Phillip smiled at the proclamation like he’d heard it ten times before from ten thousand other women, knew every syllable was meant, would already be true if it weren’t for fraternal bonds, and I was the only one who saw how Faiz’s answering smile wouldn’t climb to his eyes.

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to marry your priest,” Faiz said, easy as anything. “But if you had to get a replacement, I’d rather you pick Cat.”

  “Ugh,” I said. “Not my type.”

  “I’d rather die an old maid. No offense,” said Talia.

  “None taken.”

  “Anyway,” said Phillip with a clearing of his throat. “The bride took her abandonment in stride and told her wedding guests to bury her in the foundation of the house.”

  “Alive?” I whispered. I thought of a girl holding both hands to her mouth, swallowing air and then dirt, her hair and the hems of her wedding dress becoming heavier with every shovel’s worth of soil to come down.

  “Alive,” said Phillip. “She said she had promised to wait for him and she would. She’d keep the house standing until his ghost finally came home.”

  Silence placed itself to rest along the house and upon our tongues.

  “And every year after that, they buried a new girl in the walls,” said Phillip.

  “Why,” started Faiz, startling somehow at this revelation, “the fuck would they do that?”

  “Because it gets lonely down in the dirt,” Phillip continued, while I held my tongue to the steeple of my mouth. “Why do you think there are so many stories of ghosts trying to get people to kill themselves? Because they miss having someone there, someone warm. It doesn’t matter how many corpses are lying in the soil with them. It’s not the same. The dead miss the sun. It’s dark down there.”

  “That’s—” Talia walked a hand along Faiz’s arm, a gesture that said look, you have to understand that this belongs to me. Her eyes found mine, liquid and unkind. In that instant, I wanted badly to tell her again that the past was so sepulchered in poor choices, you couldn’t get Faiz and me back together for bourbon enough to brine New Orleans. But that wasn’t the point. “—That’s pretty fucking metal.”

  “We’ll be fine. Freshly certified man of the cloth right here.” Phillip pounded his sternum with a fist, laughing, and Talia immediately kissed Faiz in answer. He took her knuckles to his mouth, grazed each of them with his lips in turn. I stared at the skins of woven straw thatching the floors, shuddered despite myself. I was abruptly dumbstruck by a profound curiosity.

  How many dead and dismembered women laid folded in these walls and under these floors, in the rafters that ribbed the ceiling and along those broad steps, barely visible in the murk?

  Tradition insists the offerings be buried alive, able to breathe and bargain through the process, their funerary garments debased by shit, piss, and whatever other fluids we extrude on the cusp of death. I couldn’t shake the idea of an eminently practical family, one that understood that bone won’t rot where wood might, ordering their workers to stack girls like bricks. Arms here, legs there, a vein of skulls wefted into the manor’s framing, insurance against a time when traditional architecture might fail. Might as well. They were here for the long haul. One day, these doors would open and wedding guests would pour through and there would be a marriage, come the cataclysm or modern civilization.

  The house would wait forever until it happened.

  One girl each year. Two hundred and six bones times a thousand years. More than enough calcium to keep this house standing until the stars ate themselves clean, picked the sinew from their own shining bones.

  All for one girl as she waited and waited.

  Alone in the dirt and the dark.

  “Cat?”

  I blinked free of my fugue, fingers clenched around my wrist. “I’m okay.”

  “You sure?” Phillip cocked a worried look, hair haloed by a slant of owl-light. “You don’t look like you’re fine. Is it—”

  “Leave it,” Faiz said softly. The joy’d gone out of his expression, replaced by concern, a twitch of protective anger that carried to his teeth, his lips peeling back. I wagged my head, smoothed out a smile. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. “Cat knows we’re here if she needs us.”

  The look on my face must have been a sight to see because Phillip flinched and ducked out of the room, mumbling about mistakes, cheeks blotching. I ran through my to-do list thrice, counted out chores, precautions, a thousand trivialities, until order restored itself by way of monotony. I glanced over, breathing easy again, to see Faiz and Talia bent together like congregants, a steeple made of their bodies, foreheads touching. It was impossible to miss the cue.

  Exit, stage anywhere.

  So, I followed the shutter-pop of Phillip’s new camera to where he stood in an antechamber, painted by the evening penumbra, dusk colors: gold and pink. A moting of dust spiraled in the damp air, glinting palely where particles caught in the cooling sun. At some point, the roof here had fissured, letting the weather slop through. The flooring underneath was rotten, green where the mould and ferns and whorls of thick moss had taken root in the mulch.

  “Sorry.”

  I shrugged. There were wildflowers by the lungful, swelling at Phillip’s feet. “It’s fine.”

  His eyebrows went up.

  A bird shrilled its laughter. Through the wound in the roof, I saw a flash of ambergris and tanzanite, the teal of a feathered throat. Phillip stretched, a Rembrandt in high-definition. “Cat—”

  “You were just worried about a friend. It happens.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I’m not going to throw myself off a building because you were trying to be nice. That’s not how it works.” I swallowed.

  “Okay. Just … tell me what you need, all right? I don’t—I don’t always know the right things to say. I mean, I’m okay at some things, but—”

  Like women, I thought. Like being a star, being loved, being hungered for. Phillip excelled at inciting want, particularly the kind that tottered on the border of worship. Small wonder he was so inept at compassion sometimes. Every religion is a one-way relationship.

  To our right, a half-opened fusuma—the opaque panel stood floor to ceiling, slid noiselessly on its rail when I pushed—that opened into a garden: a neat square of emerald bracketed by verandahs, an algae-swallowed pool at its heart. The foliage crawled with red higanbana, dead men’s flowers.

  I ran my fingers through my hair. I was suddenly, irrevocably exhausted, and the thought of having to exorcise Phillip’s guilt again, to assure him that he wasn’t a bad man, nauseated me. In lieu of comfort, I groped for inanities.

  “When did you date Talia? Was it after or while we were seeing each other?”

  “Cat?” A laugh startled from him.

  “I don’t mean that as an accusation. It doesn’t matter. I was just wondering.” I stroked a finger along the bamboo lattice, came out with dust, decomposing plant material, an oiliness that I couldn’t place.

  “About a month after. But we weren’t exclusive or anything.”

  “You never did like the exclusive thing, no.”

  “It’s not that.” So much sincerity in those gold-blue eyes, crowns of honey around black pupils. “It’s just we were kids. We’re still kids. These relationships won’t last us into adulthood. Most of them won’t. Talia and Faiz, that’s something else. Anyway. When I’m older, I’ll settle down. But these are the best years of my life and I don’t want to waste them shackled to a person I won’t like at thirty.”

  His gaze became pleading.

  “You understand, right?” said Phillip, yearning for affirmation.

  “I’m just wondering if Faiz knows you two were together.”

  He stilled.

  “That’s on Talia to tell him. Not me.”

  I considered my next words.

  “In case he doesn’t know, I feel like you should make it a point to pretend that you two weren’t ever an item.”

  Guileless, the reply: “Why?”

  I thought of Faiz and his teeth, bared and blunt and bitter. “Faiz might not like suddenly finding out that you slept with his fiancée.”

  “He’s an adult. And male. He’s not going to care about someone’s sexual history.”

  “Better safe than sorry, Phillip.” I paused. “Also, fuck you. Faiz is an adult who can make his own decisions, but you’re a kid who shouldn’t commit yet?”

  “Hey, people mature at different speeds.”

  “Jesus. Fine. Just make sure you don’t let Faiz know you used to sleep with his wife-to-be.”

  “Okay.” Phillip put his hand out, his blunt nails grazing a fold of my shirt. “For you.”

  I wove my shoulder away.

  “Don’t do that.” Something below the crossbeams of my lowest ribs clenched as I absorbed him, the chiaroscuro of his face in silhouette, his faultless smile. Nothing ever said no to those cheekbones. “You know you’re supposed to ask.”

  “Sorry, I forgot.” Glib as the first word out of a babe’s milk-wet mouth, one shoulder raised then dropped.

  My gaze drifted, moved until it came to rest on the fusuma. There were images of marketplaces teeming with black-lipped housewives, raccoons darting between—

  I squinted. No, not raccoons. Tanuki, with their scrotums dragging behind them. Someone’d even painted the fine hairs, had made it a point to emphasize how the testes sat in their gunny sacks of tanned skin. Somehow, the profanity of the art repulsed me less than the undergrowth in which Phillip stood. The ferns grew knee-high, curled against his calves like vegetal cats.

  “So, how many ghosts do you think we’re going to find?” Phillip said, warming to the thought of small talk, his grin like a politician’s smile beaming up from the cover of GQ, only better because it was actually sincere, larger than life yet still intrinsically boy next door.

  “At least one.” I thought about corpses. I thought about how many girls were buried beneath us, foreheads together, bodies fused in a cat’s cradle of curled legs and clutching arms.

  “Yeah. She’s probably like the Queen of the Damned or something. I wonder what she’d look like.” He undulated his hands through the air, molding his palms around the voluptuous rise and dip of an imaginary silhouette. “Bet she’s hot.”

  A portraiture of the deceased—the owner of that voice—rose into focus in my mind’s eye: a round face, wide at the cordillera of her cheekbones but otherwise gaunt, the flesh whittled by hunger and worms, her complexion waxen. Hair waterfalling ragged and black, still impaled in places by sharp golden pins.

  “I don’t think you can be hot after so many years dead.”

  “Have some imagination. Sure, the corporeal body might have suffered from decomposition. But her spiritual manifestation is probably something else.”

  “You’re crass, Phillip.” My laugh sounded wet, thick, false, forced. But Phillip didn’t notice, grinning wide. I couldn’t stop thinking about what might have been under his feet.

  “Just a hot-blooded male,” he confessed. “Doing what hot-blooded males do.”

  “Cute.” The edge of a lip went up further than demure. “Promise me you’ll rein it in.”

  “I promise I’ll try.” He fisted a hand and placed it over his heart, an admiral’s salute, spine and shoulders lancing straight. That grin again, that cocksure state-funded presidential candidate smirk.

  “Talk to the hand.” I threw a raised palm in his direction and looked back to the fusuma. It wasn’t just tanuki on exhibit. There were other yokai. It was all yokai, a veritable parade: kitsune in elaborate tomesode, tails curling with questions. Ningyo crawling from the jeweled sea. Kappa and towering oni, negotiating for baskets heaped with cucumbers. Everywhere, every last brush-painted face in sight. Even the housewives: some with eyes, some only with lips, some with gaping smiles sliced into place. Every last one of them. All fucking yokai.

  “Just trying to make you laugh, Cat. That’s all.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  He swept his fringe from his eyes and palmed his chest with both hands, expression become grotesque with false despair. “You wound me.”

  “Your ego wounds you. I was just its instrument.”

  And he laughed then. Like it didn’t matter, like it couldn’t matter, not for him, not ever, not when so much of the world waited, eager, to tithe him everything for a kiss. Phillip wouldn’t pauper himself with a grudge, not with the blessed largesse of his straight, white, rich-boy life.

  “You’re good people, Cat. You know that, right? And good people deserve happiness.”

  “I think that’s overstating things,” I told him with a half-smile for a tip. However tedious the best wishes, I couldn’t fault his intent. More than anything else, I was tired. Tired of being unhappy, and even more tired of feeling sorry for the fact that I was unhappy. It was easier to agree than it was to argue, what with the immovable object that was Phillip’s faith in his worldview. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”

  Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.

  A whisper, so quiet the cerebellum wouldn’t acknowledge its receipt. The words were drowned by the reverb of Faiz’s voice calling, an afterimage, an impression of teeth on skin. We exited the room, the future falling into place behind us. Like a wedding veil, a mourning caul. Like froth on the lip of a bride drowning on soil.

  CHAPTER 2

  The mansion was colossal. Bigger than it should have been. Taller. In the dregs of my mind, a voice frothed with questions: is it meant to be so big? Had I misremembered? Were all Heian houses two storeys or more?

  It didn’t make sense.

  But here the house stood. Though only two storeys, each floor spanned at least twelve rooms and several self-contained courtyards, its symmetries united by ascetically decorated corridors. Every wall in the building was lavish with corroding artwork of the yokai: kappa and two-tailed nekomata; kitsune cowled like housewives, bartering with egrets for fresh fish. Domesticity as interpreted through the lens of the demonic.

  We poured across its spaces, alone and together, sifting through the ruins. In one room sat terracotta monks, heads weighted with an ancient regret. In another, dolls with mouths lacquered black. In another, books, or at least the corpses of books. The volumes were mulch, eaten by insects, infested; edifices, turgid with egg chambers, writhed from the rot. Despite the horror of the visuals, they did not smell of anything but a green dark wetness.

  The night stretched, chandeliered with fireflies and stars and the last cicada songs of the year, the world coloring indigo-dark. Music wafted from the next room: Taylor Swift and Coldplay and Carly Rae Jepsen. We’d chosen one of the ground-floor dining halls as a loci for our celebrations. There were shoji screens here—these held imagery of tengu at repose—to allow us to box-cut the space into rooms. A little privacy, we joked, for the spouses-to-be.

  Backlit by torch-glow, two shadows—Phillip and Talia, I’d recognize their silhouettes anywhere—rose and entwined behind the shoji screen to our right, and Faiz, elbows-deep before in our party supplies, halted to stare. Talia’s laughter flickered, girlish and eager, a darting breath of sound. I wondered then as I studied Faiz’s face, the uncertainty and his pinch-mouthed worry, if he knew that Phillip and Talia had been in lust once and found myself worrying how much that answer mattered.

  “You okay?” I came to his side of the room.

  “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Faiz swung looks between me and the shadows on the shoji screen.

  “No reason,” I said. “You just seemed tense, that’s all.”

  “Long flight.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  His head kept metronoming.

  “It isn’t too late to head back to Kyoto or something, you know—”

  “Talia has wanted to get married in a haunted house since she was a kid. I’m not going to take that away from her.” He swallowed hard between each sentence, face calcified. “Not after what it took to get us here.”

  “I don’t want to diminish Talia’s wants and dreams here but someone has to say it.” I tried for a smile. “Which freaking kid grows up wanting to get married in a haunted house? I mean, come on.”

  The shadows on the other side of the shoji screen receded into tongues of slow-swaying ink, and Faiz couldn’t look away.

  “Cat—” Finally, Faiz tented fingers and pressed them to his nose bridge, dropped his chin. “Whatever is going on with you, you have to stop. You can’t let Talia hear any of this. Do you know how much it took to convince her to let you come?”

  “I know.” Like rote now, my answer and the arrangement of my fingers, hands bunched and pressed to my belly, held there under the roof of my ribs. It hurt to be made to shrink like this. “I know. You’ve told me. I don’t know. I just.”

  “You just what, Cat?”

  I thought of the rooms and the ossuaries they’d become: the books suppurating flat-bodied beetles, hollowed, hallowed in their decay. “I think this is all a mistake. Us coming here. Us being here. I think we’re going to regret it. That’s all.”

  I walked away before Faiz could answer, could tell me again I’d been disappointing, and staggered out of the room. The air was warm, summer-wet in the plunge of the corridor. Someone’d lit a lantern at the very end, and its light bounced against a bronze mirror, my image blurred in the surface. I tensed, expecting another figure to manifest in the metal, a broken-backed body dropped over the second floor, something tall and pale and faceless.

  Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.

  No, that wasn’t right.

  An image bled into place. If Phillip’s ghost was real, she would be enamel and ink and a birdcage body, its bones like filigree or fish spines, barely enough to cup its impatient heart. A girl in her bridal whites, jaw sharp as a promise. Her kisses close-lipped, without tongue or heat. Like a benediction or a prayer or an ending.

  And her mouth, of course, from its teeth through to the tunnel of its throat: black.

 

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