The Drowning God

by James Kendley

  “Spiritual matter? This priest is a joke. He’s not even a priest.”

  Suzuki leaned forward. “Oh, I’m a priest, all right.”

  “You inherited the post from your father. He ordained you. You don’t even know the sutras by heart. You recite them from the book.”

  “I never said I was a good priest,” Suzuki said.

  Nakamura started berating Mori, and Takuda’s attention wandered. He looked out over the valley, already in twilight, then to the reservoir to the south. In the long rays of the afternoon sun, each ripple and each leaf stood clear and sharp as if outlined by an artist’s pen. The deep blue reservoir reflected the wild spring sky. The shore glowed with the bright yellow-­greens of spring and the last few sprays of plum blossoms. They were in a world of clear water, blue sky, and green trees, a clean world unpolluted by the evil of the valley below.

  “Chief Nakamura,” he said as the old man shook his finger at Mori’s bemused expression. “We’re going for a stroll, and then we’ll eat some noodles. We would be pleased if you and Sergeant Kuma would join us.”

  The chief froze. He stood rigid on the stair with his teeth bared.

  “That would be good,” Suzuki said. “We’ll have hot buckwheat noodles and a little cup of something, eh?” He nudged Kuma, who flinched. “You can go off duty, can’t you?”

  “We can all just relax,” said Mori, who looked relaxed himself for the first time since Takuda had met him. “The priest says it’s good. While we all have a nice meal, we’ll tell you everything we know about the valley.”

  “And the cause of the water safety question,” Suzuki said. “The true cause.”

  The sergeant covered his mouth with both hands and turned back toward the parking lot.

  “Everything in detail back to 1945, plus some sketchy information back to medieval times.” Takuda looked down at his own shoes. “I won’t tell you if you don’t want to hear, but I know how your grandfather died.”

  The chief’s face was pale, and he breathed through his clenched teeth. His cheeks puffed outward, and spittle flew with each ragged breath. Suzuki reached out to steady him, but he shook off Suzuki’s hand.

  “He drowned,” Nakamura said. “They never found him.”

  Takuda shook his head. “The old town clerk Gotoh told me. He saw it firsthand. He knows everything.”

  The chief closed his eyes. A wave of grief passed over his face, and he put his hand to his forehead. When he opened his eyes, he looked exhausted and lost. Suzuki reached out again, this time to comfort him.

  Again, he shook off Suzuki’s hand. “You are all liars!” The chief’s eyes lit with hatred, and his face stretched into a mask of rage and disgust. “You make up lies about our valley, and you know nothing! Nothing! I came here for information on the prisoner, Ogawa. He escaped.”

  “Escaped, huh? That’s not surprising,” Takuda said.

  “Oh, you’re not surprised at all, are you?”

  “A few days ago, I just walked right in.”

  “You were in my holding cell?”

  “It might not be the last time,” Suzuki said.

  “That’s true,” Mori said. He turned to the chief. “We may need to be in your custody someday. Maybe someday soon. If it comes down to that, we won’t resist. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  The chief stared at them. He turned to the sergeant, but Kuma was already down in the parking lot, standing beside the car with his back to the temple.

  The chief backed down the stairs. “You’re all insane,” he said. “You’ll come to a bad end, and I don’t want any part of it.”

  “Chief Nakamura,” Takuda said, “I forgive you for everything you’ve ever said about my family, and I’ll make this promise to you and to everyone in the valley: We’re going to solve the water safety question once and for all, or we’ll die trying. No one will have to fear the canals or the river. No one will suffer what I have suffered, what you have suffered. Families will finally be safe here. Little girls like Hanako Kawaguchi will finally be safe here.”

  Chief Nakamura almost spoke. Almost. He turned and walked stiffly down the stairs.

  The chief and the sergeant didn’t look at each other as they got into the car. As they drove away, Suzuki clapped Takuda on the shoulder. “Well done. He’ll start to sleep better. He might even find peace in his old age.”

  “It’s odd that I feel charitable to the chief now that I have nothing left to lose,” Takuda said.

  “It’s not odd. It’s not odd at all.” Suzuki headed back up the stairs. “I’ll change out of my vestments quickly. I really don’t want to miss this sunset.”

  Back in the worship hall, Mori watched in tight-­lipped silence as Takuda folded the map and blueprint.

  Suzuki led them along the shoreline and up a trail to a country lane. They passed a handful of farmhouses and a small fishing camp. Just as the sun disappeared behind the treetops, they came to a crossroads where the country lane met the prefectural highway threading its way among the mountaintops. The country grocery at the crossroads was overflowing with fresh spring produce, the run-­down bait-­and-­tackle shop was packed with fishermen preparing for the morning, and the parking lot of the old noodle shop was filled with panel trucks that smelled of strawberries and melons.

  The noodle shop was crowded with truckers. The only table open was on an improvised deck built over a sheer drop-­off to the neighboring valley. The lights of the villages below were just visible through the trees.

  Suzuki was a regular. A grinning waitress brought him noodles with sliced pork. She blushed and ran away when Suzuki teased her about all her “trucker boyfriends.”

  “Wonderful ­people up here. Wonderful air. Best in the world. Perhaps I’ve deserted my congregation, but I do my business up here on the country roads instead of down in the valley.”

  Mori gestured at Suzuki’s noodles. “I’ll bet you’re glad your sect isn’t vegetarian.”

  “My sect? No, no, it is vegetarian, ideally, but I’m not.” He looked down at the lights below. Confused moths began to circle the lamp above their table. “You know, it’s very fitting that the last of the old congregants have just quit showing up. My sect really isn’t about much except preserving knowledge of the Kappa. If your plan succeeds, then there is no reason to continue.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. If we’re successful, I’ll try to sell the temple to one of the Nichiren sects, I think. They’re sort of cousins to our sect, anyhow. Selling the temple at a good price will almost settle my bills.”

  He slurped up half of his noodles at once. They were so steaming hot that Takuda winced just watching Suzuki.

  “Priest, almost? You’re a whole temple’s worth in debt?”

  “Oh, yes. Maybe a temple and a half, but I can get a lot of it forgiven, I think.” He had to repeat himself when his mouth wasn’t so full. “It’s expensive to run a temple of old ­people who don’t pay their dues and expect funerals when they die. What else could I do? I’ve been treading water here for years waiting for you two to show up.”

  After noodles and beer, Takuda brought out the map and the blueprint.

  “You two knew from the start that we were a team. You both knew we would fight this beast together, and you both knew we would become outcasts in the process. But I know one thing you don’t: I have to go in alone.”

  Mori placed both hands on the table. “I can’t allow it.”

  Takuda bowed to hide his expression, but Suzuki laughed out loud.

  “Officer, don’t be so—­oh, now you’re turning red. Look, don’t be angry. Do you really think any of us can stop the others? Do you think anyone is boss here? You two don’t have bosses anymore, right? At least you won’t have bosses anymore once you answer your phones.”

  “They don’t fire detectives over
the phone,” Mori said. “He’ll have to go into the office to get fired.”

  “Ha! That’s the spirit,” Suzuki said. “See, even a small joke helps.”

  Takuda looked over at Mori. The young man stared off into the night. It must be difficult. He had a bright future with the force.

  Takuda said, “Officer Mori, I’ll be around to help you find other work. You two will make sure of that.”

  Mori and Suzuki glanced at each other. “You aren’t going to be around. You’re committing suicide. You said you would go in alone,” Mori said.

  “I will.” Takuda said. He leaned forward and pointed to the map. “I’ll go in the back door. You’ll go in the front door.” He pointed to the blueprint. “Right here.”

  Suzuki ran a bony hand over his shaved scalp. Mori stared at the map and the blueprint as if he had never seen such things before.

  “We know we’re being watched. As I said, I’m counting on it.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Takuda’s heart slammed against his ribs as he waded through the drainpipe. His mouth had been dry ever since he lowered himself into the spillway, and his hands had trembled on the hilt of his sword. The adrenaline had gotten stronger with each step. With waterproof LED flashlights strapped to his forehead, his shoulders, and his thighs, Takuda lit the hexagonal drainpipe as bright as day. The skittering light didn’t stop the sweat from his palms.

  No one can train for this. He watched the water ahead for ripples. He listened in the close, echoing space for any sound not caused by his own motion. Nothing can prepare a man for this.

  Takuda had run courses to help men and women make better choices when their brains were flooded with adrenaline. The initial session was just like this concrete drainpipe: a search for a dangerous suspect down a narrow corridor. The trainees were jittery, panicked, and confused. In their first sessions, they made terrible mistakes, mistakes that could end careers and kill innocent citizens. By the time Takuda was done with them, they could function in the narrow cone of silence where time slows down to the split-­second decision that must be correct. They told him later that the training had saved lives.

  Memories of those sessions flashed before him as he scanned the drainpipe, his sword held above his right shoulder. My training sessions didn’t have monsters. They didn’t have grates in the ceiling or runoff pipes in the walls. I should have built in places for monsters to hide.

  Takuda’s own adrenaline usually peaked the night before a raid or an arrest, leaving him relaxed and ready when the action came. This time, even though he had all night and a few hours in the morning to prepare, his heart beat faster and faster in his chest. He hadn’t known this much adrenaline was possible. He hadn’t known he could be so terrified. His fingers twitched on the sword hilt.

  He stepped out of the narrow drainpipe into the main underground spillway. It was a smooth-­walled, tubular structure almost ten meters in diameter. The floor had been filled to give a flat surface, and the walls rose above him like an underground cathedral. Echoes of his slogging through the shin-­deep water were lost in the sounds of water rushing through the cavernous pipe. His lights barely reached the ceiling, but they turned his shadow into a chorus line of insubstantial, spindly-­legged puppets curving up the wall behind him. Debris and sandbars had built up on the spillway floor since the peak of the spring melt had passed. He saw movement from the closest island of debris, a man-­tall mound of trash and driftwood, and he turned toward it, sword floating by his ear in a tight little circle, ready for a strike at the slightest motion from the . . .

  A score of tiny red eyes glared at him from the island.

  Lord Buddha protect us. It spawned. He broke into a run, lifting his feet high out of the water. He reached the debris at full speed, ready to slash any little creatures he found there, to deal with each and every one just as Gotoh had told him he should deal with the Kappa. On the last step, his spiked boots skidded on the slime-­covered bottom of the pipe. He pulled up his elbows to protect his face as he flew headfirst into the debris. He landed in a net of filth and broken branches, his sword arm pinned uselessly against a bicycle wheel.

  Bicycles. He tore himself free, walking backward out of the collected garbage and whipping the muck off his arms and his sword. With each of his backward steps, his flashlights winked in the reflectors of the rusted bicycles and scooters entangled in the branches. He cursed in the darkness, and then he crouched in the water and washed the silty muck away. Bicycles! He knelt in the water. If I don’t calm down, I’m going to die down here, just like the poor citizens riding those bicycles when the cult caught them.

  He whispered a verse of sutra until his breathing steadied and his heart slowed. He had time. His lights would last all day if necessary. Mori and Suzuki wouldn’t catch up to him for half an hour if they got through. He had time. He chanted and opened his heart and his mind. He let the fear drain away from him.

  On the third repetition of the verse, he caught a whiff of rotting fish.

  He stood up slowly. He was alone, despite the stench. He was sure of it. If he was correct, the Kappa’s lair was upstream on his right, among the old holding tanks. The LEDs projected phantoms on the curving walls as he moved toward Holding Tank One.

  Holding Tank One, originally a cooling tank, was used for storage of caustic agents that could not safely be released in any form. Ogawa’s office, a cubbyhole off the main wastewater management control room, was the closest point to Holding Tank One. The blueprint showed a ser­vice hatch in the floor; Ogawa would have been able to get down into the tank area through the hatch.

  This was what Chief Nakamura meant when he said Ogawa’s brain had been damaged by fumes in restricted areas. The bay beneath Holding Tank One was the Kappa’s new lair. This was where the Kappa had seduced and possessed Ogawa, where Ogawa had become its murderous priest.

  The drain that would take Takuda to Holding Tank One was a black oval in the high, curved wall. The bore was smooth rather than hexagonal, and it rose at a forty-­five degree angle into absolute darkness. Cool air flowing down through the pipe carried the stench of rotting fish and another stench, the same as in the cavern underneath the old shrine, but stronger, fresher. There was something dead up there. Takuda was going into the Kappa’s active lair.

  He shook out his shoulders and forced his fingers to grip his sword more loosely. If I’m going to die in here, it’s got to kill me. I’m not going to kill myself with stupid mistakes. His heartbeat had dropped to a steady, manageable thud, and his hands hardly trembled at all. He was still terrified, but he was ready to go. He started up the incline into a foul headwind.

  As he passed into the pipe, the sound of rushing water dropped away behind, and all he could hear was his own ragged breathing and the scrape of his spiked boots on concrete. The spiked boots were made for fly-­fishing on a sand or gravel streambed. He stopped, then backed down the incline. At the bottom, he pulled off the boots and dug his toes into the cold, silted sand. He walked much more quietly when he started back up the pipe. With his feet bare and his sword drawn, he hardly thought of his pulse rate at all.

  The air became denser, fouler, and hotter as Takuda neared the top of the pipe. The drainpipe ended in a concrete basin below the holding tank itself. He stepped up onto the gentler incline. The stench was incredible. Takuda turned in a circle, sword at the ready. The circular floor sloped downward to the drainpipe he had just left. Unseen sluices at the perimeter of the tank, apparently meant to keep the floor clean, supplied the stinking rivulet that ran down the drainpipe.

  The whole floor is wet, but they need more water to clean this up, Takuda thought. They need fire hoses.

  Four massive steel columns held up the holding tank, which loomed in the darkness above. The smooth, curved walls of the tank narrowed to a giant funnel poised to spill caustic poison into the concrete basin where he stood. The spout was shut with a wheeled valv
e painted bright red. The valve wheel itself was geared to a pulley chain that ran up through the steel-­grate gantry circling the tank and upward into deeper shadow. A forest of I-­beams supported the gantry. The I-­beams were so rusted and blistered that at first, Takuda didn’t notice the lumpier, rounder shapes on the floor among them.

  He stepped forward, his circle of shaking light a few steps ahead of him. The shapes on the floor were pitiful human remains, all in Zenkoku coveralls. They were ripped halfway from their clothes, exposed to the bone, bloated, blown, and half-­consumed. Around the corpses were scores of dead rats. The rats had been broken, twisted, sometimes torn in half. The Kappa had killed its victims, eaten its fill, and left the rest to rot. When rats had come to investigate, the Kappa had killed them for pleasure.

  So Ogawa really procured sacrifices from among the Zenkoku workers. He must have had a lot of inside help to cover that up. I wonder if it was as easy to cover up for missing corporate employees as it was to make whole families disappear.

  Takuda hefted his sword as he turned, scanning the rest of the room. He was not alone. He heard a shoe scraping the serrated bar grate far above, but closer, down below, he saw a shifting shadow among the gantry supports.

  Anyone lurking above could wait. He moved slowly toward the shadow, sliding his feet silently over the inclined concrete. The darkened shadow among the pillars stopped moving. Takuda raised his sword, ready to cut the Kappa in two. It would appear as a woman, of course, or maybe a little boy, maybe even as his son, but he wouldn’t be fooled.

  The shadow gurgled deep in its throat.

  His lights would blind the creature long enough for him to get the first blow. Once he started, nothing could stop him. Takuda stepped sideways, swinging his lights around to shine full in the creature’s face—­

  It was Ogawa, blinking in the glare. His eyes were wide as saucers. “Detective! What are you doing here?”

  Takuda did not lower his sword. “Me? What are you doing here? How did you get out of jail?”