by JP Romney
Archers rushed through the bushes and took aim. Shibaten stepped back toward the river.
“Hanare!” the man cried.
Shibaten’s body recoiled from fifteen arrows striking him in the chest and stomach. The kappa fell back into the river with a splash. The wooden box floated away and lodged itself downstream in the reeds.
After the men and their laughter left the banks of Kusaka River, a small hand wrapped in turtle skin rose up from the icy water to grasp the box.
I shot straight up against the wall of my bedroom.
“Whoa!” Moya shouted, still nursing her green fireball. “No warning at all. Just, pop, and out you come.”
I looked over at Moya and smiled.
“Do you know where Kōtenbō is hiding?” she asked, scooping the demon’s dry eyes into their wooden box.
“I’m a mind-thief, aren’t I?”
“More like a misery thief, but sure, you can say it that way if it makes you feel better.”
“It does. After Shibaten stole Kōtenbō’s eyes, he flew to Sarutadō Cave.”
“Good job, Koda,” Moya said with a smile that was stretched a little too thin. She stood up and looked out through my dark window. “We’ll go in the morning.”
I rolled over and grabbed a pillow from my closet.
“What’s that for?” she asked, turning around.
“I thought we should get some sleep before, you know, killing a mountain demon together.”
“You still want to kill a mountain demon with me? Even after everything you’ve seen?”
“I’d kill a mountain demon with you anytime, Moya.”
“That’s so sweet,” she said. “How am I your first girlfriend?”
“I knew it! You are my girlfriend.”
Moya laughed.
I unfolded my futon with one arm and laid it out on the floor.
“Yipes,” she said. “I think this relationship is moving a little too fast.”
“What?”
“Save a boy from a bloodthirsty kappa just one time, and he thinks he can invite you to sleep in his room. So typical.”
“What? Gods, Moya, no—that’s not what I was doing. I’ll sleep over here. Way over here. On the other side of the room, I swear.” I ran over to the opposite end of the room all floppy-armed and dropped onto the tatami mats. “See, it’s really comfortable all the way over here by myself on this hard floor. It feels great.”
No, it didn’t. I should have grabbed a blanket.
Moya crawled across the room and sat next to me. After a few moments she asked, “Can you choose what you see?”
“What?” I said, turning to her.
“Can you choose what memories to steal from a person?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“What if the person helped?”
Moya put out her hand.
“What do you want me to see?” I asked.
“A trauma,” she said, closing her eyes.
I reached out and held her hand in mine. She smiled at me. The world turned to ice.
Moya and Seimei were standing in the same park where his parents had died just a few weeks before. Moya wore a silver kimono that fluttered softly at the hems. Seimei wore his brown school uniform, washed but still snagged and torn from his first encounter with Kōtenbō. I walked through the park gate and noticed for the first time how eerily Seimei looked like me.
“You cannot defeat him,” I heard Moya say.
“But you can, Kemuri,” he said, looking down at the ground.
Kemuri? Did Moya change her name when she met me?
Moya lifted Seimei’s chin until their eyes met. “Run away from this village, Seimei. Go to the shrine of Inari. The goddess will protect you.”
“You will protect me, Kemuri.”
“I am only one, Seimei. And the tengu is one. I cannot tell you what the end will be.”
In that moment, Seimei seemed small and powerless. He was no suri or supernatural creature or great swordsman. But Kōtenbō was all of those things.
“Running is death,” Seimei said. “If not to me, then to the others whose blood is also cursed.”
Seimei knelt down and drew Ōmura Shrine in the dirt with his finger. He explained his plan to use himself as bait to lure Kōtenbō in. Moya slowly shook her head when he instructed her to chain the doors from the outside.
“The tengu is a cunning demon,” Moya said. “You will not be safe in the shrine.”
“Because he is cunning he will not enter without me there.”
Moya must have known he was right, because her only reply was a single drop of sulfur that smudged her porcelain cheek.
Seimei stood and took her hand. “We will win, Kemuri. We are the good ones. We have to win.”
But I knew what Seimei did not—deserving to win and winning are not the same thing. Moya suddenly turned and looked in my direction, as if, for a moment, she sensed someone there in the cold and the ice.
“We will win,” she whispered to Seimei. “Somehow and somewhere we’ll bring the tengu down.”
I was lying on my tatami mat when I opened my eyes. Moya was curled into a ball behind me, her forehead against my back. We lay on my floor together staring out into the darkness, knowing that tomorrow morning Sarutadō Cave would be our shrine.
“You are one of the good ones,” I whispered to her.
Moya slowly squeezed my hand.
36
* * *
NOTEBOOK/FUJIWARA, AIKO
DATE: 2006年9月22日
T R A P P ED
inside.
how does the monster make the screaming inside. the black birds are in me now. can you be released. Can yyyyyyyyyyou be released. find the door. find the way. you cant belong here. you cant belong inside. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. i can hear it. get out. be free. i can hear them hearing me. i will do it. i will drink it and you will be free. open my mouth and free the black birds. the three-legged one is not coming. hhhhhhhhhhheee is nnnnnnotttttttttt here. drink the potion. drink the potionpoisonpotionpoisonpotion. free the black birds trapped inside. drink the key. open the door. flyyyyyyyy away with them. ffffffffffffffflllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy away. we are alone. but we will not be travelers lost on this road.
* * *
The next morning Moya and I walked out to the last kaki tree. Or the twisted mass of branches and chopped-up trunk that used to be the last kaki tree. We stood there for a long time.
“We can beat him,” I told her, massaging my now-unbroken arm. It was still a little tender.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” Moya whispered as she walked slowly toward the shattered tree. She knelt down and touched the gnarled trunk. “Koda, I want you to stay here with the tree,” she said without looking back.
“No.” I slipped Yori’s goggles over my neck.
She stood and turned around. “Kōtenbō killed Seimei. He killed the kaki tree. And if you go with me to Sarutadō, he will kill you, too.”
“He also killed Yori and Aiko and Ichiro and Taiki. I can help you defeat him.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“I can help you.”
“You’re just a silly human kid.”
“You need me, Moya.”
“I don’t need you!” she cried back.
Moya wiped at her cheek.
“If you go in there alone, you might not come back,” I said.
“If you come with me, you might not come back,” she said. “How can you be so foolish, Koda? I tried to show you that Seimei thought the same thing.” Moya slowly sat down on the grass. “You could run. You could run far from Kusaka Town and become a pri
est at a shrine to Inari. She would protect you from everything.”
“I couldn’t live with myself,” I said, walking up to her.
“Why doesn’t anyone like my priest idea?”
“Because it sounds really boring.”
She looked up at me.
“And the whole abandoning-our-town-to-a-murderous-tengu idea,” I said. “There’s that, too.”
I sat down next to Moya. “Besides, hiding me is what Kōtenbō thinks you’ll do. Who in their right mind would take a teenage kid and lock them in a room with a murderous mountain demon? Twice?”
“Certainly not a sane person.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re not helping your argument at all here.”
“That’s just my point. The reasonable thing to do is keep me away from that cave at all costs.”
“Right.”
“Maybe leave me at my house or in this grove. But if Kōtenbō reached the kaki tree, he can reach me. I don’t think I’d last long against an ax-wielding tree killer. And if I have the choice, I’d rather face my threats standing by your side.”
“You know just what to say to make a girl swoon, Koda.”
“We can bring down Kōtenbō,” I said. “This time is different from any other time because you have a secret weapon.”
“What would that be?” she said.
I pointed at my face and whispered.
“What?” she said.
I whispered really softly again.
“I can’t hear you.”
“My brain, Moya! My brain.”
“Your brain is our secret weapon?”
“Yes,” I said, snapping Yori’s goggles to my forehead. “I am a suri and Kōtenbō is scared to death of me.”
“Gods,” she breathed, “I wouldn’t say he’s scared to death.”
“He is very scared of me.”
“A little nervous, maybe.”
“Petrified.”
“Anxious, at best.”
“The point is, he doesn’t know everything in the whole world, Moya! He can’t see inside my mind. He doesn’t know what we’re thinking. What we’re planning. Hell, I don’t even know what we’re planning!”
Moya thought for a moment. “It would be a shame for your homeroom teacher to chop you into bits while I’m gone.”
Moya stood and pulled a long broken shard from the core of the kaki tree. A small flame stood up from her finger. It whipped in the wind, searing the outside of the wood.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Making you a spear,” Moya said. She blew on the singed bark and then scraped the end on a rock, turning it over and over in her hands to sharpen the point.
“Wait, do kaki trees kill tengu?” I said, squatting next to Moya. “Is that why Kōtenbō was killing them off? It makes perfect sense now.”
“Nope. It’s just a regular wooden spear.”
“But if I throw it hard enough, it should tear through him like it would tear through rice paper, right?”
Moya tested the point with her finger. “I don’t think any law of nature would allow for that to happen.”
“Then what am I supposed to do with it?”
She held the spear up in front of her face and lit the whole thing in green flame. The wood crackled and pulled together, shrinking and shining like polished stone.
“You’re going to do what you do best—distract people.”
She blew out the flame and handed me the spear. It was warm to the touch.
“So you need me to wound him?” I asked.
“You just have to hit him. Or throw it near him. Just get it somewhere in his general vicinity.”
I looked down at my spear, which had seemed so awesome when it was on fire. “This isn’t going to hurt him at all, is it?”
“Like throwing a toothpick at a bullet train. But you just have to give me time to grab his sword.”
“Wait, you can grab swords?” I said. “That’s, like, a thing you can do?”
“Sure. Or melt it. Whatever. We’ll figure it out when we get there.”
“Figure it out? Dear gods and goddesses, I take back what I said. This plan I didn’t know is actually freaking terrible.”
Moya shrugged.
“We are so screwed,” I said.
“The most important thing, Koda, is getting that sword out of his hands. Every person Kōtenbō personally murdered was stabbed in the chest. We have to get the sword out of his hands before he can use it.”
“And again, this hinges on me hitting a tengu with a sharpened stick?”
“Yep,” she said, walking away from me. “Master your weapon, my little samurai. We’ll leave when I’ve paid my last respects to the kaki tree.”
“Just like that? No demonstration? No words of advice?”
“Pick something,” she said. “Throw your spear at it. Do that a bunch of times until you don’t miss.”
Oh, we are so screwed.
37
* * *
NOTEBOOK/FUJIWARA, AIKO
DATE: 2006年9月20日
i can free you. he hates me but the monster showed me how. i cannot see you be free. but i can make you be free. if i had his eyes i could wish you away from here. if I had his thieving eyes I could steal you for myself.
* * *
猿田洞
Sarutadō.
Monkey Field Cave.
Which is a weird name to give this cave system, since I’ve never seen a monkey in Kusaka. Fields? We’ve got plenty of those. Caves? Sure, I guess. But monkeys? Nope, never. Maybe they were running all over the place before humans got here. Or maybe monkey actually refers to humans. Considering how many magical creatures probably live in these mountains, that seems obvious to me now.
Back when samurai and warrior clans ruled Kōchi (or Tōsa, as it was called then), Monkey Field Cave was famous for its ninja assassins. That’s right. Ninja. From Kusaka. How cool is that? The caverns of Sarutadō twist and turn, dropping into pools of ice water, then climbing high into the mountain. At the very top, they open up into a man-sized hole in the ground. It was through this hole that ninja escaped after stabbing some unsuspecting samurai or shōgun or whatever. And if assassins can disappear and reappear unseen from Sarutadō, so too can a murder of crows.
There was a time when schoolchildren used to tour the caverns. Were we secretly training ninja elementary school students? No. That would be the most awesome field trip ever, but no. Instead it was just boring old tours full of history and junk.
Lights had been strung up, ladders and walkways nailed into the rock, but eventually the water inside Sarutadō stopped people from coming around. The metal in the ladders rusted away, bats chewed through the electrical wires, plants grew over the entrance, and before long Sarutadō returned to its quiet ninja ways—dark, mysterious, full of legends and whispers. The perfect place for a mountain demon to hide.
Moya and I jumped over the small stream running in front of the cave’s entrance. Miniature shintō statues guarded the rocky mouth, which was cool, and stale.
“Are you afraid?” Moya asked.
“Nope,” I scoffed, zipping up my jacket. “Terrified. That’s a better word.”
I adjusted Yori’s goggles on my head. In some tiny way, the Desert Punk was going to have his revenge today.
“Listen, Koda, we need to talk.”
“Really? You sure it’s not a bit late for a we-need-to-talk moment?”
“If something should go wrong in there,” she said, “you need to get out as fast as you can.”
“So you don’t want me to avenge your death with my fake spear?”
“Avenge my … Gods, no. No, no, no. I will shield you from Kōtenbō, but if something happens to me, you have to get out. As fast as you can. Get away from these caves. Then get out of this town.”
“I have a feeling Kōtenbō won’t let me leave so easily.”
“There are worse things in these caves than Kōtenbō.”
/> “What’s worse than a giant tengu that wants to rip out my skeleton?” I asked.
“The darkness in this cave is not natural. Skeletons can be put back inside bodies. Minds, however, cannot.”
“How exactly do you think the human body works, Moya? Having your skeleton on the outside is pretty freaking bad.”
“And things could end even worse than that.”
“We really need to work on our pep talks here.”
“The important thing is that you get out, Koda. Forget about me. Leave me here and don’t stop running until you find a shrine to Inari.”
“I feel like our relationship has taught me so much about being a responsible boyfriend. Thank you for that.”
“Kōtenbō is a demon. He’s a walking nightmare, but he’s still just the crest on a much larger wave. Do not let the Road take you, Koda. Do not let that darkness slip into your soul. Run away from it. As fast and as far as you can.”
Moya stepped up to me and unclipped the silver barrette from her hair. She put it in my hand and closed my fingers.
“Always remember the good in this life,” she said. “Remember Aiko. Remember Ichiro and Taiki and Yori. Remember me.”
I turned the barrette over and over in my hand.
“Do you know what an akai ito is?” she asked.
“A red string?”
“When you love someone, you are never really lost to them,” she said. “A red string reaches from one end of the sky to the next. From the moon to the oceans to the highest mountains. No matter what happens in life, focus on that instead of the sadness or the pain. I will be with you, Koda. Remember that. I will be watching. And our akai ito will always help me find you again.”
Moya looked up and kissed me. Like she had done at the Kusaka Festival under the lights and the glow of the booths and the statues looking down on us. My heart had been bleeding that night, but something in her kiss had made me forget my fears. They melted away and disappeared and made me never want to leave her side again.
Even though Sarutadō stood open in front of us, waiting to swallow us whole, her kiss pushed out the despair and the fear once more. Kōtenbō may have killed the kaki tree, but part of it survived in Moya. And for just a few seconds, I felt its light inside her. The Tengu Road fills the vast spaces of the universe, but for those brief moments I felt like it could never touch me. Like I could simply walk away from it all.