The Psyche Diver Trilogy: Demon Hunters (2 page)

They planned on hiking to Yamanakako, avoiding any marked trails. There were always a few eccentrics out in the mountains at night come August, and heading to Nakagawa Springs meant the risk of running across more of the
Kokushigun
. They had reached the slopes west of Azegamaru, leaving Nishitanzawa behind them. The direct route to Yamanakako was just over 15 kilometers. They would walk for 20 at most.

Two hours into the hike, Kumiko’s breathing became labored. She followed without complaint, but she was clearly fatigued--it was only natural hiking through the night at this pace, and they were avoiding even half-decent paths. Not many women would be able to match Fuminari’s unchecked pace for so long, he was impressed.

“Wait,” she finally said.

“Tired?” Fuminari turned.

“No. Just there, I saw a light.”

“What?” Fuminari killed the light of his headlamp. Kumiko followed suit.

“Over there, look.”

Fuminari moved closer, trampling through the darkness. He brought his head level with hers, tracing her line of sight. Something flickered below to the left. A light flitted through the leaves, between the dark trunks of the beech trees. It seemed to be firelight. It would have been easy enough to miss, obscured by the shadows of the trees, it had only been visible from Kumiko’s height.

It was closer than he had expected. They would have passed right by it if they had kept heading down. The terrain was far from suitable for someone to have set up camp. A light breeze rustled through the undergrowth carrying a faint scent up the side of the valley. Fuminari felt a chill crawl up his back.

“Can you smell that?”

“Yeah, like some kind of incense.” Kumiko’s voice had become a whisper.

There was something ominous in the way the yellowish light filtered through the gaps of the darkened grove. And the scent...it seemed to coil around the flesh, kindling sexual desire. Fuminari imagined trying to sleep while inhaling it; he would spend the night feverish with lust, awaking dry and spent like a ragged cloth. If they had not just fucked, he was certain it would be driving them wild by now.

“Listen, I can hear something.”

Human voices, more than one--a group of people intoning some kind of chant. The voices drifted in and out of earshot, sounding intermittently on the breeze, the wind carrying the voices over a surprising distance. Fuminari and Kumiko realized that they had probably been in range of both the scent and the chanting for a while now. The chants were a blend of western melody with readings from Buddhist sutra, but they had a deviant quality. They sounded
similar
to prayer, but they were clearly something darker, more like a hex. If it was prayer, it sounded pretty damn unholy. Fuminari felt a curious sense of foreboding. His hair was standing on end.

Am I getting scared!?

No, he decided, that was not it. He felt repulsion, but at the same time some dark part of him was responding to the voices. He felt an inexplicable excitement, as though a part of him that had been slumbering, a part both primitive and brutal, was being called to wake. He felt his blood seething. The chanting stopped. The torchlight wavered invitingly. Fuminari tapped Kumiko’s shoulder, “Keep the lights off and follow me."

3

The view was surreal.

An area of grass had been leveled into a clearing. The space was easily the size of three tennis courts. A few rocks had been lined in a circle to one side enclosing a large fire.

Fuminari and Kumiko observed the scene from the cover of the trees on the other side of the fire. Kumiko reached to her side, subconsciously gripping Fuminari by the arm. Her hands were trembling. Usually tough and controlled, Kumiko had become completely enthralled by the spectacle before them.

The firelight danced over a mass of naked men and women, all intertwined in an orgy. Over 20 couples swelled together, moaning lustily. Some of the men took women from behind, others had women on top while groping at their breasts as they thrust feverishly upward. One had a woman’s legs hooked over his shoulders, head buried between them. The woman pulled him toward her, ravaging her hands through his hair--convulsing like she had been possessed.

It was all clear in the firelight: sweat-drenched bodies; a seething mass of exposed breasts, hips, backs and bellies like a shapeless creature writhing on its back. The scent...that incense-like smell was potent. It was impossible to make out the faces of the people in the firelight, but it was clear that they had abandoned themselves to the pleasures of the flesh. The sexual moans welled as a single chorus of pleasure. They could have been a swarm of toads, awake after a long hibernation, furiously mating in a puddle of water.

“Look--” Fuminari gestured to the side with his chin, drawing Kumiko’s attention. A cross had been planted in the ground, slightly apart from the flames. Kumiko’s reply stuck in her throat. A woman hung naked from it, crucified.

The cross had been inverted with the horizontal bar near its base instead of the top. The woman had been pinned upside down with her legs suspended vertically, arms stretched along the horizontal bar. Her long hair dangled below. She was perfectly still. It was impossible to tell if she was alive or dead. Even if she was alive, she would not last long in that position.

“They’ve drawn something in the ground.” This time, the voice was Kumiko’s. Fuminari had noticed it too. The overall shape was obscured beneath the shadows of the crowd, but he could make out a number of straight lines dividing the ground into a series of squares. The squares were cross-sectioned pieces of one larger square, the size of half the clearing. The area was marked like a chessboard. Each square was occupied by a single couple. This was something fundamentally beyond a mere orgy. The place, the atmosphere...everything suggested something that was alien to sex for its own sake. This was degenerate--its roots delved deeper into the realm of thick, stagnant, nightmarish emotion. These people were slaves to a mysterious hysteria. Together, they formed a living mandala of copulating men and women.

Fuminari was sweating. It was as though the hysteria had mixed with the incense and transformed the darkness into a secretion that clung to his skin. He suddenly realized that for these people to be doing this, there would have to be someone on watch nearby. Fuminari cursed himself. It was not the time to get sidetracked into making a mistake because of whatever was before them. They would not be able to play dumb with these people--not if they were caught hoarding 100 million yen.

“Hey!” Fuminari pressed Kumiko’s head down. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He withdrew his attention from the sounds of the orgy and brought himself into phase with the sound of the wind. Like a fever, the feelings of lust washed away as he felt his mind become clear again. He opened his eyes, slowly, focusing on the darkness around them. He could not sense anyone nearby. They would have posted watch at any paths leading directly to the clearing, so it was safe to assume there would be lookouts nearby. That much was certain.
We were lucky,
Fuminari reflected. Things could have easily gone bad if they had taken a regular trail and stumbled across one of the lookouts; they would have been embroiled in this mess.

“Look!” Kumiko pulled at Fuminari’s arm.

Fuminari glanced back toward the clearing. Two men stood at either side of the woman on the cross. They wore black, ankle-length robes. Each held a flaming torch in their right hand. The dark wad of pubic hair between the legs of the upturned woman was laid bare in the torchlight.

A woman appeared from the darkness, also in a black robe, holding something like a ceramic bowl in her hands. She walked to the cross and came to a stop, placing the bowl on the ground under the head of the crucified woman. Another woman came into view. She was carrying a bowl, slightly smaller than that of the first woman. The first woman cast her hands upward before the cross, revealing arms that shone white in the darkness. Voices swelled over the night, the same sutra-like chanting as before, as though the gesture had been a signal. It sounded like the hushed groan of the dying, but there was a clear, tune-like sense to it; the prayer-like, curse-like chanting resembled a strange kind of song.

Fuminari focused on the scene unfolding before them, he saw a line of figures in shadow, positioned behind the open fire, ten or so to a side. They all wore the same black robes. The figures had been obscured from view on the other side of the fire. They were the source of the chanting. Again, Fuminari found himself struck with a curious sense of something, as though the chanting was insinuating itself inside him, stoking a bestial darkness. He was unsure if he felt disturbed by the sensation, or if, in fact, it caused the opposite effect.

The second woman dipped her hands into the bowl and began rubbing something across the body of the woman on the cross. It was thick and viscous, dark-crimson, like blood that had begun to congeal.

A terrified scream tore across the clearing. It was the upside-down woman; she was still alive. She had been unconscious, woken now as the woman massaged the reddish black liquid over her. The scream was hoarse and sickening, her voice had broken, but not simply because she had been strung upside down--she had screamed like this many times already. The scream was almost unbearably desperate; the kind you would only hear once in a lifetime, if at all.

The second woman withdrew, bowl in hand. The first woman reached inside her robe with her right hand. When she pulled her hand out the screams became more shrill. The woman on the cross had watched her pull out a dagger; it glinted with a sharp, metallic light.

The intoning reached a crescendo.

The woman swept the dagger down.

The screaming stopped.

The woman raised her bloodied hands in the air, softly reciting something. The dagger’s handle jutted out at an awkward angle hanging from the left breast of the woman on the cross. A horrific amount of blood poured from the wound. It ran down the woman’s chest, over her throat and cheeks and through her dangling hair, soaking the ends and dripping into the bowl below.

The woman brought her hands down and took hold of the dagger’s handle. Her body was in the way, Fuminari was unable to make out what was happening. She thrust her left hand high into the air; in it she held a bloodied heart. The attendant next to her held up a wooden tray on which she placed the heart. The wind picked up and the trees rustled loudly through the night’s darkness. The chanting grew louder, finding a sort of resonance with the wind. The moon above the clearing cast a wan, bluish shadow over the group of entangled men and women.

Kumiko had struggled not to scream as she watched them decapitate the upturned woman. Only a short while ago, she had ended a man’s life, but she took no joy in cutting human flesh. She knew she would not hesitate to kill when necessary, but what she had just witnessed was something more than just killing. It was overwhelming, foreign to her.

The robed woman held the blood-filled bowl high and stepped into the mass of fornicating couples, pouring the liquid on them as they writhed together in a diverse mix of sexual positions. They undulated in synchronized movements spreading the blood over each other’s bodies. Some accepted it with open mouths. The orgy grew in intensity, its constituents became increasingly consumed by the hysteria. The gasping and moaning rose to a cacophonous animal roar.

The woman offered the final drops of blood to a man and woman at the center of the throng and then signaled to the other robed woman now holding the tray bearing the heart and severed head. The woman carried the tray to the center and offered it to the couple; the man glanced up from his position on top of his partner. He was old. His hairline had completely receded, only a few wisps of grey hair grew to the sides of his forehead. He grabbed the heart from the tray and, still inside his partner, brought it to his mouth. He greedily sunk his teeth into it. His mouth stained red.

“This is unbearable,” Fuminari groaned, but he had no idea
what
was unbearable, or
how
it was unbearable. His hairs stood on end. His skin prickled. He felt sick. But, between his legs, he was hard and swollen, fully erect. Some bestial darkness had awoken within, kindled by these dark emotions.

Rustling grass, close by.

Fuminari spun around and in a single, clean motion pulled the hiking knife from his pocket, hurling it toward the shadow that had appeared in his peripheral vision. The shadow crumpled to the ground without making a sound. Fuminari focused his attention on the surroundings, checked that no-one else was nearby, then looked back toward the clearing. Nothing suggested that the others had been alerted.

“Don’t make a sound,” he told Kumiko. He moved to examine the fallen body. The knife had pierced the man’s throat. Fuminari’s skill was impressive.

“He’s still young,” Kumiko whispered, looking at the man’s face. He was around the same age as Muto and his gang, probably in his mid-20’s; Kumiko had used the same knife to kill one of them only a few hours ago.

It was unclear whether he had approached because they had been noticed, or whether he had simply chanced upon them during a regular patrol. Whatever the case, they could not afford to idle around.

“We’re leaving. Now,” Fuminari said. If they could make it back to the darkness of the mountains, no-one would be able to find them...he hoped. They would need a methodical trawl of the hills and tracker dogs to have any hope of catching them.

Fuminari’s mind felt clear again.

4

There was something out there.

An energy slightly out of phase with the mountain. One moment it was there, the next it was gone. The sensation was weak enough to be dismissible as a trick of the mind, but Fuminari was certain it was there, that it was no figment of his imagination. They were being tailed by something; it was unfaltering, persistent. Fuminari was certain, it felt as though something had spread a thin membrane from his neck down to the base of his spine. The membrane extruded a strand of web outward, guiding their hunter through the darkness. No matter what Fuminari tried, there was no way to cut the strand.