Eight Million Gods-eARC

by Wen Spencer

  Because of this, even housewives had business cards with maps to their houses printed on the back.

  Her crazed fan, though, had obviously been stalking her for a long time if he found a katana to match the one in her story. He had time to roam her neighborhood and find her apartment building.

  She needed to bounce. Usually she just fled with what she was wearing. But she never had so much “her” to leave behind. Never before could she decorate the walls, buy clothes, pick out dishes and pots. Everything in the apartment was seeped with her happiness in setting up her place. The joy in her power to finally make decisions for herself.

  She could be packed in thirty minutes.

  She had washed her clothes on Saturday and hung them on bamboo poles across her balcony. Luckily everything was dry. She took them down, folded and then rolled them to save space. She only had one suitcase, an ultra cute Hello Kitty trolley that she had bought for her “visa renewal” trips. Maybe she should head to South Korea early.

  As she packed, she backed up her novel twice onto flash drives. She could give one to the police so they would have some hope of catching her stalker.

  What about the katana? She eyed it sitting innocently on her table, still wrapped in fabric. “I can’t explain the sword.”

  She would figure that out later. Right now, she needed to pack as quickly as possible. Stopping to think things through would only let stress seep in, and then she be stuck writing until her hypergraphia subsided. Of course, as her suitcase filled up, she couldn’t help but notice what wasn’t going to fit. All her expensive spices. Her new rice cooker. Her body-sized pillow. Her Hello Kitty duvet cover.

  “No, no, don’t think about it,” she sang to herself. Maybe she could have Miriam pack them up and ship them. “No, that might make her a target. Better to just abandon anything I can’t carry.”

  She caught herself chewing on her fingernails. She jerked her hand out of her mouth. Food. Wine. That’s what she needed to calm down. Self-medicate away some of her stress before she ended up in a writing marathon.

  She heated up the okonomiyaki that she had bought earlier and ate it while checking her secret forum. Miriam had posted the code word of “Prepare for bounce!” to spread the word that Nikki might need to bolt and needed someplace to crash. The replies to her post were “Team Banzai: Go!” and “Team Banzai: No Go!” as people stated their ability to offer up refuge. She scanned the replies, her stomach flip-flopping. She had built up Team Banzai over the years, working at a level of secrecy that the CIA probably would be impressed with. Surely it hadn’t been compromised. Even if her computer had been hacked, her stalker wouldn’t have found the key to her code words or any information on Team Banzai. She kept that information locked in her head, where her mother couldn’t access it.

  The part of the team that was on her side of the world had responded to the post. She scanned the “go” for people she knew were in Japan. Pixii, Jaynaynay, Cloud, and Beehgly were offering her crash space. Pixii was closest but lived out in the middle of nowhere with some old master potter. Nikki wasn’t sure she would be comfortable living with a strange man. There was also the matter of simply finding the place in the middle of the night. The other three lived in studio apartments in Tokyo and worked as English teachers. She would have to cycle between their places while looking for a new place to rent.

  She focused on packing instead of thinking about how all her plans were falling apart. How she was going to lose Miriam. How wonderful it been sharing life with her best friend instead of just chatting online.

  Sniffing from unshed tears, she emptied her backpack so there would be room for her laptop. She still would be able to talk constantly with Miriam online, she told herself. They’d done it for years.

  “Keep this up, you’ll end up writing for hours.” She shut down her laptop and shoved it into her backpack. She shoved her current working notebook into it too so it wouldn’t tempt her. “Just focus on packing.”

  She distracted herself with choosing a purse. Her favorite, hands down, was the beautiful messenger bag made out of an antique silk obi. Just looking at it always made her happy. She and Miriam had found it in Kyoto while researching Shinto shrines. Generally it was too big to haul around on a daily basis, but it was perfect for a bounce. It could hold all the essentials. A handful of pens. A blank notebook. Her change purse and wallet. Her passport. Two more black pens. Her cell phone. Another blank notebook. Her iPod. Hand towel. Toilet paper. Phrase book. Two red pens.

  She stood clicking a pen, frowning at her purse. What else?

  Her doorbell rang.

  She jerked up and stared across the room at her door. She could see the shadow of someone standing beyond the door through the crack at the bottom. Was it her psycho fan? She scanned the room quickly for a weapon and saw the katana on the table.

  Her stalker would know she’d picked up the sword at the train station. Or would he? If he hadn’t seen her pick it up at the train station, how would he know that the contents of the locker had been switched?

  She crept to the table, fumbled open the fabric case, and slid the katana out of its sheath out as the doorbell rang again. Cautiously, she went to the door and peeked out through the spyhole.

  Detective Tanaka stood outside her door. “Miss Delany? It’s Detective Tanaka of the Osaka Police Department.”

  “Shit!” She danced backwards. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  “Miss Delany, are you alright?” Detective Tanaka called through the door.

  “I stubbed my toe!” Nikki yelled. What should she do? She realized she still had the damn katana gripped tight in her hand. “Shit!”

  She ran in a tiny circle, looking for somewhere to hide the sword. Refrigerator? Too small. Balcony? Too open.

  “Miss Delany?”

  “Wait a minute! I was in the middle of changing my clothes.” She slid the katana into the shadows next to the toilet and jerked shut the accordion-style fabric door. Anything else? Her half-packed suitcase sat out in the middle of the floor!

  “Miss Delany?”

  She winced as she threw her duvet over the bag. This stalker thing was completely throwing her off her game; she was smarter than this! She considered changing both hiding places when Detective Tanaka tried the door and found it locked.

  “Hold on!” she shouted. She hiked up her shirt to make it seem like she had been naked and had spent the time getting dressed and not hiding a possibly stolen weapon that might have been used in a murder. “I’ve got to get dressed!”

  She snatched up one of her many pens, clicked it twice, took a deep calming breath, and unlocked the door. “Tanaka-san.” She made a show of tugging down her hiked-up shirt. “I was getting ready for bed.” To explain the duvet-covered lump in the middle of the floor, she added. “I was laying out my futon.”

  He seemed taller, but then he hadn’t loomed over her in a dim foyer before. Nor could she remember him wearing strong, musky cologne at the police station. One corner of his mouth quirked up into a tiny, dangerous smile. He barely seemed like the same man who had sat across the table from her all afternoon. It was as if he’d taken off a mask and beneath was someone a lot more dangerous than the polite civil servant.

  She started to swing shut the door again, and he put out his hand and held it open. “What is it that you want, Detective?”

  He sniffed deeply and scanned the room. “I need to ask you more questions about Gregory Winston.”

  Was there blood on her shoes? She hadn’t even looked. She didn’t dare glance down.

  “May I come in?”

  It went against all her instincts to let him into the apartment. There was the small matter, though, that she didn’t think she could get the door shut without a fight. It was her experience that the less cooperative she was with authority figures, the more force they used to get what they wanted. She hated that she needed to go against her instincts to keep the stakes from being raised.

  She’d found, though, tha
t distraction worked well in situations like this. “I’m glad you’re here.” She stepped back from the door and out of his reach. “There’s something I want to give you.”

  “Eh?” Tanaka stepped into her apartment and closed the door behind him.

  She tried not to let that seem ominous. It probably was a Japanese custom. Bow in greeting. Take your shoes off. Close the door. Not that Tanaka had done the first two. Odd. He’d taken off his shoes at the restaurant and had bowed to her shortly before handcuffing her hands behind her back. It had struck her as absurdly polite. And why was he here without a translator? Had he just been pretending to barely follow English at the police station?

  She backed away from him. “I’ve made a copy of my documents that I’ve been working on. I think its possible that my stalker has hacked into my computer and read everything I’ve written.”

  Where had she put the flash drive? Her apartment was in complete disarray by her frenzied packing. She locked down on a yelp as she realized that she’d left the katana’s sheath on the table.

  Someone leaned against Nikki’s back and whispered into her ear, “Do not trust him. He is not who he seems.”

  She jerked sideways, trying to keep Tanaka in sight while looking behind her. There was no one else in the room.

  “Miss Delany?” Tanaka said.

  Nikki blinked at him. “I—I—I had the flash drive a moment ago. I’m not sure where I put it.” She pointed at the piles of clutter strewn in a semicircle around her duvet as she had sorted through the things she wanted to take or leave. She had to keep him from noticing the sheath.

  “Give him nothing,” the male voice whispered again. There was definitely someone pressed close to her, their breath warm on her skin. She could see, though, in the reflection of the balcony’s sliding door, that no one was standing behind her.

  Nikki slapped her hand over her mouth, but a whimper of fear slipped out.

  “Miss Delany?”

  “Need to pee!” Nikki yelped. She fought with the bathroom’s door until it was open only wide enough to allow her to slip through. She slammed it shut behind her and flipped the little catch lock.

  Her mother was right. She was going insane.

  What if I killed Gregory without even realizing it? Maybe I put that sword into the locker. It would explain how I knew where it was and what the PIN was more rationally than the idea of some psycho fan.

  Well, good news, she wasn’t being stalked by a nutcase.

  Unless, of course, you can stalk yourself.

  The door rattled.

  What a thing to realize when cornered by a homicide detective.

  “I’m going pee!” she called.

  The door shuddered and somehow held.

  “Tanaka-san?”

  A knife blade stabbed through the fabric of the door and sliced downward.

  Nikki screamed . . .

  . . . and blinked down at a dead man lying crumbled outside the open bathroom door. There was a neat slit in the back of his suit coat, wide as a katana blade, seeping blood. She had the katana in her hands, the blade dripping blood.

  “Oh. Oh. Oh.” Something warm was trickling down her face. She glanced in the mirror over the vanity. Blood streaked her right cheek.

  And her eyes were so dark brown that they were nearly black. As she stared into her reflection in shock, they shifted back to her normal blue.

  “Oh. Oh.” Had she just killed Detective Tanaka? She didn’t remember doing it—but he was dead, and she was holding the bloody sword. She looked again at the man.

  “Tanaka-san?”

  The back of the man’s head looked wrong for the police officer. Instead of neatly trimmed black hair, the man had grizzled brown hair with touches of red. There were two odd bumps on the top of his head.

  She had to step over the body and spreading pool of blood to get out of the bathroom. She glanced down as she did and nearly stumbled.

  The body wasn’t human. The bumps on the head were furred ears. There were no eyebrows over full burnt-amber eyes set in a raccoonlike mask of dark fur. The face extended out in a muzzle, ending in a black dog nose. A mouth full of sharp teeth hung open, lips still locked in a snarl.

  In a hand that was dark-furred and claw-tipped, the man-beast held a very big knife. It was wearing a conservative suit with patent leather shoes and an expensive wristwatch. There was a hole punched into the chest of the white button-down shirt now soaked with blood.

  No one else was in the apartment.

  She whimpered. Where was Tanaka? Who was this? What was this?

  Had she just killed a man, and her mind was trying to make it okay by seeing him as a monster? She closed her eyes for a minute and opened them again.

  Still a raccoon in a business suit with a knife.

  Far down the hall, the elevator stopped on her floor with a “ding.” It reminded her that her neighbors might have heard the whole fight and called the police. She snatched up her backpack and shrugged it onto her shoulders.

  She needed . . .

  8

  Blackout

  The night became an odd stuttering movie with her jerking through it like a broken puppet. One minute she was in her apartment, staring down at the dead man, and the next she was walking through a crowded underground mall. She paused, feeling oddly hollow, light and a touch feverish.

  How did she get there? Had she gone into shock or something and walked out of her apartment, leaving a dead man sprawled on the floor? Did she remember to pick up her . . .

  . . . and she was on a nearly empty train, speeding through the night. The overhead fluorescents turned the windows into mirrors, and she stared at her reflection as her eyes shifted from brown to blue.

  What was happening to her? Had she killed Detective Tanaka? Was it really some kind of animal in a business suit on her floor or simply a delusion to make killing Tanaka acceptable? Had she snapped before he attacked her or after? Had he really attacked her or was that part of her delusion? Was this the onset of madness that her mother always braced against?

  And where the hell was she going?

  Over the door of the train car a digital sign scrolled out kanji. She waited for the English translation to appear. Kyoto. She was heading toward Kyoto. They passed a small deserted station without slowing. She was on the express to Kyoto. It was a forty minute trip.

  What was wrong with her? Her doctors had often suspected her hypergraphia was related to temporal lobe lesions, because it was the least serious possible cause of her symptoms. Thought to be genetic in nature, the lesions ran in families and often accompanied epilepsy—which she had never showed signs of having before. Unfortunately, her doctors could never find signs of lesions, and hypergraphia was also caused by bipolar disorder, frontotemporal dementia, and schizophrenia.

  So why was she blacking out? She was fairly sure that in the middle of an epileptic seizure, you couldn’t operate a Japanese ticket machine. It was sad and scary to suddenly want to be bipolar, but it was the lesser of two evils at the moment.

  The fabric-encased katana lay across her lap. Her backpack rested at her feet. She snatched up her bag. She’d been transferring things into her purse. Where was it? Surely she hadn’t left it in her apartment, or worse, lost it somewhere along the way. Maybe she simply shoved everything back into her backpack. She opened her backpack and took inventory. Her laptop was in it, her flashlight, two notebooks, five pens, but nothing else. Not even a single pack of tissues. She unzipped all the various compartments and felt down to the bottom. Nothing. Not her change purse. Not her cell phone. Not her driver’s license or passport or bank card.

  “Oh God.” She slapped her pockets, full panic setting in. In her right jeans pocket was a wad of hundred thousand yen, each worth around a hundred US dollars. Where had it come from? She didn’t keep this much cash on hand, and she didn’t have her bank card. Had she withdrawn the money and left the card in the machine? She gripped the bills tightly. She was so screwed if she’d
lost her bank card. She carefully tucked the money back into her pocket.

  The need to write washed over her. She fumbled with her backpack to get out her notebooks. To her dismay, the first was already filled. The second one was her current working notebook. She turned through the pages with trembling fingers, found the first blank sheet, and submerged herself into the calmness of writing.

  More than ever, she needed a hero.

  He was too late.

  The hallway was full of the coppery richness that came from only a full body’s worth of blood spilled out onto stone. He could smell it as soon as he stepped off the elevator. The stench grew stronger as he walked cautiously down the hallway, pistol in hand. The girl’s name was printed on the plaque beside the last apartment: Demming Natasha.

  He sighed. Something bad had found the girl before he could.

  He tried the doorknob. The door wasn’t locked. He pushed it open, bracing himself for a body on the floor beyond. He wasn’t disappointed, but it wasn’t what he had expected. A tanuki lay sprawled in a pool of blood.

  He stood in the doorway a moment, surprised, and then stepped into the apartment and quietly shut the door behind him.

  The mix of coppery blood, musky tanuki, and girl’s sweetness was familiar. All three had been in Gregory Winston’s apartment. It wasn’t surprising that they’d come together again here, just that it was the girl who’d apparently walked away unscathed. But how? The police reports claimed that the girl was young and seemingly harmless. Appearances, though, could be misleading.

  The fabric folding door to the bathroom was sliced in half. Judging by the way the tanuki lay and the blood trail, he had cut his way into the tiny space only to come face-to-face with his killer. The shape-shifter had been killed with a single stab wound through the heart—quick and clean. There was a bloody towel on the bathroom’s floor from the killer cleaning his weapon and the tanuki’s wallet, emptied of cash.