The Devouring God

by James Kendley

  Mori shifted his weight from foot to foot. “They could send someone. They could find a way.”

  Takuda zipped up his coveralls. “If they could take care of it that way, they would have done it already.” He stepped to the entrance pit and pulled on his shoes. “I’m beat, completely wiped out, but I have to find out about Yoshida. She was cut up, but she was okay. She’ll know what happened with the girls, if any of them entered the system. I don’t know what we could do about it, but I need to know.”

  He and Mori walked together as far as the convenience store. “We shouldn’t leave them alone with the blade,” Mori said. “Even if it’s broken, the priest could . . . I don’t know. Come under the spell.”

  “What spell? It’s broken.” Takuda stopped walking. Everything hurt. “Suzuki is stronger than you think. He’s stronger than you are, maybe stronger than I am.”

  Mori bowed deeply, a frown carved around his mouth. He was angry, bitterly angry, and he was not going to hide it.

  Takuda thought about it all the way to Yoshida’s office. He didn’t know what to do about Mori. Maybe this was the end of the line. Maybe they had been at the end of the line the whole time. Maybe none of it had meant anything at all.

  Yoshida was sitting at her desk with a bowl of noodle soup. “It was a deep cut, but not life-­threatening in any sense. Stitches, all shallow, no staples.” She sat back, breathing a little heavily. “You tossed me well enough that I landed right on my feet, and I ran like a scalded cat out that back door. I thank you for saving my life.”

  He bowed in return, but he grinned at her when he straightened up. “You’re a fool for going in there alone. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I’ve always been a fool. How else do you end up doing a job like this one at my age?”

  “You’re talking to a soon-­to-­be unemployed security guard. I don’t know where the rent is coming from next month.”

  She nodded. “The choices we’ve made, eh? I’m supposed to go to a hot spring with some old crows from school. I’ll have this scar, if it’s even healed up. They’ll be talking about their husbands’ retirements and their children’s jobs, and I’ll be making up lies about being slashed by a patient.” She smiled. “They’ll say I’m brave.” The smile dimmed a notch. “Your wife is the brave one.”

  “Stop talking about her. I can’t stand it.”

  “What are you going to do? How will you get out of all this?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know how I got here.”

  She pushed her soup away. “There were a lot of questions, of course. I told them everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything and everyone. It was illuminating. For one thing, they were not interested in you or your friends at all.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “A patrolman. No one I’ve ever seen before. He didn’t even write down your names. He wrote the address of the restaurant incorrectly. Not even close. His report reads like he was drunk. It says I ran into a girl gang that used an abandoned cafeteria as a hideout.”

  “Girl gang? Yamaguchi Gumi Pink Faction?”

  “Sailor Moon Subfaction.” She almost smiled. “They released me to rest, but I couldn’t rest, not with these girls out there. Some of them are already home, you know.”

  Takuda just blinked.

  “They were cleaned up and dumped at their houses. That’s in the news.

  The runaways are back. The jellyfish killings were regrettable exceptions to the peace in Fukuoka City. They may have been committed by an unnamed foreigner who died in an accidental overdose in a mental facility, but the runaways coming back, that’s the headline.” She looked as if she would spit. “I’ve been calling around. A ­couple of them were picked up, not dropped off, one of them with a broken arm. But everyone was scrubbed, not a drop of blood in sight.”

  Takuda didn’t know what to say.

  She shook her head. “I still don’t believe any of this is real. The doctor kept me awake while he was stitching me up—­horrible process, just horrible—­and I just lay there, thinking it was all a nightmare and that I would wake up and come to work and hang out with Nabeshima. No worries, it was all going to be okay. But now . . .” she ended with a small, helpless gesture. “You and your crew came and destroyed everything. And you’ll move on, just as you always do, leaving chaos in your wake.”

  “That’s just it,” Takuda said. “You’ll forget. We won’t.”

  She snorted in derision.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “You’ll forget we ever existed. As aware and awake as you are, you’ll forget. Your mind will reconstruct this as a terrible aberration, a strange thing that happened with some local girls, and you’ll forget about us, and you’ll forget about the cause of it all.”

  “I’ll never forget the inside of that cafeteria.”

  “You’ll have nightmares, but those will be the memories working themselves out, like a bamboo sliver working out from under the skin. It will bother you for a while, and then, one day, it will be gone.”

  “You know this from experience?”

  “Yes. ­People forget me and my friends much more quickly than you would imagine. So will you, and so will Nabeshima. So will all those girls.”

  “And do you think this selective amnesia is magic?”

  “No, I don’t. I think it’s the human mind protecting itself from the outer darkness.”

  As if on cue, the lights cut off. The fan stopped, and the refrigerator in the kitchen stopped its reassuring hum.

  “That’s strange,” Yoshida said. “It’s not even so hot yet that everyone’s running their air conditioners. There shouldn’t be brownouts, much less a complete failure.”

  The hair on Takuda’s neck stood up. He locked the front door and started checking the windows. “Get up,” he said. “Gather your things. I’ll get you out the back way.”

  She started to protest, and he spoke from the darkness in the back of his mind: “Get out.”

  His right temple exploded with pain.

  She said, “I suppose I really should be resting at home anyway. I was going to enter some notes on Nabeshima’s workstation, but without the power, I can’t even do that. You’ll lock up?”

  “I’ll lock up,” he said, almost shoving her out the kitchen door and locking it behind them.

  “Very well,” she said. “I’ll put in a good word for you with your boss. I’m sure he will appreciate your taking care of the office . . . Good day.”

  He walked her to the end of the alleyway, and then he watched her go down the main road toward the train station. She didn’t look back. It was as if she had already forgotten who he was.

  He paused at the front door, holding his right temple. He could feel the bone rising under his fingertips, raising the ridge that would push the right canine tooth out as a new fang. I’ll be a pop-­eyed, grinning demon by nightfall. All I’ll need is a spiked club.

  When he let himself back in the office, Counselor Endo was waiting for him in the shadows of the main room.

  “Well, I see you’ve survived your schoolgirl crush without great injury,” Endo said. He stepped into the light from Yoshida’s window. “Congratulations. Now, you and your friends have something I want. You should deliver it to its home immediately, before it kills you all.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Tuesday Morning

  “I beg your pardon for the interruption of the electrical current,” Counselor Endo said as he clicked on Yoshida’s desk lamp. “I have a medical condition that makes fluorescent lighting very disagreeable. It’s usually fine in larger, newer buildings, but this . . .” He reached up and flicked the hanging fixture with a thick, blunt forefinger. “Two concentric fluorescent rings with three illumination settings and an incandescent button for mood lighting, a twenty-­year-­old model for home
use. It’s a Zenkoku product, of course, made to last.” He smiled. “The buzzing of such little units really grates on my nerves.”

  “You don’t have nerves.”

  “This one would send me all to pieces.”

  “A flickering fluorescent fixture wouldn’t show you in your best light, would it?”

  Endo regarded Takuda. “My vanity is a failing, but it is not at issue here.”

  “Vanity isn’t part of your makeup. It’s part of your disguise, the eyes on the cobra’s hood. I’m talking about persistence of vision. Illusion. Deception.”

  Endo was frozen still as a photograph. For five full heartbeats, he didn’t move at all. Then he said, “You, Detective, lack vision. You are laboring under illusion and deception, and you have no one to blame but yourself. You have deluded yourself.”

  “In what way?”

  “You have deluded yourself that your friends and your family are safe.”

  Takuda wanted to leap across the room and strangle Endo, to squeeze the poison out of him, but the man was so poisonous that Takuda simply didn’t know where to start. In his gut, he knew it would be like strangling a water balloon; a tight grip on the counselor here would just make him bulge more over there. Endo was more than elusive. He was somehow formless.

  But the form he’s chosen could not be more deadly.

  “Are you threatening my friends and family?”

  “No,” Endo said, pretending to look around the squalid little office. “You are.”

  “Just how am I doing that?”

  “Well, you’re a payday away from homelessness. I could take care of that, permanently. You know I could.”

  “Rubbish. You wouldn’t do it.”

  Endo spread his hands. “I’ve never offered directly because I knew you wouldn’t accept.”

  “You would have moved us around to clean up your messes anyway.”

  Endo smiled as if to say he had already done exactly that. Takuda felt the heat rising to his face.

  “So what kind of danger are we talking about?”

  “Ah. Back to your friends and your wife. I didn’t say they were in danger. I said you had deluded yourself that they were safe. It’s an important if subtle distinction. Danger and safety. These conditions are not polar opposites or mutually exclusive. Continued existence is contingent, and a single mind’s survival in the dark void of eternity, as brief and bright as each hideous spark may seem, is never a zero-­sum proposition. Our friend Ogawa at this point would make a sophomoric reference to Schrödinger’s cat, neither alive nor dead, in an indeterminate state. He still sees this existence, or human life anyway, as binary, and any deviation from that scheme as an aberration demanding referents in particle physics. Otherwise, it’s all yes or no, black or white, danger or safety, life or death.” He flicked the light fixture again, a little harder; Takuda heard the plastic crack. “There are, as it turns out, indeterminate states that are neither life nor death.”

  “Possession must be one of those. What possessed you? Were you ever human?”

  Endo grimaced. “As much as you seem to enjoy verbal sparring, you’re really not equipped. Not only do you lack the wit, you lack self-­knowledge. And at this moment, you’re running out of time. I’m trying to tell you something.”

  “So spit it out.”

  The counselor fixed him with a stare. “No matter how often I tell you, you don’t believe that there are rules I must observe here. The fact that you are ignorant of these rules will not protect you, but that doesn’t change the fact that I must protect myself and my interests. There are situations that would deteriorate in unexpected and potentially disastrous ways if I tried to control them directly. I know this from experience.”

  “So I have to ask the right questions. Perhaps I do lack the wits. I can’t guess at what you’re trying to tell me.”

  Endo nodded sadly. “If young Mori were here, it would go more smoothly, I’m sure. I wonder what Mori would do?”

  Takuda folded his arms. “He would probably ask you to tell him about the Kurodama.”

  “Ah. The artifact—­I’m sorry, but I really can’t refer to it by terms already in use for fruit or candy or lumps of anthracite—­is a sort of hideous spark all its own, an entity with its own karmic weight and destiny. You might even call it a soul, if you believed in that sort of nonsense.”

  “It’s not a mind anymore, and if it has its own karmic weight, that weight carried it straight to the hottest hells. I killed it.”

  “Bully! Bully for you!”

  “I don’t know what this buri means.”

  “I apologize. Old jokes, old habits. Congratulations, Detective. And how did you destroy this mind?”

  “I broke it with my staff.”

  Endo flicked the lamp’s pull-­string. “How resourceful and . . . um, virile of you, breaking it into . . . two pieces? Yes, two? All with your long, hard staff, right on the sidewalk outside the cafeteria. Yes, you were observed.” He flicked the string again, now visibly annoyed. “This artifact, a literal comma that somehow slipped into the daylight world from the litany of everlasting midnight, brings with it some of that outer darkness. I can tell you that with no ill consequences. You know already that it spurred what some might call unnatural appetites, causing famous but unproven acts of cannibalism. You’ve read the supposedly fictional story of the priest of the Koyama family temple who cleaned a beloved boy’s bones with his own tongue, thereby becoming a demon. I know that young Mori has opinions on the alleged consumption of the American airman’s liver, and that he finds it significant that the charges of cannibalism were dismissed.”

  “You’ve been spying on us.”

  Endo didn’t bother to reply. “There have been more recent dinners in that general locale, dinners that some would call unusual, special events held even right in the squalid cafeteria where you retrieved the artifact. For sensitive ­people, and I use the term sensitive in the best possible way here, the artifact has an attractive force. Mr. Thomas Fletcher is one of those ­people, even though his mental state seems to have precluded active participation in any acts of veneration. Your Reverend Suzuki may also be among those who are unduly influenced by this visitor from the outer darkness. Mind to mind, do you see? One mind affected by another in an attraction that breeds an insatiable hunger. Such an attractive force!” He smiled. “Like the electron’s lust for the proton, it’s really all about love, isn’t it?”

  Takuda hunched forward over the desk. “How can it be such an attractive force if it’s broken?”

  “Broken? There you are, thinking in binary states again. On, off. Black, white. Alive, dead. Broken . . . whole.”

  “You’re saying it’s not dead.”

  “Not by a long shot. Let’s recap, shall we? The artifact is a mind with attractive powers, a hideous spark in and of itself, and it seeks self-­actualization and self-­expression, which our postmodern world seems to prize above all else. Ignore these needs of the artifact at your peril.”

  “And you’re saying it might be calling out to the priest.”

  “He has been terribly hungry lately, hasn’t he? Your grocery bill is getting worse and worse.”

  Takuda didn’t bother to smile. “I’m supposed to run to the Kurodama and lead you right to it.”

  “Sunshine Heights, apartment 201. You left it there because no matter how obtuse you pretend to be about rules regarding matters such as this, you know neither I nor those in my employ can cross that threshold.”

  “So why are you here? You don’t care about the danger.”

  “I do. You see, not only do I want the artifact back where it belongs, I want you back where you belong, conducting monster hunts until I need you for something big. I also need your friends. You would be useless to me pining for your wife in prison because you murdered the priest.”

  “You think
the priest would hurt my wife. It’s pretty ridiculous. Don’t you need seven to kill the eighth? Critical mass, wouldn’t you call it?”

  Endo clicked off the desk lamp. “Even that incandescent unit makes a slight noise. Now it’s very quiet, isn’t it? You can hear a little traffic from the highway, even a little bustling commerce from the market across the main street. Do you hear the voices?” He cupped a hand to his ear. “I believe I hear a greengrocer calling out the prices of his eggplant. And something else, very high-­pitched . . . do you hear it? A sort of wailing?”

  Takuda strained his senses despite himself. He did hear the highway, closer traffic on the main street, voices filtering in from the market, and high above it all, sirens. Lots of sirens, far off.

  “Sounds like they’re up in the city,” Endo said. “Maybe right in your neighborhood.”

  Takuda cursed. “You didn’t come to warn me.” He vaulted toward the door. “You came to distract me and slow me down.”

  As fast as he was, Endo was faster. Endo stood with his hand on the knob. “Remember,” he said to Takuda. “It isn’t dead, not dead at all.” He opened the door for Takuda. “There’s a taxi at the corner, waiting to take you to your house. Don’t worry. I’ve already paid for it. Take care, and I hope you find everyone well at your apartment. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but breaking it probably just made it angry. It will be wanting revenge.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Tuesday Morning

  Takuda took the stairs at Sunshine Heights three at a time. He had burst through a gantlet of officers in the parking lot, and now two uniformed officers barred his way at the door. They flew before him like leaves in a gust.

  The apartment was a shambles. Every drawer had been opened, every cabinet ransacked. Dusty white footprints trailed across the straw mats in every room.