The Psyche Diver Trilogy: Demon Hunters (11 page)

“There remains only one thing you can do for me now.” The old man grinned. Munakata’s reply stuck in his throat.

“We are blessed with a fair wind,” the old man continued, smiling. “It is a beautiful day. Just look at the green of the trees, truly stunning. Soak it up Munakata, this will be your last opportunity.”

While the old man was speaking, the bodyguards maintained their impassive expressions, Renobo her innocuous smile, but as her narrow eyes fell on Munakata they betrayed a feverish glint. Enoh looked as though he were watching a grandson about to receive an award, his eyes were creased with gentle lines. Toyama was the only one of their number that appeared uneasy.

“No...don’t!” Munakata screamed, starting to back away. “Don’t kill me!” He stumbled and tripped over himself, falling backward. He appeared unable to regain his balance. His handsome features had transformed into something hideous.

“Enoh, if you would,” the old man whispered softly.

Enoh took a step forward. Wind buffeted the sleeves of his black robes revealing sinewy arms up to the elbow. He stood with a slight hunch, the effect made him appear even smaller than he was. He sent forth an eerie intensity. Munakata crawled across the grass, and as he did the blood that had congealed around his fingertips began to flow again, leaving a trail. He reached out for the trunk of a nearby beech tree and pulled himself up, staining the white of the bark with bloody handprints. Enoh began to approach, pacing over the grass on tiptoes, keeping an easy rhythm. It was like watching the steps to a dance.

Munakata screamed and launched himself at Enoh in a wild frenzy. Enoh sprang up as the two were about to collide. He was like a bird taking flight. The tree above rustled as he came to rest on a slender branch above Munakata’s head, the branch yawed in a wide arc. Without looking back, Munakata started to sprint away. Enoh whistled and took flight, using the returning momentum of the yawing branch to launch himself forward. He soared gracefully through the air toward Munakata. “
Kyaa!”
An animal noise welled up from his throat as he dropped lazily down, striking Munakata, his body fell limply into Enoh’s arms.

“It’s done,” the old man murmured.

“Bring a bucket!” Enoh shouted. One of the bodyguards ran into the central hall. Enoh’s right hand had pierced Munakata’s throat; the hand stuck in there, slanted down and buried to the wrist as he supported Munakata’s weight from below. He held his other hand over Munakata’s mouth, using his elbow and shoulder to support the man’s frame. The bodyguard returned with a large plastic bucket.

“Put it there,” Enoh laid Munakata’s body on the grass, placing it so that his head hung over the bucket. The other men steadied the bucket and lifted Munakata. Enoh pulled his hand away from the man’s mouth and a stream of blood fountained noisily out; the flow was tremendous. The liquid collected in the bucket, bubbling with a cherry-red froth. An awful stench wafted up with a wave of hot air. The bucket began to warm in the bodyguard’s hands. As the flow began slowing, Enoh pulled his other hand from Munakata’s throat. The wrinkled, sinewy hand was soaked with blood. Enoh wiped the blood over Munakata’s clothes.

“That should do it,” Enoh began to walk back with the gait an old man out for a stroll in a park. A dazzling fire burned in Master Kurogosho’s eyes.

“Renobo,” he looked up and turned to the woman, “you shall visit me tonight.”

“It would be my pleasure, Master.” A carnal grin played over her crimson-glistening lips.

“It is time for us to begin searching for the next sacrifice,” he said quietly.

3

The scene that stretched out before Kumon Hosuke was sickening.

The man’s self was missing; instead Hosuke saw a repulsive mess of viscera, the inside of an animal that had its entrails torn to shreds.

That was how Hosuke perceived the mental remains of the man that had been found lying unconscious outside the burial chamber at Mt. Koya. The remains of the man’s self that clung to the outermost shell of his ego were nothing more than a jumble of torn, bloody fragments. Maggots collected where the self should have been, mental refuse from the deepest ruts of consciousness, squirming as though being ejected out of a warm colon. Some were shaped like hearts, some like hair; they assembled in a clutter of differing shapes and colors: striking reds, blues, yellows, and other indeterminate hues. It was as though ten years of stagnant city sewage had been collected and churned up simultaneously. At some point the pieces had all been part of a single, unified self. Now its components were nothing more than chunks of cognitive meat drifting in the void.

As Hosuke watched, the meat and viscera began to clump together and bond, forming a grotesque creature-like shape. The sight was difficult to interpret, even as a metaphor. In the mind, the same object can assume any number of meanings depending on the observer. Similarly, even a minute shift in the mental state of any given observer is enough to cause the same object to alter its appearance. At that moment, Hosuke observed the following:

a twisted sneering desk the color of dripping blood with hate protruding from a drawer within a woman’s breasts which eats the taste of shit as it transforms into a speckled black sound before twisting inward and becoming a human hand that sprouts pubic hair which flowers into a gaping anus on the palm where the fingers are penises that crawl into the anus to be devoured as it screams a solid form and consumes itself before transforming into an ecstatic infinity of color and scatters out and away

That was what Hosuke perceived visually, but each segment of information could have been construed in any number of ways. What he had just seen could have been nothing more than an ephemeral fragment of thought, something that had flashed across the man’s mind while winning a game of mahjong. Equally, it might have been a memory of flavor, perhaps of a bowl of ramen he once ate.

It is rare for any single memory to resolve into a fixed visual form. Shapes, colors, and sounds are transformed into abstract emotion, and they interact in complex arrangements. The self is infinitely more elaborate than the surface consciousness; it contains the much deeper facets of the mind such as instinct and even the subconscious.

Hosuke paid careful attention to everything floating around him; it was clear that something was wrong. The floating debris all showed signs of having been forcefully pulled apart, not having peeled away naturally from the self. It was looking increasingly likely that something had travelled through the man’s mind, devouring it in its wake. He noticed something like a black, parasitical maggot clinging to an element of matter. It was the same substance he had used to facilitate his dive from the entrance to the trauma; perhaps drool from the jaws of whatever abomination had eaten through the man’s mind, left behind as it had rampaged through the man’s cognitive muscle. Whatever the case, it was obvious that this thing had invaded from the outside.

The fragments were too scattered, it would be difficult to glean any useful information from them. He had so many questions.
Who was this man? What had happened to him? Why did he try to steal Kukai’s mummified body?
Then there was the matter of the A-class Diver that had submerged himself in the man’s consciousness before him. The Diver was still connected to the Psyche Converter next to Hosuke’s physical body. His name was Kagawa, and his retrieval was part of Hosuke’s mission.

What had happened to him?
Hosuke found it hard to believe that it had been the black maggots. They were harmless enough if left alone; all that was needed was a psyche suit. Even a C-class Diver would be able to handle them.

Hosuke continued to navigate through the thin atmosphere of the man’s empty self. Even though most of it was gone, there was not a complete mental vacuum. The deformed chunks of floating meat would eventually join to form a new self, but by then the man would have either lost his mind or fallen into a permanent coma. As things stood, it was impressive that the man was still alive. He had been in a near-death state when Biku’s men resuscitated him.

Hosuke waded on, sampling the various pieces of detritus. The timeline was all over the place, and he had yet to find anything of use. One memory had been physical pain from when the man was an infant, while another had been from his childhood, perhaps his grieving for the death of a dog or a cat, and so on. If the order of his memories were intact, it would have been easy enough to filter for visual and aural memories from a particular time, but as things were that would be next to impossible. The only upside was that while the man’s mental trash had not been welcoming, it had also not been overly belligerent.

Hosuke became aware of a localized physical pain. The sensation was not that of pain in the traditional sense, more like the recognition of a foreign body attempting to force itself through his skin. If Hosuke had been a first-time Diver and not a seasoned professional, the feeling would have registered as pain.

Dozens of the black maggots had attached themselves to his body. One of them was attempting to breech his suit. To Hosuke they looked like rainforest-dwelling bloodsucker leeches; regardless of how well you protected your arms and neck a few would always manage to break through. He flicked it away, but no matter how many he disposed of, more would swarm in toward him.

“Gii,” one of them shrieked.

“Gii.”

“Gii!” The squirming mass of black maggots began to cry out together, resonating with the first.

“Kii, Kii!”

“Kii, Kii!” Each made a tiny, thin noise and together the sound was loud enough to be annoying. The numbers continued to swell, as the creatures cried out in unison. All of the maggots in his vicinity began to converge; in a moment, Hosuke found himself surrounded by a vast number of the things. He had been discovered, fresh meat. They began to group and merge into each other, growing in size.

“Kii!” They were no longer maggots or lice, the creatures had transformed into a swarm of starved rats. Their movements were sluggish, but Hosuke could feel their hunger stabbing at him like an endless series of pinpricks. They were like planaria, primitive organisms driven only by the need to consume.

Hosuke took out some of the surface consciousness he had stored in his suit, soaked it in his scent, and carefully lobbed it toward the rats. It drifted toward them before suddenly popping, the sphere fissioning into dozens of smaller spheres. The rats went for the scent-impregnated matter as a single, writhing mass.

Quite the bunch.
The creatures had sparked his curiosity.

Hosuke noticed something odd. Outside of their individual movements, all of the fragments of consciousness, even the rats, appeared to be rotating in a single orbit. Everything was following a centrifugal, circular motion, slow like a crawling slug. There was a vortex somewhere nearby.

Hosuke searched for the nexus of the gradually rotating maelstrom when he spotted a thin membrane layered over the void. He watched as the mental atmosphere was gradually funneled through it.

Just as there are many rooms and corridors within a house, there are also many compartments to the self. Hosuke suspected that he was gazing at the entrance to one such room, but the entrance before him had no shape. Entrances to rooms in the mind always reveal themselves in the shape of an object.

Did this happen when the man lost his mind, or was it always like this?
Probably the former, Hosuke thought. Whatever happened to cause the destruction of the man’s mind would have taken the entrance along with it. The membrane he was looking at was protective. It would have bandaged over the exposed gap in order to protect the interior, but something had forced its way in. The membrane had partially mended, but it was still thin where the intruder had broken in, enough to cause the one-directional flow of mental atmosphere. The membrane had stranded the black rats and other fragments of consciousness, they could not cross it.

So what had gone through? Something with clear purpose.
Maybe Yukio Kagawa, the Diver was still here, somewhere inside the man’s consciousness. Hosuke focused his thoughts and his outline began to flicker; he re-assumed his real-world physical appearance. He was free to take any form he wanted in the mind, but it was easiest to be himself. The mental effort required to maintain the form was only slightly more than that needed for the amorphous cloud shape he had been until now. Even his beard returned and his psyche suit recast itself as the dirt-encrusted clothes he had worn in the mountains only a few days ago.

He swam down through the void until he came to rest on the membrane. Concepts such as gravitational up and down, of course, do not exist in the mind. Hosuke had decided that the membrane would be ‘down’ as an expedience; it just made things easier.

He channeled his thoughts to the other side of the membrane, toward the entrance of the room. Even though it had collapsed, the memory of its form would still be present in the void. Hosuke was attempting to bring it back. Enough mental atmosphere was being sucked in to use as building blocks, probably enough to completely rebuild the entrance, and now that he had assumed human form again, the entrance would adapt itself in a way that was accessible to the human mind. Again, it just made his job easier.

Something began to form in front of the membrane below Hosuke’s feet. It was a huge, charcoal-red slab of meat.

Now there’s something.
Hosuke stroked his beard. A woman’s genitals had appeared through the other side, black pubic hair shimmered across the void like a living organism. The partially opened split was moist and glossy, ruby curtains of flesh contracted like the mouth of some obscene fish; a viscous, sultry perfume wafted upward. It was the first complete image Hosuke had seen since entering the man’s empty self.

Finally, progress.
The sides of his mouth lifted upward, white teeth showed under his beard. It was the first time he had smiled since Diving into the man’s mind.

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