The smiling woman beneath the pillar clock disappeared immediately. But even when she did, Aoyama and Miki couldn’t bring themselves to leave the dome. They must have looked pretty strange, sitting there, not doing anything with looks of sheer terror on their faces. But they couldn’t let their guard down until they were sure she wasn’t going to reappear.
“What did you do just now, mister? Did drawing those crosses stop her from coming in?”
Miki spoke as if the memory had come back to him right then.
When Haruko had been on the verge of entering the dome, Aoyama had finally remembered Rumi’s advice.
“No matter what they are, evil presences need permission to enter your space. The most famous example is probably vampires. There are also some Christian demonology texts that say demons can only enter places they’ve been invited into.”
Rumi had said this while twirling a red pen around in one hand.
Of course, he remembered now.
They’d been in the house of a man who claimed the ghost of a woman was visiting him every night, even with the door locked. At first, she had only entered as far as the shoe rack, but night after night, she penetrated deeper into the client’s home, until his tiny attic room was the only place he was safe. The man had gone to stay with a friend while Rumi and Aoyama investigated the house.
“Therefore, all we need to do is visibly forbid them from entering. We need to show this spirit that she’s not permitted, not welcome, not wanted here.”
Rumi had placed a pile of salt by the front door and pasted talismans onto the doors and windows. Aoyama chatted with her as she worked, getting other things done around the house, and the next thing they knew, night had fallen. According to the client, the woman always appeared around eight o’clock and stayed until dawn. It was long past eight then.
“Wow, those talismans really do the trick, huh?”
“Of course. They come all the way from Ise, after all.”
Rumi puffed out her chest, acting like she was the one who’d made them. After killing some more time, the clock had ticked around to two in the morning. At that point, they heard a faint scratching sound, like tiny stones being thrown against the window. Rumi sighed gently.
“They are effective, but still.”
Clink, clink.
“Is that noise…?”
“Yes. She’s here.”
Next, a loud slam came from the front door.
“Aoyama, do you remember what I told you this afternoon?”
“You mean how evil spirits need permission to come in? We’re doing that now?”
Thud, thud, thud… Someone was knocking on the door, hard.
“Yes, now. There are times when they find a way in even when they haven’t been invited.”
The noise was getting more and more intense, a faint sorrowful wailing mixed in with the knocking.
“Stay away. Get out. You’re not welcome here. If you make that clear, and they come in anyway…”
Something was splintering now. The door had had been flung wide-open, practically kicked in.
“…you do this.”
Rumi took the cap off the red pen and drew a large X on Aoyama’s forehead.
There was a sound like wet cloth being dragged across the floor. The ghost woman was crawling. She wore a filthy brown raincoat covered in mud. Her hair was dripping wet, and she drenched the ground as she crawled along. She slowly raised her head…
She had no nose. The middle of her face had been hollowed out. Aoyama yelped in fear and surprise.
“It’s all right,” Rumi assured him.
The woman must have heard Rumi, because she turned in her direction. Rumi held up one hand and made a gesture like she was throwing a stone. The woman disappeared. They waited a while, but nothing else happened. The room returned to its former quiet state.
“Well, time for us to leave,” Rumi said, dusting off her hands.
“Wh-what did you do?”
“It’s called ayatsuko.”
She extended a pointer finger on each hand and formed a cross shape with them.
“In some regions, there’s a custom to paint an X on a baby’s forehead the first time it leaves the house. Like the hatsumode shrine visit the rest of the country practices, it’s a way of warding off evil. The mark’s been found in ruins as old as the Koujindani Site.”
“The Koujindani Site?”
“It’s an archaeological site in Hikawa, Izumo, discovered near the end of the Showa era. A great number of bronze swords and other artifacts were excavated there. Experts still haven’t been able to determine exactly when they were buried, but almost all of them had an X mark engraved into them.”
Rumi peeled one of the talismans off the window as she went on.
“In other words, this mark, this ayatsuko, is a way of showing that something—or someone—belongs to the gods. It makes things sacred or at least places them under sacred protection. That’s how I choose to interpret it anyway.”
Aoyama considered this for a moment.
“So you protected me by showing that I belong to the gods. But which gods are we talking about? The one enshrined at Ise Shrine? I’m technically a Christian…”
“That doesn’t really matter, does it?” Rumi gave a gentle smile. “There aren’t many spirits foolish enough to go against the will of any god.”
In the heat of the moment, Aoyama had suddenly remembered that incident and marked the entrances to the jungle gym with ayatsuko crosses. It had all worked out in the end, it seemed. He’d been able to protect both himself and Miki. But how exactly had he, someone with no real power and no faith in Japan’s native gods, been worthy enough to invoke their protection?
Perhaps it was simply a matter of will. The power to manifest things if you believed in them enough. Mononobe, Rumi, and the young man who had brainwashed Emi all had that power. Those three were extreme examples with other abilities, too, but normal people could probably do something similar. The origin of the belief that evil couldn’t enter without permission might even be rooted in that concept.
“What I did was…kind of like a lucky charm. It just happened to work out.”
“Oh, okay.”
Miki seemed to open his heart a little and told Aoyama about how he’d met Haruko—or rather, a man possessed by Haruko.
“My sister is a nail technician, and she lets me watch her at work sometimes after school. That day, she was going to stay over at her boyfriend’s, so I had to walk home on my own. I felt a tap on my shoulder, and when I turned around, there was this lady standing there. Except it wasn’t a lady. I could tell right away. She had this rough, low voice, and, well…her outfit was all wrong. A trans lady would’ve taken more care with how she looked. This was just a man who’d thrown on some women’s clothes at random. No one with that kind of figure would actually choose to wear an I-line dress.”