The Confession of Usami Renko

by taiyakisoba

It's a fact that super-unified physics student Usami Renko can no longer ignore: she's in love with her best friend, Maribel Hearn. When their two vastly different worlds, the worlds of reality and fantasy, of subjectivity and objectivity, come crashing together, will their friendship become something more, or will everything prove to be just an empty dream?

2. Chapter 2

The Confession of Usami Renko Part 2 by taiyakisoba

It wasn't so bad after a while. A number of things made it easier. When we left Tokyo, I felt that somehow my negative feelings, that yawning emptiness, had been left behind as well. Merry behaved just as she always had towards me, as if nothing had happened: there was no change in her hugs or her jokes or her limitless enthusiasm for the Sealing Club. It made it possible for me to believe I'd imagined the whole incident.

And so I did my best to act as though everything was the way it had been before.

Spending time with her on our ghostly field trips also helped. It was a relief to fall back into our old habits. My violent feelings for her, I decided, had burned themselves out. It had just been an unhealthy obsession after all. It was kind of her, really, to act as though it hadn't happened, to spare me the pain of humiliation.

But I never forgot the squeeze of her hand in the dark theatre, a memory which was irrevocably tied up with the deliciously sadness of my dream with the sunflowers. If I closed my eyes, I could still feel her hands entwined with mine as she ran her lips along my neck, holding me down almost as if we were wrestling, the weight of her on top of me.

But it had been a dream, after all. Just a particularly vivid dream, another symptom of my obsessiveness.

We soon had a new obsession: going to the moon. It was all over the news, the new shuttles they had taking people there. I wanted to see it more than anything else. We both did. I was reminded of the space-coffee that I'd been so excited about not long after Merry and I first met and I wondered whether they served it on the flight.

Merry, of course, being Merry, delighted me with strange stories of the moon's true face: the rolling dunes of gold and silver sand, the elemental violence of the Sea of Storms, the mochi-pounding rabbits with the highly-technological civilisation they had developed, the moon capital with its impossibly slender towers like pinnacles of ice.

I wanted to see those things more than anything else.

The tickets for the moon shuttle turned out to be far too expensive, of course, for two students, even if one of them did come from a rich family. I was devastated. I guess I was really still just upset about what had happened between Merry and me and I was projecting it on the whole moon-expedition idea.

Maybe I'd hoped that leaving the earth behind, if only for a little while, might help me escape the pain I still felt.

Then one night, after we'd had dinner in a little beef-bowl place we both liked (the pickled ginger I'm addicted to is free there, and the guy who owns the shop doesn't get mad if you really pile it on), Merry took me for a walk through the nearby rice-paddy fields. Rice is still extinct, of course, despite scientists' best efforts to recreate it, but the water lies there like it used to due to the lowness of the land and the old irrigation channels. Being on the outskirts of Kyoto, there were only a few lights. The fields were a grid of glistening black glass.

"Isn't the moon beautiful tonight, Renko?" Merry remarked as we walked along the causeway.

It was. It was huge. A perfect disk of buttery-yellow light, it shone upon us from two directions, from the sky and from the earth, where it glowed in reflection on the glass-still water. I was gripped by a sudden vision of them being the eyes of some vast spectral god lying on his side, his body invisible, half-buried in the ground.

Merry led me on a little further. There was an old shrine at the side of the causeway here, dilapidated by age. Its stone gods stared out at us from the darkness.

She knelt near the edge of the water and I did the same. She placed a hand on my shoulder and drew my gaze down where the moon shone in reflection.

"Look, Renko. Really look. Can you see it? The true face of the moon?"

I blinked. Something had changed as I'd stared at that bright disk of light, as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes. I thought I could see the sparkling of those deserts, the glimmering of those great seas Merry had told me about. Then a shining jewel, like a star even brighter than the surface of the moon, burst into sudden life.

"It's beautiful," I sighed.

"The lunar capital," said Merry. Excitement tinged her voice. "You can see it?"

I nodded. I felt my chest tighten. "I wish we could go there. For real, I mean."

"Maybe we can," said Merry.

As she helped me to my feet my eyes fell on her and I gasped. Her hair was aglow, like it had drawn the light from the moon into each individual hair, becoming a halo of light. Her violet eyes shone, her face transfigured with joy.

At that moment she was so beautiful she was almost angelic.

Merry's voice, as if coming from far away. "Renko, look."

She brought her hand to my chin and turned my gaze away from her. I felt bitter disappointment, but it was replaced by wonder as I saw what was happening around us.

The world was changing. The dark shapes of the nearby buildings, the flickering lights of the city, were becoming pale as shadow. Even the ground beneath us was wavering, like we were looking at it through a sheet of flowing water.

The city and the darkening hills fled away and there shone in their place the most exquisitely beautiful skyline I have ever seen. A great luminous sea had appeared, as if quicksilver had spilled up out of the earth. On the horizon were amassed great dark clouds, their edges glazed gleaming white by the light of the landscape, lightning coursing within their hearts.

But more gorgeous still was the city that rose between them. Great towering buildings, delicate and slender like the glass of chandeliers or of melting glacial ice, they glowed from within with a dazzlingly pure incandescence.

We were looking at the city from a great distance. All about us were hills of gold and silver sand, the edges of the shoreline of that ocean of light, and beyond a forest of trees glittering like crystal.

Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes.

"We can only stay for a little while," said Merry. "Otherwise the Lunarians will detect us. They don't really like visitors."

She led me across those shores of sand. There was a river nearby and we crossed it by way of an impossibly delicate and intricately decorated bridge like a band of paper-thin silver lace. We were among the trees, then. I saw that they were festooned with fruit, each a perfect, unblemished pink.

Peach trees. On the moon. I laughed for joy at such an incongruous and beautiful thing.

I gazed up at the shining fruit. "Do you think we'd become immortal if we ate one?"

"I wonder," said Merry. "They're too high up for me to pick."

I turned to her with a mischievous smile. "I guess immortality is always just out of reach, huh?"

Merry stuck out her tongue at my terrible pun.

"I never knew you could take people with you," I said.

"Neither did I, until tonight." Merry's eyes shone. "Oh Renko, I've wanted to show all this to you for so long. Want to see something really cool?"

She led me along the little path in the sand until we came to a small copse of trees. Unlike the peach trees, these were slender and delicate and glistened like ebony. They were bare of leaves, but somehow all the more beautiful for that austerity.

Merry brought her hand close to a low-hanging branch and the tree stirred to life. Light surged within it and the bough blossomed with clusters of shining jewels. Turquoise and amethyst and tiger-eye and jade and ruby, every colour known to man burst into glittering being.

She turned to me, her smile radiant. "You try, Renko."

I darted forward and found a branch a little lower down that I could reach. I brought my hand to it, but there was no stirring of inner light, no sudden blooming of strange and gorgeous lunar fruit.

I tried again. Again nothing happened. I approached the trunk of the tree, brought my hand tentatively against it.

There was the slightest give, as of a light breeze pushing against my hand, and then my hand passed straight through as though it were a hologram.

"What does it mean?" whispered Merry. Her face was a mask of disappointment.

I noticed then that the trees about me, beautiful as they were, were wavering at the edges, like things seen through a heat-haze. Behind us, I saw that there was only one set of footprints on the lunar sand: Merry's.

So. All of this was a mirage: unreal, immaterial. It was the Kaleidoscreen on the Hiroshige shinkansen all over again.

It made little difference to me, as deeply enchanted as I was by the incredible beauty of the place, but Merry was desperately disappointed. She looked on the verge of tears.

"I'm sorry, Renko. I... I thought I could..."

I went to take hold of her hand, to comfort her, but I thought better of it. Instead I just shook my head and grinned at her. "It's still an amazing gift, Merry." My eyes drank in everything about me. "And to think I was so disappointed about not being able to go to our moon. They can keep that boring old ball of dust."

Merry's smile burst back into life. "There's no space-coffee here, though."

I gave a melodramatic sigh. "Maybe we could bring some coffee beans next time and get the moon-rabbits to pounds us up some."

We crossed back over the bridge and walked together across the sands of the moon, not saying anything, just enjoying the dreamlike beauty of the place and each other's company. Eventually the Earth rose over the stormy ocean, an exquisite blue-and-white disk against the volcanic-glass blackness of the sky. I gazed up at it. All my problems were so far away, here on the moon. It was such a pure, holy place.

I wondered if it were possible to stay here forever.

As if triggered by the thought, we were all at once bathed in white-hot light from every direction, the harsh acetylene of a dozen spotlights being shone right at us. Blinking and half-blinded, I thought I saw dark figures hopping around. Rabbits? I didn't know whether to laugh or scream.

But Merry had already grabbed hold of my arm and the landscape was shifting and melting away, like paint being smeared under an artist's fingers. We were back on Earth, standing in that silent paddy-field. Above us the moon went on shining, unperturbed, the dark rabbit on its face hiding the secrets I'd for a few precious moments glimpsed.

Thanks to her.

After that our field trips went farther and farther afield, deeper into Merry's Gensoukyou. Yet whatever was real to her continued to appear dream-like to me. I could touch things, but the force I exerted was little stronger than a breath of wind. It seemed I had all the substance of a dream in her reality.

Merry, however, could do as she pleased. She often brought little things back with us. I kept some on my desk, souvenirs of our adventures. I loved gazing across them: a polished stone, a cracked tea-cup, a bamboo-shoot. Each of them was a precious memory of being together with her.

We visited many places in Gensoukyou, but not the Garden of the Sun. Merry never suggested it and I was glad of the fact. I wanted to keep it safe, a precious memory, my own little secret. I was afraid that if we went there, I'd discover that it had, after all, really just been a dream. I was also afraid it would awaken those feelings from before, the feelings I'd taken so long to finally come to terms with.

No, that's a lie. I hadn't come to terms with them at all. That trip to the moon, the glorious smile on her face, the angelic halo of her hair, the brilliant shining of those violet eyes: they'd burned away all the lies I'd told myself and started to believe.

And just like the moon itself, spiralling around the earth, I knew there was no way I could escape Merry's gravity.

Then one day we travelled to the satellite called Torifune, and our adventures, largely carefree until then, took a dangerous turn. The attack by the chimera proved beyond a doubt to me that these places, despite my own spectral existence in them, were real. Whoever heard of being attacked by a dream? Merry pulled us out of there just as she had on that first trip to the moon, but even so I'm sure the chimera would have been unable to harm me. It was just a dream to me, and I guess I must have been just a dream to it as well. Existing on different planes, able to see each other but unable to interact on a physical level.

Merry's injury, however, proved very real.

Even though it was barely a scratch, I convinced her to go to the hospital with it. She kept telling me I was worried about nothing, but I dug in my heels. I can be very stubborn when I want to be.

Afterwards I stayed with her at her apartment. For all her outwardly brave face, I could tell she was shaken. She seemed distant, her fingers tracing her wound under the bandage back and forth.

That night, for the first time since the trip to Tokyo, we shared a bed. I was careful to keep to the edge, as far away from her as I could. During the night, though, I woke from a fitful sleep to find her arms wrapped around me from behind. She was hugging me tightly, the skin of her cheek burning hot against the nape of my neck. I went stiff, like I had in that dream of mine long ago, and tried to slip out of her embrace. Tears filled my eyes as I lay there, trapped. I bit my lip, but even so a sob finally escaped.

Merry stirred. Still half-asleep, she pulled away from me and sat up. Her face was flushed, her hair slick against her skin.

"Renko?" Her voice was little more than a whisper. "I don't feel so good,"

The heat of her body had not been my imagination. She was running a high temperature. I'd read about this sort of thing. Before all diseases were rendered extinct, it was a common sign of infection. I remembered what they used to do for it and ran to the fridge. I saw the panic on my face reflected in its mirror-like surface as I snapped at it to flash-freeze some ice for me.

The ice, wrapped in a tea-towel, did some good, but I knew I had to contact someone. I had no doubt the scratch was responsible. I grabbed my phone and rang the emergency number.

I sat with Merry, tried to get her to drink some water, but she kept refusing. It felt like an eternity, but it was surely just minutes, before light was spilling in through the window, dazzling light like the one which had enveloped us on the moon. It was an emergency flier's spotlight as it swung down over the apartment block opposite and landed in the street. In moments there were people everywhere, dressed in white and wearing masks. We were bundled out into a nightmare of darkness and light and fervent instructions.

As we were taken aboard the flier and strapped in, Merry was petrified. I slipped my hand into hers and she clung to it so hard her nails dug into my skin. The pain centred me in my own fear.

It was the first time we'd held hands since that day in Tokyo.

I'm not sure how long the flight took. One of the two officers who were flanking us, a young man whose blue eyes even behind the frightening mask seemed kind, told me that we were en-route to the imperial medical facility in Nagano.

When I asked why we weren't just being taken to a hospital in Kyoto, his eyes grew troubled and he said nothing.

Merry and I were kindly but firmly separated when we arrived at the medical facility. Two of the centre's medical personnel helped her into a wheelchair. Merry's face was flushed, her blonde hair matted with sweat, but she managed to turn her head and look at me. There was fear in her violet eyes.

I grasped her hand. It had no weight.

"Renko," she whispered.

"Merry, everything will be alright. I promise."

The fear in her eyes softened and a weak smile appeared on her lips. She squeezed my hand back.

Then they wheeled her away and I was hurried down the corridor in the opposite direction.

They kept me overnight, scanning me all over in a multitude of ways. It was cold and frightening process, but all I could think about was what was happening to Merry. A young doctor was my enthusiastic examiner. He seemed delighted to be involved in such a rare incident. I guess doctors don't get that much to do in this age where almost every virus and disease has been relegated to textbooks.

I begged him for information on Merry's condition and he was kind enough to send an orderly to find out for me. She returned to say that Merry was fine. Her condition had been stabilised and she was right now undergoing the same tests as me.

My results came out clear and I was released. I sat at the doctor's desk filling out the incomprehensible paperwork he had placed apologetically in front of me. I was still in the middle of it when the orderly from before came in. She whispered something to the doctor and then left.

"Merry?"

The doctor looked around the room then said, "Your friend's tests have come back positive for an unknown pathogen."

The pen dropped from my hand as it began to tremble.

"There's nothing to worry about," said the doctor quickly, disturbed by the force of my reaction. He leaned forward across the desk, as though to reach out and comfort me, but instead he sat back again in his seat. "It's just standard procedure, you understand. She'll be placed in quarantine until the pathogen is eradicated or runs its course."

I couldn't stop trembling. I pleaded with him to see her. The doctor said it was probably against protocol, but he eventually gave in. I'd grown hysterical, weeping like a crazy woman. I don't think he'd ever had to deal with someone in such a state.

Using his security card he slipped me in to the isolation wing where Merry was. The door to her room opened and I saw her lying on the bed against the far wall, on the other side of a glass screen that cordoned off her half of the room from the rest of it. She was dressed in a white smock. Everything was white in that room: the floors, the bed, the covers, her skin. Her hair the only thing that had any colour, a splash of gold.

For a dreadful moment I had a vision that she was a bloodless spirit, that the doctor had lied to me, that Merry was dead. I threw myself against the glass, calling her name.

My violent movement caught her attention. Her golden hair shifted as she turned over, the fearful look on her moon-pale face replaced by sudden joy. She slid off the bed and ran barefoot to the other side of the partition, placing her hands against the glass.

With tears in her eyes she mouthed words to me I couldn't hear. I can't read lips. Whatever she said to me was lost forever.

I pressed my hands against hers. The glass, only an inch thick, may as well have been an ocean for how it separated us.

"Merry, I love you," I whispered against the glass, kissed her hand through it. And then the door behind me slid open and there were orderlies everywhere pulling me away.

I was flown back to my apartment. The medical officer who went with me assured me that I'd be able to contact Merry as soon as she was better.

After he left, I slid down into the chair at my desk and took hold of the little cracked tea-cup sitting there. I remembered how we'd found it, among the ruins of that tea-party on the shores of that misty lake.

Tears poured down my face. I sat there, staring at it in my hands, and I guess sleep, or rather exhaustion, must have eventually taken hold of me.

The next thing I knew I heard music. Pachelbel's Canon.

I was lying on the floor of my apartment, the tea-cup beside me.

The music was coming from my phone.

I got up off the floor to look for it, every movement feeling alien to me. Maybe I hadn't moved for a very long time.

The phone was on my desk.

I didn't recognise the number on the screen. I didn't answer it straight away. I was too busy staring at the date.

It was three days since I'd returned to the flat. What I did during those days was, and still is, an utter mystery to me. I don't remember doing anything. I don't think I was even able to sleep. Just nothing, lost time, a blank.

I think it was a mercy.

I grabbed up the phone and answered it. It was Merry's father. He spoke to me in perfect Japanese, with the modulated tone of a government official.

Merry was going to be alright.

I remember collapsing back onto the floor and weeping uncontrollably, my eyes growing numb as tears coursed down from them, my chest aching with the sobbing that wracked my body. I wonder now what her father thought on the other end of the line listening to it all. It wasn't what I'd call an ordinary reaction.

When I'd finally calmed down, he told me that Merry had been moved to a sanatorium in the mountains in Shinshuu for observation. She was still recovering, so it was for the best that everyone give her the time and space she needed. As soon as she was better, he would contact me again.

Time and space. It was a funny choice of words.

After he hung up I cried some more. Then I stripped my greasy clothes from my skin and threw myself in the shower. The hot water scoured my filthy body until I was warm and wet and pink and reborn.

After that I dedicated myself to saving every bit of information I could about the things I knew Merry loved, in readiness for her return. Our shared interests in ancient prehistory and science and the moon and mythology and folklore and physics and astronomy and biology. I saved hours of streams for her to watch when she got better. It was like a religious ritual for me. Everything I searched out and recorded for her brought our reunion closer.

At night I went to sleep praying to see her in my dreams. But she never appeared. My sleep was utterly dreamless, a great gap of blackness from the moment I slid exhausted from the computer screen into bed to the moment I woke with the sun pouring over me.

The day her father rang me and said Merry was being released I cried again. It was getting to be a habit. I'd barely ever cried before and now it was my new hobby. He asked me if I would be able to travel to Shinshuu to pick her up, since they weren't in Japan.

It felt like pure joy rather than blood was being pumped through my swiftly-beating heart.

I caught a super express and was in Shinshuu soon after. Stepping out of the train at Nagano, I was staggered by the beauty of the snow-capped mountains, the crisp clearness of the delicious alpine air. It was an almost religious return to a living world after locking myself in my stuffy apartment for so many days.

The sun was setting when I arrived at the Mt. Togakushi Sanatorium. It was a long way into the mountains. The entire world was glazed in red-gold. The sanatorium was an imposing but attractive building, with wide parks all around it.

I found her standing near a gingko tree, gazing up at it, just as she had that peach tree on the moon. Her back was to me and I couldn't see her face, but there was no mistaking her.

I broke into a run, crying out her name. She turned in surprise, her hair catching fire with the dying light of the sun. When I reached her she fell sobbing into my arms. I couldn't cry. All I could do was crush her against me. Her face pressed against my chest I was enveloped in the sweet fragrance of her hair. I lifted her tear-stained face to mine, kissed her over and over. "Merry, Merry," I whispered, heart-sick. "I love you, I love you, I love you…"

Isn't that how it's supposed to happen?

Instead I stood there, just as I had the night I left her at her apartment after the conversation at the yakitori place, gazing at her with a mixture of longing and confusion. What was wrong with me?

Eventually Merry noticed me standing there. She turned and ran across the lawn to me. I raised my hand and waved to her. The smile on my lips felt awkward, even though I was happy.

I was happy, right?

Then why was I so afraid as well?

Her own smile was radiant. I knew she wanted to hug me, but when I made no move toward her she looked bemused and instead brought her right hand forward to touch mine, her fingertips feather-soft.

"Renko."

"Merry."

I think maybe there was just too much for us to say. And so we said nothing.

It was while we sat together under the trees waiting for the taxi to come that I couldn't stand it anymore and asked her what it had been like in the sanatorium. She laughed and said the last week was the most boring of her life. Aside from the fever, she'd suffered from sleepwalking and had seen visions of other worlds.

"So, just the usual, then," I joked.

She managed a weak smile. "The usual," she agreed.

On the way back into Nagano I filled her in with what had happened in the news while she'd been quarantined. Her face became animated and I felt a surge of happiness to see the same old Merry back.

As we enthusiastically discussed the recent discovery of the so-called Izanagi Object, I realised that until the moment we'd been brought back together I'd been sick as well, a sickness of the soul. With Merry beside me, talking as we always did, it felt like my life had suddenly started again.

But when the conversation came to its natural end, her smile faded and a distant look appeared on her face. At first I was worried it was a continuation of what had happened between us in Tokyo, but then I realised it wasn't distance from just me, but from everything.

We sat in silence. The wild landscape of mountains and forest that swept past outside the taxi seemed suddenly alien, a scene from prehistory. Merry stared out at it for a long time.

Finally, she turned to me and said, "Renko, do you believe in Hell?"

"Merry, you've been seeing things again, haven't you?"

She nodded. "I see things almost all the time now. Even when I don't want to, sometimes."

We decided not to rush back to Kyoto. I'd brought an overnight bag with some of Merry's things just in case, so it seemed easy enough to spend a day or two here in Shinshuu. Something was clearly on her mind. I knew she wanted to deal with it here before we went back to our normal lives, our so-called normal lives as students.

When we arrived in Nagano, instead of going straight to the ryokan I'd booked, Merry suggested we visit Zenkouji since it was close to the city centre. It was late and it was threatening rain, but I wasn't going to argue with her. There were fewer people there than usual. In fact, except for the shoutengai with its boring and predictable souvenir shops selling Shinshuu soba and Nozawa pickles and those poisonous-looking 'Happiness Doughnuts', the place was almost deserted. Everyone else had had the right idea: it started raining as soon as we arrived, so we expedited our exploration of the complex by going straight into the Inner Shrine. Merry wanted to see the Earthquake Pillar.

She stared at it for a long time. I found it less than impressive.

But then, Merry was seeing it on a totally different level to me.

Afterwards, we sat down on a bench. Merry seemed exhausted. I went to get her a drink from a vending machine, but the one I found was only accepting exact change. I doubled back to borrow some from her, but she wasn't where I'd left her. I looked around and found her at the statue of Binzuru, the physician disciple of the Buddha. She was standing on tippy-toes to reach his face, which she rubbed with the tips of her fingers. The significance of the act wasn't lost on me. Petitioners would come and seek the healing of injuries and diseases by touching the statue where their own body was afflicted.

It was such a little thing, and yet it broke my heart. I waited until she sat back down at the bench before I rejoined her and got the change. I made no mention of what I'd seen.

Merry seemed better after the drink. I don't know about Binzuru, but Orange 100% can do wonders. I drank my own slowly.

"I don't know how you can drink coffee without sugar," said Merry, grimacing.

I shrugged. "I guess I just like my coffee cold and black, like my heart."

Merry stuck out her tongue. "I wish you wouldn't joke like that."

"You're scolding me again. You must be feeling better."

She nodded. Then a mischievous smile popped onto her face. "Hey, Renko. Want to go do something fun? It only costs 500 yen."

I wondered just how much fun you could have for 500 yen, but I went along with it. Merry went and got the tickets and came back. She wanted it to be a surprise. She took me to a little staircase that led down to a tunnel under the temple.

I was about to ask where it led, but Merry just raised a finger to my lips.

We stepped down into the darkness. As soon as we'd left the little well of light pooling at the base of the stairs it was almost pitch black, the kind of darkness where if something happened, there would be zero witnesses.

With nothing for my visual senses to take hold of, my other senses took on an almost extrasensory perceptiveness. The sound of our breathing. The coolness of the slight breeze that wafted down the tunnel. The scent of wet stone, of earth. Merry's scent, an accent upon it.

"What is this place?" I asked.

Her voice seemed impossibly loud in the otherwise silent tunnel. "Acolytes used to undergo trials down here. Now it's just for tourists. There's a lock hanging down here somewhere, representing the door to Paradise. Want to try and find it?"

It sounded like fun, so I said sure. I opened my phone to use the light to guide us, but Merry closed it with a giggle.

"No cheating, Renko! You have to find it in the dark."

And then she slipped away and ran ahead of me. Her shoes slapped on the moist stone.

"Hey, Merry! Wait!"

Don't tell me she could see in the dark with those powers, too?

I stumbled through the darkness. I thought I might be eaten by a youkai. I may be a scientist, but I still have an imagination. I've never been a huge fan of the dark.

I was starting to enjoy a mild panic-attack when I heard Merry's voice from somewhere ahead.

"Renko, I found it!"

"Where?" I called out.

Silence. Or was that stifled giggling?

With nothing to guide me, I fell back on my other senses. Merry's scent, faint, leading me onwards.

"Renko, over here!"

The stone of the walls confused the echoes and I couldn't tell the true direction of her voice, but it wasn't far away.

"Merry?" Suddenly, movement. Something grabbed me in a bear-hug from behind. I screamed. But her scent was suddenly everywhere and I knew it had to be Merry.

The boobs pressing into my back were a dead giveaway, too.

"It's just me, Renko."

"So where's the lock?" I asked, flustered, as I slipped from her embrace.

Merry giggled. "I was telling a fib. I couldn't find it."

I sighed. "Maybe next time."

Merry's hand slid into mine. "Let's go. I want to see the Rokujizou next."

She started to lead me through the darkness back to the stairwell. That hand of hers. Always and only in the dark did it ever find mine.

With my senses heightened, her scent, her warmth, the softness of her hand was excruciatingly intense. I wanted to pull her to me, to sweep her into my arms, as she had done to me in the dream. I wanted to kiss her more than anything here, down in the darkness, alone together, in the place where there would be zero witnesses. Just us.

But I didn't. That dream slipped from my grasp, too, as her hand from mine when we reached the stairwell and light encroached back, restoring our sight. Outside, the rain had softened into the kind of mistiness that you often get in the mountains, creating the sensation that you're walking through the body of a cloud. It rose from the ground, like steam from some subterranean cavern.

The Rokujizou were on the other side of the temple complex, the stone statues of six Bodhisattvas. Their shadows loomed out of the steaming clouds, impossibly huge, shrinking back to their stone reality as we came to their feet. Their faces were distant, their eyes looking out into a space only they could see.

I had seen that look before. Many times. On Merry's face.

"They're supposed to be able to communicate with the sufferers in Hell," said Merry. She gazed at them for a long time, as if she could read something in the rain and wind-worn stone.

"Do you see something?"

Merry hesitated before shaking her head

I knew I didn't want her staring at them a second longer. "Hey. I read somewhere that the original scroll of the Tale of the Genji is kept here. I want to go see it."

Merry blinked at me, but then she laughed. She knew how big a fan I was of the novel. I'd dragged her to Uji a number of times, ostensibly to drink the tea there and go boating in the river. She knew my secret, though. I would follow the footsteps of Kaoru as he looked for his love who had been stolen away from him, wondering if he ever found her.

It's always seemed a terrible cruelness to me that the novel ends so abruptly where it does.

It took a while in those blustery, rainy grounds to find a priest. When I asked after the manuscript, to my disappointment he told me it wasn't on public display.

"We should come back and break in later," I whispered to Merry as he shuffled back to his priestly duties.

She stared at me, mouth open in melodramatic shock. "Renko!"

"Well, aren't we breaking and entering every time we go to Gensoukyou?"

"That's different," she said. "We're allowed to, since it's my dream."

"That chimera thought different," I said.

Merry went quiet. I shouldn't have mentioned it.

As we left Zenkuoji I thought that maybe it had been a mistake to go there. I was nursing a few dark thoughts of my own as well. Her hand, reaching out to me in the dark. She seemed more than willing to be with me when no one else was around. Was I really that much of an embarrassment to be seen with?

I glanced at my reflection in the darkened window of the taxi as the lights of the little houses on the outskirts of Nagano flew by.

The answer was staring me right in the face.

-

We checked into our ryokan, set in the countryside near Imai. It was all my idea. I wanted to stay somewhere nice and it had been a while since I'd been to one. As soon as we arrived we grabbed our complimentary yukata and our toiletry kit and went to the bath. The weather was still terrible and it was off-season, so like Zenkouji we had the place to ourselves. The outside bath had a curious little shrine set in the bamboo partition that separated the men and the women's baths. On our side there was a blind that you could lift to chat face-to-face with whoever was on the other side. The sign above it explained that there had been a number of successful matches as a result of such conversations.

"Hey Renko, want to try it out?" asked Merry, half-hopping, half-swimming across to it through the steam.

I snorted from where I was sitting under the little waterfall of fresh hot-water. It was the best part of any bath and I was shamelessly monopolising it. "Looking to get married?"

Merry stopped and turned to me. She shook her head. Her face was serious. I'd meant the question as a joke, of course, but for some reason she'd taken it to heart. Maybe it hadn't been a joke. I was in a pretty bad mood.

"I don't think I'll ever get married."

I blinked. "What do you mean?"

"I just don't see it happening," she said.

I didn't ask her if she meant 'see' in the traditional sense, or whether it was some reference to her ability. I felt terrible and decided the best thing to do was to just get the whole thing over with. "Why don't you open the blind, then? Maybe your future husband is on the other side."

"Do you really think I should?"

She waded the rest of the way then tentatively took hold of the little string-pull. She turned back and looked at me.

"Just do it," I said.

She pulled it and gazed through the little tunnel that was revealed.

"Hello?" she called.

There was no one on the other side.

"Well, it is the off-season," I said.

"But it's just before dinner. Everyone takes a bath now."

"I wouldn't make such a big deal out of it."

"I guess," she said, letting the blind slip back down.

"You know, Merry," I said, wanting to quickly change the direction the conversation had been going. I didn't want to ruin our time together just because of my damp mood. "The shrine reminds me of something I've been thinking about lately. Remember our trip to the Moon and to the Torifune Ruins? I think there's some connection between your ability and shrines..."

It always seemed safest to talk about stuff like that.

-

As I let us back into our room, I apologised for my selfishness at insisting we stay at a ryokan. I was still feeling guilty about how short I'd been with her in the bath and I was sure she'd gone along with it just to keep me happy.

"We should have stayed at a hotel in Nagano," I said. "After all the relaxing you did at the sanatorium this is the last place you'd want to stay at."

Merry laughed at how serious I was being.

"Oh, the sanatorium wasn't all that relaxing," she said. Then her laughter broke apart and she collapsed weeping into my arms.

I held her. Through the sobbing I managed to get the full story. After the virus had expended itself she'd recuperated almost immediately. In fact, she'd felt even better than before. But instead of releasing her, they'd taken her to the sanatorium, insisting that she had to remain under observation. The truth was, after observing her hallucinations at the medical facility, the authorities had grown concerned about her psychological state.

"Except it felt more like I was being kept prisoner than under observation," she said, her voice hoarse from crying. "They didn't stop asking me questions, trying to get me to explain what I was seeing, like I was crazy. My father must have used his influence to get me out. I think they wanted to keep me there forever." There was uncharacteristic fear in her eyes. "Renko, I'm scared."

I was, too. "Merry, you asked me if I believed in Hell before. You saw it, didn't you?"

The fear in her eyes grew starker as she nodded. And then it all came out. Her vision of the place under the earth. Straight out of the Kojiki. Pretty frightening stuff. A great yawning cave, like the maw of some hideous subterranean creature. The swarming of scuttling vermin and the stench of corruption.

Her description wasn't what alarmed me most, though.

It was that Merry seemed to think the vision meant she was going to Hell.

She didn't want to talk about it anymore and I didn't push her. The obasan with our dinner knocked at the door right at that moment and I don't think I'd ever been happier for an interruption in my life.

As we ate ayu sashimi and hot-pot and drank hot sake together, I knew that there was no use trying to escape from my feelings for her. I felt as though I'd been holding my breath the whole time she'd been away, and now that I could breathe again I'd flared back into life. It frightened me that she meant that much to me. I also raged silently at my weakness. I'd been trying and failing to get over her. With her illness and her confinement and now these strange visions of Hell, my desire to be with her, to protect her, had come crashing back over me, sweeping away my better sense with it.

But I was happy, too, even if I hated it. Even with all the worry I was so happy it felt like a kind of insanity. And it was all the worse for the fact that I knew it was a delusion that was making me so happy. I'd been so afraid of touching her, afraid that what had happened in Tokyo might happen again, and now, after weeping in my arms, she seemed closer to me than ever.

That night we slept with our futons pushed together like a married couple. She said she slept better if she could feel me beside her.

I couldn't sleep at all.

In the half-light of the room, I heard her murmur, her eyes fretful beneath their lids. What was she seeing? Her hand reached out for mine, and I let her take it.

She soon fell back into a more tranquil sleep.

I knew why she needed me. I was more than just a friend, but not in the way I wanted. With her mother and father an ocean away, I was everything she had. I was her family.

The thought terrified me more than any imaginary Hell ever could.

-

The next morning Merry came rushing into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth. I'd left her still sleeping on her futon and I almost choked in surprise.

"Renko, Renko!" Inside a halo of disheveled bed-hair, her face was shining with excitement. "I had a dream!"

I spat out some toothpaste. "A dream or a dream?"

"A dream," she said.

She explained it to me, tumbling over her words in her eagerness. The gargantuan mythic figures she'd seen, an ocean, a great dripping spear. She showed me the object that had led here there in the first place. It was a strange thing, a bit like a key, a bit like a fishhook. It was clearly man-made.

"It's a fragment of the Izanagi Plate," she explained.

I don't k now if I was all that impressed by her latest souvenir, but I was certainly impressed by the vividness of her dream. I took a hold of it.

"I don't see anything," I said.

"Let me help," said Merry.

She held her hands over my eyes, like you do when you sneak up behind someone and challenge them to guess who you are. My mind was immediately flooded with images, strange, mythic images of a limitless sea, of robed figures, huge, frightening, hovering above it.

I saw what must have been the birth of Japan. The great roiling of the ocean, the mighty dripping spear of Izanagi -no-Mikoto. And a place. A dark mountain, the spear driven deep down into its body.

I took hold of her wrists and pulled her hands from my eyes. She was staring at me, her expression one of concern tinged with guilt.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I should have warned you."

"Merry," I said quickly, hoping my growing excitement would help smooth things over. "I've seen this place before. It's a mountain in Takachiho. That spear is called the Ame-no-Sakahoko. It's supposed to be the one that Izanagi-no-Mikoto used to create Japan."

"So I was wrong." She rested an arm against the cool tiling bathroom wall. The relief on her face was palpable. "It wasn't Hell I saw. It was a place of the Gods, a vision from prehistory. The cave of Yomotsuhirasaka, the entrance to Yomi."

"Merry, you're... you're seeing things from the past now as well?"

She nodded.

So Merry hadn't been mistaken when she'd said her powers were becoming stronger. If she could see the past, what else was she capable of? Seeing the future? Were there any limits to her powers at all?

As we packed up our belongings for the trip back to Kyoto, I kept stealing glances at her. She was still my Maribel, the girl with the sweet tooth and the stuffed Okapi and the habit of sticking her tongue out, but beneath it all... in that dream world of hers... was she something else entirely?

I'd started to wonder if Merry was really all that different from the youkai we spent so much time avoiding on our adventures. The thought frightened me a little.

A lot, actually.

And for all my fear, I felt guilty as well.

On the trip back we cheerfully planned our future visit to Togakure to search for the remaining Izanagi Objects that we knew were scattered here and there. The Sealing Club was finally back in business. But Kyoto, and our studies beckoned.

The secret history of Japan would have to wait.