If the Head Fits

Three days of peace don’t happen very often, so I allowed myself free time to tell you about another story. Story I’d like to start by ranting -you may know that I have a full case of rants in my bag- against these greedy irresponsible drudges also known as real estate developers. You know, them, dissecting landscapes, quantifying and assessing. Them, unable to understand that temples are not only cheesy space-consuming buildings… History? Culture? Is that sellable?

I’m not in the property business, but at least when you build something somewhere I think you have to ponder contingencies of yôkai or ghost neighborhood. Doing so would definitely be better for these… people’s business -I admit I almost have used a slightly less polite qualifying… But they say, Master must not swear. Or not too much.

***

Generally speaking, newly built houses are a kind of place I can actually rest in. They’re not crowded by filthy auras and unwanted presences. Well, if that was the case of the one I’d like to talk about, my presence would not had been required in a hurry at nearly eight in the evening. In my area of work, overtime is a quite abstract concept, unless you assume usual working hours as my normal sleeping hours.

I wasn’t alone because my employer wanted to go to the scene with me. Sounded fun when I found said employer was Kanata.

He has not been presented yet, so I’ll jump at the chance: Kanata is my nine-years-older brother. He and I have strictly nothing in common, from ideals to daily life. His main quality is being perfectly ordinary, and he mainly fails in his appreciation of me. At least, for the last that’s something we share.

As I’m kneeling to look over the place where a corpse used to be, he’s running at me holding a security helmet, assuring me I must put it on because that’s the procedure.

“Seems it has not been of a great assistance to your worker, this procedure you make a fuss of,” I answer, and I hear him taking a deep breath (maybe preventing him from carving said helmet into my skull. I have this ability to irritate him with a single sentence).

I was in an already bad mood after a short discussion –not to say bloody argument- with two stubborn cops in charge of watching the crime scene. I had to show them my governmental permit. This is my personal autograph book, with all the Japanese political and administrative bigwigs signs, allowing me to enter any police prefecture, taking the superintendent’s cafe latte from his own hand and asking him where is the sugar on top of that (to make it clear, I know that because I actually did it).

One of the cops stays with us; on the evidence of his inquisitive eye-looking I guess he doesn’t want me to put a spanner in the works. In his defense, I don’t really look like a coroner. However, self-righteous in his varnished brown shoes, Kanata plays perfectly the part of the real estate agent oozing literally with the idea of telling his clients there’s a corpse in their home-sweet-home to be.

When he phoned, big brother was a bit out of his nerves, and between respites I think I had had the main thing: a building painter met the wrong kind of person in a house under construction. Even I should acknowledge that this is terrible advertisement, except if you like yellow journalism.

“The body was there. Nothing has been touched” says the cop and I instantly understand why Kanata smelled the dirty trick. Lack of blood stains or punch-up evidences can occur on a crime scene. When a head has been separated from the body and is nowhere to be found, it becomes harder to believe. And when ballistics and physics give up too and pretend they don’t care, that’s when I take part for the greatest displeasure of hard-nosed.

“I’d like a glass of water, if you please”.

Kanata meets eyes with the cop… okay, my brother doesn’t understand. I stare at the cop, telling him that I will not leave my fingerprints everywhere, because I know his superior would be slightly irritated. He snorts, tries to look threatening and fails, finally consenting to leave the room for my satisfaction. Who did he think he is? I had had my face so close to yokai’s that we could have made out easily, so little game of nasty glances sounds very childish to me now.

My brother, out of his depth, still doesn’t understand why I need water.

“Because it is hard enough to concentrate with you looking over my shoulder when I’m working, so I asked for him to evacuate. Close the door.”

Last time a zealous civil servant though it was a good idea to ask me what I was doing, he ended up as a stain on the wallpaper. Bad reaction. I was trying to pull a yôkai out of a nursery room and I was a bit nervous.

I need less than a few seconds to feel the heavy sticky, persistent aura floating around, of the kind that rings all my alarms. To my onmyôji ears it sounds like nails screeching on a blackboard. Not a demon, not really a yôkai either, it’s something rather… intense, as if I was surrounded.

To help you getting an idea of what it feels like, try putting your hand in a bucket full of iffy material and guess what you are touching.

“Got it. Is there a garden here?”

“In the backyard, why?”

I stand up and feel a brief pain located in my throat, sharply enough to mentally slap myself in the face.

“Satoru?”

“The cop!”

As you may understand, sometimes one can be part of Japan’s spiritual elite and part of very stupid. I let a guy wandering in a dirty, nasty house in which people bring out the big esoteric guns. And this guy has probably just paid the price of my carelessness. I thought –utterly wrong- that my aura would have prevented the thing hidden here to reveal itself.

I bolt out of the room and trip over a lying body, around two yards from the door. Kanata bumps into me and looks at the thing on the floor, loosing his lasts colors.

“Kami-“

“Leave the gods be and show me where the garden is before he clears off!”

“He?”

“A Kubikajiri!”

I catch him again within the garden as expected, wearing a raggedy sort-of kimono, cackling and bending over something. At least, he’s so focused on whatever he’s holding that my showing up didn’t worried him at all.

Easy, Satoru… the few inches above my shoulders and the top of my head are not so unnecessary that I’d like to get rid of them.

“Can I help you?”

Startled, the ghost stands up straight. Bruised and already blue, his face is Yoshi’s, the late painter he beheaded yesterday. I slowly raise both of my hands and let him study me.

“Yes, I can certainly help.”

He turns towards me and I can see what he’s holding, the cause of so much interest: the cop’s severed head.

“It may be long time before you find it, don’t you think? I can give you a hand.” Still, I don’t move. “They have bothered you, that’s the least I can do for you.”

He hesitates, claps his mouth several times, then he smiles, giving me a good view of his sharp black teeth… a smile that seems to split his face in two, his way of approving. Still avoiding hasty gestures, I move my hands to intone.

“Om… sowaka… Om… sowaha…”

The grass around me is shivering, gradually growing to a gust. In case you’re sometimes wondering about this oddly cold sensation, that kind of draft when there is not any breath of air… well you can almost certainly put your money on a ghost. And if you feel it hard to stay alive, guess probably not a spirit prankster.

Still staring at me, the kubikajiri cocks his “borrowed” head on a side, then it pulls loose and falls on the grass. In its place, a new face slowly takes shape, a bit thinner, with big black eyes and a human-sized mouth, smiling at me. I open my eyes and bow at him.

“It is easier this way, don’t you agree?”

In my back my brother comes finally out, probably wondering why the hell I am bowing to severed heads of his former employee and of the cop, because that’s all he’s able to see. The ghost bows in return, lower than me. The wind unfolds and he’s scattering away, calming down as soon as he has totally disappeared.

“Gone.”

As usually after an exorcism, my hands are slightly shaking and my legs are numb, and I need to slowly stretch them to release the tension within my muscles. An unpleasant feeling I never completely managed to overcome.

“What did you just do?”

“Gave him a hand. Kubikajiri have a nasty habit of ransacking graves in order to try on heads, looking for theirs. I just saved him some time, no more no less.”

“Searching for graves… so why is it not looking for a graveyard?”

“He was.”

What is he thinking of? That you can expropriate a ghost by asking him if he could do us a good turn and go haunting elsewhere, because a real estate will soon replace all these faded and frankly poor tasted graves?

“You were the ones who brought livings here. My advice is to see your boss and make use of little power of persuasion you have for them to screw up this building site. I would hate to come back again for the next drop dead worker. Speaking of, I’m going to eat something before I drop dead.”

Hands in my pockets, I want to turn around and walk away but Kanata stops me.

“But... don’t you exorcise it? This kaji… kaja…”

“I did. So, you think he was the only one?”

Our gazes fall on both severed heads in the grass, and this time, by the way he looks, Kanata seems to understand.

I pat him on the shoulder.

“Well, it was nice to see each other, oni-san. We should do this more often.”

Then I go back in the hall biding him a good day. That’s the very moment I put neighborhood issues into perspective. It’s a kinda positive way of thinking, when one comes to think about it.