The Devouring God (14 page)

 

CHAPTER 26

Monday Evening

T
akuda stood in the half-­light, blood running down his calf. The blade had bitten deeply into the back of his thigh, just above the knee. The pain had been shocking, but he had felt the blade bounce off his hamstring. Takuda was still flesh and blood —­with bones and sinew slowly toughening into something entirely harder to destroy.

Meanwhile, the girls didn't know he wasn't crippled.

The Kurodama doesn't know.

He pushed the girls back with his staff, tossing some of them almost out of the dining room, until he had a good staff's length between himself and the closest one. They stared at him with their awful grins until suddenly, as if in response to a silent signal, they started shuffling again. They were moving quickly now, as fully awakened as they could be, Takuda guessed. He stood on one foot, watching them pass through the pool of green light beneath the exit sign—­feral things with matted hair and bloodied mouths, eyes glowing like half-­seen creatures in passing headlights. Some came close enough to reach with the staff, and he thumped each in turn. They were predictable; they were running the rosette out at the edges of the room, and a few of them looped back inward toward the center, toward him, when the stone knife drove them to do so.

Takuda just needed to keep them back until he could start tracing the route the blade itself took among the girls' hands. That's why he was watching them in the light. If he could spot the blade, he could start to track it.

The alternative was smacking them down one by one with his staff. This just occurred to him as he stood on his one good leg, his back to the bone altar. If he could do it without killing them it would probably be the best thing for everyone there. He just needed to do it without cracking skulls—­or exposing himself to that blade. The first thing he had to do was get out of the center.

He hurtled himself across the open space, windmilling at the sides with his staff. When he reached the kitchen door, he wheeled back toward the center of the room, leading with the butt-­end of his staff.

The stone knife missed his face by a handbreadth. The girl who had held it was right on his tail; she went down with a solid exhalation as his staff took her breath, and the knife slid away into darkness in another girl's grasp.

He dropped his staff at his feet.

They drew toward him, crouching, grinning, and showing their teeth in readiness to strip his flesh from his bones. They were all so close now that he could see the knife moving among them by the ripples in their ruined clothing. It passed from hand to hand so smoothly and so quickly that he was sure now that it was not under their control. They didn't even look at it. They only had eyes for him. They closed in on him slowly, deliberately, with no fear at all.

Easy.

He caught the first one under the jaw. She dropped without a sound, and one of her sisters stepped in from the right to close ranks. Takuda watched the blade—­it was still moving almost too quickly to follow, and the path was too complicated to predict: right hand to left, left to left, behind the back, they passed it in every direction except up and down. At least it stayed a predictable distance from the floor.

Except when it's time to cut. That's when it breaks the horizontal plane, and that's what I have to let it do, if I don't want to knock out all but one girl and then wrestle it away from the last one standing.

The blade veered forward, and he caught the bearer with a punch to the solar plexus. She dropped, sucking air through that horrible grimace, then stood again when her breathing steadied. He punched her again under her left ear just as the knife reached her again, and the girls passed the knife onward, stepping over her sprawled form to reach Takuda.

The businessman went down easily, almost gratefully, it seemed to Takuda. He missed one girl, and she stood back, grinning. His forearm stung. He glanced at his arm glistening brown in the pale green light. She had sliced him from elbow to wrist.

Takuda continued to cut them down until there were only six standing amid the twisted limbs of their fallen sisters. The curved jewel continued to pass among them, still cutting a flat pattern a meter off the ground as it passed from hand to hand, still seeking a route to Takuda's blood, Takuda's bones.

They closed in on him suddenly, with no cry or outward signal. Takuda struck out fiercely at each girl in turn as the blade passed through his flesh—­first along the ribs, then along the jaw, then along his hip bone.

Sweet Lord Buddha, they're slicing me to ribbons.

But another voice in the back of his mind said,
It's slicing for the bones. It doesn't care about bleeding you out or piercing your organs. Let it try to free your poor skeleton. When poor skeleton steps out, you'll be free to join them.

Takuda was suddenly terrified. The voice wanted him dead.

No. I want you free.

He struck out in earnest. The blade continued to bite into him. He struck with his bones, suddenly understanding what the voice had told him, ignoring the musculature he usually used to form a strike. He flailed at the girls with his arms and legs, and they flew away from him, landing in heaps on their fallen comrades.

He paused when nothing came at him for a second. There were only two left, standing, and they crouched just out of the range of vision. Blood was running in his eyes now, and it was impossible to be sure where the remaining girls were.

There
, said the voice.
From your left.

Takuda struck downward, across his body with his right hand, slapping the stone knife from the grip of a pale, luminous paw. It disappeared among the bodies, and Takuda and the girls fell on the spot, digging for it.

Around them, other girls began to disentangle themselves from the pile on the floor. Takuda had knocked them out cold, perhaps concussed a few, but the knife would not let them stay down.

Takuda and the girls struggled to find the blade in the mound of sodden, bloody girl flesh where it had fallen. He felt for the knife between thin arms and scrawny knees, all the limbs so grimy and cold, as if the knife kept the girls' bodies only as warm as they needed to be for the continued functions of life.

A grinning girl rose to her knees beside him, a triumphant hiss whistling through her clenched teeth.

Takuda elbowed her in the face as the knife came swishing past his nose. He leapt to his feet as the blade slipped from her fingers, and he stepped on it. The crawling girls pried at his boot, the blade, the tile flooring. One girl closed on him and fell to chewing on the leather of his boot.

He streamed blood from a dozen slices. The girls piled onto his leg. He couldn't keep his balance for long.

The butt of his staff poked out from beneath a pile of fallen girls. He crouched low, keeping his weight on the stone blade as he reached in the opposite direction for the staff. His fingers closed on the butt and he drew it toward himself, centimeter by centimeter. He leaned too far, and the wound in the back of his leg opened. He lost his balance, falling face-­forward into a pile of girls, still pressing his boot down as hard as he could.

The girls continued to pile on, and he felt his boot heel lifting.

The blade and his staff came free at the same instant. The girl with the yellow sandal stood with her hideous grin of victory and brought the knife in a slicing arc toward his throat.

He stopped the arc in midair with his staff. As the girl's ulna and radius snapped, her hand and the blade continued in a shorter, tighter arc around its new axis, Takuda's staff. The blade flew out of the girl's fingers.

Takuda caught the blade in midair. The naked girl reached for it with her broken arm dangling. They all reached for it. Takuda cut a wide swath with his staff, but they started to pile onto his back.

There were too many behind him, toward the kitchen. He had to go forward, through the front door, and hope he could open it. If not, he would have to fight his way back through, and he would probably kill at least a few of the girls.

It was difficult. The stone knife was cold, dull, and dead in his hand. The girls swarming him were cold as well, draining him of energy as he slogged toward the door. The stone was so heavy . . .

He slashed at the base of the bone altar, and it collapsed on them, knocking a few girls off their feet. It helped a little. He plowed onward, and they made a chain, trying to pull him backward.

One step at a time
, he thought as the girls clawed at his face and tried to pull the stone knife from his hand. He dropped the staff and hugged the stone knife to his chest.

When he reached the door, he kicked it, and it banged open. He pulled the bloody girls with him up the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. He dropped to his knees and snapped the stone knife in two on the curb. The blade skittered off across the pavement. The girls watched it dully.

Takuda shook off the last of the clinging girls. A few dropped to their knees. The businessman made sudden retching, gagging sounds, as if clearing his throat to catch a breath.

Takuda, bleeding, sore, exhausted, slipped the lozenge of the handle into his left hip pocket. He hobbled across the sidewalk to retrieve the blade. His leg gave out as he bent to pick it up, but his hand landed on it, and he put it in his right pocket.

He pulled himself to his feet. On the sidewalk, on the stairs, and inside the restaurant, the girls began to weep and moan. The knife's power was broken, and the horror of what they had been through was coming to them. By the time he got into the cafeteria to retrieve his staff, some of the girls had begun to scream.

In the dim light streaming in through the doorway, he saw the naked, bloodied girl with the shattered forearm shrieking in an avalanche of bones. He picked up his staff, turned, and left.

As he limped away on his staff, men in Zenkoku Security blues streamed out of the shadows. Takuda walked away, not even glancing at the security guards as they moved in to clean up the mess. It didn't matter. The girls who had survived the blade would make it home alive, and the dead were already dead.

And he had the broken knife. No matter what else had happened, the nightmare was over, and the jellyfish murders were finished.

The proof of that was in his pocket, banging against his wounded thighs with every step.

 

CHAPTER 27

Tuesday Morning

T
he stone knife lay in two pieces on the low table while Yumi examined Takuda's wounds.

“I don't know why we bother anymore,” she said. “Most of your little cuts here seem to heal from the inside before I can get ointment on them.”

Takuda frowned. Yumi and the rest had been horrified when he had come home in tatters the night before, but their horror had given way to intrigue when he had produced the stone knife.

Mori and Suzuki sat on opposite sides of the table, staring at the two pieces.

The whole blade, before Takuda had broken it, was much like a stylized comma from a fancy Western font, that or the yang of a yin-­yang symbol. The outer rim would have described a perfect half-­circle, thick as Takuda's thumb at the disc and disappearing to a pinpoint at the tip. That tip was the horrible business end, the part of the sharpened inner curve that left such neat incisions on the victims' bones.

It was a frightening object not only because of its mysterious antiquity but because of its clear, prosaic, horrible purpose.

The palm-­sized lozenge that served as the handle lay a few centimeters from the snapped-­off blade. Both pieces were a dull, velvety, midnight black, so black that they seemed to absorb light, casting a hazy ambient shadow around themselves, but the broken edges revealed slight variations, iridescent striations that shifted slightly with Takuda's viewpoint as if hidden dimensions had formed within the stone itself. It was entirely possible, Takuda thought, that this relic of some prehuman time had built itself by accretion, layer on layer, as a way to make itself real and visible in our world.

The characters, if such they were, were intricate beyond the simple sketch in Suzuki's begging bowl or the one in Thomas's notebook.
Even mad foreigners can't do this thing justice
, Takuda thought as he and Yumi joined the others at the table.

The characters were no more than a finger's width at their most robust, near halfway down the blade. They were raised or incised or both in some cases, apparently in an effort to create depth. Some were rude and angular, some curved and delicate, but none seemed Asian in origin, nor were they linear in the manner of runes or Latin, nor were they curvilinear in the manner of the scripts adapted to languages native to Japan. Some were disorganized, random lines like jackstraws tossed by a dimwitted child. One was quite hideous, almost toothed in aspect as if poised to bite the hand of any who dared write it. Another was so smooth and rounded Takuda thought to caress it off the stone and into his palm.

The characters started at the center of the discus, fully formed but so tiny it was hard to imagine them being carved by human hands, then spiraling out onto the blade, each character by that time the width of the blade itself, each character's proper orientation as unknowable as its meaning or origin, each character incised in strokes shifting and shimmering as if with the hidden dimensions hinted at in the stone's broken edges. It was hypnotic, following the characters from their tiny origin, following the tight spiral of the discus to the freer arc of the blade, then tightening again as the characters neared the point of the blade, disappearing into the miniscule and reappearing, Takuda realized, in the center of the discus as if the blade had incised the letters itself in an unending litany of self-­creation. Takuda thought that if he just edged the pieces together, the string of characters would be unbroken, a little easier to study . . .

Mori flipped the disc with his forefinger. It clunked on the table: dull, dead stone. Now the characters on the reverse of the disc didn't match up with the ­characters on the obverse of the blade. The order had been disturbed. Takuda fought the urge to flip the disc back over.

Yumi glared at Mori. Suzuki laughed out loud.

“Well,” Mori said, “if I hadn't done something, you would have sat here staring at it all day. Until someone went to get the glue.” He shook his head as he stood up. “You said it yourself. It's broken, the girls snapped out of it. We drop one half in Hakata Bay and the other in the Inland Sea, or we catch a ferry to Busan and dump both halves in the trench. Let the deep-­sea fish worry about it.”

“Well, we can't just throw it out,” Takuda said. “Even those characters may be dangerous.”

“And the stone itself may not be inert,” Yumi said. “We don't know what happens if the pieces come back together.”

Suzuki's stomach growled.

Yumi nodded. “We have to do something about that, too.”

Mori looked exasperated. “Well, I have to work. I'll see if I can find out anything about the fallout from the cafeteria break-­in. It might be completely quiet, just because Zenkoku was on the scene. Waiting, were they?”

“It seemed like they were waiting, yes,” Takuda said, rubbing his healing jaw. He stood as well. “They let us find it, and when we did, they swooped in to clean up. That cafeteria is sanitized right now, even if they had to burn it to the ground to sanitize it.” He pulled on his shirt. “It's unclear if they know the stone is broken, and that it's all over.” He pulled on fresh Ota Southern Protection Ser­vices coveralls, even though it felt as if some of his cuts were opening up again. “We don't have anywhere else to take it right now,” he said, “but that's okay. We know they can't do anything about it. They can't touch it.”

Mori shifted his weight from foot to foot. “They could send someone. They could find a way.”

Takuda zipped up his coveralls. “If they could take care of it that way, they would have done it already.” He stepped to the entrance pit and pulled on his shoes. “I'm beat, completely wiped out, but I have to find out about Yoshida. She was cut up, but she was okay. She'll know what happened with the girls, if any of them entered the system. I don't know what we could do about it, but I need to know.”

He and Mori walked together as far as the convenience store. “We shouldn't leave them alone with the blade,” Mori said. “Even if it's broken, the priest could . . . I don't know. Come under the spell.”

“What spell? It's broken.” Takuda stopped walking. Everything hurt. “Suzuki is stronger than you think. He's stronger than you are, maybe stronger than I am.”

Mori bowed deeply, a frown carved around his mouth. He was angry, bitterly angry, and he was not going to hide it.

Takuda thought about it all the way to Yoshida's office. He didn't know what to do about Mori. Maybe this was the end of the line. Maybe they had been at the end of the line the whole time. Maybe none of it had meant anything at all.

Yoshida was sitting at her desk with a bowl of noodle soup. “It was a deep cut, but not life-­threatening in any sense. Stitches, all shallow, no staples.” She sat back, breathing a little heavily. “You tossed me well enough that I landed right on my feet, and I ran like a scalded cat out that back door. I thank you for saving my life.”

He bowed in return, but he grinned at her when he straightened up. “You're a fool for going in there alone. You know that, don't you?”

“I've always been a fool. How else do you end up doing a job like this one at my age?”

“You're talking to a soon-­to-­be unemployed security guard. I don't know where the rent is coming from next month.”

She nodded. “The choices we've made, eh? I'm supposed to go to a hot spring with some old crows from school. I'll have this scar, if it's even healed up. They'll be talking about their husbands' retirements and their children's jobs, and I'll be making up lies about being slashed by a patient.” She smiled. “They'll say I'm brave.” The smile dimmed a notch. “Your wife is the brave one.”

“Stop talking about her. I can't stand it.”

“What are you going to do? How will you get out of all this?”

“I don't know. I don't even know how I got here.”

She pushed her soup away. “There were a lot of questions, of course. I told them everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything and everyone. It was illuminating. For one thing, they were not interested in you or your friends at all.”

“Who were you talking to?”

“A patrolman. No one I've ever seen before. He didn't even write down your names. He wrote the address of the restaurant incorrectly. Not even close. His report reads like he was drunk. It says I ran into a girl gang that used an abandoned cafeteria as a hideout.”

“Girl gang? Yamaguchi Gumi Pink Faction?”

“Sailor Moon Subfaction.” She almost smiled. “They released me to rest, but I couldn't rest, not with these girls out there. Some of them are already home, you know.”

Takuda just blinked.

“They were cleaned up and dumped at their houses. That's in the news.

The runaways are back. The jellyfish killings were regrettable exceptions to the peace in Fukuoka City. They may have been committed by an unnamed foreigner who died in an accidental overdose in a mental facility, but the runaways coming back, that's the headline.” She looked as if she would spit. “I've been calling around. A ­couple of them were picked up, not dropped off, one of them with a broken arm. But everyone was scrubbed, not a drop of blood in sight.”

Takuda didn't know what to say.

She shook her head. “I still don't believe any of this is real. The doctor kept me awake while he was stitching me up—­horrible process, just horrible—­and I just lay there, thinking it was all a nightmare and that I would wake up and come to work and hang out with Nabeshima. No worries, it was all going to be okay. But now . . .” she ended with a small, helpless gesture. “You and your crew came and destroyed everything. And you'll move on, just as you always do, leaving chaos in your wake.”

“That's just it,” Takuda said. “You'll forget. We won't.”

She snorted in derision.

“I'm serious,” he said. “You'll forget we ever existed. As aware and awake as you are, you'll forget. Your mind will reconstruct this as a terrible aberration, a strange thing that happened with some local girls, and you'll forget about us, and you'll forget about the cause of it all.”

“I'll never forget the inside of that cafeteria.”

“You'll have nightmares, but those will be the memories working themselves out, like a bamboo sliver working out from under the skin. It will bother you for a while, and then, one day, it will be gone.”

“You know this from experience?”

“Yes. ­People forget me and my friends much more quickly than you would imagine. So will you, and so will Nabeshima. So will all those girls.”

“And do you think this selective amnesia is magic?”

“No, I don't. I think it's the human mind protecting itself from the outer darkness.”

As if on cue, the lights cut off. The fan stopped, and the refrigerator in the kitchen stopped its reassuring hum.

“That's strange,” Yoshida said. “It's not even so hot yet that everyone's running their air conditioners. There shouldn't be brownouts, much less a complete failure.”

The hair on Takuda's neck stood up. He locked the front door and started checking the windows. “Get up,” he said. “Gather your things. I'll get you out the back way.”

She started to protest, and he spoke from the darkness in the back of his mind:
“Get out.”

His right temple exploded with pain.

She said, “I suppose I really should be resting at home anyway. I was going to enter some notes on Nabeshima's workstation, but without the power, I can't even do that. You'll lock up?”

“I'll lock up,” he said, almost shoving her out the kitchen door and locking it behind them.

“Very well,” she said. “I'll put in a good word for you with your boss. I'm sure he will appreciate your taking care of the office . . . Good day.”

He walked her to the end of the alleyway, and then he watched her go down the main road toward the train station. She didn't look back. It was as if she had already forgotten who he was.

He paused at the front door, holding his right temple. He could feel the bone rising under his fingertips, raising the ridge that would push the right canine tooth out as a new fang.
I'll be a pop-­eyed, grinning demon by nightfall. All I'll need is a spiked club.

When he let himself back in the office, Counselor Endo was waiting for him in the shadows of the main room.

“Well, I see you've survived your schoolgirl crush without great injury,” Endo said. He stepped into the light from Yoshida's window. “Congratulations. Now, you and your friends have something I want. You should deliver it to its home immediately, before it kills you all.”