The Psyche Diver Trilogy: Demon Hunters (13 page)

Toyama looked puzzled.

“The problem is the extent to which he has gained knowledge of us. Instruct Iba to make contact with Kumon. We are fortunate in that it doesn’t they have made the link between Iba and us.”

“It appears not.”

“If that is the case, Iba should get Kumon to sign a contract with us. He is permitted to use force if the Diver doesn’t comply.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Now there’s the matter of the other one, Fuminari.”

“We--”

“Enoh will take care of him. It should be relatively simple if he is accompanied by one of my bodyguards...perhaps a few others,” the old man suggested.

Renobo’s buttocks rocked faster and faster. She was directly in front of Toyama.

“Hey,” the old man called out to him.

“Yes, sir?”

“We’re done,” he said. Toyama looked at the old man, confused. “I’m telling you that our talk is over.” Finally understanding, Toyama bowed his head down to the tatami.

3

A room in an apartment block.

There was a phone on the office desk next to the window. A man sat watching it, arms crossed. The man was one of Master Kurogosho’s four bodyguards. His name was Yoji Tsushima. He had been sitting in the same position, staring at the phone, for the past hour. His eyes were dark.

The phone rang. Tsushima let it ring three times before he picked up the receiver.

“No,” Tsushima said in a deep voice before hanging up. Someone had dialed the wrong number.

Tsushima re-crossed his arms, expression unchanged. The ashtray on one side of the table was completely clean. Tsushima hated smoking. The office belonged to the reporter Yoichi Munakata. Munakata had been due to receive a call at sometime between 13:00 and 14:00 from a man called Fuminari Senkichi. The two of them had set up a weekly exchange of information by phone. They had forced that much out of Munakata. He had told them that this man, Fuminari, had called him out of the blue a few months ago. The two had never met. When he picked up the call, the man had introduced himself as Fuminari:

“I have a job for you,” he said. “I’ll pay a million yen upfront, another two when it’s done.”

“What kind of job?” Munakata asked.

“I want you to investigate a particular organization.”

“What kind of organization?”

“I’m not sure. My hunch is that it’s some sort of religious cult.”

“Okay. Can you give me the name and the address of their HQ?”

“Finding that out is going to be your job.” The man was asking him to pluck clouds from the sky. “Somewhere, here in Japan, there is a religious group that fits the description I am about to give you. I want you to find out its name and what it is they’re trying to do.”

The description that Fuminari had given him was completely absurd. He had explained that, as part of some rite, they had hosted a mass orgy in the mountains, where a woman had been strung upside down to a cross and decapitated; they had drained her blood and cut out her heart. Then they poured the blood over the orgiastic bodies before actually
eating
the woman’s heart. It all sounded too far-fetched. The description was straight out of a medieval rite; Sabbat, or the Black Mass.

“That’s your specialty, right?” Fuminari said. It was true that Munakata possessed extensive knowledge of Japan’s newer cult religions. At one point he had been reporting exclusively on the subject. He had even been commissioned by a major newspaper to perform in situ research at a number of the groups.

Apart from his published articles, Munakata had also collated reams of detailed notes and anecdotes regarding a wide spectrum of the cults, but, unsurprisingly, none of them bore any resemblance to the organization Fuminari had described. While Japan upholds the freedom of religious practice, it would obviously not permit human sacrifice and cannibalism. There was simply no way an organization like that could exist on the official register.

There had been rogue offshoots such as the Tachikawa school of Shingon Buddhism, which promoted sexual intercourse as a route to the attainment of Buddhahood, but that was in the past. Fuminari asked if it could be something like the medieval rite of Black Mass. “I’ve done some of my own research into the Tachikawa School and Sabbat. I guess the question is if there is a group somewhere that still does that shit.”

“You’ve actually seen this?” Munakata asked.

If it was true and such a group did exist, the discovery would be huge--a scoop to end all scoops. He had read of scandals like this outside of Japan. In one case, the founder of a religious sect similar to the new cult religions of Japan, slaughtered a well-known actress in her own home. In another, again in America, a newly formed group held a commune where they would stage round-the-clock orgies with its female members. The founders had finally poisoned their followers before committing suicide themselves. A huge number of people had died, and many were shot dead trying to escape.

But scandals like that were rare in Japan. The worst case on record was the Arc of Jesus, and it had been relatively benign. A man had proclaimed himself as the leader of a new religion and canvassed women to come work for him. The girls all lived with him, and together they formed a roaming community that was always moving from one place to another.

If Fuminari’s claims were real, this would be the first truly significant case in postwar Japan. All Munakata needed was a few testimonies, some photos. The story would be gold. The media would lap it up at any price.

“So, are you gonna help?” Fuminari asked.

“You’re not kidding, are you?” Munakata replied.

“If you agree to take on the job I’ll give you some of the details I’ve dug up. If not, I’ll get someone else to help.” Fuminari pressed for an answer until Munakata finally agreed to take on the case. Their only communication would be a weekly phone call. Any documents or photos were to be sent to a P.O. box in the city, each time using a different post office. Those were the conditions he had laid out. “Remember, this could be dangerous. Be sure to take care of yourself,” Fuminari had said as he hung up.

After his capture they had tortured him until he confessed everything, and now Tsushima sat here waiting for Fuminari’s call. The phone rang again. Tsushima let it ring for a moment before picking up the receiver.

“Munakata?” a deep voice asked.

“Fuminari, right?” Tsushima replied, matching his tone. There was a moment of silence before the deep voice sounded again.

“Who are you? Where is Munakata?”

“I’m standing in for him today, my name’s Shimada.”

“Standing in for him?”

“Yes.”

“First I’ve heard of it.” Fuminari’s voice had become suddenly fierce.

“Munakata has been held up, he won’t be able to make it in today.”

“Held up by what?”

“He didn’t give me the details. He called me last night asking me to take your call.”

“Where is he now? I’ll contact him directly.”

“I don’t know where he is right now. He didn’t volunteer that information.”

“How did you get into his office?”

“I have a spare key. We’ve worked together in the past. That’s why he asked me to come in today.”

“What’s your relationship to Munakata?”

“Colleague and friend.” Tsushima had not hesitated.

“Sounds consistent, at least.”

“Munakata left a message for you.”

“Okay.”

“He wanted to tell you that someone was tailing him, that his movements were therefore...restricted.”

“Tailed? By who?”

“He said you would know. He also said that he suspects they are keeping watch on his office.”

“So that’s why you’re there instead of him.”

“So it seems. He wanted to tell you that he managed to obtain a photo of an important figure in ‘Panshigaru’. He wants to hand it to you directly.”

“I’d prefer he send it to the P.O. box, as per our agreement.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t help you there.”

“No, I guess not,” Fuminari sneered.

“He said he’ll be waiting for you at a bar called Karula in Aoyama at 22:00 tomorrow.” Tsushima read out the phone number.

“You expect me to believe this.”

“I’m just the messenger. It’s up to you whether you go or not.”

“Is that everything?”

“That’s everything,” Tsushima answered. The line went dead.

Seven

Hellbent on Revenge

1

A dream.

The usual nightmare.

A dream of being chased by an enormous black creature.

In the mountains running away. All the while the creature gives chase.

The beast remains hidden, but it is clearly there, as clearly as it is gaining on him...

A terrible fear takes hold of his body. His legs are not moving properly.

The creature that was chasing him from behind suddenly appears, in front.

He dives toward it, screaming.

But the creature is massive, three times his size.

It is human shaped but feels like a beast.

It seizes hold of him. It becomes impossible to move.

He experiences a burst of agonizing pain.

His left arm has been torn off.

The beast holds his arm in its hand. It begins to nibble the tip of his little finger.

The sound rings clearly in his ears--a grotesque, sickening sound.

Even though the arm has been torn off, he writhes in agony each time the creature takes a bite.

It takes forever for the creature to devour the little finger. Eventually it moves on to his ring finger.

By the time it finishes his ring finger, the little finger he watched it eat has grown back.

The creature returns to chewing the little finger.

The cycle repeats as the creature feasts endlessly on the two fingers.

All the time, he is watching.

The pain from the fingers reaches a crescendo, becomes too much to bear.

After the next finger, he knows the creature will come for him.

They have stopped growing back.

After the next finger...

Fear and pain well up together, but the fingers grow back, and the beast returns to them.

He wants to run while the creature is busy, but his body does not listen.

A choking nausea rises up his throat, blocking the flow of air.

His fingers are in agony...

He retches, forcing the lump out of his throat.

It emerges as a scream.

Fuminari Senkichi’s eyes opened. His scream had pulled him out of the nightmare. He was covered in a boiling sweat. The ghosts of pain lingered in the fingers of his left hand. It was the ache of missing fingers, nothing but illusion. The memory of the pain was so intense it was hard to believe that the fingers were not there. Fuminari sat up in the bed.

He flexed his left hand open and then closed it again; in the dark, he covered the fist with his right palm. His three remaining fingers were horribly deformed, covered in huge callouses. They were meaty, grotesque. Fuminari noisily ground his back teeth together. He felt an intense pressure ripple against his flesh. He had the same dream again. His vision went dark as he felt an almost maddening surge of hate and anger. He tensed with all his might, struggling to mute the emotion; it felt like it was trying to rip him apart, cell-by-cell. Most of the anger was directed inward, toward himself.

His scream still echoed in the depths of his ears. It was different from the one in his dream. It was his scream from two years ago, that night in the mountains of Tanzawa. He had felt fear for the first time in his life when he saw his fingers in the mouth of that grotesque half-human creature.

I wailed like a fucking girl, almost pissed myself--a fucking child.
It was unforgivable. He wanted to self-destruct, to strangle himself to death. He had clung to the woman’s shoulder and fled the creature, trembling, dragging a useless leg behind.
Kumiko...she died trying to protect me.
But it was not the money. It was not that Kumiko had died. It was not even that the beast had eaten his fingers. Fuminari just couldn’t forgive himself for feeling scared.

Revenge.
With that word and the pain of his fingers as a crutch, Fuminari pulled himself together. He resolved to find the identity of the people behind that freakish ritual. He would hammer the beast to death with his bare hands.

I’ll rip out the fucker’s dead heart, eat it while the blood’s still fresh.

There was nothing else.

He had returned two months later to find the money, all 100 million yen of it, exactly where it had been stashed. The two bodies were nowhere to be seen. Fuminari reclaimed the cash that had cost him Kumiko, his fingers, and his pride.

He was amazed to have even survived. If he had killed Kumiko he could have lessened his burden enough to escape the creature, but he chose a different path. For her part, Kumiko could have fled while he had been fighting the creature, but she chose not to. Instead, she had put herself between them in an attempt to protect him.

I was in love
, Fuminari realized.

She had been an amazing woman. With her looks, figure, and nerve she left nothing to be desired, perfect for a man like him. He could still see her buttocks, thrusting toward him with abandon as they fucked. More than her face it was that fit, slender body and the movement of her pale, white ass that he remembered the most. It felt like it was only yesterday.

But she was gone.

Fuminari had used the remaining money to treat his fingers then flew to Taiwan. He immersed himself in Kung Fu training with the intensity of a man possessed; divorcing himself from luxury, he focused solely on the strengthening of his fists and improving his technique and grit. He would hammer his maimed fist into piles of stone, heedless as blood sprayed from the torn and blistered flesh. He would continue until he reached bone and the bleeding ceased. Only then would the hammering stop. As soon as the wounds began to heal he would begin again. He repeated the cycle over and over, as a result, his hand became increasingly deformed.

A fist is strongest around the little finger, not the thumb. Fuminari had lost the two smallest fingers, but his training rendered his left fist even stronger than before. He could crack a walnut in his three fingers with the minutest effort. Using only his index and middle fingers he could hold his entire frame suspended, over 140 kilograms. Once he was satisfied that he had honed his body into a lethal weapon, Fuminari returned to Japan.

Even like this, am I any match for that freak?
Still, the burden of doubt loomed heavily. He got up from the bed, his body soaked with a viscous sweat, and switched on the bedside light. Light traced over his muscular body. He was naked. His upper body looked shockingly powerful as he stood over 2 meters tall. Muscles bunched like rocks under his sweat-slicked skin. His neck was abnormally thick, his buttocks rugged and athletic. It was not the forcefully sculpted form of a bodybuilder, where the muscles appear large but tend to be fragile and lack speed. Fuminari’s muscle was overwhelmingly practical. His jaw was rigid, he looked as though he could take a direct punch from a heavyweight boxer and shrug it off. His eyes burned with the intensity of a cornered predator. He looked different, threatening, all vestiges of charm had disappeared from his features. He looked demonic.

Fuminari walked to the bathroom. His movements were subtle and light, designed to conceal his predator-like strength. While his bulk had stayed mostly the same, his movements were lighter than two years ago. He took a hot shower, then returned to the bed and sat down, the springs made a dull creak. He flicked a cigarette into his mouth and lit up.

When his head finally cleared, he cast his thoughts back to the afternoon’s phone call. He decided there was an 80 percent chance it was a trap. A single mistake and he would fall into their hands.

At the end of the previous week’s call, Munakata had told him he had begun investigating an organization called Panshigaru. He was, it seemed, finally onto something. Munakata had only offered the name, Panshigaru, Fuminari suspected that the man knew more, but had decided to hold back the details. Perhaps his aspirations as a reporter had gotten the better of him and he was biding time until he collated enough information to hawk the story to the media, or perhaps he was considering the possibility of sponging Fuminari for more cash. Depending on how his investigations progressed, he could even be entertaining the possibility of blackmail. Most likely he was still undecided; he would continue gathering information, testing the waters. Then, once he had a critical amount, he would take the story to the highest bidder.

Whatever he did, he would end up getting more than the million yen Fuminari had paid. Fuminari decided to treat the man’s reticence as evidence of the weight of the information he had stumbled upon.

Fuminari had been ready to do whatever was necessary to extract the information from him if he had chosen not to volunteer the it over their last call, but someone else had picked up the phone, someone claiming to be a friend and co-worker of Munakata. It was obvious that the man had been lying. The story just did not fit with his voice. Like one beast sensing the presence of another, Fuminari recognized his own smell on the man.

If the man on the phone was Panshigaru, then they already had Munakata. They would have tortured him, forcing him to tell them about Fuminari. If so, they were formidable opponents indeed.

Fuminari felt the familiar, illusory ache of his missing fingers. His lips snaked up at the sides, uncovering fearsome teeth. His cigarette was broken in a v-shape. Fuminari had made his decision; he would take the bait.

2

Fuminari walked into the bar Karula at 9:30 in the evening.

He found a chair next to the entrance, making sure to keep his back to the wall so no-one could attack him from behind. He would be able to make a quick escape if necessary. The place was a regular drinking hole, more so than he had expected. There were 30 or so customers dotted around the relatively large interior. Fuminari’s rationale for coming all the way out to the meeting, despite the risks, lay in his single advantage: the other side had never seen his face.

He arrived early, before the designated meeting time of 10 o’clock. If Munakata did not show by half-past, he would walk. The other side, of course, would expect that. The question was how they planned to set him up before that happened.

They were in the same boat: both sides would be trying to work out which customers belonged to the other. He had considered calling the bar at the due time, but nothing would have come of it if Munakata was not there. Instead, he would have lost the only thread he had that connected him to the enemy. So, he had decided to sit and wait for Munakata. If Munakata showed then all was good, and if not, Fuminari had a trap of his own prepared. Would they take the bait? Even if it came to a fight, he doubted they would kill him straight away. They would want to capture and torture him to find out why he had been employing people to research their organization.

They wouldn’t achieve anything by killing me outright.
This knowledge allowed Fuminari to step into the trap. He waited, sipping at a beer. The fabric of his short sleeve polo shirt stretched tight over his biceps, looking ready to split. He had black leather gloves on his hands.

The clock showed 10, still no sign of Munakata. A couple of minutes later an announcement sounded over the bar’s speakers. “Mr. Munakata,” a female voice called out the reporter’s name, “you have a call. You can take it from the bar.”

This was Fuminari’s idea. If Panshigaru had someone in the bar, they would surely pick up the phone. They would have planned for the contingency of Fuminari calling the bar.

A man got up from his seat toward the back of the room. He was tall and of slender build, but he was not wiry; his frame was layered with solid muscle. A short sleeve polo shirt showed off his impressively muscled forearms.

Fuminari had paid someone to make the call. He left the man strict instructions to say nothing, to wait for the other side to say something before hanging up. Fuminari wanted to convey the impression that he was phoning in an attempt to assess the situation. When whoever picked up the phone turned out not to be Munakata, he would just hang up. That was the story.

The man that took the call returned to his seat at the back of the bar, picked up his bill and headed straight for the exit. They had fallen for his trap.

The man left the bar. Fuminari tailed a few steps behind, ducking his head just enough to allow his giant frame to pass through the exit. The man stood off on the sidewalk ten meters to the right, looking for a taxi. They were on Aoyama Street and the sidewalk was still bustling with people. Fuminari started to walk, hardly making a sound. His thick legs bulged tightly against his jeans, the fabric looked like it might rip if he flexed. His muscles tensed and contracted, snakelike.

Fuminari came to a stop behind the man and grabbed him by the arm. The man managed to refrain from calling out. Fuminari’s thick fingers dug into a pressure point on the inside of the man’s upper arm. The man’s silence was impressive, any normal person would be screaming by now. Fuminari maintained a constant pressure.

“Tough guy, huh,” he whispered. The man turned to face Fuminari. All he saw was Fuminari’s huge chest. A look of incredulity flashed across his features as he took in Fuminari’s size. He slowly looked up.