The alleys of the poor were narrow and humid and crowded with workshops. Water dripped off sloping eaves. In the shadows figures paused at their labors to watch the girls pass.
The witch’s house was a house long fallen into ruin. It stood surrounded by a tangle of dwarf bamboo at the back of a barren lot. The upper windows, long and low in the old style, had all been boarded over. The roof was missing tiles. There were bamboo blinds tied askew over the eaves of a deep verandah and when the girls walked across it the wood creaked and snapped with their weight.
They stopped at the doorless dark.
“Mistress?” called Komako.
Her sister coughed beside her.
“Mistress, hello? Are you here?”
There was a slow movement from the darkness within. A rustling, as of wings. Komako felt her sister press close.
“I did not think you would be back,” called a voice. It was soft, almost beautiful. “What did you bring me, on’nanoko?”
Komako kneeled and untied a bundle from her back and laid it in front of the darkness. Slowly she unwrapped it. It was the paper box of silky dust, taken from the theater. It gleamed silver and black on the doorstep there and as Komako moved back the reflected light flared and wobbled and slid away.
“Closer,” said the voice. “Bring it closer. My eyes are not what they were.”
Komako rose then and brought the box into the hot darkness. Her eyes adjusted. She stepped up over the edge of the receiving room and kneeled and with her damp face bowed she inched forward on her knees and set the paper box down in front of the gray figure.
The witch did not touch it. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Good. I do not know what can be done for your sister, but I will try. You understand?”
Komako nodded.
“Bring the dust.” The witch rose smoothly and led them into the ruined house. Along a hot and airless corridor Teshi gripped Komako’s hand. Her little fingers were cold, her fingernails sharp, Komako could feel it even through her linen wrappings. Most of the shoji screens had long ago rotted away and emptiness and darkness opened up on either side as they went. There was a smell of sour vegetables, of rodents. Ahead they saw daylight and then they stepped down into a courtyard garden. Despite the misty rain the day was bright after the dark of the house. The garden had been beautiful once but was weed-choked now and sad. A stone memorial stood uncared for on a rock in the middle of a green pond, reeds grown up all around it, and a little farther on, a wood footbridge had collapsed. All this they passed in silence and they went up onto a covered veranda and then back into the darkness.
The witch was not old. Her hair was very beautiful and worn high and folded with twin bone hairpins glinting in it, the kanzashi as sharp and white as her neck. She glided quickly and silently in a stiff furisode decorated with patterned flowers and she did not turn or slow for the girls. Komako had heard she was a widow by her own hand, disfigured as a punishment for her evil, that she had stayed shut up in that house since the days of the shogunate. She wondered if any of it was true.
The witch lived in two rooms at the very back of the house. She crossed to a brazier, lit despite the heat, and lifted a blanket from the mesh and lit a lantern and set this at the foot of a tatami mat. There was a teakettle half-corroded, sunk in shadow on the floor. A porcelain bowl of darkness just visible.
She turned and was still. Her hands were lost in the long sleeves of her furisode. “You have taken the child to a physician?”
“We are poor, mistress.”
“The Portuguese clinic, then.”
Komako nodded. “They cannot find anything the matter,” she said. “It is a chill. And a weakness. She is tired all the time. It is getting worse.”
The witch frowned. Her eyes, Komako saw, were strangely flat and without expression, as if they had been painted on. “You. Child. Come here, lie down.”
Teshi came forward. She lay down on the tatami. The witch went into the darkness and was gone a long time and when she came back she was carrying a wooden tray in shaking hands. Its bowls and sticks of incense and wax and the ancient knife with its bone handle all rattled softly. She had drawn a line of ash across her forehead with one blackened thumb.
The witch took a white stone and pressed it into Teshi’s palm and folded her fist around it.
“Hold this. Do not let it go. What is your name, child?”
“Teshi Onoe.”
“And what is your age?”
“Five, mistress.”
“From where do you come?”
“Asakusa Saruwaka-cho district. In Tokyo.”
The witch made a clicking noise with her tongue. “From where do you come?” she asked again.
Teshi hesitated. She glanced at Komako. “I don’t—”
“Dust, child. That is where you come from. And it is to dust you shall return.” The witch lifted her face out of the darkness. “And what is it you seek?” she whispered.
Teshi said nothing.
The witch held out a cup of tea. “Drink this.” Teshi drank. Then the witch unfolded herself from her knees and raised her arms and her voluminous sleeves fell back. She was holding two blocks. She banged them sharply over Teshi and a cloud of pale dust burst the darkness, faded. She walked all around the girl, banging the blocks. Then she began to sing.
It was a song unlike any Komako had heard, eerie and sad at once. Her little sister’s eyes grew heavy and then closed. Her skin was like a furnace. The witch fell quiet and lit a taper of incense and the coal traced a red arc in the dark. Then in the stillness there came a soft click.
The white stone had fallen out of Teshi’s fist.
“So it must be,” the witch said quietly.
Komako felt a sudden fear. She didn’t know what the witch could mean by that. Teshi’s eyelids fluttered, her breathing came fast. Komako reached for her sister’s sleeve.
The witch did not look away from Teshi when she said softly, “The dust is what animates your gift, on’nanoko. And that same dust is in your sister, making her sick. She must fight its nature.”
Something moved in the darkness beyond the second room. Komako turned her face, the hairs at the back of her neck prickling. “Is someone here?”
The witch only gestured to the paper box. “The dust is drawn to her for a reason. Something attracts it, traps its essence. Something … remarkable. I have heard of this, but I have never seen it.”
“The dust,” she echoed, afraid.
The witch smoothed out her obi in the shadow, watchful.
“Please,” Komako begged, “is it me? Am I making her sick?”
“But why would it be you, little one?” said the witch, in a tone of voice that suggested she knew far more than she let on. “Show me what you can do.”
Komako unwrapped her hands slowly. Her palms were raw and itching. She could not keep from trembling as she opened the lid of the box. “It does not always work,” she whispered.
The witch came closer. Komako could smell the sour milk smell of her skin. She hesitated, her hands hovering over the dust inside, its gathered darkness.
“You will help my sister?” she said bravely. “You must promise.”
The witch made an impatient sound. “It is not easy, on’nanoko.”
“But you can do something? Promise me.”
A darkness passed across the witch’s features. “Something can be done for her, yes,” said the witch, choosing her words with care. “I will do what I can. I promise that.”
Komako held her fingers, outstretched, high over the open box. She felt the familiar coldness seep into her wrists and winced.
And then the dust, in a long thin column, poured smoothly upward and formed, suspended in the air, a moving ball, quicksilver and beautiful in the gloom. The witch caught her breath sharply. Komako’s wrists were already hurting. She was tired. She curled her hands around and around the dust, as if shaping it, holding it suspended like a tiny moon, and then she sighed and dropped her hands and the planet of dust collapsed all at once down into the box, lifeless again, inert.