Hosuke reached up to grab a handful of the thin, upper atmosphere of Geshin’s surface consciousness; he pulled some in and began to fashion a Psyche Suit. The Psyche Suit—a layer of protection for a Diver’s body, similar to how a deep-sea diver’s wetsuit is designed to prevent contact with sea water, different in that it would be built from the very water surrounding it. The Psyche Suit is necessary because the water inside a person’s mind is alive. Dive without one and the sea—Geshin’s mind, in this case—would detect the intrusion immediately. A dive into a person’s mind is like violating the body with a foreign object. Just as the physical act results in pain, so it goes with the mind. Drugs kept Geshin under, but if his mind detected an interloper it would resist nonetheless. And damage in the mind translates to damage in reality.
A flesh-and-blood human can be conditioned, through hypnotic suggestion, to believe a rod pressed against their skin is a smoldering-hot iron. They might perceive actual heat; in extreme cases their skin might even blister. It is the same inside another’s consciousness; if an amateur Diver takes a bullet within the mind he can die in reality, however illusory the weapon.
Hosuke was surrounded by a cellophane darkness, accompanied only by the giant, floating assortment of viscera. It felt like he was suspended in the stratosphere of an intestinal planet, gazing down at the thing suspended in a void of space.
He could see that the structure was an abstract representation, only intestine-like, missing details such as the stomach and bowels. And it was all the more repulsive for it. Each time he attempted to gain visual purchase on it the surface would blur, becoming even more vague than its default, nebulous form. It was like trying to locate a bleak star in the night sky; impossible if attempted directly, better seen through periphery vision.
Hosuke had attuned himself to perceive Geshin’s mind through visual parameters, but it was just as easy to flip the coin and listen to the signals, as would a blind Diver traversing the mindscape. A series of lights flickered around him, each announced by an audible pop. Some were gone in a moment, others lingered and morphed, taking a variety of shapes. It was the breathing of the mind, a signal that Geshin’s consciousness was alive and functional.
Consciousness brings with it a constant background noise, empty chatter that originates from the deeper areas of the mind. Within the surface consciousness, such chatter is represented by specks of light. The lights change, sometimes collapsing into pint-sized motes of color, other times expanding into shapes; a book, a leaf, a female body. The reaction is dictated by the segment of the mind into which the light emerges; in the latter case, the area of the mind is one previously organized as an image, one that still contains remnants thereof—of a book, a leaf, a woman. Distinct images are only formed, however, in a tiny minority of cases. The vast majority of lights downshift into something vague and indistinct. Occasionally they clump together, or join with another object.
Hosuke had just seen the foggy outline of a woman with a bulbous rear end. Her face had lacked eyes and a nose, and her mouth had been shaped like a vagina. Her legs had parted to reveal scripture between her thighs. A single title stood out in an exaggerated font—THE RISHU SUTRA—blood gushing river-like from between the seams of the text. The woman had folded into herself and dissolved into the atmosphere. The entire spectacle had lasted but a moment. Less than a second in real time. The woman had been no larger than the tip of his little finger. Yet the characters over her groin—THE RISHU SUTRA—had been, paradoxically, many times that size. Now the space around him bristled with similar images, each coming and going in the blink of an eye, flashing into existence only to hover briefly before transforming and, just as suddenly, evanescing away to nothing.
I need to get deeper into Geshin’s mind. But Hosuke knew there was no point in pushing blindly forwards. He had to find something to lead him, an object to define his purpose.
A memory, then. Years old, from the time of Geshin’s collapse outside Kukai’s burial chamber. Hosuke’s mission was to find out exactly what had happened. But how to track one down? Hosuke had an idea—he could use Geshin’s terror of Kukai’s sokushinbutsu. He would find it and pick up the trail from there. Geshin was terrified of Kukai, the intensity of the emotion had cost him his sanity.
When Hosuke had asked him about the details from that night, Geshin had become increasingly agitated. Eventually, he had taken refuge in his madness. Now, before they had put him under, Hosuke had grilled him again, purposefully stoking the man’s fears with endless questions about Kukai. Hosuke’s plan was to inflame the element of Geshin’s mind that was built around Kukai; to force it to swell unnaturally, to make it easier to locate.
The downside of the approach was the concurrent increase in danger. Geshin would take measures to protect his mind, and there was no way to predict how the fear itself would manifest. There was also the possibility that those black maggots had wormed their way into his mind, if he had suffered an attack like that of Tamura.
Hosuke focused on the monstrous cluster of entrails.
There!
Something flickered briefly. The surface began to billow upwards, changing shape like an amoeba.
“Unhh…”
Hosuke had been caught off guard. The entrails began to reconfigure themselves into the parched form of Kukai’s sokushinbutsu. Kukai’s mouth was wide open, revealing dizzyingly sharp teeth inside. A rush of entrails snaked out, muddy as they exited the enormous cavity. They wrapped around Kukai’s body. In a flash, the object reverted to its original shape, it was over.
“Fascinating!” Hosuke muttered.
He felt a burst of excitement. The vaguely-formed lips of his consciousness curled into a grin.
2
Hosuke clung to an enormous ball of entrails, itself a tiny amoeba-like thing attached to the larger, dark assembly. The thing felt like viscera torn from the abdominal cavity of some animal, arranged into tens of thousands of layers and massaged into a single ball. Some was gelatinous, black-red and sticky. More was like scum, greenish in color. Then there were coils of pink meat, speckled black. Also grub-like things, cerise-red and shapeless. Each pulsed with a constant throbbing, gradually—sometimes explosively—changing from shape to shape. Each of these coiled, intestine-like things was covered with innumerable lacerations, all pink and clean. The lacerations resembled fresh wounds, levied by a sharp blade; or dank, splayed-open genitalia. Focusing, it was possible to see that each slit was made from a series of smaller intestinal coils, each with its own set of wounds; zooming in on these in turn revealed them to be made of even tinier coils of intestines. The effect continued ad infinitum, regardless of how far Hosuke extended his mental zoom.
Dangerous.
To overdo this in another person’s mind could damage a Diver’s senses, cripple their sense of scale. The Diver would risk getting lost inside, even becoming the labyrinth as the pattern takes hold. Either way, continuing to zoom here was meaningless—once a pattern repeats three or four times it was always best to give up and move on.
Hosuke began to gather himself into human form. He felt his formless shape condense, become a body. He noted that the viscera were lined with a sticky, glossy liquid. He scooped up some of the gunk and used it to buttress his Psyche Suit. It was important to make constant changes to the Psyche Suit, to add new materials from local depths, harmonizing the Suit with its surroundings. Doing so made it easier to keep in sync with the subject’s mind—the last thing a Diver wanted was for their naked mind to become exposed to another. If such a thing happened, the subject would feel pain like a spontaneous tumor; the pain would then compel the host’s mind to rid itself of the alien matter. By covering his body with elements of the host mind, Hosuke was able to bring the two into a form of unity.
In his new, human guise, Hosuke began to ease himself through the gaps in the viscera. There was only minimum friction, even as walls of meat closed in around him. It was like becoming submerged in a thick, tar-like substance. He fou
nd himself being pulled at, caught in a sudden wave of contracting flesh. He felt his body stretch, first to each side, then violently up and down. Each time one of the waves struck him his arms, legs and torso would stretch to many times their normal length, twisting and distorting in the onslaught of opposing currents. It was like he had become the plaything of a dozen slathering tongues. He offered no resistance. If he tried to blunder free, Geshin would notice.
Instead, he sought out the larger waves from amidst the chaos, positioning himself to ride them. Each time he succeeded he felt a concurrent increase in mental pressure. He was being pulled deeper into Geshin’s mind. The tumultuous waves were, he knew, born from emotions clashing together—anger, unease and fear, all the disparate elements of Geshin’s madness interacting as they sparked across his mind like rivers coming together, merging with the sea to throw up a web of complex undercurrents.
Yet the complexity and violence of the tempest was nothing compared to what it might have been had Geshin been conscious. Hosuke was in an area of Geshin’s mind that would be subject to constant stimulation from the outside. A wave would be generated each time Geshin saw, heard or felt something. That the swell he was inside now had a rhythm to it at all—albeit one that was highly complex—was due to the fact that Geshin was doped on medication.
Hosuke let himself slide with the flow; after a while it felt like the vast number of waves were gradually coming together to merge with another, greater swell. It felt like coming across a powerful ocean current, one that ran along the floor of Geshin’s surface consciousness.
He had become surrounded by schools of living, floating organisms. The majority were cloudy and indistinct, and even those with shapes that were distinct failed to hold them for more than a few seconds, soon diverging so wildly so as to be completely unrelated to their original form.
Now and then he caught glimpses of Kukai.
He saw a drifting, jellyfish-like thing that resembled a woman’s breast; Kukai’s sokushinbutsu was perched above it, upside down and naked. The thing’s nipple began to harden and swell, thickening until it had become larger than the object itself. Kukai’s form remained constant above the object. The breast-like object began to lose form, becoming instead a disfigured, female head with its eyes, nose and mouth all out of place. Hosuke watched as the mouth opened wide and began to laugh. Then it was gone, leaving only a ghost-image of Kukai that hung, suspended briefly in the air before it too disappeared.
He saw occasional herds of rectum-like shapes. The rectal forms lacked any surrounding meat, instead they were evident only as buttock-less lips that drifted through the air, squeezing out a reddish ooze as they pulsed open then closed again. With each contraction a version of Kukai’s head would emerge from inside, covered in excrement. Each time, its reddened mouth would stretch open to reveal pointed white teeth that chattered noisily together—it resembled the open jaws of a monster. It was grotesque, watching Kukai’s brown, parchment-like head emerge like that from a floating asshole; the only aspect that resembled anything living was the color inside its mouth—bloody-red. Hosuke could almost hear the rasping hiss of Kukai’s breathing.
There were other renditions of Kukai too; one was in the process of devouring sutras. Each time the Kukai consumed a text its dried skin would take on moisture, become human again, then it would swell and loosen before finally exploding in a thick, red mess.
Hosuke spent some time examining each of them. The sheer volume of images being displayed was a direct result of his punishing Geshin before they had put him under. His relentless focus on Kukai had forced Geshin’s mind to become obsessed with the image in the moments they sent him to sleep. It was only natural for him to be conjuring this endless procession of facsimiles.
Hosuke noticed the presence of esoteric, ritualistic tools coming in tandem with the images of Kukai. Images of female genitalia. And he had noticed something else, too. Whenever Kukai appeared it was always alongside something red. Kukai and red. There was a link, he was sure. But what did the pattern mean? Hosuke considered the question. “O-Daishi, he attacked me…” Geshin had repeated the words in terror. What had happened that night at the burial chamber enshrining Kukai’s sokushinbutsu? Kukai and red. If the pattern was related, it should lead to Geshin’s true memory of that night. All Hosuke had to do was follow it.
Another rectum-like thing percolated into being before him; he extended his consciousness towards it, a hand that plucked the object from the air. He gathered some of the red soup oozing from the rim and ate it. The act was a metaphor, symbolizing his permission for the fluid to breach the barrier of his Psyche Suit—giving it a direct line to his consciousness. He wove a separate Psyche Suit around the rectal thing itself and brought it into contact with his own suit. Finally, he created a small room between them, similar to an airlock in a space shuttle. Something to ease the object into his mind. To be able to accomplish this without conscious effort while inhabiting another mind is the sign of a truly skilled Diver. Psyche Divers are technicians, just as they are the physical laborers of the mind.
The object’s flavor was impossibly foul. It was horror, potent enough to freeze the soul. A deplorable, unbearable scream. Skin being flayed from bone. Anguish. The effect was diluted thousands of times over, but the truth was there nonetheless—the red liquid was the sap of Geshin’s terror from that night, squeezed from his mind in the exact moment of his encounter with whatever it was he saw. Why, otherwise, would it show with Kukai’s sokushinbutsu? It was the same for the each other instance of the color. The red had appended itself to Geshin’s slumbering memories of Kukai as they bubbled up from the depths of his mind, rising to surface consciousness. Hosuke had seen similar things happen before—it meant there would be a core located somewhere inside Geshin’s head.
Hosuke drew an image in his mind. Red tar made of terror and screams, enveloping a spherical object—the source of Geshin’s fear. The man’s terror was holding the object together, but it was powerful and parts of it escaped, gushing to the surface in magma-like jets that ran through his mind. The escaped core-fragments would take on the form of Kukai and leave radial passageways in their wake, entrances that would appear closed but might re-open in response to stimuli. Stimuli similar to Hosuke’s relentless questioning about Kukai. Something red, then. A sea urchin-like thing with spines branching in every direction, lurching four-dimensionally through the man’s mind to form a path. The image was complete. It felt pretty close.
He had to locate one of the entrances. An exit point that had re-opened; for Hosuke it would be an entrance leading to the core. It would most likely be colored red, although it was not true that everything red in Geshin’s surface consciousness would be related to Kukai.
The quickest way to find one of the entrances would be to sift through each instance of red he encountered.
3
It took almost an hour of real time for Hosuke to pin down an entrance. The doorway was red, a pursed aperture that bore no resemblance to anything human or animal. The mouth-like shape pulsed, each time coughing up a red, bloody liquid. Something else was emerging, something black and bent like excrement, punctuated with strings of ruby blood. Fully extended, the dark form began to change. It transformed into the familiar, upright-sitting form of Kukai’s sokushinbutsu.
It was the entrance he had been looking for, he was sure.
He gathered a few fragments of consciousness from some nearby flotsam and padded them onto his Psyche Suit, forming another layer of protection. Then he edged forwards, moving head first into the aperture. He encountered only slight resistance. He pushed harder and the friction disappeared, allowing him to slip through the boundary like a penis through moistened genitalia.
He was surrounded by a viscous sea of red. He understood that it was a four-dimensional vein, but it felt just like being suspended in sea water. There were two distinct flows; one pushing towards the outside, the other surging inwards. Hosuke positioned himself inside the latte
r. The level of mental pressure skyrocketed.
The flow pushing inwards represented Geshin’s efforts to lock the terror down; at the same time the object being suppressed was fighting back. The twin forces clashed inside the red, tar-like substance. It was clear that each of the forces originated within Geshin himself—one was his insanity, the other his attempt to keep it at bay. And Geshin would lose his mind the moment the status-quo collapsed.
Hosuke felt himself slow, then finally come to a stop. He had reached the eye of the storm.
He looked around, moving slowly now as the pressure was incredible, like a dense object stretched to breaking point. He saw Kukai. The monk’s body was afloat in the red tar, looking just as Hosuke had seen him in the basement—stark naked, stomach sunken, limbs worn shockingly thin. The insides of his empty eye sockets had distended outwards like bulging eyeballs. The brown, aged skin was dried-up and withered.
Now we’re getting somewhere, Hosuke thought. This was the core of Geshin’s terror. His memories of that night, locked up in this deep place within his mind. Hosuke had never seen anything quite like it, a mental image of terror that so closely resembled its counterpart in reality. Geshin’s teachings at Mt. Koya must have severely amplified his shock.
The more explosive the emotion, the more accurate the image carved into the mind. Hosuke circled the object, first to the right, then the left. The image he saw was always the same. Kukai watched him directly, however he positioned himself. He maneuvered below, then above the object, but it was the same. Kukai’s eyes were fixed on him regardless.
What happens now? Hosuke mused. Perhaps the best plan was to try eating a part of Kukai. Hosuke believed that the truth of whatever happened inside the burial chamber was in there, locked up in the Kukai before him. He reminded himself that memories are derived of time, that what he was perceiving visually was in fact a temporal entity, a slice of time scissored out from the burial chamber. One that happened to be shaped like Kukai, but only because of the particular circumstances of the memory.
The Psyche Diver Trilogy: Demon Hunters Page 40
