by Yusuke Kishi
“I don’t know. I don’t even know where…”
The mist suddenly vanished as if it had been sucked away and the ground returned to its familiar solidity.
“Shun!”
A young man stood twenty meters ahead, wearing the purity mask that the shinshi wear during the demon chasing festival. But the voice was unmistakably Shun’s.
“You shouldn’t have come. Go home, Saki.”
I shook my head.
“Look at this,” he pointed at the ground.
At first it was too dark to see, but then the ground began to glow softly and I saw that it was covered with writhing insects.
All of them were deformed. Moths of all sizes unable to fly because of their wilted wings and bulging abdomens. Beetles with the legs on one side of their bodies elongated as if on stilts, stumbling around in endless circles. And centipedes with their front and rear ends fused together so that they were literal rings.
“If you don’t want to end up like this, leave now.”
“No,” I said stubbornly. “Tell me what exactly is going on. I won’t move an inch until you do.”
“Don’t be stupid!” Shun said sharply.
“I’m fine with being stupid. I came all the way here to rescue you. A tainted cat almost killed me along the way,” I said in a choked voice.
“You met a cat?”
“Yeah. I was saved thanks to the charm you gave me. But there’s probably another cat around.”
“I see…” He took a deep breath. “Fine. Ten minutes. You can stay for ten minutes and I’ll explain as much as I can. But you have to leave once time is up.”
I couldn’t stand here and argue with him forever, so I nodded.
Suddenly the area was lit as if by a spotlight. I looked up and saw that the aurora filled the entire sky. A curtain of pale green hung across the sky, blended with ripples of red, pink and purple light.
“How…? Shun, are you doing this?”
I knew that the aurora only appeared at the north and south poles. Although I didn’t understand how it worked with solar wind and plasma and whatever, I could tell that pulling off a stunt like this was something not even Shisei Kaburagi could do.
“…I would have to break our promise if a tainted cat attacked us while we’re talking. Let’s go to the bungalow,” he jerked his head at the building behind him.
I noticed it for the first time. The wavering light from the aurora shone upon a small house, strangely crooked, as if seen through a distorted lens. The beams supporting the building were twisted, and the straw on the roof stuck out in all directions like an angry porcupine.
“Why is the house all weird?”
“Even now, I still keep trying to change it back to normal.”
He went in through the oval doorway and I followed.
“Ten minutes…I think I can keep it under control for that long.”
Wasp balls that had been strewn all over the floor lifted into the air. I felt like I had walked into a hornet’s nest as the balls hummed loudly.
“What is this for? It’s so noisy.”
“It can’t be helped. Bear with them for now.”
Shun crossed the dingy room and sat down at a large wooden table. Its warped surface was covered with books and piles of paper.
“Will you sit over there?”
He indicated a chair at the other end of the room. I shook my head and stood in the middle of the bungalow, looking around. Everything was deformed in some way, even things made of what were supposed to be sturdy materials like wood and stone. I felt like my senses were malfunctioning or that the fabric of reality was wearing thin.
“Where should I start? …all problems stem from the human mind.”
I frowned, completely lost as to what he was talking about.
“The conscious self is just the tip of the iceberg. The subconscious that exists below the surface is many times greater. That’s why we can never fully understand our thoughts and feelings.”
“I didn’t come for a psychology lecture. I want to know what’s happening to you.”
“I’m explaining right now,” he said in a muffled voice.
“Why are you wearing that mask? Take it off. It gives me the creeps.”
“I can’t,” Shun said curtly. “Besides, there’s no time. …listen. No matter what people do, they can never completely control their mind. Even if they think they think they can control their conscious thoughts, they don’t know what’s going on in their subconscious. Our cantus is the most tangible manifestation of that.”
“What do you mean?”
“For physical actions, there are multiple stages between forming an idea and completing it. Motive comes from our subconscious and must pass through our conscious mind before it can be realized, so logic and reason can change or stop an action from being taken. However, for our cantus, the inception and execution of an action is more or less simultaneous. Even if it’s wrong, there’s no time to correct it.
“But don’t we have to follow prescribed methods and picture very specific things to use cantus?”
“Those images are consciously created, but there are still things hidden in the darkness of our subconscious.”
The pitch of the humming wasp balls seemed to rise slightly.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Even if there were images we weren’t aware of deep in our minds, we wouldn’t be able to make use of them. For one thing, if we don’t chant our mantra, our cantus wouldn’t work.”
“You don’t understand. No matter how strictly you try to control it through hypnotic suggestions and mantras, cantus always leaks through the holes in our subconscious.”
“Leaks?”
“Yeah. Cantus is constantly leaking out. In a sense, we are always subconsciously changing the world around us.”
“That’s…” I was speechless.
I thought the idea was ridiculous, but couldn’t get the words out.
“Saki, what do you think the Holy Barrier is for? Do you think it can protect us against threats from the outside?”
“I don’t know. What do you mean?” I was totally confused.
“The Holy Barrier was created to deal with internal threats, not external ones. And the threat is our leaking cantus. Whether it’s karma demons or fiends, all the things we are afraid of come from within.”
Shun’s voice was calm, but the spinning wasp balls began to quiver.
“Of course, the power that leaks out is feeble and won’t wreak havoc overnight. But if we are continually exposed to these thoughts, there’s no telling what the result will be. That’s why we need to direct it outside.”
“How?”
“We’ve been conditioned to fear the outside world since childhood. The image of that dark boundless world merges with the dark universe that is our subconscious. In our minds, the subconscious becomes directly linked to the outside world, and the cantus that leaks out is directed outside the Holy Barrier. The barrier is a psychological device that helps “purify” us.
I didn’t really understand all the difficult things he was saying.
“…so, what happens to the cantus that is directed outside?”
“It probably takes effect on various things. No one has researched this, so we don’t really know.”
Shun spread out his hands and the swarm of wasp balls began cruising slowly around the room.
“But I think it does explain some things. For example, the minoshiro. It didn’t exist a thousand years ago. In evolutionary terms, a thousand years is equivalent to one night. The ancestor of the minoshiro was probably the sea slug, but how did it manage to evolve so drastically in such a short amount of time?”
“Our cantus created the minoshiro?”
“Not just that. Possibly tiger crabs and haythatchers as well. I’ve looked up all the new species that have been discovered in the past thousand years. This extraordinary rate of evolution starts, and ends, around the Holy Barrier.”
What he was saying was so strange that I immediately rejected it.
“…whatever leaks out is just a scrambled collection of thoughts, right? How does that create a clearly defined creature like the minoshiro?”
“There are templates in our collective unconscious. Jung, a psychologist, calls this an archetype. The shadow, the great mother, the wise old man, the trickster, and more. These characters appear in myths all over the world because they are projections of the archetype. It would be really interesting to study which archetypes minoshiro and haythatchers come from.”
I thought over everything I had just heard, but still wasn’t sure if I understood it all.
“I don’t know whether you’re right about all that or not, but to be honest, I don’t care. What I want to know is what’s going on with you.”
Shun was silent.
“You…”
At that moment I noticed something come waddling toward us from a corner of the room. I screamed.
“It’s okay. It’s just Subaru.”
Shun went over and rubbed Subaru under the chin.
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing…really, I never meant to do anything.”
The wasp balls began streaking chaotically around the room, but settled down when Shun looked up at them.
“You understand, don’t you? All this is the result of what’s happening to me.”
Subaru’s back was covered with a hard, spiky shell like some sort of monstrous armadillo.
“My cantus won’t stop leaking out. It’s growing in intensity and I’m becoming less able to control it. My unconscious is running wild, causing extreme leakage of my cantus, which wreaks havoc on everything around me. This is what Hashimoto-Appelbaum syndrome is. I’ve turned into a karma demon.”
“That can’t be…you’re lying!” I shouted.
“Unfortunately, it’s true.”
Shun picked up Subaru, being careful not to touch the spikes on his back.
“All the books here are class four. Knowledge that was supposed to have been consigned to oblivion. Usually, they’re stored in a secret room in the basement of the library. Your mother went out of her way to lend them to me.”
“She did?”
“Reading these books is the only way to learn what it’s like to turn into a karma demon. This is all we know.”
The dusty books all had the class four seal burned into the covers. Class four was divided into three subcategories, the first was “bewitching”, short for “bewitching words”, the second read “disastrous”, and the most dangerous third category read “catastrophic”, meaning “divine catastrophe, transgression, worse than death.”
“In return for lending me the books, I also have to record my own experience. After all, I’m just the most recent case.”
“Don’t say that! What about treatments? Isn’t there any way to cure you?”
“There aren’t any now.”
Shun put Subaru down. The little dog waddled toward me.
“They used to think that Hashimoto-Appelbaum was related to schizophrenia, but that’s been disproven. If anything, it’s closer to having panic disorder,” he said indifferently, as if talking about someone else. “If reality were an absolute, unchanging thing, then delusions and irrational fears would be curable. But since anxiety warps our perception of reality, there’s nothing that can be done. The negative feedback caused by the discrepancy between delusions and reality creates a vicious cycle. What’s even worse is that all this occurs on a subconscious level, making it impossible to deal with.”
“Can’t we seal your cantus?”
“Sealing it only prevents you from consciously using your power. It has no effect on the unconscious mind. Still, I thought that maybe having a mental restraint would lessen the leakage, so I had Head Priest Mushin seal my cantus. It was ineffective. My cantus is like something with a broken lid, nothing can hold it back.”
I was terrified. “Could it be…I didn’t restore your cantus properly, so it can’t be sealed again?”
Unlike Satoru, Shun had been aware that he was being hypnotized at the time. Furthermore, he had already known what his mantra was. Forcibly unsealing his cantus under those conditions could have permanently removed the hypnotic anchor buried in his mind.
“No. There was never really any hope in trying to seal it in the first place. It’s not your fault, Saki.”
Tears spilled from my eyes. I couldn’t do anything but reach down and pet Subaru.
“It’s about time. You should go home now.”
I shook my head, still crying.
“I can control the leakage for a short while by concentrating on a task and redirecting my cantus to it. During that time most of the ill effects can be suppressed. Right now, I’m focusing on controlling seven hundred wasp balls so that it doesn’t affect you. But I can only keep this up for ten, fifteen minutes at most. Once my concentration starts to wane, my subconscious could go out of control at any time.”
“No! I’m not leaving! I want to be with you.”
“Saki, my condition has already caused my parents’ deaths.”
His words pierced my heart.
“They wanted to help me however they could. But there was nothing they could do. I tried my best to control my cantus through pure willpower, but that’s the worst method to use. In the end, it rebounded with even greater force.”
“Shun…”
“I thought I heard the house creak, and suddenly the ground liquefied and swallowed it whole. I was saved, probably because one of my parents used their cantus to eject me from the house at the last second.”
I heard him sob into his mask.
“So hurry and leave. Please. I don’t want to see anyone else I love die.”
I stood up slowly. Despair and helplessness weighed me down.
I can’t save Shun.
I can’t do anything.
I…
At the door, I turned back to face him.
“Shun, is there anything you want me to do?”
He shook his head.
Suddenly, a gigantic animal slipped by me and into the bungalow.
It was a tainted cat with grey tiger stripes, twice as large as the black one I met earlier. It paid no attention to me and advanced on Shun, purring loudly.
Slowly, the cat stalked closer; its sharp glare was petrifying, but the purring in its throat conveyed no sense of enmity. Anyone who encountered the cat would be confused by these conflicting signals and temporarily be at a loss for what to do. This was the double bind technique that tainted cats used to trap their prey.
Having already experienced this tactic, I reacted first and quickly muttered my mantra.
“Saki, don’t!” Shun’s voice echoed. “It’s enough already…”
His words stunned me. What should I do? I couldn’t stand by and watch him be killed. But…
The three and a half meter long cat reached out as if to kiss Shun, and opened its mouth wide. I was about to release my cantus.
At that instant, Subaru leapt forward with a terrifying howl.
The tainted cat glanced at Subaru and brought its right paw up to meet him. Its razor-sharp claws cut into Subaru and blood sprayed everywhere. But thanks to the hard shell on his back, the wound wasn’t fatal. Subaru didn’t falter for a second and went straight for the cat’s throat. It dodged with startling agility, but Subaru still managed to sink his teeth into a leg more than ten times his size..
Even now, I don’t understand what happened. After generations of selective breeding, bulldogs should have completely lost their violent tendencies. The Subaru I knew was always aloof toward other dogs, and never went beyond barking or occasionally baring his teeth at them. You could almost describe him as being sullen.
So what was going through his head at that moment? What had happened to suddenly reawaken in him the bloodthirsty nature that his ancestors were known for?
As he viciously attacked an animal that, in all proba
bility, was going to kill him, I remembered the legends that named bulldogs the strongest fighting dogs that would take on animals many times their size.
Subaru clamped his jaws tightly and shook his head from side to side. His upturned nose made it possible to breathe no matter how deeply he buried his teeth into enemy.
The tainted cat yowled with pain. But as a beast created to hunt humans, it had been endowed with more cunning than normal animals. It deftly flipped Subaru over with its other paw and held him on down on his back.
“Stop!” I screamed.
Razor-sharp claws came slashing down on Subaru’s soft belly.
Everything that happened next seemed extremely surreal.
The cat flew up to the ceiling, legs spread wide like a giant flying squirrel. All eighteen of its claws were extended and its fangs were bared in a furious hiss, but its body was as stiff as if it had been crucified.
A thousand sparkling crystals appeared out of thin air and covered the cat completely.
The crystals melded together and turned into a half-transparent, shining jewel.
The tainted cat vanished.
Air rushed into the vacuum it left behind and created a small whirlwind.
What in the world did Shun do? All I could think of was that he had transported the cat to a different dimension.
Moving something without touching it probably meant surpassing the laws of physics. However, under normal circumstances, we are unable to manifest anything we can’t picture in our mind.
In the short time since the door to Shun’s unconscious had opened and turned him into a karma demon, he had acquired skills beyond any cantus expert’s level.
I realized that Shun was kneeling beside Subaru’s corpse.
“Poor thing…”
He had already stopped breathing. The floor was covered with blood. The cat had split Subaru open from stomach to heart in a single stroke.
“Shun,” I crouched next to him.
“He tried to save me. Despite how futile it was.” Shun said quietly. “I tried to leave him behind so many times. But he kept following me. …no, perhaps I was the lonely one. I’d be all alone without Subaru.”
He rubbed Subaru’s chin.
“I should have made my decision sooner. If I hadn’t been so indecisive, Subaru wouldn’t have had to suffer like this.”
