Sato didn’t bother staying behind to block the torrent of rain from drenching Ma’at and Tien. Her focus was solely dedicated to the Kirinai exorcists darting through the wet alleyways. They were searching high and low for their target with little success. Their silky robes, slightly damp from what amount of water managed to evade their glossy hats, still flowed elegantly in the scarcely lit shadows of the street.
The Maiden ran after them, the cacophonous downpour drowning out her wild movements. Her colleagues followed despite her eccentric behavior. They followed her for a couple hours until many of the lit windows had gone dark, until some of the lamplights had been extinguished despite their metal covers, until the faint light of the moon peeking out through drifting black clouds started to paint the city in the same gloomy hue it always donned come midnight.
“This is ridiculous. They’ll never find a ghost that doesn’t exist. We’ll be running after them and Sato all night at this rate,” Ma’at wheezed, exasperated from the chase and her drenched clothes.
Tien peeked around another corner as she had countless times already, spotted the stealthy monks and Sato lurking behind them yet again, then darted after them with Ma’at shivering behind her. She was using her suitcase as a makeshift umbrella. Surprisingly, it held up quite well. Ma’at guessed that it was either waterproof or enchanted in such a way that nothing as simple as rainwater could damage it. “Let’s hope not,” she mused.
Ma’at sighed harshly. The cold had finally gotten to her. If they didn’t find what they were looking for soon, and she guessed they never would, then she would intervene in a much more direct and physical manner before subjecting herself to hypothermia.
At last, the monks stopped and so too did their stalkers. One of them, dressed in much more ordained robes featuring higher quality material, stepped forward as if he were about to begin speaking to someone standing right before him. However, there was no one else in sight. He seemed to almost be smelling the air, sensing the locale for some spiritual activity of some sort.
After a while, one of the junior monks stepped forward and handed him a small rectangular container made out of stone. Lifting the top, the exorcist took out a handful of mysterious powder and threw it in an arc in front of himself. Like a chef haphazardly throwing a dash of seasoning on a delicious meal, the monk chucked the powder away in a plume of sparkling dust that slowly settled to the drenched sidewalk. Luminescent, colorful stars filled the street corner and twinkled in the dusky moonlight.
“Praise to the all-compassionate, all-merciful Deus Come Thus. May we bask in everlasting light come our inevitable ends.” The man spoke resolutely, his hands in firm prayer.
“Praise. May we find purpose in pain and strife. May the ever-distant star lead us to experience and prosperous change.” The others spoke in unison, their hands in prayer as well. Dark wooden beads hung in loops around their fingers, ending in dangling tails that nearly reached their waists. They were tied together with red thread.
The lead exorcist, after a moment of prayerful silence, raised his bo staff high above his head. Its end glistened with gold. He began humming an entrancing chant, the others following suit right afterwards. The quiet hymn filled the still night air.
“Haah. What are they doing now?” Ma’at whispered. The two had finally caught up to Sato. Their colleague stood motionless watching the strange display.
Sato shushed her just as she’d done back at Ryosai’s clinic. “They found it. They’re trying to draw it out.”
“Draw what out? You don’t seriously believe there’s a ghost here.”
“It’s not impossible, Ma’at. You really don’t think a ghost could exist after all you’ve been through? Especially in this city. Crazy things happen all the time in this world.” Tien’s little voice echoed from beneath her upheld case. The rainshower thumped on its surface like fingers absentmindedly tapping on a book cover.
“Exactly. I’ve seen enough things to last me a lifetime. So, I guess it’s not so much that I can’t believe in it. I just don’t want to.” The Sirithisian’s charcoal hair that was so often fluffed up and chaotic had been rendered completely damp. It hung down, almost completely covering her piercing hazel eyes.
“Well, I can’t fault you for that, I suppose.” The petite woman with eyes as blue as the daytime sky waddled over to her petrified friend and watched the ritual with her.
“Maybe they won’t find anything, and my hunch is wrong.”
Tien peeked up at Sato, then returned her gaze to the praying exorcists. “Then what?”
“Then,” she started, pausing. “Then we leave Ryosai a note and go on with our lives. Our relationship is awkward enough, he’d understand. I only conjure up sad memories.”
“That’s not true. He said you weren’t a burden. He said it himself.” She tilted her suitcase to one side to hold it up with one hand, then patted Sato’s back with the other.
“Pleasantries. He just doesn’t want me to feel bad. But he’s the same as me, Tien. We both can’t forget those times. We can’t move on.”
Tien’s hand stalled, then returned to the case.
“Behold, kin of the Kirinai.” Suddenly, the head monk spoke loudly. “The wraith is near. Be on guard.”
The others followed his words, holding their weapons at the ready and standing in a defensive circular formation.
The perceived threat was scarier when nothing came. The creaking of building signs, the deafening rain pounding the rooftops and pipe drains, the exorcist’s barely audible chanting all sent worrisome pangs into Ma’at’s heart. Whether she believed in it or not, a dread had come to grow within her. As if the fear born wasn’t from the notion of a wandering ghost at all but from the eerie thought that such a situation hadn’t come to be for nothing. That such an event wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That the phantom might just come to exist from the sheer belief the monks exhibited. That thought itself started to scare her. And for something so trivial to scare her was an achievement in and of itself. The fact that it did frighten her, too, deepened the fear welling up even more so. Until…
“Aaaagh!” One of the monks cried out, grabbing his head and grimacing in pain.
“What is the matter? What is wrong with you?” the exorcist asked, partially unconvinced that his student’s pain was real.
“Aaaagh! It’s… it’s in my head…! Help!” he cried.
“Just hold on a moment, Lao’mon. We must stand ready. There is-”
Before the other student could finish, the trembling student, wet and grounded, stopped sobbing altogether. A second passed, then another, then it came. The overwhelming stench of blood and gore. The student’s robes and flesh evaporated, as if torn off his body by some ungodly force. Brief flashes ignited the street momentarily like lightning, but no thunder sounded. A chill, familiar quiet hung in the air. In the student’s place, a broken mess of wood, chains, and mangled body parts remained.
“Lao’mon! What…! What has happened? Oh…” The student’s supposed friend looked upon his entrails in agony, fell to his knees, and began vomiting profusely. Instinctual revulsion had run through his body instantaneously with no way of stemming the tide.
Sato and Ma’at ran over with Tien following behind, their weapons drawn.
“Stand your ground! It must be here!” The exorcist threw more arcs of shimmering powder into the air around them. Finally, he noticed the Vroque women approaching. “Who are you people!? Leave! This is a sacred ritual we are conducting. Dangerous. Go! Now!”
“No!” Sato shouted back. “We’re here to help. We-”
The starry dust to their left ignited like a handful of firecrackers, alerting the exorcist of their foe’s position. He took a flying leap toward the miniature explosions and reared back with his staff. In one smooth motion, he swooped down with it and hit the golden end onto the drenched cobblestone. As the staff had passed through the falling powder, it warped and swirled as if a spell had been cast.
A rapturous chime sounded as the exorcist’s weapon made contact with the ground. All at once, the dust exploded outwards and collided with the rest of the flowing powder around the group, disappearing into thin air. As the shimmering lights faded, though, a new light came into view.
A faded, teal figure became lucent. Even as it stood motionless, it wavered like an entity that was barely holding onto the material world. Iron chains were wrapped around its torn clothes. Its face, although feminine and enchanting otherwise, was bruised and scarred. Its skin was paler than the lunar body hanging above the scene like a noose.
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“O spirit, return to times beyond.” The exorcist drew back his staff and shook it elegantly. Rings of the same golden splendor as the end they dangled from rang out and jangled as he did so. They let out more pleasant chimes. “Return to the side of our Deus Come Thus. Cross the ravine, o hallowed one, and rest peacefully with others among the Blissful Sleep.”
The figure, its shadowy hair dancing behind it untethered by gravity, remained silent. It looked upon the group of Kirinai monks, then fell on Sato and stopped.
“Sato!” Ma’at yelled, tugging at the sleeve of her colleague’s favored raincoat to no avail.
“Mother…” she said, quietly at first. “Mother! Is it… is it really you…?”
The wraith’s eyes glowed fiercely, then more flashes of silent lightning struck the street with not one bystander to witness it. All fell into the dark. All fell into a slantwise slumber, unfettered by the loathsome shackles of reality. All was silent as a tomb. All was quiet, save for the distant ticking of a grandfather clock.
***
On the seventh day of the third month of this year, a woman named Shino, a widow of the farmer Yosaku, late of this village, visited my residence and pleaded with me to perform a pulse diagnosis on her daughter, Sato (age 9), who, she said, was gravely ill.
“I shall remain forever in your debt, if only you will examine her pulse.” Shino did not accept Ryosai’s repeated refusals. She threw herself down in the clinic entryway, sobbing, begging at his feet. Grabbing at his worn leather shoes. The rain was all there was to drown out her endless cries.
“Haah… Miss Shino, I’ve already refused you countless times. How can you still come begging and pleading when I’ve already told you no?”
“I thought it was the duty of doctors to cure people’s illnesses. I tell you that my daughter is gravely ill, and yet you ignore me. This, I cannot understand.”
“...How can you now ask someone like me, ‘possessed by evil spirits’, to cure your daughter of her grave illness? Instead, you should ask for help from your own ‘Deus Come Thus’ in whom you believe so deeply.”
Her labored, hunched body spasmed from all the wailing. Her breaths were cracked and raspy from the shouting. Her body was wet from the rain, in lieu of her not owning an umbrella.
“What you’ve said is not entirely unreasonable,” Ryosai spoke up after a moment of deliberation. He stared down at the sorrowful woman with no glee nor amusement. “But your behavior as of late has been nothing short of shameful. This ‘Kirinai Sect’ you have joined; they are devils in disguise. Village folk have told me that these so-called monks preyed upon you after late Yosaku’s death, is that correct? And they say these heathens pray before impalement racks. The same racks used by our own to torture those who have committed the most heinous of crimes.”
Shino continued to cry and grovel.
Ryosai’s absent expression warped into a dour one filled with contempt. Not for the woman pleading before him, but for the ones that would take advantage of such an innocent person. “They make a mockery of the true belief. Don’t you see that?” He fell silent for a moment, composing himself as he always did when his emotions started to bleed through his mask of dignified doctoring. “If you want me to perform a pulse diagnosis, you must first renounce your faith in the Kirinai Sect and never go back to it. Unless you agree to do so, I absolutely refuse to help you in any way professionally. Medicine may be, as they say, a compassionate art, but I also fear the dark punishments of our gods and watchers.”
There was nothing she could say in response to such an argument. Recognizing that it would be futile to persist, she walked home, drenched in the endless rain, looking utterly dejected.
On the next day, the ninth, a heavy rain began to fall at dawn and for a time the entire village seemed deserted. It was late when Shino arrived at my doorstep again without an umbrella, drenched to the skin.
“Have you made your choice? You must choose between your daughter’s life or Deus Come Thus. You must ‘fall’ as they say; renounce the evil faith with all of your being. Only then will I help you.”
Through more gushing tears and cries, Shino finally calmed herself and stood as a charming, dignified woman such as herself should have from the start. She reached into an inlaid pocket in her kimono, pulled out a ritualistic idol used for praying to her god, threw it to the floor and stomped on it for good measure. It cracked and splintered beneath both of her feet, the whole of her body’s weight barely being enough to destroy the crudely-made item.
“There!” she cried. “I have fallen. I… I have turned my back on Deus Come Thus. Now, you must save my daughter’s life! Please, I beg of you! Do not let my fall be in vain! Give her the treatment she needs to live!”
Ryosai, at last, allowed the wall between him and the widow to fall to dust and disrepair. He knelt down and picked up the broken pieces of her shattered idol, placing them neatly in his large coat pockets. “Then, I shall do as you ask, as you have done as I asked of you. Bring your daughter here, and I will do all that I can to help her.”
As if the moment before and the days of wailing lamentation had never happened, Shino fell into an ecstatic frenzy, jumping up and down, hugging the young doctor with all her might. “Oh, thank you. Thank you! I’ll fetch her right away and bring her to you, as you said. Our home is not far from this place.” She released Ryosai from her clutches and swung open the clinic door in a mad dash.
“Wait a moment, Miss Shino.”
She looked back to see the doctor standing in the doorway, a baroque black steel umbrella in his hand. “Please, my dear, use this. I fear you will fall under the very same illness as your own daughter either way, but this rain and the cold will only increase that probability.”
“I cannot. It looks very expensive. There is no way I could ever pay you back. We are very poor, you see, and-”
Ryosai shook his head fervently. “I do not need payment, woman! Just take the damn thing and walk home without freezing to death. If you were to catch a cold and die on the way there, what would your dear daughter do, hm?” He pushed it into her hands. “Now, go. Bring Sato here.”
Shino stepped back into the rain and opened the umbrella.
Fwoom!
A tiny smile appeared on her ruby red lips. Dry as a sheet, the rain tumbled down the sleek canopy and onto the ground, keeping her warm just as the doctor had promised. “Th-Thank you, Doctor. I’ll be going now.” And with that, the widow disappeared into the rainy night.
At the end of midnight and the eve of morning, Shino returned to my residence with her daughter in tow. We made her a small bed in my ward in a cramped little room. Her body was extremely hot to the touch and she seemed barely conscious.
“You were right. She is very near death. I will try my best, but… there is very little I can do with what I have. For now, she must rest.”
Doctor Ryosai and Shino spoke to one another in the quaint living room. The solemn ticking of a grandfather clock in the corner continued on, unbothered, as time often is in such situations.
“I understand. Please, use all the resources at your disposal. Sato… She is all that matters to me in this world. More than any god or tyrant. She is all I care about.” Shino began to weep and sob once more, and thus, Ryosai comforted her and stroked her back.
Overcome with grief that wasn’t even his own, Ryosai shed a single tear. It went unseen even to Shino, who’s raspy cries had dwindled to a very quiet weighted breath. She had become drowsy from her insomnia and anxiety, though she couldn’t fall asleep.
“You… you were born in Nima, yes?”
Shino nodded, her eyes closed.
“It makes me sad, at times. Patients come and go. I’ve treated so many and have had countless die in my arms that it is hard to shed tears for them anymore.” The doctor took off his glasses and set them down on a table. “But there is one thing that drives me to sob just as you have over your daughter. It is in the late hours of the night, when I am sitting at my study, that I open the windows and am greeted by the alien sky above. The endless ramshackle homes across the way. The Tri-Junction along the main road, and the Eastern Mudflats far out on the horizon. It is all so terribly unfamiliar to me. But then, just as I lament over my homesickness, a nostalgic spring fragrance comes to me through a slight breeze. And I am overcome with emotion. And memories. The red plum blossoms. The pink blossoms.”
“The devil flowers,” Shino said suddenly, catching Ryosai off-guard.
“Devil flowers?”
“My husband used to call them that,” she responded despondently. “He hated that feeling. He would feel the same way as you do. But it would make him terribly angry, so much so that he would beat me senseless. That terrible, nostalgic, beautiful spring breeze forever blows through this land, torturing us. ‘It’s carried by the ocean wind all the way from Nima,’ he used to say. I never believed him, but now, since his passing, I think he was right.”
An hour passed, and Shino had long fallen asleep. Overwhelmed by an intense sadness and tiredness, Ryosai left her to rest on the couch and fell asleep in his bedroom near the clinical ward.
The next morning, however, when I performed yet another pulse examination, I found that Shino’s daughter had died in her sleep. Shino had already lost her mind out of grief, deranged and clutching at the corpse, loudly intoning her bizarre sutras.
***
“Died? That’s not-” Sato stopped herself. What happened? Once, she had been on the street corner with Ma’at, Tien, and the monks, when a familiar phantom appeared. Then, suddenly, there was only darkness to greet her. An eerie voice, that of her childhood doctor, had resonated within her mind. Now, she was alone in a partial recreation of Ryosai’s clinic. In her little room with the tiny bed and the slender window. “But… I’m not dead.”
“Yes, Sato. You are alive and well,” a voice emanated from behind her. She spun around, her raincoat swirling in a circle around her body, to see Doctor Ryosai.
“Is that… you? The real you? The present you?” Her mind whirled around in spirals, countless questions finding their way out of her mouth.
“Yes, it’s me. Do you want to know why I’m here?”
Sato nodded. An uncomfortable feeling stretched and twisted her stomach.
“The hound you resonated with, Sato. He was a Kirinai monk, as you know already. You see, he had come to me with pneumonia. That was no lie. However, he had mentioned something very peculiar as I spoke with him about his illness. That he was an exorcist searching for a ghost. A weeping specter in the form of a young widow, wandering the streets on rainy nights. You are a very smart girl, Sato, even if you try to suppress your intelligence. I’m sure you can imagine what came to my mind then. The same thought that came to yours, no doubt.”
“Mother…” Sato replied, trailing off in rumination.
“I believe it is truly her, or a fragment of her. We want the same thing, my dear. We both want Shino back. You understand what I’m getting at. I am… so very tired of it all. When I saw her, I didn’t care one bit for my own safety. I dove in when she cast this strange spell… and here we are. It seems that these are our memories. Lingering thoughts and emotions. Perhaps… they were things your mother dearly wished to tell you before she passed.”
