by Vance, Ramy
This continued for a while before the last god, Anubis, placed what looked like an urn in front of the museum’s door. Then the building sucked everything in like quicksand before sinking into the ground and disappearing.
I thought McGill’s Library of Other Studies had some interesting and rare, once-upon-a-time magical items. But this place was absolutely filled with items of rare and impossible power.
“The gods knew that items of such power, in mortal or immortal hands alike, would disrupt balance. That is why they shut it away forever.”
“Then why call it a museum? And why give it a Japanese name?”
“It was the Japanese Shinto gods who built this place in Yomi, the Shinto afterlife,” Kenji said, pausing as it considered my second question. “And as for it being a museum … they are well-guarded places, but they are also open. I believe the gods wanted all that power to be able to flow out while simultaneously confining the items themselves.”
Makes sense, I thought. After all, my soul needed a way into the Soul Jar. And when the gods left, they needed a way to let the souls out, if only that one time.
“Soul?”
Damn it—I was thinking out loud again. I hadn’t meant to tell Kenji what I was looking for. Not because I didn’t trust the nurikabe, but because I didn’t know how crazy the “he” who sent the futakuchi-onna after me was. For all I knew, “he” would torture my poor friend for information, so the less Kenji knew, the better.
That was the plan, at least, but my ridiculous thinking-out-loud mental illness had other plans.
Kenji shuffled another two steps in my direction. “Soul? But you are human now.”
“I am. Look, it’s a long story, but my soul has been taken and this map that only I can see says it’s somewhere in Okinawa. I’m trying to—” I was leaning forward, looking around nervously as I spoke, and that’s when I saw it. Right under the palm of one of those drab-looking Japanese salarymen was a mokumokuren, its floating eye pointed in my direction.
“Kenji,” I said as casually as I could, “you don’t happen to have a sword that I could borrow, do you? There are a couple of ghosts I need to chop down.”
End of Part 1
Part II
Intermission
Okinawa — World War II
Decades Ago—
Learning Japanese was easy when you had a photographic memory and a team of teachers working with you around the clock. Teachers, I might add, who were motivated by me not eating them.
And that’s exactly what I did (or didn’t do, as it were). I stowed away on a Japanese fishing boat off the coast of Nago with the goal of making my way to Okinawa, the place where the heaviest fighting between the U.S. and Japan was taking place.
It was April 1945 and I’d heard that the war might be ending, so I was anxious to make my way there as soon as possible.
I wanted to hunt in a war zone—a vampire’s paradise. A setting where bodies went missing all the time. A place where blood filled the air like pollen in a field of lavender during the spring.
It was on that ship that I motivated the sailors to teach me Japanese, a task they took on like their lives depended on it—because, well, they did.
We sailed for nine days before making our way to the little war zone where I disembarked, having not eaten a single one of them. They had, after all, successfully taught me Japanese, and even though I was an evil vampire, I still kept my word.
(Sadly, even though I didn’t eat them, I heard that their ship was sunk by a U.S. destroyer. During the heaviest days of fighting, the Americans had decided that everyone not flying their star-spangled flag was an enemy.)
I took a deep breath on the shores of Okinawa and smelled exactly what I was looking for. Blood.
↔
The first few days were paradise, with soldiers everywhere. I’d follow an advancing troop and wait for a soldier to peel off to pee or take a rest or—more often than you’d think—attempt to desert their regiment.
They were my main meals.
And during the day, I found a deserted hut deep in the Okinawan rainforest where I could rest, mostly safe from the sun’s deadly rays. The deserted hut was far enough inland that I didn’t encounter a single soul for the first three weeks living there. That hut was my base of operations and I left it only to hunt at night.
I was totally isolated. Until I wasn’t.
↔
One morning in late April, I heard footsteps. Waking from my slumber (for a vampire, I was a light sleeper), I peered outside my window and saw a Japanese soldier pulling a rope with three civilians bound to it at the wrists. I don’t know why he was there; as far as I could sense, there wasn’t another soldier anywhere nearby.
He tugged at the rope, pulling hard. The first one in the line was a child, and from the way the other two looked down at the kid, I knew they were her parents. The soldier pulled them toward the hut and for a moment I thought he was going to pull them inside.
Great, I thought, food delivery.
But he didn’t pull them in, stopping about ten feet away from the hut. There he pulled out his pistol, and with about as much emotion as one might feel throwing away their trash, shot the two adults.
I was sure the little girl would scream, would try to run away. But the little human didn’t. She just stared up at the soldier with hate-filled eyes. Some emotions have physical presence. Most can’t feel it, but vampires, we’re attuned to human feelings. We can hunt just by sensing fear and following it to the source. In that moment, I felt such a searing hate that I had to take a step back, lest I end up burned by it.
If the soldier felt her rage, he offered no indication. Instead he pointed his pistol at her. “Sutorippu.”
Strip.
The bastard. Not only had he just killed her parents, but now he wanted to—
I might have been evil, but even I couldn’t stand for such an ugly, disgustingly depraved act. I stepped into the threshold of the doorway and cried out, “Yamite.” I couldn’t go to him. It was daytime and I couldn’t risk being burned by the rays of light that made their way through the trees’ canopy.
The soldier turned around, and seeing an auburn-haired gaijin girl nearly floored him. Until, that was, he got it in his head that he could double his fun.
He took a step toward me. Good, I thought. Come to me and let me show you all kinds of pain.
The soldier didn’t make it three steps before the little girl jumped on his back and, with bound hands, started hitting him.
The kid had a lot of heart. Unfortunately, she was just a kid and heart isn’t strength. The soldier knocked her off and pointed his pistol at her. He intended to kill her now that he’d seen he could upgrade his perversion with me.
I burst out of the hut, risking the sun, and kicked him in the back of the knee. He went down and I was about to end him right then and there, but a ray of sun hit my shoulder and I fell back in pain.
The soldier turned around and seeing my skin searing, cried out, “Akuma.” The devil.
I wasn’t a devil. If I was, then the heat wouldn’t hurt me. But as it stood, I was practically in flames.
He emptied his gun at me and the blows knocked me over, exposing more of my body to the quarter-sized beams of light breaking through the leaves. I don’t think I’ve ever been in so much pain; the world started blurring as I began to pass out.
I was trying to crawl back when I heard the soldier scream. The last thing I saw before passing out was the little girl covering me with dirt and leaves.
↔
When I woke, it was dark and I was no longer covered in dirt. I sat up, still in pain from the gunshots and burns, and what I saw was nothing short of amazing.
The soldier lay on the ground, his knife sticking out of his neck. I could only guess that when he was distracted by shooting me, the little girl had stolen his knife and stabbed him in the neck. Smart girl—if she had stabbed him in the back or leg, it wouldn’t have killed him. By going for the neck, she’d s
aved herself. And me.
She was standing over her parents’ bodies, both buried under a pile of rocks. She got on her knees, muttering something between tear-filled prayers.
I sat up more and the girl stirred, staring in my direction. Again, I thought she’d run, but instead she bowed in my direction. “Arigato.”
“You’re welcome, kid,” I said in English. “But your thanks may be short-lived.” I sat up, cringing in pain. I was hurting and I knew that if I could only get to her and feed, the pain would go away.
I stood and made my way to her. “It’s nothing personal, but I’m a creature of the night and you—well, you’re my food. So if you don’t mind …”
Then I did the one thing you never do as a vampire: I popped out my fangs. Stupid. You never do that unless you have your victim in your hands. That was Vampirism 101.
Looking back, I think I made that rookie mistake because I wanted her to run. I wanted to give her a fighting chance, maybe even the playing field. After all, she had saved me.
But whatever my unconscious motivations may have been, she didn’t run. She didn’t even express fear. She just looked at me with her big brown eyes and I sensed acceptance in her. She was prepared to die.
Kind of made sense. She had just lost her parents. She had just killed a man. These were events that tended to weigh on a human soul, and I wondered if she wanted to die.
But I had sensed the desire to die before, most often while hunting in desolate places where many welcomed death. This child wasn’t one of them. If anything, she looked determined to go on. To live on. But she didn’t run. Why?
I never learned the answer to that question and I never ate her, either. This child had a will of steel and I couldn’t bring myself to be the one to rid the world of one such as her.
Besides, I still owed her one.
Shit … Shisa
36 HOURS BEFORE THE NEW YEAR—
“A sword?” Kenji asked. “We keep a daisho behind the bar, but ...” Its voice trailed off as it picked up on my tone of voice. “I sense nothing.”
“The three salarymen at the table. The ones who haven’t had a drink since coming into this place,” I said. “They have a mokumokuren with them just like the futakuchi-onna who attacked me on the plane.”
In the izakaya, the mokumokuren was still staring at me through the beaded curtain. No—not at me. At my arm.
I stood up, preparing to make my move.
“Salarymen? There are no salarymen in my izakaya at this moment. And as for the mokumokuren, I do not sense its presence, either. A changeling and two humans, yes, but a mokumokuren, no.”
I thought about that. “Can you sense the dead?”
“No,” Kenji said. “I am one who helps or hinders the living.”
It was starting to make sense. No one had seen the very real and physical (to me, at least) futakuchi-onna, and she had a floating eye. Which meant that these guys were probably dead as well. But if they were anything like the ghost on the plane, then their deadness wouldn’t do me much good. They could hurt me just like she had.
“Well,” I said, moving my neck side to side to limber up. “There are three salarymen and a mokumokuren. My best guess is that they’re dead and they’re here to steal my map. My very-attached-to-my-skin map, at that.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“You don’t have to—you just have to trust me. Now, if you don’t mind. The kanashibari behind the bar. What’s his name?”
“Akira.”
“Really?” I said, surprised.
“Yes.”
“Humph, makes sense I guess. I just thought after the movie no one went by that name anymore. Anyway, wish me luck, Kenji.”
“Luck?”
But before the wall could ask or say anything else, I burst through the beaded curtains and tumbled toward the bar. As I unfolded out of my somersault, I cried out, “Akira, daisho imasugu kudasai.”
The kanashibari looked up at me and, much to its credit, didn’t hesitate as it reached behind the bar and threw me both the long and short samurai swords hidden behind the bar. I caught them, letting the momentum of the throw unsheathe them before lunging at the three ghosts.
The salarymen didn’t have time to react before my swords went through them. And as the blades pierced their bodies, they disappeared until only the eye remained.
The eye gave me a grimace (which, for a floating eyeball, was pretty impressive), blinked twice and vanished.
“Booyah!” I cried out in triumph. I’d just dispatched three ghosts without even breaking a sweat. Pretty damn cool, if I said so myself. Too bad no one else could see the ghosts. As far as they were concerned, I’d just attacked air.
The American had been mid-sip, his beer paused at his lips. “Why do the cute ones always have to be the crazy ones?” he muttered.
Deirdre and Egya came to my side. “Milady,” the warrior changeling said as she scanned the room for danger, “are we under attack?”
“More ghosts?” Egya asked.
“Yeah.” I nodded.
Kenji shuffled out of the room, the beads making a light tapping sound that sounded like a hundred marbles hitting the ground. “Katu,” he said, his heavy accent returning, “baka janai?”
“No, I’m not crazy. There really were three—”
But before I could finish my sentence, two hooded men stepped into the izakaya. “Kuso,” Kenji said. “Heralds.”
“Heralds?” I said, but before I could ask who these two monk-rejects were, they started chanting. And they weren’t in tune.
Apparently that didn’t matter, because two giant golems burst through the wall, followed by two animated shisa statues the size of mopeds.
Fan-friggin’-tastic, I thought. There had to be shisa.
Agyo and Ungyo and Their Pet Shisa, Open and Closed
As if shisa weren’t bad enough, they were accompanied by two golems. Nio, to be exact. In other words, two huge, wrathful, muscular stone golems who usually hung out outside Buddhist temples as non-moving statues. Like the shisa statues, one had his mouth open, the other closed.
The open-mouthed one was called Agyo and he held a vajra in his hand. Think of a diamond-shaped mace, add in a dash of lightning magic and then think bigger than my head and you’ll start to get an idea of what kind of weapon he wielded. His closed-mouthed companion was Ungyo, and he wielded a sword bigger than the one Mel Gibson used in Braveheart.
Yay.
“Tell me you can sense those,” I said to Kenji.
From the way it shuffled back through the beaded curtain, I knew Kenji could. The nurikabe was making its escape, not that I blamed it—Kenji was a wall, not a fighter.
“Deirdre, Egya,” I said as we squared off against the four guardian warriors, “let’s get the civilians out of here.” Not that I needed to say any of that. The bar had cleared out; the only straggler was an ashwang from Pilipino mythology. The ugly, bat-like creature looked at the nio and shisa and bowed before screaming in Tagalog, “Three Who Are One approach this night!” Once he’d had his drunken say, he too ran out the door.
The bar was empty except for Deirdre, Egya and myself … oh, and the stupid American. For some reason he stayed behind, too.
Without looking at him, I said, “By civilians, I mean him.” I pointed my sword in the American’s direction.
I heard the unmistakable click of a shotgun. “Little Miss Sunshine, I’m many things, but a civilian is not one of them.” And before I could say or do anything, he unloaded a round right at the open-mouthed shisa.
↔
A gun, even a shotgun, can’t hurt a shisa golem. They’re made of magical stone harder than diamond. Chip it, sure, but actually hurt it? No way.
So that meant that whatever the American carried was no ordinary shotgun. The bullet spread went into the shisa’s, mouth causing the head to explode into a thousand tiny pebbles that showered the room like an autumn rain over a thicket.
&
nbsp; “Booyah,” he said, mimicking my earlier victory dance.
“Funny,” I said.
He cocked his gun again. “What was funny was your little maneuver after you’d just attacked the air.”
Just as I was trying to think of something witty to say back, the closed-mouthed shisa jumped on the bar and then at the American. He let out two shots, but the guardian dog was too fast, tackling him to the ground.
“Deirdre, help him,” I said as I tossed the longer of the two swords to Egya just in time for him to deflect a massive swing from Ungyo’s own sword.
Agyo charged at me and I managed to roll out of the way as the diamond head of his vajra destroyed poor Kenji’s tatami.
“I’ll fix that!” I called out.
The bamboo mat split and before Agyo could swing again, I thrust my sword into its side.
Well, I tried to at least, but the damn Buddhist guardian was made of stone and my sword only managed to make an impressive ping! sound against his skin. So much for picking swords.
I barely managed to duck as he tried to elbow me. But I was lucky—I had anticipated his move. If he had swung his vajra or tried to kick me, he would have connected for sure. And there was no telling what a blow from something as powerful as this guy would do to me.
What’s more, for stone statues, these things were fast. I mean, what kind of statue can move like that? I’d fought gargoyles before, and even the small ones couldn’t move like this guy.
The Heralds kept chanting, and it occurred to me that if we knocked them out, these guardian statues—which were really more like the mystical equivalent of the Terminator … as in, just doing what they were programmed to do—might be easier to shut off. But every time I made a step toward the Heralds, a nio would stop my advance. Apparently protecting their animators was part of the programming.