The teacher’s assistant has never been here before, although it is every bit as frightening as she had imagined it to be. People in loose robes (sixteen) stare coldly at her as she walks past, suspicious of how she is free to leave this place whenever she wishes to, when they cannot. Some people ignore her completely, bursting into shrill, hysterical laughter at voices no one else can hear (twelve). Others prefer the company of their closets or their potted plants, conducting animated conversations with the imaginary things that live within (ten).
People call this place the Remney Psychiatric Institute.
The teacher’s assistant looks tired. The bruises marring her face are lighter than two weeks ago, enough that they are easily hidden under a thin layer of makeup. The little finger on her right hand remains heavily bandaged, and she moves her arm with stiffness that suggests a midpoint between hurting and recovery. While sensitive to the touch, the small wound on the side of her head no longer requires dressing. She is pale, and the bright fluorescent lights overhead do nothing to hide her pain.
She has been released from the hospital with her doctor’s permission, avoiding the well-wishes and well-intentioned worry of visitors and friends as she did. But she cannot rest, not just yet. There is something else she must do first.
The White Shirt is nervous, and understandably so. He has agreed with extreme reluctance to allow the young assistant visiting rights, despite Remney’s stern rules restricting this to immediate family members only. But because the tattooed boy’s father personally requests this, the White Shirt unlocks the door leading into the Japanese woman’s room and steps back to allow the young woman entry.
The shoji screens are gone, but the dolls are still in their wooden stands, and like many others before her, this sight makes the young woman very uncomfortable. The Japanese woman sits on a chair at the center of the room, staring at nothing. She makes no sound, gives no signal that she is aware of the young woman’s presence. Nervous, the young woman hovers uncertainly a few feet away, torn between advancing and retreating.
“Mrs. Halloway? Aunt Yoko?”
The woman rocks back and forth, eyes glued to the wall before her, staring at the large carpeted stand filled with imperial dolls.
The teacher’s assistant tries again. “Aunt Yoko? My name is Calliope Starr. I’m Doug Halloway’s niece. Tarquin’s cousin.”
A faint ghost of a smile curves along the older woman’s mouth. “Tarquin?”
“Yes,” the young woman says, encouraged. “Your son, Tarquin?”
“He’s a very lovely boy,” the woman says. “He was a beautiful baby. So sweet. So very innocent. That’s what’s wrong with him, you know. If there had been more cruelty in his nature, like normal boys have, he would not be suffering as he does now. Still—such a beautiful baby boy. Has something happened to him?” Alarm flickers in the woman’s eyes, and she attempts to stand. The White Shirt guarding the door stiffens, prepared to summon for assistance if necessary. “Has something happened to my Tarquin?”
“Nothing’s happened to him,” the teacher’s assistant says hurriedly. “Tarquin’s all right. He’s safe.”
“Liar!” The woman shakes her head. “Tarquin isn’t safe. And it’s all my fault. My fault, my fault…”
“Aunt Yoko, it isn’t your fault—”
“It’s all my fault! I had no choice!” The woman sinks back into her chair, but her rocking motions grow more frantic and agitated. “He had to be sacrificed! I had no choice! She would have killed more!”
“Aunt Yoko!” The teaching assistant takes hold of the woman’s shoulders, steadying her. Pain travels up her injured shoulder, but she does not let go until the woman ceases her violent thrashing, her voice now reduced to soft whimpers. The White Shirt relaxes, though still alert. “Aunt Yoko, who would have killed more?”
“I had to,” the woman whispers. “I had to stop her.”
“Who? The woman in black?”
A shudder racks the woman’s body, and she moans.
“I think that’s enough, Miss Starr,” the White Shirt says disapprovingly.
“No! No. She has to know. Do you have a mother, my dear?”
“Yes. Linda Starr, Uncle Doug’s sister.”
“I see it now. There is something of Douglas in your eyes. Tarquin was always too young to remember the mother I once was with him—the mother I should have been. How is it that you can see her? Why do you see the woman with the mask?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“I looked up to her, you know. She was the best of us all. Chiyo had always been perfect, could do no wrong. But even she could not prevent such hate from taking hold of her. I tried, but the sealing was incomplete. The ritual had not been performed in such a long time, and none of us knew how well it would work, if it even would. But we had to try. Poor, poor Chiyo. And my Tarquin…” Her face crumples, and she ducks her head, long hair streaming down her face.
“Did you send her as well?” she asks, head still lowered. “The white ghost?”
“The white ghost?” the teacher’s assistant repeats, taken aback.
“The yuurei—a spirit that cannot rest. The lady in white. The lady with the broken neck. The woman who cannot rest. Did you send her to help my son?”
“I…I don’t…”
“I saw her,” the frail woman insists. “I saw her on the ceiling, hanging down. I thought she meant to harm my husband and my son, but now I know she is here for a much different purpose. The binding seals on my son attract her, as they do all yuurei. But the woman in black repels even her. Even now I see the woman in white, standing behind you.”
The young woman swallows hard and, trembling, turns—but sees nothing.
“Seals?” she asks. “The tattoos on your son’s body…they’re binding seals?”
“Five seals, arranged in a star pattern. Here, and here…” The woman touches her chest, then the backs of her hands. Finally, her fingers drift down her sides to rest on the rise of her hips. “And here. But the ritual has only partly succeeded. Little by little, the masked woman is breaking free of the chains that bind her to my Tarquin. I know she has broken many of those seals. She knows she is close.”
The woman grips the teaching assistant’s arm. “Promise me you will protect my son. Promise me you will tell my husband that he must return to where it all began, to lift the curse. He will not believe you. He will not understand. But you must convince him.”
“Return to where?”
But something else distracts the woman. She rises from her chair, stepping toward the platform, and lifts an empress doll off its stand. Taking a tiny pearl comb from her dresser, she returns to her seat with the doll settled on her lap. Now she combs its hair, a doting mother.
“Have you ever been to the Hina-matsuri?” Her voice is calm once more, placid. “It is a time-honored festival, celebrated throughout Japan. My father was a celebrated dollmaker, and my sister and I grew up surrounded by his creations. People would buy his dolls and bring them out for luck during the Hina-matsuri. But dolls are useful in other ways, as well. One can, for instance, use dolls as a sacrifice—a way to capture evil spirits and keep them trapped within their bodies for as long as it takes to exorcise their malice. Did you know what dolls like these are called in Japan? Ningyo. ‘One of human shape.’”
She pauses, staring off into the distance, while her hand continues to stroke the empress’s hair.
“But there also exist spirits so powerful that mere dolls cannot contain them. For this, another type of sacrifice must be used—a living human being, an innocent.
“For many long years, Chiyo had endured as such a sacrifice. But then the spirits took over, transforming her into the revenant she is now. To overcome her ghost, I was forced to create a new sacrifice…
“Was it wrong for a mother to sacrifice her son to protect the lives of others around me, those who looked to me for protection? I do not know. I was so sure of myself back then, so sure I could cleanse him from her taint eventually. But I could not.”
She smiles then, sadly. “Tarquin must have told you how I have tried to kill him many times. I thought it was the only choice I had left. But there is one more thing I can do for him. After tonight, my son will no longer suffer from my mistakes. This will end, one way or another.” She places the empress on her bed, rises to select another doll, and begins the same painstaking process all over again. “But if I fail, he must return.”
“Return to where?” The teacher’s assistant could easily dismiss the woman’s words as nothing more than ramblings. Even the White Shirt lounging by the door is no longer listening, now that the threat of violence has passed.
But the young teacher has seen the woman in black. She has seen the woman in white and is now aware of how strange things may lurk, unseen to the eye. She has seen the Smiling Man’s corpse. She has seen her cousin’s face, as blank and as paper-white as all the dolls in this room, and her own blood curdling against the seals on his skin.
The woman looks back at her, and for the first time, there is clarity in her gaze. “Yagen Valley,” she says. “They must return to the little dolls of Yagen Valley, to my sisters. To the fear, where it all began.”
The young woman leaves several minutes later with more questions, rather than the answers she seeks. The woman is alone. She selects another doll, running the small comb through its glossy black hair. Once this is completed to her satisfaction, she lifts the doll to the light, gazing into its face. She must like what she sees, for she sets the doll down—not in its usual place on the stands, but on the floor next to her chair.
She takes another doll and does the same thing, placing it down on the ground once she is done and reaching for yet another—until finally, eight dolls surround her in a circle, all facing inward. Their blank faces bore into the woman’s, awaiting her next move.
It is foolish, this thing that she attempts.
“It may be so,” she says to me, as I stand in the corner of the darkened room and watch her, “but it must be done.”
There is a knock at the door. One of the White Shirts arrives with dinner and her medication. In exchange, the woman hands him a small letter and asks him to post it on her behalf as quickly as possible. When he leaves, she carefully spits the tablets back into her hand and hides them in a tiny space between the wall and the dresser where several other pills gather dust.
From behind several dolls, she extracts four slim candles and a box of matches, taken when the White Shirts were distracted elsewhere. She lights one of the candles and tilts it to allow the tallow to drip onto the floor. She moves slowly, and when the flames flicker briefly against her fingers she gives no cry of pain, making little sound at all. She does not stop until a perfect circle of dried wax surrounds all eight dolls.
She now lights the other candles in turn, setting them down in all four directions outside the circle. Lastly, she steps inside the ring with the empress doll, seating herself at its center. She closes her eyes and begins to chant softly, once again in that obscure, melodic language.
Nothing happens. Not at first.
There are no windows in the room, yet a breeze picks up. A noiseless wind begins to whip at the hair of the dolls on their shelves, wrapping around their faces and blindfolding their eyes with their own dark locks. The wooden stands splinter, seemingly on their own. The bed behind the woman, though bolted down, lifts up once, then crashes back down against the floor.
This does not frighten the woman, who continues her chanting. Something takes umbrage at her impertinence. The shaking grows louder, more agitated. Dolls rain down as shelves dislodge themselves from the screws in the walls. The room itself seems gripped in the throes of an earthquake that grows fiercer with every minute that passes. Claw marks appear against grooves in the ceiling, long deep scratches raking down.
And still the woman chants. The eight dolls remain upright despite this terrible haunting, and the candles sputter and wink out briefly, but just as quickly resume their light.
The black fog appears just outside of the wax circle. Unlike during her previous appearances, the woman in black seems tangible, solid. Her face emerges from the writhing darkness, a ruin of skin and clot. More of the mask she wears has fallen, and now two staring sockets look out from a hideously disfigured face, flecked and mottled.
The woman called Yoko lifts the empress. The doll stares serenely back at the black abomination with its blank, colorless eyes.
“Begone!” the Japanese woman cries, and for the first time she is alive, more animated than I have ever seen her. “Leave us alone!” More sutras flow from her lips.
The woman in black hovers in the air, motionless. Then she lifts a hand as if to ward off an invisible blow, but against her will, she is slowly pulled toward the empress doll. The other woman does not budge. She is unmoving, triumphant.
The woman in black lifts her head again, and all the hate is in her eyes. Then the wind dies. The candle’s flame flickers out briefly, and when it returns, only the Japanese woman and I remain inside the room. The woman in black is gone.
The Japanese woman waits for a few moments, panting heavily. When all is finally quiet, she lowers the doll and looks at its upturned face. Its eyes are now a solid, unending black.
The woman begins to laugh—silently, then hysterically—relieved it is now over. With the empress doll still in hand, she takes a step outside of the wax circle, moving back toward the doll’s stand.
Behind her, one of the dolls in the circle slowly leans over and topples forward to land face-first on the floor.
The woman turns, shocked. As she watches, the other seven dolls follow, sinking to land on their faces, one after the other in the same manner as the first.
She looks down at the empress doll in her hand.
A mask stares back at her, and behind it that maimed, hideous face.
The woman says a curious thing.
“Oneesan,” she whimpers, beseeching, as ragged nails claw their way up her arms and shoulders, the woman in black extending to her full height. The empress doll falls at the Japanese woman’s feet, its head torn off.
The woman screams, but by then it is already too late.
When it is done, the woman in black stares at me. From behind her mask, she smiles.
The night passes quietly enough for the other inmates at Remney’s, but when one of the White Shirts comes to check on the woman, that peace is soon shattered. She bursts out of the room in such hysterics that it becomes difficult to distinguish her from her patients.
Someone has cut off the heads of all one hundred and eight dolls, their faces charred by some unknown fire. The room is in disarray with the bed and chair overturned, and faint scorch marks encompass one side of the wall. The headless dolls are lined up in small rows beside the broken bed, which is now drenched in blood.
And underneath this bed they find the one hundred and ninth head.