March 25 2007. After sunset.
I rode past the graveyard and then suddenly, a hand clamped onto my mouth.
"MMPH?!""
I barely had time to register the pressure before I was yanked sideways, hard, efficient, the grip of someone who had done this before, and dragged into a narrow alley that smelled of rust, wet cardboard and ramen that had been sitting in someone's trash for a week past its welcome.
My shoulder connected with a brick wall.
My bag hit the ground.
I thought, with the clarity that only arrives in moments of immediate danger: well, this is a development.
Three of them.
Hoods. Masks. Dark jackets with worn quality of people who spent a lot of time outdoors at night. And underneath the alley's ambient smell, something else. Something I hadn't been able to name the night I watched them in the cemetery but could name now, up close.
Grave dirt.
The specific smell of disturbed earth and old stone and something underneath both of those things that wasn't quite either.
"Gotcha," said the one in front. His voice was calm. The calm of someone who had decided in advance how this was going to go.
I did not find that reassuring.
"I told you I saw him," said the one to my left. "Kid was watching the whole time."
"Watching?" The third one, the largest, jacket straining across his shoulders, grabbed my collar and lifted me slightly, less like a threat and more like inspection. Sizing up a purchase. "You like to watch, huh? Creeping around graveyards, spying on other people's work?"
I ran a rapid inventory of my options.
They were limited.
"W-wait," I said. Which, in retrospect, was not my most impressive opening.
The first one tilted his head. Performing curiosity. "What did you see, kid?"
"Nothing," I said, "I… I wasn't watching anything. I was just walking. I'm practically blind, actually. Legally blind."
Nobody laughed.
The second one leaned toward the first. "Boss won't like this, Ren. We can't just let him walk."
Ren.
The name landed like a small stone dropping into still water.
The first one, Ren, Daigo Ren, the name from the cafeteria whispers, went very still. His eyes moved to the second one with an expression that said you talk too much without using any of those words.
"You talk too much," he said. Using all of those words.
The second one had the grace to look like he regretted it.
I was working on something better to say, something that would de-escalate this in a way that didn't involve my continued proximity to a wall, when it happened.
Someone appeared.
Not arrived. Not entered the alley.
Appeared.
From above dropping from somewhere that wasn't quite visible. A blur of black and white resolving itself into a person between one breath and the next.
The man holding me was on the ground before I fully processed that anything had moved.
He was hard to miss.
Orange hair pulled back, tied at the nape of his neck. A white robe over his shoulders, long, the kind worn at shrines but fitted in a way that suggested it had been altered for someone who moved a lot. In his hand he had a wooden staff , tipped with a cluster of prayer beads that clicked softly together.
And across his face, a Noh mask. White, expressionless in the way that Noh masks are, except that through the eyeholes his eyes were glowing red.
He stood in the alley in a way very few people stand anywhere, like he had decided the space was his and the space had simply agreed.
"Arata Seimei," Ren said. His calm had a crack in it.
The masked man didn't look at him. His head turned slightly toward me, not quite a look, more like an acknowledgment of presence, and his voice came out low.
"You're loud," he said, to the alley in general. "Makes my job easier."
Then he grabbed my wrist.
His grip was firm. Not rough.
"Run," he said.
"What?"
"Cemetery. Run."
I stared at the mask, at the red glow behind it. "Why the cemetery? That's not a safe-sounding destination."
"Safer than here."
I moved.
My feet hit the pavement and I was running before my brain fully endorsed the decision, heart hammering, bag abandoned somewhere back in the alley. Behind me, shouting, the clash of something metal against something else, Ren's voice sharp and angry and then cut off by a sound I didn't want to think about.
The cemetery gate appeared ahead of me, iron and black, standing open. Yawning. The word that came to mind was hungry and I wish I hadn't thought of it.
I went through anyway.
Gravel under my feet. The smell of old stone and new earth and that underneath thing again, that thing I couldn't name. Rows of graves in every direction, the stones pale in the thin moonlight.
I ran between them.
And because the world was apparently not done with me tonight,
I tripped.
My knee hit the gravel. My hand shot out to catch myself and found the edge of a headstone instead, jagged where the corner had chipped, sharp enough to slice clean through my palm.
I hissed through my teeth.
Blood welled up immediately, black in the moonlight, dripping onto the stone's surface, onto the name carved there.
Kenji Eito
Beloved by Those Who Knew Him
1951 - 1987
The stone drank it.
That was the only word for what happened. The blood hit the carved letters and the stone pulled, not physically, not a suction I could feel on my skin, but something underneath the physical, something that reached into my chest and tugged at something I hadn't known was there.
The air changed.
Not the temperature or the pressure. Something else. Something that didn't have a name in any vocabulary I'd been taught.
And then the whispering started.
No words or voices. Just intent, bare, raw, pressing, the feeling of a mind pressing against yours from the wrong side of a wall.
I scrambled back. My hand left a smear of blood on the stone. The carved name glowed, faint, pulsing, the rhythm matching my heartbeat in a way that made my stomach drop.
He knows I'm here, I thought. Whoever is in there, he knows I'm here.
The whispering became something louder. Building, filling the air around the grave with a weight that felt like weather.
One of the raiders burst through the cemetery gate, mask cracked at the jaw, moving fast and furious and not paying nearly enough attention to where he was going.
The pressure detonated.
From the earth beside the headstone, something erupted, a hand, skeletal, massive, pale as chalk, moving with terrible speed. It connected with the raider's midsection and launched him across the cemetery and into a tree with a crack that echoed off the stones.
He slid to the ground.
Didn't get up.
I stared.
My blood continued to drip onto the stone, each drop sending a new pulse through the glow, each pulse feeling like a conversation I was accidentally having in a language I didn't know I spoke.
"...What the hell," I whispered.
The skeletal hand withdrew into the earth, slow, satisfied.
The glow in the stone dimmed slightly.
The whispering didn't stop