Page 48 of Shadow of the Fox

Tatsumi’s sword flashed from its sheath, slicing through the thick wood like it was made of rice paper. Stepping forward, Okame raised one finger and tapped the surface, and the doors swung back with a groan.

Warily, we stepped into the house. The entryway was empty, but a faint light came from farther inside, flickering over the walls and floors. Sliding open a panel, we saw the headman kneeling in the center of the floor, a lit brazier casting his features in a red glow.

As soon as the door opened, he fell forward, prostrating himself to the floor, pressing his face into the wood.

“Mercy!” His muffled voice floated up from the floor, shaking and terrified. “Have mercy, my lords. Kill me if you must, but spare the village. They don’t deserve your wrath.”

“They don’t?” Okame crossed his arms. “So, you’re telling me that theydidn’ttry to feed us to the gaki? That they were completely ignorant of what was happening tonight?” He snorted in obvious disbelief. “Well, don’t I feel foolish, thinking this whole village was setting us up to get eaten.”

I frowned at him. “But I thought theyweresetting us up to be eaten. That’s why they were...oh. Sarcasm again. I see.”

“Please.” The headman didn’t lift his face from the boards. “Have mercy. We were desperate. You’ve seen what we face. You don’t know what it’s like, living with those creatures. We don’t know what else to do.”

“They’re not unkillable.” This from Tatsumi, his voice hard and unimpressed. “If your people would take a stand to destroy them, you wouldn’t have so many gaki wandering around.”

“We’ve tried! We’ve tried killing them, burning them, cutting off their limbs, trapping them underground. No matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they always come back.” The headman clenched his fists on the floor in distress. “It’s part of the curse! The curse that damned monk placed on us, and now we’re doomed to be haunted by gaki for the rest of our days and beyond.”

Ah. Now things started to make sense. “What curse?” I asked, stepping forward. “We’ve seen the monk. Is he the one responsible for the gaki?”

“You’ve seen him? Merciful Jinkei, will he never be satisfied?” The headman shuddered violently and sat up, closing his eyes. “I suppose there is no point in hiding it anymore,” he whispered. “Please, sit down, and I will tell you our village’s greatest secret, and greatest shame.”

Okame and I edged forward and knelt on the tatami mats. Tatsumi chose to remain standing, hovering in the doorway, though the headman didn’t seem to notice him.

“This village,” he began, “has always been prosperous. The stories said that when my great-great-grandfather was headman, he made a bargain with Ojinari, the Kami of the Harvest, that as long as they took care of the land, it would always be fertile. Even after the rice tax at the end of the season, after the daimyo took his share of the harvest, the village always had enough to eat. The fields never withered, never dried out. The streams and lakes always yielded fish, and the gardens, small as they were, always produced a plentiful bounty. We were never rich, but we never went hungry. In this, we knew we were lucky, far more fortunate than other villages that faced starvation every winter, and we thanked the kami for blessing the land.

“However, as the decades passed, the villagers began to fear that others might discover their wealth of food, and try to take it from them. We are a small village, isolated from the rest of the world—if word got out, ronin or bandits might descend upon us in waves and take all our food for themselves. The village would never have peace again.

“Such was our thinking, flawed as it was. Even though we continued to have bountiful harvests, we began hoarding our food, hiding it away like squirrels burying their nuts. The few travelers that stumbled upon the village were told that we were but poor farmers who could barely feed ourselves, and were sent away with nothing.

“And then, one night in the coldest of the winter’s months, a monk passed through the village. He went from house to house, asking for a bowl of rice, a single potato, anything that we could spare. The village turned him away—my great-grandfather ordered everyone to bar their doors and ignore the monk until he left.

“For three days, he stayed around the village, sitting in the snow with nothing but his hat and robes to keep him warm. He would offer to pray for loved ones, to say a blessing over the fields, in exchange for a bite of food. He was ignored. No one gave him anything. They pretended not to hear him, not to see that he was starving, though he never uttered a word of complaint.

“Three days later, they found him sitting outside the headman’s door, frozen stiff. He clutched a strip of paper in one stiff hand, written in blood from his own fingers, cursing our greed.

“Three months after he was buried in the cemetery outside town, a young famer’s daughter fell on a kama sickle and died. She, too, was buried in the graveyard with the rest of the dead. But that night, she returned, starving and violent. She broke into her former home and tore her family to pieces. The next month, the family returned as well, wretched and wandering, seeking warm flesh to consume, and more lives were lost to their terrible hunger.

“So began the cycle,” the headman finished, his eyes dark and haunted. “Every month, on the final three nights, one for each day we left the monk to starve, the hungry ghosts rise from their graves to wander the village. They are not interested in normal food—offerings of rice, vegetables, or sake are ignored. They hunger only for living flesh, consuming those who were once kin. The gaki you saw tonight—those are our dead loved ones, our families, all who perished after that monk drew his last breath outside this door. He is an onryo, a grudge spirit, and his curse continues to punish us for the greed of our ancestors.”

“Why don’t you just leave?” Okame asked when the headman was finished. “Seems like an easy solution. Pack up and go find a new village, leave the graveyard and your hungry ghost problems behind.”

“It’s not that simple.” The headman shook his head. “Some have tried to flee the village, of course. But the curse follows them. Gaki stalk their footsteps, the ghosts of their families trailing them wherever they go, appearing every night instead of the last three. The ones who try to flee either return to the village in terror, or they die and return as hungry ghosts themselves.” The headman looked out the door with bleak, dead eyes. “There is no escape. We are trapped here, and the curse will continue until there is no one left, until the gaki are all that remain of us.”

“Huh.” Abruptly, Okame rose to his feet. “Well, Iwasthinking about killing you for throwing us to the gaki, but on second thought, it seems your lives are pretty awful as is.” He glanced at me and smirked. “So, what say we get out of here before the curse latches on to us?”

“Canwe?” Tatsumi wondered, his eyes grim. “Will we be stalked by gaki ourselves if we try to leave?”

“No,” the headman said dully. “Your ancestors did not anger the monk. The curse will not follow you. You can leave and not look back. I would not blame you, of course. This is our punishment, no one else’s.”

“Has anyone tried talking to him?” I asked, and those dead eyes shifted to me. “The monk? His ghost is still hanging around.”

“The monk.” A shadow of real terror crossed the man’s face. “We’ve occasionally seen glimpses of him around the village,” he said. “But he disappears before we can speak to him. We think it’s more an effect of the curse, an echo of the monk, not the ghost himself.” He shivered. “The onryo...we’ve seen him in the cemetery sometimes, a glowing spirit in white, walking among the graves. But none of us dare venture close—the gaki would tear us to pieces.”

“And he only appears when the gaki come out?” I asked.

“Yes. It is as if he wishes to see our misery and terror, to make certain we are suffering.” The headman sighed. “I cannot blame his anger, our ancestors did him a great wrong. But it pains me, knowing I am destined to become a wretched thing that preys on my own family. I cannot even take my own life if I am simply to rise as one of them.”

“Yumeko,” Tatsumi said in a warning voice from the hallway, as if realizing what I was thinking. I pretended not to hear him and rose, turning to face my companions.

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