The Devouring God

by James Kendley

  Ishikawa released his cell phone. He turned and looked at the corpse as if he hadn’t noticed it before. Then he turned his stupefied gaze to Takuda, Mori, and Suzuki in turn.

  Suzuki continued: “They whipped a single instrument so violently that they spattered blood in a very regular horizontal pattern. They passed the instrument among themselves so quickly that partially coagulated blood was flung from the blade. It was a stone knife.”

  Ishikawa stared. “The tip would have broken off in the flooring.”

  “It’s an antique curved jewel of an unknown stone. The thick part is a flattened orb, an oblate spheroid that acts as a handle. The tail is sharpened along the inner edge, and it comes to a very sharp point.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s obviously sharp. Who wields it?”

  Suzuki bowed as if in regret: That’s for you to find out.

  Ishikawa said, “What are they doing with the bones?”

  Suzuki bowed more deeply and backed toward the door. “Good day. We must be going now.”

  Takuda tried to follow, but Ishikawa blocked his path. “You, nameless policeman. You know I can’t act on any of this.”

  Takuda said, “Chief of Detectives, you said ‘more toughs.’ Have Zenkoku employees been talking about this?”

  “Have they!” Ishikawa fished in his breast pocket. “I’ve got at least three of these.” He handed a card to Takuda.

  A plain corporate card on inferior card stock: Endo, the Zenkoku corporate lawyer, real-­estate speculator, and possibly inhuman monster.

  As they left the room, Takuda looked over his shoulder once more. From the door, the flayed remains looked nothing like a starfish, nothing like a jellyfish. He felt as if he should pray, but there was nothing he could say.

  He took deep, sweet breaths as Detective Kimura escorted them out the front door of the college. “Your friend Suzuki is gutsy.”

  Takuda made vague noises of agreement. He wondered if Suzuki’s gutsiness would land them in jail this week. It would happen eventually. Mori was right about Suzuki. He was becoming a liability.

  As they stepped out of the college’s main building, Takuda pulled Kimura aside. “Chief of Detectives Ishikawa said Zenkoku employees had visited him. Why is Zenkoku interested in the jellyfish killings? What do they want?”

  “I don’t think it’s related. They probably just want to make sure they’re not caught up in the incident. Thomas Fletcher beat the girl from the counseling satellite office.”

  Takuda frowned. “Why would they be caught up in it? Because he made sculptures for them?”

  “Because he taught for them. Every Thursday evening from 4:30 to 6:30.”

  Of course he did. “So Thomas Fletcher taught English to their employees. Spring intensives for incoming freshman employees? That kind of thing?”

  “No, not just that. It’s a perk left over from the real-­estate boom of the 1980s. They still offer free English classes to all employees. Sort of a hobbyish, team-­building thing. They used to contract with the college, but they contracted with Fletcher’s new employees, ActiveUs, after he quit teaching here.”

  Takuda blinked.

  Kimura brushed back his hair. “Fletcher is no longer a suspect in any of this, by the way. He was restrained for two days before he died. It’s under investigation. He may have hallucinated something about the jellyfish killings, but nothing he said was useful.”

  Ishikawa came around the corner. He stopped when he saw them.

  “You know I’m going to report your presence here, don’t you?”

  Takuda bowed out of habit. “I’m sure you think it’s part of your job.”

  Ishikawa squinted at him. “You say you aren’t with Zenkoku, but everyone is with Zenkoku, whether they know it or not.”

  Some of us more than others. Takuda bowed in assent. “A man would have to be a fool to doubt it.”

  Ishikawa looked toward the castle ruins across the street. “I don’t know what you are, but I doubt you could make this situation worse. You’ve got training, and your man seems to have training. Just don’t let that tall one make me sorry I didn’t report you.” He glanced at Takuda’s uniform. “I know Ota. He’s a shill, but who isn’t a shill these days? So if you’re using him for cover, don’t let him get hurt. Call me if you find something real. Don’t bother telling Kimura. He’s an idiot.”

  He walked off.

  “I’m standing right here,” Kimura said as Ishikawa walked away. “I heard the whole thing.”

  Ishikawa didn’t respond.

  Takuda took his leave of Kimura and looked around for Mori and Suzuki. They were a block away. Suzuki was standing at a vending machine, and Mori stood next to him as if whispering into his ear. Takuda sped up.

  When he got there, Suzuki was red-­faced and clearly angry. Mori drew several sheets of paper from his inside jacket pocket and threw them at Suzuki. While Mori pursued Suzuki to continue berating him, Takuda gathered the papers. A drawing of a stone knife, the Kurodama. Maps. Random bits of writing.

  “I didn’t ask for any of it, any more than Yumi did. I found those sheets in my begging bowl,” Suzuki said. “It’s why I want to hang up my robes.”

  Mori said, “It shouldn’t be a surprise. Zenkoku has used your begging bowl to keep us alive until they needed us. Now they’re using it to drop off clues.”

  Suzuki smiled as if in pain. “It’s not Zenkoku this time. That’s my father’s handwriting. It appears that he isn’t dead after all.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Saturday Afternoon

  “You’d better tell us everything,” Takuda told Suzuki. “Start at the beginning.”

  They sat at the window table of the business hotel next to Able English Institute. Takuda and Suzuki faced each other across the table. Mori turned sideways in his chair with his back to Suzuki. He watched uniformed officers come and go next door. He worked a toothpick in his mouth like an angry street hood.

  “Then I should start with my father’s disappearance in the Naga River valley,” Suzuki said. “That was eleven years ago. He had stepped down as head priest two years before that.”

  “The body never showed up,” Takuda said.

  “His robes, yes, but no body.” Suzuki smiled as if he were talking about a favorite old television show. “He was carrying his modern translation of medieval documents about the Kappa. You know.”

  “You thought the Kappa murdered him?” Takuda asked.

  “I assumed so. Why else would his robe show up in the valley when he was taking the high road to the capital? Now, though, it makes no sense at all.”

  “Priest, none of this makes sense. You say this is your father’s handwriting. Someone is feeding you documents stolen from your dead father?”

  “I’ll bet it’s Endo,” Mori said. “He’s obviously taunting Suzuki. He’s trying to break our weakest link.”

  Takuda closed his eyes in the silence following Mori’s insult.

  Suzuki broke the silence. “Taunting is one explanation. That would appeal to Counselor Endo, of course, but he is focused and disciplined. If he is responsible—­and I’m sure your assessment is correct,” he said with a bow to Mori, who ignored him, “then we can be sure he is feeding us information to achieve some greater purpose of his own.”

  Takuda shifted in his seat. “We can’t ignore the surge, even though we’re serving the interests of Endo and Zenkoku. Even though he’s using us, we’re doing the right thing.”

  Mori and Suzuki glanced at each other.

  “We have to stop these killings if we can. Maybe we can learn Endo’s game in the bargain.”

  Mori sucked his toothpick loudly. Takuda had to quell the urge to reach across the table and squeeze the laughter out of him.

  Suzuki said, “It’s true that I’m an easy target.” He ran a fingernail along a crease in the
paper. “I have always been an easy target. That’s part of my nature, I suppose. That may be why my father kept me in the valley after he moved the rest of my brothers to safety.”

  Takuda sat forward. “You said they went away to school. You never said your father deliberately moved them away from the valley.”

  Suzuki smiled sadly. “Oh, yes. I have always been considered the weakest link. If the weakest link is isolated, the chain won’t be endangered.” He nodded as if to himself, a half-­smile spreading and slowly disappearing.

  Takuda said, “You aren’t the weak link. I know this. The second sight is getting stronger in me. I see you as a great and terrible force, and Endo will regret the day he taunted you.”

  Mori stared off into the middle distance.

  “Anyway, your confidence in me is reassuring,” Suzuki said. “Not much confidence has been shown in me. Ever. My father once tasked me with translating a manuscript written by a foreign visitor to the temple. It was not so old, perhaps from the 1920s, but it was written in old-­fashioned and difficult English. It was a hard job, and I . . . my father seemed to assume I was failing. He gave the work to my next-­oldest brother. Perhaps I was doing a poor job. I don’t know. I remember being upset over the whole thing. But I remember the first line best of all.

  “After the impossible front matter laid out a ridiculous purpose and an improbable time frame—­not only for the author’s life, but for the events in the manuscript itself—­the manuscript proper started like this: ‘I would wish it upon no man that his father dislike him.’ ” Suzuki did not bother to say it in Japanese. “Through no fault of my own, that was my fate as well.”

  Takuda searched his memory for any signs of affection from the old head priest toward any of his sons. The elder Suzuki, shorter and rounder than his son, had never been demonstrative toward anyone, at least so far as Takuda could recall.

  “When he sent us away for schooling, I began to think he had some confidence in me. But my brothers never came back. My father and my mother fought about whether I should go as well, and he said he needed me to stay behind and help take care of the temple. She was passionate at first, but she became colder and colder, toward me and toward everyone. When she disappeared, everyone assumed she just left.”

  “Everyone but you,” Takuda said.

  “No, I thought so, too. I thought she had abandoned us. Abandon was the first word in my abridged English dictionary. Now, I don’t know. Maybe they fed her to the Kappa. But I always thought she got away. I had to believe that.”

  “And your brothers?”

  “They’re alive somewhere. I’m sure of that. They left for school or work or apprenticeships right on schedule. When my father disappeared, the last link was severed. I never heard from them again.”

  “These documents showing up in your begging bowl . . . Do you think your father entrusted these documents to your brothers?”

  “That’s one explanation.” Suzuki spoke carefully, as if avoiding some misinterpretation of Buddhist doctrine rather than weighing the possibility that his hidden family had found him.

  “Do you think they may have joined your mother somewhere?”

  Suzuki shrugged that off, physically discarding the idea. “Wishful thinking. Adding to the idea that she is alive the idea that she might have gathered together my brothers and my father, all of whom I assumed to be scattered to the winds . . .” He shook his head violently. “It’s not a possibility.”

  “Do you think Endo might have . . . captured them?”

  “The existence of documents in my father’s handwriting doesn’t indicate that my brothers ever possessed them, nor does it provide any information on whether my brothers are alive or dead.”

  Mori wheeled around to the table. “What have they sent you? Everything. Show us everything.”

  Suzuki brought out a single sheet of onionskin. “This is it. This and the description of the film. I believe that was among the papers you were throwing on the street a few minutes ago. The rest came from Yumi’s basket or the foreigner’s notebook.” Suzuki stretched out a drawing on onionskin. It was a curved jewel, a knife shaped like the dark half of a yin-­yang symbol. The flattened disk was its grip, and its long, wickedly curved tail was a blade.

  “Stop lying and keeping secrets,” Mori hissed. “Stop acting holy and spill your guts. Now.”

  Suzuki turned crimson.

  Mori made a disgusted sound. “Look at you two. What a pair.”

  “Enough,” Takuda growled.

  They both glanced up at him and then returned to their respective miseries.

  Takuda pointed to the sketch of the stone knife. “Priest, what do the symbols running along the blade mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Suzuki traced them with his finger. “These are completely new to me. They look like the markings on oracle bones, but they’re more basic. More primitive.”

  Mori said, “What markings could be more primitive than those on oracle bones?”

  Suzuki looked surprised. “Oracle bone script is hardly primitive. The Chinese were cutting characters into tortoise belly shells and shoulder bones of oxen almost four millennia ago, and there were more than six thousand distinct characters in use for divination, at least a third of which can be identified as precursors to modern characters,” Suzuki said, shifting his attention from Mori to Takuda, as Mori had begun staring out the window again. “The bones had been hollowed out in spots to make them thin enough to crack when heated. A bronze rod from the fire was placed on the bones, one on each hollowed-­out spot, one for each question. The bones would crack in a very specific way—­a long, vertical line with a shorter horizontal line shooting out from its side, a shape which itself forms our character for ‘divination,’ you see?”

  Mori lit a cigarette. Takuda was too tired to pretend interest. Suzuki sighed and continued: “The really interesting thing is that these bones actually confirmed the existence of the mythical Shang Dynasty, and some of the astronomical events depicted on the bones constitute proof of the chronology.”

  Suzuki seemed to hesitate. He wasn’t running out of steam. On subjects like this, he never ran out of steam.

  “What is it, Priest? What’s eating you?” Takuda leaned forward.

  Suzuki swallowed audibly. “The characters on this drawing are unknown. They won’t be found in any collection of ancient or modern Chinese or Japanese characters.” He looked up and Takuda caught a flash of some hidden fire in the back of the hungry priest’s eyes. Gooseflesh played up the back of Takuda’s neck.

  Suzuki said, “These characters look exactly like the silvery scars all over your body. The ones that glowed when you drowned the fire demon.”

  Mori raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you’ve become the Drowning God now.”

  The skin on Takuda’s forearm tingled as if in response to the thought. Yes, that’s me, all right. Takuda crossed his arms to quell the tingling.

  Suzuki took a deep breath. “So just as in Bronze Age China, characters are cut into bone. That’s where we will see them. When we find the bones of the victims, we will find these characters carved with stone. There will be no metallic residue.”

  “Priest, what is the Buddhist teaching on this one? What do the scriptures say?”

  “There is no scriptural view on this one.” He scratched at his ear like a dog plagued by fleas. “It all just makes me hungry.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Sunday Evening

  Club Sexychat was dead. Of course no one was here on the night of the big fireworks show. A lonesome boy sang “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” on the karaoke stage just under the mezzanine where Takuda stood. If the boy would just step to the right, Takuda could spit beer on him.

  “Anubis, what would Paul Simon say about what this boy is doing to his song? Hmm?”

  The fiberglass Anubis on his right said nothing. The mir
ror ball lights played over its sleek onyx snout. Takuda turned to the other jackal-­headed statue on his left. “You, too? Cat got your tongue? Perhaps a sexy French cat, le chat sexy? Or is that la chat sexy?”

  Takuda hadn’t even finished his first beer, but it had gone straight to his head. Perhaps the drugs Ogawa had pumped into his system were still affecting him, even though he thought he had slept it off. He wadded up the flyer that had been dropped in Yumi’s bicycle basket. No one he had spoken to at Club Sexychat seemed to know anything about Thomas Fletcher, about the missing girls, about the jellyfish killings, about the murder at Able English Institute, and certainly nothing about the curved jewel. Takuda, Mori, and Suzuki had cooled their heels for an entire day, watching the newspapers for details of the killing. So far, it was listed as an accidental death, and the name of the victim had not been released.

  That news, along with the rumors of the jellyfish killings, would drive most cities to the edge of panic, but this was Fukuoka, and this was the night of the annual Ohori Park fireworks display. As Takuda had expected, a little flaying and mayhem wouldn’t keep Fukuoka folks at home.

  But it wouldn’t bring them here. The streets were bustling with boys showing off for the girls in their summer kimonos, and Club Sexychat was grimly deserted. Takuda stood sullen and forlorn, flanked by decorative fiberglass gods of death.

  Club Sexychat was just off Oyafuko-­dori, the Street of Disobedient Children. It had apparently been Excite Disco Pharakos, a clone of a moderately successful club in Kurume, but the model hadn’t worked in Fukuoka. Now the dance floor was mostly taken up with twin banks of translucent sarcophagi, actually phone booths in a closed system. There were tokens and numbers and a system Takuda couldn’t be bothered to understand that would allow boys to chat with girls anonymously from booth to booth. It was sexy. It was chat. It was sexychat. It was all a bit pathetic.

  Two drunken foreign girls screeched off-­key and started pulling the microphone away from each other before Takuda could recognize the song. They collapsed into laughter and slipped from the stage onto the dance floor. The Japanese patrons moved back, and an older man watched the foreigners sadly. It was time to go back to his office and do nothing. At his signal, black-­clad boys wearing huge silver ankhs moved in and solemnly wheeled away the karaoke machine, an antiquated and monstrous rig more the size of a vending machine than a musical component. They had to stop when one boy’s ankh got tangled in the wiring.