The Night Itself Read Free

Gothmother,” Jack said, striking a pose.
    “Somehow I guessed that one,” Rachel drawled. “I meant Mio.”
    “Oh, I’m going as an anime character,” I said. “Rukia from
Bleach
. I’m going to wear my old kendo uniform.”
    Rachel frowned. “Doesn’t that character wear a sword?”
    “I’ve got my wooden practice one,” I said calmly.
    It was true. I did have it.
    I just wasn’t going to wear it to the party that night.

CHAPTER 2
ONE WHO IS HIDDEN
    I’ ve been having the Dream for a long, long time. Since I was a kid. It wasn’t often in the beginning: once a year, maybe twice. It wasn’t my favourite thing, but it wasn’t – I didn’t let it be – a big deal. Not until this last year. That’s when the Dream got really bad.
    In the six weeks before my sixteenth birthday I was lucky if I could get through a single night without starting upright in the bed, flinging my duvet and pillows away as if they were on fire – fighting to get up, get away, go, go—
    Where?
    I’d make it out of the bed, my feet would touch the bedroom carpet – and just like that everything would be gone. Gone, like it had never been in my head to begin with. All I had left to show I’d dreamed at all was a face covered in drying tears and this terrible feeling that someone needed me. Someone needed me to find them, hold onto them, hold on tight—
    Who?
    I never knew, and that was driving me crazy.
I couldn’t remember
.
    Sleep deprivation does funny things to a person. After nearly two months of this, night after night after night, I was getting desperate to understand why the Dream kept coming back and what it was about. I was sure that if I could just figure out what I was dreaming, if I just knew who I was supposed to find or where I was supposed to go, the Dream would have to leave me in peace. Right?
    But the more I thought, the more I picked at it, the more I
needed
to remember … the more I was plagued with another memory. That day with my grandfather. That last day.
    I was nearly ten years old, and it was summer. I was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and my hair – it was long and unruly then – was tied back tightly so it wouldn’t fall in my face. The greyish grass in our little postage stamp of a garden crunched and shredded under my bare feet, tickling my nose with that perfect-school holiday smell as I glided forward into the
okuri-ashi
, the most basic kendo movement. The shadow of the big old mulberry bush next to the garage wall fell over me as I shifted across the grass, but the chill was nothing compared to the weight of Ojiichan’s eyes. He wouldn’t miss anything. He never did.
    I concentrated on keeping the line of my shinai – a light wooden practice sword – perfectly straight as I repeated the graceful, slow movement again, again, again… The last one had to be as perfect as the first, even if Ojiichan made me do it twenty times, a hundred times. That was the whole point.
    “Yame!”
my grandfather said. It meant “Stop.”
    I lowered the shinai and brought my feet back together, turning to look at him anxiously. He tapped his chin with one finger – he was thinking. “Good. Light on your feet, controlled, graceful… Better than your father was at your age.”
    I wrinkled my nose. I was pretty sure Winnie-the-Pooh would be better at kendo than my dad. Ojiichan saw my expression and his laughter spilled over, rich and golden and sweet, like the honey that my mum drizzled in porridge on cold days. His eyes crinkled at the corners, their darkness bright with smiling light. He leapt forward in a lightning-fast pounce – not like other granddads, with bent backs and wobbly knees – careful to fold the shinai out of the way so that it didn’t hurt either of us as he lifted me up and hugged me.
    “Good girl,” he whispered into my hair.
    “There you are, Mio!” My father’s deep voice broke into the moment. “I’ve been looking all over the place for you.”
    I felt the sigh