The Girl from the Well

Callie has to smile. “I’m sure they know what they’re doing. Remember Kagura mentioning you would make a fine onmyji if you’d lived in ancient Japan?”


“I looked that up. I’m not so sure I’d do well with the calendar-making and the astrology part of the job, though. Can you imagine me coming up with horoscopes for the emperor? ‘Today shall be your lucky day, so long as you don’t behead your favorite court onmyji for no reason. Girls might like you better if you had a different face, but remember that patience is a heavenly virtue. Also, don’t forget about the not-beheading thing.’ Maybe I’d like to take a stab at kicking ghosts out of people myself. I’ve been doing a lot of research into those esoteric Japanese rituals.”

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

“Dad always says the more you know about something, the better you can plan and protect yourself. So that’s what I’ve been doing.”

In the next shop someone is selling ukiyo-e. One of these wall scrolls is of a young girl. Her arms are stretched out in front of her, the wrists dangling loosely, and her face is of a preternatural calmness, touched slightly by sorrow. There is a bluish cast to her skin, and she is slowly rising up from a well.

“You like this one? This from Thirty-Six Ghosts, one of Tsukiyoka Yoshitoshi’s greatest masterpieces,” the vendor says proudly in broken English.

“I think I’ll take it,” Tarquin decides.

He turns to look back into the crowd, and Callie gasps when I raise my head briefly past Tarquin’s to look back at her. Nothing about me has changed, except now I seem to rise up from somewhere below Tarquin’s chest. With my broken neck, it almost appears as if Tarquin and I are two heads sharing one body.

“Tark!”

“What?” Tarquin glances back at me, puzzled, and I retreat back into his frame. “What’s wrong, Callie?”

“You see her, don’t you?” Callie is excited, frightened. She had thought that memories of old ghosts would fade over time rather than linger in the present. In the past year she has seen no abnormalities of the senses, no other ghosts that haunt her vision, and she assumed the worst was over.

“Okiku?” Tarquin does not seem surprised. On the contrary, he is calm. Accepting.

“Tark, I know she protected us, but no good can come from keeping her with you. We need to get help—”

“I don’t really have much of a choice, Callie,” Tarquin says quietly.

“I don’t understand…”

“Kagura explained everything to me. Something went wrong in the ritual. With me. I shouldn’t have survived, she said. Not given how it ended. She thought I lived because I had enough spiritual energy inside me to make it through, and some other things I didn’t really understand. And then she tried to cleanse me again, a pretty simple ritual. Just in case, she said.”

And at this Tarquin pauses.

“She’s inside me, Callie. She’s been here ever since. There had to be something to fill the void that dead woman left in me, and the alternatives Kagura presented were either my dying or my being possessed by some other spirit who wouldn’t be as nice about all this as Okiku has been. I don’t have the seals anymore, and this is all strictly voluntary on her part—and on mine—so I don’t think I can call this a possession. I know she doesn’t.”

Too late, Callie finally understands the terrible decision I made on the banks of that unnamed river, while the fireflies glittered in the darkness, dancing up into the light. Now she understands why I did not follow the other souls into appeasement, despite her urging.