The Monster on the Road Is Me Read online

  “And without that grip the Road has much less influence. Kōtenbō can still lift memories, like any suri, but his ability to influence … people like me is severely muted. That’s not to say tengu aren’t a danger, though.”

  “Well, they are huge,” I said.

  “Which doesn’t matter at all. It’s the swords they carry. Tengu taught swordplay to humans in the first place. They are very skilled at it.”

  “Even when they’re mostly blown up?”

  Moya nodded.

  “If we can stop this sword-swinging puppeteer, though … You know, like”—I dropped my voice to a whisper—“if we can kill…”

  “You mean tear Kōtenbō’s head off and shove it down his neck hole? Yes, go on.”

  “Gods, Moya.”

  “A tengu just possessed your elephant of a gym teacher and tried to physically remove your head with his bare hands, and now you’re getting squeamish?”

  “Look, if the tengu isn’t around anymore, will that cut the strings? Will the Road disappear and will everyone go back to normal?”

  Moya shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a nice thought, though.”

  “Then I have a confession to make.”

  Moya cocked her head to the side.

  I took a breath and said, “I wanted to wait until we were under the kaki tree, but I know where Shibaten is hiding.”

  “You found the memory?”

  I looked around, which was stupid since we were the only two people who could have been in the restroom. “Yori was right. Shibaten did murder Taiki’s father. I convinced Yori to steal the evidence from the town hall, and last night I lifted the trauma from the watch Taiki’s father was wearing.”

  “Gods,” she said. “I’m impressed. You are a dangerous mind-thief.”

  “Can we cut the puppeteer’s strings, Moya?”

  “Well, we’re a whole lot closer to finding out.”

  “All right, then, let’s do this,” I said, walking briskly past her. “Let’s go find ourselves a river troll and stop the Tengu Road.”

  “And try to stop the Road,” she corrected me.

  I yanked on the door, which didn’t budge because Moya had welded the stupid thing shut. I did lose my balance and took a face-plant into the door frame, though.

  “Gods, Moya!”

  “Maybe we should take the window?” she said.

  “You think?”

  “Wow. You are cranky when you’re acting heroic and stuff,” she said with a smile. “I don’t hate it.”

  I gave her a heroic look as I walked over to the window and shoved it open.

  26

  * * *

  POST-INCIDENT POLICE REPORT

  Case No. 121719-03 Date: 2006年 10月 14日

  Prepared by: 森

  Actions Taken:

  Arrived at Ōmura Shrine at 3:14 a.m. A male subject at the scene (identified afterward as fifty-two-year-old Headmaster Manabu Sato) was unresponsive. All of the bushes and trees, including the botan tree, were filled with crows.

  Called out to the subject. He had his back to me and did not answer. Shined my flashlight and asked for identification. He didn’t answer. Informed him he was trespassing. No response from the subject. Walked closer and saw he was holding a knife. Radioed in my location and pulled out my baton.

  Instructed the subject to drop the knife. He refused to comply or turn around. Repeated this instruction numerous times. About the time backup arrived, the subject turned. He had no eyes. His face was mutilated. The wounds appeared to have been self-inflicted.

  The subject’s head seemed to follow the flashlight. He said something about a traveler who was lost on a road. The subject then turned and ran. On the wall, the vandalism was clearly visible. It was scraped into the wood with the knife. It read: CROWS FLY.

  Pursued the subject to the southern wall overlooking the drop-off. He climbed the wall. Called out to the subject to get down and lie on the ground. A flock of crows from the botan tree flew off. The subject jumped. Or was startled.

  By the time I reached him, the subject was barely breathing. Bones were visibly broken, and there were lacerations on the face and neck. Little could have been done to save him.

  REPORT UPDATE: THE SUBJECT (MANABU SATO) PASSED AWAY AT KŌCHI PREFECTURAL HOSPITAL ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 15, 2006.

  * * *

  TRAUMA COUNSELING/UNKNOWN

  昭和6 (1931年) 5月28日

  SUBJECT: SEIMEI NAKAGAWA, AGE 14

  He sits in the concrete room, alone,

  a thin blanket covering his shoulders. He won’t eat or drink.

  He stares at the wall. He says he is waiting for “her”

  to return and take him away from here. He must be speaking

  of his mother. But she is dead. The boy is unresponsive.

  Last night a man, who has eluded capture, murdered

  the boy’s parents while he watched from a fallen tree.

  The police arrived and the killer ran. The police officers found the boy

  talking to himself, hiding in the branches. They asked

  his name, but the boy was unresponsive.

  They brought him here, to a place of punishment

  and shame. He had nowhere else to go, they said. He has no family.

  All that existed in life ended in that park two nights ago.

  They offered him tea and rice, but the boy was unresponsive.

  The mother saved his life, the reports say.

  She threw herself between him and the sword.

  I asked him if he was waiting for her. He wouldn’t look up.

  What have we created? A world of suffering. A world of war.

  Men kill each other in the streets. Their sons and daughters

  left in rooms cold with cement and thinly covered by wool.

  This is what we made. A boy mumbling to himself in the

  dim light. He is difficult to understand. He speaks low.

  Crows fly, the boy whispers,

  A traveler on the road is lost.

  That’s what we’ve become. The boy is unresponsive.

  * * *

  Ikeda-sensei wasn’t at school on Monday. None of the students had seen him since the field trip. Toriyama-sensei drove out to ride home with us on the bus but wouldn’t say anything. It was probably better that way. No one suspected a thing.

  After school I raced home to grab the murder evidence and the files. I wanted to return everything to Yori and distance myself from him. Things were getting too dangerous. Even for the Desert Punk.

  “Koda,” my mother called to me from the front door.

  “Just returning something to a friend,” I said without looking back. I fastened my helmet and kicked up my bike stand.

  “Haru stopped by the house a little while ago. He’s home from the hospital now. He said he was going to Lawson’s.”

  “Um, all right. I’ll swing by there on my way home.”

  “He’s on crutches. You can probably catch him before he makes it too far.”

  I really did want to see Haru, but I had to return the police files to Yori.

  “I’ll hurry, kā-san. Oyasumi,” I said, even though it was four o’clock in the afternoon.

  “Good night.” She waved. “I’ll leave some shiitake rice in the steamer.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I called back.

  “Wear your helmet. And stay far away from Route 33. Promise me, Koda!”

  “I promise!” I said, and stomped down on my bike pedal.

  * * *

  When I finally got there I dropped my helmet in the basket and called up to Yori’s window. “I brought the police files back.”

  Yori’s head shot up over the sill. “Are you insane? Why would you shout that? They’ll hear you!”

  “Who’ll hear me?”

  “They!”

  “Oh, right. Rain Spider. Gotcha. I’m winking here. You can’t see it, but I’m winking.”

  “What? No. The police, Ko
da. The police will hear you!”

  “You know, screaming at me to keep my voice down kind of defeats the purpose.”

  “Get inside!”

  “Is the door unlocked?”

  “No.”

  “So will you come down and unlock it?”

  “No. My sister will see me. Crawl in through the window, Koda.”

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

  “Then go home.”

  “I have to give you back the files.”

  “No, you don’t! Go away, Koda. Leave me alone.” Yori slammed his bedroom window shut.

  Huh. That went differently than I’d expected. I looked at the overgrown corner of his house. Guess I don’t have much of a choice, I thought. The window it is.

  I stepped over the weeds and old soda pop cans and pushed on the glass of the kitchen window. It slid back with a spurt of dust. His sister is going to hear me fall inside their house and then she really will call the police. Not the brightest idea you’ve had, Desert Punk.

  My first foot landed in a sink of old dishes. Gross. Gross. I pulled my body through the window, but my backpack caught on the sill.

  “C’mon. Let go,” I said.

  Yori’s sister grunted from somewhere down the hall. “Yori? Is that you in there?”

  I slid past a table stacked with old newspapers and ran upstairs to Yori’s room.

  “Don’t give them to me,” Yori said when I walked in.

  “But you can just put them back. Put the lid on the box. Retape it if you have to. No one will ever know.”

  “They already know, Koda.”

  “How could they? No one saw you. You’re the Desert Punk! On the outside you’re a town office employee with a bad suit—”

  “I like my suit.”

  “I know you do, but it doesn’t matter because no one else notices it. You fade into a crowd. Which is perfect for a secret identity. By day you’re a boring accountant, yes, but by night you’re this fearless desert survivor who breaks down the—”

  “Stop it!”

  “What?”

  “Just stop it!”

  “Yori!” his sister bellowed. “What’s going on up there?”

  “Nothing’s going on up here, ne-chan. You should just mind your own stupid business!”

  “What did you say?” she shouted.

  “That you should mind your own business! Also your face is ugly! And I hate your TV! And you smell like rotten meat!”

  Yori’s sister didn’t say anything back. I just stood there while Yori breathed loudly.

  “I’m not an idiot, Koda. I know there’s no Desert Punk, no secret hero. I’m just Yori Yamamoto and I work at the Kusaka Town Hall and that’s all I do. All that I’ll ever do. I knew you wanted the evidence, and I knew you were using me to get it.”

  “Yori—”

  “But I didn’t care. Do you know why? Because I have nothing, Koda. I’m alone. I live with my horrible sister, who watches game shows every day, and when I get home at night I drag myself upstairs and dress up for a tiny video camera. That’s all I have: my sister and a small box of glass and electronics. I would have done almost anything if you’d promised to be my friend.”

  “We are friends, Yori.”

  “No. No, we’re not. Because a real friend wouldn’t do this to someone he cares about just for some game he made up. They’re really watching me. Do you understand that, Koda? I stole something from them. Maybe they missed the files, maybe they saw me walk out with the evidence—somehow they know what I did and they are angry and they are watching everything I do.”

  “Who is watching you, Yori?”

  “I can feel them. Like eyes in the darkness staring down into my soul. Have you ever walked up a dark flight of stairs and you could swear someone was right behind you? That’s what it’s like for me every minute of every day. I can’t get away from them. I can’t get away from their beady eyes! They’re inside me!”

  “Listen to me, Yori,” I said, stepping cautiously toward him. “I think I know what’s happening. There’s someone who can help you. Her name is Moya and she’ll know what to do. We can ask her. She’ll tell us what to do.”

  “It’s too late. They’ll follow me until they’ve seen enough and then it will be over in a flash. They’ll fly down and steal my soul. My fat, smelly sister will cry, and she should. Her brother couldn’t even grow up to be a boring accountant. I’ve failed at everything I’ve ever done, Koda. Everything! Even at being me.”

  “I can stop this, Yori. I promise. Let me help you.”

  “Get out, Koda. I can hear them outside the window. I can hear their awful wings. I can feel them staring and watching. They hate me. I’m a traveler on a road that I’ve never seen before and I am lost.”

  “Yori.”

  “They are coming,” he whispered. “The crows are coming.”

  27

  I was panicking when I left Yori’s house and there was only one thing that made sense: ride to the library as fast as I could. Yori sounded like he was on the Tengu Road, but if the Yamamoto clan wasn’t one of the founding families, Kōtenbō might not be targeting him after all. Yori might just be cracking after years of stress and make-believe. I had to make sure, but the problem was—I couldn’t remember the names of all of the Seven Noble Families.

  “I hate you, history!” I yelled into the wind, but history ignored me.

  I dropped my bike in the dirt parking lot and ran inside the library to find a copy of Kusaka Monogatari—the tale of Kusaka Town. “Do you have this book?” I wheezed at the old librarian.

  “Kusaka Monogatari,” she said, looking over her wire-rimmed glasses and clearly disapproving of my heavy breathing. “That’s a very old book, young man. Written in the year Bunsei 13 by Hotaru Kobayashi. Let’s see, that would be 1830.”

  “I’m not really interested in a history lesson right now. Well, yes, I am. Just not from you. Can you tell me where the book is?”

  “I don’t care for your tone,” she said, looking down at me again.

  “Do you have to like my tone in order to do your job?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Then, please, stop wasting my time and help me find that book!”

  The librarian snapped her notebook closed. “You are an exceptionally rude boy.”

  I tried to control my breathing. She pushed her glasses higher up her nose and led me to a shelf of older-looking books. She pulled down a worn copy of Kusaka Monogatari.

  “I’d like to check this out, please,” I said.

  “Oh, would you? Well, I’m afraid that would be impossible. This is a very rare book. You can read it, but you must stay here. At that table. In the corner. You mustn’t take it out of this room.” She glared at me over her glasses. “And you mustn’t touch the pages, either. If you want to turn one over, I’ll do it for you.”

  “Fine, I don’t care. Gods,” I whispered, dropping into a seat at the corner table.

  The librarian laid the book open to the title page.

  “Itadakimasu,” I said, with more than a little bitterness in my voice.

  “What?” she said.

  “It’s like you’re a waitress and you’re serving me a book.”

  “Do not eat the book.”

  “I was joking.”

  “Not even a corner. When you need the page turned say: Tsugi onegaishimasu. I will turn it for you.”

  “Arigatō. Let’s see, the book was written in 1830, a few decades after the village was first founded.”

  “To whom are you speaking?”

  “No one. Just reading out loud.”

  “Don’t talk on the book.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “If you’re going to talk, do it to the side, like this. Or cover your mouth.”

  “All right! To the side.”

  “Do not shout on the book.”

  “Kusaka Monogatari,” I whispered. “Written by Hotaru Kobayashi. An epic tale of the foundin
g of Kusaka Town. C’mon, c’mon. Tsugi onegaishimasu. Tsugi onegaishimasu. Tsugi onegaishimasu. Tsugi onegaishimasu. And … tsugi onegaishimasu.

  “Just say the page number you want!” the librarian shouted.

  “I didn’t know that was an option. Or that shouting is now allowed.”

  “Just say the page you want to see!” she whispered loudly.

  “Thirty-two.”

  The Tengu Wars.

  There wasn’t much there. The Seven Noble Families arrived in Kusaka in the year Bunka 2. There was a map. They weren’t alone—clan of tengu in the mountains. There were a bunch of wars with the humans. And …

  “Tsugi onegaishimasu.”

  And then there was a truce. The humans got the valley, and the tengu agreed to stay in the mountains. Things went well for a while, let’s see, until the Ikeda clan made a deal with the kappa Shibaten. Ikeda? Like Ikeda-sensei?

  Shibaten agreed to play a trick on the tengu leader. He snuck into his camp and stole his eyes. What? Gross. Oh, the blind tengu. Right. In return, the humans agreed to give Kusaka River to Shibaten, but instead they shot him full of arrows and dumped his body into the river. Humans cannot be trusted. I felt like this was the moral of the story.

  “Tsugi onegaishimasu.”

  And that’s it. “Well, who are the Seven Noble Families?” I said out loud.

  “They are the founders of Kusaka Town,” the librarian replied.

  “I know that, but the names aren’t written here.”

  The librarian lifted the book and thumbed to the first chapter. She ran her finger down the page, then flipped to the back.

  “Fujiwara. Kobayashi. Watanabe. Then … Sato, Ikeda, Shimizu, and Nakagawa.”

  Aiko, Ichiro, Taiki: the Yamabuki Three. Headmaster Sato, Ikeda-sensei, Shimizu-sensei, and that kid Moya was protecting: Seimei. Yamamoto was definitely not one of the founders. Yori’s ancestors had nothing to do with the Tengu Massacre. Yori was safe after all!

  “Can I see that map again?”

  The librarian grumbled but set the book back down.

  “Where is that?” I asked, pointing to the kanji that read 天狗大虐殺.

  She adjusted her glasses and ran her finger over the map. “The Tengu Massacre. Here it is. Just south of Kusaka River. Where the high school is now.”