by Wen Spencer
A sixty-foot-tall halberd towered straight up from the roof into the dark night.
They stood staring at it as the crowd moved around them.
“It’s not the real one,” Miriam said.
“Nope, it’s just a big old pole,” Pixii said. “Right?”
Still they turned to Nikki, or more accurately, to Atsumori, for confirmation. “It is merely a decoration.”
“Thank God,” Nikki breathed. There would be no way they could move it. None of the photos that Nikki had seen had captured the size of the float. In order to get the entire spear into the frame, a photographer would have be nearly a city block away. Up close, the scale was intimidating. “Is the real one that big?”
“I do not believe so.” Atsumori didn’t sound sure. “Kusanagi was used by . . .”
Six pairs of hands slapped over Nikki’s mouth. “Omph!”
Cautiously all the hands retreated as Miriam and Pixii promised more violence with their eyes.
“Code speak!” Pixii growled.
Atsumori huffed slightly. “He who shall not be mentioned and was not going to be mentioned used Kusanagi as a sword. As did several other less heavenly figures. It is part of the imperial regalia, and there has never been any mention of it being outlandishly large.”
“Point taken,” Pixii said.
“Tanuki. A pack, I think.” Miriam caught their arms and started them down Shijo-dori toward the other floats staged for the morning parade. Each was lit by a pair of metal frameworks supporting seven strands of large paper lanterns. Everything was discreetly sheeted with plastic to protect against the rain.
As they moved down the street, Nikki realized that a set of stairs and a walkway had been built beside the three-story float so festivalgoers could tour it. Some of the tanuki were already climbing the steps to search the Naginata Hoko from the inside.
“Are you sure it’s not there?” Nikki asked.
“I am sure,” Atsumori said.
There were thirty-two floats in all, spread throughout the heart of Kyoto like little keyholes into the past. Nikki had been in Kyoto the week before to see them being constructed from scratch. At that time they’d been nothing but big frames of lumber and coils of jute rope as no nails were used in building the floats. In a week, they’d been transformed. Elaborately carved and gilded pieces had been added to the framework. Rich silk tapestries hid all the rough wood. Paint, statues, small trees, and a multitude of rich finishing touches had changed them in ways she hadn’t imagined, despite her research.
Somehow she’d missed the existence of Fune Hoko, a massive wooden boat on wheels. Its bow had a golden phoenix larger than her with wings outspread. There was a tree on the roof of the Minami-kannon Yama that looked twenty feet tall. Houka Hoko had a wind-up doll that could dance. Kamakiri Yama had a giant praying mantis that moved its legs and spread its wings. There were dozens of larger-than-life statues, some of them five or six hundred years old.
The floats all had aged wooden boards explaining the story behind the float. Neither Nikki nor Pixii could read the text, which left the translating to Miriam. The sign for Kakkyo Yama had Miriam shaking her head.
“What?”
“Oh, what I’ve always liked about the Japanese is that they acknowledge it’s all real. In the United States, if I talked about a ghost roaming the dormitory, everyone would think I was making it up or I was crazy or something. I was afraid to even tell you. Here, it’s like they’ve never closed their ears to the truth and refused to listen to the people who could see what’s really there.”
Miriam’s obsession with Japan suddenly made sense. Nikki wondered if it was the same reason Pixii was in the country. If so, then all three of them had a secret sisterhood of escaping to Japan so they wouldn’t be labeled as crazy.
“Why are you shaking your head?” Nikki said.
“This float tells the story of Kakkyo. He was too poor to feed his mother in a manner that he wished, so he and his wife decided that they would bury their three-year-old alive in the mountains. That way they could afford to take care of his mother. Their reasoning? They could always have another child, but they only had one mother. Luckily, as they dug a hole, they found golden axe.”
“Oh my God.” The float had two statues, one of a man in a dark kimono and the other a smiling child. Did the scene show the two before or after daddy tried to kill the little boy?
“It makes me wonder,” Miriam said. “Is it really a good thing to glorify magic like that? Take your kid into the mountains, dig a hole, bury them alive—you might get a rich reward.”
“The danger of belief,” Pixii said.
Miriam nodded. “Of all the countless stories to tell, why pick this one?”
“Someone loved their mother more than I do,” Nikki said.
Each float had stalls run by the neighborhood that sponsored it. They were selling good luck charms and talismans wrapped in bamboo leaves. The Housho Yama were selling love knot charms. Nikki bought one shyly despite Miriam and Pixii teasing her.
They crossed and re-crossed Shijo-dori, weaving through thick crowds, to hit all the floats. It felt like they’d walked for miles as the rain sprinkled on them lightly. Judging by the density of the crowds and the distance they walked, there had to be hundreds of thousands of people in Kyoto, all celebrating the event. Eventually the rain started to come down more heavily.
They stopped under an overhang, soaked to the skin. Pixii surprised Nikki by pressing a hand to her neck and then tilting her head down to look her in the eye.
“He’s all that’s keeping you upright, isn’t he?”
“Huh?” Nikki stared at her, not understanding.
“She was shot a few days ago,” Atsumori said.
“Oh, shut up.” Nikki knew the reaction that was going to get.
“Shot!” Pixii made a noise of disgust. “And you didn’t tell us about that part? That’s it. We’re getting someplace to stay for a few hours.”
Nikki shook her head at the possibility. “The parade is tomorrow morning. Everyplace sold out months ago. And if we use our passports to check in, Shiva and Sato will know where we are.”
Miriam laughed. “If you’ve forgotten to add your mother to that list, then you’re really out of it.” She held out her hand to Pixii. “Let me borrow your phone. I don’t call myself SexyNinja for nothing. I am Master of Google Fu! If it’s out there, I will find it!”
“I’ll check in with my gaijin card,” Pixii said. “They don’t need to know you’re in the room. Find someplace big with lots of people coming and going—not a small family run place.”
“Bingo!” Miriam said after several minutes of muttering. “There’s one opening at Hotel Granvia Kyoto on the top floor. Someone must have cancelled. We’ll have to pay through the nose, but it will be worth it.”
The name sounded familiar. “That’s at the train station?”
“Yes, it will be perfect. Lots of coming and going.”
34
Third Eye
Pixii checked in. Miriam and Nikki waited for a crowd of returning festivalgoers to come hurrying in from the rain and walked through the lobby with them. Pixii met them on the elevator, squeezing in. She used the room key to get them to their floor after the other guests had gotten off at lower levels.
Nikki whimpered as she pulled her notebook from her purse and discovered it was waterlogged, the ink smearing on the page. “I want to write about Leo. Make sure he’s okay. Try to find him.”
“There should be paper in the room,” Miriam said.
“I’ll run out and find another notebook,” Pixii promised.
The room was a blur as they hunted for the hotel stationery. It was a mere two sheets and two envelopes of creamy, amazingly rich paper. She sat at the desk and lost herself to the writing.
The goods news was that he wasn’t dead yet, which meant Shiva wasn’t sure what was going on. Williams had gone off to investigate and hadn’t come back. Somewhere much chaos h
ad to be ensuing, but he wasn’t sure what it meant it for him except he had gone now gone a day without water. Surely this time they didn’t mean to kill him through just locking him up and walking away. He didn’t know which stronghold he was in, but normally they were all manned well enough that prisoners didn’t die of neglect. Beheading? Silver bullet? Stake through the heart? Cremated alive? Yes. Dehydration? No.
What was happening in the levels upstairs? Why hadn’t been anyone down to check on him? Leo tested the bars. The cage had been built with something like him in mind. He couldn’t break free. Growling with frustration and anger, he settled in to wait and pray that Williams would actually come back with better news.
Nikki clicked her pen, re-reading what she had written, trying to find clues that weren’t on the page. By his wristwatch, it was tomorrow, either nine in the morning or nine at night. He was in a bare cell without a toilet. There was a three-inch drain cemented into the floor; he’d been forced to piss like an animal. He had no access to water. The door was electronically locked, requiring a card key to open. His cell was lit by a lone spotlight, the fixture outside of the cage, beyond his reach. His mouth was dry as sandpaper, and his eyes were gritty from dehydration, but he was ignoring the symptoms.
Miriam came to read over her shoulder. “You’re getting more control.”
“What?”
“When we first met, you’d scribble for hours before you could stop. And the prose would be all over the map, stuff about the how the steel of the axe head had been forged, about the tree that grew in the woods before it was made into an axe handle, and oh yes, how the axe itself is now buried in the head of the main character. This is light years beyond what you could do then but it’s even more controlled than two months ago.”
Nikki could laugh about that now. When they first met, writing was something her fingers did of their own accord, flooding her mind with insanity. All the doctors had focused on the fingers moving. Miriam was the first to help her to focus on the story, weed out the insanity and leave something more than just disobedient digits. To find the truth in the madness.
“Knowing what you’re doing,” Miriam said. “It helps, doesn’t it?”
Nikki laughed slightly. “Oh, it didn’t seem like it at first—with dead bodies, gods and yokai popping up everywhere—but since then, yeah, actually. The world is more off-kilter than I suspected, but I’m not crazy. I’m better than not crazy. I’m not helpless. I can see through time and space and know the truth.” She spread her hand on the paper. If she focused, she could still sense the rhythm of Leo’s angry breathing. “And somehow, I will figure out how to save Leo. Save everyone.”
“Cool.” Miriam grinned. “Do you know what would be really great? If you could figure out how to do it without writing everything down.”
Nikki squinted. Could she? Certainly there had been moments in Leo’s car when she didn’t have to be moving her pen to see the characters moving across the distant stage. Could she wean herself away from needing the pen and paper? Could she stop moving her fingers completely? After a lifetime of fighting it, was the answer to embrace the ability totally?
Miriam hugged her tight. “Why don’t you take a hot shower and take a nap? You’re not going to be able to save anyone if you collapse.”
There was a flash of lightning outside, lighting the night. She looked out the rain-smeared window. Leo was safe for now. A few hours rest and then what? She needed to fix this somehow. If she didn’t upset Iwanaga and Sato’s plans, her novel would barrel on, taking out every single person she had written about and thousands, if not millions, of others. Finding the spear first might derail Iwanaga, but she didn’t know what she would do with the spear if they found it.
Proving that her friends truly knew her, Pixii returned with ten Campus notebooks, two pens of every color, Post-in Notes in a dozen different colors, four Cokes, and a fistfull of Snickers bars. Nikki woke to find them spread across the foot of her bed like Christmas presents. She fingered the trappings of her hypergraphia with mixed emotions. A divine gift, Atsumori called her ability. It seemed to imply that she was channeling the power of the gods. It felt good to know she wasn’t insane. That she wasn’t helpless.
Yet she wasn’t even sure where to start.
“Okay, it’s a novel. I’ve been doing this all my life. Writer’s Block 101: re-visualize the storyline. Post-it notes or colored pens?” Taking a long swig of Coke, she considered her weapons. “Post-it notes!” She tore open a Snickers and bit savagely down on the candy bar. “Plain yellow only!” She drained the first Coke and picked up a red pen. “Time to channel the divine!”
She quickly wrote a name of a character on the top sheet of the pad, pulled it free, and stuck it to the wall. Gregory—dead. Misa—dead. Harada—dead. Kenichi—fleeing to Tokyo, hopefully—no, he was safely in Tokyo. Simon—safe but exhausted. Dozens of names—most of them wrong, but all of them representing real people.
When she was done, she studied the wall, looking for some hidden connections, some clue where the story was going, how to change it, how to stop it.
It still didn’t help.
She paced back and forth, glaring the pieces of paper. She had forgotten Leo. Reluctantly she added him, and then herself, and then even more reluctantly Miriam.
“And me.” Atsumori’s voice made her jump.
She swore softly and added him to the wall. “Wait,” she whispered. She was missing a lot of characters.
Pixii. Chevalier. Sato. Ananth. Williams. Umeko.
She went to add Yamauchi and realized she was running low on plain yellow and used dark blue and black pen for the mountain god. And then she swapped Atsumori to blue too. Inari. Iwanaga. Konohana Sukuya—mistress of the doomed shrine maidens. He that couldn’t be mentioned.
She paused a moment and started to re-sort the yellow notes around the blues. She was with Atsumori. Pixii with Yamauchi. Simon? With Yamauchi. Sato with Iwanaga. Umeko joining together the two goddess sisters.
The twins with Susanoo . . .
She stopped and then slowly backed away from the wall.
She’d put the twins and Susanoo at the center of a hurricane. Everything spiraled in toward the two little boys.
“Oh shit.”
She supposed it could only be expected; the twins had both been in the running to be chosen as the celestial child. In a few hours Haru would cut a rope that stretched across Shijo-dori to start the parade and then ride in the Naginata Hoko. The thousand-year-old float was the center of the entire celebration, and it was believed that it would cleanse the country of evil spirits. The tanuki had already checked it out at least once. The girls had narrowly missed being seen by the pack that obviously crawled all over the float looking for . . .
Narrowly missed.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” She dived at the stuff from her wet purse laid out to dry.
“Is that a good oh or a bad oh?” Pixii mumbled from the bed.
“It’s a bad oh!” She had brought Simon’s passport and wallet with her to Kyoto on some off chance that she had to prove to someone in Shiva that she knew what had happened to him. “Possibly a very bad oh.”
There was a grunt from the lump that was Miriam.
Nikki had discovered that people were like dominos. If they were too far apart when they fell, then they didn’t influence the path of characters you expected them to impact. If a body were dumped in the woods, it could be months before someone found it. A husband on a business trip wouldn’t realize his wife and children had been butchered until he gots home. A serial killer could choose a victim and stalk her, but a grandmother’s death on the other side of the country could yank her out of danger.
It was one thing for characters to meet if only one of them was in motion; if both were moving, it was like trying figure out when subatomic particles collided.
Simon was very well traveled; there were dozens of stamps showing him entering and leaving countries around the world. At the end was the stamp th
at showed him entering Japan. Leo said that Simon had disappeared two months ago . . .
Miriam and Pixii came to eye the wall.
“What did you find?” Pixii said.
“Simon landed on June first late in the day.” Nikki waved his passport as proof. “According to the scene I wrote, he waited until the next day to go to Izushi by train, and he didn’t get there until nearly dark. The next morning was when he called Leo from the construction site. It means that he was taken by Iwanaga on June third.”
She took out purple post-it notes and started to number them. “Three.” She slapped it onto the wall slightly above her head. “Iwanaga’s at Izushi’s at dusk.”
“Four.” She put the next one at shoulder level. “She’s in Osaka with Kenichi.”
“Five.” Nikki stuck the note nearly at floor level. “She and Kenichi go to visit her sister in Kirishima Shrine—which is at the foot of Mount Kirishima on the island of Kyushu. Kirishima, which I only know since the silly thing erupted a few years ago, is one of the farthest points south you can get short of Okinawa. It takes her the whole day to get down there by train. I don’t have a scene of this, but Kenichi bitched about it later because she used his money to get them there and back.”
“Six.” It, too, went near floor level. “Her sister gathers together her shrine maidens and tells them that they’re going to Osaka. She gives them a day to get ready. Seven. The shrine maidens head north, taking all day to return to Osaka. Proof: the Shikansen ticket that was in Umeko’s student ID holder.”
Nikki put the purple seven at waist level to indicate travel. She took out one of the orange Post-it Notes and wrote seven on it and put it at eye level. “Also on the seventh is the first event of Gion Matsuri in Kyoto.”
Miriam shook her head. “I still don’t get the—Oh! Oh holy shit!”
“The light goes on,” Pixii said. “But I’m still in the dark.”
“After the seventh, Iwanaga sends out all but one of her shrine maidens to every shrine that she thinks has a remote chance of holding the spear. They’ve had over a month to cross off hundreds of possibilities. They would have started with his shrines and worked down through his kids and anyone with half a chance of maybe holding onto it for him as a favor. But they didn’t find shit.”
