“What?” she said.
“I have been with you since you found my katana at the train station.”
Nikki buried her face back into the towel, trying to rationalize the situation. It would be so comforting to believe someone else had killed the man in her apartment. She had thought she’d seen a boy who looked like Atsumori glaring furiously at her at the train station. She had felt like she’d been followed from Osaka Station back to her apartment, but there hadn’t been space in her closet-sized bathroom for both of them without her noticing. One of them was probably stark raving mad, and, unfortunately, it was her.
“I don’t understand,” she mumbled into the towel.
“The sword is my shintai. Where it goes, I am forced to follow. When I realized I could easily take over your body, I used you to bring it back to my shrine.”
With her eyes covered, she recognized his voice. She had heard him murmur a warning at her apartment. When she looked, though, there had been no one behind her. She had been alone with the killer.
It was possible that she was also completely alone in the storage building.
She gripped the towel tightly and whimpered. If she was so totally gone that she was seeing him in such vivid detail, she couldn’t imagine how she could prove to herself that he was really there or not.
“Are you afraid of me?’’
“I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid that I’ve gone crazy.” I’m afraid that I’ve killed people—lots of people. “None of this makes sense. I don’t know if you’re even here. Look at you. I’m soaked to the skin and you’re still dry.”
“Of course I’m dry. I am a kami.” He cocked his head. “Do you not know of these things? Of kami and shintai and the function of shrines such as this one?”
“Kami are gods.” She knew that the word wasn’t an exact translation; they were actually the essence of nature or something that English didn’t have a word to explain. The phrase “eight million gods” was to indicate that the kami were beyond counting. “I—I don’t know what a shintai is.” Was it a good thing that the boy claiming to be a god was using a term that she didn’t know? It could mean that he was actually sitting beside her—but it left her with a person who believed he was a god.
“A shintai is the object I reside in. The katana is my shintai. I am where it is; hence I was in Osaka when you found it.”
“Why didn’t I see you then?”
“I am not as powerful as Amaterasu Omikami or even Sarutahiko Okami. I am limited in how much I can manifest outside of holy ground.”
Nikki recognized the name of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. The sun goddess was the queen of the gods, holding a position in the Shinto pantheon much like Zeus. Her brother was Susanoo, god of the storms, and they engaged in sibling rivalry that rocked the world. Nikki didn’t know the god Sarutahiko. More proof that she wasn’t crazy—maybe. “You said you killed the man who attacked me?”
“I am sorry. I was forced to take over your body. He would have killed you otherwise.”
“All good.” She wasn’t sure where she stood on the crazy thing anymore. If her blackouts were caused by possession, it would certainly explain how she ended up at a burned-out Shinto shrine in the middle of the night.
“Who was the man at your apartment? Why is he searching for us?”
“Who?”
He reached over and opened her backpack and took out her notebooks. “You wrote about a man searching for us at your apartment.” He opened her newest notebook to the scene that she had written on the train.
“That—that’s just a story I’m making up.” Nikki blushed. She normally didn’t let anyone but Miriam see her notebooks. “Those people aren’t real.”
Atsumori cocked his head. “You do not know what you are?”
“I’m a writer. I make up stories—like The Tale of Genji?” She assumed he would know of the most famous Japanese novel ever written, since it was over a thousand years old.
“You are an oracle. What you are writing is the truth.”
“No, no, no.” Nikki shook her head. “I write crazy, impossible things—like demons eating children.”
He looked slightly confused. “But demons do eat children.”
A childhood’s worth of therapy was quickly unraveling. “I make things up.”
“You knew where my shintai was hidden. You knew how to undo the lock.”
Nikki pressed a hand to her mouth as she took it a step further back. She had known everything about Gregory from the fact that his window framed the HEP Five Ferris wheel to his visa problems. Denial leaked out from under her fingertips. “No.”
Atsumori opened the other notebook. “Sunlight. The fresh green smell of the new tatami. The hushed quiet of the haiden. The silent dance of the kitten as Maru warred with the dappled sunlight. She found herself smiling, as if all the peace and love of the shrine filled her up and spilled over.” He closed the notebook. “Misa loved this place. You wrote the truth.”
Nikki stared in horror at the notebook. “No, that can’t be right. I never thought of her as real.”
“She was.”
Was. Even if she denied Atsumori’s existence, the sword and burned shrine were proof that Yuuka . . . Misa had been real. Nikki had cried when she wrote the girl’s murder but she nevertheless wrote it in full gory detail. And there was Gregory, dead by a blender. She had been so proud of his death scene that she posted it online hours before he was killed.
Everything she wrote was real? She didn’t want it to be true. She knew her characters better than her few so-called “friends” and certainly better than any of her family members. She loved them. She cried as she wrote their slow and painful deaths. And they all died. She never had a character survive to “happily ever after.” Tears started to burn in her eyes and she fought to keep from crying. She had bawled uncontrollably when she thought that her characters were no more than figments of her imagination. If she started to cry now, she wouldn’t be able to stop. As she dug through her backpack, looking for tissues, she couldn’t stop thinking about all her recent characters. How easy it had been to “think” in terms of the foreign Japanese culture. Little things like how a character would spell out their name in kanji when they met someone new.
“I liked this part,” Miriam had said after fact-checking Yuuka’s introduction. “But you used the wrong kanji. Her name would be Misa using those kanji.”
Nikki started to weep. Misa been so excited about the upcoming Gion Matsuri. She had gotten a new yukata to wear out to the festival. Nikki had come to Kyoto and toured Isetan and watched girls pick out yukata’s in the kimono department. Had Misa been one of the girls Nikki spied on? Had Misa been the cute little high school girl trying on the white yukata with the scattering of pink flowers that Nikki took reference pictures of? The girl had felt right for Misa. She had been so cute and full of life. To think of her dead and dumped in bushes by Gregory Winston . . .
Oh God, she’d written five deaths already, and there were a dozen other people who had “this will not end well” written all over them. All of them real people. All of them she knew better than she knew Miriam.
With that, she started to keen.
“What is wrong?” Atsumori asked.
“They’re all going to die. I used to try and stop them from dying, but death is like this juggernaut. It just plows through everything I put up to slow it down and nails them hard. I’ve even tried switching characters to who I thought were nice and good and careful people and they do things like drive over the neighbor’s toddler by mistake, or drop their hammer off a six-story roof onto a bypasser’s head, or kill a teenage girl and burn down her family’s shrine. I knew the moment that George—Gregory—walked up to the temple gate that he was going to kill Misa—somehow. Characters crossing paths always ends badly. It’s like the Ghostbusters—don’t cross the streams. Oh God, oh God, and I wrote myself into this novel!”
10
Boy God
The boy god or
possible delusion was still sitting patiently beside Nikki when she woke up hours later. She was fairly sure she hadbeen arrested, which meant Gregory was dead, so she’d probably been to his bloody apartment, so it was possible she’d found the katana at the train station. After that, it was a bobsled ride downward into either madness or divine possession. She still hadn’t decided which.
“You don’t sleep?” she asked to fill the silence.
“Sometimes. Although it’s not as you would call sleep. I lose focus on your world. It is how the gaijin could wreak havoc on my temple.”
She stretched, aching, having slept on the stone floor in slightly damp clothes. She didn’t even have a change of clothing. At least with the money she—Atsumori—they had stolen off Harada, she could buy more clothes. She was at a loss as to what . . .
. . . she was standing on a street corner in the rain, waiting for the light to change. Her backpack and the fabric-encased katana were slung on her right shoulder.
“Stop doing that!” Nikki cried, startling an old woman standing beside her.
Embarrassed, Nikki turned around and went into the FamilyMart on the corner. She made it a point to never have less than two notebooks and a full dozen pens. She kept to black ink only; her hypergraphia needed black. The other colors had been to soothe her writer’s heart. At the moment her writer’s heart was crying in the corner and had no interest in pens except as a medical device.
Clicking one of the ballpoints nervously, she moved on to her other drug—junk food. She got four salmon rice balls, a box of Meiji chocolate-covered almonds, a slice of chiffon cake, a bag of pepper-flavored potato chips, a sandwich that looked like it might be egg salad, and two bottles of Coke. After considering the state of her life, she added a coin purse, panty liners, two pairs of socks, six packs of tissues, and a folding umbrella. She caught glimpses of Atsumori moving through the aisles like a dark thundercloud, horribly out of place in the bright, squeaky-clean convenience store. Otherwise, he was invisible to her and obviously everyone else. She was considering alcohol when she sensed him close beside her.
“Don’t just take me places without asking,” she whispered. “I really, really hate that. If you keep doing that—I’ll—I’ll –” She clicked her pen. She hated that her options were so limited. But she couldn’t stand being used that way. It reminded her of being locked up in the sanitarium by her mother. Threatened with drugs and straightjackets if she wasn’t compliant and “good.” “I won’t be used like that.”
“I’m sorry. I did not consider that it would bother you now that you know the cause.”
“It does.” She picked a mini bottle of plum wine off the shelf and stomped to the cashier to pay for everything. It bothered her even more that there was no way to really stop him. He probably could keep hold of her as long as he wanted. Hours. Days. Weeks. “Just tell me where you want to go.”
“Eh?” the cashier asked, wide-eyed.
“Kyoto desu?” She asked the first “where” question that came to mind. “Is this Kyoto?” pushed the limit of her Japanese.
“Hai!”
So they were still in Kyoto; Atsumori hadn’t taken her out of the city. Yet. She had things she wanted to do before she let Atsumori drag her all over Japan. The first was finding a bathroom. “Toire wa doko desuka?”
“Toire.” The cashier considered and then pointed across the street. “Subway station.”
She glanced to where he was pointing and saw the steps leading down into a subway station and probably a public restroom. “Arigato!”
Her panty liners were given special treatment. They were discreetly packed into a separate the brown paper bag that the Japanese only used for feminine products so that the package nearly screamed “cooties.”
Outside she said to Atsumori, “I’m going to the bathroom.” Hopefully alone but she doubted it. “And then have something to eat and then I’ll go wherever you want.”
Nikki found a pay phone at Kyoto Station and fed it hundredyen coins, praying that she wouldn’t have to deal with a Japanese-speaking operator. She wrote out some stock phrases in case the person who answered the phone didn’t speak English.
After three rings, the other end picked up with a meek “Moshi moshi.”
“Pixii, desu?” Nikki read off her cheat sheet. “Is Pixii” was the closest she could figure out to “Is Pixii there?”
A very Japanese “eh?” of surprised confusion was the only reply.
She tried to calmly repeat the question. Slower. “Pixii, desu?”
“Hai?” The other person sounded like they were in grade school. “Donata desu ka?”
Nikki wasn’t sure, but she thought the person had asked “Who’s calling?”
The one and only time she actually met Pixii was at an East Coast anime convention four years ago. Nikki had been traveling with a pack of teenage girls and somehow ended up responsible for cleaning up after all the naive stupidity that implied. Pixii had been dressed up as a magical girl from some anime that Nikki didn’t recognize. The only thing Nikki remembered clearly from the meeting was that Pixii could beat the snot out of any man who thought scantily clad girls doing cosplay were sluts, and then administer first aid to the wounds she inflicted.
Was this really Pixii?
Well, Nikki wasn’t going to get anywhere if they kept to Japanese.
“This is ThirdEye,” Nikki identified herself reluctantly.
“Third! Oh my God, are you okay? Where are you? What happened? SexyNinja has been going nuts! She says she tried calling you all last night and you never called her back!”
Nikki breathed out relief. Yes, she remembered now. Talking to Pixii was like having a conversation with a five-year-old on a sugar rush. Her voice was naturally little-girl cute, she was shorter than Nikki’s five foot three, and, much to Pixii’s disgust, she didn’t need a bra. She looked and sounded like she was twelve years old, but in truth she was thirty, a veteran combat medic, and had a doctorate in arts and archeology.
“I’m fine,” Nikki said. “I lost my cell phone yesterday. I need a place to crash. Can you put me up for a while?”
“Yeah! Team Banzai: go! It will be great.” And then the brain caught up to the mouth. “Um, so, what happened? Why did you disappear? We expected you to post last night.”
Nikki winced. This was so much more than just an overbearing mother. Of all her friends, Pixii was the one who could cope best with Nikki being either dangerously insane or merely possessed. “Things got crazy. I have some things I have to do, then I’m heading to your place.”
“Oh! Do you need the directions again? My place is kind of impossible to find.”
Which was one of the other reasons Nikki had chosen Pixii to crash with. “I’ve got them memorized. I’ll call you again when I get to Nara.”
“Great! Just keep your eye out for the little shrine alongside the road. The driveway back to the house can be tricky to spot. You might have to stop at the shrine and . . . oh shit, I need to go check the kiln!” And Pixii abruptly hung up.
Atsumori wanted to go to the Fushimi Inari Shrine. Luckily Nikki had planned a trip to visit it and knew that there was a train that stopped right in front of the shrine, otherwise Atsumori would have had her walk several miles in the rain. With his help reading signs, they found their way through the multiple train systems of Kyoto to the JR Nara line.
“Why are we going there?” she asked as they settled on the train.
We. She laughed bitterly. To a causal observer, she was completely alone.
“Misa’s death has desecrated my shintai. Until it’s purified, I’m greatly limited to what I can do. We are going to the shrine to have my katana blessed.”
“Katana” and “death” made her remember the scene she had written the night before. “Did I—you—we actually clean your blade?” Somehow that sounded slightly pornographic.
“Of course.”
“And this blessing—it will—deal with—killing Harada too?”
“He was a tanuki. He was yokai.”
“And that means?”
“Yokai are not humans. They are not animals. They are spirits. They do not exist as you understand life.”
“Harada bled all over the place.”
“That was not his real body. He could take the shape of a small girl or a dog or even a teapot.”
“Teapot?”
“In that case, instead of blood, he would have spilled tea.”
Click. Click. Click.
“Who was that man?” Atsumori murmured in her ear.
Nikki looked around the train car, but she was alone, not even Atsumori in sight. She could feel him, though, as if he was sitting beside her. “What man?”
“Last night on the train, you wrote about a man searching your home.”
Nikki sighed. Thanks to a childhood spent in psychiatric treatment, she knew all the symptoms of schizophrenia and had always been secretly proud that she showed no signs of the disorder. She was now exhibiting almost all of them—if Atsumori wasn’t actually sitting beside her, invisible to everyone. Then again, schizophrenics usually had self-referential delusions. The logic looped neatly around so it was nearly impossible to prove that their belief was false.
She couldn’t help but see her current situation as classic symptoms. If tanuki could take on any appearance, then everything that happened at her apartment made sense. She had opened the door to a magical creature that only looked like Detective Tanaka. It knew –somehow—that she would cooperate with the police. The tanuki shifted its appearance again as it attacked her to that of an animal wearing a business suit. Why, she didn’t know. Obviously changing into a teapot wouldn’t have been helpful.
If Gregory Winston, Misa, and Harada were all real people—or at least things that passed as people—then Scary Cat Dude was a real person, too.