Dad drove clutching the steering wheel like a lifeline, downshifting constantly to make the van grip the road that was slicked by all the junk the fire trucks were using to douse the flames in the streets. His face was as impenetrable as a fortress, like he was trying to keep everything from spilling in. Or out.
I felt the gnawing need for a cigarette. Biting a dirty fingernail, I turned to the window. The city had sprouted small, random patches of flame that licked upward like monstrous tongues. A derelict car burned. People drifted together to watch a restaurant being doused by the fire brigade. Squads of roving police chased looters away from abandoned shops. A dog howled in response to the never-ending scream of sirens. Great stuff to rattle your nerves. None of the fires seemed to be spreading, but it had taken the firefighters all night to get them under control.
Traffic was detoured around the disaster zone, which stretched twelve city blocks. Traffic being what it was in this town, that meant it was going to be some time before we got home. “Are you sure you’re all right?” Dad asked for the zillionth time. He looked me up and down. “I could take you to St. Mary’s, if you want.”
“The drug rehab center?”
“No, they’ve converted it into a regular hospital, in case beds are needed.”
I thought about that. Not that I needed a hospital, but the implication of needing emergency space made me feel queasy. “I’m all right. Really. I’m tougher than a few bruises.”
“I know you are. Mr. Serizawa said you were fine, said he knew it. But I was scared half to death.”
“You need to listen to Mr. Serizawa. He’s always right.”
Dad looked at me like he couldn’t believe I was on Mr. Serizawa’s side for a change. He shook his head in wonder. “Why in hell were you there?”
“I…went to see a band at the club.”
“Well, why didn’t you run when you saw that thing appear?”
I thought about trying to explain about the flaming sword, and the monster I had apparently called from hell, but I had a feeling none of this was likely to float with my dad. At best, he’d think I was hysterical, at worst, insane. I was leaning toward the insane thing myself at the moment. “I guess I froze up.” There, that sounded logical, normal, didn’t it?
A police car weaved around us, the intense nee-naw of the siren clearing a swath through traffic. I envied it. I wanted—needed—to get home. I never wanted a shower so bad in my life. I could still feel the hot alien slime that stank of sewage and evil running down the front of my shirt as Raiju tore Qilin apart. Asshole monster, I thought bleakly, to ruin my clothes like that, even if they were Goodwill fashions. Even my Harley boots looked like they had been sent through a shredding machine, the leather worn almost all the way through in places.
It was while assessing the damage to my boots that I noticed something near my feet. I picked it up, realizing it was an MLS listing of the kind that you find in waiting rooms everywhere. It was opened to apartment rentals—in Alaska. I got one of my bad feelings which never lied. “Shit…”
“Don’t swear,” Dad said, all humor gone. “And don’t start with me about that, all right?”
“I’m not running again, just so you know.”
Dad downshifted stiffly as traffic picked up. He said, softly, ominously, “And I don’t plan on staying here and watching this city burn down around us. If that thing comes back…” He shivered as he struggled to complete the thought. “I have to think about you. About our safety…”
“I’m not going,” I told him, my voice rising a notch. “I’m not running away again.” Maybe, I thought, I really was crazy, so shell-shocked from San Francisco I wasn’t operating in any kind of reality anymore. Maybe I was a mental health patient back there somewhere, just drawing a world around me in big colorful Crayolas, a world that never existed outside my own imagination. It sure beat the hell out of the alternative—that I had turned into a superhero with a burning sword and a Kami for a pet.
Dad’s jaw tensed, the way mine does when I’m pissed. I could see the tremble in his hands, even in the dark. Fear has a smell, like steel. “Kevin,” he said as reasonably as he could. “Look, we’re all tired. We’ll talk about this in the morning."
The fear, the fatigue, went off inside me like a bomb. I just exploded. I kicked wildly at the dashboard of the van, over and over, like a kid gone berserk. “I’m not running again,” I cried, punctuating each word with a good, solid kick of my burned up Harleys. “I’m sick to death of running. Sick to hell of it. Do you think mom would want us running away again?”
I knew it was unfair for me to pull out the mom trump card like that. Thank God we were pulling into the weedy lot that passed for our driveway. I threw the door of the van open before it had even rumbled to a stop.
“Kevin!” my dad yelled, trying to snatch me by the sleeve.
I was sore, tired, so done for the day I felt like crying. I hadn’t felt this way since the day they buried my mom and half my classmates in San Francisco. I didn’t cry that day, though, and I didn’t cry now. I couldn’t afford to. One of us had to stay strong.
I was out of the van and into the house before my dad could call me back.
7
Despite the utter and complete exhaustion of my body I found it nearly impossible to sleep. Too amped, too afraid something would burst out of the ground and the dark underside of my worse nightmares and stare at me with monstrous red eyes.
I took the CD Walkman my dad had given me for my last birthday and lay on the bed, the earphones over my ears and my favorite CD in the player. I cranked the CD player until I was nearly deafened by “Beethoven’s Symphony Number 5,” trying not to think, trying not to let my imagination run away with me. I have this insane dream of racing bikes with Beethoven playing over the track. He was so deaf near the end of his life that his music had become violent, almost pathological, and he was one of the few classical Romantic composers who can be heard overtop the sound of a roaring engine. But even Ludwig couldn’t drown out the image of the black monster in my head, the screaming, hungry sound it made, or the earth-shattering roar of the creature which had destroyed it.
The creature I had summoned…
I was afraid to sleep, afraid to dream. And in response to that, my brain would not shut down. The music didn’t help. The light I had turned on beside my bed didn’t help. Nothing helped.
Finally, as the digital clock beside my bed clicked over to 2:30 in the morning, I climbed over Groucho snoring on the floor beside my bed, and decided to visit Mr. Serizawa in the apartment downstairs.
There was a light under his door. Like a lot of older people, it seems Mr. Serizawa is up all night. To hear him tell it, he hasn’t slept in over twenty years. I knocked softly on his door. Anything was preferable to lying in the dark, alone with my music and my rambling, monstrous thoughts.
It didn’t take long for him to answer. He pushed the door open, clutching the collar of his jinbei shirt and smiling sadly like he had been expecting me. “Mago,” he said. “You’ve come at last.”
“Yeah,” I said, stuffing my hands in the pockets of my jeans.
“Come in.”
I had never been in his apartment before, but it was really freaky, full of low Japanese futons and ornate tables, shoji screens, and smoking samovars. But by far the most peculiar thing of all were the lions. The walls of his apartment were covered in pictures of lions drawn by an enthusiastic but not very talented child’s hand. It took me a few moments of intense concentration to realize I had drawn them—that they were my lions. They were from my dad’s collection of old drawings from when I was in kindergarten, those that had survived San Francisco and the move. Lions. I used to love lions as a kid—I could never wait to get to the big cat house at the zoo. I had forgotten.
I looked at the pictures everywhere, then went over to a low shelf where a stuffed lion with wings sat—an old toy of mine that my mom had bought me when I was six years old. I thought I had lost it. I st
ared in wonder at everything. Mr. Serizawa’s entire apartment was like a shrine to my obsession with lions. I picked up the stuffed lion and turned to face him. “How did you get this stuff?” I asked, sounding very accusatory.
Mr. Serizawa didn’t seem offended by my tone of voice. “After you and your father moved in, Mago, I saw these things in an open box. I asked your father if I could have them, and he said you would not mind. He doubted you even remembered them.”
Well, if I wasn’t convinced before this that he knew something about Raiju, I was now.
I noticed that he had been watching an old black-and-white sitcom on late-night television. No KTV. No monsters. Maybe, at his advanced age, he no longer feared them. He watched me clutch the lion. He must have read some endless despair in my face, because he immediately shut the television off and said, “Mago. I am so sorry.” His voice was sad and distant and not like Mr. Serizawa’s at all.
I suddenly felt pretty guilty about the child molester thoughts I’d had about him. But I was also angry. “You knew about it,” I cried. I didn’t want to say Raiju’s name aloud—names have power, at least in the Shinto religion. And anyway, I didn’t have to say the name. “How? How did you know about that thing?”
His eyes grew grave and old. “I know because I am a Watcher.”
I didn’t know what that meant, if anything. “So what does that make me?”
“You, Mago, are a Keeper.”
I didn’t know what that meant, either. But, finally, exhausted, overwhelmed, I turned my back on him, held my lion, and started to cry for the first time in years.
8
Mr. Serizawa left me alone, allowing me to pull myself together in private. He fixed tea in one of the samovars, then invited me to join him on the tatami mat before his himorogi, a custom-built Shinto shrine.
The boundaries of the shrine were marked with fronds of green bamboo in vases at both ends, between which was strung a large twisted border rope. In the center was a large branch of bamboo, called a sakaki, festooned with various small amulets, almost like a year-round Christmas tree. The sakaki represented the physical and earthly manifestation of the Kami that the devout Shinto worshipped. Hanging from the branches were small wooden animals and jade figurines, a wedding ring that probably belonged to Mrs. Serizawa, coins from different business transactions that Mr. Serizawa had likely considered lucky, some small toys that might have belonged to a child, and, finally, several ornate amulets (called ofuda) with kanji inscribed on them. One I recognized as the sacred name. Raiju.
You didn’t get all this ethnic information from me, by the way. Remember that.
I knelt there, my hands resting on my knees, and watched Mr. Serizawa preparing rice tea in fragile bisque china cups with no handles. He added some sake to the cups. I tried not to feel tense, but this was ceremonial stuff, done before something of great importance was about to take place—a negotiation, a wedding, or the passing down of an oral tale. I took the cup from him, carefully, properly, and drank with him, swallowing down the tea and sake, which tasted like a combination of vinegar and old gym socks. Uck.
Gradually the silence between us turned into something else. Mr. Serizawa coughed, shifted uncomfortably, then turned to the shrine. He lit a stalk of cinnamon incense, picked up a small bamboo fan, and cut intricate Kanji characters in the air before the shrine. He began to sing low and intimately in Japanese, something I recognized as a prayer. He drew out the syllables, his gruff, aged voice shaping his desire, his exaltation, his plea to the unseen deities of his ancestors—the Kami. It was a very pagan sound.
I shivered as the song ebbed away to silence. He flicked the fan down, then returned to the mat, kneeling stiffly and awkwardly, and said, simply: “Raiju wakes.”
I felt a dull stab of shock—this was too much like the dream. I thought again of the monstrous creature with the body of fire and the electric blue eyes—the same color as my own, incidentally. I licked my dry lips, but it still took me two tries to get the words out. “What is…Raiju?” My voice was so low it was little more than a vibration in the air between us. “I mean…that’s a god, right? A Kami.”
I saw Mr. Serizawa swallow, his throat working. I had never seen him this upset before. It took him a few moments to compose himself, then he centered his attention on me again, hardened his eyes, and said, “The Kami are more than gods, Mago. They are the grandfathers of gods. They are the makers of gods. And it is your destiny to be the earthly vessel, the Keeper, of the greatest of the Kami. Raiju. The Lion of Fire.” He nodded once, dourly. “As it is my destiny, as the Watcher, to bestow upon you the story of the War of the Kami. I have waited a long time for you to find me, Mago. A very long time.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t get any of this.”
“I will tell you the story that was told to me by my own grandfather. It is an old story, known by only a few. It is a story that should not be retold except to those you trust with your life. Do you understand, Mago?”
“Y-yeah.”
He looked at me. Hesitant.
I repeated, in a steadier voice, “Yes, Mr. Serizawa.”
I trusted his wisdom. I doubted anything discussed tonight would go over well with my dad—my dad who believed in work and sweat and all things rational and normal. Mr. Serizawa and I were not here tonight to discuss rational and normal things. We were so far outside the realm of rational and normal that it wasn’t even funny anymore.
Mr. Serizawa lowered his head, seemed to gather his thoughts. Then he began to speak.
9
The War of the Kami was told to me on the Island of Itsukushima, near Hiroshima, where my family lived. It was a place I traveled to after the war…after the bombs fell…an old man at seventeen, now fatherless, motherless and wifeless. I went there to speak to my grandfather about what I had done, what I had seen, and what direction my life might yet take. My grandfather was very old, Mago, over a hundred years in age. He was a man of great wisdom. A Shinto priest, he attended to the shrine of Raiju-sama, the Lion of Fire. He would let no one walk near the shrine, lest their footsteps awaken the creature from its deep sleep.
One evening I had drunk too much sake, and he caught me stepping too close to the shrine. He became agitated. I apologized. And in return, he gave me this story to bear and made me a Watcher.
Long before humans walked upon the earth, the Kami crawled and slithered across its surface, and swam in its oceans, and flew across its skies. This was their world then. And it was idyllic, for there were no wars to fight, no famine, and the Kami never took more from the earth than what they needed. They never poisoned it in any way, because the earth is the body of Amaterasu, the goddess who gives birth to all life.
But the Kami, though peaceful, were also proud creatures. Like gods everywhere, they desired creatures who would worship them, so they gathered together one day and said, “Let us create man.”
And so it was done, and men were created to live in the green fields of the earth and to care for and worship the Kami, and all was well for a while. But men, who were as proud as the Kami that have created them, became angered when they realized they existed for no other reason than to amuse the Kami. In time they gathered and said to one another, “It is we who labor and suffer. It is we who should be served by the gods. It is the gods who should listen to our prayers and requests.”
They were clever men, and instead of rebelling, they would meet in secret and devise their plans. “Let us wait and listen, and record the names of all the Kami on metal seals,” they said one to another. “Because when we have written all the names of the Kami on the ofuda, we will then have power over them. We can lock them away in the womb of Amaterasu. And then the earth will be ours.”
This took many generations, as you can well imagine. But with time and perseverance, the men gathered all the names of the Kami on a great treasure of ofuda. Then came the uprising, swift and brutal. They used the ofuda to strike down the Kami and drive them fro
m the face of the earth. For, you see, to know the name of a god is to have power over it. Some went deep into the sea and became mountains; some went into the sky and became the stars. Some dug deep into the earth and became the foundations of the greatest cities in the world. And others, the fiercest and most temperamental of the Kami, were driven into hell, the only place that could contain their terrible rage.
Raiju the Lion of Fire was one such beast.
The ones who were confined to hell were the most dangerous, for they would have ripped the heavens apart in their fury. They would have destroyed all that came before to keep it from the hands of men. And there they seethed and the earth felt their wrath in the forms of great storms and lightning.
10
“Do you think any of this mythology stuff is real?” I asked Mr. Serizawa.
And Mr. Serizawa said, “Do you?”
He had a point. I wasn’t very good at determining reality anymore, so I shut my mouth and just listened.
11
Thousands of years passed, and men became great, far greater than the Kami, for their hands tamed not just the beasts of the earth, but the very elements, as well. And after some time had passed, some of the Kami allied themselves with men in order to gain their freedom. They became like tame household pets, serving the very men they themselves had created. That is why we pray to gods and call them by name.
But this angered the fiercest of the remaining Kami, and a great war erupted between the Kami who had come to worship mankind and those who walked the Old Ways and desired to end their own creation. There was much famine and unhappiness in that time. The War of the Kami nearly upset the balance of the earth before Amaterasu intervened and put the fiercest Kami into a deep sleep within her womb.
Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) Page 8
