The breeze eddied and swirled and whipped at her clothes and tugged at her hair, and the torn bits of notes and pictures danced and skittered across the grass, moving in tighter and tighter circles. It grew stronger still, dragging pieces of cotton and the cloth skins of stuffed animals into its inexorable pull, and the gathering fragments began to build something.
A silhouette. A shape. An effigy.
At first Kara thought the fragments were constructing the image of the ketsuki, but then a sick feeling clenched in her gut and she felt the wave of grief that she’d felt before, and terror stole her breath away. She felt the presence of the demon, even as the wind finished sculpting it out of the remnants of Akane’s life.
“Oh my God,” Sakura whispered.
Miho said its name. “Kyuketsuki.”
Its hideous face looked very much like the Noh mask they had seen, but uglier, more massive, and when it opened its papiermache mouth, the long knifelike fangs within did not look like paper at all.
Nor did its eyes, when they opened. They were cat’s eyes, like the ketsuki’s, but they gleamed a sickly, putrid green.
Hachiro held Kara tightly, braced as if to run, to carry her away if need be.
And the demon spoke.
“Fortune has smiled upon you,” it said, voice a flutter of torn paper in the breeze. “I can only reach my hands into the world by chance, on those rare occasions when a window is opened. You have closed that window. I swear to you that if I should ever find a door, you would all suffer such agonies as even your nightmares cannot contain.
“But the doors have all been closed since the world was young, and I cannot touch you as I would like. Still, you must be punished for your interference, so I put my curse upon you. Little remains in the world now of the darkness of ancient days… but what there is will come to you, and to this place. All the evil of the ages will plague you, until my thirst for vengeance is sated.”
And the air went still, and the debris fell and fluttered to the ground. A moment later, the wind kicked up again, but it was only the natural breeze from across the bay, and the torn pages and photos began to disperse again.
But the scent of cherry blossoms lingered.
EPILOGUE
On a chilly, crystal blue morning, eight days after the darkest night of her life, Kara Harper sat on a stone wall in view of the Turning Bridge and strummed her guitar. Her fingers moved along strings and bounced from fret to fret with little conscious thought. She’d run through all sorts of songs that her hands knew so well, they didn’t really need her mind or her voice to participate. “Normal Sea” by Common Rotation, “Waiting for the World to Change” by John Mayer, a handful of Beatles and James Taylor songs that her father loved, and even the acoustic version of Pearl Jam’s “Evenflow” that she’d been playing for years.
Now she just strummed, idly, watching the people who waited for the Turning Bridge to swing back into place so that they could cross over onto Ama-no-Hashidate. But playing the guitar was like singing for her. When Kara thought she was only humming tuneless notes, a song would come out of her mouth as though the radio in her head had been playing all along and she had just turned up the volume. Likewise, her hands surprised her by discovering that they were not simply strumming, playing the opening notes of The Frames’ “When Your Mind’s Made Up.”
Quietly, under her breath, she sang along.
When she first spotted the thin girl in the blue skirt and long gray coat, with her white socks and black shoes and the white bow clipped in her hair, just above her right ear, she did not even look at her face. In those clothes the girl, all alone, seemed to have wandered away from some kind of church tour group. Only when the girl kept walking, away from the Turning Bridge and up the path toward the stone wall, did Kara look curiously at her face.
Her eyebrows went up, and then she smiled.
“Sakura?”
With a shrug, Sakura paused and presented herself like some actress on the red carpet who’d just been asked what fashion designer had made her outfit. Sakura actually spun around once.
“Total transformation,” she said in Japanese. But she continued in English. “My mother thinks clothes can change a girl. She thinks we are what we wear. Good girl clothes means good girl Sakura.”
Kara strummed quietly, studying her friend. “How’s that going?” she asked in English.
Sakura sat down beside her, reached inside her long coat and withdrew a packet of cigarettes. She tapped one out and flicked open a lighter Kara hadn’t even seen her produce, putting flame to the cigarette’s tip.
“I’m still Sakura,” she said. “If the school uniform did not change me, why should this? First my mother wanted me to be more like Akane, and now she wants me to be more like her. I told her it was hard enough trying to be like me without trying to learn to be someone else. She didn’t understand. Thought I was trying to make a joke.”
Kara put her fingers over the guitar strings, stilling the music. She gave Sakura a sad smile and switched back to Japanese.
“I’m going to guess she didn’t think it was funny.”
Sakura pointed the cigarette at her. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”
Kara laughed. “You’re not as paranoid as people say you are.”
Eyes mock-wide, Sakura looked around. “People? What people?”
They grinned at each other and then fell into an easy companionship. Kara played and Sakura smoked. It occurred to Kara that they must look very odd together, the proper Japanese girl in her pristine clothes and the blond gaijin girl in blue jeans and a Boston College sweatshirt. People would look at them and wonder. Kara liked that.
They had spoken on the phone and via instant message regularly throughout the days since Mr. Matsui’s murder, but they had not seen each other even once in that time. Furious with her and terrified for her, Kara’s father had not let her leave the house for the first three days unless he was with her, and by the time she had been free to go anywhere on her own-during the day, of course-Miho and Hachiro had both been taken home by their parents.
Sakura had never gone home, but the principal had restricted her to the dormitory and Miss Aritomo had stayed with her whenever she wasn’t at the police station answering questions. That arrangement had lasted for two days, and then her parents had finally arrived. They had been out of the country, out of contact, but had become miraculously findable when, instead of merely being in danger, their daughter had been arrested for assault.
So many times, Kara had wanted to say, “At least they came.” But the words never made it as far as her lips, mainly because she knew they would be hollow and bordering on deceit. Though who she was trying to deceive, herself or Sakura, she was not quite sure. Sakura’s parents had come to be with her, that much was true. But neither their daughter nor anyone else involved-even Kara’s father-thought for a moment that they had come for any reason other than to save face. They defended their daughter because if she was indeed guilty of a crime, that would be an embarrassment to them.
It had apparently never occurred to them that their neglect of their surviving girl did more to dishonor them than anything Sakura might have done, or would ever do.
“Are you officially innocent, then?” Kara asked.
“As innocent as I’ll ever be,” Sakura said. “Thanks to you and Miho and Hachiro, they don’t have any reason not to believe my version.”
Kara cringed inside. She had hated to lie, but no one would have believed the truth, and so they’d all had to manufacture a version of that long, terrible night to account for its events without any hint of the supernatural. Given her troubled history and school record, neither the police nor the school board had any difficulty believing that Sakura had snuck out a first-floor window that night.
