Man with No Name: A Nanashi Novella

by Laird Barron

  Nanashi shrugged.

  “There was a bit about time and mazes and blah, blah, blah.”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” he said.

  “Wes doesn’t time travel. Time travel goes against Einstein, thus it’s impossible. Something else very fucked up is going on. Not time travel, though. Did you kill him? Was it you personally?”

  He shook his head. The engine purred. Wind snickered through the hole he’d made in the window.

  “I want you to thank whoever did it.”

  “Send a postcard to the Yokohama office. The guys will appreciate the thought.” He brushed his hair back; useless in the teeth of the wind. Eventually he sealed the hole with the palm of his hand.

  “With Wesley’s death, I am free.”

  He grunted.

  “I was his slave. That was the price to pay for bringing me back from the underworld. He’s King Pluto, our man Wes.”

  “Yeah? Are you certain he’s not Polyphemus?”

  “Don’t you dig, killer? All the myths are the same. Geography just changes how we explain the horrors.” She lighted yet another cigarette and smiled a tight, bitter smile. “You’ll figure it out, bad boy. Act Two. Me, I’m beating feet.”

  “Where am I taking you, huh?”

  “It would be meaningless to say. Fear not -- we’re almost there.”

  You slaughtered your brothers. O woe unto thee! Nanashi could’ve tricked himself into hearing that whisper from Muzaki’s lips instead of the pit of his own subconscious. Slaughtered sworn brothers for what? This sharp-tongued gaijin with nice legs? Guilt? Your fear of something larger than yourself? Yes, that last thing felt right. There was his motive. He’d become enmeshed in the action of powerful forces, a leaf in the flood.

  “Okay,” he said. “I am at your service.”

  She laughed and it wasn’t the melodic timbre of her silver screen personae. This was swift, dark water over rocks, the quick bark of a crow. “Not mine, killer. You belong to a real sonofabitch.” She laughed again. “There, turn there. That’s my exit, stage left.”

  He parked in a leaf-strewn lot near a picnic table and a drinking fountain. A small placard indicated it might be a park or preserve -- the lettering was illegible and focusing upon it made his head ache.

  Susan Stucky finished her cigarette. She opened her door and climbed out, pausing to lean back in and study him. In the dimness her expression was inscrutable. “Your boys are going to kill you?”

  “If they find out that I helped you. Yes.”

  “You going to tell them?”

  He shrugged.

  “The macho honor bit,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “The Dragon?”

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “Nobody likes me.”

  She smiled back. “Okay, rabbit. Thanks.”

  “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Where will you go? This is a forest.”

  “You’re very observant. Maybe in the next life you should be a detective.” She slammed the door and walked in front of the car and followed the headlight beams. Her kimono shone like the moths milling around her pale hair. She vanished into the woodwork.

  Nanashi smoked a cigarette while the engine idled. He sighed and got out and went after her. The slender trees were slick with dew. Fog dampened the rasp of his breath, his shoes scrabbling among roots and leaves. Illumination from the headlights quickly faded and he felt his way through opaline murk. Ahead, a bluish light infiltrated the forest. Shadows leaped around him as limbs creaked with a puff of wind.

  Bushes rustled nearby and the Akita ghosted along, its white fur gone blue as an ice floe. Its eye flickered. Guts trailed from a fist-sized hole where the shotgun slug had torn through. Man and dog regarded one another in passing.

  “The hell is this?” Nanashi said in wonderment. He almost expected Muzaki to mutter the answer. Hell? Oh, yes, rabbit.

  The trees thinned and he caught glimpses of the born again dog. Once he could’ve sworn a woman’s voice echoed from the distance. He scrambled down a steep embankment, grasping exposed roots to keep from pitching onto his face. At the bottom was a gully and a fast-moving stream. The water flowed shin deep and cold enough to shock his feet numb. He trudged downstream as the light intensified and set the cloying mist ablaze and forced him to shield his eyes.

  The gully widened into a field of short, damp grass. The moon seethed through a low cloudbank, spotlighting a cherry blossom tree in a shaft of blue fire. The tree reared in stately menace where the water cut a delta around its gnarled bole. Empty suits and shoes dangled from the branches. Pieces of jewelry glimmered in knotholes. Thunder rumbled. His mind became so full it blankly mirrored the blue moon and struck him dumb, pinned him to the spot. The moon’s eyelid peeled back and crimson radiance stabbed forth. Where the red light touched, grand black trees silently erupted from the grass like a child’s popup book and from each tree depended the sinister fruit of empty clothing. Chimes tinkled and sang.

  A dog howled, or a god. Nanashi ran, slipping and splashing along the ravine, making for the car. He rose and fell and rose again to flee onward. Blue haze before him shivered as it was eaten by the red ray of the moon. One sidelong glance revealed a figure keeping pace, a stumbling, screaming lunatic who much resembled himself, and there were others at intervals between the skinny poplars and pines. Each of them rising, falling, rising. At his back the dog’s howl deepened to a roar and the roar became a vast ripping sound as of a pavilion torn asunder in a hurricane.

  He began to fly.

  * * *

  Dawn refused to break.

  Nanashi drove the stolen car like it was stolen, drove with the abandon of a dead man. He ignored the scenery and stared directly ahead, afraid to blink lest he find himself catapulted through time and space via the pattern imprinted within his eyelids. He didn’t entertain conscious thought. He focused on the pavement lines, focused on the rhythm of shifting, of pressing the pedal to the floorboard.

  It should’ve been light when he finally returned to the mountain lodge, but was not. The staff stared at him. Their terror was the terror of peasants at the mercy of vengeful samurai in times of war. His immaculate hair was disheveled and wild as a bushman’s, his fine clothes spattered in mud and torn at the seams. Dirt and blood ingrained his fingernails. He pointed his revolver at the innkeeper and asked if he’d seen Koma or the others. The Innkeeper shook his head frantically and when Nanashi cocked the hammer the man fell to his knees and blubbered while his wife chanted a prayer and the gaggle of serving boys wrung their hands and moaned.

  Nanashi put the gun away. What had he expected to find? He searched the lodge proper, knowing the act was useless, and next he investigated the cottages and the sweltering cave with its hot springs. All was locked tight and dripping silence. None of the gang had sneaked back for an emergency rendezvous. He should square his shoulders and head for the city, present himself before his Sworn Father and accept judgment. Either that, or flee the country forever. Yuki would quit her job and run away with him to a new life in America, somewhere the long arm of the clan couldn’t reach. Problem was, the yakuza could reach anywhere. Such was the awful beauty of that particular monster. As for sweet Yuki… Yuki had family and friends, roots. She’d never consent to a fugitive life with her much older lover, a man of no status and bleak prospects.

  Head down, he started the car and drove away, hands and feet making the necessary adjustments while his mind dissolved into itself. He was afraid and exhausted. There wasn’t much else. Upon reaching the highway junction he steered south. His hands made the decision. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He gritted his teeth and clenched the leather of the steering wheel in a death grip.

  Along the route to the pit where the Heron gang had done its murderous deed he stopped once to fill the tank. The station was deserted but for his car. Twilight smoldered at the periphery, held at bay by the plastic glow of the station lamps. He looked for signs in the contours of clouds
, the constellations of dirt and debris that swirled across the pavement. Compelled by terrible inspiration, he finally dared to shut his eyes. When he opened them the tank had filled and a tiny woman smiled at him from the tiny screen on the pump.

  Onward, he toiled.

  Muzaki awaited him at the rim of the pit. He crawled forth over the lip in a parody of birth--first his clutching hands, then his head and torso, all of him moving at strange angles until he straightened to his full height. The wrestler appeared unscathed, albeit slightly pallid. He wore a white robe that gathered the frail light like the filament of a bulb. He got into the front passenger seat.

  Nanashi swallowed hard. “Where do we go from here?”

  “That depends on whether you saved her.”

  Nanashi remained silent. Muzaki nodded and a small, odd smile tugged at the corners of his blue lips. He pointed north with a hand that shone queerly alabaster.

  Nanashi drove north. Kilometers rolled past. Dials and gauges reset themselves to their starting positions, but the car zoomed smoothly along the endless highway. He said, “I had a vision of Hell.”

  “Hell is just another neighborhood.”

  “I have tried to convince myself that this is a nightmare.”

  “Awake or dreaming, there’s no appreciable distinction.”

  “Who are you? Are you even the man I watched on television all those years ago? Was there ever such a man?”

  “I am a cursed, malignant brute. I cast a black aura. Other deserving souls, damned souls, in other words, sometimes catch in its hooks like fish in a dragnet.”

  There was nothing to say. They flew more kilometers through the changing gloom until Muzaki said, “We exist in a universe of miracles and curses. The shipwreck during my childhood was both. Those of us who survived the waves and the rocks and the sharks, were stranded upon an island. The island was barren. There was nothing to eat except for one another. So it went and madness followed. On the forty-ninth day, rescuers came. Pale Ones, terrible to behold. They brought me and a couple of others away from the island. The bones of the rest were left for the seagulls to pick.”

  Nanashi saw the child Muzaki lifted from the dirt by inhumanly gracile hands and borne across dark waters upon a gasp of wind. He beheld a crimson and purple mist, and through the mist the flint-sharp spikes of black cliffs streaked in white. He beheld towers, slender and jagged and cruel and the folk within them must also have been of a kind. An island of skulls and weeping shadows, haunted strains of melancholy tunes fluting through abandoned bones. A necropolis sanctuary. Nothing living could enter. Nothing human could enter. Yet there Muzaki had lived. There Muzaki had supped. There Muzaki had grown ever stronger with the passing cycles of time and tide.

  Nanashi trembled and bit his tongue just to feel the pain and be reassured that he yet dwelt among the living.

  Muzaki gestured and they took a spur that angled toward the sea. Nanashi spotted Koma’s Cadillac nosed into the ditch. Its doors were sprung. Bullet holes stitched the cobalt paint. The windows were blasted out. Glass and blood made a tapestry of the plush interior. The corpses were disfigured beyond recognition. Fistfuls of shell casings from automatic rifles glinted upon the ground. Nanashi wondered who’d betrayed his brothers to the Dragon; a passing thought not unlike a stray cloud floating across the subterranean sky.

  Muzaki read his mind. “Were the gracious Innkeeper and his wife afraid to see you? Afraid as if you’d returned from the grave?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ah. I regret to inform you that those inestimable persons have dealt family secrets to your foes for many, many years. We should continue, eh?”

  “I have seen enough.”

  “It’s not enough until you’ve seen everything. Hurry!”

  A bit farther the road branched and branched again and they came to a seawall. Jiki and Mizo’s Honda was parked in an otherwise empty lot near a metal pavilion that had toppled. No sign of the Terrible Two.

  Nanashi pulled alongside the Honda and exited. His clothes were whipped by a breeze that came hard and cold, strong with salt and kelp stench and bits of sand. His hair fell across his face. Muzaki grasped his elbow and guided him down the wooden ramp to the beach.

  “What are you?” Nanashi said.

  “An eater of carrion.”

  “Will you tell me something? I saved your wife. I kept my bargain.”

  “I do not recall any bargain.”

  “Tell me something. Please.”

  “I’ve told you of mazes and curses and damned souls. Yet you speak of nightmares and lunacy. I tell you that the dead and the undead may travel freely within the static maze of reality, indeed, I have shown you the truth of the maze. You choose blindness, deafness. Human primates do so treasure their ignorance. Would that I could reclaim my own innocence of the howling wilderness that goes on forever.”

  “None of this makes sense,” Nanashi said.

  “Don’t you feel how cold my hand is, Nanashi?”

  Nanashi did not answer.

  “If your future happiness depends upon my revelations, then you are doomed to an existence of abject misery.” Muzaki’s odd smile spread across his broad features, warping them into something alien. “There are planets and stars and mountains and forests. There are great, hungry fishes in the sea. There is you and I, Hell and Not Hell. There is the simple fact that knowing doesn’t equal enlightenment. You are a bit of cotton dipped in the blood of the cosmos. That which is seen seeps inside and stains you. You have been stained, Nanashi-san. But, there is always more. Corruption is never finished with us.”

  Pieces of skeletal driftwood and seashells crunched underfoot. The tide rolled in, green and black and thunderous. Farther along the shore was the dark spot Nanashi half-recalled from the phantasms he’d suffered while battling to protect the gaijin woman back at the house. As the true nature of the aberration crystallized in his mind, he gave a hoarse cry and threw himself prostrate and refused to move. Muzaki tenderly leaned down and clutched a fistful of hair and effortlessly dragged him over the hard-packed sand and toward the crashing waves.

  Nanashi struggled like a baby. Vertigo returned with a vengeance. Sea and sky folded around them in origami fashion and drew them forward at tremendous velocity. A rocky isle materialized from the void and then Nanashi was cast sprawling. He spat dirt. Pebbles gouged his elbows and knees. Nothing of the world existed beyond the beach shelf and surrounding rocks except for the sea and the clouds that reflected the sea.

  Jiki and Mizo’s Honda sat on a tilt, buried to the axles, where the beach curved. It had changed from how it had appeared in the parking lot. Blotchy handprints marred the window glass, doors, and hood.

  Koma and his gangsters had dragged a mangled corpse nearby to a depression among the roots of a driftwood stump gone gray with age. The corpse bore a terrible resemblance to Muzaki. The men squatted in their ragged suits, but for Jiki and Mizo who’d stripped naked and now languished in the unnatural light. Their flesh gleamed as gray as the driftwood, and they preened, supremely unaffected by the chill wind or the salty spray that occasionally lashed them. The wretched creatures savaged the corpse, clawing into crevices and cavities for the choicest morsels. Koma, his fine jacket saturated to a deep maroon, snapped a rib free and wrapped his pointed tongue around it and slurped.

  The gang hesitated when they spied Nanashi, chunks of meat held close to their gaping jaws. Each regarded him with the bright-placidity of lazing crocodiles. Muzaki snarled, a bestial utterance fit to freeze a man’s heart, and the unholy things cowered and grinned.

  “Brother,” croaked Amida, ashen visage smeared in fresh gore, collar undone. His left arm dangled. He didn’t seem to mind. His eyes were pure black, his sneer sharp and ravenous.

  “Brother!” said the rest, happy.

  Muzaki said, “Lo, the feast of the ghouls. This rock is the banquet table of their ilk and I, the master of ceremonies. I live, die, am consumed, and reborn in the sticky, rancid cycle th
at governs all matter.” His flesh too had darkened to the sickly gray of spoilage and antiquity. His eyes were reptilian and ebon. He breathed out fumes of kelp and sickness and decay. “Oh, rabbit. I’ve lived a thousand lives, but always it comes to this. For this is the reality behind my façade.”

  When at last he could speak, Nanashi said, “Why did you have me protect the woman?”

  “In my way I loved her.”

  “Such a monster as yourself can know love?”

  “Yes. It is the most exquisite corruption, the greatest perversion dreamt of by the forces of darkness. There can be no curse without love.”

  The ghouls tittered in chorus and dug into the wrestler’s old, abandoned meat.

  Muzaki gestured languidly, imperiously, and several meters offshore the water gathered itself and bulged outward in a slick green dome. An iris slowly widened, revealing a tunnel that corkscrewed who knew where. He said, “Man with No Name, you are the sole living being on this island. Your old life is burned to ash. There are two paths remaining. Here among the ghouls and rebirth into the unlife. Or, out there and the unknown. You must choose.”

  Nanashi gazed first at the tunnel, then at the gory repast of his undead brothers. He groaned and wept. He drew the revolver and slid the barrel into his mouth. For an age he struggled to squeeze the trigger. Defeated, he dropped the gun and stood.

  “Go,” Muzaki said. “This is not for you.”

  For several moments Nanashi swayed, his sight turned inward. Abruptly he bent and snatched the revolver. Six bullets. Six targets. Perhaps it was fate. Perhaps it was fate mocking him. “This place isn’t for anyone.” He began to fire.

  * * *

  Nanashi threw the gun into the sea. He followed its arc. Hitching, halting, almost drunken, his feet carried him from the scene of slaughter and into the infinite mystery.

  Laird Barron spent his early years in Alaska, where he raced the Iditarod three times during the early 1990s and worked in the fishing and construction industries. He is the author of several books, including The Croning, The Imago Sequence, Occultation, The Light Is the Darkness, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York.