Yokai (8 page)

“
I’m not wearing
that.”

Tanuki pouted. “No fun.”

“
I didn’t ask you to,” Shou
said, frowning at her, unable to hear Tanuki.

Yumiko looked at Shou, slightly
embarrassed. “I know. I’m just…stating facts.”

Shou seemed to be biting back a laugh,
but he turned his back on her to look at the hospital bed. It was
clean and white, with fake IVs and heart monitors alongside it to
give off an air of authenticity. Cold steel cabinets lined the
walls, with plenty of instruments to play doctor with.

Shou sat down at the edge of the bed
and grinned at her. “I’m ready for my checkup.”

“
He’s stealing my lines,”
Tanuki grumbled. “Just ignore him, Yumiko.”

Yumiko glared at Tanuki, to let him
know that he was stating the obvious. Then she turned to glare at
Shou as well, who smiled back at her innocently.

When Shou noted her serious
expression, he sighed and lay back on the bed. “Well, this is going
to be fun,” he murmured.

“
You’re telling me,” Yumiko
agreed. She pointed toward a restroom with a clear view of the bed.
“I’ll wait in there, with the door open a crack. Just relax and try
to sleep.”

“
Try to sleep, knowing full
well that there’s a psychotic spirit who’s on her way to slit me up
the middle with a pair of bloody scissors. Okay, no problem.” Shou
fell back onto the bed with a grunt. “Just…be vigilant.”

“
I always am.”

Chapter Five

“
He’s not sleeping,” Tanuki
observed as Shou turned over on the bed again, and punched his
pillow, as if it were the real threat.

Yumiko continued to peer through the
crack in the door. She could tell that Shou was angry at himself
for not being able to sleep on command, but she could hardly blame
him, given the situation. Who would be able to sleep soundly,
knowing what was coming for him?

“
At this point, even that
yokai is probably annoyed,” Tanuki muttered.

It gave Yumiko a chance to observe
Shou, so she didn’t mind the hour wait. He really was a
good-looking guy. He had thick, healthy hair, shaped with care to
give it volume, although it was starting to get a little messy as
he tossed and turned. His body was wiry and strong, toned beneath
his dress shirt, which he’d unbuttoned at the top, allowing a
glimpse of smooth skin.

Suddenly Brian’s face appeared before
Yumiko’s eyes, and she imagined that it was him lying on the bed,
his strong jaw tense with worry, covered in enticing stubble.
Swallowing hard, she looked away from Shou, shaking the image free.
Brian was a nice guy. Handsome and pleasant. He seemed caring and
thoughtful. But she couldn’t get swept away with a guy. She had far
greater concerns. Concerns of the life-and-death variety. Any high
school crush she felt toward a handsome American had to be set
aside.

“
Do you want me to hold a
pillow over his face until he passes out?” Tanuki
offered.

Yumiko sighed and sent him an amused
look. “Would you do that for me?”

“
Anything for you, my
delicate rose petal.”

Yumiko rolled her eyes. “He will fall
asleep on his own, sooner or later.”

“
Well, let’s just hope it’s
not much later then.”

Yumiko perked up as Shou stopped
moving. She cocked her head and strained to listen across the room.
When Shou’s even breathing came to her ear, she nodded to herself
and unsheathed her sword. Tanuki noted her movements and snuck in
front of her to peer into the room as well.

And they waited.

The Slit-Mouthed Woman entered through
the wall where the green string disappeared, walking through it
like an apparition. She stepped slowly over to Shou’s bed, the
string pulling her along until she stood over him, where it
disengaged itself from Shou’s body, and returned to the
yokai.

The woman entered the room wearing a
white kimono, a fan with images of cherry blossom trees spread open
and held up to her face. As she gazed down on Shou, she slowly
lowered the fan, and Yumiko caught her first glimpse of the woman’s
hideous disfigurement. It was apparent that she had once been a
very beautiful woman, before she’d been brutally sliced by a
jealous husband, who’d doomed her to this fate. But Yumiko couldn’t
pry her eyes away from that open wound, which weeped blood down her
cheeks and chin. The cut journeyed up her flesh from the edges of
her mouth to each ear, extending her smile gruesomely, like a
demonic circus clown. It wasn’t cut straight all the way, either,
but was jagged in places. It was the work of a brutal, detached
hand. The hand of a man who hadn’t stopped as his wife had screamed
in agony and had begged for him to stop.

Yumiko let out a deep breath, trying
to calm herself from this sight, and watched carefully as the woman
hid her fan in her kimono, coming up with a pair of scissors in its
place. It was a large set, rusty with age, and crusted with dried
blood, blades open wide, eager to cut through soft flesh like
butter.

“
Now, you suffer for your
lies, and what you’ve done to me,” the yokai announced in a clear
voice, lifting her scissors high into the air above her. As she
spoke, her mouth, along with the sides of her face, opened to
reveal the bloody pulp of her cut flesh, and flashed the white
glistening bone of teeth beyond.

Shou’s eyes snapped open and his mouth
fell slack with fear. He struggled to scramble up in the
bed.

The Slit-Mouthed Woman then stabbed
her scissors downward, with all of the fury and hate that consumed
her behind the thrust.

But Yumiko intercepted it with her
sword, which made a loud clanging noise when it met the scissors.
“No, Kuchisake-Onna,” Yumiko said, using the yokai’s true name.
“You have made enough people suffer at your hands.” She paused. “I
am truly sorry for what has happened to you, but you must be
stopped.”

Kuchisake-Onna growled and pulled her
scissors back. She regarded Yumiko for a moment, before chuckling
eerily. “Very well. You will share your lover’s fate.”

“
Lover?” Yumiko frowned,
then gasped as Kuchisake-Onna threw herself at her, swinging her
scissors fast and furious. Yumiko was able to easily deflect each
attack, but she was slowly being backed into a corner, which didn’t
sit well with her.

Tanuki suddenly leapt at the yokai,
but Kuchisake-Onna saw him coming, and with a heavy fist, swatted
Tanuki into the far wall, where he slammed into it at an alarming
speed, and slid to the floor, limp.

“
Tanuki!” Yumiko cried. She
saw his body flash gold, indicating that he could now be seen by
all, and Shou’s eyes snapped to the creature, confused.

“
You will pay for that,”
Yumiko promised the Slit-Mouthed Woman.

Kuchisake-Onna merely smiled her
gruesome smile, folds of skin hanging over her cheeks as her upper
lip sagged disturbingly over her lower lip, like they were
consuming each other.

They continued to exchange blows, but
Yumiko wasn’t able to get out from a defensive position, and was
growing a little worried at the yokai’s skill. She spied a standing
mirror against the wall and decided that perhaps this wasn’t going
to end with her blade cutting through Kuchisake-Onna, after
all.

When the yokai brought her scissors
down on Yumiko’s sword once more, Yumiko used the momentum of the
thrust to carry them both into the wall, where both of their
weapons clattered to the floor.

“
You just made a terrible
mistake,” grinned Kuchisake-Onna.

“
That’s what you think,”
Yumiko retorted, and grabbed the yokai roughly by the kimono, and
pushed her into the mirror so that they both tumbled into the
glass. But the mirror didn’t shatter against Kuchisake-Onna’s back.
She went through the mirror, followed by Yumiko.

The yokai screamed as she fell to the
ground in a grassy field. She jumped to her feet, forgetting
Yumiko, and slammed her fist against a lonely mirror that stood in
the field.

Yumiko watched her for a moment, then
looked around at the long yellow grass, dead from the change of
seasons. It wasn’t cold, however. It never was here. And the wind
that rolled over the field, stirring the yellow blades, made no
sound as it rippled across the landscape.

Kuchisake-Onna stopped pounding on the
glass and took a deep breath, wielding on Yumiko with a glare.
“What are you?”

With a chuckle, Yumiko shrugged. “Just
a girl who inherited some pretty amazing powers. Comes in handy,
sometimes.”

The yokai took a few more calming
breaths and looked around her. “What is this place?”

“
Beautiful, isn’t
it?”

Kuchisake-Onna tilted her head. “Yes.
It is.”

“
Well, this is going to be
your new home. Where you won’t be able to torment the unfortunates
who come across you anymore.” Yumiko bowed to her. “I hope you like
it here.”

The yokai watched Yumiko as she walked
up to the mirror. “Wait. What am I supposed to do here? You can’t
just leave me here.”

Yumiko smiled sadly. “I hope that you
find the peace you’ve been searching for.” Then she walked through
the mirror.

When she stepped back into the nurse’s
office, Shou looked up sharply, eyes wide, mouth hanging open.
Yumiko nodded to him, then turned to look back into the mirror. She
caught one last glimpse of the Slit-Mouthed Woman as the yokai
gazed into the mirror, then turned to regard the field she’d been
left in. And then, the world beyond the looking glass disappeared
from view, and Yumiko was left to stare back into her own
face.

“
What did you do?” Shou
asked quietly.

Yumiko turned to him. “I left her some
place where she can no longer hurt you.”

Shou blinked, then nodded.

She noticed that Tanuki was cradled in
Shou’s arms, and stepped forward, placing a hand to his furry back.
She was relieved to feel the rise and fall of his breathing. “He’s
okay.”

“
Is this a yokai too?” Shou
asked.

“
It is.”

Shou nodded slowly, then tilted Tanuki
so that she could see a cut on the side of his head. It was still
bleeding. “He’s going to need stitches.”

Yumiko swallowed hard. “I
don’t-“

“
I can do it,” Shou said.
“But we need supplies. This may look like a nurse’s office, but
there’s nothing in these drawers of use.”

“
Yes, there is.” Yumiko
pulled open a cabinet above a sink, empty of supplies, then tapped
on a false back, which popped open and swung to the side. There
were several bins behind it. “In our line of work, we get into
scrapes every so often that leave us in need of medical attention,”
she explained as she sorted through one of the bins. She nodded and
handed it to him. “This room is useful for that.”

Shou looked over the supplies, then
glanced up at her warily. “There’s more to this place than meets
the eye. I suppose you use some of the other rooms in your line of
work, as well.”

Yumiko thought of the dungeon, and
nodded. “We do.”

Shou set Tanuki down on a stainless
steel table, and pulled out the supplies he needed. Yumiko watched
him clean the wound carefully, before threading a
needle.

“
So,” Shou said, clearing
his throat. “That was some trick.”

With a sigh, Yumiko nodded.

“
You want to tell me how
you did that? It’s not every day that you see someone swallowed by
a mirror.” He met her eyes, then looked away.

“
I was spirited away when I
was little girl,” Yumiko told him as she watched his fingers work
deftly and quickly. “I was brought to another world through a
mirror. I found that when I returned, I was different.”

“
How so?”

“
Well, you just witnessed
firsthand what I’m capable of. I can travel through mirrors. I can
reenter that mirror world anytime I wish.”

Shou paused in his work. “What’s it
like?”

“
The mirror world?” Yumiko
pondered for a moment. “It’s different every time. Each mirror I go
through seems to lead to some strange landscape, almost like
they’ve been placed there to show off the beauty of it.”

“
Placed there? By
whom?”

Yumiko pursed her lips. “By its
ruler.” She shook her head. “Anyway, I found that while I can go
through mirrors, the people I bring through can not. I can send a
yokai there, and they can not leave.”

Shou looked up. “I was wondering how
you killed a yokai. You can’t do it very easily, can
you?”

“
Not often,” Yumiko
acknowledged. “Most yokai are tied to the spirit world by a totem
of some sort. It can be difficult to unearth them. The Slit-Mouthed
Woman’s may have been the scissors used to cut her face. The Funa
Yurei, the ship that sank with them aboard it. For oni, any mortal
wound to their body will do, as their magic is in their armor and
once it fails them, they have failed as warriors. Destroy the
totem, destroy the yokai.” She licked her lips. “It’s not always
easy to identify the totem, however. Another way to rid the world
of yokai is to perform a proper exorcism, which can also be a
tedious process. I’m good at what I do because I can rid our world
of them in a much simpler, quicker way. I can control mirrors. As
long as I touch a yokai with one, I can send them through it.” She
gestured toward her sword. “Which is why I use my mirror sword for
most battles.”