Their transport ship was hit. Grievously. An explosion ruptured it, then a second. It happened so fast, all Corporal Hutchins saw was bright white, then darkness…
When he came to, he was prostrate on the deck, facing a blue sky the hue of McLean’s Lake on a summer morning. Cotton ball clouds hung irregularly, and he was struck at how peaceful the scene appeared, how serene. He knew something was wrong, but wondered why he didn’t feel any pain.
As a child, when he’d smashed his toe on a rock, the knowledge it would hurt unfolded in his brain before the actual pain flowed up the nervous system to prove that intuition true. Perhaps this pain was like that, the awareness coming before the actual feeling. And, perhaps, the greater the magnitude of the expected agony, the longer the nerves would take to relay that information, sort of like putting off telling a buddy’s wife he’d been shot to hell by the Japanese and there wasn’t enough left of him to ship back stateside.
A buzzing like angry wasps zipped past, its droning first distant, then near, then distant again. That memory of McLean’s Lake wasn’t so peaceful anymore. The decking beneath him pitched. As he went sliding, sliding down, he remembered how .20 mm cannon fire caused that insectoid noise as the bullets flew past.
Time sped up, and the pain he’d been waiting for reached his brain full-throttle. Hutchins screamed, and the blue sky turned black, and merciful unconsciousness washed over it all.
When Hutchins next faced the sky while on his back, he saw the color had changed to a reddish-gold, the hue of autumn hickory behind Camp Lejeune, backlit by a rising sun. The moan that tore itself from his locked throat was as caustic as the dawn was pretty.
“Here, sip this. We’re rationing.” He recognized the grim voice, but the face over him was a blur: one of the platoon sergeants, Denny.
Hutchins tried to ask about his condition, but the moment his lips cracked apart, a canteen’s mouth pressed in. Iodine-flavored water dribbled over his tongue, down his parched throat.
He was bobbing, up and down, up and down, but real gradual.
Sgt. Denny turned to look at something Hutchins couldn’t see over the lip of the lifeboat’s edge. He muttered, “Goddamned sharks.”
When Hutchins opened his eyes again, he stared upon the sky and saw the color was black and white, like the static on a television set once it goes off-air; there were that many twinkling stars.
The next time he woke, the sky was purple and angry blue, as if the heavens were bruised by some mighty foe. The coloring of the sky matched that of his body. Pain throbbed with every dragged breath, though ebbing, except the times it became worse.
Hutchins stared upward, and this time he did not pass out. The sky had turned olive green as a G.I.’s piss pot.
Sgt. Denny forced more iodine water into his mouth. Hutchins almost had the strength to spit it out, but managed to keep down every drop.
He gasped and struggled to sit up until his back mutinied. Since the explosion, everything he’d seen was while laying prone, balled up aft side with a punctured life vest pillowing his head. He was drenched. Something shifted in his chest that wasn’t meant to move.
The choppy gray ocean surrounded them, and he studied it. “Wh-where… are… we?”
“Hell if I know,” Denny said. He looked to say more, but was interrupted.
“I see land!” a voice shouted. “There’s land, land!”
A thin, keen wailing sounded in the distance. After looking around, Denny finished, “Or maybe Hell’s exactly where we are.”
The few marines—those still strong enough—paddled with their hands to the craggy shore. There, the water shallowed, showing spears of slimy, jagged rocks. Fish splashed away. The water eddied with undercurrents and whirlpools. All but one of the men still wore his G.I. boots. That man remained in the raft with the wounded while the others waded out and dragged them through the swell. Hutchins knew the bootless man.
“Fitch, hey.” Hutchins rasped, coughed.
“’Bout time you got up, princess. If it weren’t for Sarge, I’d have tossed you into the soup days ago. You moan like a bitch in heat.”
“Days ago?”
“Days, weeks, who knows. I lost track, but we made it. Terra firma. And none too soon.”
With a great heave, the wading marines hauled the raft through the last of surf and beached it a dozen yards upslope. The ground was all rocks, smooth and sharp as broken Coca-Cola bottles, sparkling in the palette of the rainbow.
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A wiry marine strode back to them, crunching gravel. He patted the raft’s bow. “This ol’ bird’s done flying.”
The rubber lifeboat slumped to one side and the rest of it leaked and hissed from under peeling splits of yellow patches. Water sloshed inside. Dried blood and salt and muck smeared its ragged lining.
“That’s Private Stach,” Fitch told Hutchins, pointing to the other marine. “He saved your life.”
“I’m not a corpsman or anything,” Stach said, “but I played doctor often enough with the gals in school.”
Fitch grabbed a fish skull from inside the raft and threw it in response, pinging Stach on his steel helmet.
The raft was filled with those skulls, floating in half a foot of stale brine alongside chewed fins and loose scales and tooth-picked bird feathers. The raft water was warm, and it smelled of rot, and it frothed as Hutchins tried to pull himself out. He was soaked through, his fatigues, like his skin, soggy and discolored by the sun and sea.
“Get me out of here.”
“Easy,” Stach said. “We’ll find a place to lay you out, but it’s all rocks here. You’ll tear your wounds open on ’em.”
“Wounds?” It hurt Hutchins to breathe, hurt to move, hurt to talk. But he didn’t know what was wrong with him. There were few places his body didn’t ache.
“I bandaged your chest as best I could, though you got a couple busted ribs. I don’t think they hit any organs yet, but you move the wrong way and you’ll end up with a popped lung.”
“Be a helluva way to go out, drowning in your own blood after surviving that blast.”
“What happened?” Hutchins’s mind was a groggy beast.
“Zero’s bomb dropped right on you,” Fitch said. “I saw it. Looked like you were trying to catch a pop fly ball, way your arms went over your head. You must’ve blown airborne thirty feet.”
“You took burns on your limbs, torso, head,” Stach added. “Hope you weren’t partial to your eyebrows, ’cause they’re AWOL. And you probably sucked down half a fireball.”
“You were running a manic fever, too, but it broke.” Fitch said. “Lucky as hell, kid. You outta be dead.”
“If this is luck, I’ll take latrine duty… ” Hutchins replied dryly.
Fitch went deadpan. Heavy stubble covered his lower face, sandy blonde over burned red skin. Cracked and swollen lips pulled tight, and he tilted his head without looking back. “Could be worse.”
Hutchins hadn’t noticed the sailor lying at the raft’s other end, half-submerged in the seawater marsh. The man’s eyes were closed and his face twitched in cadence. His torso was a shambles and missing an arm. The stump sprouted black tendrils of gangrene or some other mortal infection up his blue-green shoulder.
“Seaman James,” Stach said. “He should’ve died two days ago. He just don’t know it.”
Sgt. Denny returned to the raft with another marine. “This beachhead is pure stones and bird crap. Beyond that is jungle, and plenty of it. Goes on far as we can see. Gotta be food, water, maybe native farmers or fishermen.”
“Tropical paradise,” Fitch said. “Any minute, topless hula gals’ll come out with coconuts and straws.”
Hutchins doubted whatever they found would be good. He heard that thin, keen wailing coming from the jungle depths like when they’d first spotted land. A breeze picked up, bringing with it a smell of wet, rotting filth and something else, not unlike the reek of sour tofu. In the distance the twin conical peaks of extinct volcanoes hovered over the tree line. In its foreground, one of those trees suddenly shrank into a small creature and scampered into a hole.
Hutchins blinked, mistrusting what he saw. Nothing else moved except storm clouds hurrying over their position. He was still groggy from his injuries, his brain felt swollen, his eyes bleary. Just seeing things…
“That’s it for Seaman James,” Stach said. He’d been mopping the sailor’s forehead. It was pale and wet and waxy, the sweat beading like raindrops rolling down taut rubber.
“Found peace at last,” the marine with Denny said. He was tall, and the only one of the group Hutchins didn’t know yet, but he wore the insignia of a corporal.
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“Sorry, James,” Fitch said. “At least now I got boots.”
Hutchins counted five ragged men remaining, including himself. Between the sailors crewing the USS Spectrum, the three marine rifle platoons, and his own science division squad, the ship had sailed with over two hundred men on board. When they were hit by a squad of Japanese Zero planes, it’d been a complete surprise. The Spectrum—a converted high speed transport—sank just as fast as it once sailed, slipping through the waves like the greased cartridge through a rifle’s chamber.
He asked Denny, “Where’s the rest of the company?”
“Goddamned sharks,” was all the sergeant replied.
A movement up shore drew their attention. The beach ran about fifty yards inland, stopping abruptly before a leafy jungle wall that rose from the wasteland like a lush rampart. Palm fronds rustled back and forth, and an Asian woman older than Hutchins had ever seen emerged.
“Jap!” Stach said.
The tall corporal lifted his rifle at her. “In sight!”
“Williamson,” Sgt. Denny commanded him. “Lower your weapon, you’ll scare her off.”
The old woman looked frail and stooped, no taller than five feet, and her face was painted white like Hutchins had seen in paintings of Japanese geisha girls. An oversized conical hat—a sugegasa—wrapped her head, doubling her height. She shambled toward them with great effort, slowly and delicately, as if straining at each step not to topple over. As she neared, he saw her eyes were impossibly giant, great saucers of ebony sorrow overflowing a minikin face.
Sgt. Denny tensed as she neared, and his own weapon lifted. “Speak English?”
Her staunch shuffle did not waver, but she looked at the corporal, Williamson, who stood nearest. “Saké?”
“What? The drink?”
Her enormous eyes turned next to Fitch, pleading. “Wine?”
Fitch drew back a step, glancing at the sergeant. “Are there others with you?”
She returned his question with one of her own. “Saké?”
Fitch crinkled his face, and sunburned flesh cracked. He looked about to say something else but fell silent instead.
The stooped old woman was barefoot, and Hutchins expected her to leave a trail of blood and torn flesh across the sharp rocks as she neared, but the jagged ground did not seem to bother her at all.
She looked at him next, sitting in the wrecked lifeboat. “Saké? Wine?”
“No,” Hutchins answered. “We have no saké or wine.”
The woman’s shoulders slumped, and she sighed long and mournful. She spoke no more, turning from them in the same creaking movements that had brought her to them.
“Wait,” Sgt. Denny said.
She ignored him, instead shuffling back to the palm fronds from where she’d come. Cpl. Williamson moved after her, grabbing at her bony shoulder. His hand passed through, and she became a swirl of white mist, the same color of her painted face.
He cursed and leapt backwards.
“Blue hell,” Fitch muttered.
Stach murmured a quick prayer and crossed himself.
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“Get back,” Denny ordered, and the marines retreated to their beached raft.
Again, that smell of tofu drifted past, but sour and rotten, and Hutchins suddenly recognized it. Chòu dòufu, a strange dish favored in night markets, but one also with other associations… He studied the jungle wall, so like a verdant palisade, then turned his attention to the surrounding sea. A brilliant orange fish bobbed its head through waves and watched him with several of its spider eyes. One eye winked a secret before the fish dove back down as silently as it had appeared. Hutchins felt his heart hammering and hoped it wouldn’t impale itself against one of the broken ribs, although, in light of what he concluded, it might be preferred. He thought of the phantoms…
“I know where we are,” he said quietly.
Though this should have been welcome news to the other marines, Hutchins’s voice was too dismal. He watched them tense and eye each other nervously.
“Where’s that?” Denny finally asked.
“It was my group’s mission to find proof of this site.”
Denny looked around quickly, trying to outguess Hutchins. “You’re part of M.A.G.E.”
“Yes,” Hutchins said. He sucked in a deep breath, but the pounding in his chest checked that effort. He wheezed instead. “And now my mission’s successful. We’ve found… Island of the Yōkai.”
Stach turned around as if trying to look everywhere at once. He shook his head, either uncomprehending or incredulous. “No, no, no…”
“That was Shiroibaba,” Hutchins added, “the old woman searching only for alcohol, but a warning, also, of uncertainty, of guilt. She will be the first, foraging ahead of others. She’s not dangerous… but others will be.”
Williamson traded glances with Fitch. “What does that mean? What’s… yook-eye?”
“Yōkai,” Hutchins repeated. “They’re the monsters of Japanese folklore…” He coughed, shuddered. “Spirits cursed by vice and misdeed to haunt or punish the living.”
“Blue hell,” Fitch said again, his dark eyes growing large with fright.
Hutchins nodded. “The yōkai know we’re here… we have to leave.”
“Tell us first,” Denny ordered. “What’re we up against?”
Twelve months prior, the calendar marked October 1942, nearly a year after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Bruised and outraged, America sought to avenge itself and, after long, bloody struggles, Allied forces began to do just that, successfully landing on Guadalcanal and islands in the Solomons, eradicating their Japanese strongholds one-by-one, like hunting down stags in a Big Buck contest. Each enflamed bunker was another notch on a marine’s rifle stock or a hash mark on a F4F Wildcat’s cockpit.
But as the rubble cleared, secret tunnels unearthed, and enemy officers interrogated, terrible whispers began to emerge that made Nazi atrocities seem as prosaic as morning drills on the barracks square.
Demon children corralled by Japanese artillery…
Woodland phantoms emerging from battlements…
Apparitions that could never exist, yet were unaccountably kept at top-secret installations…
Much of the intelligence was ascribed to Eastern superstitions, but there was enough evidence to question existence of the yōkai that US Admiral Chester Nimitz ordered an emergency formation of military scientists to investigate and determine how exactly to study and eradicate this ominous threat.
The Air Force had their Office of Special Investigations to research UFOs through Project Blue Book, and the Navy and Marines now were thus jointly authorized to initiate a project, known clandestinely as M.A.G.E., or Mystical and Arcane Guidance Examination. Though he was only a corporal-ranked specialist, Hutchins learned the yōkai better than anyone else in the group. He explained the phantoms to superior officers with a perceptive familiarization that went beyond their classified case files. Somehow Hutchins felt as if he already knew them all…
Biwa-bokuboku, the haunted lute; Gashadokuro, a giant skeleton that bites the heads off humans; Ha-inu, the powerful winged dog that can conjure wind with its bark; Yukinba, the snow hag, who appears with sudden blizzards to swallow her victims; and so many others.
His division squad of M.A.G.E. was on a secret mission to find proof of the Island of Yōkai, where the spirits were rumored imprisoned until they could be controlled to the bidding of Japanese leaders.
The USS Spectrum had been escorted by two destroyers, but with no sign of Japanese activity in their quadrant, the escort was called back to provide cover on another mission.
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Then the Zeros found them.
The Mitsubishi fighter planes were painted like their nation’s flag with a single red disc emblazoned in center of each glossy white fuselage, an emblem known as The Rising Sun. At Hutchins’s first glance it seemed as if two dozen enemy flags suddenly dropped upon them from the clouds. The Spectrum didn’t last ten minutes.
And now here they were, on an island not known on any map…
“We’ll advance off this beach,” Sgt. Denny said. He clenched his fists and grit his teeth.
“It’ll be night soon,” Stach countered. “We can’t march through a dark jungle with ghosts around.”
“We can’t stay, we’re exposed out here.”
“We also have a clear line of sight.” Williamson leveled his rifle at the tree line.
Hutchins interrupted the others. “We need to leave.”
“What else are we discussing?” Denny snapped.
“Off this island, I mean.”
“Unless you’ve got another boat packed in your rucksack, we’re sheltering on this rock.”
Sgt. Denny looked to say more, but a crash sounded, and a monstrous, sinewy bird bolted overhead, trailing a long, scaled snake’s tail. The body was twice as long as any of the marines, covered in shale-and-amethyst-colored feathers, and the head was an old man’s with a constipated face. Tufts of surly white hair surrounded its jagged yellow beak.
“Itsudemo! Itsudemo!” It shrieked horribly.
“In sight,” Williamson said, raising his Springfield rifle to line the creature in scope.
“No!” Hutchins shouted. The exertion made his chest wounds pound. “That one is a warning. The sound it’s making is denouncement of suffering… it means, ‘How much longer?’ If you kill that one, it would come back to haunt us further. We’d have increased its suffering.”
“In that case, I say also, itsudemo,” Stach muttered. “There’s got to be a way out from this hellhole.”
The bird-man flew away, though its call echoed long after from the jungle leaves.
Denny went red-faced as he issued a string of curses, then ordered, “We need recon, now. Stach, head straight into the jungle. Fitch, veer right. Williamson, take left. See what you can see. Report back in an hour, before dark.” He turned to Hutchins. “Meantime, I want intel. How do we fight these spooks?”
“Fight? I don’t know that we can… ” Hutchins paused, thinking. “There’s no single way to dispatch all yōkai since each is different. Imagine facing a demon, a ghoul, and a werewolf all at once. What same weapon could defeat them all?”
“You’re a real beacon of optimism, ain’t ya?” Fitch asked.
“Well, my weapon is American firepower,” said Stach. “I’ve never known a creature to withstand that.”
“I don’t think bullets can—”
“What’re you still doing here?” Denny interrupted, yelling. “Recon with a purpose! Move out!”
The other marines disbanded.
Hutchins remained, laying propped up, wounded in the raft. His fever may have broke, but he knew infection could still set in anytime. Bruised and broke and burned, how could he ever hope to escape this island?
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Denny snapped his fingers at him. “You, continue.”
“All right. Well, first, not all yōkai are hostile. Many do exist to harm, but others only suffer absolution or have been cursed. Some are just shapeshifters.” He paused, hitching a long breath. “If believed, everything without a soul that is touched by yōkai and survives to its one hundredth birthday becomes one of them. Plants, animals, even inanimate objects, kitchenware, whistles, things like that.”
“That’s key, ain’t it? If believed? Maybe something about these bastards does exist, but still seems a lot of bullshit mixed into fact. I mean, how can these ghosts or whatever be so completely different?”
“They’re like people, yōkai are diverse. Some have purpose, and some are just omens.” Hutchins coughed, another hard breath. “Oh, and if a yōkai isn’t killed properly, it can return in an even more vengeful form.”
Denny cracked his knuckles. “And I thought Imperial tanks were tough to demolish.”
“There’s more,” Hutchins said. “The yōkai have been banished to his island by the emperor of Japan, but they didn’t comply willingly. There’s a yōkai priest, the Mamono Shisai, who had to trick or cajole the apparitions to come here.”
“How do you cajole an apparition?”
“Promise it something it desires.”
“I won’t ask what a monster desires.”
“The Mamono Shisai keeps them here, and he may be our only hope. We need to find him.”
Denny grit his teeth, thinking.
Hutchins kneaded his limbs and, for the first time since landing, pulled himself out of the raft to stand, his legs feeling like grass that swayed under a gale.
“Need support?” Denny asked.
“No,” he groaned. “No… I can do it.”
The gale in his legs worsened, and his chest thundered, and his head filled with stabs of lighting, but Hutchins stayed upright until the pain and light-headedness passed. He was weak but found he could walk. Slowly.
He took his time moving around, ticking through motor functions, stretching, testing mobility, while Denny itemized their weapons and salvageable supplies.
Between the six of them making landfall—one now dead—they were armed with two M1A1 Carbine rifles, a scoped M1903 Springfield sniper’s rifle belonging to Cpl. Williamson, two M1911 pistols, and a half-dozen grenades.
Hutchins was in no condition to load and fire a rifle, much less withstand its impact, so he armed himself only with a pistol. He wanted a couple grenades too, but had no strength to throw anything; the thought of unpinning a bomb and having it fumble from his weak grasp seemed more likely an outcome than not.
When the other marines returned, Williamson reported seeing a peasant farmer with the neck of a giraffe. Fitch brought more heartening news.
“In the distance, on a mountain peak, there’s a brick tower with some sorta parapet on top. No flags or armament in sight, but it looks habitable, cared for.”
“Defensible?” Denny asked.
“Definitely.”
How can you defend against phantoms? Hutchins thought, but said nothing.
“If there’s a radio, any other chance of communications, it may be there,” Denny said. “Sounds like our best bet also to find the Mamono Shisai.”
“What’s a Mamono Shisai?” Williamson asked.
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“He lives on this island,” Hutchins said. “The name means Mad Priest.”
“You left that part out,” Denny growled.
Hutchins shrugged, sheepish. “Mad or not, he’s the keeper of the yōkai. We need to find him.”
The sergeant continued with Fitch. “Distance to the tower?”
“Hard to say with the tree line. Couple days at a trot, maybe more, maybe less.”
Denny nodded, gritting his teeth, cracking his knuckles. The flushing sun dipped half below the horizon, where ocean and sky mirrored each other in endless waves.
The marines decided to wait out night before moving ahead. They built a cairn of rocks over Seaman James and dried out the raft and relocated their pitiful camp to the edge of beach and jungle, where it wasn’t as conspicuous as on the tideline. Though as soon as they finished, it rained foul water, and they got soaked again. They took turns, guarding and sleeping. The raft was a puddle of rain and depression, but Hutchins returned to it, as lying on the terrible ground brought fresh agonies to his wounds.
He dreamt of his childhood, of a talking cat, and he woke to the sound of a gunshot and a wild shout. The high moon was fat and full, and by its light and his training Hutchins rolled over and grabbed his M1911 pistol, crying out at the sudden sharp agony in his chest.
God, the pain! He wanted to shriek. What he wouldn’t give to move freely again without feeling barbs of fire rending him at every motion…
He instead turned his focus to Stach, who was shouting, “She came at me!”
“Who?” Sgt. Denny asked. He looked around, and under the bright celestial light Hutchins could see lean muscles tense under his frayed uniform. “What happened?”
“An old woman!”
“The one who asked for wine?”
“No, no, someone else… someone, she had damned green skin. Where is she?”
The men looked around, but they were alone.
Stach continued. “I heard a sound like someone slurping, and then I saw her—it—on James’s body. It came outta nowhere!”
Fitch grimaced.
“I was watching the beach,” Stach said. “One moment we were clear, and the next, this… this thing had its mouth over James, chewing. The rocks we buried him under were scattered. It was a woman… she was naked ’cept for a hairy diaper. And when I told her to freeze, she barred her teeth at me… they grew from her mouth. Actually grew outward like extending your fingers, doubling in length right at me. I shot her. I shot her right between her yellow eyes.”
“Looks clear now,” Williamson said. “No one here.”
“She’s gone,” Fitch muttered. “Just like the wine woman.”
Hutchins’s chest pained, and he coughed and rasped for breath. He wasn’t signaling for attention, but the others looked to him. He felt obligated to speak.
“Kokuri baba,” he told them, recalling the creature’s mythology.
“What’s a kokuri baba?”
“She eats the skin of corpses.”
None of the others asked any further, nor did they sleep. The smell of chòu dòufu hung strong in the air. The marines rebuilt James’s cairn and cleaned their rifles and ate bits of chocolate Ration D bars.
Dawn crested, and they readied to march.
“What about Hutch?” Fitch asked, pointing at him.
“What about him?” Denny said.
“He can’t make it through the jungle, he can barely walk. Maybe he outta stay here with one of us.”
“We stay together. No marine left behind.”
“He was in a coma since the Spectrum sank,” Fitch countered.
“Wish I got that much R&R.”
The men discussed Hutchins as if he wasn’t there. Fitch didn’t speak unkindly; he was just a realist. But Hutchins assured them, “I’ll keep up.”
“You can’t. Your ribs are sticking out.”
“Stach bandaged him,” Denny answered, firmly.
Before Fitch could say anything else, Hutchins interjected, “I can do it. I’m a marine.”
And that settled it. Williamson drew point position and Denny shadowed him. Fitch and Stach took turns helping Hutchins walk, and he grimaced at every step. In this way they entered the jungle.
A thousand hints of ginger and jasmine, wild rose and gingko drifted between the trees as wild and potent as the green vines were savage and splendid that looped around each mighty dark trunk. Flowering kapok and hazel tualang, palms and orchids, creepers and rattan, it all flourished and stacked atop each other stretching for the sky. What little sunlight fell between their massive broad leaves appeared as dazzling waterfalls cascading to the mushroom and root-banded earth.
Progress was maddeningly slow. Hutchins grimaced at every step, even while leaning on Fitch who took his weight. Not only his chest, but his exposed burns tested the limits of misery whenever touched by the other man’s rough arms or grazed by spindly tree branches. Plants snagged at them with hooks and barbs, and his feet felt clumsy, stumbling over rocks and furrows.
Suddenly, something ahead crashed through the undergrowth. Williamson halted, and the others dropped low.
It sounded large, and it moved along the path, coming at them. Grunts, shattering branches, then a monstrous thing strode into view, elephantine in size and human in form, but with the head of a baby boar, wrapped in gold hair like a lion’s mane.
Hutchins recognized it at once: the demon offspring, Ibaraki-dōji.
The yōkai’s mottled skin was as olive drab as their faded fatigues, and a third arm sprouted from the center of its chest, pushing apart the front flaps of a silken haori half coat. That arm was its power—and its weakness—sleeved in muscle and long sinews that allowed it to reach twice the distance of any normal limb.
Ibaraki-dōji roared, and its center arm reached for them fast as a leaping cougar, each clawed finger scrabbling for a different soldier’s face.
Williamson fired once and Ibaraki-dōji dissipated in a swirl of stench and white mist.
“See,” Stach said. “Told you no creature can withstand American firepower.”
Hutchins frowned, wondering.
Fitch gagged. “What’s that horrible funk? I thought we smelled rotting fish off the ocean before, but it’s getting worse as we move inland.”
“Chòu dòufu,” Hutchins answered. “It means stinky tofu.”
“Stinky’s an understatement. Smells like someone tried masking vulture crap under garlic.”
“It’s tofu fermented in a mix of sour milk, brine, and spoiled seafood. A great delicacy, served at night in Japanese markets.”
“Blue hell,” Fitch muttered.
“The smell is associated with yōkai. I don’t know why, but they smell like chòu dòufu, and villagers eat it as homage, so as to be found pleasing by the phantoms. It’s an old superstition.”
“There, the tower,” Williamson interrupted.
Hutchins squinted to see where Williamson pointed. The initial view was just as Fitch described: A far-off mountaintop tower crowned by a parapet. It appeared plain and gray and old.
Without warning the bird-man appeared again, plunging from the sky and screaming its namesake, “Itsudemo!”
The marines flinched, bringing up their rifles, and Itsudemo flew off. Stach cursed in three languages.
“Enough tea talk,” Sgt. Denny said. “We’ve got distance to cover. Let’s move.”
They trekked through the haunted jungle, as quickly as Hutchins could keep up, following a rock-strewn path as thin and winding as a ravel of barbed wire, separating walls of wet orchids and monstrous ferns. Williamson resumed the lead, measuring each footfall, tracking sounds and movement. He held up a fist in the air, a silent order to halt. The marines froze. He dropped the fist; they moved. Williamson’s hand went up again, open-faced this time and then swatted downward. The marines crouched. Williamson seemed to listen intently. He motioned forward, the marines moved; he stopped again, and they stopped.
Denny crept up to him. “Sights on something?”
“I swear, there’s footsteps tracking us, moving when we move, and stopping when we stop.” Williamson looked back at the others. “Anyone else hear them?”
They shook their heads no.
Williamson took a step forward.
“There!” he said. “I heard it again. Behind me…”
The other marines moved to him. Stach asked, “You sure?”
Williamson nodded, confused.
Hutchins recalled an odd yōkai that was only a nuisance rather than dangerous: the ghostly footprints.
He hesitantly cleared his throat and by remembering its legend, announced, “Oh, please, Betobeto-san, you first.”
Leaves rustled and a set of footprints appeared among them, large indentations for each baseball-sized toe pushing through sticky soil. The prints padded past, walking away.
“What… was that?”
Hutchins answered, “Harmless, that one won’t bother us. You must only offer for him to go in front. But we’ve got to make better time. Other yōkai will be closing in.”
Stach yelled, “There’s something else!”
A branch snapped, and a massive buttress root shifted aside. From all around came the cries, moans, shrieks, and gibbers of countless phantoms.
“Move!” Denny ordered, but too late, for a hundred different things came at once.
A towering ogre with fanged underbite shoved through purple mangroves, swinging its spiked mace, while a skeletal harpy, gray and caped under birds’ eyes dropped from above on wings that spanned twenty feet. Something resembling a red lizard with the trunk of an elephant scurried at them, trumpeting. A floating finger with chewed nail danced in flames. A dozen rats in chains poured from burrows beneath strangler figs. One-eyed tarts, headless boars, bearded worms, a flurry of claws, feathers, satins, and colors appeared that were grisly and entirely irrational.
Hutchins had no time to identify them, and the marines opened fire indiscriminately. Stach and Fitch triggered their M1A1 carbines as fast as the semi-automatics could shoot. Down went a faceless boy, and a tiger-striped goblin, and a badger with tattooed fur, each bursting into white mist. Williamson, the sniper, picked his targets deliberately, firing through his Springfield’s crosshairs: a glowing snail in officer’s uniform, a turnip-headed baby, an old slipper with sad eyes, turned also to mist. Hutchins shot his pistol, each discharge a wracking agony in his chest. Denny threw grenades. The ogre, the rats, the harpy, and more all vanished in billows.
As fast as they were there, the yōkai pulled back, vanished. The marines reloaded their weapons, tense, eyeing everywhere suspiciously while stifling gags from the tofu’s reek.
The island fell silent…
White and gray swirls, dueling in twilight, were colors of the sky when it dumped a sudden flurry of bewildering snow drifts, and Williamson was suddenly killed.
Eaten. Eaten was more appropriate, Hutchins thought afterward, though “killed” was comfortably objective. That’s what would go in the files: Killed In Action. No marine’s death would ever be cited as Eaten In Action. At that, Hutchins suppressed a sudden, mad chortle.
Williamson’s gormandizer had been a child’s drawing, a half-finished sketch in the margins of an arithmetic table, stark and covered in rough triangle teeth. It was all head, with a pair of stick arms emitting where a person’s ears might normally appear, and one long, sickly leg jutting from its neck to taper into a seven-toed foot. The kimono around its taut calf hid nothing.
And what had happened to Cpl. Williamson was even non-perturbing to the others, a detached impression as terrible as the event itself, that they now almost seemed to expect such things of the island. The sky had dumped cold flakes, and Yukinba the snow hag appeared, and its great mouth swallowed Williamson in a flash, and that was it. Once the marine sniper was gone, so too was the snow, no trace left of either. The sky again shone soft blue as McLean’s Lake, just like when the USS Spectrum had been hit.
“Let’s go, move, move!” Denny ordered the remaining marines.
Run for your lives, he might well have said to each man, but the marines at least had the training and grace to stay together and accept their burden of supporting Hutchins.
“What… in God’s name?” Fitch whispered to Hutchins as they shoved through milky rubber trees. He wrapped his arm around the wounded comrade, supporting him, their helmeted heads at times clanking together. “Those things could have taken us all, why just Williamson?”
“The yōkai are… playful,” Hutchins said, though he also thought, deceitful. The dream of the talking cat came back, and he knew it for a memory.
