The Devouring God (18 page)

 

CHAPTER 34

Thursday Morning

T
he 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

T
akuda 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 waterfront, 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.”

T
he rusted pulleys shrieked as Suzuki slid the warehouse door closed behind him, cutting himself off from Takuda's view. When it slammed against the concrete stanchion at the end of its track, it hung on its pulleys, its steel sheets shuddering and booming as if they contained a tiny thunderstorm.

The whole situation was faintly ridiculous. It reminded Takuda of period dramas in which robed nobles secluded themselves behind paper-­paned doors to prepare for battle, but Suzuki was no warrior, and he wasn't preparing for battle. He was the battle. In the abandoned warehouse with the Kurodama, now whole again, he was grappling the oldest, strangest, most seductive evil they had ever faced.

And his plan was to eat it.

Or it will eat him
, Takuda thought,
and then everything will be lost
.

“This is insane,” Mori said. “We should catch a ferry to Busan and just dump it on the way.”

Takuda shrugged. Despite everything, he felt serene and hopeful. He had been drugged, Tasered, maced, and slashed. A concrete wall had fallen on him. Yet he was alive and whole, and the three of them had gotten this far. It was all up to Suzuki, the daydreaming priest closed up with the Kurodama. It was out of Takuda's hands.

“We could break it into a hundred little pieces,” Mori said. “We could encase each one in concrete, in little film canisters. I can get boxes and boxes of those. Then we could dump them into the bottoms of lakes and bays and canals and crevasses where they could never come together again.”

Takuda closed his eyes, imagining a huge and subtle web of evil, the pieces calling to each other across the kilometers and across the years, affecting not just a handful of schoolgirls or a few salesmen but every man, woman, and child in the archipelago, turning Japan into a land of cannibals, savages, murderers.
Not again
, came the unbidden thought.

He shook his head. “It just won't do.”

“How about a kiln? I know a potter over by Children's Hospital who would fire his kiln up for us, if we paid for the propane. I'm sure he . . .”

“A kiln?” Takuda was incredulous. “It's bad enough at room temperature. Let's not go heating it up.”

Mori folded his arms. “Deep water. We hire a fishing boat and get it out to a trench. A drop-­off. It would at least buy some years. Decades, maybe centuries.”

Takuda turned on him. “Centuries to spawn monsters in the deepest oceans to bring it back to bloodletting. No, it has a mind of its own, even if it isn't fully awake, and it won't lay down for temporary solutions. Neither will I. I don't want it out of the way. I want it dead.”

“Then you've gone the wrong way with the priest,” Mori said. “He doesn't have it under control. He'll come out of there grinning and chattering, ready to strip the flesh from our bones, and I'll have to strike him down because you won't do it, or maybe he'll stay in there and start working on himself, flaying to the bones until he bleeds to death. We don't know. We don't know what happens when we leave someone alone with that thing.”

Takuda nodded. He was sure Mori had not seen the fire blazing behind Suzuki's eyes. He could not see Takuda's new . . . fangs? Tusks? No, Mori had no idea what might be happening to the three of them. Takuda decided it wasn't the time to tell him. Instead, he said, “It's nice to finally get confirmation that you don't want the priest dead, either by his own hand or by some other agency. There is some comfort in this situation after all.”

Mori scowled. “You've already given me the lecture, and you pushed me around and disarmed me this morning to soften me up. I hear you. I should be nice to the priest. But I tell you, leaving him alone with that thing is not being nice to him. It's going to kill him. The ferry is right over there.” He pointed east. “Ten minutes by taxi. We don't have our passports, so we could just grab a ferry for Nagasaki or the Goto Islands.”

Takuda was tired of the conversation. “I'm going to grab us some food. You just keep out of sight and cover the door.” He turned, hopped off the loading dock, and strode off across the parking lot. He felt Mori's eyes on his back. As he turned the corner and headed toward the shops, he felt other eyes on his back. He saw nothing, but he knew they were there, in the forests of pallet stacks and among the rusted forklifts and empty cable spools, up on the rooftops, in the gaping windows. Suzuki was wrong. They had been followed, and they were being watched, but the watchers wouldn't move on Mori. That would be against the rules.

Or so he hoped.

Takuda was two blocks away before he realized he had left his staff leaning against the loading dock. He didn't even feel the need for a weapon anymore. He was in a different kind of fight.

While he walked, he ran his tongue over his fangs, smoother than his other teeth, and felt with his fingertips the new bone and emerging horns. He only noticed the differences when he felt for them.

A man can get used to anything.
He passed his own pop-­eyed, demonic reflection in a shop window.
Almost anything.

It was the first chance he had to think about the presence in the back of his head. It was part of him and yet it contained him, like a puzzle picture where foreground and background shifted places. It was new, and yet it was old, like a place just discovered that he had always known. It was the source of all déjà vu.

The darkness in his head stirred at that thought, but it remained silent.

Takuda directed the thought to the stirring:
What are you?

It remained still, and the stillness enraged Takuda. His body coursed with the silent fury he had felt when his only brother, Shunsuke, had been pulled cold and dead from the waters of the Naga River valley. He clenched his fists with memories the pain and suffering he and Yumi had gone through when their only son, Kenji, was pulled from the same waters many years later. A deep growl rose from his throat.

Takuda had worked too hard and sacrificed too much to be possessed by some phantom. Who did this this thing think it was, that it would occupy his mind and speak from his mouth without explaining itself? It could not be. He would not allow it. He would cut out his own heart before surrendering. He remembered the triumphs, the times when he had pushed through the pain to do a man's job, like the time when he had been poisoned by the Kappa in the Naga River valley, his blood full of a psychoactive poison that had bent his mind in a spiral of grief, and he remembered how Reverend Suzuki's voice in his head had brought him back from the brink of suicide, pushing him onward to face the beast . . .

Sweet merciful Buddha
, Takuda thought.
That wasn't Suzuki in my head. That was you.

The darkness within remained silent.

The mind that watched as if in slow motion the split second of the car crash, the mind that noted with dispassionate satisfaction that Takuda's body had survived a fifteen-­meter fall into a cave full of human bones, the mind that assessed the heat and noted the damage as Takuda wrestled a fire demon into the surf . . .

The dark mind had always been there, always part of him, always protecting him. It was not awakening. It had always been awake. He was now just awakening enough that he could hear it and feel it.

His frightening strength, his luminescent scars, his nascent horns and budding fangs—­the changes in his body were just reflections of his true nature.

Takuda slowed to a stop in the middle of the busy sidewalk on Meiji Avenue. The realization hit him like a hammer. He wasn't becoming a monster. He had always been a monster.