The Monster on the Road Is Me

by JP Romney

  “Betrayal!” the kappa cried.

  Moya dropped to the ground at my feet, growling and snarling and smoking. Shibaten’s leg hung loosely on the ground. He hopped back, still facing the kitsune, hissing and grunting and trying to keep his balance. Never taking his eyes from hers, Shibaten roared but slowly disappeared beneath the barberry bush.

  I looked to the side as the world shook in and out of focus. The kitsune was gone. Two hands grasped my shoulders and began to drag me.

  “Moya?” I could see her face floating above me. “I’m not doing very well.”

  “I know, you stupid, stupid, little thief.”

  “It hurts so much.”

  Moya stopped to lean over me. “Look into my eyes, Koda. I give you permission this time. To escape the pain.”

  I looked up and tried to smile my appreciation as the world slipped easily into ice.

  * * *

  “Seimei,” the whisper said. “Seimei, open your eyes.”

  The boy obeyed and the park burned all around him.

  “You are safe. I am with you.”

  When Seimei looked up he saw a girl in a long silver kimono covering him, shielding him from the flames. She smiled, just centimeters from his face.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Who do I look like to you?” she replied.

  “A girl. In a gray kimono.”

  “Then that is who I will be.”

  “No!” Moya yelled out.

  The cold dream vanished like smoke. I turned my head painfully to the side. We were at the edge of the bamboo forest looking in at the kaki tree. Only the kaki tree wasn’t there anymore. Moya was screaming. I tried to shift, but ribbons of fire seared up my arm. The kaki tree was in pieces on the ground, an ax thrown hastily to the side. Was I still cold-dreaming?

  Moya’s face appeared above mine. Dark trails of ash ran down her cheeks. “It isn’t safe here,” she cried. “Oh gods, Koda, it isn’t safe here anymore.” She grabbed me by my coat and yanked hard. The world, and my pain, disappeared into ice again.

  “No!” Moya screamed.

  Kōtenbō moved like lightning, sinking his sword so deep into Seimei’s chest that the blade wedged itself into the smoking shrine wall. Kōtenbō grabbed the boy’s face in his enormous red hand and yanked the sword free. Seimei’s body hung limp in the tengu’s grip until Kōtenbō dropped him like a bag of rotten fish.

  Moya rushed forward and cradled the boy’s head in her lap. Kōtenbō turned and suddenly ran for the exit. When he pulled the handles, the doors stayed shut.

  “Seimei,” Moya cried.

  Fire swept along the walls. The crows stormed around the door and Kōtenbō yanked until wood popped and hinges whined, but the chain on the outside of the shrine held true.

  Moya didn’t look up. Her silver kimono covered Seimei’s legs. Her light hair fell over his empty eyes. Sulfuric tears ran down her neck. “No, no, no,” she whispered. “Please, Inari, no.”

  Kōtenbō banged his massive fist on the door again and again. Moya saw nothing. Where her eyes should have been, embers burned brightly. Moya opened her mouth and screamed light, and Ōmura Shrine exploded in a hurricane of fire. Kōtenbō’s broken body sizzled as he was flung through the tops of the trees and into the valley below.

  “Seimei,” the flames wept, “I am so sorry.”

  34

  Shimizu-sensei sat alone in a train car. The doors would be closing soon. In just a few minutes there would be no escape.

  He’d woken up in an empty parking lot, his head throbbing. The spirits were watching and waiting. They mocked him for letting a young boy and a silly girl make such a mess of him.

  The demon will never let us go now, they said. You are too stupid for him to keep alive.

  Shimizu-sensei had pushed up to his feet and stumbled to keep his balance.

  There is still a way, a young girl told him.

  “I failed and he will kill me,” Shimizu-sensei shot back. “He will trap me here forever.”

  A woman in a black dress stepped forward and placed her hand on his cheek. Would that be so bad, my son? To stay with your mother forever?

  “I hate you,” Shimizu-sensei whispered. “I hate every last one of you.”

  Yowamushi, the rōnin at the back of the crowd grunted.

  “I am not a weakling. You make me do terrible things!”

  A man in a business suit pushed to the front. We can still escape this. Look over there. Do you see the ax? Pick it up, my son. Pick up the ax.

  Shimizu-sensei looked across the street at a pile of logs. A silent crow perched on the handle.

  “He won’t let us go,” my homeroom teacher said. “No matter what we do. He will always keep us here.”

  We have to try, the spirit in the suit said. Pick up the ax.

  “I can’t kill the boy,” said my teacher. “I don’t think I ever could.”

  You won’t have to. Pick up the ax.

  Even sitting on the train, Shimizu-sensei couldn’t force the sounds out of his mind. The kaki tree had whined and creaked under the force of the heavy blade. It was crazy, he knew, but as he tore at the trunk, he’d heard something on the air, floating along the breeze. A scream. No. Lighter than that. Like remembering a scream that wasn’t really there. When the tree was mauled and dead, the screaming breeze drifted away. Shimizu-sensei dropped the ax and ran from the bamboo grove.

  Now there were only a few moments before the train doors would shut and Shimizu-sensei’s fate would be sealed. The spirits around him hadn’t left at all—they’d only gotten louder. The ghosts shouted and ordered and begged him to get off the train, but Shimizu-sensei wouldn’t listen.

  The crows are calling us back, a small boy screamed. He wants us to return to him.

  If we help him this last time, his mother pleaded, then the tengu will let us go. We can move on from this place. We promise this time.

  But Shimizu-sensei pulled his jacket close around his body and tried to shut them out.

  You will die if you do this, said a man in a bowler hat. You will become like the rest of us, trapped forever in Kusaka Town. No one will be left to free us.

  “If I go to the tengu, he will make a murderer out of me,” Shimizu-sensei whispered.

  If you don’t go, he will kill your soul.

  “The boy is innocent,” Shimizu-sensei said.

  The world is full of innocent people.

  “No, this is our fault. Our clan. Our betrayal. Our consequences.”

  We were just trying to find a way out.

  “Desperate people always are,” Shimizu-sensei said. “But that doesn’t make it right.”

  You will never be free, said the man in the bowler hat.

  “We were never free anyway.”

  The conductor’s announcement blared out over the speakers. Next stop: Sakawa-chō. The doors rattled closed and the voices around Shimizu-sensei fell silent. The train lurched forward and started down the tracks. If other people had been in that car, they wouldn’t have seen a man surrounded by two hundred years of ancestors. They would have seen my homeroom teacher with a lump on his head, gripping the front of his jacket, staring straight into the face of a crow perched on the opposite seat.

  The 11:00 p.m. train to Sakawa blasted over the border, but Shimizu-sensei was screaming long before it reached that point. Once he left Kusaka, the sound of his voice only traveled backward, as if sucked behind him into that cursed town.

  Microscopic bits of Shimizu-sensei were pulled toward Kusaka. The scraps flaked away and escaped the car through open windows and slots in the metal. The deeper the train barreled into the next town, the longer Shimizu-sensei’s cometlike tail became. He was a meteor flying straight into the sun. The cosmic particles broke free and, while he screamed in silence, Shimizu-sensei’s body unzipped at the smallest level.

  Kusaka Town was embedded so deeply inside the Shimizu clan that it tore them all to dust. Ghosts, humans, even the crow perched in the s
eat couldn’t escape the pull. In a final flash of light, the Shimizu clan ceased to exist.

  Their funeral ash hung in the air for several moments before siphoning out of the cracks in the train.

  * * *

  I opened my eyes and looked up at the flickering green ceiling of my bedroom. I smiled. My body felt light. Sure, a kappa had just tried to tear my arms off, but I couldn’t feel any of that. I could barely remember it. The world felt warm. And shappy. That’s a whole new word—shining and happy. I just made it up. Because I’m awesome.

  “Well, you’re grinning like an idiot,” Moya said, a sad smile on her face. “Those herbs must be working—otherwise you’d be screaming.”

  I dropped my head to the side and smiled extra wide for Moya. A handful of leaves and grass dribbled out of my mouth.

  “Can I sit up?” I mumbled.

  “I don’t know. Try.”

  I rolled over and pushed up from the floor with my good arm. The broken one hung limp at my side.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  I spit out the last of the leaves and wiggled my arm. It flopped like a wet noodle. “But not good, either,” I said.

  “Your bone is like konyaku jelly right now. I think the feeling will come back soon.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, not if you keep shaking it around like that.”

  “How did you fix the bone?”

  “Just a little kitsune power,” she said. “It was either that or gnaw your arm off. As a fox, I’m not picky.”

  I lifted my wrist and let my arm fall again. “Well, you definitely made the right choice. Dragging my butt around while you’re fighting a tengu could make things a little harder.”

  Moya didn’t say anything. She pulled her knees up to her chest and stared into the green flames of the spectral fireball floating in my room.

  “That’s not going to burn the house down, right?” I said, dropping next to her. “It’s cool, but my parents have a strict no-burning-down-the-house policy. Probably.”

  “I can’t do this,” she whispered.

  I looked over at her.

  “I’m a protector spirit that can’t protect anyone.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Seriously, though, you’re the only protector spirit I’ve got.”

  Moya burst into tears. The sulfuric streaks ran down her face and sizzled holes into my tatami mat floor.

  “You’re scaring me, Moya.”

  “You should be scared. Kōtenbō is a horror! He doesn’t care if the innocent suffer. He murdered Seimei. He murdered the last kaki tree. And he will murder us if he gets the chance.”

  “The kaki tree is really dead?” I whispered. “I thought it was just a cold dream.”

  “Kōtenbō must have sent his puppets to chop it down while we were distracted with Shibaten. She was dead by the time we got back.”

  “I’m sorry, Moya.” I tried to put my arm around her, but it just flopped against her back. I reached across with my good arm and awkwardly patted her shoulder. “He knows we’re close. Remember that. He’s desperate.”

  “This was more than desperation,” Moya said. “This was his plan all along. Every time I think I’ve trapped him, I realize he was trapping me the whole time. We can’t fight this. He’s going to win, Koda. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “You can stop him,” I said.

  Moya looked over at me.

  “I believe in you, Moya. You’re one of the good ones, right?”

  Her eyes fell back to the floor. “I don’t know anymore,” she whispered.

  “I do.”

  She stared into the flames for a long time. “The shrine was Seimei’s idea,” she finally said. “I didn’t want to use him as bait. I told him not to do it. I told him he should hide in a temple to Inari until Kōtenbō was dead, but he said we had to find the tengu fast. He said that other people would die and he couldn’t live with that.”

  “I understand the feeling,” I said.

  “The shrine was Seimei’s idea, but I was supposed to protect him. Instead, I just chained him inside with a monster.” She wiped her cheeks with her fingers. “When I walked out of the shadows, Kōtenbō didn’t lunge at me. He didn’t hack at the door or kick through the walls. He turned and drove his sword straight through Seimei’s heart. The poor boy was dead before I could even reach him.”

  The floating fire shrank and burned a deeper shade of green.

  “I can’t protect anyone,” she whispered. “Kōtenbō killed Seimei. He killed the kaki tree. And he is going to kill you.”

  “You did your best,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, sometimes doing your best isn’t good enough.”

  “But if we put our bests together,” I said, “then maybe it will be good enough.”

  She looked at me. “And maybe it won’t. My partner is a kid who hurts himself at sporting events. I think you’re overestimating your value to the team.”

  “First,” I said, “that’s rude. Second, I may not be able to fight a tengu, but I’m the only person who can find one. Where are the bastard’s eyes?”

  Moya pointed to the open wooden box next to the wall.

  I scooted over and picked it up. “These are eyes?” I said.

  “They used to be.”

  “Gods, that is disgusting. I’m literally going to throw up every time I see a yellow raisin from now on.”

  Moya shrugged.

  “They’re too gross,” I said. “Will you put them in my numb hand for me?”

  Moya crawled over and pushed my head back onto the floor. “This is the kid who was going to cut out Kōtenbō’s heart and give it to a kappa?”

  “I don’t remember saying that.”

  “You did.”

  “I say things I don’t mean, then.”

  “Obviously.”

  Moya turned the box over onto my floppy hand.

  “Did you do it? Is it working?” I asked.

  Moya rolled my fingers into a fist. “Do you feel anything?” she said.

  “I don’t know! There are eyes in my hand, Moya. Eyes! I’m freaking out here!”

  “Calm down and concentrate.”

  “Okay, my arm definitely feels cold.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be here when you wake up,” Moya said.

  “I feel it now.”

  “Ja mata,” Moya said.

  “Thank you,” I told her, and fell back into my world of ice.

  35

  Before Kusaka was a town or a village or anything at all, Kōtenbō soared high above the trees, peering down at the fires dotting the valley. If he flew long enough, the humans would see him crossing the moon and the stars, but he didn’t care. He circled the mountain one more time and swooped down toward the tengu camp. Humans were loud and carried fire wherever they went, so Kōtenbō wasn’t afraid of an ambush. He just wanted them to know he was always watching.

  The giant vulture hit the ground and shook its head. It stepped left and right to gain its balance, then folded its colossal wings. The neck twisted and cracked, receding back into the tuft of white at the top of its body. The face of the vulture disappeared down the emerging throat of a tengu whose nose and long teeth rose from the feathers. The talons expanded into toes. The scaly legs became thick and red. The wings and tail shrank into arms and a sword scabbard at the waist. Kōtenbō stretched and brushed away the feathers that didn’t pull completely into his pores. He stroked the long white hairs of his chin and lay down with a sigh next to his favorite tree.

  Kōtenbō closed his eyes. He hadn’t dreamed since he was human. That was so long ago he’d lost count of the years. Stealing memories felt like dreaming, but that was as close as he got. Sometimes he missed regular dreaming. People dream for a reason, and that reason was missing from Kōtenbō now.

  A twig snapped. The tengu opened his eyes to see Shibaten standing over him,
a broken twig in hand. Normally, Kōtenbō would have run his sword through the river troll for sneaking up on him like that, but something stopped him. The world didn’t feel real. Kōtenbō felt drunk on invisible fumes. It was kind of like a dream. Or a vision. Or a trick.

  Of course, the tengu thought, a prank. A spoof. A lark. A bit of tomfoolery. Kappa were trickster spirits. Full of mischief and obscenity. Kōtenbō didn’t know what it was doing so far from the river, but he would ask the troll after he pinned it to a tree with his sword.

  The tengu shook off the intoxication and sat up against the tree. Shibaten held a thin wooden box up to his face.

  “Move away from me, kappa,” Kōtenbō growled. “Your trickery has no power here.”

  But Kōtenbō was wrong. In an instant he found that he was looking back at himself from the inside of the wooden box.

  “What is this?” he watched himself say, only this time with two vacant holes where his eyes should have been. Shibaten snapped the box shut.

  Through the icy air I watched the kappa turn and run. I watched Kōtenbō stumble to his giant feet and roar so loudly that leaves fell from branches. I watched swords and spears and armor break through the trees and fall onto the unsuspecting tengu camp.

  Kōtenbō knew that without his eyes he would be cut down by the humans and their treachery. He had to transform. Had to escape. Somehow he must find his way back to Sarutadō Cave. He crashed through the forest and rolled down a hill, smacking into tree trunks along the way. The tengu strained to transform, beating his giant wings in the direction of the abandoned cave on the east side of town.

  The cold dream should have ended there—the scarring memory trapped within Kōtenbō’s eyes was spent. But instead of evaporating, the air and the earth shifted to the banks of Kusaka River. Shibaten held out the wooden box to a huge man decorated with samurai armor and demon blood.

  The man who looked remarkably like my gym teacher looked down at the kappa and laughed. “We weren’t sure you would accomplish the trick. You have our thanks, troll. You contributed significantly to the tengu defeat.”

  Shibaten blew air through his nose and tapped the box.

  “Ah, yes. Your reward.”