“How is that supposed to make me feel better?”
I held the light in one hand as we tiptoed through the schoolyard, past the old painted white lines still visible on the ground. Glancing up, we saw the unlit school building towering overhead, and it seemed to melt into the surrounding darkness. I quickened my pace as I pointed the light toward the abandoned school building—now either a mass gravesite or the coffin of a dismembered god.
“Now, if I were two giant arms, where would I be…?” I muttered to myself. Miyaki responded from behind me.
“I’m not sure. But the arms are each twenty-five meters long. I doubt they’d be able to store them in a classroom unless they knocked down some walls.”
A night breeze suddenly wafted past, causing something shaped like a distorted dome just beyond the school courtyard to sway in the dark. I moved the beam of light in that direction. A long covering that I had mistaken for a wall at first fluttered in the wind. Bumps and protrusions were visible on the surface, as if something was pressing against it from within. It was a pool cover. There was also a stand-alone wall fitted with rows of showerheads standing nearby.
“That’s the pool. Let’s go.”
The air grew more unforgiving, chilly like cold metal. The fence around the pool was already teetering to the side. I pushed on a section, and it gave way easily, opening into a path that led to a basin where children rinsed off before getting into the pool.
“Don’t come complaining if a guard finds you, Katagishi.”
“Me? You’re an accomplice now, too, you know. You don’t have to come any farther, though. Just hold this for me.”
I pressed the penlight into Miyaki’s hand and made my way toward the pool.
The showers, white with limescale, glowed faintly beneath the light of the moon. The kickboards that had been left scattered about were rife with mold. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a loose end of the pool cover sheet, which was fluttering madly like a living creature. I hurriedly approached the edge.
The sheet, which covered the twenty-five-meter pool from one end to the other, rose up in the middle to form two humps, giving the neat impression of a pair of elbows lined up side by side.
I quickly made my way toward the starting blocks, while Miyaki pointed the light at the ground beneath my feet. I began undoing the yellow and black rope that bound the sheet to the base of one of the blocks. It was no easy task. My hands were numb from the cold, and the rope had grown stiff from long years of rain and wind exposure. I lost my grip as I pulled, my hand colliding with something hard underneath the sheet. It felt like a thin metal plate. I assumed it was a fingernail.
I managed to pry apart the knot at last, then held tight to the loose end of the sheet. Before I could peel the sheet back, however, a strong gust of wind did the job for me. The dry base of the pool was visible beneath the dim light. There it was, right down the middle. I reflexively tried to look away, but ten column-like fingers, lined up just beneath the starting blocks, caught my eye.
“Miyaki, can you see it from where you are?”
There was no answer at first. Instead, the light shook erratically, as if Miyaki was trembling.
“They’re both right arms.”
Two giant arms were stretched along the length of the pool. The palms were facing the sides of the pool, both thumbs sticking up. The positions of the overlapping fingers matched.
“There wasn’t any mention of this guardian deity having three arms, was there…?” Miyaki said, her voice quivering.
“The two eyeballs we saw in the school building were different sizes as well. And that drawing of the god we found didn’t depict any hair…”
The head of the giant we had seen on the yellowing piece of paper had been drawn with a single clean stroke, completely bald. I recalled the great mass of tangled black hair stored away in one of the classrooms.
“Then whose hair did we see? And more importantly, if it’s not the god falling on this village every year…”
“I don’t know…”
The villagers had erected new stone statues around the village to honor the god again, worrying that they had angered it by clearing the mountain and the land. But was it really the original god that looked down upon the village and their new idols?
“It’s possible that the deity has changed in some way…but there could also be something else entirely that is just pretending to be the original deity of this land…”
One of the fingers on one of the arms in the pool, the one closest to me, twitched slightly. Moved by the wind? However, no sooner had I formed the thought than the wrist, with its protruding bluish-purple vein, began to stretch and rotate slowly. I heard Miyaki’s shoes scuff the ground as she scrambled back. With a slithering, crawling sound, the arm turned so that its palm was now facing my direction. Three of the fingers, along with the thumb, curled inward, while the remaining index finger pointed stiffly toward the sky. The universal sign for shh.
The next morning, the rice paddies and the tree leaves sparkled brilliantly, not a speck of the world out of place. After the events of the previous night, we had placed the pool cover back in its original position and left the school with our tails tucked between our legs. We returned to the lodgings the village had provided for us, acting as if we hadn’t seen a thing. Currently, we were staring at the peaceful village scenery from within the safe confines of our car. Heavy machinery, such as bulldozers and cranes, cut across the fat road carved into the land. I hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. The glare coming off the paint of the vehicles stung my eyes.
“What did you tell them in the end? That they should just bury the things?” Miyaki asked from the passenger seat, rubbing her eyes. I nodded, my upper body slumped over the steering wheel.
“Yep. I didn’t mention anything about another god or anything like that. Just that they should go ahead and consign the body parts back to the earth, maybe in an area of the mountain that hasn’t been developed yet. It doesn’t matter—wherever possible.”
“I guess there isn’t much else they can try.”
“That’s how things go in our department. We may deal with unusual situations, but at the end of the day, it’s pretty standard bureaucratic stuff. When it comes to divine incursions, you should genuinely assume we won’t be able to fix anything. Just consider it a win if we manage to avoid the worst.”
Miyaki seemed dejected. I tossed her a can of coffee that I had bought from a vending machine. She smiled slightly and lowered her head.
“What do you think will happen after they bury the parts…?”
“Who’s to say? But if the real guardian deity is still alive, it will hopefully defeat whatever bizarre, terrible creature has invaded its soil. For the village’s sake.”
The old man who had passed us the other day leaned out of the driver’s seat of his truck and waved. I replied with a quick beep of my horn. Exhaust fumes diffused the glaring sunlight, meandering upward toward the mountain ridge, which towered beyond.
“We can only pray.”
After all, what else can humans do against gods?