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“You sure you want to do this?”
I looked over at Konan to gauge her face. Konan never missed anything, and there was no way she didn’t recognize the anxiety bubbling in my chest as we stood on the porch, debating whether or not to open the door and enter the atmosphere of thick, bass beats and humid alcohol-tainted air on the other side. Neither of us were much for noise or crowds or parties.
I was the one who’d brought us here, with our feet on a freshly painted porch wrapping around the side of a three-story Victorian. The house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, like the epitome of the upper middle-class lifestyle; warm, welcoming, docile. But the moment I’d seen it my chest had constricted and my skin began to itch, despite my want to accept the invitation.
It was all I could do to keep my nails from leaving red, spreading lines down my arms and across other, less noticeable patches of skin. Or less noticeable if you weren’t Konan. Konan knew all my ticks, and where to look for signs I was mentally slipping.
“I’m alright,” I said, cutting her a glance. “If we don’t do this, what are the chances we’ll be invited again? This is our best shot.”
Her eyes stayed brittle, calculating, and I knew Konan was deciding whether or not she felt I was up for this. Because while both Konan and I had problems with crowds and noise, only I had a habit of clawing my skin when everything became too much.
“Alright,” she said, after a moment. “We’ll stay, but if you start to feel itchy, we’re leaving. Especially with those clouds looking like they’ll prove the weather forecast accurate.”
I nodded and curled my traitor fingers into my palms because I was already itchy. Konan knew it but chose to let me make this choice with the caveat that if the predicted storm moved in, or I started to injure myself, we would be done here.
“Okay,” I said, in agreement, and dragged a nail across the base of my fingers before turning to the door and casting a glance at the night sky.
The dark obscured the looming cloud bank, but the definition it brought to the sky and the way it made the stars go blank made it visible. Heavy rain and potentially damaging wind gusts had been predicted for the night.
Storms were another source of anxiety for Konan and I, but I reached for the doorknob and struggled to tell my brain it didn’t matter even if it did rain. We’d be in a house, and even if we wanted to leave, an Uber ride was just a few prods at a phone screen away.
There was nothing to worry about.
We had fought and scratched to get off the streets, and then fought and scratched to not only get into college but get housing on campus. We’d fought, but we’d made it. We may have been the odd ones out for a semester in a university full of old money where half our fellow students had wings or buildings with their surnames on them, but that oddity was fading as we kept showing up and kept proving we belonged.
Nothing to worry about, I repeated to myself as I opened the door and put a fake smile on my face and did my best not to scratch my skin, while Konan and I rotated through packed rooms, shouted greetings at half-familiar faces, and hopped around on the improvised dance floor like we knew what we were doing. My stress burrowed under my skin, calling for my nails to draw it out.
It was easier to contain when flimsy plastic cups of beer we wouldn’t drink were off-handily deposited in Konan and my grasps. I saw Konan dump hers into a potted plant, but I held onto my condensation-leaden glass because it gave my fingers something to do besides draw blood. If I could pass the glass from hand to hand, my fingers couldn’t follow their wayward instincts.
Still, I was picturing angry red lines growing over my skin, slowly welling blood, when I realized the thumping beats were echoing a little louder and the rooms had become more spacious. People were leaving, disappearing with no more than a wave to Hanzō, the host of the party.
The larger boy waved them off with a grin and a shake of his head or a salute of the hand holding his drink. Whatever parting gesture they were given, the departing partygoers ducked out into the rain I’d been unable to hear over the music. The pounding throbs drowning out the hissing deluge battering the roof and the surging wind rushing around the corners of the house.
Once the storm was noticed, though, it was impossible to ignore. The windows rattled out of sync with the music and underneath the base was a constant static that worked its way into your brain and crackled there.
I was just about to give in, to draw my thumb nail down the inner length of my ring finger hard enough to break the skin, when the lights flickered, the music sputtered, and both went out, leaving a heavy absence in their wake. For one second of indrawn breath there was nothing but the steady sluicing of rain and whipping wind, then someone screamed, and I jerked and dropped my glass.
Then Hanzō was laughing, his bass rumble of a voice recognizable, even without light, before a flare of illumination blinded me. I raised a hand to shield my eyes but dropped it again and startled when a hand rested on my shoulder.
“It’s me,” Konan said in my ear, and I nodded and glanced toward the door where Hanzō stood with his phone’s flashlight cutting a painful arc of light.
“Looks like the party’s over!” he called. “Y’all can stick around where it’s dry or take your chances driving in the rain. We all know the odds of that turning out well. Better stay here and chance the obligatory ghost story.”
“Ghost story,” Konan repeated under her breath.
“It’s like he’s telling people not to leave,” I muttered, eyes roaming over the shadowy space and the dim figures in it. None of which were moving toward the door. “Like he’s warning them not to.”
Konan gave a sharp nod. “It does, and I don’t like it. We should go.”
I swallowed and dragged my nails up and down my arms, only stopping when the sharpness of Konan’s eyes turned on me.
“I think we should stay.”
The words were barely out of my mouth before a darkened figure stalked over to the door and then lingered there, as if uncertain.
“Be my guest,” Hanzō said, motioning with the hand still holding his drink, and the figure yanked the door open.
Only to be met with a blast of wind and punishing spray of rain that had them backpedaling into the room with their arms thrown up to shield their face.
Hanzō exhaled a dry, humorless laugh. “You know what you’re getting into,” he said, voice pitched to carry. “By all means, go though.”
No one else moved. The rain fell heavy outside and the wind whipped it through the door, forming a spreading puddle on the hardwood floor of the entryway. In the light of his phone, Hanzō grinned.
“Guess we’re all staying, then.”
Konan took a step, and I knew her. She would leave. Konan would challenge the wind and the rain, and she would win. That open door would be no barrier to her.
My skin screamed at the thought. Mutely, it rebelled, and my troublesome fingers scraped up and down my arms, like I was trying to rub away goose flesh, but not with my palms.
“We should stay,” I repeated, and Konan’s eyes ran up and down my malfunctioning form.
“You’re sure?” she asked.
“I’m sure.”
And just like that, Hanzō stepped forward over the flood on the floor and closed the door, as if by doing so he could keep the rain out.
Impossible. It’s already inside.
For some reason, the thought made me want to laugh hysterically into my fingers, but I was pretty sure my nails had a light spatter of blood under them, and I didn’t want to be that picture of coming undone. The harried figure with the manic eyes, giggling behind their blood-stained fingers.
So, I just scraped my nails up and down my arms and bit into my lip, my eyes on Hanzō’s ginning face. In the too-bright light of his phone’s flashlight, the senior was all hollow eye sockets and shadowy cheekbones over a flash of teeth. Like the lipless smile of a half-seen skull.
The image made me shudder, but it was only there for a moment, and then Hanzō was waving everyone into the living room with his drink. “Might as well be comfortable until this damn rain lets up,” he said.
Hanzō took the light with him and no one else seemed inclined to take their phone from their pocket and add more illumination to the night. There was a heartbeat of stillness, then what was left of the party guests began shuffling after their host.
Konan and I followed, and it was a strange twist to discover we now all easily fit in one room. What had been a house full to bursting had trickled down to a handful. As if the rest of the guests had known something Konan and I hadn’t.
As if all this was some ritual the two of us didn’t understand.
My hands ran up and down my arms, my nails seeking flesh that hadn’t yet started to sting, and Konan caught my wrists while she guided me to a chair near the fireplace. Even though there were some gas-fueled flames in the grate, the action would have looked like nothing more than that to the curious eye of anyone watching. Even the way Konan swept the surface of a coffee table clean and sat next to me would only look like a friend holding onto another in the dark.
Hanzō stood with his drink in one hand and his phone and what looked to be a controller for the fireplace in the other, while his guests found places to sit. As I watched, he pressed a button and turned the flames down to embers that danced in the dark, throwing out more shadows than light.
Then he set the remote down and turned off his phone’s flashlight, leaving the room in an orange glow that did nothing to relieve the darkness, but at least made the outlines of objects and people distinct. With the wind whipping the rain against walls and windows, it was not comforting.
“So, we’re all here. Guess we’re the lucky ones.”
Though I couldn’t see it, it sounded like there was a sneer on his face. My skin crawled with the desire to be scratched, but Konan’s hands held me back when my wrists jerked in the bracelets of her fingers.
“Lucky,” someone muttered, but I barely heard it before Hanzō spoke over the word.
“Lights will come back on eventually, and then we can all leave. In the meantime, might as well get this over with.”
Get what over with, I wondered. What was all this? What was the point of this tableau if none of those present wanted to be here?
The way Konan’s hands tightened on my wrists told me she was thinking the same, but no answer was forthcoming. Instead, Hanzō’s voice crawled towards us, dripping fascinated sarcasm.
“Everyone knows the story around here. The story about the ghost.”
No, we don’t, ran through my mind, followed by a soft whisper of, Ghost? My skin itched from the crown of my head of the soles of my feet in a hot wave, and when it passed, I tasted the salty tang of blood on my tongue, telling me I had bit through the thin flesh of my lip because I wasn’t able to drag my nails across my arms.
“His name was Nagato,” Hanzō’s grinning voice said, pulling me away from blood and heat. “Back when they were first building the main campus, his dad was the dean, and Nagato was the top student.
“Why wouldn’t he have the best grades? His daddy had a name to pass down and a rep to maintain. In addition to his university courses, Nagato had a personal tutor and every extracurricular imaginable. He was the golden boy who had everything and was destined to take on the world.
“On the outside.
“To the uninquisitive eye, Nagato looked like a portrait of a kid with his shit all neatly put together and tied with a bow, silver spoon included. But daddy’s little replacement was unraveling, his over taunt strings snapping, one by one.”
My hands twitched again, desperate to move, and Konan’s fingers shifted, keeping me still. The longer Hanzō talked, the more I wanted to scratch. Though… the itch had moved from my arms to my face. My forehead creased at the desire to skim my nails over the bridge of my nose, a sensation I’d never had before.
“One of the first places those frayed strings showed up was in all the little piles of pills Nagato carried around. When those got out of hand, daddy brought in a personal shrink to keep Nagato on the straight and narrow, only the guy liked to play with pills as much as he did his patients’ heads and—”
Hanzō paused and leaned forward. The flare of a gas-powered ember painted his cheeks orange as he lifted his drink in a mock salute to the room at large.
“Only ever two ways someone as strung out as Nagato could go.”
My stomach churned at the image of a spill of dark red over the floor, a flash of color that was unexplained even to my own mind.
“Could say the first dean’s prodigy took the easy way out,” Hanzō quipped. “But there’s nothing easy about jumping off a half-finished second floor of a dorm and impaling yourself on a thicket of rebar.”
“Motherfucker,” Konan hissed, and I knew in my stuttering heart she was cursing at Hanzō’s. His barely contained hilarity belied the gruesomeness of the picture painting, and Konan had had enough. If I had not been sitting so rigid and unmoving, I knew she would have stood up and walked out, railing storm be damned.
But Hanzō’s voice hadn’t stalled, and I was entranced by the horrors he spun.
“Especially when all those metal rods miss all your vital organs and you find yourself lying there, bleeding out at a trickle. The way the coroner figured it, Nagato probably jumped hours before he died.
“And he didn’t die of blood loss.
“Oh, no. If it hadn’t started raining, Nagato might have lived. But an unexpected storm swept in right before dawn and dumped a couple inches of rain on the campus in under an hour. Nagato drowned in the downpour.
“Held down by all those rods connecting him to the ground.”
Bile rose up my throat, but I couldn’t move. Couldn’t react to this information even enough to vomit on Hanzō’s floor. All I could do was sit as ramrod straight as a piece of rebar and itch.
“Shitty way to go,” Hanzō stated off-handedly. “Only, Nagato never has gone. Everyone knows he’s still here, pinned to campus, like a butterfly on tracing paper.
“He likes the rain, and during storms he whispers to unwary students. The ones who listen go to bad ends. Some vanish entirely, like a drizzle of rain on a sunny day. Most find a way to do what Nagato did, only a little more efficiently. And others… well. They linger around, disappearing bit by bit, without ever going anywhere.”
I could hear the gleefully malicious grin stretching Hanzō’s lips more than I could see it. The wind lashed the house, the lights snapped back on, and suddenly there was silence, aside from indrawn breaths and several squeaks of fright.
The draining rush of water gathered in low lying areas became loud.
The storm was over. Ended with the story.
Or, ended because of the story.
The thought was a disconcerting one, but not one I had time to consider.
“Whelp,” Hanzō said, breaking the tableau, “guess that’s over.” He downed the last of his drink, thumped the plastic cup on the table in front of him, braced his hands on his knees, and stood up. “Ghost story’s been told, rain’ll let you pass, you can all get out now.”
The words had the same impact as leave, and everyone took them that way. Dazedly, they stood and shuffled toward the door Hanzō held open.
“Let’s go,” Konan said, tugging me to my feet with the fingers still braceletting my wrists. And this time, I didn’t resist. I let her lead me out and onto the wet cement walk, where I looked up.
The clouds were still above us and there was a fresh mist spraying my face. Each singular pinprick of moisture a world unto itself. A reality that danced across my itching skin.
And I swore I felt a hand on my shoulder as a voice breathed in my ear, Yahiko.
† † †
Yahiko!
My eyes snapped open to a new day and I gasped, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes.
The rain had not stopped since the night of the party, a month ago, and people were beginning to get edgy. Flooding had not yet become an issue because the rain was little more than a drizzle or mist, but when people didn’t see the sun in days that dragged into weeks that turned into a month…
They began to do strange things. Things that became stranger when the morbid fascination of a lingering ghost dripped into each mind with every drop that leaked from the leaden sky. Students and professors alike had begun to flit across open ground as if they were prey animals overshadowed by a hawk. Heads turned to look over shoulders, eyes deep-set and flickering skyward, even as shoulders hunched and backs bowed.
What was worse were the hunted expressions on faces. If you stopped someone in a hall, no matter the simplicity of the question, their face would be hollow-cheeked and their glance shuttered, and they would scurry away from you at the first opportunity.
And if you happened to have marks on your arms and face from your nails, whoever you were talking to would excuse themself and turn their back on you before you could finish a sentence.
Yahiko…
The whisper of the rain breathed in my ear, and I winced and attempted to swat it away. I had first heard the cool exhale sigh my name in the mist, leaving the party after Hanzō’s retelling of Nagato’s death. Since then, it had not left.
My name whispered through me during classes, while the rain beat the windows. It breathed against the shell of my ear when I fell asleep, like a lover pressed up against me. It shouted at me in dreams, loud enough to wake me in the gray pre-dawn, while rain beaded on the window glass at the head of my bed and softened the rotting wood of the antique sill.
I rubbed my ear and rolled to my side, covering my head with my blankets. Beside me, I could hear breathing, but I knew I was alone in the room, and when I lowered my blanket there was nothing but the iron sky and the chill of bare floorboards.
The cold permeated my feet and made me want to shower, to drown myself in warm water until my bones felt heated again, but the very idea of water… running down my skin… beading in my hair… clinging to my scalp—
I pressed my hand over my mouth and only just made it to the garbage before I vomited a thin, stringy line of clear fluid into the bin. There should have been more, but I couldn’t remember when I’d eaten last. Part of me was sure it was the night before that Konan had coaxed me into swallowing something dry and tasteless, but I couldn’t be sure.
What day was it?
Yahiko…
I turned to find the source of the breathy word, but there was no one there. There was never anyone there. Several times I had turned to Konan, asking what she wanted before we had both become convinced I was hearing things.
It had taken longer for Konan to begrudgingly consider whether or not the haunting voice was Nagato. Konan was more willing to believe my auditory issue was stress related than a paranormal problem.
She had reconsidered when my scratching stopped bringing up blood.
Yahiko…
I shuddered and put down the waste basket, my hands and legs unsteady. Outside, the uniform gray was darkening. At first, my dazed, staring eyes made me think the clouds were gathering for a heavy rain, but when I caught sight of the p.m. flashing on my alarm clock, I knew it was dusk.
Somehow, I’d slept a night and day away. At the least. I wasn’t certain if Konan had actually been with me the night before. Or if that had been some other night. For perhaps a week after the party, I had been able to maintain my usual class schedule. I’d needed to wear long sleeves to hide the deepening furrows in my arms, and bandages on my face to cover up the gorges I’d dug into my nose and around my eyes.
It was my arms and torso and chest that were the worst, though. Konan had been tempted to take me to the hospital when I’d shown her the way the skin was sloughing off, but she’d stopped when she’d spotted what was underneath, the ends poking through the torn flesh.
“What are those?” she’d asked.
“I don’t know,” I’d told her, but we both knew we were liars. We were just too afraid or stubborn to admit the circular, gray patches looked like the ends of rebar.
Rebar sprouting out of my skin in dozens of places. Places that had at first leaked blood in slow trickles, but that over the weeks had ceased to weep red and begun to cry clear tears with the smell of fresh rain.
Konan still wouldn’t admit the smell wasn’t rot, but rain, but I knew better. Just as I knew that though the campus was soaked and wary of a haunting, none of the harried professors or students had anything to fear. They hadn’t listened to the whisper in the storm.
I was the one who heard Nagato breathing my name.
Yahiko…
I turned again, this time slowly, as if the gentle pivot on my heels would bring me face to face with the ghost I’d let in with the rainwater. Only it didn’t and it wouldn’t.
Because I had let him in. My choice to go to the party, despite Konan’s desire not to, my repeated choices to stay, again and again, when all I had to do was take Konan’s hand and go, my choice to listen in the whisper hidden in the mist. All of my decisions had opened the door to Nagato, the way Hanzō had opened his door and dared the partygoer to leave.
I’d dared Nagato to come in, and he had, and he wasn’t about to go.
I could not see him because he was inside me. The breath of my name wasn’t being spoken against my ear, it was coming from inside it.
The same way the rebar sprouting from my skin was coming from inside me. The ghost was in my marrow, and he was pushing outward in metal and rain.
Konan didn’t want to believe, and insisted I didn’t and shouldn’t just let this happen, but I knew better.
The week after the party, I had dragged myself back to Hanzō’s Victorian and rung the bell, despite how deep I dug lines into my arms from the anxiety. Red, weeping lines that leaked clear water and not crimson blood.
I had been standing on that wraparound porch when my nail first snagged on rough rebar hidden in my flesh, and I’d been staring at this dumbfounded when Hanzō opened his door. He’d seen what I was fixated on and just grinned at me.
“You’re the lucky winner of this year’s little lottery, then. I would say I’m sorry, but your choice, so condolences are a bit pointless, don’t you think?”
I’d raised my eyes from the rod growing out of my arm, looked at his smirking lips, and turned on my heel and walked away.
I hadn’t needed Hanzō to explain what I already knew in that moment of disgusting clarity. The party had been more than it appeared. It was a ritual of a kind that every student with a blood relation to the university understood, and I had participated in it fully and willingly.
No other details were necessary. Nagato had never left campus, and I had left a door open for him.
Yahiko…
The whisper came from my other side and seemed to echo behind my closed dorm room door. Thoughtlessly, as if my body were being propelled by the rods surrounding my bones and biting through my muscles, I shifted in that direction and shuffled toward the door.
My hand turned the knob, and trance-like, I moved down the hall and down the stairs. It wasn’t until my bare feet met wet grass that I realized I had left the dorm. My body paused, warring with the idea I had left without getting dressed or picking up my phone to text Konan, but I lost the fight the same way I lost those against my unruly fingers, and their need to rake my skin with my nails.
Not turning back, I wandered out behind the dorm where the ground turned rocky and then hard and brittle and sharp. Full of shale and splintered rocks that led into the dark of the woods where old boulders reared their heads.
I had never gone in before, though I had frequently wondered why an untamed patch of woods was allowed to grow rampant on an otherwise neat and trim campus. After an indefinable time slipping in wet moss, cutting bare feet on stones and sticks, and being slapped in the face by errant branches, I found the answer.
Half shrouded in trees, falling down and made soft by decades of rain that I didn’t think ever stopped falling, was the partly constructed remains of a dorm that would have mirrored the one where I slept, had it ever been finished.
Only it hadn’t and would never be.
This was where Nagato had died and where the rebar holding my deteriorating body together had brought me. Where it had originated.
Yahiko…
My knees buckled, like the metal that had propped me up no longer wished to do so. Bare foot, bare chested, I crumpled to the ground, like a puppet with its strings suddenly cut. Lightheaded, I attempted to draw in a breath, but my lungs burned, weighted with rainwater that bubbled over my lips and down my chin.
Part of me wanted to claw at my throat, but I could no longer move my arms. Rebar had sprouted from my palms and my forearms, my feet and my legs. The rods speared into the soft earth and slithered deep, deeper, growing with every absent beat of my heart.
I was cold and there was metal creeping out of my skin, crawling over my face to slowly close off my vision of the gray world, but none of it hurt.
There was no sensation of breathlessness, though I was not breathing. No blood, though I was impaled from the inside out. No heart to register that I was dead.
Only the vulgar wonder when my pulse had stopped.
Was it disoriented in the pre-dawn rain? Or during the weeks before, as the metal grew through my internal organs?
Or sooner. In the mist, when I’d first heard Nagato whisper my name.
Or was it before even then. Had my heart stopped in one way or another when Konan and I had huddled together in the streets.
Something in me had stopped functioning long before the college and the party and the voice in the rain. It had died in me, while it had lived in Konan. What was it that made us choose so differently? What became the living? And what became the dead?
Yahiko…
I had no answer, only cool hands on my head and fluttering lines of red obscuring my vision as I sunk into the nothing.
The nothing and the rain. The endless rain I had let in.
