Thomas Randall - Spirits of the Noh

But even as the words entered her mind, she dismissed them. Maybe it really had been her imagination, but she couldn’t blame herself for being afraid of the nighttime.

Hachiro waved and started across the grass. Kara hurried to meet him.

She’d gotten close enough to see the smile on his face and the gleam of his eyes, and then a scream split the night, echoing, drifting toward them on the wind.

Kara and Hachiro both spun toward the sound. It came from the school, but not the building itself. As the echoes died, Kara narrowed her eyes, pinpointing the origins of the scream. It had come from the darkness on the west side of the building, near the school’s driveway and parking lot.

“Come on!” Unslinging her guitar, Kara set it on the ground and took off at a sprint.

Hachiro grabbed her arm. “Wait! We should get someone!”

“There isn’t time,” Kara said.

The voice cried out again-a girl’s voice-but now instead of a scream there were words, a torrent of Japanese swears, and pleas to leave her alone. Blinking in shock, Kara realized that she knew that voice.

“Miho,” she whispered.

This time Hachiro didn’t try to stop her. They ran together across the field, barreling along a track worn into the grass by students walking back and forth. Hachiro took the lead, his legs much longer than hers, but Kara had speed and managed not to drop behind much farther.

Thoughts of missing students and whispered curses crowded her brain and she pushed them aside, focusing on Miho-smiling Miho, hair pulled back on one side, rolling her eyes heavenward whenever Sakura or Kara behaved inappropriately. Keeping that image in her mind, Kara pushed herself harder, breath coming fast, legs pumping under her.

Miho came whipping around the corner, arms outflung as she changed direction, angling toward the dorm. She slammed into Hachiro and the two of them fell in a tangle of limbs. Miho cried out in a mixture of surprise, pain, and fear, and as Hachiro groaned and tried to extricate himself from her, she began to fight him, trying to get free, perhaps to keep running. Her eyes were wide and she kept glancing back the way she’d come, into the darkness alongside the school.

“Stop,” Kara said, dropping to her knees beside them and reaching for the other girl’s hands. “Miho, it’s okay. It’s us. It’s-”

Her words froze in her throat. She’d looked into those shadows as well, the darkness from which Miho had just emerged, and she’d seen something there. For just an instant, Kara’s breath had caught, and she’d seen a silhouette in the shadows, swaying as though blown by the breeze, or like a snake summoned from its basket by a flute in some old cartoon. Had it been a woman? She thought so.

Yet now it was gone, the silhouette vanishing, swallowed by the deeper shadows.

“Kara?”

She looked down. Hachiro had managed to free himself from Miho’s flailing arms and now the girl sat beside him, eyes frantic, gazing from Kara to the darkness and back again.

A hiss came from the darkness, and then the soft shush of something moving along the ground. The small hairs on the back of Kara’s neck stood up and gooseflesh pimpled her skin.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

And then the sound was gone, and the shadows were only shadows.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” Miho demanded. “I heard it on the grass, coming after me. I knew it was there. I only caught a glimpse, but…”

She shuddered.

Hachiro stood and reached a hand down for Miho. Kara only spared a glance at them, focusing instead on the shadows.

“I saw… something. Kind of felt it, too,” Kara replied. She thought of her fear from a few minutes earlier, the sense that someone had been watching her, but now she thought that had truly only been her nerves. What had just been here, after Miho, had weight and presence. It felt… the only word she could think of was sinister. An old-fashioned sort of word, but it fit.

“It was chasing you?” Hachiro asked.

Miho nodded. “I was coming from Kara’s house.”

As she offered this, her gaze darkened with some unpleasant memory, and Kara thought she saw anger there.

“Why were you at my house?” Kara asked.

“Later,” Miho replied. “Right now-”

“We have to get inside,” Hachiro said, as the three of them started back toward the dormitory, glancing repeatedly over their shoulders toward the place where Kara had seen that ghostly silhouette.

“I’ve got to get home,” Kara said, suddenly realizing her predicament. To get back to her house, she’d have to pass through the very same shadows through which someone or something had just chased Miho.

“You could call your father,” Hachiro said. “Ask him to come get you.”

“And when he asks why?” Kara wondered.

“You tell him. Or you lie,” Miho said. “But you can’t walk home through that alone, and I’m not going back.”

Hachiro held up a hand. “I’ll walk you,” he said, looking at Kara with a gentle half smile. “Let’s just get Miho safely into the dorm, and-”

“No,” Kara said. “Then you’d have to walk back alone. And besides, it’s got to be close to curfew now as it is. I’ll call him. I don’t feel like asking him for anything right now, but he’ll come get me.”

“What will you say?” Miho asked.

“I’ll say maybe he was right, that I shouldn’t have gone out alone after dark, that I’m scared. The truth, basically. Only without monsters.”

Miho hugged herself, glancing back at the darkness as the three of them walked across the field toward the dorm. Kara and Hachiro kept Miho between them. When they reached the place where Kara had put down her guitar, she picked it up and slung it over her shoulder.

“When you’re ready, we should talk about it,” Kara said.

“Not yet.” Miho shuddered. “Wait until we’re inside. I want lights and locked doors. I want to hide under my covers.”

Kara understood, and fought the urge to try to comfort Miho with humor. Reminding her that her sheet and blanket weren’t much protection wouldn’t be funny right now. If ever.

“I thought I saw a girl,” Hachiro said, whispering as he pulled open the door of the dormitory and stood back to let them pass. “Or a woman.”

Miho shook her head. “That wasn’t a woman. No matter what it looked like.”

K ara’s father picked her up in front of the dorm, shooting a stern look at Hachiro as the boy escorted her to the car. It was a total Dad look, and Kara wanted to shout at her father. What, did he think Hachiro had caused the fight they’d had earlier? That he had done something to upset her enough that she didn’t want to walk home? Stupid. She knew that all guys could be stupid sometimes, that they lost the ability to interpret what their eyes were showing them, but it still frustrated her hugely when her father turned out to be one of those men.

Yeah, Dad, she wanted to say, Hachiro is the problem.

Sigh.

Hachiro carried her guitar, put it into the backseat, and headed back into the dorm with about three minutes to spare before curfew. Kara sat in silence beside her father as he turned the car around and drove the almost absurdly short distance back to their house. She had figured he would assume her silence stemmed from their fight, and Kara let him go on thinking that. She wasn’t ready to explain.

“Look,” he said, reverting to English. That was getting to be a habit now, whenever things between them grew tense. “I should have talked to you more about what’s going on between Yuuka… I mean, Aritomo-sensei… and me. But, honey, you can’t pretend you didn’t see this coming. You were the only one who did. I wasn’t looking, and you know that. You know it. And you seemed to want something to happen with us-”