Eight Million Gods-eARC (12 page)

10

Boy God

The boy god or possible delusion was still sitting patiently beside Nikki when she woke up hours later. She was fairly sure she hadbeen arrested, which meant Gregory was dead, so she’d probably been to his bloody apartment, so it was possible she’d found the
katana
at the train station. After that, it was a bobsled ride downward into either madness or divine possession. She still hadn’t decided which.

“You don’t sleep?” she asked to fill the silence.

“Sometimes. Although it’s not as you would call sleep. I lose focus on your world. It is how the
gaijin
could wreak havoc on my temple.”

She stretched, aching, having slept on the stone floor in slightly damp clothes. She didn’t even have a change of clothing. At least with the money she—Atsumori—they had stolen off Harada, she could buy more clothes. She was at a loss as to what . . .

. . . she was standing on a street corner in the rain, waiting for the light to change. Her backpack and the fabric-encased
katana
were slung on her right shoulder.

“Stop doing that!” Nikki cried, startling an old woman standing beside her.

Embarrassed, Nikki turned around and went into the FamilyMart on the corner. She made it a point to never have less than two notebooks and a full dozen pens. She kept to black ink only; her hypergraphia
needed
black. The other colors had been to soothe her writer’s heart. At the moment her writer’s heart was crying in the corner and had no interest in pens except as a medical device.

Clicking one of the ballpoints nervously, she moved on to her other drug—junk food. She got four salmon rice balls, a box of Meiji chocolate-covered almonds, a slice of chiffon cake, a bag of pepper-flavored potato chips, a sandwich that looked like it might be egg salad, and two bottles of Coke. After considering the state of her life, she added a coin purse, panty liners, two pairs of socks, six packs of tissues, and a folding umbrella. She caught glimpses of Atsumori moving through the aisles like a dark thundercloud, horribly out of place in the bright, squeaky-clean convenience store. Otherwise, he was invisible to her and obviously everyone else. She was considering alcohol when she sensed him close beside her.

“Don’t just take me places without asking,” she whispered. “I really, really hate that. If you keep doing that—I’ll—I’ll –” She clicked her pen. She hated that her options were so limited. But she couldn’t stand being used that way. It reminded her of being locked up in the sanitarium by her mother. Threatened with drugs and straightjackets if she wasn’t compliant and “good.” “I won’t be used like that.”

“I’m sorry. I did not consider that it would bother you now that you know the cause.”

“It does.” She picked a mini bottle of plum wine off the shelf and stomped to the cashier to pay for everything. It bothered her even more that there was no way to really stop him. He probably could keep hold of her as long as he wanted. Hours. Days. Weeks. “Just tell me where you want to go.”

“
Eh?
” the cashier asked, wide-eyed.

“
Kyoto desu?
” She asked the first “where” question that came to mind. “
Is this Kyoto?”
pushed the limit of her Japanese.

“
Hai!
”

So they were still in Kyoto; Atsumori hadn’t taken her out of the city. Yet. She had things she wanted to do before she let Atsumori drag her all over Japan. The first was finding a bathroom. “
Toire wa doko desuka?
”

“
Toire.
” The cashier considered and then pointed across the street. “Subway station.”

She glanced to where he was pointing and saw the steps leading down into a subway station and probably a public restroom. “Arigato!”

Her panty liners were given special treatment. They were discreetly packed into a separate the brown paper bag that the Japanese only used for feminine products so that the package nearly screamed “cooties.”

Outside she said to Atsumori, “I’m going to the bathroom.” Hopefully alone but she doubted it. “And then have something to eat and then I’ll go wherever you want.”

Nikki found a pay phone at Kyoto Station and fed it hundredyen coins, praying that she wouldn’t have to deal with a Japanese-speaking operator. She wrote out some stock phrases in case the person who answered the phone didn’t speak English.

After three rings, the other end picked up with a meek “
Moshi moshi.
”

“Pixii,
desu?
” Nikki read off her cheat sheet. “Is Pixii” was the closest she could figure out to “Is Pixii there?”

A very Japanese “eh?” of surprised confusion was the only reply.

She tried to calmly repeat the question. Slower. “Pixii, desu?”

“Hai?” The other person sounded like they were in grade school. “
Donata desu ka?
”

Nikki wasn’t sure, but she thought the person had asked “Who’s calling?”

The one and only time she actually met Pixii was at an East Coast anime convention four years ago. Nikki had been traveling with a pack of teenage girls and somehow ended up responsible for cleaning up after all the naive stupidity that implied. Pixii had been dressed up as a magical girl from some anime that Nikki didn’t recognize. The only thing Nikki remembered clearly from the meeting was that Pixii could beat the snot out of any man who thought scantily clad girls doing cosplay were sluts, and then administer first aid to the wounds she inflicted.

Was this really Pixii?

Well, Nikki wasn’t going to get anywhere if they kept to Japanese.

“This is ThirdEye,” Nikki identified herself reluctantly.

“Third! Oh my God, are you okay? Where are you? What happened? SexyNinja has been going nuts! She says she tried calling you all last night and you never called her back!”

Nikki breathed out relief. Yes, she remembered now. Talking to Pixii was like having a conversation with a five-year-old on a sugar rush. Her voice was naturally little-girl cute, she was shorter than Nikki’s five foot three, and, much to Pixii’s disgust, she didn’t need a bra. She looked and sounded like she was twelve years old, but in truth she was thirty, a veteran combat medic, and had a doctorate in arts and archeology.

“I’m fine,” Nikki said. “I lost my cell phone yesterday. I need a place to crash. Can you put me up for a while?”

“Yeah! Team Banzai: go! It will be great.” And then the brain caught up to the mouth. “Um, so, what happened? Why did you disappear? We expected you to post last night.”

Nikki winced. This was so much more than just an overbearing mother. Of all her friends, Pixii was the one who could cope best with Nikki being either dangerously insane or merely possessed. “Things got crazy. I have some things I have to do, then I’m heading to your place.”

“Oh! Do you need the directions again? My place is kind of impossible to find.”

Which was one of the other reasons Nikki had chosen Pixii to crash with. “I’ve got them memorized. I’ll call you again when I get to Nara.”

“Great! Just keep your eye out for the little shrine alongside the road. The driveway back to the house can be tricky to spot. You might have to stop at the shrine and . . . oh shit, I need to go check the kiln!” And Pixii abruptly hung up.

Atsumori wanted to go to the Fushimi Inari Shrine. Luckily Nikki had planned a trip to visit it and knew that there was a train that stopped right in front of the shrine, otherwise Atsumori would have had her walk several miles in the rain. With his help reading signs, they found their way through the multiple train systems of Kyoto to the JR Nara line.

“Why are we going there?” she asked as they settled on the train.

We
. She laughed bitterly. To a causal observer, she was completely alone.

“Misa’s death has desecrated my
shintai
. Until it’s purified, I’m greatly limited to what I can do. We are going to the shrine to have my
katana
blessed.”

“Katana” and “death” made her remember the scene she had written the night before. “Did I—you—we actually clean your blade?” Somehow that sounded slightly pornographic.

“Of course.”

“And this blessing—it will—deal with—killing Harada too?”

“He was a
tanuki
. He was
yokai
.”

“And that means?”

“
Yokai
are not humans. They are not animals. They are spirits. They do not exist as you understand life.”

“Harada bled all over the place.”

“That was not his real body. He could take the shape of a small girl or a dog or even a teapot.”

“Teapot?”

“In that case, instead of blood, he would have spilled tea.”

Click. Click. Click.

“Who was that man?” Atsumori murmured in her ear.

Nikki looked around the train car, but she was alone, not even Atsumori in sight. She could feel him, though, as if he was sitting beside her. “What man?”

“Last night on the train, you wrote about a man searching your home.”

Nikki sighed. Thanks to a childhood spent in psychiatric treatment, she knew all the symptoms of schizophrenia and had always been secretly proud that she showed no signs of the disorder. She was now exhibiting almost all of them—if Atsumori wasn’t actually sitting beside her, invisible to everyone. Then again, schizophrenics usually had self-referential delusions. The logic looped neatly around so it was nearly impossible to prove that their belief was false.

She couldn’t help but see her current situation as classic symptoms. If
tanuki
could take on any appearance, then everything that happened at her apartment made sense. She had opened the door to a magical creature that only looked like Detective Tanaka. It knew –somehow—that she would cooperate with the police. The
tanuki
shifted its appearance again as it attacked her to that of an animal wearing a business suit. Why, she didn’t know.
Obviously changing into a teapot wouldn’t have been helpful.

If Gregory Winston, Misa, and Harada were all real people—or at least things that passed as people—then Scary Cat Dude was a real person, too.

“I don’t know who he is. I’ve only written one other scene with him. He seems to be working with a powerful organization, like maybe the government or underworld.”

“Underworld? With demons?”

“With criminals.” She frowned as “demons” rolled around in her mind. Her hypergraphia liked the idea that Scary Cat Dude was linked to something otherworldly. Normally she would embrace such a notion, but then, normally, every thing in her books stayed fiction. The burned down shrine and the dead bodies were inescapable truth.

“He was at the shrine?” Atsumori asked.

“Yes.” She flipped back through her notebook. She hadn’t had a chance to type in the scene. “That was his first scene.” She read over the pages, aware that Atsumori seemed to be scanning them with her. Did Japanese gods read English? She supposed it wouldn’t be very godlike if they couldn’t.

Atsumori thought aloud with a deep “Hmm.”

Nikki really wished that if she could hear him, she could also see him. “What?”

“The
tanuki
, it killed the
gaijin?
”

“Yes, Harada killed . . .” She was now confusing her character name with the real man. Which was which? Not a good sign. “. . .him. In my story, the
gaijin
worked for an American insurance company.” Was it true for the real man, too? She hated the idea of assuming what she wrote as fiction to be the whole truth. The fiction, though, explained why a businessman would suddenly become a criminal overnight. The real man kept rope in his bedroom dresser. “He had some kinks that would be illegal in the United States. He liked the image clubs in Dontonbori.”

An image club had a variety of fantasy settings, and their prostitutes would dress up in costumes. As long as full penetration didn’t take place, it was perfectly legal. He liked his women as young as possible, in a school uniform, either in a subway car or a classroom. “He kept pushing the limits of the law until he found a
yakuza
-run image club that let him go beyond them.”

The club, had brought him into the orbit of Harada and various other characters in her book. They gave him a twelve-year-old Chinese girl and enough rope to hang himself with.

“They took videos of him with a child. It would have gotten him arrested here in Japan, but in United States, he would have been labeled as a monster for the rest of his life.”

“So it was these
yakuza
that sent him to my shrine?” Atsumori asked.

She nodded. “They told him to get a camera and pretend to be a tourist. To walk around and take pictures. He could go where no Japanese could. Where no Japanese would. He didn’t believe in
kami
; he wasn’t afraid of their wrath. They talked as if he would be safe from the
kami
.”

“Humans like him are rare. If Misa had not taken my
shintai
off the shrine grounds, I would have only been able to protect her indirectly. I couldn’t stop him. Not before he killed her. Nor afterwards. He was like scrabbling against polished stone.”

“Harada had heard of the fire at the shrine and guessed that Gregory had set it. He went to Gregory’s place disguised and, once inside the apartment, demanded the sword.” The scene had confused her, as Gregory had started out treating Harada as an old friend that he was trying to brush off and then realized that he was talking to the
tanuki
. Until Harada broke the blender’s glass pitcher against Gregory’s head, the scene had been all dialogue and no description. Then everything had been Gregory—his pain, his screams, his blood. There hadn’t been anything about his killer. She hadn’t even been sure that Harada was a “he.” It was as if she knew describing him would be useless, that she knew that he could utterly change his appearance.

Self-referential delusions
, she reminded herself. She clicked her ballpoint.

The great entrance of the Inari Shrine was within a stone’s throw of the tiny train station. As Nikki walked under the towering gate, Atsumori appeared beside her. It was weirdly comforting to be able to see him. In the timeless entrance plaza, he looked proper for the setting despite the sober kimono and topknot.