Tengu

by Graham Masterton

  As the Tengu stepped forward to Admiral Thorson’s door, he was accompanied by tiny flames that danced in the air: the foxfire Kitsune-bi, the visible evidence of evil. Foxfire had pursued Yayegaki Hime, one of the characters in an ancient and still-forbidden No play, and it was the mask of Hime that the Tengu wore tonight. It was Kappa’s idea.

  Mary Thorson, terrified by the sound of the anteroom door being smashed, stood in the middle of the room, her eyes wide, one hand across her breasts, the other half raised as if to protect her husband’s oxygen tent. “Who’s there?” she demanded. But all she could hear was a dragging sound, and then a clatter as the Tengu threw aside one of the chairs.

  The Tengu kicked at the door once, and splintered it. But just as he was about to kick again, Nurse Abrarnski came unexpectedly through the shattered doorway into the anteroom. The security guards and the police had seen Commander Ouvarov and the second Japanese bushi escape across the gardens, and hadn’t realized that the Te’ngu had actually forced his way into the intensive-care unit.

  Nurse Abrarnski shrieked, “Stop! You mustn’t!” and ran forward to seize the Tengu’s arm, thinking only that he was small and nearly naked, and that he mustn’t disturb Admiral Thorson at any cost.

  It was only when she gripped the Tengu’s wrist that she understood her mistake. He turned, and his face was blank and white, with eyes that seemed to Nurse Abramski to glow with a fluorescent life of their own. His body was deeply muscular, although it was marked all over with terrible scars and weals, and the loincloth he wore was soaked in crimson blood. It was the sheer evil he exuded that terrified Nurse Abramski the most, though. It overwhelmed her like a tide of freezing vomit. She tried to step back, tried to release her grasp, but the evil was so intense that she didn’t seem to be able to make her legs move properly, didn’t seem to be able to open her mouth and scream for help.

  With the bursting, flaring sound of a gas ring lighting, a crown of flames ignited around the Tengu’s head. His eyes pulsed a mesmerizing blue. With one hideously powerful movement, he seized the lapels of Nurse Abramski’s uniform, and the skin of her collarbone with them, and tore the flesh off her shoulders and ribs. Sternomastoid or cleidomastoid muscles, deltoid muscles, pectoral muscles–all, including her breasts, ripped raw from the bone, all the way down to her abdominal muscles.

  Beneath her exposed ribs, her lungs expanded in one last powerful shriek of horror. The realization of death. Then she dropped to the floor and lay dying of shock in her own blood. The Tengu stared down at her, the foxfire still hovering around him. Then he turned back toward the half-splintered door of Admiral Thorson’s suite.

  Inside, Mary Thorson knew now that she was in terrible danger. She backed away from the door until she reached the edge of her husband’s bed. She glanced behind her. There was a window, and although it was closed she knew that it wasn’t locked. But what about Knut? How could she leave Knut, comatose and defenseless, to whatever it was that was rampaging in the next room?

  She heard more police sirens warble down Balboa Boulevard; she heard the wail of an ambulance, then another. Then there was another shattering kick at the door, and the top hinge burst free.

  Panicking, she stared down at “Inch-Thick” lying with his eyes peacefully closed inside his oxygen tent. The door was kicked again. This time the paneling cracked wide apart, and she saw for the first time her assailant’s bare and bloody foot. The cardiopulmonary unit beside her husband’s bed bleeped on, unconcerned, and the endless electronic ribbon on the electroenccphalograph showed normal, ten alpha waves per second.

  She could still have made it to the window. But she was already sure that she wasn’t going to try.

  As fearful as she was, she had stayed with Knut through war and peace, through career struggles and great triumphs, through all of his children and all of his hopes; and through almost a year of unconsciousness. How can a love so gentle be so fierce? she thought. How can a soft caress grip with such strength?

  There was one final wrenching noise as the shattered door was hurled across the room; and there in front of her stood the Tengu, his hands gloved in drying blood, his masked face surrounded by floating fires as hot and noisy as blowtorches.

  “Oh, my dear Lord,” she whispered. “Oh, my dear Lord, save me.”

  The Tengu stalked forward and tried to thrust her away from the oxygen tent. The magical instructions he had been given by Kappa’s servants were explicit: slay the one in the tent of air. It was the man whose blood he was smelling, the man whose body he wanted to rip to pieces. But the woman clawed and struck and screamed at him, and even when he threw her aside across the room, she climbed painfully to her feet and shrieked at him to stop.

  Inside the oxygen tent, miraculously, Admiral Thorson opened his eyes. Mary’s screaming had penetrated deep into his comatose sleep, and already the alpha waves on his electroencephalograph were hesitating and jumping. He heard her scream again. He actually beardhet. He tried to turn his head to see what was happening, but he couldn’t. He willed himself, Turn, turn, turn your head, but his nervous system wouldn’t respond.

  The Tengu tore at the plastic tent, and it opened with a soft exhalation, a dying beast. But when Mary Thorson threw herself at him again, screaming and screaming, trying to tear off his mask, scratching and clawing at skin that had already been tortured past human endurance.

  Pushing her roughly away from him, the Tengu picked up the chromium stand on which Admiral Thorson’s nutritive drip was hanging, and gripped it in both hands like a spear. The foxfire around his head burned even brighter as he took up the Oni stance called Shishi-mai, the lion dance. Then with a howl that was old as Japan and her demons, a cry that came straight from the mouth of a triumphant devil, he thrust the stand deep into Mary Thorson’s stomach and lifted her up on it, struggling and kicking and silent with shock. He rammed the stand straight into the wall, so that she was impaled, alive, with her feet more than two feet from the floor.

  Panting harshly, the Tengu turned to Admiral Thorson. But his time had already run out. Three policemen appeared in the doorway, two of them armed with revolvers and the third with a pump shotgun; while a fourth policeman smashed the window with the butt of a rifle and thrust the muzzle through the shattered frame. T “FreezeLie flat on the floor with your arms and your legs spread!” one of the officers ordered.

  The officer with the pump shotgun, however, wasn’t going to wait. He fired one deafening shot and hit the Tengu in the chest. The Tengu pitched around, staggered, but remained upright, his chest smoking, swaying on his feet. The officer reloaded and fired again, and this time blew the Tengu’s head apart, so that nothing rose from between his shoulders but the bloody pipe of his neck. As if in nervous reaction, the other officers fired at the headless body too, six or seven times, until it sagged at the knees and dropped heavily to the floor.

  Slowly, walking knee-deep through their own glutinous fear, the officers stepped into the room.

  One of them said, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  They lifted Mary Thorson down from the wall as carefully as disciples in a religious painting.

  They looked down at the Tengu, and then looked away again and holstered their guns. They couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Will you look at this guy?” one of them said at last. “These goddamned marks all over his body.”

  After five minutes they declared the room safe for paramedics, medical examiners, forensic staff, TV, press, and anybody else who wanted to mill around and stare at all the blood. A newspaper woman came in, took one look, and hurried outside again to be sick. The medical examiner kept asking for body bags, but nobody seemed to have remembered to bring them. One of the paramedics kept saying, “What is he, Japanese or something? What do you think, Japanese?”

  “No head, could be anything,” replied a local detective, in a voice as crackly as an old-time radio. “I don’t know what kind of charge the uniformed guys are putting in their shotguns these days, b
ut you can bet your ass that somebody’s going to start an inquiry about it. Look at that, no head. Could have been hit by a fucking cannon.”

  “Did you bring those bags or didn’t you?”

  “Speared her, right to the fucking wall.”

  “Will you move back, please?”

  At last, arguing and pushing as he came, Admiral Thorson’s personal physician was able to force his way into the room. Dr. Isaac Walach, was a tall, thin, balding man, one of the country’s wealthiest and most expert specialists in apoplexy and brain seizures. He ignored the police and the blood and the medical examiners crouched over the corpse of the Tengu, and went straight to Admiral Thorson’s bedside. All the monitoring equipment had been torn loose and the oxygen pump disconnected, although one of the policemen had been quickwitted enough to turn off the oxygen supply in case of fire. Doctor Walach made a quick check of the Admiral’s pulse rate and vital signs, lifting back his eyelids to check his response to light, listening to his heart.

  Then he quietly tugged one of the paramedic’s sleeves and said, “Help me get this patient out of here, please. He’s still alive.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  She came to the door in a black silk robe, painted by hand with modern graphic designs by Shigeo Fukuda, yellow-and-green faces interlinked to form the falling figure of a bird. She said,

  “Yes, what is it?” in a mystified tone that was strangely attractive.

  He recognized her for what she was: Hokkaido Japanese, probably from Sapporo. He said, “My name’s Sennett.”

  “Yes?” she asked.

  Jerry hesitated. He had come to Nancy Shiranuka’s apartment on Alta Loma Road on nothing more than a hunch: another cold wind that had blown through his mind. He didn’t know what he had been expecting to find: David bound and gagged and tied to a chair maybe? He didn’t even understand what it was that haunted him so persistently about Japan. Now, here he was, facing a pretty Japanese girl who had asked him what he wanted, and he didn’t have the first idea what to say.

  “I, er, I heard about Kemo,” he told her in a hoarse voice.

  She raised one eyebrow. A perfect arch, finely drawn.

  “I was down at police headquarters,” he said. “They told me there.”

  “Are you a police officer?”

  He shook his head.

  There was a lengthy silence. Nancy at last said, “You’ve come about your son, I suppose?”

  “You know where he is? Is he safe?”

  Nancy reached out and gently held the sleeve of his jacket. “He’s safe for the time being. Come in. There’s nobody here at the moment.”

  Jerry felt as if his head were exploding with questions and anxiety, but he knew Japanese etiquette well enough to hold his tongue, and to follow Nancy into her silent, austere apartment.

  “Sit down,” said Nancy, indicating a cushion. Jerry eased himself into the cross-legged position which he had once accepted as the only way to sit, but which now required some painful tugging at his shins.

  “You’re certain he’s safe?” he asked.

  “Certain,” said Nancy. “They have taken him for the express purpose of flushing you out of your home, to entice you to a place where they can easily dispose of you. They will take great care of him until you are dead.”

  “Who’s theyT’ demanded Jerry.

  Nancy went across to the liquor cabinet, slid it open, and took out a bottle of Gekkeikan export sake. She poured it carefully into a flask and left it to warm. She said, “I do not know their identity any more than you do. But they are hawks.”

  “It was you who left that scroll under my windshield?”

  “It was a friend who put it there. But the message came from me.”

  “I should have understood it,” said Jerry, with bitter realization. ‘The hawks will return to their roost.’ To catch the lamb, of course. It’s from something by Tanizaki Jun’ichiro. Chijin no At?”

  Nancy said, “You impress me.”

  “A Westerner shouldn’t be conversant with sadistic Japanese literature of the 1920’s? Why did you leave me the message if you didn’t think that I’d understand it?”

  “I hoped you would grasp it intuitively.”

  Jerry tugged again at his awkwardly folded leg. “As it turned out, I was in too much of a hurry.

  The police wanted me to look at a suspect they’ve charged with murdering Sherry Cantor and that police officer out on the Hollywood Freeway.”

  Nancy poured out a little sak6 and handed it to Jerry in a fragile porcelain cup. She took some herself, and then sat down close to him. “You are an unusual man,” she said. “I sense that there is something hanging over your head.”

  “A mushroom cloud,” he told her wryly, and raised his glass. “Kampail”

  “Kampail” she echoed.

  They drank, and sat in silence for a while. Then Jerry said, “These people who have taken David–they’re the same people who sent that man to murder me?”

  Nancy said, “You understand, then, that Sherry Cantor’s murder was a mistake?”

  “I understood the minute the police described the assailant as wearing a white No mask. And–I had a feeling, I guess–something to do with the fact that I’ve been undergoing psychiatric treatment for years after what happened to me in Japan–and, I don’t know. I just guessed.”

  Nancy reached forward and picked up the sake flask again. Her black robe opened a little, and Jerry was conscious in a way that made him feel curiously old, but also curiously aroused, that he had glimpsed the dark areola of her nipple. Underneath that thin silk robe, she must be naked.

  How can I be so anxious about David, he thought of himself, and still think something like that?

  But then she passed him ?l fresh cup of sake and he remembered that he was sitting with a Japanese woman. His mind, after all these years, had slipped back into the timeless traditional way of observing every ritual scrupulously, whatever its importance. There was a time for everything, for anxiety, for passion, for pursuit, and revenge. There was also time for sake, and quiet intensive conversation, and the studied but accidental glimpse of a beautiful woman’s breast. It was quite possible she had allowed the accident to happen, to reassure him.

  “Are you one of them?” Jerry asked her.

  Nancy stared at him for a moment, as if she were unsure. Then she said, “No, it is impossible to be ‘one of them.’ They are not a gang, in the conventional sense of the word, nor a sect. I am unsure what they arc; but I do now realize that they are evil and powerful. I am employed by one of their hired running dogs as a translator, organizer, general drag lady.”

  She sipped at her drink, and then said, “A few days ago I became curious about them: why they wanted to kill you, who they really are. I sent my houseboy Kemo to follow one of them after a meeting. If you saw my address at the police headquarters, then you will know what happened to him.”

  “I only glimpsed the report,” said Jerry, with a dry mouth. “It seems they tore his heart out.”

  “It is a technique used in a particular martial art known as Oni, the art of the demons,” Nancy explained, almost as if she were talking to a party of tourists. Then she looked up at Jerry, and her eyes were hard and dark and unforgiving. “The adept’s arm is swung around to gain velocity, in the same way that a baseball pitcher winds up. By the time it reaches his intended victim, his hand is formed in the shape of a chisel, fingers straight, and it is traveling as fast as a bullet train. The technique is to drive the hand right through the muscular wall of the stomach, upward and slightly to the right, and to seize the victim’s heart.” Jerry said quietly, “I’ve heard of Oni. But it’s forbidden, isn’t it? I mean, it’s actually illegal.”

  “Illegality, danger, death, they are all part of what makes the Japanese personality what it is,” said Nancy. “You are speaking of the people who invented seppuku and kamikaze and the rituals of Shrine Shinto. You are speaking of people who eat fugu fish not because it tastes better than
any other, but because it can kill within minutes. Can you imagine sitting down to a dinner, not knowing if you will ever arise from it alive?”

  “Is there any particular reason why I should believe you?” asked Jerry. “Can you give me any guarantee that David is unhurt and still alive?”

  Nancy Shiranuka watched him for a while, and then said, “No. But if you have only half an understanding of what is happening here, you will know that I am risking my life telling you any of this. If I fail, the next Tengu they send out will be for me.”

  Jerry lifted one finger, his mouth half open, in sudden and complete understanding. “The Tengu,” he whispered. “So I was right.”

  “You guessed it was the Tengu? That was what they were afraid of. That was why they sent him to kill you. •There can be only two or three people in the United States who know what a Tengu is, what a Tengu can do. They wanted to launch their program without anybody knowing what they were doing.”

  “What program?” Jerry asked her. “What are you talking about?”

  “They are creating a corps of killer bodyguards,” Nancy told him. “A band of fanatical and superbly fit Japanese who will do whatever they’re told to protect their masters. Well, that is what they claim they are doing. Whether they are speaking the truth or not, I don’t know. That’s all they ever tell us. But they may have underestimated what I knew about the Tengu from the days in which I was a disciple of the Seven Black Kami. And they may have underestimated my intuition.”