A Natural History of Hell: Stories Page 9

  When the car moved again into the moonlight, he checked behind them and saw nothing. Then they heard a loud growling. Each searched frantically to see where the noise was coming from. Swerving out of his lane, Riku looked out his side window and down and saw the creature running alongside, the movement of its four legs a blur, its face perfectly human.

  “Kuso! Open the glove compartment. There’s a gun in there. Give it to me.”

  “A gun?”

  “Hurry,” he yelled. She did as he instructed, handing him the sleek nine millimeter. “You were right,” he said. “The place was haunted.” He lowered his side window, switched hands between gun and wheel. Then, steadying himself, he hit the brake. The dog looked up as it sped past the car—a middle-aged woman’s face, bitter, with a terrible underbite and a beauty mark beneath the left eye, riding atop the neck of a mangy gray mutt with a naked tail. As soon as it moved a foot ahead of the car, Riku thrust the gun out the window and fired. The creature suddenly exploded, turning instantly to a shower of salt.

  “It had a face,” he said, maneuvering the car out of its skid. “A woman’s face.”

  “Don’t stop,” she said. “Please.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Now,” she said, “who is your employer? Why would he send you to such a place?”

  “Maybe if I tell you the truth it’ll lift whatever curse we’re under.”

  “What is the truth?”

  “My employer is a very powerful businessman, and I have heard it said that he is also an onmyoji. You know him. In a moment of weakness he told you a story about an affair he had. Afterward, he worried that you might be inclined to blackmail him. If the story got out, it would be a grave embarrassment for him both at home and at the office. He told me, spend time with her. He wanted me to judge what type of person you are.”

  “And if I’m the wrong kind of person?”

  “I’m to kill you and make it look like an accident,” he said.

  “Are you trying to scare me to death, you and the old woman?”

  “No, I swear. I’m as frightened as you are. And I couldn’t harm you. Believe me. I know you would never blackmail him.”

  She rested back against the car seat and closed her eyes. She could feel his hand grasp hers. “Do you believe me?” he said. In the instant she opened her eyes, she saw ahead through the windshield two enormous dogs step onto the highway thirty yards in front of the car.

  “Watch out,” she screamed. He’d been looking over at her. He hit the brake before even glancing to the windshield. The car locked up and skidded, the headlights illuminating two faces—a man with a thin black mustache and wire-frame glasses, whose mouth was gaping open, and a little girl, chubby, with black bangs, tongue sticking out. On impact, the front of the car crumpled, the air bags deployed, and the horrid dogs burst into salt. The car left the road and came to a stop on the right-hand side, just before the tree line.

  Riku remained conscious through the accident. He undid his seatbelt and slid out of the car, brushing glass off his shirt. His forehead had struck the rearview mirror, and there was a gash on his right temple. He heard growling, and, pushing himself away from the car, he headed around to Michi’s side. A small pot-bellied dog with the face of an idiot, sunken eyes, and swollen lower lip was drooling and scratching at Michi’s window. Riku aimed, pulled the trigger, and turned the monstrosity to salt.

  He opened the passenger door. Michi was just coming around. He helped her out and leaned her against the car. Bending over, he reached into the glove compartment and found an extra clip for the gun. As he backed out of the car, he heard them coming up the road, a pack of them, speeding through the moonlight, howling and grunting. He grabbed her hand and they made for the tree line.

  “Not the woods,” she said and tried to free herself from his grasp.

  “No, there’s no place to hide on the road. Come on.”

  They fled into the darkness beneath the trees, Riku literally dragging her forward. Low branches whipped their faces and tangled Michi’s hair. Although ruts tripped them, they miraculously never fell. The baying of the beasts sounded only steps behind them, but when he turned and lifted the gun, he saw nothing but night.

  Eventually they broke from beneath the trees onto a dirt road. Both were heaving for breath, and neither could run another step. She’d twisted an ankle and was limping. He put one arm around her, to help her along. She was trembling; so was he.

  “What are they?” she whispered.

  “Jinmenken,” he said.

  “Impossible.”

  They walked slowly down the road, and, stepping out from beneath the canopy of leaves, the moonlight showed them, a hundred yards off, a dilapidated building with boarded windows.

  “I can’t run anymore,” he said. “We’ll go in there and find a place to hide.”

  She said nothing.

  They stood for a moment on the steps of the place, a concrete structure, some abandoned factory or warehouse, and he tried his cell phone. “No reception,” he said after dialing three times and listening. He flipped to a new screen with his thumb and pressed an app icon. The screen became a flashlight. He turned it forward, held it at arm’s length, and motioned with his head for Michi to get close behind him. With the gun at the ready, they moved slowly through the doorless entrance.

  The place was freezing cold and pitch black. As far as he could tell there were hallways laid out in a square, with small rooms off it to either side.

  “An office building in the middle of the woods,” she said.

  Each room had the remains of a western-style door at its entrance, pieces of shattered wood hanging on by the hinges. When he shone the phone’s light into the rooms, he saw a window opening boarded from within by a sheet of plywood, and an otherwise empty concrete expanse. They went down one hall and turned left into another. Michi remembered she had the same app on her phone and lit it. Halfway down that corridor, they found a room whose door was mostly intact but for a corner at the bottom where it appeared to have been kicked in. Riku inspected the knob and whispered, “There’s a lock on this one.”

  They went in, and he locked the door behind them and tested its strength. “Get in the corner under the window,” he said. “If they find us, and the door won’t hold, I can rip off the board above us and we might be able to escape outside.” She joined him in the corner and they sat, shoulders touching, their backs against the cold concrete. “We’re sure to be safe when the sun rises.”

  He put his arm around her, and she leaned into him. Then neither said a word or made a sound. They turned off their phones and listened to the dark. Time passed, yet when Riku checked his watch, it read only 3:30. “All that in a half-hour?” he wondered. Then there came a sound, a light tapping, as if rain was falling outside. The noise slowly grew louder, and seconds later it became clear that it was the sound of claws on the concrete floor. That light tapping eventually became a clatter, as if a hundred of the creatures were circling impatiently in the hallway.

  A strange guttural voice came from the hole at the bottom corner of the door. “Tomodachi,” it said. “Let us in.”

  Riku flipped to the flashlight app and held the gun up. Across the room, the hole in the bottom of the door was filled with a fat, pale, bearded face. One eye was swollen shut and something oozed from the corner of it. The forehead was too high to see a hairline. The thing snuffled and smiled.

  “Shoot,” said Michi.

  Riku fired, but the face flinched away in an instant, and once the bullet went wide and drilled a neat hole in the door, the creature returned and said, “Tomodachi.”

  “What do you want?” said Riku, his voice cracking.

  “We are hunting a spirit of the living,” said the creature, the movement of its lips out of sync with the words it spoke.


  “What have we done?” said Michi.

  “Our hunger is great, but we only require one spirit. We only take what we need—the other person will be untouched. One spirit will feed us for a week.”

  Michi stood up and stepped away from Riku. He also got to his feet. “What are you doing?” she said. “Shoot them.” She quickly lit her phone and shone it on him.

  Instead of aiming the gun at the door, he aimed it at her. “I’m not having my spirit devoured,” he said to her.

  “You said you couldn’t hurt me.”

  “It won’t be me hurting you,” he said. She saw there were tears in his eyes. The hand that held the gun was wobbling. “I’m giving you the girl,” he called to the Jinmenken.

  “A true benefactor,” said the face at the hole.

  “No,” she said. “What have I done?”

  “I’m going to shoot her in the leg so she can’t run, then I’m going to let you all in. You will keep your distance from me or I’ll shoot. I have an extra clip, and I’ll turn as many of you to salt as I can before you get to me.”

  Turning to Michi, he said, “I’m so sorry. I did love you.”

  “But you’re a coward. You don’t have to shoot me in the leg,” she said. “I’ll go to them on my own. My spirit’s tired of this world.” She moved forward and gave him a kiss. Her actions disarmed him, and he appeared confused. At the door, she slowly undid the lock on the knob. Then, with a graceful, fluid motion, she pulled the door open and stepped behind it against the wall. “Take him,” he heard her call. The Jinmenkin bounded in, dozens of them, small and large, stinking of rain, slobbering, snapping, clawing. He pulled the trigger till the gun clicked empty, and the room was filled with smoke and flying salt. His hands shook too much to change the clip. One of the creatures tore a bloody chunk from his left calf, and he screamed. Another went for his groin. The face of Grandmother Chinatsu appeared before him and devoured his.

  The following week, in a private room at the Limit, Michi sat at a blond-wood table, staring out the open panel across the room at the pines and the coast. Riku’s employer sat across from her. “Ingenious, the natural history of autumn,” he said. “And you knew this would draw him in?”

  She turned to face the older man. “He was a unique person,” she said. “He’d faced death.”

  “Too bad about Riku,” he said. “I wanted to trust him.”

  “Really, the lengths to which you’ll go to test the spirit of those you need to trust. He’s gone because he was a coward?”

  “A coward I can tolerate. But he said he loved you, and it proved he didn’t understand love at all. A dangerous flaw.” He took an envelope from within his suit jacket and laid it on the table. “A job well done,” he said. She lifted the envelope and looked inside.

  A cold breeze blew into the room. “You know,” he said, “this season always reminds me of our time together.”

  As she spoke she never stopped counting the bills. “All I remember of that,” she said, “is the snow.”

  Blood Drive

  For Christmas our junior year of high school, all of our parents got us guns. That way you had a half a year to learn to shoot and get down all the safety garbage before you started senior year. Depending on how well off your parents were, that pretty much dictated the amount of firepower you had. Darcy Krantz’s family lived in a trailer, and so she had a pea-shooter, .22 Double Eagle derringer, and Baron Hanes’s father, who was in the security business and richer than God, got him a .44 Magnum that was so heavy it made his nutty kid lean to the side when he wore the gun belt. I packed a pearl-handled .38 revolver, Smith & Wesson, which had originally been my grandfather’s. It was old as dirt, but all polished up, the way my father kept it, it was still a fine-looking gun. It was really my father’s gun, and my mother told him not to give it to me, but he said, “Look, when she goes to high school, she’s gotta carry, everybody does in their senior year.”

  “Insane,” said my mom.

  “Come on,” I said. “Please . . .”

  She drew close to me, right in my face, and said, “If your father gives you that gun, he’s got no protection, making his deliveries.” He drove a truck and delivered bakery goods to different diners and convenience stores in the area.

  “Take it easy,” said my dad, “all the crooks are asleep when I go out for my runs.” He motioned for me to come over to where he sat. He put the gun in my hand. I gripped the handle and felt the weight of it. “Give me your best pose,” he said.

  I turned profile, hung my head back, my long chestnut hair reaching halfway to the floor, pulled up the sleeve of my T-shirt, made a muscle with my right arm, and pointed the gun at the ceiling with my left hand. He laughed till he couldn’t catch his breath. And my mom said, “Disgraceful,” but she also laughed.

  I went to the firing range with my dad a lot the summer before senior year. He was a calm teacher, and never spoke much or got too mad. Afterward, he’d take me to this place and buy us ice cream. A lot of times it was Friday night, and I just wanted to get home so I could go hang out with my friends. One night I let him know we could skip the ice cream, and he seemed taken aback for a second, like I’d hurt his feelings. “I’m sorry,” he said and tried to smile.

  I felt kind of bad, and figured I could hug him or kiss him or ask him to tell me something. “Tell me about a time when you shot the gun not on the practice range,” I said as we drove along.

  He laughed. “Not too many times,” he said. “The most interesting was from when I was a little older than you. It was night, we were in the basement of an abandoned factory over in the industrial quarter. I was with some buds and we were partying, smoking up and drinking straight, cheap vodka. Anyway, we were wasted. This guy I really didn’t like who hung out with us, Raymo was his name, he challenged me to a round of Russian roulette. Don’t tell your mother this,” he said.

  “You know I won’t,” I said.

  “Anyway, I left one bullet in the chamber, removed the others, and spun the cylinder. He went first—nothing. I went, he went, etc, click, click, click. The gun came to me, and I was certain by then that the bullet was in my chamber. So, you know what I did?”

  “You shot it into the ceiling?”

  “No. I turned the gun on Raymo and shot him in the face. After that we all ran. We ran and we never got caught. At the time there was a gang going around at night shooting people and taking their wallets, and the cops put it off to them. None of my buds were going to snitch. Believe me, Raymo was no great loss to the world. The point of which is to say, it’s a horrible thing to shoot someone. I see Raymo’s expression right before the bullet drilled through it just about every night in my dreams. In other words, you better know what you’re doing when you pull that trigger. Try to be responsible.”

  I was sorry I asked.

  To tell you the truth, taking the gun to school at first was a big nuisance. The thing was heavy, and you always had to keep an eye on it. The first couple of days were all right, ’cause everyone was showing off their pieces at lunchtime. A lot of people complimented me on my gun. They liked the pearl handle and the shape of it. Of course the kids with the new, high-tech 9 millimeter jobs got the most attention, but if your piece was unique enough, it got you at least some cred. Jody Motes, pretty much an idiot with buck teeth and a fat ass, brought in a German Luger with a red swastika inlaid on the handle, and because of it started dating this really hot guy in our English class. Kids wore them on their hips, others, mostly guys, did the shoulder holster. A couple of the senior girls with big breasts went with this over-the-shoulder bandolier style, so their guns sat atop their left breast. Sweaty Mr. Gosh in second period math said that look was “very fashionable.” I carried mine in my Sponge Bob lunch box. I hated wearing it; the holster always hiked my skirt up in the back somehow.

  Everybody in
the graduating class carried heat except for Scott Wisner, the King of Vermont, as everybody called him, I forget why ’cause Vermont was totally far away. His parents had given him a stun gun instead of the real thing. Cody St. John, the captain of the football team, said the stun gun was fag, and after that Wisner turned into a weird loner, who walked around carrying a big jar with a floating mist inside. He asked all the better looking girls if he could have their souls. I know he asked me. Creep. I heard he’d stun anyone who wanted it for ten dollars a pop. Whatever.

  The teachers in the classes for seniors all had tactical 12-gauge short-barrel shotguns; no shoulder stock, just a club grip with an image of the school’s mascot (a cartoon, rampaging Indian) stamped on it. Most of them were loaded with buckshot, but Mrs. Cloder, in human geography, who used her weapon as a pointer when at the board, was rumored to rock the breaching rounds, those big slugs cops use to blow doors off their hinges. Other teachers left the shotguns on their desks or lying across the eraser gutter at the bottom of the board. Mr. Warren, the vice principal, wore his in a holster across his back, and for an old fart was super quick in drawing it over his shoulder with one hand.

  At lunch, across the soccer field and back by the woods, where only the seniors were allowed to go, we sat out every nice day in the fall, smoking cigarettes and having gun-spinning competitions. You weren’t allowed to shoot back there, so we left the safeties on. Bryce, a boy I knew since kindergarten, was good at it. He could flip his gun in the air backwards and have it land in the holster at his hip. McKenzie Batkin wasn’t paying attention and turned the safety off instead of on before she started spinning her antique Colt. The sound of the shot was so sudden, we all jumped, and then silence, followed by the smell of gun smoke. The bullet went through her boot and took off the tip of her middle toe. Almost a whole minute passed before she screamed. The King of Vermont and Cody St. John both rushed to help her at the same time. They worked together to staunch the bleeding. I remember noticing the football lying on the ground next to the jar of souls, and I thought it would make a cool photo for the yearbook. She never told her parents, hiding the boots at the back of her closet. To this day she’s got half a middle toe on her right foot, but that’s the least of her problems.