Thomas Randall - The Waking

Miho nodded, forlorn. “In three days. My father can’t get away from work until then.”

Sadness and a bit of disgust tinged her voice. Other students had parents who were showing up tonight, and many more would be gone tomorrow. But with three students dead, at least one of them murdered, her parents couldn’t make the trip for three days.

“Yeah, but they’re coming,” Kara said.

Miho glanced up in surprise. “You want me to go?”

“No way. I’m terrified. I want you here with me. But I’m happy that your parents are coming. What about Sakura’s parents?”

Miho gave a slow shake of her head. “Out of the country.

Sakura said the school hasn’t even been able to reach them.”

Kara sighed. “They’re disgusting. Don’t they care at all?”

“Maybe they don’t.”

The ugliness of the statement gave both girls pause, but then Kara sighed and flopped down on the bed beside Miho.

“I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Me too. It’s strange to be in a teacher’s house, though.”

“When you’re here, he’s not a teacher, he’s my father. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Kara propped herself up on one elbow. “Well, we can’t talk about this stuff all night. We need distractions. Why don’t you let me fix your hair?”

Miho looked horrified. “Fix? What’s wrong with my hair?”

“No, it’s just an expression. Let me do something different with it. Just for fun. And after dinner, we can watch a movie. Something with explosions. Always a good distraction.”

Miho touched her hair and gave her a doubtful look.

Kara got up and grabbed her hand. “Trust me.”

A sound sweeps into Kara’s bedroom on the chilly air, a tinkling noise like wind chimes, but there are no wind chimes hanging outside the little house.

The chimes become cries, and at first she thinks it is a baby, but then she knows the sound is adult. Sobs of grief, carried on the breeze, slipping through the gap between window and frame.

Her eyes flutter open. She shivers, so cold, and for a moment she only wants to burrow deeper under the covers, but the cries grow more plaintive, tugging at her heart.

Kara climbs out of bed, listing like a drunken sailor, feeling as though the thinnest sheet separates her from total wakefulness. She staggers to the window and peers out. The moon is limned with an icy white corona, as though it has frozen over. Its gleam illuminates a lonely figure, naked, seated on the ground with her legs drawn up to her chest, hugging her knees.

She knows that figure. Knows the knife-edge cut of her hair.

Sakura.

Kara blinks. It feels like a dream, and yet her room is her room, just the same as always. In a dream, she knows, you’re not supposed to be able to see your hands. But there’s another kind… lucid dreaming, where you can control the outcome. If she can see her hands, either she’s not really dreaming, or it’s a lucid dream, and she can change things. She can be in control.

She tries to look down, but her body will not obey her mind.

She leans her forehead against the glass, squinting to get a better look out there, and the glass is cold and damp with condensation and solid against her skin. So real.

Sakura… if that is Sakura… weeps outside her window. Kara blinks. The little house where the sweet old people live is not there. Instead, her view is of the slope leading down to the bay. She can see the ancient prayer shrine and the modern shrine of anguish, the one created in Akane’s memory. The place where she died.

Sakura rocks back and forth, hugging her knees against her chest. Is she cold?

Go out there, Kara tells herself. Hold her. Comfort her.

But fear skitters down her spine and her body flinches backward. She needs to pee. Needs to pee and then get back to bed. Needs to turn away from the window.

She knows that hair, though, and she knows it is Sakura out there on the bay shore, crying-there is something very wrong.

Sakura’s back is to the window. And though Kara tries hard to will the girl to turn toward her, to give her a glimpse so she can know it really is Sakura, the girl does not turn.

The cries grow louder. Guilt squeezes Kara’s heart. But fear closes her throat, and slowly, she begins to turn her head away.

She turns from the window, taking shallow breaths. Kara closes her eyes and presses the heels of her hands against them. When she opens them again, she is staring at her bed.

Only then does she remember, in the shifting reality of dreams, that Miho is in her bed. The girl lays there, just at the edge of the bed, not wanting to take up more space than she requires. Her back is to Kara, and that gives Kara pause.

Another back. Another face she cannot see.

But she smiles, forcing the serpent of fright that twists in her gut to uncoil. For a moment, Miho’s hair was straight, silken black. But now Kara blinks and sees the girl’s hair is done in a thick braid, and laced through the braid is a bright red ribbon. Kara had spent over an hour working on it, and Miho had laughed and posed like a model in front of the mirror.

Miho.

The room feels fluid… liquid… and Kara wades through it, the edges of her perception melting as she climbs onto the bed.

“Miho,” she says. Or thinks. Loudly.

She kneels on the bed and reaches for the girl.

Miho lolls toward her, tipping toward the weight Kara has added to the mattress like a corpse disturbed. Her head tilts, turns-

She has no face.

Kara jerks away, stumbles, and bangs her knee, and for a moment her vision clears. But then she glances up and sees the no-face girl, and in her bedroom there comes a soft, chuffing, insinuating laughter, like two girls sharing secrets, sweet and innocent and yet cruel all at the same time. And Kara opens her mouth to scream-

Only nothing comes out, and she knows why. She’s been here before. Doesn’t even have to reach up to feel the smooth skin covering the place her mouth ought to be. She has no mouth, no face, no scream. No voice.

Her heart races, searing its own scream into her. Her chest burns as she tries to find air.

She can only stare at the no-face girl, whose hair is braided with a red ribbon the way Miho’s should be, and she wants to scream more than she has ever wanted anything in her life. Her whole body tenses, heaves, tries to scream, and her eyes burn with tears of frustration and terror.

In the moonlit shadows of her bedroom, she hears a cat begin to purr.

Kara runs, shaking, out into the short corridor.

The cats are black and white, ginger and gray, fat and starved. They sit on tables, on chairs, on tatami mats. One sits so still beside a lamp that it looks carved from wood. She wants her father, wants to go into his room and wake him, but three of them sit, barring his door.

As one, they follow her with their eyes as Kara weaves through the living room.

As one, they hiss.

As one, they begin to follow, stalking her.

Kara backs up to the front door, reaches behind her and finds the knob, fumbles it open, and then she is running.

Outside, the bay is gone. Her street has returned. The lights are off in the sweet old couple’s home, and for a moment she wonders if they are dead.

On the sidewalk, the naked girl moans and sobs, her face still turned away. Kara’s stomach churns. She moves to one side, takes three steps closer. Moves the other direction, trying to get a look at the girl’s face, but cannot. The air seems to shift around her, obscuring her features, turning her at the last second, always only the back of her head.

The cats hiss, and again she hears the secret laughter of faceless girls, and she turns and sees that she’s left the door to her house open. Figures move inside, and at first she thinks they are cats, but she blinks and they are dark silhouettes, tall figures with long, black hair, faces lost in darkness.