Chapter 12
Cold and lush, the grass soaked through Mai's pyjama bottoms as she squatted behind a gravestone, heart pounding. Under the normal circumstances of her marathon dreams, she expected terror to gradually stoke her adrenalin levels until it racked her body—so it didn't bode well that she'd only just arrived and nothing yet had happened. Yet her already her trembling legs could barely support her.
What had triggered this instantaneous feeling? The cemetery's stark contrast of grey granite—grave markers, mausoleums, gravel paths and crumbling walls—against the luminous green quality of the finely manicured grass? Or the silence? A stone and mortar city sprawled above and just beyond the cemetery's ancient outer walls—but even it seemed terrified to make a sound.
Mai didn't dare take a breath.
Gravel shifted from somewhere close. Slow, scuffing steps.
Mai's knees unlocked enough to allow her to scoot around the headstone and scramble down onto a sunken pathway. She lay prone on her stomach and turned her face toward the approaching sound.
An older gentleman wearing jeans and a t-shirt meandered along the pathway. Gravel shifted beneath his sandals. He reminded her of a bohemian academic. Recognition grasped Mai tight, like icy vines pinning her to the ground. The Academic, that's what she'd call him. It was just easier to give some sort of name to anyone that appeared more than once in her visions. He'd be The Academic, as surely as the man that always shot himself at the top of the hills was named The Hill Suicide and the decomposing child that Mai often saw in shopping mall visions was named Shambling Shopaholic Shorty.
The Academic looked the same as he had that day she'd lost all control of her feet and run headlong into his strange little studio. He'd looked her up and down from over his wire-framed glasses and had asked her if he could help her, and—no, she didn't want help from him.
It was weird but Mai got the distinct impression that The Academic was visiting—not from afar, but still not from within. Which in and of it self seemed odd because of course he'd be a visitor. People don't live in cemeteries.
A colossal wolfhound—ill-groomed and darkly brindled in colouring—trotted out from behind a headstone. With hooded eyes, it matched the man's pace and looked neither left nor right. The gravel never shifted. Never crunched beneath its huge paws.
Mai shivered with apprehension.
The hound looked up, red eyes lit with fire, and it fixed its gaze on Mai. It lowered its head and curled its lips as it growled—a low, hungry sound. And then its muscles coiled and sprang forward.
Mai screamed. Her lungs burned with the effort. And yet no sound swamped the cemetery. She thrashed and strained to stand, to rush to safety, and yet her body remained immobile.
'Enough.' The Academic's voice came from directly above Mai. Strong and smooth and commanding. 'Enough, Shuck.'
Mai's muscles unlocked, and she wrenched around to locate the source of the voice.
Nothing. The cemetery was empty.
Mai leaped to her feet and braced for an attack. Nothing. The hound. The Academic They were gone.
'What the hell was that?' Mai whispered, brushing gravel off her pyjamas with trembling fingers.
She slowly wandered between headstones, hyper alert and waiting for even the slightest shift in the air. Assuming that this was a marathon terror, something would happen soon. Probably not zombies, though. Cemetery, zombies. Too obvious. It would be something weird.
Though what could be weirder than that hound, she wasn't sure. Her stomach twisted.
A church sat at the front of the cemetery, and beyond that stood the narrow and cobbled streets of a city. Bustling. More than bustling. Teeming and frantic. People pointed, yelled, waved their arms about like actors in a silent film. It seemed that Mai'd gone deaf.
As the panicked throng swept Mai up the steep street, she caught sight of a tourist board beside the cemetery gates. Canongate Cemetery. High above the street there flew a banner. Edinburgh Film Festival. If she could believe the sign, she was back in June of this year.
People crushed together as they moved, and pinched between several large men, Mai's feet barely touched the ground. Just as she started to wonder if they'd carry her to the very crest of the street, the crowd stopped and Mai finally stood on solid ground again. She used her compact size to her advantage, squeezing between people—occasionally even crawling. She had to see. Had to know. She wished she didn't.
A university-aged guy in a blue blazer stood before the crowd. He fitted his cupped hands together, trapping nothing but air, and bowed his head in concentration. His fashionably tousled hair obscured his face. He shook his hands as though he held dice, and with a twist of his fingers, he held up a lit match.
The crowd applauded enthusiastically. Mai glanced around in confusion—was it such an impressive trick? She'd see Naru make a coin talk. That had been impressive.
The guy blew out the match and cupped his hands together again. This time he produced two lit matches. The crowd started to roar, but quickly dissolved into quivers of anticipation as the guy blew out the two matches.
He controlled the crowd absolutely, and even Mai couldn't keep her heart pumping at a calm pace as the guy moved on to his final trick. Again he cupped his hands and shook them about. As expected, he twisted is fingers and produced three lit matches.
The crowd went mental, cheering and rushing forward while the matches slipped from his fingers.
He went up in flames like a straw man. People continued to cheer and chant even as the guy screamed in agony and rapidly disintegrated into a heap of soot.
'Strange,' Mai whispered to herself and turned around to find a way out of the rioting masses.
Time dropped away. People disappeared, simply blinking from existence, and the sun rapidly fell behind the towering stone buildings.
'You shouldn't be out here alone.'
Mai jerked around—she didn't recognise the voice but it was never a good sign when people acknowledged her in the dreamscape.
'The police are saying three girls have disappeared in the last few weeks,' a man said as he wrapped an arm around a scantily dressed girl.
She smacked him playfully on the shoulder. 'Oh Hamish, you don't have to scare me into your bed.' She giggled and stumbled about—oddly reminding Mai of Kiki—before grabbing the man by his tie and leading him away. 'Let's stop at the chip shop on the way, though. Brown sauce and cheese makes me horny.'
'And somehow this dream is getting more and more bizarre,' Mai whispered as she watched them totter up the street. Not wanting to follow them and find out what other oddities spiced up their sex life, Mai glanced over her shoulder and down the street toward the cemetery. She didn't want to go that way either—up the street it was, then.
Two steps forward, and the street narrowed between two glass and metal buildings. Mai could safely bet that she was no longer in the same city. Seeing as she had a bad track record with alleyways, walking further into this one was not a smart move.
Unfortunately a glance over her shoulder told her that she was already standing at the end. A rubbish tip and a brick wall barred any other exit.
Debris blocked her path. She waded through bags of trash, broken crates, and mounds of glass bottles. Her gut told her that she had to keep moving forward, but her heart kept stuttering.
Instead of leading to a street, the alley abruptly ended with mesh fencing.
And in the clearing beyond the fence knelt a teenage girl—maybe fifteen years old. She held a cup, which she rested in her lap. Her scraggly and poorly dyed blond hair obscured her face. Newspapers littered the ground around her.
Pressing her hands against the mesh, Mai belatedly realized that it wasn't part of a fence but rather a large cage. A kennel.
And Mai stood in front of the door.
The girl sighed, lifting the cup to her lips.
'Don't,' Mai hissed.
Recognising that it wasn't the smartest move in the world, Mai squatted down beside the kennel door. It was a really dumb move. Idiotic. If she opened the door for the girl, logic followed that Mai would find herself shoved inside. But she still fumbled with the latch. No matter how many deaths and horrific visions she witnessed, she couldn't let herself become so desensitised that she allowed an innocent victim to suffer when she could potentially help. On the day that finally happened, she'd know that the Taniyama Mai that was a worthwhile human being had finally died. Her hand trembled as she unlatched the cage.
When the girl did not move, Mai opened the door wider. 'Come quickly before he returns,' she said, kicking at the debris that caught on the door.
The cup quivered in the girl's hand before she set it aside. She crawled forward on hands and knees. Each moment painfully slow.
Gesturing frantically, Mai strained her ears for any hint of Kennel Boy's arrival. She stretched her arm inside the cage, hoping the girl would grab it and allow Mai to haul her out.
'Will you help?' she whispered.
'That's why I'm here. So please, just take my hand!'
'Do you promise?'
Mai opened her mouth to say of course she promised, but the words caught in her throat.
'Will you help?' the girl whispered again. An almost singsong quality wove into her voice. 'Do you promise?'
'I….' Mai froze, her legs as gelatinous as they'd been at the start of her dream. Even as she pulled her hand from inside the cage, Mai knew it was too late.
The girl seized her wrist in an iron grip. 'My brother will be so pleased,' she said.
'Your brother…?' She didn't look like Kennel Boy—ethnically speaking there was an obvious different. Despite the dreadful blond hairstyle, this girl was clearly Japanese—meaning Kennel Boy was… not. It seemed so simple. Kennel Boy was not Japanese, and yet it had never occurred to her. But where? Where was he from? What did he actually look like?
Agony, like a metal rod being rammed through her skull, exploded through her brain.
The foulest stench of rotten flesh burst across Mai's face. 'What are you thinking about?' the girl whispered. 'Never mind. You can wait inside.' She yanked Mai into the cage.
Arms and legs of every colour, size, and stage of decomposition surrounded Mai. It was as though she were drowning in a carnival's ball pool filled with dismembered body parts. Flesh crumbled off the bones, and joints popped like legs torn from a roast chicken. Fingers and toes, stiff with rigor mortis, gouged and scratched. Every time Mai got a knee up, something would shift and her other leg would slip furthering into the oozing, putrid pit. Spreading her arms wide, she attempted to float atop the sea of corpses, but as she pulled her right leg to the surface, something warm and moving snared her ankle.
Kicking out and arching upward shifted the bodies, and her right shoulder and arm lost their purchase on surface area and sunk below. Another warm binding encircled her wrist and dragged her under. Rancid puss smeared across Mai's face, but it was too late to draw a breath to scream.
A bell shattered the vision.
…
Spine welded straight, Mai shot up in bed and kicked off the duvet. She lashed out with a clumsy hand to turn off the jarring alarm.
'And the monster arises,' Gene said from his perch beside Mai's feet.
Trembling fingers searching out any unpleasant traces from her dream, Mai tried to calm herself by breathing deeply and counting backwards from ten. When she reached 'one' and her heart still thudded in her throat, she started the countdown again. 'We've got to come up with better protection charms,' Mai finally managed to say.
'I know they are horrific, but you need to ride out these marathon visions until you've found balance—'
'I saw the kennel… but it was big. Really big,' she interrupted, scooting to the edge of the bed and slipping on a pair of mules. She stood and headed for the stairs. 'A girl pulled me in.'
'Pulled you in? Did you approach it? Are you crazy?' Gene asked, nipping after her.
'She called for help.' Or at least Mai had assumed that she had. Why hadn't she thought of that before?
'You are crazy,' he said, and she swivelled around to scowl at him. 'And scary. When are you going to throw out that t-shirt? The bloodstains are disgusting.'
Panicked that she had pulled a trace out of her dream, Mai wrenched on the hem of her shirt and stared down. A small hole tore wide near the stomach, but other than the rip, the shirt looked exactly the same it had when she'd put it on before going to bed. Despite a great deal of soaking and scrubbing, the brown smears from her bloody nose and the knock on the head had never properly washed out.
'I know I should throw it out but…' Mai rubbed the thin material between her fingers. 'Bou-san gave it to me. He said it was a talisman against bad dreams.'
'Bullocks,' Gene scoffed. 'Exactly how many con-artists did my brother hire?'
Mai swallowed a sharp retort. This wasn't the first time Gene had complained about the motley crew that had formed SPR's Irregulars—and every time Mai struggled to recall that Gene didn't know Bou-san, Ayako, John and Masako and that even she'd been overcritical of each person before getting to know them. Regardless Gene's little snipes about her short-lived SPR family did grate her, and they always reminded her that pretension, pride and severity ran deep in the personalities of both Davis twins.
'I'm sure Bou-san only meant it as a joke,' she muttered, proceeding down the stairs.
'Obviously. That shirt would be more useful as pulp to make your charm paper.'
Mai nearly tripped at the notion. 'Would it?'
'I was joking.'
They'd been trying everything to increase the staying power of her charms, but still they couldn't surpass the 6-hour time limit. Several texts suggests that Mai use natural elements—like blades of grass, pressed flowers or seeds—to strength her charms, and rather than using these elements in half-comprehended sutras, mantras or spells, she'd been simply adding them to her homemade spell paper. Unfortunately one night a certain element would seem to work, but the next it would have no effect. Another text suggested using objects with which she had a solid rapport or that held distinct memories, but as Mai had lost everything in the fire, she'd thought she possessed no object worthy enough to incorporate into a charm. It had never occurred to her to cut up the I see dead people t-shirt.
'I don't think I can actually make pulp out of the fabric, but maybe I can mix in threads. It won't change the texture any more than the grass. Do you think it'll work?'
'I wonder,' Gene said and shrugged again, but Mai was sure he was really thinking: at least I won't have to look at those nasty bloodstains again. 'You're avoiding the subject. Again.' Gene continued down into the living area, leaving Mai standing on the stairs. 'What happened when you stupidly opened the cage and got pulled in? Did Kennel Boy show up?'
Making a mental note to come back to the idea of using the shirt in her next spell paper batch, she hustled into the chilly kitchen to put on the kettle. 'Nah,' she said, pulling the cafetière from the cupboard and grabbing the ground coffee from the fridge. 'I just went for a swim in a pool filled with a thousand or so dismembered corpses.'
Gene watched her speculatively from his seat at the dining table. 'Is that really the kind of thing you should say in a blasé tone?'
'Probably not.'
While she waited for the kettle to boil, she idly stared at the calendar stuck on her pinboard. Black script marred every date until New Years Day—Gin Knockers 7pm to 8am. 'I was thinking that I should ring Bou-san tonight. He and Ayako have been back from Australia for over a week now. They'll be concerned if I don't contact them.'
Gene shrugged, not looking up from the paper-strewn dining table. At each museum and gallery that they visited, he always had Mai pick up an exhibition guide—sometimes at cost—and he seemed to garner a great deal of pleasure looking over them. In fact sometimes she thought he enjoyed that more than he enjoyed perusing the tourist guides and newspapers for new venues to visit. In a funny way, it reminded Mai of how Naru used to pour over his maps.
Not for the first time, Mai wondered if Gene felt threatened by her relationship with the others. If maybe he worried that once they resumed their place in Mai's life, he'd be forgotten or pushed aside or left to tour Tokyo alone. Of course Mai would never let that happen, but she had to admit that a little more variety in her social life would be welcome—and this admittance swashed her with guilt because Gene was sacrificing his afterlife for her. It really sucked for him, seeing as he was stuck on a plane wherein his was incorporeal and only able to interact with her. These anxieties fed her fear that Gene would get bored or sick of her and that he would abandon his position as guardian. If that happened Mai wasn't sure that she could hold herself together any longer.
In fact she knew that the only reason she'd not gone mad was because she had her dear spectral friend by her side. She tried to ease his situation in everyway possible. Most recently she'd initiated several games of blackjack—of course, she always played the dealer. She also took him to galleries at least four times a week, read tourist guides aloud, and followed the Rugby League World Cup stats—all activities involving a great deal of English and none being to Mai's extracurricular tastes. She only hoped that all her efforts made Gene's afterlife a little more bearable.
'Have you figured out what you'll tell Bou-san and Ayako?' he asked.
Mai shrugged. 'A colleague got me a good deal on a new and better flat, so I moved house.'
'That's it?'
'Sure,' she said, taking the kettle off the boil. She kept her hands steady and practiced pretending like lying to SPR's ex-Irregulars wasn't a big deal and that she felt no remorse. Merely the idea of lying was wearing ulcers into her stomach. 'Keep it simple to start—because we both know that nothing stays simple for long.'
Like a child pawing at an out-of-tune pianoforte, the carousel music lurched ominously but stumbled on and on and on. The same phrase looping. Mai braced herself as the vision burned into focus.
Frescos of happy children dressed in Victorian costumes adorned the carousel ceiling. Mai remained stationary in the centre of the spinning colours and large, theatrical lighting. Red and white striped posts wove in and out of the ceiling—though when the music lurched, the posts too seemed to struggle with their rhythm.
A gust of cool night air slid over Mai's body. Her frayed pyjamas seemed to capture the cold and press it hard against her body, and Mai itched as though all the moisture were being drawn from her skin. Chafing her arms only made it worse.
She sucked in several deep breaths, preparing to face whatever was making her so uncomfortable, but when she went to gaze down at herself, her eyes were instead drawn to the carousel's red and white poles again. At the top they looked like candy canes, but towards the middle they narrowed and the spiralling stripes were faded and marred by brownish splatters.
Her stomach heaved, her bellybutton seemed to pull toward her back, and her knees weakened. Swallowing thickly Mai shook her head and stubbornly stared straight ahead. She refused to look down any further.
Lukewarm liquid surrounded her feet and slipped between her toes. She closed her eyes and tilted her head downward before opening them again.
Blood. Just blood. Mai remained very still as she cast her gaze across the sunken platform on which she stood. A river of blood flowed slowly toward her from all directions. Standing in the partially congealed fluid did not make her shriek and cry—and this bothered her. And that she was more bothered about her own indifference than the source of the blood bothered her even more. What kind of insensitive person was she becoming?
The carousel music lurched again, and a tremulous whinny split the stagnant air.
Mai jerked her head in the direction of the sound and then stumbled backward—a hand clasped over her gagging mouth.
A dozen deformed horse corpses lied in heaps on the carousel's rotating platform. The stripped posts lanced through their flesh to the music's staccato rhythm. A dappled pony in the outermost row collapsed on its side and convulsed. Its legs kicked out, hooves scrabbling against the floor, its neck corded and strained, but it could not free itself from the piercing post.
Mai was stumbling over cold horseflesh before she even realised that she'd moved. Blood slicked the hardwood platform, and she skidded on her knees, ignoring the splatter. The pony continued to lash out, so Mai crawled around to its back. She tried to find a rhythm in the post's lancing—to anticipate the moment it would rising up and the longest it would remain poised before rocketing downward—but the carousel music became more disjointed, and she knew that, even if she could physically push such a large animal, the vision would never allow her the opportunity to save the pathetic beast.
Resting her forehead on the pony's damp and trembling back, she combed her fingers through its mane and prayed that it would give in to death soon.
Three gunshots rang out in succession.
Mai sprung to her feet only to be brought to her knees by a wave of nausea.
Her palms pressed down against cold, dry tile. The kitchen was the industrial sort. Steel worktops. Pots and pans hung from ceiling racks. Appliances thrummed and clunked. Somewhere in the distance, children shouted and laughed.
'You've got to believe me, Pitt,' a burly man whimpered. Duct tape bound his hands behind his back and strapped him to a chair. His voice cracked as he pleaded. 'I'm not lying to you. You know me!'
'That I do.' The second man, Pitt, was a ferrety fellow with a neatly trimmed beard.
'Come here, boy,' he barked.
The man strapped to the chair whinnied and strained, making Mai think of the poor horse in the carousel. 'Pitt. Pitt! Why would I lie? Why? Why!'
'That is what we are going to find out,' Pitt the ferrety man said. 'Now get over here, boy! Or. Else.'
Mai's stomach plummeted. Whatever 'or else' inferred, it pushed Mai to tears. Covering her face, she rocked back and forth. Orbs of dread lodged in her throat, constricting her breath and making it impossible to swallow.
Fabric brushed by her shoulder. A pale, dark-haired boy of perhaps eight years stood with his back to her. Tremors racked his arms. In one hand he held a black ball.
The man in the chair went wild.
'Do it, boy!'
Tentatively—reluctantly, the boy lifted one arm.
Mai grabbed for the boy's shoe but a blast sent her sprawling backward. Pain bloomed on the back of her head, and Mai flinched and squinted against the shift in light. The mid-day sun washed out most of the scene—everything but the back of that dark-haired child.
'I won't,' he hissed. He clenched his black ball in both hands and shook it brutally. 'I… I am…' Holding the ball up, he roared. His neck corded with rage. 'I am not a Magic 8 Ball!' he screamed, launching the ball through a large window. Glass sprayed everywhere, throughout the well-appointed living room inside and across the patio where the boy stood in absolute stillness.
Mai stood clumsily. She wanted to do something—anything, but…. She reached for the boy's shoulder with trembling fingers.
'Oh my god, what happened?' A blond woman rushed onto the patio. She too reached for the boy, but he jerked to the side—hands up, arms drawn close, shoulders hunched up around his neck.
'Don't you touch me!' he cried. 'I'll kill you.'
Mai didn't know why, but her heart was broken.
…
'Mai. Mai, wake up.'
Mai curled in tighter on herself until her knees pressed against her tear-damped eyes. She shivered uncontrollably beneath her duvet.
'Mai, what's wrong?' Gene whispered.
Snuffling, she struggled to sit upright in her bed. 'Nothing. Just another marathon dream.' Glancing at her alarm clock, she swung her trembling legs to the side. 'You shouldn't have let me sleep for so long. We missed going to the Raindrops exhibition today. We'll go tomorrow, okay?'
…
The right side of Mai's yukata wrapped over the left, which was definitely not correct since she was relatively positive that she was not dead.
Although she was back in the grey and green Canongate Cemetery again, so maybe she was dead.
And maybe she should stop worrying about a stupid thing like how she was fused into corpse-garb and start worrying about the possibility—nay, probability that the wolfhound was going to appear at any second.
This wasn't a particular scene that she wished to experience again. It was different from the repeated gallery riot. There she had no part to play—here felt far more dangerous. Kicking off her sandals and hiking up the hem of her yukata, Mai darted for the front of the cemetery and the street beyond.
A little girl in a yellow sundress waited for her at the gate. 'Stay?' she asked.
Mai shook her head and pushed out into the crowded street.
Again the horde of people swept Mai up the cobble street until she was crushed shoulder to shoulder. If she crawled to the front of the crowd, all she'd see was The Match Magician go up in flames—and so Mai twisted around to continue up the hill.
More and more people joined flooded the street, and with every step forward that she took, the crowd swept her back three steps. The dream wanted her at the front of the crowd, and fighting it would only exhaust her—and still she grappled forward.
'This is so stupid!' she shouted to no one in particular.
The crowd spit her out, and she landed on her tailbone.
'Fine,' she said, twisting around so that she could look at the familiar scene of The Match Magician—except that he wasn't there.
Black smoke billowed from the bottom floors of the tenement building.
Sound—sirens and shouting—cut in and out. A buzzing began building in Mai's ears. Like the gradual approach of swarming bees. Every time she blinked, black floaters warped her vision.
The crowd heaved forward, spitting out another person.
Lin.
He scrambled to his feet, and before Mai could shout his name, he rushed headlong into the burning tenement.
Mai's yukata tripped her up again and again as she attempted to follow him. The moment she crossed into the building the black smoke wrapped around her. Swallowed her. It threw her to the ground, dragging her deep into the building. She crashed against walls, snagged on doors. Her bloodied fingers slipped every handhold. The stone floors gave way to stairs and then to dirt floor, and then more and more stairs. And all the while she could not secure a single breath.
Finally she rolled to a halt facedown on a cold floor—and Mai kept her eyes clenched tight. She knew where she was. She didn't need to see. She could feel the newspapers.
'Stop. I'm sorry,' a woman whimpered. 'I'm sorry, so please stop. Make it stop. Make it stop.'
'You make it stop.'
Mai cracked her eyes open enough to see Blur Face wrapping the woman's hands around the black-bladed knife and helping her press it against her own neck.
'Don't,' Mai whispered.
'Your gift will not go to waste,' Blur Face said and blood sprayed across the room.
…
'Gift.'
'What, Mai?'
Mai sat up in her bed and held up her fingers for inspection. They were fine. Not even a broken nail.
'I….' She glanced toward Gene, who was sitting on the floor with a crossword puzzle and a copy of Gallery Space Tokyo. 'It's…. I…. Nothing. Have… have you figured out all the answers for your puzzle? Do you want me to write them in?'
'No, but there is a new exhibition at the Watanabe Gallery.' He wiggled an eyebrow. 'It's on the way to work.'
Mai yawned and stretched as she tried to shake off the dream. 'Fine. But I need coffee first.'
'You're the boss.'