by Wen Spencer
She waved the remaining Post-it Notes at him. “I’ve got over three dozen characters in all, and so far only me, Greg, Misa, and Harada have intersected.” She shuffled the papers to Simon’s turquoise Post-it Note.
“Here’s your father, in Izushi, and he’s here because . . .?”
She turned to Leo for the answer.
“The Japanese government is building a hydroelectric dam to replace the nuclear power plants damaged in the 2012 tsunami,” he explained. The area is supposed to be geologically stable—well—as stable you get for Japan—but there were several odd landslides that stopped work. They asked Shiva if they could find the underlying problem. Ananth felt that the Japanese were merely covering all the bases. They tend to be much more superstitious than, say, the Germans or the French. Then again, they have good reason. The Inquisition and other witch hunts stamped out much of the abnormal in Europe. Places like the United Kingdoms logged their virgin forests and fought the things that like to live in those dark places long ago. Japanese supported the more Buddhist and Shinto idea of living in harmony. Live and let live.”
Ananth had been the name of Leo’s phone contact. Far as she could tell, he wasn’t a character, but so far she’d gotten all the names wrong. “Who is Ananth?”
“The old man? He’s the Director of Shiva. A bastard of a Hindu with ice water for blood.”
She didn’t have any non-Japanese character beyond herself, Simon and Gregory. Nikki nodded, tucking away the information, as she tried to mesh the real reason for Simon’s visit into what she remembered of her scene. She was going to have to read it again since it had been months since she’d written it. “Shiva didn’t think the threat was real, so they sent your father alone?”
“He’s a Sensitive, not a Talent, and he’s worked with them for nearly two decades, so he’s trusted to travel alone. But yes, normally I work with him as his bodyguard. Simon thought it was a good chance to show that I could work alone and talked Ananth into letting me go solo in Nova Scotia.”
It meant that Leo and Simon were half a world apart when Simon had disappeared. If there was any logic to her ability, then Leo hadn’t started to affect “the story” until he started to investigate the katana. Whatever Leo was doing in Nova Scotia had nothing to do with Simon’s disappearance except for the fact he wasn’t guarding over his father. Was Simon’s section simply a way to show Leo’s reason for being in Japan?
Like Leo, Simon had refused to be named. Miriam nicknamed him “the Brit” due to the fact that occasional British phrases would slip into his narrative. Nikki knew that he worked for an international agency named after a Hindu god. The phrase describing Shiva as “the one who kills the forces of darkness” resonated with her. She’d even taken “ThirdEye” as her handle after fleeing New York City—an attribute often associated with Shiva.
She continued to stick Post-it-Notes on the wall, tracking the progress of her characters through their fairly normal lives. Compared to the confusion of the katana’s branch, Simon’s was so bare that only three notes marked his arrival and departure from the story. Still, the fact that she had mapped his movements from New York to Osaka to Izushi was more than she would do for a simple witness. He had to be important to the overall story somehow.
What was the common thread?
“This is probably going to take a while,” she told Leo.
17
To Sleep,
Perhaps to Dream
Leo left her considering her colorful plot tree, trying to sketch out a story framework around Simon so she could pinpoint him. She took out her laptop and reread his only scene. Simon’s attention had been on his phone call to Leo as he arrived at the construction site. The twelve-hour time difference, the fifteen hours on the airplane, followed by a night’s sleep and a morning riding on a Japanese train—which banned talking on cell phones—meant that they had been out of contact for days. Leo was “out on a job,” and Simon had been worried about his safety. Knowing now that Leo was a “tame monster” for Shiva, she could understand why. Simon started the conversation speaking in code.
“It’s me,” he said. “How’d it go?”
His son’s voice was like a summer thunderstorm, rumbling in the distance, promising violence on the landscape. “It went.”
He relaxed slightly. If the job was over, then his son was home. “Are you okay?”
The reply came too fast, too angry. “I’m fine!”
He waited, scanning the valley below him where bulldozers crawled over freshly torn earth. It would be better if his son confessed freely rather than be forced to report what had happened to make him so angry.
For several minutes there was only the low growl of anger, and then a snarl of “The density estimate was bullshit. One or two? My ass! There were over twenty. I needed to do a lot of scrambling to stay in the clear. I missed a jump.”
His heart stumbled slightly at the news. The job is over, he reminded himself, and he’s home safe. “Did you report the discrepancy?” What he really wanted to add was “Or did you just chib the blighter who set the density?” He had to stop being the over protective father and let his son stand on his own.
“Yes. Written down and cc’d all the heads.”
“Good boy.”
“What about you?”
“Just got here.” He knew that his son was trying to distract him from asking more questions, which meant he would probably not be happy with the news. “How bad?”
There was a long, unhappy silence and finally, “They’ll let me out of this bed by the end of the week.” And then an unhappier, “Doctor is here. I’ve got to go.”
The conversation with Leo was much more understandable now. The vagueness of the discussion was because Shiva had sent Leo off to kill monsters. Not something you would discuss over a cell phone. The information Leo had been given about the number of monsters had been wrong. He’d barely gotten out alive. Worse, he was in a hospital when his father disappeared, unable to come searching for a week or more.
After the phone call, Simon had gone down into the valley to talk with the construction supervisor. The man had been uncooperative and brushed Simon off first chance he’d gotten. Leo’s father had drifted through the work site, trying to ignore the fact that his son was in a hospital, half a world away. He inspected equipment, made it a point to talk to every worker, and then climbed over the broken landscape.
Like the conversation, everything seemed to be in code. She couldn’t figure out what exactly Simon had been looking for. Since his mind was on Leo, his point of view didn’t include information on why he was there and what he wanted. Nikki had assumed that she could fill in the details later.
What hadn’t she written? There were so many details that would have been clear moments after writing them that she’d probably forgotten now.
There was a slight knock, a female voice murmured something in Japanese, and then the door to the room slid open while Nikki was still trying to come up with some kind of reply. One of the hotel staff members knelt in the doorway and murmured again in fast Japanese.
“Na—nani?” Nikki managed to stammer out.
The girl made a cute face as she thought deeply and then said something slowly. Nikki wasn’t sure if she was still speaking Japanese or very mangled and thus unrecognizable English.
Then Atsumori’s presence flowed through her, and her mouth opened and she heard herself say, “Yes, please, put out the futons, thank you.”
At least, that’s what Nikki heard. The girl looked startled and laughed.
“Katajikenai,” the girl said in a deep male voice and laughed again. “You sound like a samurai. You must have learnt Japanese from historical movies.” The girl moved to the closet and slid open the door. Inside were two futons and Atsumori’s katana.
Nikki was beside the girl before she realized that she was moving, and snatched up the katana. “Please, do not touch that.”
She retreated out onto the porch, and then, stepping
into the wooden sandals, fled into the garden.
She found a gate on the other side of the garden, and without meaning to, she was out into the town. She wasn’t sure if she or Atsumori was running. After the third turn, she was fairly certain it wasn’t her.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she cried.
They took six more steps and stopped just beyond the torii marking the entrance to a small shrine.
“What are you doing?” She caught hold of the base of a foo lion statue just beyond the torii, trying to anchor herself so he couldn’t drag her away.
“Talking.” Atsumori appeared beside her. “There are things we need to discuss. I am not sure we can trust this half-breed, and certainly it seems as if we’ve been detoured to his needs, not ours.”
“Ours? There are no ‘our’ needs.”
He looked a little stunned and hurt. “We need to find out who ordered my shintai stolen.”
“That is your need,” Nikki said.
“Have you forgotten the tanuki in your home?”
She was really starting to hate how she’d lost control of her life days ago. “They are after you, not me. If I didn’t have your shintai, no one would be trying to kill me.”
“You have been caught up in the flood waters. I wish it were otherwise, but that is how it is. Even if we parted, those seeking me would still hunt you down to discover where you had hidden me. I must stay with you to protect you.”
She swallowed down on “Leo will protect me.” Atsumori was right that she had been trusting Leo more than she should simply because he was one of her characters. She had crawled into his head and read his thoughts. He was the Scary Cat Dude who rescued kittens. He was the poor misunderstood and abused little boy, saved only by the kindness of his now-missing foster father. He was the man who didn’t want to burden his father with how truly wounded he was.
Assuming—dangerously so—that every word she wrote was the truth.
“I do not think we should trust this male of yours,” Atsumori said.
She laughed at the idea that Leo belonged to her. “Noted. But I think finding his father will help you and me.”
“You only have his word that the man who came to this town is the same that saved him from the cage. He has your writings; he can use your truth against you.”
She frowned as she searched her memory. No, not once did the man tied up think of his son as “Leo.” It brought her back to the fact that she knew so little about Leo. “What is an . . .” She struggled with the word that Simon had used. “Obakemono?”
Atsumori relaxed slightly, nodding as if he had won some point. “An obakemono indicates yokai that can shapeshift. There are any number of them. I believe his mother must have been a bakeneko.”
“And a bakeneko is . . .?”
“If a cat’s tail grows too long, its tail will split in two and the cat will become a bakeneko.”
She nearly said “Oh, that’s so stupid” but then remembered whom she was talking to. Silly as it sounded, it probably was true. She took a deep breath as the understanding canted her entire belief system on its side. She was never sure if she believed in God, but somehow confirmation (and long-delayed realization) that there were countless “gods” dancing about Japan and all the attached spiritual system was true . . .
Why was it less intimidating to think she might be insane than maybe every part of the Japan mythology was true? Was insanity more sane than tanuki and bakeneko?
“Nikki-chan?”
She waved aside his concern. “I’m just coping. Give me a moment.” She took a couple more deep breaths. Maybe it wouldn’t be so overwhelming if she weren’t running from murderous tanuki in the company of a god . . . and Leo.
“His mother was a monster? How does that work? I mean—why didn’t she kill and eat his father?”
“Yokai can be both good and compassionate or malicious and evil. It has been my experience that yokai are drawn to humans that can sense them. It is quite possible this half-breed’s father was what he refers to as a Sensitive. It is not uncommon for a bakeneko to take the place of a loved one that has died. They can mate with humans, but their children are yokai.”
The scene with Leo in a cage suddenly made more sense. “Oh.” And the one with Miriam. “Oh.”
The girl from the hotel staff had taken the futon mattresses out of the closet and unrolled them so they lay side by side, making one big bed on the tatami mat-covered floor. The implied intimacy set Nikki’s heart beating faster.
“No, no, not going to happen.” Nikki grabbed the edge of the right-most futon and dragged it to the corner. Really, what was she thinking, sharing a room with a total stranger? She remembered how Leo’s hand had felt as it brushed over hers during the drive—large, strong, and oh so male—and dragged Leo’s futon to the farthest point away from hers that she could get it.
She stared at the mattresses for several minutes, chewing on her bottom lip. That she didn’t want Leo sleeping near her was entirely too obvious by the futons’ new positions. Should she go with something less blatant? Maybe she should move Leo’s to in front of the door, so it seemed more like she was worried about someone coming into the room undetected. That would appeal to a hero-like guy—right? The porch, though, was more open to attack.
Once she had Leo’s futon out on the porch, it occurred to her that he might not even come back to the room: he knew he had until dawn to find his father still alive. If he’d spent six weeks of fruitless searching, he’d only return to see if she knew anything new about his father. If that was the case, she might be pissing him off by moving his bed for no reason.
She dragged both futons back to the center of the room, inches apart instead of touching, sheets and duvet smoothed back into place. After a minute of staring down at the futons, she laid the katana between the two mattresses.
“Okay, find Simon and everything will be good.”
Simon dreamed that he was buried, pinned under rocks and earth, massive and unyielding as a mountain. Water dripped down his checks like cold tears—spilled down his breast like raindrops sliding down glass. He strained to dig himself free, but he was bound tight. He burned with anger toward those who had thrown him down and buried him. He’d get free and show his righteous anger—but no matter how hard he pushed and wriggled, he couldn’t free himself.
Nikki frowned at the page. “Really? That’s it?”
She had written several chapters on one character buried underground before—poor Mary Southland. This was clearly just a nightmare. The dream world was always blurred at the edges, details lost in darkness. She had no smell of earth or feel of the crumbling dirt. She tore the page out and laid it on Leo’s futon. Tucking away the rest of the incriminating notebook, she thought about the scene. Had there been anything that didn’t make the page? No, there was nothing.
She lay in the dark, listening to the night noises. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself to sleep. The last thing she needed was to push herself into exhaustion on top of everything else. The day’s events jumbled through her head. She rolled onto her side and pressed fingertips to the katana. “Atsumori?”
“Sleep, Nikki-chan.” For a moment, she felt his fingers twine with hers. “I will watch over you and keep you safe.”
She understood then the comfort of belief. Calm swept over her and carried her off to sleep.
18
Stalking on Paper
Japan had been the land of mini cars, mini fire trucks, mini ambulances, and even mini tractor-trailer trucks, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the bulldozers were half-sized. They did some mysterious shuffling of dirt around a large rip in the steep river valley.
Nikki trailed after Leo as they moved through the construction site, drowning in the smell of mud and diesel and the roar of heavy equipment clanking and beeping loudly. What great fodder for her book, but she wasn’t sure now if she could bear finishing her book for publication. How could she let people enjoy the death of Misa? Besides, ther
e was the small problem that she might not be alive to finish the novel, as her characters usually died.
Leo had returned after dawn, full of angry silence. She got the distinct impression that he was furious at someone, perhaps everyone, maybe just her.
He hadn’t wanted to come to the construction site. It might have been the last place anyone could place his father, but she had written him alive, in a hotel room. She didn’t try to explain her artistic process, mostly because she was no longer sure of anything except for the fact there was very little “artistic” to it. She’d only recently discovered that she could “tweak” a scene by visiting where the story was set. A character walking through a familiar place, mind on some problem (or pursuing a monster) ignored the world around them. During a tweaking session, she could take her time and her own eyes to everything, and yet keep in the character’s mindset.
Between Leo’s furious silence and the roar of the heavy machinery, though, she was starting to get a headache. She was going to have to tune out if she wanted to get in touch with Simon’s thoughts. When they stopped for Leo to talk rapid fire Japanese to yet another yellow helmeted man, Nikki dug through her purse to find her iPod. Earbuds in, volume up high, she retreated into soothing music.
Simon had floundered through the mud—it had been even thicker that day because of a downpour the night before. Simon, though, had left the mud behind as he thought about his angry son, who cared so deeply and yet shielded his heart with fierce defenses. There had been a shift in his attention, away from the treacherous footing.
