Frail Human Heart Read online

  Aiko felt her mouth drop open in horror and disbelief as the vehicle sailed over her and Rachel’s heads and crashed down thirty feet behind them, ploughing into two parked cars in a glittering explosion of glass and shrapnel.

  Panic broke out. Screams and wails filled the air. Doors shot open everywhere and people stampeded away from their vehicles. Aiko whipped her head round to stare at the place where the Jaguar had been.

  A massive form was shimmering into view there, rippling and drifting at the edges as if she was squinting at it through a heat haze. Blocking the road completely, the shape towered above the cars. It had a humanoid body, leathery red skin and the head of a bull. In addition to the two white horns on each side of the skull, a third, black horn sprouted out of the centre of its head above the eyes. A giant potbelly jutted over a ragged loincloth – the only piece of clothing the thing wore. In huge hands that had only three fingers each, it held a spiked iron club the length of two cars.

  The creature threw its head back and let out a wordless animal roar of fury.

  “Oni,” Aiko whispered, awestruck as fairy tales from her childhood came washing into her memory.

  In the next instant, she was plucked from her feet and hefted up over someone’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She choked back a scream, realizing incredulously that her abductor was Rachel, making her earlier threat a reality. As Rachel darted between the parked cars, surging past fleeing drivers and passengers and leaving the monster behind, it no longer seemed like a threat at all. More a rescue.

  “Is it real? Is that thing real? Where did it come from?” Aiko yelled.

  “From Yomi, most probably! But we’re not sticking around to ask. I promised Mio I’d keep you safe, and that’s what I’m going to do!” Rachel yelled back.

  “How did my daughter know that there would be a – an ogre loose on the bloody A10?”

  “There are a lot of things loose in London right now, Mrs Yamato. Bad things. Mio’s working to fix it.”

  “Mio? My Mio?”

  “I promise I’ll tell you everything later, but right now I really need to concentrate, if you don’t mind.”

  Aiko shook her head dazedly. “OK, but … sweetie, please put me down! This can’t be good for your back!”

  Behind them the Oni roared again. Another car flew overhead and crashed down to the right of Aiko and Rachel in a spray of shattering glass, landing upright on its front bumper. It spun like a coin, cartwheeled sideways and slammed onto the roof of a nearby blue hatchback. More glass flew as it flipped over. Aiko watched in slow-motion as the car teetered and began its descent – directly on top of Aiko and Rachel. The black mechanical underbelly of the vehicle sailed towards them like a falling hammer.

  All she could think was, This isn’t how I want to die, I need to see my girl again, I need to see Takashi, I can’t go like this—

  She felt Rachel’s muscles bunch.

  Then they were airborne.

  Aiko stared down while they flew up − effortlessly, impossibly, miraculously − over the place where the wrecked car had just crashed to a halt. She heard its deafening shriek and the sound of rending metal and saw the SUV next to where they’d been standing cave in under the impact.

  They landed lightly on top of a black city cab.

  Aiko let out a confused babbling sound. There was a lot of “how” in it, but it wasn’t really a question because her words seemed to have stuck to her tongue.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs Yamato. I’ve got you.”

  Rachel sprang off the cab roof, landed squarely on both feet and kept running.

  I froze, my fingers tightening around the silk wrappings of my sword’s hilt as I contemplated ignoring Ebisu and drawing the blade.

  Jack swore savagely.

  “Jack? Are you all right?” Hikaru asked anxiously.

  “I’m fine,” she said, voice tight. “I just … really, really hate the dark.”

  “Shh, listen,” my dad said.

  The high-pitched whistling noises were fading away, replaced with a soft rumble remarkably like a cat’s purr. Given my recent experiences with cats, that realization instantly sent a shiver down my spine. But the sword’s energy still wasn’t reacting. It was as if there was no danger.

  A glimmer of brightness danced through the shadows. It was peacock green. I tried to track it with my eyes, but was distracted by another movement, a soft fluttering like a moth’s wing that left a faint trail of fluorescent pink.

  Slowly the lightless space of the sunken cathedral filled with luminous colours. The crashing waterfalls shone pale blue and deep purple. The walls and ceiling were lit with complex patterns of yellow. The wake of the boat glowed vivid green. I could see the others’ faces again.

  And in the air around us there were creatures. Dozens of creatures, with long, slender bodies, delicate little paws, tiny round ears and pointed, clever faces. Their long, fluffy fur shimmered with colours – pink, blue, orange, purple, red, green – that seemed to trail behind their sleek bodies like comets’ tails as they zoomed through the air.

  Jack let out an incredulous huff of breath. “Ferrets?”

  “Kamaitachi.” Hikaru and my father spoke together, in hushed tones.

  “What?” I said.

  “Invisible weasels,” Hikaru said, a sudden grin splitting his face. “Great and little gods, they’re invisible weasels. I thought they were just a story for children!”

  “They’re so … cute,” Jack said uncertainly.

  “Are they going to attack us again?” I asked, still edgy.

  “They didn’t attack us in the first place,” my dad said, a laugh trembling in his voice as he stared at the creatures gambolling through the air. “They’re famed for having claws like knives, and ripping strips off people who annoy them. They just wanted us to get rid of our lights. They live in the dark. We must have hurt their eyes.”

  Jack let out a startled laugh as one of the little animals did a loop the loop around her head, brushing her cheek. She raised her hand tentatively, and the weasel rubbed against it and made a purring chirp before zooming off again.

  “No wonder they dragged the pole away from me,” my father said. “Did I frighten you, little ones? I’m sorry.”

  Two of the weasels closed in on him and began doing barrel rolls round his shoulders, making flirtatious noises. Hikaru had managed to get one to twine around his forearm and was sending it into ecstasies by scratching the back of its neck.

  One of the Kamaitachi circled me, deep blue radiance drifting away from its luxuriant fur like tiny stars. It hovered before my face, its head tilting to one side as it peered curiously at me. Long whiskers tickled my nose, and a laugh bubbled up in my throat. I reached out tentatively to touch one delicate ear. The weasel let out a meep, and I felt the rough lick of its tongue on my fingers.

  Unbidden, the thought sprang into my head: Shinobu, you’d love this.

  For an instant I felt as if he was sitting beside me, as if all I had to do was turn my head to see his smile, hear the sound of his laughter.

  But he wasn’t here.

  He wasn’t waiting for me somewhere, just around the corner. His smile and his laughter were gone, forever. He was gone. Yawning, sickening emptiness swallowed every good feeling and left nothing behind but grief.

  I almost threw up over the side of the boat.

  My hand dropped away from the little creature as if it had burned me. I shut my eyes, trying to force back the nausea churning in the pit of my stomach and the tears that wanted to squeeze out from under my eyelids. My fingers clenched until I could feel my nails digging into the tendons in my palms.

  I can’t afford to break like this. I have to hang on.

  I won’t let go.

  I won’t let go again.

  Opening my eyes, I saw that the little blue weasel who had tried to befriend me was gone. Jack, Hikaru and my dad, engrossed in the wonder of what they were seeing, hadn’t noticed what had happened. Good. Good. Tha
t’s … good.

  I wrapped my smarting hand around the hilt of the katana, flexing my fingers on the silk wrappings as I made myself think about other things. The katana had failed to react to the weasels’ assault on us. Was that because the little animals weren’t really a threat? Or had our entering the dream realm somehow made the katana go dormant? If that was the case, then I couldn’t rely on the sword’s energy to warn me of danger.

  It was just me and my instincts from now on.

  CHAPTER 9

  SOMEBODY FORGOT TO BRING TOTO

  T he current carried us inexorably forward. The Kamaitachi gradually left us, dispersing to fly about their own business with soft farewell chirps. We left the waterfalls of the cathedral behind, and the yellow glow of the walls began to fade. New sounds – echoes and dripping noises – reached my ears. The darkness became total, oppressive.

  I heard Jack’s breathing speed up, and her valiant efforts to control it. “Hey, Hikaru,” she said, voice shaking a little. “I know you’re, like, too young for fox lights, but I don’t suppose you could hit the ceiling with some lightning bolts or something? Just to show us what the place looks like?”

  Hikaru was silent for a long moment. “I’m sorry. I’m just… I can’t control my lightning well enough to risk it. If I misjudged, I could bring the roof down, or electrocute you. I’m really sorry.”

  There was real distress in his voice. My dad shifted uncomfortably.

  “It’s OK,” Jack said. “Don’t – I mean, don’t stress out about it.”

  “I wish I could—” Hikaru cut himself off with an angry growl.

  “Listen, seriously,” Jack said more forcefully. “I shouldn’t have asked. This right here is amazing therapy for me. By the time we get home I probably won’t even care about the dark any more.”

  There was a gentle rustle of fabric. I pictured one of them – who knew which one? – slowly reaching out to the other. Jack’s breathing began to even out.

  A moment later, Hikaru said, “There’s some light above us now. It’s coming through a crack in the roof.”

  “Actually, I can kind of see it,” Jack said, sounding relieved.

  Shortly, I could make out the difference between the rough, dark cavern walls and the dark water lapping around us.

  “There’s an opening ahead,” Hikaru reported.

  The boat bumped into something, jolting hard enough to send us all sliding forward. Worrying grinding noises came from the hull as we scraped and dragged along the bottom. Finally we came to a halt.

  “Dry land?” Jack asked hopefully.

  “There’s a ledge – see?” Hikaru said. “That rock outcropping just above us. And above that there’s a crevice with light coming through it. I think that’s our way out. If we’re careful, we should all be able to climb up through it.”

  “And if we’re not careful, we get a spontaneous swimming lesson,” my dad said.

  “Just FYI,” Jack put in matter-of-factly, “the hideous, lingering revenge is still on the table. So nobody had better bump me at the wrong moment.”

  With a lot of nervous shifting around and some panicky swearing, we all managed to get out of the punt and onto the rock ledge. The crevice that Hikaru had spotted was very bright and very obvious once we were up there. It was also extremely narrow and shaped like a sickle. There was enough space for us to slide through in single file, but once inside, it was impossible to fully straighten your legs or back. The only way to move was to lean your shoulder blades into the curve of one wall, press your hands to the other and scuttle sideways like a crab.

  “You think when Ebisu said ‘eventually’ we’d be guided to the waki-doodah, he actually meant any time this century?” Jack asked. “It feels like we’ve been here hours and there’s still no sign of it.”

  “How long have we been here?” Hikaru asked.

  “An hour? Maybe an hour and a half,” I said, assuming Jack was exaggerating.

  “No way!” Jack’s voice was incredulous. “It’s been nearly a full day!”

  “Hmm. Is anyone hungry? Or thirsty? Does anyone need to pee?” Dad asked.

  “Er … no, now that you mention it,” said Hikaru.

  “This makes sense, I suppose. There’s generally no sense of the passing of real time while you’re asleep,” my father said, sounding concerned. “We have no way to tell how long we’ve been here – and no way to know how much time has gone by in the mortal realm, either.”

  “Everyone just concentrate on what we’re here to find,” I said firmly. “It’s a wakizashi blade. A Japanese short sword, usually twinned with a katana. It had a plain black-lacquer saya that was kind of battered and scraped up and rubbed black silk wrappings on the hilt.”

  “So – you got a pretty good look at it,” Jack said hesitantly. “You know, you’ve never really told us what happened…”

  Instantly my brain nailed me with a painfully vivid image of Shinobu’s face as he gasped for breath on Mr Leech’s flowery carpet, the feel of his hand clasped in mine and the smell of blood, his blood, smeared on my palm.

  I was trying to save him. Didn’t work.

  I blinked a few times, incredulous when I realized that my eyes were trying to well up again. I scrubbed my forearm roughly over my face.

  “Midget Gem?” my dad said softly. His hand slid on the rock, as if to touch me. I swiftly pulled away.

  “I’m…” Don’t say fine. “OK. I just tripped.” I shuffled sideways again, trying to put a little distance between me and the others.

  I picked up the pace as more light flooded the narrow gap in the rock. The next shuffle carried me out into a space where I could finally straighten up. I felt weird twanging sensations in my lower back and neck as I stretched vigorously and looked around.

  We were in a roughly oval-shaped cave. It was about the size of a tennis court, with straight walls that soared away overhead to some great distance I couldn’t measure with my eyes. Irregular shafts of bluish light criss-crossed the space above me, revealing something extraordinary about the walls: they were painted.

  I moved closer to stare at the strange markings that covered the rock. The artists had used the natural swirling formations in the stone to suggest landscapes – hills, mountains and valleys, plains, rivers and forests. Animals cavorted across the painted world, sketched with simple, powerful strokes that somehow suggested more to my eyes than careful details could have. Elegant deer, lumbering bears and shaggy wolves seemed almost to move, their white-dappled, red-brown and silvery-grey pelts rippling under an imaginary sun. In contrast, the humans in the pictures were spiky and black – determinedly two-dimensional. Small settlements were sketched out with steeply pitched roofs and faint wisps of smoke. The style of the paintings was primitive but beautiful, like prehistoric art I’d seen in school textbooks. But there was something hauntingly familiar about the scenes depicted, about the shape of the mountains, the dark shadow of the forests and the curve of the rivers. I turned slowly, watching the progression of the images as they travelled across the curved walls.

  Here a tall, dark figure marked with golden swirls fled into the forest, pursued by deformed, twisted creatures that bristled with fangs and had too many limbs. The dark figure carried something – a shining green light. Further along the wall the same figure emerged from the woods and came to a small group of houses nestled between the woods and the mountains. In the next image, he and the green light he carried vanished into the little village.

  A swirling catlike creature slunk out of the trees and attacked the village under the light of a full moon.

  Then the dark figure reappeared, this time pointing towards the forest – a forest that now glowed red and gold with the colours of autumn. Another, smaller figure – a boy – went into the woods. He fought the cat-creature there, with a blade in each hand. The cat-creature transformed into a blur of grey swirls and became a lump of rock, and the boy fell.

  The black-and-gold figure loomed over the fallen bo
y. Green light swirled in his hands, and gold and white energy seemed to boil all around them. In the next painting, both the boy and the light were gone, and the dark figure seemed to be exulting as he held something new – a shining, silver crescent. A blade. A katana. The image that followed showed the dark figure handing the silver blade to a tiny, faintly feminine person, even smaller than the boy.

  But that wasn’t the end. The next painting showed a fourth figure, as tall as the black-and-gold one had been, but coloured a soft bluish green. Holding a long staff in one hand, the figure walked into the red forest. Then that same figure was standing in the clearing where the cat-creature and the boy had fought, and fallen. In its free hand was another object. Something black, curved like a blade. A wakizashi.

  The tall blue-green figure straightened, its head tilting back and its mouth gaping wide. It swallowed the wakizashi, and the blade disappeared.

  “This place is amazing,” Jack said. I jumped violently and turned my head to see her spinning in slow circles as she tried to take everything in. “God, I wish I’d brought my phone so I could take pictures.”

  “I wish we’d brought that rope from the dock.” My father’s voice was grim. “Because this seems to be the only way out.”

  He wasn’t staring at the walls, but at the floor in the centre of the cave, where there was a large, round hole in the ground. I moved closer to examine it. Its walls were smooth pale blue rock, with a series of metal rungs set into one side. There was no way to tell where the ladder led.

  “Can you smell or hear anything?” I asked Hikaru.

  Hikaru crouched and sniffed a few times, closing his eyes. “Well, this is boring, but it just smells of more water. And maybe … fish? It’s pretty quiet down there.”

  I chewed on my lip, then tucked my hair back behind my ears. “OK, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll climb down first—”

  “Why you?” my dad interrupted.

  “Because I’m the strongest one here – if there’s a problem with the rungs, I can probably get myself back out. And if there’s trouble at the bottom, I’ve got the katana. For emergencies only,” I added, when he opened his mouth again. “I’ll check it out, and if everything’s safe, you can follow me.”