And it was then, all at once, with a slow grinding screech, that the gap between the cars began to widen, the distance to open out, and she could see the tracks racing past below, and the back half of the train was sparking and slowing and pulling away from them.
Alice crouched on the roof, holding the little boy in her arms, her hair whipping out around her face. Far down the tracks, on the roof of the carriage, Jacob Marber stood facing them, motionless, while darkness swirled around him like a swarm of bees. He was watching, just watching, while they raced away, and all the while that he was still in sight it seemed to Alice he didn’t move, until at last he was gone from view, and their train was racing on, northward, into Scotland.
The VANISHING of JACOB MARBER
?
1873
12
KOMAKO AND TESHI
On the night before Komako Onoe—nine years old, twister of dust, witch child and sister to a dying girl—was to meet Jacob Marber in the flesh and witness something extraordinary, something that would change her life forever, she first lay with her little sister on their tatami and prayed.
She prayed to whatever god might be listening: Save my sister, please.
It was the month of hazuki. All of Tokyo was hot, muggy. Komako’s wrist and the shadow of her wrist lifted and hung in front of the lantern, twinned and strange there in the glow of the brazier and the darkness of the sickroom floor.
“Show me, Ko,” her little sister whispered, stirring, her eyes shining. “Show me again. Show me the girl in the dust.”
The oak rafters of the theater creaked around them. Through the shutters, rickshaws rattled past over the wooden streets of the old quarter.
Komako did not think there was time. The third act was already half over and if the stagehands caught them underfoot they would be scolded or beaten or worse. She knew the kabuki and the tempers of its players the way other girls knew calligraphy and etiquette. But she slid back the screen with a soft click and crept in her slippers down to the trapdoor behind the ropes and pulleys, her little sister rising thin as smoke from her tatami to follow.
No one saw them go. The dark below the stage was sweltering and still. She waited until her sister was at the bottom of the crawl space and then went back up and pulled the braided cord of the trapdoor to shut it. Down through the slats drifted the singing of the ghost, the stamp and drag and stamp of the kabuki. Orange light from the stage fell in stripes over her mittened hands and face.
She could hear the rustle of her sister’s obi dragging in the dust and she paused and turned. “Teshi,” she whispered. “Teshi, do you need to rest?”
But her sister, five years old, stubborn, only set her pale face and crawled on past.
They found the paper box among stacks of props and old masks far at the back. It was filled with a silky gray dust, collected carefully by Komako. She unwrapped her hands. The skin was chapped and red-looking.
There was an old mirror, which she uncovered and laid flat for the smooth surface of it, and then she kneeled and dumped out the dust in a slow smoking pile and closed her eyes, waiting for the stillness to come. She could feel the sweat trickle down her rib cage. The dust was cool to the touch and then it got colder. A chill radiated through the heels of her palms and she bit her lip at the quickness of it. Then it came over her. The ache crept into the bones of her wrists, her elbows. She turned her hands slowly, and slowly the dust turned too, rippled across the dark mirror, and her reflection and her sister’s reflection shuddered and dissolved in the swirling sand. Komako could not feel her arms. The cold was creeping into her chest. She opened her eyes and molded the air, gently, softly, and as she did so the dust came together into the shape of a little silhouette, doll-like, and it bowed its little head to Teshi, and she heard her sister laugh softly.
“Make her dance, Ko,” her sister breathed.
And Komako, working her fingers like a puppeteer, danced the little dust creature across the glass of the mirror, its hands pressed demurely together, its legs sawing and folding in a perfect imitation of a kabuki princess.
In the gloom she heard a change in her sister’s breathing and glanced across. Teshi’s eyes were dark and big. Her lips looked very red.
“Teshi?” Komako whispered in concern, her damp hair plastered to her temples. She let the dust swirl and fold itself back down into an inert soft pile. Her hands throbbed. “We should go back up, now. You need to rest.”
Her little sister was weaving, weakly, as if she might fall over.
“Oh, it’s cold, Ko,” she mumbled. Her white skin almost glowed in the darkness. “Why is it so cold?”
* * *
Gekijo mausu, the two sisters were called. Theater mice. The Ichimura-za had stood in the crowded Asakusa Saruwaka-cho district nearly twenty years, ablaze with fire lanterns, famous throughout Tokyo for its kabuki. The two girls lived there after hours and cared for the props and kept the doors locked and the braziers cold, the candles snuffed. The theater had burned to the ground in 1858 and the fear of fire was still real in a city of wood and paper. After the old master retired from the stage his son Kikunosuke kept the girls on. They went unpaid but ate what was left by the actors, balls of sweet rice, half bowls of broth, a fried dumpling on lucky nights. Winter mornings they would hunch over a charcoal brazier while curtains of rain swept the shop fronts outside, and the theater creaked emptily around them, and they’d imagine they were the only two in all the world. For their round eyes and pale skin set them apart. They were hafu and belonged nowhere and to no one. Many were the alleys they would not walk because of the urchins and rag boys who threw rocks and chased them. Yes, they knew what the world could be, its cruelty. Justice existed only on the stage. Their father had sailed off to his own country far in the west while Teshi was still in the womb and when work dried up their mother in despair had tied Teshi to her back and taken Komako by the hand and begged her way north to Tokyo. That was Komako’s earliest memory, walking through the big city gates in the rain.
Their mother was the daughter of a poor calligrapher long in the grave and did herself die of a fever in the poorhouse just two years after Teshi’s birth. Komako remembered little about her. The softness of her hair in the candlelight. A sadness crinkling the eyes. Stories she used to tell some nights of yōkai and the spirit world and of the girls’ tall father, bearded, orange-haired like a dragon. All of that had faded with the years. Komako did not know anymore how much of what she remembered was real. But she would tell Teshi that their mother had cradled her in the night in a giant wooden shoe, and had sung to her, her little cricket, and she would watch her sister’s face in the moonlight for the dream creeping over her features. Sometimes she would tell how she, Komako, only five years old, had carried Teshi through the rainy streets day after day and snuck into a theater for the heat and there crouched in the back listening to the kabuki and when it was all over how she’d hid under a bench and kept her sister quiet with a finger in her mouth. When they were caught she clung to Teshi and screamed and kicked out at the stagehand who’d been sweeping the house but was dragged backstage all the same. The old master just sat very still in his white makeup, staring. He asked nothing. With his wig already removed and the great folds of his robes pouring out around him he had looked like a living demon and Komako had been terrified. At last the master grunted, smoothed out his whiskers.
“That is your brother, little mouse?” he said, in his slow deep voice.
Komako clutched her sister closer.
“Sister, sir,” she whispered.
“Hm,” he murmured. He looked over at the stagehand kneeling at the screen. “There are already mice here in the walls. I do not think two more will matter.”
* * *
“You must not ever talk about it,” she used to tell her little sister. “Not what I can do. Not ever.”
“But what if it helped people? What if there was a fire, and you could save someone?”