Strange dreams keep her company for most of the night.
Callie first imagines she is back in Applegate, teaching a class of students. She can see Tarquin hunched over his desk, drawing, and Sandra, who keeps turning her head to smile at something at the back of the class. There are nine lightbulbs hanging over her head, and as she continues her lecture, they silently explode one after the other. She knows without knowing why that when the last bulb goes out, something will come to take her away.
And then the lightbulbs are inexplicably transformed into long, hanging stalks of hair. She looks up and realizes they are attached to nine women in white, hanging upside down from the ceiling and staring at her with
pale faces
and
bright black eyes.
The dream shifts. Now she finds herself strapped to the gurney inside the Smiling Man’s basement, as the murderer methodically cuts off her fingers one by one. And yet she feels no pain and watches placidly as the Smiling Man is enveloped in a mass of hair that tears him into pieces.
Then she is standing before a ring of mirrors. In some, she can see herself looking out. In others, it is Tarquin, his face solemn and grim, or the woman in black, bits of mask still clinging stubbornly to her horrifically disfigured face. In some, I look out at her as a vengeful creature, and in others as a young girl in a servant’s garb.
And then she sees Tarquin struggling to free himself, while Yoko Taneda and the masked woman loom over him, the first tracing tattoos on his skin and the other carving them out with a stone knife. He is screaming.
The dream shifts briefly, and she watches me run across a dark, nameless river, running after paper lanterns bobbing in the stream. And then the scene changes again, and now eight dolls are arranged neatly in a circle, and I stand inside it. As she looks on, I move around the ring, laying my hand on each doll.
“One.”
“Two.”
With each count, I change. My hair comes undone, more of it falling over my eyes.
“Three.”
“Four.”
The obi slips away, my kimono coming loose and undone as blood seeps into the fabric.
“Five.”
“Six.”
My skin loses its color and sags into unhealthy, blotched white.
“Seven.”
“Eight.”
And I disappear. Only the circle of dolls remains.
It is only then Callie realizes I am behind her, my hands burrowing into her yellow locks, warring with the thin black strands of my own.
“Nine,”
I whisper into her ear.
Callie looks down at herself. She reaches up at her own head and feels the tangle of disheveled hair, the glassy sheen of her own complexion and realizes that the horrifying visage in the mirror is not mine, but her own face.
“Yes,”
she says.
And then Callie starts awake, white-faced and trembling. It is lighter outside, two hours away from dawn, but she crawls out onto the porch, waiting for the sun until it breaks through the horizon, comforting her. When she looks to her left, I am sitting beside her, dressed as the servant I had been in my youth, with my eyes glued to the sky.
“Will Tarquin die?” Callie asks aloud, though she does not address this question to me. “Is he going to die today?”
This, I cannot answer.
• • •
The sunrise over Yagen Valley is beautiful. The air is crisp, and birds fly overhead, dotted against sky the color of peaches and lavender.
There is much to do for the ritual. All participants must first be purified, and Tarquin is embarrassed, turning away quickly, while the mikos show no qualms at taking off their clothes and bathing at what they call the Chinsei-no-yu hot springs, and they laugh at his flushed face. Taking pity on him, Callie brings him to the second onsen spring, where he is able to bathe and rest with none of the other teasing mikos for company. For Callie, the water feels unusually hot against her skin, a pleasant warmth that penetrates into her very being. If only everything could be this way—like a river, she thinks, where all things warm and light can float on forever.
After the hot springs, Tarquin is given a faded but comfortable yukata to wear. Callie herself wears a loose, formfitting cotton kimono Kagura lends her. Every stitch of clothing that the participants wear must also be purified and cleansed beforehand, down even to the socks on their feet. Already the other mikos are hard at work. They scrub down the altars, the wooden floors and walls, even the movable shoji screens, with sprigs of sage and more sweetgrass, even going so far as to wash the wooden porch and parts of the roof with sage and sweetgrass before sprinkling everything with more salt.
Kagura explains that the combination of sage and sea salt dispels the negativity of a particular place, while sweetgrass encourages positivity to settle in once the negativity has dispersed. The mikos perform this cleansing three times, once every hour, to ensure its maximum potency.
The ritual makes use of not one, but eight dolls, carefully selected from the display. “These are the best of the dolls we have,” the obaasan says. The old woman appears to be in a good mood, even as her gnarled but still nimble fingers rip the dolls open, emptying their cotton contents into a small wooden bowl. Another larger bowl bearing fragrant rice grains, blessed earlier that day, sits on her right side, and as in the previous exorcism, they will serve as filling.
“These dolls have been with us the longest, and so they have borne witness to numerous rituals and purifications, have soaked up the holiness of Chinsei. Some have been with the shrine for more than a hundred years. We use these dolls in groups of eight when we purify especially powerful demons, you see.”
“Will they be able to hold someone as powerful as Chiyo?” Callie asks her.
“They should. We had very few reasons to attempt this before Chiyo died.” With that chilling revelation, the old woman stuffs the rice grains, then takes up needle and red thread to expertly stitch the dolls close. “But today is a very auspicious day. I have much hope.” She winds the excess threads around each doll’s body, keeping them firmly in place.
“My sisters and I will all take part in the ritual,” Kagura explains further. “Technically, a miko who is strong enough can carry out the ritual herself, but more will strengthen it. It is better to be safe than to be sorry.”
The mikos also do other things they did not do for the seven-year-old’s exorcism. Kagura and Amaya have been up earlier than the others to make several more necessary purchases in Mutsu. Now Callie watches as Saya smears a liberal amount of sea salt onto the only two mirrors inside the shrine, to the extent that her own reflection is now barely visible. The shrine maiden stops by the doorway leading into the next room.
“Okiku-sama,” she says aloud. “You must step out of the room for now and allow us to complete the ritual successfully.”
She then tosses several handfuls of the salt along the entrance. More is added in a straight and unbroken line around the corners of the room to prevent any malingering spirits from escaping or entering once the ritual begins.
Every conceivable bowl or container found inside the shrine is filled with water, and even more sea salt is added to them: eight serving bowls, two plugged sinks, five wooden buckets, four of the incense burners that would not be used that day. Even the small wooden spoons the miko use for their daily meals (six) are spread across a tatami mat, the hollow curves filled with as much water as they can hold. Finally, Amaya hands Callie four pieces of sage and requests that she put half of these in her mouth, and the other half on the soles of her feet, which she does by slipping them inside her socks.
Finally, all eight dolls are ready. They are brought out to form a large circle in the center of the room, with equal amounts of more sweetgrass in between each doll. The obaasan gestures at Tarquin, who has said nothing all morning, silently watching the preparations.
“Obaasan wants you to take off your hakama,” Kagura translates. “Lie down at the center of these dolls, and remain perfectly still.”
Whatever nervousness and unease Tarquin experienced the night before is now gone. His face is quietly composed, and he shows little fear. Dutifully, he stands in the middle of the dolls’ ring. Dutifully he removes his hakama, revealing the vile seals he has sought to keep hidden for all of his short life. Of the five, three of the seals have faded to be nearly invisible against his skin, while one remains a deep black. Still another seems uncertain, fading from black to transparent and back again.
Dutifully, Tarquin lies on his back, his palms turned toward the ceiling. His breathing is heavy. Around him, the other mikos settle themselves outside of the circle, kneeling and positioned so that each miko is within reach of three of the dolls.
The obaasan takes the best and the most beautiful of these dolls: an ichimatsu in a pure white kimono, with lovely, colorless eyes and soft, silky black hair, and lifts it over Tarquin’s head. Slowly, the old woman begins to chant, and the ritual begins.
An hour passes, and then another. Still the obaasan continues without stopping, and still the other mikos surrounding the circle wait with their heads bowed and their hands folded, never moving.
And yet nothing happens.
But by the third hour it becomes obvious that something has taken hold of the shrine. The small wind chimes that hang by the entrance, greeting each gust and whisper of air that enters, have now fallen silent, barely stirring in the sudden stillness. Something creaks along the floor, though no one moves. Callie, sitting just outside the circle, sees the looser floorboards bend under some unseen weight, as if an invisible foot treads on them. The creaking sounds circle the dolls and the mikos beside them, like an invisible beast stalking prey.
If the others are aware of this unseen intruder, they give no sign. But at the obaasan’s signal, the other mikos begin chanting in unison, a chorus of voices and sutras that crackle through the air with hidden power. The creaking increased in retaliation, an invisible tantrum stamping angrily about.
Callie suddenly understands. The mikos and dolls are creating a barrier between Tarquin and the unseen spirit, preventing it from gaining access to his body. Slowly and painstakingly, they are severing her connections to him.
Something begins to scream, but it comes from no physical source. Shriek after shriek rings out, howls of rage echoing up to the nearby mountains. Callie presses herself against one corner, arms clapped around her head to drown out the horrible sounds. And still the mikos remain unaffected and chant on. Tarquin stares up at the ceiling, never blinking, and gives no indication he hears the tumult around him.
In time the screams grow weaker, as if the screamer has been drained of most of its strength. At another gesture from the obaasan, the chants increase in volume and speed, and the old woman lifts the ichimatsu doll over her head, shouting triumphantly. The floor begins to rattle, as does everything inside the Chinsei shrine. Dolls that do not take part in the ritual topple to the floor, cracks appearing in the display glass. Heavy bowls containing water slosh noisily, and from above, a wooden beam actually splits in two, showering sawdust and splinters onto the mikos below. Callie gasps, but the shrine maidens have nerves of steel and do not flinch.
Despite the growing violence around them, there is peace within this ring of dolls, and Tarquin remains untouched. The obaasan does not waver. The doll remains aloft, and Callie sees how the pupils of its eyes dilate and contract. A cold wind picks up, and the young woman spots a faint figure clad in black struggling against this air, helpless as it is drawn closer and closer to the doll. Inch by grudging inch it gives way, until finally the figure is sucked right into the doll’s prim rosebud mouth. Something wails loudly one last time and then stops. The wind dies down, and from outside, the wind chimes ring again.
The obaasan has stopped chanting, and so have the other mikos. With hands that now betray themselves by their trembling, the old woman sets the doll down beside Tarquin’s head. Brief sighs erupt from around the other mikos, sounds of relief. Tarquin does not get up from the floor, however, and stares at something above him. The strange tattoos around his body have finally disappeared.
“It is done,” the obaasan says with finality. Callie stares at the boy’s prone body, unsure why Tarquin does not move, why he does not look like he is breathing.
“Tarquin-kun,” Kagura says, “the ritual is over now. You can get up now. See? The tattoos are gone.”
And still Tarquin says nothing. The satisfied look on the mikos’ faces changes abruptly to one of concern when he does not move. His chest does not rise and fall, and he does not blink.
“Tarquin-kun?”
Saya crouches over the prone boy, frowning. And then she gives a small cry of alarm and turns one of his wrists over.
There is one remaining seal on the boy’s body, throbbing frantically against his flesh like a heartbeat. It is the seal on Tarquin’s left wrist, the same seal bearing Callie’s blood. Callie, the only victim to survive the woman’s curse.
“What has happened?” The obaasan is shocked, trying to rise to her feet.
“The seal is still here!” Saya sounds panicked.
“That is impossible! It should have disappeared along with the others unless…unless…”
The obaasan’s hard gaze now swivels toward Callie’s stunned face.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Callie does not need to understand the woman’s Japanese to glean its meaning from the fury of her lips, the anger in her eyes. “It was your blood on this seal!”
“I…I don’t…”
“You should have told us, Callie-chan!” Kagura wails. “You should have told us it was your blood, your seal! Everything that bears witness to the ritual must be pure and untainted. You should have been forbidden to watch!”
“I’m sorry! I…I didn’t know…”
There is a loud gasp, and the obaasan suddenly stumbles, her face deathly pale. She is clutching at her stomach, where the hilt of a stone knife protrudes. She tries to speak, but blood flows instead from her mouth, and she falls onto the wooden floor.
“Machika-obaasan!” Forgetting their duties, the other mikos rush to the old woman’s side, unmindful of the pool of blood that is spreading from her in spirals, growing larger and larger until it first brushes and then soon immerses itself in Tarquin’s hair. The boy’s mouth falls open, and a harsh, choking sound comes from his throat.
It is Amaya who is first made aware of the danger. “No!” she howls, attempting to lift Tarquin and bring him away, but by then it is too late. Blood drips onto the boy’s back, onto the final untouched seal that reappears on his skin without warning, before just as suddenly dissolving back into nothingness.
The darkness steals into the room, blocking out the daylight outside, and with it comes cold, mocking laughter.
The ritual has failed. The woman in black
is
free.