by JP Romney
“Two days.”
“In two days.”
“Good.”
“Thank you, Yori.”
“Hey,” he said, sticking a stubby finger in my face. “Don’t thank me.”
“Okay,” I said, opening the door to his bedroom.
“Thank someone else.”
“Oh, right. Thank you, Desert Punk.”
“Whatever the feat, whatever the run…”
“Desert Punk gets the job done,” I finished, walking out into the hall.
“Yes! Wait, can we do that again?” he called after me. “I want to record it and post it on my website.”
“No. Absolutely not. That is a terrible idea.”
“Right. No, I get it. Next time, then.”
I ran through the rusted gate, buckled my giant helmet, and rode down Yori’s street, overflowing with confidential police files and murder evidence. I looked back. Yori was standing in front of that small metal gate in the dimming sunlight with his hands on his hips, grinning from ear to ear. You could almost see his cape billowing in the wind.
21
I passed my house and kept riding to the secret bamboo grove.
“What are you?” I demanded, ducking under the kaki tree.
Moya looked up at me. “A girl.”
“What kind of girl?”
“I don’t think I like your tone, Koda.”
“Well, I don’t like vans driving over my face!”
“First,” Moya said, “it didn’t drive over you. Your head would have popped like a grape if it had. Second, how did you not see a van trying to hit you through a convenience store window? A van. It didn’t exactly sneak up on you.”
“To be fair, I wasn’t watching for runaway vans. I was inside a building!”
“A building with windows. That’s what windows were invented for.”
Moya reached out and patted the grass. “Sit down, Koda. You’re hyperventilating.”
“I was riding my bike very intensely. Are you trying to kill me, Moya?”
She looked up at me. And then laughed.
“I’m serious, Moya. If my girlfriend is trying to murder me, I think I have a right to know.”
“Ah, you think I’m your girlfriend.”
“That was totally not the point! And no, I don’t think you’re my girlfriend. I don’t know why I said that. I was probably thinking of someone else.”
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Well, you don’t have to break up with me.” I dropped onto the grass obediently.
“No, I just want to talk. See, there is someone trying to kill you. But don’t worry, it’s not me.”
“Okay, this is worse than a breakup.”
“Did you see the crows, Koda? Out in the parking lot before the van veered off the road?”
I nodded. They forced Natsuki to cut her smoking break short.
“Think back to every interaction you’ve had with the Yamabuki Three. Did you see the crows then?”
The flock that flew after Aiko. The cries in the math room. The birds taking off with Taiki.
“Crows and tengu have a long history together. The very first tengu were karasu-tengu—small humanoids with beaks and claws and crow wings. Then came the mountain tengu—fallen humans that the Road had corrupted until their skin had turned red and their noses had grown ridiculously long. Kusaka Town is sick, Koda. But the crows are just a symptom, not the disease.”
“Who is behind the crows?” I asked.
“Not so much a ‘who’ anymore,” she said. “More of a ‘what.’” Moya picked a blade of grass and held it up to the last rays of the setting sun. “The Seven Noble Families first entered Kusaka Valley two hundred years ago, but they weren’t the only ones here. A powerful tengu called Kōtenbō led a clan of demons in the mountains above them. They had a war and all the tengu disappeared. Almost all of them, anyway.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” I said.
“What would you have done,” she asked, “if I’d walked up to you in a parking lot and asked you to mind-loot the location of a river troll so we could fight a mountain demon together?”
“I’d have called the police.”
“Because…”
“I’d have thought you were clearly a danger to yourself and those around you.”
“I thought it best to take baby steps. At least until I knew for sure that you were one of the good ones.”
“Why would Kōtenbō stay in Kusaka?” I asked with resignation.
“Hate. Revenge. Spite. He is the source of the Tengu Road in this town. He is the magnet that’s drawing it here. As long as he’s hiding in this valley, the sickness will remain.”
“If this tengu is behind the crows, why would he go after Aiko, or Ichiro, or Taiki? What did they ever do to him?”
“Aiko Fujiwara. Ichiro Kobayashi. Taiki Watanabe. C’mon, Koda, don’t you know anything about your town’s history?”
I shrugged.
“Inari, goddess of light, do you ever pay attention in class?”
“If I like the subject, I pay very close attention.”
“But since there aren’t many high school Pokémon classes…”
“I do not often pay attention.”
“Fujiwara, Kobayashi, and Watanabe are three of the noble families.”
“Wait a minute.”
“Here we go.”
“Stuff we learn in school…”
“Almost there.”
“… has real-world applications!”
“Yatta! You did it, dum-dum.” Moya leaned back against the trunk of the kaki tree. “Kōtenbō is hiding out somewhere, so he uses the crows to break into his victims’ minds. And the lingering Tengu Road is the side effect. Think of it like muddy footprints left behind when a thief leaves a house. Only these prints seep into your brain floor and infect everything they touch. The Road spreads through your mind, replacing happiness with fear and despair and loneliness. Kōtenbō needs the crows to control people, but he knows that in order to destroy his victims, all he has to do is nudge them onto the Road.”
“How do we stop that nudge?” I asked.
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Moya said. “But we can cut off the source. The kappa Shibaten is the first step. If we find Shibaten, I think we can find Kōtenbō.”
“But no one’s seen Shibaten for two hundred years.”
“Yori’s obsession with Shibaten would have piqued the kappa’s interest. I thought it would have been enough to draw the troll out of his hiding spot.”
I looked out at my bicycle in the dimming light and the murder evidence tossed so nonchalantly in its basket.
“You’re sure you weren’t trying to kill me with a van?” I said.
She smiled. “About as opposite as you can get, Koda. With the help of the crows, that driver temporarily took leave of his senses and tried to park his vehicle on your skull. I bumped him off course a bit.”
“With a fireball?”
She shrugged. “We all bump in our own way.”
Moya leaned forward and took my hand. She laid her head on my shoulder, and together we watched the sunlight disappear from the bamboo grove around us. It felt nice to be with Moya like this. It could have just been the sweet glow that comes from realizing your girlfriend isn’t trying to murder you, but it felt good. Maybe Moya was my zenko fox spirit after all.
The sky grew dark and a little cold. It reminded me that there was one nagging question that I simply had to ask. “Who is Seimei?”
Moya’s hand stiffened. “You promised you would never steal from me,” she whispered.
“I didn’t mean to,” I answered. “I don’t know how this whole suri thing works.”
Moya pulled away from me. She hugged her knees and looked down at the ground. “How much have you seen?” she asked.
“I saw the park,” I started. “I know what Kōtenbō did to Seimei’s parents. I know you saved him.”
Mo
ya dropped her head lower. “I watched them die,” she said in a small voice. “His father was being hunted by Kōtenbō, but his mother’s death was a mistake.”
“The Nakagawas were one of the noble families,” I ventured. “But Seimei’s mother wasn’t from that line?”
Moya shook her head. “With her last breath she called on the goddess Inari to save the life of her son. Inari granted her request. She let me come down to protect him.”
“I saw all of that, Moya. But what happened next?” I asked.
She looked over at me with swollen eyes. “I failed, Koda. That’s what happened next.”
Tears rolled down Moya’s cheeks. But instead of, you know, normal human tears, they dissolved into smoke, leaving black streaks down her face. I wanted to press her about the explosion at Ōmura Shrine, but if you’re wondering when it’s a good time to give a girl space—it’s probably when she starts crying smoke.
“I think you should go,” she said.
I slowly pushed up to my feet. Moya dropped her head onto her knees.
“I’ll see myself out,” I said, ducking under the branches of the kaki tree.
22
* * *
NOTEBOOK/FUJIWARA, AIKO
DATE: 2006年9月19日
my hair hurts. my eyes hurt. everywhere i look i see them. watching me. perched outside my window perched on the fence perching perching watching watching. i watch him watching them watching me. it makes my eyes hurt. it makes my skin push and pull. fly away black bird. fly away. i didnt hurt you. i didnt know you then you came and perched and watched and perched and hurted. someone is angry. thats why he sent you. the angry one. you have no teeth. you have no arms. but he does. Hhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeee dddddddddddddoooooooooeeeeeeesssssssssssssssss. i am hurting. you are hurting. he is hurting us. black feathers no shine. strong feet cracked broken. deep eyes cloudy blind. so beautiful. so lovely. where is the crow with three legs? why wont he save us? fly away, black birds. fly to places he can never find. i will follow. fly away from here.
* * *
Yori hadn’t lifted a lot of files from the town hall basement. There was a report about the headmaster’s suicide at Ōmura Shrine. There was an interview between a social worker and Seimei just after his parents died in the 1930s. And there was Aiko’s journal. The official files on the Yamabuki Three had already been moved to some central police station in Kōchi City.
More than anything else, the journal reached out to me. It was like the book was sewn together from the chills that run up your spine on a cold night. Aiko had obviously spent a lot of time decorating the front cover. The three-legged crow was carefully drawn and painted like some kind of tribute. She must have done that while she was still thinking clearly. As the journal went on, her writing became more and more muddled. At the end, she was just furiously scribbling crows with dark lines shooting out of their eyes.
I slid the journal under my futon and turned over the last item in the manila envelope. A single wristwatch fell out. We all have secrets. Moya didn’t want to tell me about the shrine fire? Well, I didn’t want to tell her about the memory I might have found. Not yet, anyway. Not until I knew for sure. I poked the watch with my finger. It wasn’t particularly cold. Other than the face being cracked, there was nothing strange about it. Maybe the trauma trapped inside had faded.
“Okay, so how do I do this?” I said to myself. “How do I start the cold dream?”
I picked the watch up and turned it over. Nothing happened.
“Maybe if I had a phrase or something? Maybe ‘Genkaku Power Go!’”
Did I just shout that in my bedroom at eleven at night?
Yep, my brain said.
“That did not work at all.”
It would have worked, said my brain, if you were in an anime and you were a crime-fighting princess.
“Hey, I like Sailor Moon,” I blurted out.
Can we just do this now? My own brain was getting impatient with me.
I lifted the watch into the air and closed my eyes as tight as I could.
Is it working? my brain asked.
“I don’t know. Should I, like, rub it or something?”
It’s not a genie!
“Well, usually things feel cold right before I faint.”
Does it feel cold to you?
“Not really.” I dropped my hand onto my futon. “Stealing memories—especially about death—does seem like a terrible thing to do.”
But there’s no other way to find the kappa.
“Yeah.”
Just take that part of you that feels weird about spying on someone’s misery and strangle it.
“Strangle it? That’s a harsh choice of words.”
If you want, I can do it for you. I am your brain.
“Good point, I guess. If you think you can, go ahead— Oh, see, now I feel the cold—”
I flopped forward on my futon as the world turned to ice.
From the reeds along Kusaka River, an ancient hand reached out. It could have belonged to a very unfortunate child. Small. Thick. Wrapped in turtle skin. Not the kind of hand you want to see poking around as you drunkenly stroll the edge of a river late at night.
Taiki’s father tossed his empty sake bottle into the black water. The boy had run at least this far, he reasoned. Normally Taiki hid out in an abandoned truck near the river, but he wasn’t there now. It didn’t make sense for the boy to throw a rock through the window and then run to his usual hiding spot. If he’d been thinking straight, Taiki’s father would have just waited until the boy returned home and then whipped the stupid out of him with a broom handle.
But Taiki’s father wasn’t thinking straight at all. How many times had he yelled at the boy for throwing pinecones at the side of the house? Soon he’d be throwing rocks, and then this would happen. Taiki ran fast, though, and by the time his father reached Kusaka River, the boy had already vanished.
Unfortunately for Taiki’s father, his son was nowhere near the river. But the real vandal was.
Shibaten had been hiding on the banks of Kusaka River for two centuries, feeding off the life-energy of bugs and rodents in the mud. In all that time, he’d never ventured far enough to watch a human. But then the small one came along. He sang a flattering nursery rhyme and threw cucumbers into the water. The small one was lonely. He was a throwaway, like the metal carriage he hid in at night. The small one looked over his shoulder and was constantly afraid. Like Shibaten with the crows.
But if the small one could find Shibaten, maybe the tengu could, too. Shibaten thought he might have to kill the small one and eat him. That would be the safest thing to do. The small one was sad and alone, so perhaps it would be better if he stopped existing anyway. Shibaten would decide what to do with Taiki in the future, but the fate of the man he lured out to the river tonight had already been decided.
Shibaten watched Taiki’s father as he kicked through the reeds, yelling into the darkness, screaming for the small one. The large human would draw out the crows in the area if he wasn’t silenced soon. Shibaten could break the man’s neck now. It would be so easy. Like a dry stick. The kappa pushed through the river grass.
“Who is it?” Taiki’s father screamed. “Who’s there?”
The reeds drifted in the breeze. The shadows along the bank shifted without a sound. Taiki’s father stared so hard into the darkness that he lost his balance and stumbled to the edge of the water. Taiki’s father rocked back and forth, drunken to a stupor on warm rice wine.
“Taiki!” he screamed again.
The boy he called for didn’t emerge. Something else that was small and hated did. Taiki’s father looked up and screamed for the last time.
Grabbing his wrist and shattering the watch, Shibaten yanked Taiki’s father off his feet and folded him backward until his spine popped. Shibaten was sorry that he might need to kill the young boy, so he gave him a gift—an agonizing death for the one person who tormented him most in the world. Taiki’s father groa
ned softly, moving his chin from side to side. The man’s spirit seemed old and sour like his breath, so Shibaten nudged his body into the water and let Kusaka River carry the folded man away.
Shibaten turned and leaped back across the freezing water. I stood on the other side, watching him through the icy air and the terror that still hung there. Shibaten crept up to an old barberry bush. He reached his hand out, and the thorny branches sank into a hole in the ground. The half-turtle, half-troll dropped to his stomach and slid into the cold darkness of the earth. The barberry rose up again, covering the entrance to Shibaten’s den.
I opened my eyes and stared at my futon with its warm electrical blanket. The broken wristwatch was tightly wedged in my fist. I forced my fingers free and brushed the murder evidence onto the tatami mats. I felt overwhelmingly tired. Maybe misery visions take their toll on you. Or maybe the week was finally catching up to me. Either way, I flopped forward and couldn’t keep my eyes from falling closed again.
23
My parents thought it would be a good idea for me to attend my high school field trip the next morning. I wasn’t so sure. Who knows how people would react? Fainting from the top of a bamboo mast is understandable—it’s almost expected of a kid who wears a helmet during Sports Day, but getting hit by a car through a convenience-store window kind of gets people talking.
“Ah, Koda-kun, ohayō gozaimasu.”
“And good morning to you,” I said to a second-year girl I’d never met.
“Ogenki desu ka?” her cute friend asked.
“I’m feeling fine, I guess.”
“Yokatta ne.”
“Yep. Good.”
I took off my street shoes and set them in the cubby with my name on it. I stepped out of the school genkan and into my slippers.
“Oi, Koda.”
I looked up to see Kenji walking straight at me. I braced for impact.
“Soba ni sawaranai ka?”
“What?” I said, opening my eyes. “Like, right now?”
“No, stu— I mean, no, Koda. On the bus. Do you want to sit next to me on the bus?”
