The fire bell was still there on the fifth of July.
The principal had accepted Saki’s petition on a Friday in June, three pages of names, and said he would look into it. The bell stood where it had always stood, at the corner of the field by the gate, on its little rusted tower of steel struts, a black iron bell the size of a rice cooker with a rope hanging from the clapper. Saki had stopped mentioning it. I’d see her glance at it sometimes through the window, in the way you’d glance at a dog that had once bitten you.
It was a Monday. The rainy season had stopped for the afternoon and the sun was out, hot and white, steaming off the field. Sixth period was math. Our classroom is on the second floor of the main building, along the side that faces the field, and from my desk by the window I could see all of it: the sandy field baked pale, the running track around the edge, the gym at the far end with its doors open and the first-years inside it for some kind of assembly, and in the near corner by the gate, the bell.
A third-year class was out on the field for PE. They were doing the long jump, taking turns to run at the sandpit while the PE teacher stood beside it with a clipboard and a whistle.
I was looking at them instead of at the board. It was three fifteen.
The field moved.
* * *
It wasn’t an earthquake.
Nothing shook in the building. Out on the field, in the middle of the track, the sand rose up in a long low ridge, like a wave under a sheet. The ridge ran across the field toward the sandpit. It moved fast. The third-years by the sandpit turned to look at it.
The PE teacher blew his whistle.
The sand opened under him.
Something came up out of the ground, gray, pale and enormous, the size of a train carriage. It had no eyes and no face, only a blunt round end like the end of a worm, wet and gleaming. It came up out of the field under the sandpit in a spray of sand, closed around the PE teacher, the sandpit and the clipboard, and went back down. The sand closed over it.
The field was flat again. The whistle lay on top of the sand.
Somebody screamed. A third-year girl. Then all of them were running, scattering in every direction across the field, toward the gates and the building and the gym. One boy ran straight across the middle, fast, the fastest of them, a tall boy with long legs, and the ridge came up out of the sand again behind him and went after him.
It caught him before he got to the track.
In our classroom, everybody was at the windows. Chairs went over. Someone was crying. The math teacher was shouting at us to get back, get away from the glass, and nobody was listening. Out on the field the third-years were still running, and the ridge in the sand had turned, and it was going after the next one, and the next.
It went where the ground shook hardest, and the ground shook hardest under whoever was running fastest.
The cuff on my wrist was burning.
“It can’t see,” said Kohaku. She was on the windowsill beside me, flat against the glass. “It goes to whatever shakes the ground. Feet. Anything that moves.”
Down in the corridor somebody was running. All along the building doors were banging open and people were running, six hundred students, running for the stairs, running for the exits, running out onto the field.
“They’re all going to run,” I said. “They’re all going to run out there.”
* * *
The speaker on the wall clicked.
“Everybody stand still.”
It was Saki’s voice.
It came out of every speaker in the building at once, steady and clear, the way she read the Monday notices, as if she were telling us the library would be closed at lunchtime.
“Everybody stand still. Don’t run. Don’t go outside. It follows vibration. If you move, it can hear you. Stand exactly where you are. Don’t move. Please.”
There was a moment when nobody did anything.
Then the building went silent.
It happened in one sweep, from the top floor down. The running on the stairs stopped. The doors stopped banging. In our classroom, thirty-two people stood frozen at the windows and between the desks and by the overturned chairs, nobody moving, nobody breathing loudly, the math teacher with his hand still out toward us. Through the window, out on the field, the third-years who were left had heard it too, from the outside speakers. They had stopped where they were, all over the field, scattered across the pale sand in the sun, standing perfectly still with their arms at their sides.
The ridge in the sand stopped too.
It lay in the middle of the field, a long low hump, not moving.
Six hundred people stood still in the afternoon sun and nobody made a sound. I could hear a crow somewhere. I could hear the traffic on the main road, far away. I could hear my own heart.
The speaker clicked again.
“I’m going to the gym,” said Saki’s voice, very quietly now. “The first-years are in the gym. I’ll keep them still. Everybody else, please, don’t move until somebody tells you.”
The speaker clicked off.
* * *
Down on the field, a phone buzzed.
It was in a bag. A first-year’s school bag, lying on its side on the sand where some first-year had dropped it running from the gym to the main building, before Saki’s voice had stopped her. The phone in it was buzzing on silent mode, a message, a call, someone’s mother at work who had seen the news, and the buzz went through the bag into the sand.
The ridge moved.
It turned toward the bag. The sand rippled toward it, slowly, the way water moves when something swims underneath, and the bag lifted a little on a bulge of sand and sank and was gone.
All over the field, the third-years stood and watched it go and didn’t move.
I had to get out of the classroom.
I couldn’t change here. Thirty-two people were standing around me. I couldn’t run, either, because running was the one thing that would kill people. I looked at the classroom door, standing open onto the corridor. Across the corridor, opposite, there was the door to the supply room, where the cleaning things and the spare chairs are kept.
It was eight meters away.
I bent down, slowly, and took off my indoor shoes. I put them under my desk, side by side.
Then I started to walk.
* * * This story is hosted at g.com.
It was the slowest eight meters of my life.
I walked in my socks across the classroom floor, one step at a time, putting each foot down heel first and then rolling it, the way you walk across a room where a baby is sleeping. The floor was wooden. Every board was loud. I could feel thirty-two people watching me and not breathing.
“Asakura,” hissed the math teacher. “Stand still.”
I didn’t look at him.
I kept walking, out of the classroom door and into the corridor. The corridor was full of people standing frozen, leaning against the walls, holding each other, holding their phones switched off in their hands. A girl from the class next door was standing right in front of the supply room with her eyes shut, crying silently. I had to step around her. She opened her eyes and stared at me.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
I opened the supply room door. It squeaked. Every head in the corridor turned.
I went in and pulled it shut behind me and stood in the dark among the mops and the stacked chairs, shaking.
“Go,” said Kohaku. She’d come with me. She was on top of the chairs. “Window. Don’t touch the ground. Don’t touch anything.”
There was a small window high up at the back of the supply room, over the side path, with a latch nobody had opened in years. I took off the sweatband and Saki’s hair tie and held them in my left fist.
“Transform,” I whispered to the mops.
The seam lit. The light filled the little room, white and gold, shining on the buckets. My hair came down. The staff was in my right hand, with its rings an inch from the ceiling, and I held them still with my fingers so they wouldn’t clink.
I didn’t touch the floor again.
I rose off it and floated to the window and opened the latch, slowly, and went out through it into the sun.
* * *
From up there I could see the whole field.
It lay below me, baked and pale, with the third-years standing on it like chess pieces, frozen where they’d stopped. The long jump sandpit was a hole. The ridge lay in the middle of the field, still, listening. Over at the far end, the gym stood with its big doors open. I couldn’t see inside it.
In the near corner by the gate stood the bell on its rusted tower.
I couldn’t fight it. It was under the ground. I couldn’t hit what I couldn’t see, and every second it lay there was a second someone might move. A phone might ring. A first-year might faint. Somebody might break and run.
I couldn’t go to it.
So it would have to come to me.
It went to noise. It went to whatever moved, whatever shook the ground.
The bell was iron, on a steel tower, with its feet in the ground at the corner of the field. Iron rings loud, and the ring goes down the steel into the earth.
I flew to it.
I didn’t land. I stopped in the air beside it, a meter off the ground, with my boots tucked up under my hakama like a child on a high chair, and I swung the staff and hit the bell.
It rang out across the field like the end of the world.
It hadn’t been rung in living memory. It rang deep, harsh and enormous, clang, clang, clang, the sound going out across the field, bouncing off the gym and coming back. I hit it again and again. I beat a rhythm on it, hard and steady, the way feet sound when someone’s running.
Left, right. Left, right.
Somebody running, as fast as they could, to the corner of the field.
The ridge in the sand turned toward it.
It moved across the field, fast now, faster than before, the sand rising and splitting in a long wake behind it. It went past the frozen third-years without turning. It went straight to the bell, to the ringing coming down through the iron and the steel into the ground. It came up out of the earth at the foot of the tower, blind, gray and enormous, rearing up under me to wrap itself around the thing that was making the noise.
The tower was rusted through at the base. Saki had said so. It was a hazard.
I put my free hand flat against it and shoved.
The whole tower came down, steel and iron and bell, across the gray thing at its foot, and drove it back down against the lip of its own hole. It heaved. The steel struts bent across it. Before it could pull free and go under, I pushed the light up into the rings, and the chain came pouring out of them with that bead-curtain hiss, thick this time, links as big as my fist. I threw it around the thing, around the fallen tower and around the thing again, and pulled. The steel and the gray body came together under the chain with a groan like a ship.
It was pinned. It couldn’t go down.
It lifted its blunt eyeless head out of the sand toward me, toward where the ringing had been, turning a little one way and then the other, the way a plant turns after the sun.
I came down on top of it with the staff in both hands and drove the iron foot into the middle of that head, where everything else in it seemed to be pointing.
The rings rang.
They rang out over the field, high and clean, the only beautiful sound in the whole afternoon. The light went in and turned. The thing under the tower shuddered once all along its length and went slack, and then it wasn’t a thing. It was sand and wet earth and gray clay, slumping down into the hole under the bent steel, and the chain had nothing left to hold.
Then it was quiet.
Nothing moved on the field. The third-years stood where they were. The bell lay on its side in the sand with its rope trailing.
* * *
I hung over the fallen bell and breathed.
“Haruto,” said Kohaku. She’d landed beside me a few seconds after I did, on the fallen tower, the way she always does. Her voice was wrong. “The gym. Look at the gym.”
I looked.
There was a crack running across the field. I hadn’t seen it. It ran in a long, crooked line from the gym doors to the place where the thing had lain listening in the middle of the field, a furrow in the sand, and I understood, too late, that before it came out to the sandpit, before any of it, it had come up under the gym. This story is hosted at g.com.
It had come from that way. It had passed underneath.
As I watched, the gym floor gave way.
I heard it from across the field. A long crack and a crash and screaming, from inside the gym, and through the open doors I saw dust come up.
I was there before I knew I’d moved.
I came down through the big open doors into the gym in a burst of light, and the first-years were all along the walls, standing frozen, white-faced, a hundred of them, the way Saki had told them. In the middle of the gym the wooden floor had fallen in. There was a hole there, a pit, broken boards hanging down into the dark, where the thing had passed underneath and left the ground hollow.
At the edge of the hole, lying on the boards, there was a first-year girl, small, with her eyes shut. She was breathing. She was lying where someone had pushed her, at the very edge, clear.
By the edge of the hole, side by side, neatly, there was a pair of indoor shoes.
Kohaku had come in behind me. She stopped when she saw them. She stood on the broken boards and looked at the shoes. Her voice, when it came, was flat and quiet and nothing like her.
“Fumi took her shoes off too,” she said. “They make you, at those schools.”
* * *
I dug for her.
I dropped the staff and went into the hole with my hands. I tore out the broken boards and the joists under them and threw them over my shoulder, and dug into the earth underneath with my fingers, faster than I had ever done anything. The first-years along the walls watched me and didn’t move and didn’t make a sound. The note in the staff was screaming. I didn’t care.
I dug and dug.
She was at the bottom.
She was lying on her side in the dirt where the floor had dropped her, with one arm out, as if she had been reaching up. Her eyes were open. She was very still, and very neat, the way she always was, her short hair hardly out of place.
On her wrist, where she always wore a hair tie, there was nothing.
I lifted her out and laid her on the gym floor. I didn’t know what else to do. I knelt beside her in my red and white, with my light shining on her face, and I said her name.
She didn’t answer.
The PE teacher, the tall third-year boy who ran, and Ueda Saki. Three people died. That was all. Six hundred people had stood still in the sun because she told them to, and three had died, and she was one of them.
* * *
I don’t remember leaving the gym.
I remember that I couldn’t let go. I tried. I knelt there beside her and tried to let the light go, to be myself again, to be Asakura Haruto, a boy from her class, kneeling beside her, and it wouldn’t go. It stayed. It was stuck on me like a wet coat. I tried and tried and the light just shone.
Then someone was shouting outside, men’s voices, sirens, and I panicked and went the only place I could think of.
Home.
I went out of the gym doors and up, with the staff in my hand, and I didn’t look down at the field. I flew low over the hills, over Kita-Kamakura and the railway, over the roofs, and I don’t remember any of it. I landed on our balcony on my knees by the clothesline, between Mom’s pots of shiso, in the hot afternoon sun. The staff fell across the shiso and lay there.
I was still her. I was still glowing. My hair was down to my waist. I was holding something in my fist so hard my nails were cutting into my palm, and when I opened my hand it was my sweatband, and Saki’s black hair tie.
I started to cry.
I didn’t mean to. It came up out of me from somewhere very deep and I couldn’t stop it. I knelt on the balcony in the light, holding the sweatband and the hair tie, and cried so hard I couldn’t breathe. The light wouldn’t go. I tried to make it go, and somewhere under the crying a part of me wasn’t trying very hard, and I hated that part, and cried harder.
Kohaku arrived a few seconds after me, pulled after it, and leaned against my side. She didn’t show herself. She didn’t say anything at all. She just leaned on me, a small warm weight I could feel and nobody could see.
It was all she could do.
* * *
I don’t know how long I was there.
Long enough for the shadows to move. Long enough for the sirens to start, all over Kamakura, in the distance, and go on and on. Long enough for my phone, in the pocket of a uniform I wasn’t wearing, to be somewhere nobody could call it.
Then the front door crashed open.
Somebody ran through the apartment. Somebody was shouting my name, over and over, in a voice I’d never heard before, high and cracked and terrified. Feet ran into my room, out again, into the kitchen.
The balcony door slid open.
Mom stood in the doorway.
She was still in her work fleece, with her name badge on. Her bag was gone. Her hair was coming down. She’d run all the way from somewhere, from the station, from the bus, her face was gray and wet and she was breathing in great gasps, and she was holding her phone in one hand so hard her knuckles were white.
She looked at me.
She was looking at a small girl kneeling on her balcony between the pots of shiso, a girl in red and white with hair down to her waist, glowing, crying, with gold eyes, the girl from the news and the keychains.
The girl was holding a black sweatband, the tennis one. There was an iron staff lying across the shiso.
Mom looked at the sweatband.
Then she looked at my face.
I looked up at her. I didn’t know what my face was doing. I didn’t know what to say, or how, or in what voice.
“Mom,” I said.