Pokémon Hospice

[bluesidra]

Between your last heartbeat and the afterlife is a long way. For some it's a straight one, for many, it isn't. But whatever the case, you leave behind a ghost. It haunts your loved ones every time they think of you. And sometimes, your ghost haunts them even while you are still alive.

This is a story about the living, the dead and the priest who walks the line between

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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Expert
Chapter 2: Investigator

❂​

Rating: Teens
Content warning: Discussion of Death, including a suicide 40 years ago. Specific CWs at the beginning of the chapter.

Notes: Welcome to this love-child of everything I read during the Blitz! Major thanks to everyone who inspired me for that. The people I'm ripping off can probably tell. You are such great writers. Thanks to you I finally got the courage to tackle a kind of story I wanted to tell for quite a while now.
Preferred feedback: Everything, really. And don't be shy to point out typos or grammar, I'm still learning.

❂​

 

[bluesidra]

Thank you, @CinderArts, for beta-reading

Chapter 1: Expert​

You’ve been called many things before. Some of them are true. ‘Countryman’, however, is none of them, and for good reason.

Twenty-two years you’ve managed without ever being on a tractor. Now, after just ten minutes of being on one, you know you have missed nothing. The old, cabin-less vehicle is bumping up and down with every stone and hole in the pathway it encounters, while the engine happily adds its own vibrations and noises to the mix. The smell of oil and diesel is sharp and lulling at the same time and there is only one thin handhold separating you from the ground and the fall it takes to get there.

The summer hillsides you are crawling through, however, are a different story.

“Sorry about my father,” says the man in the driver's seat next to you. “The attacks have caused him quite some sleepless nights now. And now we’ve had to move the kentauros into the downhill stable.”

Terraced fields are huddled together, sharp against the clear blue sky and almost bursting from the rice that is now blooming in thousand shades of green and gold. Like an ocean it gently sways whenever a breeze cools the heat off your skin. There are specs of violet, red and blue along the ridges, and some smaller terraces are even fully dedicated to them. Sometimes a stray ray of sunlight manages to hit the watery bed below the rice, throwing its reflection back at you. You squint.

“Downhill? Next to the heifers?” Takara asks from the other wheelhouse-slash-seat, happy to break the awkward silence between you.

Every now and again, you pass by a tree, but soon after you leave its shadow, you are again met with colours that are almost too vivid for your eyes.

“Yep.”

There are a myriad of smells and sounds in the air that you haven’t been aware of before. The heavy scent of rice and grass is sweet and nothing like the bitter herbs that grow along the shaded pathways of the towers back home. It mixes with the mist of the water-fields and sticks along your throat, almost too heavy to breathe. There are tiny splashes when a nyoromo darts through the water and the rustling when it pushes the stalks out of its path. Every tree along the way is trembling with the songs of the korobohshis. Up ahead, a nyarth lies in ambush, tail flicking in anticipation. A rustling in the hedge — its prey. And then the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of little blows when the wind gets caught in the leaves or the haulms and bashes them against one another. The tractor’s beating. Takara’s laugh. Quick, high-pitched. Fake.

“I can imagine the noise,” he says. You can’t and you don’t want to.

Your grasp around the handhold tightens and you slowly root your senses back into you and your immediate surroundings. The smell of unfiltered diesel. The somewhat rhythmic sound of a four-chambered heart beating under the cerulean hood. The shocks running through your spine from yet another hole in the path. The other two men you share this ride with — and the awkward silence that’s been there since you left the farmstead and that now threatens to come back. If so, you don’t intend to break it. That way, you get to enjoy the scenery some more. Just remember to shut down a few senses this time.

“Still,” Ono sighs after a while. “How often do we get visitors from Enju?” He shifts gears and the motor howls. If the small machine wouldn’t sound so confident in its huffs and puffs, you’d be sure you’d soon hold the funeral rites for it. “First time out here?” Damn, this one’s for you.

You nod.

“That makes it even worse, then.” He turns to you and his posture straightens up. “In that case, I’m all the more thankful that you came out here to help.” You nod once more, and after some time, he turns his eyes back towards the path. He is in his mid-thirties, you’d guess, muscular frame and healthy skin tone from working on his family’s farm his entire life. But now he slumps and his good posture is gone. “He hasn’t been the same since mother died,” he sighs.

“They rarely are,” the other man says before you can even think it, and Ono frowns once more. “But let’s not dwell on it.”

The commiserating man, Takara Sen, looks like a priest, even though he wears civilian clothes. You wonder why that is, and if this applies to you as well. You’re somewhat torn between the plain hairstyle and the remarkably unremarkable shirt when he again involves you in the conversation.

Putting on a smile so big it shifts the freckles on his face around, he says with pointed glee, “Hey, Koji, why don’t you explain to Mr Watanabe a bit what you’ve got here?”

“Oh, sure,” Ono says and turns to you. The grudge is still not entirely gone from his voice, but he definitely is thankful for the distraction. “How much do you know about rice-farming?”

“Not overly much,” you admit.

He shrugs and grins sheepishly. “Just making sure. Who knows? You might be an agriculture major. With you city folks, I never really know.” His cheeriness soon vanishes when the sound of his words hits his eardrums and he adds a quick “No offence, Sir” to minimise any transgressions.

You cover up your irritation with a slight smile and judging by the relief washing over his features, it works. “I’m not. And no offence taken.” You’ve already encountered many preconceptions before, but even you agree that throwing you in with other ‘city folk’ is a sound assumption to make.

“See those fields over there?” Ono gestures towards the terraces to the right of your vehicle. “That’s rice. We’re currently switching from commercial rice-farming to a more ecologically sustainable approach. My sister and I planted all those seedlings by hand only a month ago. Compare how they’re doing with those. Quite good, right?”

Not that you are the best judge for these matters, but the plants in the fields to the right look a bit taller and way better organised than the other ones he pointed out, so you nod and hum in agreement. Driving past the fields, you notice that the plants stand along a tight grid. Every row you pass by forms a straight line from here to the horizon for the briefest of seconds.

But there is something else you noticed, and that might relate to why you’re here. You give him a few seconds, but he doesn’t follow up with anything. So you turn back around, and shout over the noise of the tractor, “Why are you switching?”

Immediately, Ono’s smile falls into a more serious line. “Well... it’s hard for smaller farms to keep up with the international prices. The west has large, flat plains. Even aerial sowing in some places. I just can’t force that productivity out of my soil. And if I did, the ground would be exhausted five years from now.” There is concern in the lines around his mouth and temples, but also a bright and focused look of defiance in his eyes. He tenses up and brings his shoulders back behind him. “There’s a market emerging for ecologically grown food, especially around the bigger cities. It’s the only way to sustain this farm.” When he says this last sentence, his shoulders droop only a little forward.

Uncertainty about the future. A massive change in cultivation methods and possibly a rift between father and son. Add to that that so far he has told you a lot about rice and nothing about the kentauros. Loss of a close family member. Judging by how hostile his old man acted to your presence, he holds a few grudges, not only grief.

“Do you only grow rice here?” you shout over the sound of the engine. A breeze picks up and you lean in a bit closer to be able to hear him. It tugs on your hair and blows through your pullover. For a moment, you have to focus on Ono’s answer and not the billions of other sensations that this breeze brings.

He shakes his head. “Father breeds red sekichiku kentauros. They're over there.” He gestures somewhere, but you are distracted by a cold pressure against your leg. Giving in to the begging, you lean back again and a bit to the side. The ghost that’s been hiding in your shadow stretches himself and for a moment, your shadow’s shape shifts.

“When the rice-fields are recuperating, they make great meadows for the cattle.”

{Only a few more hours and the sun sets,} you think-say. In response, whatever part of your body that’s not touched by sunlight feels a few degrees cooler for a moment. The downside is that you now can’t really make out what Ono is saying, unless you want to hear every other thing around you as well.

Takara leans in and from his lip-movements and the jovial smile you can piece together that they are talking about the cattle. The breeze still tugs your hair. It makes you aware of every square millimetre of skin on your body, or so you think. You’re not cold, you are just… aware.

You close your eyes and focus on the sensation. A thousand tiny stings where the breeze cuts through the stitches of your pullover. A thousand tiny sounds from the fields and the forest up ahead. You focus on the surface of your skin and let it confine you and your perception for one moment. After that moment has passed, you breathe in, and now the air that’s rushing through your nostrils, your windpipe and into your lungs is loud enough to drown out the static.

When you open your eyes again, you are already close to the edge of the forest that covers the top and the north-face of the hill you have been steadily climbing up. The wind picks up one last time and howls through the woods before it falls quiet. You simply endure it.

At the edge of the forest nestles an old farmstead. Its shingles are weathered and its white walls look darkened, even though the trees don’t cast their shadows over it yet. Ono points towards it.

“That right there is the scene of the crime. We call it the upper farm, but it’s really the older one of the two. After the war, my parents built the other one and moved the farm down into the valley. It’s simply easier to access. We maintain this one because of the stables, but really, most of our life happens downhill.”

You look at the farmstead as the tractor slowly pulls up in front of it and for a brief second, the sun doesn’t seem to burn as hot as it used to. Your shadow twitches in anticipation.

❂​

The narrow door creaks in pain as its rusted hinges are moved once more. Ono steps through it and secures it to the side of the barn, when Takara already freezes in place. “It’s grown even bigger,” he comments in a feeble tone. You step through the doorway as well and see it before you even had time to thank your host.

The other end of the yard opens to a sharp decline down into the valley. Creeping from this abyss is a knot of withered, warty roots, stretching itself into the property like a cancerous growth. They look old and dry, but the recently disturbed soil around them betrays their age.

“Yes. The last attack has torn down the fence,” Ono says. “Look how close to the stables they are now.”

You step into the yard and bow to the unnatural growth and the old house itself. It is not just a greeting. It is a sign of respect for what has caused this. Behind you, Takara mimics the movement.

The roots are perfectly still when you get closer. In fact, there is no sign of life in or around them. Even the old fence looks livelier. The places where the roots shattered the pickets reveal light brown wood that contrasts with the almost greyish hue of the ghostly roots. When you put your hand onto them, they don’t react and you can feel their brittle, cold surface underneath your fingers.

“Have you seen something like this before?” Takara asks behind you. You nod.

Now that you are so close to it, it is a lot quieter. Even the forest seems to dull its sounds out of respect. By now you are sure that there is no life around, but you silently ask the roots for their permission regardless before you climb onto them. Nothing objects.

After a short struggle, you stand on the highest point of the growth, where it had clashed against the fence before tearing it down. In front of you, the hillside slopes down into a dark, misty creek. From what you can see, these woods stretch almost up to the fiery red forests of Enju. The roots themselves run further down the mountain, down into the creek. In their single-minded path, they have mowed down smaller shrubs and trees. But the plant these roots spring from is nowhere in sight.

{Can you check what’s down there?} you ask quietly. The air around your legs cools for a second, then a part of your shadow dislodges and rushes along the roots’ shadows down the mountainside.

You turn around to the two men, who are keeping a respectful distance. “Mr Ono,” you address the owner of this place, “what is down there?”

“Umm…” He looks at you like he’s never considered that question before. “Nothing much. Well, there’s the old air-raid shelter a few metres down. But we haven’t maintained it or this forest for an eternity. Way too steep. We mostly let it do its own thing.”

{Halfway down the mountain’s some sort of path, but it gets lost in the underbrush soon after. Want me to go further down?} A deep voice reverberates somewhere between your sternum and the base of your skull. You respond with an unarticulated notion of gratitude and decline the offer while you climb down. With the source of this activity still unknown, you want him close by.

“Not some path?” You ask Ono nonchalantly while making sure you keep a close look at him from the corners of your eyes.

“Wouldn’t know where to.” Normal response time, no stress signals in his posture. You decide to believe it and let it go for now. Mostly because something else has caught your attention: There seems to be a spot where the roots aren’t as thick.

Once you’ve got both feet firmly back on the ground, you push the roots apart to find a little strip of paper. Judging from the blue ink and the floating brush-strokes, it’s a plea asking Lugia for their protection. Takara’s handiwork. But most importantly — it worked. The roots avoided the divine sign at any time. The paper was unharmed, not even a fold on a corner. Good to know.

So what do you have here? Aggressive roots making their way up from the valley below. They show no signs of damage, so they must have been very much alive when they dug into this yard. It could be a genuine forest spirit, but those attacks usually target newer sites. Also, forest spirits rarely respect manmade charms. So you’re back to a spirit of the dead. Human or pokemon you can’t quite tell yet. And somehow it is drawn to this place.

You turn around, and, seeing Takara’s insecure look, you put on a smile halfway between praise and reassurance before you address Ono and let your expression go back to business casual.

Time for some questions.

“Did you experience any recent deaths?”

“Ehrm… had to shoot one of our oldest bulls when he fell down a ledge and broke his leg,” he responds. “And, well, if you count them in, four went to the butcher over in Funaoka.” You count them in, but they're only a problem if you’re ever at the butcher’s workshop. No mention of his mother, though.

“Any other major changes?” you continue, to which he only shakes his head. You make a mental note about the omission of changing cultivation methods too and decide that this man requires a more direct approach. Well, more direct than you already are. “Was this your mother’s or your father’s birthplace?”

“My mother’s. Why—,” he says slowly. His expression forms the equivalent of a question mark as he begins to grasp what this is aiming at. You give him time to finish his sentence, but he doesn’t, so you press on.

“How and when did she die?” At your question, he flinches in pain and takes half a step back. In the corner of your eye, you can see Takara growing restless and you hope he gets the hint, but a second later you learn he doesn’t.

“She died three months ago of a stroke,” the priest interjects and you immediately cut him off with a small but stern hand-wave that Ono hopefully doesn’t notice. Takara does, and he is quiet again. You don't want his answer. You want Ono's.

The silence stretches over the three of you. Ono shrinks under your stare and the emotions he doesn’t want to confront until he finally cracks. His voice is almost inaudible now.

“In the middle of the day. We were preparing the rice fields. She just fell over... But she... Do you think she has anything to do with it?” His voice doesn’t have its strength back, but there is definitely resolve in there. Holding his gaze is easy, nevertheless.

You shrug and continue to say nothing. Humans don’t like silence. It makes it harder to distract them from the things that go unspoken. And here, the absence of sounds that these roots command makes it even easier to get the words out of him.

“My father has been up here every other night since she passed,” he says after a minute or so. Your instinct is to nod, but you suppress it. Every sign of confirmation from your end would make this less uncomfortable. So after another moment he adds: “She loved this place a lot. Lots of childhood memories, you know?”

His shoulders droop under the thought. For one moment longer, you hold up the pressure, but he discloses nothing more.

“How was their marriage?” you ask.

Another, almost imperceptible flinch and no answer. You start to question if your direct confrontations are the way to go here. When you’re already thinking of an alternative, Takara steps up to the man and puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Koji, this is important now,” he says, his tone soothing. It works, as Ono lets out a voiceless sigh and straightens up a bit. Takara doesn’t remove his hand.

“I just can’t imagine she has anything to do with it. She loved the kentauros. She would never…” As if to assure himself, he shakes his head firmly. But it’s not the answer you wanted to hear, and so you stay quiet. Takara sends you a worried look, which you ignore. The silence does its job once more, when Ono finally gives in.

“Their marriage was good, as far as I can tell. In fact, her parents were never too happy with my father. His family’s farm was burnt down during a bomb raid. He didn’t bring anything into the marriage. But she insisted.” And after a quick moment of consideration, he adds: “As far as I’m aware, those feelings never changed.”

This time he meets your gaze and you know better than to push him further. Whatever else he might be holding back can wait until later. Or so you hope. Now you only have to divert this pressure you’ve built to something that doesn’t make him hate you.

You shrug and deliberately break eye-contact. “Ghosts are very susceptible to negative emotions,” you explain. “It doesn’t have to be your mother who casts her vines here. But your father’s grief might have lured something else here.”

Ono seems to understand. He relaxes visibly and even Takara now takes a step back. The tension is almost gone. It is not strong enough to taint this site, not by far. But Ono’s stress and the memories of his dead mother did certainly leave their ripples in the emotional structure of this place.

You end this conversation by demonstratively turning back towards the yard and the roots, before you address the home-owner in a much more conciliatory tone. “I’ll have to stay the night up here, is that okay?”

“Um, sure. I haven’t prepared anything. Let me just—”

“No need, really,” you assure him. “I’m going to stay outside, anyway.”

❂​

What follows is an uneventful tour around the old farmstead and a more than awkward conversation with both Ono and Takara. Convincing Ono that you’re okay staying the night up here is simple. Convincing Takara that you’re okay staying the night up here alone is hard, and you ultimately fail at it. At least you get the names of Ono’s parents out of it in a quiet minute.

The farmstead has the commonly unique layout that every place has once it’s been given multiple centuries to grow into its present form. It is maintained enough to not be run over by mildew, and after a few tries, Ono gets a small fire burning in the common room’s fireplace.

There are a few ghosts in the building, but by now they are nothing more than soot sprites that hide in dark corners as soon as you enter. They aren’t intelligent enough to be quizzed about… anything, really, so you just greet them and move on.

After everything appears to be settled, it takes another hour for Ono to leave. It is filled with reassurance, ranging from platitudes to explanations, but when it is done, you stand in the yard once more. Alone. Almost.

Since it’s only two priests now, you feel a little bit more at ease. The company almost reminds you of the times when the towers still had a decent amount of personnel. But now you can almost feel Takara’s expectations mounting on your shoulders.

You unzip your duffle bag and take out your hakama. Wearing your vestments over your daily gear is not exactly common practice and most definitely not honouring the rites, but it’s going to be a long night. Even though the day was hot, the night will be cold and you need all the layers of cloth you can get on your person. So you ask Houou for forgiveness for disrespecting them, and in return offer your best effort to guide this restless soul, whoever it might be, to them.

From inside the main building, Takara’s footsteps approach the door. You can’t and don’t want to teach him anything. Being watched was one thing. But being watched with the expectation of learning something was an entirely different thing. At least for you. And then there’s the awkward fact that you, although younger, rank higher on some sort of hierarchy within the already very scattered johtonian priests. It doesn’t help either. You try to relax your shoulders.

When he exits onto the porch, you ask him to cleanse the common room and set up some wards there, and he soon comes to a logically sound conclusion: “Isn’t that a bit counterintuitive?”

Confronted with such deductive skills, you can only nod.

“So there’s a chance she won’t show up tonight?” he asks when you don’t elaborate. To which you again have to nod.

“Ghosts by their nature are attention-seekers,” you say after a while. “If they sense somebody listening, they’ll come out.”

“And you will be listening?”

“Yeah.” You nod a third time and tie the last knot on your vestments. “I want you to stay behind those wards. And whatever happens tonight, please don’t interfere.” He doesn’t even look as disappointed as you feared. Good. Instead, he looks rather worried.

“But… you don’t have…” He sheepishly gestures towards your belt and the obvious lack of pokeballs on it, but doesn’t get to finish his sentence. The wind ominously howls as it rises again, picking up dust and dry leaves from the ground, until it swirls around you like a miniature whirlwind. For nothing more than dramatic effects, your shadow doubles in size for a moment.

{Showoff,} you think-say.

{C’mon, you like the dramatics as much as I do,} the response instantly reverberates through you.

You revel in the stunned expression on the other priest’s face for one moment longer, then you state the obvious. “Gangar. We’ll be fine.”

Takara soon catches himself, and to his credit he takes it in stride, smiling warmly while gangar’s show fizzles out. “You train ghost types. Why am I not the least bit surprised?”

Returning his smile feels easy this time.

❂​

The sun has vanished behind the mountains to the west when you finally take a seat on the roofed porch that runs alongside the old barn. From here, you have a comfortable view over the entire yard. But most importantly: you are more or less protected from the mountain-winds. You adjust your hakama one last time and get comfortable, pulling your legs into a cross-legged position.

Exhaling deeply, you let your eyes and thoughts wander over the entire scene. So, an angry forest spirit attacks the same farmstead over and over again. What’s up with that? Is it the mother? The timeline doesn’t add up. The roots were first spotted here three weeks ago. The mother died three months ago already, why wait? Spirits are the strongest right after they die. …And they grow stronger when fed with anguish, wrath and grief, you have to add. Her husband revitalising this place could have helped her grow to this noticeable size.

You take a deep breath in and follow the air’s flow down your chest.

You are judging things. Making your own conclusions, which, in the end, is nothing more than mere speculation. It clouds your vision of the truth, you know that, but it is also a deeply human process. So you let your mind jump for another breath before you let your judgement go.

What remains is an angry spirit, drawn here by the woe of a grieving husband. This spirit is why you are here. You are their voice in a world where their screams aren’t heard any longer.

All those little details, the names and the dates — you shelf them in your memory, neatly stack them so you have them at hand when you need them. But they are not to colour your perception.

As you put away your thoughts, your mind calms. After a while, your consciousness stops bouncing around from one idea to the next. The thoughts slow down, and where there used to be an explosion of new ideas and connections remains over time a simple acknowledgment of the facts.

Gangar is done inspecting the premise and settles around you. For a moment, his presence distorts the world before you, but soon he is an invisible sphere of animated gas. You trust him. And he trusts you. He knows without a word what is about to happen and you thank him for his effort and his presence.

The wind picks up dust from the ground and blows it over the yard, slowly but steadily ablating the thousand hoofprints in the dirt. It carries the last daylight away with it, so the night and its children can come out of their hiding places. A hoho peeks out from its nest under the roof and surveys the yard. In the corner of your eyes, in the darkness, a small shadow scurries around the buildings, accompanied by the skittering of tiny paws. The fire in the common room burns peacefully now and casts its orange glow over the porch. In its light, the shadows become long and take on a life of their own. Sometimes, the wind picks up a stray leaf and it dances with the shadows. Sometimes they flicker, sometimes they sway.

The eddies in your mind dissolve until your thoughts float along a quiet river. You let yourself be carried away by it. While you drift in its soft current, you see your surroundings on its shore, passing you by.

You stop paying attention to the owl as it leaves its nest or the rat trying to hide from its glowing red eyes. You stop paying attention to the figures in the shadows and the dancing of the wind. You are merely aware of them.

You’ll need to anchor yourself for what is to come, and this right here is the perfect ground for your anchors to dig in. This is the world of the living. You can see the porch. You can touch its old, wooden planks. You can hear the wind creak in them. You belong here, into this world with all its sounds and people and their laughter and cries.

You assign these sensations to your memory as well. They will guide you back here when the lure of the otherworld has pulled you out too far. But for now, you just watch them a bit longer. You let gratitude wash over your heart and thank Houou for their creation, then you close your eyes as your anchors pull you down, deeper into the river.

Deeper in its currents, where your world is reduced to smells and sounds, it is dark. But the light of the fireplace colours this darkness and warms the right side of your body. For a moment, your attention lingers on this mismatch between your body-halves. Then, after you have accepted this, you open your mind again to your surroundings.

With the distraction of sight gone, the world reveals so much more. The roots catch the wind in their labyrinth. It howls a melody, like an eerie flute. So many more paws are skittering across wooden floors and through hay and straw in the barn behind you. Two nyarth are having an extended conversation somewhere in the hills. The little hoho owlets move around in their nest and Takara moves in the common room beneath it. Grains of dust waft over the ground, a smooth grinding sound mixing into the melody of the winds. A chill creeps beneath your clothes and into your skin.

Beneath you in the shadows is movement. The soot sprites have congregated, collected their courage to inspect this stranger in their domain. It takes you extensive amounts of effort to not let your form fall and play with them while they curiously poke at your feet.

You stay in this state until you can locate the walls that separate the warm interior from the chills of the night by sense alone. Until you can sense gangar’s and Takara’s bodies again. Until you hear every single soot sprite in their pile beneath the porch. From the darkness, a new picture forms. It consists mainly of sensations — warm air meeting cold, wind rushing along wooden walls, over roots and broken fences, bodies disturbing the air around them.

A thousand creatures move through the shadows. They are as ancient as this building is and every one of them once held so much importance. The painful joy of childbirth, the devastation of a sudden death. Happiness, surprise, guilt, shame, rejection. All these emotions and more have now become part of this place. They have faded over time, and sometimes, what used to be unforgettable was forgotten. The ghosts that all these moments left behind faded with them, and now, only soot sprites remain.

They don’t know who they are or why they are. But the emotions that have created them still haven’t faded completely. Instead, they have again taken on a life of their own.

From time to time, one climbs up your legs and explores a bit, before it falls down into your lap or back onto the planks with a surprised squeak. It leaves the tiniest wave of annoyance in the emotional sea of this derelict mountainside farm.

It can’t compete against the new feelings this place has gathered. You can sense the vivid footprints of life: Happiness, anger and rivalry, but also camaraderie and the occasional fear from the stables where the kentauros were held. But just like the warmth that splits your body into two halves, these sensations only exist to your left. To your right is a solemn and quiet maelstrom of regret, guilt, and sadness. It is so strong, it almost overwrites the kentauros’ bold liveliness. It gets caught up in the winds, which themselves get tainted by the sadness and carry it far past the perimeters of the farm. This is the way grief spreads.

Beneath these ripples are the undercurrents of this place. They are still present enough to be decipherable, not yet faded into a mere impression only capable of carrying a few grains of soot. A child feeling her chores for the days are unjust. The nervousness of a first date. Arguments. Reconciliation. Happiness. A lot of those, in fact, most of them in the common room. Secrecy. There’s desperation and defiance in the face of hunger and hardship. Fear has carved a path across the yard and sounds like the distinct droning of low-flying planes. Now, a lone spirit moves across it, taking in their evening meal. There’s the feeling of betrayal, too, somewhere around the same time these paths were carved into the mud, and it is still there, even after generations of kentauros have happily stomped over it.

Your anchors holding you in place, you turn your mind inwards. There is anticipation. Nervousness. Exhaustion. Gratitude. And the calm safety that gangar’s presence evokes. You inspect these feelings, turn each one in your mind and let them go. They mix into the sadness and the regret and the guilt and the happiness and the anger. You open yourself and seep out of you, and at some point, you are empty. You cease to exist.

Time passes with your breaths on the winds.

Waves ripple again through the fabric of your reality as something moves through the yard. This time the feelings are hard to pin down, they feel foreign. But one thing is common in most ghosts, and you could recognise it in any species, pokemon and human alike — confusion. This mix of uncertainty, the nagging fear of being lost, and a sense of smallness is universal across all beings.

A low roar bellows through the mountains as the spirit of the old bull looks for his herd. You follow him for a while. He trots over the yard, steering clear from the roots, but otherwise unaggressive. Just lost.

Far, far above, on the surface of the river, anxiety washes over you. It causes waves, threatens to increase your breath. A pokemon’s mindset is so different from species to species. Once their soul has moved on and their remaining energy has taken the form of a ghost, they feed on their surroundings and become a bit more uniform. But a kentauros’ soul is something you’ve never dealt with before. You acknowledge this fact and let it be swept away. The river moves on until it’s only you and the spirit again.

The bull wanders around for a while and at one point, your anxiety vanishes. Your world returns to its darkened, alien state. Your beating heart doesn’t threaten to deafen you any longer. The wind still howls around the mountains. You open yourself again.

A thought forms somewhere around you that is not yours. You can’t decipher it, but you understand that it’s a question being asked.

{You are dead. Your herd is in the valley.} Thinking in concrete words is strenuous, and they rip through the quiet night like a chainsaw through paper. And you’re not even sure if he can understand you.

But he can hear you. Now his presence approaches, until you feel the temperature in front of you dip. Still confused. He doesn’t understand you. There is yet another approach…

You comb through your memories. You were seven when your grandmother died, and you didn’t quite understand yet why she was there when her body wasn’t any longer. There is this one specific memory that you are looking for. It is the closest thing you’ll ever get to the feeling that someone is missing, even though they shouldn’t be. For you, there hasn’t been a world without them. They’ve been there ever since you can remember and therefore, their absence is incomprehensible.

All these conflicting thoughts can be boiled down to one image — the empty living quarters of your grandmother. They looked exactly like they always had, but now, for the first time in your life, they were cold. Grandmother always had a fire burning in the stove. And in the evenings, she would warm her bones under a heated blanket. It wasn’t supposed to be cold.

You watch your emotions as they pour out and mix with the grief and the fear and the joy here. Feelings may be foreign, but to some degree, they are universal. More universal than language, at least. And if the bull doesn’t understand, you hope gangar can do the job. But right now, it seems to work. The confusion becomes less dominant, the turbulence it causes weaker.

Then the flow gets violently ruptured, when something breaches through the ground below you. You sense it a second before the kentauros does — something is running up the mountain, ripping into the stone with a terrifying force. Something hungry.

{Run,} you tell the bull, while you focus every sense on the incoming creature.

Then it reaches the farm. The fence splinters as it is pushed back by new, stronger roots. Earth groans as it is displaced when they bury themselves into it. The wind blows through them and over the yard; a wild dance shaking the farmstead’s old planks.

{SOMEBODY… HAS COME…,} a voice screeches in your head and for a moment, your entire reality threatens to be torn away by this storm. The entire emotional fabric gets caught in the torrent as well. Whatever had comprised this place before — now it is a muddy pool of anger and fear.

You open your eyes and a tiny aspect of the world comes back into existence with full force. Before you is a network of roots, stiff and yet ever shifting. It draws closer, slowly. It is watching you. Evaluating.

{I am Watanabe Matsuba,} you say, your voice bare of emotions. {What is your name?}

The twine arches up like a nyarth about to strike and for a moment, it takes over the entire sky. Then another screech, as violent as the first one:

{I AM ANGUISH.}

An onslaught of sensations hit you all at once, rushing over you like a tidal wave, but your anchors hold up. As these sounds and feelings rush past you and they pull at you; it’s hard to decipher what emotions comprise this ghost.

There are the violent whirls of red anger, the cold quivering ripples of fear over an undercurrent of sadness. All of them blend and pull at the very essence of your anchors, threatening to tear it asunder.

The roots dig into the surrounding ground, drawing closer and closer, yet don’t dare to touch you yet. There’s shaking confusion and a cautious curiosity. A lot more pronounced than in the kentauros when he realised you could perceive him. Much stronger than in the soot sprites when they discovered your presence hours ago and who now cower in fear beneath your body and in the folds of your clothes.

{I CAN SMELL IT ON YOU,} the spirit hisses after they circled you twice. Half-circled. So far they don’t dare to break through the porch.

{TREEBLOOD.} Ghostly plants. Hesitation to touch wrought material.

{ARE YOU A PRIEST? OR ARE YOU MOURNING THAT FARMER’S WIFE, TOO?} They draw closer, almost touching your skin now. The air around you compresses.

{YOU ARE, AREN’T YOU? HAVEN’T HIS TEARS SOAKED THE OLD FLOOR ENOUGH ALREADY?} Resentful jealousy. But there’s something else to their anger.

You sort through the threads, as fast as you can. From the way they cut into you, it feels like hate. But cold, without hostility. And is that threadbare thing over there exasperation?

The tips of the roots are close enough now that you can feel them move past you.

{I am mourning no one. I am here to listen to you.}

Roots break through the ground beneath you. They pierce a few soot sprites, instantly absorbing their life-force. But the spirit doesn’t take notice. Instead, they creep up around you, lifting you off the ground.

Far over you, your own fear mixes into the current as your amygdala signals danger. You force yourself to let it go. An impulse of cool air, but one quick twitch of your eye is enough to buy a bit more time.

{THEN YOU ARE A FOOL, MY GROOM!} They say as they lift you up higher. {YOU SHALL SPEND YOUR ETERNITY IN MY ANGUISH AS WELL!}

A single red eye stares at you from within the knot, frenzy between its shivers.

Dread and helplessness. Feelings that your presence by their side would alleviate.

A root presses its tip against your sternum and into your chest. It presses the air out of your lungs as it reaches for your heart, but then its approach comes to a halt.

Surprise. Quickly followed by pain.

{I belong to the world of the living, as you once did,} you say, and the root threatening to pierce your ribs turns black and withers. {Killing me will do nothing for you. Tell me what is holding you here, and I will help you.}

They — she, as you’re now almost certain — retreats slightly as the poison spreads through the wood.

{YOU CAN’T HELP ME ANY LONGER.} Her screams have died down.

You scramble to decipher as many emotions as you can before she leaves. A mix of insecurity — hurt, distress, neglect — they all retreat with her, like the tailing tide.

She is almost back over the edge now.

Come on, what is the reason for these feelings? You sift through the fleeting impressions with a focus that you know full well can be dangerous.

Horror at a realisation. Anxious waiting, at last turned to hopelessness. A lot of thoughts — overwhelmingly many - and they are coloured in blue, spiteful envy.

{NO ONE CAME… NEITHER YOUR GODS NOR YOUR LIVING. I BELONG TO THE FOREST NOW.}

Scared. A dark place. Illusions of a happy end dying with the sunlight.

The main tangle has now reached the edge of the yard. The roots wreath around themselves, trying to shed the poison. A red eye takes one longing gaze at you, then plunges down into the crag.

With the force that had animated them gone, the roots that hold you immediately wither and break under your weight. You fall down and are instantly bombarded with sensations as the grains of sand press into the palm of your hand like thousand needles. Your knees experience the same as you become painfully aware of the crosses in the weave of your pants.

With the same violence it came, the wave of emotions retracts back into the valley and your world starts to shake again. Not only from the physical sensations that you have been woefully underprepared for. Anger, fear and sadness again rush past you in broad, chaotic strokes. Their weight is boundless and threatens to drown you in their maelstrom.

But there is something else. The wind has turned. It rushes down the mountainside as well. And it gets caught in the building. And the old planks. The porch. Your anchors. You focus on them, on the creaking, while an entire lifetime of memories tries to pull you with it.

They hold.

When the rush finally fades, your breath comes in bursts. The sound reverberates through your skull and you feel like your ears are about to give in, but you are also thankful to hear your own body again.

When the flow of emotions has calmed down into a tickle, you can sense one last thing you haven’t sensed before. Unmoving, you force your last resolve into focusing on this. It is a calm little tether, not larger than your finger. No wonder it got lost in the overwhelming amount of pain before. But this one is almost warm. Love?

“W— what was that?” Takara’s voice pierces your eardrums. You catch yourself before you flinch — movement would cause friction and every sensation is pure pain right now.

“Ohrot,” you get out between breaths. They are so loud, but there is no drowning out in this state. Takara’s voice is just as loud.

“Is it over?”

{Should I eat him?} gangar comments right inside your head.

{No,} you answer him, while getting out a “for now” to Takara. Honestly, you’re not sure if you mixed them up, and you’re also not sure if you would care.

But Takara takes the hint and leaves you alone and you get back into your neutral position. Every movement is a million new sensations.

You knew what you were getting into. You knew that opening your focus so far was dangerous. You scraped her memories there. This was way deeper than what was recommended and even deeper than what you have tried so far. Serves you right.

All these thoughts and more flitter around on the surface. Beneath that there’s pain, pain and some more pain as a firework of impulses from your receptors overloads your brain. Even deeper beneath that anger, regret and pride mix with the chaos that’s still all around. And you are aware of everything. At once.

It takes a while until you are back at the ground, in your dark world where only sound and temperature exists, and every step on the way there is painful. But here you can weather the storm that churns the stream above you. And from here you can slowly resurface into reality. Decompress. Gather your personality and your memories along the way.

Exploring the thin layer between the world of the living and the dead is tempting, but getting lost in it is deadly.

❂

In the highest reaches of the heavens and the darkest depths of the seas
Solemnly soar our divine protectors, Lugia and Houou.
We sing their praises and find our peace in the beauty of their creation.
May their righteous fire cleanse our defilings of sin and impurity
And may their frightful waves protect their shores from our enemies.
So pray we to the sun in the spotless sky and the foams on the endless sea.

❂​

The rhythmic puffs of the old tractor break the busy quietness of your routine. You can hear it from far down in the valley, so loud are its complaints about the strenuous incline. That leaves you with plenty of time to finish your prayers.

Both Takara and you have been setting up wards and working to resuscitate the old house-shrine throughout the night. But not before he insisted you catch him up to speed. With every. Last. Detail.

No wonder it’s hard to keep your head on straight and your mind clean during the ceremonies.

You take a deep breath. The morning winds race eastwards, carrying the smell of incense over the hills, towards the sea and into the rising sun. You thank Houou once more as you write their names and your plea on a piece of paper.

Nothing about it is special. Sure, this is traditional red ink handcrafted from maple tree sap and rice vinegar and the paper has been consecrated. But, if push came to shove, you could craft a seal from any sort of paper and ink. It is Houou’s name that drives the spirits away. And as much as you don’t want to admit it, after years you’re still baffled about when the paper stops being paper and becomes a seal.

When the ink has dried, you fasten the charm to a column of the porch. At the moment, driving the spirit back with force is of little use. Not when you can resolve this issue without the use of violence. Go to its roots, so to speak.

Hehe.

The gods soon punish this horrible pun, as the tractor pulls up in front of the building. A moment later, the bubbling motor gets shut off and the old door creaks in its hinges as Ono enters.

“By the Protectors!” he gasps as he sees the dead roots that now cover almost half of the yard. “Are you alright? Could you banish it?”

You bow, before straightening up to your full height and looking him straight in the eyes. “No, not yet. And I’m afraid I can’t do it here. She’s a recently deceased human in great turmoil, feeding here on your father’s grief,” you explain. “I have an idea what happened, but I’ll have to find her body to do anything about it.”

At your words, Ono tenses up. “She?”

“Not Masae,” Takara chimes in from the walkway in front of the main house. He is, like you, still wearing his vestments. The blue embroidery unmistakably marks him as a Lugia priest from some branch of the Asagi shrine.

Upon hearing his words, Ono sighs, visibly relaxing. He collects himself for a moment, then shakes his head and looks back up, his eyes wandering between the two of you. “So, a dead body,” he says. “Should I call the police?”

You shake your head. “I’ll take care of that. I need to do some research, anyway.” Also, you know how informing the police about activities from the dead without a body to show for usually plays out.

“You’re finished?” you ask Takara when Ono nibbles on his lower lip for a bit. The young priest nods and you return the gesture. Time to pack things up. Finally. It’s been a long night.

You’re already undoing the knots on your robe when Ono speaks up again. “Not to sound impatient, but I thought... exorcising a ghost would be a one-time thing for you.”

You look at him, probably too sharply and he flinches a bit. You try to relax the muscles on your face and get them into a more polite expression, but you’re not sure if your tired body is willing to comply. “I can do that,” you explain, your voice pointedly emphatic. “There are many ways to destroy spirits. But then they are truly dead. Imagine if this was your mother. Wouldn’t you want her to have a chance to reach the afterlife?”

Ono sighs and you leave him to his thoughts while you peel yourself out of three layers of linen.

After a while, he asks: “Is there anything I can do?”

There is a strong desire in you to not be in anyone’s debt at any given time. So of course, your immediate response would be ‘no.’ Yet — and it pains you immensely to admit it — there is one problem.

“... I might need a ride again,” you finally say.

❂​

It is well past ten when you throw your duffle bag onto your couch. And only narrowly resist the desire to throw yourself right next to it.

The ride down the mountains was more taxing than you thought, because small-talk is difficult when you’ve just talked about a dead woman ten minutes prior. At least the tram was quiet, now that most people were at work and the morning rush hour was over.

And your house is even quieter than that. Which is good.

You shuffle over to the kitchen and away from the living room and the temptation of a nap to find the answering machine blinking. You glare at it for a little while, but it doesn’t budge. So you give into its attention seeking and push the replay button. The tape rustles while you sift through the fridge a bit. Emptiness stares back at you. By the time you decide you’re not hungry, a robotic voice announces the first call and its timestamp. It is soon followed by an energetic male voice.

“Sunday, 12th July 1992, 2:42 — brrrt — Hey! Leaving Kantai the day after tomorrow. Saffron International eta at around 2pm. Expect me Tuesday evening.”

Minaki. Well, looks like you should get groceries some time soon.

The tape winds forward with a static rustle, while you contemplate what unholy things you’d have told him if you would have been home by the time that call hit.

“Sunday, 12th July 1992, 7:34 — brrrt — Hello? This is Okumara Aiko speaking.” A female voice you’ve never heard before. Nervous. Interesting. You shuffle closer to the phone. “Something… I think we’re dealing with a ghost here. Can you please come? Nishijin Street 34, Enju. Thank you. Phone number is—”

As you note down the number onto a notepad, you can’t help but to raise your eyebrows at the address. Nishijin. Right at the heart of the historic guild district. That sounds like fun.

You call her back, but she isn’t answering the phone. When you try it again after you’ve taken a shower, you schedule a visit for tomorrow afternoon.

Everything but now.

Now it’s time to actually sort out what happened today.

 

[bluesidra]

Thank you so much @Torchic W. Pip for beta-ing!

Chapter 2: Investigator​

Enju has been a loud city once. Once, when its streets were filled with hasty hoofbeats and indignant screams as merchants jumped to make way for the imperial couriers. When those screams turned to terror at the knights’ barked warnings — barely audible over the clatter of their armour, but understood nevertheless. When the castle’s stones roared under the kairyu’s flames and shook when the denryu called the thunder. Once, when shoguns and samurai ruled the land and even the Lord Protector and the Lady of Storms went to war. Once, almost half a millennium ago.

But today, Enju isn’t a loud city any more. It still shouts its long history from every single one of its rust-coloured roofs and red-painted gates, but these shouts are a far cry from the couriers’ proclamations of old. The city has long since traded in the capricious unpredictability of war for a quiet state of permanence.

Some people have compared Enju to a graveyard, forever bound to memorialise lives and events long past. Some people are wrong.

Following your memory, you turn right into one of the narrow, intimate streets which permeate the residential areas in the western districts. And are immediately hit by the heavy scent of summer ivy. For one long moment, the smell takes over all other senses.

Not everything here is stuck in time.

The concrete walls that crumble underneath the ivy were cast in the sixties. The squat houses behind it were built around the same time, when the first post-war generation was finally able to move out of their parents’ silent homes. Their lawns are now occupied by the strollers and toys of yet another new generation.

Time in Enju hasn’t stopped. It’s just slower. And it is this slow pace that you wouldn’t want to trade in for anything in the world. Especially on a day like this one.

With Minaki arriving soon, you’ve tried to get some chores done. But around noon, you gave up on it.

There’s been a good reason you took your day off today. You knew the job on the farm would be a taxing one. Not because of the working hours — you like to believe that you can still shake off an all-nighter — but because of the mental overexertion. The better you become, the harsher the ramifications are on your senses.

But since you won’t get anything else done today, you figured you could as well look into what or whoever formed this ohrot. Since you don’t remember any news about unusual deaths in the vicinity of Ono’s farm, a sweep of the missing persons would be as good a start as any. Anything about her former life will give you an advantage next time you face her.

You step around a car parked on the sidewalk and watch as your shadow briefly slinks under the vehicle, then back to your feet. There’s an undeniable tugging on your legs. You know what he wants — the shadow of the ivied wall — and you also know you’re neither in the position nor condition to argue. So you just brace yourself and switch to the other side of the street.

The smell hits you like a blow to the head. The invisible band that’s somewhere between the walls of your skull and your brain tightens just a little further. You groan while your perception goes dark for a moment, your brain shutting down every other sense to process this smell.

When the world around you starts to feel real again, cold air compresses around your legs in a show of gratitude. Then your shadow dislodges itself and flits ahead, deforming the ivy’s uneven projection just a tiny bit.

You nestle your nose deeper into your scarf, concentrate on the familiar smell, and let your eyes rest a bit.

From up ahead and around the corner, a child’s high-pitched scream reaches your ears. Then another one soon after. You consider it for a moment, then shrug it off. You’ve heard enough fearful screams to know that this is nothing too serious.

By the time you turn onto the main street, the screams have gone from fear to squeals of joy. To your right, in a small playground between two ancient maple trees, a group of small children are excited to see their shadow move on its own. They playfully taunt it with all sorts of grimaces.

You watch the scene for a few heartbeats. Gangar puts on an impressive shadow play, before he’s chased across the playground by the excited group. When one of them recites a blessing to shake off the ghost that’s cornered her, it forces a smile onto your lips.

Sometimes you forget how old you both were when you met. And that ‘growing up’ is a concept foreign to the timeless logic on which the dead operate.

{I’m headed off,} you think-say. Within seconds, the temperature around you drops. You give the general vicinity around you a lazy look that one might take for quizzical if they’re generous. There’s no need to put on any facial expressions for a ghost who partially lives inside your head.

{What?} comes his voice a few seconds later. {I still have to settle a score with that delvil. No way I’m letting that go.}

You need a moment before a vague memory of a nightly conversation with a police officer and his very shaken service pokemon resurfaces. And of the commotion that preceded it.

{You better do. And Sargent Matoi works at the western city department, not here.} The grinding of teeth, shortly below your hairline. You break your train of thoughts shortly to signal a mental sigh. {And you’re not allowed in, anyway.} More grumbling in the back of your head.

Gangar’s absence hasn’t gone unnoticed. Confused, the children have started looking for their new friend. You purposefully draw out the moment, making sure gangar cannot ignore their calls. The atmosphere around you shifts. Waves of air brush against you in slow-motion; an afterthought when you’re in the centre of an indecisive cloud of sentient gas equalling the volume of a small building.

{Come on, get lost!} With an almost sincere half-smile, you kick a bit of dust and the odd pebble in the playground's direction. It takes another moment of indecisiveness, then an invisible gust carries the sand-grains further along and soon rustles through the maples, where it rips loose a handful of leaves and tumbles to the ground in their shadows. Soon, the children interrogate the ghost about where he’s been.

With the sun warming your shoulders once more, you turn the other direction towards the glass-fronted building that fits itself so neatly into the line of small shops and residences here.

A small bell above the door announces your entrance, its high-pitched ringing reverberating painfully between your ears. You freeze for a moment, only able to move when the pain has passed.

The station’s waiting area is empty, and the furniture’s warm wood-tones and scraggy plants look almost disappointed about their unreciprocated efforts at hospitality. At the front desk, a familiar face greets you.

Tanako and you have been to the same school, albeit a few years apart — a fact you only learned about when you met her as a junior police officer. She hasn’t bothered you too much about these kinds of visits and that’s one reason you keep returning to this station. The other is a certain detective who works here.

After a blissfully brief greeting, you ask for Megure. But to your dismay, the younger woman shakes her head.

“He works weekdays.” The way her voice pitches up at the end makes it sound like she’s concerned about you.

Right. Today is Sunday. Maybe she’s right to worry.

For a moment, fatigue overcomes you and you bury your face in your hands, massaging your eyes and temples.

“Sargent Miyamoto is on duty,” Tanako says. “She’s handling the missing persons today.” It’s a question. You nod and only then remember to take your hands down. You’re met with a pitiful look. The fact that you can tell it’s genuine doesn’t make it any better.

She opens the visitor registration and fills your details in with narrow, orderly letters. At the last column, she stops and looks up. “Any pokemon?”

You shake your head, but she gets up anyway and takes a brief look down your person. Content with the lack of pokeballs, she crosses the last field out and instructs you to wait while she slips into the neighbouring office. From behind half-closed doors, low voices become audible.

You attempt to focus your senses inward, or at least to your immediate surroundings. You can understand them as clearly as if they’re speaking straight to you. But if you allow this, if you let your senses hone this deep into their surroundings, you risk being blown off your feet by someone actually talking to you.

So you try to ignore them and instead study the open register, trying to decipher the upside down writing. Your eyes get stuck on the last column again.

Police stations don’t allow non-service pokemon outside their balls. In fact, every pokemon who enters the building, stored away or not, has to be checked in.

Now, gangar is officially registered to your name, and you are fully licensed to carry pokemon up to category 5. If you put an evening’s effort in, you might even find the ball he’s registered to. However, there are approximately forty unregistered reasons floating around your premise that highly encourage you to keep police interest in the legal status of your pokemon to a minimum.

That, and the recent debate on the nature of ghost type pokemon.

You frown. This year’s changes to the Classification Act are just another cycle in the endless back-and-forth on the ethics of catching ghost pokemon. But still. It downgraded many ghost-types by at least one category, leaving only gangar and yonoir in the ‘sentient and dangerous’ category.

You couldn’t care less about some regulatory paper’s empty claims on the sentience level of your partner. At most, it made working with the police harder, since revoking the verdict of sentience from ghost-types means any cooperation with specialists seems inherently unscientific. The problems arise at the lower end of the scale, where many smaller ghosts have been moved from the ‘protected’ category to the relatively open category two. But especially with smaller manifestations, telling a spirit apart from a ghost becomes difficult. You should know — you struggle with it on a daily basis. And that doesn’t even touch on the consent side of the equation.

Just as you try to fight the thought of teenagers capturing a bokurei, the office door swings open. A well-dressed, reserved looking woman around your age greets you with cautious curiosity and asks you to follow her.

❂​

Asking for the missing persons’ record is a chore.

{ASK HER ABOUT CASE 92-340!}

Sargent Miyamoto takes your request as well as you expected. She doesn’t know of the unspoken arrangement between yourself and Detective Megure. And given, you yourself would suspect someone walking into a police station demanding to see the missing persons’ record — not of one particular case, but all missing persons in the Enju area. And even more so if this person has already found a suspiciously high number of dead bodies.

{LISTEN!}

So you stoically dodge the expected questions with as vague an answer as possible. The record is open for public viewing. You know that. She knows—

{THERE WAS NO JUSTICE!}

She knows that. She has to give in, eventually. You can even point her to the folder behind her desk.

Usually, you could handle an intransigent police officer just fine. Usually, there’s not an agitated spirit screaming into your ear.

You’ve noticed the presence the moment you’ve entered the room. Something about the corner by the window wasn’t right. It felt colder. By a lot. But then you made the mistake of squinting in the general direction for one second too long.

{LISTEN TO ME! I KNOW YOU CAN!}

The presence is female. It was one of the first and only things you could discern. Her voice is inside your head just as much as it is in the corner. You focus on it; laying down a pathway with your mind.

{I can hear you.} The moment you acknowledge her, she falls silent. The cold space to your right recoils, and surprise ripples through the room like waves on a quiet pond. It buys you a brief window of respite.

“Please, Mrs Miyamoto. What I’m asking for is neither illegal nor impossible.” Your speaking voice sounds strained. It isn’t even pretence. Your pleading expression, however, is, and you’re not sure anymore if you’re still looking sincere.

She looks at you for another long moment. Then, to your boundless relief, she sighs and pushes her chair backwards towards the coveted folder.

“Fine.” Her teeth could grind millstones to dust, but she finally drops the binder in front of you. “But you still owe me an explanation.”

You give an automated nod, while you watch the stack of papers being shoved across— Shoved. Grinding dust against wood. Occasionally a sharp sound when the reinforced corners engage.

Next to you, the atmospheric pressure rises again, and you have to swallow to readjust your eardrums. The air vibrates in anticipation. But there are other threads. The surprise is gone now; in its place — discomposure? Disappointment?

You open the folder and mechanically utter some platitudes. Before you is the familiar format of press-released missing persons’ notices, one per page.

Before the mental pathway becomes a two-way street, you address her again. {I can hear you just fine. I can listen, but I cannot speak for you at the moment.}

There’s a box detailing the last confirmed location and date for each person. Three weeks—

{THAT IS NOT YOURS TO DECIDE!}

A gust of wind strong enough to turn the page you’re looking at accompanies the scream, and sends some loose papers flying. They sail down to the floor somewhere to your left. You hold your composure, but beneath you, the floor shifts a little.

“By the — What is it with the window today?”

{Case 92-340. You need to give me something to work with,} you think, despite your better knowledge. Engaging with her will only draw her closer. As does looking at her, but you do so anyway.

There is still no one in the corner, except for Miyamoto examining the window. But now that your full attention is on the presence, you can sense her emotions clearer. Chest tightening from insignificance. Fear. Fear above everything else. And a dull, old pain somewhere under your eye.

{THERE WAS NO JUSTICE!}

Stop. These are not your feelings.

Miyamoto returns. Chair-wheels across linoleum. Eyes back on reports. Older than three weeks.

You skip the reports that are too recent. Then there’s one with the right time frame, but from the city proper. Skip. Two from the Choji area. Skip.

What’s this? Woman gone missing on the Ukyō-Takimata round trail, four weeks ago. Tani Fujiko, last seen wearing a green hiking jacket, blue shirt and— You won’t be able to memorise this.

“Can I—” Hearing your own voice sounds unreal. “Can I have something to write, please?”

A sheet of paper appears under your hand. The floor shakes. The pressure keeps mounting, becomes unbearable, like a thunderstorm. A thunderstorm right next to you. And lightning ready to strike.

{THE--

.E-- }

The paper scrunches up as your fingers claw into it.

{W-- . -..-

A--.-} The rest of her wail is too strong to be comprehensible.

Waves of emotion crash over you, too strong to be decoded. At the edges, your vision goes dark. Not that you could actually process any visual cues any more. The walls around you stretch in all directions, to infinity. You’re falling endlessly in place. The confine of your very being fringe in the torrent. The ground is there (is it?), your feet touch it (your feet?).

Fear. Not yours.

Fear and screams. A fight. In your head. You’re falling.

Fear. Maybe yours.

Counter-pressure. Air around you expands. Hair moves across face. Sleeves across arms. One million impacts. Every one scraping your skin like a needle. But positively your skin.

Papers fall, without echo. A voice, getting lost in the expanse, also no echo.

Pressure returns, room collapses on you.

Silence.

“Mr Watanabe?” asks a voice somewhere outside your head. “Are you alright?”

You press your fingers over your eyes — oh, hello hand, fancy meeting you here — and manage a weary nod. “Migraine,” you lie.

Strings of genuine worry float so close, you could grab them out of the air. Between them are little strands of abashment, which themselves are oozing the guilt from an attempt to cover them up. But also footsteps and voices.

Gangar is back. You sense it in the way gravity lessens. For a second, a memory of a spring-breeze washes across your skin. Inside this safe bubble, your tumultuous state of mind feels like an ulcerating infection in otherwise healthy flesh. You squeeze your eyes tighter, beg the Lord-Protector to make it so the ghost understands.

And your prayers are answered. There are no words spoken or thought. Just one single image; a box in a dry, dimly lit room that smells of old wood and furnish. Everything else you need to know — where this place is, what the box contains and why he showed it to you — simply appears in your memory, as if it has always been there. For a moment, you’re lost there.

Then gravity sets back in and something icy touches the palm of your left hand. The sensation runs like a freezing shiver through your arm and into your spine. Before it can reach your skull, it’s stopped by the heavy, warm weight of someone’s hand on your shoulder.

It takes effort to adjust your eyes. In your hand is a glass filled with something dark and fizzing. Next to you is Tanako. And a huge fidgeting knot of concern you can’t and don’t want to untangle right now.

This will hurt.

You swallow down the contents of the glass. The liquid is so sweet; it burns its way across your tongue, down your throat and leaves the hair in the back of your neck standing. In your heightened state, the carbon dioxide fizzling against your gum is more akin to a shotgun blasting its little projectiles into the base of your skull. You can’t stand coke.

But you focus on these sensations, on every single one of them. Inwards. Until you can’t feel the glass any longer. Or the hand. Inwards. Until you only consist of a burning, stinging sensation where the base of your skull once has been. Slowly, your self retreats back to you, like an ebbing tide. Its fragments cling to the limbs this pain sprouts, and share some confused banter while your personality reforms.

When you’re sure you're in one piece again, you try to find something to orient yourself at. The part of you that’s in control of your body is there, reliable as always. Slowly, it pulls your foot back. There, through the sole of your sneaker, you make out a tiny nick in the even floor. It’s too small. In any other circumstance, you wouldn’t rely on it. But this is no regular circumstance. This is an emergency procedure. It will do.

Using the nick as an anchor-point, you slowly reconnect to your body. Senses fill out the vacuum you created until you can feel your skin again. You remain in this position for another few heartbeats, cautiously monitoring yourself to not get swept out all over again.

You don’t. The world seems stable. Except for the fact that your hands shake a bit. But that’s just agitation.

You open your eyes. Nothing happens.

You’re sitting on a leather-bound sofa. A fact that you only realise now. This room is crammed full of little things — the typewriter with a stack of carbon paper and an empty box for new correction ribbon next to it, a mug atop a stack of files, a small circle of crumbs that escaped a hasty clean-up effort — things you normally would have noticed the moment you walked in.

You squeeze your fingers around the now empty glass.

The next minutes, filled with reassurances and a few more white lies, feel like a small eternity. You want nothing more than to get out of here. Not because anything inherently dangerous is lurking around the place — the spirit is gone now —, but because of something more threatening to you than any revenge-filled ghost: humiliation.

It takes a while, but you finally make your way back to the desk, where the folder is still resting, unperturbed. You flick a few pages back and forth, and try to ignore the intense scrutiny.

Well, you try.

In the end, you give in. You make up something about an acquaintance who recognised her on a radio broadcast. Is it convincing? No. Is it enough to set the playing-field of polite conversation straight? Yes.

In the end, Miyamoto even offers to make a photo-copy of the report.

When she returns, a small note has already found its way between the sheets of carbon paper, one corner peeking out innocently. It reads: “92-340. Victim left tape-recording with sister. Box of personal belongings, upstairs storage.”

❂​

Outside, the sun slowly settles in for the evening, vanishing behind the roofs of the city and painting the western sky with strokes of soothing lavender.

You carefully fold up the report and slip it in your back pocket. Twenty-three years old, from Yamabuki, on a two-week holiday in Enju. These facts swirl through your head, but you don’t want to think about them now. You don’t want to think about anything.

You let your feet guide your way, eyes half-closed, ears listening to the sound of the city while you watch leaves and grit scatter away before you and the ghost in your shadow.

Traffic’s low hum fills the air, at times interrupted by the metallic ringing of the tram’s bells when it snakes its way through the streets, picking up couples bound for an evening at the cinema and the bars downtown. A business of otachi overtakes you, one always keeping watch as they occasionally stop to let a group of teenagers catch up with them. They, in turn, are busy boasting about how strong they and their partners have become. A moment later, all of them vanish into a park.

You walk the other way.

Slowly, the streets grow lonelier, the traffic-hum grows more distant. As the sky’s colour turns from lavender to violet and the leaves under your feet turn their vibrant green to a shade of burning orange, you find yourself again in front of the familiar gate.

Red even against the eternal autumn forest stands the tori that guards the entrance to the shrine. Further down the path, the shadows of the two towers cast out the last daylight from the woods. Well, only one tower. But on nights like these, you can almost see the ghost of the burnt pagoda looming over the forest as well.

Was it habit or did you beckon their call? A part of your brain wants to rationalise your decision, wants to weigh the reasons for forgoing your day off. But to you, the darkening woods was all the argument it took. You step through the arch; cleanse yourself with icy cold water and follow down the white gravel path.

Once you head past the gate-house, past the outer shrine and onto the sacred grounds, you notice a soothing warmth spread through your chest. Your shoulders relax. You are at home.

❂​

Long after the evening’s prayer is finished, you’re still there. Legs folded beneath you, forehead almost touching the ground, bent down in a deep bow. The wooden idol of the Lord Protector towers above you, wings spread towards the skies, guarding those beneath from harm.

The scent of centuries lingers in the air — dry, dark, comforting. Just like the Towers themselves, it is ever-present — a constant underneath floor-polish, candle-wax and incense-smoke. Occasionally, the wind loses itself under the nine roofs of the pagoda, rattles the old trusses and howls with the carved figurines. But the tower only sways patiently, like an ancient tree in a breeze to whom the slender blades of grass look up in admiration.

Life surrounds you on all sides. Hanecco gliding on a breeze, otachi hiding in the underbrush, koratta scampering under the floorboards, onisuzume nesting in the rafters above. They don’t heed the ruins of the other tower, the scent of burnt wood or the memory of a fire this place refuses to forget. In fact, life weaves its threads through the charred beams, past the ghosts of the dead and forgotten, guided by the same wind that rocks the intact tower. The promise of amity, whispered by the Lady of Storms.

And just like the winds howling through the charred ruins of Her temple, so are you, too, only a visitor in this other-world.

You straighten yourself up, eyes still closed. You focus on the sounds and smells around you, on the reeds by the pond, rattling amongst each other in the breeze. On the leaves waving to the wind as it moves on to sweep across the roofs. And on the lonely moaning of the tower as it sways with the wind.

Slowly, your heart calms down, adapts to the rhythm of the night. You feel your weight on your feet, as they themselves rest on the floorboards beneath. And for the first time today, your scattered self is coming back to you willingly, as the limiting husk of yourself steadies.

The thought crosses your mind: You should have done this a long time ago.

As your presence becomes more concise, so too do those anchors that hold you here when you willingly open yourself and allow the currents of life to wash you away. Without solid anchors, you run a serious risk of losing yourself in the world between, where even the ghosts fear to tread.

That place has lured people who walked before you, it will lure people long after you’ve passed. Your duty is to ensure your walk goes on for as long as possible.

As you sense a familiar wrinkle creep across your forehead, you focus again on the wind outside. And the voices of life it carries on its wings.

❂​

Time passes, noise fades and a full, round summer moon now hangs high in the sky. The shrine has fully surrendered itself to the night, and an unforgiving silence has replaced dusk’s sedated buzz.

When you left the sanctum, you’ve been more energetic than you have been the entire day. Instead of avoiding him, as you did when you entered, you sought out the junior priest on duty and relieved him into an early evening. This meant that besides a surprisingly pleasant conversation, you also got to close down the shrine for tonight.

This routine has been with you since your earliest childhood. Seeing off the last visitors, extinguishing candles, wishing goodnight to the spirits, shutting doors and drawing curtains. Retracing the ever same paths through the slumbering premise. It is your personal lullaby.

Now the gates have long been closed and all but one candle extinguished. Its light illuminates the uneven stone-steps leading up to Brass Tower, cracked by fire, washed out by rain and smoothed over by time. The scent of burnt wood accompanies your every step as you sweep them clean of any leaves and debris. It’s quiet here, where only ghosts dare to tread.

Generations of priests have been here before, wearing the same clothes, sweeping the same autumn-leaves from the same steps. Time moves on — in Enju as much as everywhere else. But some places exist outside of time, a reminder of how fleeting a lifespan can be. This is one of them.

Today, you’ve gambled with this lifespan and only escaped losing it by a close margin. Like it or not, you were scattering.

The cracks in your confines were big enough for her emotions to get mixed up with yours. You were not in control. In fact, you don’t even know if this woman was a genuine spirit and not a malevolent ghost type — a not entirely unimportant detail you should have worked out long before you let her close to you. Not only for your sake.

You bite the corner of your mouth while the familiar grip of guilt tightens around your chest.

The relentlessly opportunistic morality that ghosts operate under doesn’t lend itself to compassion. They are indifferent towards the potential woes of their meal. Gangar is no exception. It’s your word that stops him from eating the spirits of those seeking closure. At least when he’s with you.

Whether errant or malevolent, the presence you’ve met in the police station is no more. Her pain and fear are now savoury memories, stored alongside other emotions of all tastes and flavours. When you’re doing the evening’s paperwork and he’s lounging in your shadow, gangar might revisit them like a fine wine.

Fractioning — scattering — fading. Everyone who walks the line comes across them, eventually. And as much as you want to believe you’re above it — today, for the first time, you experienced what it is like to scatter. You were lucky. The only casualties were your pride and a piece of paper. The man your father crashed his car into wasn’t as lucky.

The wrinkle returns, cutting between your brows like a knife. This time, you don’t stop it.

Your modus operandi makes you more or less safe from fractioning. Emotions getting mixed up because your line of self has become blurred is one thing. It takes the lowering of far more essential barriers to invite a ghost into your own body. And some terrible luck — or judgement — to let it push you out. It isn’t called the channeler’s disease for nothing.

Fading, on the other hand, was the one you’ve always thought you’d be the most at risk at. Retreating from the world of the living until you yourself become a ghost in a human shell. Your family-tree is full of people with an unconfirmed date of death, simply because no one remembered that they even existed, neither family nor friends.

During training, one task has been to go out and spin a tight social safety net around yourself. After all, there is a certain strength in numbers when school-yard friend-groups slowly dissolve as responsibilities shift. But you’ve always preferred a small circle of living friends, even before your training started.

But what happened today was a textbook-case of scattering.

On a rational level, you know what to do now. Take it slow, meditate, focus yourself. Build your walls back up again. And don’t speak to any ghosts for a while. Yet you still grind your teeth at the thought of it.

A familiar gust shifts around you. It picks up stray leaves and strews them in all directions, but has the decency to leave the bigger piles alone. You smile.

There’s the reason your life hasn’t ended six hours ago.

Existing outside of time, gangar doesn’t feel the late hours and is just as lively as he’s been earlier on the playground. He has formed from the imprint of a child, after all. Nine years might not sound like much, but these nine years of memory are the only ones he will ever genuinely call his own. It has taken you way longer than nine years to really understand how dying takes away your ability to experience new things.

You grew up; he didn’t. But no matter how annoying his antics sometimes are, you still remember that nine-year-old who lost his life on these very temple grounds. And in these moments, the weight of the memories of a lifetime lifts from your shoulders. As it does right now.

Ghosts, too, belong to the world of the living. Maybe even more so than the living themselves. The living stride towards death. It’s the ghosts who seek life. Gangar certainly does.

“Thank you,” you say.

For a moment, the wind stops, leaves suspended in midair. Then, at last, a leaf-pile scatters.

 

[bluesidra]

It's only been two years!
Thank you so to my beta-reader for the feedback and the many missing commas.

Chapter 3: Interrogator​

“It started the night of Monday to Tuesday, three weeks ago.”

It is early evening at the Okamura residence, Nishijin Street 34. An orange afternoon sun casts its warm rays over the low coffee table of the formal guest room.

“At first I thought it was a minor earthquake, you know? Things like these happen sometimes. But when we found the shrine destroyed again only two days later, I was convinced something was wrong.”

Yuriko Okumara sighs and clutches her teacup — jasmine tea, freshly brewed for the occasion —, the sleeves of her kimono catching at the edges of the table. It exudes the distinct air of plain casualness that’s exclusively reserved for exorbitant prices, even you can tell that. A white strand of hair comes loose from a simple bun and falls over a face where wrinkles run as plentiful as roads on a map.

“And then, of course, the painting.”

You shift your gaze from the old lady and onto the small stack in front of you. The photographs are freshly developed; their edges still sticking to your fingers as you spread them out next to each other. In turn, your fingerprints etch themselves into their gloss forever.

They all depict a defaced house shrine — an empty shelf keeping a saddened watch over the remains of the offerings and the sacred charm it once held, all of which lie scattered across the floor beneath. Only on second glance do you realise that these are different instances of the same action. Here’s a fine layer of ash covering the spilled rice and dulling the small mirror that’s no longer present in the follow-up images, and there’s a corner chipped off the miniature gate that had been intact before — its rough surface now stark contrast to the woodcarver’s immaculate planning.

You shift the images over the polished ashwood.

Five photographs of a shrine. The sixth of a sliced apart sliding door.

It had struck you the moment you had stepped into the entry-hall: The panels on the north-facing wall had only recently been installed, their paper so new that, compared to its yellowed compatriots, its ivory was more akin to a brilliant white. A foreign object, turning an otherwise healthy body sickly. But here on the photograph, there is no trace of such dissonance. The original screen had been painted, a landscape in greens and yellows that stretched from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling before it had been slashed multiple times. The photo shows the aftermath: tatters of canvas now hanging in loose folds from the lattices. But even in this state you can feel the serenity and restrained opulence emanating from it.

“We don’t even know if the painting and the shrine are connected.”

With her short hair, buttoned-up silk blouse and casual dress-pants, Aiko Okamura almost stands out in this ensemble of picture-perfect late Taisho-era architecture. Despite that, the family resemblance is undeniable: The same slightly protruding chin that her mother seeks to hide by keeping her head bowed gives her daughter an air of unmistakable resolve.

Now she pushes herself up from the low table with practised ease and walks over to the decorative shelf that’s mostly staffed with equally decorative vases. When she returns, she carries a flat envelope that has the Okamura-business’ symbol — a highly stylized omeshi weave would be your best guess — emblazoned on it. From it she pulls a sheaf of paper and hands it to you.

“Here. I’ve marked the dates,” she says while she sinks down again, onto the seat to your left.

The page she handed you — formerly part of a monthly calendar — displays the month of June, extended by the first week of July via a hand-drawn grid at the bottom. Five days are marked on it with the word ‘Shrine!’ written in red ballpoint pen. One day is marked as ‘Painting!’, also red. The days between are filled with miscellaneous events in blue ink and a much smaller handwriting, the meaning of which, combined with the inherent crypticness of personal notes, is lost on you for the moment.

The events seem to be clustered in three groups. The first two instances of ‘Shrine!’ appear three weeks ago, which is then followed by over an entire week of minor blue events, until the calm is broken by an eventful weekend which saw both the destruction of the painting and the shrine. The week which follows — last week — starts with a lull which is eventually cut short with another two mentions of ‘Shrine!’, the last of which must have been the one Aiko was referring to when she made her call to you.

The grainy scratching sound of a porcelain cup sliding across the wooden table briefly breaks the silence, but doesn’t take away from the oppressive feeling of having your every movement monitored with careful trepidation. The time to passively listen is over. You are to ask the questions now.

You lean back a bit, eyes still on the calendar. This is far from the permanent onslaught of terror the women had made it out to be. You’d bet good money on there being a cause for both the events picking up and slowing down again. But for now, you’ll have to establish a timeline.

When you finally look up, you find two sets of expectant eyes on you, and take a deep breath.

“Was there anything out of the ordinary going on in the days before it first happened?”

Aiko’s eyes narrow. The motion is so brief, you might have missed it had you so much as blinked. The older woman evades her daughter’s gaze within the same heartbeat, and by the time Aiko turns to you, any animosity is wiped from her features.

“Nothing to do with the shrine,” she says. “My daughter’s friend is going to move in with us at the end of summer, to attend college in Enju. We cleared up a bit of space in the other house to prepare her room, moved some things to storage.”

“Do you think this might have anything to do with it?” Yuriko interjects.

“Hard to say.” Your motion is somewhere in the vague no-man’s-land between a nod and a shrug. Despite this, the older woman’s eyes linger on you, sharp. No relief, no disappointment either.

You hold her gaze for a moment longer, then turn back to Aiko. “What happened next?”

“The painting.”

The younger woman’s eyes narrow again, but this time, there is no hint of anger in it. She takes a breath, a bit longer than usual.

“We were all out, attending a play my youngest son starred in. When we returned around half past ten, Makoto — my daughter — had already called the police. Someone had broken into our house and torn the main screen in the entrance hall apart.”

“Makoto has taken all of this rather harshly,” Yuriko adds. “Since that night, she says she cannot sleep safely any longer. And I have to admit, I understand the child.”

In your mental image of the calendar, you scramble not over a few days, but down an entire row as they casually skip over a whole week. But also…

“So your daughter wasn’t with you at the play?”

In return, you get a look that couldn’t be more confused if you had just turned into a yabukuron in front of their — but especially Aiko’s — eyes.

“No, she attended a college orientation course.” Are you mistaken, or does her voice suffer that distinct patience of having to explain what should be common knowledge? You will your eyebrows not to rise.

“What did the police find?”

Again, Aiko’s eyes narrow. This time, her shoulders tense a little as well. For the first time, she doesn’t meet your gaze.

“Nothing,” she says. “They’ve searched the property, asked the neighbours, those things. Currently they are waiting for new developments.”

When she finishes her sentence, the silence fills the warm summer-air with a leaden heaviness. There it blends in with the smell of wood-polish, pine-needles and old rice-paper that wafts in through the open door. There is no need to hurry. Your eyes rest on her all the same.

The barks of a dog somewhere outside briefly take the tension away, when both women turn their heads to look for the source. You force them back into your stalemate. They aren’t the only ones who can play the game of scrutinizing silence after all.

Then, almost imperceptibly, the tension in the younger woman’s shoulders falls.

“They suggested the culprit came from inside the house, since there’s no sign of forced entry. But that cannot be.”

Another bout of silence, again broken by the dog, whose barks have grown a little more frantic. Recognizing an opportunity when one presents itself, Aiko gets up.

“Excuse me, they aren’t usually this agitated. I’ll see what’s amiss.”

With that she leaves the room, her indoor shoes barely making a sound despite the briskness of her steps.

Her sudden absence leaves an almost palpable hole in the room which now quickly fills up with the distinct quivering of abashment and guilt. When Yuriko meets your eyes again, she does so with an unspoken apology. You cannot exactly say you’re surprised, both at the police’s findings and her reaction. So you relax your shoulders, flash a quick smile that both accepts the apology and reassures no ill feelings, and pick the thread back up where it had been left.

“Has anything been stolen?”

The older woman across from you shakes her head, determined. “Never. Not even from storage.”

Why would she mention the storage?

“Have you changed the locks?”

“Some. It’s another reason the police suspect it’s one of us.”

It’s harder to make out under the wide fabric of her dress, but Yuriko’s shoulders droop a little. The next words come in a burst, having taken some courage to gather.

“With all due respect to the police officers, but I don’t think they are correct here. See, I wasn’t at the play either.” Why are you not surprised? “It was late at night and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be, especially in the dark, so I stayed at home. The house was empty when I made my last round and closed everything down, I’m sure of that. My father-in-law is bed-bound, and I know I didn’t do it. So with everyone else accounted for, who of us should have done it?”

You close your eyes, blink the irritation away.

“When you’re talking about ‘us’, who are you talking about? Who lives in this house?”

When you look up again, Yuriko’s features soften slightly.

“My daughter Aiko, her husband and their three children.” Her attention is clearly on you as she takes a sip from her cup, and the wrinkles around her eyes betray the smile she’s seeking to hide. “Then there’s me — my husband died a few years ago — and my father-in-law, who is mostly confined to his bed. During the week, some of our employees come by when they have to pick up special pigments from storage, or need space for the more intricate patterns, but most of the work is done from the office downtown nowadays. Insurance reasons, Aiko says.”

You reach into your jeans’ pocket for your pen — yes, you’re only now starting to take notes — when the temperature around you drops by a few degrees.

{Had fun?} you think while a scattered breeze settles around you.

{Many dogs.} You have to account for the fact that he’s an incorporeal being, as well as not actually speaking to you, but what you perceive translates surprisingly close to being out of breath. A grin makes its way onto your face as you lean forward and scribble down the inhabitants of the house into the corner of the calendar.

{Nothing special in the house, but there’s a pile of weaker ghosts around the greenhouse. And I mean a big pile.}

For a moment you stop, but soon continue. You’re on the grounds of a silk-manufactory, after all.

On the veranda outside, silent steps draw closer. Silent enough that it’s only the impacts they send through the floor that are giving them away.

{I can take another look at the greenhouse..?}

You shake your head, as inconspicuous as you can. Just as you’re somewhat sure gangar has gotten the signal, Aiko returns to the room.

“I’m sorry. For some reason, they are very on edge today,” she says with a dismissive handwave towards the dogs, who have now magically quieted down. Your shadow tugs on your toes.

{Not now,} you think, before returning your attention to the women.

“Did the dogs alert the night the painting was destroyed? Or any of the other nights?”

Aiko stops in her movement to exchange a glance with her mother, halfway caught between standing and sitting down.

“No,” she says with the hesitancy of someone who’s just gone over the events of six nights at a rapid pace. When she sinks down fully, she’s biting the inside of her cheek.

Once more you push the calendar into the centre of the table. This time it’s you who skips over a few days when you point to the start of the latest outbreak, only three days ago.

“This was after the police had finished their investigation and we set up the shrine again,” Aiko answers your unspoken question. “It didn’t last long.”

“Were the police present at the estate the entire time between the incident with the painting and here?” You tap your finger onto the aforementioned entry three days ago.

“On and off. They were here a total of three times for interviews, and then one entire afternoon when the technicians dusted the locks.”

Yuriko adds: “The foremost reason why nothing happened there is because we’ve left the shrine disassembled.”

Makes sense.

A heightened police presence and the target of the primary ire not being available sounds like a good enough reason for the decreased activity, at least for now. So you run your finger back on the calendar, marking the week of peace between the first burst and the painting.

“What about this stretch?”

The temperature seemingly drops again, and this time it has nothing to do with gangar. Good thing you’ve looked up before asking your question, because Aiko’s tone only portrays genuine concern and confusion.

“Nothing really. Grandpa made us take down a few paintings. He said they bring misfortune. But I can’t see how that has anything to do with the shrine.”

Your eyes quickly dart over to Yuriko. Her lips are pressed shut. There is something they aren’t telling you, aren’t telling each other.

“Anything might help, no matter how coincidental,” you implore. Nothing happens. Aiko still looks at you with wide-eyed innocence, while Yuriko avoids her gaze. Eventually, you give up. “What kind of paintings were they?”

“Landscapes from the turn of the century, most of them unsigned and unappraised,” the younger woman explains. “They’ve been around ever since I can remember, so I’ve never paid them much attention, to be completely honest.”

“How would those bring misfortune?”

Aiko simply shrugs, Yuriko doesn’t answer. This won’t do.

“So to summarize — and interrupt me if I’m wrong: You have one weekend of clearing out, then your house-shrine is defaced two nights in a row. Paintings are taken down, one week of quiet, then the screen in the entrance hall and the shrine are destroyed while Yuriko and her father-in-law are at home. No signs of forced entry, no alert from the dogs. Police investigate and it’s quiet again, but as soon as the shrine is set up, it gets destroyed once more.”

Aiko nods.

“And then again the day after that. Also, the third time the shrine got destroyed was the night after the painting, not the same night, but yes. That’s the rough timeline of events.”

You lean back and stare at the calendar for a heartbeat longer, idly playing with the clip on your pen while you consign these dates to memory. Your cup starts moving by itself, and you cut its undoubtedly nefarious way across the table short before anyone else can notice it. The ghostly force still pushes and pulls on the cup in your palm when you look up. To your surprise, the two women aren’t looking at you. Rather, they are lost in their own thoughts, gaze still on the calendar, albeit unfocused. For a moment, the only sound that fills the air is the korobohshi‘s symphony.

“Has there been any conflict over religion in your family as of late?”

As if pulled out of a reverie, Aiko shakes her head and crosses her fingers in front of her.

“No. As far back as I can recall, everyone here has been raised in the rites of the Lord Protector and the Lady of Storms. My brothers have fallen off, but there’s no bad blood, as far as I’m aware.”

You nod. Yuriko is a regular at the Towers; you recognise her from your services. You think you’ve seen Aiko a few times as well, but wouldn’t bet on an exact number. The cup in your hand moves again, so you pick it up and finally take a sip. Neglected, the tea has become a little too cold, but its taste is still excellent.

“Anyone past or present who might have a grudge against your family?”

This time, there’s a reaction. The two women exchange glances. From where she’s at now, you cannot quite make out the expression on Aiko’s face, but it is her who ultimately turns back to you and speaks up.

“Certainly some.”

You’re not interested in that. You are more interested in what went unsaid.

{Maybe you should check out the greenhouse after all…} you think.

“We have a long history, and with history comes enemies. But none I’d suspect of something so… childish.”

The force playing tug with your cup is gone, as is the cooling presence that has held the summer heat away for now. As you set down the cup and lean forward to meet Aiko’s gaze, you cannot help but feel the warmth finally seeping in underneath your clothes.

“You call a break-in and the destruction of your historical painting childish?”

“In a way.”

Aiko shrugs with one shoulder before gathering her wits and shaking her head with much more emphasis.

“You see, we are artisans. We have bolts of luxury designer silk, as well as invaluable historical fabrics dyed with all sorts of techniques. Compared to that, the screen was…” She struggles for a polite descriptor for a moment, then gives up on it. “It fits nicely with the house. It has never even been appraised. If anyone would try to harm our family business, why—”

Her answer is cut short by the frantic barking of this time not one, but two dogs.

“Oh, what is it with them today?” As if on cue, the young woman gets up. “Excuse me.” When she leaves this time, her steps are a little louder.

When she’s out the door, you turn your gaze back to the old lady, only to have that very same look of quiet inquisitiveness thrown back at you. For one long moment, your eyes are locked in this stalemate, and it is you who gives in first.

“I can tell you’re withholding something from me.”

The soft smile makes its way onto her features once more.

“Why don’t I show you around the property a bit?”

❂​

When you turn the corner, the true extent of what Yuriko disparagingly called the backyard rolls out in front of you. Standing at the north facing veranda of the main house, you’re looking at a meticulously kept landscape garden rivaling some of Enju’s smaller public parks in size. Gravelled paths lead through groves of old, crooked trees densely covered with dark green leaves. From them, a faint, sweet scent not unlike overripe oran wavers lazily through the summer air. Mulberry — the silk-spinning kemusso’s preferred food.

Scattered in between are smaller buildings, a colourful selection of different building styles and time-periods. A small row of turn-of-the-century workshops which never have gone out of use, a few of them with freshly dyed fabrics on their drying racks, a dedicated guest house from the interwar-period, and of course the massive green-house, its new stainless steel framework blinding in the afternoon sun. The entire ensemble is unified only under the rusty-red roof-tiles of Enju’s very own brickwork company and the verandas of cypress-wood darkened by time. Here and there are new plastic ramps connecting the living areas with ground level. And over everything lingers the eerily quiet productivity of the silk-worms gorging themselves into an early grave.

On the far end of the yard, a low, windowless building tucks itself behind the workshop’s wide open fronts, as if ashamed of its relative plainness. A large AC-unit hums busily by its side. The doors are dark brown like any other doors around. Unlike all the other doors, though, this one is steel, with a lively blinking high security lock-system instead of a knob.

Out of view, the dogs still bark.

Next to you, Yuriko is ready to move on, but your eyes are still focused on the unassuming building.

“What’s so special about the storage? Or the things you put in there three weeks ago?”

From the edge of your vision, you see her stop and turn to you. After she’s stared at you for a while, she turns her gaze towards the little building as well. Her posture doesn’t change. A quick side glance confirms: There’s no trace of fear, anger nor any negative emotion. It’s only the softening wrinkles around her eyes that give away… longing?

“It’s just an old superstition,” she says eventually.

The sun reflecting off the greenhouse is blinding. You regret not having brought sunglasses as you wait out the silence she needs to overcome that last hurdle, which is her own embarrassment.

“The room we cleared out was my late son’s room.” You turn to her. She folds her hands in front of her belt, which is delicate enough to reflect the reflections. “His passing isn’t recent, not by any means — it’s what? Twelve years now? Still, I wonder…”

Her words taper out onto the evening breeze where they mix up with the sweet fruits’ scent and get lost.

“How did he pass away?”

Your words follow hers, and for a moment, there’s only the ever-present humming of the AC.

“A car hit him while he was on the way to work. No helmet could have saved him.” She shrugs, her smile still remaining stapled to her face. “By that point he had long since moved out. We only learned about it when the funeral was announced.”

“My condolences.” Your voice is flat.

After twelve years, wounds have scarred over, no matter how messy. Condolences are no longer needed. You can tell she’s heard those words so often, they lost any meaning and are now only empty husks of moving air. You have seen these kinds of old scars before and know not to acknowledge them when they’re healed. But estrangement from a loved one without the hope of ever making amends is a scar that throbs forever.

“There is a legend in our family, about a curse. About the firstborns always dying young. My late husband very much believed it.”

Hearing this, your focus snaps back onto her.

“And your son was…”

“Yasuo. He was my oldest, yes.”

She looks in your direction before turning her gaze back to the garden. Her facade had briefly slipped, but it had been too brief to differentiate between trust and disapproval.

“I cannot believe he has anything to do with this.” Disapproval. “Despite everything that had happened, he seems to have carved out a good life for himself in Yamabuki. And it’s not like I suspect him either. It’s only that it’s such a coincidence…” Her hands clench around each other. After a heartbeat of consideration, she lifts her gaze — determination — and turns to you, not quite meeting yours. “But even if — if his ghost was truly restless — nothing like this has happened in all those years. And believe me, I have looked for signs.”

An answer is expected of you. It is one that has become as much a routine to you as accepting condolences has become to her.

“The dead — and the living — are unpredictable. I cannot speak for your son, of course. But I know that sometimes, the opening of old wounds seemingly summons the dead back into this world, even if it is nothing more than the living battling with their memories.”

Her hands relax a little, then she grips them tight once more. Her lower lip wavers for the briefest of moments.

“What would you need to tell me—”

Her gaze flees into the garden. For one precarious moment, her composure threatens to collapse under the impact of foregone hope. Then the moment passes. When she shakes her head, twelve years of grief flatten down, go to rest in their scars.

“No. Please don’t answer this question.”

For a moment, a quivering silence stretches over the veranda, and the garden before it. Only once the ripples have run themselves out somewhere in the groves, you ask a question of your own.

“May I ask what has happened between you?”

Throughout all this, the steely smile on her face has never faltered, and neither does it now. Sadness tugs at her features, the corners of her mouth twitch lightly, but ultimately, her smile and the faraway look remain.

Beneath your soles, the wooden veranda vibrates under busy, silent steps.

“Stupid things…” She shakes her head. “He wanted to… I guess prove himself, step out of his father’s shadow. Instead of mastering the family trade, he chose to study architecture in Yamabuki. Then he met a woman the family didn’t approve of… meaningless things in hindsight, really.”

The words have barely had time to grow into the weight they carry when Aiko turns around the corner.

“Oh, there you are!” she says, her cheeks still flush. “Have you taken a look at the shrine yet?”

Her mother mirrors her smile, and this time, it’s genuine.

“It’s our next stop.” In front of her, Yuriko’s hands unfold. “Have you found what startled the dogs?”

When you make your way over gravel paths to the guest house; after the women have engaged in a fair bit of speculation on the odd behaviour of the dogs, Yuriko takes you aside once more.

“My daughter has always been very protective of her older brother,” she says by way of belated explanation.

❂

In the darkest reaches of the sea, along current and eddy, through trench and reef, over wreck and cave, our Lady of Storms glides.
She who protects our shores with the torrents of Her mighty tempest, yet grants calm water to Her faithful.
She who nourishes our fields with Her soft rains so the rice-plant may deliver Her vow to Her lover above.
She who carries our prayers from the highest mountain to the farthest shores on Her wings of blazing silver.
May She guide our ships through perilous waves and shelter our homes beneath Her watchful gaze
While we await Her return in the quiet patience of Her summer rains.

❂​

Slowly, your senses pour inwards again. Back from the strokes of blue ink on grainy white paper. Back from the letters that spell Her Lady of Storms’ name. Back from the mirror guarding it from the world’s gaze. Back from the effigy of the Tower’s southern gate house with the chipped corner. Back from the painted wooden cut-outs used to set the gate house into its familiar setting of autumn-red leaves and the Towers nestled between them. Back from the offerings of rice and sake, back from the candles along which waxen strings of blue, silver and white wind themselves like a waterfall climbing towards the sky. Back over mats of rice-straw, into the gently swirling air that has snuck up on you and formed a protective bubble around you. Back beneath the knitted fabric of your clothes, back into the pores of your skin. Back into you.

When you open your eyes, the shrine stands quietly on its shelf, here, in the quiet room in the equally quiet western guest house. Nothing here indicates any sort of animosity against this innocent place of worship.

Nothing.

{What are we waiting for?} asks an impatient voice in the back of your skull.

{I asked Mrs Okumara for photographs of the paintings.} In response, a huff of dust rises from the floormats.

{So, have you been to the greenhouse?} you think while you cross your arms in front of your chest and contemplate the shrine a little longer.

{You can bet.}

Seven stories on the Tin Tower. Exactly how they should be.

{Lots of kemusso there. Even more ghosts.}

You expected nothing less of a silk-factory. Although you doubt that the individual ghosts of murdered silkworms, no matter how real their pain, would direct their ire against a human shrine. Against the Lady of Storms and the Lord Protector, maybe. But not against man-made ways of worship.

However… Your eyes wander down to the faded photograph framed in black that hangs just below the shrine. An older couple dressed in fine silken garments, flanked by one younger man on either side. Same unequivocal chin as Aiko’s, even more prominent. Interwar, you’d guess. Those deeper cut issyu-style collars on the western suit that one of the sons wears only became fashionable shortly before the war.

{Anyone among them particularly strong?} you ask.

{Not really.}

You tear your focus away from the shrine and the photograph, and turn it to the hovering dust-motes on the ground. Are you hearing things or did gangar sound dejected? You’re about to ask what’s up when the sliding door behind you is shoved open.

You turn around just enough to look over your shoulder.

“My daughter-in-law told me about your visit. I can assure you; this is entirely unnecessary.”

Framed by light wooden lattices stands a man who has shrunken under his age, one emaciated hand clutching the head of a walking cane not unlike a talon. His grey hair is thin enough to reveal the liver-spots beneath; the silken kimono has long lost its shine. Despite that, the sharp lines of the fish pattern are still perfectly visible, and his dark eyes linger on you even sharper.

Same prominent chin. Through his clenched jaw, it speaks less of cheery confidence but of grim determination.

Your instinct is to bow and to toll your respect towards the older man. But since it was him who skipped any formalities, you don’t feel particularly compelled to adhere to them either.

“And may I ask how you can be so sure about that?”

“It’s quite simple.”

Unstable as it might be, there is no sign of reconsideration in his movement as he steps closer to you. These are the steps of a man who is used to ownership and power.

“I don’t want someone poking their nose into my family’s affairs.”

Standing about a head taller than him, you look at him and consider how far you’re willing to entertain his taunt. Next to your ankles, the dust-motes stand still mid-air, breath bated and clearly hoping for some sort of violence, when a second shadow appears behind the door.

“Grandpa, let the man do his work,” Aiko says with an expression that’s just shy of rolling her eyes.

Leaning halfway into the room, one shoulder propped up against the doorframe and with the tone of a perpetually peeved teenager, she has suddenly lost much of her authoritative air.

The old man’s sharp eyes quickly dart to her, then back to you, where they scan you up and down without any attempt at hiding it. Whatever conclusions he comes to, it doesn’t brighten his mood.

He takes another step, towards you, towards the shrine. For what feels like an eternity, his eyes linger on it. There is a question in the air, painfully short of being spoken aloud.

Behind you, Aiko waves a stack of paper and you finally turn around fully. Disappointed dust-motes fall to the ground.

You briefly flick through the photographs; listen to the explanations the woman gives you for each while you try to memorize them as best you can. The ritualistic pleasantries heralding the end of a visit are initiated, but the unspoken question lingers still.

When she is about to show you out, you turn around. The old man is still contemplating the shrine. And although the changes are minimal, the fact that he’s moved the offerings a little closer to the centre doesn’t slip past you.

You should be leaving. You are only a guest in this house, and have not the slightest right to refuse or rebut your host. Despite that, you clear your throat.

The patriarch doesn’t turn around, but even without confirmation, you know he watches your reflection in the shrine’s mirror. His voice, underneath the tremble of age, has a distinct acerbic cadence to it.

“Tell me, priest. Do you believe the things you preach?”

The answer is simple: “Yes.”

❂​

“I have to apologise.” Aiko’s last words still echo in your ears when you step off the tram half an hour later. “The recent events have been hard on everyone. And I can imagine it is twice as frightening when there’s a high chance your body will deny you its service once push comes to shove.”

{Didn’t look bedbound to me,} gangar says as he flits along the shadows of the familiar fences and lampposts.

You agree with a hum. With your mind still elsewhere, your feet find the way home on their own. Occasionally you greet people — your neighbours — with the same autonomy, your face and voice relying on the very same muscle memory your legs are pulling from.

Your mind is stuck to the gloss-covered photographs that now sit in your back-pocket. Landscape paintings from the turn of the century, as unassuming as they come, just as stated.

Religiously motivated vandalism, the destruction of a historical work of art, all without forceful entry. A dead son. Mentions of a curse. Religious and interpersonal conflicts a-plenty in the family. A bountiful harvest of lesser ghosts in the backyard. Any spirit would lick their incorporeal fingers for a place like this. And yet…

You turn the last corner. When you push back the bolt on the courtyard’s gate, you dimly register how it’s not been closed all the way to the stop. Only when you reach the front door and you notice the doormat being slightly askew do you snap back into reality somewhat.

When you open the door — unlocked, not locked twice as you did when you left — and look around the windowless hallway, your foot gets caught on a soft object. You push it forward with the tip of your shoe, until the slim streak of light coming in through the opposite door reveals its nature.

A backpack.

Of course.

When you carelessly toss your jacket onto the coat rack to your left, the plastic rustle of a familiar raincoat responds.

It’s not far from the backpack, at the bottom of the staircase that you find a hardcover suitcase, the luggage tags from Kantai still wrapped up in its handle.

It’s been a long day, but only when you can’t find it in you to be surprised do you realise how tired you are.

Judging by the anxious chimes of small keys against even smaller bells, gangar is already in the kitchen, chasing the poor cleffy around. For now you leave him to his bullying and instead head straight for the living room.

You toss a spare blanket over Minaki’s sleeping form and then collapse onto the other sofa. If your guest was expecting a more pompous welcome, he would have to try another day. But chances are high the still empty fridge was all the welcome he’s needed.

The furtive sound of tin clinking against tin approaches. A tiny plea for refuge. One arm hanging off the sofa, you tap your fingers against the carpet, and a moment later you can feel thin wires climbing up along your sleeve. Gangar is a lot more discreet when he slides into the small, dark gap between couch and floor.

It takes a bit of manoeuvring between you and the sentient keyring, but eventually, you’ve turned yourself around and onto your back. That’s when you notice the stack of photographs still in your back-pocket. You pull them out and unceremoniously toss them onto the nearby coffee table, where they slide off each other with an unpleasant scraping sound.

Whatever.

While you drift off into sleep’s realm, you trace all the invisible movements through the rafters and the walls of your own home, from the little pockets of cold air to the ever-forming landspout at the old coal bunker. This place offers them the freedom to be, at the cost of a — for a ghost — ascetic lifestyle. Many of them would freely trade in your walls for the Okamuras’.

And yet, there was absolutely nothing.