I spent Wednesday in bed.
By the afternoon I could breathe without it catching. By the evening I could sit up. My ribs ached the way a bruise aches when you press it, deep and dull, and every time I moved I could feel them knitting, slowly, like something being sewn up from the inside.
Kohaku sat on the end of the bed all day and watched me. She didn’t talk much. She didn’t ask for fish. When Mom brought the okayu she sat beside the bowl and didn’t touch it, and that frightened me more than my ribs.
On Thursday morning I woke up and she wasn’t a cat.
There was a young woman sitting on the edge of my desk. She had short gray hair cut straight across in a bob, and she was wearing a plain old work kimono in a dull blue, tied with a narrow sash, with the sleeves tucked up. She was barefoot. She had her feet on my chair.
On top of her head, sticking up through the gray hair, were two gray cat’s ears.
I yelped. I tried to sit up too fast and my ribs told me not to, and I lay back down and stared at her.
“It’s me,” said the young woman. “Obviously.”
“You’re a person.”
“I’m not. I’m wearing one. It’s easier for talking.” She looked down at herself with mild disapproval and pulled at her sleeve. “I haven’t done this for a hundred years. The sash is wrong. I never could do these.”
Her eyes were amber, the same clear tea color. Her ears turned toward the door when a car went past outside, and back toward me.
“Why?” I said.
“Because I want to tell you something, and I want to look at you while I tell it. You can’t look at a cat properly. People don’t.” She drew her feet up onto the desk and wrapped her arms around her knees. Her ears went flat. “And because I’m frightened, and I didn’t want to be frightened as a cat. It shows more.”
* * *
She told me with the curtains half open and the gray Thursday light coming in, sitting on my desk with her knees up.
“There have been six,” she said. “I told you that. I’m going to tell you how each one ended. Not to frighten you. Well, a bit to frighten you. Mostly so you don’t do it.”
“Do what?”
“Any of it.” She looked at the window. “The first one I won’t talk about. Not yet. All you need from her is this. Tell someone.”
“Tell someone what?”
“Everything. Where you’re going. What you’re doing. Somebody should always know.” She looked at me. “Have you told anyone? About Tuesday?”
“No.”
“Tell someone.”
“Who? Mom? Mio?”
She didn’t answer. She went on.
“The second was Hana. Fifteen. A retainer’s daughter, in Kamakura, when the shogun was there and the town was full of soldiers. That was the twelve-fifties. They came ashore in the shogun’s city and they took people, and then they came back wearing the people they’d taken. Badly. Like a coat that doesn’t fit. Hana’s brother was taken.” Kohaku’s voice stayed light. “One of them came back wearing his face. She couldn’t hit it. She stood there with her hands up and looked at her brother’s face. It wasn’t her brother. She knew it wasn’t, and she couldn’t.”
I kept quiet.
“So. Trust what a thing does, not how it looks.” She held up two fingers. “The third was Shino. Sixteen. She was a novice at a nunnery in Kita-Kamakura, the fourteen-hundreds. She flew like you. Faster than you. One night she chased one of them out over the bay, out and out, because it was getting away and she was nearly faster. She went further than she could fly back from. Her light gave out over deep water.”
Three fingers.
“Keep enough to get home.”
“I came down in the sea on Tuesday,” I said. “At Kugenuma.”
“In the surf. Ten meters out, with sand under your feet.” Kohaku looked at me. “That was luck. Shino was lucky too, until she wasn’t.”
Four fingers.
“Oharu. Seventeen. A net-mender’s girl at Yuigahama, in 1703. Nine days after the big earthquake, they raised a wave, and she held it back for her whole street while everyone ran. She held it and held it. Everyone got out. She could have let go. She didn’t. It took her with it when it fell.” Kohaku looked at her hand. “Know when to let go.”
The light in the room had gone very still.
“Kiyo,” she said. “Fifteen. An apprentice at a brewery in Fujisawa, in 1855. Kiyo hid. From everyone. Fought at night, only at night, alone, and wouldn’t let anyone help, and wouldn’t tell anyone anything, and one night there was nobody to help.” Her voice didn’t change at all. “Don’t hide.”
Five fingers.
“And,” she said.
She stopped.
She opened her mouth and nothing came out of it. Then she reached into the front of her kimono and took something out. It was a ribbon, a hair ribbon, faded red silk, frayed at the ends. She held it in both hands in her lap and looked at it, and her ears went right down, and she didn’t say anything for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to.
“Fumi,” she said. “Sixteen. A girl at the girls’ school here in Kamakura, in 1923. The earthquake knocked half of Tokyo down and the other half caught fire, and the fires came down the coast. She flew into the smoke to reach a class that was trapped in a school, because she could hear them. She couldn’t see in the smoke. She couldn’t find the way out again.” Kohaku turned the ribbon over in her fingers. “See the way out before you go in.”
“That’s six,” she said. “I know six ways not to come back. You’re going to learn every one of them, and then you’re going to do something else.”
I lay and looked at her sitting there with the ribbon, and I asked the thing I’d been wanting to ask since the cave.
“When they changed,” I said. “The six of them. Did they look like themselves?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got,” said Kohaku, and put the ribbon away.
* * *
I didn’t speak for a long time. I lay looking at the ceiling with my hand on my ribs.
“Why isn’t any of this in history?” I said eventually. “Things like the Crab. Things like that block. Somebody would have written it down.”
“Somebody did. They wrote down the earthquakes.” Kohaku pushed her hair behind one cat’s ear. “Every time the door cracked, it was because the ground shook. Every time. A big earthquake, the kind people remember for a hundred years, and they came up in the middle of it, and afterward, who could say what had knocked the houses down? The earthquake got the blame. The older ones, the people turned into stories. Sea monsters. Things in the bay. You’ve heard them.”
“There wasn’t an earthquake,” I said. “That Sunday. When the ringing started.”
“No.”
“So why did it crack?”
Kohaku didn’t answer for a while. Her ears had gone flat again, flat right down against her gray hair.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s never opened without the ground shaking. Not once. Not in all that time.” She looked at me. “That frightens me more than anything I’ve just told you.”
* * *
She told me other things too, that day and the next, in pieces.
The Lady had made the bracelet. The Lady had been a smith’s daughter, from down at Koshigoe, by the sea. There had been a shrine once, on the bluff above the harbor there, a little forge shrine that the Lady had looked after herself, before anybody ever prayed to her.
“She kept it in red and white,” said Kohaku. “The robes. The way the girls did, then, at a shrine.” She looked at me sideways. “That’s why you look like that. When you change. It dresses everyone the way she was dressed.”
“It’s a lot of hakama.”
“She liked them practical,” said Kohaku. “She’d have hated the stars.”
“And the hair?” I said. “I dreamed about her. Her hair was pink. Like that.” I meant the girl on the television. I didn’t mean me. “Does it do that to everyone?”
Kohaku didn’t answer straight away. She was looking at my face.
“No,” she said. “I told you. They looked like themselves.” Then, much too quickly, “Is there any of that chicken left? The spicy one?”
On Thursday evening, on the news, the soldiers fired at the block.
They’d brought guns up to the hill above Katase and shelled it where it stood in the river mouth. The camera showed lumps of concrete flying off its legs and walls. Then it showed the harbor wall at Katase, a long concrete breakwater, crumbling away along one edge, and the block’s legs whole again.
“It rebuilds,” said Mom, watching. “Look. It takes the wall.”
Twenty-three, said the newsreader. Twenty-three people were unaccounted for. Their families had been asked not to approach the cordon.
* * *
On Friday night I dreamed of the white shore again.
The tall woman with the burned hands was sitting on a flat stone, looking at nothing. She looked up when I came, the way you look up from a book.
“You were hurt,” she said.
“I’m all right now.”
“You pushed on all of it at once.” She said it without blame, the way you’d say it was raining. She held up one of her scarred hands and turned it in the flat gray light. “When I was a girl, my father would give me a piece of iron and make me look at it for an hour before he let me pick up the hammer. An hour. I hated it. Nothing wears a thing without holding on to it somewhere.”
“Where?”
She smiled a little, for the first time.
“That was what the hour was for.”
She looked at me then, at all of me, in the flat light.
“It still fits you,” she said.
“It’s a costume,” I said.
She didn’t argue. She went back to looking at nothing.
* * *
On Saturday night I went back.
I told Kohaku before I went, as if it counted. She came anyway.
On the roof I said the word under my breath. We went at midnight, high over Fujisawa, and came down on the roof of a fish wholesaler’s on the edge of Katase harbor, where the sheds come right down to the water. From there I could see all of it. The river mouth, wide and dark, with the tide in. The long causeway running out across the water to Enoshima, the Benten Bridge, lit along its length by streetlamps, with a police car parked across the near end of it and two more halfway across. Floodlights on the shore. Soldiers on the hill.
And in the middle of the river mouth, standing in the water up to its first-floor balconies, the block.
Its windows were dark now, or nearly. It was just a building, gray and blank, standing in the sea on six legs.
I watched it.
I watched it for an hour, the way the Lady’s father had made her look at the iron. I sat on the roof of the fish shed with my knees up, the staff across them and my light turned as low as it would go, and I made myself not move.
It didn’t do much. That was the first thing. It stood. Every so often the soldiers on the hill fired at it. A lump of concrete came off a leg, and the leg leaned toward the harbor wall, took a bite out of it and was whole again. It always took from the harbor wall, never from the sand around its feet.
The second thing took me most of the hour to see.
Its windows were dark, all of them, all the way up, except one. On the third floor, at the end nearest the sea, there was still one yellow square. In it, very faint now, like a lamp left on in a room nobody uses, the woman in the cardigan was still waving. Slowly. Back and forth.
The first one who walked in, Kohaku said later. The neighbor from Block 12.
Every time the guns on the hill fired, the block moved. It wasn’t much. It shifted its legs, the way a man on a crowded train shifts his feet. But it always shifted them the same way, so that the shells hit the other end, the far end, and never that corner.
It put its own body between the guns and that one window, every time.
Where’s it holding on?
I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t need Kohaku to ask me this time. I sat on the fish shed and looked at the one lit window, and I knew.
At three o’clock the block moved.
After four days of standing still, it lifted one leg out of the water, slowly, and put it down again a few meters further on. Toward the causeway. Toward the bridge, the police cars and the island at the end of it, where there were hotels, shops and people asleep.
The police car at the near end of the bridge didn’t move. There was someone in it. I could see his face through the windshield, white, looking up.
It lifted another leg.
* * *
I went.
I went low across the river mouth with the staff in my right hand, and the block turned toward me the way it had at the complex, that pressure from every side at once. Its next step came down toward the causeway, toward the police car, a leg the size of a truck coming out of the dark.
I put out my left hand and pushed.
The light came out of it flat, the way it had come out of my back under the leg on Tuesday, except that this time I meant it. A wall went up across the causeway in front of the police car, from the road to above the streetlamps, white-gold, like frosted glass with the bridge lights coming through it.
The leg came down against it.
The wall held.
It held, and the whole weight of the block came into my left arm, into my shoulder and my back and my knees, as if I were holding a door shut against a crowd. The note in the staff went up into a whine. My nose started to bleed. I could feel the wall in my own body, every centimeter of it, and the leg pressing on it, and the block leaning in.
I flew at the third floor with the staff in my right hand.
The woman in the window saw me coming. She went on waving. I drove the iron foot of the staff straight through the glass into the middle of the yellow square, into the light where her shape was.
The rings rang.
It was the clean high sound from Ofuna, louder, ringing out across the water. I felt the light go in and turn, the soft give of the key, all the way down. The woman’s shape stopped waving. She looked at me, I think. Then she smiled, the small tidy smile of someone thanking you for holding a door, and she went out.
The block fell down.
It didn’t topple. It came down where it stood, all at once, like a sandcastle when the wave comes in under it. Five stories of concrete poured down into the river mouth with a roar that went on and on, and the water came up white around it, and the spray went over me. The leg against my wall wasn’t a leg anymore. It was rubble, sliding down the face of the light into the sea.
I let the wall go.
The police car sat on the causeway in the floodlights, with the river running off its roof.
* * *
I sat down where I’d landed, on the wet sand by the river mouth, with blood running down my lip and my hands shaking so hard I had to put them between my knees. The staff lay across my lap. The note in the staff was ringing on and on, high and thin, and slowly coming down.
Kohaku came and sat beside me.
“You watched it,” she said.
“For an hour.”
“You watched it,” she said again, and leaned against me.
I flew home before the soldiers got to the beach. I was so hungry when I landed on our roof that I went straight down to the kitchen in the dark and ate cold rice out of the rice cooker with my fingers, standing up. Then I ate a whole packet of the whitebait, and some pickles, while Kohaku sat on the counter and watched me with something like approval.
* * *
In the morning there was a new island at the mouth of the Katase River.
That was what the news called it. It was flat and gray and roughly square, about the size of an apartment building, a low heap of broken concrete rising a little way out of the water where the river met the sea, with a twisted balcony rail sticking up out of the top of it. Sand had already drifted across it. Seagulls were standing on it. A helicopter circled it slowly, as if it couldn’t think what else to do.
The cameras on the shore showed the soldiers and the police boats and the causeway, closed at the near end, with a police car sitting on it, its roof dented. They showed the crowd on the beach.
Then they showed the sea wall at Katase, the long concrete wall along the top of the beach, and a man standing on it alone, a little apart from everyone else, with his hands in his coat pockets.
It was Inspector Nishikawa.
He wasn’t talking to anyone, only looking out at the island.
He stood there for as long as the camera stayed on him, and he didn’t look away.