Eight Million Gods-eARC

by Wen Spencer

  To the victor go the spoils. According to the driver’s license inside the wallet, the creature was using the name of Harada Hayashi.

  He breathed out disgust; the most dangerous of the monsters were the ones that could use the weapons of men along with their own natural talents. Either Hayashi had gotten clumsy with its excitement or there was more to this girl than reported.

  There was a purse on the table with her wallet and passport, along with the impression of a long thin blade painted in blood. A Hello Kitty duvet covered a half-packed suitcase in the middle of the floor. Around it were small piles of items. The girl had been packing when the tanuki arrived. Where was she now?

  He picked through the suitcase and things she’d left unpacked. Size-small, bright-colored T-shirts. Manga. Festival fans. Anime figures from out of Gacha vending machines. Everything hinted at a young, whimsical girl.

  How could such a girl kill a cunning monster?

  There was a frenzy of Post-it Notes on the wall in a kaleidoscope of colors. A turquoise-color Post-it Note caught his eye. It read “Shiva? Vishnu? Kali?” with the “Shiva” underlined multiple times. Below it were two more turquoise-colored notes. “The Brit” and “JFK to Osaka. Hotel Nikko Kansai Airport, Osaka. Walk to train station, airport to Umeda, express to Izushi, Nishimuraya Honkan.” It was the exact travel itinerary for Simon before he disappeared. The last turquoise note had a variation of the smiley face, x’s for the eyes, a squiggle for a mouth, and several question marks surrounding the face. What did that mean?

  He scanned the wall for more turquoise notes. There was one off to the side, down low. It read: “Scary Cat Dude.” Was that supposed to be him? Under it was a flash of pink. He lifted up the note. The Post-it Note underneath read: “Kitten.”

  How could she know about the kitten? He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.

  He stepped back, eyes widening, to actually look at the collage in front of him. Ananth had said the police had Natasha as “a person of interest” in Gregory Winston’s murder, which was shorthand for “we think she’s involved but we can’t prove it.” There had been no explanation, though, in the police reports as to why they suspected the girl. He studied the other colorful scraps of paper, trying to find a pattern. Slowly, he managed to see the underlying order. It was tracking dozens of people and objects as they intertwined. Each person had a different color, although there was some overlap, since she had only a dozen or so to choose from. Several colors trailed down to end in a frowny face with x’s for eyes. A “GW” was tracked in violet on the wall. He brought YF’s pink to an end before his own color stopped with a death mask and two words: “Harada.” “Blender.”

  Half-hidden under Gregory’s death mask was another flash of pink. He lifted the frowning face to read the note: “Katana, Osaka Station, locker 1601, PIN 108.”

  That would explain why the sword hadn’t been in Gregory Winston’s apartment. The lockers were emptied after three days of nonpayment. The sword would be still there. Unless . . .

  He glanced at the bloody blade impression on the table. It was the right shape for a katana. If the girl knew where Winston had hidden the sword, then she could have retrieved it and killed the tanuki with it. What happened, though, afterwards? Why had she left without her purse and suitcase? Did someone take her?

  He sniffed, pulling in the blood-drenched air, testing it for a more elusive scent. There was a slight tinge of ozone, like lightning had passed through the room.

  His phone vibrated. He growled softly and took it out to look at the number. Ananth. He glanced at the turquoise Post-it Notes on the wall. It was a tenuous lead at best, but it was the only one he’d found since arriving in Japan. He needed to find this girl. He couldn’t let Ananth order him off on another wild-goose chase. He considered what to tell the Director and what to keep to himself.

  He took a deep breath and answered with “Yes?”

  “What did you find?”

  “I’m going to need a cleanup at the girl’s apartment.”

  “You killed her?”

  He barely controlled the impulse to fling his phone against the wall. He forced himself to count to ten before answering. “No. There’s a dead tanuki here; it’s the same one that was at Gregory Winston’s place. The girl isn’t here. I think she bolted.”

  He considered offering to track her and decided against it. Ananth didn’t trust him. If he seemed too eager, the Director might yank him off the hunt. He waited for the man to think through the options and come to the logical conclusion.

  “Find her.” Ananth ordered after a moment of silence. “But make sure you don’t kill her until we’ve had a chance to question her.”

  Nikki stared at her notebook. What the hell was she writing?

  Harada was the name she had given the assassin that killed George Wilson. He’d showed up at George’s apartment disguised as one of George’s friends. Only after George had opened the door did he realize his mistake . . .

  Much like what had happened to her.

  After a long discussion with her editor, Nikki had put Natasha in a nicer building than hers and given her a spacious one-bedroom penthouse with a clear view to Osaka Castle. At night, they shined great spotlights up onto the gleaming white stones and gold edged pagodalike roofs. Surrounded by dark gardens, the castle looked as if a hole had opened up to another time.

  Natasha’s walls were covered with sketches and paintings, not post-it notes, and there was no dead body at Natasha’s. Or at least, Nikki didn’t think there was. She hadn’t written anything about the quiet artist for almost a month. Trying to write a more glamorous version of her life was like pulling teeth, as if her whole being refused the lie. What her hypergraphia had spit out since the conversation with her editor had been utterly lacking in detail, as if Natasha lived in a white void.

  This scene was full of details—only they were details of Nikki’s apartment.

  And the Scary Cat Dude had used Gregory Winston’s name instead of George’s.

  First the blackouts and now this—so not good. She was blurring reality with her story; not a good sign. How much of the scene was actually suppressed memories of what happened during her blackout? It would explain the mysterious hundred thousands of yen in her jacket pocket.

  The train started to slow down, and the loudspeaker announced, “Kyoto desu, Kyoto desu.”

  9

  Burn Out

  As soon as the doors opened on the train, Nikki hurried from the platform toward the lobby of Kyoto’s station. She had only two hours before the local trains stopped running. She needed to go back to Osaka to get her passport, credit cards, and anything else vital that she had left behind. An express would take forty minutes, and a local would take nearly an hour. It would leave her only an hour to get to her apartment and back to the Osaka train station to catch the sleeper to Tokyo. Her stomach was doing flip-flops over the idea of returning to her apartment with the dead body. Part of her very active imagination envisioned bugs crawling in and out of his mouth, but she knew in the enclosed apartment it would be days before that could start. She focused on the diminishing time before she would be stuck in Osaka without a place to spend the night. Miriam was the only person she knew in Osaka, and she wasn’t going to bring this mess down on her head.

  Kyoto Station was a vast modern structure built to be a visual re-creation of the valley that Kyoto nestled in. The lobby was a six-story-high rectangle under an umbrella of steel and glass. The occasional pigeon testified that despite seeming enclosed, one side was open to the elements. The wedge-shaped Isetan Department Store actually started three floors under the station and formed a mountainous slope up and out of the lobby that you could walk up the side of—provided you wanted to hike more than ten floors to the roof-top garden.

  The lobby was crowded with people hurrying home from cram school and office socialized drinking. Nikki wove through the sea of Asians, aware she was the only gaijin in sight. The far wall of the lobby was one massive
bank of automated ticket machines. Despite there being dozens of machines, lines were cued up.

  The only money she had was the hundred thousand yen. She nervously fed one into the machine. It calmly took it and spit back nine ten thousand yen bills and a handful of coins. She gathered them up and headed to the gate to scan the big digital board showing train departures. She wanted an express but she would take . . .

  . . . she was in a taxi on the outskirts of a town.

  The driver was a typical Japanese taxi driver; a middle-aged man in a uniform and white gloves. The car was spotless, and he was listening to a baseball game between Osaka’s Hanshin Tigers and the Yokohama BayStars.

  Why was it that every little piece of the puzzle seemed so orderly and sane and yet the big picture was filled with blood and chaos? Was the order serving to magnify the disorder?

  At least she still had her backpack and the money in her jeans pocket, and of course, the katana. It was only her sanity that she was losing.

  The taxi stopped. They were on a steep hillside, the orange torii posts of a shrine gleaming in the headlights. The driver said something in Japanese and tapped the digital display of his meter that showed eight hundred yen. Apparently he thought this was where she wanted to go.

  She had asked to come here? Where the hell was here? She could see stumbling into a taxi and asking for a hotel, but what was this?

  “Nani?” She pointed at the torii.

  The driver answered in a flood of Japanese.

  “Do—do you speak English?” she cried, interrupting him.

  “Eh?”

  “English?” She couldn’t even think of the phrase in Japanese. “Where are we? Is this Kyoto? Osaka?”

  “Kyoto. Hai.” The driver nodded and then pointed at the gates in his headlights. “Ikuta Shrine.”

  Had she asked to go to a shrine? In the middle of the night?

  “No, I don’t want . . .”

  . . .she was standing under a streetlamp in front of the shrine, alone, the taxi no longer in sight.

  “Stop doing that!” she shouted. “It’s scaring me.”

  It started to rain. It was a light drizzle, but it washed away what little strength she had left. She walked in a small circle within the pool of light, eyeing the dark landscape around her. There was the shrine . . . and not much else. The street ended under the streetlight. Down the hill, on either side of the road, were tall blank walls, over ten feet high, giving no clue to what lay beyond them. She seemed miles out of the town center with no idea where the nearest subway station might be or if the subway would still be running by the time she got there. Her wristwatch said it was nearly midnight. All told, she’d lost almost four hours to the blackouts.

  “This day really, really sucks. What the hell am I even doing here?”

  There was nothing to be done but go into the shrine. Something locked in her unconscious had brought her the whole way out here; she might as well find out what. Sniffing back tears, she took out her flashlight, turned it on, and walked into the temple grounds.

  The gravel path disappeared into a grove of tall trees, cloaked in darkness. In the distance, there was a glimmer of a spotlight. She could smell smoke, and the odor grew stronger as she went deeper into the shrine’s grounds. Dread grew in her chest as if the dark and cold were seeping into her, tainted with wood smoke.

  Her hypergraphia had spilled out scenes about a little Shinto shrine on the edge of Kyoto. While the daughter who worked as a shrine maiden had been vividly depicted as a wonderfully sweet and vibrant girl, everything else had been full of holes. Nikki had spent days exploring the temples of Kyoto, soaking in details to fill in what was missing from the scenes. While she visited dozens, she hadn’t been to this one.

  Or had she?

  What if she’d been having blackouts all along? What if she’d been living some dual existence, stealing ideas from reality and disguising them as fiction? What if the “flow” of hypergraphia was uncorking the bottled-up memories and letting them come out?

  It made horrible, terrible sense. When she wrote, she always felt like she’d dashed through some massive elaborate stage, carefully only tracking what the point-of-view character saw and felt and ignoring everything else. She disregarded everything the character hadn’t focused on, and thus lost important details that she needed to fill in later.

  What if the reason her settings always felt so real was because they were real?

  Did she write the vivid scene of George setting fire to the shrine because she’d been here before? Found the fuel can sitting in the storage shed, the door unlocked because this was peaceful Japan and no sane person would steal from the gods?

  She had written the sloshing sound that the kerosene had made inside the can as George splashed it on the back of the gift shop. The smell of the thick fumes as the dry wood soaked in the liquid. The heat of the fire as it “woofed” to life with a single flick of a lighter.

  Beyond the deep shadows of the trees, there was a courtyard lit by a jury-rigged floodlight. The light shone on a jumble of blackened timbers. Only burnt skeletal remains were left of what had stood for a thousand years, but she recognized the buildings all the same. To the left was the gift shop that sold charms. To the right was the raised stage of the kaguraden where Yuuka would dance with the other shrine maidens, pretending to be so solemn and serene when she was giggling inside.

  Straight ahead was the haiden or hall of worship, where Yuuka had been cleaning the day of the fire. Beyond it stood the honden, a small, upraised building with a steep gabled roof. The honden was the most scared part of the temple and closed to the public. Yuuka’s father only opened its doors on certain festival days. The katana had been kept within the honden; “George” had set the fire to gain entrance to it.

  “Oh, no,” Nikki whispered. “No.”

  “I didn’t know he’d burned it,” someone said behind her.

  She spun around, blinking away tears and raindrops. A boy stood in the pool of light. He looked fifteen or sixteen and was fiercely beautiful, with raven-winged eyebrows and eyes so dark that they were nearly black. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail that was twisted up into a topknot. He was dressed in a somber blue kimono, black tabi socks and geta sandals.

  “Wh-wh-what?” She glanced around, trying to fit him into the destruction around her. What was a teenage boy doing here in the middle of the night, dressed as a samurai?

  “I didn’t know that he set fire to my shrine.”

  “I-I-I’m sorry. Your family owns this shrine?”

  “For eighty generations, yes, they have served me. I do not know what will happen to it now. There are no sons to inherit it; Misa was to marry a boy from Nara. Ichiro would have adopted him as a son and passed the shrine to him.”

  Nikki frowned, trying to understand who this boy was and if she had somehow greatly wronged him. Currently everything was refusing logic and order and she was floundering lost. “She’s dead?” Nikki was no longer sure who “she” was though. Yuuka? Misa? Were they same girl?

  “Yes,” the boy said bitterly. “He killed her and raped her and hid her body in the dead leaves.”

  Nikki closed her eyes against the vivid memory of George’s fear and anger suddenly turning to lust and need. Oh god, what have I done?

  The rain turned to a heavy downpour, and she stood there, uncaring, weeping.

  “Come.” The boy took her by the arm. “The storehouse wasn’t touched by the fire.”

  He led her into the darkness.

  In the back corner of the shrine area there was an old Edo-period storehouse with stark white walls. Unlike the storage shed, it had a massive padlock that looked centuries old. Apparently, though, it was not truly locked, as the boy tugged the padlock off without producing a key.

  “I’m Taira no Atsumori,” he said. “You may call me Atsumori-kami. My name is written with the kanji for honest and then the kanji for prosperity.”

  The double doors creaked open and he walk
ed into the cavelike darkness.

  “I have a light.” Nikki turned on her flashlight. The walls seemed a foot thick, and the only window set above the door was tightly shuttered. How could Atsumori see anything? She could hear him, though, opening up wooden drawers somewhere in the back.

  “There is a lantern here,” Atsumori said. There was a flare of light, brilliant against the black, and when she could see again, he had a small old stone dish, filled with oil, with a burning wick draped over the edge.

  “Yeah, that looks safe.” She edged into the building. The light danced off tall tansu with metal-reinforced drawers and high rafters strung with paper festival lanterns. There was no sign of electric outlets or overhead lights.

  “I can protect you here.” The boy rooted through the drawers of the cabinets. “Once we leave the shrine, though, I will be dependent on you.”

  “What?” She felt like she had come in at the end of a conversation.

  He handed her a fine linen towel. “You can dry yourself with this.”

  Nikki buried her face in the towel. It smelled of pine and cedar, like it had been stored with potpourri. “I’m Nikki Delany. I’m so sorry about everything that happened.” She felt tears welling up again as she thought of all the madness she had accidently spilled out onto this serene place. “I—I don’t know how this all happened. I don’t even know how I got here.”

  “I brought you here.”

  Nikki laughed into the towel. “No, no, I mean—I don’t remember how I got to this shrine.”

  “I brought you,” the boy said with quiet intensity. “I killed the tanuki that attacked you in your home and brought you here.”

  Nikki lowered the towel to stare at the boy. He was sitting on the floor in the pool of light cast by the oil lantern. He watched her with calm detachment. He couldn’t have said what he just said—one of them must be misunderstanding the situation. She played the conversation back. And ran through it a second time when it came to the same illogical end.