THE MOON KEEPS CALLING MY NAME

THE VOICE

The voice showed up at the worst possible time, which I guess is the only time voices ever show up.

It was night two. I was at the station, halfway through the show, doing the weather for people who were mostly asleep. Fog again. Visibility poor. Small craft advisory. The usual.

And something said, clear as if the person was sitting in Daichi's chair: Turn left.

I stopped talking mid-sentence. On air. Dead air for maybe three seconds, which in radio is a small eternity.

"Sorry," I said. "Reading the wrong card. Fog again tonight, visibility—"

Turn left.

I finished the segment and put on a song with shaking hands. Daichi's voice came through the talkback. "You okay in there?"

"Yeah. Zoned out."

"You never zone out."

"First time for everything."

He let it go. He was getting good at letting things go, which worried me more than the questions would have.

The voice didn't say anything else that night. But it was there. Not like thoughts. Thoughts come from inside, you can feel them being yours. This was like when someone stands just outside your field of vision and you know they're there without looking.

Yuki had said not to answer it. She hadn't said what to do when it talked first.

I made it home at four-thirty and stood in my kitchen eating cold rice out of the pot because cooking felt like too many steps. The apartment was quiet except for the things that weren't quiet anymore. The refrigerator had a hum I'd never noticed, and inside the hum there was a rattle, and inside the rattle a tick, like the thing was falling apart in layers. Downstairs, somebody's pipes. Across the alley, a man snoring with a catch in it, like a engine that wouldn't turn over.

Turn left, the voice said.

"Left where," I said. Out loud. To my kitchen.

Nothing.

I went to bed and lay there listening to the snoring man across the alley until he rolled over and stopped, and then the silence was worse, because in the silence I could hear my own heart, and my heart was doing something odd. It was steady. That's the odd part. I'd been hearing voices and my heart was beating like I was asleep.

Like it knew something I didn't.

Night three, Yuki was waiting outside the station when I got off work.

She was leaning on the truck with a paper bag, and she handed it to me without saying hello. Inside were two meat buns from the corner store, still warm.

"Eat," she said. "Then we drive."

"Where?"

"Nowhere. Around." She got in the truck. "Tonight's the third night. You shouldn't be alone for it."

I got in. The saint on the dashboard watched the windshield with its blank face. The meat buns were the best thing I'd ever eaten and I told her so and she said, "It's the hunger talking. They're terrible buns."

We drove out of town, not the coast road — I noticed that — but the inland one, along the river. The fog was thinner there. The moon came and went behind it.

"So," I said. "What happens tonight?"

"One of two things. The bite holds, or it doesn't."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then you had a weird week and a story nobody believes." She said it like she was reading it off a card. "You heal up. Your hearing goes back to normal in a month or two. You never see me again."

"That almost sounds nice."

She glanced at me. It was the first time she'd really looked at me, I think. "Yeah," she said. "It does, doesn't it."

"And if it holds?"

She didn't answer right away. The river ran alongside us, black with a skin of moonlight on it.

"If it holds, you'll know," she said. "There won't be any doubt. And then things get complicated, and I'll explain them, but not tonight. Tonight you just get through it."

"That's not an explanation."

"No," she agreed. "It's not."

She parked on a gravel turnout above the river, killed the engine, and told me to sleep.

"Here?"

"Here. I'll keep watch."

"Keep watch for what?"

"Sleep, Kisaragi."

I didn't think I could. I was wired, buzzing, my skin felt too small. But she reached over and put two fingers on my wrist, on the pulse, and something about it — the cool of her fingers, the steadiness — turned the volume down on everything. The way you'd turn down a radio.