In The Falling Light (21 page)

The pain of standing still, anticipating for
hours, was a dull sensation in the background of Ono’s mind. This
was not war, full of movement and noise and endless exertion. This
would be decided in a single cut, and if it was not timed with
absolute precision and executed with perfection, then failure and
death would instantly follow the error.

Ono considered the central point in Itto’s
philosophy,
aiuchi
, mutual destruction. It was the
acceptance that death was inevitable, and the resolution to strike
a killing blow even while receiving one. This was what made Itto
Ryu samurai so deadly. It was
aiuchi
that Ono now pursued,
mentally eliminating the weak points in his mind, his fears for the
future, thoughts of his family, worry or failure or dishonor,
belief that he was strong, even a desire to win. Nothing mattered,
only that he strike true regardless of his own death. Finally, the
younger samurai slipped into
mushin
, a state of no-mind,
free of emotion and conscious thought, a virtual dead man with
every sense aware, yet seeing nothing.

Zenki achieved an identical mental
nothingness at the same time, and at that moment, there were no two
more dangerous samurai in Japan.

Seven hours had passed since Ittosai led
them onto the field, and the sun was setting, a dying orange
blossom over a flat yellow sea.

Then the tense of a muscle.

A glimmer of lowering sun on steel.

A flicker of dead eyes.

The lethal blur of two swords in motion, a
ring as metal kissed, a soft whisper of parting cloth and parting
flesh.

One man remained standing, as motionless as
before, his sword now held aloft where it had finished its arc,
stained red. There was the slow snap of a wrist to clear the blade
of blood, then a respectful bow to the fallen man. The victor
approached Ittosai wordlessly and knelt, bowing. The bow was
returned, and the master presented his ancient sword and scroll,
bowing again. Then the old man rose, breathed deeply, and slowly
walked from the field.

The new headmaster secured Itto’s sword in
his belt, tucked the box under one arm, and began the long walk
home.

Three days later, the students of the Itto
Ryu were once more assembled before the veranda, two newly-promoted
sempai
at the front of the ranks. An honored guest was
present, the Shogun’s emissary kneeling beside the new master of
the Itto Ryu.

“Honorable Headmaster,” the emissary said,
“my lord the Shogun has been informed of the recent events, and he
is satisfied. He instructs me to ask if you will be
sensei
to his eldest son, and honor the House of Tokugawa by teaching him
the mysteries of the sword.”

After an appropriate pause, Ono bowed
slightly. “I will.”

Denny Pellet had the stairway to himself,
and his shoes scuffed over the cement steps as he left the street
above and descended into a subterranean subway world. It was a
place of graffiti-marred tiled walls and advertisements, the
echoing voice of a P.A. and a vague odor of urine.

The laptop bag over one shoulder was heavy
enough to make him sag slightly to the right as he made his way
slowly through the corridors. His brown suit was rumpled from a
long work day, and he didn’t move with the frantic briskness of the
commuters at earlier hours. There was no need, for it was just
before midnight, another sixteen hour day.

As he approached the turnstiles he glanced
left to where the musicians usually sat, finding their customary
place against the wall vacant.
Musicians
was a generous
term. Vagrants in dreadlocks hammering out beats on overturned,
white pickle buckets, coffee cans set out to collect bills and
change. But even those guys were smart enough to go back to
whatever passed for home this late hour.

A rush of distant air and a squeal of metal
on metal announced the arrival of a train pulling in beyond the
jail-bar partition. He checked his watch. He’d missed it again,
seemed to always miss it, and knew he’d have to wait another ten
minutes for the next one. He swiped his MetroCard, pushing against
the rotating bar, but it didn’t move. The green digits on the
reader reported $0.00. With a sigh, Denny backtracked to the card
venders against the wall and used his debit card to get a new pass,
looking around carefully before pulling out his wallet to be
certain no one was watching. He needn’t have worried. There was
only an old black man in a blue MTA jumpsuit pushing a rumbling
trash bin, and he paid Denny no mind.

He passed through the turnstiles and reached
the platform, the long day pulling down on him like the laptop bag,
wanting a shower and shave but knowing he’d be too tired for either
by the time he got home. He eyed the two benches against the wall
opposite the tracks. One looked sticky, the other was occupied by a
snoring lump of stained coat and soiled jeans, hugging a backpack
behind which was tucked a bearded face.

Denny decided to stand, thought about
leaning against one of the tiled pillars near the tracks, but
didn’t want the grime to rub off on his suit, even though it was
long overdue for dry-cleaning. Instead he shoved his hands in his
pockets, slumped a little further and looked up the black tunnel.
He wondered how long it would take before the ghost appeared.

Down the platform to his right stood an
older Puerto Rican woman with a long coat buttoned up to the neck.
She was gripping the handle of a collapsible shopping cart as if it
might suddenly try to get away. Farther beyond her, a young man
with a shaved head and a Yankee jacket was shaking a cell phone,
yelling, “Can you hear me?” and then shaking it some more. The
platform on the far side of the cement trench was vacant.

Denny was a practical man. His job as a
mid-level facilities manager at the Garden kept him firmly grounded
in the realities of maintenance, electrical and HVAC systems and
personnel issues, and didn’t leave much room for entertaining
fantasies about the supernatural. He didn’t believe in those
things, or at least he hadn’t. But when it was right there in front
of you, with no other explanation, what else was there to think?
He’d been seeing her for weeks now, right at midnight. Work had
been keeping him consistently late, and it seemed he never managed
to catch the 11:50, so he was always here when she made her
appearance. At first he decided it was fatigue from the long days,
and to some extent that was right. The routine was starting to get
blurry, his ride to and from Queens barely-remembered, the grind of
work, the exhaustion at the end of the day. It was making him
clumsy and distracted, and tonight he had almost stepped off the
curb in front of a racing cab. Wouldn’t that be a stupid way to buy
it, he thought? Living and working in the city his entire life,
developing the necessary alertness and survival skills, then
getting smashed like a stray tourist looking up at the tall
buildings.

Fatigue wasn’t the answer, though. Every
night he dragged himself down those steps from the street, his
laptop just a bit heavier than the evening before, and every night
he saw her on the platform down to the left, right where the tunnel
emerged from the wall. She wore tattered jeans tucked into black
boots, a leather jacket and a messenger bag across her chest,
decorated with silver studs in the shape of a skull. She had a lot
of piercings, and her jet black hair hung in her eyes. She looked
about twenty, and Denny could tell she was very pretty behind all
the Goth. Actually, he thought she was beautiful.

And then there she was, stepping from behind
a pillar, nervous as a doe and looking around, biting a thumbnail.
She was dressed just as always, her milky skin a sharp contrast to
the black leather jacket. He checked his watch. Midnight on the
dot.

She cut her eyes towards Denny – not really
looking at me, he thought, because she’s not really there – then
wrapped her arms about herself and stared down at the tracks. As
she did every night.

He was so curious about her. Had she been a
jumper? One of those desperate wretches hurling themselves in front
of a subway train, knowing it was incapable of stopping and that it
would be quick. Had she wondered if it would hurt? Worried about
what it would do to the motorman who had to go home with that on
his conscience? Not that NYC subway drivers lost sleep over that,
he mused. He suspected they’d all had it happen, and perhaps it was
some dark bit of humor among them, like a special club, waiting for
the new drivers to be initiated in that gruesome fashion before
they could be a part of it. He wondered if they kept score of their
jumpers.

Denny shook his head. He
was
tired if
he was daydreaming about that kind of nonsense. But then was it any
crazier than what was standing just down the platform from him? He
was unable to take his eyes off the girl. What had been so terrible
in her life that she considered this a solution? He was more
convinced than ever that she was a jumper. Why else would she
appear here night after night.

Then she turned her head and looked straight
at him. Denny felt a shudder race through him, and now it was he
who wanted to wrap himself in his own arms to ward off the sudden
chill of having something from the other side truly see you.

He looked away. She caught you staring, he
thought.

She can’t catch you staring, he argued.
She’s dead.

Staring at a dead girl, thinking she’s
pretty. Almost as creepy as a forty-year-old man staring at a live
girl half his age. A sudden panic hit him. What if she wasn’t a
ghost? What if he was just over-tired, his weary mind making up
things to amuse itself in the face of the daily grind? He’d
actually been considering saying hello to her, just to prove his
theory one way or the other, but he quickly dismissed it. If she
was a spirit, might that not invite some malevolent act on her
part? A dozen movies about possession zipped through his head. And
if she was real, not a ghost, then the creepy old man might very
well catch a face full of pepper spray, writhing helplessly on the
filthy platform while she screamed for a transit cop.

The rumble of the train filled the black
tunnel, pushing warm air before it, and a dazzling light in the
darkness grew steadily brighter. Denny looked back at her, and now
there was no question. She was staring right at him, the heavy
makeup around her eyes making her look even more dead. Heart
suddenly thumping, he turned away, but he moved too quickly and the
laptop bag swung out, the weight throwing him off balance. He
stumbled, choked out a surprised little yell, and then he was
falling, the tracks coming up fast, and the train roaring in
faster.

Madeline watched the ghost in the brown suit
fade as he fell, and she shivered. It had been weeks since she’d
seen the man fall in front of the train, and though the actual
impact had been below eye level and out of view, she flinched every
time she thought about it. It had happened right about this time of
night, after she’d hustled down here after getting off her second
shift job as a barista and bookseller. A memory she just couldn’t
shake, that instant of surprised expression, and then… In her
dreams she heard him scream, but she told herself it was probably
just the brakes of the subway train as the driver tried to stop,
knowing he couldn’t.

Worse was the fact that he showed up again,
and now she was seeing him every night at this time, his movements
and death replayed over and over again. And the way he looked at
her, so intensely, had her freaked out. As if her life wasn’t
crappy enough. Sometimes she found herself envying him, darkly
attracted to the idea that all of life’s hurts and disappointments
and betrayals could be over with just…a…single…step.

The train was coming, a howling mass which
could make it so very simple.

Just…a…single…step.

Over on the bench, the bum watched first the
man in brown, and then the punk girl fade from view as a phantom
train squealed through the station. He snuffled and rolled over.
Goddamn ghosts. He rubbed his chest, uncomfortable with the
increasingly painful ache of his untreated heart disease and his
numb left arm, and tried to drift off.

A current of cold air spun out of the empty
tunnel, and the Puerto Rican woman gripped her shopping basket more
tightly and crossed herself, watching as the man, the girl and then
the bum all faded from view. A quick glance to the right gave her a
glimpse of the young man with the cell phone walking right through
the tiled subway wall. She shook her head and whispered a prayer to
the Blessed Mother, deciding that from now on she’d risk getting
mugged and make herself walk the extra six blocks to another
station, hopefully one not as haunted as this.

And then she faded too.

The situation room under 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue was crowded. All the civilians had their jackets off, ties
loosened and sleeves rolled, but the Joint Chiefs looked starched
in full uniform, chests heavy with medals. At the head of the
table, the president sat with his palms on the polished wood,
staring at the video feed at the far end of the room, entranced.
How was this even possible?

Sherwood, the top ranking Air Force general
in the country, slid a dark blue folder in front of the president.
Its cover read, TOP SECRET, Z-71. On screen, the president watched
one of the living dead drift in zero gravity through the shuttle’s
cargo bay. Its face was half gone and it was missing an arm. The
name tag on its blue jump suit read, CMDR. MARKHAM. The president
had shaken the man’s hand only weeks ago, wishing him well before
his launch. Another body floated in the background, a woman
trailing her intestines from a gaping rip in her belly. She was
clawing the air in slow motion and gnashing her teeth.