“Ugh!” Sanemi was abruptly overpowered by an unfamiliar scent. It was heavy as incense, but chokingly sweet, with the septic tang of a ripe corpse. And yet, at the same time, the fragrance beckoned. Sanemi reeled.
“What’s that smell?” Sanemi shook his head, trying to shake off the cloying scent. Wrinkling his nose, he looked to his partner. “Hey, Masa—”
Masachika was gone.
“Masachika?”
Sanemi whirled around, but there was no sign of anyone in the palatial entryway or the dim hallway stretching ahead. He checked outside. No trace of Masachika there either. Anyway, Masachika would never abandon his friend without warning.
Sanemi glared into the darkness. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on?” Masachika blinked repeatedly, baffled by the sudden disappearance of his partner. He’d vanished like a puff of smoke. He pressed on into the house, the sickly sweet scent filling his nostrils. “Sanemi! Where’d you go?”
The house was silent, chilly, and deserted. The rooms were empty save for a few furnishings scattered around, as if abandoned in a hurry. Masachika found a dresser and an empty rosewood display case in a room deep in the house. Both were elegant pieces, but, shoved into forgotten corners, they looked curiously drab.
“Sanemi! Where are you?”
Calling his friend’s name, Masachika searched every cranny of the house. He looked in the kitchen and storerooms, even the stable and outhouse behind the main building, but Sanemi was nowhere to be found. Neither were the missing children or Demon Slayers. And Masachika sensed no sign of a demon.
“There’s no one …”
They said the house was empty. No demons, no missing children, and no sign of the other Demon Slayers.
His own words came back to him unbidden. His concern deepened.
“Where’d you go, Sanemi?” he shouted. “If you’re here, give a holler. If you’re gone, say you’re gone!” It was the kind of demand that would make his friend groan and call him an idiot, but there was no reply.
He stood, baffled, in the dim hallway. That almost unendurable scent, sweetly rotten, assaulted his nostrils.
This smell hanging in the air... I can’t tell if it’s a fine perfume or a terrible stench. And it’s so intense I can barely think.
Where was it coming from? He hadn’t seen an incense burner anywhere in the house. Masachika covered his nose with the sleeve of his uniform and mentally retraced his steps.
Sanemi said, “Let’s go in,” and I said, “Right.” We stepped through the lattice door together. As soon as we walked in, the smell hit us...
And then Sanemi was gone.
No matter how he racked his brain, Masachika couldn’t remember anything more than that. Not only that, his memory was growing foggier. He was beginning to doubt whether Sanemi had been with him at all. In a panic, he slapped his own face.
“Get a grip, Masachika!” he snapped to himself. “Keep your head on your shoulders!” With that, he stormed out the front door.
At the touch of the cool breeze outside, his head cleared to a surprising degree. With fresh eyes, he looked back at the house. There was no second floor, no storehouse, no wing he hadn’t explored. He was peering under the front veranda to see if there was anything hidden there when a voice called out to him from behind.
“You there. Boy. What are you doing?”
Masachika turned to find an old man standing outside the gates. The hair on his head was snowy white, but he seemed hale and hearty for his age, no cane in his hand. From his tightly pursed lips and hardened face, Masachika could tell at a glance that this was one stubborn old character.
“Don’t go barging into other people’s houses,” the old man said.
“I’m sorry.” Masachika bowed dutifully. The old man’s eyes, buried in wrinkled flesh, narrowed into mere threads.
“You a police officer?” His gaze flashed over Masachika’s black uniform. “Mighty young for that.”
“No, sir, I only look young. I’ve got a baby face. See?” Masachika was happy to go along with the old man’s mistake. Correcting him would only complicate things. The Demon Slayer Corps was a secret society, known to few and seldom mentioned by outsiders.
The old man looked dubiously at Masachika’s sunny smile. “And what brings the police here?”
Masachika scrambled to throw a story together. “Er...we’re investigating the resident of this house.”
“What’s there to investigate? The place is empty. No one lives there anymore.”
“Anymore?” Masachika hurried down the walk. “Do you know who lived here before? Would you mind telling me about them?” His words ran together in his excitement. Finally, a lead!
The old man cupped a hand behind his ear. “Eh?”
Masachika brought his face in closer and raised his voice. “Who lived here before, grandfather?”
“You don’t have to holler! And I’m not old enough to be called ‘grandfather’ just yet!” The old man grumbled. “I couldn’t follow you, is all, seeing as you were yammering a mile a minute.”
Masachika grinned ruefully to himself. His first impression had been accurate; this witness was not going to be so easy to handle.
But, soothed and humored by Masachika’s natural friendliness, the old man lowered his hackles. “When I was a young’un, a beautiful girl lived here with her servants. Name was Yae.”
After losing her parents as a child, he explained, Yae married young out of loneliness. Her new husband was handsome—“like an actor”—and played the gentle, attentive lover at the beginning of their relationship. But he showed his true nature when their daughter Sae was born.
“He was a right violent fellow,” the old man said sadly.
Mother and daughter were always covered in bruises, the neighbors noted. Yae’s husband sold the priceless antiques and hanging scrolls she had inherited from her parents and frittered the money away on booze and gambling. If Yae dared reproach him, he beat her unconscious. The servants all fled in terror of the man.
Listening to this, Masachika grew furious. “What a monster.”
“Sure was.”
“I should’ve beaten that guy to a pulp,” Masachika erupted, as if he had been there himself.
“Water under the bridge, my boy. What’s the use of getting angry now? Keep quiet and listen.” Even as he chided Masachika, the old man smiled slyly. Throwing off another layer of reserve, he added, “Don’t worry. He got what was coming to him.”
One morning, after a rainstorm, the husband’s body was found floating in the nearby river. His eyesight had always been weak, and the area was rocky, so the official story was that he’d lost his footing and drowned. Not one person mourned his death.
“Everyone heaved a sigh of relief. They thought Yae could finally be happy with her daughter, but …” The old man shook his head.
No sooner had Yae been freed from her abusive husband than her daughter Sae fell ill. Everyone in town felt pity for them and tried to help. Being close in age to Sae, the old man himself was often sent to the house with gifts from his mother. “Well do I recall,” he said, “what good care Yae took of her girl.”
Yae had cooled Sae’s brow, had spooned rice porridge into her mouth, had given her sponge baths, and had cleaned up her vomit and filth. She had worked tirelessly. Perhaps to hide the smell of medicated baths and disinfectant, or else to soothe her bedridden daughter’s nerves, she had kept fragrant incense always burning in the house. But just when it seemed Sae was recovering at last, she had suddenly taken a turn for the worse.
“Soon she couldn’t even speak anymore. Poor thing wasn’t yet ten when she passed.” The old man sighed, pained at the remembrance. “The evening of the wake, Yae broke down sobbing in front of the dresser in little Sae’s room.”
“Dresser?” Masachika asked.
“Little chest of drawers, low to the floor, with a mirror on top. Marvelous old piece of furniture Yae inherited from her mother. And I heard her mother inherited it from her mother. Made special to order, by all accounts, and the mirror was supposedly a charm to ward off evil spirits. It was just about the only thing she managed to keep her vile husband from pawning. No doubt she hoped it would protect them …” The old man trailed off. Clearly the charmed mirror, handed down for generations, had not saved the mother and child.
“What happened to Yae after that?” Masachika asked, hardly wanting to hear the answer.
“Well, that, you see...” The old man furrowed his snowy brows. “Sae’s body was buried on the grounds, but not long after the mourning period, it was dug up. Dragged away by wild dogs or some such, I don’t doubt. All that was left was the girl’s kimono. Well, that was the last poor Yae could bear. She gave in to grief and drifted off someplace. No one knows what became of her.”
“And no one’s lived in the house since then?”
“Stood empty ever since.” Shyly, the old man confessed that he still tended the grounds, coming by once a day, as a gravekeeper of sorts. Perhaps, somewhere in his heart, he still longed for the girl who had departed from this world too soon, or her missing mother.
“Whatever else, it’s a fine house,” the man continued. “Can’t have ruffians coming along and getting up to no good in there.”
“Can’t let that happen,” Masachika agreed solemnly.
“Just this evening, you know, I saw a couple of seedy-looking characters headed this way, loud as all get-out. Got concerned and decided to take a look.” The old man gave Masachika a significant glance.