Koyasan Read Online Free PDF

Koyasan. “I knew you understood what I meant, but I thought you might not respond.”
    “You told me three days ago that something bad was going to happen,” Koyasan noted miserably.
    “Yes. But I didn’t think it would be this bad. And I didn’t think the fear would be as strong inside you as it is. Coming here was the hardest thing you have ever done, wasn’t it?”
    Koyasan nodded, tears trickling down her cheeks, unable to hold them back.
    Itako turned. Her face was red from the heat and lined sternly — she had something difficult to say. “If you want to save your sister, you’ll have to do much harder things than come to my hut tonight. Your trials have only begun.”
    “I can save her?” Koyasan cried.
    “Possibly,” Itako grunted.
    “How?”
    Itako didn’t answer immediately. Instead she scratched her chin and picked at a mole. “I’d go myself if I could,” she mumbled. “Or send one of the men. This is a job for an adult, someone who knows much about the world and the workings of spirits. But you let Maiko go into the graveyard. You were the one the spirits tricked her away from. And you were the one they called to. They singled you out when they hissed your name. It can only be you. That’s the way it is.”
    Itako leant forward and crooked a finger at Koyasan. The girl shuffled closer to the old lady. When they were no more than a hand’s width away from each other, Itako spoke in a creaky, cautious whisper.
    “You have one night and one night only,” she said. “In the morning, if it has not been restored to Maiko’s body, her soul will dissolve. If that happens, she is damned for certain. But if you can restore her soul before then... return it to its rightful place in her body... all will be well.”
    “Restore her soul?” Koyasan echoed, frowning through her tears. “I don’t understand. How can I do that?”
    Itako chuckled softly, without humour. “By crossing the bridge, entering the graveyard and stealing it back from the spirits,” she said.

OVER THE BRIDGE
     
    K OYASAN DIDN ’ T GO home. She knew if she did, her parents would stop her. Bad enough to lose one daughter to the spirits, but if they lost two it would be utterly unbearable. Her parents, like most village folk, were practical. If one child fell down a well, you didn’t throw a second child down after her.
    A large part of Koyasan wanted to be stopped. It had screamed at her while she’d stood, listening to Itako, absorbing the old woman’s instructions and advice. It had roared with every step she took when she left the hut and was roaring still. “Don’t be crazy! You’ll be killed! Go home!”
    Koyasan ignored it. Somehow, finding strength somewhere deep inside her, she blocked out the voice of reason and the cries of fear, and skulked from Itako’s hut to the bridge leading over the stream into the world of the dead.
    That was where she stood now, as rigid as Maiko had been when she returned. Koyasan had never been here at night. Never even been outside the village- after dark. It was scarier than she’d thought it would be. She’d often had nightmares about this, or had lain in bed, imagining what it would feel like if she came to this haunted graveyard in the dark of night. But this was real. She was here. She was going to cross. And the reality was far more terrifying than anything her imagination was capable of making up.
    “Three spirits will attack you,” Itako had told her, back in the safe warmth of the hut. “One at a time, they will come. You must defeat these three before you can attempt to bring Maiko’s soul back.”
    Koyasan took a deep, slow breath. Her bare feet were cold. Her legs and arms were cold. Her stomach was cold. Only her head felt hot, as her brain sizzled inside its skull like an egg in a frying pan.
    There was a half-full moon. She could see the outlines of the tombs and headstones, and behind them the forested hill. Wisps of mist — or the breath of the dead? —