by Wen Spencer
“That’s good.” She turned off the bathroom light, cloaking her underwear in darkness.
“Can you try to write more?”
“I tried already.” She remembered then what was in her notebook. With heart thumping hard, she dropped a towel onto the tablet to hide it. She didn’t want him to see it, pick it up, flip through it, and find the scenes with him as a child. She scrambled for another distraction away from the notebook. What were some of her tricks against writer’s block that might work? “Do have all my Post-It Notes?”
“What do you need those for?” He rumbled.
“Being able to see all the elements of my story sometimes helps me see places where I need witnesses.” She held out her hand and twiddled her fingers in what she’d been discovering was a universal “give me” sign.
He huffed but pulled the stack of Post-it Notes from his coat’s breast pocket. He passed all but Simon’s to her. He stood a moment, fingering the turquoise paper like it was a lifeline to his father. And then, reluctantly, added it to the pile in her hand.
She sorted through the scraps of paper and started to stick them to the largest blank wall. The hotel room was larger than her tiny studio apartment, so she could spread out her plot tree. The wider separation between the characters made the interconnections more obvious. “These are all my characters. They’re in the story for a reason—I just don’t know why. Your father is part of my story, and I think more than just so I can meet you.”
“Pardon?”
She blushed furiously and focused on sticking up the notes. “I need to find other characters that interact on the same plot thread as your father so I can use them as a witnesses.”
“What do you mean?”
“See this cluster of characters? This is the katana branch.” She had up three of the six colors that she knew were definitely linked to the katana. “Gregory—who I was calling George—killed Misa in Kyoto to steal the katana. Harada killed Gregory in Umeda trying to take the katana from him.” She found Natasha’s white notes and added them to the wall. “I find the katana and kill Harada in Otemea. If most of those people weren’t dead, I could use one of them to find out about the others. Like I could use Harada to witness Gregory—only they’re both dead, and my writing doesn’t work on dead people.”
She hadn’t completely intertwined the branches in her apartment, so Leo hadn’t grouped the rest of the Osaka characters with the first four. She still wasn’t sure how the next few Post-It Notes were related.
“The thing is, this branch isn’t the whole story, it’s just one little piece of it. All these other characters aren’t tied into the katana.” She named the people as their Post-It Notes went up onto the wall, spread far apart to emphasize the lack of connections. “There’s Haru and Nobu, who are eight-year-old twins that live in the Shimogyo Ward of Kyoto. Haru has been picked to be the Chigo or celestial child for the Gion Matsuri this year. It means he is supposed to ride in the Naginata-hoko in the parade, but he’s scared of heights and the float is three stories tall.” She understood his fear completely. “Nobu is going to take his place and has been learning the dance that Haru is supposed to do on the float.”
She’d picked yellow for the twins. She put them close to Misa’s pink since they lived in Kyoto, too. She wasn’t sure, though, if they were related in any way. Misa had been excited about the Gion Matsuri, as the month-long festival meant an increase of tourists visiting all the shrines of Kyoto. Misa hadn’t been involved in the parade and the twins hadn’t visited Atsumori’s shrine. With the fire and Misa’s death, the possibility of their stories intertwining was even more remote.
“There’s Chitose; he’s team captain and starting pitcher for the Tohoku High School baseball team. They’re going through the regional tournament, trying to get to the National High School Baseball Championship.” Chitose’s color was teal. She put him close to the Osaka branch because the playoffs were held in nearby Kobe.
“And the real crazy outlier, Kayo. She’s a war widow in Hiroshima with her two children and elderly father who repairs watches.” Nikki stuck the pale green at the far edge of the wall. “Her scenes are all in August of 1945, a few days before the atomic bomb is dropped. She lived about a half-mile from the Aioi Bridge, which was the Allied aiming point. Talk about ‘this will not end well’ written all over a character.”
She waved the remaining Post-It Notes at him. “I’ve got over three dozen characters in all, and so far only me, Greg, Misa, and Harada have intersected.” She shuffled the papers to Simon’s turquoise Post-It Note.
“Here’s your father, in Izushi, and he’s here because . . .?”
She turned to Leo for the answer.
“The Japanese government is building a hydroelectric dam to replace the nuclear power plants damaged in the 2012 tsunami,” he explained. “The area is supposed to be geologically stable—well—as stable as you get for Japan—but there were several odd landslides that stopped work. They asked Shiva if they could find the underlying problem. Ananth felt that the Japanese were merely covering all the bases. They tend to be much more superstitious than, say, the Germans or the French. Then again, they have good reason. The Inquisition and other witch hunts stamped out much of the abnormal in Europe. Places like the United Kingdoms logged their virgin forests and fought the things that like to live in those dark places long ago. Japanese supported the more Buddhist and Shinto ideas of living in harmony. Live and let live.”
Ananth had been the name of Leo’s phone contact. As far as she could tell, he wasn’t a character, but so far she’d gotten all the names wrong. “Who is Ananth?”
“The old man? He’s the Director of Shiva. A bastard of a Hindu with ice water for blood.”
She didn’t have any non-Japanese characters beyond herself, Simon and Gregory. Nikki nodded, tucking away the information, as she tried to mesh the real reason for Simon’s visit into what she remembered of her scene. She was going to have to read it again since it had been months since she’d written it. “Shiva didn’t think the threat was real, so they sent your father alone?”
“He’s a Sensitive, not a Talent, and he’s worked with them for nearly two decades, so he’s trusted to travel alone. But yes, normally I work with him as his bodyguard. Simon thought it was a good chance to show that I could work alone and talked Ananth into letting me go solo in Nova Scotia.”
It meant that Leo and Simon were half a world apart when Simon disappeared. If there was any logic to her ability, then Leo hadn’t started to affect “the story” until he began to investigate the katana. Whatever Leo was doing in Nova Scotia had nothing to do with Simon’s disappearance except for the fact that he wasn’t guarding over his father. Was Simon’s section simply a way to show Leo’s reason for being in Japan?
Like Leo, Simon had refused to be named. Miriam had nicknamed him “the Brit” because British phrases would occasionally slip into his narrative. Nikki knew that he worked for an international agency named after a Hindu god. The phrase describing Shiva as “the one who kills the forces of darkness” resonated with her. She’d even taken “ThirdEye” as her handle after fleeing New York City—an attribute often associated with Shiva.
She continued to stick Post-It Notes on the wall, tracking the progress of her characters through their day-to-day lives. Compared with the confusion of the katana’ branch, Simon’s was so bare that only three notes marked his arrival and departure from the story. Still, the fact that she had mapped his movements from New York to Osaka to Izushi was more than she would do for a simple witness. He had to be important to the overall story somehow.
What was the common thread?
“This is probably going to take a while,” she told Leo.
17
To Sleep,
Perhaps to Dream
Leo left her considering her colorful plot tree, trying to sketch out a story framework around Simon so she could pinpoint him. She took out her laptop and reread his only scene. Simon’s attent
ion had been on his phone call to Leo as he arrived at the construction site. The twelve-hour time difference, the fifteen hours on the airplane, followed by a night’s sleep and a morning riding on a Japanese train—which banned talking on cell phones—meant that they had been out of contact for days. Leo was “out on a job,” and Simon had been worried about his safety. Knowing now that Leo was a “tame monster” for Shiva, she could understand why. Simon started the conversation speaking in code.
“It’s me,” he said. “How’d it go?”
His son’s voice was like a summer thunderstorm, rumbling in the distance, promising violence on the landscape. “It went.”
He relaxed slightly. If the job was over, then his son was home. “Are you okay?”
The reply came too fast, too angry. “I’m fine!”
He waited, scanning the valley below him where bulldozers crawled over freshly torn earth. It would be better if his son confessed freely rather than be forced to report what had happened to make him so angry.
For several minutes there was only the low growl of anger, and then a snarl of “The density estimate was bullshit. One or two? My ass! There were over twenty. I needed to do a lot of scrambling to stay in the clear. I missed a jump.”
His heart stumbled slightly at the news. The job is over, he reminded himself, and he’s home safe. “Did you report the discrepancy?” What he really wanted to add was, “Or did you just chib the blighter who set the density?” He had to stop being the over-protective father and let his son stand on his own.
“Yes. Written down and cc’d all the heads.”
“Good boy.”
“What about you?”
“Just got here.” He knew his son was trying to distract him from asking more questions, which meant he would probably not be happy with the news. “How bad?”
There was a long, unhappy silence and finally, “They’ll let me out of this bed by the end of the week.” And then an unhappier, “Doctor is here. I’ve got to go.”
The conversation with Leo was much more understandable now. The vagueness of the discussion was because Shiva had sent Leo off to kill monsters. Not something you would discuss over a cell phone. The information Leo had been given about the number of monsters had been wrong. He’d barely gotten out alive. Worse, he was in a hospital when his father disappeared, unable to come searching for a week or more.
After the phone call, Simon had gone down into the valley to talk with the construction supervisor. The man had been uncooperative and brushed Simon off first chance he’d gotten. Leo’s father had drifted through the work site, trying to ignore the fact that his son was in a hospital, half a world away. He inspected equipment, made it a point to talk to every worker, and then climbed over the broken landscape.
Like the conversation, everything seemed to be in code. She couldn’t figure out what exactly Simon had been looking for. Since his mind was on Leo, his point of view didn’t include information on why he was there and what he wanted. Nikki had assumed she could fill in the details later.
What hadn’t she written? There were so many details that would have been clear moments after writing them that she’d probably forgotten now.
There was a slight knock, a female voice murmured something in Japanese, and then the door to the room slid open while Nikki was still trying to come up with some kind of reply. One of the hotel staff members knelt in the doorway and murmured again in fast Japanese.
“Na—nani?” Nikki managed to stammer out.
The girl made a cute face as she thought deeply and then said something slowly. Nikki wasn’t sure if she was still speaking Japanese or very mangled and thus unrecognizable English.
Then Atsumori’s presence flowed through her, and her mouth opened and she heard herself say, “Yes, please, put out the futons, thank you.”
At least, that’s what Nikki heard. The girl looked startled and laughed.
“Katajikenai,” the girl said in a deep male voice and laughed again. “You sound like a samurai. You must have learnt Japanese from historical movies.” The girl moved to the closet and slid open the door. Inside were two futons and Atsumori’s katana.
Nikki was beside the girl before she realized that she was moving, and snatched up the katana. “Please, do not touch that.”
She retreated to the porch, stepping into the wooden sandals, fled into the garden.
She found a gate on the other side of the garden, and without meaning to, she was out into the town. She wasn’t sure if it was she who was running or Atsumori. After the third turn, she was fairly certain it wasn’t her.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she cried.
They took six more steps and stopped just beyond the torii marking the entrance to a small shrine.
“What are you doing?” She caught hold of the base of a foo lion statue just beyond the torii, trying to anchor herself so he couldn’t drag her away.
“Talking.” Atsumori appeared beside her. “There are things we need to discuss. I am not sure we can trust this half-breed, and certainly it seems as if we’ve been detoured to his needs, not ours.”
“Ours? There are no ‘our’ needs.”
He looked a little stunned and hurt. “We need to find out who ordered my shintai stolen.”
“That is your need,” Nikki said.
“Have you forgotten the tanuki in your home?”
She was really starting to hate how she’d lost control of her life days ago. “They are after you, not me. If I didn’t have your shintai, no one would be trying to kill me.”
“You have been caught up in the flood waters. I wish it were otherwise, but that is how it is. Even if we parted, those seeking me would still hunt you down to discover where you had hidden me. I must stay with you to protect you.”
She swallowed down on “Leo will protect me.” Atsumori was right that she had been trusting Leo more than she should simply because he was one of her characters. She had crawled into his head and read his thoughts. He was the Scary Cat Dude who rescued kittens. He was the poor misunderstood and abused little boy, saved only by the kindness of his now-missing foster father. He was the man who didn’t want to burden his father with how truly wounded he was.
Assuming—dangerously so—that every word she wrote was the truth.
“I do not think we should trust this male of yours,” Atsumori said.
She laughed at the idea that Leo belonged to her. “Noted. But I think finding his father will help you and me.”
“You only have his word that the man who came to this town is the same that saved him from the cage. He has your writings; he can use your truth against you.”
She frowned as she searched her memory. No, not once did the man tied up think of his son as “Leo.” It brought her back to the fact that she knew so little about Leo. “What is an . . .” She struggled with the word that Simon had used. “Obakemono?”
Atsumori relaxed slightly, nodding as if he had won some point. “An obakemono indicates yokai that can shapeshift. There are any number of them. I believe his mother must have been a bakeneko.”
“And a bakeneko is . . . ?”
“If a cat’s tail grows too long, its tail will split in two and the cat will become a bakeneko.”
She nearly said “Oh, that’s so stupid,” but then remembered to whom she was talking. Silly as it sounded, it probably was true. She took a deep breath as the understanding canted her entire belief system on its side. She was never sure if she believed in God, but somehow confirmation (and long-delayed realization) that there were countless “gods” dancing about Japan and all the attached spiritual system was true . . .
Why was it less intimidating to think she might be insane rather than think maybe every part of Japan mythology was true? Was insanity more sane than tanuki and bakeneko?
“Nikki-chan?”
She waved aside his concern. “I’m just coping. Give me a moment.” She took a couple more deep breaths. Maybe it wouldn’t be so overwhelming if she weren
’t running from murderous tanuki in the company of a god . . . and Leo.
“His mother was a monster? How does that work? I mean—why didn’t she kill and eat his father?”
“Yokai can be both good and compassionate or malicious and evil. It has been my experience that yokai are drawn to humans who can sense them. It is quite possible this half-breed’s father was what he refers to as a Sensitive. It is not uncommon for a bakeneko to take the place of a loved one who has died. They can mate with humans, but their children are yokai.”
The scene with Leo in a cage suddenly made more sense. “Oh.” And the one with Miriam. “Oh.”
The girl from the hotel staff had taken the futon mattresses out of the closet and unrolled them so they lay side by side, making one big bed on the tatami mat-covered floor. The implied intimacy set Nikki’s heart beating faster.
“No, no, not going to happen.” Nikki grabbed the edge of the right-most futon and dragged it to the corner. Really, what was she thinking, sharing a room with a total stranger? She remembered how Leo’s hand had felt as it brushed over hers during the drive—large, strong, and oh so male—and dragged Leo’s futon away from hers to the farthest point she could get it.
She stared at the mattresses for several minutes, chewing on her bottom lip. That she didn’t want Leo sleeping near her was entirely too obvious by the futons’ new positions. Should she go with something less blatant? Maybe she should move Leo’s to the front of the door, so it seemed more like she was worried about someone coming into the room undetected. That would appeal to a herolike guy—right? The porch, though, was more open to attack.
Once she had Leo’s futon out on the porch, it occurred to her that he might not even come back to the room: he knew he had until dawn to find his father alive. If he’d spent six weeks of fruitless searching, he’d only return to see if she knew anything new about his father. If that was the case, she might be pissing him off by moving his bed for no reason.