Abruptly as it had begun, it stopped.
“The world is ending tonight,” said Minoru in a plaintive voice, deep and gravelly, halfway between a moan and a growl.
Dog said nothing.
“They say,” Minoru went on, “no masters of the arts will appear when the world is coming to its end. So tell me, have you seen any great works of art lately? Even the flowers are gone in this season of death. Some would say there is art before our eyes, out there on the killing sand. But those so-called artists … feh! They do not call the eta butchers artists. If there is no art in butchering an animal, tell me then. What art in butchering men? No. The world is at its end.”
Dog only stared at the floor and rubbed life into his deadened feet, thankful for the abundance of space. He could stretch out for his last night of sleep if nothing else.
“Everything in the world is but a sham, and death is the only certainty,” said Minoru.
Dog paused, considering. The danger of lunatics was that they sometimes made sense.
“Would you like to know about my Jizō?” said Minoru, gesturing in the dark to the little excrement sculptures flanking him.
Dog shut his eyes and lay his head back. Maybe there would be no sleep on his last night after all.
“No,” he said. “Shut up.”
Dog could tell by Minoru’s voice that a grin had split his ghostly face.
“Ah! I thought maybe you were deaf and dumb. The doshin told you what I am, didn’t they?”
Dog shifted on his side, resting his ear on his palm.
“Yeah,” said Dog. “They told me.”
“As a jikininki, I am cursed to go digging for corpses in graveyards at night and to eat the dead. I eat every part. Their tongues, noses, their genitals … I eat their assholes. In life I was a samurai, proud and vain. These Jizō,” he said, as he again gestured to the invisible figurines. “They are both my curse and my salvation.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” said Dog. “Shut up.”
But Minoru went on as if he were deaf himself.
“You know how children who die before their parents are doomed to pile stones at the banks of the River Sanzu because they have not lived long enough to purify themselves with good karma? It came to me, while I was chewing on the leg of a nun I had dug up near Hiroshima that although the blessed divinity Ojizō-sama hides these children from demons beneath his robes when they are prayed for, there were still some children who might never make it across due to the unfortunate circumstances of their birth. I mean eta children. Who is more defiled spiritually from the womb to the grave than these poor, filthy creatures? Eta are a living blight, surely, but their little children … who prays for them, that blessed Ojizō-sama would deign to hear?”
Dog stared across the cell now, his blood beginning to simmer.
“And so I thought, what better savior for these muddy little souls, than a poor, damned jikininki? You see, I serve these unfortunates in two ways. Firstly, in cutting their lives short, I spare them a pitiful existence of uncleanness and spiritual debasement. Secondly, when I consume them, my body transmutes them, breaks down their impurities, and what I at last eliminate is their refined selves. I fashion these into little Jizō, to honor Ojizō-sama, so he may then take these neglected souls at last across the River Sanzu. Do you see how fine and loving a jikininki I am? In all of human history there has never been a jikininki like me. I am a savior to the eta. At night I hear their little voices calling to me from the banks of the River Sanzu, calling my name and thanking me. Thank you, Uncle Minoru! (they say) Bless you, jikininki! Bless you!”
Dog watched him splutter and shout in his excitement, watched the tears spill from his fish eyes. In the end, the monk was so overcome that he sobbed into his filthy sleeve.
Dog wanted to tell the fool he was eta. But why die at the disgusting hands of this monster, or dirty himself killing him? He was going to die anyway. Why not die as no eta ever had? By the shizai, like a legitimate person. Let him take that joke with him to the next world.
Minoru returned to his flute, and played haltingly for some time.
After a while, snow began to fall, and Dog heard a pair of wooden geta crunching across the grounds. In a few moments a samurai in dark clothes flaked with white came to stand before the cell. He was very pale, and meticulously groomed, obviously a person of worth and not any prison official he’d seen about. Surely he was no doshin.
Minoru continued to play, and the stranger listened. Then he moved and lit the lamp outside, shining light into the cell and becoming a featureless shadow.
Minoru lowered his stained flute and bowed respectfully to the stranger.
“’Evening, samurai,” he said, smiling a gap-toothed grin.
Dog could barely stand to look at him.
“You are the monk, Minoru,” said the stranger, in a cultured tone.
“I am he.”
“That honkyoku you’re playing … I’ve heard it before.”
“It’s called Shika No Tone,” said Minoru, and he smiled. “Do you remember it from your youth, young master Kamada?”
Dog looked sharply at the monk. What was he playing at?
Sadahiko stiffened at the sound of his own name. But this man had been here earlier today. He had probably watched the o-tameshi demonstration from his cell. He might have heard Lord Abe speak his name. Still, the monk’s familiarity was off-putting. He knew the heinous crimes this man had committed. The warden had told him all about them over tea before he’d excused himself to walk the grounds and take in the cool air.
But, he did remember having heard the tune as a boy. It was strange to be called ‘young master’ again, after so many years. He peered through the bars at the older man. He was skeletal and filthy, like the hungry graveyard ghost he claimed to be, and his stench was extremely offensive.
“It was in Edo during the Kanda festival that you first heard it,” Minoru said, “in the spring of your eighth or ninth year. You heard a komuso monk playing, and you wandered from your mother’s side to listen.”
Sadahiko cocked his head at the strange man. He did remember going to Edo to the Kanda festival with his mother and father. He remembered the bright little shrines bouncing on the shoulders of the boisterous Edokkos as they paraded through the streets singing and dancing. And he remembered the tune, and the strange, basket headed monk solemnly breathing in and out of his flute in a quiet alley away from the tumult. It was the same tune.
“Yes!” said Sadahiko, taking an inquisitive step toward the cell, in spite of his disgust. “But how could you know this? Were you the monk I saw?”
“No, young master,” said Minoru patiently, as if he were correcting a guessing child. “In life, I was a retainer to the Kumada family. I saw my young master wander off, and I followed him to the alley where he heard the monk playing Shika No Tone. I told him what the tune meant.”
“Two deer,” said Sadahiko, amazed. “Ready to mate, calling to each other in the forest.”
Minoru smiled, almost pleasantly, and nodded.
“You remember.”
Red Dog leaned back against the wall and blew through his lips loudly.
Sadahiko turned to the scruffy, unshaven man in the other corner. He had asked the warden about him too, and after sake, the warden had agreed to let him conduct the man’s execution on the morrow.
“What is the meaning of that?” Sadahiko demanded.
Dog looked at the samurai and shrugged.
“Forgive me, samurai. My feelings about this touching reunion between a child eater and his old employer’s son moved my lips of their own accord. It’s a small world, isn’t it?”
He didn’t know why he said it. It was worth a beheading on the spot. But he was tired of this mean world and wished it would end like the mad monk said.
Sadahiko turned from the old man. In truth, he had only a vague recollection of this onetime retainer. It was known that not all of his father’s samurai had followed his su
icide in the obligatory tsuifuku ritual. Some had become masterless ronin, and it was said that many wandering komuso monks were onetime samurai. It would have to wait.
“You’re the bandit, Red Dog,” Sadahiko said.
Dog nodded.
“I was. Tomorrow …”
“Tomorrow, I will take your head.”
Dog stared at the samurai, looked into his eyes. There was a perverse fire there. He had said that with lust in his voice, as if he had made an intimate promise to a lover.
Dog could not resist.
“Are you willing to stain the execution sand with an eta’s blood, samurai?”
“What!” said Minoru, stiffening in his corner and putting his back to the wall.
Sadahiko recoiled from the man as he had not from the filthy monk. His first instinct was to throw open the cell and cut the bandit down then and there. But he stayed himself. What if a swift death was all he wanted? This was a bold man indeed, to make such a claim. But no, it was no claim, for who would pretend to that?
“A filthy eta!” Minoru hissed, his face coiling into an ugly mask.
Dog jumped to his feet.
“That’s right, you bastard! Why don’t you come and purify me?”
The monk made a disgusted face.
“You? Full grown as you are you would turn this jikininki’s stomach!” he clenched his belly as if it were a precious treasure. “You would expel my poor children from me. Kill him, young master!”
Sadahiko curled his lip at the monk, whose madness had begun to show. He looked again at the Dog.
“Why tell me this? I can kill you right now.”
Dog shook his head. He walked toward the bars.
“So I choose between a death in this shitty cell or on that pretty sand in the morning in front of all those soft-skinned hypocrites? I don’t care which I get. My father was an executioner at this very prison. He performed the haritsuke. You ever watch a crucifixion, samurai? I never knew what my father did for our living. Just thought he swept up around the prison. Then one day he brought me here when I was eleven years old. I guess he meant to make me his apprentice. My father … we’d fished together, and I’d watched him bounce my little sister around on his shoulders. Then I watched him string a crying, pissing burglar up on a wood frame, and stab him twenty times in the side with a spear, till the blood and the rice, and his stinking guts spilled out of his wounds … like wet meal from a ragged sack. The smell … it’s even worse than his smell,” he said, nodding to Minoru and wrinkling his nose with the memory of it.
“After he stripped the body, I realized all those years, the new clothes he’d brought home for us, the dresses for my sister … taken from the dead. The corpse handler’s bounty. I didn’t want any part of it, so I fled. Never saw my family again. I tried to live on my own. I stole. I was caught. They brought me back here and sentenced me to irezumi.” He held his hair away from his forehead, displaying the flat, ugly scar there. “My father’s best friend, a man I had called ‘uncle’ when I was a little boy, branded me with ‘dog.’ When I got out, I held a hot trowel in a fire and burned it off my flesh. Still there was no one who would hire me on as anything. I had to travel far. I went across the sea. Tell me, samurai. Do men smell an eta? I never killed a man till I was thirteen. I never butchered an animal, I never worked in a tannery. But it was as if they smelled it on me. I didn’t believe I was different. I tried to find a place. But all the places were taken. So I became Red Dog. It was all I could do. I made sure never to kill above my station.”
He laughed, and gripped the bars, peering out at the pale man. “But what the law didn’t know was, everybody was above my station. The lowdown beggars and pickpockets and thieves, the gamblers and the pimps I had to kill over the years, even this filthy, crazy bastard who plays with his own shit. Somehow, you’re all above me … so I don’t care anymore samurai.” He pressed himself against the bars, and pulled open his shirt, baring his chest.
“Go ahead.”
But what Sadahiko would have done next neither of them would ever know, for at that moment a shrill, strangled scream pierced the stillness and men began to shout, prisoners and doshin alike. The lamps were lit, and feet pounded the boards and broke the snow.
Sadahiko backed away from the strange pair of men in the death cell and hurried after the commotion.
Dog watched him go and sighed, closing his jacket and returning to his wall.
Minoru huddled, watching him.
After a minute, he began to chuckle.
“Foolish eta,” he murmured. “None of it matters. The world is ending tonight.”
* * * *
Sadahiko rushed across the compound and arrived at the site of the disturbance before the warden. Two doshin guards were standing at the door of the lesser jail, T-shaped tsukubō polearms brandished at the mass of wide-eyed prisoners huddled against the bars and yelling all at once.
The doshin rapped the groping hands, and these recoiled only to be replaced by others. Desperate faces framed in the jail bars. Eyes bugged and lips spluttered.
Sadahiko stood back for a moment and tried to understand what was going on, but the prisoners, nearly half the jail room’s compliment with more pushing behind them, were all shouting over each other at the guards. He could discern a few calling for the door to be opened.
“What is it?” the warden demanded, stumbling over and fastening his coat. “Is it a riot? Kinpachi! Gorobei! Report!”
The guards looked over their shoulders, as panicked as the prisoners.
“I don’t know, sir!” said Kinpachi. “Somebody started screaming, then they were all yelling and rushing the door!”
“Get us out of here! Get us out! A monster!” shouted one of the prisoners over all the others. He was a thin man, and he was pressed against the door.
The warden stalked forward and pointed the man out.
“What’s that you said?”
The other prisoners heaved at the door and the thin man grimaced as he was forced against the bars. There were shrill screams coming from the back of the mob.
A dozen more guards came rushing over, bearing a variety of arresting polearms from the guardhouse. They took up a defensive formation in front of the jail. The guard captain, Murasame Jinza, was in the lead.
“Where is Kikuchi?” the warden called to the prisoners. “Where is your dairyo?”
“Dead! He’s dead!” several of them yelled. “Open the door!”
The thin man in front gave a shrill, dwindling scream and fell slack, lips dribbling blood.
Sadahiko watched in fascination as the prisoner slumped and was dragged down by the men behind him.
“They’re killing each other! Jinza!”
The warden turned, and the captain stepped to meet him.
“Fetch some muskets, and call out the entire guard!”
Jinza nodded and selected a four man detail to do so. These four broke off and headed for the armory at a run. A bell rang wildly in the night.
“Stand down!” the warden shouted at the prisoners, marching up and down behind his guards. “Stand down or I will shoot every man in front!”
They were heedless, and shoved at the door, some of them climbing the grate like monkeys to avoid the crushing fate of the thin man.
“What is going on?” the warden demanded again, when the guards returned, the fuses of their arquebuses trailing smoke.
The four musketmen knelt in a line before the guards.
The sight of the primed and ready muskets calmed the men in the front somewhat, but the prisoners in the rear continued to howl and press the others forward, until several were screaming as the thin man had.
The warden cursed as there was a groan and the cell door began to buckle in its housings.
He lifted his hand to Jinza, shaking his head in disgust and turning away as he did so.
“Ready!” Jinza bellowed.
The musketmen raised their weapons to their cheeks.
Now
the men who were not being crushed against the door scrambled for the rear, while the men in the back pushed, unaware of the guns.
“Fire!” yelled the captain.
Sadahiko watched the red flashes of fire alight from the barrels of the long guns, and the bright explosions of blood and smoke that rose from the twisting mass of prisoners. Chips of wood splintered and flew as the lead balls glanced off the grating.
Three men went down dead and a fourth slapped his hands to his face and wailed. He was quickly dragged down with the others.
Then Sadahiko saw something that made him grip the handle of his sword.
One of the men on the floor reached a trembling hand up and grabbed a hold of the naked leg of one of the men standing on him. Craning his neck, he sunk his teeth into the fat part of the offender’s calf.
The standing man screamed shrilly and the men around him looked down. They began to scream too.
A semicircle cleared around the bitten man and the man on the floor.
“Look! Look!” someone gibbered.
It was the thin man who had been crushed.
The crushed man pulled away from the prisoner’s leg, taking a hunk of bright, stringy flesh in his teeth.
“Help me!” the bitten man cried as he fell to one knee.
The crushed man grabbed a hold of the wounded man’s kimono and pulled him down as if to kiss him with his bloody mouth, but instead clamped his mouth on the soft part of his throat and tore it open in a gush.
The warden, the guards, even Jinza and Sadahiko were speechless at the grisly sight.
The prisoners scrambled to get away, but men in the back were still pushing forward, and some stumbled and fell. Then, the men who had been shot began to move. They held the fallen down, and these began to scream and fight furiously, but there was no room in the tangle of flailing limbs and stomping feet to escape. Teeth tore through skin and blood spurted. Sadahiko saw a belly rent and quivering intestines pulled out by manic, clawed fingers, strewn like parade ribbons across the shoulders of the confused prisoners. He could smell the hot blood.
“Sir?” Jinza called, unable to keep his voice steady.
Deadcore: 4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas Page 17