Tengu (24 page)

Gerard left his
suitcase in the bare living room, and then walked through to the kitchen.
There, sitting on a zabuton, a large flat
cushion,
was
Doctor Gempaku himself, eating his breakfast. In the far corner, over the
old-fashioned black-iron range, another of the masked Japanese was stirring
vegetables in a donabe. It was only just past five o’clock in the morning, but
Doctor Gempaku always rose early to say his prayers.

‘‘Would you
care to eat?” he asked Gerard as Gerard sat down next to him on another
zabuton.

Doctor Gempaku
was tall and lean for a Japanese, with a closeshaven head and small,
oval-framed spectacles. There was always a certain grace and mystery about him,
as if he were living partly in California and partly in some tranquil Japanese
garden, a garden of chrysanthemums and golden carp and esoteric riddles.

Gerard peered
into Doctor Gempaku’s blue-lacquered bowl. “What’s on the menu?” he asked.

“Kitsune udon,”
smiled Doctor Gempaku. “In English, that means ‘fox noodles.’ It is a
particularly compelling mystery why a dish of bean curd and noodles should have
become historically associated with the fox, which is one of the most evil of
Japanese spirits. Some say that the fox was always fond of bean curd. Others
say that kitsune udon is the last meal you are given before you are sent to
everlasting hellfire.”

“Do you have
any cornflakes?” asked Gerard.

Doctor Gempaku
spoke quickly in Japanese, and the black-masked boy came over and set a bowl
for Gerard, as well as a paper packet of chopsticks and one of the white china
spoons usually used for eating soup.

Before the
noodles were served, Gerard observed the small ritual of oshibori, wiping his
hands with a hot, lightly scented towel. Even at Pacoima Ranch, Doctor Gempaku
insisted on the civilized niceties. The black-masked boy filled Gerard’s bowl
with kitsune oJon, bowed, and returned to his cooking.

Gerard ate in
silence for a while, and then asked, without looking at Doctor Gempaku,

“Esmeralda’s
told you what we’re supposed to be doing next?”

“Yes.”

“What do you
think?”

“I think it is
possible. I can have the next Tengu ready by tomorrow night.”

“I’m not asking
you if it’s possible. I know it’’s possible. What I’m asking you is, what do
you thinkT’

Doctor Gempaku
watched Gerard carefully for a moment or two, and then said, “What do you want
me to think?”

“I just want
your reaction, that’s all.”

“My moral reaction?
Or my philosophical
reaction?”

Gerard chased a
piece of bean curd around the inside of his bowl. In the end, he gave up and
set the half-emptied bowl down on the table.

“We’re sending
a Tengu out to kill a man. I want to know how you respond to that.
Whether you think it’s the right thing to do, not just as far as
the law is concerned, but as far as the whole project is concerned.”

Doctor Gempaku
picked up his chopsticks, tested them with his hands, and then snapped them in
two. “Japanese esthetics,” he said, “are preoccupied with the idea of the
perfect moment, the

‘
accident
’ that is spontaneous, and yet carefully
controlled–so that it takes on an artistic and spiritual deliciousness beyond
any experience that occurs either wholly accidentally or wholly deliberately.
To me, this is one of the satisfactions of the Tengu. We have created the
strongest and fiercest of human beings, a creature that can terrify and
overwhelm anybody and everybody.

He obeys our
directions, and yet he is also un- predictable. We cannot tell what he might
take it into his mind to do, what grisly horrors he might suddenly decide to
perpetrate. The death of the girl Sherry Cantor was a perfect example.

To the Western
mind it seemed like random and brutal murder, purposeless and bloody. To us,
however, it was an event of terrible beauty. The Tengu did as he was bidden;
and yet the error he made in killing Sherry Cantor added an indefinable ecstasy
to the whole event. We are asked to send out a Tengu to deal with Admiral
Thorson. Perhaps a smiliar mistake may occur. The only criteria can be destiny
and the demands of perfection. So when you ask me, is it right! I can only say
that it can only be right when it actually takes place. Will it be an esthetic
event or not? We cannot tell.”

Gerard sat back
on his zabuton and took out his cigar case. “Are you serious?” he asked Doctor
Gempaku. “Perhaps,” said Doctor Gempaku, and smiled. Gerard clipped the end off
a cigar and pasted down a stray piece of broken leaf with saliva.
‘ The
Tengu we sent out to deal with Sennett...
 
how’s he doing? He was shot up pretty bad,
wasn’t he?”

“He’s still in
a coma. But most of the body injuries are beginning to heal satisfactorily. You
know that a Tengu is so unnaturally strong partly because his metabolism is so
drastically accelerated.

It gives him a
shorter life, of course; but it also means that any wounds or injuries heal
themselves with remarkable speed. It’s his mental state that concerns me more.
Something happened after he killed Sherry Cantor that seriously and dangerously
unbalanced him. It seems to me that it was a similar reaction to that of a
child whose body temperature rises suddenly and dramatically.
A kind of convulsion, or fit.”

“Do you think
it might happen again?” asked Gerard. He struck a match and leaned forward
slightly to light his cigar.

“I would prefer
it if you smoked outside,” said Doctor Gempaku. “Tobacco smoke will upset the
delicate balance of aromas in this kitchen. It is already bad enough that I can
smell it on your clothes and hair.”

Gerard stared
at Doctor Gempaku for a moment, and then slowly waved out the match. “I’ll
leave the cigar until later,” he said. “Let’s go take a look at the Tengus.”

Doctor Gempaku
clapped his hands, and the black-masked cook removed their bowls. Then the
doctor rose from the table, and Gerard followed him through to the front of the
house again, where the two black-robed guards were still keeping watch. “We’ve
had one or two unwelcome intruders lately,” said Doctor Gempaku as he slipped
on his shoes.
“Nobody dangerous, no police or anything like
that.”

“Has anybody
come up to the house?” asked Gerard.

Doctor Gempaku
shook his head. “They don’t get the chance. Usually I send Frank out with his
shotgun to turn them around before they get the idea that anything unusual is
happening here.

My young bushi stay well out of sight.’’

The sun was
already up and warm as they crossed the yard to what appeared at first sight to
be a rundown barn. It was only from close up that it was possible for anyone to
see the modern prefabricated building which had been constructed inside the
gappy, collapsing timbers, and to hear the deep humming of portable electric
generators. Doctor Gempaku led the way through the sagging barn doorway, and
then up a short flight of stainless-steel steps that took them to the interior
door of the Tengu building. He unlocked the door, using two keys, and when it
swung open he rapped on it with his knuckles to show Gerard how solid it was.

“Four-inch
carbonized steel,” he said. “We fitted it last week.”

“I know,”
Gerard responded coldly. “I had to pay $7,500 for it. I just hope that it
proves to be worth the price.”

Doctor Gempaku
smiled. “If any one of our Tengus goes berserk again,
then
believe me, it will be worth the price. Not even a Tengu can break his way
through four inches of carbonized steel. Well, we hope not.”

Inside the
building, which ran nearly 90 feet in length, the only illumination came from
tiny, beadlike red safety lights. The temperature was well below 55 degrees,
dry and constantly controlled. Doctor Gempaku held Gerard’s sleeve while both
of them stood in the entrance, waiting for their eyes to become accustomed to
the darkness and their skin accustomed to the cold. Gerard felt the sweat in
the middle of his back freezing like a cape of ice.

At last, Doctor
Gempaku’s face began to emerge from the crimson twilight, and Gerard could look
around him and see a long, narrow corridor, with doors going off on either
side. He had been here before, when the building was just erected, but there
were more partitions now, more rooms where Tengus could be concealed. There was
also a different resonance, a deep, almost inaudible drumming sound, both
irritating and strangely threatening, like the first tremors of an earthquake.
A smell, too: of incense and stale flowers and one thing more–sickly and
overwhelming, the smell of dried blood.

Gerard said,
“If hell could ever be created in a cabin, then this would be it.”

Doctor Gempaku
steered him toward the first door on the right. “Come see the Tengu we’re
trying to save. If we have not lost him overnight.
A young
student of ancient Japanese religion, before he joined us.
A very dedicated young man.
The sort of
personality that refuses to be diverted from the essence of spiritual truth.”

“This is the
guy who killed Sherry Cantor?”

Doctor Gempaku
nodded. “He was always our most promising Tengu. But the most promising are
usually the most unbalanced. It requires a high level of emotional
susceptibility for a man to be suitable for the role of a Tengu, and extreme
physical strength and emotional susceptibility are also a volatile mixture.
Like nitroglycerin, the Tengu is both powerful and touchy.”

He unlocked the
plain metal door and slid it back. It was no lighter on the other side than it
had been in the corridor, but Doctor Gempaku guided Gerard into a small
antechamber and then swiftly locked the door behind them. “This is always the
moment of no return,” he said. “If anything should go wrong, it is better for
just one or two of us to be slaughtered by the Tengu than to try to give
ourselves an escape route and risk letting it out.”

“Well,” said
Gerard, “I would call that a matter of opinion.”

“Nothing about
the Tengu is a matter of opinion,” Doctor Gempaku corrected him, politely but
adamantly. “The Tengu represents the ultimate physical power which any human
being can achieve, coupled with a spiritual compulsion which is the greatest
that any human brain can stand. When we tried out our earliest Tengu program at
the Yoyogi Olympic stadium in Tokyo, during the weight-lifting events, a Tengu
was able to lift over 430 kilograms. Unfortunately, because our methods were
not recognized by the Olympic committee, we were forced to withdraw under
conditions of great secrecy.”

“Mr. Esmeralda
told me about that.” Doctor Gempaku was silent for a second or two. Then he
said, “Follow me. But remember to stay quiet.

The Tengu is
still sensitive to disturbances.’’ “I’ll be quiet,” Gerard assured him. Doctor
Gempaku drew aside a curtain of fine jet beads which, in the darkness, Gerard
hadn’t seen before. Stepping silently on slippered feet, he led the way into a
room draped with black silk curtains, a room in which scores of black silk
ribbons hung from the ceiling, tied with silver temple bells, birds’ feathers,
pomanders of cloves and cherry blossoms, bamboo tokens, and haniwa, the clay
figures usually found in ancient Japanese graves. Gerard, who had been
expecting something more like a surgical theater, with cardiopulmonary
resuscitators and electronic monitors and oxygen equipment, was considerably
taken aback.

“What is that?”
he hissed. “Where’s the Tengu?” Doctor Gempaku raised a finger to his lips to
indicate total silence. Then, very gradually, he raised the lighting in the
room with a dimmer switch located behind the drapes, until Gerard could see the
Tengu who had torn Sherry Cantor to pieces.

The Tengu was
suspended from the ceiling, like all the icons and bells which hung around him;
except that he wasn’t tied up by ribbons. He was naked, and he was held up by
fifteen or twenty silver claws, shaped like the hands of a demon or an old
woman, whose long silver nails actually pierced deep into his flesh. Each of these
claws was tied to a black silk braided cord, and in turn these were all
gathered and knotted close to the ceiling, and attached to a strange kind of
metal frame.

Gerard slowly
approached the Tengu, with chilly sweat sliding down the insides of his armpits
and a taste in his mouth like congealed grease. He had seen many horrors in
Cuba. But for human butchery, he had never seen anything like this, and he
could scarcely believe that the mutilated creature hanging in front of him was
real.

The Tengu was still
masked with his white varnished mask. He was breathing, in shallow, interrupted
gasps, but Gerard wouldn’t have laid money on his survival, especially not hung
up like this from the ceiling. The silver claws had dug so far into his chest
muscles that they had lifted them up in bruised and dead-looking peaks, and the
claws in his buttocks had almost disappeared into the flesh altogether. There
were claws in his leg muscles, in his shoulders, in his arms. The claws in his
feet had gone so deep that one of them had actually broken right through, from
the sole to the instep. There was even a claw in his genitals, dragging up his
scrotum and piercing his foreskin so that his penis looked like a hooked eel.

“This is
crazy,” said Gerard. “What the hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be
making the guy better and you’re injuring him even worse than he was before!”

Doctor Gempaku
dimmed the lights again. “What you are witnessing here is not a traditional
Western form of healing.”

“What you’re
doing here has just about as much to do with the traditional Western form of
healing, or any form of healing, as Belsen had to do with summer camp,” Gerard
retorted.