The Waking

10

B lue light washed over Kara’s face. She breathed deeply, feeling the rise and fall of her own chest, vaguely aware of her surroundings. Then some tiny internal alarm sounded and she opened her eyes wide.

Sakura had a small book light on, and she lay in her bed reading a manga. Miho stood by the DVD player, putting a disc back in its case. The movie had ended.

“How much did I miss?” Kara murmured, pushing herself up to a sitting position on the futon the girls had set out for her.

Sakura looked up from her manga, her short blade of hair a kind of curtain obscuring one eye. “Most of Kiki’s Delivery Service and all of Nausicaa.”

Kara scowled at her. “No way. I saw most of Kiki. And you didn’t

…” She looked around for a clock and instead stared at Miho. “Tell me you didn’t really watch Nausicaa.”

Miho tried to keep a serious face, which must have been difficult enough in her flannel Hello Kitty pajamas. But the girl was a terrible liar. She smirked.

“No. Kiki just ended. So much for our Miyazaki marathon.”

“We got through two movies,” Sakura said. “Tonight, that’s a marathon.”

They’d wanted to watch movies tonight, just to clear their minds, and had agreed on nothing violent. All three of them loved the films of Miyazaki, who had become perhaps the most successful director in Japan while making only animated films. Kara had vetoed Howl’s Moving Castle because she’d seen it too recently, and they had all seen My Neighbor Totoro far too many times, so they had started with Spirited Away.

In truth, Kara had exaggerated for how much of Kiki’s Delivery Service she’d been awake. She had to have missed at least the last half hour. But the upside was that in that time, nothing unpleasant had visited her dreams.

“We are such party girls,” she said.

Miho nodded in mock seriousness. “We are troublesome. All the drugs and sex. We’re bound to end up in jail.”

“Or dead by eighteen,” Sakura muttered with her usual sarcasm.

Kara and Miho blinked at each other. Another time, that might have been funny. But not now.

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” Sakura said, looking up. She set the manga on her bed, a stricken expression on her face. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

“You didn’t mean it like that,” Kara said.

Sakura smiled, grateful for the instant forgiveness. Laughter came through the walls from the room next door. Kara returned the smile.

“Thanks for letting me sleep over.”

Miho slid the DVD onto a shelf. “Thanks for coming. We’ll do it again, too. Sometime when there aren’t clouds hanging over our heads.”

That made all of their smiles falter.

“Time for lights out, you think?” Sakura asked. “Or should we put something else on? Maybe something with cute American boys to send Miho off to dreamland.”

“I think I’m too tired,” Miho said. “But I can sleep through anything, so I don’t mind if you two want to put on something else.”

Kara looked at Sakura. There were dark circles under her eyes and a wildness in them that seemed different from the rebellious nature she’d recognized the first time they’d met. Sakura smiled thinly, and an understanding passed between her and Kara-neither of them expected to sleep well tonight. Yet Sakura almost seemed eager.

“It’s all right. We’ll have all day tomorrow,” Sakura said. “Let’s go to sleep.”

“Should I turn out the lights, then?” Miho asked.

Kara looked at Sakura again, and then nodded. “Sure.”

And then they lay in the dark. The girls slept with a window open, and the night air crept across the floor, making Kara nestle under the blanket they’d given her.

She’d fallen asleep during the movie, but now she couldn’t even close her eyes. In the darkness, she stared up at the ceiling. She had told the girls about her walk with Hachiro but had been waiting for the right moment to broach the subject of their conversation. The moment had never come, unfortunately, and now-even though Sakura and Miho had both avoided talking about Hana or Jiro or Akane or even Ume- Kara couldn’t go to sleep with her questions unanswered.

“Jiro was having the dreams, too.”

“What?” Miho asked, turning on her side.

Sakura raised her head from the pillow, her brass-colored eyes gleaming in the dark, hair spikier and wilder than ever. “What dreams?”

Kara searched for her eyes in the dark. “Hachiro told me Jiro had nightmares about Akane, but in them, Akane had no face.”

Sakura flinched and glanced at Miho.

“I’ve had dreams like that, too,” Kara went on. “Girls with no faces. And Akane coming up out of the bay,” she said, relieved to be speaking the words aloud. “And one night, I was down at the water, near the… the shrine people made for her, and I saw this cat.”

As she told the story of watching the cat walk over the shrine and drop dead, only to stand up again a moment later like nothing had happened, she watched both girls’ eyes widen.

“Akane,” Sakura whispered. “I told you guys.”

Sakura seemed almost pleased, and the thought made Kara shiver.

Miho stared at her, then turned to Kara. “It might just have stumbled. It might have laid down. I know I wasn’t there, but if it got up again, Kara, it wasn’t dead. I’ve been trying to tell Sakura that Akane’s not haunting anybody, and that story doesn’t help. Anyway, I haven’t had any dreams like that.”

“I know,” Kara told her. “But Sakura has.”

Sakura hesitated but finally nodded. “Ever since school began,” she confessed. “And they keep getting worse. When I wake up, I’m not just afraid, I’m angry, and all I can think about is Akane, and missing her and grieving for her starts all over. Every night.”

Miho shot her a look of heartbreaking sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”

“But why am I having them?” Kara asked. “I wasn’t even here.”

“I don’t know,” Sakura said. “Maybe because of that night with the cat. But I do know why Ume is having them.”

Kara didn’t have to ask. Sakura had made it clear that she suspected Ume knew more about Akane’s death than she was telling.

“Do you really think your sister is haunting us?” Kara asked, thinking of all of the no-face girls in her dreams and the terror she felt when she awoke from them.

“Not just haunting.”

Miho stared at her. “No, Sakura.”

Kara turned to Miho. Suddenly she looked far too old to be wearing Hello Kitty pajamas. “ ‘No’ what? You think Akane’s doing more than haunting?”

Miho exhaled, seeming to deflate into surrender. “Sakura thinks it is Akane’s spirit, taking revenge. She thinks a ghost killed Jiro and drove Hana off the roof.”

Kara stared at her, then looked at Sakura again. “I’m sorry. Dreams or no dreams, I can’t believe that. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

Sakura laughed. “You’re in the wrong country, then. Japan is full of all sorts of ghosts.”

“I don’t mean to be cold, but Akane can’t come back and take revenge. She can’t come back at all. She’s dead, Sakura. Dead and gone,” Kara said, wondering at the emphasis in her own voice, and at the fear.

Sakura lay her head back on the pillow, staring up, and from that angle Kara could no longer see her eyes.

“Then how do you explain all of this?” Sakura asked.

“I can’t,” Kara replied.

“That’s right. You can’t.”

Kara still had questions, but the conversation clearly seemed over. The other girls lay in the dark, not speaking, waiting for sleep to arrive. While Kara felt trepidation at the thought, she realized now that, nightmares or not, Sakura looked forward to her bad dreams, for in them, however briefly, she could be reunited with her sister.

Within just a few minutes, she heard Sakura’s breathing deepen and the slow rhythm of sleep overtaking her. Perhaps ten minutes passed, and then she glanced at Miho, who lay on her side with her eyes closed and seemed also to have fallen asleep easily.

How they could simply shut off the conversation and not want to talk it over, try to figure out what was really going on, Kara did not understand. Perhaps they were simply afraid and in denial.

Kara frowned, noticing an odd, sweet smell in the room. A flower smell. It took her a moment to place it-cherry blossoms.

The scent grew quickly until it was almost overpowering, like hugging an old aunt who wore far too much perfume. She glanced around to see from where the odor might have come. In the dark, gleaming with moonlight, the Noh masks on the walls were hideous and unsettling. Kara felt like they were watching her, laughing at her. She rolled onto her side, turning toward Miho…

… who lay in bed, not asleep after all. Her eyes were open and her breath came in quick sips. She stared, face contorted with such fear that Kara gasped, chilled, heartbeat quickening. Her skin prickled with terror and she didn’t want to turn, did not want to see what had so frightened Miho.

But she forced herself to look.

The cat sat just inside the open window, on the wide sill, its copper and red fur raised in hackles.

It hissed, long and slow, and it watched them with human eyes. After that first night, by Akane’s shrine, Kara had told herself she had imagined those eyes… the dark eyes of a girl… eyes that reminded her of Sakura’s.

“Do you,” Kara managed, her voice ragged. “Do you see it?”

Miho did not reply, and when Kara looked at her and saw tears glistening on the girl’s face, she knew it had been the stupidest question she had ever asked.

The cat arched its back. It hissed again, jaws opening wide to reveal fangs like a serpent’s, long and yellow and glistening wet, as though with venom.

Miho screamed.

Kara joined her, as though she had needed that confirmation of her terror, that permission to lose control.

They scrambled from beneath sheets and blankets and clung to each other, moving toward the door.

“Sakura!” Miho screamed. “Sakura, wake up!”

Startled by their screams, Miho’s roommate nearly fell out of bed. But when Kara looked back to the open window, only the moonlight remained.

“What happened?” Sakura demanded.

“You saw it,” Kara whispered to Miho, holding the girl’s hands in her own, the two of them huddling together. “You saw it, right?”

Miho nodded. “Yes. The eyes. Oh, the eyes.”

Kara looked to the window again. The cat had really been there, and now it had gone.

But to where?

Something woke her.

Kara opened her eyes and inhaled sharply, as though surfacing from deep water or a nightmare. Yet she couldn’t remember any dreams at all. The events of that night had been terrifying enough.

Shifting slightly on the futon the girls had put out for her on the floor, she looked out the window. Morning still only hinted around the edges of the sky, just beginning to glimmer with the onset of dawn. The smell of cherry blossoms had vanished from the room, but her memory of that powerful scent lingered.

Drawing the blanket tighter around her, she closed her eyes but soon discovered that sleep would not be quick to return. Early or not, she felt entirely awake.

With a sigh, she opened her eyes again, and then remembered the impression she’d had a moment ago that something had woken her. Kara lay there and listened to her surroundings. Miho snored lightly but Sakura slept in silence, so much that Kara had to turn and watch her a moment to make sure she hadn’t stopped breathing. It took a moment before she confirmed the rise and fall of her chest.

As the sun rose, a gray-blue hue spreading across the sky, the wind picked up. She could hear it rushing by outside, but the windows did not rattle. The old dormitory building creaked a little, but she heard nothing that could have stirred her, not even footsteps padding down the hall outside on the way to the bathroom.

Listening to the gentle sounds of the morning, she felt her eyelids growing heavy again and let them close. Even if she couldn’t fall back to sleep, she wasn’t ready to get up yet, and she didn’t want to wake her friends.

Her body rocked back and forth. Kara felt herself swaying. The motion entered her subconscious and she dreamed herself in a small boat atop undulating water, the rolling waves tilting her side to side.

Kara.

The sea became rougher.

“Kara.”

She moaned, the boat and the waves vanishing. Vaguely aware of some reality intruding upon her peace, of hands shaking her, she curled in upon herself, limply batting at the offending grasp.

“Kara, wake up!”

Her body felt heavy and cramped, so tired, but she forced herself to open her eyes. Squinting against the sunlight that washed into the dorm room-and how did it get so bright?- she glanced up to see Miho bent over her, a stricken expression on her face. Without her glasses, she looked almost like a stranger.

In the back of her mind, she felt a spark of worry. What had upset Miho so much? But she still felt tired and sluggish and closed her eyes again.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Just wake up,” Miho said.

The urgency in her voice finally made Kara throw off the gauzy blanket that sleep had wrapped around her brain. She blinked rapidly and looked at the window again. Last time she’d awoken, it had barely been dawn. From the look of the sky, hours had passed.

It took her a moment to realize that she and Miho were alone in the room. Sakura had gone.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

Miho bit her lip, tucked a stray lock of her silky hair behind one ear, and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. And then, in English: “Something bad. Something really bad.”

Footfalls raced past the room out in the corridor. Down the hall, someone shouted. Kara sat up and saw that the door stood open a few inches. Voices came to them from elsewhere on the floor, too many speaking for her to make out many specifics, but she heard something about a doctor and an ambulance.

And she heard weeping. Sobbing.

Two girls hurried past the door, whispering to each other.

“Miho, tell me,” Kara said, rising to her feet and reaching for her jeans. She slid them on and zipped them, then went to the door, but Miho didn’t follow.

“Chouku is dead.”

Kara caught her breath. Chouku was one of the girls on this floor-one of the soccer girls. The police could say all they wanted now about suicide or about how none of these things were related, and the school administration could try to pretend nothing really was wrong in order to save face, but nobody would believe that now.

“Is it murder?” she asked, her voice soft, cracking on the last word.

Miho nodded, gesturing toward the door. “Sakura is out there. I don’t want to see it again.”

From somewhere in the distance, beyond the walls of the dormitory, Kara could hear the high-pitched keening of an ambulance siren. She hesitated a moment, looking at the shattered Miho, and wondered what would become of her friends. Would this, at last, force Miho and Sakura’s parents to pay attention to them? To come and see their daughters, and maybe take them home? Selfishly, she feared such an outcome. But for their sake, she hoped so. Sakura had been crumbling for days, brittle from lack of sleep and her lingering grief over Akane. And now Miho seemed frayed to the point of breaking.

Kara pushed her hands through her blond hair, snatched a rubber band from Sakura’s desk, and tied her hair back in a ponytail. She pushed the door open and stepped out into the corridor.

Most of the doors on the floor were open, girls in pajamas and nightgowns standing, framed in their horror, looking further along the hall toward a cluster of students crowding outside a door four rooms down. Girls wept, some with their hands over their mouths. Others whispered to one another. One girl-Chouku’s roommate, Kara figured-sat on the tile floor, long legs drawn up beneath her. The sobbing Kara had heard before came from her. A statuesque, athletic-looking girl, she was only vaguely familiar to Kara. They did not share class or an after-school club, so she would only have seen her in the morning or during o-soji.

Another girl sat cross-legged in the corridor in front of her, holding the weeping girl’s hand in her own. Perhaps because she wore purple pajamas with butterflies on them and sat hunched over, hair falling across her face, it took Kara a moment to realize this was Ume.

Further along the hallway, at the top of the stairs, Sakura leaned against a balustrade and watched all of the shock, horror, and sorrow unfold. She had no tears and no fear. No, for her there’s only satisfaction, Kara thought.

She shivered, horrified at herself for even considering such a thing. And then she wondered why the thought had come to her, and if it had arisen because that truly was what she saw in Sakura’s face. Not for a moment did Kara believe Sakura wanted anyone to die, but the girl wouldn’t mourn, either.

Unseen, or at the least ignored, Kara made her way down the hall past the pale, drawn residents of the dorm until she came to Chouku’s room. Ume and Chouku’s roommate didn’t even look up at her.

“They’re all over her,” a voice said from inside the room, frantic and on edge. “Yes, everywhere. And I think she’s like the other one. So pale.”

Kara entered the room.

The only person alive in that small chamber was Miss Aritomo, the art teacher. She faced the window, her back to Kara, her cell phone clapped to her ear, and at first she didn’t notice that anyone had entered.

Chouku lay on her stomach on the bed, a sheet covering her up to her shoulders. Spots and streaks of blood marred the white sheet, but Kara saw no other sign of blood anywhere in the room. The girl lay totally inert and her flesh was a bluish-gray, verging on white, almost as though she-like Jiro-had been dredged up from the water. Yet she had died here, in this room, and only last night. For her to have gotten so pale, so quickly… there had to be another explanation.

I think she’s like the other one, Miss Aritomo had said.

Which made Kara think of the conversation she’d overheard between the art teacher and her father, about Jiro’s body being drained of blood.

“I don’t know what kind of animal, but I’m telling you, they look like bites to me,” Miss Aritomo said firmly to whoever listened on the other end of her phone call.

The teacher reached over, back still to Kara, and lifted the sheet, providing a quick glimpse of Chouku’s naked corpse. All over her body, from heel to calf to back to throat, there were hundreds of tiny punctures, arranged in half circles like the bite marks of a small animal. She had to have been bitten dozens of times, and yet the only blood in the room was smears on her pale flesh and spots on the white sheet.

Kara gasped.

Miss Aritomo turned, lowering the sheet, and her face grew stormy with anger.

“What are you doing? Get out of here!” she snapped.

Kara backed up quickly, bumping into the door frame, and stepped into the hall.

“And close the door behind you!” Miss Aritomo said.

Kara pulled it closed, glancing around to see that all of the girls in the corridor were staring at her now, including Ume and Chouku’s roommate.

“Sick freak,” Ume said, in clear English, her lip turning up in disgust. “What does she want from us?”

Kara stared, confused, and then realized Ume wasn’t talking about her. Slowly, she looked up. Sakura still stood by the stairs, arms crossed in defiance now, and she met Kara’s gaze with her own.

Burdened by the weight of the other girls’ attention, Kara focused straight ahead. She walked over to Sakura and bent to whisper in her ear.

“Can we go back into your room? We have to talk.”

Sakura narrowed her eyes and gave Kara a cautious look, as if trying to decide yet again whether she could be trusted.

Kara rolled her eyes. “Just come on.”

She turned and started back along the corridor, weaving through the gaggle of grieving, horrified girls. Sakura followed, and when she passed outside Chouku’s room, Ume spit on the floor by her feet. Surprisingly, Sakura made no attempt to retaliate or even speak to her.

Miho had shut the door, forcing Kara to knock.

“Who is it?”

“It’s us.”

The door opened quickly. Kara led Sakura into the room and Miho shut the door again behind them. Miho leaned against the door, arms crossed protectively over her chest, and chewed her lower lip expectantly. Sakura went to gaze out the window for a moment, perhaps listening to the escalating volume of the siren from the approaching ambulance, and then flopped onto her bed. Her eyes were unfocused, gazing at some bit of nothing in the middle of the room.

Seconds of awkward silence ticked away with Kara standing roughly between the roommates.

“You both saw her?” she asked.

Miho nodded and glanced away. She wiped at one eye and Kara thought her lip might have quivered.

“Not much to see,” Sakura said.

“You’re wrong,” Kara told her.

She described what she had seen when Miss Aritomo lifted the sheet, and the conversation she had overheard between the art teacher and her father.

“The only blood I saw was on the sheet,” Miho said.

Kara threw up her hands. “That’s what I’m saying. Miss Aritomo was even saying something on the phone about how it reminded her of ‘the other one.’ ”

Sakura frowned, staring at her. “What ‘other one’?”

“You’re not making sense,” Miho said.

“I can’t believe I forgot to tell you about this. There never seemed to be a right time, and then last night I didn’t remember, and I’ve been so damn tired that-”

“Tell us what?” Sakura prodded. “Speak!”

Kara took a breath. “The other day I sort of accidentally eavesdropped on my father and Miss Aritomo. I kind of thought it was a romantic thing and I didn’t want to interrupt them-that would be weird-but then they started talking about Jiro and the investigation into his death, and…” She shuddered with revulsion. “All the blood had been drained from his body.”

“That’s not funny,” Miho said.

“I’m not trying to be funny. I’m completely serious. So, just now, when she said Chouku’s body reminded her of ‘the other one,’ she had to be talking about Jiro. This isn’t a nightmare. This is real. Maybe there’s a”-she tried to find the Japanese word for rational in her memory but couldn’t-“maybe there’s an explanation for this that will make me feel ridiculous later for how much this is scaring me. But I can’t imagine what it could be.”

Sakura sat up, perching on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees, and stared at Kara. “What are you suggesting?”

“Come on! The nightmares. The bite marks all over Chouku. She and Jiro both drained of blood. Haven’t either of you ever seen a vampire movie?”

In the silence that followed those words, Kara felt her face flushing with heat and knew how pink her cheeks must be. If she’d been in a joking mood, she’d have made a little cricket noise. But she had run out of jokes.

Miho spoke first.

“You’re serious,” she said, as though suggesting the impossible.

“Totally!” Kara replied. She hated the way they were looking at her, but she wasn’t about to back down. “You didn’t see the bites all over her body. Fine. But what’s happening here is… it’s not natural. You can’t deny that. The dreams alone are proof of that. All of us having these dreams, not being able to sleep, the terrible things in our nightmares? That crap is just not normal.”

“We’re not all having the nightmares,” Miho said quietly.

Kara snapped, “Yes, I know. You don’t have them. Good for you!”

The girl blinked, obviously stung, and Kara felt guilty-but not so much that she was prepared to drop it.

“Miho, you saw the cat last night. You admitted it to me.”

“What cat?” Sakura asked.

Kara and Miho studied each other, each waiting for the other to explain.

“There’s no such thing as vampires,” Sakura said.

Kara shot her a dark look. “Are you serious? In this country, people still believe in everything. There are ancient prayer shrines all over the place. People still respect the old gods, even if they don’t pray to them anymore. The Japanese take their legends very seriously.”

“There are no vampires in Japanese legend,” Miho said. “Not in myth, not in Kabuki, not in Noh theater.”

Kara sighed and turned toward the window. The ambulance siren had ceased, which meant the EMTs would be in the building by now, on their way up to Chouku’s room.

“Fine,” she said with a shake of her head. “Then you tell me what’s going on.”

“I’ve told you both,” Sakura said, her voice even and emotionless. It scared Kara how detached she’d grown. Grief had forced her to shut down.

“It’s Akane,” she went on. “The police never did anything to punish her killers. They could never prove anything. She’s come back to make them pay.”

Kara studied her eyes. “You can’t really believe that. I’m sorry, Sakura-really sorry-but Akane is dead.”

“I never said she wasn’t,” Sakura said. Then she stood and went to the door. Miho moved out of the way. Sakura looked back at them. “I’ve been studying them, trying to figure out who else was involved. I think the ones who are crying the most are probably the other killers, or at least they were there. Chouku’s friends. Ume’s friends. I’m going to go and watch them, to see if I can narrow it down.”

With that, she went out into the hall and left the two of them standing there, staring at the open door.

Miho closed it quietly and turned to look at Kara with frightened eyes.

“She’s really scaring me,” Miho said.

Kara nodded. “Me too.”

Miho took a deep breath and let it out. She bit her lip, shook her head, clearly struggling to make sense of her thoughts.

“What?” Kara urged.

“I said there were no vampire legends. But there are stories about other things… things that are like vampires,” Miho said. “One of them, the ketsuki, appears in the form of a cat.”