by Ramy Vance
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Really, Daniel—this is what you brought us out to hear? ‘Time draws near …’ ‘Soon, our powers …’ These lines are out of a b-movie, at best. You’d think after millions of years, you’d learn to avoid the clichés and come up with something original—”
My mini-rant was abruptly cut off by Gomer, who opened his eyes and looked at me. Recognition came over his face, but not because he was remembering me from earlier … it was like he actually knew me. Like we were two long-lost friends accidently meeting up in the middle of Times Square.
But any friendliness was short-lived, as Gomer’s face filled with hatred and he cried out, “You brought her here? Fools. Kill her. Now. Now. Now.” Gomer repeated the word over and over again, and from the way he cried out, I knew he wasn’t going to stop until either he was dead, or I was. So it seemed that Gomer did do stuff … like ordering my execution. And given I was hogtied and on my knees, I was guessing me dead was more likely.
One of the centaurs who had tied us up charged forward without hesitation and unsheathed his sword. They were getting ready to run me down and given the position I was in, there was literally nothing I could do.
“No!” cried Daniel. I guessed the apocalypse hadn’t started in earnest and he needed me around a wee bit longer to help usher in the end.
But any power Daniel had was nothing compared to the authority their nutbar of a prophet had, and neither centaur slowed down.
“Oh hell no,” Jean said, before clamping down hard with his teeth. Then he lunged forward, knocking me down just in time for the centaur’s blade to fly over us.
Jean had saved me, but for what? So I could live another minute or so? I waited as I heard the centaur turning for another pass at me, while Gomer’s cries continued to fill the air, accented by the clicking of hooves that sounded more like the ticking of a clock counting down the last seconds of my life.
The centaur stood above us, getting ready to drive his sword through both our bodies.
“No,” Daniel said. “Just the girl.” He spoke like just killing me was the lesser of two evils.
How chivalrous, I thought as the centaur reached down and pulled Jean off me.
“Bastards. God damned bastard,” Jean spat, and given that there was no quip, no ill-timed joke, I knew I was a goner.
To Jean’s credit, he struggled against the beast, but in the end, the half-horse, half-man threw him off me with all the exertion necessary to fling a sack of potatoes. Jean went tumbling away.
So this is how it ends for me, I thought, and readied myself for the nothing that would come after.
↔
When I was a young girl, my mother—who was a God fearing, church-going Christian back then—told me that I had a guardian angel watching over me. I believed that until the day I was turned into a vampire. After that, I chalked up concepts like “guardian angels” and “divine intervention” to superstitions held by people too weak to save themselves. In other words, my mother was wrong.
Dead wrong.
But it seemed I was the one who was wrong, because just before the centaur could drive his blade through me, dozens of mokumokuren appeared. And not just mokumokuren … the futakuchi-onna from the plane, the three specter salarymen from the izakaya and dozens of other half-dead, ghostly Others.
Gabriel—my guardian angel—and his half-dead army had shown up to save me.
And save me they did. From the centaur at least, because although the ghosts weren’t corporeal in any meaningful punch-you-in-the-face-with-a-solid-fist kind of way, they served up one hell of distraction.
The horse part of the centaur took hold; the mythical beast reared up on his hind legs as he tried to swat away the floating eyeballs.
Daniel lunged toward me, but before he could get within striking range, Gabriel manifested. Except it wasn’t him, it was a projection, a hologram (not that magic needs a scientific explanation). The real Gabriel was still nailed to a cross and from the grimaced expression on this hologram, he was still in a hell of a lot of pain.
Seeing the archangel, Daniel dropped to his knees. “Gabriel,” he said. “You’re dead. I saw you die. I—”
Gabriel lifted a silencing hand and spoke six words to Daniel. Six words that stopped the angel dead in his tracks. “Father would not have wanted this.”
Hearing those words from Gabriel must have been like being hit by a truck, because Daniel half-crumpled and shook his head as streams of light fell from his eyes. “I was only doing His will … I was only doing His will.”
Devastated, babbling angels aside, there were other dangers to contend with. Specifically, prophets.
If Hosea and Gomer had noticed the ghostly Others, they made no show of it. Their eyes were intently focused on me as they crossed their arms against their chests.
I heard a familiar rumbling. They were summoning their nio and shisa warriors, but at least this time I understood what was happening, and seeing my chance, I got up on my bound feet and did the only thing I could think of doing: I hopped over to Gomer and head-butted him hard enough to knock him out.
Hosea was backing away from me, his murmuring continuing as the thunderous rampage of the stone guardians grew louder. I saw the first of the approaching army crash through the hotel’s front door as I hobbled toward the summoning prophet. But Hosea kept backing away and I knew that I wasn’t going to make it in time to stop him.
I’d need a miracle to take him down. Miracles were in short supply these days, but they weren’t gone—not entirely—and my miracle took the form of what looked like a giant, hairy beanbag that dropped from the sky, smothering Hosea under its incredible weight.
Aki stood triumphant over his, ahem … sack. Beneath it lay a possibly dead, definitely unconscious Hosea who was no longer summoning his guardians.
The shisa and nio, who had been approaching in force, abruptly stopped, turning back into what they normally were: lifeless statues that felt oddly appropriate in Aki’s stone garden.
Jean waved over to me as he stood, gasping for breath next to the cage that once held Aki, Harry and the Others.
Harry, now free, used his immense strength to snap my binds, and the four of us stood together as we surveyed the scene.
Daniel and the centaur guards, outnumbered and no longer with their leader, were being rounded up by their once-upon-a-time prisoners. The ghostly Others and Gabriel, seeing that the situation was now under control, had gone, presumably to preserve their limited strength in the corporeal world.
“So,” I said, “that was close.”
Jean stared at me gravely, like he couldn’t believe I still breathed. Then he smiled and with a “I don’t know—I figured I still had a few seconds to spare” and a chuckle, I knew things were right.
Well, not right. There were still the resurrecting gods to contend with. But things were better, at the very least.
“Now what?” Harry asked as he wiped dirt from his glasses.
Jean and I filled the yeti and tanuki in as quickly as possible, telling them about the gods and bombs, before Jean finally said what I had been thinking. “The path is clear. We get you inside and you do your soul magic and … well, we call it a day.”
“And the bombs?” I asked.
“Well, there is that. But how about we deal with one problem at a time? First we kill the gods dead. Then we find a bomb shelter or something.”
I looked at my watch and shook my head. “No, not yet. We still have three days until they rise. There has got to be a way we can save the Others battling on the beach. Others on both sides,” I said, emphasizing the plurality of my intention. “We have to warn them, at least. Let them know what’s happening.”
“We can’t save them all,” Jean said. “We don’t have time. Hell, I doubt we even have the time to save ourselves.”
“We have to—”
Harry put a hand on my shoulder. “Your capacity to love is immense,” the yeti said. “But the soldier is right: ther
e is no time. Go. Aki and I will try to warn them, though I do not think they will listen.”
Harry took a few steps toward the hotel as he spoke, as if his steps would somehow inspire me to take my own. “The passion of battle, even a battle that is being lost, is too great to be ignored and—”
But before the kind and gentle yeti could finish his thought, a giant hand burst out of the hotel, splintering the ancient structure into tinder before slamming down and squashing Harry under its incredible weight.
The gods were here.
Idle, Godly Hands, Playgrounds and All That Jazz
If the giant hand knew it had crushed one of the most gentle, erudite creatures I’d ever met, it made no sign of it. I had no time to mourn Harry’s death; that would have to come later. Now I needed to focus on the impossibility of what was happening. How was it they had risen so quickly? We were supposed to have days left to stop them. But here one had risen out of the hole.
The hand pulled back, dragging ravines ten feet deep as fingertips wider than great sequoias clawed at the earth. From the motion, I knew it was climbing. As in, the gods, or at least one of them, was pulling himself out of the giant hole caused by the incomplete temporal transfer that occurred when our two planes of existence had overlapped.
Jean and I stood in awe as the hand of god continued clawing at the edge of the abyss while it slowly rose from beneath. A god was raising, and it took everything in my three hundred years of experience not to fall to my knees and grovel in awe-struck insanity. I totally got why everyone in an H.P. Lovecraft novel goes crazy. Seeing a god—as in, actually seeing one—is mind-bogglingly overwhelming.
Aki, the divine judge and tanuki of old, had seen one before and wasn’t quite as flabbergasted as we were. He traded out a gaping mouth and disbelief with a well-timed, “Ah, crap. They’re early. Unfashionably so.”
Gallows humor. It had saved me more than once and at that moment, Aki’s casualness was enough to jolt Jean and me awake. With a chuckle, we both shook our heads, looked at each other with a let’s-get-to-it resolve and sprang into action.
Not that we had many actions to take. I mean, what were you supposed to do against something as huge as that? We were literally the size of fruit flies compared to what was coming out of the hole. The only thing that gave me a modicum of hope was the way the hand struggled. Whoever controlled this body wasn’t used to it.
It wavered too much, moved with the uncertainty of one learning to skate without ever having seen someone skate before. If this god was struggling that much to get out, then maybe, just maybe we could get back inside where my soul-power would have a chance against it.
Then again, maybe not.
“Still, early or not, this shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t be at full power yet. This shouldn’t be possible,” the tanuki said.
“Probably not,” Jean said. “But then again, there is only one of them. Maybe the other two, I don’t know, gave her some of their mojo so she could rise early and deal with any threats, as in …” He pointed at me.
“And she has the Soul Jar around her neck. She was the one who found it, used it to free them,” I said. “Maybe that has something to do with it.”
“Whatever the reason, what do we do now?” Jean asked.
I looked up at the massive hand struggling to find a grip and then at our surroundings. There had to be something that we could use against this god to slow it down. Then I saw my answer standing off in the distance. “Water,” I said, pointing to the water tower near the hotel. “Let’s make this as slippery as possible.”
“On it,” Aki said, twirling his massive satchel around and taking to the air. With a single bound that would have made Superman jealous, he plowed through one of the tower’s legs and sent the thing toppling over, releasing gallons upon gallons of water.
“Jean, you release the prisoners—”
“They’ll turn on us.”
“They’ll die if they can’t run. This god is flailing about. It’s only a matter of time until she swats them.”
Jean nodded in understanding. Best to give them a chance than let them die like caged animals. “OK, and after that? What do we do?”
“We fight,” I said.
“A bit more specific?”
“Well personally,” I said, “I kind of want to slay some gods.”
↔
Looking over at the hole, I saw our make-it-muddy gambit had paid off. The hand disappeared into the abyss below.
I was about to run over to the hole when Jean stopped me, fumbling in his pocket he pulled out Father Time’s note. “I figure this is as good a time as any,” he said as he unfolded it. My heart raced with anticipation and hope that the words on that paper would change everything. But when Jean’s face furled with disappointment and exasperated rage, I knew hope wasn’t here.
“What does it say?” I asked, expecting something cryptic and useless.
“ ‘Not all time is equal.’ ” Jean crumpled up the paper and tossed it aside.
“Fan-friggin-tastic,” I muttered. “I hate it when I’m right.”
But useful message from crazy Father Time or not, I didn’t have time to worry about it now. Right now, I had to stop a god.
I gave Jean a hug in the way one does when things are truly over, and ran to the edge of the hole before he could say anything else. Peering down, I saw that the hand had retreated from the flow of water, presumably to find some kind of grip or footing to climb out.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do to stop it, and figured my only chance was to get down into the museum and use my soul-power to try and pull it back inside. My plan, if you could call the extreme parkour insanity I was about to attempt a “plan,” was to climb down the huge god and get inside as quickly as possible.
But from where I stood, I couldn’t see anything. The arms of the god, her head … nothing. Just a dark hole that was impossibly deep.
I need to get down—quick. Jumping down would be suicide, I thought, but not seeing a god on which to climb down had basically ruined my plan. I needed access to the museum now. But without a clear path, it would take me hours to get there. Then again, this was always a suicide mission …
I took ten steps back and ran to the edge, jumping into the black abyss below.
↔
Sometimes you just have to take the leap, and doing so pays off. And that was exactly what happened at that moment, for as I fell into the darkness, a body shot up through the hole. A huge, imposing body with a necklace holding a jar on it. Izanami.
So she was the one who’d come early to the party.
Seasons of the Abyss
Climbing down a giant goddess is harder work than you’d think. For one thing, they don’t have clothes. Sure, Izanami was robed in something that covered her fun bits and displayed the majesty that was her … but it wasn’t like the robes were made of cotton.
The material (I had no idea what it was made out of) seemed to be an extension of her, something that grew out of her being. And given that Izanami was the zombie of a dead goddess, a god that was locked away by her husband Izanagi because she was too hideous to look at, the material I clung onto was covered in a mixture of old, coagulating bodily fluids that made me yearn for a full-body exfoliation with sandpaper.
Still, a girl has to do what a girl has to do, and I shimmied down the curtain of slime, making my way down the mess she called a wardrobe until I made it to the platform, but couldn’t go any further to the door. It seemed that once we were actually in the waiting area in front of the museum, her clothes and body became less tangible and more ghost-like, the rest of her body trailing into the museum like a genie’s tail coming out of a lamp.
The door no longer hung there, but rather had been splintered by what I can only assume was Izanami’s dramatic exit.
I tried to use Izanami’s ghostly tail to climb to the entrance, but my hands went right through her, and I stared helplessly from the wrong side of the chasm. I needed to get
inside, but the gulf between where I stood and the entrance was too far to jump and the bridge that had once stood between the two points had been cut down by Benkei to stop me from entering.
Speaking of Benkei. I turned to see the samurai (“Warrior monk!” I heard Keiko cry in my head) standing several feet behind me, his blades around him, each dripping with a different color of blood. And not just his weapons … his clothes were covered in so much brightly colored blood that his monk’s robes looked as though they’d been tie-dyed.
And that’s when it hit me: there had been Others down here trying to get in and according to Jean and Keiko, Benkei hadn’t tried to stop them. But whatever stalemate they had had gone out the window when Izanami made her move, freeing the warrior monk to do what he did best. Kill.
And kill he must have done, because there wasn’t a single body anywhere to be seen. I only needed to follow the rainbow-colored streams to know where the bodies were, too. They’d been dumped down the chasm.
Holy guacamole—he literally took down dozens of Others and he didn’t have a scratch on him. And here I was, little old me, with no weapons, because in my haste, I figured I only needed my soul-power to stop the gods. I’d forgotten all about him.
I stared up at the giant man, waiting for him to make his move, but he didn’t do anything except stare directly ahead at the door. There was fire in his eyes and I followed his gaze. Then it hit me who he really was.
Lifting my hands up, I said in my best Japanese, “You know, all this time I thought you were a guardian. But you’re not, are you? You’re a guard. A warden, to be more specific. You’re here to make sure that whatever is in there doesn’t get out.”
Benkei’s gaze shifted to me for a split second before he returned to his vigil. That was all the confirmation I needed.
“I’m trying to stop them from getting out, but I need your help. I need to get inside.”
