by Ripley, Ron
“The fact that we have three shotguns, two pistols, and a dog,” Israel grinned.
The three men laughed, the noise filling the small kitchen.
Turk opened an eye, looked at them with resignation, and then closed it again, eliciting another round of laughter from the men.
***
It was once more close to three in the morning as Ka-Riu came stepping lightly into the barnyard of the miserable farmer. The old man had been difficult to deal with since their very first encounter, and Ka-Riu had every intention of making this their last.
Granted, the man had that pewling dog, which would undoubtedly raise the alarm, but Ka-Riu was no longer the half-starved thing which had been freed by the foolish hikers. The Dragon King had had his fill of blood and bone and flesh, this night, in particular, and he was ready to feast once more. The dog he would slay immediately, and he would push through the pain of those terrible things these men could shoot. He would seize the farmer and drag him screaming all the way back to the Lodge.
Listening to the man die slowly as both he and the Lodge devoured his rotten old flesh would more than make up for any pain or discomfort he might suffer.
With that idea firmly entrenched in his mind, Ka-Riu advanced upon the house. From within, he heard the dog start barking, but he didn’t see any lights appear in the windows.
It was as he thought.
The man was exhausted. Sleepless nights spent fearful of Ka-Riu’s return had ensured the man would be ill-prepared to face the Dragon King again.
The dog continued to bark, and still there was nothing.
Ka-Riu laughed to himself and stepped boldly up to the door, only to go twisting backward, falling upon himself, as not one weapon, but three, exploded into life.
Two of the weapons came from windows on either side of the door, and the third from the door itself, which had suddenly been jerked open as the weapons fired from either side.
Ka-Riu screamed furiously, trying to twist back towards the house, but found he could not. The firing was relentless.
While not a single shot drew blood, they struck him with the force of blows.
He scrambled to his feet, yet as he tried once again to bring his head around, first one blow, then a second caught him in the jaw, dragging an enraged howl out of his mouth.
The man that had stopped his feast in the culvert was there, stepping out of the doorway and down into the barnyard. The man rapidly fired and reloaded, a grim look never leaving his face. Even as the man stepped to the right, a second man appeared, stepping off to the left, and a moment later the old farmer appeared in the doorway, the dog at his side, baring its teeth and snarling.
The Dragon King took a step back, and the men continued to fire, pausing every couple of seconds to reload, but there was no true lapse, no way Ka-Riu could launch his own attack.
With a scream of rage that sent the unknown man stumbling back into the side of the house, Ka-Riu turned and fled the farm.
***
Tom’s ears rang, and the tips of his fingers were singed from pulling freshly fired shell casings out of the shotgun repeatedly. In fact, all around them shell casings littered the barnyard.
But Ka-Riu was gone.
Not dead. Not even bleeding.
But the dragon was gone, nonetheless, and all three of them were still there.
Hell, even Turk was still there, sitting happily beside Israel.
“That’s a lot of spent rounds,” Israel remarked.
Tom and Henry nodded their agreement.
“Well,” Israel grinned, “you can’t put a price on safety, now can you?”
“That was bad, old man,” Henry sighed, shaking his head.
“Oh, come on now.” Israel chuckled. “That wasn’t too bad.”
Tom looked at the barnyard again, the casings gathered around the back door. There were more inside on the kitchen floor, too. Casings that would have to be cleared up. And somehow or another they were going to have to try and sleep.
Tom didn’t know if that would be possible, but they sure as hell needed to try. And he needed to call the trooper on duty. Tom was going to have to call in sick, and he wanted to give them as much time as possible to find someone to cover the shift. With everything that had happened, there was too good of a chance the dragon would return.
He wouldn’t be direct about the attack next time either.
The beast would know there were three of them, and it would plan accordingly.
Of that, Tom had no doubt.
***
Kyle had spent the better part of the day searching Portsmouth, New Hampshire for the shrine to the goddess Benzaiten, but she hadn’t found anything. Not a single thing.
She was going to get a hotel room for the night, and have one of her grad students cover an Eastern History segment for the following day’s lecture. She needed to find the temple.
Failure wasn’t an option, and dragons were notoriously difficult to kill. It was something that had to be planned out.
Like where she was going to get her dinner, where she was going to sleep, and should she try and get in touch with Tom Henderson sooner rather than later?
Kyle decided on sooner, found a Howard Johnson’s hotel, and checked in. Once in her room, Kyle plugged her phone into an outlet to charge, and got out of her clothes and into one of the terrycloth robes from the bathroom. Walking over to the bed, she found the room service card. Shortly after that, she was propped up on the bed watching the evening news.
A dinner of steak tips, a garden salad, and a bottle of red wine would be arriving shortly. Even better, room service would pick up her wash, clean it, and return it to her within three hours.
Kyle sighed, smiling to herself. The frustration she had felt at not being able to find Benzaiten’s shrine was slipping away. Reaching onto the nightstand, she picked up her phone and started a text to Tom.
In Portsmouth. No sign of the shrine. Will start to look again first thing tomorrow morning.
She hit send, settled back on the bed, focused on the news, and waited for room service.
Chapter Seven
Professor Bennett’s Search for the Shrine
Kyle was up early and out of the hotel long before the official checkout time. She drove to the Portsmouth Whole Goods Grocery store and grabbed herself a peach and a coffee as well as a bag of trail mix for the morning.
She had to find the shrine.
From Tom’s texts, she learned that Ka-Riu had attacked Israel in the early morning. Tom and another officer had been there, and together the three of them had been able to stall the dragon and turn back the attack.
But for how long?
Ka-Riu was a dragon king, and he might be complacent, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. That’s not how it works in Eastern Mythology.
In fact, she wasn’t sure if dragons even should be considered part of the mythos anymore.
She shook her head.
Stay focused, Kyle told herself. Stay focused.
And so she did.
The day before had been spent wandering, in an ultimately fruitless effort, around the city of Portsmouth itself. Today, she decided, would be a day of research. On her phone, she Googled directions to the Portsmouth Library. Soon she found herself at a library table with a stack of books about Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the negotiations between Russia and Japan to end the Russo-Japanese War.
Initially, she could find nothing about a shrine being built, or even anything about the Japanese other than that there were social events held occasionally to help keep the peace talks moving forward.
But then, in a slim, self-published volume, she found a reference to a hotel called, Wentworth by the Sea. The hotel had ‘generously’ donated accommodations for the Russian and Japanese diplomats.
Kyle looked up the hotel on her phone, and then frowned. The address for the hotel was in New Castle, New Hampshire, which wasn’t Portsmouth. If the Japanese ambassador was the one to build the shrine
to Benzaiten, and she suspected he was, then why would Kuribayashi have told her it was in Portsmouth when the ambassador was staying in New Castle?
But where did Kuribayashi get his information from? she asked herself. Was it a memoir? A memoir by the diplomat or perhaps someone else? And where is New Castle?
Kyle set aside the memoir and picked up a large coffee table book that had a few maps inside it. She quickly flipped the pages until she came to one originally printed in 1914. It showed Portsmouth, and it showed a large island a short way away from the city.
The island of New Castle.
The map even had some prominent buildings marked on it, including the hotel, Wentworth by the Sea, which was right on the coast of the island. There was land around it.
Kyle stood up, something nagging suddenly at her memory about Benzaiten. She left her research on the reading table and made her way into the bookstacks. She followed the neatly printed signs telling her what could be found in each section, and she finally came to Eastern Religions.
After browsing the shelf for a moment, she found a large encyclopedia that dealt with the various incarnations of the Buddha and the different deities. She flipped through the pages and found an entry on Benzaiten. The goddess, Kyle read, was associated with water.
Extremely so.
Smiling to herself, Kyle closed the book and returned it to the shelf. She left the library quickly, making her way back to her car and punching the address for Wentworth by the Sea into her GPS.
A moment later she was on her way.
It didn’t take her very long since traffic was moving through the city at a good pace. Soon she was pulling into the parking lot of the hotel. Wentworth by the Sea was huge, possibly the largest hotel she had seen outside of the Mount Washington Hotel.
Kyle got out of her car and made her way around to the right of the hotel, the walk long and open and easy. Behind the hotel, she could see trees, and somewhere—somewhere she knew there was a shrine. In that shrine would be a representation of the goddess.
Kyle just had to find it.
The day was cool, and a sharp wind came in from the Atlantic, snapping the tops of the trees back and forth. She could smell the sweet scent of the ocean, and she smiled. Her pace quickened a little, and she got around to the side of the building. She kept moving at a slight angle until she got to the tree line and stopped, looking for walking paths.
Kyle tried to find the oldest looking path. Down, close to the center, was an old brick walkway that led into the woods. The bricks, she saw, were clean and set close together, yet they were slightly sunken in the well-manicured lawn, unlike the bricks in the other paths that branched off from the back patios.
This is it, she thought to herself. She knew it. She could feel it.
Kyle followed the old path into the forest.
She could hear birds singing and squirrels chattering while about their business. Kyle nodded and went further in. Her shoes whispered on the old bricks, and the farther she went into the forest, the louder the noises of the animals became. A short while later, she heard the sound of water too.
For another ten minutes, she walked, and suddenly the path opened onto a small brook that ran through a clearing. On the other side of the clearing was a small, distinctly Japanese shrine. Within that shrine, Kyle could see a carved image although she wasn’t close enough to make out the details.
Hurrying forward, she crossed a small wooden bridge that brought her directly in front of the shrine.
The image standing within the shrine’s protection was of a woman with eight arms, each of them holding a weapon. The goddess’s face was serene.
I can see how you slew a dragon, Kyle thought. She stood for a long time before the shrine, trying to think of what to do, of what to even say. She had never been one to pray for much of anything. And even when she did, it was to the classic image of a bearded white man as God.
This was something completely and utterly different.
Taking a deep breath, she stepped in as close as she could, and she sank down to her knees. She clasped her hands together in front of her breast, closed her eyes, and bent her head.
And she started to pray.
***
Ka-Riu seethed, pacing the wide planks of the Lodge’s floor.
He had eaten again, a quick meal of a both a sheep and a woman who had been running for no apparent reason, and who had a heady smell of fear about her when he latched onto her from behind.
The memory of it brought a chuckle forth, but it was quickly smothered by his rage.
Three men stood against him.
He had to stop them. Not only did he not have a choice, but Ka-Riu was livid.
He was a king! He had been a king for centuries, and he would be king long after he had shat them out upon the earth.
Snarling to himself he walked to stand in front of the hearth and threw himself down on the floor, the whole Lodge shaking.
My apologies, old friend, Ka-Riu grumbled. I am angry.
Flames blossomed, then leaped within the confines of the hearth. The warmth washed out over Ka-Riu, and he sighed.
Yes, I shall bring them here. We shall feast upon them together. And we shall do it soon.
Ka-Riu sighed again and set himself to thinking of how best to kill the men who had dared stand against him.
***
There was still no text from Dr. Bennett.
The three men sat at the table, and Turk lay under it.
None of them felt like talking. The chores had been done, the farm squared away, and night, as was inevitable, was falling.
The dragon would be back.
There was no denying it.
The men couldn’t run. Running would only force the dragon to chase them, and who knew how many others might be killed then?
Tom and Henry and Israel had to make a stand. They had to fend Ka-Riu off for at least one more night.
Tom hoped.
He hoped it was only one more night.
His phone buzzed.
Israel and Henry looked at him as he took the phone out of his pocket and looked at the text message from Dr. Bennett.
Tom blinked several times, and then he read it out loud.
“‘I found the shrine of Benzaiten,’” Tom read. “I’ve been praying for hours. It’s up to her now.’”
“She found the shrine,” Israel said as if mulling the thought over out loud.
Tom could only nod.
“Do you think it’s going to do anything for us?” Henry asked. “Honestly. Is praying to a goddess really going to take care of business?”
“Well,” Israel said before Tom could answer. “Let’s look at it this way, Henry, would you have believed in dragons before you saw what you did on Route 4?”
“That’s a valid point, Israel,” Henry said. “I’m just nervous.”
“I think we’re all nervous,” Tom said.
Israel nodded his agreement.
“So we wait now?” Henry asked, plainly uncomfortable with the idea.
“‘Fraid so,” Israel said.
Tom picked up his beer and finished it. “All we can do is wait, Henry,” Tom said. “It’s terrible, but that’s all there is to it.”
“Best thing to do now,” Israel said, “is to make sure the weapons are ready and that we have enough ammunition to last as long as we can.”
“Is there anything we could do to strengthen the house?” Tom asked.
“No,” Israel said. “Our best bet is still going to be to stay here, in the kitchen. That way the dragon won’t be able to separate us and pick us off individually. Once we finish up with our beers, we should get about the business of bringing some blankets and pillows down.”
“Well,” Henry said, stretching. “There’s one good thing about being stuck in the kitchen. Plenty of food and water.”
Tom nodded his agreement.
“Two good things,” Israel said.
“Oh?” Henry asked.
&
nbsp; “Bathroom’s right off the kitchen too,” Israel said.
Tom and Henry both laughed, shaking their heads and trying to chase their fears away.
Chapter Eight
The Battle of Porter House
Once more Ka-Riu arrived at the farm where the three men were. The three men and the dog.
The dragon king hid in the shadows. The night was still young, and the men were undoubtedly awake. Ka-Riu would start to stalk his victims soon, but for now he would simply watch.
Unlike the previous evening, there were lights on in every window of the house, bright, strong lights that cast their rectangles upon the packed dirt of the barnyard.
They were afraid.
The lights told Ka-Riu this fact as surely as the stink of fear which escaped from the house itself. Perhaps they might have a little bit of confidence, having succeeded in driving him off the night before, but they surely knew he would come back with a vengeance.
He would come back for vengeance.
He was there for exactly that purpose.
Yes, his stomach rumbled with hunger. And yes, the Lodge wished to dine upon their flesh and blood as well.
But Ka-Riu wanted vengeance.
If the blood of these men was a little cooler in their veins by the time he carried their corpses to the Lodge, then so be it.
There would be other men to hunt and to eat.
These men, though, these men screamed out for punishment. And Ka-Riu so wished to be the one who disciplined them.
He had only to wait. Only to be patient.
He could be patient.
A century trapped in a steel box had taught him to be patient.
In the barn, one of the cows must have smelled him. The animal let out a nervous bellow and kicked at the barn’s side.
Ka-Riu chuckled, slipping around the back of the barn to the other set of doors. With a push, he broke the lock and stepped inside.
The cows smelled him.
***