The Drowning God

by James Kendley

  There was a slight rustling sound, a grinding of bones underfoot, the sound of Suzuki shifting from one foot to the other, bracing himself, reaching carefully into his bag.

  The hair stood up on Takuda’s neck. What a fool I’ve been.

  It had been Suzuki all along. Suzuki had played innocent to lure him into this cave, this burial pit, and Suzuki meant to crawl out alone. Suzuki had even invoked the name of Takuda’s murdered brother to lull him into a state of trusting stupidity. Now Suzuki was drawing out a poisoned blade, or five poisoned blades, the same blades that had killed Takuda’s brother and his son and Lee Hunt. Takuda raised his left arm to defend himself and raised his right hand high to deal Suzuki an invisible, openhanded blow from above, a blow that would shift Suzuki’s head a palm’s width to the left before the first cervical vertebra could catch up, severing the spine and killing him instantly. If Takuda used some of his newfound power, the blow would pulp Suzuki’s brains as well, but that was incidental. It’s too bad. I liked him. He stood frozen in the dark, waiting for the bite of a blade.

  “I’ve got it,” Suzuki said.

  “What do you have?”

  The flashlight clicked on in Suzuki’s hand. It lit his puzzled expression from below. “What are you doing? Warding off bats? There are no bats here. The exit is too low and too watery.”

  Takuda slowly lowered his hand.

  “I was standing on your flashlight.” He handed it to Takuda. “Before that, I was just praying for the truth about this place. I know why we’re not afraid.”

  “Priest, I am afraid of this place. Very afraid.” You’ll never know, Priest. He was so afraid that he had almost slapped the man’s head off his neck.

  “No, that’s just nerves. Stay still for another minute. Feel for it. There’s no evil here. It’s just a hole full of bones. This place is deserted. This is all old sacrifice. Years old.”

  Takuda stilled himself and listened to his heart. Suzuki was right. There’s no meat on these old bones, and the trail from here is cold. Stone cold.

  Forensic evidence in the cave wouldn’t give them a living suspect. The murderers had their own process, their own discipline, and they would never, ever deviate. That was how the monstrous sacrifice had survived for so long with multiple murderers, generations of murderers covering for each other. As far as corroborating clues from the outside, there was less than nothing. There might be pictures linking dead members of the Farmers’ Co-­op to the stone pillars on the river, but nothing linking anyone, living or dead, to the shrine itself or the narrow cavern beneath. Unless one of the worshippers had dropped his wallet into the chasm, there would be no way to prove that anyone from the cult had even lifted the stone, much less committed murder.

  “Priest, do you think news of this will flush out the killers? Do you think someone will crack?”

  Suzuki sighed as he rummaged for a flare. “That happens in the movies, doesn’t it? Some brave widow steps forward, or some old man wracked with guilt. But here? In this valley? Don’t bet on it.”

  Suzuki was already crouching as if to crawl out though the low fissure to the river. He picked his way through the bones.

  “Take off your pack,” Takuda said. “You’ll get stuck.”

  “Then hold it for me,” Suzuki said. “No, wait, I’ll tie it to the rope so it follows me. Now you take the end. Hold it tight!” He crawled down among the bones to look out through the fissure.

  Takuda swore and grabbed Suzuki’s legs. He was ready to jerk Suzuki out if anything went wrong.

  “I see light coming in here,” Suzuki said. “Wow, that’s a long way out! There’s an opening just at the waterline! I’m going through!”

  Takuda released Suzuki’s legs. The priest’s grunting diminished as he crawled, then there was silence, and then there was just Takuda and the rope passing though his fingers. The bones clunked and rattled with the rope’s passage.

  Finally, two sharp tugs, and it was Takuda’s turn to follow. As he crawled through the muck and jumbled bones toward the fissure in the rock, his nostrils flared. He thought he caught a whiff of rotting fish, but it was hard to pick out from the mud-­bloody smell of the moldering bones. Still, he was tensed in every muscle as he belly-­crawled on the wet sand. He had never felt claustrophobic, but he was in a very, very tight spot.

  It’s not going to be the last time I’m in a tight spot if I follow this mad priest.

  He came out squinting in the perpetual twilight at the river’s edge. Suzuki was nearly naked, perched on a stone washing his pale, bony body in the cold river water.

  “I need your help, Detective.”

  Takuda pulled himself out of the fissure, dragging his back pack behind him. The rope trailed down the sandy slope to Suzuki’s feet.

  “You didn’t even bother to tie off the rope? I’m glad I didn’t need your help with anything. What do you need?”

  “My vestments. And I need you to check the opening.”

  “What opening?”

  “The other entrance to the cave. There.”

  Takuda turned. A few yards upstream, parallel to the stone columns, a man-­high cleft hid in the roots of the mountain. The pillars obscured it from the higher bank, but it was visible down by the new waterline. Before the dam was completed, the cleft would have been completely underwater. At the mouth of the cleft were piles of toppled stones. Stacks of them still stood at the mouth of the cleft, as if there had been a wall.

  Gooseflesh stood on Takuda’s neck.

  There had been a wall to keep something trapped inside the cave, just as there were ancient statuettes to keep it contained from above, just as there was a shrine for sacrifices to keep it quiet, just as there was a secret cult to make sure it got its fill.

  Suzuki pointed upward. “Did you see the sacrifices? Up on the pillars?”

  Fish and birds, including cranes and cormorants, had been tied to the pillars with rice-­straw ropes. They were blackened husks, dried and leathery despite the moisture in the air. Takuda looked away. “If you want mercy and benevolence from the Naga River, you make your offerings directly, right, Priest?”

  “This is nasty, Detective. It’s old and primitive superstition. Live sacrifices to the river. I knew it was here, on some level, but it’s still hard to believe. What a nightmare.”

  “What about those shackles inside?”

  “Hmmm? Yes, big iron shackles pinned into the walls. You don’t have those black iron shackles I gave you, do you?”

  “No, they’re at home.”

  “Pity. I think they might have been part of a set. We can compare them someday.”

  Takuda moved toward the second cave opening as if in a dream.

  “Detective, don’t go back in there until you have to.”

  The sandy bank stopped at the mouth of the cave, where the remaining stones denied the river entrance. Takuda stepped over them into the darkness. Suzuki stepped in behind him, pulling his sash on straight.

  “There’s a bend here—­that’s why we didn’t see the light from the inside.” When they got around the bend, Takuda stood in near darkness before a wall of dried silt, sticks, and stones. “Light that last flare,” he said. “We’ll use my flashlight after that, but I don’t want to run down the bat—­Oh, no. Priest, light this up. There’s even more.”

  In the light of Suzuki’s flare, the wall rose before them. It was not made of sticks and stones. It was a solid wall of human bone mortared together with black silt. Under Takuda’s fingertips, the bones collapsed inward in a rattling mass, leaving behind them a faint, moldy stink and a sound like bowling pins in sawdust, a sound that echoed through the cave like stifled, chuckling laughter.

  CHAPTER 17

  It was twilight in the rest of the Naga River valley, but the river gorge had been in darkness for hours. Chief Nakamura slipped and slid on the riverside trail.
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  “This is all very bad business. A cave full of bones? What stupidity!”

  Nakamura had complained the whole way. Detective Takuda had ignored most of it. When the chief had become too shrill, Takuda had moved farther ahead.

  Behind him, the chief stumbled into the under-brush. “This trail is too muddy. I can’t get traction here.”

  Sergeant Kuma caught up to the chief. He was breathing hard. “That’s probably why the detective suggested you change your shoes.”

  Takuda didn’t bother looking back. He was glad of the time to think.

  The disappearances were a mystery for generations, but they were wrapped in a sort of shadow. Even when schoolmates and relatives had vanished, even when everyone had been suspicious of the postcards, no one in the valley had questioned it aloud.

  Now, even though Takuda and Reverend Suzuki had found the site of the worst mass murder in Japanese history, no one would believe it. If Takuda dragged the local police by the collars and threw them into the cave, they might not notice the human remains.

  What was worse, Takuda couldn’t really blame them. He knew the murders had occurred, but the more evidence of a murderous conspiracy Takuda found, the less sense it made. The cult offered sacrifices to the Kappa in return for—­what? The hope of good irrigation? The hope of good fishing? It was stupid.

  There was no possible reason for all these murders. Why did the cult bother?

  There was something else at work. Just as the slicked-­back punks on the streets of the city represented the real mobsters in the background, the cult of the Kappa represented something bigger. But what?

  When the short procession finally reached the sandy bank downstream from the stone pillars, Takuda asked the sergeant to go back and fetch the doctor. They had left him retching up the previous night’s drinking among the broken stone lanterns downstream. Nakamura gave a curt nod of assent, and Kuma waddled up the bank. Nakamura hissed at him to hurry and turned a cold eye to Takuda.

  Things had worked out as well as they could have, Takuda thought. If Takuda had the chief to himself, without the sergeant and the doctor, he might be able to talk some sense into the man.

  It was not to be.

  “There is no cave of bones,” the chief said. He shifted from one foot to the other. Takuda could tell that moisture from the riverbank sand was seeping into Nakamura’s street shoes. “There never was such a thing. Maybe they’re remains of ­people who drowned by accident. In a place with so much water, it’s inevitable.”

  “The ­people in that cave didn’t drown. Not without help, anyway.”

  “Listen to me.” Nakamura stepped closer. His face was twisted with anger. “Don’t you dare start talking about some sort of serial killings. Don’t even think it! If what you say about some human bones is true, there will be reporters all over this valley very soon. Airing your wild theories would be the height of irresponsibility, and I won’t have it. Don’t force me to invoke higher powers!”

  “The higher powers are already here waiting for us. I left Officer Mori to take pictures while I came to pick you up. He’s in there now, taking photographs and laying evidence marking flags, but he called to say the uniforms were gathering outside the cave. At this point, I’m not talking to anyone but you, Chief.”

  The chief stepped back and bowed. “Ah, I see. Well, that’s sensible of you. Yes, quite. It’s good that you understand the gravity of our situation here. I suppose our conversation last night helped you see that it’s best to let things take the proper channels.”

  Takuda returned the bow. “I don’t care who’s in charge, Chief. I just want the freedom to investigate what’s really happening in this valley.”

  Nakamura shook his head in disbelief. Takuda stepped forward to keep the chief from stumbling backward into the river, but he shrugged Takuda off and went around him toward the cave. Takuda followed the old man’s uneven progress.

  When they came around the last bend, light blazed from the darkened cave like an ironic reenactment of a tale from Japan’s mythical past. Uniformed officers scurried on the sandy soil at the base of the mountain. Three men stood talking on the bank opposite the cave mouth. Talking. Laughing.

  The chief started to cross the river on the rocks below the twin obelisks. Takuda held no hope that the old man would get to the cave without soaking his trousers, at least. He chose not to aggravate Nakamura by attempting to help him.

  He studied the three men talking on the bank.

  The regional director general was out of uniform. Takuda had received two commendations directly from him, but he knew nothing about the man. The regional director general answered directly to the National Police Agency’s commissioner general, so he was in the level of Japanese bureaucracy where management by force of personality no longer existed. At that level, power lay in the inexorable bureaucracy itself, and only the greatest of fools would allow his personal preferences to run afoul of that torturous machinery.

  The uniformed officer beside him, on the other hand, could still style himself a leader of men. He was a superintendent supervisor, four ranks above Takuda, and he stood with his feet wide and his fists on his hips. He probably considered himself in charge of the site.

  The third man, a broad-­shouldered, square-­jawed civilian, was a total mystery to Takuda. He pointed at the interior of the cave as if lecturing tourists about an interesting landmark. He wore spike-­soled, split-­toed fishing boots appropriate to the terrain, and his sportsman’s khaki pants and houndstooth jacket gave him an air of local gentry from a bygone age. He ignored Takuda completely, as did the regional director general.

  “Takuda, good job bringing the locals into this immediately,” said the superintendent supervisor. “You’ll give your report to Superintendent Yamada. Take your man Mori home. We’re handing it over to the village chief.”

  Takuda bowed deeply, buying time. While he slowly straightened, the well-­dressed stranger murmured to the regional director general and gently led him away by the sleeve.

  “Superintendent Supervisor, thank you for relieving me, but I believe Mori has this scene under control, and it’s doubtful that the village station has the resources . . .”

  “Detective, you are relieved. Go home. Prepare a detailed report for Superintendent Yamada.”

  “Yes, Superintendent Supervisor, but I thought you might want to know something of the circumstances here before . . .”

  “There’s no need for a superintendent supervisor to know more about an archaeological site,” the civilian said. He had simply reappeared at the superintendent supervisor’s elbow. “Let’s go have a drink.”

  The superintendent supervisor turned toward the stranger, smiling. “Let’s go have a drink,” he said. “There are a few pubs in Oku Village, but I think we’d do better down in the city.”

  “Excellent idea, Superintendent Supervisor.” They drifted across the rocks and down the muddy trail, the superintendent supervisor and the regional director general chatting amiably as the third man gently guided them along the darkling path. Takuda watched them until they disappeared in the gloom at the bend.

  Chief Nakamura was wet to the knees. He stood at the opening of the cave in the glare of portable floodlights. Beyond him, jumbled skeletons and broken skulls stretched to the depths of the cave. In the middle of the cave, Mori squatted among the skulls. The only sounds were the rapids outside and Suzuki’s droning chants from the ruined shrine above.

  Takuda stepped up beside Nakamura. The chief stood on stray ribs.

  Mori stepped carefully between the skulls. He wore plastic shoe covers and surgical gloves. He placed an evidence flag by the next skull and photographed it with the prefecture’s standard camera. He had come prepared.

  Nakamura looked from one side of the narrow cave to the other as if unable to comprehend the scene before him. He seemed to watch Officer Mori f
or several seconds, then he turned his blank, uncomprehending stare on Takuda. His face slowly twisted with rage.

  “The foreigner drowned far downstream. What were you doing up here?” Nakamura’s hands were shaking. His reedy voice echoed in the cave. “This was already out of hand. This will destroy the village police office. It will bring nothing but bad press, and Zenkoku—­Oh, Zenkoku. If they pull out, this valley will die.”

  “Nothing like that will happen if we handle it correctly. All they’ll have is helicopter shots of the ravine. We can keep them out of the valley until things cool down.”

  Nakamura looked up sharply. He was interested for an instant, but then he growled, deep in his throat, like a dog.

  “A fine detective you are. Liar! You tell ­people anything you need to follow your own insane agenda. First you say you can get the prefecture to take the stinking pervert out of my jail, then you say you can keep ­people out of the press . . .”

  “What?” Is he talking about Ogawa’s wife or about the cave?

  Nakamura shook his head. “I’ll have your job if this leaks out. I’ll talk to your supervisor.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  Nakamura took a breath as if he’d suddenly remembered how. “Detective, you’re a fool. You’re a fool, just as your father was. Do you really think these old bones mean anything?”

  “Some of them are not very old at all,” Takuda said.

  “They’re ancient. They’ve been well preserved by the conditions of the cave.”

  “That cave was under water fifty years ago. The only thing that kept the bones in was the stone wall in the mouth. How did anyone build a stone wall right there, right at the rapids?”

  “Perhaps it was the Kappa. The Kappa built himself a house. If you meet a Kappa, just bow to it. It will bow in return and spill the water out of the depression on top of its head, and then you can wrestle it! That’s the sort of nonsense ­people told us as children. Are you saying that there are ­people who believe that? Is Ogawa so crazy that he believes it?”