Eight Million Gods

by Wen Spencer

  “Oh, no,” Nikki whispered. “No.”

  “I didn’t know he’d burned it,” someone said behind her.

  She spun around, blinking away tears and raindrops. A boy stood in the pool of light. He looked fifteen or sixteen and was fiercely beautiful, with raven-winged eyebrows and eyes so dark they were nearly black. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail that was twisted up into a topknot. He was dressed in a somber blue kimono, black tabi socks, and geta sandals.

  “Wh-wh-what?” She glanced around, trying to fit him into the destruction around her. What was a teenage boy doing here in the middle of the night, dressed as a samurai?

  “I didn’t know that he set fire to my shrine.”

  “I-I-I’m sorry. Your family owns this shrine?”

  “For eighty generations, yes, they have served me. I do not know what will happen to it now. There are no sons to inherit it; Misa was to marry a boy from Nara. Ichiro would have adopted him as a son and passed the shrine to him.”

  Nikki frowned, trying to understand who this boy was and if she had somehow greatly wronged him. Currently everything was refusing logic and order and she was floundering lost. “She’s dead?” Nikki was no longer sure who “she” was though. Yuuka? Misa? Were they the same girl?

  “Yes,” the boy said bitterly. “He killed her and raped her and hid her body in the dead leaves.”

  Nikki closed her eyes against the vivid memory of George’s fear and anger suddenly turning to lust and need. Oh God, what have I done?

  The rain turned to a heavy downpour, and she stood there, uncaring, weeping.

  “Come.” The boy took her by the arm. “The storehouse wasn’t touched by the fire.”

  He led her into the darkness.

  In the back corner of the shrine area there was an old Edo-period storehouse with stark white walls. Unlike the storage shed, it had a massive padlock that looked centuries old. Apparently, though, it was not truly locked, as the boy tugged the padlock off without producing a key.

  “I’m Taira no Atsumori,” he said. “You may call me Atsumori-kami. My name is written with the kanji for honest and then the kanji for prosperity.”

  The double doors creaked open and he walked into the cavelike darkness.

  “I have a light.” Nikki turned on her flashlight. The walls seemed a foot thick, and the only window set above the door was tightly shuttered. How could Atsumori see anything? She could hear him, though, opening up wooden drawers somewhere in the back.

  “There is a lantern here,” Atsumori said. There was a flare of light, brilliant against the black, and when she could see again, he had a small old stone dish, filled with oil, with a burning wick draped over the edge.

  “Yeah, that looks safe.” She edged into the building. The light danced off tall tansu with metal-reinforced drawers and high rafters strung with paper festival lanterns. There was no sign of electric outlets or overhead lights.

  “I can protect you here.” The boy rooted through the drawers of the cabinets. “Once we leave the shrine, though, I will be dependent on you.”

  “What?” She felt like she had come in at the end of a conversation.

  He handed her a fine linen towel. “You can dry yourself with this.”

  Nikki buried her face in the towel. It smelled of pine and cedar, like it had been stored with potpourri. “I’m Nikki Delany. I’m so sorry about everything that happened.” She felt tears welling up again as she thought of all the madness she had accidently spilled out onto this serene place. “I—I don’t know how this all happened. I don’t even know how I got here.”

  “I brought you here.”

  Nikki laughed into the towel. “No, no, I mean—I don’t remember how I got to this shrine.”

  “I brought you,” the boy said with quiet intensity. “I killed the tanuki that attacked you in your home and brought you here.”

  Nikki lowered the towel to stare at the boy. He was sitting on the floor in the pool of light cast by the oil lantern. He watched her with calm detachment. He couldn’t have said what he just said—one of them must be misunderstanding the situation. She played the conversation back. And ran through it a second time when it came to the same illogical end.

  “What?” she said.

  “I have been with you since you found my katana at the train station.”

  Nikki buried her face back into the towel, trying to rationalize the situation. It would be so comforting to believe someone else had killed the man in her apartment. She had thought she’d seen a boy who looked like Atsumori glaring furiously at her at the train station. She had felt like she’d been followed from Osaka Station back to her apartment, but there hadn’t been space in her closet-sized bathroom for both of them without her noticing. One of them was probably stark raving mad, and, unfortunately, it was her.

  “I don’t understand,” she mumbled into the towel.

  “The sword is my shintai. Where it goes, I am forced to follow. When I realized I could easily take over your body, I used you to bring it back to my shrine.”

  With her eyes covered, she recognized his voice. She had heard him murmur a warning at her apartment. When she looked, though, there had been no one behind her. She had been alone with the killer.

  It was possible that she was also completely alone in the storage building.

  She gripped the towel tightly and whimpered. If she was so totally gone that she was seeing him in such vivid detail, she couldn’t imagine how she could prove to herself that he was really there or not.

  “Are you afraid of me?’’

  “I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid that I’ve gone crazy.” I’m afraid that I’ve killed people—lots of people. “None of this makes sense. I don’t know if you’re even here. Look at you. I’m soaked to the skin and you’re still dry.”

  “Of course I’m dry. I am a kami.” He cocked his head. “Do you not know of these things? Of kami and shintai and the function of shrines such as this one?”

  “Kami are gods.” She knew that the word wasn’t an exact translation; they were actually the essence of nature or something that English didn’t have a word to explain. The phrase “eight million gods” was to indicate that the kami were beyond counting. “I—I don’t know what a shintai is.” Was it a good thing that the boy claiming to be a god was using a term that she didn’t know? It could mean that he was actually sitting beside her—but it left her with a person who believed he was a god.

  “A shintai is the object I reside in. The katana is my shintai. I am where it is; hence I was in Osaka when you found it.”

  “Why didn’t I see you then?”

  “I am not as powerful as Amaterasu Omikami or even Sarutahiko Okami. I am limited in how much I can manifest outside of holy ground.”

  Nikki recognized the name of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. The sun goddess was the queen of the gods, holding a position in the Shinto pantheon much like Zeus. Her brother was Susanoo, god of the storms, and they engaged in sibling rivalry that rocked the world. Nikki didn’t know the god Sarutahiko. More proof that she wasn’t crazy—maybe. “You said you killed the man who attacked me?”

  “I am sorry. I was forced to take over your body. He would have killed you otherwise.”

  “All good.” She wasn’t sure where she stood on the crazy thing anymore. If her blackouts were caused by possession, it would certainly explain how she ended up at a burned-out Shinto shrine in the middle of the night.

  “Who was the man at your apartment? Why is he searching for us?”

  “Who?”

  He reached over and opened her backpack and took out her notebooks. “You wrote about a man searching for us at your apartment.” He opened her newest notebook to the scene that she had written on the train.

  “That—that’s just a story I’m making up.” Nikki blushed. She normally didn’t let anyone but Miriam see her notebooks. “Those people aren’t real.”

  Atsumori cocked his head. “You do not know what you are?” />
  “I’m a writer. I make up stories—like The Tale of Genji?” She assumed he would know of the most famous Japanese novel ever written, since it was over a thousand years old.

  “You are an oracle. What you are writing is the truth.”

  “No, no, no.” Nikki shook her head. “I write crazy, impossible things—like demons eating children.”

  He looked slightly confused. “But demons do eat children.”

  A childhood’s worth of therapy was quickly unraveling. “I make things up.”

  “You knew where my shintai was hidden. You knew how to undo the lock.”

  Nikki pressed a hand to her mouth as she took it a step further back. She had known everything about Gregory from the fact that his window framed the HEP Five Ferris wheel to the problems he had with his visa. Denial leaked out from under her fingertips. “No.”

  Atsumori opened the other notebook. “‘Sunlight. The fresh green smell of the new tatami. The hushed quiet of the haiden. The silent dance of the kitten as Maru warred with the dappled sunlight. She found herself smiling, as if all the peace and love of the shrine filled her up and spilled over.’” He closed the notebook. “Misa loved this place. You wrote the truth.”

  Nikki stared in horror at the notebook. “No, that can’t be right. I never thought of her as real.”

  “She was.”

  Was. Even if she denied Atsumori’s existence, the sword and burned shrine were proof that Yuuka . . . Misa had been real. Nikki had cried when she wrote the girl’s murder but she nevertheless wrote it in full gory detail. And there was Gregory, dead by a blender. She had been so proud of his death scene that she posted it online hours before he was killed.

  Everything she wrote was real? She didn’t want it to be true. She knew her characters better than her few so-called “friends” and certainly better than any of her family members. She loved them. She cried as she wrote their slow and painful deaths. And they all died. She never had a character survive to “happily ever after.” Tears started to burn in her eyes and she fought to keep from crying. She had bawled uncontrollably when she thought that her characters were no more than figments of her imagination. If she started to cry now, she wouldn’t be able to stop. As she dug through her backpack, looking for tissues, she couldn’t stop thinking about all her recent characters. How easy it had been to “think” in terms of the foreign Japanese culture. Little things like how a character would spell out their name in kanji when they met someone new.

  “I liked this part,” Miriam had said after fact-checking Yuuka’s introduction. “But you used the wrong kanji. Her name would be Misa using those kanji.”

  Nikki started to weep. Misa been so excited about the upcoming Gion Matsuri. She had gotten a new yukata to wear out to the festival. Nikki had come to Kyoto and toured Isetan and watched girls pick out yukatas in the kimono department. Had Misa been one of the girls Nikki spied on? Had Misa been the cute little high school girl trying on the white yukata with the scattering of pink flowers that Nikki took reference pictures of? The girl had felt right for Misa. She had been so cute and full of life. To think of her dead and dumped in the bushes by Gregory Winston . . .

  Oh God, she’d written five deaths already, and there were a dozen other people who had “this will not end well” written all over them. All of them real people. All of them she knew better than she knew Miriam.

  With that, she started to keen.

  “What is wrong?” Atsumori asked.

  “They’re all going to die. I used to try and stop them from dying, but death is like this juggernaut. It just plows through everything I put up to slow it down and nails them hard. I’ve even tried switching characters to who I thought were nice and good and careful people and they do things like drive over the neighbor’s toddler by mistake, or drop their hammer off a six-story roof onto a bypasser’s head, or kill a teenage girl and burn down her family’s shrine. I knew the moment that George—Gregory—walked up to the temple gate that he was going to kill Misa—somehow. Characters crossing paths always ends badly. It’s like the Ghostbusters—don’t cross the streams. Oh God, oh God, and I wrote myself into this novel!”

  10

  Boy God

  The boy god or possible delusion was still sitting patiently beside Nikki when she woke up hours later. She was fairly sure she had been arrested, which meant Gregory was dead, so she’d probably been to his bloody apartment, so it was possible she’d found the katana at the train station. After that, it was a bobsled ride downward into either madness or divine possession. She still hadn’t decided which.

  “You don’t sleep?” she asked to fill the silence.

  “Sometimes. Although it’s not as you would call sleep. I lose focus on your world. It is how the gaijin could wreak havoc on my temple.”

  She stretched, aching, having slept on the stone floor in slightly damp clothes. She didn’t even have a change of clothing. At least with the money she—Atsumori—had stolen from Harada, she could buy more clothes. She was at a loss as to what . . .

  . . . she was standing on a street corner in the rain, waiting for the light to change. Her backpack and the fabric-encased katana were slung on her right shoulder.

  “Stop doing that!” Nikki cried, startling an old woman standing beside her.

  Embarrassed, Nikki turned around and went into the FamilyMart on the corner. She made it a point to never have less than two notebooks and a full dozen pens. She kept to black ink only; her hypergraphia needed black. The other colors had been to soothe her writer’s heart. At the moment her writer’s heart was crying in the corner and had no interest in pens except as a medical device.

  Clicking one of the ballpoints nervously, she moved on to her other drug—junk food. She got four salmon rice balls, a box of Meiji chocolate-covered almonds, a slice of chiffon cake, a bag of pepper-flavored potato chips, a sandwich that looked like it might be egg salad, and two bottles of Coke. After considering the state of her life, she added a coin purse, panty liners, two pairs of socks, six packs of tissues, and a folding umbrella. She caught glimpses of Atsumori moving through the aisles like a dark thundercloud, horribly out of place in the bright, squeaky-clean convenience store. Otherwise, he was invisible to her and obviously everyone else. She was considering alcohol when she sensed him close beside her.

  “Don’t just take me places without asking,” she whispered. “I really, really hate that. If you keep doing that—I’ll—I’ll—” She clicked her pen. She hated that her options were so limited. But she couldn’t stand being used that way. It reminded her of being locked up in the sanitarium by her mother. Threatened with drugs and straightjackets if she wasn’t compliant and “good.” “I won’t be used like that.”

  “I’m sorry. I did not consider that it would bother you now that you know the cause.”

  “It does.” She picked a mini bottle of plum wine off the shelf and stomped to the cashier to pay for everything. It bothered her even more that there really was no way to stop him. He probably could keep hold of her as long as he wanted. Hours. Days. Weeks. “Just tell me where you want to go.”

  “Eh?” the cashier asked, wide-eyed.

  “Kyoto desu?” She asked the first “where” question that came to mind. “Is this Kyoto?” pushed the limit of her Japanese.

  “Hai!”

  So they were still in Kyoto; Atsumori hadn’t taken her out of the city. Yet. She had things she wanted to do before she let Atsumori drag her all over Japan. The first was finding a bathroom. “Toire wa doko desuka?”

  “Toire.” The cashier considered and then pointed across the street. “Subway station.”

  She glanced to where he was pointing and saw the steps leading down into a subway station and probably a public restroom. “Arigato!”

  Her panty liners were given special treatment. They were discreetly packed into a separate brown paper bag that the Japanese used only for feminine products. The package nearly screamed “cooties.”

  Ou
tside she said to Atsumori, “I’m going to the bathroom.” Hopefully alone but she doubted it. “And then to have something to eat. Then I’ll go wherever you want.”

  Nikki found a pay phone at Kyoto Station and fed it hundred yen coins, praying that she wouldn’t have to deal with a Japanese-speaking operator. She wrote out some stock phrases in case the person who answered the phone didn’t speak English.

  After three rings, the other end picked up with a meek, “Moshi moshi.”

  “Pixii, desu?” Nikki read off her cheat sheet. “Is Pixii” was the closest she could figure out to “Is Pixii there?”

  A very Japanese “eh?” of surprised confusion was the only reply.

  She tried to calmly repeat the question. Slower. “Pixii, desu?”

  “Hai?” The other person sounded like they were in grade school. “Donata desu ka?”

  Nikki wasn’t sure, but she thought the person had asked “Who’s calling?”

  The one and only time she actually met Pixii was at an East Coast anime convention four years ago. Nikki had been traveling with a pack of teenage girls and somehow ended up responsible for cleaning up after all the naïve stupidity that implied. Pixii had been dressed up as a magical girl from some anime that Nikki didn’t recognize. The only thing Nikki remembered clearly from the meeting was that Pixii could beat the snot out of any man who thought scantily clad girls doing cosplay were sluts, and then administer first aid to the wounds she inflicted.

  Was this really Pixii?

  Well, Nikki wasn’t going to get anywhere if they kept to Japanese.

  “This is ThirdEye,” Nikki identified herself reluctantly.

  “Third! Oh my God, are you okay? Where are you? What happened? SexyNinja has been going nuts! She says she tried calling you all last night and you never called her back!”