The Drowning God (8 page)

 

CHAPTER 15

T
he shrine was a plain cedar box perched on a lip of rock overhanging the Naga River. Detective Takuda and Reverend Suzuki dug into the clay with their boots as the ascent steepened, and then they hit the last three meters: an almost vertical climb to the stone lip. Wooden posts jutted from holes in the exposed stone, but the posts were rotten, spongy and wet to the touch. Takuda broke the posts off with his bare hands, Suzuki dug out the blackened pulp with a spoon from his backpack, and they used the empty postholes to climb the face. At the top, Takuda pulled himself over the stone lip and then pulled Suzuki up after him.

The shrine lay above the shadow of the river's passage. It was sun-­splintered, dry as kindling. The door rattled in its stone track and finally refused to slide at all, so Takuda lifted it aside.

“It's been rebuilt in the last century or so, but no telling how long it's been since anyone came here,” Suzuki said as he ducked inside. Takuda stayed at the door, playing his pocket flashlight over the faded red walls. The building was basically a cubical hut, but the corners had been filled in at seemingly random angles to make an irregular octagon with a square altar in the center.

Takuda stepped into the octagon. The painted panels were lurid and amateurish, impossible to ignore. On the wall opposite the door, a thin and vicious Kappa glared into the distance past Takuda's shoulder as it wrestled an improbably large horse into a stream. On the next panel, the Kappa feasted on the entrails of a drowning man. On other panels were sooty scenes apparently unrelated to the Kappa: a monk approaching a temple in a dark valley, the same monk praying at an altar half-­submerged in a black pool, a demon swimming with fantastic sea creatures, a demon in ragged robes approaching a village, the same demon set aflame by villagers with torches.

Takuda turned away from the painted walls. The floor was unfinished wood, bare save for windblown leaves, dust, and a length of yellowed nylon rope. The altar in the center of the floor was a plain cubical box with a stone lid. The lid was a flattish trapezoidal boulder bound with crude iron straps, straps perhaps designed to attach a chain to the stone.

“We need a winch up here,” Suzuki whispered.

They stood quietly. Takuda was considering the wisdom of removing the stone, winch or no winch, when he realized they were being watched.

On shelves placed near the ceiling in the eight angles of the room stood ancient terra-­cotta statuettes, the kind that had guarded the giant tombs of princes. Those statuettes were from the beginnings of their culture, before Buddhism had come to the islands, before the territories were united, before Japan even had a single name.

Takuda nudged Suzuki to indicate the statuettes. Suzuki shook his head as if to say he didn't know why they were there, either.

These were the most primitive type of such statuettes, like bowling pins with holes for eyes and mouths. Takuda had always considered them simplistic parodies of human figures, comically inept in terms of sculpture. Seeing them in this place, he realized that they had never been meant to represent humans. They were terrified ghosts, eyes wide in alarm, mouths agape in everlasting screams.

The strangest part was that the statuettes did not face outward to protect the stone altar from the outside world. They faced inward to protect the world from whatever waited beneath the stone lid.

Suzuki stepped forward, and the wooden floor whined and popped beneath his feet. As he approached the stone slab in the center, his footsteps resonated more deeply. The wooden floor covered a hole or fissure in the rock. Takuda stepped back at the alarming give beneath their feet, but Suzuki inched forward. He bent as if to lift the slab.

“What are you doing?”

Suzuki straightened, but he didn't step away from the slab. “Why are we whispering?”

Takuda didn't laugh at himself, and he surprised himself by continuing to whisper. “Stop playing with the slab. This floor is weak.”

“This old cedar lasts forever, and no one has been wearing out this flooring. I don't think anyone has been up here in a long time. I don't see what it could hurt.” Suzuki spoke at a normal volume. His voice was painfully loud inside the shrine. “Besides, why have pulleys to lift it if there's nothing to see underneath?”

“Pulleys?”

Suzuki pointed to the ceiling. There, in the shadows, old oaken pulleys were lashed to the rafters.

“That wouldn't lift this stone. Even if it did, that ceiling beam wouldn't hold up.”

Suzuki slid his backpack onto the floor and grasped the iron bands on the stone. “That was part of their ritual, you see? They lifted the stone, but why? What could be under there? Don't you want to see what's under there?”

Takuda wasn't as concerned about what lay beneath the stone as what lay under the floor. “Step away from it now. It's going to give.”

Suzuki slid his hands under the iron straps. “See? This one goes here, and this one—­wait a minute—­ouch—­there!” He stood back, shaking his pinched finger. “Now, help me, and we'll just guide it to the floor over there.”

“No,” Takuda said. “This isn't . . .”

The floor began to buckle beneath Suzuki. Nails squealed and ancient cedar popped as the box leaned like a capsized ship awash in the ancient wooden floor. Suzuki made to jump, but one hand was still in the iron strap. He would go with the stone when the floor gave out.

Takuda leapt forward, grabbed Suzuki by the back of the trousers, and squatted.

“Get your hand free of that thing!”

Takuda pulled for all he was worth, but it seemed to take forever for Suzuki's center of gravity to shift backward. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw wood slowly splinter and rend beside the altar. The floor was giving way in the center, and Takuda couldn't pull Suzuki backward faster than the floor collapsed.

The altar and the stone disappeared, and Suzuki began to sink feet-­first, screaming, into the buckling floor. Takuda splayed out his own legs and elbows to make himself too big to fit through the gap. The buckling of the floor warped the flimsy cedar walls to bring the clay guardians crashing down from their perches.

The stone lid crashed in the echoing darkness below, and the falling cedar chattered down on top of it.

At least it's not bottomless—­

There was a faint, meaty stink in the cool, damp air rushing up from beneath.

Suzuki's long legs flailed as he slid forward into the priest-­wide hole, and Takuda was going with him. First Suzuki's belt loops entered the darkness, then Takuda's own hands, then his wrists, then his forearms, and then his own head . . .

Takuda's mass stopped them. He lay with his arms hanging into the hole in the floor. Blood trickled down his right arm, but it was only a scrape. The real problem was Suzuki's squirming. As Suzuki swung in Takuda's grasp, the creaking wood slowly splintered.

“Hey, Priest, stop moving around so much.”

“I'm caught on something!” The echo from below was immense.

“Yes, I have you by the back of the pants.”

Suzuki went still. “Can you please pull me up?”

“I could, but I'm flat on my belly here, so it wouldn't help you,” Takuda said. “I could try to swing you up so you can catch the edge.”

“No, no, no swinging. Just don't drop me. Are you okay? Can you hold me?”

“I could hold you here all day,” he said, and he felt as if he could. “What do you see down there?”

“Nothing. It's pitch-­black.”

The nylon rope from the old block and tackle was barely within reach. When Takuda let go with one hand to reach for the rope, Suzuki shrieked in the darkness.

“Sorry. Here, rope coming down,” Takuda said.

“Warn me if you do something like that again, okay?”

When Suzuki had tied the rope under his arms, Takuda rose to his knees and began hauling him up.

“Hey, just lower me,” Suzuki shouted.

“Lower you? Don't be a fool. We don't know what's down there.”

“Can you reach my pack? Hand it down here.”

Takuda passed it down. In a few seconds, a flare exploded into blinding red light, and a cloud of sulfurous smoke singed Takuda's eyebrows and burned his nose. It was Suzuki's turn to apologize.

As Takuda lowered Suzuki into the darkness, the detective felt as if he were an adventurous child in a story from a grammar school reader. He and Suzuki were searching for treasure hidden by mountain bandits. It was ridiculous.

“I see light coming in down there,” Suzuki said. “Wow, that's a long way down! This is about fifteen meters, don't you think? There's an opening just at the waterline. Just a little daylight at the bottom. That fall would have broken my leg, I'll bet! Okay, the flare is helping. There's a little water down there, some pools from the river water leaking in, I guess, and the stones—­Oh, no. Oh, no.”

Takuda felt the rope go slack as Suzuki found the bottom.

“What's going on down there?”

“Oh, oh, oh. There are iron shackles on the wall—­oh, look down here, Detective.” Suzuki stood in a reddish circle. “Can you see?”

“Priest, what's going on down there?” Takuda stretched out farther over the ragged gap in the wooden floor.

Suzuki lowered the flare. There were bright roundish stones and ordered sticks like baskets all over the cavern floor.

They weren't baskets. They were rib cages.

“These are skulls, Detective. Oh, oh, oh. The floor here—­it's covered with human bones.”

The floor popped and lurched under Takuda's belly. He reached for the rope, but it slid down into darkness. He had nothing to hold on to but the tilting floor itself, and it was giving way beneath him.

I hope Suzuki has the sense to move aside
.

As the cedar splintered and folded all around him, he looked into the eyes of one of the toppled clay guardians. The silent sideways scream of frozen terror would fall with him into the cavern below.

The floor went silent as it finally released him. He fell free of the splintered wood into red-­lit darkness, an echoing void. He prepared himself for the cavern floor rushing up to meet him.

 

CHAPTER 16

D
etective Takuda didn't have time to tuck as he fell into the cavern beneath the Shrine of the Returning Apprentice, but he tried to relax and bend his knees. He felt oddly serene.

His feet hit first. He heard bones snap, but not his own. His legs bent properly, but his weight was so far forward that the impact drove his knees into his chest. His head whipped forward, and his chin hit his sternum so hard that his jaw rattled. His body briefly compressed into a ball, and when nothing more could compress, he bounced. As his body sprang forward, he hit Suzuki, and they somersaulted through the darkness together.

Takuda protected Suzuki's head on the first roll. He let go, and they separated. Takuda rolled to his feet, sliding among the skittering ribs until his boots bit in. After such a hard landing, he expected to see stars, the blue-­and-­orange sparks of a knockout punch, but he saw only the darting red glow of Reverend Suzuki's flare.

Suzuki landed flat on his backpack with his head pointed toward Takuda, the sputtering flare still grasped tightly in his hand. Takuda winced at Suzuki's impact, but Suzuki stopped his slide and swung himself around on the bones as if he had planned the whole thing. “Detective, are you okay?”

He said he was. He felt himself for breaks and punctures. His jaw ached from the impact with his own breastbone, but one hard little part of his mind noted without passion that the damage was more than acceptable for a fifteen-­meter fall into darkness.

“This is horrible,” Suzuki said as he clambered back up among the bones. He was covered with muck and shards of shattered rib. His eyes were wild in the last glimmerings of that flare. He pulled another from his backpack. His hands trembled as he struck it alight. “I counted seventeen skulls, Detective. There are probably many more in the shadows, all covered with mold and slime.”

Overhead, Takuda saw the dim outline of the broken floor. Even the shrine was brighter than the cave. His eyes adjusted to the flare light. At his feet were jumbled bones, shattered stone, and splintered cedar. He and Suzuki had managed to ruin the most important crime scene in Japanese history.

“I've got one more flare after this one,” Suzuki said. “I don't know about gases down here . . .”

“If it were flammable, we would already be dead.” He grasped Suzuki's wrist and held the priest's trembling hand aloft to get a steady light from the spitting flare.

The reddish light made a scene from hell. The narrow cave cut ten meters into the roots of the mountain. The floor of the cave was black, silty mud, and in that darkness were gray and cream and brownish skulls half-­sunk among jackstraw ribs. All but hidden by the long bones and newer skulls were older bones blackened with slime and moss.

They stood speechless.

“There must be—­there must be thirty skulls here,” Suzuki said.

Takuda nodded. “At least thirty,” he said, “but that's only in the top layer.”

Suzuki looked at him in astonishment as the little flare sputtered out.

Takuda and Suzuki stood silent in the darkness. Takuda released Suzuki's wrist and waited for him to speak or to light another flare, but Suzuki was silent as well.

“Priest, what are you doing?”

“I'm waiting.”

“For what?”

“To see what will come.”

Ridiculous.
In some ways, Suzuki was a great and clumsy fool, and he tried to make up for it by aping wisdom, which only made it worse. Standing silent in the darkness when there was work to be done? A vain pretense.

“Priest, light your flare. I haven't found my flashlight yet.”

“Soon, Detective. Soon.”

Takuda had to restrain himself from reaching out and shaking the man till a lit flare fell out of him. Instead, he listened to his own heart pounding in his chest and waited for Suzuki to finish his game.

He was truly in the mouth of evil, the sacrifice pit of the Kappa cult. The water safety question wasn't a question anymore. This was murder. If he could not bring the killers to justice, he would stop them by any means possible. He would clean up this wretched little valley for good.

There was a slight rustling sound, a grinding of bones underfoot, the sound of Suzuki shifting from one foot to the other, bracing himself, reaching carefully into his bag.

The hair stood up on Takuda's neck.
What a fool I've been
.

It had been Suzuki all along. Suzuki had played innocent to lure him into this cave, this burial pit, and Suzuki meant to crawl out alone. Suzuki had even invoked the name of Takuda's murdered brother to lull him into a state of trusting stupidity. Now Suzuki was drawing out a poisoned blade, or five poisoned blades, the same blades that had killed Takuda's brother and his son and Lee Hunt. Takuda raised his left arm to defend himself and raised his right hand high to deal Suzuki an invisible, openhanded blow from above, a blow that would shift Suzuki's head a palm's width to the left before the first cervical vertebra could catch up, severing the spine and killing him instantly. If Takuda used some of his newfound power, the blow would pulp Suzuki's brains as well, but that was incidental.
It's too bad. I liked him.
He stood frozen in the dark, waiting for the bite of a blade.

“I've got it,” Suzuki said.

“What do you have?”

The flashlight clicked on in Suzuki's hand. It lit his puzzled expression from below. “What are you doing? Warding off bats? There are no bats here. The exit is too low and too watery.”

Takuda slowly lowered his hand.

“I was standing on your flashlight.” He handed it to Takuda. “Before that, I was just praying for the truth about this place. I know why we're not afraid.”

“Priest, I am afraid of this place. Very afraid.”
You'll never know, Priest.
He was so afraid that he had almost slapped the man's head off his neck.

“No, that's just nerves. Stay still for another minute. Feel for it. There's no evil here. It's just a hole full of bones. This place is deserted. This is all old sacrifice. Years old.”

Takuda stilled himself and listened to his heart. Suzuki was right.
There's no meat on these old bones, and the trail from here is cold.
Stone cold
.

Forensic evidence in the cave wouldn't give them a living suspect. The murderers had their own process, their own discipline, and they would never, ever deviate. That was how the monstrous sacrifice had survived for so long with multiple murderers, generations of murderers covering for each other. As far as corroborating clues from the outside, there was less than nothing. There might be pictures linking dead members of the Farmers' Co-­op to the stone pillars on the river, but nothing linking anyone, living or dead, to the shrine itself or the narrow cavern beneath. Unless one of the worshippers had dropped his wallet into the chasm, there would be no way to prove that anyone from the cult had even lifted the stone, much less committed murder.

“Priest, do you think news of this will flush out the killers? Do you think someone will crack?”

Suzuki sighed as he rummaged for a flare. “That happens in the movies, doesn't it? Some brave widow steps forward, or some old man wracked with guilt. But here? In this valley? Don't bet on it.”

Suzuki was already crouching as if to crawl out though the low fissure to the river. He picked his way through the bones.

“Take off your pack,” Takuda said. “You'll get stuck.”

“Then hold it for me,” Suzuki said. “No, wait, I'll tie it to the rope so it follows me. Now you take the end. Hold it tight!” He crawled down among the bones to look out through the fissure.

Takuda swore and grabbed Suzuki's legs. He was ready to jerk Suzuki out if anything went wrong.

“I see light coming in here,” Suzuki said. “Wow, that's a long way out! There's an opening just at the waterline! I'm going through!”

Takuda released Suzuki's legs. The priest's grunting diminished as he crawled, then there was silence, and then there was just Takuda and the rope passing though his fingers. The bones clunked and rattled with the rope's passage.

Finally, two sharp tugs, and it was Takuda's turn to follow. As he crawled through the muck and jumbled bones toward the fissure in the rock, his nostrils flared. He thought he caught a whiff of rotting fish, but it was hard to pick out from the mud-­bloody smell of the moldering bones. Still, he was tensed in every muscle as he belly-­crawled on the wet sand. He had never felt claustrophobic, but he was in a very, very tight spot.

It's not going to be the last time I'm in a tight spot if I follow this mad priest
.

He came out squinting in the perpetual twilight at the river's edge. Suzuki was nearly naked, perched on a stone washing his pale, bony body in the cold river water.

“I need your help, Detective.”

Takuda pulled himself out of the fissure, dragging his back pack behind him. The rope trailed down the sandy slope to Suzuki's feet.

“You didn't even bother to tie off the rope? I'm glad
I
didn't need
your
help with anything. What do you need?”

“My vestments. And I need you to check the opening.”

“What opening?”

“The other entrance to the cave. There.”

Takuda turned. A few yards upstream, parallel to the stone columns, a man-­high cleft hid in the roots of the mountain. The pillars obscured it from the higher bank, but it was visible down by the new waterline. Before the dam was completed, the cleft would have been completely underwater. At the mouth of the cleft were piles of toppled stones. Stacks of them still stood at the mouth of the cleft, as if there had been a wall.

Gooseflesh stood on Takuda's neck.

There had been a wall to keep something trapped inside the cave, just as there were ancient statuettes to keep it contained from above, just as there was a shrine for sacrifices to keep it quiet, just as there was a secret cult to make sure it got its fill.

Suzuki pointed upward. “Did you see the sacrifices? Up on the pillars?”

Fish and birds, including cranes and cormorants, had been tied to the pillars with rice-­straw ropes. They were blackened husks, dried and leathery despite the moisture in the air. Takuda looked away. “If you want mercy and benevolence from the Naga River, you make your offerings directly, right, Priest?”

“This is nasty, Detective. It's old and primitive superstition. Live sacrifices to the river. I knew it was here, on some level, but it's still hard to believe. What a nightmare.”

“What about those shackles inside?”

“Hmmm? Yes, big iron shackles pinned into the walls. You don't have those black iron shackles I gave you, do you?”

“No, they're at home.”

“Pity. I think they might have been part of a set. We can compare them someday.”

Takuda moved toward the second cave opening as if in a dream.

“Detective, don't go back in there until you have to.”

The sandy bank stopped at the mouth of the cave, where the remaining stones denied the river entrance. Takuda stepped over them into the darkness. Suzuki stepped in behind him, pulling his sash on straight.

“There's a bend here—­that's why we didn't see the light from the inside.” When they got around the bend, Takuda stood in near darkness before a wall of dried silt, sticks, and stones. “Light that last flare,” he said. “We'll use my flashlight after that, but I don't want to run down the bat—­Oh, no. Priest, light this up. There's even more.”

In the light of Suzuki's flare, the wall rose before them. It was not made of sticks and stones. It was a solid wall of human bone mortared together with black silt. Under Takuda's fingertips, the bones collapsed inward in a rattling mass, leaving behind them a faint, moldy stink and a sound like bowling pins in sawdust, a sound that echoed through the cave like stifled, chuckling laughter.