Tengu

by Graham Masterton

“Your cold wind?” asked Jerry gently.

  “My cold wind,” nodded Nancy. “The cold wind which tells me that if they are creating Tengus, they have more in mind than a mildly profitable scheme to sell killer bodyguards to rich Arabs and Arizona mafiosi. If they are creating Tengus, they have only one thing in mind. And that is, apocalypse.”

  Jerry thought for a long while. Then he said, “Where is my son?”

  ‘‘They have a ranch out at Pacoima, in the San Gabriel Mountains near San Fernando Airport.

  That is where they have been keeping the Tengus. I expect they took your son there as well.”

  Jerry said, “You’re not tricking me, are you? This isn’t part of a setup, just to get me out to some place where they can kill me quietly and get it over with? Or is it naive to ask?”

  She said softly, in her Japanese accent, “I have been through varying degrees of hell in my life, Mr. Sennett. I have committed crimes of greed and crimes of passion and the greatest crime of not taking care of my soul or my body. I can be many things to many different men. I can experience pleasure, and call it pain. I can experience pain, and call it pleasure. I was blackmailed into helping these people. They threatened to turn over to the FBI a file of photographs and documents which would have implicated me in child pornography, abduction, pimping, illegal sexual activities, and manslaughter. At the same time, they offered me a very great deal of money. They told me they required absolute secrecy and absolute devotion. I was to translate technical data for them; arrange house leases and car rentals and hotel facilities; and act as hostess and translator for their employees and guests.”

  “And they told you they were creating this special team of bodyguards?” -”That’s correct. They said that one of their doctors had discovered a new technique during the Tokyo Olympics for making men stronger and more tolerant to pain. They called the men Tengus–which at first I thought was simply a nickname like calling a baseball team the Red Devils. It was only after they killed that girl, Sherry Cantor, that I began to doubt them. Now, I am quite sure that they have been misleading me.”

  Jerry asked, “Have you told anybody what you think?” His voice was dull and expressionless.

  Nancy said, “One of them, a man called Gerard Crowley. He is the go-between, the man who arranges for all the Japanese to come into the United States without being stopped by immigration officers; the man who takes care of the finance.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t know whether to believe me or not. They told him nothing more than they told me.

  But, he may be sympathetic. I’m not sure. He is a very cold person, very difficult to reach.’’

  Jerry held out his cup for more sake. He wasn’t at all drunk. It usually took more than half a bottle to get him anything near tipsy. He felt highly suspicious of Nancy Shiranuka, and yet he couldn’t really sec any reason why he should. She had tried to warn him, after all, as subtly as she knew how, and if he hadn’t understood her message about the hawks, then it had been his own fault. She certainly hadn’t advertised her address, so she couldn’t have been prepared for him to come around. The Japanese were always so meticulous: even their accidents didn’t happen by accident. But Jerry couldn’t believe that he had been afforded a glimpse of Nancy’s address by design.

  He said, “You know why they wanted to kill me, don’t you?”

  Nancy replied. “It was something to do with the war. Something to do with the fact that, if any of the Tengus had been mentioned in the press or on television, you would have known at once what they were. It was a question of security, they told me.”

  “Well, you’re partly right,” said Jerry. “In fact, they needn’t have worried. A Tengu attacked Sherry Cantor next door, quite horribly and spectacularly, and even when I heard what had happened to her, I didn’t put two and two together, not at first. It was all too long ago, too far away. The thing still haunts me, still gives me nightmares, but who would have imagined that it would return for real? Not me. I would have been the last one to think of a Tengu, no matter how grotesquely anyone was butchered. It was only the No mask that reminded me. The face of the greatest Oat of all, the demon of a hundred identities and a million cruel ways.’’

  Nancy said, “You know about the Tengu, don’t you?”

  Jerry nodded.

  “Tell me everything,” she said. “I promise we will do whatever we can to find your son. But tell me everything. It could help me to understand what is happening, and who is creating these monsters, and why.”

  Jerry stood up, and walked across to the window. “I’m not supposed to tell you this,” he said.

  He felt very tired and empty, and somehow his disloyalty to his country’s secrets tasted like ashes, as if all the confidential dispatches which had comprised the Appomattox Papers had been burned, as a punishment, on his tongue. “But, during the latter part of the Pacific war, when I was a lieutenant in the Naval Intelligence Command, bright, intelligent, just out of college, I was told that I had volunteered to be parachuted at night into Japan, into the Chugoku Sanchi, not far from Hiroshima, to monitor at close quarters the military radio messages that were being sent to and from Hiroshima to Tokyo.”

  Nancy said nothing, but lit a cigarette.

  Jerry said, “I was the ideal candidate for the job, they told me. I was young and fit. I spoke fluent Japanese. I had worked for nearly two years on Japanese naval codes, and I could put on a headset and understand what the commander of the Akagi was saying to the commander of the Soryu without even bothering to jot it all down.’’ He paused for a moment or two, and then he said, “They called the mission ‘Appomattox.’ They warned me that the chances of my returning to the United States alive were not particularly high; but that what I was going to do was going to be crucial to the entire course of the war. In fact, more than that, to the entire course of twentieth-century history.

  “They said that, all across the Pacific theater, U.S. Marines had been suddenly met by fierce opposition from special Japanese troops they had codenamed ‘Hogs.’ The exact casualty ratio was top secret, they told me, and as far as I’m aware, it still is today. But to give you some idea, five amphibious landings on small Pacific islands yielded a U.S. casualty list of more than twenty-three thousand men dead, and eighteen million dollars of equipment lost, and these were on nothing more than atolls and reefs of minor strategic importance. The island of Pulau Thuap only fell to the Marines after three separate attempts at storming its beaches, and seventeen saturation-bombing missions by B-25’s.”

  “The Tengus,” whispered Nancy. Jerry tiredly rubbed his eyes. “The Japanese were sending Tengus out to every possible location in the Pacific, in a last hopeless attempt to turn the tide of the war. There must have been hundreds of them, even thousands. At that time, it couldn’t have been difficult to find enough fanatical young Japanese who were prepared to submit themselves to the pain which was necessary for them to become... well, what they became.”

  “Possessed,” Nancy prompted him.

  “I don’t know,” said Jerry. “I wasn’t sure then, and I’m still not. After the war was over, and I was sent back to Tokyo, I spent days reading everything I could on ancient Shinto rituals and Japanese demonology. But who knows? The human mind and the human physique are capable of extraordinary things under stress, and in conditions of trance or religious ecstasy. The members of the Pentecostal Holiness Church in Kentucky drink strychnine and burn Tengu their feet with blazing torches, just to show that the Lord will protect them against harm. I saw a fire-walk myself in Polynesia, when a man walked twenty yards over white-hot coals with bare feet and appeared to be unscathed. You think to yourself, are these people really possessed by angels, or devils, or are they simply using their ordinary human capabilities to the utmost–something which most of us rarely do?”

  Nancy said nothing, but waited for Jerry to continue. It was growing dark outside, and somewhere in that darkness David was being held captive, for a ransom
which amounted to nothing less than Jerry’s own life. The thought was clinging around his mind like a tangle of barbed wire, and already his emotions and his desperate love for David were scratched and bleeding and raw.

  ‘They parachuted six of us into the Chugoku Sanchi at night, with a high-power Stromberg wireless receiver and enough food to last us for a week. We set up three base camps in the mountains and trekked from one to the other, listening at each one to the military and code messages that the Japanese were putting out from Hiroshima. Most of the wireless traffic was routine–which ships were docking, how many troops were being embarked for where, how much ammunition was available, what their civil-defense plans were in case of an American assault. But after three days we picked up a different batch of signals from the center of the city, from a building which we pinpointed on our street plans, by simple triangulation, near a bridge across the Ota River. All the signals were related to what they called the Tengus, the devil-people. We listened for four days and four nights, and by the end of that time we were absolutely certain that it was right there, in that building in Hiroshima, that the Hogs were being trained.”

  Jerry came away from the window and sat down again. Nancy poured him another drink, and watched him with caution and sympathy. It was clear from the look in his eyes that he had relived those wartime days in Japan over and over again, dreaming and awake, and that he would carry the responsibility for what he had done forever.

  “They had briefed me, before I was dropped into Japan, that if I found the place where the Hogs were being created, I was going to be giving the President the go-ahead to use a completely new type of bomb, an incredibly devastating firebomb, they told me, which would instantly incinerate the Hogs and give them no chance of survival whatever. They had Japanese experts helping the U.S. Intelligence Commands–experts in Japanese demonology, as I later found out–and it was the opinion of these advisers that the only way in which the Tengus could be eradicated without any fear of their revival would be to vaporize them with an atomic bomb.

  You know the legends, I expect. If a Tengu is chopped to pieces, even one piece, on its own, remains capable of independent life. And so nothing could remain. Not even a fingernail.

  “Well, I was sure that I had found the place. Every signal confirmed it. I radioed a message to the USS Value, which was waiting off Mi-Shima in the Sea of Japan, and the Value, in turn, relayed the message to the U.S. Pacific Fleet. President Truman Was at Yalta at the time, with Stalin and Churchill. They gave him the message, and he said go. The official justification was that, if America had the means to bring the war to a swift conclusion, she ought to do so, which as far as it went was quite true. But what they omitted to tell the public and the press was that two or three thousand Tengus could have held up the American advance for five or six years, even longer; and that General MacArthur had already expressed the opinion in a confidential memorandum to President Truman that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would cost an un-acceptably high number of American casualties. That is, unless the Tengus were eliminated, totally.”

  “Which is what you justifiably did,” said Nancy.

  “Yes,” Jerry agreed. “But when I confirmed the position of the Tengu training center, right in the middle of Hiroshima, among ten square kilometers of wooden houses, I didn’t understand that our ‘incredibly devastating firebomb’ was going to be an atomic bomb. I didn’t understand that, for the sake of killing three or four hundred fanatical young Japanese soldiers, we were going to wipe out eighty thousand men, women, and children in the space of a split second, and that another sixty thousand were going to die of radioactivity within a year.”

  He was silent for a very long while. Then he said, “I didn’t know.”

  “And if-you had known?” asked Nancy.

  Again he was silent. “I’m not sure,” he replied at last. “When you’re in a war, everything looks different. I lost all five of the men who were with me. We got caught in crossfire on the beach at Kokubu, when the landing craft tried to pick us up. Japanese Coast Guardsmen, most of them not much more than sixteen and seventeen years old. They caught us like ducks on a pond. I only got away because I could swim. Five men lost out of six, and I thought it was a massacre.

  “Then I heard that they’d dropped the atomic bomb. Compared to that, my massacre was a school picnic.”

  Nancy allowed Jerry to settle into repose. Then she said, “Nagasaki?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jerry. “They might have suspected another Tengu center there, but I doubt it. They probably realized that the atomic bomb was so damned effective that they could end the war almost immediately. Jesus–once you’ve killed a hundred and forty thousand people, what does it matter if you kill seventy thousand more?”

  Nancy said, “You still blame yourself after all this time?”

  “Wouldn’t you? I could have sent back a radio message saying that I hadn’t found anything.”

  ‘‘Then you would have had to take the responsibility for all of the American soldiers who would have been killed by the Tengus.”

  Jerry gave her a wry, lopsided smile, the first smile he i had managed since he had heard that David had been kidnapped. “You see my problem,” he told her.

  Nancy went to her tape deck and switched on a soft recording of koto music. There was something about her stillness, something about the peace of her apartment, that made Jerry feel as if whole centuries might have passed by since he had first rung her doorbell.

  He said, “I don’t know why I’ve told you all of this. Apart from my shrink, you’re the first person I’ve ever discussed it with. They could put me into jail for twenty years for what I’ve said to you tonight.”

  Nancy said, “You want your son back.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your son is more important than twenty years in jail?”

  “Yes.”

  ‘‘Then you have been justified in telling me about the Tengus, and about the bomb. You and I have more in common than you think.”

  Jerry reached across and took out one of Nancy’s cigarettes. “How’s that?” he asked her.

  “The Tengus have affected both of our lives. You, because of what you did in the war. Me, because I am now being blackmailed into helping them come back to life. And also because I was once a member of the shrine that worships the Seven Black Kami, of whom the Tengu is the greatest and the most terrible.”

  Jerry said, “I want my son, Miss Shiranuka. What can I do?”

  “You can stay here and wait for a while,” said Nancy. “Gerard Crowley is due here in just about an hour’s time, and you can talk to him.”

  “It must have been Gerard Crowley who arranged for the Tengu to kill me in the first place. The Tengu who murdered Sherry Cantor.’’

  “It was,” said Nancy blandly.

  ‘Then how can I talk to him about David? I mean, how can I...”

  “Gerard Crowley has changed a little in the past few days, the same as I have,” said Nancy. “Like me, he is beginning to realize that he is extremely dispensible; and that unless he hedges his bets, he may find himself a very bad loser. We are all in fear of our lives.”

  Jerry said, “Forget it. I’m going straight out to that Pacoima Ranch right now.”

  “You want to bring your son back alive?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then control your anger. Hold back your impatience. Wait and speak with Mr. Crowley. You are up against an enemy which only Presidents and atomic bombs have been able to defeat in the past. You are up against the accumulation of centuries of Japanese history, and a devil that speaks with many voices. Gerard may help. Gerard may tell you how to get your son back. But you must beware, for even Gerard himself may be the devil, or the devil’s disciple.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mr. Esmeralda heard the news from Rancho Encino at a few minutes after eleven o’clock, on ABC television’s evening roundup. He was standing in front of the mirror in his rented house on
Camden Drive, fastening his red-and-white silk necktie, in preparation for Commander Ouvarov’s imminently expected return from Encino and for the visit he would have to make subsequently to the split-level house in Laurel Canyon, to give Kappa his report that Admiral Thorson had been successfully slain.

  Through the half-open bedroom door, he could see Kuan-yin sitting in the parlor in her chauffeur’s uniform, her tunic unbuttoned as far as her heavy bronze belt buckle, her brown-booted legs crossed, reading TV Guide. His Spanish maid, Luisa, was clearing the table from the evening meal. Then he heard, “From Encino tonight, we’ve just heard that a maniac killer...”

  “Turn it up!” Mr. Esmeralda demanded. “Quickly, turn the sound up!”

  Kuan-yin reached for the remote control and casually increased the volume. Mr. Esmeralda walked slowly into the parlor, his hands still holding his half-fastened necktie, listening with dreadful attention to the news which he had feared from the very beginning.

  “…examiner says that she died instantly from her injuries, although he would not yet detail what these actually were. His only comment was that it was a ‘terrible multiple murder, the work of a madman.’ The bodies of two other Japanese were discovered in bushes in the hospital grounds, one of them shot by security guards, the other apparently the victim of a knife attack by his Caucasian associate. Detectives from Hollywood who have been working on the barehanded killings earlier this week of Our Family Jones star Sherry Cantor and a uniformed police patrolman by the side of the Hollywood Freeway have been in close contact with Encino detectives as...”

  Mr. Esmeralda scarcely heard the rest of the report. He sat down on the arm of the sofa and gradually tugged his necktie loose, twisting it around his hands like a garotte. So, Commander Ouvarov had failed, and the Tengu had not only been seen and caught, but killed. He supposed it wasn’t really the commander’s fault. Breaking into the hospital and attempting to silence Admiral Thorson had been a fanatical idea at best. But Mr. Esmeralda knew that Kappa would never take the blame for what had happened, and he also knew that Kappa would lay much of the blame on him.