The Psyche Diver Trilogy: Demon Hunters (42 page)

Now and then he caught glimpses of Kukai.

He saw a drifting, jellyfish-like thing that resembled a woman’s breast; Kukai’s
sokushinbutsu
was perched above it, upside down and naked. The thing’s nipple began to harden and swell, thickening until it had become larger than the object itself. Kukai’s form remained constant above the object. The breast-like object began to lose form, becoming instead a disfigured, female head with its eyes, nose and mouth all out of place. Hosuke watched as the mouth opened wide and began to laugh. Then it was gone, leaving only a ghost-image of Kukai that hung, suspended briefly in the air before it too disappeared.

He saw occasional herds of rectum-like shapes. The rectal forms lacked any surrounding meat, instead they were evident only as buttock-less lips that drifted through the air, squeezing out a reddish ooze as they pulsed open then closed again. With each contraction a version of Kukai’s head would emerge from inside, covered in excrement. Each time, its reddened mouth would stretch open to reveal pointed white teeth that chattered noisily together—it resembled the open jaws of a monster. It was grotesque, watching Kukai’s brown, parchment-like head emerge like that from a floating asshole; the only aspect that resembled anything living was the color inside its mouth—bloody-red. Hosuke could almost hear the rasping hiss of Kukai’s breathing.

There were other renditions of Kukai too; one was in the process of devouring sutras. Each time the Kukai consumed a text its dried skin would take on moisture, become human again, then it would swell and loosen before finally exploding in a thick, red mess.

Hosuke spent some time examining each of them. The sheer volume of images being displayed was a direct result of his punishing Geshin before they had put him under. His relentless focus on Kukai had forced Geshin’s mind to become obsessed with the image in the moments they sent him to sleep. It was only natural for him to be conjuring this endless procession of facsimiles.

Hosuke noticed the presence of esoteric, ritualistic tools coming in tandem with the images of Kukai. Images of female genitalia. And he had noticed something else, too. Whenever Kukai appeared it was always alongside something red.
Kukai and red.
There was a link, he was sure.
But what did the pattern mean?
Hosuke considered the question. “
O-Daishi, he attacked me…”
Geshin had repeated the words in terror. What
had
happened that night at the burial chamber enshrining Kukai’s
sokushinbutsu
?
Kukai and red.
If the pattern was related, it should lead to Geshin’s true memory of that night. All Hosuke had to do was follow it.

Another rectum-like thing percolated into being before him; he extended his consciousness towards it, a hand that plucked the object from the air. He gathered some of the red soup oozing from the rim and
ate
it. The act was a metaphor, symbolizing his permission for the fluid to breach the barrier of his Psyche Suit—giving it a direct line to his consciousness. He wove a separate Psyche Suit around the
rectal thing itself and brought it into contact with his own suit. Finally, he created a small room between them, similar to an airlock in a space shuttle. Something to ease the object into his mind. To be able to accomplish this without conscious effort while inhabiting another mind is the sign of a truly skilled Diver. Psyche Divers are technicians, just as they are the physical laborers of the mind.

The object’s
flavor
was impossibly foul. It was horror, potent enough to freeze the soul. A deplorable, unbearable scream. Skin being flayed from bone. Anguish. The effect was diluted thousands of times over, but the truth was there nonetheless—the red liquid was the sap of Geshin’s terror from that night, squeezed from his mind in the exact moment of his encounter with whatever it was he saw. Why, otherwise, would it show with Kukai’s
sokushinbutsu?
It was the same for the each other instance of the color. The red had appended itself to Geshin’s slumbering memories of Kukai as they bubbled up from the depths of his mind, rising to surface consciousness. Hosuke had seen similar things happen before—it meant there would be a core located somewhere inside Geshin’s head.

Hosuke drew an image in his mind.
Red tar made of terror and screams, enveloping a spherical object—the source of Geshin’s fear.
The man’s terror was holding the object together, but it was powerful and parts of it escaped, gushing to the surface in magma-like jets that ran through his mind. The escaped core-fragments would take on the form of Kukai and leave radial passageways in their wake, entrances that would appear closed but might re-open in response to stimuli. Stimuli similar to Hosuke’s relentless questioning about Kukai.
Something red, then. A sea urchin-like thing with spines branching in every direction, lurching four-dimensionally through the man’s mind to form a path.
The image was complete. It felt pretty close.

He had to locate one of the entrances. An exit point that had re-opened; for Hosuke it would be an entrance leading to the core. It would most likely be colored red, although it was not true that everything red in Geshin’s surface consciousness would be related to Kukai.

The quickest way to find one of the entrances would be to sift through each instance of red he encountered.

3

It took almost an hour of real time for Hosuke to pin down an entrance. The doorway was red, a pursed aperture that bore no resemblance to anything human or animal. The mouth-like shape pulsed, each time coughing up a red, bloody liquid. Something else was emerging, something black and bent like excrement, punctuated with strings of ruby blood. Fully extended, the dark form began to change. It transformed into the familiar, upright-sitting form of Kukai’s
sokushinbutsu
.

It was the entrance he had been looking for, he was sure.

He gathered a few fragments of consciousness from some nearby flotsam and padded them onto his Psyche Suit, forming another layer of protection. Then he edged forwards, moving head first into the aperture. He encountered only slight resistance. He pushed harder and the friction disappeared, allowing him to slip through the boundary like a penis through moistened genitalia.

He was surrounded by a viscous sea of red. He understood that it was a four-dimensional vein, but it felt just like being suspended in sea water. There were two distinct flows; one pushing towards the outside, the other surging inwards. Hosuke positioned himself inside the latter. The level of mental pressure skyrocketed.

The flow pushing inwards represented Geshin’s efforts to lock the terror down; at the same time the object being suppressed was fighting back. The twin forces clashed inside the red, tar-like substance. It was clear that each of the forces originated within Geshin himself—one was his insanity, the other his attempt to keep it at bay. And Geshin would lose his mind the moment the status-quo collapsed.

Hosuke felt himself slow, then finally come to a stop. He had reached the eye of the storm.

He looked around, moving slowly now as the pressure was incredible, like a dense object stretched to breaking point. He saw Kukai. The monk’s body was afloat in the red tar, looking just as Hosuke had seen him in the basement—stark naked, stomach sunken, limbs worn shockingly thin. The insides of his empty eye sockets had distended outwards like bulging eyeballs. The brown, aged skin was dried-up and withered.

Now we’re getting somewhere,
Hosuke thought. This was the core of Geshin’s terror. His memories of that night, locked up in this deep place within his mind. Hosuke had never seen anything quite like it, a mental image of terror that so closely resembled its counterpart in reality. Geshin’s teachings at Mt. Koya must have severely amplified his shock.

The more explosive the emotion, the more accurate the image carved into the mind. Hosuke circled the object, first to the right, then the left. The image he saw was always the same. Kukai watched him directly, however he positioned himself. He maneuvered below, then above the object, but it was the same. Kukai’s eyes were fixed on him regardless.

What happens now?
Hosuke mused. Perhaps the best plan was to try
eating
a part of Kukai. Hosuke believed that the truth of whatever happened inside the burial chamber was in there, locked up in the Kukai before him. He reminded himself that memories are derived of time, that what he was perceiving visually was in fact a temporal entity, a slice of time scissored out from the burial chamber. One that happened to be shaped like Kukai, but only because of the particular circumstances of the memory.

Even so, it was still dangerous to touch anything that could maintain this kind of clarity inside the mind; it was impossible to know what it might become if stimulated. At the same time, watching it in silence was getting him nowhere. There was a technique. He could send in a fragment of his self, a shadow of his mind. It would mean sacrificing it, but the loss would be no greater than the calories lost from lifting something heavy; a non-issue. Hosuke rested his hand on the shape of Kukai and released a gentle current of energy. Kukai stirred, appearing suddenly restless.

The monk’s eyes flicked open, then closed again just as fast. Hosuke tried again. Kukai’s head bent upwards, eyes opening again. They burned with an amber light. Hosuke released yet another charge of energy. This time Kukai’s head began to turn, creaking in a way that seemed to register in Hosuke’s
actual
ears. The monk’s eyes grew brighter still, taking on a golden, vapor-like intensity inside the parchment-like frame.

Electricity had begun to spark through Geshin’s consciousness—it was beginning to react. Geshin’s mind was waking up, and fast. A direct reaction to Hosuke’s stimulation of the dormant memory core. Hosuke hoped to bring about a fairly accurate re-enactment of the events from the burial chamber. Maybe
accurate
was the wrong term—the re-enactment would be of events
as Geshin remembered them.
Even so he did not expect the divergence to be large. Kukai was directly ahead of him. Hosuke was ready to perform the role of Geshin.

He had already altered his shape to resemble the monk as closely as he could. He allowed his Psyche Suit to attenuate, grow as thin as he was willing to let it. He was letting it thin to the point where Geshin’s mind could detect him. The Suit was made from elements of Geshin’s surface consciousness; empty murmurings of the mind mixed with fragments of daily, subconscious memory—a fraction of some location, an object glimpsed in the corner of the eye, the partially-registered sound of the wind.

Its purpose was to protect Hosuke’s consciousness from direct contact with Geshin’s. Regardless of how careful he might be, the deeper sections of Geshin’s mind would detect him if he ventured around without one; closer to the surface and he would be even more vulnerable. When the mind senses an intruder it attempts to destroy it—any Diver would face a sudden, powerful resistance. The primary function of the Psyche Suit is to conceal the presence of a Diver. It is an imperfect system, but diving without one is like blundering naked into the mountains—except that in this case the resultant damage would be levied on the exposed Diver’s mind.

Hosuke was letting his Suit fall away.

He had already taken on Geshin’s form. Now, by lowering his defenses, he was preparing himself to be detected by Geshin’s mind. The aim was to spark the same chain of events as
the night in the burial chamber. Kukai was shuddering. Geshin’s consciousness was reacting to the waking memory, attempting to shut it down. There was a creaking as the level of mental pressure grew even higher. Geshin’s consciousness was already through Hosuke’s fading Psyche Suit. It had contacted Hosuke’s bare flesh, causing Geshin to notice the intrusion.

Kukai’s mouth snapped open. The inside was a shocking red, marked with fences of tall, razor-like teeth. Hosuke saw a violence emerge, something heretofore concealed below the folds of the monk’s aged skin. Kukai’s entire body was undergoing a transformation into some kind of demonic creature.

A monstrous form consisting of teeth and sulfurous eyes burst from Kukai’s flesh; it lunged directly at Hosuke, a black, grotesque amalgamation of eyeballs and fangs. Hosuke tore away the remainder of his Psyche Suit, leaving the empty human shape as he dived to the side, completely exposing himself to the mental sea around him. The monster clamped its jaws over the human form. Behind it all, Kukai moved in motions that matched those of the dark creature. Kukai drew the creature back, swallowing it so that the two became one again. Kukai’s head vibrated with the Psyche Suit in its lips.

The black creature that had sprung from Kukai was a part of Geshin’s mind, along with Kukai himself, memories of the burial chamber. The core had opened, allowing Geshin to relive the moment. As Geshin was still, the memory would have come to him in dream form. Had he been awake he would have lost his mind.

As I suspected,
Hosuke muttered.

Then he noticed that something red had clamped itself to him. It squeezed at him as it wriggled and squirmed. It was Geshin’s mind attacking him, attempting to get rid of the aberration.
Haw!
Hosuke’s imaginary lips curled into a thick smile. It was the fearless smile of an A-grade Diver.
When has Diving in the buff ever stopped me?
He engineered subtle changes to the rhythm of his mind, matching his own signature to the crushing elements of Geshin’s mind.

The technique was the same as the one he had demonstrated with Biku at the Odawara coast. There, he had let his mind grow transparent, phasing it to blend in with the scenery behind him. Now he was doing the same inside a person’s mind.

All he had to do was shut down his aura, synchronize with Geshin’s mind. The conscious part of this, the matching of beats, occupied him for a fraction of a moment. The rest was automatic, his transparent consciousness naturally phasing with the bulk of the adjustments. To an outside observer it would look like his brainwaves had begun to tick in perfect alignment with Geshin’s. Just as Enoh could conceal his aura in mid-combat, so could Hosuke maintain an invisible mind, even while navigating the interior of another mind. He had achieved a perfect harmony between their emotional blueprints, a state impossible to maintain with even the slightest dissonance or instability. Only a true A-grade Diver could accomplish this while the host mind was in turmoil. The one disadvantage to the technique was that it left the Diver open to influence from the host. If Hosuke was forced to remain like this for an extended period of time his personality would begin to merge with Geshin’s.