The Drowning God

by James Kendley

  She folded her arms with the packet to her chest. “This really means freedom, doesn’t it?”

  “You’ll just be a poor orphan girl who’s grown up and made a life for herself.”

  She bowed. “I’m afraid to do this, but I’m deeply indebted.”

  He returned her bow. “Don’t let anyone see that packet. Sleep with it. Carry it with you every minute till Monday.” He started climbing the balcony side railing back up to the roof.

  “You could go through the door.”

  “They might be listening inside. Not a word about this, anywhere. Not a word.” Before he pulled himself up on the roof, he said, “Good luck.”

  He hit the street four buildings closer to the train station. Two stations later, he bought a seat on a train headed home but boarded a bullet train headed the other way. He sat in the first unoccupied seat until the train got moving, but then he went to the public telephone.

  Yumi answered on the third ring. “Why are you calling me? Don’t you think they’ll find you?”

  “I just wanted to tell you I’m not coming straight home.”

  “Good. You’re ready to go do your duty,” she said.

  “Umm, I’ve still got a few days’ leave,” he said. “If you’ll be okay . . .”

  “No, do your duty, not your job. Go to the valley.”

  She wants me dead. He felt a pain like stabbing in his chest. The Kappa hadn’t hurt him this badly. He laid his head against the polished steel surrounding the telephone.

  “Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Kill it. You and your strange new friends kill it. Then come home to me.”

  Tears welled in his eyes. “I thought you meant—­ah, never mind. Thank you for your forgiveness.”

  “Don’t get soft. Listen to me. There might be ­people protecting it. If you have to kill them, kill them dead. Wring their necks or cut them in half. Don’t leave them half-­dead so they can shoot you in the back. And if you get caught, lie down and let them take you. Don’t fight. Then pretend to be insane. Just tell them the same story you told me the other night.”

  “Yumi, I . . .”

  “No, no, no. Listen to me. One: Kill it. Two: Kill anyone who stands in your way. Three: Don’t get caught. Four: If caught, act insane. But most important, number one: Kill it. Kill the monster that took away my baby. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “If you kill it, I’ll wait for you forever. As long as it takes. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “And don’t hurt Nakamura.”

  Takuda listened into the tinny silence for a few seconds. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I thought you hated Nakamura.”

  “He’s stupid. Stupidity isn’t a crime.”

  “I’m innocent, then.”

  “You’re only stupid about women. Now, go kill it and come home to me.”

  “Yumi, I just need to say a few things. First . . .”

  “Shut up. Shut up! You will not die. You will not! Say it.”

  “I will not die.”

  “You will kill it, and you will come home to me.”

  “I will kill it, and I will come home to you.”

  She let out a ragged breath. “I’ll wait for you,” she said, and she hung up.

  The conductor stopped Takuda to check his ticket. “Passenger, this train is going up to Tokyo. You’re headed in the wrong direction.”

  “Yes, I realized that when I saw the water to our right.”

  The conductor didn’t even blink. He had heard it all. He gave Takuda a transfer that would allow him to take another bullet train back west. “It will still add almost two hours to your trip, but you can get off at the next regular stop. You’re lucky you’re on the regular bullet train and not the super express bullet train. That would have ruined your day.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Miyoko Gotoh’s voice shook. “So, now you know. That’s what happened to your brother. And your son. Your father was the last good man in Oku Village, but he was too old to fight them, and he finally broke from the grief.”

  She sat on her doorstep before him with her broom over her knees as if she would use it to protect herself. Takuda stood very still. If he moved, he might be unable to stop himself from killing her.

  “You never told,” he said.

  “Who would I tell? Half the valley knew, and the other half suspected. Dirty bastards. I’ll bet they’re in the Hell of Incessant Suffering right now. I can’t imagine how many lifetimes you’d have to stay in hell for offenses like those. A lot, I’ll bet. I’ll be there, too. I’ll swim the River of Fire and climb the Mountain of Needles.”

  He reached past her to open her door. It ground along on its track. Takuda wondered how she managed to slide it open.

  As he stepped in, she said, “Don’t tell him. Don’t tell him how much I know. Don’t tell anyone.”

  He looked down at her. “Don’t worry. I doubt I’ll ever speak your name again.”

  She bowed her head as he stepped inside.

  The dark house stank of kerosene and incontinence. Takuda kept his shoes on. The ground floor was three rooms of junk and a foul-­smelling kitchen. He climbed the narrow wooden stairs. The air was warmer as he climbed, and the stench of sickness was thicker. There was no scent of Kappa, not yet. Gotoh had become careless as he aged, so there might be some Kappa trace in the house. Takuda would follow his nose as long as he could stand it.

  The old man lay on a filthy pallet in a dingy bedroom. A newish television squatted on a stand at his feet, and a shiny kerosene heater took up the center of the floor. The remote controllers for both lay on a wooden box at the old man’s fingertips. Nothing else in the room looked as if it had been touched in years. An empty rice bowl lay at his side. The straw matting was dark with overlapping stains radiating outward from the edge of his pallet. The stench filled the room.

  Gotoh had no words of greeting, and there was no surprise in his face. “You’re Tohru Takuda’s son.”

  “The old woman told you I was coming.”

  “That shark-­skinned hag hasn’t spoken to me in a month. More than a month.”

  “You expected me anyway.”

  “I expected you. When I saw on the news that the idiot police chief arrested an outsider for our crimes, I knew you would come. That was the first slip in fifteen years.”

  “What was the last slip before that?” He held up the Kappa’s severed finger. “Was it when your filthy god lost this?”

  The old man squinted at it. He tried and failed to sit up, and then he reached for the Kappa’s finger with a spotted, withered hand. His own left forefinger was missing. Takuda knelt to pass the grisly relic to the old man, but he stayed tensed in thigh and shoulder to spring away or to hammer Gotoh where he lay. Just as Yumi says, even the oldest dog has one more bite.

  Gotoh turned the finger over several times. He held it out to Takuda without any change of expression, but his breath had become sharp and ragged. “Where did you get it?”

  “It was one of the treasures of Eagle Peak Temple.” Takuda took the finger carefully.

  “The old priest kept secrets better than anyone in the Naga River valley. Better than we did.”

  “He drowned anyway, didn’t he?”

  The old man pointed at the finger. “You know it has grown back, don’t you?”

  “I’ve seen it.” Takuda held up his bandaged forearms. “I’ve felt it.”

  The old man’s eyes widened.

  Takuda shook his head in disgust. “Didn’t you imagine the creature could be fought? Didn’t anyone in the Farmers’ Co-­op ever fight it?”

  “Fight him? We didn’t want to fight him. He made us rich.”

  “Made y
ou rich.” Takuda wrapped the finger and put it away. His hands were surprisingly steady. He was getting used to talking about murder in terms of profit and loss. “You had your pick of anything good in the valley, didn’t you? You could have the best land. You could have the prettiest girls, at least until the next solstice or equinox. You could settle grudges and relieve debts by making whole families disappear. And no one could stand up to you. The Farmers’ Co-­op used your Kappa to hold this valley hostage for—­how long? A hundred years?”

  The old man noticed that Takuda had kept his shoes on inside the house, an unforgivable insult, and he laughed until his laughter had him coughing and choking on his pallet.

  Takuda sat on the floor, well away from the high-­water mark of stains on the straw matting. When the old man recovered, he said, “Come closer. Are you afraid of me?”

  Takuda shook his head. “If you had wanted to rewrite my family registry, you had your chance.”

  “You know everything. Everything but the truth.”

  “I know who was running that Q–35 typewriter in the village office until 1981.”

  The old man looked at the ceiling. Finally, he said, “The Co-­op was just since the war. We made it look like a rural labor movement. The real cult died in the war.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “You’re talking about the festival? The dance? That was nothing. A drunken after-­party. The cult was the main event. The cult was conversation with our Drowning God, with the shaman translating for us. Our Drowning God told us everything. He told us when to plant, when to fish, when to have babies, where to find money in the canals. He was the voice of the wind and the water and the rocks. He’s older than anything. He’s older than Japan. There hasn’t been a shaman who could talk to him since the war. I was just a kid, and I was in a prison camp for a year after it was over. When I got back, he was out.”

  “From under the shrine.”

  “He was trapped down there for centuries. There was a time when he was free, but a shaman trapped him down there to protect him from the temple. He got out during the war. No one knew if it was a stray bomb or the river or the last shaman going mad. Maybe he took the shaman’s mind and forced him to remove the rocks. He can steal a man’s mind, you know. Anyway, it’s a mystery, because the shaman was the first one to die. They said they found his skin emptied like a rice sack.”

  “So your Kappa steals a man’s mind to make a new shaman. That’s how the little girl was almost kidnapped. The Kappa stole Ogawa’s mind.”

  “It’s not that simple. Most of us are too deaf, you see? Anyone can learn the old speech, but a shaman understands the meaning. We couldn’t talk to him after the war. The best we could do is point out likely sacrifices and try to cover it up, you see? He has no idea about the modern world, how impossible he has become. We kept him penned in till the war, and after the war, we thought we could contain him in the canals.”

  “So, with a little help and direction, the Kappa killed on his own.”

  “His name isn’t ‘Kappa’. It’s ‘Returned Apprentice of Black Water’ when we pray to him and ‘Earthly River Spirit-­swallower Drowning God’ when we speak of his physical presence.”

  “Did you tie victims to the uprights in the river?”

  “The stone pillars? Sometimes, at first. We built a wall to keep him in, and we tried to trap him again. It didn’t work. When we tried to trap him, he grabbed old Nakamura, the chief’s grandfather, and he waited till the rest of us got down to the water, all of us standing there with our torches. He tore old Nakamura to pieces and ate his liver right in front of us. Right in front of us. Then he laughed and swam toward us. We scattered like rats.”

  “And you did nothing. You and your wife. You did nothing.”

  “Don’t tell the old woman. If she knew how much I know, she’d leave me for sure.”

  Takuda opened his mouth to tell him that they needed to get their stories together, but it didn’t matter. They would take their horrible secrets to the tomb.

  “So you kept the secret for all these years, just waiting for someone to ask you.”

  “No, no, no. If you had come to me like this ten years ago, you would have been the next one down the hole, and your wife would have followed you three months later. You still have a wife? You don’t want to tell me? That’s okay. I don’t really care. Anyway, that’s how I was. I would have told them everything, and then I would have come home and stayed in this room until the phone rang. That’s the only time the phone rang, in the end. We don’t even have a phone anymore. There’s no one to call us.”

  “So you all got old. When was the last time? When did you last sacrifice?”

  “For sure? Seven years ago? Six years ago? I don’t know anymore. Probably the same year as the last dance. I don’t know.”

  “Someone helped it. Between the time you cultists got too old and the arrival of Ogawa the patsy, someone helped it. Otherwise, how could the disappearances be covered up?”

  “Every day, I’ve wondered about that. I’ve watched the calendar and watched the news, just waiting for the Drowning God to be spotted or for someone to find the chamber below the shrine. Then someone finally finds the chamber, and it all gets washed away in a dam release! Who’s protecting him now? We’re all old men! We wouldn’t know how to get an accidental dam release! Anyway, I don’t know where the sacrifices have been coming from, but they haven’t been coming from the valley unless someone has come up with a better system than I ever could.”

  “Did you know there was a new shaman? The Zenkoku worker who tried to take the little girl. He understands what it says.”

  The old man waved it off. “He can’t be a shaman. He doesn’t know the old rituals. All that is gone. He’s just—­he’s just a procurer. It’s not a religion anymore.”

  “You’re right. It’s not a religion. It’s just murder. But, old man, it was always just murder.”

  The old man spoke in dead monotone: “The things I did, the things I believed, for all my power, they left me with nothing, worse than nothing. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen things spin out of control. It’s been like being drunk. I feel the darkness and the chaos creeping in from all sides. I have done what I could in the past few months to release my bad karma, but the things I’ve done—­it’s terrible. Maybe after a few eons, I’ll get out of the Avichi Hell to be reborn as a gutworm or a flea. Show me that finger.”

  Takuda pulled it out. As he unwrapped it, the old man struggled to sit up. “You know, when he lost that finger, he made us bite off our own fingers for not protecting him. His finger was already growing back, but he made us line up so we could bite off our own fingers. The punishment for failing to protect him. That mean-­spirited, dirty creature! I can tell you how to kill him. It seems impossible because he grows back anything you cut off, but there’s a way, and I’ll tell you because I’m dying, and I’m going straight to Hell. I’m more afraid of dying than I am of the old frog-­face himself. If telling you how to kill him can erase a few lines of the library of bad karma I’ve written during this life, it will be worth it, even if he comes right up those stairs and sucks my liver out through my ass. Now, listen closely . . .”

  CHAPTER 34

  “It’s too dangerous,” Officer Mori said. “This time, it will kill you.”

  They sat on the straw matting of the worship hall. No one had come to evening ser­vice for three days. Suzuki had dressed for ser­vices just in case, but he expected to chant the sutras by himself.

  Mori sat back with his arms folded. Suzuki still bent over the maps and the blueprint Takuda had lain on the floor, but his face was grim. He shook his head as he sat upright.

  “This is suicide,” Suzuki said. “It’s not like the railway tunnel. We didn’t have enough information then, and we thought we could go undercover, like spies. Now we know we’re being watched.”

  “Yes,
we’re being watched,” Takuda said. “I’m counting on it.”

  “Detective,” Suzuki said, “there’s a lot to be said for this kind of bravado, but there’s nothing to be gained by dying. We’ll be stronger if we’re all in the fight.” Suzuki stood. “Someone just drove up. Stay for the ser­vice. Afterward, we can have buckwheat noodles. There’s a nice place right on the mountainside, a twenty-­minute walk. Why not enjoy the evening, clear our heads?” He pulled his vestments straight and walked toward the entrance pit. “If you’ll excuse me, the few congregants who still come are very old, and they need a little help up from the parking lot.”

  As Suzuki slid into his shoes, Mori turned back to Takuda. “He’s right, you know. Your suicidal plan will just leave us to deal with this monster on our own. Not to mention your wife.”

  “You’re reminding me that I’m married?”

  “Well, you just don’t seem to be thinking clearly. That’s all.”

  “Enough. This is the first time you’ve mentioned my marriage, ever. You suddenly care about my marriage—­when you don’t like the plan?”

  “No, it’s not—­look, I just mean . . .”

  “She knows I might not come back. You might not come back, either. We might all die. You need to absorb that idea, too. She already has!”

  Mori knelt formally. “I absorbed that idea when I was nine. I was a foolish little boy who was mad with grief for his sister. You, on the other hand, are a grown man.”

  Suzuki came back into the entrance pit. “It’s the chief. And the sergeant. They’re coming up. Let’s meet them outside.”

  Takuda and Mori joined Suzuki halfway down the stairs. Chief Nakamura and Sergeant Kuma made so much noise with their own huffing and puffing that they didn’t notice the trio until Nakamura came face-­to-­face with Takuda. Nakamura’s eyes lit with rage.

  “You can’t be in the Naga River valley. You’re not on a case. You’ve been removed. I’ll report you to your supervisor.”

  “I’m off duty,” Takuda said. “I’m consulting the priest on a spiritual matter.”