The Devouring God

by James Kendley

  They both turned toward something Takuda couldn’t see: the older stonework section. “It’s an old iron door,” Mori said, “older than the kitchen stove even. This is Meiji-­era shipyard work. You have to see this thing.”

  Takuda started knocking out bricks again. He was too big to get through the hole he had made for Mori and Suzuki.

  They moved out of his line of sight while he worked on the bricks. He heard them arguing about whether to open it or not, whether to wait for him, Suzuki becoming insistent that he wanted the Kurodama, had to have it . . .

  Takuda started kicking in the bricks. They shattered under his boots. He was almost ready to step in when he heard a low shifting, almost too low for his range of hearing, and Mori crying out in surprise.

  Oh, you stupid priest, you’re going in without thinking. He used his knees to smash away a section of half a dozen bricks.

  Suddenly, Mori stood in front of him on the other side, gesturing for him to come through the hole. Just as he was about to yell for Mori to get Suzuki away from the iron door, Mori grabbed the front of his jumpsuit.

  It was too late. Mori’s hands were swept away as a wall of falling bricks and shattering plaster drove Takuda to his knees. The alley had collapsed upon him. He was covered, smothered, and darkness closed in on him.

  CHAPTER 34

  Thursday Morning

  The bricks and shattered plaster covering Takuda were surprisingly comforting. The warm, reassuring weight of it made him sleepy, so sleepy he barely noticed there was no air, no light, and no real warmth. He barely noticed the brickbat corners digging into his skull. He barely noticed that he was dying.

  Something pulled him. It forced his fingers to dig, forced his back to bow under the weight of masonry and earth, and forced his knees to draw up beneath him. He wanted only to lie there and sleep, if only for a few moments, but the massive presence of which he was only a tiny part forced him to stand in a flood of rubble.

  When he finally opened his eyes, Mori and Suzuki stood gaping at him. Suzuki still held a brick. Mori finally released the length of rotted rafter he’d been digging with.

  “How long was I under there?”

  “Minutes,” Mori said. “Just a few minutes.”

  Suzuki dropped the brick. “You’re getting stronger,” he said. “I didn’t think it possible.”

  “That should have crushed you,” Mori said. “It should have broken your skull and flattened your rib cage.”

  Takuda rubbed dust and brick chips out of his hair. He wondered idly if the horns and the extra bone in his face had protected him. “At least it wasn’t a supporting wall for the Zenkoku Sales building.”

  Suzuki laughed in appreciation and relief. Mori sat suddenly, losing his balance at the end and falling sideways. They grabbed him by the collar so he didn’t hit his head on the concrete floor.

  Takuda waded out of the bricks and rubble as Mori made the feeble gesture of fighting off Suzuki’s help. Takuda brushed himself off while watching them. His uniform was dusty but unmarred. Ota isn’t stingy about the uniforms, at least, Takuda thought. Good old Ota. Maybe we should take him up on his offer.

  Takuda looked around. The room was the size of a tennis court. The walls were white, all I-­beams, concrete pillars, and exposed plumbing. Folding tables and chairs stood stacked against the far wall. Block-­and-­tackle rigs on pulleys long since painted immobile hung on rails running the length of the ceiling above a long drain set into the painted floor. At the end of the drain, to Takuda’s right, a low, ornate iron door was set into the irregular stones of the wall. The other walls were modern cinder block, but the wall to his right was of much older construction. The ornamentation of the door itself suggested prewar fabrication, perhaps even from the nineteenth century. The iron door was black, as if it had been oiled or varnished. It had been taken care of.

  Takuda walked to it. The latch was simple. He lifted the latch, opened the door on silent hinges, and stooped inside.

  There was sand. There were scattered bones, human bones. There was a low, rectangular stone altar. Mori and Suzuki suddenly crowded the entrance, shutting off what little light came in the door, so Takuda took out his flashlight. Beside the altar lay an elaborately decorated human skull, gaping at Takuda as if surprised to meet him in this dark, sandy place.

  Takuda flipped the lid off the altar. A corner of it smashed the skull. One wood-­and-­ivory eye popped out into the sand.

  The Kurodama lay in the altar. Takuda grasped it by the blade and rapped it against the edge of the altar. It took three tries to break the lozenge-­shaped handle off the blade. Takuda realized it would have been easier had he simply taken it out of the enclosure. It was strongest here, in its home.

  He was surprised he was immune to its powers, he thought as he turned to the door. His immunity really made it unnecessary to carry it in two pieces. He really should rejoin it just for the sake of convenience . . .

  Oh, you cunning little rock, I know all your tricks. You have no idea how many demons have spoken into my head.

  “What are you grinning about?” Mori asked as he stepped out of the shrine enclosure.

  Takuda just shook his head. “I got it.” He handed both halves to Suzuki. “Let’s figure out how to get out of here.”

  “It’s almost dawn,” Suzuki said as he slipped the Kurodama shards into the sleeves of his robes. “We’re going to run into employees. This could get nasty.”

  “It could,” Takuda said. “Hang on while I dig out my staff.”

  Mori was at his elbow the whole time he dug down into the bricks looking for his staff. “You’re leaving the Kurodama to the priest? It’s a bad idea. A bad, bad idea.”

  Takuda thought to answer, but he had just found his staff. He wormed it out carefully. He was strong enough to pull it out in one go, but there was no way to be sure it wouldn’t crack under the strain rather than simply passing among the bricks and rubble on the way up. Slowly but surely. . .

  “You’re not listening to me at all,” Mori hissed.

  “That’s true,” Takuda said. He ran his hands down the staff. A few nicks and deep scars. He was unreasonably pleased with himself. He and the staff were both buried, and he came out better than the staff.

  “Just think about it,” Mori said. “Do we know if it was Inaba or Zenkoku Security that put the two pieces of that stone knife back together? Are we sure it wasn’t the priest?”

  “I’m not sure of anything. But if the priest put it back together, that means he walked out of the apartment and left it there. That makes him safer than most, doesn’t it?” He smiled and hefted the staff over his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The double doors were locked tight. Takuda strained against the knobs, which came off in his hands. He could not budge the steel doors themselves, and the hinges were buried in poured concrete within the hollows of I-­beams.

  “The ceiling is even worse with those slabs between the steel beams,” Mori said. “What did they build this room for anyway?”

  “We might have to scramble back up,” Takuda said. He pointed up the heap of rubble. A ragged hole at the top showed a tiny glimmer of predawn light.

  Suzuki and Mori exchanged glances. “You can try it,” Suzuki said, “but you’ll need to bring us a rope and haul us up. We’re not like you.”

  “Right. Right.” Takuda turned and turned, looking for a way out. “We don’t have any wall to go through.”

  Suzuki pointed at the cinder blocks beside the door. “What’s that?”

  A sheet of paper was taped to the wall at chest height. The painted concrete floor was smeared with hastily swept concrete dust.

  Takuda poked his finger through the paper. “There’s a whole cinder block missing here,” he said. He stood back as Suzuki ripped the rest of the paper free and tried to stick his head through the wall. “Allow me
,” Takuda said, aiming the butt of his staff at the cinder block below the hole.

  The noise was tremendous, and they were sure security would come running. When they were done, Mori pushed between them to be first into the hole. “I’m smallest,” he whispered as he wriggled in feet first. “Putting the priest in here would be like shoving a noodle through a straw.”

  Takuda resisted the urge to push Mori through by the top of his big, brainy head.

  “It’s a broom closet,” Mori hissed through the hole. “Come on through.”

  As Mori wrangled Suzuki through the hole, Takuda looked again at the chest-­high hole they had started with. He stood before it and then turned slowly until he faced the cracked and yellowed projection screen hanging from the pulleys above the drainage trough. Someone had been watching murder movies in this awful place. That person had written a precise description of a murder movie and dropped it into Suzuki’s begging bowl.

  “Come on through,” Mori hissed.

  Takuda squeezed in. There was no sign of a projector, just a broom closet. They cracked the door and crept out.

  It wasn’t a hallway as much as a tunnel. The stone walls were painted an ancient tapioca green and lit with incandescent bulbs in tiny cages, the lighting itself powered via rusting conduit pipe strapped haphazardly onto the stone. The tunnels wound around pilings and boiler rooms, past padlocked storerooms, piles of worn furniture, and a security office with security camera monitors turned off. An aged security guard with his shoes off and his feet up slept at the desk. They dropped to their knees and crawled past carefully.

  After the security office, the tunnel went up three steps, continued for two meters, went down three steps, and then took a hard right into darkness. There the tunnel narrowed to shoulder-­width. Takuda went first, trying to keep away from the left wall, covered as it was with water pipes and electrical conduit. The tunnel took a ninety-­degree right turn and opened into a tiny elevator lobby. There were no stairs.

  Mori swore so eloquently that even Suzuki looked impressed.

  “We must have missed something,” Takuda said. “There has to be another way out of the basement.”

  “There was nothing else,” Mori retorted. There was no other way to go.

  They both turned to see Suzuki moving a dusty plastic plant and a folding screen to reveal a steel door. He turned the knob quietly and grinned at them over his shoulder. He opened the door before they could whisper for him to stop.

  He looked in, then turned to them and whispered, “Stairs.”

  The fire door at the next landing up had a narrow, reinforced glass pane looking out into the darkened lobby. Mori reached for the knob, but Suzuki touched his sleeve.

  Out in the lobby, a burly security guard strolled past the circular reception desk toward the elevator bank. They waited till he had gone in and the door had closed behind him before they tiptoed out into the lobby.

  All but Mori. He ran to the reception desk and vaulted over. “In the Tenjin office, they keep the keys . . . right here.” He tossed the jingling ring of keys to Takuda, who was halfway to the massive, curving glass doors. Takuda caught them with his right hand and tucked his staff in his left armpit. The third key fit . . . and nothing happened.

  Suzuki stood back and waved his arms at the sensor, and the doors slid open with a hiss of muffled servomotors.

  “As easy as that,” Takuda said, tossing the keys into the shrubbery.

  “As easy as that,” panted Mori, catching up to them. They walked quickly and quietly back toward the college, past fallen earth between the Zenkoku Sales building and the abandoned cafeteria.

  “We forgot to turn the lights out,” Mori said, pointing toward the glow coming from the disturbed earth. Suzuki laughed and clapped Mori on the shoulder, and Mori didn’t shake the hand off this time.

  As they neared the park, Takuda thought he was glad, very glad, that Suzuki was keeping the two pieces of the Kurodama separate. Suzuki really was the best man for the job, having shown a virtual immunity toward it. It only made him hungry, really, and why not? He had a very fast metabolism. He was always hungry. Perhaps they should stop and get him some breakfast so he could carry his burden without undue strain . . .

  Takuda stopped in the darkened street. “Priest, where is the stone?”

  “It’s in my sleeve, of course. I mean, they are. In my sleeves. The two pieces.”

  Takuda brought his staff around. Cicadas awakened by dawn’s first rays in the treetops shrieked their greeting to the sun.

  “Priest,” Takuda whispered, “bring out the stone.”

  Mori held out a restraining hand. “Now, now, it’s safest in the priest’s robes. He really is the perfect man for the job.”

  Takuda felt a thin wedge of panic in his chest. “Priest, let me see it, or we’re going to have problems. Right now.”

  Suzuki, grinning shyly, drew the stone knife from his sleeve. It was whole again. “I couldn’t help myself,” he said. “I’m just so hungry.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Thursday Morning

  Takuda struck the Kurodama from Suzuki’s hands, and Mori stripped Suzuki of his sword. Suzuki dove for the stone knife with a cry of anguish, but Takuda drove him backward with his staff.

  Suzuki was drooling. “Just give it to me. This is what I was born to do. Don’t you see? This explains my hunger, my constant, raging hunger.”

  He squared his shoulders and stared into Takuda’s eyes. He was breathing hard, almost panting with the effort of keeping away from the curved jewel. “This explains everything.”

  Mori stood back with the swords. He had tried to keep Takuda between Suzuki and the curved jewel the whole time. He held his own sword at the hilt guard, ready to whip off the scabbard if Suzuki came at him.

  Takuda spread his arms as if to protect Mori. “Priest, why do you think it’s safe with you?”

  Suzuki all but wailed in frustration. “Because nothing can survive my hunger!”

  Takuda shook his head.

  Suzuki said, “Just let me have the Kurodama, and I’ll eat it, bit by bit. I can see evil now, you know. The curved jewel is all aglow with it, but there are little spots of it in everyone, hideous sparks of evil hiding in their hearts.” He leaned around Takuda to leer at Mori. “Some ­people have more than others.”

  Mori whipped the scabbard off his blade. “That’s it. You want to eat my heart? Come on.”

  Takuda turned and took Mori’s sword out of his hands. “It’s not time for drawn swords,” he said.

  Mori growled and made to draw the laundry-­pole sword. Takuda took it away as well. Mori stood unarmed, glaring at Takuda.

  Suzuki leaned over Takuda’s shoulder. “Just give me the curved jewel. I’ll scrape it down bit at a time. I won’t be bothering anyone.”

  Takuda stepped away to look at Suzuki without turning his back on Mori. “You’re sure, Priest? You’re sure it won’t just possess you from the inside out?”

  Suzuki laughed out loud. “I’ll grind it into sand and then into paste and then into jelly to fill my stomach. Believe me, it will not possess me.” He beamed. “I was born to possess it . . . in my belly!” Suzuki pointed to his laundry-­pole sword. “That blade will last long enough to shave it down.”

  “You’ll ruin it for good,” Mori said. “That’ll be worse than the time you tried to pry open a window with it.”

  Suzuki shook his head. “No one cares about that. I was born to consume evil, and this is the biggest evil I’ve ever seen. I’m ready. And I have the perfect place.”

  Mori retrieved his scabbard from the bushes. “We have to move. It’s almost dawn. Traffic is already steady out on Meiji Avenue.”

  Takuda said, “Priest, where is this place?”

  “Some of my friends, the beggars on the street, told me about it. It’s an abandoned warehouse on the wa
terfront, on the other side of West Park.”

  Mori wrinkled his nose. “That’s all refineries and yacht slips and so forth. It’s all fenced and gated.”

  “Not this place,” Suzuki said. “It’s right on the water. We just go through the park and under the expressway and walk along a little road, and then we walk right to it. It’s a group of abandoned warehouses, and the gate has come right off the hinges. Maybe my friends helped with that, but I don’t ask.” Suzuki leaned forward. “Here’s the best part,” he whispered.

  Takuda leaned forward, ready to smack him down if he seemed possessed by evil.

  “To get there,” Suzuki breathed, “we pass through the grounds of a little Zen temple, and we go past an elementary school, which will of course be consecrated, and then we go right up the road to West Park, which is a shrine road! The whole path is actually holy, though not for the reasons the pagans think.” He sang a snippet of the Toryanse:

  Going in is easy, but returning is scary.

  It’s scary, but you may pass, you may pass.

  Suzuki laughed aloud, but Mori scowled. “Enough children’s songs, Priest. We need to get this thing to deep water.”

  Takuda looked at Mori, and quick as a wink, Suzuki snatched the Kurodama from the pavement and secreted it in his sleeve. Mori moved on him, but Takuda held him back.

  “Priest, can you do this thing? Are you sure about this?”

  Suzuki nodded deeply, silent as a naughty child. He had his arms crossed tightly over his chest to protect the Kurodama, and he cut his eyes at Mori as if he expected the attempt at any second.

  The huge, dark presence in Takuda’s mind was wholly mute, as if it were asleep or absent. Nothing his parents had ever said helped him in this situation, nor any of his police training. But Yumi still likes Suzuki even when she’s frustrated, Takuda thought. She’s never steered us wrong.

  Takuda nodded and slammed the butt of his staff on the tarmac. The sound rang out in the narrow street. “Right, Priest. You have a lousy sense of direction, but if you have a route, let’s go.”