The last train had already gone when Daichi left the platform.
Hokkaido in November made the station feel larger than it was. The fluorescents hummed. The underpass to the north exit held the smell of wet concrete and iron. He had missed his connection by four minutes and told himself the walk to the bus stop was nothing.
He heard it before he reached the stairs.
Teke.
Then again.
Teke.
Not a heel. Not a cane. Two beats, close to the floor, as if something were dragging itself and striking stone with the same two bones every time.
Daichi stopped. The underpass ran thirty meters. At the far end the night was a rectangle of colder air. Halfway down, under a light that flickered once and held, the floor was empty.
The sound came again, closer than the empty stretch allowed.
He had been told the story in school the way everyone was told it and had filed it with the rest. A young woman on a crossing. A train that did not stop in time. A body taken through the middle. A spirit that kept only what the wheels had left her, and moved on her hands, and made that sound, and if she caught you she made you the same shape she was.
He was twenty-six. He did not believe in school stories.
He started walking anyway, faster.
The beats kept time with him. When he sped up they sped up. When he glanced over his shoulder the underpass was still a clean tunnel of stained tile. No figure. Only the sound, now on his left, as if it had chosen the wall.
He took the stairs two at a time and came out by the unused freight crossing, where the bars were down for a train that was not coming. The rails shone with a thin skin of ice. Beyond them the bus road was a dark ribbon.
Teke.
Teke.
It was on the ballast.
He saw her because the crossing light caught the wet in her hair.
She was low. That was the first wrong thing. Not crouched. Placed on the world the way a dropped coat is placed. Long black hair hung over a pale face that had been a woman’s face and had decided not to finish the expression. Her hands were on the ties. The rest of her ended where a person should have had a waist, and the end of that was in shadow, and he was grateful for the shadow until she moved.
She moved the way a spider moves when it has decided the distance is nothing.
Daichi ran.
He was not a slow man. The freight road was packed snow and grit. He heard the two beats behind him change from scrape to hammer. Teke. Teke. Faster than his own stride. He did not look back because looking back was how the story ended in the versions that wanted you to see the blade.
There was a blade. He learned that when it passed his calf close enough to open the cloth and not yet the skin. Cold air rushed the cut. He stumbled, caught the fence, and the fence sang.
She was beside the fence.
Up close the face was worse for being almost ordinary. Mouth open. Eyes not tracking him so much as measuring the place on him that matched the place on her. One hand on the ground. The other already rising with something dull and hooked that might have been metal and might have been a bone the train had given back.
He threw himself through a gap in the chain-link and hit the service lot on his shoulder. The sound did not stop at the fence. It came under it. It came through it. Two beats. Too fast.
The night watchman’s hut at the far corner had a light and a door that stuck. Daichi hit the door with the side of his body and it gave. He slammed it and put his back to the wood and listened.
Silence.
Then, against the bottom of the door, two small sounds.
Teke.
Teke.
As if knuckles were counting the grain.
He stayed there until the first workmen’s voices came up the line at dawn. When he opened the door the lot was only a lot. A drag-mark in the frost ran from the fence to the hut and ended as if whoever made it had been lifted straight up.
His trousers were cut clean across the calf. The skin beneath was a white line that had not quite decided to bleed.
He did not take that underpass again.
The people who still tell it in the north do not agree on every piece. Some say she asks a question before she cuts. Some say she is faster on tile than on snow. Some give her a name from a crossing that does not appear on any timetable. They agree on the sound.
You hear her before you see her.
She is lower than a standing person and quicker than a running one.
If she reaches you, she does not want your fear.
She wants you even.
Daichi keeps a lamp on the floor now, not the ceiling. He learned that in the hut, in the hour before the voices, when he understood what the two beats were measuring.
Not the length of the room.
The height of his waist.
