The Devouring God

by James Kendley

  He was glad he was drunk when the screaming started. If Ogawa had been there with his evil syringe, Takuda would have rolled up his own sleeve. He gathered the girl in his arms and wrapped her tightly. He couldn’t stop her screams, but he could stop her from hurting herself. She could barely breathe for the screaming, and Takuda had to turn his face away from her gaping, gasping, howling maw. It wasn’t just the volume. It was what she was doing to herself. He knew it was only his drunken imagination, but he thought he could hear her vocal cords shredding as she screamed.

  As her shrieking subsided into gasping moans, black shapes milled in the park shadows. Takuda looked to the lampposts for the first time—­most of the lamps were dark. This was all carefully staged, with just enough light for him to find the girl.

  Takuda turned and turned with the girl in his arms. The shadows were all around. He could take care of himself, but he didn’t know if he could protect her.

  Two figures appeared from the Oyafuko side of the park, just by the police box he had passed moments before, and he knew them at a glance. “Mori! Suzuki! Help me here!”

  As they began to run toward him, shadows detached themselves from the darkness, shadows in Zenkoku Security uniforms, masked and armed. Also limping and maimed. Takuda had met them before.

  They surrounded him, and their leader pulled up his mask. “You can’t take care of her. You don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

  He looked down at the girl. Her eyes had rolled back in her head. She jerked spasmodically as a thin trickle of bloody drool ran from the corner of her mouth.

  “Give her to us quickly,” the security team leader said. He motioned, and two smaller figures appeared from the shadows. They removed their masks: grim, hard-­eyed women who stared at the girl with an urgency beyond mere concern.

  “We have to get her stable,” one of the women said.

  “Shut up,” the team leader hissed. He turned to Takuda. “Quickly. We give the girl the help she needs, and you get what you asked for. Counselor Endo wants to speak to you.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Sunday Evening

  The blindfolds came off. Takuda, Mori, and Suzuki were in a posh lobby. Takuda looked behind them to see huge doors of frosted, curved glass sliding silently together.

  The floor was formed of concentric, alternating rings of polished marble and rough granite radiating outward from the circular reception desk to walls of matte burnt-­umber tile with dark oak trim. Burgundy leather couches, fat ferns, the works. An oversized version of The Thinker dominated the lobby from a pedestal in the center of the reception desk. It was Thomas Fletcher’s work. He had used beveled edges and precise curves to replace the smooth, natural lines of the ­original.

  Suzuki elbowed Takuda. “The original is from a piece called The Gates of Hell. Do you think they get the irony?”

  Takuda shook his head as Zenkoku Security forces nudged them toward the elevators.

  Counselor Endo waited for them in a dimly lit third-­floor conference room. The walls were covered with pages from flip charts, and one whole wall was taken up by a vinyl whiteboard, the warning not to erase it more prominent than anything else written thereon.

  Hiroyasu Ogawa lay on a thin mat on the conference table. He was unconscious, pale, dressed in a hospital gown, attached to an intravenous saline drip bag hanging from the fluorescent light fixture.

  Counselor Endo was solid and brown and smiling wide with his large, yellow teeth. As the security guards fanned out around the room, the counselor performed the polite and distinguished bow of a successful businessman to his colleagues.

  “Good evening,” he said. “I trust you had a pleasant time on Oyafuko-­dori. Fukuoka is a wonderful town for entertainment, I find.”

  Suzuki looked around. “That was a very short drive,” he said. “We must be in Daimyo.”

  Mori said, “They turned right and then left. Based on the direction the van was headed, that would put us west, not east. From the traffic sounds as they unloaded us, we’re probably in the little strip between Showa Avenue and Meiji Avenue. I think we’re in Otemon.”

  Endo’s smile broadened. Takuda hadn’t thought that possible. “Ears like a fox,” the counselor said. “Almost as keen as your wits.”

  “Where are you taking the girl?” Takuda asked.

  “I’m not taking her anywhere. After her condition is more or less stable, she will be remanded to a sanitarium, a plush, privatized counterpart to the one in which you foolishly and illegally visited the foreigner.”

  “The one in which your Ogawa tried to murder me.”

  The smile didn’t dim at all. “Yet he is the one still supine on the altar of modern medicine,” Endo said, indicating Ogawa’s pathetic condition with a sweep of his manicured hand. “I think you’ll agree that it is with him that our sympathies must lie.”

  “He murdered Thomas Fletcher and he tried to murder me.”

  Endo raised one eyebrow. “If that is true, then it seems that pharmacology is not his strong suit. In an unexpected lucid window, he reported administering to you a dosage that would have felled an ox, literally. Yet you were up breaking furniture in no time.” Endo inclined his head as if examining a curious work of art. “He also said your heart stopped altogether. Did you know that? If our Ogawa did succeed in murdering you, as you so colorfully put it, something brought you back to life right before his eyes.”

  There was nothing to say. Takuda thought back to the massive presence that had woken him in the mental hospital.

  Endo idly poked Ogawa in the side with a meter stick. “You’re getting stronger and stronger, unlike your friends. Doesn’t that bother you? Young Mori is just getting impatient, and the priest is getting hungrier. He’s eating you out of house and home, no matter what ends up in his begging bowl.”

  He continued into the silence: “So, the girl is safe, the parents—­whatever sorry excuse for parents allowed their misbegotten waif to get into this situation—­have been notified and compensated for whatever anxiety they were obliged to feel. The foreigner is gone, cleared by his own death and by the testimony of expert consultants of any connection to the recent killings, disappearances, and whatnot. Apparently, a doctor at the mental hospital, a most disagreeable little fellow named Haraguchi, will commit suicide any minute now over the foreigner’s accidental overdose. All the blood is washed away.” He made a dusting-­off motion with his hands. “All fresh and shiny like newborn babes, ready to start again.”

  “Ready to start what again?” Mori asked.

  “The hunt for the artifact, of course, the artifact whose activity wakened your latent talents and disturbed your tranquil working life. Get this taken care of quickly so you can get back to making ends meet.”

  “It’s important to you,” Takuda said.

  Endo almost frowned. “In itself, no. You see, once ensconced in its usual home, it has a muted and salutary effect on the workplace. Without it, things don’t run smoothly. It shares a home with some sharp, aggressive men and women who are expected to go out and make a real difference on an international level. It also shares a home with a group of editors, copywriters, and such who should be beaten to death at their desks. Seriously. They are lackadaisical, pedantic fools who should have been whipped into shape from birth, and even then, they may still have turned out to be the sort of useless buffoons they are today. Some ­people blame postwar liberalism, but I think they just might be congenital idiots.”

  Endo poked Ogawa a little harder. “The sharp ones, the international players, are off their game. Numbers are down, and they seem to have lost their hunger, their lust, for acquisition. But even at their worst, each of them is worth a dozen of the copy editors. I don’t think you can imagine how those pitiful wretches behave without the influence of the artifact. Just today, two of them came to blows about a reference in a valve manual, and the one nicknamed Ishii
the Mutant somehow managed to staple his own tongue.”

  Ogawa groaned and tried to turn over before falling back into uneasy slumber. “If I had my way,” Endo said, “I would turn the girls and the artifact loose on the editors, solving the whole problem at once, but there are rules to be followed and deadlines to be met. My conduct in relation to such antiquities as the artifact are extremely circumscribed. Once again, I need your help.”

  Takuda said, “It drives children to murder, but you broke one loose from the pack and directed her into our path so she could tell us about the Kurodama, but not where it is.”

  Endo assumed a pained expression. “Kurodama is a word for grapes or candies. Or coal. No jokes, please. It’s nameless. It’s older than Japan itself, and I mean the islands, not our beloved national identity.”

  Mori snorted. “No one cares what you call it. It drives mere children to murder. I’d like to shove it down your throat. Just as you used us to kill your pet kappa in Naga Valley, you want to use us to find your Kurodama.”

  Endo spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Rules are rules, and I must obey the rules. Even worse, I can’t tell you where to look. Ironic, isn’t it? It’s the bedrock of our organization, the foundation of everything we do.” A yellow grin split his face. “But I can’t tell you anything about it.”

  Endo’s broad, nut-­brown face was impassive. Takuda leaned over the table toward him, far enough to catch a whiff of antiseptic and stale urine wafting upward from the unconscious Ogawa. “You’re dropping hints about girls and bedrock, laying a trail of rubbish that will lead us wherever you want us to go. Tell us where your wayward stone knife lies, and we’ll destroy it. For the victims, not for you.”

  The counselor rubbed his forehead. “Your strength has completely scrambled what brains you ever had. As you obviously can’t follow in the moment, at least try to reconstruct later, between the three of you, the various threads of our conversation tonight.”

  Takuda leaned in closer, despite the unpleasant odor from Ogawa. “Where is it?”

  Endo put his hands in his pockets. “You look at our poor Ogawa with something like disgust, but you are so inferior to him in so many ways. So pathetically ineffective. You want me to draw you a map. You want me to do your job for you.”

  They heard a sound like thunder. The fireworks had begun.

  Endo said, “I could draw you a map, but there would be little use. Things keep on shifting here in Japan.” He sighed as if in pain. “This is tedious beyond belief. Please listen so that I don’t have to repeat it.” He held his hands out as if trying to physically grasp their attention. “I was sightseeing in Fukuoka City’s East Ward, just beyond the end of the subway line. You know the old mystery novel Points and Lines? It’s set there.”

  Suzuki smiled. “Why am I not surprised you’re a mystery fan?”

  Endo ignored him. “On the way, I noticed a marker commemorating a poem in the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves. Something about frolicking in the surf and gathering seaweed. That marker is roughly where the beach lay in the ninth century, but it’s quite far inland from where the beach lay in the 1950s, when Points and Lines was written. And that shoreline in the 1950s is a brisk walk from the shoreline today. You see? Land reclamation continues apace, and the shoreline continues to move. Zenkoku Heavy Materials, I am proud to say, is deeply involved in plans to build an island in the marshlands beyond the present shoreline, once some concerns about migratory birds are cleared away. And they will be. Time marches on, and so does the shoreline.”

  Mori frowned deeply. “So you can’t draw us a map.”

  Counselor Endo pointed at Mori with genuine enthusiasm. “You have everything you need. All you need is transparency and a proper sense of proportion.”

  Takuda turned on Mori. “You’ve got it? You understand what he’s going on about?”

  Endo laughed out loud. “Young Mori could find the artifact’s home on his own, I suppose. He could stop more killings, as you three did with the poor little water-­imp.” He turned his attention fully on Mori. “It’s really too bad that you didn’t stop the water-­imp before it gutted your sister, but you were just a child then, weren’t you? Not all grown up, as you were when you failed to protect the Nabeshima girl from the mad foreigner. She really shouldn’t have been there to start with, but there’s no stopping a girl once she acquires a taste for the exotic.”

  Mori’s jaw clenched. He took off his glasses.

  “Oho, you’ll need those,” Counselor Endo said, apparently oblivious to the security guards unsnapping mace and Tasers. “Keep your eyes peeled. Engage that intellect and find the artifact.”

  “You don’t have to wind him up,” Takuda said to Endo. “He’s already so disgusted with the rest of us that he can barely stand it.”

  “Just tell us who’s drawing up the clues,” Mori said. “Is it the elder Reverend Suzuki? Is he alive? Is he working for you, or is he some sort of captive?”

  Endo’s smile was beatific. “Yes, you all have your daddy issues, don’t you? Your father, Detective Takuda, showed you how a man may be destroyed by monsters. He really let the water-­imp drag him down, so to speak.” He looked at the ceiling as if considering whether to stretch the pun even further. “Reverend Suzuki, on the other hand, was abandoned for fear of monsters. The youngest son, destined to be the lost one . . . but he stayed home to prove his loyalty, so the whole family had to leave him instead! That was a surprise, wasn’t it? And his father didn’t stay around long enough to teach him about monsters.”

  “So is the elder Reverend Suzuki alive,” Takuda asked, partly to fill the void left by Suzuki’s silence, “or was he drowned by your little pet in the valley?”

  “The water-­imp was not my pet,” Endo said. “It was a nonfunctional aberration, a relic of a failed union of vastly dissimilar entities, a freakish miscegenation that could only cause confusion in this otherwise orderly modern world. I’m grateful to you all for cleaning that up. Anyway, back to your daddies. Detective Takuda’s father taught the dangers of monsters by example. Reverend Suzuki’s apparently didn’t teach quite enough about monsters before his abrupt departure. Young Mori’s father, however, taught best, in a much more direct method.” Endo absently examined his own shoes. “What better way to teach the danger of monsters than to become one yourself?”

  Mori went for Endo over the table, but Takuda pulled him back before the security guards could Taser him.

  “Very well, then,” Endo said, clasping his hands together as if something had actually been accomplished. “Thanks for playing, and we have lovely parting gifts for you all. First, for young Mori.” Two security guards limped forward with a large box. They tilted it forward so everyone could see. It was a ceramic figurine, a samurai in a fighting stance holding a large sake bowl. “A Hakata doll, one of Fukuoka’s most renowned local products, a fearsome Kuroda clan warrior. His spear and the glass case are in the box as well.” The security guards busied themselves repacking the box as another came forward with a flat, twine-­tied packet. “For Reverend Suzuki, another local treat, spicy pickled cod roe. Delicious on rice for any meal.” Mori hissed as Suzuki reached for the package, and Takuda held Mori a little more tightly so the hiss became a rushing of air.

  “For you, the strongman of the group, something special.” Endo himself reached under the table and pulled out a suit bag. “My tailor made this for you.” He unzipped it to reveal a suit, shining black, iridescent. “The shirts and shoes are not tailored, I’m afraid, but the measurements should be correct.” He zipped up the suit bag and laid it on the table beside Ogawa. “There is also a bottle of solvent for the mace. The smell of it is rather strong, still. I believe that might have been why that poor child you accosted in the park was crying so. And you don’t want to make your Yumi cry. She’s waiting for you.”

  Takuda stiffened, and Mori stopped squirming. Suzuki looked up
from the package.

  “She’s waiting for you at Fair or Cloudy. She might be next door at the sister establishment by now, singing chanson with the owner’s wife. Hurry up and get into your suit,” Endo said, smiling like a benevolent uncle. “You don’t want to leave her alone with this jelly­fish killer on the loose.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Sunday Evening

  The blindfolds came off, and the security guards melted into the shadows of the little park.

  Takuda brushed off his fine new suit, and Suzuki clutched his packet of spicy pickled cod roe. Mori aimed a kick at the Hakata doll, large and square in its silk bundling cloth, but Suzuki edged in to block the kick. “No, no, no,” he moaned. “That’s a nice doll. It’s a week’s groceries if we can get cash back for it.”

  Takuda scooped the doll up under his arm. “I’m done for the day,” he said. “I have to go find Yumi.”

  “We were set up,” Mori growled. “This little jaunt to Club Sexychat, the satellite mental health center, the job with Ota Southern Protection Ser­vices, everything.”

  Takuda nodded. “They even want us to know where their offices are. They took the same route, coming and going.” He watched Mori cataloging the information. He knows something, but he isn’t ready to tell us. “We’ll catch up tomorrow. Meet me at the Lotus Café for breakfast. You’ve got the overnight shift at the satellite office, though it will be pretty grim for you without Miss Nabeshima there. I’m sorry about that.” He bowed politely to let them know he was really going. “Good evening.” And he turned on his heel and left.

  He hoped Suzuki could take care of himself with Mori, but it was out of his control. Takuda had to catch up with Yumi. Counselor Endo’s threat about the jellyfish killer was not a direct threat, and Endo knew that hurting Yumi would bring war. Endo didn’t want that. Endo had Zenkoku at his beck and call, but Takuda had more power at his command, somehow, though he wasn’t sure exactly what it was. Or how he could use it to feed himself.