Thomas’s head was filled with devils, and brutality poked into his life like jagged glass. Thomas was the anti-Takuda, or Takuda was the anti-Thomas, or something. There were too many pieces, and Takuda couldn’t put it all together.
Who can stay sane, seeing what we see? Thomas and Nabeshima and I might someday share a smoke in a dayroom with no shoelaces or sharp objects.
Kimura returned. “I’m taking the notebook copies with me,” Takuda said. “Maybe Yoshida can help me with it.”
“I don’t care. I have more copies. Here,” he said, handing over a thin folder. “Here are student papers we don’t understand. Maybe she can make something of that.” Kimura looked disappointed. “You don’t have any ideas about him? I was thinking that you might have some insight.”
“The only thing I can tell you is that he would’ve snapped no matter where he was living.”
Kimura laughed, though nothing was funny. “Maybe that is true. But I just wonder why he did not go back home to America.”
Takuda left him wondering.
The sun was low, but Takuda sat near East Park, by the museum devoted to Kublai Khan’s abortive invasion of Japan, in front of the giant bronze statue of St. Nichiren with his big baby head. Takuda pulled out Thomas’s notebook, but he couldn’t look again so soon.
Yoshida was wrong. Trying to unlock Thomas Fletcher’s mind through his journals had not helped at all. Now that he had a glimpse, Takuda didn’t want to go talk to the boy at all. Unfortunately, Yoshida had told him the way, and he even knew which bus to take. He slung his satchel over his shoulder.
Takuda just hoped he didn’t have to go any deeper into Fletcher’s head than he had gone already. It looked like hell in there.
CHAPTER 14
Friday Afternoon
“What are you doing? It’s not break time! Get those boxes into the pharmacy!”
The doctor was an angry little hornet of a man. He shouted at Takuda from the back door of the mental hospital where Thomas Fletcher was being held pending deportation.
Takuda was sprawled on the gravel in the scant hospital garden. He had shinnied up a utility pole two meters from the fence and leapt over the barbed wire. The utility pole was in a blind spot, and Takuda had thought he could land and recover without drawing attention to himself. He hadn’t taken into account the ground-shaking impact. They had probably felt it inside. Takuda’s virtual indestructibility didn’t relieve him of mass.
“Idiot!” the doctor hissed at him. “You’ve left psychoactive medication within reach of the patients! Come in. Now!”
Takuda leapt to his feet, bowing as he brushed himself off and straightened his satchel. He bowed all the way to the back door. The hospital was a nondescript two-story building surrounded by rice paddies on three sides and framed behind by the aquamarine arc of the expressway flyover. There were only five parking spots, two designated for patient transport and the rest for doctors and prefectural police. There were no visiting hours at this sort of facility.
Takuda’s bows as he passed the stiff, angry little doctor were sincere; he was grateful to have entered the hospital so easily.
He stepped up from the entrance pit into a bright hallway painted pistachio green. The staffroom was on his right and the stairs were on his left, just as Yoshida had said. The dispensary was ahead on the left. Across the hallway from the dispensary, by the restroom door, a nurse stood stiffly beside a waist-high stack of small boxes. The delivery.
They go through a lot of drugs in this place, Takuda thought.
The doctor pointed at the stack. “Quickly,” he said.
Takuda spared a glance into the staffroom. The whiteboard with the patients’ names and room assignments was also exactly where Yoshida had said it would be. Thomas’s name, written in phonetic script, stood out among the rest. Room 5 on the second floor, then. He knew the spare room keys would be hanging from a pegboard behind the open door, just as soon as he could get back to them. In the meantime, he bowed as if to duck another scolding from the doctor and shuffled forward to take the first few boxes.
In the dispensary, a slender middle-aged woman smiled as she buzzed him in behind her glass wall. He put the boxes carefully on a long table that seemed to divide the counter from the ranks of shelves that lined the walls. He stared for a moment. It was a lot of medication, three whole walls of medication.
“You’re new, so you won’t get in trouble,” the pharmacist said, “but don’t ever let Dr. Haraguchi see you sitting down again. Ever.”
When he stood from picking up the last of the boxes in the hallway, he was face-to-face with a young man in coveralls. The bathroom door swung closed behind the young man. He stared at Takuda as if he had met his own double.
“Your partner covered for you,” said the nurse guarding the last of the boxes. “You’re both new, so you won’t get in trouble. Just don’t let Dr. Haraguchi catch you leaving supplies loose, especially medication.”
The young deliveryman bowed and grabbed the last box from Takuda. Takuda followed him into the dispensary.
“You’re not my partner,” he hissed as they waited to be buzzed in. “What are you doing?”
“I’m here to check the ducting upstairs.” Takuda replied loudly enough for the pharmacist to hear. “I slipped on the gravel in the garden looking for outside roof access, and the doctor thought I was with you.”
“You should thank him for covering for you,” the pharmacist said as she buzzed them in.
She told Takuda that the only roof access was the locked door at the end of the upstairs ward. He bowed to them both and headed off.
The corridor outside the dispensary was empty. The staff room was empty. The pegboard behind the door was labeled by room. He snagged the keys to “Room 5” and “Roof” and slipped them into his pocket. He crossed the hallway and started up the stairs.
Dr. Haraguchi was coming down the stairs as Takuda went up. Takuda stood aside and bowed as if ashamed. The doctor ignored him.
The desk nurse upstairs glanced up as he passed. “Checking the ducting,” he said as he headed for the door at the end of the hallway. It rattled open and squealed as he pushed. It was a broom closet with a door at the far end, a disused emergency exit. The cut alarm wires dangled, so he unlocked the door and stepped out onto a tar-and-gravel roof overlooking the tiny parking lot. A rusted fire escape was at his feet. They had shut off this emergency exit to leave one tiny elevator and one narrow stairwell the only way off the second floor. They really, really didn’t want anyone to leave.
He spent five minutes banging around on the roof just above the desk nurse’s station. It was unnecessary. When he came back down, her seat was empty and the door to room 2 was ajar. Takuda went quickly to room 5 and slipped the key into the lock. He went in and eased the door shut behind him.
It was much like a regular hospital room except for the bars on the window and the molded foam padding on every angled surface. Thomas lay manacled on his bed, his mouth open, eyes closed. But for the slow and steady movement of his chest, he could have been dead.
Takuda stood beside the bed. “Wake up,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
Thomas opened his eyes and turned his head toward Takuda.
“I need to ask you some questions, Mr. Thomas. I know your Japanese is very good.”
The unnervingly blue eyes focused on Takuda. “You’re trying to collect for your newspapers here?”
Takuda smiled and shook his head. “That was just to meet you. Do you remember that you lost something?”
Thomas shook his head.
“Did you have something in the farmhouse? Something you were looking for?”
“I was very confused,” Thomas said. “But the medication is working. You don’t look like a devil anymore.” He frowned. “Not really.”
Takuda pressed him. “Wh
at was taken from you? Was it the Kurodama you spoke of?”
“I shouldn’t have taken it,” Thomas said. “It called to them, during our lessons. There was something exciting about it. I didn’t feel anything from it. They did, though. They were very, very excited, so I brought it to my house.”
Takuda leaned forward. “You say you didn’t feel anything, but that’s not quite true, is it? It gave you ideas.”
Thomas hesitated. He licked his lips in fear and indecision.
Takuda leaned closer. Foreigners seemed to like to be touched in such situations, but Takuda wasn’t sure, so he folded his hands. “You’re safe here. You may be able to help some people.”
Thomas exhaled, though Takuda hadn’t noticed him holding his breath. “It gave me very strange thoughts about a boy named Haruma, a student at Able English Institute, a community college where I teach.”
Takuda nodded. “The desire was very comforting, like a place you went when you were troubled or bored. You drew bones in your journal. You were very curious about the texture of the bones, how they would feel on your tongue. You imagined that the cranium, the jaw, and the cheekbones would probably be smooth, like polished ivory, but that the long bones, like the humerus and femur, may have fine grain like hardwood. You licked different surfaces around the house, trying to imagine how different bones would feel.”
“I have been sedated,” Thomas said, “but I know what I have said. I never told the doctors or the police about this. I never told them of this desire.”
“You called a mental health emergency hotline. You knew of the hotline through Kaori Nabeshima.”
Thomas closed his eyes.
“I saw your house. It was strange and messy, but there was nothing evil there.”
Thomas’s eyes popped open. “How do you know that?”
Takuda said, “I just know. And I know you fought it. You encased your knives and tools in plaster because these desires frightened you.”
Thomas squeezed his eyes shut. Tears leaked at the corners.
“You didn’t want to hurt anyone. You fought it. You fought it hard. You are a good boy, Mr. Thomas.”
Thomas wept openly. Takuda sat beside him. After a moment, he pulled Suzuki’s drawing of the curved jewel from his breast pocket.
“Is this what gave you the desires, Mr. Thomas?”
Thomas opened his eyes. He reflexively reached for the paper, but his restraints stopped him. “Yes, that is it. I didn’t believe it was real. I knew the girls wanted it, but I didn’t know what it was. It called for me, you know. It wants to be free.”
Takuda nodded as if he understood. “Do you know what it is?”
“I have no idea.”
“It is called a ‘curved jewel.’ Such things are sometimes sacred in Japan.”
Thomas frowned deeply. “Curved jewel? Isn’t that part of the Imperial Regalia, along with the Grass Sword and the bronze mirror?”
Takuda bowed. “You study not just our language, but our culture and history, as well.” Takuda felt an odd welling of pride that the foreigner was so interested in Japan, but he shoved those thoughts aside. There was no time.
“And it called to you and gave you these ideas.”
“Oh, no. No, that didn’t happen until I touched it,” Thomas said. “It’s smooth, and it warms to the touch like soapstone, but it seems too soft, even though it has an edge like volcanic glass.”
Takuda tried to keep his expression from changing. “You touched it directly, but you resisted the desires.”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “I don’t suppose anyone would give in, do you?”
He hadn’t quite formulated an answer when Thomas’s eyes went round. He was staring at something past Takuda’s shoulder.
As Takuda turned on the bed to look behind him, he felt a sharp sting in his neck. He reached up to brush it away, and his hand wasn’t responding properly.
“What are you doing?” he heard Thomas saying. It was thin and reedy, that voice, and it seemed to come from a long distance. “What are you doing to him?”
Takuda felt himself sliding from the bed. He ended up on his back, looking up at an old nemesis, a kidnapper and murderer named Hiroyasu Ogawa.
CHAPTER 15
Friday Afternoon
Takuda had thought he was going mad when the scars appeared. Yumi still could not see them. Nor could Suzuki or Mori. The silvery blue scars, pulsing just under the skin as if waiting to burst through, had swollen and spread slowly at first. Later, as their encounters with others like themselves increased, the scars branched and multiplied, crossing and curling around each other in an elaborate script unreadable by anything living but designed, in the end, for writing the story of Takuda’s life in madness and despair.
No one else saw them until the night he held the fire demon by the throat.
In that moment, with Suzuki nursing his wounded hand and Mori shouting directions from the flaming villa, Takuda walked toward the surf with a writhing creature of living flame held at arm’s length. Arm’s length was not far enough, and Takuda was sure he would die. He had always assumed that his last thoughts would be of Yumi or his lost family or the infinitude of the Lord Buddha’s love and mercy. These crossed his mind as the flames whipped around his head, but his overriding thought was of the constant and repetitious stupidity of evil: Why would a demon composed of flame choose to terrorize a peninsular village, surrounded by water on three sides?
Idiot.
By the time his feet touched the sand, he realized the flames would not kill him. Tendrils sent to reach down his throat blew out like birthday candles. Great streamers of fire from the demon’s mouth singed his eyebrows and hair, but they curled around his head so that he barely felt the heat. Burning gouts hurled against his chest eventually charred his shirt to smoking ribbons that fell off as he stepped into the waves, but his skin was untouched. The only thing that really hurt was the steam that rose around him as he plunged the shrieking demon into the surf. The water boiled up to his thighs as he held the demon under, Suzuki chanting and Mori cursing close behind.
His hands came out filled with wet cinder. As he washed the dead soot into the waves, he knew the demon had not chosen its home, or this world. It had been trapped in a cycle of death and rebirth just as everyone else was. As Suzuki said, releasing the fire demon from this world was the only merciful act he might perform.
Standing in the surf in that moment, he felt something like an echo, a ripple between thoughts. The scorched hairs prickled the back of his neck. There was something behind his mind, behind it or underneath it. When he retraced his thinking to that gap between two thoughts, it closed like a trough between waves, but he knew it was there. He had felt it before, and now it knew he had felt it.
He walked steaming out of the waves, his mind reeling from almost touching the fearsome emptiness within. Suzuki pointed at him and said, “Those scars you’ve been talking about . . .”
Takuda looked down at himself. Now that he had turned away from the ocean and the moonlight, the scars pulsed bright blue, arcs and jags overlaid by straight, slashing strokes, all in all like primitive characters scrawled in ice by savage scribes. Suzuki poked at them with a long, bony finger as they faded back to their silvery seams. Mori swore he saw nothing, and in the morning, Suzuki said he could not see the scars at all.
Takuda could see them, for all the good that did him. He also felt the huge and silent presence behind the noise of his mind. It neither watched nor waited. Untouched and unshaken, with neither judgment nor reflection, neither impressed nor disgusted by the human world, it was simply there. It was the revelation of a secret reality, the split second containing all that ever was, all that ever had been, and all that ever would be, with the dim memory of life as a dream revolving around that instant. Takuda hated it almost as much as he hated his scars.
He remembered
all this as he opened his eyes, but he remembered it as if in a dream, and everything seemed reversed, as if he were the dream and not the dreamer. He looked out of eyes that were undoubtedly his own eyes, but he looked out of them as part of something larger, the massive presence that waited silently in the back of his mind.
And when he looked out of those eyes, he faced Hiroyasu Ogawa.
“You’re alive after all, heh-heh.” Ogawa didn’t looked pleased.
Ogawa was sleeker, fatter, and much better groomed than when Takuda had first met him, in the Oku Village jail in the Naga River valley. Ogawa had been merely an unemployed engineer suspected of attempting to kidnap a little girl, but Takuda had known better. Ogawa turned out to be the henchman of the Drowning God, a procurer for a murderous water sprite, a kappa. Perhaps the last kappa.
“Perhaps the only kappa ever,” Takuda murmured.
“What? You’re still not making sense. You need more medication!” Ogawa rummaged in the cardboard box on his lap.
Takuda was sitting in a chair, he realized, though he could not feel his own body. He looked down through the unfamiliar eyes to see that his arms were restrained. The chair was metal, held together with predictable weld points. A normal man could work it to pieces given time. With Takuda’s strength, he could simply stand up and the chair would fall to pieces at his feet, but he was quite tired.
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