Koyasan by Darren Shan Page A

beneath it. Even in the worst winter, the stream never threatened to overflow. But it never went dry in summer either, although Koyasan often worried that it would, leaving the village unprotected from the spirits who massed and cavorted at night on the other side of the thin trickle of water.
    The graveyard beyond the bridge was ancient and sprawling, and no longer in use. People’s ashes had been buried there for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Nobody in the village knew where all the dead had come from. There must have been large towns or a city nearby at one time, but no ruins of such places existed any more. Or else this had been a place of pilgrimage in the past and the ashes of the dead had been brought from far away to rest in this secluded spot.
    The land just beyond the bridge was flat and bare except for the monuments to the dead — but started to rise sharply after seventy or eighty paces. Twenty paces beyond that, the first trees sprouted, and they covered the rest of the hill where the bulk of the dead were buried.
    It was impossible to say how many urns of human ash had been set here by their unknown ancestors. There’d been many attempts to find out. One count put the number at ten thousand, another at twenty thousand. One problem was that many of the tombs and headstones had been covered by moss, bushes or trees, and now lay hidden beneath the forest floor, lost forever. Another was that although a headstone might bear only one name, there might be fifty or a hundred urns beneath it, maybe more.
    Some said a hundred thousand souls had been placed here, that the hill was not a natural growth, but had been built out of the remains of the dead. Koyasan didn’t think that was true, but she often had nightmares about it, pursued through her dreams by an army of wailing spirits.
    Koyasan had never explored the forested, tombstone-encrusted hill. She’d never even crossed the stone bridge which linked the world of the living to the realm of the dead. Fear always stopped her here, on the safe, human side of the stream.
    It was silly, she knew. The spirits were wicked, everyone agreed about that. Nobody ever crossed the bridge once the sun had set and most made sure they got out of the graveyard at least an hour before darkness fell, just to be safe. But no spirit could roam freely by day. Some of the stronger ones could maybe exist above ground in the daytime, but they couldn’t leave the safety of the shadows. They were forced to cringe behind larger monuments, in the shade of great rocks, or in the hollow stomachs of the thicker trees. As long as you didn’t venture too deep into the forest, and stayed out of caves and other dark places, you were perfectly safe. All the children said so. And the fact that they always came back, alive and uninjured at the end of each day, was proof that it was true.
    But Koyasan was scared despite all that. She could sense the spirits slithering through the earth like impossibly long, vicious worms, scratching at the surface from beneath, always yearning to escape... capture... torture... kill...
    Two claws scraped the back of her neck.
    Koyasan screamed, dropped her clove of garlic and whirled round.
    Yamadasan was standing there, holding a forked stick, laughing. Mitsuo and Chie were with him. They were laughing too.
    “You thought it was a spirit!” Yamadasan chortled.
    “Shut up!” Koyasan shouted angrily, automatically bowing — she was always polite, even when scared. “I thought it was a bird.”
    “No, you didn’t. You wouldn’t have screamed if it was just a bird.”
    Yamadasan did a short, mocking dance, then threw the stick away and grinned at Koyasan. “Are you coming across today or staying here as usual?” Koyasan opened her mouth to tell him she was coming, that today she was going to prove how brave she was... then closed it slowly, not so certain now that she could follow through on her earlier decision.
    “Leave her alone,” Mitsuo said,