by David Reed
Why’d they bring me in? Because my reluctant driver thought that I had more information about what we were both hunting than I actually did. Once we got talking, he immediately regretted showing me the location of their base. For all he knew, I could be the creature that was killing those girls, and he just led me right to the home of the only people who could stop me. I made my case pretty effectively, explaining everything I’d been through. They had suspected that Nishigo Maru had been a victim of some kind of sea creature attack, and were all very interested in hearing the (long) story. When I finished, the oldest man there gave me a long, withering look, then took me into the next room.
Inside the chamber, there was a samurai sword. He explained (in Japanese, which by then I thankfully understood) that their brotherhood (and sisterhood) had been keeping the Japanese islands safe for many generations, and that this sword had been used to slay a great beast by his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather (probably there were even more greats in there than that). Ever since then, their family kept the secret of the supernatural—that all of the creatures in folklore were real—to themselves. They protected civilians while taking on incredible risks, and he respected me for trying to do the same. He put a lot of emphasis on the word “trying,” which I didn’t exactly appreciate, but whatever.
They called themselves or hantaa, which means hunter. Not that original, but what are you gonna do? Looking back, the lore he told me about the “great beast” his ancestor had slain with that samurai sword makes me think it mighta been a dragon, which made that blade a dragon sword. If current events are any indication, you’ll need to brush up on dragon history . . . I’ll get to writing some down as soon as I can.
We ate a meal together, and my Japanese brethren told me that I was wrong about the werewolf—it was actually an okami we were hunting. They’re a cousin of the werewolf, but specific to Japan. Most of their MO is similar, but the method of dispatching them is very different. Made me real glad that I didn’t try to go after the thing myself, or things woulda gone pear-shaped right quick.
To kill an okami, you need a bamboo dagger, blessed by a Shinto priest. In Japan, those aren’t hard to find. In fact, one of the hunters at the table was himself a Shinto priest. In America and other parts, good friggin’ luck. Probably could get one imported, but if I learned anything on board Nishigo Maru, it was that the boat trip between San Fran and Tokyo is looooong.
Once you’ve got your bamboo dagger and had it blessed, you need to stab the okami seven times. Not six. Not eight. Seven. Why? I don’t know. The folks at the Japanese Ninja Hunter Lodge didn’t know, either, they just told me over and over to stab the okami seven times, so I took notice.
I thanked the hantaa for their hospitality and asked what they planned to do next. Go after the thing? Collect more evidence? I was new to the game, so I wasn’t sure what a proper hunter would do. Their answer? They weren’t gonna do squat. I was.
See, the old man told me that I had a dark spot on my soul, or something to that effect. That I wasn’t going to be able to start moving on from Karen’s death until I’d been able to take retribution on some of the dark forces in the world. Mostly, I think, he knew I was a crappy hunter and I needed to get better quick or die trying.
So out I went, into the wilds, armed with a bamboo dagger and a prayer. I spent the next week chasing leads, going from one clue to the next as quickly as I could. Eventually, another victim was found. I felt terrible, seeing as the hantaa clan had trusted me to find the okami and put it down before anyone else got hurt.
I redoubled my efforts, and was able to find a solid lead—all the women had gone to the same bar within twenty-four hours of being killed. The okami musta been following women home from the bar and attacking them when they were alone.
A flannel-wearing white dude at a hip Japanese bar attracts a lot of attention, let me tell you what. Usually, that’d be a bad thing. In this case, I used the attention to talk to as many people as possible about the bar’s regulars, ask if any of them had been acting strangely recently. The bartender pointed me in the direction of a particularly shy-looking man of about twenty-three. He sat in the corner and nursed a beer, eying women as they walked by.
Just before closing time, the guy up and left. I followed him out to the alley, where he lit up a cigarette and waited in the shadows. It’s hard to follow someone discreetly when they’re already in the best hiding spot, but I made do. Sure enough, after a few minutes of waiting, he started to tail a woman as she walked home.
I tailed them both, interrupted his stalking just as he closed in on her. Right as I was pulling the bamboo dagger from my jacket, he screamed out something I wasn’t expecting: “Surprise!”
From out of nowhere, there were suddenly twenty-five people all around me. They were all holding noise makers and balloons, one of ’em had a friggin’ cake. Weirdest surprise birthday party I’ve ever seen, but hey, that’s Japan.
I started to walk back to the bar, feeling like a damn fool, when the bat hit the back of my head.
. . . . .
Thanks a lot, Americans, for introducing baseball to Japan. Now they can’t get enough of the sport, and that meant that the baseball bat that the okami used to clock my noggin was of very high quality. The better to give me a concussion with.
I could only have been out for a minute, because when I came to, the okami was still trying to drag me to a secluded area. Guess he didn’t want to rip me to shreds where the birthday partygoers could see. He was about thirty years old, and a salaryman. His suit was nice, like he made a decent living, and his hair was impeccably styled. All this murdering must have been his side job.
So there’s a lesson for you—first of all, you can’t tell the monster just from his appearance. Shady looking guys could be legit, businessmen can be monsters. Second, standing out like a sore thumb while you’re hunting can just as easily lead the monster to you as it can lead you to the monster.
In this case, luck was on my side. This guy knew I was onto him, but he probably thought I was a cop. Had no idea how prepared I was for this encounter. A lot of monsters are completely unaware that there’s even such a thing as hunters, since it’s not like there’s some orientation session they all have to go to when they find out they’re monsters ( . . . that we know of). The okami hadn’t noticed that I’d come to, and was very surprised when I hooked my leg behind his foot, tripping him. I was on top of him in a second, reaching for my bamboo dagger—but it wasn’t there. Balls. Musta dropped it when I got hit. I leaped off him, ran back towards the lighted area where he’d jumped me. A flying baseball bat hit me in the back of the knees, knocked me flat on my face.
But I’d been knocked down before, and this time I was determined to come out on top. I picked up the bat, hurled it back at the okami, who took it right in the face. No matter how big you are or how invulnerable to conventional weapons, that’s gotta hurt.
Grabbing the bamboo dagger, I raced back to him, grappled with the beast as he bared his fangs. They were razor sharp and headed right for my carotid artery. I got the bamboo dagger between us and pushed it towards him as hard as I could, inch by inch, as he tried to reverse it and impale me instead.
I won. The dagger slipped out of his hands and I drove it right into his chest. He gasped in pain, and I pulled the dagger free and stabbed him again. And again, and a few more times, and . . . dammit. In my excitement, I’d forgotten how many times I stabbed him. Five? Six?
I was pretty sure it was six, so I gave him one, final, violent stab. His blood spurted out a hole in his back, I stabbed him so hard. Funny how quickly something like that becomes an accomplishment, and not evidence of being a sociopath.
The okami fell to the ground, dead. I waited a minute, catching my breath. In the distance, I could hear the party-group moving off into the night. I thought about how close I’d come to accidentally murdering that kid, and it gave me pause. Hunting is full of gray areas, and that’s a big one. Sometimes
, you’re just not sure you’ve got the right guy. Even after you’ve put ’em in the ground, it can be a question mark. This time, I’d seen the fangs. I knew for sure, and it felt damn good. My first real victory.
. . . . .
Even in Japan, cell phones were an extreme rarity back then, so I was gonna have to handle the body all by myself. After retrieving a shovel I’d left near the bar, I found as secluded a spot as I could and started to dig. Two feet into the grave, I felt an itch on my leg, reached down to scratch it, and—the okami’s fangs were in my leg. The bastard wasn’t dead—I musta miscounted the stabs. I kicked him square in the jaw and had my bamboo dagger out in a heartbeat, buried it as deep in his sternum as I could. I’ll skip to the end—this time, the critter was well and truly dead.
. . . . .
The hantaa were much more welcoming to me after I’d killed the okami, though “welcoming” for them don’t mean the same thing as it does in my neck of the woods. They took me in to fully train me in their ways, but it felt more like boot camp than a bed and breakfast. I learned so much crap from them that I use every day it’s not even funny. They were all about honor, which goes back to what I was saying before, about knowing you’ve got the right guy. “The right thing, the honorable thing,” that’s what the old man was always tellin’ me.
We went on hunts together for a few months, most of the time with one of the hantaa taking the lead. I was happy to stand back and watch them work, see what details they noticed, what they didn’t. A few times, I found things that they didn’t. Those were the best days—when I felt like I could actually contribute something to a group that’d been doing this since friggin’ Christopher Columbus was sailing the ocean blue.
To say that living in Japan was therapeutic is an understatement. So much of my life had been messed up by losing Karen, but being in a new place, an outsider in a strange land . . . it was like I’d started over. A whole new chance at life, but this time, I don’t know, I felt like what I was doing mattered. I was changing the world for the better, one hunt at a time. ’Course, before Karen died I didn’t know any of these problems even existed, but just because you don’t know about something don’t mean it won’t kill you.
While I was there, we took down that okami, a yama-otoko, which is sort of like a cyclops and a troll mixed together, a hinoenma, which in America we call a succubus, and more than a few ghosts and vengeful spirits. Poltergeists are big in Japan, and if I had to guess why, I’d say it’s because their culture can be so rigid. People there are polite, there’s a strict social hierarchy, and people rarely deviate from it. If someone walks into a room, you formally greet them. Every time. It can wear on you a little bit, but I gotta say, it’s a nice change from the way Americans can act sometimes. Like Romans under Romulus Augustus. Anyway, if you’ve lived your life constrained like that, it’s no wonder some of them go a little bonkers in the afterlife, start stirring the pot in a way they never could when they were alive.
I loved living in Japan, but all good things must come to an end. There came a day when I’d learned about everything I could from the hantaa, and I booked my trip back to America. On a plane, if you’re wondering. No way was I getting on another freighter.
Rufus
WHEN I GOT BACK TO SIOUX FALLS, I spent a week just cleaning up the place. The house had been trashed before I left, and then I was gone for nearly a year, which didn’t help. The dust alone was enough to make the place feel like a tomb. Which, in a way, it was.
My next order of business was to find Rufus Turner. He’d given me his contact info, but I’d smartly dropped it into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so I had to use more unorthodox methods to find him. He’s not the type of guy that’s in the public phone book, and this was before you could do a person search on the Internet and have an answer in five seconds.
I used the same method I’d come up with in Japan—I gave him a reason to come to me. I started feeding stories to newspapers in the Sioux Falls area about cattle mutilations, trees being knocked over by dry lightning, huge black smoke clouds circling above farmland, the works. Every omen of demonic possession I could think of. Then, I waited.
It took Rufus three days to get to my place, and boy was he surprised when I was waiting for him on the front porch. This is an understatement, but the man was not happy to see me. He’d let me in on a secret world that very few people ever get to hear anything about, only to have me run off without so much as a goodbye. He tried to track me down, but assumed I’d gotten myself killed, either by a monster or by drinking myself to death.
That said, convincing him to take me under his wing wasn’t all that difficult. He still wanted a partner, and I’d learned quite a bit about hunting in my time abroad. As crazy as it seemed, there were things I could teach him. Not that he’d ever admit that.
He asked me a few questions before we set out on the road:
• “Are you willing to die for this?” I answered that it was the only thing I was willing to live for, which was good enough for him.
• “Are you willing to kill me, if I ask you to?” I told him about all the death I’d seen on Nishigo Maru, about the okami, about all the other things I’d seen. I understood what it meant to become a monster, and all the reasons it’d be better to die than be turned.
• “Do you like disco?” I guessed that he was hoping for a yes, so that’s what I said. He told me to pack up my crap.
From that moment on, we were a team. Just like Sam and Dean, we rode around the country, helping people, hunting things while trying to get whatever enjoyment out of life that we could. That meant a lot of great times, but also a lot of terrible ones. Probably more terrible than great, but I knew that going in. It was a perfect partnership, until I screwed it all up. But I’ll get to that.
Something Good
WHAT ELSE AM I FORGETTING to write down? I’ll get back to Rufus in a minute, but my brain can only take so much reminiscing at once. Probably because so many of my memories are tragedies.
Maybe I should write down a good one. Something great that happened to me. The day I brought home Rumsfeld? He was my dog, a great mutt if you ever saw one, and friendly as all get-out, as long as you were coming in peace. He had a way of knowing when people were coming to make trouble, and that made him an even better dog.
I got him when he was just a pup, from a guy on I-29 coming north from Kansas City. He had pulled over to the side of the interstate, steam billowing from his engine compartment, and he flagged me down. Knowing a bit about cars as I did, I offered to help him fix his problem (broken serpentine belt, I had a spare in the truck that just happened to fit) and in exchange, he gave me one of the two pups he had kenneled in his backseat. I took Rumsfeld home, and . . .
Naw. That story ends in tragedy, too. Sam and Dean came by my place, looking for help with a little demon problem they had. Then the demon herself shows up at my door, Rumsfeld barks at her, then disappears. Never saw him again. Meg Masters, that was the demon. Haven’t had another dog since, because no dog could live up to him. Except maybe Rumsfeld’s brother, who’s probably still out there somewhere.
Okay, so, something else then. Something useful. Shifters?
Here’s some shifter lore:
• Every culture in the world has legends about shape-shifters. They call ’em different names, but they’re all talking about the same beast. A man or woman who can take on the appearance of someone else, including their voice and mannerisms. They’re one of the few monsters that are truly worldwide, like ghosts, and like vampires used to be before they were nearly hunted to extinction.
• Shifters have limits. They have to get close to the person they’re going to mimic, or at least have access to a lot of imagery. When they change form, they shed their skin, hair, nails; everything on the outside must go. It’s one of the more disgusting things you’ll ever see, but not nearly as bad as knowing that someone is out there doing horrible things while wearing your face.
• T
hey can only be killed by silver. A silver bullet or silver dagger to the heart are the best methods, but feel free to experiment if you ever get one tied up. The more ways to off them the better.
• Shifters can be identified by a flare in their eyes that appears on film or video. In a pinch, you can use the camera viewfinder on your cell phone to scan a crowd for them. This goes for a lot of other supernatural critters, as well—something about having their image captured reveals their true appearance.
• Some shifters are more adept and can shift faster and with less shedding than others. The alpha shape-shifter that Sam and Dean encountered was able to shift his appearance nearly instantaneously without shedding at all. The implication to me is that a shifter gets more talented as they get older. Practice makes perfect.
• They can hold a psychic connection with the person they’re mimicking, as long as that person is still alive. The good news is that means they’re less likely to kill you if they’re taking on your appearance. The bad news is that they’re using that psychic connection to know everything that you know, giving them the ability to walk right into your house and interact with your family in a way that is totally convincing. Every secret you have will be laid bare to the shifter.
