Page 30 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Someone had just recently begun to use it as a holy tree again. There were six or seven new cards on bright ribbons tied to the lowest branch. A little wind clocked them together. It sounded ecclesiastical, like church bells did, or footsteps alone on a stone floor. There was nothing else he could do for Hotaru, so he took a new card from the box someone had left out and looked at the hanging ones.

So that Midori’s headaches get better before the wedding

So that I stop seeing the ghosts

So that the baroness’s play goes well

So that the ghosts go away

So that the ghosts go away.

All of them were in different handwriting. He took the pen tied on a string to the tree and filled in a spare card, wishing Hotaru well, and flicked a coin into the shallow pool. A good few sen coins already sparkled under the lilies.

He jumped when something shrieked at him, then laughed at himself. It was only an owl. There was a mother and two half-grown chicks, all lined up in the roots of the pine tree. One of them was pecking at a dead crow. Other birds littered the grass; there was another glass window just above. One of the chicks came to investigate his bootlaces.

‘Hey! Get out!’ A girl with a broom had appeared from the side door. ‘Go on, go!’

The owls flapped away, the little ones leaving behind a few of their last downy baby feathers.

‘They weren’t doing any harm,’ he protested. ‘They just wanted the birds.’

She looked uneasily after them. ‘Owls are bad,’ she said. ‘You understand? Something bad will happen if there are too many together, they steal your luck. They shouldn’t come near a holy tree. We’re having a hell of a time keeping them away, this whole place is infested with them. Always is when the master comes home.’

He paused. ‘I didn’t mean to spy, but I saw the cards. Did you write one of those about the ghosts?’

She nodded. ‘There’s an evil spirit in the well, a woman.’

Thaniel tried not to look openly unconvinced. Practically every Japanese castle and mansion he’d ever read about had some sort of story about a woman in a well. Medieval lords had seemed to think that that was where women generally belonged. ‘Was there a real lady who died in the well, then?’She looked blank. ‘You don’t know about Countess Kuroda?’

‘Oh,’ he said, not sure why he was surprised.

The girl pointed through to another section of the garden. ‘Go and see,’ she said.

The well was just beyond some gingko trees. It had been sunk deep, but there must have been some seismic change since the building of it. If the water had ever been clean, it wasn’t now. It had left a thick, vivid yellow sulphur-salt around the well walls. The water at the bottom was boiling, pouring more steam upward. It was impossible to see through, and even if you could have, it would have boiled all the flesh off a corpse before anyone could get down to take it out. It must have been forty feet down, but he could hear the hiss and roar of the water. The heat was uncomfortable, even leaning against the well lip.

‘I didn’t know Countess Kuroda died here,’ he said at last.

The girl had come too. ‘Well, no one was surprised,’ she said. ‘You know how to write down Yoruji?’

‘Sorry?’ asked Thaniel, confused. ‘Er – yes. Evening Temple, doesn’t it mean?’

‘They write it like that now to posh it up. It never used to be. Yoru is tomb.’

Disconcerted, he went back to the graveyard to bury the rest of the birds, so that Hotaru wouldn’t be in trouble. Ghosts; like at the legation. Maybe this was just a haunted country. The quicklime puffed into odd shapes as he worked. When he finished, he stuck the spade in the disturbed soil and straightened, feeling better for having done something useful, though he was much, much more tired from it than he ought to have been. Brushing off his hands, which were stiff right in the bones and crackly when he flexed them, he drifted through the nearest graves to see if there was anyone famous here.

There was a tall, stone shrine gate to mark the boundary. It was old; there was moss around the base, and a wind-eroded fox carving. He couldn’t tell what it meant. Beyond it, the graves were set far closer together than they would have been in the West. Some of them were Christian. Others were simple columns with vertical text, scattered with the curving skeletons of old incense sticks. The moss clung to everything, and so did delicate spiders. With the constant earthquakes, some of the older stones had listed or fallen, and in turn the moss anchored them to the loamy grass.

He stopped by one, because worked into the headstone was a sort of periscope pipe, and at the top of the pipe, a bell. People were so afraid of being buried alive that they had a bell pull put round their fingertip in the coffin. It must have been quite a fashion, because a lot of the graves had bells. On a couple of them, the bells had plainly been added a long time after the grave had been laid. Some of the little bell towers were wooden, brand new, even on graves from last century. They smelled fresh. It must have been some legal thing they had to do. He had no idea if people here believed in resurrection. Mori talked about past lives sometimes, but only in the way Thaniel talked about Hell – not with any real feeling.

One of the graves had a kind of scope with a shutter at the top, so you could see down into the coffin. He opened the shutter. Bounced back by two mirrors, gone cloudy now, was the image of someone’s small, inoffensive skull, chin tucked down. It was oddly pleasing.

From away at the far end of the graveyard, there came the soft, prism-coloured jingling of a single bell. He looked around to find it and frowned. She had changed her clothes, and without all the finery she was nearly unrecognisable in plain things, but the woman kneeling by the oldest graves was Takiko Pepperharrow. She was tying up a new bell. On her left, she had a whole basket of them still to go. They sang merrily when she picked them up and moved them to the next grave.

Gripped by the need to not talk to her again, he turned away.

FOURTEEN

By the time dinner was served, Thaniel was so tired he felt delirious, but Mori promised the food would be worth it. It was a real effort at first, but as he, Mori, and Six walked through the peculiar house, hearing other people coming down from other obscure staircases, the men still fizzy from the hunt and the women talking about the weather on the mountain, he woke up more.