“But that’s just a story,” Mai said.
“What if it’s not?” Kara asked, and then she ran to catch up with the others.
She could not be certain over the sound of the fireworks, their light splashing the white sand and black pines, but she thought she heard Mai start to pray.
I have seen many boys play Anchin, but you are more beautiful than any of them.
Yasu could not speak or breathe or move. His eyes bulged and his chest burned with the need for air as its voice- her voice? -wormed its way into his brain. Shadows gathered at the corners of his eyes, but he did not think this was the ordinary darkness of the night or the black pine woods around him. No, this was unconsciousness enveloping him, perhaps death drawing him down into an abyss of eternal nothing.
Air. Please.
She had been there in the crowd beside him, so beautiful and slender, her hair gleaming blacker than black, her eyes green. She wore a gossamer dress the same ebony as her hair, the moonlight hinting at delights beneath. When he had first caught sight of her, he had inhaled sharply at encountering so fine and delicate a girl. Only a few years older than himself, she had tilted her head back and thrust out her tongue as if tasting the night, and then she’d swiveled her head to return his stare, as though she’d been aware of his attention all along. When she smiled, he lost any sense of himself. In that moment, he would have been whatever kind of fool she wished.
“Come,” she’d whispered, lips brushing past his ear as she took his hand.
Yasu gave no thought to his friends, or the fireworks that were about to start. He had followed her through the crowd. Somewhere, he heard the low, sonorous bong of a bell, and then they had reached the part of Ama-no- Hashidate where the beach gave way to the thick tangle of black pines that ran down the center of the sandbar.
The first of the fireworks had exploded behind them, finally breaking whatever trance Yasu had been in. He turned to look up at the beauty of the colors shooting through the night sky, and behind him, he’d heard a hiss.
The hands that grabbed him could not have been her hands. One folded over his mouth and nose and one wrapped around his torso, pinning his arms to his sides. But then something thick and cold and rough coiled around him, squeezing, and now he felt something crack inside of him, the darkness at the edges of his vision rushing in.
Someone came into the trees, calling his name. Other voices shouted for him as well. The fireworks popped and thundered, throwing multicolored ghost lights among the pines.
Half-conscious, he felt himself being carried. Branches scratched his face and arms, but suddenly he could breathe again. Air rushed into his lungs. Still, he felt barely aware of his surroundings. His body swayed from side to side, still clutched by cold flesh. The touch was cold and rough at the same time. It flexed and shifted, and as awareness filtered back into his brain along with oxygen, he tried to turn his head, to get a look at the thing that had grabbed him. A single glimpse showed him red scales and dreadful yellow eyes, small black horns, wisps of white hair, and jaws opened so wide that they seemed capable of swallowing him whole. And teeth. He saw its teeth.
Yasu’s first instinct was to fight, but even as he bucked his body, trying to get loose, his gaze caught on a half-dead pine tree. He thrust his arms out and grabbed hold of a branch, gouging his left wrist but adrenaline overcoming all pain. His fingers closed tightly and he tore free of the creature’s grasp.
Breathing in ragged gasps, heart drumming hard, he snapped a branch off the dead pine and spun to face the thing with the yellow eyes. The woods were empty. Nothing moved. He scanned from shadow to shadow, strange colors still filtering through the branches from the fireworks high above. That single glimpse of the creature flashed in his mind and he twitched, whipped around, thought he’d seen it just out of the corner of his eye.
“Help!” he screamed. “I’m here! Help me! Anyone!”
Two seconds passed, maybe three, before he heard shouts in reply. People were looking for him. His friends, and others. After the other kids had vanished, everyone was on guard, paying extra attention. He would be-
The hiss came from his left. He twisted, wielding the branch. Soft and low, as if just beside him, he heard the slow bong of an old bell; a church bell, a funeral bell. Something darted across his field of vision, darkness against darkness, low to the ground, and the hiss came again, to his right.
The voices were coming closer, from either side now, surrounding him. They would find him. But too late.
It rose up behind him and he felt the chill of its breath like the cold of the grave, and then its rough tongue against the back of his neck.
Yasu screamed.
Fool, it said.
Kara glanced through the trees back at the beach. Many people had come up near the tree line now, peering in from the sand, wondering what the hell was going on, or knowing, but without any idea what they could do to help. Others truly had no clue, and weren’t about to be distracted from enjoying the Toro Nagashi Festival by the scrambling panic of a bunch of high school students and various adults who were lending a hand. They kept their backs turned to the trees, their eyes glued to the lanterns or the spectacle of the fireworks, and they grinned with childlike pleasure or sighed with solemn appreciation of the ritual of the lanterns.
In the woods, shouts of “Yasu!” drifted here and there, drowned out by the boom of fireworks, people yelling to be heard over one another’s voices. Kara and her friends had split up. She and Hachiro picked their way among the trees, forced too many times to back up and find a new path when the pines grew thick enough to create an obstacle. Ren and Mai were a little ways off. At first she’d heard the soccer queen wincing and complaining about the scratches, but she’d quieted down quickly, and now joined the chorus of anxious searchers calling Yasu’s name. Miho and Sakura were near enough that Kara could make out their voices from time to time, but she couldn’t see them. There were so many people picking their way through the pines that she felt sure if Yasu was still there to be found, they would find him.
Yet Kara couldn’t shake the feeling that they would find nothing, that Yasu had vanished as completely as the others. If this was the Hannya, or a Hannya, whatever serpentine spirit had been summoned up by their attempt to perform Dojoji, it left no trace of its victims. Either it abducted them and took them somewhere else, like a spider binding its prey to eat later, or it consumed them all without leaving a drop of blood behind.
She stopped yelling his name. Hachiro, caught up in the moment, didn’t seem to notice, but Kara gave up on Yasu. She kept moving through the pines, kept searching the shadows, but she did not believe they had any hope of finding him.
And then she heard the shouting from up ahead.
“What?” she said, pushing through a scrabble of pine branches that raked her skin in order to reach Hachiro. “What was that?”
Even as he reached for her hand, he picked up the pace, pulling her behind him as they weaved among the pines.
“Someone heard him. He’s calling out up ahead, or something,” Hachiro said.
Kara listened carefully and thought that she could actually hear a voice crying out for help. But by then the frantic shouts for Yasu had increased to a fervent cacophony that drowned out everything but the staccato explosions of fireworks.
They ran, dodging trees, whipping through the pines, and then there were many others around them, the circle closing. She saw Mai and Ren, and behind them Sakura and Miho, and others on her left side as well.
A scream tore through the pines, rising up, louder even than the fireworks’ finale, so close must they have been to its origin. They all went faster, harder, rushing, snapping branches, calling to one another now, trying to pinpoint Yasu’s location.
Kara’s steps faltered and she slowed. Ahead, a dozen or more searchers had come to a complete stop, forming a strange kind of half circle. An audience.
She let go of Hachiro’s hand and padded forward, finding a narrow gap between two others who had participated in the search. In between them, she had a view of a small clearing in the pine woods, and of the twisted, broken, bleeding human wreckage that had been left there, a rag doll cast aside by some giant, monstrous child.
She’d been wrong, after all. They had found Yasu.
And now she wished they had not.
