by Zoe Drake
Jewell nodded his head gravely. “This time the challenge was too much for him.”
Weiss fidgeted in his chair; his guts were beginning to complain once more. “Look, what we should do is forget our protocols and schedules for the moment and try to find out what went wrong, don’t you think? We owe it to Ayin.”
Marcus Jewell shifted in his seat. “Thank you, Professor. This is disturbing, most disturbing. I’m afraid that we’ll have to lift the ban and try translating the Codex, despite the risks.”
Those sitting around the circle looked glumly at each other. Sinclair shook his head, whispering something to Julia.
“Professor,” Jewell announced, “I suggest you return to Italy to find out more. You’d better go with him, John, as this is partly your responsibility.”
Julia’s sharp gaze flicked from the priest, to Elemanzer, to Jewell. “And what about us?”
“Naturally, you’ll both be welcome. Won’t they?”
After a moment’s pause, the priest nodded his head.
Jewell turned in his chair to address the rest of the assembled members. “Ladies and gentlemen of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim, let me ask for your prayers and meditation. Be with the Professor in spirit. Be his strength, his guardians…”
Jewell traced an unnamed sigil in the air with a long, manicured forefinger.
“And I,” he said, “shall consult a higher authority.”
Chapter Five
Osorezan
There was a smell in the air, a smell that David noticed the moment he opened the car door, leaving the air-conditioned interior to stand in the middle of the parking lot. It was the smell of sulphur. The smell of brimstone, volcanoes, geysers bubbling out of the earth.
To the west of the road they’d travelled by was a lake. “Lake Usoriyama,” Mrs. Yoshida had announced. “The lake of the spirits.” Beyond it on the horizon stood a range of mountains, their summits lost in the cloudy haze.
David and the Yoshida family stood in front of the entrance to Entsuji Temple. He stared at the grotesquely weathered stonework of the three Buddha statues that reared up in front of the gate. Each of their hands were frozen in different arcane gestures, eyes in their pitted grey heads downcast, their expressions unreadable.
Around the gate milled a tangle of visiting tourists in sunhats and light summer jackets. On the other side of the waste ground sat the coaches and cars that had brought them, and a row of antique-looking wooden shops and stalls vying for the visitors’ attention.
In his guidebook, David had read that the Osorezan temple complex lay on the Shimokita Peninsula, where the northernmost tip of the Honshu mainland ended and the sea leading to Hokkaido began. The mountain was actually something called a composite volcano, with the lake inside the crater. Apparently only one species of fish could survive in the waters of the lake: the Ugui.
The guidebook had tried to describe the strangeness of the place; in David’s eyes, it had failed. Approaching the gate, David had the uncanny feeling that the stone heads of the colossal Buddha figures were watching him. He looked back at the lake and the distant mist-covered mountains. The mournful sight made him think they had entered a place where natural laws no longer operated. Something felt very wrong.
At Mrs. Yoshida’s suggestion, they took a wooden bench inside one of the shops and asked for bowls of kakigori – finely shaved ice flavoured with fruity, sugary syrup. The mother and father muttered their blessings and began to scoop the icy mush out of their bowls. The chilled sickly sweetness made David’s teeth ache. Saori picked at hers, saying nothing, looking pensive. She was out of school uniform today, wearing a black skirt and a light black cardigan over a T-shirt, jeans and sturdy-looking sports boots with thick white laces. As usual, she had only the slightest touch of make-up on her clear skin.
As David tried to finish the sticky confection dissolving in front of him, he glanced around at the other customers. Not many seemed to be below the age of sixty. He looked around at dulled faces stained with liver spots beneath almost identical cloth sun-hats, hunched figures with sticklike arms poking out of their short polo shirt sleeves.
“Entsuji Temple,” Mrs. Yoshida was saying. “It is the very famous temple of Osorezan, do you know? It was founded long, long time ago by the monk, Jikaku Daishi. He had gone to China and in the China, he had a dream. The very powerful dream told him to come back to Japan and walk east for thirty days, and he would come to a special place, a most sacred place. And so he did that.”
“So he discovered this mountain? Osorezan?” David guessed.
“Sono tori desu.” That’s right.
“One thing,” Mr. Yoshida confided, leaning over his plate of blueberry slush. “Gomen nasai, David. We are sorry but this place has no beer.”
David couldn’t stop his face from dropping its smile. “Oh.”
“A temple, you see. Buddhist. No meat, no alcohol.”
David nodded sagely, shrugging his shoulders. “Well, not to worry. That doesn’t seem to deter the crowds, does it?”
Mr. Yoshida followed David’s gaze to the line of elderly tourists with backpacks and walking sticks, standing in front of the cashier’s desk. “We have a saying in Japan,” he said. “Heaven’s nets are large, and they catch everything.”
“Otsukare, David-sensei,” Mrs. Yoshida said. “You must be very tired! Let’s check in to the hotel.”
Leaving the shop, they wheeled their suitcases away from the main temple entrance, down a path that led to a modest three-story concrete building. Most of the buildings had stainless steel roofs, the guidebook said, to prevent the corrosive effects of the sulfur. David had a sudden vision of Osorezan as a frontier post, with warning notices saying ‘Conventional reality stops here! Proceed beyond this point at you own risk!’
The path was lined on both sides with blue tarpaulin tents: something to do with the Itako festival, David guessed. “I thought we’d be staying inside the temple,” he whispered to Saori.
“We are,” she whispered back. “Wait and look inside.”
The reception desk was manned by monks. Some of them had the customary shaven heads, some had hair with the short tidy partings of businessmen, but all of them wore the brown and orange robes of the temple.
Mr. Yoshida gave David the keys to his room. “Wash your face, David, and meet us here in the lobby.”
As he’d expected, it was a room of tatami straw-mat flooring, a low table coming up to knee-height set in the center. Floor cushions were arranged in a corner. Along one wall stood the wardrobe with sliding doors where he knew the futons were kept. He unpacked the change of clothes he’d brought, washed his hands, checked his hair in the mirror and returned to the lobby.
Mrs. Yoshida was busying herself with the parasol that she’d brought. Even though the day was overcast, she wore clothes that concealed every inch of her skin: a thin cardigan that stretched to her wrists, a white skirt that went down to her ankles.
“David-sensei, shall we take a walk? While we try to make an appointment for tomorrow, perhaps you would like to see the grounds? Saori will walk and talk with you for while, desu sho? Jya – dozo.”
Leaving the hotel and turning right, Saori led him back to the main concrete path to Entsuji Temple. The path was lined by massive stone lanterns, each one twice the height of a normal human being.
In front of the solemn green pagodas of the temple, Saori stopped and pointed to the left. David saw an open gate of the same leaden stone, and beyond it canyon-like surfaces that blocked his view, and at the end a steep narrow flight of wooden steps leading up a muddy hill. There were no trees, just anaemic-looking shrubs up on the hill. A sign in kanji told them this was the beginning of the walking course. David looked around and peered through the gate.
“Shall we go in?” asked Saori hesitantly.
Chapter Six
The Lake of the Dead
With gravel beneath his feet, the sky above a cloudless glaring blue that almost hurt to look at, Da
vid looked around at the stony gulch he found himself in. It was like standing on the surface of the Moon, except the Moon didn’t have steam rising up through cracks in the ground, didn’t have the stench of sulphur filling the air, didn’t have the mocking cries of crows echoing across the stones. David and Saori started to walk along a path between large rocky mounds that blocked their view of the landscape. Wisps of foul-smelling steam issued from cracks in the heaps around them, but it wasn’t this that disturbed David the most; it was the statues.
Around them at irregular intervals, a number of small figurines lined the path. Sitting on top of columns of pebbles and flat pieces of stone, they were short, roughly hewn things, lumpy torsos only vaguely humanoid, faces blackened and scarred with age. Some were a foot tall, some only a few centimeters. They all had bright red cloth wrapped around their necks, like bibs. And in front of them…
Scattered before the tiny stone gods, like offerings, were items of children’s clothing. No, David realized; they were offerings. Hats. Gloves. Coats. Toys. All spread out upon the yellow earth. The smell of incense now mixed with the sulfur, wafted on the hot and heavy air.
David pointed at a gathering of the figurines. “You remember where we stopped on the road, to wash our hands?”
This was, for some reason, amusing to Saori. “Yes, to purify ourselves before we entered Osorezan.”
“I saw a lot of those small statues back there. What do those red bib things mean?”
Saori gazed at the dwarfish, lumpen figures surrounding them. “Red is the color of defense against demons,” she explained. “The statues are Mizukojizo – dedicated to children. Jizo is a Buddhist god – well, maybe like a saint. Protector of children. This is a children’s place, David.”
The young man blinked. He couldn’t imagine a place more unappealing to children.
They walked deeper into the morbid strangeness, the shimmering sunlight picking out the details of the scene around them. No other visitors were visible, but they could hear human voices, their words floating disembodied in the haze, mixed in with the cawing of the crows.
“Jizo,” Saori continued, “is the guardian of the souls of dead children. After death, their souls must go to the Sai-no-Kawara – the river that leads to the world beneath.”
“It sounds like the River Styx.”
“Do you mean from Greek myth? Yeah, I guess so. That’s what all the children’s toys and clothes lying around mean. Parents whose children have died come here to pray for them. They leave offerings.”
David stared down at a jacket that could have fit a five-year-old, laid out in front of a monstrously weathered Jizo figurine. “You mean, the child’s possessions?”
“Yes. And they plant those. How do you say that in English?”
David looked. It was a child’s plastic windmill. There were about a dozen of them nearby, blue and orange and pink, making a faint rattling noise as they spun round, plucked by the fingers of a fitful breeze.
“They’re called windmills.”
Saori led the way to a tall statue of Jizo, taller than the rest and serving as a landmark to navigate in the eerie barren landscape. There were mounds of stones everywhere along the path like miniature volcanoes, rocks piled up in blunt cone shapes, thin yellowish exhalations seeping through the cracks and adding to the stench. He read the faded kanji characters on the rotting wooden plaques that marked the area: the Infinite Inferno. The Thousand Armed Goddess. The Temple of the Master Monk who Awakened in Mercy.
Saori went on: “You know what I was saying about the river to the underworld? There’s a story of a demoness called Shozuka-no-Baba who lives there. She steals the children’s clothing and makes the children’s spirits pile up columns of stones by the sides of the river. She tells them if they make the towers high enough, they’ll be able to reach heaven. But the demoness and her pack of followers always try to knock the towers of stones over as soon as they’re finished.”
Thick, greasy sweat was matting down David’s hair and oozing over his brow. He started mopping his face with the towel-handkerchief from his rucksack. “That means it never ends,” he said.
“But Jizo is there to save them. He drives the demons away and hides the little children in the big sleeves of his robe. Then he takes them to heaven.”
The path to the statue led them past two of the biggest crows David had seen in his life. Fat brutes with black glossy feathers, resting on two wooden posts, they regarded the pair of humans with disdainful eyes as they walked.
David eyed them cautiously. “A couple of guardian spirits?”
“Disgusting things, I wish the monks could do something about them. They take away the snacks that people put down as offerings. Why can’t they leave the spirits in peace?”
David grimaced. “Sent by that old woman demoness, maybe.”
No other birds sang here, David realized, there was only the rasp of the crows. Sound was muted and distorted. The chirping of crickets, the wind in the trees; all the natural sounds were absent. There only remained the crows and a tiny squeaking and rattling; the sound of the bright plastic windmills, spun round by the fetid breeze.
Behind the tall statue of Jizo the ground turned the color of old blood. They took a footpath going down to the lake, the red earth becoming softer and moister beneath their feet. Things lined their path, things like stone torsos without heads with red bibs draped around their stumps of neck, relics from a tragic childhood scattered upon the stones before them; a wooly hat, a child’s bib decorated with teddy bears and the English words Happy Go Lucky, a blue toy car, a blurred photo of a teenager set among freshly cut flowers.
The path to the lake led them to a number of small wooden bridges set across tiny streams of sluggishly moving water. The River of Three Crossings, said the Japanese inscription written on a piece of material that looked like driftwood, hung on the bridge post at a precarious angle. Saori told him that the bridge led to Gokurakuhama – the Shore of the Home of the Happy Dead. The colour of the soil now changed from red to entirely white, volcanic ash underfoot leading down to the lake. The piles of rocks fell away, and within minutes Saori and David were walking by themselves upon a lonely beach, the shore giving them a view across misty waters to desolate mountains in the distance.
As they got closer to the edge of the water, David peered harder at the sand. It looked as if the beach had sprouted hairs. In many places the sand had been shaped into small conical mounds, and in each of these, at dead center, someone had placed a wooden twig, pointing straight up at the sky.
He swore under his breath.
A lone gazebo stood at the edge of the lake. Three wooden branches for a roof, inside a metal bucket for an ashtray, a couple of trash cans, two old wooden placards with painted kanji letters peeling away.
Saori pointed to the gazebo. “David, shall we sit down for a while?”
They sat down on the damp wooden bench and looked out at the lake.
It was like arriving at the end of the world. It was difficult for David to remember that back beyond the gates of the walking ground, beyond the colossal stone Buddhas standing guard at the gates of the Temple, the country called Japan still existed. It was even more difficult to believe that England still existed. Here at the lake, the water and the sand assumed a diamond-hard clarity, and David’s previous life seemed a distant dream.
“David,” the girl said eventually, “I didn’t tell you exactly how Ayano died.”
“I didn’t like to ask,” he replied after a pause. “I thought it might have been some kind of…accident.”
“Yes. Yes, they said it was an accident.”
A voice from further down the beach made David turn his head. An elderly woman walked along the shore, alone, and it looked like she was singing to herself.
“It was an experiment,” Saori said.
The old woman stopped and faced the waters of the lake. She took something from the bag, put it to her lips, and then tossed it into the murky water.
“Ayano was doing volunteer work at a university hospital. Well, not exactly volunteer work, because they received a little money, but this wasn’t a job. It was a research project.”
“Scientific research?”
“Yes, doing research into sleep.” Saori made a gesture around her head. “They had that kind of technology that scans your brain and takes measurements, do you know what I mean?.”
“Brain waves? Like MRI?”
“Yes. Yes, that was it.”
The hairs on David’s neck prickled and he realized there were goose-bumps coming up on his arms. Chicken-skin, the Japanese would say. You are frighted and you have the chicken-skin.
“Ayano was put into the equipment, and she fell asleep. But something went wrong.”
The girl stopped, and David tried to think of something to prompt her. “Some kind of reaction?”
“I don’t know. The doctors told us that her heart stopped during treatment.” Saori sniffed, blinking rapidly as her eyes filled up with emptiness, like the same emptiness glittering on the surface of the lake in front of them. “She never woke up.”
The urge to touch her became almost overwhelming. “I’m so sorry…”
She lifted up her head and her pellucid eyes met his in the lakeside silence. David felt that if he moved, even breathed, the scene might shatter into pieces like a broken mirror.
“We went to see Ayano’s body and her face was wrapped with bandages, because the doctors had to break her jaw to close it. She was screaming…”
Saori’s voice faltered, and she had to turn aside, brushing away tears. “She was screaming when she died. They told us she died in her sleep, we thought that meant she died peacefully.” She stopped, unable to go on.
I’m going mad, David thought, in rising panic. Or Saori’s mad. She can’t mean what she’s saying. This place is enough to send anyone round the twist, maybe the morbid atmosphere has got to her.