Eight Million Gods

by Wen Spencer

  What was happening to her? Had she killed Detective Tanaka? Was it really some kind of animal in a business suit on her floor or simply a delusion to make killing Tanaka acceptable? Had she snapped before he attacked her or after? Had he really attacked her or was that part of her delusion? Was this the onset of madness that her mother always braced against?

  And where the hell was she going?

  Over the door of the train car, a digital sign scrolled out kanji. She waited for the English translation to appear. Kyoto. She was heading toward Kyoto. They passed a small deserted station without slowing. She was on the express to Kyoto. It was a forty-minute trip.

  What was wrong with her? Her doctors had often suspected her hypergraphia was related to temporal lobe lesions, because it was the least serious possible cause of her symptoms. Thought to be genetic in nature, the lesions ran in families and often accompanied epilepsy—which she had never showed signs of having before. Unfortunately, her doctors could never find signs of lesions, and hypergraphia was also caused by bipolar disorder, frontotemporal dementia, and schizophrenia.

  So why was she blacking out? She was fairly sure that in the middle of an epileptic seizure, you couldn’t operate a Japanese ticket machine. It was sad and scary to suddenly want to be bipolar, but it was the lesser of two evils at the moment.

  The fabric-encased katana lay across her lap. Her backpack rested at her feet. She snatched up her bag. She’d been transferring things into her purse. Where was it? Surely she hadn’t left it in her apartment, or worse, lost it somewhere along the way. Maybe she simply shoved everything back into her backpack. She opened it and took inventory. Her laptop was in it, her flashlight, two notebooks, five pens, but nothing else. Not even a single pack of tissues. She unzipped all the various compartments and felt down to the bottom. Nothing. Not her change purse. Not her cell phone. Not her driver’s license or passport or bank card.

  “Oh God.” She slapped her pockets, full panic setting in. In her right jeans’ pocket was a wad of hundred thousand yen, each worth around a hundred US dollars. Where had it come from? She didn’t keep this much cash on hand, and she didn’t have her bank card. Had she withdrawn the money and left the card in the machine? She gripped the bills tightly. She was so screwed if she’d lost her bank card. She carefully tucked the money back into her pocket.

  The need to write washed over her. She fumbled with her backpack to get out her notebooks. To her dismay, the first was already filled. The second one was her current working notebook. She turned through the pages with trembling fingers, found the first blank sheet, and submerged herself into the calmness of writing.

  More than ever, she needed a hero.

  He was too late.

  The hallway was full of the coppery richness that came only from a full body’s worth of blood spilled out onto stone. He could smell it as soon as he stepped off the elevator. The stench grew stronger as he walked cautiously down the hallway, pistol in hand. The girl’s name was printed on the plaque beside the last apartment: Demming Natasha.

  He sighed. Something bad had found the girl before he could.

  He tried the doorknob. The door wasn’t locked. He pushed it open, bracing himself for a body on the floor beyond. He wasn’t disappointed, but it wasn’t what he had expected. A tanuki lay sprawled in a pool of blood.

  He stood in the doorway a moment, surprised, and then stepped into the apartment and quietly shut the door behind him.

  The mix of coppery blood, musky tanuki, and the girl’s sweetness was familiar. All three had been in Gregory Winston’s apartment. It wasn’t surprising that they’d come together again here, but that it was the girl who’d apparently walked away unscathed. But how? The police reports claimed that the girl was young and seemingly harmless. Appearances, though, could be misleading.

  The fabric folding door to the bathroom was sliced in half. Judging by the way the tanuki lay and the blood trail, he had cut his way into the tiny space only to come face-to-face with his killer. The shape-shifter had been killed with a single stab wound through the heart—quick and clean. There was a bloody towel on the bathroom floor from the killer cleaning his weapon, and the tanuki’s wallet, emptied of cash.

  To the victor go the spoils. According to the driver’s license inside the wallet, the creature was using the name Harada Hayashi.

  He breathed out disgust; the most dangerous of the monsters were the ones that could use the weapons of men along with their own natural talents. Either Hayashi had gotten clumsy with its excitement or there was more to this girl than reported.

  There was a purse on the table with her wallet and passport, along with the impression of a long thin blade painted in blood. A Hello Kitty duvet covered a half-packed suitcase in the middle of the floor. Around it were small piles of items. The girl had been packing when the tanuki arrived. Where was she now?

  He picked through the suitcase and things she’d left unpacked. Size-small, bright-colored T-shirts. Manga. Festival fans. Anime figures from Gacha vending machines. Everything hinted at a young, whimsical girl.

  How could such a girl kill a cunning monster?

  There was a frenzy of Post-It Notes on the wall in a kaleidoscope of colors. A turquoise-color Post-It Note caught his eye. It read “Shiva? Vishnu? Kali?” with the “Shiva” underlined multiple times. Below it were two more turquoise-colored notes. “The Brit” and “JFK to Osaka. Hotel Nikko Kansai Airport, Osaka. Walk to train station, airport to Umeda, express to Izushi, Nishimuraya Honkan.” It was the exact travel itinerary for Simon before he disappeared. The last turquoise note had a variation of the smiley face, xs for the eyes, a squiggle for a mouth, and several question marks surrounding the face. What did that mean?

  He scanned the wall for more turquoise notes. There was one off to the side, down low. It read: “Scary Cat Dude.” Was that supposed to be him? Under it was a flash of pink. He lifted up the note. The Post-it Note underneath read: “Kitten.”

  How could she know about the kitten? He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.

  He stepped back, eyes widening, to actually look at the collage in front of him. Ananth had said the police tagged Natasha as “a person of interest” in Gregory Winston’s murder, which was shorthand for “we think she’s involved but we can’t prove it.” There had been no explanation, though, in the police reports as to why they suspected the girl. He studied the other colorful scraps of paper, trying to find a pattern. Slowly, he managed to see the underlying order. It was tracking dozens of people and objects as they intertwined. Each person had a different color, although there was some overlap, since she had only a dozen or so to choose from. Several colors trailed down to end in a frowny face with xs for eyes. A “GW” was tracked in violet on the wall. He brought YF’s pink to an end before his own color stopped with a death mask and two words: “Harada.” “Blender.”

  Half-hidden under Gregory’s death mask was another flash of pink. He lifted the frowning face to read the note: “Katana, Osaka Station, locker 1601, PIN 108.”

  That would explain why the sword hadn’t been in Gregory Winston’s apartment. The lockers were emptied after three days of nonpayment. The sword would be still there. Unless . . .

  He glanced at the bloody blade impression on the table. It was the right shape for a katana. If the girl knew where Winston had hidden the sword, then she could have retrieved it and killed the tanuki with it. What happened, though, afterwards? Why had she left without her purse and suitcase? Did someone take her?

  He sniffed, pulling in the blood-drenched air, testing it for a more elusive scent. There was a slight tinge of ozone, like lightning had passed through the room.

  His phone vibrated. He growled softly and took it out to look at the number. Ananth. He glanced at the turquoise Post-It Notes on the wall. It was a tenuous lead at best, but it was the only one he’d found since arriving in Japan. He needed to find this girl. He couldn’t let Ananth order him off on another wild-goose chase. He considered what to
tell the Director and what to keep to himself.

  He took a deep breath and answered. “Yes?”

  “What did you find?”

  “I’m going to need a cleanup at the girl’s apartment.”

  “You killed her?”

  He barely controlled the impulse to fling his phone against the wall. He forced himself to count to ten before answering. “No. There’s a dead tanuki here; it’s the same one that was at Gregory Winston’s place. The girl isn’t here. I think she bolted.”

  He considered offering to track her and decided against it. Ananth didn’t trust him. If he seemed too eager, the Director might yank him off the hunt. He waited for the man to think through the options and come to the logical conclusion.

  “Find her.” Ananth ordered after a moment of silence. “But make sure you don’t kill her until we’ve had a chance to question her.”

  Nikki stared at her notebook. What the hell was she writing?

  Harada was the name she had given the assassin that killed George Wilson. He’d showed up at George’s apartment disguised as one of George’s friends. Only after George had opened the door did he realize his mistake . . .

  Much like what had happened to her.

  After a long discussion with her editor, Nikki had put Natasha in a nicer building than hers and given her a spacious one-bedroom penthouse with a clear view to Osaka Castle. At night, they shined great spotlights up onto the gleaming white stones and gold-edged pagodalike roofs. Surrounded by dark gardens, the castle looked as if a hole had opened up to another time.

  Natasha’s walls were covered with sketches and paintings, not Post-It Notes, and there was no dead body at Natasha’s. Or at least, Nikki didn’t think there was. She hadn’t written anything about the quiet artist for almost a month. Trying to write a more glamorous version of her life was like pulling teeth, as if her whole being refused the lie. What her hypergraphia had spit out since the conversation with her editor had been utterly lacking in detail, as if Natasha lived in a white void.

  This scene was full of details—only they were details of Nikki’s apartment.

  And the Scary Cat Dude had used Gregory Winston’s name instead of George’s.

  First the blackouts and now this—so not good. She was blurring reality with her story; not a good sign. How much of the scene was actually suppressed memories of what happened during her blackout? It would explain the mysterious hundred thousands of yen in her jacket pocket.

  The train started to slow down, and the loudspeaker announced, “Kyoto desu, Kyoto desu.”

  9

  Burn Out

  As soon as the doors opened on the train, Nikki hurried from the platform toward the lobby of Kyoto Station. She had only two hours before the local trains stopped running. She needed to go back to Osaka to get her passport, credit cards, and anything else vital that she had left behind. An express would take forty minutes, and a local would take nearly an hour. It would leave her only an hour to get to her apartment and back to the Osaka train station to catch the sleeper to Tokyo. Her stomach was doing flip-flops over the idea of returning to her apartment with the dead body. Part of her very active imagination envisioned bugs crawling in and out of his mouth, but she knew in the enclosed apartment it would be days before that could start. She focused on the diminishing time before she would be stuck in Osaka without a place to spend the night. Miriam was the only person she knew in Osaka, and she wasn’t going to bring this mess down on her head.

  Kyoto Station was a vast modern structure built to be a visual re-creation of the valley that Kyoto nestled in. The lobby was a six-story-high rectangle under an umbrella of steel and glass. The occasional pigeon testified that despite seeming enclosed, one side was open to the elements. The wedge-shaped Isetan Department Store actually started three floors under the station and formed a mountainous slope up and out of the lobby that you could walk up the side of—provided you wanted to hike more than ten floors to the roof-top garden.

  The lobby was crowded with people hurrying home from cram school and office socialized drinking. Nikki wove through the sea of Asians, aware that she was the only gaijin in sight. The far wall of the lobby was one massive bank of automated ticket machines. Despite the number of machines, lines were cued up.

  The only money she had was the hundred thousand yen. She nervously fed one into the machine. It calmly took it and spit back nine ten thousand yen bills and a handful of coins. She gathered them up and headed to the gate to scan the big digital board showing train departures. She wanted an express but she would take . . .

  . . . she was in a taxi on the outskirts of a town.

  The driver was a typical Japanese taxi driver: a middle-aged man in a uniform and white gloves. The car was spotless, and he was listening to a baseball game between Osaka’s Hanshin Tigers and the Yokohama Bay Stars.

  Why was it that every little piece of the puzzle seemed so orderly and sane and yet the big picture was filled with blood and chaos? Was the order serving to magnify the disorder?

  At least she still had her backpack and the money in her jeans’ pocket, and of course, the katana. It was only her sanity that she was losing.

  The taxi stopped. They were on a steep hillside, the orange torii posts of a shrine gleaming in the headlights. The driver said something in Japanese and tapped the digital display of his meter that showed eight hundred yen. Apparently he thought this was where she wanted to go.

  She had asked to come here? Where the hell was here? She could see stumbling into a taxi and asking for a hotel, but what was this?

  “Nani?” She pointed at the torii.

  The driver answered in a flood of Japanese.

  “Do—do you speak English?” she cried, interrupting him.

  “Eh?”

  “English?” She couldn’t even think of the phrase in Japanese. “Where are we? Is this Kyoto? Osaka?”

  “Kyoto. Hai.” The driver nodded and then pointed at the gates in his headlights. “Ikuta Shrine.”

  Had she asked to go to a shrine? In the middle of the night?

  “No, I don’t want . . .”

  . . . she was standing under a streetlamp in front of the shrine, alone, the taxi no longer in sight.

  “Stop doing that!” she shouted. “It’s scaring me.”

  It started to rain. It was a light drizzle, but it washed away what little strength she had left. She walked in a small circle within the pool of light, eyeing the dark landscape around her. There was the shrine . . . and not much else. The street ended under the streetlight. Down the hill, on either side of the road, were tall blank walls, over ten feet high, giving no clue to what lay beyond them. She seemed miles out of the town center with no idea where the nearest subway station might be or if the subway would still be running by the time she got there. Her wristwatch said it was nearly midnight. All told, she’d lost almost four hours to the blackouts.

  “This day really, really sucks. What the hell am I even doing here?”

  There was nothing to be done but go into the shrine. Something locked in her unconscious had brought her the whole way out here; she might as well find out what. Sniffling back tears, she took out her flashlight, turned it on, and walked into the temple grounds.

  The gravel path disappeared into a grove of tall trees, cloaked in darkness. In the distance, there was the glimmer of a spotlight. She could smell smoke, and the odor grew stronger as she went deeper into the shrine’s grounds. Dread grew in her chest as if the dark and cold were seeping into her, tainted with wood smoke.

  Her hypergraphia had spilled out scenes about a little Shinto shrine on the edge of Kyoto. While the daughter who worked as a shrine maiden had been vividly depicted as a wonderfully sweet and vibrant girl, everything else had been full of holes. Nikki had spent days exploring the temples of Kyoto, soaking up details to fill in what was missing from the scenes. While she visited dozens, she hadn’t been to this one.

  Or had she?

  What if she’d be
en having blackouts all along? What if she’d been living some dual existence, stealing ideas from reality and disguising them as fiction? What if the “flow” of hypergraphia was uncorking the bottled-up memories and letting them come out?

  It made horrible, terrible sense. When she wrote, she always felt like she’d dashed through some massive elaborate stage, carefully only tracking what the point-of-view character saw and felt and ignoring everything else. She disregarded everything the character hadn’t focused on, and thus lost important details that she needed to fill in later.

  What if the reason her settings always felt so real was because they were real?

  Did she write the vivid scene of George setting fire to the shrine because she’d been here before? Had she found the fuel can sitting in the storage shed, the door unlocked because this was peaceful Japan and no sane person would steal from the gods?

  She had written about the sloshing sound the kerosene had made inside the can as George splashed it on the back of the gift shop. The smell of the thick fumes as the dry wood soaked in the liquid. The heat of the fire as it “woofed” to life with a single flick of a lighter.

  Beyond the deep shadows of the trees, there was a courtyard lit by a jury-rigged floodlight. The light shone on a jumble of blackened timbers. Only burnt skeletal remains were left of what had stood for a thousand years, but she recognized the buildings all the same. To the left was the gift shop that sold charms. To the right was the raised stage of the kaguraden where Yuuka would dance with the other shrine maidens, pretending to be so solemn and serene when she was giggling inside.

  Straight ahead was the haiden, or hall of worship, where Yuuka had been cleaning the day of the fire. Beyond it stood the honden, a small, upraised building with a steep gabled roof. The honden was the most sacred part of the temple and closed to the public. Yuuka’s father only opened its doors on certain festival days. The katana had been kept within the honden; George had set the fire to gain entrance to it.