The Gate of Sorrows

  A middle-aged, potbellied man sat cross-legged on the edge of the far mattress. This must be Papa, Kotaro thought. He was wearing a jersey that matched his wife’s.

  There was another man, a young man stripped to the waist, sitting diagonally across from Gaku on a clothes trunk. He was constantly jiggling one knee up and down. He sported flashy tattoos on both arms from shoulder to midbicep. His legs, sticking out of a pair of badly stained cutoff jeans, were similarly decorated to the ankles. Both ears were pierced with a row of small rings. He was chewing gum and smiling faintly, as though he were enjoying an amusing show.

  “How many times are you gonna ask that?” Papa said to Gaku. He had fishlike pop eyes nestled in a fat, puffy face. “I told you, we promise. Just bring your dad or your mom’s ATM card—”

  “Best not forget the PIN code,” said the young man. “You don’t want to upset us.” He sounded like he’d learned his gangster delivery from TV.

  “All we need is some money,” Papa added. “Then we let her go. Until then, we’ll take good care of little Mika-chan.”

  The woman downstairs had said they’d “taken care” of Mika. Whatever that meant, Gaku hadn’t been told.

  “I want … to see her.”

  The young man lost his temper. “Cash card first, ya twit!”

  Kotaro winked out. Two more rooms. Where was Mika?

  Hallway. He passed through the wall into the room to the right. It looked like a storeroom. Cardboard boxes and clothes trunks were piled on top of each other. The curtains were closed.

  One more.

  This room was almost empty. There was a window opposite the door, but it was covered with a sheet of plywood. The edges were sealed with duct tape.

  A cell. This is where they did the dirty work. The proof was on the floor next to the wall.

  The ceiling light was off. A small nightlight in an outlet near the floor cast a faint yellow glow. Kotaro was not sure what he was looking at in the dimness. A rolled-up rug?

  Someone was lying there, wrapped carelessly in a blue plastic sheet that covered the entire upper body, from the head to below the hips. The sheet was secured with duct tape, applied with equal carelessness.

  Two bare legs protruded from the plastic.

  The figure was facedown. The skin behind the knees was soft above muscled calves. Healthy legs, tanned from daily training. The soles of the feet were pure white.

  What was this? There were streaks of something smeared down the thighs.

  Dried blood.

  He didn’t have to check. He knew she was dead. She was rolled up tightly and bound in plastic, but she wasn’t moving. She wasn’t breathing.

  He was too late.

  Even without his body, Kotaro could cry out in anguish. He still had a heart.

  He moved again, winking in and out. He felt it now vividly. Frame by frame, like a heartbeat. The sensation sharpened into crystal clarity as his pulse sped up, the pounding of a sinister drum.

  Hunt, hunt, hunt—

  Glitter Kitty came running up the stairs. She ran right through him just as he winked out. When he winked in again he was behind her, watching her rush into the room at the end of the hall.

  “Mama just doesn’t understand!” Her voice was shrill. “Gaku-chan, let’s go. There’s something wrong with these people.”

  “That’s not very nice,” Papa said.

  “Why are you trying to get money out of him? We’re not going to pay you more than you promised!”

  Both men laughed.

  “Very funny.” The young man sneered. “You don’t get how this works, do you?”

  That just wound up Kitty more. “Why are you bullying him? You weren’t supposed to touch him. Papa, you told me you wouldn’t touch him.”

  Kotaro passed into the room. Kitty faced away from him. Her slender shoulders were heaving with rage.

  She was just a girl. To look at her, she seemed completely harmless. No one would guess she was rearing a monstrous spider.

  “Our software only tracks his smartphone. Haven’t we been over this before?” The fat man’s voice was calm, like a father admonishing a hair-splitting daughter.

  “That’s right,” the second man chimed in. “Mikarin should’ve got herself the latest phone. It’s not our fault.”

  Mikarin. He called her Mikarin. And the stains on his cutoffs.

  That would be her blood.

  What did he do to her?

  “Come on, Gaku. Your nose is running. I can’t believe you’re so upset,” Kitty said disdainfully. Gaku covered his face with his hands and shrank from her in fear. This couldn’t be happening. It was a bad dream. Please be over, please let it be over.

  “You’re not nice to me, Gaku. That’s the whole problem. Now do you understand? Come on, let’s go home.”

  “We keep telling you, we’ve got business with him. I’ll drive him home when everything’s settled.” The young man spoke as if addressing a simpleton. “Just go home. Get out of here while you can, for your safety.”

  “My safety? What does that mean?” She shrank back. Her voice had an edge of fear.

  “By the way, it looks like he’s blowing you off. If it’ll cheer you up, I’ll be your boyfriend.”

  “Are you crazy? Nobody in her right mind would be your girlfriend!”

  Kotaro could feel his body flooding back. Hot blood surged to the tips of his fingers and toes.

  Then he was there, complete, in a body that was his and not his. A body that was the sum of his words made real.

  He heard a howl, the voice of a beast whose den had been destroyed, whose friend had been butchered. A howl of rage.

  My den. My friend. You devoured her. Now, I devour you.

  The girl is yours, Galla whispered.

  He roared in answer.

  He felt bared fangs. He raised his arms; they were not human. Dense obsidian fur covered powerful muscles. Claws curved from the ends of his fingers. They gleamed dully and clicked as they struck against each other.

  He bayed with exultation and lunged at Glitter Kitty.

  He encircled her neck with one hand as she turned toward him. Just then Galla flashed into being. She drew her blades and began to dance.

  The blades flashed and sliced Papa, then the tattooed man, in two at the waist. Their torsos rose into the air, lifted by the whirlwind from her blades. Both were wide-eyed with astonishment. The young man still wore the shadow of an indecent smile. The blades flashed again, reducing both men to clouds of black dust that whirled around the room.

  Galla danced. The dust spiraled into her scythes.

  Kotaro lifted Kitty high into the air. Her head nearly touched the ceiling. He forced her to look at him. The girl was out of her mind with fear. She flailed her arms and legs frantically, trying to kick him.

  He bellowed again and sank his fangs into her eye sockets. Blood gushed over her face. Her arms and legs still flailed, but in mindless spasms.

  Kotaro pulled her head into his maw, bit through her neck, and spat her head out again in a shower of blood. The severed head hit the wall with a light thud and bounced off like a ball. Before it hit the floor, Galla’s blade sliced it in two.

  The blades shone with a dazzling light. In that light, Kotaro saw Glitter Kitty, her face distorted with horror. It was streaked with black blood. Her head dissolved into black dust from the crown downward as Galla’s blades devoured her.

  “What in the world is going on up there?!”

  Mama’s voice preceded her as she pounded up the stairs. She stopped in the middle of the hallway. Kotaro turned and hurled Kitty’s headless body at her. She made an attempt to catch it but was bowled over onto the floor. When she realized she was holding a headless corpse, she screamed. She kept on shrieking as she shoved the limp body aside and tried desperately to crawl back
ward, too shocked even to stand.

  Kotaro overtook her in a few huge strides and slammed a clawed foot onto her belly. The woman uttered a toadlike croak that turned into a gurgle. Her mouth flew open and she spewed a geyser of vomit.

  He lifted his foot and the woman tried to run away again, clawing desperately at the floor.

  Galla advanced silently down the hall, gripping a scythe in each hand just below the blade, touching the tips to the walls on either side. As she advanced, she carved a deep gash in each wall.

  Those gashes were the dividing line between reality and Galla’s world.

  She passed through him and stood over Mama. She let the scythe in her right hand slide downward in her grip until she held the handle by the end. She put the flat of the blade against the side of Mama’s head, against her left ear. She did the same with the other blade, pressing it against the right ear.

  The blades shone with a cold phosphorescence. Dazzling, jewellike hues. The woman’s twisted face seemed to levitate in the light.

  “Help … Please, help me …”

  Mika must have cried out just like that. Again, and again, and again.

  Mama’s head was pinned between the crossed scythes. Slowly, Galla lifted it off the floor.

  “Help … help me …”

  Galla’s shoulders moved slightly. There was a dull crack as Mama’s neck snapped.

  “Now then.” Galla lifted the woman’s limp form by the scythes and brought her face level with her own. “I will take this one as well.”

  There was a flash as Mama’s head separated from her body. Another flash, and she was transformed into black dust. Galla’s blades fed again.

  When the last particle was consumed, the air seemed to change. It smelled purified, refreshed.

  Something else was different. Galla’s blades were burning with a new light.

  As Kotaro watched, the crescent blades grew longer. Each handle thickened, and a pattern emerged on the surface of each, an arabesque of lines that might have been intertwined hieroglyphs. Where the tang of the blade was embedded in the handle, a ring of petals emerged and swelled into a round object that was very much not a flower.

  It was a skull, with its jaws wide open. Each icy crescent projected from the mouth of a screaming skull.

  “Together they are one,” Galla said, her back still to Kotaro. “They are the Skulls of Origin. One tells of the Circle as it was. The other, of what it will be. They speak with tongues of steel.”

  Galla deftly stowed first the right, then the left scythe behind her back. Even this much movement was enough to make the air hum with their power.

  The scythes rose above Galla’s head, each larger than the weapon she had originally carried. They had reached their final form. The blue-white light from each crescent pulsated with a rhythm of slow breathing.

  “Your task is finished,” Kotaro said.

  Galla turned and nodded. “Now, I must go.”

  To the Gate of Sorrows.

  Kotaro didn’t think, and so he did not hesitate. “Take me with you.”

  Galla gazed at him in silence.

  “I can’t be in the world anymore. I hate it.” He shook his head, to Galla and to himself. “I don’t want to be here.”

  A world where a young girl like Mika could end up wrapped in plastic like a load of garbage. A world where a woman like Ayuko Yamashina could be strangled and mutilated and dumped like trash in an empty lot.

  He had wanted to make that world just a little better. He’d wanted to help.

  It made me a monster.

  He could never go back. He could never forget the sensation of his fangs tearing into Glitter Kitty’s neck. No matter how long he lived or how much happiness he experienced, it could never match the monstrous pleasure he’d felt at that moment.

  His appearance was not the only thing that had been transformed. What he was inside—that was a monster now too.

  “I don’t care where you go. I’ll follow. I want to witness your battle. I want … I want to see you reunited with your son. I want to be there when it happens.” His eyes were brimming with tears. “That’s all I can hope for now. After that I don’t care where I go. I’ll spend the rest of eternity wandering the gap between reality and the void.”

  A pack of creatures that roamed the gap between dimensions of time and space had attacked Yuriko Morisaki and her master, Ash, on the roof of the tea caddy building. Ash had called them the Hounds of Tindalos.

  Maybe I’ll turn into something like them. I only remember the horrible touch of their huge foot pads and claws, but now I feel like I have the power to see them.

  Galla shook her head faintly. Her long, black hair flowed over her shoulders as if freshly combed and smoothed. For the first time, Kotaro could detect the sweet fragrance of it.

  “You sought justice,” said Galla. “Revenge was yours. In that there is no shame.”

  Craving for forgiveness. Craving for release. Craving for fulfillment of desire. Craving to devour. Galla had harvested them all. And that was what she had to say.

  Kotaro wanted to believe she was right. But it was no use. His stomach rebelled—he could feel his gorge rising.

  “I’m a monster. It happened. I don’t even know if what I did was right or wrong. All I know is I was too late. I couldn’t help her. And the violence I did after I realized that got me high. You warned me a long time ago. You said I’d regret it. I never even listened to you.”

  Yes, Shigenori had warned him too, several times. Yes, Yuriko Morisaki had begged him to return to everyday life. He’d ignored them both.

  Galla motioned with her chin toward the open door behind them. “See to the boy.”

  It took Kotaro a moment to comprehend. Gaku Shimakawa! He rushed back into the room.

  Gaku was out cold, curled up in a fetal position on the floor, still bound hand and foot.

  “Do you think he saw?”

  The room was torn apart. Clearly something very violent had taken place here. But there were no traces of Papa and Mama, or the tattooed man, or Glitter Kitty. There was no blood. They had simply vanished.

  The only corpse in the house was Mika’s.

  Galla bent over the boy. She caressed his cheek, still hollow with terror. She put the tips of three fingers on his forehead and pressed hard. His eyelids, which had been screwed shut, fluttered for a moment.

  “Now he will have no memory of us.”

  But he would remember Mika. He would remember what had happened to her and why. He would remember the horror he experienced. Unbearable fear, and even greater feelings of helplessness and guilt.

  I’m sorry.

  Why are our expressions of regret so short?

  There was a window in the room. The double curtains were closed. Kotaro parted them an inch or two and peered out. All the lights were on in the house next door. Beyond it was a four-story condominium. All the lights seemed to be on there too, and an unusually large number of people were out on the balconies, looking straight at Kotaro. The neighborhood must have heard the screaming and howling.

  “The police will be here soon.”

  Another uncanny case of disappearance—four at once this time, and all of them soon to become suspects in a murder-kidnapping. The survivor’s story would sound made-up and hard to believe. He fainted, and when he woke up, the kidnappers had disappeared …

  The only person who might be able to read the signs, other than the two wolves, was Shigenori. Doubtless he’d be furious with Kotaro. Again.

  A siren wailed far off. It grew louder. Kotaro closed his eyes and listened.

  It would be the last sound he ever heard in this world.

  3

  Where are we going?

  Kotaro walked in darkness. How long had he been following Galla?

  He heard his own footfalls.
He wasn’t treading on soil. The surface was hard and smooth, cool to the touch. With each step, his talons clicked faintly. They were curved, claws to pin the flesh of prey and never release it, like a carnivorous dinosaur.

  He knew he had transformed into something strange. Fangs, claws, a huge body. The darkness was so complete that if someone had grasped the end of his nose he wouldn’t have seen them, but he could feel his body. It was enormous. With each step, ponderous muscles slid and shifted in his back and shoulders, in his arms and calves.

  Galla led the way. She was invisible, but he knew exactly where she was.

  Something glowed, blue-white lights burning steadily but wavering with the rhythm of her tread. Flames. In the stygian darkness Kotaro walked on, guided by lights burning in the eye sockets of the Skulls of Origin like will-o’-the-wisps. The lights swayed up and down, leaving a trail on his retinae. Their graceful trajectory beckoned him on.

  Out of nowhere, he remembered something that had happened ten years earlier, an overnight hiking trip with his family to the mountains near Tokyo. They’d spent the night at a famous hot spring inn.

  Not far from the inn there was a creek where fireflies swarmed on summer nights. They’d stayed up late, and with the other guests had been guided by the inn owner to the creek to see the fireflies. Little Kazumi had been frightened by the dark mountain road, and Kotaro held her hand all the way.

  The little waterway was alive with lights, as though a dipperful of stars had been scattered along the creek and the stars were alive and swarming, pulsating with a rhythm like breathing.

  Asako and Takayuki were entranced. Kazumi was wide-eyed with wonder. Kotaro had been holding her hand firmly, but now she pulled away, overjoyed, reaching out gently for the dancing lights.

  Kotaro’s eyes were drawn from the clouds of fireflies by a solitary pair of lights—perhaps a male and female. As he watched, they floated away from the swarm and plunged deeper into the forest.

  He had followed them, his steps quickening out of curiosity. He was convinced that he’d been chosen, that they wanted to show him something special, something even more beautiful. When he followed, they flew on; if he paused, they swooped back toward him, rising and falling, urging him onward. Come. Come with us.