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1.
No: 232 in Chinatown is a restaurant with tangerine-colored screens at the windows. White tigers and pot-bellied tapirs stand frozen in mid-cavort on the screens, orange blossoms raining around them. At night, with small orange lanterns swaying on wooden rafters and throwing a mosaic of shadow and light, they seem to come to life. The Chinese man named Hsin Dongli serves peppered oysters and soup dumplings here, thukpas and wontons all steaming hot, while his Japanese wife slings ramen and makes bowls of rice and salmon roe. Her name is Sachi and her cheeks are scalded from decades of bending over steaming pots. Her hands are very small and do not know any alphabet.
When Dongli married her, she brought with her a carved wooden wedding chest. Two floors above, on the second floor of No: 232, it sits under a persimmon-colored yukata that she has forgotten how to wear. The inside of the wedding chest still smells like her home in Saitama Prefecture.
2.
Hakeshibaba, the lantern-blowing yokai, is perched on the shingles of No: 232 when two men roll up in a black car. She flies out into the street, laughing with mischief and opening her wide red mouth to swallow the cones of its headlights, but then they’re stopping and the lights are cut off. Cheated, she swallows the older man’s mobile-phone light instead, hating its digital taste as it slips down her throat like bad sushi.
“Damn it. My phone’s out of charge,” he says, shaking it once and sighing. “You okay with waiting here while I set things up? I’ll be fifteen minutes, tops.”
The younger one sounds annoyed when he speaks. “Yeah, Dean. I’ll be fine.”
But he’s not fine. Three minutes after the older one’s gone he gets into an argument with himself, knuckles whitening as his fists clench tighter. Then one hand whips out and splays against the closed window, like heroes do in movies when they’re trapped in drowning cars. His fingers clench and unclench. His eyes are screwed shut.
He inhales sharply, and says, “You’re not real.”
Hakeshibaba is very real, but whatever the boy’s afraid of is not. The smoke of her hair sparkles with the lights she has swallowed. She presses her foggy hand over the desperate five-pointed star his hand makes on the window. She waits for him to open his eyes so she can eat the light in them. It’s not as if they’re doing him more good than harm. But when he does, she knows something has already beaten her to it.
3.
“Very thin walls,” Hsin Dongli tells Dean Winchester. “Not for love-making. I throw you out if you do!”
Dean sputters, nearly dropping his ice-colored teacup. “I’m not—we’re not— we’re brothers.”
“I’ve known this young man since he was yay high, sir,” Dr. Robert says, demonstrating what he assumes is the height of a five-year-old Dean. He takes a sip of the cloudy-green tea and makes a face at Dean, then turns back to the small, sulking man. “They’re good people. You have my word.”
Mr. Dongli suddenly launches into a monologue about Manchuria.
While they negotiate, Dean wanders to a grimy glass shelf that holds old photos of pre-war Japan. There’s also an old transistor radio, and a fox-statue with a red scarf around its throat carrying a crystal ball in its mouth. Gold coins litter the bottom of a tiny, withered bonsai-tree pot. Everything smells like dust.
Dean looks past the tiny living room cluttered with faux-Chinese plants and artifacts, into a hallway lined with extremely bright pink arcade machines. There are people at every machine, moving levers and launching what looks like tiny silver balls into the screen. Cigarette smoke curls through the psychedelic flashing lights. The sound of trilling laughter floats from the machines, shrill Japanese voices babbling incomprehensibly. It sounds exactly like Asian cartoon porn. Sam would probably know the exact word for it. Dean only knows the content.
“We have tatami mats on the floor up there. No footwear inside.”
“That’s all fine, Mr. Dongli. They just need a place to stay, and you have free rooms. They’ll pay.”
“I know hunters,” Mr. Dongli says, darkly. “Will pay me by cheating at my own pachinko machines.”
Dr. Robert makes an affronted face. “Oh, no, Mr. Dongli. They wouldn’t dream of it.”
Dean puts out a hand, smiling brightly. “Don’t worry, man. We’ll be awesome tenants.”
The man looks at his hand for one long, awkward minute before getting up to unhook a key from his belt.
“I need the money,” Dongli clarifies, fixing Dean with a razor-sharp gaze.
The key is surprisingly heavy when it lands on Dean’s palm and curiously warm, as if in possession of a soul of its own.
4.
The second floor of No: 232 is designed as a hotel room in Japanese style. No one has ever actually stayed here. Sam and Dean are like ghosts without footsteps, tatami-mat splinters scratching the bottom of their feet.
“Well, there are holes in the windows,” Dean says. They look like fists punched through sheets of ice. He raises his head and there is a hole in the ceiling too, through which a strip of rusted asbestos sheeting is visible. Around that hole, the otherwise pea-green ceiling is wounded orange by years of water. Moisture tattoos the walls black in places, and shards of glass like snow litter the ground near the windows.
Dean wanders, picking up things and putting them back down, keeping up a running commentary as he does. “But there’s some cool shit here too. Place is like a Feng Shui museum. Two tiny pearly dragon statues, one tiny abalone Mary, a big fat golden dude with a shit-eating grin, an ugly-ass ceramic frog that must be the illegitimate sister of the fox in the main room because it has a ball in its mouth, and a little black elephant. Scrolls and stuff—and oh, this is a wooden shrine-thingy…”
“A butsudan, probably,” Sam says, as Dean picks up the onyx elephant. “Fairly common in Buddhist homes.”
“A bed!” Dean crows, pouncing on it. “But only one. You can take the floor, Sammy.”
“Why would I do that?” Sam asks, distractedly, his mouth starting to pull into a thoughtful sulk.
Dean thinks for a second. “Because I’m older, and thereby likely to get arthritis sooner.”
Sam, big confused frown on his face, twists his head slightly to the left. He takes a careful step, and then another, forehead furrowing into anxious lines.
“What is it, Sam?”
“It’s like something’s whispering. Can you hear it?”
“No, and I can’t see anything either. Stop moving. There’s broken glass on the floor.”
“Don’t they ever do any maintenance up here? Isn’t that weird?”
“Yeah, well,” Dean chirps. “It’s actually loads better than some motels we’ve stayed in, trust me. And I’ve already scoped the place out for spirits and stuff. EMF’s got zilch. You’re just—you’re still—”
Sam makes a threatening noise. “I swear, if you’re going to make another food metaphor for the condition of my brain—”
Dean wasn’t going to. There’s only so much you can make light of something awful until everything you say about it starts to feel kind of like a death sentence.
“No, I think I’m done with those,” Dean says, morosely. In the middle of the room, Sam stiffens at the change in Dean’s tone and makes a hard-edged, derisive sound. Dean doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean. It is Sam who wants him to quit with the food-whatevers in the first place. These days, it’s like they’re attuned to different channels.
It’s like he’s the one who’s blind.
“Pretty decent bathroom to the left. You’re about six paces from the wall with the windows. Four of them. Three with holes, like I said. Kidding about the bed though—there’s another one in the far corner. I’ll pull that nearer to mine. Less chances of the roof raining over here.”
Sam breathes out, slowly. Dean knows he’s constructing it all in his head, fitting images block by block. When Sam was little, he had a building-blocks set that Pastor Jim or someone had got him. Dean put the dome-headed Lego man in one of those blocks with wheels and drove it into another set of blocks, so arranged that they’d all topple. That was all he did. Sam, on the other hand, could build impressive little structures out of all that stupid plastic. He hopes Sam’s the same now. That he attaches fixed shapes to things, and don’t think of them as a different Rorschach panel each day.
“Okay. I get first shower. Where’s my stuff?” Sam puts one hand out in the way that Dean reads as his silent I-need-you-now.
“Come on,” Dean says, standing up. He wraps his fingers around Sam’s and turns the onyx elephant around in his other fist. Something moves inside of it. Through its glass eyes and under-belly, Dean can see glitter snowing down on a tiny red palace. White streets with tiny people spool out from the palace. They all seem to be frozen in celebration.
He wishes Sam could see it.
5.
There is an umeboshi tree in the tiny space between No: 232 and the street, and at night the yokai suck on the wrinkly red plums that sprout along the branches like angry boils.
You can’t really inventory the different yokai that live on the second floor of No: 232 because they come and go, borne on winds and invisible lunar tides, attracted to the house by the Japanese wife that leave them offerings and write their names on ofuda charms.
But these are the main culprits:
Among the tsukomogami, you have the tiny pearl-studded dragons that breathe green fire. They do so only on full-moon nights, preferring to be asleep on all other days. The moon is heavy and condescending to them, but still they pretend. They are from an 18th century artisan in rural Hokkaido, but when they dream, they dream of flying above the orange arches of Fushimi Inari.
The Laughing Buddha and the Three-Legged Money Frog compose haikus by night, but the Buddha mostly wins because the Frog is limited in vocabulary by the glass ball in its mouth. The Frog is waiting for the love-poem scroll’s one-hundredth birthday so it can get its soul and come alive. Then maybe the Frog’s haikus will get written down elegantly instead of being spat out around the glass ball.
The abalone Mary came to Sachi from a Christian missionary in Yokosuka, and will only tell stories about the woes of crustaceans. If asked about the Bible, it will pretend to be deaf.
The Elephant That Ate A City feels lonely because it is from the streets of Chandni Chowk, and does not know any Japanese.
There are the thirteen pink-yokai of the pachinko machines downstairs, who continuously worry about gamblers and their souls. There’s the calligraphy brush that cannot speak, only draw kanji characters that float haughtily away from it, leaving it mute in every way.
Then there’s the lantern-blowing Hakeshibaba who the others don’t like, and Tenjoname, a ceiling-crawler yokai who does nothing but crawl over the ceiling, licking the place where the water has discolored it. No one knows what the ceiling tastes like, because even though they ask, its tongue is too long and swollen from ceiling-licking that they don’t really understand its answers.
“They’re hunters,” Hakeshibabasays, quietly.
“They’re brothers,” one of the dragons say, and gently chews on its own brother’s tail.
The counting yokai that blew in on yesterday’s west wind is crouched over the younger brother, counting the tiny scars on his back. Its mouth, like a code-lock on a salaryman’s suitcase, ticks past each digit with a clicking sound. The elephant nudges the calligraphy brush, and it makes the kanji for ‘brothers’ on a window. They watch the letter jump off the window and float to the elder one. It sinks into his skin and he turns over in his sleep with a frown, mutters “Shut up, Sammy,” and swats good-naturedly at something invisible.
6.
In less than a week’s time, Dean is sleeping with Eva.
That’s the girl from No: 230, the one who buys Dean Camel Wildes and has the shittiest bedside manner ever. She comes on the days when Dr. Robert is otherwise occupied, and always leaves Sam cursing a blue streak for hours afterward, rubbing the spot on his arm where she’s seen it fit to jam that motherfucking needle in with the momentum of an impassioned woodpecker.
Sam’s surprised she talks at all, but: “It’s like the Heineken pentagram works some magic on her, Sammy. One beer and she’s off like it gives her diarrhea of the mouth.”
“You’re hanging around with her drinking green beer. Seriously? I didn’t think she was your type.” Sam says, to which Dean’s reply is mostly to turn up the volume of Cosmic Love on his shitty Made in China music player. They’re listening to fucking weird stuff these days, but Sam is putting his foot down if Dean ever brings up the Cocteau Twins.
“She’s exciting,” Dean offers like a puzzle piece, a day later.
“Frisky?”
“She’s got claws. And medical knowledge, I don’t deny. But mostly she’s just...rowr.”
Sam shudders. One thing he has no trouble at all doing, even now: imagining Dean’s face as he made kitty claws with his fingers.
“Please don’t elaborate on that.”
This is the thing about being blind: Sam builds up the world and the people around him like a house of cards, collecting voices and inflictions, back stories and facts, trying to thread them up into a cohesive whole. The way Dean describes her, Eva is chimerical. Like a Nordic spy-thriller heroine, she seems to exist in a haze of Goth culture adjectives—sultry, snappy, sexually ambiguous. Her ideas and ideologies change like the weather. Sometimes she seems to lack a finger or two; sometimes she has a couple extra. Sam mentally adds claws to his image of her, and finds that he doesn’t think it too fantastical.
Dean says, wonderingly, “Maybe she’ll sleep with you too.”
“Jesus, Dean. That’s so many levels of wrong, the way you just said that.”
“Yeah? I’m just thinking out loud. It’s not like I’m gonna marry her or anything. She seems the free-love type. And you already have one thing more in common than I have with her.”
“Yeah?”
“Happy drunks.”
Sam laughs and goes back to teaching himself Braille.
7.
Most days are not as good. The yokai watch quietly as the humans struggle. They are strange humans. They have hands that can break but also build, mend, search, orient. They are loud sometimes, get into fits when all they do is snap at each other, and then the next day they will be so obviously in tune with each other that they remind the yokai of serene green-limbed bodhisattvas in the Pure Land.
The yokai learn their names because they like having projects, and because it makes them happy to give names to these strange creatures. They gather that the younger boy who cannot see is also sick, and that the strange doctor man from the opposite building is needed to help him sleep. They gather that the elder brother is seemingly the unhappiest with the status quo, going through bottle after bottle of alcohol, but never getting tipsy like the salarymen do on their weekends drinking saké. Sam does not comment on it. The yokai wonder if he blames himself.
They learn quickly. Dean can power up a whole city with his quick hands and crazy energy. Sam’s barely keeping a light bulb lit for the sake of his brother. This is how they are, and they are kind of okay, except when they’re not.
On the mornings when the wind is such that the air reeks of congealing blood from the grocery on No: 230 across the street, Sam goes pale and withdrawn and refuses food. He tells Dean to get rid of the mirrors and laughs when Dean tells him there aren’t any. He tells Dean he isn’t real.
“We’ve been over this, Sam.”
“It’s not that easy now,” Sam whispers. “Seeing is believing, he says. I can’t see you. I can see only him.”
Dr. Robert has some mystery medicine that seems to help a little, but as the days trickle by, Sam seems to get resistant to it. Pill bottles pile up in the bathroom cabinet. Dean keeps the music screamingly loud at all times of day, even when it is playing the Beastie Boys, even when it gives him a headache—so it can try and drive all other thought out of Sam. Things between them are rubber-bands and rope; within them there had to be made a less complex structure that they could live in.
One time, with Dean out, Sam stumbles to the bathroom with a nosebleed, hands clasped over his ears and babbling in a coarse language that even the lantern-blower doesn’t recognize. Grabbing the edge of the sink, his spine suddenly goes stiff as an iron rod and he falls to the floor. The thirteen pink-yokai, alerted out of their pachinko machines by the alarm of the others, slides up through the floor and manage to stop his skull from cracking on the floor.
The dragons wake from their slumber and slink quietly towards him. The sound of pachinko from downstairs drown the rasp of their many feet on whispering tatami. The counting yokai hovers violet and bubblegum-pink, counting seconds with its twelve blue eyes. A small puff of smoke escapes the first dragon’s nostril as it roars at the white tigers of Sam’s delusions, peeking out of his hair. The tigers roar back. They are powerful creatures, forged in hellfire, and the dragons are no match. They whinny sadly, pushing their intangible snouts against his arm. The counting yokai marks the tracery of veins like a leaf-print around Sam’s eyes, counting erratic pulses. The calligraphy brush composes stories that they hide beneath his tongue, in an attempt to comfort. When he moans and blinks awake, he swallows them and learns their names and tales.
“The dragons,” he tells Dean later in the evening, “are called Ko and Taro. The Elephant has no name but it knows the story of every person in its belly. The calligraphy brush has a shameful secret: it knows only kanji, not hiragana or katakana. They don’t like noise and think you’re crass, but they still like you because you dust them. Really? You dust the cutesy little artifacts?”
“I don’t want your snotty allergies to happen, on top of everything else.”
“No idea how I came up with all this,” Sam says. He’s sitting on the bed with his knees drawn up and a blanket over his legs. Fat, happy carp swim on a blue background on the blanket. The two dragon yokai curl up near his thigh.
Dean is with him, kneeling with one knee on the bed as he dabs at Sam’s face with antiseptic. He shakes his head and dabs at the dried blood beneath Sam’s nails as well. “You want to tell me what happened?”
“Not really.”
Dean pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. “Sam. Will you please just cut the ‘I’m fine’ bullshit and tell me what happened?”
“Afternoon today,” Sam says, deep breath and voice like someone cowering beneath a waiting landslide, “this place looked exactly like…like down there. Before, things at least looked different. Now all I see are the wrong things. Always. I just—this is going to get worse. The hand-cure, Dr. Robert’s meds—everything’s got an expiry date. And then I’m screwed again.”
Dean’s got no words. The yokai understand this. Often, words don’t matter anyway.
“Hey, you wanna go out?” he says instead. “I hear there’s an awesome diner at the end of the street that serves chicken and dumplings on Wednesdays.”
Hakeshibaba blows out the lights in their wake.
8.
The easterly blows in Okiko-Onna and a Baku who’s grown so fat eating dreams that he floats like a giant tapir parachute above the house.
Okiko-Onna, with her sunken dead eyes and soaked kimono, swims straight down through the floors to the kitchen where Sachi is making onigiris with salmon and salted ume plums. The other yokai watch, terrified, as Okiko-Onna begins counting plates stacked by the sink. Not counting ten, she begins to wail. Sachi drops a plate and runs screaming into the small courtyard behind the kitchen. She knows what Okiko-Onna is, of course. Poor dead girl. Sachi has nothing but pity for her. But it is still a dreadful scare.
She and Dean communicate through sign-language, but she mimes salt and iron and he kind of gets it. He comes down with a sawed-off and an iron rod and grabs a pot of salt from her shelf, and when Okiko-Onna appears again, he makes her disappear, even though he does it with shaking hands. Then he says something else that she can’t understand, pantomimes bones and skeletons and burning, and Sachi just shakes her head over and over. She doesn’t understand this world and its spiny language. She just smiles and says domo arigato and gives him a bottle of nigori saké, because that will probably help with his unsteady hands.
The yokai huddle against the wind and ignore the falling plums. They know Okiko-Onna will be back tomorrow to count the plates again.
9.
“Her bones are probably in some well in feudal Japan. I don’t know, man. Looked like any random dead chick to me. Counting plates and crying. And Sachi probably knows something about her, but I don’t understand anything she says. If Bobby was around, we’d be sorted in no time.”
“Maybe it’s on the internet? Japan’s got a lot of ghost stories.”
“How’d she end up here anyway?”
Sam twists the edge of his T-shirt. “This house has a lot of stuff that Sachi brought from Japan, right? Any one of them could be a supernatural magnet.”
Sam hears clicking, Dean typing in words into a search engine. “So, if we want to get rid of her, we burn down the entire house?”
“No! God, you fucking pyro.”
“Let’s hear your brilliant idea, then.”
“Don’t have one. Maybe you could search the storage room for anything too freaky,” murmurs Sam. “You said there was a storage room above us.”
“Yeah, but it’s gonna be like searching for a needle in a needle-stack, Sammy. Whole place is freaky.”
Sam’s lying down, one arm hooked around Dean’s knee, the top of his head pressed against Dean’s hip. Between the typing and clicking, Dean’s hand curves around the back of Sam’s neck, sweeping at his hair. Sam has half a mind to scoot off this bed and find his own. All of this feels like alien-territory, but it also feels necessary somehow: if he can’t see Dean, he should at least be able to feel him nearby.
“I picked up a book for you. The Island of Dr. Moreau. Have you read it?”
“Nah. I’ve read some H. G Wells,but not this one.”
“Good. I hear there are, like, vivisections in it.”
“Figures why you’d buy it. You didn’t have to do that.”
Dean’s hand pauses on Sam’s hair, just resting. “Why not?”
“Because when you do stuff like that—or stuff like this, even, I don’t know, Dean. It just messes me up that things have changed so goddamn much.”
Dean clicks on more things. He says nothing, and that has Sam somehow both embarrassingly relieved and terrified at the same time. It feels like Sam is lost at the bottom of a sunless canyon and Dean lives fully in the light, and the only bridge between them are words. When Dean’s quiet, Sam can’t tell what he’s thinking, and he’s always wondering what if Dean just stopped talking to him altogether. It’s not a very rational fear, but it’s real. He likes answers now. But then, there are always some things that Sam says that Dean will either ignore or pretend to be too cool to answer, and secretly Sam’s always as relieved as he is frustrated about that. It’s like a dog offering another dog a meaty bone to chew and being ecstatic when it refuses. Or something.
Still, the pause is too long.
“I’m going to check out the storage room.”
“Okay. Bring back swag.”
“That’s stealing. You’re telling me to steal.”
“Borrowing,” Sam shrugs as much as someone can shrug lying down, digging his thumb into Dean’s ankle till he finds bone, smooth as pearl, and Dean yelps and swats at his hand.
10.
Sam now has a tiny mecha-warrior that screams battle-cries in squeaky Japanese and gets up by itself if knocked down. It was just lying there in the dust in the storage room. Dean fiddled with the remote-controller and made the little guy run around the room for a whole day before he lost interest, as Sam predicted he would. Dean magnanimously bequeathed it to him instead, and the thing is now helping with his moving-target practice.
Armed with heavy darts, Sam lies on his stomach on the bed, while Jizu the Warrior runs the length of the room. Following the rustle of its footsteps and the intermittent battle-cries, Sam throws darts to knock it down. It promptly grunts and gets up and runs again, and Sam will probably burn through batteries in a few hours’ time, but he’s smiling in half an hour. It feels good to have some level of accuracy.
“I don’t know what you think the point is,” Lucifer says, and Sam ignores him, “You’re not going on any more hunts.”
Another dart hits home. This time, Sam doesn’t hear Jizu the Warrior get up.
“Come and get your toy.”
Lucifer didn’t cause the blindness. It was a hunt, a routine thing made memorable by the devil riding shotgun in Sam’s head. Just a moment of confusion, a second of looking away and at something unreal. He doesn’t know the entity that cursed him—neither of them does—all of it had happened too fast and before they’d actually pinned the trouble down to a particular menace. Not for lack of trying, though. Dean’s read nearly everything that has any lore on things that inflict blindness. But the blindness isn’t the problem. It’s only the accelerant that fuels the crazy in Sam’s head.
“Put it down,” Sam says, quietly. He closes his eyes against the only thing he sees anymore, but that’s the tricky business of this. The devil never goes away, and it’s not like there is anything to differentiate between the darkness beneath his closed lids and the darkness outside.
“Play with me, Sam. Come and get it. Or I’ll come over there and scratch your eyes out, just for emphasis.”
Sam laughs, brusquely. “You can’t really hurt me. I know that. You’re not real.”
“Wanna bet?”
Sam throws a dart at him, and hears it clatter to the floor somewhere. His skin is starting to crawl, and a faint sense of anxiety spurs him to his decision. “I’m going out.”
He finds his way off the bed, across the room and pauses at the door, searching for the handle. It’s where Dean said it would be. He stops at the landing, with one foot on the stairs.
“Want me to give you a push?”
Sam grits his teeth. He wishes he didn’t need Dean around all the time, wishes he could tell what was right in front of him, wishes he could see just this goddamn possibly dingy stairwell at least. If wishes were horses, Sam would own a Texas ranch.
Downstairs, keeping close to the walls, Sam can hear the pachinko machines screaming their happy sounds. There are probably a lot of people there this time of the day. He sticks to the stairwell, follows the scent of cookie-dough and the sound of Dean’s voice to the kitchen. He’s knocking over something as Sam finds the kitchen door. The girl-ghost has been particularly resistant today; last Sam had heard, Dean had put an iron rod through her about twenty times.
“Sonofabitch. Why does she keep coming back?”
Sam can hear Sachi in the background, a long stream of words that he’s sure Dean doesn’t get a word of. A wave of coldness passes over Sam and he can hear ceiling lights flickering. Then, through the door, an eerie sound of a girl’s voice.
“…san, yon, go, roku…,” she whispers. “…shichi, hachi—”
Dean “Counting? Is she counting plates?”
“-kyuu-,” says the ghostly voice, and then there is a sound like plates crashing to the floor, and the girl disappears with a loud, bloodcurdling wail.
“Wait for it—” Dean murmurs, and sure enough, in a minute the counting starts up again.
“Ichi, ni, san, yon—”
And this time, when she gets to kyuu, nine,Sam says aloud: “Juu.”
There’s a rush of coldness and something cold presses a hand to his chest. Sam holds his breath, hears Dean call out his name in panic, but then with a tap of icy fingers that he feels right through his shirt, the ghost is gone.
Dean hisses through his teeth, “What the hell was that?”
“Is it gone?”
“Fire and all the works, yeah.”
“I think I just said ‘ten’ in Japanese.”
“Since when do you know Japanese?”
“Since never.” Sam shrugs. “It just came to me.”
“Came to you. On the wind. Just like that.”
“Yeah.”
Dean’s quiet for a few seconds. “You’re goddamn weird. Here, have a fortune cookie for your trouble. She insists.”
Sam fusses to break open the warm boomerang shaped cookie. He pulls out the strip of paper and waves it in the general direction Dean’s voice is coming from.
“So. What does it say?”
“‘Honeybees don’t like family-planning.’”
“What?”
“Mine says, ‘Put salt in your love’,” Dean laughs, and Sam finds himself start to smile even before Dean explains. “Freaking Eva, man. Eva’s who they’ve got to write these.”
11.
The yokai are happy that Okiko-Onna is gone. Things get quiet for them, nature moving towards that wavering stillness of winter. The dream-eater loses its bulk and stops shedding tears, as all Baku must do when they realize their gluttony. It begins to crave the peachy taste of nightmares again, and prowls the gutters on No: 232’s roof.
Baku are allowed to eat only the fuzzy flesh of nightmares. Their teeth must not scrape against the core place where they spool out from, because a man is made as much of his nightmares as he is of his dreams. All Baku know this; it is their law.
Eva’s dreams are spiked and thorny, and involves men and women with piscine, dissecting eyes.
Sachi dreams of rice fields and Kamakura by the sea and octopus ink smeared on chopping boards.
Sam does not dream at all. The dream-eater prowls around him and finds only a medicinal haze where there must be dreams.
Dean dreams of Hell and of driving his car down an abandoned highway and of bones burning beneath the ground. He dreams of drinking alone in dark pubs, of flickering signs and the grimy hems of waitresses’ skirts. He dreams of running into a man in a trench-coat who is either a friend or an enemy, he doesn’t know anymore. Dean also dreams of sitting in a hospital with Sam’s hand wrapped in a vice-grip around his wrist, of Sam lost and confused and blinking his blind panic. He dreams of a disappearing Sam, of searching the whole hospital, of finding him at last out on the road and refusing to go back in there.
The other yokai scream at the Baku to not eat that. It’s a memory that’s lost its way, not a dream. The Baku runs its tapir snout over something about bees and Kate Winslet instead, but brushes up against the memory again. It sees Sam white-fisted and one step away from completely losing it while Dean argues with the doctor. Dean already has his car keys in one hand, is holding onto his brother’s sleeve with the other so Sam won’t bolt, and when the doctor asks, “Do you even know how to live with this kind of disability?” Dean only snorts, because they’ll figure out, they’ve figured out worse, they’ll get through this because they always do.
In the mornings if Dean wakes up overly cheerful and doesn’t even need any coffee, and if Sam is seriously annoyed by this unfairness, it is the Baku’s fault for making raggedy holes in his dreams, in the places where the worst things go. The worst things are always the sweetest, and every Baku has a sweet tooth.
12.
On the first night of autumn, the Baku is interrupted in its feasting by the call of another dream.
There are things that a Baku must not eat, even among dreams. Those born from fever, those born from madness. In the Baku’s celestial stomach, such dreams curdle with the normal kind.
Sam turns over in fitful sleep. His fingers curl into the sheets and his mouth works into a frown, and the Baku rolls gently to him, already fat on other dreams. Nightmares are shaped like thick, shining sheets, rolling over its victim and choking them till they break free. The Baku takes a corner of it in its mouth and swallows, and it is very sweet.
The other yokai are screaming, but all their words seem to have lost their shapes. The Baku snarls and sucks it down, all of this stranger’s nightmares—and in them lie a whole city, black in its bones and empty of life. Dark down there, and up on the top floor of the tallest building is a hole in the ground, and someone is singing a song, and it grows fainter and fainter as he falls. You wake up when you fall in a dream, but Sam doesn’t. Down here there is fire and there is wind, and the wind smells of metal, and all his bones feel broken.
The Baku pulls at the raveling edges of the dream, and takes all of it. The grief and the fear, the knowledge of things that can never be shared, graves dug and bones burned and so many loved ones on pyres. Sam opens his eyes but does not move, breathing fast and trying to form words, failing, gasping inelegantly. The Baku’s teeth are licked clean of the last of his nightmares, the nightmares that make a man as much as dreams do, but still its sniffing snout searches and presently finds something, something big and made of shadow and water, and it drags it out.
The nightmare unfolds less like a sheet and more like a man, all shabby clothes and growing too fast, too large, and his icy gaze gives even the Baku pause. It slinks away, back towards the other yokai that watch now, terrified.
The nightmare-man looms over Sam. Sam sits up, crawls until his back hits the headboard of the bed, drawing his knees closer to himself. His eyes gleam helplessly in a shaft of moonlight that bends around the nightmare-man as though he is solid.
“Hey, Sam,” the man says. “I don’t know how I got here. Last I remember, we were in your head.”
“You’re not real,” Sam says finally, his go-to argument, but he doesn’t sound so sure. The yokai shiver with the knowledge of his grasping, manic, skyscraper-tall panic, but do not move. The nightmare-man could break them all. Such are nightmares if they escape a Baku’s mouth.
“I don’t know,” the man says, wonderingly. “This is very strange. You can feel it, can’t you? Something’s different with me. Am I bigger? Whoa, I’m bigger, aren’t I? Bigger than you? Always felt Nick here was a bit on the short side—”
Sam hisses through his teeth, fumbling to find the gun he keeps under the pillow. “What the fuck are you?”
The nightmare-man clucks. “Oh, you know who I am, Sammy. Put that down. You’re not going to hurt me with that.”
Sam shakes his head.
“Come on, Sam. Play nice,” the nightmare-man says, reaching out, grasping the muzzle of the gun. His fingers move over the length of it, wraps around Sam’s wrist and twists, until Sam gasps and drops the gun. The nightmare-man doesn’t let go, and the yokai see Sam’s face blanch white, hear the soft snap of bones like moths shattering against closed windows.
The dragons launch forward, tiny puffs of fire streaming from their nostrils. They zoom and nip at the nightmare-man, and five of the pink-yokai begin to drag at his hair and clothes. The nightmare-man opens his mouth, and from it stream screeching starlings, a murmuration, sharp-beaked and night-black.
“Stop it,” Sam mumbles, his hand still in the nightmare-man’s wretched grasp, other hand curling on itself, fingers pushing against his mended scar. Whatever it did for him before, it doesn’t do that anymore.
The starlings tear through the yokai, carving at their soft bodies, driving ragged holes through them. They cover the ceiling in a shroud of black, shimmering feathers dropping onto the tatami-floor, and the windows shatter in their onslaught, as they grab for an escaping Hakeshibaba, for the leg of a pink-yokai crying silver tears. Glass shards fly inward, and finally the breach between the human and unhuman world is loud enough to wake Dean, who jolts up in alarm.
“What the hell—” he gasps, reaching for the switch, and with the sudden explosion of lights into the darkened room, all the nightmares shatter into nothingness, just as Sam drives a knife through the scar on his hand.
13.
Dean replaces the windows, and Sam’s broken wrist mends. His other hand will never quite heal, and the yokai will not forget how the tatami-mats smelled of his blood for weeks before Sachi got her husband to replace them with new ones.
Down in the pachinko parlor, the days are a blur of bright pink pachinko machines and the tinkle of silver balls. Hentai anime girls with big tits and brightly colored hair shimmer on the screens, sparklepop bubblefizz laughter spooling from thin mouths. The yokai turn their faces away from them, disgraced by their crass cacophony. Silver pachinko balls have no soul and no magic, but the pink-yokai of gambling sits within the Machine of Accounting, counting each ball as it tinkles through.
Dean Winchester only plays at night. The yokai come to watch him. They hold each other’s hands and paws and long crystal fingers. Dean plays a reckless game, shooting balls left and right, unmindful of any strategy. That is him these days, noise and fury and a long downward spiral. Sometimes Sam follows the noise downstairs, but he doesn’t have much to say. Dr. Robert’s medicines don’t seem to work anymore for Sam. The yokai inventory the shadows beneath his eyes, his hair limp and brittle like glass, his thin wrists and the copper taste that fills his mouth when he’s coughing. The Baku is gone, but the guilt stays. The yokai, who didn’t know guilt before, now think it tastes a bit like devil’s root. They spend a lot of time watching Sam, and watching Dean watch him, and watching Dean go from sadness to rage (we were fucking okay) to sadness again. He knows Sam is fading, silently and very fast. There are barely any days when Dean doesn’t spend an hour or two trying to convince Sam he isn’t back in the Cage.
“Jackpot,” Sachi says excitedly one day, when all of the lights on Dean’s machine light up. A clatter of silver balls rush through the machine’s flap and into Dean’s tray, much more than what he’d put in, and Sachi claps her hands. “Jackpot,” she says again, leaning to pick up the tray. And then she stops, her eyebrows pulling in a frown.
The pink-yokai and the calligraphy brush has marked each ball with a number and an alphabet.
“Kami,” Sachi breathes, her eyes widening. She shows Dean the balls. “Kami.”
“Those are, like, Japanese Gods or angels or something, right? You’re saying a kami wrote this?”
Sachi nods excitedly, and goes off with the balls, and Dean throws up his hands in frustration. But then she comes in the morning with Mr. Dongli and the tray of balls ordered according to number.
“She says, a kami will come during O-bon. You leave a scoop of grain each in the dragons’ mouths each day, and their spirits will eat the grains and travel far to find a kami who can help. It’s an old story, sort of like a wishing well tale.”
The tray of silver balls glint in the sun and so do the yokai.
14.
The dragons grumble, but just a little, their bellies starting to fill and their wings growing stronger.
During O-bon, the Festival of the Dead, the spheres of human and unhuman worlds in their circling around the sun coalesce, and the wall between the two melts into a river of milk that carries enthusiastic yokai towards the sea. The ghostly yurei go to their ancestral homes to feast on what their successors have left out for them, but the yokai just dance in a three-night long parade. Beautiful glass-kami and snow-kami and cherry-blossom-kami come out to dance with them, as do the usually serene bodhisattvas and the magical carp with their fat, shining earthquake-tails.
The tsukomogami don’t have enough magic to travel, being just household objects with souls, but with the grains strengthening them, the dragons will be able to fly.
Sam does not care very much for all this. He scoffs softly and whispers, “It’s all just snake-oil, Dean. No way out of this.”
“You shut up. I’m feeding the fucking dragons, okay? It doesn’t hurt anyone. God.”
“It hurts you,”Sam mutters, and then won’t talk again, no matter how many times Dean asks him to clarify exactly what he means.
On the second night of O-bon, Sachi makes paper lanterns that they will float in the river. She finds the calligraphy brush and makes kanji characters on the lanterns with squid ink. It’s a modern way of doing it, but it doesn’t matter. Dean takes to impatient waiting and alternates between hopeful and fuck it. The dragons are gone, borne on an excited wind that also takes the scent of the rotting plums with it. The umeboshi tree consequently loses all its leaves and stands naked.
When Dean’s gone to get dinner, Sam knocks down the dragons. It’s an accident. The grains scatter onto the ground, and he stands frozen for a minute. Somewhere, two dragons feel their wings weakening and prays that the Kami-of-the-Wind will protect them. Sam kneels, closing his eyes for a moment and curling his shaking hand into a fist. Then he reaches out to find the grains, scooping it back into the dragons’ mouth.
“What the fuck are you doing, Sam?” Eva asks, ten minutes later, when she finds him fumbling for whatever, and looking downright miserable about it.
“I need to get all of them,” he tells her, sounding shaken. “Stuff it in the stupid dragon’s mouth. Don’t ask me why, Eva. Please.”
Eva blinks, wondering. And then she snorts. “Dean?”
Sam takes a shuddering breath, pushes a hand through thinning hair. “Dean.”
Eva looks at him for a minute, and then she kneels too, and the dragons slowly get all their strength back.
15.
Nearly midnight on the third day of O-bon, and when the lanterns have sailed and the lights have gone out downstairs, Sam takes the measured three paces to Dean’s bed, searching until Dean grabs his hand. He’s sitting up, it seems like, and Sam finds his shoulders, his palms following the curve of Dean’s neck to his face. His thumbs fan out over Dean’s cheekbones, and Dean wraps his palms around both of Sam’s wrists.
“I thought I got them all,” Sam whispers.
Dean’s head shakes. “It’s not your fault, Sammy,” he mutters, but his voice breaks.
16.
No: 232 in Chinatown is a restaurant with tangerine-colored screens at the windows. White tigers and pot-bellied tapirs stand frozen in mid-cavort on the screens, orange blossoms raining around them. At night, with small orange lanterns swaying on wooden rafters and throwing a mosaic of shadow and light, they seem to come to life.
The stranger stares at them for the longest time before he goes to the whitewashed door on the side of the building and pulls the chord on a dragon-shaped calling bell. It’s cold outside, and quiet. From the grocery next door comes the sound of boxes being stacked and from somewhere else a drill, and the moon above is fat and watchful. The stranger shivers, wishing he had a coat. He wishes he knew what he was here for, but as his wife says, God seems to work in mysterious ways.
It takes him three pulls on the bell before Hsin Dongli opens the door, scratching his belly. He shines a flashlight into the stranger’s face.
“Hi there,” the stranger says, his blue eyes looking unblinkingly into the light. “My name is Emmanuel.”
Another man fills the doorway, breathing hard, blinking his surprise. “Cas?”
-fin