The Devouring God (8 page)

 

CHAPTER 15

Friday Afternoon

T
akuda had thought he was going mad when the scars appeared. Yumi still could not see them. Nor could Suzuki or Mori. The silvery blue scars, pulsing just under the skin as if waiting to burst through, had swollen and spread slowly at first. Later, as their encounters with others like themselves increased, the scars branched and multiplied, crossing and curling around each other in an elaborate script unreadable by anything living but designed, in the end, for writing the story of Takuda's life in madness and despair.

No one else saw them until the night he held the fire demon by the throat.

In that moment, with Suzuki nursing his wounded hand and Mori shouting directions from the flaming villa, Takuda walked toward the surf with a writhing creature of living flame held at arm's length. Arm's length was not far enough, and Takuda was sure he would die. He had always assumed that his last thoughts would be of Yumi or his lost family or the infinitude of the Lord Buddha's love and mercy. These crossed his mind as the flames whipped around his head, but his overriding thought was of the constant and repetitious stupidity of evil: Why would a demon composed of flame choose to terrorize a peninsular village, surrounded by water on three sides?

Idiot.

By the time his feet touched the sand, he realized the flames would not kill him. Tendrils sent to reach down his throat blew out like birthday candles. Great streamers of fire from the demon's mouth singed his eyebrows and hair, but they curled around his head so that he barely felt the heat. Burning gouts hurled against his chest eventually charred his shirt to smoking ribbons that fell off as he stepped into the waves, but his skin was untouched. The only thing that really hurt was the steam that rose around him as he plunged the shrieking demon into the surf. The water boiled up to his thighs as he held the demon under, Suzuki chanting and Mori cursing close behind.

His hands came out filled with wet cinder. As he washed the dead soot into the waves, he knew the demon had not chosen its home, or this world. It had been trapped in a cycle of death and rebirth just as everyone else was. As Suzuki said, releasing the fire demon from this world was the only merciful act he might perform.

Standing in the surf in that moment, he felt something like an echo, a ripple between thoughts. The scorched hairs prickled the back of his neck. There was something behind his mind, behind it or underneath it. When he retraced his thinking to that gap between two thoughts, it closed like a trough between waves, but he knew it was there. He had felt it before, and now it knew he had felt it.

He walked steaming out of the waves, his mind reeling from almost touching the fearsome emptiness within. Suzuki pointed at him and said, “Those scars you've been talking about . . .”

Takuda looked down at himself. Now that he had turned away from the ocean and the moonlight, the scars pulsed bright blue, arcs and jags overlaid by straight, slashing strokes, all in all like primitive characters scrawled in ice by savage scribes. Suzuki poked at them with a long, bony finger as they faded back to their silvery seams. Mori swore he saw nothing, and in the morning, Suzuki said he could not see the scars at all.

Takuda could see them, for all the good that did him. He also felt the huge and silent presence behind the noise of his mind. It neither watched nor waited. Untouched and unshaken, with neither judgment nor reflection, neither impressed nor disgusted by the human world, it was simply there. It was the revelation of a secret reality, the split second containing all that ever was, all that ever had been, and all that ever would be, with the dim memory of life as a dream revolving around that instant. Takuda hated it almost as much as he hated his scars.

He remembered all this as he opened his eyes, but he remembered it as if in a dream, and everything seemed reversed, as if he were the dream and not the dreamer. He looked out of eyes that were undoubtedly his own eyes, but he looked out of them as part of something larger, the massive presence that waited silently in the back of his mind.

And when he looked out of those eyes, he faced Hiroyasu Ogawa.

“You're alive after all, heh-­heh.” Ogawa didn't looked pleased.

Ogawa was sleeker, fatter, and much better groomed than when Takuda had first met him, in the Oku Village jail in the Naga River valley. Ogawa had been merely an unemployed engineer suspected of attempting to kidnap a little girl, but Takuda had known better. Ogawa turned out to be the henchman of the Drowning God, a procurer for a murderous water sprite, a kappa. Perhaps the last kappa.

“Perhaps the only kappa ever,” Takuda murmured.

“What? You're still not making sense. You need more medication!” Ogawa rummaged in the cardboard box on his lap.

Takuda was sitting in a chair, he realized, though he could not feel his own body. He looked down through the unfamiliar eyes to see that his arms were restrained. The chair was metal, held together with predictable weld points. A normal man could work it to pieces given time. With Takuda's strength, he could simply stand up and the chair would fall to pieces at his feet, but he was quite tired.

He looked again at Ogawa, who was holding a glass ampule up to the light. “Why are you doing this?” Takuda asked him.

Ogawa smiled. “Because I can, heh-­heh. And I was asked to come see young Mr. Thomas Fletcher.” He snapped the cap off the ampule with his thumb, and it tinkled on the floor. He bit the tip of his tongue in concentration as he stuck the needle of a large syringe into the ampule. “Your being here is just a bonus.”

Takuda looked over his shoulder. Thomas Fletcher was still manacled to his bed. He looked as if he were sleeping peacefully, but he was not breathing, and his lips were blue. Takuda turned back to Ogawa. “You murdered him.”

“No, I executed him humanely. You I murdered, and I'm pretty sure your heart stopped, but you kept right on talking. Lies, lies, lies, about watching from the bottom of a collapsing tunnel as reality revealed itself through implosion. What rubbish you say under the influence!”

One part of Takuda's mind, the part that still feared death, flared into anger, but he was mostly moved to pity for Ogawa. “You can stop all this, you know. You can turn away from this path.”

Ogawa snorted and flicked the cap off another ampule. “This is the path I've been on ever since you helped my wife escape. I never found her, even with all the resources at my disposal.” He drew the contents into the syringe more easily this time. He was getting the hang of it. “That was a grave mistake on your part.”

Takuda focused with effort and examined Ogawa more closely. Not only was he well-­groomed, he was impeccable. His gorgeous black suit reminded Takuda of something, something dangerous . . .

“Counselor Endo,” Takuda croaked. “He's your new boss at Zenkoku General. You don't hate me just because of your wife. You hate me because I killed your old boss, your filthy Drowning God.”

“Heh-­heh-­heh.” Ogawa's laugh was entirely without mirth as he concentrated on the third ampule. The syringe was almost full. “You and your friends did me a favor, killing off old frog-­face.” He flicked the syringe with his forefinger and squirted pale liquid into the air as if he were actually concerned about causing an embolism while administering this massive overdose of psychotropic compounds.

“I'm much happier with my new employers.” He smiled as he leaned forward and pushed up Takuda's sleeve. “You see, I'm very much aligned with the corporate principles.”

The door swung open. “What is this? Who are . . . Oh, no. Oh, no.”

Takuda looked up to see Yoshida standing at the door. She stared in disbelief at Thomas Fletcher's body.

As Ogawa stood, the syringe disappeared up his sleeve. “Ah, good. A health-­care professional. I barely managed to restrain this man. I believe him to be responsible for the death of this patient . . .”

“Who are you?” she said. She hadn't moved from the doorway.

Ogawa moved toward her. “Let me show you my identification,” he said, feinting a dip into his pocket. When the hand came out, the syringe would go straight for her throat, and she would be dead before she hit the floor.

Takuda was across the room, gripping Ogawa's wrist. The deformed remains of the metal chair still hung to his forearm by frayed restraints, and pieces of broken plastic buckles skittered across the floor.

Ogawa sidled up to him and hissed in his ear, “Think this through with whatever brains you have left, heh-­heh. You're the one with pilfered pharmaceutical drugs in your bloodstream. You're the one who's had prior contact with this poor, dead foreigner. You're the one with the strange, spotty record.” Ogawa pulled as far away as Takuda's grip would let him. He pointed at Takuda's left hand. “And you're the one with the syringe. Heh.”

Takuda looked down. The syringe was in his slack fingers. He looked back at Ogawa's smirking face, and he smiled back as he started to apply pressure to Ogawa's wrist. Ogawa howled.

Yoshida closed the door behind her. “What is going on?” she hissed at Takuda. “Did you kill the Fletcher boy?”

“No, Ogawa killed him. Look at him. He's dead,” Takuda said.

She stared past Takuda's shoulder at the corpse on the bed as Ogawa leaned toward him, grunting with pain. “And who is . . . who is this Ogawa you speak of?”

“Shut up,” Takuda said as he jabbed the syringe into Ogawa's shoulder. “Here's something for the pain.”

Yoshida wheeled on him and pulled the syringe out of his hand. “We have to get out of here now,” she said.

“Leave that syringe with him,” Takuda said as Ogawa crumpled to the floor. “He won't get in trouble. You'll see.”

She slid the wrecked restraints and ruined chair from Takuda's forearm as he gently swayed in place. He slid his satchel off and handed it to Yoshida. “This is the foreigner's artwork. It's awful. Take it.”

“Can you walk?”

“I can walk or run or vault or whatever you need me to do. I can break things.”

Yoshida closed her eyes. “Well, let's walk out slowly. I can tell them you're a consultant sent from heaven.”

 

CHAPTER 16

Saturday Morning

T
akuda slept through the afternoon, all night, and well into the next morning. He woke to a note telling him to meet Mori, Suzuki, and Yumi at the Lotus Café, across Meiji Avenue from the moat of the Fukuoka Castle ruins. He dimly recalled Mori and Suzuki trying to wake him and his own drugged rambling about Thomas and the girls who had stolen the Kurodama. Now they wanted to meet at the café, just down the street from Able English Institute, Thomas Fletcher's former employer. Yumi was probably ready to have a long overdue talk about their living situation. None of it sounded like a good time.

Takuda sat on the straw matting smoking a cigarette, waiting until his eyes focused properly. Ogawa had pumped so much dope into him that he could taste it as it left his body, a taste like burned plastic and synthetic banana flavoring. He smoked an extra cigarette to paralyze his tongue.

When he got to the café, Yumi was waiting with Mori and Suzuki. She smiled at him, a tight little smile. He slid into the booth beside her. The others nodded and did not look up. Mori was haggard, too gray-­skinned and exhausted for a man his age. Suzuki sat quietly, as if resigned to his fate. Takuda hoped Yumi hadn't started the conversation about their living situation without him.

He spoke to Mori first: “So, any word on Nabeshima's condition?”

“No way to know. Her mother has taken over.”

No, not the day to talk about Mori and Suzuki moving out on their own.
He stifled a sigh as he picked up the menu.

“Good afternoon. I'm Koji!” Takuda was startled by a grown man introducing himself by his given name. As he looked up, the plump little server bowed with a sunny smile and a flip of his head that turned it into a curtsy.

Ah. He's a girl.
He returned his attention to the menu.
Used to be only in the bar districts. Times change, even in Japan.

“Today's specials are . . . oh, Reverend Suzuki! My goodness, you look absolutely starved.” Koji pouted as he moved to Suzuki's side. “Haven't they been feeding you at home?”

Suzuki smiled. “I am a little hungry. What would you suggest?”

Koji bent low to address the whole table. “How about savory pancakes for four? I can move you to a griddle table in the blink of an eye. Pork or seafood, all with vegetables, special today because eggs are cheap.” He bounced back upright. “How does that sound?”

It sounded delicious, even though it was a hot day, but it was more expensive than noodles or lunch sets. Takuda looked at Yumi.

She shrugged. “Everybody's working today. Why not?”

Takuda nodded to Koji.

“Excellent! I'll have your griddle ready in a flash.” He sped away.

Yumi leaned toward Suzuki. “Do you know that server?”

Suzuki looked away. “I've been in here once or twice. I believe we also spoke once or twice while I was begging for alms near Shintencho shopping arcade.”

They watched Koji shout the order into the kitchen and uncover the griddle top on a booth table. True to his word, he was going to hustle them to another table. As they gathered their things to move, Mori said, “The priest can have my share.”

Takuda said, “Don't pay if you don't eat.”

“He's hungry all the time. He needs it for something. Maybe next time he'll feed me.”

Takuda wanted to slap Mori, but it wouldn't have helped. Mori wasn't going to leave Suzuki alone, not today.

As they slid into the booth, Mori indicated the server with a jerk of his chin. “Priest, is that the kind you like?”

Suzuki glanced at Koji. “I don't know what kind I like. I know I don't like your kind, if that's what worries you.”

Mori snorted. “I've got bigger things to worry about.”

“We all do,” Takuda said. Yumi nudged him with her foot under the table:
Don't say anything now.

He lowered his head in answer. “Thomas Fletcher is dead.”

He told them everything, assuming that the night before had been gibberish. Finally, he said, “He touched the Kurodama, and I think his madness protected him. We will never know what he might have told us.”

He had their attention. He pulled out a sheet he had found in his satchel. Yoshida had relieved him of all the copies of Thomas Fletcher's notebooks but left behind one of the student papers.

Mori leaned forward to see the characters. After a second, he took the sheet from Takuda to read it. Suzuki looked over his shoulder. “This is a girl's writing, probably a high-­school graduate, based on the characters she uses here and here and here. See?”

They frowned in concentration.

Takuda said, “Would you read it aloud, or would you rather I did it?”

Mori blinked as if startled by the question. He cleared his throat and began:

“We pass underground with the wind at our feet, and it pushes us along, up the stairs. Thomas is there, but he has three heads. We pass him and walk up the street, past the fishmongers, and we come to the cafeteria.

“It is old, but we are at home. The men who work here are no longer men at all, and they are pale and hollow as if made of wax. Their eyes are black holes.

“The downstairs room is a greasy, old-­fashioned cafeteria, the kind of place with crushed sesame and pickled ginger strips in open jars on the counter. It's disgusting, but we know that it's just a front. Up above the steaming cauldrons hang fly-­specked wooden placards with the dishes and their prices written in traditional script. In a the top row, above the noodle dishes and spitted meats and other cheap and nasty dishes one finds in such places, special placards hang facing inward. The names of our special fare is written there.

“The hollow men greet us with veneration, and they fall at our feet and rub our legs with grease from our dinner. They anoint us with the food, even though we do not clearly remember preparing the meal. The doors close for a special celebration, and the hollow men turn over the wooden placards to reveal strange character combinations, old characters we have never seen before. We cannot read these characters, but we know that they are the names of the meal we are there to partake of, and we begin to cry and beg for our food.

“The hollow men lead us farther, and then we understand that the food is unimportant. The food is just to feed our bodies while our minds fly around the room. The real reason we are there, the reverent and right part of what we are doing, is glowing within the food, as if the food were translucent fat. Our appetites are gone, and now we hunger for the act of devotion.

“We have a single tooth between us, and we each use the tooth in turn. We use it to slice dirty flesh from the bones, and the bones shine through the filth in our hands. As if we had been born for the moment, we begin to lick the bones.

“We are smeared with the food as we clean the offering. Our human appetites are sated, but we hunger so for the offering that we cannot be satisfied. As the bones shine more clean and smooth, we carve the old words into the bones, even though we do not fully understand. It no longer matters. We are not in school anymore. This is what we were truly born for. Some of the girls become so excited that they begin to perform sexual acts with the long bones. This is to be expected, and in the long run we shall all do so. Everyone will, and then we will pierce our flesh and the flesh of those around us with the shining bones. Japan will become a glittering pile of bone connected with twitching, bleeding flesh.

“We have a single tooth of the Devouring God, but this tooth has a great reach. The more who use the tooth, the more power it will have. There were days when it took entire villages, and then it simply waited for someone to pick it up and carry it to a new village.

“Now, the village will come to the tooth, and more and more ­people will be under the influence of the Devouring God. We will take the tooth to Tokyo.”

Koji cleared his throat. His smile was a bit more brittle than before. Takuda didn't know how long he had been standing there.

“Here we are. Start with the pork and seafood, and pile on the vegetables when it's done. Everybody wants to hurry and pour on the batter right then, but make sure the cabbage is starting to go translucent. Trust me on that one. I'll bring sauces and mayonnaise in a moment.”

“Thank you, Koji.” Takuda passed bowls to Yumi and Suzuki. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Oh, I tried not to listen,” he said. “Honestly, I'm sure it's very interesting, but I don't understand modern poetry anyway. If it has upsetting imagery, it's not for me.” He hugged the platter to his apron. “Really, I do admire scholarly types.” He spared Suzuki a speculative glance. “However, I'm in the ser­vice industry because I am so much better at easing the troubles of the intellectually gifted. Soothing the worried mind, so to speak. Perhaps that's my gift.” He bowed in mock embarrassment. “So sorry for prattling on when there's sauce to be fetched. I'll be right back!”

Takuda returned his attention to the table. He expected jokes from Mori, or even Yumi, but they were focused on the essay. Suzuki stared at the griddle.

He's not embarrassed about the waiter. He's transfixed by the essay.

“What's happening, Priest? What do you make of all this?”

Suzuki passed a bony hand over his shaved scalp. “I don't know.”

Yumi dumped seafood on the griddle. Takuda did the same with pork.

Mori held the essay up to the light as if looking for a watermark. He seemed dissatisfied with what he saw.

Takuda spoke softly. “What do you know, Mori?”

Mori frowned. “I know there's an awful lot of paper just magically showing up. From the begging bowl, we get a drawing of a curved jewel, then a description of a man being butchered with it, on matching onionskin. From Thomas Fletcher's notes, we get a college girl's first-­person essay about how she was possessed by the Kurodama during her summer semester. What's next?”

Yumi said, “These, from my bicycle basket. I was parked at the station.” She spread papers on the table: a cartoonishly simplified English tourist map of the city, a photocopy of a medieval Japanese map, a photocopy of a newer map, hand-­drawn but fairly modern, and a flyer for a telephone sex chat club, the kind kids hand out at the train station. Most such flyers ended up in wastebaskets or in gutters. The photocopied maps were on onionskin.

“And this,” Yumi said, drawing a flat package out of her bag. It was a summer kimono, a lightweight thing, very thin. “Most of these are pretty bright and hideous, for young girls trying to attract boys at the fireworks show this weekend. But this one . . .” She ran a palm over the plastic. The kimono was cerulean blue, the bright, brittle blue of a late-­August Fukuoka sky, with concentric white ripples around lotus blossoms. The sky reflected in a lotus pond, like the one in the moat across the street. It was a gorgeous kimono, just right for Yumi.

Lotuses, a Buddhist symbol. Just the kind of irony Counselor Endo of Zenkoku General would love. Takuda didn't have the heart to tell her where it came from.

From the look on her face as she put it back into the bag, he could tell that she knew. No one said anything for a moment.

Mori reached for the sex chat club flyer. “Well, I think we can discount this one.”

Takuda poured the batter over the pork and vegetables. “Check the address before you throw it away,” he said.

Mori peered at it. “Oyafuko.” The Street of Disobedient Children, the young ­people's party street southeast of the main shopping district. “That's where Kimura wanted to go clubbing.”

Takuda nodded. “Counselor Endo is drawing us a map. It looks like he's even given us an address. If he's throwing us a party, it would be rude not to go.”