Chapter 3: Stay
The village is at the end of a road that stops being paved an hour before you reach it.
It sits in a fold of the mountains like something dropped and forgotten: forty or fifty wooden houses with heavy tiled roofs, a shrine on the slope above them, terraced fields going brown at the edges. The air is cold and smells of woodsmoke and wet leaves. It's late afternoon when you arrive and the light is already thinning, the shadows of the cedars stretching long and blue across the road.
Nobody comes out to meet the car. You see faces at windows, then don't.
"Friendly," you say.
Geto doesn't answer. He has been quiet for the last two hours, since the road turned to gravel, sitting very upright in the passenger seat with his hands on his knees. He didn't tell you what the curse on the last job tasted like. He didn't ask where you were stopping for soba. When you glanced over at a junction in the forest, he was looking out at the cedars with an expression so blank it frightened you more than anything he's said all summer.
The village head is a stooped man in his seventies who meets you at the door of the community hall and bows too low and talks too fast. Yes, yes, thank you for coming. Yes, people have died. It is a terrible thing. A curse, the man from the city said, yes, they understand. But they know the cause already. They have dealt with it. They only need the sorcerer to take it away.
"Take what away?" asks Geto, in his pleasant voice.
The old man's mouth works. Then he turns and beckons, and leads you both around the back of the hall and down a narrow path to a wooden storehouse with an iron padlock on the door.
You know before he opens it. You don't know how you know. The back of your neck has gone cold and tight, the way it does when a curse is close, but this isn't a curse.
The door swings inward. It's dark inside, and it smells bad, of damp straw and worse. At the far end, there's a cage. A real cage, wood and iron, the kind you'd keep a dog in.
There are two people inside it. Two sisters, thin as reeds, filthy, their hair matted, huddled against the back bars with their arms around each other. One of them has a black eye going yellow at the edges. The other one is holding her sister's hand so tightly her knuckles are white. They look at the open door, at the old man, at you, at the tall stranger in the dark uniform, and they don't make a sound. They have learned not to.
"They did it," the village head says behind you. His voice is shaking, but not with shame. "Strange things happen around them. They see things. They did this to us. We've kept them here so they can't do any more harm. You'll take them away. You'll deal with them, the way you people do."
Beside you, Geto Suguru has stopped breathing.
Later, you will try to remember exactly how it happened, and you won't be able to. It comes back in pieces. The cold. The smell. The sound the iron made when Geto's hand closed around one of the bars of the cage and squeezed, and it bent.
And the curses.
They come out of him like smoke out of a burning house. You've never seen him call so many at once. They pour up from the ground around his feet, from the air behind him, dozens of them, shapes with too many mouths and too few eyes, dragging long wet shadows across the floor of the storehouse. The village head stumbles back with a cry. Out in the dusk, somewhere behind you, you hear people start to shout. You hear a door slam. You hear someone praying.
Geto turns around, very slowly. His face is perfectly calm. He's smiling, a little. It's the smile from the rear-view mirror, the polite one, the one that never touched anything behind it, except that now, finally, you can see what's behind it, and it's an abyss.
"Monkeys," he says softly, to no one. To all of them.
The old man is on his knees on the path outside. Villagers have come out of the houses with torches and farming tools, a ragged half-circle at the bottom of the slope, and they're staring at the storehouse and the shapes boiling out of it, and you can see in their faces that they can't see the curses at all. They can only feel them. A cold wind. A pressure. Death standing at their shoulders.
"Suguru," you say.
You've never used his given name before. It comes out of you very small.
He doesn't turn. The curses are spreading out across the slope now, slowly, unhurried, like a tide coming up a beach. One of them has gone right up to the old man on his knees and is bending over him, opening its long black mouth.
You've done this job for two years. You know what a sorcerer looks like right before they do something they can't take back. You've seen it in jumpy first-years and in grade ones on bad nights. You've never seen it on anyone like this.
You step around him. You put yourself between him and the slope, between him and the old man and the torches and the faces, and you look up at him, and you don't think about the curses at your back. You don't think about anything.
"Suguru," you say again. Louder. "Look at me."
He looks down. His eyes are black and very far away.
"Move," he says, quite gently.
"No."
"They put them in a cage." His voice doesn't rise. "They beat them. Look at them. They'd have let them die in there, and thanked themselves for it. This is what they are. This is what they always were. I've swallowed what they make for years and they put two people who can see in a cage, and you want me to protect them?"
"No," you say. "I want you to stay."
Something flickers across his face.
"If you do this," you say, and your voice is shaking now, it's shaking so badly you can barely get the words out, "you're not coming back from it. You know that. You'll never get in the car again. You'll never get soba in Kawagoe again. Satoru will have to come and find you, and I'll have to fill in the logs, and I'll read them, Suguru, I'll read all of them. Every single one." You're crying. You didn't know you were crying. "And you'll be telling me that I'm one of them. My dad, ironing shirts. Me, in my stupid black suit. You'll be telling me I'm a monkey too."
"You're not," he says.
"I am! I can't do anything! I raise curtains and I drive the car! That's all I've got!" You grab two fistfuls of the front of his uniform. Behind you, the curse bending over the old man has stopped moving. "I'm not asking you to forgive them. Don't. Hate them. They deserve it. Take those two out of that cage and take them somewhere warm, and report this village to every higher-up in Japan, and call Satoru, and make him come up here and stand on that slope and scare them half to death, I don't care. But don't do this. Please. Don't go somewhere I can't drive."
For a long time, nothing happens.
The curses hang in the cold air. The torches flicker. The cicadas are silent; it's too late in the year, too high in the mountains, and the quiet is enormous. You stand with your fists in the front of his uniform and your face wet and look up at him and don't let go, and he looks down at you with his black faraway eyes, and you can see him doing the sum again, working through it one more time, the way he has all summer.
And then, slowly, you see him get a different answer.
His hand comes up. It's shaking. He puts it over both of yours where they're knotted in his uniform, and holds them there. And the curses, all of them, all at once, fold back into the dark like a breath being let out.
The pressure on the slope vanishes. Someone screams in relief. The old man falls forward onto his hands.
Geto Suguru bows his head until his forehead is resting against yours, and closes his eyes, and for a while he just breathes.
"Call Satoru," he says at last, roughly. "I'll get them out."
He opens the cage with his bare hands. He kneels in the filthy straw and talks to the sisters very quietly for a long time, too quietly for you to hear, and eventually they come out, one holding his sleeve and the other holding her sister. He carries them to the car wrapped in his uniform jacket and the tartan blanket from your boot. You raise a curtain over the whole village so nobody leaves before the higher-ups arrive, the words steady in your mouth for once, and you call Gojo Satoru, who answers on the first ring.
"Where is he?" Gojo says, before you've said a word. His voice is strange.
"With me," you say. "He's with me. He's all right. I think he's all right. We need you."
There's a short silence on the line.
"I'm coming," says Gojo Satoru, and hangs up, and you know that in this country there is no distance he can't cover before morning.
The sun comes up over the cedars at a quarter past five. You're sitting on the bonnet of the sedan at the bottom of the gravel road, outside the curtain, and Geto is sitting next to you. The sisters are asleep in the back seat, curled together under the blanket. You can hear, distantly, the first cars of the higher-ups' people coming up the valley road.
Neither of you has said anything for an hour. You're cold and stiff and your face is sore from crying, and he's in his shirtsleeves with his hair coming loose from its tie, the long black strands falling around his face.
"I wanted to," he says, eventually. He's looking at the mountains, not at you. "Back there. I wanted to more than I've wanted anything. I'd done the sum. I'd done it a hundred times. Every time, it came out the same."
"I know."
"It still does." He turns his head. "That's the truth. Tomorrow I'll still think it. I'll look at people and I'll still see what they make. I don't think you can stop me thinking it."
"I'm not going to try." You look at him. "Just tell me. Tomorrow. And the day after that. In the car, before I start the engine. Tell me what it tastes like. And then we'll go and get soba."
Something happens to his face then. It isn't the polite smile. It isn't anything you've seen before. It's raw and unguarded and very, very tired, and it reaches all the way down.
"You didn't move," he says. "When they came out. You turned your back on a hundred curses and you didn't move."
"I'm from Kumagaya," you say.
He laughs, cracked and astonished. Then he reaches out and takes your face in his long cold hands, very carefully, as if you might break, or he might.
"I've wanted to do this since you gave me your soba," he says. "In Takasaki. The first time. I'm sorry it took me until the end of the world."
"It isn't the end of the world," you say. "That's the point."
He kisses you on the bonnet of a dented black sedan at the bottom of a mountain road at dawn, softly, then less softly, his fingers sliding into your hair. He tastes of cold air and nothing else at all. You hold on to the front of his shirt and kiss him back and feel him let go of something, all the way down, like a man setting down a weight he's carried so long he forgot it wasn't part of him.
A long way off, down the valley, there's a sound like the sky being torn in half. The trees bend. A pale blue light flashes over the ridge.
Geto pulls back an inch. He doesn't let go of your face.
"That's Satoru," he says, resigned. "He's going to be unbearable about this."
"Good," you say, and kiss him again before Gojo Satoru can land.