Evan drifts off, drifts away, circling, circling drunkenly — a cyclone in his head — whirling and snatching up bits of the days — words and objects alike — and hurling them about so that there are monsters and there are men and beaks and claws and hard words and grabbing arms and pages flying and ships in bottles on stormy seas and bits of phone calls and words funneling down the line . . .

He wakes up. Dizzy.

There is the beginning of something like light in the room. He turns toward his window. Not dawn but false dawn. He looks at his cell phone: 3:23. He rubs his eyes. Picks it up. A text message:

— Do orphans eat cheese?

What the . . .

It’s not a number he knows. Orphans . . . cheese . . .

He falls back onto his pillow, too tired for riddles.

Start again. He looks again at the cell phone. Nothing from Leo. What had he been expecting? He thinks back to their conversation. There was something Leo said. Evan tries to piece it together again. A clue. He can feel the excitement of it — that was what woke him up. The feeling that he knew something he didn’t think he knew. Something hidden somewhere, but somewhere he had access to.

E-mail.

Leo and Clifford had e-mailed.

He goes to roll out of bed and —

“Ouch!”

The walrus penis bone.

He pushes it onto the floor, where it thunks on the carpet. Gross! He actually slept beside that thing.

On wobbly legs he makes his way to the door. Opens it. Listens to the dark hallway. There is no light downstairs. He tiptoes to the Dockyard, the first door on the landing. He listens again. Nothing. He tries the door, pushes it open. Shhh.

The room is empty. He doesn’t turn on the light. He goes to the desk and wakes up his father’s ancient computer. The light from the screen blinds him. He types on the clunky keys in the dimness, goes to his father’s e-mail account. There’s no password. Too bad. He goes to his father’s in-box. Types Leo’s name into the search function. Double clicks. No items appear. So he tries the out-box. Nothing sent to Leo, either — nothing, anyway, that is still there. Finally, there is only the trash left to search. He doesn’t expect much by now. And that’s exactly what he gets.

He leans back in his father’s chair. It squawks and he goes cold all over. He holds his breath. Nothing. The old man must be sleeping it off.

Whatever was in those e-mails, Griff didn’t want him to see it.

I pulled away the wreckage of broken bamboo and torn canvas and knelt before my little shrine of flat stones in the far corner of the compound. I have led Derwood to believe it is an altar, a holy place. He is a gentleman, and I know that he will keep his distance. But in truth, it really is a shrine, in a sense, for I kept my story hidden there. This story. I hoped the heavy rocks had been enough to protect what was inside. The rocks have fallen in on one side, but when I carefully lifted them off, there lay the flight manual wrapped in oilskin, dry and safe.

I turned as Derwood joined me and, seeing the concerned look in his eyes, I made an important decision. I unwrapped the book and showed it to him. I must admit I was slightly afraid he would think it inappropriate that I had taken the flight manual for my personal use. Might it be a sacrilege to use a dead man’s property in such a way? I had no idea and I watched him closely for his reaction. I saw only avid curiosity.

I stood and took the book from him, pointing at the cover where I had written your name and address. I underlined the kanji characters with my finger, explaining who it was. Derwood nodded, though obviously none of the words made any sense to him. His vocabulary by now includes much of the natural world around us: the names of fruit and seafood. He knows a lot of the language of work and survival, but this does not extend to such abstract ideas as wife or love or devotion. I handed him the book and pulled my omamori from inside my shirt, where it always stays, and from it I took the picture of you.

“Watashi no tsuma,” I said. “My wife.”

Derwood looked at your picture and smiled. “Your girl?”

“Girl,” I said. Is that what you are? So be it. And having someone to finally talk to about you, I went on and on and tried to explain to Derwood that we had been married only a few weeks before I enlisted. Oh, I was hungry to talk about you, Hisako. And although I knew this American gentleman could not understand a word I was saying, he nodded his head appreciatively, smiling, I suppose, at my enthusiasm. There we stood in the ruins of my house — our house — our shattered stronghold, talking about the only thing left to me, other than my own little life.

Derwood nodded. Then he pointed at the photo again.

“Your wife,” he said.

“Wife.” This was something different from “girl”? It didn’t matter. “Wife,” I said again.

“Tsuma,” said Derwood. Language has to be like this, a negotiation with no text to turn to, no teacher. I glanced at him again, and the smile had slipped from his face. He was looking around at the mess left behind by the typhoon. The golden moment was over. I slipped your picture back into my omamori and the omamori back inside my shirt. I replaced the book in the oilskin and back into the altar and moved the stone into place. I held out my hands to indicate the devastation.

Derwood nodded, cheerlessly. “Come,” he said. And we made our way through the mess to the table where we eat, the low table I built, low enough and heavy enough, made from rock, that it had been left in place but not untarnished by the events of the day. There was a hideous heap of stinking yellowish-brown excrement there.

It is clear that we have to rebuild. Quickly. We have survived the typhoon, but Tengu has left a reminder that he is still here and healthy again!

So, where is he? Why does he not take advantage of our lack of defenses? I have heard of such demons: harbingers of war. And is it not just like war that this creature wreaks havoc and then pulls away, so that you run the risk of going mad with waiting?

We work hard in the humid weather and then take turns standing guard by night. We built a fire and kept it going until daylight — certainly there is enough kindling around!

Among my finds have been several forty-two-gallon oil drums, although I’ve never found a use for them. They stood on the beach, too large to bring up to the fort. Derwood came up with the idea of wrapping long branches with cloth and drenching them with oil. There are six of these torches, standing sentinel around us, stuck into the ground, far enough away from the newly reconstructed fence not to be a hazard — not to us, at least. We have spent most of a day rolling two of the heavy drums uphill to the fort.

“Come, Tengu,” I murmur to the night.

I dream of Tengu.

His hideous face becomes the very face of war. I dream of dipping one of those torches into the flames and jabbing it down the monster’s horrible throat, or at least blinding him. After all, he only has one eye left after our first encounter. “Come,” I whisper. And for a moment, I actually think I see the flames reflected in the eye of the creature.

But Tengu does not come, although the jikininki do. They hover well back from the flames, ghastly in the flickering light. They hiss and fart, as usual, but they also cackle in a way that sounds extraordinarily like laughter. One night when Derwood was asleep, I got up and walked toward the nearest and boldest of the creatures, holding one of the flaming torches in my hand. It was scared but did not withdraw, only cowered, raising its wretched arm up to cover its face.

“Go!” I said, poking the fire at it. It withdrew a few feet but kept turning toward the bamboo fence, as if waiting for something. I could guess well enough what. “You want Tengu to come, don’t you?” I said. “There will be lots of leftovers for you and your kind.”

“Yes,” the creature hissed. “A feast of stories.”

I looked closer. Was this the same character I had talked to so many weeks ago? It is impossible to tell with them, because one can barely look at their faces without revulsion. “You still say it is just stories you are after?”

“Yes. Stories. You cannot understand.”

No, I do not understand, but I wanted to. Because as horrible as the countenance of this thing was, with its sunken glowing eyes and ravaged cheeks and yellow teeth, there was something that disturbed me about its manner, something that struck me as pathetic, whereas up until then I had only looked upon the jikininki as carrion eaters, scavengers.

I squatted and then sat cross-legged on the dirt, the burning torch beside me. “Tell me. Make me understand.”

The jikininki looked through the slits in the bamboo, out to where the wind off the lagoon rustled the leaves of the forest. Then it turned its attention to me.

“You,” it said. “You have your own ghosts. They hover near you, protectively. They have no strength to help you but can only look on from their world of waiting. You see the hope in their faces? They are the ones waiting to be born.”

“What do you mean?” I said, though I had come to this same conclusion.

“The children you will have and the children they will have.” I turned to look at them, at my familiars, the ones who were always there. The torchlight seemed to glow inside them, but their features were lost to me. Then the nearest, a boy, reached out a hand to me, and some of the flame seemed to sit on his palm. He was seated like I was, and he reached out and, though I am ashamed to admit it, I did not reach back to him. It was all too strange.

“They were here waiting in this place for only you,” said the jikininki. “And because you came ashore alive, they have found you and wait with you for deliverance.”

I nodded. As I said, I had reached much the same conclusion and was only surprised to find confirmation in this mutilated creature. “Then, what are you?” I asked. “In the stories you are the restless dead. You were human once, yes?” The jikininki shook its head. “So you are unborn as well?”

This time it nodded. “Yes, but not like them.” The creature stared at my ghosts. “You see, the fathers we might have had were washed up on this shore already dead. So we will never be. We have no one.”

It was a startling idea to me. I tried to reconcile it. “But there, just now you said ‘we.’ There are many of you. You are a tribe, yes?”

“You are wrong. We are not a tribe. We are not ‘we,’ though I have used this word for lack of a better. We are one and one and one.” The thing gestured behind me at my huddled ghost children. “They are what will be. The jikininki are what never can be.”

It was such a strange idea, Hisako, illusive as fire, a bright thing flickering that I could not grasp. I heard a loud noise from beyond the walls of the fort — a rustling that was louder and clumsier than the wind! The zombie straightened, a hideous smile lighting up its face, then shuffled off, and right there, behind where it had been standing, Tengu’s eye appeared, staring through a crack in the bamboo wall. I jumped to my feet and grabbed the torch. The jikininki cackled at me, its teeth glowing in the light. I looked at Tengu again. The eye pressed up against the crack in the wall was the monster’s right eye. The one I had obliterated with gunfire. It had grown back.

I am not sleeping well. Too often I am in a foul mood. We work together, but tempers flare from time to time. Derwood cannot work as hard as I do. He is weaker and crippled. We are both frightened and, I admit, I am irritated and prone to mistakes and injury. After four days of intense effort, the fort is now completely rebuilt, stronger than ever, but our nerves are badly frayed. And I can only think that the monster has been waiting for us to reach such a state. They say a crocodile kills its prey and then drags it down to the bottom of the river, where it traps it under debris to rot. Softening it up. This is what Tengu has been doing with us. Derwood Kraft and I are trapped at the bottom of a dark river of fear.

I wasn’t sure what woke me. I gripped my service revolver and peered toward the bamboo wall. There was a tipped teacup of moon in the sky that did not spill enough light to make out anything. I listened, heard a rustling in the bushes that could have been an errant breeze. No. There it was again, and there was no wind to speak of that night.

Isamu spoke of how our nerves were frayed. It is true. I was a wreck. Had we been able to really communicate, I feel we might have been able to boost each other up. I had no idea of his conversation with the jikininki, although he might well have tried to tell me about it. It frustrated him to no end that I could not speak his language. I have never been particularly talkative, but he was a man, I think, who thrived on lively conversation. I could see the frustration growing in him. He was hungry to talk. I grew up in a family of sisters and quickly learned to keep my thoughts to myself. Whatever the reason, Isamu and I were at odds with each other. We were prisoners because of Tengu. But we had also made ourselves prisoners.

I lay the revolver down on my lap and rubbed the stump of my left arm. There were phantom pains there; fingers itching to act that were no longer there at all. Such treachery. The mind plays such tricks. None of this seemed real, and yet it was the realest thing I had ever experienced, a fear so visceral it made my insides churn.

Did we trust the fence? We had buried the stout bamboo stakes deep in the ground, reinforced them with heavy rocks, lashed the wood tightly together. The stakes angled out as they had before, the sharp points seven feet above the ground. Could the creature jump so high? I remembered its escape from us on the beach. Despite its many wounds, it was nimble on the rocks as it scaled the cliff. Perhaps we should build a trench on the other side of the wall? A moat? But I was not about to suggest any more digging to Isamu. That was part of the problem. Much more of the work fell to him. I tried my best. Even rigged up a wire contraption that fit over my stump and could grasp a shovel. But it was a poor substitute for a hand, and increasingly I felt myself to be a poor substitute for a man.

That night I heard the thing growl. How could a creature with a raptor’s beak make such a sound? It was the low rumble of a big cat, deep-throated, utterly intimidating. I felt I should wake Isamu, but his sleeping was so haphazard, I was loath to disturb him. Meanwhile, I became increasingly nervous.

It was planning something.

I heard the sound again, a growl that ended in a kind of clicking noise. There was no denying how close it was. I swung up out of my hammock and in my bare feet made my way to where the torches stood in the ground. The fire was not lit, but there were matches nearby. Fumbling in the dark, I found the box, shook it, heard the comforting rattle, then heard the growl again, sounding so close I feared irrationally the creature had somehow entered the compound. I lit a match, yet another one-handed trick I’d mastered, and with a trembling hand raised it to the dark, turning slowly around in a full circle before lighting one of the torches just as the match was at its end.

The torch swooshed into flame. Gripping it tightly, I approached the barricade. In order to hold the torch, I had stuck my gun in the waist of my pants. If the damn creature broke through the wall, I could only hope to hold it at bay with the torch. I thought I should wake Isamu, but by then I was afraid to say anything out loud — wasn’t sure I could. My throat was bone dry. Were I to try to speak, I imagined only a peep would come out.

For God’s sake, wake up, Emperor!

By now I was at the wall. I tried to peer through the cracks as I slowly walked the perimeter, holding the torch as near as I could without burning the barricade down.

Then I saw it and stopped dead in my tracks: an eye, gleaming with firelight. A hawk’s exophthalmic eye staring directly at me, pressed up against the bamboo. I jumped back, waved the fire in front of it to scare the thing off. It didn’t flinch. Instead, I heard the three-inch-thick bamboo squeak and watched the thick twine tauten. Tengu had pressed a bulky shoulder against the barricade. Hypnotized, I leaned toward the crack only to see the dark, mottled body slide along the fence toward the gateway. The sturdy door, reinforced by thick planks at the top and bottom, was hinged with wire wrapped round and round many times. I followed the creature, not two feet away, with only the fence between us. I could smell the fetid odor that rose from its flanks. I wondered if it was one of those creatures that likes to roll in its own feces. It smelled as if it did.

Again it leaned its muscled haunch against the fort, but this time against the door, testing it! Then it raised its beak and began to tear at the Manila twine, shredding it. There was wire as well and nailed boards, but the astuteness of the creature made my blood run cold.

“What are you?” I said, my voice cracked and desperately small.

Tengu eyed me, and then its beak opened wide and a screech came from it as loud as the squeal of a jet engine. It was so sudden — so powerful — I fell backward on my backside, dropping the torch. Just as a shot rang out.

Isamu had jumped from his hammock and fired into the air. He joined me at the fence, where I was groping for the handle of the torch lest it roll into the wall.

“Tengu?” he asked.

I nodded. But when we looked again, each of us at the crack in the wall, there was nothing to see but the vague form of the underbrush across the clearing and the moonlit shimmer of hungry ghouls, hovering nearby, expectantly. One of them was soundlessly clapping its hands.

It was sometime later we heard a different kind of cry. Some animal dying.

The dead deer lay halfway down the hill path that led to the lagoon. It had been eviscerated, a thread of entrails leading off into the tall grass that bordered the sandy route to the beach. To me it seemed a message to us written in blood.

“We have to do something,” I said. Whether Isamu understood me or not, he nodded. We couldn’t go on living this way.

Later that morning, I showed Isamu a series of small drawings I had made in my sketch pad, a plan view of Fort Ōshiro II, showing the shelter, the kitchen and dining area, the shrine, and the place we stored supplies. A large area inside the entranceway, directly before the gates, was marked by a dotted line. Below the drawing there were diagrams and section drawings indicating my plan. Examining the page carefully, Isamu nodded. It would be a lot of work, but it was something.

If the creature came to the compound that night, neither of us was aware of it. We had worked all day behind the walls, worked feverishly at backbreaking labor. Now we lay sleeping — or at least Isamu was — dead to the world, trusting in our handiwork, but with a weapon or two near at hand.

I was quite certain the animal had some kind of malevolent intelligence beyond anything one would expect to find in nature. Tengu was toying with us. Had I been asked before Tengu came, I would have said that I did not believe there was evil in the natural world, only survival. My childhood reading had included Darwin. I read books on how things worked and the biographies of scientists, inventors, Arctic adventurers, men of discovery. I wasn’t much for stories; my imagination tended toward the mechanical, the factual and prosaic. But despite all that, I was quite certain that simple survival was not at the heart of Tengu’s nature. I had lived on a farm and seen barn cats play with mice, catch and release them only to pounce on them again. The cruelty we perceive in our human naivety had a purpose, I gathered at a young age, student of nature that I was: the cat keeping itself sharp, working on its skills, its quickness. We didn’t feed the barn cats, other than a bit of milk if they were lucky. They depended on their hunting skill. What Tengu was doing seemed to have some darker purpose that was unfathomable to me. And what we don’t understand we have to ascribe to either God or the Devil, don’t we?

Survival was very much at work in what Isamu and I were cooking up. We had been on the defensive, but now the creature was stalking us, tormenting us. It was as if it had been put on the island to drive us crazy — to drive a wedge between us. And it had been succeeding for a while. We had snapped at one another, sulked, and eaten separately.

Until we came up with this plan.

The beast did not return, not that night nor the next. It was a form of torture. Could a beast be that sly, that premeditated? If it was possible, then we would have to fight fire with fire. So the next day, we acted as if there were no Tengu. We went fishing, swimming, foraging. We played baseball with a small coconut and a stick. I marked out the bases on the beach and tried to teach Isamu the rules. We put on an act for the demon. If Tengu was watching, the thing saw two men with nothing to fear. We bathed in the lagoon just before sunset. To me it felt like some ritual thing a warrior might do — a gladiator before entering the Colosseum. And maybe this prolonged and showy tactic worked, for it was that night the creature returned at last.

We heard it prowling along the perimeter of the fence, heard the low growl deep in its throat and chest, the ticking sound; heard it pick at the Manila twine, heard the bamboo click and creak as it tested the strength of the wall. Finally it got to the gate. We waited under a breathless thin rim of moon, heard the creature press hard, find some give in the door, and press again. There was silence. Retreat? No, not that — not after all our work!

But it had only retreated far enough to charge the door. Suddenly, its body crashed against the reinforced bamboo! Once, twice, and then it broke through. And there we were, two men sitting side by side, waiting across the yard directly before the thing, lit by torchlight. It roared at us, a victory roar, and charged.

And the pit opened under it.

We held one torch each high above our heads as we looked down into the six-foot-deep hole Isamu had dug in the sandy ground. A pit we had rigged with sharpened bamboo stakes.

The squealing was horrible, the raging, writhing creature pierced through and through. But even though it was pinioned there, I never let my revolver stray from the thing’s misshapen head. Isamu stood transfixed by it.

“The oil, Isamu,” I cried.

He didn’t move.

So it was I who put my torch and gun down and tugged, one-handed, a large vat of oil, spinning it on its rounded edge, trying to keep it from tipping, all the way to the edge of the pit. I kicked it over and the thick liquid poured over Tengu. Exhausted, I looked at Isamu, expecting him to throw his torch on the howling monster. But Isamu only watched, his eyes blazing in the reflected light from his torch, his body immobilized by shock. So, badly shaking now, I recovered my own torch from where I had stuck it in the ground and threw it into the pit. The howling didn’t end until the flames did.

There was no celebration. Not that night. The creature was finally dead; I was able to grasp that, but it was harder to let go of the fear it had engendered.

The rain helped.

It came sometime in the predawn. A light rain but continuous. After a bit, I sought the shelter of my bed, wrapped myself up in bedclothes, and fell into an exhausted sleep. When I awoke, Isamu was sitting cross-legged at the edge of the pit, his body as still as a Buddha, his hands curled in his lap, but with nothing of the Buddha’s serenity on his tired, rain-soaked face. His eyes were open but unseeing, looking down into the hollow place where the charred and soaking remains of our tormentor lay. Isamu was so still that I wondered if he was actually dead. I knelt beside him.

“It’s all right, Isamu,” I said. “We did it. It’s over.” Tentatively I touched his arm.

Finally, the other man acknowledged my presence. He nodded. But his eyes were full of a sorrow that I couldn’t understand.¹

¹ Curiously, Ōshiro does not write about the incident, only mentioning Tengu’s demise after the fact, as you will see. It seems from what he writes that either he wanted to protect Hisako from the horror of it, or that he repressed the event entirely.

I left the fort this morning. The door was open wide. Derwood was at work shoveling dirt into the pit we had excavated. He probably still is. So much work, using the wire hand he has made himself. Hard work. Too hard for him, but I did not offer to help. I did not want to be there. It was there. The horror. We had dug a pit and filled it with sharpened spears, and Tengu charged to its death into it. The siege is over. I should help, but I do not. I feel weak — weak as I felt when I first dragged myself up onto this shore from my raft. I feel, Hisako, as if it is all catching up to me: the war, my flight, the months alone, the uneasy time with an enemy who has become a friend, the terror that he brought with him that is now past.

Except I cannot quite believe that.

I sit down on the beach by the gently lapping tide, writing this. Trying to explain to you what I cannot understand myself.

“It will come back,” I said to him as I watched a shovelful of sand fall across the blackened corpse.

He seemed to understand me and stopped his digging, and with his good hand patted my shoulder. “No, we’ve done it, Isamu-san. It is over.” I nodded because I knew the words “no” and “over,” and because he expected me to agree with him, but I was full of uncertainty. That is when I left and walked down the hill to the beach. It is as if something of me died in the night.

I look out to sea. It is a dull day, the sea calm, exhausted, tired of the moon always tugging at it, not wanting to always be coming in or going out and never getting anywhere. I stand at the lip of the tide and feel my feet sink a little into the sand with every halfhearted sip of the waves that slips by my ankles.

I’m not sure how long I have been standing here, but I suddenly become aware that I am being watched. I expect it is Derwood — that he has come for me. For one terrible moment, I even think he has come to kill me, now that the danger of the monster has passed. The terror is exhilarating. So I do not turn right away, confident that after all we have gone through, he will not shoot me in the back. I want to look out upon the weary sea, drained of its color, not even made lively by the squawking of the gulls on this strangely quiet morning. I close my eyes. Some small dark part of me almost wants him to pull the trigger.

When I do finally turn, my ghostly children are waiting patiently just beyond the water’s edge, and beyond them is a small cadre of jikininki. They have come for me, I think. They seem to know something I don’t. But I am not afraid.

“What is it?” I say. I fold my arms impressively and stand as straight and tall as I can, not wanting them to get any fancy ideas. “Have you come to make a petition to the Emperor of the Island?”

One of them, the nearest, says, “Our own emperor wishes to speak to you.”

“Ho! So you have a leader? I thought you were one and one and one?”

“I am not the leader,” says another of the creatures, coming forward but not closer than the gentle lapping of the tide. Water, it seems, is another element that does not agree with them. “We borrow words from the stories of those who have died so that we may converse with those who are living. If we must. I am first among the dead you see before you.”

“So converse with me, first of your tribe!” I say to the creature in a jaunty voice. My depression of earlier has lifted a little. As dark as my depression may be, at least I am more alive than these miserable creatures! It is almost entertaining to watch them pulling away from the tide with their faltering steps, not able to bear even the frothy hem of the incoming water. It has risen past my ankles. The tide is turning, and I half think I might stand here and watch these miserable fellows have to withdraw farther and farther from me up the shore, as the sea climbs inch by inch up my body. I will stand there unmoved by them or by the sea until I am claimed by it.

“A word with you,” says the one who calls itself the first. “But I cannot raise my voice so loud as to be heard above the tide.” I relent. I unstick myself from the suction of the wet sand and march up to where the jikininki congregate. My diary and writing implement sit on the sand. I move them farther up the shore and put a rounded stone on them so they do not blow away. Already, I am hungry to write this scene in those pages. I shall write it as if it is happening before your very eyes.

“What is it you want?” I say it in a most regal voice so that they hear I am not anywhere near ready to become fodder for their ravenous appetite.

“Perhaps, if you knew more,” says the first, “you would look more kindly upon our . . . our needs.”

I know what their “needs” are and cannot help but turn up my nose. Still, I would speak to them. “Go on, king of the ghouls,” I say imperiously.

The ghoul king, or whatever it is, looks around at its ghastly companions. “I am the first. Not the king, not the leader, for we have no leader, no followers. I arrived in this place before anyone else, that is all. That is all that distinguishes me. I have been here the longest.”

At that moment one of my ghosts, the boy who always ventures nearest, suddenly slips his hand in mine. I look to see if he is afraid, but he does not seem to be. It is hard to tell if he has any sense at all of what is going on. The first of the jikininki glowers at the ghost boy, flinching. They seem to find the companion ghosts distasteful.

“There was a first body to float up on this island,” says the jikininki spokesman. “A fisherman whose boat had overturned in a storm.”

“But if he was dead,” I say, “how did you learn how he died?”

“Dying was among his memories,” says the jikininki. “His last thought. His topmost memory.”

I should have known better than to ask.

“His body lay there for a great long time, for there was no one here to attend to him, to do what you do and send him on to the Afterlife, or to do what we do and consume what he had been, taking up his story and making it our own.

“He lay there long enough that I grew from him. Not his ghost, you see, but the ghost of what would never be, though I had no sense of that, at first. I stood looking down on his rotting corpse, abandoned on the beach, picked at by other scavengers — the crabs that had come ashore with him, the gulls and carrion crows, but still not entirely decayed. And something in me, some instinct, led me to understand what I must do.”

“Please spare me the details!” I say. The demon bows slightly, as if I truly am an emperor. “And in time other corpses arrived?”

“Other corpses, yes. And with each corpse fresh memories. And it might have stayed that way, with just me here — the island all my own, alone, providing many stories for my consumption — but then there was a war at sea and the dead floated in, too many to count. And while I feasted, there were so many corpses — more corpses than I could get to — so other jikininki came into existence as had I, rising as a dreadful need out of the corpses. The need for their stories not to be lost.”

The thing bows to me and says no more.

“That’s it?” I ask. “This is supposed to win me over?”

But the first of these monsters seems to have forgotten I am there. Its nose is raised in the air, and when I look around, it is true of the others as well; seven or eight of them all sniffing and turning this way and that, until finally one of them starts marching in its ungainly gait along the beach in a northward direction, and soon enough the others turn that way, too.

And a horrible thought occurs to me.

“Derwood!” I call out. Something must have happened to him. He slipped while he was filling the hole and fell, skewering himself on one of the bamboo spears. The boy child clutching my hand stares up into my eyes, smiling, unconcerned about anything, not of this world and free of all of its horrors. I gently extricate my hand from his so as not to disturb the wraith, and bowing slightly to this glowing child and to each of his kindred, I take my leave, pick up my diary and pen, and race after the jikininki, soon passing them and dashing up the hill toward my home and my only friend on this strange and impossible island.

I filled in the pit we had dug, which was now a grave for Tengu. The work was hard and my improvised prosthesis was next to useless. I ended up kicking dirt into the hole as much as shoveling it. By the time Isamu returned, I was sitting cross-legged on the ground, rubbing an unguent into my aching and bruised stump. The contraption I’d constructed as a metal hand had chewed my forearm up something terrible. All that was visible of the pit was a square-shaped depression of churned-up sand, a few inches lower than the surface of the ground. I had decided that I would shovel or kick sand into the hole on a daily basis, a little bit at a time, and then roll one of the steel oil drums over it to compact it. In time, I hoped, weeds would grow in and grass, until no evidence of the hole could be seen at a casual glance and the blasted thing in it might gradually be forgotten.

Isamu seemed distant, as if something had snapped. I called to him and smiled, glad to see him back — glad of some company — but my greeting barely registered on his face. He took the shovel without seeming to notice the work I’d done and headed from the compound without a word. I could only assume another corpse had washed ashore. I’d leave it to him; I was too tired to bury anything else right now. I stood and stared down at the square of sandy soil that marked Tengu’s resting place. I smiled grimly to myself. Burned and buried. We had granted the creature both rites, as if he were both Eastern and Western.

Sadly I watched Isamu withdraw into himself over the next few days. My own relief at being free of the monstrous creature buoyed me to no end. I cooked nice things for Isamu that he ate but without delight. I sang his favorite songs to no apparent success. My voice is not much, I’ll readily admit, but it used to get a laugh out of him and now he seemed not to hear.

One evening, after we had eaten, he tried to talk to me. I listened intently but, knowing so little Japanese, I could only make out that he was talking about Tengu in relationship to the two of us. He would point at the monster’s grave and then at me and himself. His eyes would inquire of me if I understood, and when I shook my head, he would throw up his hands and go off by himself.

He slept late a lot, which was not at all like him. Then one morning I awoke and found his hammock empty. I went about my morning ablutions trying not to worry. His spirit will come back once the horror has truly passed, I thought. I had watched men wander around after a battle, seen the same vacancy in their eyes. They were alive but what was there to celebrate? I’d flown supplies into Guam that past August, after the Americans took back the island. There were more than seventeen hundred men to bury and some six thousand men officially injured, but I saw injuries in the eyes of men who wore no bandages. It was as if being alive was an affront to the dead. As if being alive only meant there was going to be another opportunity to die; that they had been saved only to prolong the agony. We have a name for the illness now: post-traumatic stress disorder. It was called shell shock back then. Whatever you call it, it’s not something you can put a bandage on.

The day that Isamu left early, I worried enough that by midafternoon I made my way up into the coral tree and scanned the island, hoping to catch sight of him. The sun had passed to the other side of Kokoro-Jima before he made an appearance. He was walking along the beach carrying the Gibson Girl.

Isamu built a new box kite. He had thin wire, a whole roll of it, wire that would be perfect as an aerial. He had hidden the wire from me, but now he produced it, and together we set about making the distress beacon operable. In the end it was Isamu, the stronger of the two of us and certainly the most dexterous, who cranked it enough to get the light on the top glowing. He cranked it like a man possessed.

This is good, I thought. He is ready to get out of here. Ready to go home.

Then we waited. Isamu wrote; I drew: plants, flowers, rock formations. It was as if the Gooney Bird had been my own personal Beagle, bringing me to this tiny island, and I must record the flora and fauna here just as Darwin had done a hundred years ago on his grand tour. I wasn’t sure what Isamu was doing. I recognized his ballpoint pen as belonging to my pilot, Pete Laski. It was a new invention but tended to jam unless you held it pretty well straight up and down. Flyboys used them, because the lower pressure in the cabin made the ink flow just fine. I asked Isamu what he was writing, but what could he tell me?

He’s telling the story, I decided. And I could see, as he must have been all too aware of himself, that the story would have to come to an end quite soon, for there were only a few pages left in the flight book. So I gave him my second sketch pad and one of my last pencils. Isamu stared at the pages and pages of blankness and smiled for the first time since the death of Tengu. But it was nothing like the smiles I had come to know. It was as if the monster still had its claws in him, for the smile was strained and tinged with grief.

He had lost something. The monster has stolen something from him. That was as much as I could deduce. I did not know at the time about his talk with the jikininki and how that affected him — infected him: the horror of an abandoned body giving birth to a ghost that must forever eat the stories of others, having no story of its own.

Isamu had woven mats out of grass for us to sit on when we ate at the low table, a new table to replace the one that Tengu had soiled. One night, when Isamu didn’t seem quite so lost in his thoughts, I reached across the table and tugged lightly at the string around his neck. Isamu produced the omamori but did not open it.

“Hisako,” I said. “Soon you will see Hisako.”

Isamu stopped eating. He smiled and turned to stare vaguely in the direction of the island that had been his home.

“Boy, oh boy, are you going to have a lot to tell her,” I said, making various gestures with my hand that we had come to understand as a form of sign language.

Isamu nodded. Then he stared straight into my eyes. What was going on down there in those deep brown depths? Did he doubt that help would come? Or did he doubt that there was anything to go home to?

We worked the Gibson Girl every day, taking turns. And every day I went up to the crow’s nest to look for a sign of rescue. I would wait until Isamu had gone off fishing or on one of his long walks. What I saw on Tinian was an enormous airfield taking shape. Already the Seabees had built one runway at North Field that looked incredibly long, and other runways were under way.¹ The place was a constant beehive of activity, day and night. But surely there was someone there who could spare a few hours away from the war effort to slip across the strait and pick up two lost souls.

¹ The first runway was, in fact, eight thousand feet in length. By the following spring, there would be three more. It would be the largest airfield in the world for a time.

I saw the boat first. It was early morning, first light. The sea was dead calm. The sky blue with pure white cirrocumulus clouds five miles up. A herringbone sky. The boat was anchored two hundred yards offshore at the inner edge of the heart’s eastern shoulder. A small American gunship. The kind we called “devil boats.”

I raced back to the fort and roused Derwood from his sleep.

“Come,” I said.

I watched Derwood run forward when we reached an open spot on the hilltop where I had first seen the boat. I held back, out of view.

“We’re saved,” said Derwood, turning to me, his eyes huge with excitement. He had thrown out his arms, and his eyes were on fire. I knew what he meant, even if I did not know the words.

“Yes,” I said. “You go.”

He ran back to me, like a child at the fair, running back to grab the hand of his kind but slow-moving grandfather, wanting to drag him through the gates into the fairground.

“You go,” I said to him, and touched his chest. There was no mistaking my intention.

“You, too. Come.”

I could not explain to him my fear, the apprehension that had been growing in me for days now. “You go first,” I said. This time I pushed him in the chest with both hands and pointed out to where the ship was.

Derwood nodded vigorously. “Good plan,” he said. These were words I knew. “I’ll tell them about you,” he added in our complicated sign language. He pointed from himself to me. Slowly I shook my head and watched the color drain from his face.

“Go. Hurry. Quick.”

Derwood started to protest. I grabbed and tugged at the hair on either side of my head with frustration. “Go!” I growled. “Go!” I shoved Derwood harder. I knew the man would not stay, for I could see the excitement in his eyes. And sure enough, he went. He raced down the hill waving his arms. He was wearing what he had slept in: pants cut short at the knee, a faded khaki shirt, no shoes.

I sit in my tree to write this, Hisako. He has gone.

I’ll take over from Isamu here. I reached the beach in under three minutes and raced out onto the sand waving like mad, yelling at the top of my lungs. I needn’t have worried. There was already a canvas-covered Carley float being lowered into the water. A sailor dropped into the raft and took up the oars. Someone on deck waved at me. Good. I waved back. Until that moment, I seriously worried that the PT boat was a hallucination.

The sailor turned out to be a marine, though what he was doing on a navy vessel, I would not find out right away. He could have been a tinker or a tailor for all I cared. I waded out to the raft, whooping like a kid at a Friday night football game, and held the craft steady while the marine hopped out into a foot of water.

“Fella, am I glad to see you,” I said. I took the man’s hand in mine and shook it as I introduced myself. The man’s hand snapped to his brow.

“Lieutenant Kraft, sir,” he said. “Sergeant Griffin, Sixth Marines.”

“At ease, Sergeant,” I said, barely able to keep from laughing.

Then he saw the familiars.

And I witnessed for the first time the phenomenon of them coming into existence — his own ghosts — growing out of the still morning air. I had almost come to ignore my own flock, always obediently at hand. You have to understand that my own first experience of them was awakening in acute pain to find them hovering nearby like hospital attendants and the jikininki right there as well, much larger — and hungry! Talk about hallucinations! My own tribe of ghosts had come into existence while I was unconscious and so I did not get to see them “born,” as I did at that moment with Sergeant Griffin’s ghosts. It was as if the air coalesced before our eyes, here and there and there and there, on up the beach.

My eyes darted back and forth between the ghosts and the marine. I watched his hand reach for the firearm in his holster. Then he withdrew his hand, aware of me watching him. Our eyes made contact, and I’m sure my eyes were shining with the kind of brightness one associates with a madman. Without so much as a nod, we seemed to come to a tacit agreement. He would not say anything about what he was seeing — what was snapping into existence before his very eyes. Nor would I. We would ignore it and it would not be there.

Together we pulled the raft ashore, while Griffin explained how they’d been getting intermittent signals from the island for a few days. I nodded excitedly, but found myself strangely tongue-tied and what I suspected was way too close to the edge of hysteria. What was I to say? Where to start? The Gooney Bird, that’s where.

“There’s a C-47 in the jungle back there,” I said, pointing southwest. “We went down back in mid-September en route to Mindanao, carrying firearms and ammo.”

“Survivors?”

“Just me.” I held up my left arm. “Well, most of me.”

The marine gave me a stiff-lipped nod. He was not the demonstrative kind, but I could see the respect in his eyes. Eyes that had been searching the beach restlessly when they weren’t looking directly at me.

“And the shipment?”

“In good shape, last time I looked.”

The sergeant smiled, grimly. “Well, I’m guessing the Sixth Marines will make as good use of that consignment as the GIs would have done.”

“What’s the news from the Philippines?”

“MacArthur waded ashore at Palo, Leyte, on the twentieth.”

“Of November?”

“No, sir. October. They seem to be doing just fine, from what we hear. They’re pummeling the Japs.”

And there it was. The Japs. Now what?

I must have given something away because Griffin looked at me with his head cocked. “Everything okay, sir?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Guess I’m just . . .” I looked up to the headland. “There’s something I need to get.”

“You need help?”

“No.”

“You want company?”

He knows. Time to pull rank.

“No, thank you, Sergeant,” I said, getting the tone of command just about right. “Give me one minute.” I held up my index finger, to make sure he knew what I meant and to make a point. I turned and started to go, then turned again and said, “Make that ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” said Griffin. There was a knowing look in his eye, though what he thought he knew, I had no idea. The marine wasn’t about to risk insubordination, but he was clearly suspicious. He was the sharp-eyed type. And I couldn’t help wondering whether when Isamu saw the boat, Sergeant Griffin had already spotted Isamu. There was no time to waste.

Isamu was gone. I didn’t dare call for him, in case the sound traveled, but I looked everywhere I could, fully aware of the man waiting down on the beach and a boat filled with sailors who had better things to do with their time than wait on a bearded shipwreck of a flyboy. I got angrier and angrier. Did the damn fool think I would sell him down the river after everything we’d been through?

On an impulse, I raced over to the coral tree. I looked up to the platform but could not tell if he was on it.

“You saved my life, Isamu,” I said, staring up into the thorny branches. “Come down. I promise you’ll be treated fairly. It’s time for me to help you. Do you hear me?”

There was no sound, only some bird flitting about like crazy as if I were going to steal her eggs.

“Please!” I said. It was a word I knew Isamu understood.

I waited. I didn’t dare climb the tree in bare feet, nor was there time. Meanwhile his patient ghost family mingled with mine, exchanging furtive glances.

Finally, I swore, colorfully. It was a word Isamu had heard me use on more than one occasion when I’d stubbed a toe or banged my head into something. A good strong word to indicate I was hurt. Hurt bad.

Then I sighed and said, “Sayonara, kokoro no tomo.” “Good-bye, my friend.”

I turned a few yards from the tree and shouted, despite my earlier trepidation about being heard. “Mata modotte kimasu.” “I will be back.”

When I reappeared on the beach, I was in my uniform, such as it was, the jacket frayed at the cuffs, the pants oil-stained, and my garrison cap looking as if a bird had been nesting in it. I was carrying the Gibson Girl transmitter and one of the rifles from the shipment.

Sergeant Griffin saluted me snappily.

I saluted him back. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

I watch the devil boat leave from my watchtower with my friend Derwood upon it. They will be back for the guns. Will I let that happen? Those guns would kill Japanese soldiers. I will have to give this matter significant thought. I will write about it, ask your advice, Hisako-chan. You are so wise — wiser than I am. It will be good to be alone with you again on our desert island. Just the two of us.

The soldiers will come, and the jikininki will melt into the depths of the jungle. Troops of healthy soldiers would be as intolerable to them as fire. Soldiers are only good to the jikininki dead. Were I to booby-trap the plane, all that I would accomplish would be to feed the undead — these gluttons of other people’s memories. There would be too many to bury, and burying is hard. Harder than fire.

It is strange, but sitting up in my tree, with the devil boat racing away, only a speck on the wide flat ocean, I realize that I have ceased really to think of the war as them and us. We are all flesh and blood, together. Have not Derwood and I proved this point? We have.

Together we have vanquished war! Ha!

From my post in the watchtower, I trained my binoculars on the marine. I saw what Derwood did not see. The marine’s eyes watched him run up to our headland fort, and though the marine could not have seen any sign of habitation from where he stood, there was suspicion in his eyes. Without meaning to, Derwood led the marine directly to me. I will be most careful when they return that I am not anywhere to be found.

So Derwood and I teamed up to destroy Tengu. But war is not destroyed. This is what I have learned, here on the heart-shaped island. And I have learned that it is good to help the dead on their way to the next world and save them from the ravages of those whose only taste of life is a bitter one, filling them with borrowed memories that fade and leave them hungry for more and never satisfied, never satisfied. Saving the dead from the jikininki has taught me what killing never did.

I wanted to say to Derwood I will wait for the end of the war. I wanted to say that no prison could be as bountiful as this island. I wanted to say that I trusted Derwood Kraft — trusted him with my life! But war was war, despite what we have accomplished together, and that if war was war, then one man must be the prisoner and the other man the prison keeper. That is the way of it.

It is sad I could not tell him all this. Sad that although we had learned to communicate so well in the months of our time together, we do not share enough language to speak such complicated thoughts, although I am as sure as sure that this man if any would understand. I wanted to call Derwood my friend. But in the end it is better to say nothing. To do nothing. To wait it out. Wait for the end.