Читать книгу The Stone of Kuromori - Jason Rohan - Страница 7

BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!

‘Hnh? Whuzzah? ’ Kenny pushed himself up on one elbow, his mind lurching towards wakefulness. Blinking his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose, he fumbled for his watch.

04:09. In the morning.

He sat up. Stifling a yawn, he wavered between flopping back down to sleep or investigating the source of the noise. Drowsiness won and he slumped back on to his warm futon.

BANG-BANG-BANG! The front door rattled with the urgent pounding.

Fully awake now, Kenny jumped up and threw off the duvet. A strip of light blinked on at the base of his bedroom door and he heard his father, Charles, trudging along the hallway.

Scrubbing his hairline with his fingers, Charles unlatched the door. It slammed inwards, catching him on the ankle, and a Japanese girl in biker leathers stormed past him.

‘Oww! Kiyomi, what’s with all the hammering?’ Charles muttered, hopping and clutching his bruised bone. ‘Do you have any idea what time –’

‘Where’s Kenny?’ Kiyomi’s clenched jaw and the flash of anger in her eyes stopped Charles mid-hop.

‘Kiyomi?’ Kenny stood in his bedroom doorway. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ She put her hands on her hips and glared at him.

‘Uh, Dad. It’s OK,’ Kenny said, catching his father’s look of concern. ‘I’ve got this.’

‘Really?’ Charles said. ‘Not from where I’m standing.’

‘We need to talk,’ Kiyomi hissed at Kenny. ‘In private.’

‘Fine, but I don’t see why this couldn’t wait until the morning,’ Charles grumbled, pointing to the living room. Kiyomi marched past, with her boots still on.

Charles dipped his head closer to Kenny’s. ‘You two aren’t going to fight, are you? I mean, literally fight, as opposed to just arguing?’

‘Dad!’ Kenny said, throwing up his hands.

‘OK, just asking. I don’t need the place trashed.’ Charles stifled a yawn. ‘I’m going back to bed, so try to fight quietly.’

Kenny padded into the lounge where Kiyomi was pacing like a caged tigress. She rounded on him, stabbing a finger at his nose. ‘What have you done?’

‘Whu-? ’

‘Don’t act stupid with me.’

‘It’s not an act.’ Kenny jerked his head away from the accusing finger and ran through the hundreds of reasons Kiyomi might be angry with him. Had she heard about him tackling Red Cape alone? Did he forget to text her? Had he left the toilet seat up again? He had no idea.

Kiyomi grabbed a handful of his T-shirt, marched him backwards towards the sofa and pushed him on to it. ‘Sit down, shut up and hear what we have to say.’

‘We?’ Kenny looked around in bewilderment until he spied a fat, furry, raccoon-like animal waddling in from the kitchen area, an open packet of roasted-squid-flavoured crisps in its paws.

‘Hey, I was saving those,’ Kenny objected.

Poyo spat a mouthful of chewed potato on to his paw and offered it to Kenny.

‘Ugh. No thanks.’

‘Do you mind?’ Kiyomi snapped at the tanuki, who retreated back into the kitchen.

Kiyomi strode over to the balcony windows and stared out into the dark Tokyo night. ‘I just had a dream,’ she said, ‘or nightmare more like.’ A shudder ran through her slender frame and she wrapped her arms round herself.

Kenny sat up at once, fully awake. Dreams were not to be taken lightly; he had learned that the hard way.

Kiyomi continued, her voice flat and emotionless. ‘I’ve been to Yomi once, if only for a few minutes, so trust me, I know Hell when I see it.’ She shuddered again. ‘It’s a dark, desolate, empty wasteland infested with every kind of filth and vermin.’

‘This was your dream?’ Kenny asked, eyes wide with concern.

‘I said to shut up and listen.’ The city lights beyond the window sparkled in Kiyomi’s dark eyes. ‘In my dream, I was flying through the Land of the Dead, zipping over the earth until I came to this palace made of bone. It’s the only building of any size, so it’s obvious who it belongs to: the Lord of the Underworld. Do you know who that is?’

Kenny swallowed hard. He sensed that something bad was thundering towards him and there was nothing he could do to avoid it.

‘You can answer,’ Kiyomi said.

‘No, um, never heard of him,’ Kenny lied, hoping to protect her.

Kiyomi spun on one boot heel. ‘Well, he damn well knows who you are! In fact, he’s on first-name terms!’

Kenny’s heart sank. This was rapidly going from bad to worse. ‘Uh, was there any more to your dream?’

Kiyomi’s jaw tightened and her eyes drifted into the middle distance, while she replayed the vision. ‘The palace doors go up a mile. They’re so high that I can’t see the top. Anyway, I stand at the entrance, with this freezing-cold wind howling. And there’s this . . . this moaning and wailing sound, of dead people – and guess what happens?’

‘A pizza delivery guy shows up?’

Kiyomi grabbed an eraser from the desk and hurled it at Kenny, bouncing it off his forehead.

‘Oww,’ he protested. ‘Sorry, I can’t help it.’

Kiyomi took a deep breath. ‘So the doors swing open and this . . . rotting thing . . . ushers me in, like some kind of zombie butler, and says that his Lord is expecting me.’ She held her hands out in Kenny’s direction, as if pleading for help. ‘Don’t you get it? I’ve been summoned . . . invited. Me personally.’

Kenny absently wiped a cold sheen of sweat from his brow.

‘Inside, the palace is a crumbling ruin,’ Kiyomi said, ‘all decaying glory. I’m taken through this maze of corridors to the throne room, high up, and there’s like a thousand oni standing there, all waiting for me.’

Kenny scowled, trying to picture the scene.

‘And you know what they do?’ Kiyomi’s voice went up almost an octave and a grimace of horror twisted her face. ‘They bow. All of them. They bow – to me, like I’m one of them.’

Kenny’s head spun and he felt dizzy. ‘But . . . I thought –’

‘No, Ken-chan, you didn’t think. You never think through the consequences of your actions.’

‘What actions? What exactly am I supposed to have done?’ Kenny shrugged. ‘Uh, back to the oni . . .?’

‘Yeah, the oni. Half of those guys should be queuing up to tear me apart, after I sent their sorry butts back to Hell, but no. Now they’re treating me like long-lost family. Then the doors open and in comes the Storm God himself, ruler of the underworld.’

‘Susie?’ Kenny breathed, firing a glance in Poyo’s direction.

‘Susano-wo himself. He comes over, takes my chin in his hand and kisses the top of my head. Ugh! It’s so disgusting. A centipede is crawling through his hair and a freaking cockroach plops on to my shoulder.’ Kiyomi closed her eyes tightly and grimaced at the memory.

‘Does he say anything?’ Kenny asked, dreading the answer.

Kiyomi nodded. ‘You bet he does. He says, “Welcome, child. Any friend of Kuromori is a friend of mine. How is young Kenny? Has he forgotten me and our arrangement?”’

A cold chill ran through Kenny. ‘But this is a dream, right? From your imagination? Maybe it’s post-traumatic stress –’

‘Shut up,’ Kiyomi said. ‘After the dreams you’ve had, you think I don’t know when the gods are sending a message?’

‘But . . .’

‘I haven’t finished,’ Kiyomi warned. ‘So then he takes out a bronze mirror, about this big.’ She held her palms out, marking a space roughly as wide as her shoulders. ‘And he shines a beam of light on it.’

‘Let me guess,’ Kenny interjected. ‘He says, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”’

‘Close,’ Kiyomi said, her voice cold. ‘He says, “Show me the resting place of the Yasakani no Magatama.”’

‘The what?’

‘It’s the Jewel of Life. The image in the reflection changes to show the surface of the ocean, then it shifts to the seabed.’

‘The bottom of the sea?’

‘Uh-huh,’ Kiyomi said. ‘And then Susano-wo looks at me and says, “Tell Kuromori he has four days to bring me the precious Stone of Life or our bargain is at an end. My patience grows thin.” He holds up his hand and shows me this white jade ring on his finger. It’s the twin to that ring you gave me – the red jade one. “Tell him to remember our agreement and honour it,” he says, “or I will reclaim my prize.” And then . . .’ Kiyomi stopped, her breath catching in ragged gasps. ‘And then . . . he punches his claws into my stomach and rips out this . . . white, glowing mist.’

‘Your soul,’ Kenny gasped.

‘My ki,’ Kiyomi corrected. ‘That’s when I woke up.’

Kenny rubbed his face with both hands. ‘That’s some nightmare all right.’

Kiyomi remained by the window, shaking. ‘It wasn’t a dream, Ken-chan. It was a message – from a god.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ Kenny asked.

‘Because . . .’ Kiyomi pulled out her phone and scrolled through the photo gallery. ‘When I woke up, I found this . . .’ She handed Kenny the phone.

He stared for a few seconds, uncomprehending, before his mind finally made sense of what he was seeing. The picture showed a bedroom wall and scrawled in mucky red fingerprints to form large marks and symbols, was:

Kenny zoomed in on the photograph and his stomach lurched as he recognised the sticky drips and spatters that formed the writing. The message was written in blood.