The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
As soon as we were certain that Shinzaburo had left, we began our chore. The edge of very blind, every shoji, was covered with a sutra. I pasted the paper down carefully as Gyunyuko chanted the prayers. It was like building a giant temple lantern, and I wished I could take more joy in the process. At one point, I thought I saw Yone, Tsuyu’s handmaid, peering through the garden gate. I called out to her, but she ran away. I wondered if she were a ghost too. It took nearly all day to finish covering all the entrances to the house. We left only one spot uncovered at the front entrance.
Just after sunset, Shinzaburo returned. He strode confidently through the open shoji where Gyunyuko, as always, knelt in welcome. As soon as he was inside, she slammed the shoji home and slapped a sutra over the remaining spot, sealing the house safe from any ghost who might try to enter.
Shinzaburo looked around at the holy prayers plastered all over the walls. He turned on Gyunyuko. “What have you done?” he demanded.
Gyunyuko bowed very low. “Our duty, Shinzaburo-sama. We are protecting you.”
“Protecting me! From what?”
“It is our belief,” I said, also bowing low, “that your Lady Tsuyu is a ghost. We had heard that she had killed herself—”
“Foolishness!” Shinzaburo shouted. “Tsuyu is not a ghost! I have held her in my own arms!”
“Please excuse our presumption, my lord, but we spoke to a priest today. He said that ghosts have the power to cast delusions over those who love them.”
Shinzaburo bared his teeth, breathing rapidly in anger. “I knew I should never have hired you again. I should—”
We heard movement at the garden veranda and Lady Tsuyu calling, “Shinzaburo? Shinzaburo-chan?”
“Do not go to her, I beg you,” said Gyunyuko. “This one night, do not go to her.”
Shinzaburo! Tsuyu’s voice cried. “Yone told me something may be wrong and I hurried here. What is it? What is wrong?”
“Nothing, Tsuyu-chan. I shall be there in a moment.”
But Gyunyuko got to the veranda shoji first, scuttling quicker than I had ever seen her move. She knelt between Shinzaburo and the shoji, saying, “You must not let her in.”
“Shinzaburo!” cried Lady Tsuyu. “Please, you promised! I must be with you tonight. We must be together! Don’t leave me alone out here!”
“You see!” Gyunyuko hissed. “She will take you to the Land of Darkness with her.”
“Old fool,” Shinzaburo growled.
“My lord,” I said, “Let it be for this one night. If your lady is here again tomorrow night, then it is proven she is not a ghost and you may do with us as you wish. Indulge us, please, this one foolishness. It is for your sake.”
“Please!” Tsuyu shrieked behind the shoji. Her fingernails gashed the paper of the panels, like the claws of some wild animal, stopping where they came against the sutras.
Shinzaburo went to the simple wooden stand on which hung his long and short swords. He took up the short wakazashi and slowly drew it from its wooden scabbard. “Get away from the shoji,” he said, his voice soft and deadly, his eyes bright with rage. Gyunyuko bowed her head and did not move.
I knew that Gyunyuko would die for her duty if I did not act. As Shinzaburo stepped forward, I grabbed Gyunyuko’s arm and pulled her away from the shoji, sliding it open with my other hand. I spared Lady Tsuyu only one quick glance— she was a horror, with dark, sunken eyes, wild unkempt hair, and her face powder smeared and streaked. I hurried Gyunyuko out of the room and ran with her down the hallway to the farthest room of the house. There we huddled together in the dust.
“He has chosen his path,” I said to her, stroking her white hair as she sobbed on my shoulder. In the distance, I could hear my lord and lady moaning, but I could not tell if they were cries of ecstasy or despair.
I must have slept, somehow, for I awoke to the sound of a scream. Sunlight was streaming in through the window slats, blinding me. I rose and staggered down the hallway to my lord’s chamber. I arrived just as Gyunyuko stepped out, her face blank with shock.
“We never saw him in full daylight,” she murmured. “I never saw him eat.”
I grabbed her shoulders. “What are you saying? What has happened? Is our lord gone?”
Gyunyuko clutched at my sleeves and she stared up at me in terror and sorrow. “We were wrong!” She pointed into Shinzaburo’s chamber. “We should have been protecting her!”
I looked in and saw the thin, pale, and freshly dead body of Lady Tsuyu lying amid the bleached bones of my lord Shinzaburo, who had indeed died two years before on the shores of Lake Biwa.
We later learned from Yone, the handmaid, that Lady Tsuyu had attempted sepukku the night after I gave her the news of Shinzaburo's death. She had not cut deep enough and her relatives were able to save her life. But she lost the child she was carrying, and had remained ill ever afterward.
Gyunyuko, burdened with shame, became a nun at a nearby Shinran temple, hoping to forget this world. I returned to my family trade of lantern making, at which I expect I shall work until I, too, leave this world.
It must be the melancholy autumn wind that brings me such thoughts. The trees sigh and whisper together. Fallen leaves chase one another playfully past my feet. I hope my lord and lady now dwell in joy, wherever their karma has taken them. Someone is bowing to me—I turn, but no. It is only the peony lantern nodding in the wind.
TO BE A HERO
Nancy Springer
“To Be a Hero” by Nancy Springer (whose short story “In Carnation” can be found elsewhere in this volume) comments on storytelling . . . and on life. It comes from Weird Tales magazine.