Original writing.
Nov. 24th, 2007 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stalkerbunnyThis is just the first part of three. Mostly just wanted to store is somewhere, in case something strange happens to my computer, thought of course it would be great to know if someone found it readable. In any case, practice is always good, right?
Also, I think this might be the most boring part. Or at least bleakest. =_=;
Title: While You Wait.
Summary: She knew that the harder you tried to hold on to things, the more certainly they were lost. Too bad she never really learned to act any other way.
Epilogue:
He woke up from a deep sleep, and wandered over the land. He happened on a small river, almost dry, with the barest trickle of water on the bottom. A noise penetrated his drowsy thoughts then, a chanting, uneven drone of human voices. Maybe it was this noise that woke him up, because they were calling his name after all. Silly humans. Usually he would have ignored it, but that day he was feeling a bit bored...so he decided to answer them.
There were screams, and the humans scattered, like a frightened flock of birds. All except one, and he almost missed that one. It was a child, a starved, battered looking thing. It stared at him as he leaned down to see it better, with eyes that held the indifference of someone soon dead.
"What is the matter then?" He asked. The child opened it's mouth, a hole in a white face.
"The...the river."
"Is dying, yes." He replied calmly. The child shook it's head.
"Please, make it run again. Please save us."
"You don't know what you're asking. The river has run it's time, and now it's over. It's no small effort to bring it back."
"Please." The child parroted.
"What will you pay?"
"I..." Two stick thin arms, held out to him. Ah. Such miserly people these were.
"And who are you? The spawn of the village headman, huh? Someone important?"
The child shook it's head again, and swayed a bit.
"No, I'm no-one."
He sighed. Really, he was too soft hearted...
"Fine. But you must pay later."
"With what?" The child asked quizzically.
"With the most important thing you have."
"I have nothing."
"Not now, but when you go back, you'll have saved this village, right? I'm sure if I return in...say, fifty years, you'll have found something precious, for a first payment. For me, fifty years is barely a flicker of an eye."
It did go very fast. He wondered if that once dying child turned out to have any taste after all. He hadn't seen any greed in it, and that gave him hope. This time he took a more discreet shape, and walked through the now prospering village. Just looked for the biggest house, that was all it took.
"Hello." It didn't seem surprised.
"The time has gone fast."
"Indeed...and what have you found?" A frown, at that.
"I have many riches, from far parts of the world..." He waved that all away.
"I don't need any cheap trinkets...have you truly not found anything worthy?
"I am sorry." He smiled, then, a terrible smile.
"You lie."
"Who is that?" A clear voice called from the inside of the house.
Oh, despair really painted a more vibrant image on this face.
Everything was black and white. The trees on the other side of the lake were black against the white sky, and the shadows under them were dark grey. The ice was a milky white under Ume's feet. You could only guess the water was down there, a huge black thing barely visible.
There was a loud crack, and she saw the darker lines webbing away from her feet, but was just staring at them. And then the ice broke.
She only remembered it very faintly, later. She didn't remember how she got the deep gash in her hand, thought it must have been the ice, and she didn't remember how she got up from the water, or the way home. There was just a blank space in her memories. White, like snow.
"There was something there!" She told Shizuka later, after she could talk a bit. "It...it tried to pull at me, but I kicked, I think..." Shizuka looked worried, her eyebrows drew together, and she shook her head quickly.
"Don't let mother hear you! She already thinks...it was probably a fewer dream anyway." And that was when mother came in, so she had to step away from the bed, so mother could take her place and scold Ume.
Of course she had been told not to ever go there, she wasn't quite sure why she had anyway. It was just that she could never be alone at the house. Even if the only people living here were just her mother, grandfather and Shizuka. Maybe it was because the walls were so thin that if someone spoke in one room above a whisper you could hear it anywhere in the house. Shizuka had said that too.
"You'd think I would be used to it already, wouldn't you? I've only lived here all my life. But I guess you don't really notice."
Ume had looked up from the bucket she was filling, after thinking about it. "No, I have."
Shizuka laughed a bit, unbelievingly. "Really? You're always so quiet anyway."
"So, what if I wanted to be loud some time? Thought I don't really..." Shizuka had laughed at her again then, and tapped her arm teasingly.
"Now you don't even make any sense."
It didn't really, Ume supposed, for the house to feel too full when there were too few people living there.
She didn't go to the lake again for a long while, almost a year. Her mother wouldn't even let her leave home, except for school, or if Shizuka was with her, so she had time to inspect the buildings in the yard. In the one that had been some kind of animal shelter, she found an old toolbox, with a few woodcarving tools in it.
She took small pieces of the firewood meant for the oven, and started carving them. She tried to carve a spoon, but the wood was brittle right where the handle was supposed to start, and when she dug too deep with the blunted edge, it broke of. She looked at what was left, turned it here and there. The concave side was rather smooth, since it was done with the bigger chisel, but the other side looked more unfinished, all uneven, like a pine cone, or like scales.
"It's a fish boat." Ume told to herself, and smiled. She made more of them, and when she got better she carved them mouths and eyes and gills. It never occurred to her why she was doing them, until the next autumn, when she realized they were floating lanterns.
By that that time mother wasn't watching her so closely, she seemed to think Ume had learned her lesson, so it was easy to walk towards the eastern peaks, and then double back towards the lake.
As she was walking, the sun sunk behind the trees, and at the lake it was already dark. There was still a narrow pink streak just over the trees, but over it the sky was a deep blue and dotted with stars. The trees around the lake were gnarled, and bent in strange shapes.
"That one looks like a dragon about to dive." Ume told herself, but she wasn't afraid. There had never been any threat here, perhaps a slight feeling of reticence, and that only on the first few times she had been visiting.
She lit the candle ends tacked to her floating lanterns, and leaned over the bank to set them on the water. The water was very still, and she could see her own face in it like in a mirror, lighted sharply by the flame of the lantern. The reflection shivered as the fish boat hit it. After Ume had carefully put the boats floating, she inspected the shoal critically. They floated rather well near the shore. Just as she was kneeling down to push them further, a little gust of wind appeared out of nowhere, and snatched the small lanterns towards the center of the lake. A few of them sunk and blinked out, but a fair bunch kept bobbing on the small waves until they settled again.
"They are very beautiful" a dreamy voice said. Ume froze and then jumped up. "I'm sorry, did I scare you?" Then man said.
"I was just surprised." Ume said stifly. She hesitated a bit, and then bowed very low. "Good evening."
The man tilted his head a bit and smiled, and then bowed back, so that his hair fell over his shoulders. It was quite long. Strange.
"Good evening. May I ask what brings such a beautiful lady to this lowly shore at this time in the evening?" The man spoke strangely, in an old fashioned way. Ume couldn't quite decide if his tone was teasing or sincere.
"I just...just wanted to see how the lanterns would look."
"Quite lovely." Said the man, thought he wasn't looking towards the lake.
The man said that his name was Tomi.
"Is that why you're wearing red?" Ume asked, and Tomi smiled widely and nodded.
He also kept saying that Ume was beautiful.
"I'm not." She said finally. "My sister is, maybe, but I'm really not."
The man made a small distressed sound. "Lady Ume is elegant like a tree in winter, decorated only by the snow."
"That's not funny."
"It is not meant to be, my lady."
Tomi was very difficult to figure out. While his speech pattern was polite and archaic, the things he said were often almost impolite in their forwardness. Thought Ume supposed it was only to be expected. A very strange person, really.
"I've been here for too long, I have to go...excuse me."
Tomi's mouth turned into a frown.
"Until we meet again." He called after her.
When Ume reached the higher ground, the constant wind hit her, blowing against her like a hand trying to push her back. It was like stepping out of a house, with the small trees disappearing above the shelter of the valley.
"I have to go home." Ume mumbled, and it abated a bit, as if reluctant, letting her go forward. On the way it started to rain as well, in a heavy downpour that obscured the big house ahead, making it seem unreal, like the ghost of a house.
It was quiet inside, you could hardly even hear the rain. Ume knew that even if she climbed througt those three empty floors it would still be muffled by the thatched roof.
"I'm home." Ume said. Her grandfather, who was just walking along the hallway, stepped into a room without replying. He had begome more and more withdrawn after Ume's father and brothers died in the war. Not that he hadn't always been quiet, as far back as Ume could remember. Her father had been like that as well, really.
"Where have you been! I was worried...oh, you're wet. Go dry up immediately." Ume nodded in approriate places and tried to look like she was listening to her mother. She had that usual pinched look on her face, the one that made her look years older than she really was.
Shizuka was in their room. She was looking out of a window, lost in thought. She had had that far-away look in her eyes quite often recently. Ume closed her eyes and listened. Footsteps somewhere below. Her grandfather coughing.
"Shizuka." Shizuka jumped a bit and turned to look at her, her eyes big and grey with surprise.
"Oh, I didn't hear you...what is it?"
Had she had something to say? Ume couldn't remember.
"I was thinking about Gorou." Shizuka said after a while.
"I thought you didn't know him that well?"
"Well...no, but I was supposed to get married with him, and he's dead. It's pretty horrible, isn't it?"
"A lot of people are dead." Ume said, in a voice that sounded like it belonged to someone else.
"Yes." Shizuka said sharply. "You can hardly forget that, here." Then her mouth closed, into a tight angry line. It was one of the few times Ume ever saw her look angry.
She and Shizuka always slept in the same room in the winter, since getting that one room warm was difficult enough. A streak of pale light fell from the window across the floor. Shizuka was sleeping with her hand thrown across her eyes, snoring slightly. Ume poked her a few times, until she turned over and quietened. One of her two braids was now lying in the space between them. Shizuka had asked Ume to braid her hair earlier in the evening, so it wouldn't get tangled while she slept.
"It's kind of a bother, don't you think? I've been thinking maybe I should cut it short, like women do in cities..." Shizuka had said. Ume had frowned.
"Mine doesn't even grow that long."
Shizuka had just shrugged at that.
"By the way, Ume." She continued after a while, a mischievious smile tugging at her lips. "Do you happen to have a crush on someone?"
Ume had messed up the braid a bit there, she could still see that part. She wondered where on earth Shizuka had gotten an idea like that anyway...Shizuka was still wheezing in an annoying way. Ume sighed and tried to ignore it.
"She just left." Ume told Tomi, and then closed her mouth tightly, because her voice was shaking.
Tomi was watching her with an unhappy look.
"Didn't even leave a message." Ume continued after she had her voice back in control.
"Will Lady Ume's sister return some day?" Tomi asked.
Ume looked over the lake, not really seeing it. She smiled faintly and mirthlessly and closed her eyes. "No, she won't. They don't return once they leave here." Tomi sighed, and then he said, very quietly.
"I'll always be here, thought." Ume looked at him then.
"I know all the boys my age who live here. And I would know if someone was visiting, this is a small enough place." She said, very calmly.
"Lady Ume?" Ume just shook her head.
"So what are you? A ghost?" She asked.
"I have feet, see?" Tomi said indignantly, and splashed then in the water. Then he looked thoughtful.
"But maybe I'm not really a human...anymore. I was once, maybe. It was a long time ago."
"I thought so..." Ume mumbled. "So what do you really look like?" She continued.
"Are you sure you want to know?" Tomi asked, looking unsure.
"Yes." Ume answered firmly. Tomi sighed and waded into the water. Then he started to change. His skin lost any healthy color it had had, and went from pale to a bluish grey color as his eyes sunk in their sockets. It was like watching someone turn into a corpse. Ume thought she could glimpse horns under the hair on Tomi's forehead.
"Are you afraid now, lady?" Tomi asked, after a long silence. His voice was different as well now, more hoarse and dry. Like sand falling.
"Actually, I still want to know what you really look like." Ume said. There was another long silence, with only some small splashes of water to break it. Then Ume started to laugh. She was quite proud there was merely a slight hysterical edge to it.
In the end none of it really mattered, of course. Shizuka never did come back, so Ume inherited the house. She married a man who her mother and grandfather chose, who liked to fix small things in the house. After Ume got pregnant, he started to talk about moving closer to the village. A month later he was dead.
They told her it had been very quick, and Ume supposed it had to have been, if the car fell into the gorge in the place they said. She didn't ask to see the corpse, and nobody offered.
Her daughter was a beautiful sunny girl, so happy and carefree Ume wondered where she had inherited it. Maybe it had been her father, and that made her regret never really getting to know him. Ume tried to hold on to her daughter, but maybe that just made her run away faster. There was a boy she liked, and...Ume supposed it wasn't an unusual story. Her daughter left when Ume was sleeping, just like Shizuka had.
And then it was just her.
Ume lay in her bed one morning, and listened. A creak of a floorboard somewhere, the creak of a door. If she held her breath she could almost imagine she heard voices as well. Everything was just like it had always been.
"Get up, before you become entirely crazy." She told herself. When she was brushing her hair, Ume thought about going to the lake, for the first time in years. There was no-one waiting for her here now. She looked into the mirror, at her graying hair that had gotten even coarser than in her youth, and at the displeased lines on her face. Then she looked away. It was a stupid idea.
Years later she woke up in the darkness of the early morning because she smelled smoke. She ran around the house, but could find no fire, and even the smell seemed to disappear after a while. Out of breath and with her heart beating wildly, Ume staggered into the kitchen and fumbled for a water glass on the shelf. Her elbow hit something that tumbled of the shelf and shattered on the floor. Ume stared at the colorful shards that shone faintly in the light of her lantern.
It had been the cup her daughter had made in school, as a present for her.
After that...she waited. It was almost refreshing to have something to wait for, in fact, and Ume was quite mad at herself for feeling that way.
Then one winter day, a strange car drove to the yard. "Here it is." Ume thought resignedly.
A woman got out of the car, and a child after her, a small girl, maybe six or seven. Ume stood at the window, and looked as they walked across the yard. The child was walking slowly, almost reluctantly. Her shoulders were hunched sullenly, and her whole bearing reminded Ume of a child who thinks they will be scolded. "So that's my granddaughter. She looks like her father."
Well, that was too harsh, Ume decided. She wasn't quite embittered enough to think like that yet.
The child, Haruko, was very closed of at first. She didn't cry, or smile, or show much of any kind of feelings, except perhaps vague wariness. She did seem to like exploring the house, and hiding in strange places. It was quite eerie to open the closet, and find the girl hunched over the linens, completely quiet and just staring at Ume. Later Haruko started to run around, and for a moment that patter of feet was a relief after the silence. At least until it was accompanied by the sound of several of the finer plates hitting the floor. Then their hide and seek had more motivation. Clearly Haruko had gotten used to the big house fast, if Ume wanted to find a positive side to all this.
She was just too old for this.
She tried ignoring her, finally. It seemed to work, the house was big enough for one child to disappear very easily. Ume left food on the table, and sometimes it disappeared, sometimes it didn't. It was a bit like having a cat again. As long as she didn't think about it...but she was just so tired of it all.
She was sleeping, or maybe somewhere between sleep and awake. Ume had the vague idea someone was trying to wake her up.
"What?" She said finally and sat up, trying to shake of the sleepiness. The room was empty, of course. Ume padded downstairs, to the kitchen.
Ume's late husband had installed an iron oven in the kitchen, which kept it nicely warm in the winter. The hatch was open now, and the Haruko was sitting on the floor in front of it, staring at the flames as thought hypnotized. Her left hand was clutching the right with a burn on it, seemingly forgotten. 'It's the handle, it always gets too hot' Ume's mind pointed out, while she stood frozen at the door. There were pieces of coal on the floor, some of them still glowing faintly, and the floor under them...Ume finally unfroze and hurried to stomp out the small flames. Afterwards she looked around the room, expecting Haruko to have disappeared again, but she had just gotten out of her way, and was sitting next to the wall, her head down. Ume took a deep breath.
"Do you have any idea how dangerous that was!" She yelled. The girl's shoulders jumped a bit, but there was no other reaction. Ume herself realized only after the fact she'd hit the child, when her head recoiled from the slap. Haruko turned her head slowly and turned to stare at Ume, her eyes huge and dark. She took a few deep breaths, and started to cry, sobbing desolately. Ume hovered for a while uncertainly, untill she bent down awkwardly and put her hands around around the little girl. She gripped her immeaditely, her small hands digging into Ume's sides, mumbling something into Ume's shoulder. The child's voice was rusted from disuse, and the words difficult to discern from the sobs, but finally Ume understood the gist of it.
"It wasn't your fault." She said, trying to sound reassuring, and then repeated it, in a sterner voice. The child shook her head, and kept crying. When she finally seemed to calm down a bit, Ume drew her further apart and stared into her eyes. Haruko wiped her nose with her sleeve and looked back, the apprehension back on her face.
"They died in the car crash, right." Ume asked. Haruko's face froze a bit more, and her mouth opened.
"There was a fire." She whispered. Ume looked at her questioningly, until she fidgeted and looked away.
"The car burned..." This in an even quieter voice.
"And how was any of it your fault." Ume asked calmly.
"I don't know. Just, sometimes...sometimes I really hated them." The child seemed distressed, in the way of people who don't expect to be believed. Ume sighed.
"Well, maybe it was your fault." That certainly got her attention. "I don't think it's very likely thought. Your mother and father, as far as I knew them, were quite capable of causing their own death...really, it's a miracle they lived as long as they did. But they wouldn't have died just because a little girl was a bit displeased at them, I'm sure of that." She put as much certainty into her voice as she could. The child listened to her intently, and then scrunched up her face into consideration. She sighed, as if letting go of something, and her head hung down.
"They were arguing...it was so stupid." She said quietly, looking too old for her age suddenly.
"It usually is." Was all Ume could think to say to that.
Also, I think this might be the most boring part. Or at least bleakest. =_=;
Title: While You Wait.
Summary: She knew that the harder you tried to hold on to things, the more certainly they were lost. Too bad she never really learned to act any other way.
Epilogue:
He woke up from a deep sleep, and wandered over the land. He happened on a small river, almost dry, with the barest trickle of water on the bottom. A noise penetrated his drowsy thoughts then, a chanting, uneven drone of human voices. Maybe it was this noise that woke him up, because they were calling his name after all. Silly humans. Usually he would have ignored it, but that day he was feeling a bit bored...so he decided to answer them.
There were screams, and the humans scattered, like a frightened flock of birds. All except one, and he almost missed that one. It was a child, a starved, battered looking thing. It stared at him as he leaned down to see it better, with eyes that held the indifference of someone soon dead.
"What is the matter then?" He asked. The child opened it's mouth, a hole in a white face.
"The...the river."
"Is dying, yes." He replied calmly. The child shook it's head.
"Please, make it run again. Please save us."
"You don't know what you're asking. The river has run it's time, and now it's over. It's no small effort to bring it back."
"Please." The child parroted.
"What will you pay?"
"I..." Two stick thin arms, held out to him. Ah. Such miserly people these were.
"And who are you? The spawn of the village headman, huh? Someone important?"
The child shook it's head again, and swayed a bit.
"No, I'm no-one."
He sighed. Really, he was too soft hearted...
"Fine. But you must pay later."
"With what?" The child asked quizzically.
"With the most important thing you have."
"I have nothing."
"Not now, but when you go back, you'll have saved this village, right? I'm sure if I return in...say, fifty years, you'll have found something precious, for a first payment. For me, fifty years is barely a flicker of an eye."
It did go very fast. He wondered if that once dying child turned out to have any taste after all. He hadn't seen any greed in it, and that gave him hope. This time he took a more discreet shape, and walked through the now prospering village. Just looked for the biggest house, that was all it took.
"Hello." It didn't seem surprised.
"The time has gone fast."
"Indeed...and what have you found?" A frown, at that.
"I have many riches, from far parts of the world..." He waved that all away.
"I don't need any cheap trinkets...have you truly not found anything worthy?
"I am sorry." He smiled, then, a terrible smile.
"You lie."
"Who is that?" A clear voice called from the inside of the house.
Oh, despair really painted a more vibrant image on this face.
Everything was black and white. The trees on the other side of the lake were black against the white sky, and the shadows under them were dark grey. The ice was a milky white under Ume's feet. You could only guess the water was down there, a huge black thing barely visible.
There was a loud crack, and she saw the darker lines webbing away from her feet, but was just staring at them. And then the ice broke.
She only remembered it very faintly, later. She didn't remember how she got the deep gash in her hand, thought it must have been the ice, and she didn't remember how she got up from the water, or the way home. There was just a blank space in her memories. White, like snow.
"There was something there!" She told Shizuka later, after she could talk a bit. "It...it tried to pull at me, but I kicked, I think..." Shizuka looked worried, her eyebrows drew together, and she shook her head quickly.
"Don't let mother hear you! She already thinks...it was probably a fewer dream anyway." And that was when mother came in, so she had to step away from the bed, so mother could take her place and scold Ume.
Of course she had been told not to ever go there, she wasn't quite sure why she had anyway. It was just that she could never be alone at the house. Even if the only people living here were just her mother, grandfather and Shizuka. Maybe it was because the walls were so thin that if someone spoke in one room above a whisper you could hear it anywhere in the house. Shizuka had said that too.
"You'd think I would be used to it already, wouldn't you? I've only lived here all my life. But I guess you don't really notice."
Ume had looked up from the bucket she was filling, after thinking about it. "No, I have."
Shizuka laughed a bit, unbelievingly. "Really? You're always so quiet anyway."
"So, what if I wanted to be loud some time? Thought I don't really..." Shizuka had laughed at her again then, and tapped her arm teasingly.
"Now you don't even make any sense."
It didn't really, Ume supposed, for the house to feel too full when there were too few people living there.
She didn't go to the lake again for a long while, almost a year. Her mother wouldn't even let her leave home, except for school, or if Shizuka was with her, so she had time to inspect the buildings in the yard. In the one that had been some kind of animal shelter, she found an old toolbox, with a few woodcarving tools in it.
She took small pieces of the firewood meant for the oven, and started carving them. She tried to carve a spoon, but the wood was brittle right where the handle was supposed to start, and when she dug too deep with the blunted edge, it broke of. She looked at what was left, turned it here and there. The concave side was rather smooth, since it was done with the bigger chisel, but the other side looked more unfinished, all uneven, like a pine cone, or like scales.
"It's a fish boat." Ume told to herself, and smiled. She made more of them, and when she got better she carved them mouths and eyes and gills. It never occurred to her why she was doing them, until the next autumn, when she realized they were floating lanterns.
By that that time mother wasn't watching her so closely, she seemed to think Ume had learned her lesson, so it was easy to walk towards the eastern peaks, and then double back towards the lake.
As she was walking, the sun sunk behind the trees, and at the lake it was already dark. There was still a narrow pink streak just over the trees, but over it the sky was a deep blue and dotted with stars. The trees around the lake were gnarled, and bent in strange shapes.
"That one looks like a dragon about to dive." Ume told herself, but she wasn't afraid. There had never been any threat here, perhaps a slight feeling of reticence, and that only on the first few times she had been visiting.
She lit the candle ends tacked to her floating lanterns, and leaned over the bank to set them on the water. The water was very still, and she could see her own face in it like in a mirror, lighted sharply by the flame of the lantern. The reflection shivered as the fish boat hit it. After Ume had carefully put the boats floating, she inspected the shoal critically. They floated rather well near the shore. Just as she was kneeling down to push them further, a little gust of wind appeared out of nowhere, and snatched the small lanterns towards the center of the lake. A few of them sunk and blinked out, but a fair bunch kept bobbing on the small waves until they settled again.
"They are very beautiful" a dreamy voice said. Ume froze and then jumped up. "I'm sorry, did I scare you?" Then man said.
"I was just surprised." Ume said stifly. She hesitated a bit, and then bowed very low. "Good evening."
The man tilted his head a bit and smiled, and then bowed back, so that his hair fell over his shoulders. It was quite long. Strange.
"Good evening. May I ask what brings such a beautiful lady to this lowly shore at this time in the evening?" The man spoke strangely, in an old fashioned way. Ume couldn't quite decide if his tone was teasing or sincere.
"I just...just wanted to see how the lanterns would look."
"Quite lovely." Said the man, thought he wasn't looking towards the lake.
The man said that his name was Tomi.
"Is that why you're wearing red?" Ume asked, and Tomi smiled widely and nodded.
He also kept saying that Ume was beautiful.
"I'm not." She said finally. "My sister is, maybe, but I'm really not."
The man made a small distressed sound. "Lady Ume is elegant like a tree in winter, decorated only by the snow."
"That's not funny."
"It is not meant to be, my lady."
Tomi was very difficult to figure out. While his speech pattern was polite and archaic, the things he said were often almost impolite in their forwardness. Thought Ume supposed it was only to be expected. A very strange person, really.
"I've been here for too long, I have to go...excuse me."
Tomi's mouth turned into a frown.
"Until we meet again." He called after her.
When Ume reached the higher ground, the constant wind hit her, blowing against her like a hand trying to push her back. It was like stepping out of a house, with the small trees disappearing above the shelter of the valley.
"I have to go home." Ume mumbled, and it abated a bit, as if reluctant, letting her go forward. On the way it started to rain as well, in a heavy downpour that obscured the big house ahead, making it seem unreal, like the ghost of a house.
It was quiet inside, you could hardly even hear the rain. Ume knew that even if she climbed througt those three empty floors it would still be muffled by the thatched roof.
"I'm home." Ume said. Her grandfather, who was just walking along the hallway, stepped into a room without replying. He had begome more and more withdrawn after Ume's father and brothers died in the war. Not that he hadn't always been quiet, as far back as Ume could remember. Her father had been like that as well, really.
"Where have you been! I was worried...oh, you're wet. Go dry up immediately." Ume nodded in approriate places and tried to look like she was listening to her mother. She had that usual pinched look on her face, the one that made her look years older than she really was.
Shizuka was in their room. She was looking out of a window, lost in thought. She had had that far-away look in her eyes quite often recently. Ume closed her eyes and listened. Footsteps somewhere below. Her grandfather coughing.
"Shizuka." Shizuka jumped a bit and turned to look at her, her eyes big and grey with surprise.
"Oh, I didn't hear you...what is it?"
Had she had something to say? Ume couldn't remember.
"I was thinking about Gorou." Shizuka said after a while.
"I thought you didn't know him that well?"
"Well...no, but I was supposed to get married with him, and he's dead. It's pretty horrible, isn't it?"
"A lot of people are dead." Ume said, in a voice that sounded like it belonged to someone else.
"Yes." Shizuka said sharply. "You can hardly forget that, here." Then her mouth closed, into a tight angry line. It was one of the few times Ume ever saw her look angry.
She and Shizuka always slept in the same room in the winter, since getting that one room warm was difficult enough. A streak of pale light fell from the window across the floor. Shizuka was sleeping with her hand thrown across her eyes, snoring slightly. Ume poked her a few times, until she turned over and quietened. One of her two braids was now lying in the space between them. Shizuka had asked Ume to braid her hair earlier in the evening, so it wouldn't get tangled while she slept.
"It's kind of a bother, don't you think? I've been thinking maybe I should cut it short, like women do in cities..." Shizuka had said. Ume had frowned.
"Mine doesn't even grow that long."
Shizuka had just shrugged at that.
"By the way, Ume." She continued after a while, a mischievious smile tugging at her lips. "Do you happen to have a crush on someone?"
Ume had messed up the braid a bit there, she could still see that part. She wondered where on earth Shizuka had gotten an idea like that anyway...Shizuka was still wheezing in an annoying way. Ume sighed and tried to ignore it.
"She just left." Ume told Tomi, and then closed her mouth tightly, because her voice was shaking.
Tomi was watching her with an unhappy look.
"Didn't even leave a message." Ume continued after she had her voice back in control.
"Will Lady Ume's sister return some day?" Tomi asked.
Ume looked over the lake, not really seeing it. She smiled faintly and mirthlessly and closed her eyes. "No, she won't. They don't return once they leave here." Tomi sighed, and then he said, very quietly.
"I'll always be here, thought." Ume looked at him then.
"I know all the boys my age who live here. And I would know if someone was visiting, this is a small enough place." She said, very calmly.
"Lady Ume?" Ume just shook her head.
"So what are you? A ghost?" She asked.
"I have feet, see?" Tomi said indignantly, and splashed then in the water. Then he looked thoughtful.
"But maybe I'm not really a human...anymore. I was once, maybe. It was a long time ago."
"I thought so..." Ume mumbled. "So what do you really look like?" She continued.
"Are you sure you want to know?" Tomi asked, looking unsure.
"Yes." Ume answered firmly. Tomi sighed and waded into the water. Then he started to change. His skin lost any healthy color it had had, and went from pale to a bluish grey color as his eyes sunk in their sockets. It was like watching someone turn into a corpse. Ume thought she could glimpse horns under the hair on Tomi's forehead.
"Are you afraid now, lady?" Tomi asked, after a long silence. His voice was different as well now, more hoarse and dry. Like sand falling.
"Actually, I still want to know what you really look like." Ume said. There was another long silence, with only some small splashes of water to break it. Then Ume started to laugh. She was quite proud there was merely a slight hysterical edge to it.
In the end none of it really mattered, of course. Shizuka never did come back, so Ume inherited the house. She married a man who her mother and grandfather chose, who liked to fix small things in the house. After Ume got pregnant, he started to talk about moving closer to the village. A month later he was dead.
They told her it had been very quick, and Ume supposed it had to have been, if the car fell into the gorge in the place they said. She didn't ask to see the corpse, and nobody offered.
Her daughter was a beautiful sunny girl, so happy and carefree Ume wondered where she had inherited it. Maybe it had been her father, and that made her regret never really getting to know him. Ume tried to hold on to her daughter, but maybe that just made her run away faster. There was a boy she liked, and...Ume supposed it wasn't an unusual story. Her daughter left when Ume was sleeping, just like Shizuka had.
And then it was just her.
Ume lay in her bed one morning, and listened. A creak of a floorboard somewhere, the creak of a door. If she held her breath she could almost imagine she heard voices as well. Everything was just like it had always been.
"Get up, before you become entirely crazy." She told herself. When she was brushing her hair, Ume thought about going to the lake, for the first time in years. There was no-one waiting for her here now. She looked into the mirror, at her graying hair that had gotten even coarser than in her youth, and at the displeased lines on her face. Then she looked away. It was a stupid idea.
Years later she woke up in the darkness of the early morning because she smelled smoke. She ran around the house, but could find no fire, and even the smell seemed to disappear after a while. Out of breath and with her heart beating wildly, Ume staggered into the kitchen and fumbled for a water glass on the shelf. Her elbow hit something that tumbled of the shelf and shattered on the floor. Ume stared at the colorful shards that shone faintly in the light of her lantern.
It had been the cup her daughter had made in school, as a present for her.
After that...she waited. It was almost refreshing to have something to wait for, in fact, and Ume was quite mad at herself for feeling that way.
Then one winter day, a strange car drove to the yard. "Here it is." Ume thought resignedly.
A woman got out of the car, and a child after her, a small girl, maybe six or seven. Ume stood at the window, and looked as they walked across the yard. The child was walking slowly, almost reluctantly. Her shoulders were hunched sullenly, and her whole bearing reminded Ume of a child who thinks they will be scolded. "So that's my granddaughter. She looks like her father."
Well, that was too harsh, Ume decided. She wasn't quite embittered enough to think like that yet.
The child, Haruko, was very closed of at first. She didn't cry, or smile, or show much of any kind of feelings, except perhaps vague wariness. She did seem to like exploring the house, and hiding in strange places. It was quite eerie to open the closet, and find the girl hunched over the linens, completely quiet and just staring at Ume. Later Haruko started to run around, and for a moment that patter of feet was a relief after the silence. At least until it was accompanied by the sound of several of the finer plates hitting the floor. Then their hide and seek had more motivation. Clearly Haruko had gotten used to the big house fast, if Ume wanted to find a positive side to all this.
She was just too old for this.
She tried ignoring her, finally. It seemed to work, the house was big enough for one child to disappear very easily. Ume left food on the table, and sometimes it disappeared, sometimes it didn't. It was a bit like having a cat again. As long as she didn't think about it...but she was just so tired of it all.
She was sleeping, or maybe somewhere between sleep and awake. Ume had the vague idea someone was trying to wake her up.
"What?" She said finally and sat up, trying to shake of the sleepiness. The room was empty, of course. Ume padded downstairs, to the kitchen.
Ume's late husband had installed an iron oven in the kitchen, which kept it nicely warm in the winter. The hatch was open now, and the Haruko was sitting on the floor in front of it, staring at the flames as thought hypnotized. Her left hand was clutching the right with a burn on it, seemingly forgotten. 'It's the handle, it always gets too hot' Ume's mind pointed out, while she stood frozen at the door. There were pieces of coal on the floor, some of them still glowing faintly, and the floor under them...Ume finally unfroze and hurried to stomp out the small flames. Afterwards she looked around the room, expecting Haruko to have disappeared again, but she had just gotten out of her way, and was sitting next to the wall, her head down. Ume took a deep breath.
"Do you have any idea how dangerous that was!" She yelled. The girl's shoulders jumped a bit, but there was no other reaction. Ume herself realized only after the fact she'd hit the child, when her head recoiled from the slap. Haruko turned her head slowly and turned to stare at Ume, her eyes huge and dark. She took a few deep breaths, and started to cry, sobbing desolately. Ume hovered for a while uncertainly, untill she bent down awkwardly and put her hands around around the little girl. She gripped her immeaditely, her small hands digging into Ume's sides, mumbling something into Ume's shoulder. The child's voice was rusted from disuse, and the words difficult to discern from the sobs, but finally Ume understood the gist of it.
"It wasn't your fault." She said, trying to sound reassuring, and then repeated it, in a sterner voice. The child shook her head, and kept crying. When she finally seemed to calm down a bit, Ume drew her further apart and stared into her eyes. Haruko wiped her nose with her sleeve and looked back, the apprehension back on her face.
"They died in the car crash, right." Ume asked. Haruko's face froze a bit more, and her mouth opened.
"There was a fire." She whispered. Ume looked at her questioningly, until she fidgeted and looked away.
"The car burned..." This in an even quieter voice.
"And how was any of it your fault." Ume asked calmly.
"I don't know. Just, sometimes...sometimes I really hated them." The child seemed distressed, in the way of people who don't expect to be believed. Ume sighed.
"Well, maybe it was your fault." That certainly got her attention. "I don't think it's very likely thought. Your mother and father, as far as I knew them, were quite capable of causing their own death...really, it's a miracle they lived as long as they did. But they wouldn't have died just because a little girl was a bit displeased at them, I'm sure of that." She put as much certainty into her voice as she could. The child listened to her intently, and then scrunched up her face into consideration. She sighed, as if letting go of something, and her head hung down.
"They were arguing...it was so stupid." She said quietly, looking too old for her age suddenly.
"It usually is." Was all Ume could think to say to that.
