“If it helps, I wish you weren’t here either.”

  “I hope the house eats you.” Talia, her charity only good for so much.

  “I hope the same about you.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Whose turn is it?”

  “Not it.” Lin lobbed a kernel of caramel popcorn upwards, missed its descent by a millimeter. It bounced off his nose and rolled under a shelf. Fat-faced dolls in ragged magistrate wear, chignons still sleek, watched us from beside princesses in full jūnihitoe, cascades of emerald and golden damask, their brows dewed with brass. I stared as a fly hatched from the husk of a boy’s small porcelain skull. Of all the figurines, this was the only one to have not survived time’s touch. It looked like someone’d grabbed him by the jaw, squeezed until the cheekbones snapped, fracturing inwards. A sacrifice.

  The thought filled me like ice water.

  The dolls—an audience of dozens, set on thin shelves—stayed silent as Talia padded back inside from wherever she had been, their hands on their thighs, suspended on the brink of breath. It was late enough to lose track of the hours to exhaustion. Talia made us parade through every room until we found this one. This one because the last six lacked the right atmosphere. I’d thought it was stupid at first. But as we told stories of drowned things and hungry ones, it started to make sense. There was power here, even if it was of our own invention.

  We killed a candle with every story until there was one last flickering survivor. Its light twitched through the shoji screen. The walls here frothed with waves and rough ocean. Through its lambent waters, the paint glittering as though tinctured with crushed sapphire, woodblock octopi watched us incuriously.

  “I’ll do it.” I flipped my phone onto its screen, pounded down the last Asahi, chasing down the thin, flat flavor with Lin’s plum wine. My teeth were just sugar now, furred with so much plaque I couldn’t stop working my tongue over them, over and over. Like a horse. Like a dog that’d gotten into a bag of toffee. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. “I’ve got a story.”

  Faiz spoke up first. Sometimes, he still remembered how to be a best friend. “You don’t have to. You’ve had a rough night. Just sit and enjoy—”

  My vision gyred, one way and then another. I’d drunk too much. I didn’t care. I swayed upright onto my feet, bracing against a shelf. “No, no. I’m okay. I’ve got a story. Blow the rest of your shit out of the water.”

  “I don’t know. Faiz’s one about his ex’s uncle was pretty good. Makes me never want to go back—” said Lin.

  “Ssh.” I pushed a finger to Lin’s mouth. Shadows frescoed the corners of the room, elongated its angles, bent them into nightmare bodies. Bile soured the back of my throat and I swallowed against the coming hangover. I was sick of this. Sick of everything. “Ssh.”

  The world swung.

  “Sit down.”

  “You going to tell me to go fetch next?”

  “Jesus.” Faiz got up, grabbed a water bottle, tipped its neck at me. “You’re drunk, Cat. Sit down before—”

  “I make a fool of myself?”

  “He didn’t mean it like that.” No break between Faiz fucking up and Talia stepping to the plate, cause and effect, the two synthesized into one perfect choreography. I hated them for that. This wasn’t how any of it was supposed to go.

  “I’ve known Faiz—” I strangled the rest of the sentence and sat down again, a knot of acid sizzling just under where my ribs fork from my sternum, like chapel doors or a wishbone. I’ve known Faiz since before the thought of fucking him was a wet spot in your crotch. I gulped down vomit, two fingers bolted over my lips. “Just let me tell my story.”

  Phillip exhaled. “Christ.”

  “Fine,” Talia said, while Faiz continued standing, looking like he had at least another paragraph left to recite. But he gave in, stroking his fingers through Talia’s hair as he lowered himself beside her, knees bumping. He wouldn’t compromise on hydration, however, wouldn’t stop bobbing the bottle in my direction until I snatched the container and took a swig.

  The water went down like a swallow of light. “Okay, okay. Let’s do this. Once upon a time.”

  You know how poets say sometimes that it feels like the whole world is listening?

  It was just like that.

  Except with a house instead of an auditorium of academics, collars starched, textbooks like scriptures, each chapter color-coded by importance. The manor inhaled. It felt like church. Like the architecture had dulled its heartbeat so it could hear me better, the wood warping, curling around the room like it was a womb, and I was a new beginning. Dust sighed from the ceiling. Spiderwebs fell in umbilical cords, a drape of silver.

  It felt like the house talking to me through the mouths of moths and woodlice, the creak of its foundations, the little black summer ants chewing through what remained of our food like we’d left bodies, not balled-up, slickly gleaming cling wrap. The air smelled of raw meat, lard, and bits of seared protein.

  I hoped to hell in that moment that she was listening.

  Half because I was tired of being unloved, being pitied like a fawn panting its last handful of breaths into a ditch. Half because I hoped it was all true.

  A little bit of magic.

  Even if it was hungry.

  Even if it was a house with rotting bones and a heart made out of a dead girl’s ghost, I’d give it everything it wanted just for scraps. Some unabridged attention, some love.

  Even if it was from a corpse with blackened teeth.

  Anything to feel alive again right now.

  Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.

  I’m so tired of this, I thought. Come make me warm and I’ll give you what we both want.

  “Once upon a time,” I repeated. “Once upon a time, there was a house in the middle of the forest and it stood silently until a group of twentysomethings barged through the door, looking for ghosts.”

  Phillip and Faiz gave each other high-fives.

  “They ate their dinner. They drank their beer. They played a game to call up the dead from their rest. Except they didn’t have to. The house already knew they were there.” I sloped backwards, weight balanced on the heels of my palms, watched that one fly as it wiggled from a crack in the ceramic boy’s skull and buzzed to another doll, squeezing through its black-lipped mouth. I thought I could hear its feet scratch at the lacquer.

  Lin caught on first. “Did you see something?”

  “A girl,” I whispered. It should have sounded like a joke, something stupid. But a wind frissoned through the cracks in the shoji and it was as if the manor was laughing, I was sure, its voice dripping with termites. “A pale little bride with a smile full of ink.”

  Right on cue, all the lights went out.

  * * *

  “Shit!”

  Smartphones strobed to life, slicing the darkness into halves, quarters, polygons of irregular sizes like pieces of shattered glass. Phillip staggered upright, an arm raised to fence the group from the door. “What the fuck was that?”

  “Probably just a breeze.” Lin didn’t sound so sure, though, body thrumming with adrenaline, and you could just about see his heart battering against his breastbone, dying to get out. He was afraid. I couldn’t wrap my alcohol-addled brain around the idea. Lin was never afraid. But since he was, it meant that the rest of us should have already started running.

  I lapped my tongue over my upper lip.

  “It’s her.”

  Talia’s eyes shone in the near dark. “What are we waiting for? Let’s check it out.”

  She clambered onto her feet, swayed for one tightrope of a heartbeat, before the momentum drove her straight into a sprint. Talia was out the door before the rest of us could put together why forward was the wrong direction, before Faiz could wring out a desperate “Wait!” and take off after her, the rest of us clattering along behind. All of us shouting, filling up the corridors with our voices, and somewhere, an ohaguro-bettari was wandering the house her husband built.

  I came out of the room in time to see Talia flashing down a corridor, her silhouette receding along the wall, spotlighted by the halogen glare of her phone. No footsteps, their escape frictionless as envy. I started forward, only to be jerked back, Lin hauling me back inside, my wrist trapped in his long fingers.

  “Wait,” he hissed. “It isn’t safe.”

  “Don’t you think I know? There’s something wrong with this place.”

  “Well, shit. Yeah. It’s a giant mansion in the middle of nowhere full of dolls and creepy shit.” Sweat gleamed on his forehead, dampened the ring of his collar. I tugged, but Lin wouldn’t let go. He adjusted his grip instead, wrapped his palm tighter around my joint. His wedding ring ground into bone.

  “And this is safer? Separating from the group?”

  “From those idiots? Absolutely.” He craned a look outside, neck rigid. Phillip and Faiz were wading farther into the house, their voices gusting together into one unbroken howl, one throat. “Structurally speaking, this place is a shithole. Who knows if it’s going to come down on our heads? What with all that stomping—”

  “You’re deflecting.” I pulled again.

  “Yeah? So what if I am.”

  “They’re our friends. We have to go after—”

  “Your friends.” Lin yanked. With one supple motion, his hands routed my arms into improbable configurations and pinned them there, two degrees from torture. I tested his hold anyway, winced as my synapses lit up with a what-the-fuck-had-you-expected. “Not mine. I don’t give a shit about those idiots.”

  I bared my teeth. “Nice. Real nice. Those were your groomsmen.”

  “I had a baker’s dozen, so whatever. There’d be spare. But that isn’t the fucking point.” He nuzzled his head against my temple, exhaled. “Cat, this is literally the part where the supporting cast dies horribly. You’re bisexual. I’m the comic relief. It’s going to be one of us.”

  “But—”

  “Phillip’s white. He’ll be fine. Faiz’s the hero so he won’t die in the first fucking act. And Talia’s, well, maybe Talia’s thoroughly fucked. But I don’t care about her.” He said it so casually. Like it was the easiest line in the universe, simpler even than hey, how ya doing, I didn’t miss you at my wedding at all, and I’ll never ask why you didn’t RSVP, didn’t stop to tell me your world was crashing down.

  I kept rotating my shoulders, checking to see if I could find any give, any way to move without dislocating my elbow, or ripping the tissue threading my scapula together. And all that’s assuming, of course, that Lin wouldn’t let go if push escalated to shove. I leaned into a direction and counted how long it took before the amygdala called time-out on my chicanery, flashbangs of pain going off over my corneas like a black-and-white Fourth of July.

  Three seconds.

  “Let go.”

  I couldn’t hear the others anymore, but the floorboards throbbed like they had a heart carved into their grain.

  Lin held on. “God damn it, Cat. I’m not the enemy.”

  Four, five.

  I loaded a breath into my lungs like it was a silver bullet, the air burning between my teeth. Six. Seven. Eight. Between every second, I eased another millimeter forward, let myself slide between the sine waves of pain, Lin’s grasp slackening in increments. At that point, it was just about ego, mine and his, daring each other to break.

  “Cat—”

  The fusuma opposite us rolled open, rocketing so hard along the walls it slammed into the wall.

  We jumped, Lin nearly torquing my hand the wrong way. It was Talia, a shoulder leaned against the frame, the mass of her hair squirming around her face, her eyes black. The light from our phones were three xenon squares, mirrored in each pupil. She grinned at us. “You wouldn’t believe what I found.”

  My breath shallowed to sips.

  Something was wrong.

  It wasn’t just the fact that Talia had bolted so unexpectedly out of that door, although that was at least some of it. It was the way she did it. No matter how many times I turned the thought over, looking for a new angle, the same image kept coming up: a fishing line rolled down her throat, tracing the ripples of her intestinal tract, the hook at its end crooking up and out through her navel, bent like a finger calling her onward.

  “What’d you find?” The corridor behind her peeled away into a hell of opened doors, closing into a deep indigo murk. Something was wrong. Somewhere, choking in alcohol and stress hormones, there was a piece of me that knew why.

  “You wouldn’t believe it. Seriously. Like, oh my god—”

  “Was it the ghost girl?” Lin interrupted.

  “No. Shit. I wish. But it’s almost as good. I can’t believe—” Talia strained her hair through her fingers and rubbed the ends together. Her expression was exultant. “You have to see it.”

  Phillip loped out of the gloom, his smartphone bleaching his blond hair to cartilage colors, his skin to polished bone china. A second later, Faiz came up from behind, his breath thready, whistling between his teeth as he shambled to where Talia stood, the look on her face halfway between worship and a woman’s love for her dog.

  Faiz walked up to her and they sank together into an embrace. I glanced away, an itching in the skin below my right eye. The muscle fluttered. My head swam, full of static again, like someone’d tuned the inside of my head to a broadcast decades dead.

  “Why the hell did you run off like that? What were you thinking?”

  “Sorry. I know. I just—I was excited.”

  Faiz, shouting: “You could have been hurt!”

  “I know, I know.” Talia waved away his concern, her eagerness a knife working under all of our jabber, all of our fears, cutting away the parts that didn’t fit what she needed. Feverish. “I’m sorry. But seriously, it’s fine. Nothing happened. It’s all good. And it doesn’t matter. I need you to follow me. You have to see this.”

  Lin’s fingers met with mine, familiar. I ran my eyes over the lacquered rail along which the fusuma had moved, crossed it to where it met with the adjoining wall before I flicked my gaze to the opposite end. There weren’t any hinges.

  No grooves, no indentations, no clever mechanism to accommodate the moving panels. The rail looked ornamental, was ornamental.

  It didn’t make sense.

  “No offense to the happy couple here.” Lin coughed into his free hand. “But assuming that there’s something actually here, how the fuck do we know that Talia isn’t possessed by some crazy—”

  “There wasn’t a door,” I said.

  It had been a wall. It was still a wall. But no one seemed to conjecture the problem save for me, and no one was listening.

  “How did you get in there? There wasn’t a door.”

  “What are you talking about?” Talia laced an arm around Faiz’s, full of absolvement for my outburst, chin tipped to a modest angle. She rocked the fusuma back and forth. “It’s right here.”

  “But it wasn’t there a second ago. We went through every room on this floor and the one below. That door didn’t exist. The hallways. All of it. It didn’t exist when we first came in.”

  “You’re drunk,” said Talia.

  “Please don’t go with her,” I said, starting forward.

  Lin folded his arm around my shoulders. “I got her. You do what you want.”

  “You can’t go in there.”

  Phillip started towards Lin and me, palm turned up. “We shouldn’t leave these—”

  “We’re fine.” Lin bared a snarl. “You guys go do protagonist shit.”

  “Come on.” Talia wrapped both Faiz and Phillip in smiles, a hand in each of hers, and walked them into the mouth of the house.

  “There w-n’t a door. They neesh to come back. They arsh goin’ to get themselves killed. Fuck.” It wouldn’t come out right: the words muffled, my tongue suddenly too big, a nerveless flap of muscle, stringing sick onto the floor.

  “It’s fine. It’s just a stupid old house.” Lin rubbed absent circles into the muscles bracketing my spine, right where the brain stem eases into the neck. “They’re going to come back spooked and that’s it. Chill.”

  The words came together, but I swallowed them stillborn. It was too esoteric, too ambiguous to get across. Maybe I’d been wrong.

  But if I wasn’t …

  I got up, Lin bellowing protests, and staggered after the clack of sandals on wood, half-blind as I followed my Dantes into damnation.

  CHAPTER 5

  He caught me by the nape of my collar as I stumbled onto a bridge, its blackwood railings corniced by sculptures of maidens in repose, their bodies twisted around one another, so that at a glance, they resembled a strange garden. Below: an ornamental pond rendered tar-dark and fathomless. How had we gotten here? We’d been above ground level. But the doors had opened nonetheless to lightless sky and cold air.

  “The fuck, Cat. The fuck. No. We’re not—”

  “They were there for me when you weren’t.” I blotted tears from my eyes, slowing, thought for a moment on the value of pointing out what had happened as the world smeared into a sodium haze. Somehow, Lin had taken no notice of the spatial weirdness so I said nothing. We were fucked, clearly. Might as well die without any bad blood. “They kept me going. They got me to come out of the house. They made me feel normal.”

  “Well, if you’d just called me—”

  “You didn’t even tell me you were getting married.” The words melted together, no syllabic definition, just sound: awkward and delicate. “You have no idea how much that part bugged me.”

  Lin winced like he’d been slapped, staggering to a stop, fingers spasming. A slight tug on my collar, as though that would be enough to rewind everything, replace it with something better. Pull me back from the ledge, put down the knife, undo the hurt that curled its cold finger around the trigger.

  “I didn’t think you’d want to know.”

 

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