The Drowning God

by James Kendley

  Takuda struggled forward in the darkness. His fingers were numb and tingling. His grip strength seemed to be failing, and he didn’t know why. No matter. It would be enough. He was strong enough.

  He was completely turned around. After a few labored steps, he felt as if he was going back the way he came. On impulse, he turned and headed in the opposite direction.

  He bumped into his tackle tube, and he carefully stepped through the strap hanging beneath the water’s surface. It bumped against his thigh at every step. It was the most reassuring thing he had ever felt.

  The creature seemed weaker and slower, just a little. It hissed and growled like an angry cat: “Heh ho khu! Heh khiru khu hariri!”

  Takuda couldn’t understand the words, but he somehow knew what it was saying. He saw flashes of his past as if the creature was putting ideas in his head.

  It knew who he was, and it had killed his family.

  It bubbled as if in pleasure. It knew that he understood.

  “Heh khudo tan khuhuhu—­”

  It had eaten his brother’s liver.

  Takuda twisted its elbows one underneath the other until he heard the rubbery bones grinding in their sockets. At that moment, the beast pitched sideways in an effort to escape. It was as weak as a baby, but it had taken him by surprise, and he had almost dropped it.

  He felt his way onward. If the Kappa got into the water, it would regain its strength and kill him. He dug the iron spikes of his boots into the gravel as best he could on each step.

  The curved wall ahead grew brighter. The light made an irregular halo around the lumpy, misshapen head of the creature he held in front of him.

  “Wait till I get you up on the dirt,” he told the beast. “I’ll take you in one hand and my sword in the other, and I’ll cut a piece off you every twenty paces, all the way up to the temple, and then I’ll drop your ugly head in the parking lot. After the priest is done reading sutras over it, he’ll open it up and use it as an ashtray.”

  It breathed heavily. Its voice was a dry rattle in its throat. “Heh khu khozann kho tan—­”

  It planned to eat Suzuki’s liver, too.

  “The priest is a drinking man. You’ll need more than your little turtle beak to eat a liver like his.”

  The Kappa laughed, a sound like cracking bamboo. It chilled Takuda, so he held his tongue until the tunnel mouth was a huge arc of green before them, a sunlit world, a world of freedom from the hideous monster in his grasp. It was unfamiliar territory, not the spur line station. He had chosen the right direction, and he was heading for the Naga River valley.

  In the sunlight slanting inward through the rusted gate, Takuda took another look at his captive.

  It was gray and shriveled. Out of the water for so long, it had drained like a squeezed sponge, and the skin hung on its thin frame. Its misshapen head flopped on its shoulders. He turned it to face him. It snapped weakly. It opened one eye, a clouded, yellowed little orb that had once been a human eye. Takuda could read nothing from it but hatred. What else could be left in a creature like this?

  He would kill it quickly, of course. He felt no mercy for the Kappa itself, but enjoying its death would make him just as evil.

  At the mouth, the water was only up to his knees. Takuda used the Kappa to push open the unlocked gate. As he shoved the creature against the rusted steel, its groans were lost in the squealing of the hinges. Water spilled from the corroded frame above, and most of it went down Takuda’s collar. He swore and stepped into the sunshine.

  The flooded rail bed turned south, running parallel to a canal. Here, in sight of the trees and bamboo and flooded rice fields, Takuda could hardly believe the nightmare of the Kappa.

  Except that he held it in his own two hands.

  Takuda walked forward until the water was only up to his ankles. He held the Kappa aloft with one hand as he retrieved and uncapped the tackle tube. His eyes seemed dim, almost unable to focus. His forearms were covered in blood, human blood. His own blood. He was very weak, but he could still wield a sword.

  The blade shone bright in the morning sun, and the Kappa’s eyes followed it as Takuda raised it for the strike . . .

  . . . and then the Kappa’s yellow eyes met his. It gurgled like a happy child.

  He felt the blow before it came. Just barely. He moved his head back, and the sharpened claws whizzed past his chin and slammed into his shoulder.

  The water, Takuda thought. Just a trickle as we passed through the gate, but it was enough.

  The Kappa laughed aloud. That sound was almost worse than the pain.

  Takuda dropped to his knees as the second claw zipped over his head.

  The Kappa wriggled free of his weakened grasp as its feet dipped into the shallow water. It twisted its claws into Takuda’s shoulder, and the sudden, shocking pain made Takuda release his sword.

  Now they were together on the flooded rail bed, and the Kappa had regained its strength. Its skin tightened up before Takuda’s eyes as if it were soaking up water through its webbed feet.

  The Kappa made something like a smile. “Ho kho dokho ya. Heh ho khu kho zhita.”

  It would start by eating Takuda’s tongue. It reached for his throat.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Kappa’s voice rattled with joy as it wrapped its slimy fingers around Takuda’s neck. A thin, black trickle of sticky spittle dangled from the corner of its beak.

  Takuda collapsed backward onto his back in the shallow water between the railroad tracks. Even as his vision began to blur, Takuda realized how stupid, how blinded by hatred and bloodlust the creature had become. It had poisoned him, and he would soon be immobilized, but the creature wanted to prove its strength. It wanted to watch him die up close. Takuda had no fear, not any longer, and only a little pain. He looked quickly for the weapon he was sure would appear.

  And poking through the zippered opening of the pocket on his right arm, just below his shoulder, a bright steel cylinder shone in the morning sunlight: the pen he had accidentally stolen from the distracted salesman at the sporting goods store.

  Now it was just a matter of delivering that pen to the Kappa’s brain stem.

  He rolled on the gravel and worked his left hand between himself and the Kappa, up to the protruding pen. His hands were curiously numb. As the Kappa turned its head to see what he was doing, Takuda pulled the pen free and backhanded it into the Kappa’s face.

  The Kappa howled and stumbled through the shallow water, pulling feebly at the bit of steel.

  Takuda scrambled over the rail for the sword, but he moved in slow motion. He took it up in his left hand, but his fingers were so numb that he almost dropped it. He crawled painfully to the embankment.

  When he looked back, the Kappa crouched in the shallows, yanking at the pen. It finally got a grip, and it shrieked as it pulled. The pen came free in a gout of black fluid.

  The Kappa looked at Takuda and hissed in rage.

  Takuda held the blade aloft. “Come on, this is for you.” They stared at each other as Takuda struggled to his feet.

  The creature dropped to all fours and scrambled away from him, toward the canal.

  “Wait for me. I’ll take you to a magical land.”

  The Kappa slipped over the embankment and out of sight.

  Takuda’s legs gave way. He was suddenly—­saddened? What a horrible thing, that a creature like that could exist. What a horrible world that could produce that kind of torture. An endless cycle of pain and fear and doubt, all culminating in death.

  It would be better to simply die and get it all over with. He should have let Yumi bleed to death when she had stabbed herself in the throat. Perhaps he would just sit in the water and bleed to death himself.

  What did he have to live for? Day after day, waking up, working, all of it was just a torturous, monotonous ordeal. There was nothing mor
e. Life was work, and he was exhausted by it. Perhaps if he opened a vein, he would finally find peace.

  He rolled up his sleeve, clearing the shredded fabric away for a cut.

  Vertical, vertical, not horizontal. Up the road, not ’cross the street. You want the vein, not the meat.

  Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he was insistently surprised by all this. He hadn’t thought this way since the days following the death of his son, Kenji, but now he couldn’t imagine why he should think anything else. He had never believed in anything, not really. Death was just the end. Darkness. In the end, there was nothing but death.

  He had to rest the blade on his shoulder to get the point on a good vein in his wrist. As the heavy steel dug into the base of his palm, ready to slice along the vein up to the elbow, the flat, cold blade rested against his cheek for just a moment. Just an instant. It felt good. For no reason in particular, he thought of Yumi’s hand on his forehead when he was feverish. Yet he was not feverish.

  But I am certainly ill. I am poisoned. I am poisoned by evil.

  He stopped to examine that thought. His hand remained on the spine of the blade, ready to slice himself open.

  Even if the Kappa’s poison had somehow affected his thinking, it did not mean he was incorrect. Buddhism was the only religion that explained human suffering, but Buddhism was complete nonsense. In the long run, no matter what humans want to believe about love, mercy, and justice, the savage universe is always out there, just outside the door, a swirling vacuum of chaos waiting to take our children, take our lives, break our hearts.

  My little Kenji. My sweet little boy. He was a good boy. He did not deserve to die that way.

  I am so tired of grieving for him.

  He grasped the blade tighter, and the cold steel brushed his cheek again, like Yumi’s cool, slim fingers.

  What about Yumi? What will she do?

  —­Detective, if you get up and do your job, she can stop grieving.

  It was another voice in his head, and it was startling. It was—­Suzuki? Now I know I’m insane. Suzuki is in my head.

  The Suzuki in his head laughed.

  —­Relieve the suffering of others by ending this water-­imp’s killing spree. If you don’t feel better after that, then go kill yourself.

  Takuda shook his head. That doesn’t give meaning to life. It’s all nonsense. Buddhism is nonsense.

  —­Of course it is. That means all we have is this life. Thanks to that foul little creature over in that canal, you’ve wasted more than a third of yours in mourning. What a pitiful existence. If you end it here, how many more lives will be wasted in the same way?

  Purplish blood had welled around the tip of the blade. Takuda was still unready to lift the steel out of his own flesh.

  I decided to live, despite my situation. I decided against suicide, but wouldn’t my suicide make it easier for everyone?

  The Suzuki in his head was silent. Takuda opened his eyes. The Kappa stood stiff on the embankment. Its face didn’t change, not exactly, but its form seemed to shift, as if some obscuring shadow fell over its hideous deformities. It suddenly looked like a young woman.

  Takuda stood. The Kappa’s hands were too long, the legs were too short, the head was misshapen, and its mouth was a horror, but it looked like a young woman nonetheless.

  “Dono zhan. He kho dono zhan.”

  It wanted to be his friend.

  He was on his feet before he realized he was going to stand. The Kappa squealed as he advanced with the sword. He chased it to the edge of the embankment, and it skittered into the canal like a skipping stone. It disappeared, carried away in the swollen stream.

  Takuda turned his back on the canal. Foolish to turn his back, but he was so tired—­

  His shoulder was oozing blood. He needed to have it irrigated and the surrounding muscle pumped with antibiotics. He probably needed a tetanus shot. He would find if there was another doctor in the valley these days. He wouldn’t have the butcher coroner treat him.

  As he looked at his hands, there was too much blood. It wasn’t just from his shoulder. He tried to peel back his sleeves, and they seemed to fall apart under his weakened fingers.

  The Kappa had torn his forearms to pieces. He was slashed to the bone in spots.

  He tried to bind the wounds with the dry trousers in the tackle tube, but his fingers felt too thick. He wasn’t bleeding to death, but he needed stitching.

  Blood and poison. This is bad bad bad.

  He wasn’t sure he was breathing deeply enough. He tried to fish his phone out of the tackle tube and finally just poured everything out onto the dirt. He could barely focus on the screen. His fingers flexed senseless against the phone, and blood oozed onto the keypad.

  He used his thumb knuckle to find Mori’s number. Mori’s away message answered on the third ring.

  “Mori, it was waiting for me, and I’m in bad shape. I’m in the valley, at the mouth of the old railway tunnel. I’ll just rest here.”

  He tried to hang up, but the phone fell from his fingers and into the dirt. He thought of Yumi and Kenji.

  He hadn’t realized it would be so easy to let go and slip away. Five minutes before, the point of the blade had been poised to slice a vein. Now, he didn’t want to die, but he probably would anyway. It was—­ironic. He thought to close his eyes, but they didn’t seem to respond, and it didn’t matter. His breathing was shallow and ragged in his own ears. He fell and lay sideways on the dirt. It was warmer there.

  Darkness overtook him.

  CHAPTER 29

  Detective Takuda woke to pain and incense. He lay on a thin mat in Suzuki’s sitting room. Fujimoto, the village doctor, knelt at his side.

  “Oh, no, I need a real doctor,” he said as he tried to sit.

  The doctor restrained him with a single hand. Takuda collapsed, gasping on the mat.

  “The poison has weakened you. You slept for two full days. This is Wednesday.”

  Takuda said nothing, so the doctor continued: “Most of the wounds on your forearms are superficial. A few are very deep. They are clean now, and they may heal quickly.”

  Takuda lifted his leaden arms. Beneath the bandages, his arms were swollen like bolsters. I look like Astro Boy. He dropped his arms to his sides, and he felt a sudden twinge of pain.

  “Take it easy,” the doctor said. “You have a few deep mattress stitches.”

  The breath rattled in Takuda’s throat. “You know a lot about this kind of wound, don’t you?”

  “Not about treating them. I’ve never seen them on a living patient,” he said. His hands shook as he filled a hypodermic needle. “This is a massive dose of antibiotics. Another one. You’re a big man, and I think you can take another.”

  He slid the needle into the vein at Takuda’s left bicep.

  Takuda gripped the doctor’s windpipe with his right hand. Well, there’s still enough strength for this. “Pull that needle out slowly, Doctor.”

  The doctor’s eyes widened, but he didn’t move. “I’ve already stuck enough needles in you to sew a winter kimono. If I wanted to hurt you, why would I wait till you woke?”

  “Maybe you had someone at your shoulder.”

  Suzuki spoke from the kitchen: “We haven’t been watching him. We’ve been sitting in here chatting about monsters.”

  Officer Mori stepped in. “Don’t hurt the doctor,” he said. “He has something to tell you.”

  Takuda looked up at the doctor’s averted eyes. His fingertips were tingling as if feeling had just returned. “What do you want to say, Doctor?”

  “May I finish administering this antibiotic first?”

  Takuda released the throat. He felt pressure and a little cold as the antibiotic flowed in. The doctor removed the needle and covered the puncture mark with a circular adhesive bandage printed with the face of a car
toon pig.

  “I know very little,” the doctor said. “I know that your brother and your son bore these wounds. When your brother died, it was tragic, but I didn’t see anything odd about it. Your father was a reformer, but there was no reason to believe that anyone would kill his son.”

  Takuda looked away from him.

  “But after your son—­I thought you and he hit the same rocks. The swelling and the paralysis of your face—­I sent swabs from his wounds to the city for toxicology. I had to pay for the tests myself because the village wouldn’t pay. The police reported a simple drowning, you see. No foul play, no snake, no spider.”

  “What was the result?”

  The doctor snapped his bag shut. “The result was that I should be quiet.”

  Takuda sat up.

  “The samples were tampered with,” the doctor said hurriedly. “The swabs I sent out were full of blood, river water, and the black, gelid substance I found in the wounds. The report came back confirming a little blood, no apparent river water contamination, and puffer fish liver toxin.”

  “Puffer fish liver toxin? In the upper reaches of a northern river?”

  The doctor nodded gravely. “It’s ridiculous, but it was instructive. Whoever tampered with the samples told me indirectly that there was a neurotoxin at work. When I saw those wounds on the foreigner, I saved a little of the gelid compound and experimented.”

  “You used it on yourself.”

  “Yes, the other day. I didn’t dare have the samples tested, not with everyone watching, so I put a little in a pinprick on my arm. Just a little. I felt a tingling in the outside fingers of my right hand, just as expected. My breathing and heart rate slowed, less than two percent each. I didn’t feel the euphoria we get from eating puffer fish. As a matter of fact, it was the opposite, a dysphoria like waking from a nightmare, all afternoon. I wanted to die. I sat in the dark until I fell asleep. I had a very small dose.”

  “Did you hear anything?” Takuda asked.