The Yokai groans. “I can’t follow all that! I barely know where I am now. There must be a way to — hang on. Do you smell that? Smells yummy.”

The Konaki Jiji looks over its shoulder. “A nightmare. Get down. Down!”

About to inform the creature she cannot kneel down any farther, the Yokai gasps as she feels the sharpest of tugs on her arm. The Konaki Jiji pins her to the earth, shushing in her ear. “’Tis the blood-drinker,” he whispers.

There is something moving in the dark. A light, bouncing along in the darkness twenty feet away. It bobs one way, then the other, as if dangling from a wire, coming ever closer. A humanoid figure follows it. A girl. A tall, long-haired girl, thin as a rake, dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform.

“What does he want?” says the girl.

“To talk to you, Hino-chan! He’s been worried.”

“Then he should not tarry any longer. He should take the man’s eyes and be done with it.”

The light and the girl figure pass close to the ditch, illuminating the Yokai’s bare legs by mere inches, then turn and continue down the path. They do not speak again. The Konaki Jiji and the Yokai hold their breath until the light fades away.

“Forget the directions; follow the nightmare,” the Konaki Jiji whispers. “Follow the nightmare and the blood-drinker to the King. But beware, Baku-sama. Do not let the nightmares spot you, or they will devour you, too. I could not bear that happen.”

With a kiss farewell on the Konaki Jiji’s tiny hand, the Yokai rises to her feet. Like a leopard, she springs from her feet and scrambles up the nearest tree. She runs and leaps across the treetop branches over the path, keeping the girl and the bobbing light in her sights. At some point she loses them around a bend but looks up and sees the house just ahead. She continues toward it, confident in her noiseless feet carrying her above the path, confident that she will not be spotted. “I can do this … I am invisible. I am invisible.”

A sudden flash of light shines overhead, illuminating the barren treetops of a multitudinous forest. There it is. The house on the small hill surrounded by brambles and dying gardens and what appears to be a lake. The house that was once a Japanese ryokan, a love hotel, an alley behind a shop, the emperor’s palace, the top of a Ferris wheel, an infinite number of other places, and once even had the most decadent chocolate and baked confections for walls and roofing. The house was all of these rooms and places at one point in time or another. Now it is simply a house of wood and tile, ancient but built to stand strong against the elements of time and weather, maintained by some unknown supernatural force to serve its owner. Just above the roof, with its demon- and spike-shaped monuments, several hundred lights like stars hover in the air. Nightmares. The Yokai can smell them over the dead-fish stench of the moat, like a breeze of fresh air, but heady and fruitier and delicious. She can feel the urge to grow up to the height of the house, reach out a hand and scoop them into her palm all at once, cupping them to her mouth, feeling the chewy sensations as their flavourful essences burst out of their delicate skins …