The Devouring God

by James Kendley

  Takuda wandered the upstairs, just in case he had missed something. The boilerplate mezzanine led past the old Sphinx Ballroom, an empty space with a free wall dominated by a bandage-­wrapped rhino head crashing through a blow-­up of Boris Karloff in full mummy regalia. The room was roped off and piled high with funerary jars, hinged sarcophagi, and a stack of bug-­eyed papier-­mâché cat mummies. The Anubis twins themselves would have been stored there as well, had they not been built into the railing.

  The least-­used washroom was right beside the Sphinx Ballroom. It was mirrored floor to ceiling, and all the mirrors were etched with Old Dynasty hieroglyphics and scenes from the story of Isis and Osiris. Isis and Osiris were twins who fell in love in the womb, who loved as brother and sister, as king and queen, as god and goddess, with a deep, unconscious love that overcame death, interment, dismemberment, and reconstitution, transcending mortality and cult to become a binding force of the Egyptian cosmos, binding night to day, life to death, man to woman. The best love story of the past five millennia was right in front of him as he weaved gently at the urinal in the best foreigner pickup bar in town. The irony was killing him, and he said so to the mirrors.

  On the glass wall beside the urinal, Osiris lay supine with the infant Horus standing on his belly and Isis at his feet with her arms raised in blessing. Takuda aimed high to spatter them, growling deep in his throat. He saw his face change in the mirror. It was not dramatic, just a subtle shift, a deadening of the eyes, a sagging of the cheeks. He gave himself a heavy, loose-­lipped grin from the mirror, as if some dangerous thing inside him knew it was free to do some property damage.

  Takuda zipped his fly and turned the sink on full. He doused his head with cold water. He had seen the glowing scars, and he had seen the fire behind Suzuki’s eyes, but he had never seen himself become a beast. When he looked up into the mirror, the beast was gone. It was just Takuda, red-­faced and frightened. He grinned in the mirror, just to see what would happen. It was the solid grin of his police academy days, but with an overlay of scarring and a hint of fear at the corners of his eyes.

  Maybe the fight to remain human isn’t about horns and scars after all.

  At the bottom of the stairs, a girl in a summer kimono was climbing onto the lap of a seated statue of Seth. “Hello,” she said, wiggling her hips at her friends. “Are you happy to see me?” She turned around and straddled Seth’s knees, slipping, looking at her friends with lowered eyelids. They shrieked with laughter and fought over the camera to take her picture.

  He turned right toward the bar. Ramses II stood before him, black as the Anubis twins upstairs, probably from the same fiberglass workshop. The pharaoh’s belly was broken out in sharp chunks to reveal glowing innards made up of translucent circuit boards and pulsing fiber-­optic strands. Above the mugs and glasses, a zoetropic scarab pushed a glass globe of flaring plasma with its rear legs. The stools were thin, inverted pyramids, chic and thematic and extremely uncomfortable. Trying to ignore the girls frolicking on Seth’s lap, he turned toward the dance floor, looking for a habitué, someone who might know something about Thomas Fletcher or his friends.

  And as he faced the dance floor, one of the sarcophagi lit up. Club Sexychat was open for business.

  A plywood sign stood beside the sarcophagus: English Corner, with a picture of a cat, a sexy cat, la chat sexy, with a phone to her ear and an ankh dangling on her suggestively full bosom.

  There was someone in the sarcophagus. Takuda sighed and knocked on Tutankhamen’s translucent face. The lid swung open immediately to reveal a girl, a foreign girl, frowning at him from her plush stool. “Buy a token,” she said, pointing toward the bar. Takuda nodded and turned away immediately.

  He bought three tokens at the bar, enough for about ten minutes of chat. Each was emblazoned with the same four-­digit code. He met the gaze of the smirking bartender with equanimity, but he avoided looking at the broken statue of Ramses II. At that moment, he was slightly embarrassed on behalf of Japan as a whole.

  And he was very nervous about engaging in sexy chat with a pretty young foreigner, even for all the right reasons. At least she had brown eyes. Green eyes were a little unnerving, and blue eyes were worse. He had drowned a demon, cut a monster’s head to pieces, and he was on the hunt for a weapon that forced schoolgirls to kill, but foreigners still made him skittish. He had just decided to live with it.

  He dropped onto the stool in the sarcophagus beside the foreign girl’s and faced the obviously recycled office phone. There was no place to put the tokens. He picked it up: a dull dial tone. He punched in the numbers from the token.

  She picked up the phone immediately. “You give the tokens to me,” she said.

  He left the phone off the hook. Her lid was open a crack, so he handed in the tokens and went back to his sarcophagus.

  “I don’t want sexy chat,” he said. “Do you speak Japanese?”

  “A little,” she said. “I’m really supposed to speak English, though.”

  Her accent was understandable. Takuda heaved a sigh of relief. “My name is Takuda,” he said. “Ta-­ku-­da. The characters are ‘high’ and ‘field.’ I want to ask you about Thomas Fletcher. Do you know him?”

  Static crackled to the slow disco beat outside their sarcophagi.

  “I am not Fukuoka police,” he said. “Do you understand? Not police. I am higher than police. Bigger than police. Ah . . . higher cause . . . you don’t understand me?”

  “I understand,” she said. “What’s the question?”

  “First, what is your name?”

  “You don’t know? How did you find me without my name?”

  Takuda couldn’t say he had been guided by a flier in his wife’s bicycle basket. “Let’s start with your name, please.”

  “Tracy,” she said. “Tracy Jenkins.”

  “Miss Tracy,” he said, “how do you know Thomas Fletcher?”

  “We work together at ActiveUs. We teach English in the offices of big companies. They send us there like sushi delivery.”

  Takuda tried not to laugh. She spoke more than a little Japanese. “You knew he was mentally unwell, didn’t you?”

  “I knew,” she whispered.

  “You liked him, and you tried to help him.”

  “I tried,” she said. Her voice was breaking. “He wouldn’t take his medicine. It hurt him sexually. And in other ways, not just sexually. He said he became . . . ah, sleepy all over.”

  “Excuse the . . . I’m going to ask a personal question. Do you understand?”

  “We are not lovers,” she said. “He thinks we are, I think. He doesn’t understand reality sometimes.” She was truly distraught.

  Takuda said, “He’s a good boy. I told him so last time I saw him.”

  She inhaled sharply. “You met him? Is he okay? Is he going home?”

  “I believe he is probably home already,” Takuda said. The plastic handset cracked slightly in his grip. He eased up so he wouldn’t crush it. “He was resting comfortably last time I saw him. There is no pain.”

  He swallowed his shame about lies and half-­truths to a grief-­stricken foreign girl and ticked off his questions about the missing girls, about the jellyfish killings, about the murder at Able English Institute, and about the curved jewel.

  She sounded stunned. “He is a crazy boy. He chased his old girlfriend. You think he killed lots of girls? Maybe you are the crazy boy.”

  “Did he know lots of girls?”

  She snorted, like a pig. “He was a foreign boy in Japan. ‘Did he know lots of girls?’ That’s a stupid ­question.”

  Takuda persisted: “Where did he meet girls? Active­Us? Able English Institute?”

  “Oh, Able, for sure. He met private students there, girls who wanted to be stewardesses or tour guides, wanted to use their English, and one gay boy who wanted to be a hotel clerk or something.�
��

  “Where did he teach them?”

  “An old, stinky restaurant that used to be a cafeteria for a big company. The company gave him the space for free.”

  Takuda closed his eyes. “Zenkoku General?”

  “Zenkoku General? I don’t know. Just Zenkoku,” she answered. “I won’t work there. Not again. I’ll never go down into that horrible basement.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Sunday Evening

  There was a knock on the lid of his sarcophagus. Through the translucent plastic, Takuda could just make out the black sleeve attached to the rapping hand. Counselor Endo of Zenkoku General was moving him along to the next clue.

  “I think I have to go, Tracy Jenkins,” he said into the handset. “I hope you enjoy your stay in Japan.”

  The line was dead. He dropped the handset and stepped out of his sarcophagus.

  The club had been cleared, and the music had stopped. Endo wasn’t there in person. In his stead, a slim phalanx of black-­uniformed security guards squared off against Takuda on the dance floor. Tracy’s sarcophagus was already empty.

  “What did you do with the girl?” Takuda asked the security guards.

  The guard nearest the door bowed and indicated the exit with an extended palm, a gesture of almost courtly elegance. Bright spots of light from the mirror ball swam over his Zenkoku Security badge. “The club has been cleared for safety reasons, by order of the regional fire department,” he said. “Everyone else has left. Please move toward the exit.”

  Takuda felt something tight loosen in his chest. Ten of them to one of him. Hardly a challenge, but finally, an enemy he could lay his hands on.

  He tossed them like laundry. They maced him and Tasered him before he even reached their ranks, but they couldn’t break his momentum, and four of the ten were down for the evening before the others could regroup and circle him. Three of the six still had functional Tasers. It was an effort of will, forcing individual limbs to resist the paralyzing current, but even a tenth of his true strength was enough for these rented toughs. He laughed out loud as he yanked the leads from his own flesh and shocked them with their own weapons. Three tried to pin him with their staffs. He took their staffs away and tossed them up to the mezzanine. One guard, enraged by failure, threw himself on Takuda and tried to wrestle him to the dance floor. He howled as Takuda took him up on it, and he shrieked for his friends to rescue him as Takuda idly applied joint locks. He was testing the suppleness of the fellow’s elbow when he heard a familiar metallic clicking.

  He looked up into the barrel of an old revolver. Even in the dim lights of the disco Takuda could tell it was a museum piece. He released the swelling elbow and stood to face the lead guard, the one who had stayed out of the fray until he could get a clear shot.

  “Please,” the guard said. “It’s time to move toward the exit.”

  The pistol was a Russian M1895 with a rounded front sight, at least six decades old. “Be careful with granddaddy’s gun,” Takuda said. “You’ll blow your hand off.”

  The guard stepped back as he fired past Takuda’s ear. The noise was deafening, and Takuda blinked involuntarily. His ears rang, and the pistol was now aimed between his eyes. The guard’s hands were rock-­steady, and he aimed to drop Takuda where he stood. “Please move toward the exit,” he repeated.

  Takuda looked back at the jagged, gaping hole in King Tutankhamen’s face; the round had destroyed the sarcophagus behind him, so the old Russian pistol wasn’t loaded with starter rounds. The other guards had withdrawn, tending their wounded near the karaoke stage. The guard with the gun was keeping out of reach.

  It was time to go.

  Takuda felt the gun pointed at the back of his head all the way to the door, but every time he turned, the guard stopped two body lengths behind, pistol trained on Takuda’s skull. Maybe Takuda was faster than the guard, but he wasn’t faster than the bullets.

  At the door, he told the guard, “Tell Counselor Endo I want to speak to him.”

  The guard let the door swing shut. Without taking the aim off Takuda’s face through the glass, he jammed the door with his own boot as he reached down to flip the lock. He spun on his heel and returned to his men.

  Takuda faced toward the street to see the old manager waiting for him. The manager snapped a Polaroid of Takuda and told him he was banned from the bar forever. Then the old man slouched off toward the Street of Disobedient Children.

  Takuda looked around. The alleyway was deserted, with only a garlic-­themed restaurant to keep the disco company. Club Sexychat itself was a mess. The old pink faux-­marble stairs were faded and milky: they hadn’t been made for outdoor use. The sphinxes pieced together from auto chrome were slowly rusting to bits on either side of the golden door, and the rust stains extended down the marble and halfway across the concrete sidewalk. The old Excite Disco Pharakos sign was still visible under the sagging and faded banner that proclaimed it Club Sexychat. Takuda felt a pang of sadness for Tracy Jenkins, the brown-­eyed girl who felt she had to work in such a place.

  Takuda followed the old manager to Oyafuko-­dori, the Street of Disobedient Children. Oyafuko was lined with restaurants, pubs, karaoke parlors, and game centers. Dusk had filled the street with shifting swarms of orange-­haired youths with raucous laughter and too many teeth, small knots of young business ­people, and the occasional long-­legged beauty who slid like silk under the neon. On this evening before the fireworks show in Ohori Park, the street swam with girls in bright summer kimonos. There were sidelong glances for Takuda, bloodied and disheveled and massive. On the Street of Disobedient Children, the kids weren’t afraid to let him know he didn’t belong.

  The phone booths were plastered inside and out with sex ser­vice ads. Takuda read them idly as he rang Mori’s cell phone. Mori and Suzuki were waiting for the call.

  “I just slapped the snot out of ten Zenkoku Security guards. Nine, I mean. The one got the drop on me. But the others, I stuck my hands in their ears and rattled their molars. Most fun I’ve had since Sado Island.”

  Suzuki laughed in the background as Mori quizzed him on what he had found.

  “There was a girl Thomas Fletcher knew. I couldn’t tell her he’s dead. Couldn’t do it. But I found out that he taught students from Able English Institute in private lessons. Get this: He taught them in a space provided by Zenkoku.”

  Mori didn’t even comment on that. Silently cataloging everything, Takuda thought. That’s another thing I hate about him.

  Mori said, “We’re on our way. There’s a lot of police activity in the area. A lot, but they don’t say what they’re looking for, and they’ve gone to cell phones, blackout on radio communication. Stay around there. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “Meet me at the pub here on Oyafuko, a place called Fair or Cloudy. It’s not cheap, but the ­people are wonderful. Even for this wonderful town, they’re wonderful ­people. My treat.”

  “You’re drunk,” Mori said.

  “You’re perceptive,” Takuda said. He hung up and called Yumi. He left a message that she should meet them at Fair or Cloudy, and that she should wear her summer kimono.

  After the answering machine clicked off he hung up and wandered, enjoying stares and the whispers. Adrenaline from the fight had sobered him up, but he was still too drunk and too mussed to be out on the streets. He could have been in the pub bending his elbow in minutes, but he enjoyed shocking the children a little. After half a block, he noticed that they were really disturbed, really frightened. They all averted their eyes when they realized he was staring back. One girl cut away from the crowd. “Please, uncle,” she said, a note of terror in her voice. “The police box is empty, and there’s a hungry ghost in the park.”

  It was like being struck sober. He ran to the little park where the kids made out, dodging and weaving through the knots of frightened ­people fleeing some unknown hor
ror.

  The police box on the corner was empty, lights on but no one home. He walked past the darkened kiosk into the park, right to the hungry ghost floating above the grass.

  It was a girl in a stained white dress, and she wasn’t really floating. Her feet were so dirty and covered with caked blood that they blended with the shadows. She shuffled in the grass, her arms held out from her body as if to keep the dress clean, but it was too late. The dress was covered with drying blood turned blackish brown in the vapor lights in the park.

  “Little sister,” Takuda coaxed, unsure what would happen if he got too close. “Little sister, come with me. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  She looked up at the sound of his voice, but her gaze was blank and uncomprehending. Just like the police box, Takuda thought. The lights are on, but no one is home. He cursed Ogawa for pumping him full of drugs, and he cursed himself for drinking on the job, even a single beer. He wasn’t in control, not in control at all, and he couldn’t help this girl, couldn’t help this poor little wounded thing who had come to the make-­out park, a place that may have been a place of ease and comfort before whatever had happened to her had happened.

  Takuda was face-­to-­face with one of the jellyfish killers.

  “Kurodama,” she whispered. Her eyes widened and she looked down at her hands. Clotted blood had gathered at her cuticles and the webbing between her fingers. Clots like strips of bark fell to the grass as she picked feebly at her bloody dress. “Kurodama.” The bloodstained fingers shook as she started to scrub at the dress. She whimpered deep in her throat as her scrubbing became more frantic, and then she opened her mouth and began to shriek.