After all that, the bunch of us cleaned together that night.
Luckily the lights had only gone out because a breaker had tripped, and they were easily turned back on, but even when the room was brighter, it wasn’t as if that made the fish scattered all over the carpet disappear.
We all picked the fish up, removed the rugs, and intently scrubbed the exposed floor with a mop and rags.
“Miss, you and your friends should retire now,” the butler suggested, deeply grateful, but I was in no mood to sleep and joined Tohko in her work.
Maki was picking up fish and throwing them into a bucket with a blasé expression as she’d been doing the whole time.
Tohko had her braids pinned up on top of her head and the lower half of her face covered in a bandanna. With the rubber gloves she wore, she was in full war dress for sanitation. She tried to pick a fish up by its tail, but it looked as if it wasn’t working, and after trying several times, she gave up and focused all her efforts on polishing the floor with a rag. Occasionally she would shake her head rapidly from side to side, as if to clear away some bad thought.
The others were working silently, too, looking exhausted and hardly once opening their mouths.
Uotani also wore a tense, brooding look and didn’t say a word.
It was nearly midnight by the time the room became somehow tolerable. The smell of fish had seeped into my hands and clothes, and I waited my turn to get into the bath, then slathered my entire body with bubbles and scrubbed my skin until it practically split open.
Thus, after two o’clock, I finally managed to lie down in my bed.
Tohko climbed into my bed again, hugging a pillow. I had no energy to chase her off and reminded her before falling asleep, “Please don’t kick me.”
It was after noon when I woke up.
I had developed two beautiful lumps on my head.
“Tohkoooo.”
“I-I’m sorry!”
Tohko said she was going to wash her face and ran off.
Geez… Frowning, I got dressed and left the room.
As I walked down the hall, I thought about the supernatural events the night before and grew depressed.
Up until now I had been theorizing that Shirayuki was human. One person was fully capable of sending a threatening letter and of pouring water off the roof. But what had happened last night—
I recalled the demonic woman with the white hair who had floated before the bookcase and a shudder went down my neck. Was it possible that everyone could see the same hallucination?
And those fish and the puddles in the halls—that was impossible for one person to do. How had they managed to get into the house and do those things without being discovered by anyone?
The more I thought about it, the colder I felt.
Even though she had been exposed to such danger so far, Maki was still unfazed. And she didn’t act as if she was trying to catch the ones responsible for it, either. Was she…waiting for something? But what?
When I started to go downstairs, Uotani came up.
“Morning.”
I called to her, but she didn’t answer.
She wasn’t ignoring me; it was as though she couldn’t hear me. Her eyes were bloodshot and she looked as though she could barely breathe. Her face had gone beyond ashen to pure white, like a candle. Her steps were unsteady, too.
While I was caught up in my surprise at how haggard she looked, Tohko, who had finished getting dressed, ran up.
“Morning, Sayo. Wha…?”
It seemed Tohko sensed that Uotani’s manner was odd, too.
“Sayo, can you come over here?”
She took Uotani’s hand and pulled her down to the bottom of the stairs, then pressed their foreheads together.
“I knew it! You’ve got a fever! And your eyes are all red. You couldn’t sleep last night, could you? You should stay in your room and rest today.”
Uotani finally seemed to have noticed the presence of others. She looked up at Tohko with a trembling gaze and shook her head from side to side, as if frightened of something.
“I can’t…sleep. I can hear…the song.”
“Song? What song?”
Uotani’s voice grew even hoarser. Her face contorted, and her eyes filled with tears before she whispered with difficulty, “My grandmother…taught me…the rhyme…that comes from…the land…of dragons…”
“’The land of…dragons?’”
Tohko knit her brows and looked thoughtful.
My mind was also moving through what the land of dragons could possibly be.
“You know what, let’s go back to your room, Sayo. I’ll go talk to the butler for you.”
Tohko and I delivered Uotani to her room, her head still bent and trembling.
It was a bare room on the first floor about six feet on a side. I saw that a woven ball the crimson of a spider lily had been set on top of her chest of drawers, and a shiver went through me.
That old woven ball…I’d seen it before…
Could the rhyme be the song Uotani had been singing that day?
Once we’d pulled her bedding out of the closet and spread it out and put her to bed, we left the room.
Just as we closed the door and were about to walk off, there was a whisper of a song behind us.
A snake is in the swamp there.
Rich old spirit’s little girl
Get you up and set a trap
A bead of water ’pon her neck,
Golden shoes upon her feet,
Call me this and call me that
To the mountain or the field, go, go, go…
Tohko and I looked at each other.
When we returned to her room after that with warm milk and honey and some fever medicine, Uotani was sitting up in bed cradling the ball in her arms like a baby and tonelessly singing the same song.
A snake is in the swamp there,
in the swamp there.
Her monotonous voice and her vacant eyes, as if she was lost in a dreamworld, made my skin prickle.