Nothing But Blackened Teeth(16)

The ohaguro-bettari began to laugh before any of us could think to scream.





6



Who the—what the fuck is that?”

Faiz made a noise that I’ve never heard, a whining sound that hitched in his lungs, expressed in gasps. The kitsunes turned. No more pretenses now. Painted tengu approached in staccato, ticking across the seams in the shoji, a stop-motion flock, their expressions mocking. Faiz hit the floor, crab-walked about two feet backwards, gargling obscenities in a throat that wouldn’t work.

Phillip crossed himself the wrong way three times before he looked over, eyes so wide that both irises were necklaced in white. Outside the room, through cracks in the walls and in the few places where the lantern-light would reach, I could see movement, subtle and swaying.

“Told you she was probably going to be possessed and everything was going to hell,” Lin said, more satisfied, maybe, than anyone had a right to be.

The dead girl, the thing in Talia’s place, Faiz’s changeling bride, white as a tongue of wax, let her laughter ebb to a giggle, low and coquettish. Demurely, she raised a sleeve to her mouth, her chin ducked, and moved towards Faiz, each of her steps causing a scramble back of his. He whimpered, head lolling.

“Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.”

“What the fuck is it saying?” Faiz whispered hoarsely.

“Dude, seriously. We’re both Chinese. Don’t know what Phillip is.” Lin jerked a thumb at the other man, voice thinned by hysteria. “But you’re the only one with a Japanese parent.”

“Something about a mountain.” I swallowed, too petrified to correct him. I spoke the language too, if barely at this point, the knowledge leeched by crisis. “A-a promise?”

“That’s helpful.” Phillip thumbed through his phone and whatever dregs of satellite data he could milk from the air, face contorted. His hands shook. “I’ve got a—shit, the fucking page won’t load. Why won’t this—ah, fuck.”

“Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu,” said the dead bride again, this time with no musicality, her delivery urgent, her voice abraded, like she’d spent too long screaming in the dark.

Then a memory filled my mouth: “If I were one that had a heart that would cast you aside and turn to someone else, then waves would rise above the pines of Seunomatsu Mountain.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” demanded Lin.

“That’s the poem. The thing she keeps repeating. It’s part of the poem,” I said. “She’s still waiting for her husband-to-be. After all these years, she’s hanging on to the hope he’s coming home.”

“That or she’s saying it ironically,” declared Lin. “Which, I can tell you now, worries me because that sounds like the recipe for an angry fucking ghost.”

He paused.

“Or angry ghost fucking.”

I bayed my laughter, sudden and delirious. At the sound, Phillip’s phone slid from his trembling fingers, cracked open on the floorboard. Glass shimmered. The ohaguro stopped, a broken wind-up toy. No breath, no shiver of muscle, candlelight washing golden blue over enamel skin.

“Fuck,” Phillip repeated and we all stared as one at our ghost.

She chittered and the kitsune in the walls answered, applauding in perfect silent synchronicity, their fur flushing burgundy from nose to curling tails. Their eyes grew cataracted, a film of silk. I couldn’t stop staring. Then, the ohaguro began to laugh.

“Where’s Talia?” Faiz whispered.

The ohaguro stopped and, jerkily, she cocked her head.

“Where’s Talia? Where the fuck is Talia? Where is she you fucking—” Faiz choked down that last word, but the swallowed bitch still hissed through the air. He stumbled upright, slipped on sweat, nostrils and mouth and eyes dripping clear mucus, a slickness pearling along his chin. “Give her back. Give. Her. Back.”

The words stuttered together, warping with agony. Over and over and over, until he’d tortured the meaning from the refrain, until it was a croak hollowed out of his belly. Give her back. Give her back. Giveherback. Giverakgiverakgiverak.

“Jesus, man. What do you—” Phillip started.

Faiz hit her.

His fist bore into her sternum, through it. But there was no crunch, no wet pop of bone concaving, no sound to speak of. Nothing but softness, the ohaguro’s body bending into the impact, swallowing his arm to the elbow. For a moment, I thought she might have a mouth buried in the mound of white silk, that we were a sliver of a breath away from hearing Faiz scream himself bloody.

But he only stared at her.

“Please.”

She stroked his cheek with the back of her alabaster hand, wove her fingers beneath his jaw, slid her thumb across his lips before popping the digit into his parted mouth. I thought I saw his tongue move, see Faiz suckle at the extremity, red muscle laving over her pale, pale skin. That laugh again. Girlish, gorged with knowing. The rest of us stood rooted, transfixed by the obscene tableau.

“Please,” Faiz moaned around the curve of her thumb.

The ohaguro vanished.


*

But the kitsune stayed.

The tengu did too.

The ceiling ripened with bodies, yokai bleeding from the other rooms to come gawk; first oozing through the cracks in the architecture, slithering rills of wet ink, before regaining three-dimensionality. They leered at us from the wood and the paper, faces and palms pressed against what now felt like a sheeting of glass. It was as though we stood in a vivarium, had always stood in display, surrounded by children but unconscious to that truth until now.