The Devouring God (21 page)

 

CHAPTER 40

Thursday Afternoon

T
hey gathered once again in the Lotus Café to wait for Yumi. Suzuki sat still and gaunt while his father, the abbot, jabbered apologies meant to atone for decades of abuse and neglect.

“My son, my son, I don't know how you can ever forgive me, or how I can ever forgive myself. We abandoned you. We left you alone to continue the fight in that nasty little valley. It's unforgivable.”

Suzuki laughed, an abrasive echo of his formerly breezy self. “There's nothing more to be said about it, Father. You were possessed. Possession is an understandable phenomenon. You acted more or less against your own will.”

The abbot blinked. “More or less?”

Suzuki cocked his head in return. His smile seemed fixed, a calculated expression unrelated to human pleasure. “Yes, more or less against your own will. Being possessed by a demon is certainly an extenuating circumstance, but you have to admit that it just barely counts in this case. After all,” he said, “it was a very small demon.”

Suzuki winked at Takuda.

Takuda felt a surge of relief, and he felt the grin spread across his own face, despite any embarrassment it might cause the abbot.
Thank the Lord Buddha, Suzuki is still Suzuki, no matter what else he may have become.

After the third heartbeat of silence, the abbot burst out laughing. He laughed until his face turned purple. Takuda hoped this stress-­driven hilarity wouldn't devolve into tears. Finally, the old man settled into a steady chortling. He sat back wiping tears of mirth from the corners of his eyes.

Mori pretended to study the Lotus Café's one-­page menu as if he had never seen it before. His hand shook slightly.

The abbot leaned forward when he had recovered his breath. “But the three of you, you and young Takuda, and this Mori who severed the water-­imp's finger . . .”

“He cut off its arm later, and I lopped off its head.”

The abbot beamed. “That must have been something. But what happens now? We need you in the order. We've been thriving up in the hills. We have converts and satellite temples and . . .”

“And your luck has run out,” Suzuki said. “You were living in a fool's paradise, and now it will come crashing down around your heads. Counselor Endo had you all under his thumb, all in the same place where he could see you. Now that your eyes are open to his evil and his villainy, he must either possess you all over again, if that is even possible, or he must destroy you and everyone else involved in the order. I doubt that he will leave you in peace or leave a single brick of your temple standing. He doesn't do things by halves, this counselor.”

“But he gave us the temple outright,” the abbot said. “He can't just . . .”

“Don't think for a second that you know what he can and cannot do,” Suzuki countered.

The abbot spread his hands. “What can we do? Will the three of you come and assess the situation? Perhaps we can keep the temple, with your help?”

Suzuki looked at Takuda and Mori. “We don't seem to have much else going on right now. Shall the four of us take a trip with my father, if Yumi agrees?”

Mori nodded distractedly. Takuda bowed to the abbot and said, “We would be honored to be of ser­vice, if there's anything to be done. You understand, of course, that having us there might be the single most dangerous thing you could do.”

The abbot jumped out of the booth. “Let me make a call. Where's the nearest pay phone?”

They pointed him toward the Heiwadai Hotel, next to the college. He took off at a trot.

Mori said, “Is it wise to let him run off by himself?”

Suzuki said, “I don't know, but we can't hold his hand forever. He has to go to the bathroom. Fairly often, I'd guess, judging from his age.” Suzuki looked pensive.

Mori turned an exasperated look to Takuda.

“He'll be fine,” Takuda said. “Fukuoka is a good city, and the shadow of evil is gone. Don't you feel it? Can't you feel that it's lifted?”

Mori shook his head.

The three of them sat for a few moments. “So,” Mori said, “where does this leave us?”

Suzuki looked back and forth between them. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what have you become, and where will it lead us?”

Suzuki looked steadily at Mori. Reddish fumes slowly wafted from Suzuki's head, radiating more than they drifted. It wasn't smoke, and Takuda had no idea what to call it.

Suzuki continued to look at Mori. Suzuki smiled, and Mori finally looked away.

He sees
, Takuda thought.
Maybe not as much or as clearly as I do, but he sees.

“You recall that our Takuda had the water sword, the massive blade with the hilt guard with a pattern of overlapping concentric ripples.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“And the hilt guard of the one I used? The laundry-­pole sword?”

Mori pulled a shard of the broken hilt guard from his pocket. The lacquer had chipped off completely. “As you see, great triangles like gnashing teeth. It made me think of your hunger. You eating us out of house and home.”

“It looks more like massed mountains meeting the sky,” Takuda said.

“I think so as well,” Suzuki said. “I believe this was the Earth sword. Ironic for a swallow-­cutting sword . . . yes, I know, Lieutenant, I should call it a sword designed to make the swallow-­cutting stroke. But I don't think the swords have much to do with the abilities of their bearers. It's the nature of their opponents.”

“As the water sword was made for the water-­imp, so the Earth sword was made for the Kurodama.”

“Exactly.”

Suzuki gazed at Mori. “And what is on the hilt guard of our one remaining sword?”

“I don't know,” Mori said. “I haven't looked.”

Suzuki's smile didn't waver. “I see.”

Mori flushed.

Suzuki's smile broadened, revealing the leaden glints on his teeth. “I would guess it is the fire sword, even if the element has more to do with the opponent than the bearer. You are much like fire, like the wind. So quick and consuming, so mercurial as well.”

“Stop it. You don't know that I am even the correct bearer of this sword.”

“Oh, but I do. I see it in you.”

“You see now more than I do.”

“I do indeed. I see much more.”

Mori shifted in his seat. “Then what do you see in me, Priest? Some evil to be sucked out, like the evil from your father?”

“You are a normal mix of fears, weaknesses, virtues, and strengths. A little heavy on impatience and pride, but that's to be expected.”

“You see all that?”

“I wouldn't need second sight for all that.” Suzuki smiled at Takuda, who pretended to be signaling Koji.

Suzuki said to Mori, “Your anger is understandable. You know the existence of infinite love and infinite mercy, but all you can see around you is an imperfect reflection of those beautiful truths. Now you are engaged in a great struggle on behalf of those truths, and you must act as a votary of the
Lotus Sutra
, but your vision is clouded by the vagaries of this illusory world. You are a perfect being in an imperfect shell, an angel trapped in a gorilla suit.” Suzuki laughed at his own joke. “If I could show you, just for an instant, the world beyond this illusory realm of death and pain . . .” His bony, blue-­veined hand rose as if of its own accord toward Mori's forehead.

Mori recoiled. “I would rather wait, if you don't mind. Maybe I've already seen as much as I need to see in this life.”

Suzuki's hand floated to the tabletop. “As you wish,” he said. He grinned, the thin lips peeling back to reveal a mouth full of chisels. Takuda had to look away.

“You will see worlds beyond imagining to you now,” Suzuki said to Mori, before turning his attention to Takuda. “And so will you. All will be revealed.” His teeth gleamed. “And then you and I will have a long-­overdue reckoning.”

Takuda wasn't sure what Suzuki meant, but the dark presence in his head shoved him aside to use his voice: “I'm looking forward to it, old friend.”

The pain was immense, just as it was every time the presence spoke through him, but Takuda was getting used to it.
A man can get used to anything
, he thought. He pushed his temples together with his palms to make sure his head didn't actually split down the center.

While Takuda recovered, a group of surly youths strolled in, bush-­league punks reverse-­slumming on the nice side of town. They wore their hair slicked back, and they were all dressed in baggy double-­breasted suits in improbable colors.

Takuda saw nothing out of the ordinary, but the priest's eyes glittered. “Sometimes, now, I see things differently. I wonder, when I see someone out of balance, if I couldn't just . . . tinker a little bit.”

One of the lads bowed to Suzuki. Another, with his back to Takuda, twisted in his seat to look at Suzuki. He had too many nostrils, and cloudy membranes blinked sideways over the slitted pupils of his yellow eyes. A forked tongue slipped out to test the air around Takuda, Mori, and Suzuki.

“That's more than an issue of balance,” Takuda said.

“Oh, that one? No, he's none of our business. Probably just passing through this life on his way to one of the frozen hells, I'd say. But the boy across from him, he could be saved.”

“But he's none of our business either, is he?”

“That's a good question. Other than seeing to my brothers, what is our duty? And what is that growing out of your face?”

“What do you mean?”

Suzuki picked up a coffee spoon and smacked Takuda in the center of the forehead. Takuda cursed to wild laughter from the table of punks. As Takuda rubbed his forehead, he felt it: the beginning of a thick, horny growth. It was as though the skin had thinned and melded with the bone, thickening to shingles of rough, nail-­like substance.

Takuda was growing a third horn, a broad one, right in the middle of his forehead.

“I'm a man, not a devil!”

One of the punks said, “Did you hear that? He said he was a man, not a devil!”

“He's neither,” said the reptilian creature. He turned his head completely backward to stare at Takuda with his deadly yellow eyes. “He should come to this table if he wants to meet one or the other.”

The table erupted in laughter as an indifferent Koji brought the punks their beer. One of the punks asked if Koji had come to their table to meet a man or a devil. They made kissing noises at him.

Suzuki made an odd whistling noise between his teeth. “I shall now introduce them to the mysterious love of the
Lotus Sutra
,” he said, rising from the table.

Mori caught him by the sleeve. “Not now. Not here.”

Suzuki stared down at Mori. Takuda saw something new flaring behind Suzuki's eyes, a deadly mix of anger and hunger. He didn't know if he could handle the hungry priest in his new state.

“I don't appreciate the way you speak to me sometimes,” Suzuki said.

Mori lowered his eyes. “I don't understand any of this, but I think we must be very careful with any . . . new powers we . . . remember.”

Suzuki wavered.

“We don't know much,” Mori said, “but we know the surge when it comes. This isn't it.”

Suzuki sat, and Mori released his sleeve. Mori was sweating.

Good
, Takuda thought.

Mori stood and bowed formally. “For my rudeness, for my impatience, for my lack of faith, I most humbly apologize. For the way I have spoken to you before our strange little family and before outsiders, there are no words to express my shame. Please forgive me, though I do not deserve your forgiveness.”

“About time, too,” Koji muttered, bringing another round of beverages. “You work him to the bone—­look at how thin he is—­and you keep him away from me for days and days, and then you bring him back just as I have to endure this ridiculous junior gangster convention. Yes, I am talking about you in your avocado-­green suit, and you'll just accept that if you want clean food.” Koji turned from scolding the hooting punks to lavish his attention on Suzuki. “So you, my priest, you just take his apology as good as gold so we can build up your strength. Then you can tell me again about the sutras and this universe of yours, this place of infinite love and infinite justice and infinite mercy.”

“He's forgiven, of course.” Suzuki looked at Mori with genuine warmth.

“Well, then,” Koji said, scooting in beside Suzuki. “Let's talk about appetizers. You first, Reverend Suzuki, as you are looking so thin.”

“Dear Koji,” said Suzuki. He smiled with a mouth full of beveled steel and placed one blue-­veined claw over Koji's pink, pudgy little hand. “Dear, dear Koji. Right now, I couldn't eat a bite.”

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
hanks to Thao Le of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency for her energy and enthusiasm, and thanks to Rebecca Lucash of Harper Voyager for bringing out the best in this story.

Special thanks to the kind and generous ­people of Fukuoka City for putting up with me for the duration of the 1990s. Thanks also to David Hughes, an unsung beta reader of
The Drowning God
, and to Honeycomb Jack, the APE Records forum troll who helped fuel my determination to keep writing.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JAMES KENDLEY
, author of
The Drowning God
and
The Devouring God
, has written and edited professionally for more than thirty-­five years, first as a newspaper reporter and editor, then as a copy editor and translator in Japan (where he taught for eight years at private colleges and universities), and currently as a content wrangler living in northern Virginia with his lovely wife and two fascinating and wonderful children.

kendley.com

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