The Devouring God (7 page)

 

CHAPTER 13

Friday Morning

T
he detectives' office was beige and gray with desks pushed flush together so that work groups sat face-­to-­face. At the center of the room, a short, balding detective wrote hurriedly in a small notebook. Takuda asked for Kimura. Without looking up, the detective pointed with his pen toward at the other corner of the office where Kimura sat alone at a table.

Kimura had the hippest glasses Takuda had seen since the 1970s, and he grinned when Takuda told him so. “Yeah, my boss hates them.” He pointed at the man out at the table. “So I bought more.” He laughed a high-­pitched hiccuppy laugh and smoothed his hair with his free hand.

Kimura put on one of his business faces. “You know, this incident with Mr. Thomas and Miss Nabeshima is very serious. When we look at his notebooks, there is a lot that we don't know. I thought that you, as a special consultant, might have some input on this matter.”

Takuda looked down pointedly at his coveralls. He almost reached for his staff before remembering that he had left it at home on purpose. “I'm not really a specialist.”

Kimura tossed his chin at the busy detective out in the main room. “Chief of Detectives Ishikawa said you are. He said he got the call that you and your friends were sent from the heavens.”

Takuda controlled his expression. The euphemism “sent from the heavens” to mean “from upper strata of the hierarchy” was already getting on his nerves. “I think Yoshida of the social ser­vices offices would be more helpful,” he said.

Kimura smiled and handed Takuda a large binder. “She's not a criminologist like you.”

Takuda sighed and opened the binder. It was filled with copies white on black, like photostats. They were splotched with gray clouds of fingerprints and crossed by sheets of scudding stains from the ham of Thomas's hand. He had lettered and sketched with a mechanical pencil, that or a nib too fine to blob or fill.

Thomas drew with a vivisectionist's precision: details of charred flesh peeling from the bones of inverted popes, intricate and sparingly cross-­hatched views of the damned abroil on pikes with their bellies ballooned and juices bubbling from burst navels, and one freer rendering of the Greek Titan Sisyphus crushed beneath his stone, blood spewing from his twisted mouth and coiled mass issuing from his anus. In the lower right-­hand corner of each page lay clustered fingerprints as if Thomas had paused after each drawing to examine and approve before moving on.

Kimura took notes as Takuda spelled out the classical references in what he saw. He was surprised the detective was so ignorant of European mythology and religion. Even a cursory reading of popular manga would have taught him as much as Takuda knew.

Three pages were drawings of the three-­headed dog, but they were rough enough to be just starting points for Thomas's sculpture, if that. The last sketch in that group was a jointed framework. Either he had continued in another notebook or he had been good enough to pull off that sculpture with almost no preparation.

The sketches were interleaved with bits of writing, none longer than two pages. Thomas's longhand was a surprisingly childish scrawl, but his printing was sharp and angular with neither loops nor curves. He wrote in diamond
O
's and isosceles
D
's with high ascenders and deep descenders alike barbed as fishhooks, all characters discretely vertical and altogether more like primitive runes than any English writing Takuda had ever seen. He had reserved this sharp, unleaning style for poetry and essays, as if it were a script specially designed for recording madness, but what he wrote in that stilted hand was even stranger than the lettering itself.

Takuda lit a cigarette after reading the first paragraph, a bizarre and disjointed admission of lust for another foreigner named Tracy.

Kimura directed him to one short passage about knives and Thomas's fear of them. He had written that he couldn't go to Nepal for fear of the long, curved
kukri
nor to Israel for fear of the “shining fish” commando daggers, that he didn't sculpt wood because he thought eventually his own knives would turn on him. It may have explained why he encased his knives in plaster, but Takuda didn't think it told the whole story.

Another, much longer essay was on someone named Job. It seemed deliberately convoluted, filled with internal references to biblical names “two lines above” and concepts “forty-­three words before.” Had it been straightforward, Takuda still would not have understood; this went far beyond his casual knowledge of Chris­tian­ity. As it was, Takuda just scanned it. It ended on the second page with a nicely shaded cross-­section of a boil, that or some geological formation for which Takuda had no name.

The longhand scribbling was in random spots, sometimes wedged into trapezoids between finished drawings. When Takuda noticed this, he flipped through the binder. It seemed that Thomas had filled a one-­hundred-­page composition book from cover to cover, then had started to fill in empty spots. No wonder the police had copied this journal. If they were looking for proof of insanity, it seemed a likely place to find it.

One page featured a full-­sized drawing of the stone knife, in loving detail. The legend in English at the bottom of the page read,
Kurodama, unknown stone, unknown origin
.

Takuda flipped past it. The following pages were detailed drawings of individual bones and full skeletons, some highly detailed and some ridiculously stylized, some dancing in apparently joyous abandon with the legend
Poor Skeleton Steps Out
.

Two facing pages stopped Takuda as he flipped through. On first glance he thought there was an old Japanese print stuck in Thomas's notebook, but the meticulous cross-­hatching was unmistakably Thomas's work. Then the whole thing came clear and Takuda's stomach started to squirm. Thomas had drawn caricatures of Japanese ­people in scenes from Buddhist hell. They were tortured by comically grotesque demons who grinned to show their tusks and fangs while they flayed and roasted emaciated bodies. The flapping tongues of businessmen were nailed to the floor. Nabeshima, unmistakably Nabeshima, was skewered on a demon's pike in a parody of physical love. Others Japanese girls were stacked in tiers on beds of smoking coal.

The caricatures themselves were worse than the tortures inflicted. Nabeshima's face was haggard and bleary. Thomas had drawn her in three-­quarter profile, her forehead sloping down to heavy brows, then shoved her pug nose farther up between her eyes to make room for her jutting jaw and hugely outsized teeth.

The squirming settled deeper into Takuda's stomach. He laid the binder facedown on the table and lit another cigarette. Kimura picked up the binder and pointed out some interesting sights in Buddhist hell, including the
Hari no yama
, the mountain of needles, and the
Sanzu no kawa
, the flaming river. Takuda didn't care. He was done.

“But wait. See, it changes.”

Kimura turned the page. Willowy, indistinct shapes floated out of slipstreams and waves. They were beautiful, like faceless angels shining white on the black pages. There were arrows and labels to indicate different figures: “the woman in the hallway,” “the screaming boy,” “the man who stands sideways.”

In the angular script:

They are very shy. They disappear when they turn sideways. They aren't transparent, and they aren't like chameleons. They just know how to disappear. One is a woman and she always hides in the wood crying. I hear her just as I fall asleep, and it wakes me up. But I turn on the light, and she doesn't want to be seen. She just cries.

Beneath that, in longhand:

Eleven voices, two that are certainly not mine.

Takuda sat back on the sofa and exhaled. Kimura raised an eyebrow.

“It's interesting, isn't it? He was hallucinating vividly.”

Takuda just looked at him across the notebook. “You're not a psychiatrist.”

“When I spoke to Mr. Thomas in the hospital, I thought perhaps he had a borderline personality disorder, but everything else points toward paranoid schizophrenia. And when I went to his house, I thought he also had an obsessive compulsive disorder. Look.”

He laid out another binder, this one full of photos from the house. It was like a haunted house from a traveling festival sideshow. Cerberus was gone from the greenhouse studio, and the plasticene bust was hacked down to gray-­green chunks. The paneling in the narrow hallway between the studio and the main room hung in splinters from the lath. Kimura directed Takuda's attention to a two-­page series of photos: the dissection of Thomas's identical daily garbage bags. Each one contained an empty Gen-­Key bottle and the plastic box from his daily boxed lunch, a deep-­fried mix from a local restaurant. The next photo was the mixture of cigarette butts and shrimp tails in each Gen-­Key bottle.

“All schizophrenics smoke,” Kimura said conspiratorially.

Ishikawa, still in the other corner of the detectives' bull pen, barked for Kimura in the local dialect. Kimura winked at Takuda just to show that he didn't care what anyone thought, then excused himself to talk to his boss.

Takuda went back to Thomas's notebook for clues about the Kurodama. Instead, he found a list of nice things to say to Nabeshima about her hair, her body, her work, her English.

At the bottom of the page in scribbled longhand almost too small for Takuda to read, he had written:

KAORI is MOMMYROT.

Beneath that, in his hooked script:

Not MOMMYROT, but like MOMMYROT.

Outside the window in East Park, the sun shone as if in a different world. Takuda shoved the copy of Thomas's notebook in his satchel and stood to leave.

A framed canvas leaned against the back of the couch. Takuda pulled it out and set it right side up. It was in oils, painted from the center outward with the foreground fading into an unpainted grid with mountains, a valley, and a small town penciled in. At the center was the shadow of a cross cast by the bars of an open window. It fell on dirt near the knobby feet of men who slept shadowed in a squat earthen house. Jesus sat on the doorsill in the golden morning light. He was small and wiry, a nut-­brown man with a slightly hooked nose, flaring eyebrows, and the large, liquid brown eyes of Arab children. In his right hand he held a knife, and from his left hand dangled a strip he had cut from his ragged cloak. A kitten at his feet batted at the strip as its mother cleaned her paw in a patch of sunlight in the foreground. Jesus looked off to the distance with his brow furrowed and his jaw set hard.

Thomas's head was filled with devils, and brutality poked into his life like jagged glass. Thomas was the anti-­Takuda, or Takuda was the anti-­Thomas, or something. There were too many pieces, and Takuda couldn't put it all together.

Who can stay sane, seeing what we see? Thomas and Nabeshima and I might someday share a smoke in a dayroom with no shoelaces or sharp objects.

Kimura returned. “I'm taking the notebook copies with me,” Takuda said. “Maybe Yoshida can help me with it.”

“I don't care. I have more copies. Here,” he said, handing over a thin folder. “Here are student papers we don't understand. Maybe she can make something of that.” Kimura looked disappointed. “You don't have any ideas about him? I was thinking that you might have some insight.”

“The only thing I can tell you is that he would've snapped no matter where he was living.”

Kimura laughed, though nothing was funny. “Maybe that is true. But I just wonder why he did not go back home to America.”

Takuda left him wondering.

The sun was low, but Takuda sat near East Park, by the museum devoted to Kublai Khan's abortive invasion of Japan, in front of the giant bronze statue of St. Nichiren with his big baby head. Takuda pulled out Thomas's notebook, but he couldn't look again so soon.

Yoshida was wrong. Trying to unlock Thomas Fletcher's mind through his journals had not helped at all. Now that he had a glimpse, Takuda didn't want to go talk to the boy at all. Unfortunately, Yoshida had told him the way, and he even knew which bus to take. He slung his satchel over his shoulder.

Takuda just hoped he didn't have to go any deeper into Fletcher's head than he had gone already. It looked like hell in there.

 

CHAPTER 14

Friday Afternoon

“W
hat are you doing? It's not break time! Get those boxes into the pharmacy!”

The doctor was an angry little hornet of a man. He shouted at Takuda from the back door of the mental hospital where Thomas Fletcher was being held pending deportation.

Takuda was sprawled on the gravel in the scant hospital garden. He had shinnied up a utility pole two meters from the fence and leapt over the barbed wire. The utility pole was in a blind spot, and Takuda had thought he could land and recover without drawing attention to himself. He hadn't taken into account the ground-­shaking impact. They had probably felt it inside. Takuda's virtual indestructibility didn't relieve him of mass.

“Idiot!” the doctor hissed at him. “You've left psychoactive medication within reach of the patients! Come in. Now!”

Takuda leapt to his feet, bowing as he brushed himself off and straightened his satchel. He bowed all the way to the back door. The hospital was a nondescript two-­story building surrounded by rice paddies on three sides and framed behind by the aquamarine arc of the expressway flyover. There were only five parking spots, two designated for patient transport and the rest for doctors and prefectural police. There were no visiting hours at this sort of facility.

Takuda's bows as he passed the stiff, angry little doctor were sincere; he was grateful to have entered the hospital so easily.

He stepped up from the entrance pit into a bright hallway painted pistachio green. The staffroom was on his right and the stairs were on his left, just as Yoshida had said. The dispensary was ahead on the left. Across the hallway from the dispensary, by the restroom door, a nurse stood stiffly beside a waist-­high stack of small boxes. The delivery.

They go through a lot of drugs in this place
, Takuda thought.

The doctor pointed at the stack. “Quickly,” he said.

Takuda spared a glance into the staffroom. The whiteboard with the patients' names and room assignments was also exactly where Yoshida had said it would be. Thomas's name, written in phonetic script, stood out among the rest. Room 5 on the second floor, then. He knew the spare room keys would be hanging from a pegboard behind the open door, just as soon as he could get back to them. In the meantime, he bowed as if to duck another scolding from the doctor and shuffled forward to take the first few boxes.

In the dispensary, a slender middle-­aged woman smiled as she buzzed him in behind her glass wall. He put the boxes carefully on a long table that seemed to divide the counter from the ranks of shelves that lined the walls. He stared for a moment. It was a lot of medication, three whole walls of medication.

“You're new, so you won't get in trouble,” the pharmacist said, “but don't ever let Dr. Haraguchi see you sitting down again. Ever.”

When he stood from picking up the last of the boxes in the hallway, he was face-­to-­face with a young man in coveralls. The bathroom door swung closed behind the young man. He stared at Takuda as if he had met his own double.

“Your partner covered for you,” said the nurse guarding the last of the boxes. “You're both new, so you won't get in trouble. Just don't let Dr. Haraguchi catch you leaving supplies loose, especially medication.”

The young deliveryman bowed and grabbed the last box from Takuda. Takuda followed him into the dispensary.

“You're not my partner,” he hissed as they waited to be buzzed in. “What are you doing?”

“I'm here to check the ducting upstairs.” Takuda replied loudly enough for the pharmacist to hear. “I slipped on the gravel in the garden looking for outside roof access, and the doctor thought I was with you.”

“You should thank him for covering for you,” the pharmacist said as she buzzed them in.

She told Takuda that the only roof access was the locked door at the end of the upstairs ward. He bowed to them both and headed off.

The corridor outside the dispensary was empty. The staff room was empty. The pegboard behind the door was labeled by room. He snagged the keys to “Room 5” and “Roof” and slipped them into his pocket. He crossed the hallway and started up the stairs.

Dr. Haraguchi was coming down the stairs as Takuda went up. Takuda stood aside and bowed as if ashamed. The doctor ignored him.

The desk nurse upstairs glanced up as he passed. “Checking the ducting,” he said as he headed for the door at the end of the hallway. It rattled open and squealed as he pushed. It was a broom closet with a door at the far end, a disused emergency exit. The cut alarm wires dangled, so he unlocked the door and stepped out onto a tar-­and-­gravel roof overlooking the tiny parking lot. A rusted fire escape was at his feet. They had shut off this emergency exit to leave one tiny elevator and one narrow stairwell the only way off the second floor. They really, really didn't want anyone to leave.

He spent five minutes banging around on the roof just above the desk nurse's station. It was unnecessary. When he came back down, her seat was empty and the door to room 2 was ajar. Takuda went quickly to room 5 and slipped the key into the lock. He went in and eased the door shut behind him.

It was much like a regular hospital room except for the bars on the window and the molded foam padding on every angled surface. Thomas lay manacled on his bed, his mouth open, eyes closed. But for the slow and steady movement of his chest, he could have been dead.

Takuda stood beside the bed. “Wake up,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

Thomas opened his eyes and turned his head toward Takuda.

“I need to ask you some questions, Mr. Thomas. I know your Japanese is very good.”

The unnervingly blue eyes focused on Takuda. “You're trying to collect for your newspapers here?”

Takuda smiled and shook his head. “That was just to meet you. Do you remember that you lost something?”

Thomas shook his head.

“Did you have something in the farmhouse? Something you were looking for?”

“I was very confused,” Thomas said. “But the medication is working. You don't look like a devil anymore.” He frowned. “Not really.”

Takuda pressed him. “What was taken from you? Was it the Kurodama you spoke of?”

“I shouldn't have taken it,” Thomas said. “It called to them, during our lessons. There was something exciting about it. I didn't feel anything from it. They did, though. They were very, very excited, so I brought it to my house.”

Takuda leaned forward. “You say you didn't feel anything, but that's not quite true, is it? It gave you ideas.”

Thomas hesitated. He licked his lips in fear and indecision.

Takuda leaned closer. Foreigners seemed to like to be touched in such situations, but Takuda wasn't sure, so he folded his hands. “You're safe here. You may be able to help some ­people.”

Thomas exhaled, though Takuda hadn't noticed him holding his breath. “It gave me very strange thoughts about a boy named Haruma, a student at Able English Institute, a community college where I teach.”

Takuda nodded. “The desire was very comforting, like a place you went when you were troubled or bored. You drew bones in your journal. You were very curious about the texture of the bones, how they would feel on your tongue. You imagined that the cranium, the jaw, and the cheekbones would probably be smooth, like polished ivory, but that the long bones, like the humerus and femur, may have fine grain like hardwood. You licked different surfaces around the house, trying to imagine how different bones would feel.”

“I have been sedated,” Thomas said, “but I know what I have said. I never told the doctors or the police about this. I never told them of this desire.”

“You called a mental health emergency hotline. You knew of the hotline through Kaori Nabeshima.”

Thomas closed his eyes.

“I saw your house. It was strange and messy, but there was nothing evil there.”

Thomas's eyes popped open. “How do you know that?”

Takuda said, “I just know. And I know you fought it. You encased your knives and tools in plaster because these desires frightened you.”

Thomas squeezed his eyes shut. Tears leaked at the corners.

“You didn't want to hurt anyone. You fought it. You fought it hard. You are a good boy, Mr. Thomas.”

Thomas wept openly. Takuda sat beside him. After a moment, he pulled Suzuki's drawing of the curved jewel from his breast pocket.

“Is this what gave you the desires, Mr. Thomas?”

Thomas opened his eyes. He reflexively reached for the paper, but his restraints stopped him. “Yes, that is it. I didn't believe it was real. I knew the girls wanted it, but I didn't know what it was. It called for me, you know. It wants to be free.”

Takuda nodded as if he understood. “Do you know what it is?”

“I have no idea.”

“It is called a ‘curved jewel.' Such things are sometimes sacred in Japan.”

Thomas frowned deeply. “Curved jewel? Isn't that part of the Imperial Regalia, along with the Grass Sword and the bronze mirror?”

Takuda bowed. “You study not just our language, but our culture and history, as well.” Takuda felt an odd welling of pride that the foreigner was so interested in Japan, but he shoved those thoughts aside. There was no time.

“And it called to you and gave you these ideas.”

“Oh, no. No, that didn't happen until I touched it,” Thomas said. “It's smooth, and it warms to the touch like soapstone, but it seems too soft, even though it has an edge like volcanic glass.”

Takuda tried to keep his expression from changing. “You touched it directly, but you resisted the desires.”

“Yes,” Thomas said. “I don't suppose anyone would give in, do you?”

He hadn't quite formulated an answer when Thomas's eyes went round. He was staring at something past Takuda's shoulder.

As Takuda turned on the bed to look behind him, he felt a sharp sting in his neck. He reached up to brush it away, and his hand wasn't responding properly.

“What are you doing?” he heard Thomas saying. It was thin and reedy, that voice, and it seemed to come from a long distance. “What are you doing to him?”

Takuda felt himself sliding from the bed. He ended up on his back, looking up at an old nemesis, a kidnapper and murderer named Hiroyasu Ogawa.