scribbling in details, fetlocks above the hooves and muscles trailing down the horse’s legs.

“I think that’s enough,” I said.

“Huh?” He broke away like I’d snapped him out of a dream. I pointed to the horse sniffling at the grass with his scribbled black muzzle.

He whispered, “I did it.”

He rose to his feet, placing the notebook gently on the grass.

“Stay here,” he warned. I knelt, ready to tear the drawing to shreds if I had to. The horse lifted its head high as Tomohiro approached, and then it swallowed back a distressed whinny. Tomohiro whispered as he stepped closer. The horse pawed the ground, then lowered its head.

I watched him reach his gentle hands to the horse’s muzzle, and I waited for it to take a big chunk out of him. My fingers bent the corner of the drawing as I waited for the jaw to open.

But the horse merely nuzzled his hands, drank in the spiced smell of him and turned back to the grass. Tomohiro turned to face me, his face brighter than when he won a kendo match.

“Come on!” he shouted. I ripped the page out of the notebook and folded it into my pocket. Just in case.

He lifted me onto the horse’s back, then climbed a railing in front of the Yayoi hut and leaped on behind me. Swirls of ink spilled into the grass from the horse’s hooves and twisted into the air from his mane. The horse’s skin felt like crinkled paper, but he was warm and alive beneath that thin hide.

His hair flopped in slow motion, pulled by the wisps of ink that radiated from it. I pressed a tentative hand into the wiry mane and twisted my fingers through the warm, oily ink.

The swirls dissipated as my fingers slid through, curving away into new clouds.

“Ready?” Tomohiro said, but he didn’t wait for my answer. He kicked in his heels and the horse lurched forward.

I almost fell into its neck. I tangled my hands into the mane and gripped its stomach hard with my legs.

The Yayoi huts blurred around us as we galloped forward.

Tomohiro’s shoulders pressed against mine as his bare arms reached for the mane to steady himself. The humid air pressed against my skin as we raced through Toro Iseki, Tomohiro’s laugh ringing in my ears.

We galloped to the southern edge of forest, where the horse slowed to a trot. He wound through the trees and broke through the other side, where the newer excavations were taking place. I held my breath as the horse narrowly missed the pits in the dirt, the tools sprawled around the site. When we reached the end of the clearing, the back of the Toro Iseki Museum, Tomohiro dug his heels in and the horse turned, galloping north again. We went around so many times that everything blurred, everything but the whizzing of the air as it went past and Tomohiro’s breath against my cheek.

He hadn’t thought to draw any reins or saddle on the horse, but somehow the horse went exactly where Tomohiro wanted him to. Maybe he was right that the horse wasn’t entirely alive but an extension of him. Tomohiro tensed and the horse reacted; he turned his head left and the horse followed. It suddenly hit me how much control he had and how little I did. I had no choice but to trust him, and the feeling left me unsettled.

The horse began to cough and shake with the effort, ink trickling down his white neck like black sweat. Tomohiro halted him by the notebook with no effort. A giant grin plastered on his face, he leaped down and I followed, glad to be on the ground and in control again.

“What did you think?” He laughed, stroking the horse’s nose.

“Amazing,” I said, but anxiety began to spread through my thoughts.

“I should have tried this earlier!”

“Yeah, but you practiced a lot to get to this point.”

“And this is only the beginning of what I can draw,” he said, and I saw in his eyes how giddy he was, how intoxicated by his own ability.

“We should take it slowly,” I said. “Don’t forget what happened to Koji.” He held out his hand and I passed him the folded paper from my pocket. He collapsed on the grass and drew through the picture of the horse with his pen. The scraping sound almost made me sick.

The horse stretched his leg out to the front and lowered his head, resting his muzzle against his hoof. He sighed, a long shudder that rattled through his rib cage, and then his eyes lost the depth of their light. He collapsed on his side and dissolved into swirls of ink, nothing left on the grass but a sheen of oily black.

“Yeah, but I was too young then. Did you see it?” he said.

“It didn’t try to hurt anything. It was entirely under my control.”

“Yeah,” I said, but his tone was making me nervous. “Let’s go have some melon ice to celebrate.” But he didn’t hear me.

He reached into his book bag and pulled out the velvet pouch, shaking the brush and inkwell into his hand.

Shivers ran up the back of my neck. “Tomo.”

He pulled the lid from the ink and dipped in the brush.

“Tomo, stop.” I stared, my skin pulsing with fear, my ears buzzing.

He flipped to a clean page in his notebook, and the bristles of the brush bent backward as he stroked the stark black across the paper. The ink sank in and spread in little tendrils of black, the pigment too thick for the notebook paper. He was like some kind of addict, completely lost to the thrill of it. He wasn’t thinking straight. Whatever control he’d talked about, it was slipping—he’d never acted like this before, at least not with me.

“What are you drawing?” I said, my throat dry.

“You think the horse was amazing,” he said, “but anyone can have that experience. I want to give you something that only Kami can feel. Something others can’t do.”

I watched him draw the expert curves, as if he’d only left calligraphy yesterday. The long strokes snaked across the paper as I desperately tried to guess what he was drawing. What could Kami have that other people couldn’t? My mind raced.

I looked at his face, and his eyes startled me. They looked like the horse’s, thick and ghostly, vacant of anything familiar. The eyes that had stared me down in the courtyard, that had lit up with his bright laugh in the café—they were gone, replaced by these alien pools of black that stared down at the paper with intensity.

His hand moved faster and faster, the strokes more and more desperate.

My voice was shaky, and I realized my hands were shaking, too. “Tomo, you’re scaring me.”

“The pen was too weak,” he said, but the voice wasn’t his.

It was raspy, and he panted for breath as he painted faster and faster. “I see that now. It was just the reflection in the water.”

“Stop it,” I said and grabbed the end of the brush. My wrist hit the inkwell and it tipped over, pouring ink down the side of the notebook and onto the grass. But Tomohiro was stronger than me, and he kept drawing as I tried to pull the brush tip off the paper.

“You know what Kami can do?” he said in the raspy and desperate voice that wasn’t his. “What Kami can do but others can’t?”

He dropped his voice to a whisper.

“Fly.”

He was drawing a dragon, long and angular, and it wriggled on the page like a snake, like the scrap I had picked up that day. The sun glinted on its mouth full of shiny teeth and my whole body went cold.

I struggled to snatch the brush from him, but it was like it didn’t take any effort to fight me off No way was I that weak, but it was like Tomohiro suddenly got stronger. A lot stronger. He stared down at the paper with his big, vacant eyes, a horrible grin twisting his lips. And suddenly the dragon’s jaws turned on the page, and with a blur they pushed through the paper and clenched down on Tomohiro’s wrist.

Tomohiro shrieked as he wrenched his arm out of the dragon’s razor teeth. The brush tumbled into the grass, forgotten as he grasped at his wrist. The dragon snapped his paper jaws over and over, just out of reach, while the jagged gash vanished under a torrent of blood, overflowing onto the paper and the ground, onto Tomohiro’s clean white shirt. I screamed and reached for my handkerchief, ramming it against the slash

and pressing until my fingertips turned white. Tomohiro kept shouting and shouting, but I couldn’t hear the words over my own panic. It was like I’d gone deaf or forgotten all my Japanese. I couldn’t make sense of anything he said. His eyes weren’t vacant anymore but wide and filled with terror.

“The kami!” he shouted. “The kami!”

I stared as my handkerchief soaked up the blood, the pretty pattern on it staining a deep crimson.

“The kami!” he shouted again, and it finally registered.

The paper.

Dark clouds unfurled above, and rain pelted the clearing.

Thunder rumbled and flashes of lightning shot through the sky.

“Destroy the drawing!” he shrieked. T he blood leaked through the edges of my handkerchief

I fumbled through the grass for the brush, the rain drenching through my shirt and my hair falling in tangles into my eyes. I screamed as my fingers ran through something wet. I lifted them up-ink.

With my fingers I drew thick lines through the dragon.

“Don’t go near his mouth!” Tomohiro shouted. The drawing snapped at me as I sliced its tail from its body with a thick line of ink. The sketch moved so quickly that my head throbbed to watch. I wasn’t used to it like Tomohiro, and I thought I might throw up. I hesitated, terrified, then drew a line through its rear legs.

Desperate, I ripped the whole page out and crumpled it, tearing it to shreds. But as the scraps fluttered from my hands, I could see the ink moving and twisting on them.

“It’s not working!” I shouted through the thick rain. Tomohiro’s copper hair was flattened to his head in awkward spikes.

He’d mounded his handkerchief on top of mine, but the dark blood bloomed and spread across it.

“Give me the brush!” he shouted. I dropped to my hands and knees and searched for it in the grass.

A movement blurred where the horse had been, and I looked up. A thick coil of giant snake, wider than the belly of the stallion, wrapped around itself over and over, so that the mound was taller than Tomohiro. The jagged outlines of the snake soaked into long tendrils of ink toward the center of its crackly skin, and as it wound around, it looked like it slithered in two directions at once. It raised its huge head, antlers rising from the top of its silver snout.

The dragon Tomohiro had drawn.

At first I couldn’t hear anything but my own scream. The beast stared at me with vacant eyes, its whiskers drooping low below its lips and hanging limp in the drenching rain. Swirls of ink lifted from its whole body, like steam off a horse in a morning mist.

“Katie, the brush!” Tomohiro shouted, but I stood paralyzed as the dragon stared at me.

Tomohiro moved his left hand desperately through the wet grasses. The handkerchiefs he’d let go of dropped to the ground without the pressure of his hand to hold them there, and the blood streaked down his wrist and along his slender fingers.

The dragon lifted up like a boa ready to strike. Huge claws appeared from the mass of its coiled body, and it pressed them into the earth, bending its long legs. Ink-colored bristles spiked down its spine and twisted into sinewy wings, which it flapped back and forth as it got ready to pounce.

“Tomo!” I shrieked as his fingers closed around the paintbrush.

The dragon leaped up, uncoiling into the air. Tomohiro dove toward the scraps of the page and drew ugly lines through any he could find. High above, the dragon screeched and its leg fell off, dropping in the clearing with an ugly thud and a cloud of ink dust. Tomohiro found another soaked scrap and sliced through it; one of the bristled wings crumbled and the dragon veered sideways in the sky.

Tomohiro flipped over two more pieces before he found the neck. He carved through it in one quick stroke.

The dragon plummeted from the sky. The coils shook the ground as they hit, the tongue lolling out of its mouth before it turned to shimmering dust.

Tomohiro reached into his bag and grabbed his kendo headband, pressing it into the gash as he raced over to me. I fell to my knees in the mud and sobbed while he flung his arms around me.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he cried over and over into the soaked tangle of my hair. “Gomen, gomen, gomen!”

The rain poured down from the sky, washing over the shimmering dust, soaking the paper and the notebook until the ink blurred beyond recognition. We clung to each other as our drenched clothes clung to our own skin, and as terrified as I was to let go, I was just as scared to hold on.