The Emperor of Any Place (22 page)

I wasn’t sure what woke me. I gripped my service revolver and peered toward the bamboo wall. There was a tipped teacup of moon in the sky that did not spill enough light to make out anything. I listened, heard a rustling in the bushes that could have been an errant breeze. No. There it was again, and there was no wind to speak of that night.

Isamu spoke of how our nerves were frayed. It is true. I was a wreck. Had we been able to really communicate, I feel we might have been able to boost each other up. I had no idea of his conversation with the
jikininki,
although he might well have tried to tell me about it. It frustrated him to no end that I could not speak his language. I have never been particularly talkative, but he was a man, I think, who thrived on lively conversation. I could see the frustration growing in him. He was hungry to talk. I grew up in a family of sisters and quickly learned to keep my thoughts to myself. Whatever the reason, Isamu and I were at odds with each other. We were prisoners because of
Tengu.
But we had also made ourselves prisoners.

I lay the revolver down on my lap and rubbed the stump of my left arm. There were phantom pains there; fingers itching to act that were no longer there at all. Such treachery. The mind plays such tricks. None of this seemed real, and yet it was the realest thing I had ever experienced, a fear so visceral it made my insides churn.

Did we trust the fence? We had buried the stout bamboo stakes deep in the ground, reinforced them with heavy rocks, lashed the wood tightly together. The stakes angled out as they had before, the sharp points seven feet above the ground. Could the creature jump so high? I remembered its escape from us on the beach. Despite its many wounds, it was nimble on the rocks as it scaled the cliff. Perhaps we should build a trench on the other side of the wall? A moat? But I was not about to suggest any more digging to Isamu. That was part of the problem. Much more of the work fell to him. I tried my best. Even rigged up a wire contraption that fit over my stump and could grasp a shovel. But it was a poor substitute for a hand, and increasingly I felt myself to be a poor substitute for a man.

That night I heard the thing growl. How could a creature with a raptor’s beak make such a sound? It was the low rumble of a big cat, deep-throated, utterly intimidating. I felt I should wake Isamu, but his sleeping was so haphazard, I was loath to disturb him. Meanwhile, I became increasingly nervous.

It was planning something.

I heard the sound again, a growl that ended in a kind of clicking noise. There was no denying how close it was. I swung up out of my hammock and in my bare feet made my way to where the torches stood in the ground. The fire was not lit, but there were matches nearby. Fumbling in the dark, I found the box, shook it, heard the comforting rattle, then heard the growl again, sounding so close I feared irrationally the creature had somehow entered the compound. I lit a match, yet another one-handed trick I’d mastered, and with a trembling hand raised it to the dark, turning slowly around in a full circle before lighting one of the torches just as the match was at its end.

The torch swooshed into flame. Gripping it tightly, I approached the barricade. In order to hold the torch, I had stuck my gun in the waist of my pants. If the damn creature broke through the wall, I could only hope to hold it at bay with the torch. I thought I should wake Isamu, but by then I was afraid to say anything out loud — wasn’t sure I could. My throat was bone dry. Were I to try to speak, I imagined only a peep would come out.

For God’s sake, wake up, Emperor!

By now I was at the wall. I tried to peer through the cracks as I slowly walked the perimeter, holding the torch as near as I could without burning the barricade down.

Then I saw it and stopped dead in my tracks: an eye, gleaming with firelight. A hawk’s exophthalmic eye staring directly at me, pressed up against the bamboo. I jumped back, waved the fire in front of it to scare the thing off. It didn’t flinch. Instead, I heard the three-inch-thick bamboo squeak and watched the thick twine tauten.
Tengu
had pressed a bulky shoulder against the barricade. Hypnotized, I leaned toward the crack only to see the dark, mottled body slide along the fence toward the gateway. The sturdy door, reinforced by thick planks at the top and bottom, was hinged with wire wrapped round and round many times. I followed the creature, not two feet away, with only the fence between us. I could smell the fetid odor that rose from its flanks. I wondered if it was one of those creatures that likes to roll in its own feces. It smelled as if it did.

Again it leaned its muscled haunch against the fort, but this time against the door, testing it! Then it raised its beak and began to tear at the Manila twine, shredding it. There was wire as well and nailed boards, but the astuteness of the creature made my blood run cold.

“What are you?” I said, my voice cracked and desperately small.

Tengu
eyed me, and then its beak opened wide and a screech came from it as loud as the squeal of a jet engine. It was so sudden — so powerful — I fell backward on my backside, dropping the torch. Just as a shot rang out.

Isamu had jumped from his hammock and fired into the air. He joined me at the fence, where I was groping for the handle of the torch lest it roll into the wall.

“Tengu?”
he asked.

I nodded. But when we looked again, each of us at the crack in the wall, there was nothing to see but the vague form of the underbrush across the clearing and the moonlit shimmer of hungry ghouls, hovering nearby, expectantly. One of them was soundlessly clapping its hands.

It was sometime later we heard a different kind of cry. Some animal dying.

The dead deer lay halfway down the hill path that led to the lagoon. It had been eviscerated, a thread of entrails leading off into the tall grass that bordered the sandy route to the beach. To me it seemed a message to us written in blood.

“We have to do something,” I said. Whether Isamu understood me or not, he nodded. We couldn’t go on living this way.

Later that morning, I showed Isamu a series of small drawings I had made in my sketch pad, a plan view of Fort Ōshiro II, showing the shelter, the kitchen and dining area, the shrine, and the place we stored supplies. A large area inside the entranceway, directly before the gates, was marked by a dotted line. Below the drawing there were diagrams and section drawings indicating my plan. Examining the page carefully, Isamu nodded. It would be a lot of work, but it was something.

If the creature came to the compound that night, neither of us was aware of it. We had worked all day behind the walls, worked feverishly at backbreaking labor. Now we lay sleeping — or at least Isamu was — dead to the world, trusting in our handiwork, but with a weapon or two near at hand.

I was quite certain the animal had some kind of malevolent intelligence beyond anything one would expect to find in nature.
Tengu
was toying with us. Had I been asked before
Tengu
came
,
I would have said that I did not believe there was evil in the natural world, only survival. My childhood reading had included Darwin. I read books on how things worked and the biographies of scientists, inventors, Arctic adventurers, men of discovery. I wasn’t much for stories; my imagination tended toward the mechanical, the factual and prosaic. But despite all that, I was quite certain that simple survival was not at the heart of
Tengu
’s nature. I had lived on a farm and seen barn cats play with mice, catch and release them only to pounce on them again. The cruelty we perceive in our human naivety had a purpose, I gathered at a young age, student of nature that I was: the cat keeping itself sharp, working on its skills, its quickness. We didn’t feed the barn cats, other than a bit of milk if they were lucky. They depended on their hunting skill. What
Tengu
was doing seemed to have some darker purpose that was unfathomable to me. And what we don’t understand we have to ascribe to either God or the Devil, don’t we?

Survival was very much at work in what Isamu and I were cooking up. We had been on the defensive, but now the creature was stalking us, tormenting us. It was as if it had been put on the island to drive us crazy — to drive a wedge between us. And it had been succeeding for a while. We had snapped at one another, sulked, and eaten separately.

Until we came up with this plan.

The beast did not return, not that night nor the next. It was a form of torture. Could a beast be that sly, that premeditated? If it was possible, then we would have to fight fire with fire. So the next day, we acted as if there were no
Tengu.
We went fishing, swimming, foraging. We played baseball with a small coconut and a stick. I marked out the bases on the beach and tried to teach Isamu the rules. We put on an act for the demon. If
Tengu
was watching, the thing saw two men with nothing to fear. We bathed in the lagoon just before sunset. To me it felt like some ritual thing a warrior might do — a gladiator before entering the Colosseum. And maybe this prolonged and showy tactic worked, for it was that night the creature returned at last.

We heard it prowling along the perimeter of the fence, heard the low growl deep in its throat and chest, the ticking sound; heard it pick at the Manila twine, heard the bamboo click and creak as it tested the strength of the wall. Finally it got to the gate. We waited under a breathless thin rim of moon, heard the creature press hard, find some give in the door, and press again. There was silence. Retreat? No, not that — not after all our work!

But it had only retreated far enough to charge the door. Suddenly, its body crashed against the reinforced bamboo! Once, twice, and then it broke through. And there we were, two men sitting side by side, waiting across the yard directly before the thing, lit by torchlight. It roared at us, a victory roar, and charged.

And the pit opened under it.

We held one torch each high above our heads as we looked down into the six-foot-deep hole Isamu had dug in the sandy ground. A pit we had rigged with sharpened bamboo stakes.

The squealing was horrible, the raging, writhing creature pierced through and through. But even though it was pinioned there, I never let my revolver stray from the thing’s misshapen head. Isamu stood transfixed by it.

“The oil, Isamu,” I cried.

He didn’t move.

So it was I who put my torch and gun down and tugged, one-handed, a large vat of oil, spinning it on its rounded edge, trying to keep it from tipping, all the way to the edge of the pit. I kicked it over and the thick liquid poured over
Tengu.
Exhausted, I looked at Isamu, expecting him to throw his torch on the howling monster. But Isamu only watched, his eyes blazing in the reflected light from his torch, his body immobilized by shock. So, badly shaking now, I recovered my own torch from where I had stuck it in the ground and threw it into the pit. The howling didn’t end until the flames did.

There was no celebration. Not that night. The creature was finally dead; I was able to grasp that, but it was harder to let go of the fear it had engendered.

The rain helped.

It came sometime in the predawn. A light rain but continuous. After a bit, I sought the shelter of my bed, wrapped myself up in bedclothes, and fell into an exhausted sleep. When I awoke, Isamu was sitting cross-legged at the edge of the pit, his body as still as a Buddha, his hands curled in his lap, but with nothing of the Buddha’s serenity on his tired, rain-soaked face. His eyes were open but unseeing, looking down into the hollow place where the charred and soaking remains of our tormentor lay. Isamu was so still that I wondered if he was actually dead. I knelt beside him.

“It’s all right, Isamu,” I said. “We did it. It’s over.” Tentatively I touched his arm.

Finally, the other man acknowledged my presence. He nodded. But his eyes were full of a sorrow that I couldn’t understand.
¹

¹
Curiously, Ōshiro does not write about the incident, only mentioning
Tengu’
s demise after the fact, as you will see. It seems from what he writes that either he wanted to protect Hisako from the horror of it, or that he repressed the event entirely.

I left the fort this morning. The door was open wide. Derwood was at work shoveling dirt into the pit we had excavated. He probably still is. So much work, using the wire hand he has made himself. Hard work. Too hard for him, but I did not offer to help. I did not want to be there.
It
was there. The horror. We had dug a pit and filled it with sharpened spears, and
Tengu
charged to its death into it. The siege is over. I should help, but I do not. I feel weak — weak as I felt when I first dragged myself up onto this shore from my raft. I feel, Hisako, as if it is all catching up to me: the war, my flight, the months alone, the uneasy time with an enemy who has become a friend, the terror that he brought with him that is now past.

Except I cannot quite believe that.

I sit down on the beach by the gently lapping tide, writing this. Trying to explain to you what I cannot understand myself.