James Kendley

from

 The Devouring God 

 

 

Monday Evening

 

Despite his faith, the old man was terrified. His breath echoed ragged in the enclosed space, and his heart hammered in his chest. He was alone in a basement, he was sure of it; his escorts had led him down stairs and through a narrow tunnel, and now he was waiting to be punished for his mistakes, his treachery, and his cowardice. A honeyed voice from the darkness said, “Abbot, you may remove your blindfold.” The abbot’s liver-spotted hands trembled as he untied the silken kerchief. He blinked in the glare of a naked lightbulb suspended in the gloom. When his eyes adjusted, he found himself alone in a room the size and shape of a tennis court, a basement room as he had guessed. The walls were white with a floor of durable rust red. Folding tables and chairs stood stacked against the far wall. The bare concrete floor sloped slightly away from him to a steel-grated drain running the length of the room. A track in the ceiling ran parallel to the drain. Rusted pulleys in the track suggested a machinist’s assembly line or an abattoir. He imagined briefly that he had been led there to be murdered, and that his blood would be washed into that drain, but only vanity would lead him to believe himself worth murdering.

 

A cracked and yellowed projection screen hung from the pulleys. At one end of the drain, to the abbot’s right, a low, ornate iron door was set into the irregular stones of the wall. The other walls were modern cinder block, but that wall, plastered and painted though it had been, betrayed much older construction, and the ornamentation of the door itself suggested prewar fabrication, perhaps late-nineteenth- century Meiji era. It was as if the whole building had arisen around this older structure.

 

The iron door was midnight black, shining with oil or varnish. It had been cared for.

 

There was nothing else. He turned. The double doors behind him had closed, and there was only a folding table—no, a human skull on a folding table.

 

“Is it—” His voice echoed in the darkened space. “Is it the Cinematographer?”

 

“As promised,” the voice answered from the darkness. It seemed to come from all around the abbot, buzzing and whispering from the shadows themselves. “Please, feel free to examine it. Take your time.”

 

The abbot’s hands were steady as he reached for the skull, but his pulse fluttered in his belly.

 

The bone was cocoa-brown and unmarred under thin shellac. The cranium and jawbone were wired together in an everlasting grin. The crooked teeth were inlaid with brass, and the eye sockets were inset with sleepy ovals of ivory and stained wood. A silver band embossed with a death’s head motif marked the seam where the skull had been sawed open and the brain removed. The abbot pulled, and the skull cap popped off in his hands—the discarded grail of a bloodthirsty Hindu goddess. The interior of the cranium had been lined with beaten copper to make an airtight cavity, and a cylindrical brass key lay on a bed of green felt within.

 

“Does this key unlock the shrine?”

 

The darkness laughed, and a man stepped into the pool of light beneath the naked bulb. His suit was so black that it seemed to stay behind, melding him with shadow. “The shrine needs no lock. The lock that key once fit was reduced to slag decades ago.”

 

The abbot glanced at the double door. It had not opened, so the man in the suit had been there all along, somehow concealed in the empty room. He was clearly the one called the counselor. Such a man’s time was very valuable, and even the abbot himself had to avoid wasting it. The abbot quickly reassembled the skull, raised it to his forehead, and chanted a brief verse from the sutras.

 

“He’s quite unable to hear your prayers, you know. He lost his ears in the Himalayas almost seventy years ago.”

 

The abbot looked up to see the counselor’s small, derisive smile. Such impiety could be a test of the abbot’s responses, or it might be a mockery of the heresies spouted by their common enemies. The abbot could only reply from his faith: “My prayers are not for the ears of the living or the dead, but for those of the Eternal Buddha, who is beyond life or death.”

 

“An interesting proposition, but we are concerned with only two alternatives: life or death.”

 

“The life or death of our cause if news of the . . . ah, the other relic becomes public?”

 

The counselor grinned. His teeth were huge, yellow in the incandescent light. “The life and death of Japanese citizens. Productive members of society. Consumers and taxpayers. We must retrieve the artifact, and we must retrieve it quickly.”

“You have the resources of this huge corporation at your command,” the abbot said. “Why do you need us?”

 

The counselor waved at the darkness. “All this is really . . . well, let us just say that recovery of the artifact requires a different sort of power. That is where your organization comes in.”

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

“It’s not necessary that you understand the levels of power involved, but you must witness the effects of the artifact itself. This footage is the work of the cinematographer whom you so revere. Each frame was painstakingly colored by the same skilled workers who tinted Japan’s famous postcards. An important cultural legacy indeed, especially since those skilled workers were liquidated at the project’s conclusion.” The counselor addressed the darkness: “I will leave the room, and then the projector will start.”

 

He slipped out into a brief glimpse of sickly green corridor.

 

The abbot heard, for the first time in many years, an old-fashioned motion-picture projector whirring and clattering to life. His own silhouette sprang up fat and black on the projection screen hanging on the rust-frozen pulleys above the steel grate in the floor. He stepped out of the beam and turned to look for the projector. There was a cinder block missing in the wall behind him, a hole pouring forth the chatter of sprockets and the flickering stream of moving images.

 

The abbot turned back to face the screen. The footage was disturbing from the first but not horrifying, not even when he began to suspect what was about to happen. When the blood began to flow, the abbot couldn’t help but pity the artists whose final work in this world had been hand-tinting this monstrous reel, laboring frame by frame toward their own doom. He forgot all about the workers when the artifact’s true effects became clear, abundantly and gruesomely clear, and his body attempted to betray him. His hips pivoted as if to turn him from the screen, but he dared not look away. His hands rose to cover his eyes, but he dared not raise them higher than his cheeks. His lungs pushed air through his vocal cords as if to make him scream, but he dared not make more than a small, mewling moan easily drowned out by the ratcheting noise from the hole in the wall behind him.

 

The screen went dark. The abbot stood in silence, his hands still on his cheeks, stunned and shaken by what he had seen.

The counselor stepped into the light again. “So you understand why we must regain the artifact.”

 

The abbot started. He had not noticed the counselor’s return. “So it’s t-true,” the abbot said in a stuttering, wheezy voice. “The rumors about the starfish killings are true.”

 

The counselor assumed a pained expression. “Starfish killings indeed! I called them the jellyfish killings. What else would you call murders with boneless victims?” He sighed. “Even the best marketing sometimes goes to waste.”

 

The abbot didn’t know quite what to say.

 

“Abbot, you have a special relationship with the ones who will retrieve the artifact for us. One of them at least.”

 

The abbot stiffened. “I know the men of whom you speak. They are heretics. Madmen. They cannot be trusted.”

 

The counselor tilted his head. “The same has been said of you and your followers, Abbot.”

 

The abbot crossed his arms. “I will not contact them.”

 

“They are already engaged. They are on our side, working for the health and welfare of the Japanese people.”

 

“Their betrayal of the Lotus Sutra condemns them to the Avichi Hell. I cannot intervene.”

 

The counselor laid his forefinger on the abbot’s wrist. “You will save them. You will bring them back into the light of truth.”

 

A relief and a certainty swept over the old man. I will save them.

 

“You will help feed them information they need to recover the artifact for us.”

 

“I will bring them back to the light,” the abbot said. Then he growled: “I will bring them back to the light or I will kill them myself.”

 

The counselor laughed with genuine amusement. “Abbot, your enthusiasm is commendable, but killing won’t be necessary. If our mutual friends fail to retrieve the artifact, why, within a few weeks there will be no one in Japan left to kill.”

 

 

 

Former DM Senior Editor James Kendley is the author of The Mooncalf and Other Tales, a collection to benefit A-rated charities: the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and a Ronald McDonald House in the Florida panhandle. THE DEVOURING GOD is available on Amazon or from HarperCollins...