The Drowning God (13 page)

 

CHAPTER 25

A
n old woman got on the train so slowly that she appeared bit by bit: first, the spotted hand gripping the railing, then gray hair in a neat bun, then her pale, wrinkled face, then the smock that protected her kimono, and then clear plastic spats over white silk socks and high wooden sandals. She had shaken the worst of the rain off her umbrella by the time Detective Takuda realized he should have helped her up the steps. She shuffled toward him and bowed slightly before she put her package on the seat between them. He thought of saying something about the weather, but she had seen rain before.

She was no bigger than she had to be, very neat and self-­possessed. He was huge and clumsy beside her. He watched her in profile as she wiped her hands and her glasses with a small, embroidered handkerchief. She caught him looking, and he bowed briefly. She glanced at his golf bag on the overhead rack and eyed him critically. She returned her attention to her handkerchief.

It was going to be a long ride.

It took at least two hours to get to the Naga River valley from anywhere else. The national expressway ran along the coast, far north of the valley, and prefectural highways narrowed and their number decreased as they wound south toward Eagle Peak. Finally, only one two-­lane road hugging the face of the mountain crossed over into the valley itself, and even that way was closed to Takuda. He had taken the train, the slowest way possible to reach the village, and now he had to go in through the back door. He sincerely hated the idea.

The back door was a railway tunnel that had been dug into the mountain during the tenure of an ambitious and optimistic governor. The governor had convinced the national railway ser­vice to operate a spur line from the nearest east–west line through the tunnel and to the valley. There was no financial incentive to build the tunnel. It was purely an effort to bring the Naga River valley into the twentieth century. Now the east–west local line still wound through the mountains on its eccentric schedule, but the narrow-­gauge line into the valley itself had been abandoned before Takuda entered grade school. The tunnel was still there, along with its decrepit transfer station, but the nearest ser­viced stop on the local line was twenty-­five minutes farther along the base of Mount Tensai, just northwest of Eagle Peak.

Takuda disembarked from the local train and exited the station, but he had only the roughest idea of how to find the tunnel. Walking along the tracks of the east–west line was out of the question. The old woman, who had gotten off the train just behind him, sat on a bench. Takuda glanced at the schedule board. The station was almost as remote as the old spur line itself; the next train wasn't for another two hours. If someone were picking her up, she would wait outside the station, not on the platform.
What was she waiting for?

Takuda went to relieve himself. Unattended little stations like this had filthy men's rooms. He lit a cigarette to cover the stench.

He had just finished washing his hands when he heard the woman pass the men's room door, and he walked out quietly behind her. She wore sturdy walking shoes that didn't match her kimono. Of course she hadn't been waiting for anyone. A modest country woman, she had let the rest of the passengers leave before she changed her shoes.

She walked up a narrow lane by the station, the same way Takuda was going. After passing the noodle shops and pubs that clung to the side of the station, the lane wound up and over the foothills of Mount Tensai. Takuda slowed down and let the woman get well ahead of him. He wasn't following her, and he didn't want to alarm her. He knew the trail to the spur line station had to be somewhere up that way.

Squat houses with stucco walls lined the street. As they approached the base of Mount Tensai, the houses dropped away on the left, and the mountain rose in their place. It was quiet here. The last of the plum blossoms were almost gone. The songbirds weren't back yet, but hardy sparrows flitted through the bamboo. As the grade steepened, Takuda felt better and better. He let out his stride, reveling in the crisp morning air. When he spotted the trailhead Mori had told him about, he would turn around and get some noodles back down at the station. The fresh air and the midmorning walk had already made him a little hungry, and he wouldn't mind walking up this pleasant little stretch again. Perhaps he was killing time, but who would want to go back into that valley before he had to?

He didn't notice that the woman had turned to face him until he was just a few paces down the hill from her. Her face was grim and lined. Her kimono sleeve hung like a curtain as she pointed out a gap between two squat, decrepit houses. A garbage-­strewn trail curved out of sight.

The woman stared back at him, her expression so forbidding that he stopped mute before her. Her eyes were black even at this short distance, and she pointed to his path with a stiff, bony finger. She was younger than she looked, but a hard life had made her formidable.

Still, he called out, “How did you know?”

“You were conspicuous even on the train, but here, you're downright suspicious. Everything is wrong. You're some kind of soldier dressed as a clerk carrying a very light golf bag in a mountain village where there's no golf.”

He felt himself flush. His sword was in the golf bag.

“You blush like a schoolgirl. If you have business in that valley, you had best prepare yourself.”

He growled. As he turned toward the path, she told him to wait.

“Listen,” she said. She stepped closer. “You should dress as a fisherman so that it's not a surprise if you're dirty from the tunnel. Also, a heavy fishing tackle tube would be less conspicuous than a light, bouncing golf bag. There's a store on the other side of the station. You can buy your fishing outfit there and store your city clothes in a locker at the station. Lose the golf bag.”

He frowned. “You know Naga River valley is rotten. Everybody knows it. So you just never cross the mountains, and everything is all right for you?”

She frowned back at him. “Don't get so high-­and-­mighty. We stay alive. We don't disappear in the middle of the night like they do in the Naga River valley. That's what I know about the Naga River valley.” She started back up the hill. “Remember this, fisherman: don't chase the fish into the water. Let the fish come to you.”

“Believe me, auntie, I'm not going into the water.”

She called over her shoulder, “Buy waders, too. If you're going into the tunnel, you're going into the water.”

An hour later, he once again approached the trailhead the old woman had shown him. His sword was slung over his shoulder, snug in the biggest tackle tube he could find at the sporting goods store near the station. He carried waders ending in spiked, split-­toed fishing boots. He doubted he looked like a fisherman.

As he stepped off the road, he was struck by the decrepitude of the houses on either side of the trailhead. They weren't simply abandoned. They were dead and rotten. Stucco had popped off the lath to reveal dark, fungal masses in the wood underneath. The window frames were bent outward, corroded aluminum still bristling with bits of filthy glass. The eaves sagged as if ready to fall into the dark, fetid undergrowth slowly overtaking the gardens.

Takuda hunched his shoulders in the drizzling rain and turned to the trail. The first fifty paces was littered with cigarette butts, alcohol containers, pornographic comic books—­the leavings of garden-­variety juvenile delinquents. The trash ended in a small clearing where the trunk of a fallen cedar blocked the path. Here was a small fire pit and a small mountain of beer cans and saké jars. In the clearing, the hard-­packed earth was free of trash. The kids apparently threw it all into the fire.

As Takuda climbed over the fallen tree, he saw that the tree had been felled with axes. Someone had worked very hard to block the trail.

On the other side of the felled tree, the forest had nearly retaken the trail, but there were old footprints in the soft bed of cedar needles. Takuda wasn't the only one to use the path this spring.

The path led to the transfer station, a cement platform between the local line and the rusting tracks of the spur. The spur line had been disused for decades. A tiled roof supported by rotting wooden pillars ran the length of the platform. At the end of the platform squatted a ticket office big enough for one employee and a kerosene heater. The ticket window had been filled in with plywood. A faded, hand-­lettered sign requested that disembarking passengers drop their tickets into a slot long since boarded over.

The station and everything around it cut sharp angles in that gray midmorning light. On the local-­line side, a sheer retaining wall of wet concrete blocks rose at a forty-­five degree angle. On the spur-­line side, a stand of bamboo shone green through the drizzle. The face of Eagle Peak humped with remains of terraced fields, some overtaken by kudzu vines. Houses of time-­blackened cedar with heavy tile roofs crumbled above those abandoned terraces.

At the base of the mountain, tracks choked with underbrush and debris led to the tunnel's black, gaping mouth. He squared his shoulders and walked toward it, ready to enter the darkness once again.

 

CHAPTER 26

T
he tunnel mouth yawned like the maw of some primitive cave, a lair for savage beasts. The rusted gates hung from their hinges with no evidence of chain or lock. Water covered the gravel railway bed almost up to the black-­slimed concrete ties.

Mori didn't say anything about water. The old woman did me a favor.

Detective Takuda put on his waders and packed his slacks tightly into the tackle tube. After a moment's thought, he put in his keys, handcuffs, badge, notebook, and cell phone as well. The sword barely fit. He watched the tunnel mouth the whole time.

The rusted rails curved away into dead black.

Spring wind died as Takuda stepped under the mossy concrete arch into still twilight. He looked over his shoulder at the platform behind. He felt somehow as if he had crossed more than a few slimed railway ties to enter this tunnel, and going back to the platform wouldn't bring him back, not all the way.

What nonsense! It's just a shortcut. It's foolish for a grown man to be afraid of the dark.
He stretched his shoulders and tilted his head one way, then the other, just to feel the vertebrae pop. In a smooth motion, as if he had done it all his life, he reached between his shoulder blades and drew the sword from its scabbard in the tackle tube.
Just to be on the safe side.

It had seemed like a reasonable way to get into the valley. He couldn't take the high road for fear of being spotted, and he couldn't hike over the mountains in less than a day. This would be shorter. Takuda figured that the tunnel through the mountain's shoulder had to be less than two kilometers long. If the tunnel was less than two kilometers long, it would be a twenty-­minute walk. Feeling his way along the slimed ties would make it half an hour. Anyone could do that. Miyoko Gotoh could do that, leaning on her broom.

Five steps into the tunnel, Takuda was in shadows. Ten steps into the tunnel, he couldn't see anything beyond the tiny pool of light from his penlight. The water on either side of the tracks was impenetrable black. The silted gravel between the ties seemed to absorb the light itself. The only sounds were his breathing and the grating of his spiked fishing boots.

He was surprised that he was afraid. He was used to the dark, and he trained for it. When a suspect could not be flushed out into the light of day, Takuda's work took him into the shadowed lairs of gangsters, pimps, and drug addicts. These ­people, by the time they became hazards to public safety, seemed to prefer living in the twilight underworld.

His colleagues had sometimes compared dark-­seeking criminals to cockroaches, but more than once, Takuda had knocked on a darkened door with a crash squad crouched at his back, and he had survived by taking every threat seriously. No matter what else these suspects had done, they had managed to bring the battle to their home turf, where they knew the terrain and controlled the conditions. Such clever fighters were hardly cockroaches.

No, he had walked into the dark too often to be afraid of the simple darkness. He would live or he would die. It was the unknown he feared, not the dark.

Not the unknown, not anymore. Now it's just the suspense.

None of it really made sense. Why was he the one to walk the dark tunnel? Why did everyone just accept that he would? Yamada, Mori, Suzuki, even Yumi. They all just assumed he would follow the trail to the end of his career. Everyone just assumed that it would come to this, and everyone was letting it happen. The only ones actively opposing it were the ones who stood to lose out financially. The others just let him destroy himself.

The whole thing was insane. Everything his family had wished for him, everything he and Yumi had worked and sacrificed for was coming to an end. His parents had died of grief—­cancer had been a symptom, not a cause. Takuda had mourned them daily, in his heart. Now, for the first time, he was glad they were dead. At least they hadn't lived to see what was happening to him.

He would lose his position, his livelihood, his status, his retirement. He would lose everything, including the respect of his colleagues. In a different age, he would have had to commit suicide as soon as the job was done.

Times had changed, and he had already decided to live.
That will stink things up, won't it?

Water glinted in the corner of his eye.

He stopped and played his flashlight beam over the inky surface.
This water shouldn't be moving.
A fish? A turtle? There had been a ripple, but it had gone as quickly as it had appeared.

How deep could this water be?
His hand tightened on the sword. It was about two meters from the rails to the tunnel wall. If the gravel fell off from the ties just as it had outside the tunnel, then the water couldn't be more than half a meter deep.

Fifteen minutes more? Twenty minutes more?
There was no way to tell. No matter what, he would get out of the tunnel sooner by staying on the tracks. He returned his flashlight beam to the rails in front of him. He resisted the urge to run. He trusted his physical abilities, but running in complete darkness with a drawn sword should be avoided if possible.

He walked onward, scanning the water on either side of the rails. Maybe it had just been a drip from the ceiling. He resisted the urge to play the flashlight beam on the tunnel ceiling. He conjured again in his mind's eye the rippling water: concentric rings as from a falling droplet? No, it had been a wavelet, almost triangular, caused by movement from beneath the surface.

He let out a deep breath, and it rattled out of his chest. His heart was thudding.

Three steps later, the water seemed to creep up the rails as the grade of the rail bed changed. Ten steps later, the rails disappeared under the surface. Beyond, there was darkness, the black face of the water.

Takuda, up to his ankles in water, heard a faint sound behind him, like a ripple, a single droplet. The stench of rotting fish wrapped around him. He turned, pointing the flashlight back the way he had come. Beside the track, a shape rose from the water.

Takuda knew what it was.

In a way, he had always known what it was.

It was like a boy, but it was not a boy. Its head was much too big for the spindly neck. Its arms were much too long, and its huge hands hung limp by its bony, wide-­splayed knees. It was altogether sexless.

Takuda moved the flashlight beam up to the head. The skull seemed spongy and misshapen, with lank, dark locks hanging like strips of seaweed. The eyes were too large and too far apart. The mouth was a gaping wound hardened and cracked at the edges.

“
Azhi,
” it hissed. It shuffled toward him slowly beside the track. The sound was meaningless, but Takuda understood anyway:
big brother
.

And deep in Takuda's chest, there was a satisfaction, a glow.
It has stolen my brother's voice, and it tries to look human. It really is a devil.
In that instant, with his heart in his mouth and blood ringing in his ears, Takuda's life became whole again. Everything made sense.

He held his sword low, almost behind him as he backed along the tracks into deeper water.

“Demon,” he said. “Murderer. Monster. Come to me. It's been a long time.”

The creature hissed with pleasure. Its mouth contorted into something like a smile. Takuda was going to deeper water, just as it had hoped.

Takuda tightened the lanyard of his little flashlight around his wrist. The water was past his knees. He was going exactly where the creature thought it wanted him.

Legend had it that the creature was strong enough to pull a horse underwater. Takuda knew from painful experience that it had poisoned talons.

The water was up to his hips, and the creature was slowly closing the gap. He smiled to himself despite his hammering heart.
It's going to have its hands full. If I get a good grip on it, I'll tear it to pieces right here.

He let the flashlight dangle as he gripped his sword with both hands. With a strangled shriek, the creature dove for him.

Takuda whipped the sword through the water, and the impact jolted him backward. The creature had impaled itself under the left shoulder, and it writhed on his blade. The flashlight beam shuddered on the roiling black water as Takuda struggled to keep his balance. As he regained his footing, he dug in with the fisherman's boots and heaved the squirming thing into the air.

It wasn't a little boy. It wasn't a boy at all.

He didn't dare release the blade to take up the flashlight, but in the quivering half-­light, he saw enough: The cracked and blackened beak snapped at him, and the long, paddle-­like hands swished past his face. Bandy, knotted legs pumped in midair, searching for water with the long, webbed, feet.

Webbed human feet. Taloned human hands. Frog-­lidded human eyes. And a human mouth, ruined and tortured, now a snapping beak.

Lord Buddha help us. This thing was once a man.

The talons swung closer as the Kappa slid down the blade toward him. He dug his feet in deeper and coiled in upon himself, concentrating all his power at his center of gravity. At this time, at this place, drawing strength from the mountain, from the water, from all corners of the universe, he was stronger than twenty men, stronger than fifty. With every bit of that strength, he coiled himself even tighter. Then he picked a spot on the tunnel wall and exploded toward it, releasing his entire energy as he slung the creature from his sword.

The creature hit the wall. The impact made Takuda's ears ring and drenched him in fish-­stinking muck.

He wiped the foul liquid from his eyes and regained his little flashlight. The Kappa had exploded against the wall, but he needed to make sure there was no life left in the pieces. There was more than biology keeping the thing alive, and he needed to be sure it was gone for good. Perhaps he should collect the pieces and take them to Suzuki.

He rinsed the creature's foul blood from the sword and wiped it dry before he sheathed it and capped the tackle tube tightly.

Black ooze ran down the wall, but the creature had disappeared. Takuda stood dripping in the tunnel, not moving a muscle. It didn't make sense. It couldn't have simply dissolved into muck and filth. It had hit the wall very, very hard, but skin and talons and bones should still be near the surface of the water even if they had slid off the wall.

As he stepped forward into waist-­deep water to find the broken corpse, he felt the motion behind him.

The claws bit into Takuda's boots at the ankles, and the Kappa pulled his feet out from under him.

He flailed and went down in the hip-­deep water as the Kappa clawed its way up his body. The flashlight flickered and died, and the last thing Takuda saw was the Kappa reaching for his face through the murky water.