Chapter Six Lee
Where did you go, James? Lee thought.
It had been four days since Lee left New York, and no one had reported James missing. Somehow, he’d done an exceptionally
good job at hiding the body.
The problem was, Lee still couldn’t remember how he’d done it.
He had brought his only suitcase with him to Japan, and it was definitely not full of body parts, so he couldn’t have stuffed
James into it. He could have shoved him down the garbage chute, but garbagemen tended to notice when entire human corpses
were mixed in with the bags, so unless he’d concealed him somehow, James probably wasn’t there. Maybe it was a Weekend at Bernie’s situation—maybe he’d tucked James back into his bed and no one would notice he was actually a corpse until he started to
rot. Which was... Lee paused to google it... four to ten days after death. It was day four, well within the putrefaction
zone. If that was what Lee had done, the smell would give it away soon.
He tried to put himself back in the panicked mindset that had accidentally triggered brilliance. How would I hide a body right this moment, if I had to? he thought, pushing through the wall of sedatives. There were pigs in town that would probably eat anything, so if Lee could
find a hacksaw, he could dismember a body and discreetly feed it to the pigs, a little bit at a time. But there were no pigs
at NYU, so that couldn’t be the answer.
Or he could throw the body parts down the well and fill it with water, just like Okiku. The body would dissolve beyond recognition
if animals didn’t get to it first. But raccoons could probably find their way down and pull James back up, piece by piece,
and that risked somebody finding a severed foot out in the woods. There were no wells at school, though there were water tanks.
But no—students would notice the smell in the water when they brushed their teeth and tasted decay.
In high school, Lee had been fascinated by perfect crimes. He’d once read about a woman who was abducted on her way to work.
Police had located her car in a nearby neighborhood and even found surveillance tape footage of a stranger parking it, but
because of the low resolution and the slats in the fence in front of the camera, the police couldn’t discern the driver’s
face or even gender, and the killer had never been caught. There was another news story about a boy who’d been found naked
in a chimney in an abandoned house in the woods. It was almost definitely a murder, because there was no reason the boy would
have taken his clothes off and crawled inside on his own, but there were no leads, and the family would never know the truth.
And then, of course, there was Lee’s mother.
Now, somehow, Lee himself had committed a perfect crime, but he couldn’t even remember how.
For the first time, Lee started to consider that he might have gotten away with it.
The more days that spun by, the easier it became for him to believe.
Lee knew that cold cases could always be reopened—he’d read stories about DNA evidence condemning people ten or twenty years down the line—but the more time passed, the less likely it was, and the quieter the fear became.
I’ll wait until he’s reported missing before I relax , Lee thought. Because eventually, James’s family would notice, and there would be an investigation. Police would want to
question Lee, even if they didn’t suspect him at first. But by then, how many students would have used the stairwell, adding
their fingerprints to the banisters? How much security footage around campus would be routinely deleted? If you didn’t act
fast, the truth had a way of glinting away like a fish in a river.
Lee stared up at his ceiling light, feeling half melted from the summer heat. Even though the sun had set, the air felt like
a wet blanket. Lee imagined himself as a rotting corpse decaying into his futon. How relaxing it would be to let the world
devour you, to return to the dirt.
He was so relaxed that, at first, he thought he was dreaming when light bloomed behind his closet door.
Lee sat up, suddenly wide awake.
All the sedatives had worn off. Now, instead of the dreamy haze he normally stumbled through, the world had sharp edges, rendered
in crisp clarity. His mind latched onto details, fed him truths until he was so full he wanted to vomit, but all he could
do was drink in the information before him.
Like the truth above his head, where thin lines scarred the low-hanging panels, though he hadn’t noticed that until now. Hina
said this was a samurai house, and the cuts were definitely thin enough to be katana marks. Lee conjured an image of a samurai
raising a blade above his head, the thunk as it stuck in the ceiling panel, and this time—without the drugs—the image did not dissolve but grew more vivid.
Lee saw the flash of armor against the moonlight, smelled the salt of the man’s sweat.
The average Japanese man was five foot seven, probably shorter in the Edo era when the house was built, so five foot six was a generous estimate.
Lee scanned the katana of the imaginary samurai, did a quick estimation against the man’s height and the height of the ceiling, determined that the katana was somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty inches long, which meant he could decapitate Lee if he swung on his knees instead of his feet.
Lee looked toward the far wall, where he now saw that the sliding door leading to the backyard hung unevenly on its rail,
listing to the left so it didn’t align with the other panels. Someone had thrown it open quickly and carelessly, many times.
Maybe children running out to play? But in a samurai house, it was more likely someone had tried to escape.
Then there was the Sometimes Window.
Under the bright moonlight, Lee could make out the inconsistent coloring of the tatami mats, which grew darker on the side
closer to the hall. That side was across from the kitchen, where the doors were probably left open to let out smoke and cooking
smells—meaning more sunlight had discolored the mats. But with a window facing south like this one, the direct sunlight should
have stained that side of the room as well, yet it was light and smooth. Which meant either the window was new (unlikely because
the wood looked old) or the mats were new (also unlikely because his father had bought the house for cheap since it hadn’t
been touched in at least fifty years, and his father didn’t even like tatami mats so he wouldn’t have replaced them).
Lee held his breath, closed his eyes, and tried to quiet his thoughts as he exhaled.
This was why the sedatives were important.
He had more beside his bed, and he would have taken them at once if it weren’t for the light coming from the closet. He stared
at the light and tried to conjure an explanation for it, but his mind felt like a windmill caught in a storm, spinning and
spinning and spinning, and there was no explanation that made sense.
The light was warm and yellow and flickering—candlelight, not the steadiness of a light bulb.
The shadow was a blur of clothing and long hair, probably female, very still yet breathing steadily.
Her shape had swelled to twice Lee’s height, which meant she was either a giant monster, or was sitting very close to the candle, which had distorted her shape.
Lee leaned to one side, and the shadow shifted toward him.
She can see me , Lee thought.
Strangely, he did not feel fear. That was not something he’d ever felt while in this state. It was like his mind was packed
full of information, trying desperately to make the puzzle pieces lie flat, and there was only room for objective facts. If
anything, Lee felt calmer than usual, now that the world had pulled back its lips and was baring its crooked teeth. Somehow,
everything made more sense this way.
There was a limit, of course, to how much truth he could bear. There would come a point at which all the truths spilled out
of his ears and he would do anything to keep his thoughts quiet.
But not here, not now, not yet.
Lee crawled forward until he was seated in front of the door, his shadow swelling until it covered the woman’s shadow from
the other side, the pools of darkness merging into a formless blob, a monster they had made together. He raised his hand to
the shadow, feeling for cool cement beneath the paper.
But instead, he felt the paper give with no resistance, threatening to tear. There was a sharp intake of breath from the other
side, then slowly, a warm hand pressed against his.
James’s hand closed around Lee’s, pulling him up from the ground.
“You okay?” James said.
Lee blinked and stood up straight, yanked from the whirlpool of his mind.
He was standing in the kitchen of their dorm, a can of Coke overturned on the floor in front of them. Lee had dropped the
can, spraying soda across the off-white wall, and then slipped on the puddle. It was dripping down now, slow and syrupy.
Something about the stain unsettled him.
The central splash was a muddy lagoon, surrounded by tiny sparks of brown tearing down in dark stripes. The stain was growing,
changing, alive.
“Lee?” James said again.
Lee blinked, and there was James, with his kind green eyes, his expression softened as if concerned. But no one was concerned
about Lee Turner, the same way no one was concerned for the ants that they squished into the soles of their shoes.
“Sorry,” Lee said, turning away. He grabbed a couple paper towels and scrubbed the stain away because he knew that was what
he was supposed to do, even though it felt like he’d destroyed something of great importance.
For a moment, Lee could feel the fast pulse of the other person through their palm, separated by only the thin paper barrier.
His mouth went dry as he searched for the right words. What could he possibly say to a spirit conjured into shadows, probably
the ghost of whoever had lived in the house last?
Slowly, he pressed his ear against the paper, listening closely. He heard nothing but slow breaths and the creaking of old
floorboards muffled by tatami mats.
“Hello,” Lee whispered in Japanese.
At once, the breathing stopped. Lee held his breath as well, afraid to disturb the sacred silence.
He felt as if he was standing on a thin rope over a great chasm.
Time did not exist here. The shadow had fallen so silent that if it weren’t for the flickering candlelight, Lee might have thought they’d left.
Then, a wooden scraping sound ripped through the quiet, raw and ugly. It took Lee a moment to place the sound. It sounded
like weathered hinges or rusted knives clanging. The silhouette on the other side shifted, but Lee couldn’t discern what they
were doing in the dark lagoon of shadows. He imagined the woman he’d seen standing in the yard and tried to visualize her
where now he could see only a hazy outline. Her white, unadorned robes. Her eyes like the lightless depths of the sea. Her
dark hair that the wind raked over half her face. The katana at her side, its handle woven with black thread.
The katana at her side...
Lee realized—too late—what the scraping sound had been.
He threw himself away from the door just as a blade stabbed through the paper. It tore through his right sleeve, drawing a
line of bright blood across his forearm. If he hadn’t moved, it would have plunged into his eye and skewered his skull.
He scrambled to his feet as the blade withdrew. Lee looked around for something to use to defend himself, but found nothing
useful.
He shouldn’t have worried. The blade did not strike again, but something heavy scraped across the floor on the other side,
blocking out the light. Tentatively, Lee pressed his hand to the hole the blade had torn in the paper, but felt only smooth
wood.
The shallow wound on his arm began to sting, blood running down to his wrist, scarlet devouring the pale blue of his pajama
shirt. Lee looked down at the cut, unable to hold back his smile.
The pain was bright and real, which meant that the ghost was real too. Here was his crimson proof that he hadn’t lost his
mind, that he was standing at a crossroads between his own world and something more.
Lee grabbed his backpack and dumped out all the Benadryl, the Ativan, the Xanax that he would never be able to replace in Japan.
He opened the pill bottles, tore through the blister packets, dropped them one by one into the toilet like coins tossed into a well, and with each one he wished louder and louder for the truth.
He wanted to speak to the ghost again.
At last, he’d found it—a bridge between life and death. If he could only figure out how and why it was possible, if he could
learn to part the curtains of the universe and cross into different planes at his will, then maybe he could one day find his
mother. He pictured the ghost girl as a rabbit in a cage while he loomed over her, poked her and fed her and studied her day
and night. He would learn from her, and he would find his truth at last.
Lee felt full of electricity, light on his feet as he turned on his laptop, bare feet tapping impatiently against the floor,
dried blood tacky on his skin.
His laptop blinked to life, and he tapped down on the touchpad repeatedly until a browsing tab popped open and he pulled up
Google Translate. His spoken Japanese was passable, thanks to his dad’s girlfriends, but his written Japanese was mediocre
at best. Besides, he needed to write this backward—a mirror image—so he had to be very careful and accurate. He practiced
writing his question in a notebook a few times, holding the words up in the mirror to make sure they displayed correctly.
Then he pulled out a marker, went back to the closet, and wrote his question across the paper door.
How did you die?
He sat back and looked at the nonsensical scribble—backward from his end—and hoped the ghost would see it.
He had many questions, but this was perhaps the most important—what was it about this ghost’s circumstances that allowed her to reach out and touch Lee, while his mother’s lost soul had never been able to find him?
There was nothing more he could do now, so Lee sat heavily on his futon. The drop in adrenaline felt like plunging into a
cold sea. It was still dark, not even a whisper of sun through his window. Lee drifted off to sleep sometime before sunrise
broke, thinking of the woman’s eyes, which could devour the whole universe, eat this house whole, teeth full of wood splinters
and dirt and blood.
He woke to the sunlight on his face from the window that was only sometimes a window, and when he rubbed his eyes and sat
up, the answer to his question was written on the door.