Eight Million Gods-eARC (11 page)

Or had she?

What if she’d been having blackouts all along? What if she’d been living some dual existence, stealing ideas from reality and disguising them as fiction? What if the “flow” of hypergraphia was uncorking the bottled-up memories and letting them come out?

It made horrible, terrible sense. When she wrote, she always felt like she’d dashed through some massive elaborate stage, carefully only tracking what the point-of-view character saw and felt and ignoring everything else. She disregarded everything the character hadn’t focused on, and thus lost important details that she needed to fill in later.

What if the reason her settings always felt so real was because they
were
real?

Did she write the vivid scene of George setting fire to the shrine because she’d been here before? Found the fuel can sitting in the storage shed, the door unlocked because this was peaceful Japan and no sane person would steal from the gods?

She had written the sloshing sound that the kerosene had made inside the can as George splashed it on the back of the gift shop. The smell of the thick fumes as the dry wood soaked in the liquid. The heat of the fire as it “woofed” to life with a single flick of a lighter.

Beyond the deep shadows of the trees, there was a courtyard lit by a jury-rigged floodlight. The light shone on a jumble of blackened timbers. Only burnt skeletal remains were left of what had stood for a thousand years, but she recognized the buildings all the same. To the left was the gift shop that sold charms. To the right was the raised stage of the
kaguraden
where Yuuka would dance with the other shrine maidens, pretending to be so solemn and serene when she was giggling inside.

Straight ahead was the
haiden
or hall of worship, where Yuuka had been cleaning the day of the fire. Beyond it stood the
honden
, a small, upraised building with a steep gabled roof. The
honden
was the most scared part of the temple and closed to the public. Yuuka’s father only opened its doors on certain festival days. The
katana
had been kept within the
honden
; “George” had set the fire to gain entrance to it.

“Oh, no,” Nikki whispered. “No.”

“I didn’t know he’d burned it,” someone said behind her.

She spun around, blinking away tears and raindrops. A boy stood in the pool of light. He looked fifteen or sixteen and was fiercely beautiful, with raven-winged eyebrows and eyes so dark that they were nearly black. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail that was twisted up into a topknot. He was dressed in a somber blue kimono, black
tabi
socks and
geta
sandals.

“Wh-wh-what?” She glanced around, trying to fit him into the destruction around her. What was a teenage boy doing here in the middle of the night, dressed as a samurai?

“I didn’t know that he set fire to my shrine.”

“I-I-I’m sorry. Your family owns this shrine?”

“For eighty generations, yes, they have served me. I do not know what will happen to it now. There are no sons to inherit it; Misa was to marry a boy from Nara. Ichiro would have adopted him as a son and passed the shrine to him.”

Nikki frowned, trying to understand who this boy was and if she had somehow greatly wronged him. Currently everything was refusing logic and order and she was floundering lost. “She’s dead?” Nikki was no longer sure who “she” was though. Yuuka? Misa? Were they same girl?

“Yes,” the boy said bitterly. “He killed her and raped her and hid her body in the dead leaves.”

Nikki closed her eyes against the vivid memory of George’s fear and anger suddenly turning to lust and need.
Oh god, what have I done?

The rain turned to a heavy downpour, and she stood there, uncaring, weeping.

“Come.” The boy took her by the arm. “The storehouse wasn’t touched by the fire.”

He led her into the darkness.

In the back corner of the shrine area there was an old Edo-period storehouse with stark white walls. Unlike the storage shed, it had a massive padlock that looked centuries old. Apparently, though, it was not truly locked, as the boy tugged the padlock off without producing a key.

“I’m Taira no Atsumori,” he said. “You may call me Atsumori-kami. My name is written with the
kanji
for honest and then the
kanji
for prosperity.”

The double doors creaked open and he walked into the cavelike darkness.

“I have a light.” Nikki turned on her flashlight. The walls seemed a foot thick, and the only window set above the door was tightly shuttered. How could Atsumori see anything? She could hear him, though, opening up wooden drawers somewhere in the back.

“There is a lantern here,” Atsumori said. There was a flare of light, brilliant against the black, and when she could see again, he had a small old stone dish, filled with oil, with a burning wick draped over the edge.

“Yeah, that looks safe.” She edged into the building. The light danced off tall
tansu
with metal-reinforced drawers and high rafters strung with paper festival lanterns. There was no sign of electric outlets or overhead lights.

“I can protect you here.” The boy rooted through the drawers of the cabinets. “Once we leave the shrine, though, I will be dependent on you.”

“What?” She felt like she had come in at the end of a conversation.

He handed her a fine linen towel. “You can dry yourself with this.”

Nikki buried her face in the towel. It smelled of pine and cedar, like it had been stored with potpourri. “I’m Nikki Delany. I’m so sorry about everything that happened.” She felt tears welling up again as she thought of all the madness she had accidently spilled out onto this serene place. “I—I don’t know how this all happened. I don’t even know how I got here.”

“I brought you here.”

Nikki laughed into the towel. “No, no, I mean—I don’t remember how I got to this shrine.”

“I brought you,” the boy said with quiet intensity. “I killed the
tanuki
that attacked you in your home and brought you here.”

Nikki lowered the towel to stare at the boy. He was sitting on the floor in the pool of light cast by the oil lantern. He watched her with calm detachment. He couldn’t have said what he just said—one of them must be misunderstanding the situation. She played the conversation back. And ran through it a second time when it came to the same illogical end.

“What?” she said.

“I have been with you since you found my
katana
at the train station.”

Nikki buried her face back into the towel, trying to rationalize the situation. It would be so comforting to believe someone else had killed the man in her apartment. She had thought she’d seen a boy who looked like Atsumori glaring furiously at her at the train station. She had felt like she’d been followed from Osaka Station back to her apartment, but there hadn’t been space in her closet-sized bathroom for both of them without her noticing. One of them was probably stark raving mad, and, unfortunately, it was her.

“I don’t understand,” she mumbled into the towel.

“The sword is my
shintai
. Where it goes, I am forced to follow. When I realized I could easily take over your body, I used you to bring it back to my shrine.”

With her eyes covered, she recognized his voice. She had heard him murmur a warning at her apartment. When she looked, though, there had been no one behind her. She had been alone with the killer.

It was possible that she was also completely alone in the storage building.

She gripped the towel tightly and whimpered. If she was so totally gone that she was seeing him in such vivid detail, she couldn’t imagine how she could prove to herself that he was really there or not.

“Are you afraid of me?’’

“I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid that I’ve gone crazy.”
I’m afraid that I’ve killed people—lots of people.
“None of this makes sense. I don’t know if you’re even here. Look at you. I’m soaked to the skin and you’re still dry.”

“Of course I’m dry. I am a
kami.
” He cocked his head. “Do you not know of these things? Of
kami
and
shintai
and the function of shrines such as this one?”

“
Kami
are gods.” She knew that the word wasn’t an exact translation; they were actually the essence of nature or something that English didn’t have a word to explain. The phrase “eight million gods” was to indicate that the
kami
were beyond counting. “I—I don’t know what a
shintai
is.” Was it a good thing that the boy claiming to be a god was using a term that she didn’t know? It could mean that he was actually sitting beside her—but it left her with a person who believed he was a god.

“A
shintai
is the object I reside in. The
katana
is my
shintai
. I am where it is; hence I was in Osaka when you found it.”

“Why didn’t I see you then?”

“I am not as powerful as Amaterasu Omikami or even Sarutahiko Okami. I am limited in how much I can manifest outside of holy ground.”

Nikki recognized the name of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. The sun goddess was the queen of the gods, holding a position in the Shinto pantheon much like Zeus. Her brother was Susanoo, god of the storms, and they engaged in sibling rivalry that rocked the world. Nikki didn’t know the god Sarutahiko. More proof that she wasn’t crazy—maybe. “You said you killed the man who attacked me?”

“I am sorry. I was forced to take over your body. He would have killed you otherwise.”

“All good.” She wasn’t sure where she stood on the crazy thing anymore. If her blackouts were caused by possession, it would certainly explain how she ended up at a burned-out Shinto shrine in the middle of the night.

“Who was the man at your apartment? Why is he searching for us?”

“Who?”

He reached over and opened her backpack and took out her notebooks. “You wrote about a man searching for us at your apartment.” He opened her newest notebook to the scene that she had written on the train.

“That—that’s just a story I’m making up.” Nikki blushed. She normally didn’t let anyone but Miriam see her notebooks. “Those people aren’t real.”

Atsumori cocked his head. “You do not know what you are?”

“I’m a writer. I make up stories—like
The Tale of Genji
?” She assumed he would know of the most famous Japanese novel ever written, since it was over a thousand years old.

“You are an oracle. What you are writing is the truth.”

“No, no, no.” Nikki shook her head. “I write crazy, impossible things—like demons eating children.”

He looked slightly confused. “But demons do eat children.”

A childhood’s worth of therapy was quickly unraveling. “I make things up.”

“You knew where my
shintai
was hidden. You knew how to undo the lock.”

Nikki pressed a hand to her mouth as she took it a step further back. She had known everything about Gregory from the fact that his window framed the HEP Five Ferris wheel to his visa problems. Denial leaked out from under her fingertips. “No.”

Atsumori opened the other notebook. “
Sunlight. The fresh green smell of the new
tatami.
The hushed quiet of the
haiden
. The silent dance of the kitten as Maru warred with the dappled sunlight. She found herself smiling, as if all the peace and love of the shrine filled her up and spilled over.
” He closed the notebook. “Misa loved this place. You wrote the truth.”

Nikki stared in horror at the notebook. “No, that can’t be right. I never thought of her as real.”

“She was.”

Was.
Even if she denied Atsumori’s existence, the sword and burned shrine were proof that Yuuka . . . Misa had been real. Nikki had cried when she wrote the girl’s murder but she nevertheless wrote it in full gory detail. And there was Gregory, dead by a blender. She had been so proud of his death scene that she posted it online hours before he was killed.

Everything she wrote was real? She didn’t want it to be true. She knew her characters better than her few so-called “friends” and certainly better than any of her family members. She loved them. She cried as she wrote their slow and painful deaths. And they all died. She never had a character survive to “happily ever after.” Tears started to burn in her eyes and she fought to keep from crying. She had bawled uncontrollably when she thought that her characters were no more than figments of her imagination. If she started to cry now, she wouldn’t be able to stop. As she dug through her backpack, looking for tissues, she couldn’t stop thinking about all her recent characters. How easy it had been to “think” in terms of the foreign Japanese culture. Little things like how a character would spell out their name in kanji when they met someone new.

“
I liked this part
,” Miriam had said after fact-checking Yuuka’s introduction. “
But you used the wrong
kanji
. Her name would be Misa using those
kanji
.
”

Nikki started to weep. Misa been so excited about the upcoming Gion Matsuri. She had gotten a new
yukata
to wear out to the festival. Nikki had come to Kyoto and toured Isetan and watched girls pick out
yukata’s
in the kimono department. Had Misa been one of the girls Nikki spied on? Had Misa been the cute little high school girl trying on the white
yukata
with the scattering of pink flowers that Nikki took reference pictures of? The girl had felt
right
for Misa. She had been so cute and full of life. To think of her dead and dumped in bushes by Gregory Winston . . .

Oh God, she’d written five deaths already, and there were a dozen other people who had “this will not end well” written all over them. All of them real people. All of them she knew better than she knew Miriam.

With that, she started to keen.

“What is wrong?” Atsumori asked.

“They’re all going to die. I used to try and stop them from dying, but death is like this juggernaut. It just plows through everything I put up to slow it down and nails them hard. I’ve even tried switching characters to who I thought were nice and good and careful people and they do things like drive over the neighbor’s toddler by mistake, or drop their hammer off a six-story roof onto a bypasser’s head, or kill a teenage girl and burn down her family’s shrine. I knew the moment that George—Gregory—walked up to the temple gate that he was going to kill Misa—somehow. Characters crossing paths always ends badly. It’s like the Ghostbusters—don’t cross the streams. Oh God, oh God, and I wrote myself into this novel!”