Mori and Nabeshima moved quietly on the edges of the conversation. They brought tea and snacks in a surprisingly subdued manner. Letting the adults talk, Takuda realized. He felt Nabeshima’s eyes on him while he told Yoshida of their various fights with ghosts, demons, and monsters, and he wondered which of the three she considered him.
Mori didn’t interrupt Takuda with corrections or additions, which was a surprise in itself. Takuda glanced at him during pauses in his story of their traveling horror show. Each time, Mori was watching Nabeshima. On his best behavior.
“What about the swords?” she asked. “One conspiracy site called you ‘warriors against the forces of darkness, armed with nothing but medieval weaponry.’ What’s that all about?”
Takuda glanced at Mori, who shrugged as if to say he wasn’t a lawyer.
“Reverend Suzuki had three swords handed down from his ancestors,” Takuda said. “Gorgeous swords, true works of art. They came originally from Kuroda clan warriors, centuries before the clan came here. The warriors were passing through Naga Valley on a pilgrimage to Sado Island, and they barely escaped the Kappa with their lives. They donated both the swords and the land for a temple to Reverend Suzuki’s ancestors.”
Yoshida leaned forward. “That’s the temple he was evicted from, accused of embezzlement, malfeasance, tax evasion, and . . .” She checked Nabeshima’s computer. “And squatting.”
Mori said, “He’s not much at bookkeeping apparently.”
Takuda grimaced. “Those charges were a ruse. The real story is that his parents disappeared, probably murdered, and his brothers abandoned him there. He hung on long enough to gather us and kill the Kappa.”
“Ah. Sweet vengeance. And the three of you run around with unlicensed swords.”
Takuda pointed to his staff. “I use that now. My sword was destroyed in the process of killing the Drowning God. Young Mori’s sword is licensed. As a fourth-degree black-belt in Iaido, he’s legally entitled to have a true blade in his possession.”
“What about the priest?”
Takuda hesitated. Now it was time for him to trust Yoshida. “He has a long sword designed for the swallow-cutting stroke, a medieval masterpiece sometimes called a ‘laundry-pole sword.’ We try to make sure he doesn’t cut his own foot off with it.”
They were all silent for a moment.
Yoshida stood. “Well, I don’t really know what to say about your hobbies. I just hope that the information our Kaori gave you won’t end up hurting anyone. There is a disturbed young man. An innocent girl has befriended him. There’s no reason to assume there’s any connection to all this . . . other rubbish.”
Takuda sat back, satisfied. Yoshida didn’t seem to believe his story, but it sounded as if she wouldn’t be trying to turn them in to the police.
Yoshida called Nabeshima, who gathered her things and prepared to follow.
“Our Kaori is going out,” Yoshida said. “I will walk her to the station and return.”
Mori all but leapt for the door. “I can accompany you to . . .”
Nabeshima bowed. “No, please. Let us go. We need time to talk, and . . .” She flushed crimson. “I’ll see you day after tomorrow. I will. I just have to take care of something.” She looked directly at Mori. “Until day after tomorrow.” She whirled and sped out the door.
A bemused Yoshida strolled after her. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t bother to answer the hotline,” she said to Takuda. “We don’t treat demonic possessions.”
Takuda made fists for the simple satisfaction of feeling his knuckles crack. Mori stood staring at the door.
“She doesn’t believe us,” Mori said. “She thinks it’s a racket.”
“But she doesn’t think we’re dangerous.”
Mori sighed. “That’s something at least.” He pulled a folded sheet from his breast pocket and placed it on Yoshida’s desk, right across from Takuda.
Takuda stared at the folded sheet. He hated it when Mori casually dropped things on him. These little bits of paper Mori pulled from nowhere were always portents of the worst kind of trouble.
“What is this?”
Mori pretended to study Yoshida’s antiquated electric typewriter. “I found it on the floor in our room. I believe it’s another sheet that showed up in the priest’s begging bowl.”
It was new onionskin covered with neat, dense handwriting. He spread the sheet flat with both hands and began to read:
The footage was silent, hand-tinted, a flickering image on a cracked projection screen: eight peasant farmers squatting, filthy and nearly naked, on a narrow spit of sand, a beach on a tiny island or perhaps on the tip of a peninsula. They could have been from any corner of Asia, but one wore braided straw sandals unmistakably Japanese. Beyond them lay three beached military boats, perhaps the boats on which the farmers had arrived. On the horizon stretched the mainland, a harbor city.
Before the farmers stood a low, rectangular stone box. A thin rope tied to the stone lid was pulled taut by someone or something out of frame, and the lid tipped to the ground. The men gathered around the cavity thus revealed.
One drew from the cavity a knife that appeared to be made of black volcanic glass. The scene cut abruptly to a close-up of the object in the peasant’s trembling hand. It was simply a palm-sized stone lozenge with a long, curved blade. The inner curve of the blade glittered. The film then jumped to a longer shot of the men passing the knife among themselves. Seven caressed it, but one held it in his palm and slapped it excitedly. As he spoke, gesturing toward the mainland, the others grew still and listless. Their faces took on a drawn, strained expression. They took the knife from the eighth farmer, who continued to gesture back toward the mainland, and they passed it flat from palm to palm among themselves. They were very still, except for the passing of the blade, and their eyes were downcast. The blade passed from one to another with increasing speed, fairly flying from hand to hand. The men seemed to barely use their eyes; each man released the blade in midair, but another hand appeared at the last instant to catch it, and so one more hand appeared to replace that one. The blade itself traced a flat and repetitive rosette above the sand. The eighth reached out for the knife several times, but it slid away on its own arc just as his fingers reached it. The final time, he jerked back and then rocked on the sand, pinching his right thumb and speaking angrily to the other seven. He tried to wipe the thumb with his own filthy tunic, but the blood did not stop, and he began to wrap it tightly with strips he ripped hastily from his own loincloth.
The seven broke into grim, unpleasant smiles, their mouths broadening in unison as if to a signal unheard by the eighth of their party. The eighth shouted at them. All at once, the jaws of the seven popped open, each man’s lips peeling back in a painful rictus. They raised their eyes as one, still passing the knife with chilling precision. Moments before, they had been a ragtag band of quarrelsome farmers, and now they moved as a single creature. As the eighth fell silent and rose to back away from his fellows, the seven set upon him. They quickly overpowered him and pinned him to the sand. While he still lived, they began to separate his flesh from his bones with the stone knife.
The cameraman changed vantage points several times to capture the smallest details of this ritual. The grinning farmers bathed unconcernedly in the spewing blood. The blade passed from hand to hand as rapidly as before save for quick, dipping slices into the meat of their victim. Each farmer engaged his gruesome tasks with both hands, each slicing skin, retracting muscle, and restraining the victim for his fellows in turn, and together they were as efficient and impassive as laundry maids folding sheets. When a bone became disarticulated from the quivering carcass, the stone knife passed on as the bearer of the bone quickly picked away any remaining flesh, severing muscles or trailing ligaments with his teeth before licking the bone spotlessly clean.
The cannibalism, even though there
was a great deal of flesh consumed in the process, seemed incidental to this ceremonial cleansing. Even painstaking processes like the disarticulation of the small bones in the hands and feet and the disassembly of the cranium were performed so quickly and efficiently that the knife itself was always in motion, always there when the next bone was in need of freedom from the flesh surrounding it. In the end, the brains were dumped unceremoniously on the heap of hide and organs stretched in a rough five-pointed star on the sand—one hideous smear for each appendage and one for the flayed-open head. The bones, cloven from the flesh and cleaned in a specific order perhaps relayed from the knife itself, were interlocked to form a cantilevered platform on which the cleaned blade finally was placed.
The seven, blackened with the drying blood and offal of their flayed comrade, knelt before their hideous new altar. Their gaze fell then upon the camera operator. The seven stood in unison and the nearest retrieved the stone blade from its ghastly cradle. The camera shook but the cameraman held firm as the seven advanced. Suddenly, bright red blossoms sprouted on their heads and torsos, new and urgent growths in the blackened field of dried blood. They fell as one, shot to pieces.
Immediately a spry old man in priestly robes, accompanied by a young man in an Imperial Navy officer’s uniform, stepped into the scene. The old man, the hems of his robes instantly stained with blood, grasped the knife with fire tongs and tried to wrest it from the dead farmer’s grip. The fingers would not release. The old man pulled, lifting the dead man half off the ground. The farmer’s head lolled on the sand, but even in death, his lips were pulled back in that horrid grin.
Finally, the officer drew his sword and struck off the farmer’s hand. The old priest unceremoniously dumped the knife into the stone box, hand and all. As he hauled the lid back onto the box, he indicated where the officer should cut the ropes, and the officer complied. As the priest turned away, the officer cut him down with a single stroke. The old man folded to the ground, murdered too quickly to register surprise. The officer deftly flicked the blood from his blade and sheathed his weapon. He gestured wordlessly to the cameraman.
Takuda sat up blinking. “What’s a rosette?”
“A sort of floral pattern that loops out and comes back through the middle, like a chrysanthemum,” Mori said. “I had to look it up. Strange character combination.”
“So it’s possession. This black curved jewel wants a cradle of bones, and that’s what’s behind the rumors about the starfish killer.”
Mori frowned. “It seems to want pain.” He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been trying not to think about it, concentrating on Kaori Nabeshima’s situation.”
I’ll bet you’ve been concentrating on her situation, Takuda thought.
“But the more I think about it, the worse it gets. An object that possesses crowds . . . There’s a practical limit, of course, on how many victims could be flayed at once, but is there a limit on how many could be possessed?”
“Well, if this thing is real, it would be very easy to find the possessed,” Takuda said, folding the onionskin. “Covered with blood, jaws locked in a grin. Should be easy to find.”
“You told me Detective Kimura said the same thing about Thomas Fletcher.”
“Well, I hope he was right,” Takuda said. “I’m going to track Fletcher down tomorrow.”
They were silent for a moment. Mori finally said, “Finding the possessed might not be a problem. Not joining their number, well, that’s another question altogether.” He put his glasses back on. Takuda couldn’t see his eyes for the reflected lamplight. “As I said, there’s a limit on how many victims could be flayed at once, but is there a limit on how many could be possessed?”
CHAPTER 10
Thursday Afternoon
Thomas Fletcher lived in a farmhouse at the far end of a village south of Fukuoka, surrounded by low, rounded hills the locals referred to as “mountains.” The house was a heap of faded stucco and weathered cedar with a roof of reddish-brown clay tiles. Foreigners would call it quaint. Japanese would call it squalid, and only the very poor would live in it. Takuda hated walking into such places. One day, I’ll meet my match in some dark, unclean place like that old house. I’ll die on a bed of broken plaster and rotten straw mats, watching some evil stalk me in the gloom.
He slowed in the street.
I should just turn around. I should get plastic surgery and become a stunt man. I should get a mask and become a professional wrestler. Anything.
The villagers had noticed Takuda wasn’t from those parts. One boy stopped in his tracks to stare and almost got himself run down by a cyclist. A wall-eyed, gap-toothed man in pajamas approached him gibbering, bowed profoundly, and then pointed out the way to Thomas’s house. The whole village knew where Takuda was going. Even if it would have helped, he had missed the element of surprise.
He turned around and went back to the station for a cheap lunch.
Takuda picked at his fish. He was edgy and exhausted, but there was nothing else to do. Nabeshima and Yoshida had entrusted him with retrieving Nabeshima’s cell phone from the mad foreigner despite their fears.
The women had discovered his identity at the worst possible time. If he had been able to befriend them as a security guard, not a monster hunter, life would have been easier, but there was nothing to be done. He had told them everything, and they were still trying to decide if he was a lunatic or a liar.
It had been worth it. They had finally told him how Nabeshima and the foreigner had become involved in the first place, an old story with a new twist. Thomas was a young foreign teacher at the junior college, and Nabeshima was a bored, bright overachiever attending a fifth-rate school. He was the only challenge in her life, so she pursued him.
He apparently began to act erratic fairly quickly after they became involved. He grew distant and uncommunicative. He began to spend more time with his private students than with her, and his lack of sexual interest in her made her suspect that he was involved with others, perhaps with another foreigner with whom he worked. When she asked him why he did not want sex with her, he started spouting gibberish, she said, and threw her belongings into the street.
Nabeshima told Takuda to look at Thomas’s artwork.
“Look at his journals, if you can, and look at his sculpture,” she had said. “He’s really good. His sculpture is in the lobby of some Zenkoku Sales office.”
Takuda had tried not to squirm. “I’ve dealt with Zenkoku before. What will his art and his journals tell me?”
“That the world doesn’t look the same to him as it does to most people.”
Takuda looked at her closely. She looked away. He said: “He sees things other people don’t. Just as you do.”
She did not reply, and she still didn’t look at him.
Takuda asked, “How does he have your phone?”
“When he threw my things into the street last week, the phone was gone. I thought that perhaps I had lost it earlier. I decided not to lock the account in hopes that someone would call my home number.”
“Any luck?”
She shook her head. She was leaving out important information, of course, but not to protect herself. She still liked the young foreigner even though he had gone insane.
Takuda already knew it was not as simple as insanity. He just hoped he could retrieve the Kurodama before anyone got hurt.
Thomas lived next door to his landlord. In the garden between their houses, melons and small, green-skinned pumpkins lay rotting in the dirt, some of them exploded from the overlong rainy season. Bean pods hung limp and black on the vines. Takuda marched up to the door and rapped sharply, and then he slid it open and yelled out his presence. “Daily Yomiyuri!” If he was going to play the pushy salesman, he would do it with gusto.
There was a faint, sharp reek like rotted crab. It took Takuda
back to an earlier horror, but there was nothing supernatural about this stench. Thomas’s entrance pit was almost filled with plastic bags, all from the same convenience store, each the same size and shape, each sealed with a nearly identical cross of masking tape. Twenty-five bags were lined up five by five, probably waiting for disposal. Takuda stepped in.
“Excuse me! Daily Yomiuri! Would you like to subscribe? Special subscription rate today . . .”
The long, narrow front room was darkened. The walls and windows were draped with yellowed canvas bunched and puckered where it’d been nailed to the beams. Pinwheeled spatters of paint had faded so they met and melded with creeping brown water stains and black constellations of mold. In the middle of the back wall, one section of canvas bearing the legend Welcome to Yokatopia Art Space Bravo hung in ribbons and tatters, and the wall behind was gouged to the lath. Plaster had been trodden to dust where ruined canvas sagged to the floor.
He felt eyes on him and looked up. There stood a skinny foreigner, pale and freckled, a redhead with watery, red-rimmed eyes. His eyes were so blue as to be almost transparent. Takuda found it disconcerting, but he grinned and bowed. Thomas didn’t say anything.
“Excuse me! Daily Yomiuri! It’s lucky that I found you at home!”
Thomas smiled slowly and cocked his head to the left. “Good morning. You’re back.”
Back? Takuda smiled and bobbed two quick bows as he reached in his pocket for an order form. “Yes, a lucky day for both of us. Happy to find you here. You know, The Daily Yomiuri is the least expensive English newspaper in Japan . . .”
“Back for your money,” Thomas said. He stood, head still cocked as if he were a broken puppet.
“Quite right,” Takuda said after a pause. Then in a rush: “For the subscription rate this low, there’s really nothing like it. Plus, there’s nothing like it for a teaching aid. It’s a daily lesson plan. That’s what teachers call it in Tokyo. A daily lesson plan.”
Thomas smiled a little more tightly and looked at the floor as if considering his words. “My lessons don’t come from newspapers, and they are not suitable for all students.” He paused as if he were mulling it over. “Anyway, I’m losing students for some reason. They aren’t coming back anymore. Perhaps my lessons were becoming too difficult.”
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