Chapter 5.3

"How was it, any talk about grave wrecking come up?" Toshio asked Seishin as he entered the room, earning an inappropriate laugh.

"It didn't. But there was talk of some compassionate soul who went tending to graves in the middle of the night."

"I see," Toshio said with a laugh, lowering his eyes to his book. After a moment of laughter, he continued. "....So, what'll we do?"

Seishin hung his head, at a loss for what to say. 

It was Shiki. There was no proof but he could say there was no doubt about it. But, ---that said, what were they to do about it? People wouldn't exactly believe them if they went around to others saying be careful, there are Shiki. Even now attacks were taking place. Even though the victims were increasing, Seishin and the others had no way of stopping it.

"Seems pretty much confirmed that magic's affective. Also it looks like they probably can't get in without an invitation. Don't invite anyone strange in to keep the Shiki at bay. If possible keep a talisman or a ceremonial arrow or something on you for protection. ---If we put that out there, you think anyone'll listen?"

Seishin wordlessly shook his head. Seishin sighed. 

"By now, there's no faith left in me after all. The best I'd get out of it is that they'd say that Ozaki quack's playing a prank on us. At least compared to me you've got a little more esteem but..."

Toshio didn't say anything more but Seishin nodded. They lacked faith in Seishin in another way. he had his side job as an unknown author. Without anybody knowing much about it, somehow he'd cultivated a certain eccentric image. On top of that was a prior offense Seishin couldn't deny. The reason that the parishioners weren't pushing him to marry and hurry to bear a successor was because they couldn't escape the feeling that they would be touching on a sore spot that needed to be handled with utmost care, Seishin was well aware of that. If he tried to start saying there were Shiki here, it would just come down to them thinking it'd finally come to that end with him too. 

They didn't have Ishida. Kanemasa's son, his replacement, didn't have the predecessor's prestige. Even if he did, be it Kanemasa or be it Ishida, trying to convince anyone of it would cost them dearly, and even if they did have them on hand, convincing them would be incredibly difficult, with convincing the villagers themselves bound to be near impossible. If they at least had others with like-minded suspicions, Seishin thought. If they just had a count of such people, if they could get their hands on them, then they could breathe suspicions to the other villagers at least. But if it were just Seishin and Toshio decrying it loudly, it'd be seen as entirely too absurd, with nobody taking it realistically.

"We don't have any way to go at this, huh...."

"Yeah."

"We can't do nothing. How about it, feel like wrecking another grave?"

"Setsuko-san's?"

"We do have to check if Setsuko-san's Risen up or not but for now it might be better to follow the trend starting with the first people to die. The three from Yamairi were cremated, so the first dead body'd be Gotouda's Shuuji-san, huh?"

Seishin cast his eyes down. In spite of it all he was still opposed to grave digging. But at any rate it was true that the only thing that they could do for the time being was dig up and confirm the dead bodies. 

"For better or for worse, the only Gotoudas hit were the main family. by the time the Gotouda's Jii-san died his ties were pretty scant, so there's probably nobody who goes by his grave. We don't have to be as careful as we were when it was Nao-san's. It should be easier work, so how about it?"

Seishin thought about it then nodded. He couldn't do anything but nod.

Toshio was already prepared. Flashlight in hand, in the falling dusk Seishin and Toshio headed to the Gotouda gravesite. It didn't seem like anyone had tended to the grave since the burial so the grave was covered with autumn growth and colored with age. 

This time without taking such precise care in the matter they used the shovel to dig up the coffin. Even so, digging up the coffin deeply buried in the earth was annoyingly hard work. 

As they came upon the coffin, seeing the lid half off they were prepared for Shuuji's coffin to be empty. Just like with Nao's, one part of the lid was broken open. They broke in the rest of the lid to peer inside. As expected Shuuji was not within.

As Seishin made to rebury it, Toshio went to work at Fuki's grave. Seishin was just reshaping the dirt into a mound like shape when Toshio came upon Fuki's coffin.

"...Oi." 

Toshio shined the flash light over the coffin lid. It was nailed tightly shut, with no sign of a broken lid. As expected even Toshio was visibly taken aback.

"...What will we do?"

"There's no what about it," Toshio said wiping the sweat from his dirt-covered face as his brows furrowed. "We can't just leave it unchecked like this, right?"

Seishin nodded. Toshio awoke from any misgivings he may have been under and roughly jammed the shovel beneath the lid. The lid made a sound as it broke, and at the same time a rotting smell wafted up. Toshio masked his face with the stained towel. With the shovel tip still wedged beneath the lid, he pushed down on the handle with his knee to force the lid up. Seishin likewise took off his sweatshirt to cover his face, shining the flashlight into the gap.

Toshio immediately released the shovel and let the lid drop back down. Seishin too averted his eyes, and after all of this turned towards the grave with his hands folded in prayer. Toshio didn't say a word, and so neither did Seishin. The two reburied the grave in silence. 

It wouldn't do to just throw the dirt over this one and not make it up as they did Shuuji's but since they'd started digging these up they'd become more familiar with it, so reburying it didn't take as much time this time. They reshaped the mound, set the sotoba in place again, once again folded their hands and left the graveyard. Their knees and hands trembled with cramps of exhaustion.

"....This means not all the dead people revive, then." Toshio breathed hard enough his shoulders moved with it, heading down onto the lumber road, towards the village road where he sat down. He threw himself down in the thicket. "No matter what the actual rate is, it's not a hundred percent. That's helpful."

Likewise sitting there in the village at night, Seishin nodded. 

"But that doesn't change the problem. What're we supposed to do now?"

Seishin kept quiet. If not all of the dead revived, then what they needed to hurry on with first was getting a grasp on the numbers of the Shiki. How many Shiki was the village housing, and from there how many victims would a Shiki take?

In terms of getting a count of how many Shiki there were, practically speaking they could visit the graves and just count the empty coffins. ---No, he thought. Even then they wouldn't know the true count. There were those who had moved out. Those who had clearly had an outbreak before they'd left the village. It was possible that that was more or less all of them. Attacked by Shiki, with no regard for their own will, they left, leaving behind only the words 'we're moving.' The ones who handled the luggage were Takasago Movers. A moving company that only came at night. They couldn't have been moving to anywhere above ground at this rate. They'd probably never find them. Surely the same went for Ishida. 

Doing Shuuji and Fuki's graves wasn't so hard without the aftermath to consider and it went fairly simply but doing Nao's had taken four hours. Speaking of practical problems, it would be impossible for Toshio and Seishin to check every grave in secret, he didn't think that the efforts would pay off. After all, Seishin's throat was dry. The rotting scent was still clinging to his nose.

There were an absurd number of dead, in well built graves, and in some percentage of those graves slept rotting bodies. Just thinking of peeking in on that and confirming it, as expected, left him feeling despair. Somehow he wanted to at least avoid that much, Seishin thought, unable to deny the self serving thought.

Maybe thinking the same thing, Toshio murmured. "First thing's to stop the Shiki from multiplying from here on," he said looking to Seishin. "If they're sucking blood, then to start with to make sure they don't rise up, you'd stake them before burying them, if I remember."

Seishin made a face. He could feel a physiological aversion to that. That was damaging a corpse. If the dead body were certain to rise up, that might have been a precautionary measure. But there were those who didn't revive. Staking such a body was none other than desiccation of a corpse, and even the act of 'hitting a stake in' itself had a terrible cruelty to it.

"Seishin, there isn't a more proper way to do it, is there?"

"...In the case of vampyr, typically they are staked and reburied. Or otherwise their head's cut off. Otherwise, they open a hole in the dead body's leg. There's also folklore of burying them face down."

"All of those'd be impossible."

"Or we could set up a blade at their neck, drive a spike in through the mound..... If the dead body does rise up, that could be set up to react at that time automatically digging into the body. Or we could put a net out, filling it with grains or sowing seeds."

"Heh?"

"Vampyr have to count every grain of rice, according to some folklore. Also it seems like they can't pick up more than a single grain per year. ....But as if that would apply in the case of Shiki."

"In the first place all of those are fishy. Isn't there something more, you know, something we could put into the casket without it looking strange?"

"Crosses, holy icons, medals..." 

"Or Honzons or talismen?"

"But they're set with blades and juzu in hand. In both Nao-san and Shuuji-san's coffin, there were protective blades and juzu in with them. It's doubtful they have an effect."

[T/N: In some Japanese funerals, the dead are set with juzu beads just as some Catholics may be buried holding rosaries. They may also be set with knives in order to ward off (or fight off) evil spirits.]

Toshio groaned. "What else are we supposed to do? If only drugs worked. If they do, I could inject paraquat to stop them from being reborn, making it look like an innocent treatment when they die. But I don't know what it'll take to keep them from being able to be revived. If only we had the custom of embalming. ---To start with, I don't know if embalming would stop them from being reborn either, but. To be sure it'd have to be cremation, obviously."

Seishin could only agree with that. 

"But cremation is..."

"The bunch in the village won't go for that. To get them go for it, we'd need a hell of an excuse, but I don't think they're going to believe us once we talk about Shiki or vampires. As a back-up plan we can say there's a huge plague spreading, we do have that on hand, but."

Seishin thought a bit about what would happen if they went to that end.

A plague. So burial was dangerous. They needed to cremate. If they pushed it, what percentage of the villagers would abide by it?

"That might be hopeless... Or at least, without the Administration making it compulsory."

People couldn't escape thinking only about themselves. This would stop the problem, but that and one's pride were different matters of different perspectives. Amongst the villagers was a clear line of thought on how a dead body must be handled. Doing harm to the corpse was thought of along the same lines as doing harm to the living family members. The problem was not whether they could do it or not, it was the resistance to it that they would face. They would be reluctant to cremate. There was probably nobody who would choose that option. And yet all the same, nobody wished to lose themselves or to lose those surviving family members. The plague was menacing. That harmed the living. As expected there would be opposition to leaving the menacing threat unchecked as well. The villager's choices were limited to two options in this. They could either look at the safety of the living as paramount and reluctantly choose to cremate or they could view the desire not to harm the corpse as paramount and expose the living to that threat.

And, Seishin thought, when man was faced with a choice in which all of the options were negative, they could fabricate a third choice that didn't actually exist--a positive one. It was possible the villagers would think: "That couldn't happen"---and it wasn't just limited to thinking they would be safe from the danger. It wasn't impossible for at least their own family to avoid it. As long as their own family weren't involved, they could avoid making an unpleasant decision. 

Maybe Toshio understood that as he sighed and nodded. "Saying that it's a plague and setting them into an uproad'd be a waste... If that's the case, then the only choice is something we can do in secret, but."

Seishin shook his head. This was in itself an unpleasant choice. 

"At any rate, we have to stop this before it gets worse. We can't leave the corpses as they are, so we have to make it so there're no more corpses."

"Aa," Seishin nodded but when trying to think of what they would need to do to ensure that, he couldn't help feeling further reluctant. Magic was effective. In order to protect his patients, Toshio's treatment measures and spiritual techniques to evade their attacks were indispensable. The ones to provide as much could only be the shrine or the temple, and they couldn't turn to the shrine that had no chief priest for that. It had to be the temple. In other words, the temple would have to pray to disperse the plague, was what it came down to. It would involve going around to the victim's houses and praying to disperse the illness. But Seishin was not accustomed to such a spiritual idology. 

"We'll need to do a mushi-okuri again. We'll put the traveller's guardian deities back up, round up the village again and do another mushi-okuri."

"With what explanation?" 

That was in the way of every counter-trategy.

"Whatever the case we'll have to do it. Moreover we'll have to decrease the number of Shiki."

Seishin looked to Toshio's face. Toshio raised a brow in surprise. 

"What're you surprised about? It's obvious, isn't it? We have to exterminate the Shiki. As long as one of them is alive, the contamination will spread."

"But."

"But what?"

Seishin could quickly feel his convictions wavering. He believed there were Shiki, but he realized he was thinking still that that could be wrong. ---No, Seishin was clinging to the hope that it wasn't Shiki. That in itself was in order to reject making an unpleasant choice.

"Shuuji-san might have been reborn. If he did, he might be attacking people right now."

"There's no might be about it."

"But it isn't confirmed. All we've confirmed is that there's no body in the grave."

"Oi, oi," Toshio said, his eyes widening. "Do we need anything more than that?"

"You may be right but...." Seishin hung his head. "Let's say Shuuji-san has revived. And right now he is spreading the contamination. It's true that we have to stop the spread but to do that, will we have to kill Shuuji0san again?"

"Is there any other way?"

"But wouldn't it mean Shuuji-san is alive? And can he be killed? By us?"

"It's not killing. Shuuji-san was dead already."

"But now he's alive. Isn't that right? That Shuuji-san revived isn't really something Shuuji-san is responsible for. It's an unfortunate accident, and so."

"What are you trying to say?"

"What I mean," Seishin hesitated. He didn't know how to say it himself. "Shuuji-san is dead, but he's reborn. Rising up means to return to life doesn't it? In other words, if a patient had gone into cardiac arrest once, putting them into that condition again would be called killing them wouldn't it? What part of that's different from murder?"

"Oi, oi. We're talking about Shiki, right?"

"Whether they're Shiki or anything else, doesn't it still stand? Of course, Shiki attack people. They spread the contamination. But even if they are murderers, say, can we just execute them at our leisure? Even if it's said that we can't leave them alive, we don't have the right to kill people."

"Don't sidestep the problem."

"Sidestep?"

"You're putting the Shiki equal with the people they're attacking. What's going to come of thinking of them on the same level as people who are part of society who commit murder? Of course we don't have the right to punish murderers. That's the government's job. But is there a law for judging Shiki? The government's not going to step in and do it for us."

"Even so."

"You're just saying that out of cowardice. At the heart of it you're afraid of having to do something to a Shiki yourself, huh? I get that you're opposed to it. So, since you're afraid and don't want to kill Shiki, you're going to leave the Shiki to attack people? Shiki dying is terrible, people dying aren't?"

"That's...."

"Are you saying to sit quiet and watch while the victims are adding up? If we leave even one Shiki alive, then they'll add to the number of Shiki by geometric progression. The number of victims will go on growing. There's no opposition to that anywhere inside of you?"

Seishin didn't have the words to argue. He was indeed right. What Toshio was saying was correct. If returning the Shiki to their dead state was murder then the Shiki attacking people was likewise murder as well. If killing Shiki were a sin, then Shiki killing people was also the same sin. If one replaced Shiki with murderer in the argument, the reasoning was clear. Of course he had to approve hunting the Shiki as a form of self-defense.

(...Really?)

The reasoning was clear, Seishin thought even while unable to assent to it. In the first place, he hesitated to replace Shiki with murderers in this. That hesitance was not something Seishin could express well.

"Are you going to just watch the village die?" Toshio asked as Seishin hung his head in shame.

"Let me think about it just a little."

"---Oi!"

Seishin stood up and left Toshio behind as he ran down to the village road. He was literally running away.