by Wen Spencer
She dragged both futons back to the center of the room, inches apart instead of touching, sheets and duvet smoothed back into place. After a minute of staring down at the futons, she laid the katana between the two mattresses.
“Okay, find Simon and everything will be good.”
Simon dreamed that he was buried, pinned under rocks and earth, massive and unyielding as a mountain. Water dripped down his cheeks like cold tears—spilled down his breast like raindrops sliding down glass. He strained to dig himself free, but he was bound tight. He burned with anger toward those who had thrown him down and buried him. He’d get free and show his righteous anger—but no matter how hard he pushed and wriggled, he couldn’t free himself.
Nikki frowned at the page. “Really? That’s it?”
She had written several chapters on one character buried underground before—poor Mary Southland. This was clearly just a nightmare. The dream world was always blurred at the edges, details lost in darkness. She had no smell of earth or feel of the crumbling dirt. She tore the page out and laid it on Leo’s futon. Tucking away the rest of the incriminating notebook, she thought about the scene. Had there been anything that didn’t make the page? No, there was nothing.
She lay in the dark, listening to the night noises. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself to sleep. The last thing she needed was to push herself to exhaustion on top of everything else. The day’s events jumbled through her head. She rolled onto her side and pressed fingertips to the katana. “Atsumori?”
“Sleep, Nikki-chan.” For a moment, she felt his fingers twine with hers. “I will watch over you and keep you safe.”
She understood then the comfort of belief. Calm swept over her and carried her off to sleep.
18
Stalking on Paper
Japan had been the land of mini cars, mini fire trucks, mini ambulances, and even mini tractor-trailer trucks, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the bulldozers were half-sized. They did some mysterious shuffling of dirt around a large rip in the steep river valley.
Nikki trailed after Leo as they moved through the construction site, drowning in the smell of mud and diesel and the roar of heavy equipment clanking and beeping loudly. What great fodder for her book, but she wasn’t sure now if she could bear finishing the book for publication. How could she let people enjoy the death of Misa? Besides, there was the small problem that she might not be alive to finish the novel, as her characters usually died.
Leo had returned after dawn, full of angry silence. She got the distinct impression that he was furious at someone, perhaps everyone, maybe just her.
He hadn’t wanted to come to the construction site. It might have been the last place anyone could place his father, but she had written him alive, in a hotel room. She didn’t try to explain her artistic process, mostly because she was no longer sure of anything except for the fact there was very little “artistic” to it. She’d only recently discovered that she could “tweak” a scene by visiting where the story was set. A character walking through a familiar place, mind on some problem (or pursuing a monster), ignored the world around them. During a tweaking session, she could take her time, use her own eyes to take in everything, and yet keep the character’s mindset.
Between Leo’s furious silence and the roar of the heavy machinery, though, she was starting to get a headache. She was going to have to tune them out if she wanted to get in touch with Simon’s thoughts. When they stopped for Leo to talk rapid-fire Japanese to yet another yellow-helmeted man, Nikki dug through her purse to find her iPod. Earbuds in, volume up high, she retreated into soothing music.
Simon had floundered through the mud—it had been even thicker that day because of a downpour the night before. Simon, though, had left the mud behind as he thought about his angry son, who cared so deeply and yet shielded his heart with fierce defenses. There had been a shift in his attention, away from the treacherous footing.
Swaying in time with the music, Nikki considered the possible directions that Simon could have gone. There were the remains of a road, cut short by the construction’s sprawl, that led upriver, away from the dam site. It matched with Simon’s easy, mindless walking.
Nikki picked her way through the mud to the road. There she took out her notebook and pen.
The deafening roar of the construction dropped away as he walked up the deserted road. Around him life, continued as it had for hundreds of years, ignorant of the coming flood.
Simon had taken the road. Nikki hitched the katana on her shoulder and headed after the man. The road matched the river, running fast and heavy beside it. A bend took them completely out of sight of the bulldozers to a small farmstead. A house stood empty, the front door invitingly open.
This was the farm of the people evacuated out of the valley. They had been there for generations, out of mind, displaced by a disaster on the other side of the island and the needs of the many. They were not that different from Leo’s family. Their family farm had been given to them by the Hawaiian king and the state had tried to sell it to a private investor to raise money for public coffers.
There! Proof that the Brit was indeed Leo’s father. The question remained if Simon had gone into the house. “Will you get your mind off Leo and pay attention?”
“You’re thinking of me?” Leo murmured beside her.
She jumped sideways. “I told you not to do that! And no, I’m talking about your father. I’m trying to track him, and he’s not cooperating at all. I think he went into the house.”
“I could find no sign of him in the house.” Of course Leo had checked, probably more than once.
She glanced down the road, hugging the river’s bank. The farm’s mini fields terraced up the hillside behind the farmhouse. There was nothing else of interest to draw Simon away from the house, and Simon had mentally linked it to Leo, so there was a good chance he’d explored it.
“What did the construction people tell you? Did anyone see him come this way?”
“The landslides stopped after Simon vanished, so they’ve convinced themselves that nothing was wrong in the first place. They don’t want to talk about him or what could have been causing the problems.”
Was it that they didn’t want to seem superstitious? Or didn’t they have to acknowledge that someone might have been their sacrificial lamb?
Nikki made her way through the overgrown front yard to peer through the open door. It was an old-style farmhouse, the entrance just a mudroom with a dirt floor and one center stepping stone up into the house for guests to use. “Ojamashimasu!”
“No one is here.” Leo took her call to mean she was going in. He stalked into the dim interior.
It was a sign of how long she’d been in Japan that she was slightly dismayed that he hadn’t taken off his shoes. Then again, the house was slated to be flooded. She compromised by taking off her shoes and carrying them with her as she followed Leo into the house.
It was a sturdy house, if somewhat crudely made by American standards. The ceiling was wooden, and many of the inner doors were filthy shoji paper. There was a surprising amount of stuff still scattered everywhere, although there were spots among the clutter that suggested someone might have taken a handful of items. There were dishes piled around the kitchen sink, although there were no lights on the instant hot water heater and flipping the light switches produced nothing.
“They have moved out—right?” Nikki asked.
Leo gave her a dark look. “The owner died. His son moved to Osaka years ago. He dropped out of college to work at a host club in Dontonbori.”
“A host? What was his name? Kenichi? Kenichi Inoue?”
His eyes narrowed tightly. “Another character?”
“Yes. His father died, and he went home to collect things. I didn’t have the name of the town where he lived, because he was based in Dontonbori. He never mentioned the dam project. In his second scene, a stranger showed up at his father’s house as he was collecting things; it was ve
ry creepy.”
She turned in a circle, taking in the house. Now that she considered it, the house felt familiar. She had written the scene shortly after Simon’s abrupt end. Had the stranger been Simon or someone else? She hadn’t connected the stranger with Simon—but then Simon had been simply “he.” She hadn’t even been able to nail down Leo’s name; all references to Leo had been “his son” until what she wrote this morning.
“I need to reread Kenichi’s sections again.”
Nikki sat on the back porch of the empty farmhouse with her laptop. Looking back, Kenichi’s first scene should have been a huge clue-by-four to the head that what she was writing was real. Like all her characters, he’d sprung fully formed onto the page, already in motion. He was, however, the first where she could investigate the reality of what she had written.
Her knowledge of host clubs had been limited to manga. In them, the “club” was a sugary sweet version that high school boys put together, serving nothing stronger than instant coffee. She had been dismayed when Kenichi’s story spilled out onto the page, detailing a harsh reality of manipulating women with champagne, flattery, and lies. The men would do anything, say anything, in order to get their female customers to spend every penny they had on overpriced alcohol.
Since Kenichi lived in the glitzy Dontonbori district of Osaka, one short subway trip confirmed that everything she had written was true. The nightclubs were as shallow, exploitive, and gritty as she had depicted them. She had gone home worried about her sanity. Of course, even if she’d found the real Kenichi, she wouldn’t have believed he was her character.
She could barely believe that this was his family’s house. The one he had left when he was eighteen. The one he had never thought he would go back to. But after he learned that his father died, he’d returned. And while he was here, he had met someone . . .
It was no longer the house that Kenichi had grown up in. The old man had wiped out every trace of that house. Kenichi’s bedroom had been stripped of everything he had left behind and filled with medical supplies. His mother’s only presence in his childhood had been her compulsiveness neatness. Now grime coated every surface, blotting out all trace of his mother. There was railing installed that someone who wasn’t the raging giant of his father needed to keep from falling.
What was he doing here? Everything Kenichi really wanted he took when he fled when he was eighteen. He drifted through the house, looking for anything he might want to keep. There wasn’t much; his standards were higher now. His shirt was Armani, his jeans were Gucci, and his shoes were Prada. He filled a box with grimy items and then abandoned it.
Really, there was nothing he wanted. Let the water take it all. Ironic that with all the arguments over the question of whether or not he would take over the family farm, when the time finally came, it was a moot point.
He stopped at the back porch, its sliding door standing open. He frowned as he took out a cigarette and lit it with his brushed gold lighter. The front door had been standing open when he arrived. Who had left the house open? There were fresh footprints in the mud of the garden path, heading toward their terraced fields.
As he tucked away his lighter, he spotted someone at the far edge of the garden, walking slowly toward the house. Dusk was setting in and mist was rising early from the river.
There was something familiar about the person, but as they drew nearer, Kenichi grew sure that he didn’t know this tall stranger. He could sense his rage. Kenichi was so used to his father’s fury that he could nearly see it in others, shimmering like heat off the person. For a moment, he was five and wanted to flee this angry giant. He had learned, though, that the house had no safe refuge. Nor was he a five-year-old farm boy. He was twenty-five now, a full-grown man. He lived in the gritty big city in an apartment that looked down on glittering lights. He answered to men with guns, tattoos, and missing tips of their fingers.
He pulled on false indifference, and breathed smoke like a dragon, as the stranger closed on him.
“Kenichi,” the stranger greeted him. “You’re all grown up.”
“Do I know you?” He peered through the gathering dusk, fairly sure he didn’t know this person. But if he didn’t, how did this stranger know his name?
The stranger stepped up onto the porch beside him. “My, my, you’ve stayed a pretty boy. Not like your father, all puffed up with anger like a toad.” The man reached out and cupped Kenichi’s face with a fever-hot hand. “You have your grandmother’s eyes.”
“What do you want?” Kenichi tried to pull free without seeming to struggle. His heart was banging in his chest. There was no mistaking the towering rage within this stranger. It was safest not to fight, but to wait, and then run.
“I want to travel. I want to see all that I’ve heard rumors of. The cities that gleam like jewels at night. I want to hear the ocean again—not this damn endless river murmur. I want to drink deep, eat my fill, and then destroy my enemies. And you’re going to help me.”
“Me?”
“Your family has always been good, obedient, and useful. No need for that to change.”
Nikki realized that Leo was leaning against her back, reading over her shoulder.
“This stranger,” Leo rumbled. “He does not sound like my father. He had never been to this area before. He would not have known this family.”
“This is the first scene I wrote after your father’s last scene. I didn’t link the two because Kenichi only makes the one veiled reference to the dam. Originally Simon didn’t mention this house at all. I tweaked his section this afternoon.” She showed him the writing on the notebook. “He came to the house.”
Leo frowned as he realized the implication. “This stranger might have done something to my father while he was here.”
“Yes. Maybe. Wait.” Nikki pulled up Simon’s section and started to add in the tweaks. She started by typing up the short paragraphs and then shifted the block of text around. Simon noticed the house halfway through his scene. In the last paragraph, though, he was standing on a hill, looking at the construction in the distance.
“He took the garden path up to the fields.” Nikki pointed at the narrow beaten path. “I think it was his footprints that Kenichi saw leading away from the house.”
“I haven’t been up there.” Leo stood, suddenly a thunderstorm embodied. “I did not think Simon would walk so far from the dam.”
“He did.” Nikki shut down her laptop and put it carefully into her backpack. “I need to see what’s up there to figure out why his scene just ended in midsentence.”
The path led up the side of the steep hillside, with worn stepping stones as testament to how long the Inoue family had farmed the terraced land. The fields hadn’t been tended for a long time, growing thick with tangled weeds.
Halfway up the hill, there was a path leading off to the left.
“You can’t see the construction from here. He might have gone down this path. He would be able to see the dam from around the hill.”
Leo blocked her from stepping forward. “Let me go first.”
She hadn’t considered that there was any danger lingering on the hillside. She nodded to him. He took out his pistol and slipped down the path, silent as a cat. She removed the fabric case from her shoulder and took out Atsumori’s katana. She felt the heat of the kami’s presence. Gripping tightly to the wooden sheath with her left hand, right hand on the hilt, she followed Leo.
The path led through the brooding woods. The silence grew thick and oppressive.
Deep in the woods, far from the fields, lay an ancient landslide. The side of the hill had given way, creating a tumble of rocks and dirt. The path ended abruptly at the edge of the rubble.
Suddenly Atsumori was beside her. “Careful. This place is holy, but it feels—it feels wrong.”
She was shivering from the creepiness of the place. A shaft of sunlight shone on one large boulder sitting apart from the rest of the landslide. There was a strand of rope around it and p
aper streamers hung from the rough cord to signify that it was a shintai.
“There’s a god here? In the rock?”
Atsumori stared hard at the boulder, his head slightly tilted to one side. “No, but there was a god here for some time. Her presence is like a perfume after the geisha has passed.”
From the clearing, the dam construction was fully visible. The bulldozers crawled like bugs in the dirt. This was where Simon’s scene had ended.
“Leo, was Simon like sand?”
“Sand?” Leo echoed, his eyebrows rising.
“Atsumori can take me over because I’m like sand. Gregory Wintson was like granite. That’s why the yakuza used him to steal the katana; Atsumori couldn’t stop him.”
Leo’s face filled with dismay. “A kami possessed my father?”
“I think so. It brought him up here and walked down to the farmhouse where Kenichi was. The stranger that walked into the house was Simon, but it wasn’t him—it was the kami. That’s why the stranger knew Kenichi—his family had been tending this shrine.”
Leo hunched, eyes to the ground, as if fighting with inner pain.
“He’s alive.” Nikki offered what comfort she could. “The god is keeping him prisoner because—because the god needs him. This valley is about to be flooded. The god has abandoned its shintai. It can’t stay in Simon, because that would kill him, but it doesn’t have its shintai to return to.”
“The kami has to have something else,” Atsumori said. “In the heavens, we can exist as pure spirits. Here on Earth, we cannot exist as ourselves without something to hold us.”
“That’s why it stole your sword—to have something else.”
Atsumori’s face filled with anger, followed by fear. “To take the sword away from me, it would have to be more powerful than me.”
“Where would it take my father?” Leo asked.
