The Oni, page 1
THE ONI
By Gordon Linzner
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2018 Gordon Linzner
Original publication by Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.—1986
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Gordon Linzner is founder and former editor/publisher of Space and Time Magazine. He is the author of the novels The Spy Who Drank Blood, The Oni, and The Troupe, as well as dozens of short stories appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Twilight Zone, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and numerous other magazines and anthologies.
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THE ONI
Table of Contents
New York City
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
Nihon (Ancient Japan)
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
New York City
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
Nihon (Ancient Japan)
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
New York City
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
Nihon (Ancient Japan)
CHAPTER 43
New York City
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
Other books by Gordon Linzner
New York City
Tuesday, December 28, 1982
CHAPTER 1
Scritch.
Scritch.
Scritch.
For one thousand three hundred and thirty-two years, his impenetrable coal-black eyes have seen nothing but more impenetrable darkness. He does not know the exact period of his imprisonment; only that it has been a very long time.
More vexing than this darkness is the virtual absence of sounds from the outside world. The iron encasement acts as an efficient damper. In the past millennium and a third, he has heard little beyond the desperate scrape of his bleeding fingernails as they worry the predetermined spot on the otherwise homogeneous interior surface of his prison; that, and the angry, bitter curses with which he passes the time when he must pause, not to rest but to let his nails grow out again.
It took centuries just to make a tangibly noticeable dent in the barrier, centuries during which he kept track of the site by marking it with his own viscous, sticky blood. Then hundreds of years more to deepen that first hairline scratch to its present groove.
He might breach the barrier tomorrow, or not for another thousand years. He has no clues by which to judge. His memory of the casing’s thickness, glimpsed inattentively so long ago, is vague. He cannot recall its relationship to his present size, and layers could have been added after he was sealed within. Nor has he been inclined to speculation. Guesswork would not shorten his confinement by a single hour. Only the tedious wearing away of metal beneath his stinging and abraded fingertips could influence that. This task has been all to him. His waking hours—and he was not even sure he ever slept—held no other diversions.
Scritch.
Scritch.
Scri ….
In mid-stroke he was thrown off balance, tumbling heels over head over heels. Instinctively, he wrapped muscular arms over his face. The tips of his skullhorns pricked his forearm. He gnashed his pointed teeth, enraged by this interruption, as he was whenever such an event disturbed him. It held no terror for him. He assumed it was another earthquake, and long overdue, at that. He’d survived scores upon scores of quakes, including several before his confinement and even before his transformation, when he was as vulnerable as the inferiors over whom he’d ruled.
Disturbances rarely last more than a few minutes at a time, at most perhaps an hour. It seemed absurd to begrudge so brief a recess, considering the centuries he had been at his task. Nonetheless, he did begrudge it. He vented his anger in guttural curses as he rode out the upheaval curled into a fetal ball, rattling about the iron casing like a pebble in a New Year’s noisemaker.
Whang!
Jing!
Clang!
These last vibrations, more forceful than the previous shock waves, threatened to shake loose the fangs in his massive jaws.
They also seemed to signal an end to the convulsions. He cautiously uncurled. His thick, horny skin was splotched with tender bruises, which he ignored. They would heal with unnatural swiftness. They always did.
He extended his right foot, gripping the concave metal with all three toes. The prison pitched abruptly. He tensed, ready to curl up again should the quake continue.
It did not. The iron casing had shifted in response to his own movement. It must have fallen, perhaps from a shelf, to land at an awkward angle. Or been set down so. It which case, there had been no earthquake.
Anger returned, a knot of fire in his belly. Someone had dared to toy with his prison! To toss it about like a fishing boat in a typhoon! To mock the power within! If only he were free, that rash fool would learn a lifelong lesson. Although his life would not be so very long.
On hands and knees, he began the familiar groping for his furrow, systematically running blunt fingertips along the metal interior. His only external clue to progress was the dubious one of gravity. Not this section. Nor that. Nor over here.
He stopped abruptly, neck muscles bunching in cords. The broad, flat nose snuffled once, twice, thrice. Trapped with the odor of his own sweat for so many years, he no longer detected it, but his sense of smell had not completely atrophied. His tongue, fat and dark and rough, lashed out as if to entice the heady aromatic mixture from the air like a snake’s.
Grease. Varnish. Raw sewage. Saltwater tang. The faint hint of less-than-fresh fish. A mingling of less identifiable scents. More important than the nature of these olfactory stimuli was the question of their source. His outsized head swiveled slowly, dragging the torso after.
For the first time in more than thirteen centuries, a grin of hideous and undisguised pleasure twisted his grotesque features.
He could see the groove. The wall had been breached.
Dim light seeped through the hairline crack, less than the glow from a single candle but blindingly bright to the direct gaze of eyes long useless. His diligence had weakened the barrier at that spot, and the recent jolting saved him further months, perhaps years, with the application of the right amount of stress at the precise point. He could almost forgive whomever had treated the shell with such disrespect. If it had been his nature to forgive.
He pressed thick lips to the opening and filled long-empty lungs with comparatively fresh air from without. The sensation further fired his anxiety to escape. Blunt, powerful fingers forced their way into the narrow gap, pressing the sides outward. Muscles bulged on forearms and upper arms, shoulders and back, as increasingly better leverage permitted them to come into play.
With a sharp hiss, he drew back his right hand. From where th
Scowling, he used the three fingers of his left hand to press the gaping wound closed, clamping it for the minute or so required for his flesh to heal. Waiting, he bent to peer through the hole. His pupil-less eyes were adjusting to the faint glow. The view was monopolized by dark, coarse-grained wood. The side of a clothing chest, he supposed, or a section of molding. He did not greatly care. His immediate concern was the size of the opening.
It could now accommodate his limbs and even his great skull, but not his chest and shoulders. He flexed his right palm, examining the bright strip of red scar tissue only slightly less dull than the surrounding skin. Its movement was stiff. Exercise would remedy that. He grimaced. If he tried to further stretch the gap, he risked another and potentially deadlier injury. On the verge of his liberation, he might unwittingly accomplish what his captors had failed to do. The irony did not appeal to him.
There was a better way.
He wedged himself into the gap as far as possible, careful of the keen edges. The metal shell grew warm beneath his touch. Mass—his mass—converted to heat energy. Little conversion was required, fortunately, for he was already near the lower limit where too much mass would be lost for him to regain it. The iron became no hotter than if it had been held in a mortal’s hand for five minutes. The sides of the opening seemed to retreat. He struggled further. Suddenly, as though his body were greased, it slid forward to tumble onto a hard, wooden surface.
Free!
He rocked on his back, grasping three-toed feet in three-fingered hands, chortling exultantly. Huge splinters gouged his flesh. He reveled in the sensation of real wood. Not iron! Wood!
Free!
His capering carried him away from the shell that had held him captive. As the first flush of triumph faded, he took in his new surroundings. He was on the next-to-lowest step of a steep stairway in a narrow room. The cabin of a boat, for it pitched and rolled beneath him. Still, the water seemed calm, gently lapping alongside. In harbor rather than at sea.
He was not alone on board. Now that his ears were no longer filled with his own gleeful gloating, he heard other voices. The syllables were meaningless, but the throats undoubtedly human. Two of them. Male and female.
The pair were at a berth on the starboard side. The man, whose back was to him, wore oddly-cut clothing that lacked the rich, flowing lines he was used to. The woman, similarly clothed, faced him, her features partially hidden by the shoulder of the man who was bent over her partly supine form.
Only her too-narrow nose and rounded eyes, reminiscent of certain primitive tribes, were visible. She was too occupied to notice his tiny form. Her hand shot toward her companion’s face. The other caught it and twisted her arm. She cried out.
His thick lips writhed with remembered pleasures. The world had not changed so very much in his absence. The scene confirmed what his ears conveyed. Although the words were ugly gibberish, the urgent tone of the man’s voice and the protest in the woman’s told a familiar tale.
At some point in this ageless drama, however, his prison had been disrespectfully treated. This had hastened his freedom, but the crime was inexcusable. Discipline must be enforced.
Further, as the struggle progressed, his own appetites began returning. They demanded appeasement. It was not his nature to question his urges.
Instead, he satisfied them.
The cabin cooled. Heat energy was sucked from the iron shell, the metal fixtures, the single dim overhead lamp, the wood paneling and stairs, even the very air, and was rapidly converted into mass. When he stood as tall as the man beside the berth, he noticed the heavy brass railing along the port side of the companionway. He grasped it. The metal was icy beneath his blunt fingers. It grew colder yet as he wrenched it from the wall. The retaining bolts rattled down the steps and along the keel.
He hefted the railing in one hand. It felt solid and well-balanced. A good weapon.
The cabin temperature continued to drop.
The woman saw him first. She stopped struggling and her eyes went wide. The man leaned forward, pressing his advantage.
A towering shape blocked the light. Its shadow engulfed the berth and darkened the bulkhead beyond. The man stiffened, mouth suddenly dry, and turned to look.
He didn’t give the mortal time to duck.
CHAPTER 2
“Aieeee!”
The scream awakened Andrew Kura suddenly and completely. It reverberated through the shadowy, barren loft. It caused him to lurch awkwardly erect in the narrow cot, one elbow digging at the ribs of the woman who lay beside him. Sweat coated the upper half of his body.
After a moment he realized, with a shudder, that the scream had come from his own throat, ripped from it as though by barbed hooks.
Kura stripped the blankets from his naked body. He swung his legs over the side of the cot and sat up. The glow of the electric heater reflected off the sheen of his perspiration; his hairless chest crimson. That, too, agitated him. He clasped his shaking hands together and pressed them between his knees to stop the violent trembling. Air whistled through the gap in his front teeth as he sucked great, rapid gusts into his lungs. Blood pounded in his ears.
The woman stretched her cramped legs into the space where his had lain. She rolled over to look up at his back. Highlighted by the shadows of the heater’s faint illumination, its muscles jerked and contracted in an eerie dance.
“What the shit was that?” she demanded. “A delayed orgasm?”
Kura shook his head. He had to swallow twice before he could speak.
“I don’t know, Jen. A nightmare. The granddaddy of all nightmares. Jesus.” He licked his lips obsessively until a trickle of saliva touched his chin. “Christ. I need a smoke.” He bent forward, almost double, fumbling beneath the cot for the half-empty pack he’d dropped there earlier.
Jen slid to the foot of the cot and sat up cross-legged. It was disconcerting to talk to a pair of buttocks—although, she reflected impishly, this was not the first time she’d thought of Kura in those terms. She kept the blanket wrapped about her shoulders, but not from modesty, for she was unconcerned with the exposure of her apple-sized breasts. No matter what Kura claimed, this vast loft was cold, even on this unseasonably warm winter night. Cracked windows, ill-fitting doors, spaces between shrinking, ancient floorboards meant perpetual drafts that were invariably dank. Jen also noticed that Kura always wound up on the side of the cot near the heater.
She reached out to touch his shoulder where a muscle seemed to form a hard knot.
Kura jerked forward. His knees banged the rough wooden floor. He spun, crouching, and gripped the metal rod along the cot’s edge. The flesh beneath his fingernails was white. In the orange aura of the heater, his wide, dark eyes gleamed ferally, like those of a trapped tiger.
“Sorry, I’m sure!” Jen snapped. She drew back her hand as if burned and tossed her shoulder-length red hair, which looked almost black in this light. Kura looked away from her. He shook his head, trying to clear it. The cigarette pack in his right hand was mashed against the bedding. He pried his fingers loose enough to hold out the pack to her.
“Want one?”
“You know I don’t smoke, Andy. And I wish you wouldn’t. Not around me. Kill yourself if you like but don’t drag the rest of the world along.”
As usual, Kura did not hear the lecture. His shaking hands drew out a cigarette torn in the middle, where a golden thread of tobacco poked through. He reached under the cot again to come up with a red and black matchbook.
“What kind of nightmare?” asked Jen, her tone softening.
Kura suddenly realized that his bare rump rested on an icy, splinter-laden floor. He hauled himself onto the cot beside her. His reply was slow.
“There was a presence of some kind, ancient and powerful and utterly evil. It seemed tied to me in some way but didn’t want me, unaware on the most basic level that I even existed. I tried to escape before it became aware of my presence. Then something else, another force, compelled me to approach it. I remember a blinding pain, as though I was being torn apart from within … but that wasn’t me it was happening to! Then there was a strangled cry …”
