The Devouring God

by James Kendley

  “It’s up in the rafters in the second bedroom,” Suzuki said. “There’s a loose panel in the top of the bedding closet, and my arms are long enough that I can get the sword up over the second ceiling rafter, where no one could see it even if they were looking for it.” He sighed heavily. “Mice are chewing off the sharkskin wrapping.”

  Mori slid silently into the seat beside Suzuki.

  “Thank you for helping us with the detective,” Yumi said acidly.

  “None of you seemed to see him coming,” Mori said. “I hoped we could keep at least one of us out of custody to help the others.”

  “Or you were just tired of us,” Takuda said.

  Mori frowned. “It was time to leave. I couldn’t believe you were all still standing there.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered,” Takuda said. “The Kurodama was on the property the whole time.” Takuda told Mori of Kimura’s disappearance in the van.

  “So Endo got his artifact back,” Suzuki said.

  “And we have nothing. Nothing,” Mori said. “After three years on the road, fighting the forces of darkness, we’ll have no work, no prospects, moving along at the whim of Counselor Endo. If he wants us out of Fukuoka today, we’ll have to leave. We’ll wander the islands, following the little jobs we’re allowed like sparrows after fallen grains of rice. We’ll be only as prosperous and happy as he allows us to be, until he needs us to clean up another mess, and then we’ll move there to do his bidding.”

  Suzuki looked up, his eyes blazing. “We must capture him.”

  Takuda glanced over at Yumi, who stared at Suzuki. “You mean,” she said, “we must capture Counselor Endo?”

  Suzuki nodded eagerly. He bared his teeth in an unpleasant grimace. “We should bind him with sutras and throw him in a well. Or a pit. Something to separate him from his base of power. That’s the way to start.”

  “That won’t stop him,” Takuda said.

  “No,” said Suzuki. “No, it won’t. If we want to stop him, we have to kill him. We have to eat him.”

  Takuda and Yumi sat back. Suzuki had crossed an invisible line. As narcoleptics slept and kleptomaniacs stole, so Suzuki ate, and his hunger devoured his rational thought. He believed that he could eat his problems. Suzuki had finally gone mad.

  “It’s not such a bad idea,” Mori said. “That would take care of the evidence right away.” He took the lid off a jar of seaweed flakes and peered inside. “We’d still have the bones to contend with, if there were bones.” He frowned at Takuda. “You seem to think he isn’t human. Do you think he has bones? Would we make soup?”

  Takuda heard his own knuckles popping under the table. Yumi laid a cool hand on his forearm.

  “I’m committed to not finding out about anyone’s bones today,” Takuda said quietly.

  Mori feigned disappointment.

  “You’re mocking me,” Suzuki said, “but it’s the only way to stop him. I’m serious.”

  Mori leaned halfway out of the booth, away from Suzuki. “You’re not going to eat me for disagreeing, are you?”

  Suzuki grinned at him, a strange rictus of the mouth that Takuda had seen before. Maybe it’s more than madness, Takuda thought. Maybe the Kurodama set him off.

  “Well,” Takuda said. “At least there are groceries to hold us through tomorrow, and tomorrow’s going to be a busy day. I have to attend the cremation . . .”

  “Whose cremation? Inaba the gambler’s?”

  Takuda bowed. “They have no friends or family. It’s going to be rushed, of course, to beat the press, and I feel obligated to serve.”

  “I could go,” Suzuki said.

  Takuda hesitated. “You’re not invited,” he said finally, “and you need to look for work. After the ceremony, I’m going to talk to Ota again.” He pretended interest in the tabletop. “Maybe he can find us something.” Even if I have to beg, he thought. I can’t ask Yumi to keep living like this.

  “And I have work tomorrow,” Yumi said, “until the phone call comes that I don’t. That will be any day now.”

  “Well,” said Mori, “I can pay for one more dinner here, if your Koji ever comes to serve us.”

  Suzuki flushed. “He’s not my Koji.”

  Takuda was satisfied. If the worst Mori did was tease Suzuki about his crush on the waiter, that was more than acceptable. But as Mori and Suzuki bickered, he leaned over and whispered to Yumi, “Make sure the priest has enough groceries tonight. Let’s not let him get hungry.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Wednesday Morning

  “It’s really a nuisance,” said the apartment manager. “Their social ser­vices caseworker should be here, but he said he had to make the rounds, roust the unemployed, and get them out looking for work. I don’t envy him that job. A never-­ending struggle.”

  The crematorium waiting room was silent except for the apartment manager, and Takuda ate his boxed lunch while the man talked. The lunch was a stale, soggy mass of rice and fried vegetables that was supposed to be tempura but tasted of curry. He thought several times just to set it aside, but as he was unsure where his next meal was coming from, he kept eating.

  “This is a depressing place, isn’t it? Cardboard coffins, old ambulance gurneys to transport bodies, stale box lunches.” The apartment manager tossed his aside. “This is the only kind of place that accepts the charity cases the city sends them, I suppose. What a sad place to be disposed of.”

  Takuda didn’t look around. He had seen it all, from the dusty, ailing plants to the discolored imitation granite flooring. Takuda himself had never even been to a crematorium with a waiting area, but he was a country boy, and from a backward area, at that. Even when he had been a detective in the capital of his home prefecture, the mourners had dispersed when the body was removed for cremation, returning after the bones had cooled enough to be placed in the funerary urns.

  This crematorium was so cheap there was no attendant to stay with the bodies. Takuda had waited alone, with the bodies in cardboard coffins perched on their battered gurneys. Of course he had peeked.

  Inaba the gambler’s wife was in a black plastic body bag, for which Takuda was immensely grateful. Inaba himself was under a white sheet. He had a cheap nylon shirtfront and suit, a one-­piece thing that opened at the back. It was tucked in underneath him very poorly, but it was all going to burn in a few moments anyway. Fake plastic shoes had been jammed on his feet. His face was puffy and greenish, as if he had died of liver disease rather than blood loss. His nostrils were stuffed with cotton to prevent leakage, and his jaw had been fixed shut. Maybe his teeth had been glued together. Takuda didn’t want to know badly enough to touch the corpse. Inaba’s slashed throat was covered with a beige bandage through which the rough, black sutures bulged visibly.

  Like my new scars coming up, Takuda thought.

  Takuda had let the sheet drop and closed the cardboard coffin again just as the apartment manager had arrived. The attendants had wheeled the bodies off to the cremation chamber on his signal.

  “The whole thing is inconvenient, that’s all,” the apartment manager said as Takuda finished the dismal boxed lunch. “They had no family, no friends, no one but a neighbor and a landlord’s proxy to mourn them.” He looked at Takuda, sizing him up. “They were always late with the rent, even though I knew exactly when they got it. These subsidized cases are a real handful sometimes, especially when they get in on a regular lease and then things go sour. You can never get them out. Never.” He sighed. “They said your brother-­in-­law helped them out sometimes. The tall one.” He sipped coffee. “He stays over a lot, doesn’t he?”

  “He’s a priest in a small sect. He’s got calls all over the northern part of the island, sometimes farther south,” Takuda said. “He sometimes sleeps over for convenience and safety. It’s always nice to have a priest on the premises, isn’t it?”

  “Didn’
t help much this time, did it? Where did you say his temple is, or did you say?”

  A sleepy-­eyed youth in a tight, shiny suit cut for nightclubbing stepped in to tell them that the cremation was completed.

  They followed him out across the grimy lobby. Ahead were brass-­bound double doors. The attendant in the nightclub suit opened the doors with a smooth, practiced air. He escorted them into a spare, dim room. A young monk with mild acne stood at the foot of the gurneys, which now held stainless steel trays covered with bones.

  Takuda drew closer. The bones were laid out more or less in the shape of human bodies, with the tumbled toe bones facing the young monk, the ribs and vertebrae laid out neatly in the middle, and the skulls sitting at the heads of the trays. Each gurney was overarched by a rolling tray, a repurposed over-­the-­bed hospital tray table. On each of these tray tables was a plain ceramic urn that Takuda and the apartment manager would fill with the bones of the dead. Takuda assumed they would push the tray tables along as they went.

  “Are you family of the deceased?” the monk asked.

  “No, we’re not,” the apartment manager said. “I really have to go soon. Would you please start ­chanting?”

  The monk blinked, then reached into his robe for his beads. He started to chant the “Expedient Means” chapter of the Lotus Sutra. Takuda realized he was a monk of the Tendai sect, the sect Suzuki referred to as “the heretics of Mt. Hie.”

  Another reason it’s good I didn’t bring the priest. It would have turned into a brawl.

  “Look,” the apartment manager whispered, “I know this is unusual, but why don’t you take one, and I’ll take the other? I have to dash, so I’ll leave you the hyoid bones and the skulls, okay?”

  Takuda bowed in assent. The less this man touches the bones, the better.

  Using oversized chopsticks designed for the purpose, they put bones in the urns, starting with the toe bones. The apartment manager all but pitched them in, moving quickly from phalanges to metatarsals to shattered long bones. The bones the apartment manager worked on were grayish, shadowed almost blue, but the bones on Takuda’s table were pearly white, almost as white as the urns themselves. The long bones had been broken up for ease of loading into the urns, but as Takuda picked up one length of femur, he noticed an indentation along the length of the bone. He held it up to the light; it was an incision. It was the woman’s femur, and the knife had cut into the bone.

  My kitchen knife, or the black stone knife? He stood holding the bone in the oversized chopsticks for a long moment while the apartment manager tossed bones into his urn.

  . . . clunk . . . clunk . . . clunk. . .

  How many died because of that stone knife?

  . . . clunk. . .

  The boy Haruma, almost surely.

  . . . clunk. . .

  Thomas Fletcher.

  . . . clunk. . .

  The girl at Able English Institute.

  . . . clunk. . .

  How many at the cafeteria? I never even counted.

  . . . clunk. . .

  The gambler and his wife.

  . . . clunk. . .

  Kimura. Poor, conceited Kimura.

  . . . clunk. . .

  He dropped the fragment into the urn and worked his way up to the shattered hip bones.

  The apartment manager sidled over to him. “Okay,” he whispered, “you have the hyoid and skull over here . . . still on the ribs? I must have gone too fast, but I do have to be elsewhere. I’m honored that I could take part at all.” He bowed to the monk, bowed to Takuda, and then bowed toward the gurneys while holding his palms together and muttering prayers from a different sect altogether.

  After he left, Takuda transferred bones. They echoed over the droning of the young monk.

  Finally, Takuda reached the hyoid bone, the delicate arch of bone from the throat that allows speaking, swallowing, and breathing. He placed it gently on top of the other bones.

  It was time to break up the skull. He looked around for the attendant. There was no one to help. The young monk droned on, pretending not to notice Takuda’s dilemma.

  Makes sense, Takuda thought. Just a drunken reprobate and his wife. No one cares about a hanger-­on at the boat races.

  There was no one else to do it. He plunged the oversized chopsticks into the brittle skull of the gambler’s wife. It split with a muffled crack.

  Just another drunken gambler. He stabbed again.

  . . . crack. . .

  Just another silly schoolgirl.

  . . . crack. . .

  Just another mad foreigner.

  . . . crack. . .

  Just another gay boy.

  . . . crack. . .

  The skull lay in plates, ready to line the top of the urn. He placed them carefully.

  He moved to Inaba’s tray. The hyoid bone was often placed by two mourners using two pairs of funerary chopsticks. Takuda did it by himself, just as he had for the wife. As he prepared to break up Inaba’s skull, he noticed a tiny bit of bone at the base of the urn. The apartment manager had been in such a hurry that one of the smaller bones had missed the urn altogether.

  Takuda picked it up. A toe bone, it seemed, too small for a finger, one bone from Inaba’s tiny, delicate little feet. Takuda sighed as he placed the bone in the urn. It was all backward, a toe bone going in the top of the urn instead of the bottom, where it should have gone in.

  Something about the toe bone nagged at him as he began to break up the skull.

  . . . crack. . .

  Something about those little feet sticking out from under the blue plastic sheet.

  . . . crack. . .

  Black socks. Tiny feet in black socks. Takuda paused with the chopsticks hovering above Inaba’s skull like the bill of some hideous, bone-­puncturing bird. Inaba had been wearing black socks when he died in his apartment, Sunshine Heights 203. The Kurodama had been in Takuda’s apartment, Sunshine Heights 201. Whoever had burst through that apartment wall had spread plaster dust all over Takuda’s apartment. The apartment manager had personally vacuumed up as much as he could, with a promise to have the mats professionally cleaned or replaced. The footprints Takuda had seen were prints of stockinged feet, but much too big to be Inaba’s feet.

  Inaba’s socks hadn’t shown a trace of plaster dust. Inaba had been framed in his death.

  Proof positive that someone had gone through Inaba’s apartment to get to the Kurodama. Someone had butchered Inaba’s wife and then stabbed him in the throat to frame him for the jellyfish killings.

  Pointless.

  . . . crack. . .

  It would have been easier to just steal the Kurodama.

  . . . crack. . .

  Perhaps it wasn’t so simple. Perhaps there was some truth to Endo’s claims that he couldn’t affect these things directly. There was a blood debt to pay. Endo had been willing to pay the price with other ­people’s blood.

  Takuda was angry, but his hands were steady as he placed Inaba’s skull in the urn. When he was finished, he put down the funerary chopsticks, recited a verse of the Lotus Sutra, and walked out. The stylish attendant rushed after to hand him a certificate of cremation, which he refused.

  He had made a decision. He had more pressing responsibilities to the dead.

  CHAPTER 32

  Wednesday Afternoon

  The old castle grounds were deserted. Takuda, Mori, and Suzuki walked in silence, first up the hill past the old moat and then into the winding gardens planted among the remaining fortifications.

  “So it’s all pretty clear from the newspapers,” Mori said. “They pinned the jellyfish killings on Inaba the gambler. It all wraps up pretty neatly.”

  “Not neatly enough,” Takuda said. “There was really no need for anyone to die. Thomas Fletcher wasn’t going to talk to Japanese officials about the Kuro
dama, and if he did, who would believe him? The gambler and his wife were just a ruse. ”

  Suzuki said, “Maybe it was a cover so that Endo’s masters couldn’t see that he was bending the rules he always talks about.”

  Takuda looked around as they climbed winding roadways to the highest point of the castle ruins. The massive granite blocks were a perfect backdrop for summer foliage. With the droning of early cicadas a reminder of the hotter summer to come, the shaded walk up to the top of the stonework was a pleasant break from the sweltering concrete downtown.

  They wound upward through the fortifications, now a garden of azaleas, camellias, and begonias in the shade of plum, cherry, and dogwood trees. The walkway narrowed to a gravel path. The stone ramp of the castle’s upper keep rose to the north. The ramp doubled back on itself and led them to a narrow stairway of dressed stone. At the top of that stairway lay a cramped courtyard and the stairs of a steel superstructure rooted into the highest level of the castle ruins. At the top of those stairs, a ten-­meter square of boilerplate steel let them look out on the city from the castle summit.

  Low, rounded mountains rose green in the south. Takuda looked north for a glimpse of the bay, but the buildings were just too dense. He breathed it in, enjoying the break from the city, surprised that a little oasis like this wasn’t crowded, even on a weekday.

  “What are we looking for?” Takuda asked Mori.

  Mori stood still in the center of the boilerplate, his feet spread wide and his fists deep in his pockets. “First, we have to talk about history and geography.”

  Suzuki struck an attentive pose.

  Mori pretended to ignore him. “Right over there, where the old baseball stadium is, stood the Korokan, a seventh-­century waystation for travelers going to and from China. Much of our culture came through this gateway from Japan to the rest of the world. Our written language, our drama, our weaponry, our basic social structure, all flowed through the Korokan. The light of Buddhism entered here. The light, and also darkness.”