The Psyche Diver Trilogy: Demon Hunters (29 page)

Biku flicked on the inside lighting. The gash where Shimizu’s head had been connected to his body was twisted, as though ripped off by some tremendous force, the flesh torn and veins popped. Ashen bone protruded from the middle of the bloody rag-like gore, strikingly long.

“Hanko!” Fuminari screamed.

Something cold raced across his back and he felt his hairs stand on end. He couldn't tell whether the sensation came from joy or fear. He had to concentrate to keep himself from yelling excitedly, stopping the noise in the back of his throat.
Hanko was out there, somewhere in the darkness.
He had almost forgotten he still had the hostage on his back. A wind raised; it brushed through the darkness around them causing the mountain trees to stir and rustle. To Fuminari, it was Hanko calling out to him. He wanted to howl at the top of his lungs and stampede into the dark of the hillsides.

“You’re shaking again.”

Fuminari had been unaware of the tremors rippling through his frame until he heard Biku’s cool voice.

5

Fuminari stared into the darkness beyond the cutting beams of the Land Cruiser’s headlights.

The heavy roar of the diesel engine was a constant tickle on his back. Biku was behind the wheel. The key was gone from Shimizu’s pocket, but Biku had brought a spare with him. Shimizu’s corpse was sprawled along the back seat, together with the man they had tied up. He was still unconscious. Fuminari had carefully measured the force of his blow, the man would be out for a half day. He could wake the man at anytime by applying force to a pressure point located on his back.

The surrounding darkness felt heavy on the Land Cruiser. They had been driving for ten minutes when Biku slammed on the brakes. Fuminari immediately saw the reason why. There was a severed head on the road before them, just ten meters up ahead. The head was Shimizu’s. The man’s once handsome features were distorted in abject fear, eyes stretched wide. His mouth gaped open to reveal a pool of blood gathered inside.
Were you going to leave me?
He looked like he was pleading with them. His face had spasmed out of shape, but even then the expression seemed to contain shades of melancholy. Disappointment, perhaps, at them having forced him into such an impossible confrontation.

Biku edged the car forwards.

“Hey! What the fuck are you doing?” Fuminari called.

Biku said nothing, he shifted the gearstick from first into second.

“You’re not gonna leave it just lying there, are you?” Fuminari shouted, louder now. The head was inside one of the tracks that formed the sides of the road. If they continued as there were, the Land Cruiser’s wheels would crush Shimizu’s skull. The road was narrow and the only way to avoid the head would be to get out of the cruiser and move it themselves.

“It’s probably a trap. It’s too risky to get out,” Biku said, his voice cold. His tone left little room for argument. The Land Cruiser accelerated.

“Ffuu...!” Fuminari managed as the vehicle’s front tires made a sound completely different to gravel or dirt. The sound was repulsive, something you would never want to hear twice. Fuminari felt ready to throw up. Biku was making him nauseous. He wanted to hack and slash at the man, teach him the real meaning of pain, if such a thing were possible. But he knew that no matter what he did to him, the man’s bewitching smile would never even falter.

Fuminari had killed before, probably more than someone like Biku. But he had never killed anyone without feeling some form of emotion. He had killed on a drunken blood rush, even smiling as he did so. He had killed out of burning hatred. Even when he killed the members of the Kokushigun for money, there had been an unexpected throbbing, a backwash of guilt. Whether he was killing from anger or for pleasure, he considered these emotions a base-minimum form of respect paid to those he was dispatching. As such, he had thought himself cold, even cruel...but he knew now that only Biku truly deserved those words.

“Now I know how you like to deal with shit,” Fuminari spoke like he was coughing up a clump of congealed blood.
What a great fucking way to treat a dead colleague.
If Biku ever truly had been a Shingon Priest, he should know that there are ways to run over heads, and then there are ways to run over heads.

Biku slammed on the brakes as a cedar tree came crashing out of the dark above to their right, its branches whipping the air. It impacted the ground with a heavy crash, scratching the bumper of the stalled Land Cruiser. Biku made a quiet tutting sound.

“Now we have a predicament.” It appeared that someone out there was keen on them staying around.

“They want us to come out.”

“We could always sit here until morning.”

“Yeah, they’d let us just relax here until the sun rises.”

“Most likely not.” Biku shook his head.

“I’m getting out,” Fuminari said.

“Out there, are you insane?” Biku answered.

“Not yet. I should be able to get that tree out of our way.” The tree was not giant, he estimated it would weigh around 500 kilograms; he wouldn’t have to lift it over his head, all he had to do was get it to roll off to the side. That should be possible.

“Give it up,” Biku told him.

“I can do it,” Fuminari grunted, biting his lip tight. The tree was a gauntlet thrown down before him, a challenge from Hanko himself.
Come and get me!
He could almost hear Hanko’s deafening roar. And he had to maintain his pride in front of Biku.
I’m acting like a fucking teenager,
he realized. What was the point of putting himself in such obvious danger? But he was in motion before doubt had the chance to lock itself in. The door clicked as he opened it. Biku said nothing. “Kill the lights,” Fuminari whispered.

The lights faded. Darkness flowed into the spaces around the Land Cruiser. A few faint lines of moonlight scattered across the narrow mountain road, descending the valley walls. Fuminari nudged the door open with an elbow, holding a knife in each hand. He edged through and scanned the area around base of the fallen tree.
No-one.
He had not expected to find anyone, but was careful to check for a double bluff nonetheless. He crouched forwards and paced out in front of the car. He heard a sound, something sharp cutting thinly through the air. Fuminari ducked without even thinking. A silver flash grazed over his head.
Crossbow.

He knew it would be too difficult to aim over any real distance. They were right there with him, somewhere close. He could calculate the direction from the angle of the arrow. And if they moved now, there would be a rustling of grass.

Whether they moved or not, this was the moment, right after the first attack, that he had to seize his chance. Fuminari crouched lower and drew his right hand back, aiming in the direction the arrow had come from; he let the knife fly with all his strength. There was a sharp intake of breath in the dark, then the sound of something heavy hitting the ground. Fuminari’s huge frame was already moving, he found a gap between the fallen tree and the ground.

He scanned the area. The sudden quiet was unsettling. He rolled up from his prone position so that he was on his knees and began to push backwards. He felt his back take on the weight of the tree behind him. It was unbelievably heavy. He thought he might pass out. Every muscle in his body burned from the strain, swelling like rocks. His face reddened, in agony from the exertion. He pushed upwards, straightening his knees. His whole body was shaking. Then he sensed something in the air, something darkly violent--he looked up. There were two shadows standing in the centre of the road before him. One was gigantic, the other tiny. The sensation was like scalding gas bubbling through the air towards him.

“Hanko!” Fuminari called out, his voice like an animal. The adversary he had sought desperately for two whole years was standing right in front of him. If Hanko chose the moment to attack, Fuminari would be crushed. But the beast remained still. Fuminari could feel the burning gaze of their eyes as they watched him.

Then the darkness split open like a thunderclap as dazzling light flashed around them. Biku had turned the lights back on. The figure to Hanko’s side was female. Her face was shrouded under black cloth. Jakou’in. The moment the lights came on she tapped Hanko. Hanko hoisted her lightly upwards, placing her so that she sat on his shoulder.

Hanko started to move, but not towards Fuminari. The beast had turned its back on him. Its legs kicked against the dirt path, launching its bulky mass upwards--Jakou’in still on his shoulders--out of the beam of the headlights.

“Hanko, stop!” Fuminari screamed.
Why didn’t you kill me?
What about the unspoken rule that they would kill each other on sight?
Hanko had done nothing, then it left.
Has it forgotten me? Was I that insignificant an adversary?
Fuminari raised himself upwards, half dazed with his back still bearing the weight of the cedar’s trunk. He began to cry, even as he supported the colossal weight. Tears of blood. The realization sank in that he had been deserted. He had been crushed by a weight far greater than the load on his back. He felt loneliness of the kind he had not known before.

“Hanko!” he screamed. His despairing wail was sucked into the same darkness that had consumed the beast.

Fifteen

The Nightmare Residence

1

Hosuke Kumon dreamt a dream that was far from enjoyable.

He was in the midst of a nightmare, a horrific one at that. Darkness extended in each direction, thick and palpable as though black tar had been painted over the air around him. Hosuke stood in the epicenter. The darkness was truly vast. It felt as though he had been cast into the void of space, empty of stars, although he knew instinctively that he was observing something altogether different. He considered that it might be the interior of a cave, but he had no way of telling the direction it extended. On one hand, it felt as though tendrils spread through the darkness in every direction; at the same time there was a sense of it being elliptical, as though he had been imprisoned inside a closed-off spherical object.

He was standing upright, but without any sense of gravity. He felt weightless, like he was floating in water. The feeling was counter-balanced by a pressure that seemed native to the darkness. The sensation was not dissimilar to entering another person’s consciousness as a Psyche Diver. He observed an amber-tinted light originating from something circular. It looked like starlight a billion light-years away, yet at the same time it was right there before him. Hosuke could adjust the focal length of his vision just by flexing his mind. It was as though his subconscious had been fitted with all manner of lenses ranging from extreme telephoto to ultra-macro. A black snake was coiled around the exterior of the yellowish sphere.
No, not a snake
. Its skin was too slimy, glossy with a reflective, wet sheen. Whatever it was, it was starving.

Devour!

Devour!

Devour!

Its mind seared through the darkness, a vortex of desire ravaged by inconceivable hunger. Cries of starvation reverberated outwards, soundless as the creature began to writhe. It had no nose, eyes, or mouth, yet the coiled thing broke into an unsettling howl that charred the black space around it. It had noticed Hosuke. Black, thread-like feelers lashed out from its body, latching onto him. It felt like a giant swamp-dwelling leech had suckered itself over his body. Hosuke’s skin registered the sensation, spine-chilling as it wrapped itself around him. He watched as the shell of feelers bloated, visibly thickening as though a transfer of blood and flesh from the thing’s insides was taking place, the feelers acting as a conduit enabling the entity to move towards him.

A huge jaw suddenly manifested, taking shape over the surface of the tendrils. Without warning, it swallowed his right arm all the way to the shoulder. It felt like his arm had been plunged into a bath of warm, swampy blood. The arm made horrific noises inside the creature. He recognized it as the sound made when a carnivorous animal fed on its prey. His flesh and bone came unglued. The crunch of his bones breaking up carried over his shoulder blades and echoed down his spine. A number of smaller mouths opened inside the creature’s primary jaw, each one began to cut feverishly into Hosuke’s arm. The creature dragged its tongue over the bone as soon as it became exposed; it felt like nails on a chalkboard. It was utterly real, more so than in a dream. It felt as though Hosuke had dived into the consciousness of someone having their arm torn apart and their experience was being relayed firsthand into his own brain.

The creature was progressing from the right arm, now his left, then his legs, buttocks, head, his chest. The beast was intent on consuming his entire body. Its feelers delved through his ears and eyes, nose and mouth, even his anus, directly eating up his insides.

He felt no pain. There was only the knowledge that all of this was
occurring
. He was a copy watching the real ‘him’ being eaten alive as it slept. As he watched on, the realization hit him that he was not dreaming at all. With it came the knowledge that what he was seeing had not originated from anything internal to himself; it was obviously the work of some outside influence. He became convinced of it. He felt a form of excitement creep through him.
Fascinating.
His consciousness responded directly.

Even as he grimaced in his sleep, Hosuke’s mouth began to form a narrow grin.

2

Hosuke opened his eyes.

They registered only darkness. For a moment, he wondered if he might still be dreaming. But it was almost immediately apparent that this was not the case; he could feel the futon over him, the sheets on his back. His body was flush, covered in a thin sweat. He focused on remembering the reason he had woken up. In the dream...he had noticed a strange presence.

Something had stepped onto him. He had sensed it watching him as he slept, its gaze unfaltering. The feeling had been like the tip of a teasing feather that stopped short of his skin and, instead, brushed the air above his forehead. It had dissolved into the darkness the moment he awoke. He wondered if he might have imagined it. It was possible, he guessed, that it had been an illusion, a trick brought on by the depth of the darkness.

No.
The feeling was too real to have been a simple trick of the mind.
Something had taken agency, woven that horrific nightmare.
And now it was hiding, as might a small forest animal surprised by something walking nearby.
I guess it’s worth a try
, Hosuke muttered inwardly, closing his eyes again. He regulated his breathing and let his presence spread outwards before closing it off again; he repeated the pattern in gentle waves that matched his breathing. Nothing happened. Then, just as he was beginning to dismiss it as an illusion after all, he felt it come to rest over him.

It began as a single point, manifested without warning, followed immediately by a presence hidden in the darkness, spreading outwards from the single focal point. It was clearly an apparition. It was as though his own body weight had undergone a sudden increase. He could smell faint traces of rancid meat. The stink seeped through his pores. His apparent weight increased in line with the potency of the smell. Hosuke slowly opened his eyes, still suppressing any conscious thought. He saw a spirit-like impression of a human form. It emitted a terse light that was not quite phosphorescent, not quite fluorescent. The glow was probably something that had originated in his mind, enabling him to create a visual image of the ‘presence’ he felt. The apparition was the size of a cat reared up on its hind legs, but human-shaped. It was naked, belly unnaturally swollen. Its honey-warm eyes were focused on Hosuke. It stood over the futon on Hosuke’s chest, peering inwards so that its face was directly above Hosuke’s. The rotten stench had been the thing’s breath. It was a picture-perfect representation of a hungry demon, straight out of a hell scroll. Hosuke unlocked his mind and let it flow towards the spirit. The spirit immediately evaporated into thin air.

“Ghosts,” Hosuke murmured the word to himself.
Spirits.
The air in the room was charged with an abnormal energy. It wafted in bunched-up pockets, magnetized somehow. The effect was powerful and dense enough to be visible to the naked eye. The patterns shifted, morphing in resonance with his mind. It could be a naked girl or a demon--it all depended on his perspective. It mirrored the mind of its beholder. Hosuke had perceived the demon because his mind still contained fragments of the dream, of the scene where he had been eaten alive. The starved howling of the black helix-like form continued to influence his subconscious. The hungry demon was a metaphor for the dead, a spirit with an endless appetite.

But Hosuke could not shake the feeling that, this time, the apparition had been the one influencing
his
dreams; that it was not his mind that had caused it to appear as a demon. If that were true, the frenzied hunger would actually exist as something substantial, part of the room’s energy. It had influenced Hosuke’s dream. And the dream had, in turn, allowed Hosuke’s mind to catch a glimpse of its true state. The process in which a person’s mental state is reflected in such magnetized forms of energy is never exclusively one-sided. Once a fragment of energy enters a person’s consciousness, a part of it bears influence in the image the mind creates to represent it.

The stench Hosuke had inhaled did not exist in any real sense. Natural pockets of energy can be found in the mountains, even in cities. They are formed from the energy gathered by various flora and fauna over time, becoming a sediment over the inherent energy of the location. The trapped energy can cause physical and mental discomfort. This is often why certain places--deep valleys, dark alleyways, empty rooms--feel ‘creepy’ or ‘unsettling.’ The trapped energy rarely poses any threat, however, beyond causing slight feelings of discomfort.
But here...
It was unprecedented to see energy-levels as dense as those Hosuke had just experienced.

Hosuke sat up in his futon and flicked on the bedside lamp. The room was bathed in light. It was not particularly large, no larger than a twin room in any bog-standard hotel. The light was soft but it stung his eyes; they had already adjusted to the dark. He thought he could sense something towards one of the room’s corners, at the point furthest from the light. He suspected it was the energy hiding from view, away from the light. He gazed slowly around the room. Apart from the bed there were a couple of chairs arranged around a small table. The room was windowless, devoid of personality. Hosuke had no idea what time it was. Yuko was still asleep next to him, breathing softly.

A rush of images crossed his mind. His memory of the previous night was still clear. Back in the Tanzawa mountains, he had asked Enoh to introduce him to Kurogosho. Yuko had looked on in disbelief when he showed up. She had taken a while to process who had just appeared before her. She saw a heavily-built man, dressed untidily and covered in mud. She saw the pained way his caring eyes fell on her, the same face she had turned to so many times during the days of constant rape. When she finally realized it was him, she had cried. She had clung to him, still naked, thighs wet from sex and urine, wailing like a child as she refused to let go.

They had descended from the mountains under the watch of a group of men. The participants of the ritual had split into a number of separate groups, each following a different route away. After an hour and a half of walking, they were pushed into a car waiting at the foot of the hills. They drove for around three hours. They had been blindfolded before being bundled into the vehicle; Hosuke could not be sure how far they had traveled, but he felt he could make a decent guess. Hardly anyone had spoken during the trip. Every now and then someone jammed something hard into his back, reminding him they were armed.

They only removed his blindfold after bringing him to the room. Yuko was still with him. Enoh had also been there with two other men. One of them had a gun. The men shared dark, cold eyes with an almost reptilian lack of emotion. The eyes of people that made a business of killing, all emotion suppressed.

“So this is the final stop?” Hosuke had asked.

“Get some sleep. We will have finished debating what we’re going to do with you by the time you wake,” Enoh said.

Hosuke glanced at the bed then nodded in agreement, his thick fingers scratching at his head. He unbuttoned his shirt and threw it to the floor. Then he loosened the belt to his jeans and pulled them over his feet with his underwear in tow, the way kids do, stepping out of each leg in turn. He stood there completely naked, his tanned body impressive. He looked like he had been carved from stone. He turned so that his strong, hairy buttocks faced Enoh, lifted up the sheets and got straight into the bed.

“Come on, you’d better get undressed too,” he called to Yuko. Yuko timidly stripped her clothes before crawling into the bed beside him.

Enoh watched the whole time, grinning. He chuckled. Hosuke pulled the sheets to his chest and turned to meet Enoh’s gaze.

“I’d just been thinking about a nap.”

“I heard you slept--snored--the whole way here.”

“Just pretending. I was counting, keeping track of the time it took to get here.”

“You crack me up.”

“Listen, if you’re gonna kill me do it in my sleep okay? It’s against the rules to do it after I’m up.”

“Uh huh.”

“That’s all I ask,” Hosuke said. He took Yuko into his arms and closed his eyes. Her naked body was warm against him, trembling slightly. She clung to him with all her might. “You don’t need to worry now,” he whispered, softly pressing his hands over her shoulders. He looked like a father comforting his daughter. As he held her, the trembling gradually subsided. Finally, her breathing told him she was asleep. That was the last thing he remembered. He had fallen asleep directly after her...

...and now he had woken up to see a ghost. He saw his clothes, strewn over the floor as he had left them. He pulled his naked frame out of the bed and scratched at his scalp, dislodging a surprising amount of dandruff. His head was itchy. He thrust the fingers of both hands into his hair and gave himself a good scratch. As he did, the door swung open to reveal Enoh. Hosuke turned to look at him, then returned to scratching his head some more.