“Sir?” Jinza called, unable to keep his voice steady.
The warden shook his head.
“Shoot them again!” he mumbled.
“No!” Sadahiko heard himself yell. “Can’t you see? Open the door! Let them out! Shoot the ones on the floor!”
The warden looked at Sadahiko and slowly nodded.
“Yes! Yes! Gorobei, let them out! Polearms!”
The doshin formed a semicircle as Gorobei gingerly stepped toward the cell door with the key and looked over his shoulder to see that all was ready.
In that instant an arm shot through the bars and grabbed his face, fingers hooking into his mouth and jerking him toward the door by his cheek.
Gorobei screamed as he was held there. He yanked his policeman’s jitte from his belt and beat at the fingers holding him until they let go. He stumbled back and fell on his knees in the snow, blood flowing from the empty place his ear had been.
Sadahiko jumped forward, taking the keys from the snow and drawing Tasogare as he went.
With one hand he jabbed the point between the bars again and again, not caring who he stabbed so long as they kept away. He jammed the key in the lock and turned it, then retreated as it swung open.
Men tumbled out like bales of hay. Some of them were biting furiously. Those bitten screamed in agony and thrust out elbows, even kicking to get away. They scrambled through the snow, trailing blood. The guards parted for these, and thrust their blunt-headed tsukubō and their spiked sodegarami sleeve-catchers and their sharp, U-pronged sasumatas at the biting prisoners, entrapping them on the ground like wild dogs so the others could escape.
There were some forty prisoners lodged in the lesser jail, and they streamed out in a rush, inadvertently bowling over some of the guards, freeing the crazed, biting men to snap at their ankles and trip them up as they rushed by, pulling them down.
Sadahiko found himself in danger of being overrun himself, but he planted his feet and swept back and forth at the mob of men, describing a deadly arc of silver with Tasogare. The skin on the back of his neck rose with secret glee as Tasogare’s edge tore through four living men, spilling their guts and blood in a shower of scarlet. They tumbled to the ground, one of them nearly cut in half, forming a natural barrier that the men behind pitched clumsily over and the rest avoided, parting around him like a rushing river around a jutting stone.
He looked on the four dead men with satisfaction, thinking how only a few hours ago he had remarked how difficult it was to cut a man in two at the waist.
Then the bisected man began to twitch.
At first he thought it was the natural muscular reflexes of the dead. Sometimes the bodies of men he beheaded continued to shake and jump. It was why women tied their legs together before committing jigai—so the throes of death would not shame them.
But the upper half of the dead man did not simply tremble. It lifted itself on two hands and began to drag itself towards him. Its eyes were wide open and regarded him, though they were clouded over with strange, blue gray cataracts. Its nose twitched like a hunting animal’s, and its teeth gnashed and snapped.
He took a step back and regained himself, then struck off its head. It slumped, lifeless once more.
In a moment, the other three men he had cut began to stir.
He did the same for these, decapitating each in turn. But he did it with a dread deep in his chest that harrowed him to the core. What madness was this? What monstrosity?
He fell back toward the line of guards. Something gripped his pant leg. He glanced down and saw one of the doshin on the ground, bleeding from a bite wound in his neck. That same cloudy glaze was in his feral eyes.
Sadahiko split the guard’s head down to his teeth.
Hands gripped his elbow and Sadahiko nearly cut the young warden down.
“What are you doing?” the warden stammered.
Sadahiko shrugged him off and leapt over the four bodies into the oncoming rush. He dodged through the prisoners until he reached the cell door. Jamming Tasogare into the ground, he flung his shoulder against the door and slammed it shut, knocking back a half dozen men still trying to funnel out the exit.
He turned the key in the lock and pulled his sword from the ground.
He backed away quickly as outthrust hands clawed at his clothes.
The warden had followed him.
“What are you doing?”
Sadahiko grabbed him by the throat.
“Listen to me! No more can come out, and all that will die must be killed!”
He dragged the warden over to the men he had twice killed and, gripping him by the nape like a wayward pet, forced him to look.
“Look! I cut these men down and they rose again. The men you shot attacked the others.”
The warden tried to shake his head, but Sadahiko would not let him.
“The doshin I killed. Go and look at his body. He was bitten in the throat. He was dead before I split his skull.” Sadahiko released the man. “Go! Look!”
The warden backed away from Sadahiko.
All around them, the sudden fight had subsided.
The prisoners who had escaped the jail room were huddled in a corner near the prison wall, penned in by guards. Across the yard, curious faces pressed sleepily against the bars of the greater jailhouse.
A few of the biting prisoners were writhing and snarling like animals on the ground, pinned by the doshins’ poles.
Some of the men, prisoners and guards alike, sat or lay in the disturbed snow, hands clasped to bleeding wounds. None of these looked too serious.
The men still locked in the lesser jail begged to be let out. There were groans from the darkness behind them.
The warden went to stand over the doshin he had seen Sadahiko kill.
“I tell you, he was dead. These others were dead. But they moved.” Sadahiko turned to regard the four men being restrained by the doshin. “Look at their eyes. Look at their wounds. There! From the muskets! You saw them fall!”
“Listen to him!” shouted one of the prisoners huddled against the wall.
The warden marched over to where the prisoners were being guarded, and the pleading of the men still locked in the jail became shrill.
“What are you talking about?”
A spindly man with wiry hair spoke above the others until they quieted down;
“When the new man killed the latrine boss, Koda Moan, we laid his body out on his tatami in a corner and old Denzo said prayers over him,” the man related breathlessly. “When we all lay down to sleep and the lights were put out, we heard Denzo scream. Some of us went over there and found him wrestling with someone in the dark. A couple of us, Ichige and Entaro, they tried to pull them apart. Ichige, he got bit bad in the arm. We dragged the biter close to the bars to see who he was by the moonlight. It was Koda Moan.”
The warden bunched up his lips, disbelieving.
“He kept fighting, snapping at us. Then old Denzo crept up on somebody and started gumming them. We thought he’d gone crazy. Then Ichige bit Entaro …”
“What is this madness?” the warden chuckled, waving the prisoner away and stalking back to the jail room. “I’ll see for myself.”
But as he came to the door of the jail, he stopped. The dozen who had been standing there begging to be let out had fled back into the dark and were apparently hiding. Three men stood at the door of the lesser jail, moaning and reaching out beseechingly. Their eyes were all a milky gray and they bore the marks of terrible wounds. One of them was trailing his own coiling intestines. Another’s forearm hung twisting from the elbow by a ragged thread of bloody flesh, and a third had a gaping, blackened bullet wound in the middle of his chest.
The warden took a hesitant step backward.
There were exclamations from the guards, and one of them nearly let go of their charge, a pale eyed prisoner covered in blood lying on his back in the snow, pinioned by two tsukubō. It—for by its behavior Sadahiko could not consider it a man—gave
an obscene spasm of effort, spitting and growling and snapping its jaws. The noise seemed contagious, for the other three trapped creatures did the same before they all succumbed once again and lay still, groaning, gathering their strength.
A blubbering noise erupted from the dark jail room and was quickly silenced.
The four horrors at the cell door turned in unison and walked slowly back to hunt for the others who were hiding. The disemboweled creature stumbled on its own entrails heedlessly. They were the last thing to recede into the shadows, sliding across the floor like eels, leaving a trail of blood.
Sadahiko stepped up to one of the trapped prisoners and thrust the point of his sword a few times into its torso. It howled and struggled, but not from pain. Blood welled up from the wounds and spilled onto the snow, and as it writhed, flecked the terrified guards who held it in check.
The warden made a move as if to stop him, but waited.
Sadahiko watched it for a moment. They all did. It continued to snap and struggle, never diminishing in strength. Then he swung his sword and struck its head from its neck. Instantly it lay still, though its dead eyes were unchanged. It simply ceased to move.
“Murderer!” the warden whispered.
“Jikininki,” said Gorobei, the doshin whose ear had been bitten off. His eyes were red rimmed, his lips trembling.
The others looked at him.
Gorobei spluttered as he spoke, the red stained cloth clamped over the side of his head making him look all the more unhinged. “We are cursed … by that old monk. He really is some kind of master jikininki. He’s cursed us!”
“Shut up!” the warden spat. “Nonsense! All nonsense!”
Sadahiko regarded him quietly.
“The same must be done for these others. And the ones in the lesser jail.”
A scream came from the lesser jail, and wet, terrible sounds, as of bones breaking and skin tearing, of stomachs emptying onto the wood floor.
“Jinza!” the warden growled. “Transfer the lesser jail prisoners into the greater jailhouse. Take the wounded men to the infirmary and see they’re tended to.”
“The surgeon won’t be in until the morning,” Jinza reminded him.
“Yes I know,” the warden said. “Do the best you can.”
“If their wounds are fatal, they’ll have to be beheaded,” Sadahiko said plainly.
Jinza looked from the warden to Sadahiko. The warden looked at the ground.
“I know what I saw,” Sadahiko said.
“I’ll take some men in there after those four madmen myself. There are still prisoners in there that need help.”
“Sir!” said Gorobei, who had been listening. “Please, don’t make me go in there!”
“Gorobei!” Jinza barked, disgusted at the guard’s nervous tone.
“You’re hurt, Gorobei,” the warden intervened. “Go to the infirmary with the other prisoners.”
Gorobei flushed and bowed deeply.
“No matter. The ones still inside are dead anyway,” Sadahiko said.
The warden looked at Sadahiko, hissing.
“Please, stop this. You’re inciting panic.”
“I would burn the lesser jail down if I were you.”
“Captain,” the warden said to Jinza. “Before you carry out your orders, please escort Kumada-sama to my residence and see him to bed.”
“Bed?” Sadahiko said, disbelieving.
“Your services won’t be needed tonight,” said the warden. “Please feel free to retire. My men and I will handle this crisis. Don’t trouble yourself.” He gave a short bow.
“You think you can put me under house arrest?” Sadahiko challenged.
“I didn’t say that. You must have misunderstood …”
“You little cur!” Sadahiko snapped, touching the hilt of Tasogare.
Instantly three sasumata were leveled at him, and Jinza brandished his jitte baton, ready and able to trap and break his sword.
“The law requires that you be detained until the matter of officer Samidare Kinpachi’s death can be investigated,” the warden told him coldly.
“Who?”
“The doshin I saw you kill,” the warden said, glaring.
“Please feel free to resist, samurai-sama,” said Jinza, unsmiling.
Sadahiko looked from Jinza, to the warden, to the three doshin covering him. He let his hand drop from the handle of his sword.
He knew what he had seen. Dead men had moved. They had attacked the living. This pup of a warden thought this was some kind of sickness, or hysteria. Sadahiko did not believe in jikininki or curses, but he had lived with death long enough to know it when he saw it. He was familiar enough with its finality to know its nature had somehow been suspended. Altered. Something unnatural was going on at the prison, and he was afraid, but not for his sanity. He did not doubt what he had seen.
“Very well,” he said. “But you will pardon me if I do not relinquish my sword.”
Jinza looked to the warden uncertainly.
“Let him keep it,” the warden sighed. “Just see he stays put.”
* * * *
It was half past midnight when it stopped snowing. The screams and the musket fire grew sporadic.
Dog had lain awake listening to them.
Minoru too remained wakeful, playing his flute. He paused once to squat in the corner and sculpt a new Jizō for the wall. The crazy bastard knelt there saying sutras over it, clasping his filthy hands together and rocking where he sat, touching his head to the grimy floor like a supplicant, heedless of whatever was going on outside.
After the first volley, Dog stood at the grate and peered out through the bars, though he could see nothing. The trouble was far across the compound. What in hell was going on? He heard orders barked, and the alarm tolled. No one came to their part of the prison. They had no news other than what could be gleaned from what they heard.
After the alarm, things were quiet for an hour, the strange, tense silence broken only by the occasional shout from the direction of the lesser jail. Then there came another loud commotion, followed by a second volley of rifle fire, and a tremendous crash as of a wall collapsing somewhere. The alarm sounded again, and there was a lot of yelling back and forth amongst the doshin. Orders and counter-orders, nothing much discernible beyond the calling out of various areas of the prison. The lesser jail, the upper rooms, the infirmary, now the greater jail and the armory. Dog thought maybe a fire had broken out and was spreading across the compound. Good. Let the whole damned place burn around them.
But they saw no lights, smelled no smoke. The intermittent cries and screams continued off and on for hours. Soon he heard women too. Whatever it was, it had engulfed the entire western quarter of the prison.
Dog went from pacing the cell to sitting against the back wall and staring out into the night. It was nerve wracking to hear the screams of men and women. The air was heavy with a dread more terrible than if it had been thick with wood smoke and fire. Minoru’s crazy words about the world ending poisoned his thoughts.
Minoru finished his prayers and returned to his flute, wordlessly, as if he knew exactly what was going on outside and it didn’t concern him.
That was when the shambling figure came to stand before their cell.
They heard it first, the shuffling steps across the snowy ground. It was like the step of a tired man, without cadence or rhythm, more a stagger than a stride.
The thin, shadowed form crossed in front of them. Dog saw unkempt hair and long, ropy arms. But the most standout thing about the stranger was the angle of his head. It was bent sharply to the right, so that the right ear seemed to touch the right shoulder. Yet the man’s posture was not hunched. There was a snuffling sound, and the man emitted a low, almost plaintive moan and shuffled closer to the bars.
He stepped into the beam of moonlight.
That was when Dog saw the face of Koda Moan, the latrine boss. His neck was broken still, by all appearances, and yet he lived. His eyes we
re glazed with a white film, and the jaw hung loose. His mouth was splashed with black, like the ink on a woman’s teeth.
He was expressionless, and as Dog flattened himself against the wall, Koda Moan pawed at the grate as though he were unfamiliar with the concept of a door. His thin arms snaked in between the bars and his long fingered hands reached imploringly out to him. His head lolled about his shoulders, flopping between his chest and back without reason.
Minoru stopped playing his flute and stared silently. He slowly got to his feet.
“It’s Koda Moan!” Dog exclaimed.
“Oh. He’s your visitor, then,” Minoru said, sitting back down and picking up his flute. “I thought he had come to see me.”
“He’s dead!” Dog stammered. “I killed him!”
“Well,” said Minoru, “maybe you should appeal to the warden and see if he will agree to hear your case again in light of this new development.”
Koda Moan rattled the wooden grate and groaned again.
“He’s certainly anxious to see you,” Minoru went on. “Go and get the keys, if you want in,” he called to Moan.
Moan answered with an animal snarl and a disconcerting wobble of his broken neck.
Minoru cocked his head, and stood up again.
Dog trembled all over, his hairs straight on end. He hugged himself for fear that he might shake the soul loose from his body. He had killed this man with his hands. Heard his neck break, heard his last breath rattle out of him. He had heard prayers being said over his corpse. Hadn’t he?
Minoru approached Moan, stopping inches from his grasping hands. He watched his fingers clench and unclench, peering through the dimness at his face.
Dog forced himself to stand also, and stared over Minoru’s reeking shoulder.
Minoru’s hand snaked out suddenly and touched Moan’s face, eliciting an outburst of violent growling.
Minoru held his hand up to his own face and licked his palm.
Dog winced, imagining the flavor.
Minoru held out his hand to Dog. It glistened with the black substance all over Moan’s face.
“Blood,” said Minoru. “And he’s cold to the touch. I’m afraid there’ll be no appeal for you.” He chuckled.
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