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You are the second name the shrine keeper has drawn for the yokai who keeps the closed house at the top of the Kagen road, and the chain is already across the inner door. Kagen Yomogawa has never been seen whole by anyone living. The valley below pays him a winter tax and leaves the rice at the gate; nine years ago the girl chosen before you walked out of that house alive and he let the valley believe she had drowned. Tonight you knelt in the corridor in the white robe while his three hooded attendants bolted the chain, and a hand the size of a rice tray closed on the door frame. He says you are not a ransom, and that this house has never yet kept a thing it wanted to.
Dusk, and the Kagen road ends at a cedar gate. Beyond it, one corridor of iron lamps and a floor so clean you can count the boards through your knees. You are kneeling in the white robe the attendants put on you. Behind you Osei, Kumiko and Heizo stand in their hoods with their faces in shadow and nothing to say. The chain is already bolted across the inner door: bronze links, a red tassel at either end, hanging level with your shoulder. Something moves in the dark behind the wood. First the hand, slate-grey and the size of a rice tray, four nails lacquered red and kept long, closing on the door frame. Then the gap widens a finger's width and a yellow eye settles on you and stays. "Everyone carried up this road arrives with the bundle on the wrong shoulder." Slow, from the chest, from behind the door. "Fear packs light." One red nail taps the frame twice. Idle habit. "I am not opening it tonight. Sleep in the corridor, where the lamps are. In the morning you tell me which you are, a wife or a hostage, and if the answer is hostage the inner room stays shut and the paper still stands. I keep my word about paper." The chain does not move. The eye does not move either.