The Devouring God

 

DEDICATION

To Elizabeth Lawhon Kendley,

who always put good books before all that other stuff

that didn't matter

 

CONTENTS

 

CHAPTER 1

Monday Evening

D
espite his faith, the old man was terrified. His breath echoed ragged in the enclosed space, and his heart hammered in his chest. He was alone in a basement, he was sure of it; his escorts had led him down stairs and through a narrow tunnel, and now he was waiting to be punished for his mistakes, his treachery, and his cowardice.

A honeyed voice from the darkness said, “Abbot, you may remove your blindfold.”

The abbot's liver-­spotted hands trembled as he untied the silken kerchief. He blinked in the glare of a naked lightbulb suspended in the gloom. When his eyes adjusted, he found himself alone in a room the size and shape of a tennis court, a basement room as he had guessed. The walls were white with a floor of durable rust red. Folding tables and chairs stood stacked against the far wall. The bare concrete floor sloped slightly away from him to a steel-­grated drain running the length of the room. A track in the ceiling ran parallel to the drain. Rusted pulleys in the track suggested a machinist's assembly line or an abattoir. He imagined briefly that he had been led there to be murdered, and that his blood would be washed into that drain, but only vanity would lead him to believe himself worth murdering.

A cracked and yellowed projection screen hung from the pulleys. At one end of the drain, to the abbot's right, a low, ornate iron door was set into the irregular stones of the wall. The other walls were modern cinder block, but that wall, plastered and painted though it had been, betrayed much older construction, and the ornamentation of the door itself suggested prewar fabrication, perhaps late-­nineteenth-­century Meiji era. It was as if the whole building had arisen around this older structure.

The iron door was midnight black, shining with oil or varnish. It had been cared for.

There was nothing else. He turned. The double doors behind him had closed, and there was only a folding table—­no, a human skull on a folding table.

“Is it—­” His voice echoed in the darkened space. “Is it the Cinematographer?”

“As promised,” the voice answered from the darkness. It seemed to come from all around the abbot, buzzing and whispering from the shadows themselves. “Please, feel free to examine it. Take your time.”

The abbot's hands were steady as he reached for the skull, but his pulse fluttered in his belly.

The bone was cocoa-­brown and unmarred under thin shellac. The cranium and jawbone were wired together in an everlasting grin. The crooked teeth were inlaid with brass, and the eye sockets were inset with sleepy ovals of ivory and stained wood. A silver band embossed with a death's head motif marked the seam where the skull had been sawed open and the brain removed. The abbot pulled, and the skull cap popped off in his hands—­the discarded grail of a bloodthirsty Hindu goddess. The interior of the cranium had been lined with beaten copper to make an airtight cavity, and a cylindrical brass key lay on a bed of green felt within.

“Does this key unlock the shrine?”

The darkness laughed, and a man stepped into the pool of light beneath the naked bulb. His suit was so black that it seemed to stay behind, melding him with shadow. “The shrine needs no lock. The lock that key once fit was reduced to slag decades ago.”

The abbot glanced at the double door. It had not opened, so the man in the suit had been there all along, somehow concealed in the empty room. He was clearly the one called the counselor. Such a man's time was very valuable, and even the abbot himself had to avoid wasting it. The abbot quickly reassembled the skull, raised it to his forehead, and chanted a brief verse from the sutras.

“He's quite unable to hear your prayers, you know. He lost his ears in the Himalayas almost seventy years ago.”

The abbot looked up to see the counselor's small, derisive smile. Such impiety could be a test of the abbot's responses, or it might be a mockery of the heresies spouted by their common enemies. The abbot could only reply from his faith: “My prayers are not for the ears of the living or the dead, but for those of the Eternal Buddha, who is beyond life or death.”

“An interesting proposition, but we are concerned with only two alternatives: life or death.”

“The life or death of our cause if news of the . . . ah, the
other
relic becomes public?”

The counselor grinned. His teeth were huge, yellow in the incandescent light. “The life and death of Japanese citizens. Productive members of society. Consumers and taxpayers. We must retrieve the artifact, and we must retrieve it quickly.”

“You have the resources of this huge corporation at your command,” the abbot said. “Why do you need us?”

The counselor waved at the darkness. “All this is really . . . well, let us just say that recovery of the artifact requires a different sort of power. That is where your organization comes in.”

“I don't understand.”

“It's not necessary that you understand the levels of power involved, but you must witness the effects of the artifact itself. This footage is the work of the cinematographer whom you so revere. Each frame was painstakingly colored by the same skilled workers who tinted Japan's famous postcards. An important cultural legacy indeed, especially since those skilled workers were liquidated at the project's conclusion.” The counselor addressed the darkness: “I will leave the room, and then the projector will start.”

He slipped out into a brief glimpse of sickly green corridor.

The abbot heard, for the first time in many years, an old-­fashioned motion-­picture projector whirring and clattering to life. His own silhouette sprang up fat and black on the projection screen hanging on the rust-­frozen pulleys above the steel grate in the floor. He stepped out of the beam and turned to look for the projector. There was a cinder block missing in the wall behind him, a hole pouring forth the chatter of sprockets and the flickering stream of moving images.

The abbot turned back to face the screen. The footage was disturbing from the first but not horrifying, not even when he began to suspect what was about to happen. When the blood began to flow, the abbot couldn't help but pity the artists whose final work in this world had been hand-­tinting this monstrous reel, laboring frame by frame toward their own doom. He forgot all about the workers when the artifact's true effects became clear, abundantly and gruesomely clear, and his body attempted to betray him. His hips pivoted as if to turn him from the screen, but he dared not look away. His hands rose to cover his eyes, but he dared not raise them higher than his cheeks. His lungs pushed air through his vocal cords as if to make him scream, but he dared not make more than a small, mewling moan easily drowned out by the ratcheting noise from the hole in the wall behind him.

The screen went dark. The abbot stood in silence, his hands still on his cheeks, stunned and shaken by what he had seen.

The counselor stepped into the light again. “So you understand why we must regain the artifact.”

The abbot started. He had not noticed the counselor's return. “So it's t-­true,” the abbot said in a stuttering, wheezy voice. “The rumors about the starfish killings are true.”

The counselor assumed a pained expression. “Starfish killings indeed! I called them the
jellyfish
killings. What else would you call murders with boneless victims?” He sighed. “Even the best marketing sometimes goes to waste.”

The abbot didn't know quite what to say.

“Abbot, you have a special relationship with the ones who will retrieve the artifact for us. One of them at least.”

The abbot stiffened. “I know the men of whom you speak. They are heretics. Madmen. They cannot be trusted.”

The counselor tilted his head. “The same has been said of you and your followers, Abbot.”

The abbot crossed his arms. “I will not contact them.”

“They are already engaged. They are on our side, working for the health and welfare of the Japanese ­people.”

“Their betrayal of the
Lotus Sutra
condemns them to the Avichi Hell. I cannot intervene.”

The counselor laid his forefinger on the abbot's wrist. “You will save them. You will bring them back into the light of truth.”

A relief and a certainty swept over the old man.
I will save them.

“You will help feed them information they need to recover the artifact for us.”

“I will bring them back to the light,” the abbot said. Then he growled: “I will bring them back to the light or I will kill them myself.”

The counselor laughed with genuine amusement. “Abbot, your enthusiasm is commendable, but killing won't be necessary. If our mutual friends fail to retrieve the artifact, why, within a few weeks there will be no one in Japan left to kill.”

 

CHAPTER 2

Monday Evening

T
ohru Takuda found his wife, Yumi, watching the lights dancing on the Naka River.

She leaned with her elbows on the footbridge's concrete balustrade, her hands clasped, her expression serene. The neon signs of the entertainment district on the river's east bank reflected from the rippling river. It was beautiful, he thought, as he crossed the footbridge to meet her. She was beautiful, and he loved to see her in a moment of peace despite all the trouble he had brought to their lives.

The abnormally long rainy season was finally over, and it was a steamy, lazy late summer in Fukuoka. It was a gorgeous southern city stretching in a low, flat crescent around Hakata Bay like a lazy cat sunning itself on a windowsill. Fukuoka lent itself to an easy pace of relaxed industry, and this summer's fashions and pop songs accentuated the atmosphere. Okinawan music played everywhere Takuda went, even now drifting from a convenience store across the river.

If only he were wearing sandals instead of jackboots, it would be perfect, he thought. If only he were wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt instead of a security guard's coveralls. If only he were a decorated prefectural police detective on holiday instead of a wandering hunter of demons and monsters.

Yumi looked up at the sound of his footsteps and smiled at him. “I was going to meet you at the pachinko parlor, but I got distracted here.”

He joined her at the balustrade and put his hand on her hip. Her eyes were wide, clear, and untroubled. Her hair was slightly wavy in the sultry air, as it had been ever since the rainy season started. “You don't need to be in the pachinko parlor,” Takuda said.

“Neither do you,” Yumi said. “I'm sure something else will come along.”

He looked out across the shimmering water. There were jobs available, of course. Fukuoka was on the cusp of becoming a world-­class city, a metropolis of promise and possibility. It was a perfect time to be there. Unless you had pitched over your career to destroy a cursed beast that had murdered your son and your brother. Unless you and your friends had continued to stumble across monsters to slay, communities to liberate from hauntings, demons to send back to the deepest, hottest hells. Unless you had to move every few months when you became unemployable.

He watched Yumi watching the water.
At least she still sees me for what I was
, he thought,
not what I'm becoming.

She seemed not to be thinking of him at all. She looked out across the ripples with the same wistful expression she wore when viewing fireworks or cherry blossoms. She didn't have to say it. Nobody had to say it.

This will not last.

Today or tomorrow or next week, no one knew when, some new beast would appear to be slain. Then Takuda, the ex-­priest Suzuki, and their young cohort, Mori, would be drawn into a new horror, and soon after, they would be forced to wander again. In the three years they had all been together, they had already moved five times.

Takuda sighed. “Let's go home,” he said. He hated the thought of going back to the cramped little apartment they shared with Suzuki and Mori, but it was better than standing on the bridge contemplating the inevitable future.

She nodded. They went back across the bridge the way Takuda had come, ready to cut through the bar district to catch their bus, but at the end of the bridge, she pulled at his sleeve to turn south. “Let's take the long way home,” she said. “Let's find a place for you to lay down your staff and relax for a while.”

That road led past tawdry little clubs, pachinko ­parlors, and adult shops, but it also led to posh little hotels designed for lovers like Takuda and Yumi, ­people who seldom found privacy.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“We have enough,” she said. He slung his oaken staff over his shoulder. She took his arm as they threaded through the crowd of office workers and secretaries. “Don't worry.”

He smiled, for the first time in days.
Maybe things aren't so bad after all. Maybe we can stay here for a while this time.

He stole a glance at Yumi as they walked along the river. She still looked happy, but there was a tiny crease between her eyebrows. Not as serene as she seemed. Takuda looked back at the road in front of them.
It's coming
, Takuda thought.
She knows it, whether I want to admit it or not.
He squeezed Yumi's hand.
We have tonight, at least.

“ . . . s
o I must talk to someone about this strange desire. It is not natural . . .”

The foreigner's Japanese was stilted and bookish, and he refused to be interrupted. Yoshida muted her phone and rested her head on the desktop. As she moved, her clammy cheek made a slight sucking sound on the cool plastic. The pencil lying beside her call log rocked slightly with her breath.

It was only 11 o'clock at night.

“The words I must say are very simple, but the meanings are complicated . . .”

He would have to wind down on his own. These late-­night callers usually needed healthy sleep more immediately than medication or therapy. If they weren't violent or suicidal, the goal was to get valid contact information and then try to tuck them in over the telephone. Even a few hours seemed to help.

The foreigner spoke more quickly, as if to tell his secret before his spirit weakened. “There is a boy,” he said.

Yoshida bundled her sweater into a pillow.

“I met this boy, a student, at the college where I teach, and I have strange thoughts about him.” His whisper had a hollow, metallic echo, perhaps from calling on a cell phone. “Never before have I had such thoughts.”

If the caller paused for a breath, she would confirm for him that he was not the only man who liked men. A little late in life to be finding out, but perhaps he had been preoccupied with his studies. She laid her head on the bundled sweater.

“I want to do something I have never done before.”

She smiled. The foreigner couldn't know it, but that was the setup of an old, old comedy routine.

“His . . . his bones,” the foreigner whispered. “I want to lick his bones. I want to peel off his flesh and lick his bones clean.”

Yoshida's eyes snapped open. All of a sudden, sleep was the last thing on her mind.

The foreigner was breathing hard. “Pardon me, but if you wouldn't mind answering a question . . .”

Yoshida grunted in numbed response.

“Well,” the foreigner said, “how tall are you? Are you a long-­legged woman?”

H
aruma stood forlorn in the darkness. The girls from his study group had promised him a party, but instead they were performing a silent and complicated dance in a dim, stinking restaurant, and he was beginning to hate them for it.

He had tried to join in at first, but he bungled the pattern again and again. The girls were weaving in and out, stepping in perfect unison without even looking at each other. They had obviously practiced this dance for hours and hours, practiced so they could do it with only the greenish glow of the exit sign to guide them. Perhaps they wanted to impress him, but it really wasn't working.

Close order drill was sort of a Japanese specialty, as far as Haruma was concerned. No flair or originality on display here, just the same lockstep precision of a Tokyo crosswalk, the great ant heap in motion.

“Girls, this is great,” he said, rolling his eyes in the dark as he clapped his hands. “Think of how much better this would be with music and exotic drinks. I know places we can go to show everyone!”

They didn't look at him. They hadn't brought him here to dance with him or entertain him or even let him take part. It was all clearly designed to make him more separate, to make him more the outsider. Haruma was used to being the outsider. Maybe the girls thought he felt at home with them at school, flirting harmlessly and joining in their breathless conversations about boy bands and fashion, but he was always on the outside. Every time one of the girls mocked him to establish her own place within the circle, his place was clear as day. Outside.

Haruma's deepest resentments led him only as far as avoiding those who had hurt him. He had learned not to hate, and he had learned not to feed his anger. The lessons reminded him of the teacher . . .

“This is boring,” he said. “Girls, thank you for the display, but I'm going to get some dinner at the Lotus Café, on Meiji Avenue across from the Black Gate. You should join me. My friend Koji will serve us. He'll appreciate a tale about your dance in the darkness.” And Koji would be much, much more entertaining. Flamboyant and witty, utterly hostile toward pretension and imposture, Koji was currently the brightest light in Haruma's life. Koji was only a waiter, but he had become what Haruma only hoped to be.

“Well, I'm going, then,” he said to the echoing darkness, the shuffling of feet. They didn't even look at him. “Stupid,” he muttered as he stepped into the pattern. The pattern tightened on him. Inexplicably, the girls quickened into a faster lockstep. Up close, even in the greenish half-­light they looked disheveled, unkempt. They brushed by him on all sides.

He didn't know how many there were—­he hadn't stopped to count. There had seemed to be seven when he first walked in, but they had multiplied, or other girls had come out of the woodwork. It made no sense. They were two-­deep all around him.

All at once, they grinned. Their mouths popped open in painful-­looking grimaces, baring their teeth in spastic smiles that stretched and contorted their lips. They grinned and grinned in a humorless, skull-­like rictus identical on every face.

“That's horrible,” he said. “This isn't funny.”

He began to shove his way out. He was pushed back at every turn with no seeming effort. They simply moved with him, still milling about him two-­ or three-­deep no matter where he turned, still grinning the horrible grins.

He pushed with all his strength, trying to break through. The crowd absorbed his push, and he felt a shocking, burning pain that ran up his arm. He pulled back his hand and stared at it. It was dark brown—­blood. It was crimson blood, brown in the greenish half-­light. It pumped out of his forearm, through the slit in his sleeve. He had been cut.

He swore at the top of his lungs, then gasped at sudden, blinding pain in his leg. He went down to one knee. The girls stopped their dance and turned inward toward him, grinning their horrible grins. He was at the center of the circle. They bore down on him, and he screamed as they stripped him of his flesh.