Page 89 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

He stood up again, trying to hunt it out. At the right distance, running water – gutters mainly – had the colours of a human voice. He opened the door. There was a faint chattering somewhere outside and if he’d heard it blind it could have been a stream or children talking, but he could see the water from here, or rather, he could see something like a stork walking in it, just through the trees.

When he pulled the door shut, he heard it again, a bloom of gold off to his left. There was a deeper, dark red under it. Piano strings, but only the thrum they made when you blew on them, nothing stronger. He strayed across and put his head against the top panel. It was a fraction stronger there. It wasn’t a tune, but it didn’t quite sound random either. It was snatches of something, too quiet for him to catch and fill in the gaps. He listened for a while before opening the lid. The hinges squeaked.

He didn’t understand what he was seeing at first, but when he did, he jumped and the piano lid banged shut, which juddered the strings and made the ground look like it was casting a rainbow mist as the reverberation hummed up through the floorboards. From inside the piano came upset, disturbed skittering. He waited for it to stop before he opened the lid again.

The strings were covered in moths, a whole colony of them. They were shuffling over the entire sounding board, their wings and legs just heavy enough to sound the strings. He stared down at them and wondered what the hell to do about them.

He took the monk’s lightbulb outside and propped it on the bough that stooped down just outside the window, then pushed open the window, which was uneven and warped on its runners. In the dimness, the moths were only a shifting shimmering over the strings. Not wanting to hurt them, he eased the damper pedal down and then rippled the keys to make them move. They lifted from the strings and hovered, disorientated, and then began to falter out towards the light.

One of them landed on his knuckles and paced about – it was very soft – then bumbled away again. He was no entomologist, but it seemed like too much of a coincidence to meet some winter moths only two months after Mori had asked him to post a package of them to this same forest. But even if they were the same moths, he had no idea what they were supposed to mean.The crawling, slimy thought he’d had after the explosion in Tokyo, and with Grace, crept through his head again. Something had gone wrong. None of this felt like Mori’s plans did when they were going well. There were too many gaps and broken pieces.

On their way out, the last moths avoided a distinct space in the air, like they were hitting the edge of an invisible thing. It was only for a second, but they outlined the shape of a person. Then they were out and coiling around the lamps. He watched the place where the ghost had been, unable to shift the creeping sense that it was watching him back.

He couldn’t sleep. Whenever he was close, there was another flash from the electricity tower, or a clatter outside that might have been a bat or something else, and he jerked awake again. All the while he couldn’t stop feeling like there was someone in the corner.

He pulled the blanket further up his shoulder and curled forward against it. It felt like one of those makeshift nights when something had gone wrong and everyone ended up camping on the floor instead of in their usual places. It had happened once at Filigree Street; they’d given up the bedrooms to Dr Haverly and his youngest boys, because Mrs Haverly was in a difficult labour. Sometimes over the patter of the hail outside it had been possible to hear the midwives talking, urgently, through the chimneys, and so Mori had kept the phonograph going on the hearth to send the music up the chimney shaft to the boys upstairs. It was Christmas, and he’d put on carols, because Mrs Haverly would be all right in the end and so would the baby.

Between them, they had a candle and a game of backgammon, where the lacquer counters winked.

He couldn’t remember who had won or lost, but after the game, Mori had pulled him back to fit them together under the blankets. Thaniel caught his hand and pulled it down, not quite all the way, and pressed his knuckles to ask him to keep it there. He did, and didn’t move except to stroke the edge of his thumb against Thaniel’s last rib, like it was made of something much more difficult to come by than bone. From outside somewhere came the bright clatter of breaking glass. It didn’t even occur to him that their own windows might be in danger. He had fallen asleep listening to the carols and the hail and the bang of the wind hitting the side of the house.

There was still some leftover calm in the memory, enough to rub off and catch a silvering of it, at least. He lay holding it until he could sleep. In the dark, the room strobed every so often as the tower fizzed and flashed.

The next morning, everything outside was invisible in glowing white fog. Wisps of it had come in where he’d left the door a fraction open for air. He lay watching it, only half awake, and thinking distantly that the weight of his hands on his chest was uncomfortable. A new arena of feebleness. He didn’t move, not wanting to get up straightaway into the cold, but he could tell that if he stayed where he was, the background panic under his ribs was only going to get worse and worse. He hadn’t completely relaxed at night since the ghost had caught his shoulders at the legation.

He shifted as an overture to getting up, and froze when he realised that it wasn’t his own hands on his chest.

He couldn’t see it properly without turning his head, but there was something beside him, formed of small moth bodies and shifting wings. He jerked away from them and ran to the door. The second he moved, the form dissolved, but he saw it, just; a man kneeling down. The moths burst away in all directions.

He stood frozen on the doorstep, waiting to see if it would come back.

The moths started to come together by the wall. He leaned back in. Gradually, enough of them gathered to form the person-shape again. It was doing something; writing, or painting. Then it stooped down and seemed to unroll something invisible down the wall, and mimed out nailing it up. The rubber: it was the workman who had put up the insulation.

The ghost looked right at him and pointed urgently at the wall, then dissolved again. The moths edged towards the window.

Very slowly, Thaniel stepped back inside. He had to look around for a bit before he found a hammer, but when he did, the nails in the rubber insulation slid out easily enough. The rubber fell off. Underneath, the wall was bare wood. The writing on it, in white paint, was in big clear Japanese letters.

DO NOT GO BACK TO YORUJI.

He stared at it for a long time. A flutter in his chest buzzed with joy to see some sign from Mori, but it was very small. Mori had gone to a lot of trouble to make him see this. Something horrible must have happened at Yoruji.

Thaniel stared at the block letters. Yoruji was cordoned off, Arinori’s wife had said. No one had heard from Mori for months, except Grace and the scientists, who didn’t know where he was being held. Somehow everyone had assumed Mori was somewhere far away, but Kuroda had set everything up perfectly at Yoruji itself.

Kuroda could have kept Mori there all this time. Or at least until the end of January, when Grace’s telegrams had run out.

He didn’t have to be dead. Anything could have happened; he could have been ill from everything they’d done, or even from something they hadn’t even done yet. He felt the pain before he knocked into things.

And he was too bloody stubborn to ask for help. He was doing what he always did; tidying people out of the way. Thaniel had had enough of being tidied.

Thaniel nailed the rubber back up, packed and locked up, leaned into the office to say goodbye to the director. He wished he could say it to Grace too, but he didn’t want anyone to notice him paying her any more attention than a Ministry clerk would have to. He was feeling as strong as he was ever going to, so he set off back down the mountain with his whole mind churning so much he barely noticed the hanging ghosts on the way.

He couldn’t really believe it when he saw the glow of the little lightbulb shrine. The monk was there too, cheerful as ever. Thaniel thanked him for everything again and then paid him to fetch in a horse ready to go, and then to go up the mountain if he could and tell the white lady there that she could get out as soon as she needed to, even without money, and without papers if she could keep to the back roads. The monk promised he would.

He went back through the burning village, back through the fence, past the crooked tree to fetch his bag, and out to the road, to find out if there were any stagecoaches going up towards Tokyo.

His memory kept replaying every conversation they’d had at Yoruji, how nervous Mori had been, how wary. If he had been watching a future of imprisonment, maybe even his own murder in that godforsaken house slink nearer the whole time, in silence, he had done well to stay standing up.

Thaniel had to punch a tree when imaginings of black rooms and chisels seethed up too far. He should never have left Yoruji. He had to go back.