The Devouring God

by James Kendley

  Koji pouted. “And when will I see him again?”

  “He’s coming this morning. But I have some questions about the missing boy, Haruma.”

  Koji surveyed the bustling breakfast crowd. “Stand in line. You’re the second one this morning.”

  “I’ll make it quick,” Takuda said. “Did Haruma have private English lessons with a foreigner named Thomas Fletcher?”

  Koji’s brow furrowed. “No, group lessons, with a fake and fickle group of little floozies from the ratty little college up the street. Why?”

  Someone was bellowing for Koji from the kitchen, but Takuda didn’t care if Koji didn’t. “Where did Haruma have his lessons?”

  Koji wrinkled his nose. “An old farmhouse. Sounded awful. He quit to save the money for clothes.”

  Takuda nodded. That made sense, but it didn’t help.

  Koji leaned forward. “Speaking of clothes, I love that suit. I’ll sponge off the jacket for you when I have a clean cloth. Somebody had a good time last night . . .” He turned on his heel and bustled back to the kitchen. “Yes, yes, yes, I hear you,” he sang. “Koji’s coming.”

  Takuda sighed. He hadn’t even ordered tea.

  Yoshida arrived a few minutes later. She spilled Thomas Fletcher’s journals and his students’ papers all over the table.

  “I have a lot to show you. I think I know what these girls are talking about.” She stopped dead, a thin sheaf of papers in each hand. “Why are you dressed that way? Where are you going in a suit like that?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not important.”

  “You look like a different man without your coveralls and your staff,” she said, laying handwritten ­reports out on the table. “These students’ papers are . . . Well, first, they’re horrifying. These girls are writing dark, twisted horror. It’s as if Thomas Fletcher gave them a scenario of dreamlike imagery as metaphors for butchery and cannibalism, and they all did different takes on it. Literally, they each approach the scene from a different direction.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means exactly what I said. Violet—­he gave them all English names for class. That always gave me the creeps.”

  Takuda nodded. “I was Theodore.”

  “I was Alice. Anyway, Violet writes the wind rushes under her feet and carries her to the river of lotuses. You see? It’s a dreamlike description of taking the subway to Ohori Park and then walking this way, toward the moat.”

  “You think they’re writing about a place around here?”

  “I’m almost certain. Abby mentions the hanging needles pointing to the tadpole. I think that’s a reference to the broken hands on the clock at Able English Institute. The six looks like a tadpole.”

  Takuda didn’t quite snort. “That’s a bit of a reach.”

  She frowned at him. “Maybe, but I’m doing everything I can because this is pretty disturbing stuff. Their essays for Thomas Fletcher say they’re worshiping. It sounds like they’re describing some horrible ritual sacrifice, all about cleaning the bones of the victims. All these horrible little essays are like coded messages about something called the Devouring God.” She spread them out further. “And there is a pattern in it. Violet’s is a description of the path to a cafeteria coming from the west, along Meiji Avenue. Jane’s comes from the northeast, down and across Showa Avenue past Enou Temple. I can almost pinpoint the location, somewhere in Otemon, but not quite.”

  “You’re triangulating. Let me know when you find the spot.”

  “That’s just it. There’s no spot to hit. There’s no restaurant at all in the part of Otemon these routes lead to.”

  “Maybe you’re not reading it right. Maybe you have to widen your search a little.”

  She shook her head. “I just have to put it all together.”

  Takuda looked around for Mori and Suzuki. They should have been there by now. Yumi had promised to keep Suzuki out of the basket from Fair or Cloudy, but she had a hard time saying no to him. Takuda was getting worried about his basket.

  “Anyway,” he said, distracting himself from the image of Suzuki gorging himself on grilled mackerel and braised tuna from the basket, “what did you think of Thomas’s art and his writing? Could you make anything of it?”

  Yoshida puffed out her cheeks. “I couldn’t do much with that. He’s an artist, you know? Really, really good drawings. Can you make a diagnosis from an artist’s work? Some ­people say they can. One English ­psychologist became famous by rearranging the chronology of a patient’s paintings of cats to show some sort of progression of schizophrenia, as if it worked that way. The problem was that the patient was painting cute, cuddly kitties at the very same time he was painting demonic neon dragon kitties. Who’s to say what’s madness on canvas? Art is not structured, like a thematic apperception test.” She dropped a sheaf of papers and heaved a deep sigh. “You know, I’m trying to forget that poor dead boy and that poor battered girl and just get on with this.” She looked up at him. She was tired. “You told me a lot more as I drove you home day before yesterday. The drugs that murderer pumped into you really made you open up. You’re fighting some pretty horrifying ­people. I’ve met ­people in my job who’ve done awful things, but this, what you’re fighting . . . What that man did to Thomas Fletcher and what he was about to do to me . . .” She spread her fingers on the scattered sheets on the tables. Her hands were shaking.

  Takuda said, “Don’t think about it. Don’t do it. Just focus on the job.” He felt the dark presence from the back of his mind stirring, and then it pushed him aside. His vision of the bright café around them darkened as the massive mind behind his spoke through his mouth to Yoshida: “Forget. Forget fear. Forget me.”

  She smoothed the papers with steady hands, as if she had intended to do so all along.

  That was quick, Takuda thought. Just a few words, and she. . .

  The room brightened, and a jolt of pain shot from his forehead all the way to his canine tooth, a lightning bolt passing through his eye. He swore aloud. “That’s the last time I let you speak,” he said, rubbing his temple.

  “Excuse me?” Yoshida said, incredulous.

  “Where are my friends?” Takuda said. He was gasping with the pain. “They were supposed to be here.”

  “Oh, I told your partner Mori that they shouldn’t come. You and I needed to work on this, but it looks like you aren’t in any shape. They went home to meet your wife for breakfast.”

  Takuda swore again as he stood up, holding his aching head. His basket would be empty for sure.

  “It’s my shift tonight,” he said. He held his head with both hands, and he felt the left side of his face swelling beneath his fingers. “I’ll be there just after dinnertime. We’ll work on it then. If you figure anything out, wait for me to get there, okay? I don’t want you charging off alone.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said. She was beaming, happier and more carefree than he had imagined she could be. “After all, it’s just a few schoolgirls playing some sort of game. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Monday Afternoon

  When Takuda got back to the apartment, the basket was empty and no one was home. Yumi had left a note about smoked salmon, but there was none in the refrigerator.

  When this thing is over, the priest is moving out, Takuda thought as he settled down to sleep. We just can’t go on like this.

  He rolled on the mat for a few minutes till he realized he would never sleep with the dull throbbing in his face. When he clicked on the bathroom light, the beast in the mirror horrified him.

  A vertical ridge of bone had formed under the skin, running from the bump atop his temple down into his cheekbone and continuing under his lip. The bone ridge would have shut off his peripheral vision, but the left eye had bulged outward to compensate. He bared his teeth at his refle
ction; the canine tooth was no longer a tooth at all. It was an opalescent fang beginning to crowd out his incisors.

  If the other side of his face distorted to match, he would be a bug-­eyed demon with contiguous horns and tusks bracketing his face.

  He lay on the bathroom floor with the cool tiling against his aching face. Is this real? Am I mad? Have I gone insane like Thomas Fletcher? Gently, he felt around in his mind for the dark presence that contained him, using consciousness like a tongue probing a tooth. The great presence remained silent.

  He didn’t know which was more terrifying, that the dark presence was in his head at all, or that it was so powerful that it could make another person forget just by speaking through his body. Or that its words left bones warped in their wake.

  Powerful or not, it would not help him sleep. When he finally slept, he dreamt of dark water for the first time in ages, but he wasn’t in the water to save his brother or his son, and he wasn’t there to drown a fire demon. He was surrounded by girls, swimming, just out of reach. Lovely girls, naked, with dark hair streaming in the water. They wove around him in an intricate water dance, like the synchronized swimming in old Hollywood musicals, but it was tighter, more controlled, almost mechanical.

  Then the dream changed, and he realized that he was in the center of the rosette, the Kurodama’s killing pattern, and he struggled to get out. Then the lovely girls turned on him, and they all grinned. Each had long, black fangs, each mouth full of razor-­sharp curved jewels. The girls turned on him and began to bite and slash with those fangs, and his skeleton helped them by turning this way and that to expose itself, to help free itself of flesh.

  He woke stripping the sheets off himself, as if he were pulling away his own skin.

  He sat up on his sleeping mat catching his breath, wondering how he had come to such a place in his life. Impoverished, disheartened, never sure from one day to the next what would happen. The lustrous black suit hanging from the closet door mocked him as clearly as if Counselor Endo had been standing in it. He almost threw it away right then, but as Yumi had said, he might need it for a funeral anytime now.

  He bathed hurriedly and left long before dark. If he had waited just a few moments, he would have seen Yumi and Suzuki at least, and maybe even Mori, but he didn’t want to see them. He didn’t want to see anyone.

  He tried to sit through the last matinee, Jurassic Park. It was too loud, and the dinosaurs’ teeth reminded him of his dream, and of his own new fang. The young girl’s terror reminded him of the hungry ghost in the park. He walked out when he could tell the bloodshed was about to start.

  He took a shortcut through the bar district. A Japanese bar district is pitiful in the light of day when neon glitz gives way to peeling paint and filthy pavement. Takuda cut through a narrow alleyway headed for his bus stop.

  Coming toward him in the alleyway, a bar matron herded three young, giggling hostesses toward a tiny club. The hostesses were dressed in a weird combination of Tokyo teenybopper fashion and bar-­girl trash. They were chatty and silly, country girls just getting the taste of the high life in a provincial capital. One girl, red-­haired and coarse, a head taller than the others, stared at Takuda in astonishment. The recognition in her face stopped him cold. The other girls giggled, and the matron bowed and called out her club’s hours, but the redhead showed him the corners of her eyes and opened her mouth wide as if to catch his scent. He was not invisible to her, nor she to him, and she wasn’t just a girl. She was something more than human, or less, an animal spirit in a woman’s body.

  He did not bow as he passed, for such a wild thing would only be confused by his lowering his head as if to attack. They watched each other warily, and Takuda turned when he was sure she would not charge at him. The matron shooed them into a tiny bar, and the spirit-­girl glanced back for just a second to show him her teeth: Don’t follow.

  Takuda paced back and forth a few times, then went on his way. The redhead was someone else’s problem. For all he knew, he and she were on the same team.

  Fukuoka Prefecture Mental Health Ser­vices Satellite Office 6 was dark when he got there. He let himself in and turned on the lights. Yoshida’s desk was covered with papers, student essays with bits underlined and annotated.

  In the center of the desk was a city atlas open to the Otemon neighborhood, the triangular bit in the branching of Showa Avenue and Meiji Avenue, across from Ohori Park and the castle ruins. Yoshida had drawn approaches and routes inward from the main roads, all of them converging on a single block.

  Among the papers, almost lost, was a note from Yoshida:

  Security Guard Takuda:

  I figured it out. I’ll be back by 6 p.m.

  It was almost dark. She wasn’t back, and if he didn’t go get her, she was never coming back.

  He snatched the map off the desk. Takuda took a taxi until it got stuck in traffic on Showa Avenue. Then he ran, weaving his mass and his staff through the pedestrians along the way.

  The map took him to a building just around the corner from Able English Institute. It looked abandoned, with rust on the shuttered front and blistered paint on the window casements. The awning hung in rags.

  He went down the steps to the kitchen entrance, prepared to rip the door from its hinges, but it swung inward at his touch.

  He stepped into the darkened kitchen, and the door clicked shut behind him.

  The reek of blood and rotting flesh was almost overpowering. Takuda reeled against a shelf, and nested steel bowls gonged gently as he tried to quiet his retching and gagging. This was the strongest stench of decay he had ever encountered, and it was a small, enclosed space.

  The kitchen was empty, lit only by the greenish exit light above. He flipped the wall switch—­nothing.

  He felt his way through the kitchen, staff at the ready. When he swung the door into what he felt sure must be the dining area, the smell of blood was even stronger, though the underlying rot was unchanged.

  The cavernous dining area was a scene from hell, worse than anything in the mad foreigner’s journal. In the greenish half-­light, small, ragged figures shuffled slowly past each other amid heaps of rotting flesh. They were girls, or they had been. They looked neither at each other nor at Takuda as they crossed each other’s paths, each trading places in a sinuous and repetitive path through the room. The chairs and tables were stacked against the walls, jammed together in an interlocking pattern up to the ceiling so neatly that he had at first mistaken it for wallpaper.

  He watched the girls shuffle past the eyes of the rosette, dark, five-­pointed stars of gore, black with blood and drying flesh, and there, the center of the rosette, a man-­tall altar of shining bone with a detached ­jawbone on top, a resting place for the Kurodama. The jawbone was empty. Takuda squinted in a vain search for the black comma, but it was not there. The stone knife was already in motion. One of the girls had the Kurodama, or maybe it was circulating among them, navigating their rosette on its own deadly course.

  Yoshida walked past him, her eyes wide with fear.

  He felt his mouth go dry. She had survived this long by somehow becoming invisible, as he was sometimes invisible, but he knew that two of them would not escape this place without a fight.

  She mouthed something at Takuda. He assumed it was “Help me,” but he couldn’t quite make it out. He beckoned her forward, and she shook her head subtly. She indicated her blouse front—­it looked like a brown silk scarf, which made no sense in this weather. No, blood. Bright, slick blood on her blouse, the crimson darkened and muted to brown in the green light of the exit signs.

  He knew he would have to go in after her. He prepared to step into the pattern, but she shook her head to stop him. When she came around again, she made a weaving motion with both hands. Takuda cocked his head. Even in this dim light, he could see that she was exasperated. She made the weaving motion again, but this time in a v
ery deliberate manner, as if explaining something to a particularly dim child. She also pointed downward as she wove her hands together, waggling her forefingers and middle fingers in a pantomime of walking, weaving in, joining the rosette.

  He exhaled loudly. One of the girls looked up at him briefly, her dull eyes barely visible through her blood-­matted hair.

  Why didn’t they all just attack at once? How did Yoshida get cut, but just get a single cut, not a flaying?

  Takuda did not want to join the rosette, but that was the only answer. She must have been cut, then stepped in, masquerading as one of them until she could step out again.

  With a feeling of deep revulsion, Takuda stepped into line behind a short girl in a blood-­spattered DKNY tee shirt. She stepped behind the next girl they met; Takuda stepped in front of the one after that. They were hideous in their brokenness, their apathy, their bloody dishevelment. This was what happened when ­people became animals, slaves to forces beyond their control.

  Still, it seemed too easy. He was half-­again as tall as most of these girls, and twice as wide as any of them, but he shuffled along among them without seeming to draw any attention to himself. The bone altar now blocked his view of Yoshida, but he would come along to a line-­of-­sight view of her any moment, he was sure.

  The girl in front of him suddenly cut right. He realized he had to cut left, and he found himself following a bloody waif who was completely naked except for one yellow rubber sandal. A young man in a bloodied gray summer suit passed him in the rosette without a glance. Takuda somehow thought this was the strangest part of the whole experience so far: the other man had passed him without the flicker of recognition they usually would have shared as outliers in this gang of girls.

  It was as if they were asleep, as if they were all asleep, as the Kurodama itself was asleep, like sleeping sharks in shallow waters. The rosette just kept going all the time, the machine in motion, the jaws always chewing, waiting for something to bite.

  Takuda was at the outside edge again, at the far side from the kitchen doors, but the next pass would take him straight to Yoshida. He wondered idly if the sleepwalkers stepped out of line when they had to pee, or if they simple soiled themselves as they walked. With the stink of death in that place, there was really no way to tell.