The Emperor of Any Place

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “Yeah, sure,” echoed Isamu, and laughed too. He flipped another page. I pulled the sketchbook around so I could see it: a pencil sketch of the Gibson Girl in detail. Isamu cast me a look of unease, suspicion. He closed the book and handed it to me. I flipped through the densely covered first few pages, glad to have it back.

  “Time to go,” said Isamu, hopping to his feet with an agility that made me feel old by comparison. I gathered together some things I’d been wanting: the pack with my few art supplies, various drawing implements, a small watercolor kit, another sketch pad, filled, and a brand-new one. There wasn’t much else.

  Time to go.

  When we got back, the fort was gone.

  Evan drifts off, drifts away, circling, circling drunkenly — a cyclone in his head — whirling and snatching up bits of the days — words and objects alike — and hurling them about so that there are monsters and there are men and beaks and claws and hard words and grabbing arms and pages flying and ships in bottles on stormy seas and bits of phone calls and words funneling down the line . . .

  He wakes up. Dizzy.

  There is the beginning of something like light in the room. He turns toward his window. Not dawn but false dawn. He looks at his cell phone: 3:23. He rubs his eyes. Picks it up. A text message:

  — Do orphans eat cheese?

  What the . . .

  It’s not a number he knows. Orphans . . . cheese . . .

  He falls back onto his pillow, too tired for riddles.

  Start again. He looks again at the cell phone. Nothing from Leo. What had he been expecting? He thinks back to their conversation. There was something Leo said. Evan tries to piece it together again. A clue. He can feel the excitement of it — that was what woke him up. The feeling that he knew something he didn’t think he knew. Something hidden somewhere, but somewhere he had access to.

  E-mail.

  Leo and Clifford had e-mailed.

  He goes to roll out of bed and —

  “Ouch!”

  The walrus penis bone.

  He pushes it onto the floor, where it thunks on the carpet. Gross! He actually slept beside that thing.

  On wobbly legs he makes his way to the door. Opens it. Listens to the dark hallway. There is no light downstairs. He tiptoes to the Dockyard, the first door on the landing. He listens again. Nothing. He tries the door, pushes it open. Shhh.

  The room is empty. He doesn’t turn on the light. He goes to the desk and wakes up his father’s ancient computer. The light from the screen blinds him. He types on the clunky keys in the dimness, goes to his father’s e-mail account. There’s no password. Too bad. He goes to his father’s in-box. Types Leo’s name into the search function. Double clicks. No items appear. So he tries the out-box. Nothing sent to Leo, either — nothing, anyway, that is still there. Finally, there is only the trash left to search. He doesn’t expect much by now. And that’s exactly what he gets.

  He leans back in his father’s chair. It squawks and he goes cold all over. He holds his breath. Nothing. The old man must be sleeping it off.

  Whatever was in those e-mails, Griff didn’t want him to see it.

  I pulled away the wreckage of broken bamboo and torn canvas and knelt before my little shrine of flat stones in the far corner of the compound. I have led Derwood to believe it is an altar, a holy place. He is a gentleman, and I know that he will keep his distance. But in truth, it really is a shrine, in a sense, for I kept my story hidden there. This story. I hoped the heavy rocks had been enough to protect what was inside. The rocks have fallen in on one side, but when I carefully lifted them off, there lay the flight manual wrapped in oilskin, dry and safe.

  I turned as Derwood joined me and, seeing the concerned look in his eyes, I made an important decision. I unwrapped the book and showed it to him. I must admit I was slightly afraid he would think it inappropriate that I had taken the flight manual for my personal use. Might it be a sacrilege to use a dead man’s property in such a way? I had no idea and I watched him closely for his reaction. I saw only avid curiosity.

  I stood and took the book from him, pointing at the cover where I had written your name and address. I underlined the kanji characters with my finger, explaining who it was. Derwood nodded, though obviously none of the words made any sense to him. His vocabulary by now includes much of the natural world around us: the names of fruit and seafood. He knows a lot of the language of work and survival, but this does not extend to such abstract ideas as wife or love or devotion. I handed him the book and pulled my omamori from inside my shirt, where it always stays, and from it I took the picture of you.

  “Watashi no tsuma,” I said. “My wife.”

  Derwood looked at your picture and smiled. “Your girl?”

  “Girl,” I said. Is that what you are? So be it. And having someone to finally talk to about you, I went on and on and tried to explain to Derwood that we had been married only a few weeks before I enlisted. Oh, I was hungry to talk about you, Hisako. And although I knew this American gentleman could not understand a word I was saying, he nodded his head appreciatively, smiling, I suppose, at my enthusiasm. There we stood in the ruins of my house — our house — our shattered stronghold, talking about the only thing left to me, other than my own little life.

  Derwood nodded. Then he pointed at the photo again.

  “Your wife,” he said.

  “Wife.” This was something different from “girl”? It didn’t matter. “Wife,” I said again.

  “Tsuma,” said Derwood. Language has to be like this, a negotiation with no text to turn to, no teacher. I glanced at him again, and the smile had slipped from his face. He was looking around at the mess left behind by the typhoon. The golden moment was over. I slipped your picture back into my omamori and the omamori back inside my shirt. I replaced the book in the oilskin and back into the altar and moved the stone into place. I held out my hands to indicate the devastation.

  Derwood nodded, cheerlessly. “Come,” he said. And we made our way through the mess to the table where we eat, the low table I built, low enough and heavy enough, made from rock, that it had been left in place but not untarnished by the events of the day. There was a hideous heap of stinking yellowish-brown excrement there.

  It is clear that we have to rebuild. Quickly. We have survived the typhoon, but Tengu has left a reminder that he is still here and healthy again!

  So, where is he? Why does he not take advantage of our lack of defenses? I have heard of such demons: harbingers of war. And is it not just like war that this creature wreaks havoc and then pulls away, so that you run the risk of going mad with waiting?

  We work hard in the humid weather and then take turns standing guard by night. We built a fire and kept it going until daylight — certainly there is enough kindling around!

  Among my finds have been several forty-two-gallon oil drums, although I’ve never found a use for them. They stood on the beach, too large to bring up to the fort. Derwood came up with the idea of wrapping long branches with cloth and drenching them with oil. There are six of these torches, standing sentinel around us, stuck into the ground, far enough away from the newly reconstructed fence not to be a hazard — not to us, at least. We have spent most of a day rolling two of the heavy drums uphill to the fort.

  “Come, Tengu,” I murmur to the night.

  I dream of Tengu.

  His hideous face becomes the very face of war. I dream of dipping one of those torches into the flames and jabbing it down the monster’s horrible throat, or at least blinding him. After all, he only has one eye left after our first encounter. “Come,” I whisper. And for a moment, I actually think I see the flames reflected in the eye of the creature.

  But Tengu does not come, although the jikininki do. They hover well back from the flames, ghastly in the flickering light. They hiss and fart, as usual, but they also cackle in a way that sounds extraordinarily like laughter. One night when Derwood was asleep, I got up and walked toward the nearest and boldest of the c
reatures, holding one of the flaming torches in my hand. It was scared but did not withdraw, only cowered, raising its wretched arm up to cover its face.

  “Go!” I said, poking the fire at it. It withdrew a few feet but kept turning toward the bamboo fence, as if waiting for something. I could guess well enough what. “You want Tengu to come, don’t you?” I said. “There will be lots of leftovers for you and your kind.”

  “Yes,” the creature hissed. “A feast of stories.”

  I looked closer. Was this the same character I had talked to so many weeks ago? It is impossible to tell with them, because one can barely look at their faces without revulsion. “You still say it is just stories you are after?”

  “Yes. Stories. You cannot understand.”

  No, I do not understand, but I wanted to. Because as horrible as the countenance of this thing was, with its sunken glowing eyes and ravaged cheeks and yellow teeth, there was something that disturbed me about its manner, something that struck me as pathetic, whereas up until then I had only looked upon the jikininki as carrion eaters, scavengers.

  I squatted and then sat cross-legged on the dirt, the burning torch beside me. “Tell me. Make me understand.”

  The jikininki looked through the slits in the bamboo, out to where the wind off the lagoon rustled the leaves of the forest. Then it turned its attention to me.

  “You,” it said. “You have your own ghosts. They hover near you, protectively. They have no strength to help you but can only look on from their world of waiting. You see the hope in their faces? They are the ones waiting to be born.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, though I had come to this same conclusion.

  “The children you will have and the children they will have.” I turned to look at them, at my familiars, the ones who were always there. The torchlight seemed to glow inside them, but their features were lost to me. Then the nearest, a boy, reached out a hand to me, and some of the flame seemed to sit on his palm. He was seated like I was, and he reached out and, though I am ashamed to admit it, I did not reach back to him. It was all too strange.

  “They were here waiting in this place for only you,” said the jikininki. “And because you came ashore alive, they have found you and wait with you for deliverance.”

  I nodded. As I said, I had reached much the same conclusion and was only surprised to find confirmation in this mutilated creature. “Then, what are you?” I asked. “In the stories you are the restless dead. You were human once, yes?” The jikininki shook its head. “So you are unborn as well?”

  This time it nodded. “Yes, but not like them.” The creature stared at my ghosts. “You see, the fathers we might have had were washed up on this shore already dead. So we will never be. We have no one.”

  It was a startling idea to me. I tried to reconcile it. “But there, just now you said ‘we.’ There are many of you. You are a tribe, yes?”

  “You are wrong. We are not a tribe. We are not ‘we,’ though I have used this word for lack of a better. We are one and one and one.” The thing gestured behind me at my huddled ghost children. “They are what will be. The jikininki are what never can be.”

  It was such a strange idea, Hisako, illusive as fire, a bright thing flickering that I could not grasp. I heard a loud noise from beyond the walls of the fort — a rustling that was louder and clumsier than the wind! The zombie straightened, a hideous smile lighting up its face, then shuffled off, and right there, behind where it had been standing, Tengu’s eye appeared, staring through a crack in the bamboo wall. I jumped to my feet and grabbed the torch. The jikininki cackled at me, its teeth glowing in the light. I looked at Tengu again. The eye pressed up against the crack in the wall was the monster’s right eye. The one I had obliterated with gunfire. It had grown back.

  I am not sleeping well. Too often I am in a foul mood. We work together, but tempers flare from time to time. Derwood cannot work as hard as I do. He is weaker and crippled. We are both frightened and, I admit, I am irritated and prone to mistakes and injury. After four days of intense effort, the fort is now completely rebuilt, stronger than ever, but our nerves are badly frayed. And I can only think that the monster has been waiting for us to reach such a state. They say a crocodile kills its prey and then drags it down to the bottom of the river, where it traps it under debris to rot. Softening it up. This is what Tengu has been doing with us. Derwood Kraft and I are trapped at the bottom of a dark river of fear.

  I wasn’t sure what woke me. I gripped my service revolver and peered toward the bamboo wall. There was a tipped teacup of moon in the sky that did not spill enough light to make out anything. I listened, heard a rustling in the bushes that could have been an errant breeze. No. There it was again, and there was no wind to speak of that night.

  Isamu spoke of how our nerves were frayed. It is true. I was a wreck. Had we been able to really communicate, I feel we might have been able to boost each other up. I had no idea of his conversation with the jikininki, although he might well have tried to tell me about it. It frustrated him to no end that I could not speak his language. I have never been particularly talkative, but he was a man, I think, who thrived on lively conversation. I could see the frustration growing in him. He was hungry to talk. I grew up in a family of sisters and quickly learned to keep my thoughts to myself. Whatever the reason, Isamu and I were at odds with each other. We were prisoners because of Tengu. But we had also made ourselves prisoners.

  I lay the revolver down on my lap and rubbed the stump of my left arm. There were phantom pains there; fingers itching to act that were no longer there at all. Such treachery. The mind plays such tricks. None of this seemed real, and yet it was the realest thing I had ever experienced, a fear so visceral it made my insides churn.

  Did we trust the fence? We had buried the stout bamboo stakes deep in the ground, reinforced them with heavy rocks, lashed the wood tightly together. The stakes angled out as they had before, the sharp points seven feet above the ground. Could the creature jump so high? I remembered its escape from us on the beach. Despite its many wounds, it was nimble on the rocks as it scaled the cliff. Perhaps we should build a trench on the other side of the wall? A moat? But I was not about to suggest any more digging to Isamu. That was part of the problem. Much more of the work fell to him. I tried my best. Even rigged up a wire contraption that fit over my stump and could grasp a shovel. But it was a poor substitute for a hand, and increasingly I felt myself to be a poor substitute for a man.

  That night I heard the thing growl. How could a creature with a raptor’s beak make such a sound? It was the low rumble of a big cat, deep-throated, utterly intimidating. I felt I should wake Isamu, but his sleeping was so haphazard, I was loath to disturb him. Meanwhile, I became increasingly nervous.

  It was planning something.

  I heard the sound again, a growl that ended in a kind of clicking noise. There was no denying how close it was. I swung up out of my hammock and in my bare feet made my way to where the torches stood in the ground. The fire was not lit, but there were matches nearby. Fumbling in the dark, I found the box, shook it, heard the comforting rattle, then heard the growl again, sounding so close I feared irrationally the creature had somehow entered the compound. I lit a match, yet another one-handed trick I’d mastered, and with a trembling hand raised it to the dark, turning slowly around in a full circle before lighting one of the torches just as the match was at its end.

  The torch swooshed into flame. Gripping it tightly, I approached the barricade. In order to hold the torch, I had stuck my gun in the waist of my pants. If the damn creature broke through the wall, I could only hope to hold it at bay with the torch. I thought I should wake Isamu, but by then I was afraid to say anything out loud — wasn’t sure I could. My throat was bone dry. Were I to try to speak, I imagined only a peep would come out.

  For God’s sake, wake up, Emperor!

  By now I was at the wall. I tried to peer through the cracks as I slowly walked the perimeter, holding the tor
ch as near as I could without burning the barricade down.

  Then I saw it and stopped dead in my tracks: an eye, gleaming with firelight. A hawk’s exophthalmic eye staring directly at me, pressed up against the bamboo. I jumped back, waved the fire in front of it to scare the thing off. It didn’t flinch. Instead, I heard the three-inch-thick bamboo squeak and watched the thick twine tauten. Tengu had pressed a bulky shoulder against the barricade. Hypnotized, I leaned toward the crack only to see the dark, mottled body slide along the fence toward the gateway. The sturdy door, reinforced by thick planks at the top and bottom, was hinged with wire wrapped round and round many times. I followed the creature, not two feet away, with only the fence between us. I could smell the fetid odor that rose from its flanks. I wondered if it was one of those creatures that likes to roll in its own feces. It smelled as if it did.

  Again it leaned its muscled haunch against the fort, but this time against the door, testing it! Then it raised its beak and began to tear at the Manila twine, shredding it. There was wire as well and nailed boards, but the astuteness of the creature made my blood run cold.

  “What are you?” I said, my voice cracked and desperately small.

  Tengu eyed me, and then its beak opened wide and a screech came from it as loud as the squeal of a jet engine. It was so sudden — so powerful — I fell backward on my backside, dropping the torch. Just as a shot rang out.

  Isamu had jumped from his hammock and fired into the air. He joined me at the fence, where I was groping for the handle of the torch lest it roll into the wall.

  “Tengu?” he asked.

  I nodded. But when we looked again, each of us at the crack in the wall, there was nothing to see but the vague form of the underbrush across the clearing and the moonlit shimmer of hungry ghouls, hovering nearby, expectantly. One of them was soundlessly clapping its hands.

  It was sometime later we heard a different kind of cry. Some animal dying.