Pandora's Closet Read online

  Kitsune nodded and stepped back, the strange missile heavy in his hand.

  Asano turned to Nishina, who stood tensed in front of him. “Honored Nishina-san, if I may ask for your assistance as I reveal what has been happening here.” He held up the paper box.” I know that your training by Inoue-san is excellent, of course. If you would indulge me by slicing open this box when I toss it up in the air?”

  A frown on his face, Satomi nodded, his fingers tight on the hilt of his katana.

  “And… now!” Asano launched the box into the air, the small container arcing over Nishina’s head. The samurai’s blade flashed, and the box separated into not two but four pieces that fluttered to the ground, along with a fine spray of twinkling crimson powder that enveloped the agile warrior.

  “What-sorcery-is-this?” Nishima stared at the cloud around him, his sword ready, but with no true target to strike at. The dust did not affect him in the least, but seemed to be drawn to his breastplate, coating it in a layer of sparkling red particles.

  Asano mumbled something under his breath, then raised his voice as he lifted his hand in a “come forward” motion at Nishima. “See now what has been behind your quest to wage war on your allies to the south.”

  As everyone in the room watched, the red powder on the armor shifted and bulged, forming into a large face with blazing green eyes, a proud, hooked nose, and hair bound in a topknot on the breastplate, snarling in silent rage. As the dumbfounded Nishima watched, the face emerged from the armor, followed by a neck, shoulders, long, spindly arms, and a torso that trailed off into a stream of vapor. The spirit flew from the armor to the ceiling, circling the room once, then streaked for a far wall.

  “Now, Kitsune!”

  Kitsune hurled the egg at the floor in front of the wall, the grenade bursting apart in a shower of hard rice grains. The spirit immediately stopped its flight and sank to the floor, peering intently at the grains of rice while pointing to each one with a spectral finger, its lips moving silently.

  Asano bowed to Kitsune. “My apprentice was on the right path, but he was focused on the wrong instrument of Takahashi’s-or should I say, his spirit’s-plan for revenge from the afterlife.” He turned to bow to Nishima. “Your grandfather was very active in the civil war leading up to the true joining of our great land that began in 1600. However, he harbored a deep hatred of the Yamazaki, even after the peace accord was drawn up. Apparently, much like Senzo-san’s famed swords, his emotions against the Yamazaki were so great that a portion of his soul was imbued in the armor itself. Your father, Nagai, had no use for the suit and, therefore, never wore it; but when you began to use it in your training, the spirit was wakened from its rest and sought to finish through you what it had not been able to do in life.”

  Nishima’s katana dropped from a shaking hand, and he fell to the floor, crawling toward Asano. “I have committed the gravest insult to you, Asano-san… I must absolve myself-” He grabbed at the hem of the sorcerer’s kimono and wept.

  Asano bent over and helped the young man to his feet. “Stand, Nishina-san, and be at peace. Not only have you not insulted me, but on this night you are responsible for assisting your honored ancestor’s spirit to his final rest. That spirit is Takahashi’s base emotions-hatred, lust, fear, jealousy-given form, albeit a simple one. That is why the rice grains stopped it-these types of spirits crave order in all things. Without that aspect of his personality restored to Takahashi, he cannot ascend to the great wheel and take his rightful place in the heavens.”

  “Can you-can you help restore my grandfather’s soul?” Nishina asked.

  “It is a simple matter.” Asano produced another small paper box, walked over to the frantically counting spirit, and poured it out. A fine brown powder wafted over the apparition, and as it settled, the ghost became more and more insubstantial, until it faded into nothingness. “I have sent this konpaku to the spirit realm, where it will be drawn to your grandfather’s soul to join with him, and restore that which was sundered between the world of the living and the world of the dead.”

  Nishina bowed deeply, holding the position for several seconds. “Domo arigato, Ashiga-san. My family is forever in your debt, myself most of all. You have saved my clan from eternal shame and dishonor.”

  Asano bowed low as well, a small smile on his lips. “You honor me with your words, Nishina-san. All that I would ask is that you take the strength of your grandfather and your father and turn them toward keeping the peace in your lands and the lands of your neighbors.”

  Nishina fell to the floor again. “On the souls of all my ancestors, I swear it will be done.”

  “Then rise, Nishina-san, and assume the true role of the leader of your family.” Asano looked at Kitsune. “As for us, I think a good meal is in order, and then we will speak about the preparations for the Shogun’s impending visit.”

  Still slightly dazed from what he had just witnessed, Nishina stumbled from the room, surrounded by Inoue and the other guards. Kitsune and Asano watched him go, flanked by Maseda, who stood impassively next to them.

  Kitsune bowed to Asano. “You were correct about the false faces, even if it was a ghost of the past that had caused all this trouble.”

  “Indeed, my apprentice, it is not always those of flesh and blood that seek to influence the living, but the spirits often have their own designs on our humble world as well.” Asano leaned on his staff and headed for the door. “I expect that the rest of our stay will be a relaxing one, and I am looking forward to some peace and quiet-at least, until the Shogun arrives.”

  “My master is correct, as always.” Kitsune bowed and followed as they left the main room-and the ghost laid to its final rest there-behind.

  THE OPPOSITE OF SOLID by Linda P. Baker

  “The more you live, the less you die.”

  Janis Joplin

  Solid. That’s the word that sums up my life. Rock-solid, my momma called me. Rock-solid and steady. “You’re gonna make some woman a good, steady, dependable husband,” she would say, all proud and approving, as we sat in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for Sunday dinner. “Rock solid.”

  She thought it was a compliment. Wouldn’t my momma have been shocked to hear her compliment turn into “stolid and plodding”? That’s what my last girlfriend called me, as she slammed the door on her way out.

  I think that’s why I noticed the woman wearing a faded red hippie jacket, sitting on a park bench in the afternoon sun. It was her transparency that drew me. She was ethereal. Ethereal and luminous, with coppery, Irish-red hair and light like sun sparkling on snow around her head. It almost seemed I could see the wood slats of the bench through her shoulders. That’s why she drew me… she looked so much the opposite of solid.

  I wouldn’t have normally had the nerve to ask a strange, beautiful woman if I could sit with her, but today, enjoying the early spring sunshine of Golden Gate Park, watching the flitting of butterflies and hearing the buzzing of bees, I felt particularly daring. I mumbled my request and remained standing, just on the off chance that she would refuse.

  She looked up at me with eyes that for a moment seemed clear as water, then darkened to a good, solid blue. “You see me!” Her voice was like orchids, throaty and fragile, as if she didn’t talk much.

  “Yeah, sure I do.” I answered immediately before I could think what an odd question it was. I sat down beside her as close as I dared and put my newspaper and my lunch salad and my bottle of fancy spring water between us.

  Up close, she was less fragile, more visible, and the fairy light that danced around her head settled down and proved to be the noon sun reflecting off the bay. She smelled like gardenias with a touch of carnation, almost a taste rather than a scent. Almost funereal, but… pleasant.

  Flower power. This woman had it, from her long red hair to her deliberately scuffed bell-bottom jeans to the tips of her sandaled feet.

  “Don’t people normally see you?”

  “Not normally,” she confessed. “
They just sort of… look past.”

  I thought of how her shoulders had seemed to disappear into the back of the bench. But she was plainly solid up close. Thin as a model and pale, but substantial. She was wearing a jacket a bit too big for her that must have once been a deep, ruby red but was now faded to a streaked pink. It had gold embroidery around the cuffs and running up the front, a kind of flowery fleur de lis design that had frayed and cracked with age. It looked weirdly familiar, as if it were something I’d seen before.

  I picked up my salad and fought with the supposed easy-open corner. “I don’t see how anyone could look past you. Not with that hair.”

  She fingered a long copper curl as if she’d forgotten she was wearing a halo of fire around her head.

  “It’s beautiful,” I offered, “especially with the sun shining on it.”

  She looked at me as if she was as startled at being paid a compliment as I was at giving one. She blushed, a pale pink that touched only her high cheekbones and just above her eyebrows. “Thank you. No one’s said something like that to me in a long time.”

  I was smitten. In addition to a funky retro jacket and hair like new pennies, she had the smile of a siren, bright as sunflowers.

  “I’m Charles.” I held out my hand.

  She touched her small hand to mine. Her skin felt strange, cool and there, yet… so not there. Like the brush of dandelion fluff. “ Arizona.”

  I could help but laugh. “ Arizona? That’s your name?”

  The smile faltered. Her hand slipped away, leaving a ghostly impression of coolness where her fingertips brushed.

  I rushed to patch my faux pas. “With hair like that, I thought you’d be Caitlin or Maureen or… “ I searched my mind for another obviously Irish name and couldn’t think of a single one.

  She relaxed, her smile returning. “It’s from a song.”

  And immediately, the lyrics popped into my head. “ Arizona, rainbow shades and hobo shoes. Paul Revere and the Raiders.”

  She smiled even wider, surprised and delighted that I got the reference. “My mom and dad were sort of hippies.”

  “I wanted to be a hippie. More than I ever wanted anything in my life. I even bought a map of San Francisco and a moth-eaten old duffel bag and kept it packed and hidden in the back of my closet.” I couldn’t believe I’d just told her that. I’d never told anyone about the stuff I’d dreamed when I was a teenager. It all just seemed so silly and flighty. The exact opposite of the rock-solid person my parents expected me to become. And I guess there was a bit of disappointment in there, too, that I’d never shinnied down the pear tree that grew right outside my window and lit out for California.

  I’d missed the summer of love and Woodstock and Monterey Pops. The closest we’d come to anything hippie in East Texas was Jimmy Johnston, who wore his kinky blonde hair in a ’fro and went around saying “Groovy, dude,” to everyone, until he slipped and said it to our English teacher in class one day and got sent to the Principal’s office. The Haight-Ashbury district that had seemed so exotic and exciting was now just The Haight, home to Gap and Starbucks. I hadn’t moved to San Francisco until I was forty-something, and only then because I was promoted into it.

  Arizona and her shining hair and the strangely familiar, flowery, faded embroidery on her sleeves brought back the bittersweet smells and sounds of those summer nights. Lying in my bed, listening to Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker and Jefferson Airplane, with the radio turned low so my parents wouldn’t hear. Smelling the warm, growing earth and the green pears. Dreaming of hopping a freighter headed west.

  “What was in your duffel bag?”

  I still remembered that, too. “A pair of bell-bottomed jeans that I bought off a guy named Jimmy Johnston. And a poster for a Janis Joplin concert. And clean socks.”

  She laughed, a rougher sound than I’d have expected from such a delicate woman.

  I looked down at my sensible leather dress shoes and smiled. I would have been the only flower child in Haight-Ashbury wearing clean, white cotton socks. I guess solid and rebellious are strange bedfellows.

  “Why did you want to be a hippie?”

  I opened my mouth to be glib but, again, wound up telling the truth. “I didn’t want to be sensible and steady. I thought being a hippie sounded like a magical way to live. Free and alive, the way Janis Joplin was. Unfettered, spontaneous. Music, drugs, free love.”

  She frowned, as if I’d said something goofy again.

  “I know it probably wasn’t like that. I mean, living moment to moment may sound glamorous, but not knowing where your next meal is coming from isn’t all that… groovy.”

  We both grinned at my use of the word.

  “I guess the fact that I thought I’d need clean socks tells you I wasn’t cut out for it.”

  “I think you can be glamorous and free and still have clean socks,” she said, and for a moment, I saw that sparkling light again and caught a glimpse of a Monterey Pine, needles shifting gently in the breeze through her forehead, as if her brain was clear.

  I rubbed my eyes. Seeing things like that sounded like all the stories I’d read about LSD trips. When I looked up, her forehead was just a forehead again, solid and wrinkled by fine concentration lines.

  “Why didn’t you do it?” she asked. “Why didn’t you run away and become a hippie?”

  “I don’t-I’m not sure exactly.” I didn’t like the sound of the words coming out. “I guess… I guess the right time just never came. And then it was too late.”

  “I was there once,” she said. “For a while. It was cool, just like the books say.”

  “There where?” A bean sprout fell off my fork onto my thigh. I brushed it away. Why did I feel like our conversation lulled her into saying something she didn’t mean to? Why did I, for just second, think she meant she’d been to Haight-Ashbury, in the Summer of Love?

  Then she looked at me, straight into me. As though she could see through me. “ San Francisco, back then. I was there for a while.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t know about taking you there, but… I think I can take you somewhere you’ve never been before. If you want to go with me on my next trip.”

  Because I was still in that whole Woodstock, summer of love frame of mind, I immediately thought she meant a trip. A drug trip. But… would I do it? I sat there, staring at her. Kind of stupidly, I imagine. Like a big, dumb rock with a heart beating triple time. Would I do it? Wasn’t that the kind of recklessness I’d always wanted? Hadn’t I always intended to try tripping, just once? But I wasn’t that fourteen-year-old dreamer anymore.

  What if she was a cop? What if this was a set-up? My appetite shriveled, and I put the salad down on the ground. “Is this a joke?” I looked around, trying to do it casually. I couldn’t see anybody who appeared to be watching us, but that was the point of surveillance, wasn’t it?

  “No, it’s not a joke.” She held out her hand.

  I glanced over my shoulder, then at a guy who was sitting nearby on the ground, leaning back against a tree.

  I looked back at her. She hadn’t moved. She was just sitting there, her small hand extended, palm up. But she was doing that shimmering thing. One minute so transparent that she almost wasn’t visible, the next as solid as… well, not as solid as me. Few people were as solid as me.

  It must be something about the area, about the way the bench was positioned against the sun and the water. There was something about her. Something about the way she was barely there, but so much more there than anyone else I’d ever met, that drew me like a magnet. I took her hand. And the world shifted.

  It felt like-it felt like sparkling. Like sparkling should feel, if you could feel it. It felt as though I’d become one of those sparklers that all the kids played with on holidays. As if I were giving off sparks, showers of them, but they didn’t burn. I didn’t burn. I gave off sparks of multicolored light, but I didn’t diminish. I was still solid and stable.

  Then s
lowly the fiery pricks of light began to die down, and I could see. The world around me was hazy and thin, but I could see. The world was becoming more and more solid, more and more color leaching into the walls and the floor beneath my feet.

  Floor? I was sitting in Golden Gate Park, watching the noon sun sparkle on the bay, holding hands with a girl named Arizona. There shouldn’t be floor beneath my feet. Especially not floor with shag carpet. Or walls with flocked gold and green wallpaper becoming more solid around me. There shouldn’t be-I looked around in a panic. Where was Arizona? But there she was, right beside me, her thin fingers still gripping my thick ones.

  “ Arizona? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said, her voice calm and even. There was none of the panic in her tone that I’d heard in my own. “It’ll come clear. It always does.”

  “What does?” I turned slowly, not going so far that I had to let go of her hand. At the moment, she was my only connection to solidity.

  We were in a hotel room. It looked and smelled as though there’d been a raucous party there. The air was thick, almost unbreathable with the sour scent of aged cigarette smoke and the sweet scent of whiskey. There was an unopened bottle of booze on the nightstand and one overturned on the floor just under the foot of the bed. Cigarette butts and potato chips overflowed from several ashtrays and from what looked like a large, shell shaped soapdish on one bedside table. On the floor, beside the almost empty bottle of whiskey, was a newspaper. I leaned over and picked it up. A Los Angeles newspaper, dated October 4, 1970.

  “I don’t understand. Where are we? Is this some kind of joke? Did you have this made up at that shop over on Page?” But of course, a fake newspaper wouldn’t account for how I’d gotten here.