Koyasan (8 page)

“You are a clever, courageousssss girl,” the spirits said. “You entertained usss tonight. And there’sss no denying you are of more interessst to ussss than your sssisssster.”

“Essspecccially asss ssssshe doesssn’t have a body,” a spirit outside the dome shouted. “If we’d kept her body, like I ssssaid...”

“Sssssilenccce!” the spirits closest to Koyasan roared. When there was no response, they addressed Koyasan again, angrily this time. “We will do a deal. You came here to ssssave your sssisssster. If you agree to our termsss, we will sssend her ssssoul back to her body.”

“You’ll let her go?” Koyasan gasped.

“Yessss. You have our word and the dead cannot lie.”

“What will I have to do in return?” Koyasan asked suspiciously.

The spirits chuckled. “Sssstay here, of courssssse. With ussss. To be tortured and killed in our own good time.”

“No!” Koyasan moaned. “There must be some other way, something else that I can...”

“No,” the spirits snapped. “Sssswap yoursssself for your sssisssster, now, or we kill you both. Choossssssssse!” the spirits crowed, and then everything went silent.

NO

Koyasan had no
real choice. The spirits had her where they wanted her. If she said no to their offer, they’d kill her and let Maiko’s soul perish when the sun rose. Koyasan couldn’t save herself. The spirits would slaughter her no matter what she did. If she rejected their deal and fought, the best she could hope for was a quick, painless death. But that would mean letting Maiko die too. It would be better if she agreed to their terms and let them torture her. That way, at least Maiko would live. Better one die horribly and one live than both perish.

Koyasan opened her mouth to agree to the spirits’ terms ... then closed it without saying a word.

There was no need to rush her decision. She had a few minutes to play with. She’d learnt tonight that you should never abandon hope. Her situation had looked bleak each time she’d faced a spirit, and her initial instinct had been to surrender quickly to them. But by delaying and employing her wits, she’d survived.

“Yes,” the inner voice remarked drily, “but those were individual spirits. You can’t fight or trick this many. You’re finished.”

“Not necessarily,” Koyasan replied silently. “These spirits were human once. You can always bargain with humans. Everybody wants a better deal in life — why should it be any different in death? If I can offer them something more attractive than my torture and murder...”

“Like what?” the voice sneered.

Koyasan didn’t respond. She was remembering the bitterness in the spirits’ voices when they complained about her being alive, all the people she could mix with, the many things she, as one of the living, could experience. These spirits were confined to the graveyard. Nothing ever happened here. They had nobody to interact with, nothing to break the boredom.

Children came in the daytime, but the spirits could only watch them enviously as they played and enjoyed themselves. And at night they were alone here, nothing new to experience or do, prisoners of eternity. Koyasan could see how hatred had grown and spread here, why they wanted to torture and kill her. They weren’t evil by nature — they just wanted to do something different for once, to relieve the misery and boredom.

They thought killing was their only option. Everybody in the village feared and avoided the spirits. There was nothing they could do with Koyasan except murder her, so that was what they’d made up their minds to do. But they were wrong. If Koyasan could conquer her fear, and think of the spirits as lonely souls rather than malicious agents of destruction, maybe they could come to an arrangement by which all of them would benefit.

It was hard to overcome the beliefs of a lifetime. Koyasan had always been terrified of the spirits. She’d been raised to think of them as wholly evil, beyond approach or compromise. But she’d undergone a transformation tonight. The world no longer looked as simple as it had the day before. Maybe the dead were like the living, neither entirely good nor entirely evil by nature, instead moulded by how they’d lived and how other people treated them.

Koyasan gathered her courage, took a deep, steadying breath, then said, very softly,
“No.”

The spirits didn’t have physical eyes, but she nevertheless had the sensation of thousands of eyelids blinking at the exact same time.

“What?” the spirits said, too astonished to make their voices sound ominous and threatening.

“I won’t swap.”

“But you have to!” the spirits protested. “We’ll kill you both if you don’t.”

“I don’t think you’ll kill either of us,” Koyasan said. “Not when you hear what I have to offer instead of our deaths.”

“More deathssss?” the spirits asked eagerly. “Will you go back and trick a lot of otherssss into coming here, to be killed in your placccce?”

“No,” Koyasan snorted.

“Then what?” the spirits grumbled.

“If you let us go,” Koyasan said, “I’ll promise to come back here one night every week... and play with you.”

There was a long silence.

“Isss thissss a joke?” the spirits finally asked.

“No.”

“You think we want to play with you?” They sounded offended. “We are powerful, wicked ssspiritssss. We are the dead who have been denied the pleasssuressss of the next world. We exisssst to torment, torture and dessstroy.”

“No, you don’t,” Koyasan said. “You exist because you don’t have any other choice. You act wickedly because people don’t understand you and treat you like evil monsters. I’m sure some of you were wicked in life, but not all of you. You can’t have been. I bet most of you were normal people and it was just bad luck that you ended up stuck here in this graveyard. Right?”

The spirits didn’t answer. She could tell her words had troubled them.

“You’re lonely and bored,” Koyasan said quietly, confidence coming with understanding and sympathy. “You’ve known each other so long, you probably don’t have anything left to talk about. You get glimpses of the world outside, and I’m sure you want to know more about it, how it’s changed, what people are like, what’s happened to the places you used to live and the people you once knew.”

“They’re all dead now,” the spirits said.

“Yes. But there are records of what they did, stories and legends. But you’ve no way of finding out any of that because nobody ever comes here to tell you.

“Well, that can change. I’
ll
come. One night a week, like I promised. I’ll play with you and read to you. I’ll tell you all the stories and history that I know, and find out new tales to pass on. I’ll sing and dance if you wish, although I’m not very good at that. I’ll bring paintings and small statues, and clothes so you can see what people are wearing. If you want to know about sports, I can find out. If you just want to talk, and tell me about your past or your troubles, I’ll sit and listen.

“I’ll be your friend,” Koyasan concluded simply, then waited for the spirits to answer.

HOME

Koyasan CROSSED THE
bridge with Maiko’s soul in her arms. It was warm and slippery, and she had to be careful not to drop it. Part of her was still afraid, worried that the spirits might change their minds and attack. But mostly she was calm and carefree. She had nothing to fear in the graveyard at the end of this long, amazing night — and would never have anything to fear there again.

The spirits had agreed to her proposal. There’d been some dissent. A few wanted to rip her to pieces. There were several truly evil spirits, who cared only about hurting and killing. But most were like living people, with the shadows of good hearts. They’d forgotten that for a while and become the monsters they were treated as. But Koyasan had reminded them of their humanity. The majority of noble spirits had quickly put the troublemakers in their place and made them agree to let Koyasan pass safely.

She hurried from the bridge to the village. The sky was brightening above her, ahead of the sun’s stately entrance. She could see smoke rising over the roof of her hut. Her parents hadn’t slept during the night, keeping vigil by Maiko’s side.

As Koyasan passed through the gate, someone moved in the shadows to her left. Glancing around, Koyasan saw Itako standing there. The old woman was smiling. “You did well,” she said softly, then returned to her hut. She was too old to waste a lot of time on unnecessary words of praise.

Koyasan’s mother and father were sitting by Maiko’s stiff, emotionless body. Their heads were bowed and they didn’t look up when Koyasan entered and crossed the room. Koyasan said nothing, only held out the ball of light which was Maiko’s soul and gently pressed it into her sister’s chest. For a moment Maiko’s flesh resisted, but then the soul slipped through the tiny pores in Maiko’s skin and disappeared into the body from which it had been taken.

A shimmer ran through Maiko. Her legs and arms jerked. Her nose and lips twitched. Then her eyelids flickered. “Tired,” she yawned. Her mother and father cried out with shock when they heard that and their heads shot up. They stared at their youngest daughter, then up at Koyasan, who was wilting on her feet, the trials and exhaustions of the night catching up with her now that it was all over.

“Funny head,” Maiko said, steepling her fingers together into a pyramid shape.

“Yes,” Koyasan agreed.

Maiko reached up and hugged her older sister, then lay down and went to sleep on the floor. Koyasan thought about going to bed, but decided it was too far to walk, so she lay down, cuddled up to Maiko and fell asleep too.

On chairs beside them, their parents watched the sisters sleeping, and slowly their stunned expressions were replaced by smiles of relief, love and joy.

DEAD HAPPY

A LOT OF
the villagers didn’t believe Koyasan’s story. They thought the sisters had played a trick on them, that Maiko had been faking. After all, everybody
knew
that the spirits in the graveyard were evil and would kill anyone who went there at night. This was a truth which had been passed down through generations. Were all the adults, and their parents and grandparents before them, wrong and this young snip of a girl right? Impossible! She was lying. She had to be.

Koyasan didn’t care what people thought. She just tried to get on with life as normal. She’d talk about that night on the hill if pressed, but was happier not to. She didn’t think it was polite to gossip about the dead behind their backs.

When, four nights later, she returned to the graveyard, a huge crowd had gathered. Most were convinced that she wouldn’t enter the graveyard or wouldn’t return if she did. Yamadasan was there, ready to laugh at her when she fled from the bridge as she always did. Only her parents truly believed she’d cross, and although they were worried, they’d seen a new strength in their eldest daughter’s eyes and knew they couldn’t stand in her way. Koyasan had earned the right to make her own decisions.

Maiko wanted to go with her, to play with the funny spirits in the gravy. “Not this time,” Koyasan told her gently but firmly. “I’ll take you another night.”