The Suffering Read online

  Because nobody would ever believe that he was a scumbag.

  He’s not who you think he is! I want to tell them, but I know that ship has long since sailed.

  Kendele asks me how I’d known McNeil could be in danger that night at the party. The police have turned to other, more promising leads—rival teams, jealous friends, spiteful ex-girlfriends.

  I shrug because nobody ever believes me, because Okiku is my secret to keep. “I don’t know. I just had a feeling.”

  “That’s a pretty accurate feeling.” She was with me during the time McNeil was supposed to have died, so she isn’t suspicious. But she’s worried.

  I don’t answer. I expect her to recoil, but she doesn’t let go of my hand. “I believe you.”

  “You do?”

  She blushes. “Trish told me everything. You were right. I feel stupid for not seeing it sooner, especially with the way he talked about other girls. I don’t think they’ll be able to do much about it now that he’s dead. Trish doesn’t want to say anything, and I don’t think the other girls will either. But for what it’s worth, I was right about you. I knew there was a reason you went to the party, which was because you suspected Keren. I just…I can’t believe someone I know could do something like that.”

  She didn’t quite hit on the right reason I was there, but it was the closest I could afford to tell her. “Everybody knows a killer,” I say, “even if they don’t know they do.”

  For the rest of the week, Dad watches me carefully, waiting to see if I’m going to break down the way I did at my last school. He insists on bringing me to a therapist, and I let him, mostly because it makes him feel better.

  I’m even cheerful about it. I tell the therapist I’m all right, that I feel bad about McNeil dying, but that I can’t feel guilty about something I had no control over. The therapist appears satisfied but suggests future sessions. I tell Dad I’d rather not, that I don’t want to spend senior year under a microscope. A lifetime of talking to therapists has taught me the right manners to display, so he believes I’m fine, even when I don’t believe that myself.

  Because I don’t feel bad that McNeil’s dead. And that frightens me.

  Okiku sits in on the therapy session, and I know she’s distressed because she doesn’t count anything in the room. She just stands there and stares at me with her pitted eyes, waiting for me to acknowledge her. I don’t.

  For the next day, I ignore her. She says nothing and waits.

  ***

  “How did you know?” Trish asks me. There are dark circles under her eyes, and she looks tired. “About McNeil being…horrible to me? Not even Andy knows.” She’s accosted me in the parking lot en route to my car and refuses to leave until she has answers.

  “I know the signs. I’ve seen them before. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Did you curse him?”

  “What?” I wasn’t expecting this question.

  “Like with that doll. I saw his face. I don’t think anything human could have done that to his face.”

  I’ve underestimated Trish. Of everyone, she’s hit the closest to the truth.

  She surprises me further by drawing close and dropping a kiss on my cheek. “If it really was you,” she says softly, “thank you. I promise I won’t ever tell anyone. I owe you that much.”

  I watch her walk away, my hand pressed nervously against my cheek. I have definitely underestimated Trish.

  I haven’t been checking my email for the last few days, and by the time I finally work up the energy to do so, it’s Friday. The first email I see, the most recent one, is from Saya. For a moment, I am alarmed, wondering if the McNeil news has reached even Japan, but Saya hates technology and thinks the Internet is some kind of worldwide conspiracy. Her letter tells me something even more frightening:

  Tarquin-san, it is Saya. I am asking a friend of mine to type this for me. Kagura once sent me your email and I am thankful I thought to keep it.

  Tarquin-san, Kagura-chan’s missing.

  What?

  I find myself on my feet without knowing I’d stood up, the chair overturned behind me. I stare at my screen in shock as the letter goes on:

  She and some Americans went into Aokigahara last Monday, and no one has seen or heard from them since. I am very worried about her. They have been searching for many days now, and police from America have already been alerted. If you know anything about Kagura or this American film crew, please let us know immediately.

  Underneath is a small postscript, no doubt added by Saya’s friend:

  Please if you can come to help, come quickly. Saya is very frantic.

  No. No, no, no.

  I scroll though my email and see that Kagura sent me a reply a few days before that I have not read. Heart pounding, I click on the link:

  I suppose it would do no harm to show these hunters around. Aitou village has been lost for so long that it is doubtful we will find it even if we spend weeks searching Aokigahara. As strange as it sounds, the more I look through my father’s research, the more I am intrigued by what I learn. He’s been gone for some years, but I almost feel like he is close by, helping me.

  I am sending you a photo of the crew—the autographs you asked for are safely with me, but you must come here to get them!

  I click on the attachment and wait for the photo to finish loading. I asked for the autograph as a joke more than from any real interest in the crew, but Kagura had taken my request literally.

  In the photo, Kagura is standing beside the ghost-hunter crew. There are, I count, seven of them in total, posing for the picture.

  At least, I assume this is the crew, because five of their heads are missing.

  The only ones with theirs intact are one of the ghost hunters and Kagura herself. They look back at me with distorted faces, nearly unrecognizable and terribly contorted, as if their faces had been rendered in soluble paint and left out in the rain. Only Kagura’s haori tells me that it’s her in the picture.

  Other than the lack of heads, nothing is out of place in the photo. Amid the trees, I can make out what is probably a temple, with the curved roofs common in Japan’s traditional architecture. Further in the distance, I can see what I think is Mount Fuji. Otherwise, there’s only foliage.

  I peer closer at the screen, trying to find something, anything, that might give me a clue. “What did you get yourself into, Kagura?” I whisper, acknowledging the hypocrisy of my words. “Where are you? Damn it, couldn’t you at least have waited until we got there to protect you like you’ve always protected us?” I focus my attention on Kagura’s face, trying to envision what her expression might have been before something twisted her features.

  As I do, something moves behind Kagura.

  It opens its eyes and looks at me.

  I leap back, nearly tripping over the fallen chair in my haste.

  Crap, crap, crap, crap.

  “It wanders,” Okiku says quietly. She is standing beside me with her hands folded in front of her and her head bent.

  “What…what is this?”

  “A spirit. It is not happy. Something has happened to Kagura.”

  I swallow. “She’s…they’re not dead, are they?”

  “I do not know. But she lingers close to the spirit world.”

  “I have to find her.” The shadow has retreated behind Kagura. It was a black silhouette with no clear form or shape, but I know instinctively that it’s a woman. And that it has Kagura.

  And that it wants to play.

  I stare hard at the photo for a long time, but the creature does not reappear.

  “If Kagura’s in trouble… I owe Kagura a lot, Ki. I practically ruined her career, forced her to relocate… Obaasan and Amaya died because of me. I need to know what’s going on. If this…thing has her, then the police won’t be much help.”

  “Are you still angry at me?” Okiku whispers.

  I glance back at her. Her face is lowered. I sigh.

  “Okiku.” I abandon the la
ptop for the moment to sit on the bed, patting at the empty space beside me. “Come here.”

  She complies, eyes still downcast. Once she’s within reach, I tilt her chin up and make her look back at me. Her expression gives nothing away, but I can feel the unease rolling inside her. For all her bloodthirsty antipathy, Okiku is just a girl who never really got the chance to be one.

  “When we’re angry at each other, we have to sit down and talk it over. If we don’t, our hurt will stay between us and cause us pain when we least expect it. It’s normal to sometimes be angry at me, in the same way it is normal for me to sometimes be angry at you. But that doesn’t mean I hate you or anything close to it. Do you understand?”

  She doesn’t say anything, but her eyes tell me she does.

  “Good. Now we’re going to talk like I promised we would. I’ll start first, all right?” I take a deep breath. “I was angry at you because you killed that boy after I asked you not to. It’s…it’s not right. You can’t punish someone for something he hasn’t done yet.”

  “He hurt many girls.”

  “That isn’t enough to kill him. Jailed for as long as possible? Yes. But not killed.”

  “I cannot prevent his crimes if I let him live. His desires twist the longer he remains unpunished. He will kill next time.”

  “You know the rules, Okiku. You can’t kill him for thinking about committing a murder. I mean, had you noticed anything odd about him before?”

  “The girls opened something inside him. Violence excited him after that. He would do it again, and he would be worse each time.”

  “People think about murdering people all the time, and they never do.”

  “He wished to kill you.”

  I stop. “Me?”

  “I saw it, after you hit him. He would kill you, even with witnesses. Had he been stopped that night, he would have found you alone someday and beaten you until you could no longer move. I saw this in his head. I refused to wait for him to act on his urges.” Okiku closes her eyes. “I am sorry that I did not listen. But he was going to kill you.”

  I am silent for a few minutes. If Okiku says McNeil was going to kill me, then McNeil was going to kill me. Knowing this makes me feel all the more terrible that I haven’t been nice to her the last couple of days.

  “Okiku, I’m sorry. But you still need to tell me before you act—even when someone wants to kick my ass. I feel bad enough about this whole mess—”

  “But you do not feel bad he is dead.”

  “That’s not the point! It doesn’t matter whether I feel bad about it or not. It isn’t right! That’s why we only do this to murderers that the legal system can’t touch. If you’re going to run around killing people you just don’t like, then what makes you any different from—”

  I blurt out the words before thinking my way through them, and immediately I clamp my mouth shut. But the problem with a being having access to my thoughts is that Okiku is quick to pick up on what I don’t say. Her eyes narrow.

  “I am nothing like her.”

  “I didn’t mean to insinuate that you—”

  “I am nothing like her.” She rises from the bed. Before I can stop her, she disappears into the wall, leaving me half rising from my seat, hand reaching out to where she was moments before.

  I groan. You’ve done it this time, Halloway.

  My laptop chooses this moment to sing, announcing an incoming video call. My relief fades when I realize who is on the other end.

  “What the hell is going on over there?” Callie’s face fills the screen, and I wince. I shouldn’t have been surprised. My cousin knows how Okiku’s victims look afterward. “Tark! Is this Okiku’s doing? Is Okiku there? Whatever possessed you to make such a public—”

  “Before you bust my ass about it, Callie, this was all an accident.” I lower my voice, hastily plugging in my earphones before she becomes too vocal. “He was attacking me, and Okiku…took some steps, okay?”

  “‘Took some steps’ is an understatement. Tell me everything,” Callie commands. “I want to know what the news hasn’t been saying.”

  It doesn’t take long for me to relay the details, and Callie calms down in the interim, her initial fury turning into concern. “Oh, Tark,” she says, sighing.

  “Don’t you ‘Oh, Tark’ me, Callie. What else could I have done?”

  “Not punch that boy, for starters. But given the circumstances, I can’t really blame you for that, can I?” She pauses. “How’s Uncle Doug holding up?”

  “I’m not a suspect or anything, so he’s fine. He took me to a shrink again, but that’s his answer whenever he thinks something’s wrong with me.” I take a deep breath. “Callie, would you think less of me if I said I don’t feel bad at all?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t care that the guy’s dead. Even if I’m to blame for it. Do you think I’ve been doing this so long that I’m starting to be numb to stuff like this?”

  “What you really mean to say is, if Okiku’s starting to rub off on you, right?”

  I nod. Callie always did know me well.

  “I may be suspicious of her, but Okiku did save your life—and mine. I can’t ever repay her for that, so the least I can do is try to understand her. It’s your arrangement that I don’t like. If she didn’t need to drag you along with her each time she went out hunting, I’d be more supportive. I think you and Okiku need to sit down and have a real heart-to-heart.”

  I snort. “Maybe you should be my shrink. But there’s another problem, Callie.”

  “Another one? Are you trying to set some kind of world record?”

  “Kagura’s missing.”

  Silence on her end. Callie stares at me from the screen, chewing on her lower lip as she processes the announcement.

  “She and some people from that Ghost Haunts show were investigating some village near Mount Fuji, and nobody can find them. I want to help search for her. There’s something in those forests, and I know Okiku and I can figure out what it is.”

  “Tark, you’ve barely squeaked out of trouble. Now you’re proposing we go look for a strange village that may or may not exist? At a place we’ve never been to?”

  “What can I do?” I demand. “I can’t just sit here and pretend everything’s fine. I’m not telling Dad. He’d stop me from going. I know you’re looking forward to our hot springs trip, so I understand if you don’t want to get involved.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I want to help find Kagura, brat. But—are you sure? Uncle Doug doesn’t mind us leaving so soon after everything that’s happened?”

  “Actually, Dad thinks you’re a treasure. Why do you think he always asks you to tag along on these trips? He still feels guilty about what happened in Mutsu.” Callie was severely injured two years ago in Aomori from an unexpected earthquake at the shrine we were visiting. At least, that is what we told my father.

  “We don’t know if we can help Kagura from Japan any more than if you stayed in Washington and me in Boston.” Callie knows and is less eager about my habit of acquiring dolls than Kagura was. “But you’re going to do it anyway no matter what, right?”

  “I owe Kagura my life, Callie.”

  She sighs. “I know. And I owe her mine. I want to help too.”

  “Are you grumpy because you’re leaving your boyfriend for a few days? I don’t think Dad’s going to pay for Trevor to come along by the way. You’d have to smuggle him in your suitcase.”

  Callie sticks her tongue out at me. When we finally log off, I lean back against my chair, resuming my study of Kagura’s strange photo. “Time to return the favor, Kagura-chan,” I tell it.

  I reach out one last time to Okiku, but she senses me and shies away, retreating. I sigh and decide not to push it, and I head to bed.

  I’m not sure at what point during the night Okiku comes back, but I wake to find her sitting beside me, watching me with a worried look on her face. It’s an expression I’ve never seen her wear before
.

  “Okiku,” I whisper. This time, she does not move away. My hand finds hers and envelops it tightly.

  Her features are softer now. The gash of her mouth is tempered, the skin of her eyes no longer taut. I squeeze her hand and offer her my apology: “Hey. Wanna go to the creek?”

  ***

  We’re not supposed to be at Rock Creek Park at this time of night. The area is closed to visitors until dawn, and I’d get my ass kicked if I was found loitering. I suspect it’s Okiku’s influence that’s always ensured I never get caught.

  We camp out at our favorite spot—a small clearing with a stream that eventually leads into the Potomac River some miles out. It’s deep enough in the thicket that we’re not visible to roving rangers but not so dense that I’d get lost without my incorporeal companion. I bring a couple of sandwiches in case Ki’s hungry, though she never is.

  We never come here for the picnics anyway. We come here for the fireflies.

  You don’t usually get large swarms of them in DC, but there’s something about Okiku that they love and that brings them out in droves. They never show until we’re settled in, and then they come creeping out in ones and twos—and then soon enough, there are small clouds made up of fireflies.

  I have never seen anything Okiku enjoys more than being the center of these fireflies’ attention. They wind through her hair, braiding into her dark tresses until she’s wearing a crown of stars on her brow. When there’s no one on our list to catch, this is what curbs the whispers in her head, and I’m only too happy to accommodate her.

  She’s always so beautiful this way.

  As always, we don’t need to talk. We sit and watch the fireflies flutter around Okiku, and once again my hands find hers.

  She’s still hurting, I can tell. We aren’t quite okay yet.

  But the thing about me and Okiku is that I know we will be.

  Chapter Seven

  Clues

  “This cannot possibly end well,” Callie says.