Her eyebrows are different. They’re shaved off, with teardrop-shaped gobs of ink painted on in their place. From what I remember of the books I’ve read, it’s a fashionable court custom called hikimayu. It was a popular practice among noble ladies, though it tapered off by the time the Meiji era rolled around.
The apparition makes an unnerving, ululating sound. I watch in horror as it flings its head back and jerks toward Kagura.
The video chooses that moment to end.
“Ah, damn it!” I frantically play the next one, but I needn’t have worried.
“We found it!” The excitement bubbles in Adams’s voice. Nobody else seems to have noticed the ghostly presence I saw in the last clip, and the sight of Kagura standing unharmed beside Adams helps me breathe easier.
“Oh my God, we actually found it!”
They’d found the village. Hope struggles with the despair growing inside me. Kagura and the crew must be somewhere around this place, but that also means they could have encountered the wandering ghost as well.
“I don’t believe this,” I hear Kagura whisper in Japanese. The others are too jubilant to hear her dismay.
“This is unbelievable,” Stephen Riley is saying. “We have actually found the legendary Aitou village, a place no one has seen in more than a hundred years. This is almost like—like a ghost hunter’s version of El Dorado. This is phenomenal.”
“It has all the atmosphere you’d expect with this creepy fog and rows and rows of abandoned houses,” someone else says. “It’s the perfect place to talk to ghosts.”
“Please stop.” The camera swings back to Kagura. The miko is visibly distressed, and she’s holding a wooden stake in each hand. “Please, please be silent. We are in danger here.”
“In danger? I don’t see anything, Miss Kino. There’s no one left here.”
“It does not matter,” Kagura insists. “Please stay close to me and do as I say. Strange spirits still live here. Do not anger them.”
“Kagura—” Riley begins.
“There is no time, Stephen! We must find the dolls and exorcise the ghosts immediately. My father’s notes say it’s the only way. Do not antagonize these spirits!”
“Miss Kino,” Adams protests, “we make a business out of pissing off ghosts. That’s the risk we take every time we’re out on haunts like this.”
But even as he says the words, a startled cry rises in the air. The camera turns to one of the film crew, who is trembling on the ground.
“Franz is gone!”
“What? But he was just standing—”
“I saw it. I saw her grab him from the mist. She dragged him into it.” The man raises his arm, and the camcorder follows the direction he’s pointing, away from the village. But the woods have disappeared into an unending swirl of fog so thick you could tap-dance across it. “Oh my God, she has Franz!”
“Run! Make for the shrine!” This time, the crew takes heed of the fear in Kagura’s voice. The men scramble for safety, the camera bouncing at dizzying angles.
Then the camera sweeps back to Kagura, who had remained behind to face the ghost inside that mist. A few seconds before the video ends, I see something rising behind Kagura. I pause the film to study it. It’s not the female ghost from the previous video. The spirit is facing away from the camera, so all I can tell is that her hair is longer and her head is set at an unnatural angle. My hopes fall. Had Kagura confronted it?
I view the last video. At first, there’s nothing but black, and I wonder if someone forgot to take off the lens cap. But then a man moves into view. I assume it’s the man who’s been holding the camcorder all this time. His face is pale, and streaks of blood run across his face, though I can’t tell if it’s his own or someone else’s. He’s wheezing, as if he’s having difficulty breathing. I don’t know where he is. The camera seems to have a hard time focusing on his surroundings. The frame looks grayed out and blurred.
“If anyone can…suh-see this, puh-puh-please help,” he gasps, struggling with the words, “don’t let her…don’t let hhhher take me. The shrine is the kkuuuh-key. The shri…”
He stops, eyes wide. Something has slithered up behind him. Pale hands wrap around his face. A dead girl’s face rises on screen before the man loses his grip on the camera, and it crashes to the ground. In the distance, there is an odd, gargling sound.
The camera continues to record. I wait with bated breath, torn between my horror for the man and fear that there is nothing I can do. I know I’m too late to help this man. The next best thing I can do is to avenge him or put a stop to whatever spirit got him.
I regret the thought almost immediately. The girl comes back into view, her face so close to the screen that I reel away from the camera, hitting the wall with the back of my head.
It’s not the same ghost who’d been tailing the crew or the one behind Kagura or even the one I’d seen crawling outside. Much to my shock, the ghost has the same teardrop brows, the same black, distended smile, but it’s a different girl.
“He is not the one,” the ghost whispers into the camera and then reaches out for me.