March 26, 2007. The School. Second Attempt.
"Why did you break that window?" I asked Saiko.
"Incase we need a quick exit route again, improvement from last time, huh?"
Now the ghost knows where we are… wait do ghosts even have ears? I guess they would.
We got pushed through the front this time. This felt like progress until we were standing in the first-floor hallway and the lights went out.
All of them. Every fluorescent tube, every emergency exit sign, every ambient source of illumination, extinguished simultaneously.
"This is fine," Saiko said, in the dark.
"Is it," I said.
"Probably not," she said. "But I'm choosing to commit to the framing."
A faint red glow appeared at the end of the first-floor corridor. Moving.
"Here's what I'm thinking," I said, keeping my voice at a level I hoped communicated calm. "She feeds on the question. On the gap where the answer goes. So we don't give her the gap."
"We don't answer," Genkei said.
"We answer," I said. "But we answer with our own question. We make the conversation move in a direction she doesn't control."
A pause.
"That's what Miu said," Saiko said. "About dialogue."
"I know," I said. "I was listening."
"You looked like you were staring at the floor."
"I can listen while staring at the floor."
The red glow was on the stairs now. Moving up. Moving toward us.
"Okay," Saiko said. "Itsuki talks first. Genkei and I provide… what? Backup?"
"Present a threat," Genkei said. "She needs to understand that physical engagement has costs. Keep her from simply ending this with violence."
"And if dialogue fails entirely?" I said.
"Then," Saiko said, her palm beginning to glow gray, ash threading between her fingers, "we pivot to violence ourselves."
The red glow arrived at the top of the stairs.
Aka Manto stood in the corridor.
---
Up close, and in the dark, with the only light coming from her own presence, she was different from the glimpse in the stall.
The cloak was the most visible thing, deep red, moving even without wind, the hem trailing slightly above the floor in a way that suggested she didn't quite have the same relationship with gravity that we did. Underneath it, the outline of a figure that was almost human in proportion.
And her face, or where a face would be if I could see it clearly, was covered. Not just by a mask. But by the darkness between her and visibility, a negative space.
"Red," she said, into the silence we were specifically not filling.
Genkei's hand was on his scabbard. Saiko's ash curled around her fingers.
I stepped forward.
"Neither," I said.
The corridor went very still.
"That is not an option," she said.
"You said red or blue," I said. "But those are your categories. I'm not in your categories."
The cloak stirred.
"Everyone," she said, "is in my categories."
"No," I said. "They're just in a category. There are more than two."
A pause. The length of a thought.
"What is the third?" she said.
"That depends on who's asking," I said. "And why. And what they actually want."
The darkness where her face was shifted.
"What they want," she said slowly, "is to leave?"
"Yes," I said. "And what do you want?"
Silence.
Very long silence.
"What I always want," she said. And her voice changed. Not dramatically, just slightly. A hairline fracture in the patience. "The question answered."
"That question doesn't have a right answer," I said. "You know that. You've always known that."
More silence.
Then: "Yes."
"So what does it give you when someone answers wrong?"
Saiko's ash was still ready. Genkei hadn't moved his hand. But neither of them spoke.
"Power," Aka Manto said finally. "The answer feeds me."
"And when no one answers?" I said.
The cloak moved.
"Then I am hungry," she said. "And I ask again."
"You've been asking for a long time," I said.
"Yes," she said. Something in that one word was… I couldn't name it. Not sadness exactly.
I looked at her.
She looked back, or directed her attention at me, which was the closest equivalent given the darkness where her face was.
"What would you do," I said, "if someone just stayed with you? Not to answer. Not to run. Just, was here?"
The corridor lights flickered on.
All of them.
In the sudden fluorescence, Aka Manto was fully visible for the first time. Crimson cloak, white mask beneath the hood, white, expressionless, the classic Noh-style face that the legend described. Her eyes behind it were not the horrifying void I'd prepared myself for.
"No one has asked that before," she said.
"I'm asking now," I said.
She moved, toward me, fast, the cloak spreading.
---
Reality creased at a point and resolved into somewhere else, the school hallway persisting in my peripheral vision but receding, becoming a frame for a different picture.
Saiko screamed something that I heard from a very long distance.
In the other place, the dreamscape, though I didn't know that word yet, Aka Manto stood in a room that was every school bathroom ever described in every urban legend ever told, layered on top of each other, mirror on mirror on mirror, each reflecting a different version of the question, the walls papered with red and blue options, the stall doors stretching out of my sight.
And she looked at me.
And I looked at her.
And she said: "You bound me."
I looked at my hands.
"I didn't… I wasn't trying to."
"Neither was I," she said. And her voice, here, without the filter of the physical world, was… different. Less the voice of a haunting and more the voice of something that had been haunting for so long it had forgotten there was more.
"What does this mean?" I asked.
She tilted her head. The mask caught no light here, it had its own.
"I don't know," she said. And the honest uncertainty of it was more disorienting than anything else she'd said.
"Ask me again," she said, "when you understand more."
And then I was back in my body, in the fluorescent hallway, with Saiko's hands on my arms and Genkei staring with an unprocessed look on his face.
I was wearing a crimson cloak and a half broken mask.
There was a kitchen knife in my hand.
I stared at both of these developments.
"Did you just," Saiko said, "absorb the ghost?"