At first the ground was uneven. He’d proceeded cautiously, but soon he stopped paying attention. As long as he was with his fireflies, he felt no fear. They were so kind; sometimes they almost flew against his cheek. Yes, yes, come with us. Come.
Suddenly they spiraled high into the air. He was about to bound after them, but a pair of strong arms bear-hugged him from behind.
“Watch out, son!”
It was the owner of the inn. He was wearing a hard hat with a light like a miner’s helmet. His face was stern. “Look down.”
Kotaro’s eyes followed the beam of light. He’d been climbing a slope along the creek. At the top was a sheer drop into darkness. He was about to walk right over it.
“I was chasing fireflies,” he said sheepishly.
“Those weren’t fireflies. Real fireflies don’t play tricks. The mountains are full of things that aren’t what they seem.”
Like the darkness.
Why had that memory come back to him just now? The fairy lights of the skulls rose and fell slowly ahead of him.
“Stop!”
A voice rang out, clear and strong. Kotaro stopped. His reverie popped like a soap bubble. Once more he felt the weight of his huge body.
“Kotaro Mishima, go no farther!”
Who was it? A man’s voice. It was familiar. Someone had followed him along this road in the dark. The voice came from behind.
“This is your last warning. You must not go any farther.”
Galla spoke. She sounded surprisingly close. “Leave us. The defiled have no place here.”
The voice came back. “Guardian of the Tower! I call to the weak, to one whose place is in the Circle.”
“Then you miss your mark. The weak do not walk this road. Only those with the strength of a Guardian can walk this road.” Then, to Kotaro: “Come.”
He stood indecisively, chewing his lip. He felt his fangs. It’s U-ri’s master, Ash. The man in black with two swords. The wolf.
“You remember,” the voice said.
The road ahead and back was pure night. There was only the voice, calling him.
“That means you’re still human,” it said with a tone of relief. “Kotaro Mishima, I ask you to remember yourself.”
He wavered.
“Remember U-ri.”
U-ri. A mysterious girl, full of strange stories. Black hair. Petite. Beautiful.
“She told you about her brother. You remember, don’t you? You’re traveling the same path. That’s why she’s worried about you.”
That story. I thought maybe it was phony. Now I know it was real.
“Is she there?” He finally found his voice.
“She’s not strong enough to come this far. Even with my skills and knowledge, I can only go as far as the foothills of darkness. A wolf is no match for a Guardian of the Tower.
“That’s why I can go no farther. Kotaro Mishima, remember! You are a person, raised by a mother and father, with friends and people who love you. A person, with a person’s life.”
He stood rooted, thinking. But something clearer and more vivid kept intruding, filling his mind: the sensation of biting through Glitter Kitty’s neck.
I’m not a person anymore.
“I’m a killer, Ash.” He turned to face down the road. “I’m a monster now.”
Yes. I can feel my fangs in my mouth when I talk.
“What you see and feel,” the voice answered, “may not be real. You’ve been bewitched by the greatest power in the Circle, so powerful and primal that it’s beyond good and evil.”
Bewitched. Someone else had said that to him once.
We were bewitched by a demon.
Kotaro swayed and almost lost his footing. His talons clacked on the stone. This body is a pain in the butt.
He lifted his hands in front of his face. He couldn’t see a thing. All he knew was the weight of them. The mass of a giant body. A frightful smell, the stench of a beast. The reek of blood. His fur was steeped in it.
How can he say I’m still human?
Kenji had become a killer as well. Now Kotaro would take the same leap. He had a debt to pay. He would pay it without regret.
“I can’t go back.” He turned toward Galla. The skulls beckoned. “Say goodbye to U-ri. Thank her for worrying about me,” he called over his shoulder.
“There’s still time. Come back and tell her yourself.”
“I’m not going back, Ash. I’ve made my choice.”
“Kotaro Mishima!” The voice was breaking up, like someone on a radio with a fading signal. “Ko-taa-rooh Mi-shi-maa!”
The voice faded and disappeared. Absolute silence descended, a silence like gravity itself. As Kotaro closed his eyes and gave himself over to it, he felt a profound sense of peace.
He walked on, led by the skulls.
The road climbed slowly upward, became steeper. His talons scraped the stone. The path curved, became a clockwise spiral. He knew its cold, smooth surface now.
It dawned on him. He and Galla were ascending a gigantic spiral gallery. And he could see, but not because his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. They had merged with it.
To his left: a great void, a vast expanse of nothingness, of pure emptiness. Along the right margin of the gallery: a file of columns, each one immeasurably larger than the largest skyscraper. Kotaro looked up at them—it was like something seen through the multifaceted eyes of a moth.
He stood transfixed. His metamorphosis into a monster was complete, but he still had a heart capable of wonder.
This world was surpassingly beautiful, beyond the limits of mind. This was not scale that was meant to impress. It was not even scale that rendered an onlooker small and insignificant. It was scale beyond any human standard of reference.
Nor could the columns have been fashioned by human beings. At first they seemed to soar straight upward, but on closer inspection he saw that their surfaces followed complex, gently undulating curves. His eyes, now part of the darkness, saw how they glowed with the oily sheen of obsidian and the gleaming luster of marble.
The columns marked the edge of the gallery and the boundary with the world beyond. Galla and Kotaro were alone on the sloping road, but beyond the columns, the darkness was charged with a multitude of presences—the fluttering of wings, the murmuring of voices. A sharp shout of triumph. A cry of astonishment. There were no words, at least none that Kotaro could make out.
The voices were not human.
The chirping of birds, the snarling of beasts, the moaning of the wind, waves breaking on a distant shore. The voices of living creatures and of nature itself. Each voice seemed to contain both without being either.
Something scrutinized him from the darkness. It drew back, then the tip of a wing slashed the space just ahead. For a moment he saw a creature much like Galla in her true form.
That means, in the darkness beyond—
“These pillars support the Tower of Inception.”
Galla spoke without turning her head. She kept walking at the same measured pace. “Beyond them lies my region.”
The column alongside them erupted with a blinding light. As the light flashed from the base and hurtled upward, an enigmatic pattern seemed to levitate from its surface before sinking into darkness.
The light illuminated the column, yet nothing around it. The darkness beyond the pillars was impenetrable and vast, extending to untold distances. Doubt began to gnaw at Kotaro.
An abyss of endless night … ?
A region so sacred, so noble, that even Ash and U-ri were barred from entering it. Yet it was a world of darkness. This was not the hazy image he had been imagining. The birthplace of the souls of words must surely be pure and bright, something like heaven.
“Darkness is the reason for our existence. We are darkness, so that there may be
light. At the head of this gallery stands the Tower of Inception, one of the two regions that preside over the Circle. This place is its shadow.”
Something sprinted across his path, treading on his foot as it sped away. Kotaro was astonished. Where had it come from? Where had it vanished to? And where had he felt that touch before?
That horrible foot pad. The cursed breath. It was a hound of Tindalos.
“Why are these monsters here?” he called to Galla.
“They come and go freely.”
“Why do you let them run free just outside your region?”
“Fear not. They will not attack you. Not as you are.”
“I guess you’re right. I’m a monster too.”
And he would spend eternity here, living alongside them. Would “living” even be the right word? Simply existing, perhaps?
What kind of existence did Galla have here? What about the other inhabitants of this region sealed in darkness? Was there some form of society? He turned the question over in his mind before he discarded it, shaking his head.
It was meaningless. How could entities that were real but did not exist form any sort of society? How could entities that were only real when someone in the Circle acknowledged them as real live as people lived?
But then again …
What about Galla’s relationship with her son, Auzo? The one she had called her second self? Was it a relationship between mother and child, like human beings had? Like that between Kotaro and Asako? Or Takako and Mika? Did they share the same flesh and blood? The same sorrows and joys?
At the thought of Mika, the monster felt a sharp twinge in his chest. He gnashed his teeth and called up that memory—the sensation of Glitter Kitty’s head nestled in his jaws, and how easily her spine had snapped. The gush of hot blood and her scream the instant before he bit her in two.
His heart was in an uproar. His thoughts came in snatches. Galla and her precious offspring. Galla, who gathered raw craving to rescue her child who was banished to the Nameless Land. Her precious child.
Even in a world of darkness, of countless monsters flapping their wings, there could be ties of love, of family—
Could there? If nonexistent beings couldn’t form a society, could they love one another?
A world of darkness beyond the pillars. Galla’s world. It was nothing like the image he had been nurturing in his heart.
Go back!
A voice that was not a voice. His heart beat wildly.
And there was light, everywhere.
A bell.
Kotaro stepped from the solid darkness of the gallery into a world of light.
In the center of this world: a single tower.
A row of pristine white pillars circled its base. It rose into the sky, topped by a dome of pure crystal. Beneath the dome, a single titanic bell, majestic, beautiful, elegantly curved. The tower was white silver dusted with gold. No sculpture or inscription broke its water-smooth surface. The bell was without embellishment of any kind.
It revolved in a perfect circle. Anyone tarrying beneath that serene rotation would soon have grown intoxicated. The true circle traced by the bell’s orbit was perfect beauty, perfect virtue, perfect truth.
The bell was silent.
Instead of sound, this sublime entity spawned words transparent to the eye and ear. It moved in its orbit without end.
“Is this really the birthplace of words?” Kotaro couldn’t help asking. Galla didn’t answer, nor did she slow her pace.
“Who’s making it move?” He saw no sign of life.
The tower rose into a sky that seemed enormous and far away. Transparent golden shafts of light dropped from gaps in high, milky clouds. No birds cut through the shafts of light.
A world without life, without even the whisper of the wind. The stillness of absolute purity. As he followed Galla, entranced by the bell, Kotaro realized that it produced something else.
Darkness. The shadow cast by the bell as it moved cut through the light and fell at his feet, tracing out its perfect circle.
The shadow was inverted into light in the world below, enclosed by the columns that supported the Tower. The shadow cast by the bell gave life to Galla’s world.
We are darkness, so there may be light.
Galla was a guardian of that darkness. Since their first encounter, Kotaro had conversed with her, exchanged opinions with her, and felt in his own way that he understood her. He’d spent a lot of time imagining what her world, the tower she guarded, must be like. The hazy image he’d formed was a child’s dream. Someone else in the same situation, of the same generation, from the same culture, would probably have imagined something very similar: A colonnaded temple out of ancient Greece, but immeasurably larger, with the holy of holies, a stately bell tower, served by priests and acolytes. And to defend it, valiant, awe-inspiring warriors with multifarious weapons and armor.
But there was nothing like that here. This was something unimaginable, nothing someone might picture spontaneously. There was no link between the beauty of this place and the human imagination.
Stories.
There was no trace of narrative in this place.
That was why everything was so pure and undefiled, so untouched by any description. It simply was.
The words born here were ultimate emptiness, unsullied by meaning or narrative. Only people could bring meaning and life to the words that poured forth from the bell. That was why this region had to remain undefiled. That was why absolute silence reigned: where there is sound, the beginning of meaning follows.
This place was emptiness itself, the emptiness of undifferentiated potential. Yet how full of sound and life and overwhelming spectacle was the darkness beneath the tower! Even the Hounds of Tindalos possessed name and form there.
Confusion and bewilderment called faintly to Kotaro the monster.
People framed the meaning of life with words. Words allowed them to build societies. Could absolute emptiness spawn words?
No. It wouldn’t do to question reality. He should be asking himself a question instead. Could he, Kotaro Mishima, believe that the words people used were born from pure emptiness?
It doesn’t matter now.
He shook his head resolutely. Once, twice. He closed his eyes and clapped a hand to his forehead.
Accept it or not—it’s not a choice I can make.
He was a monster, here in this place, because of the decisions he’d made. Now all he could do was accept it.
He opened his eyes, looked down at his feet. He was walking on air. There was no sensation of stone, or talons clicking on something hard.
He hesitated, peered around. He was hemmed in by white, faintly shining clouds. He hadn’t noticed the tower go out of sight. They must be high above it now.
He saw Galla’s black wings and streaming hair as she made her way upward amid the clouds. To his right and left and rear were only clouds and more clouds. They shone fresh, softly white, like untracked snow before dawn. They did not exist. They were eternally pure.
There was no road back, even if he’d wanted to return.
“You would only lose your way.” Galla read his thoughts and barred the way home with her answer. “There is no road back, not to your region or anywhere else. We can go only forward, toward the Nameless Land. The Skulls of Origin guide us through this pure emptiness. And once one possesses the skulls, one must go to the Nameless Land.”
Galla called the emptiness pure. Kotaro the monster blinked with surprise. “You think this place is emptiness itself?”
“I do not think. I know. We are ascending the Stairs of Emptiness. They link the Tower of Inception with the Nameless Land. Without the Skulls of Origin, even a guardian of the Tower would lose her way here. That would mean wandering in the void for eternity.”
Kotaro was not so much wa
lking as being pulled along. Galla’s presence was the only thing keeping him from being swallowed up by this shimmering region of pure contingency.
He no longer had a choice, but he was not afraid. He did not call out in fear or try to run away. He no longer had the right to human reactions. Yet still there was an echo, a faint reverberation of the person he once had been. No, Kotaro Mishima would not have run away either.
He still knew who he was. He remembered. Ash had only been trying to help him, but Ash had missed the point. Kotaro was drifting like a buoy on an infinite ocean, drawn on by Galla’s dark power, but only because that was what he wanted.
There was soft earth beneath his feet. The pure white emptiness drew back quickly on either side. A new world opened before him.
Terra firma and a breeze, heavy with the scent of dry grass, caressing his cheek. He reflexively lifted a hand and waved it toward his nostrils, hungry for the smell of it, the fragrant smell of dry spring grass and the moist air of an autumn night.
He was in grassland.
There was no moon, but he knew that the darkness here was the friendly darkness of night.
Countless lamps flickered and wavered far across the plain. People must be living there. A town?
The grassland spread from horizon to horizon. Here and there the ground rose and fell gently, but there was nothing to block the eye. The entire vista could be taken in with one sweeping glance. It was like having the sight of a god.
“What is this place?”
Galla planted her feet beside him, rose to her full height, and lifted her chin in triumph.
“This is the Nameless Land.”
Galla stood motionless, gazing at the lights. Kotaro stood beside her, shoulder to shoulder. Where once he had gazed up at her with fear and trepidation, Kotaro the monster was now as tall as she was.
The source of all stories, where they were born and to which they must return. The Nameless Land.
But for Kotaro, the gently rolling plain, the sky, the scent of the wind—everything was intimate and familiar. He knew the names of the things he saw. He could say their names. This was not a nameless place. After his journey past the darkness beyond the pillars, past that silent, shining bell and its massive shadow, through the faintly glowing emptiness between the regions, this place seemed to his eyes, to his ears and all his other senses, natural and welcoming. Even the touch of the night was gentle.
The Gate of Sorrows Page 56
