There was more to it than that, of course.
In the oddly blended mixture of Buddhism and Shintoism that constitutes organized religion throughout much of Japan, there is a belief that old and thrown away objects, after a certain period of time, became possessed by demons angered by their casual abandonment. These were the dread tsukumogami.
“Unlike the mortals who had discarded them, the vengeful specters were having a great time celebrating and feasting – building a castle out of flesh and creating a blood fountain. They danced and drank, boasting that celestial pleasures could not surpass their own,” Tom read, and he thought of Rachel, alone and far away in New York.
“We have faithfully served the houses as furniture and utensils for a long time. Instead of getting the reward that is our due, we are abandoned in the alleys to be kicked by oxen and horses. Insult has been added to injury, and this is the greatest insult of all! Whatever it takes, we should become specters and exact vengeance.”
His studies into the esoteric Shingon Buddhism had taken a sudden and somewhat disturbing turn. The tsukumogami and their damnable shrine in the recesses of Mount Funaoka, the shrine of the Great Shape-Shifting God called Henge Daimyojin by the old Shinto priests.
He remembered the old city of Kyoto, in the shadow of the haunted mountain, and his own failings and the many things over which he had no control. It had been his first and only trip to Japan.
Alive and self aware, the tsukumogami could take the form of men or women, young or old, of the inanimate objects they once were or of beasts such as ravens and coyotes.
There had once been an occasion, you know, a hundred years ago it seemed to Tom now, when driving that white Camaro – car weighed but 1800 pounds and had a 350 four barrel under the hood -- at a high rate of speed along an ice-covered country road very late one snowy night, drunker than hell and heading home from the small town in Pennsylvania where he served as chief editor of the little newspaper they had there, when he hit a particularly slippery patch and the car spun out, winding up in a ravine some twenty feet beneath the roadway, near a small stream they called Hare Creek.
He hadn’t been injured and he climbed up out of the ravine back to the roadway and, just then, a drinking buddy happened to be driving by in an old green Ford F-150 pickup truck and stopped, and Tom got in and they went back into town and had a few more drinks before someone else gave him a ride back to his house in the country.
The next day he learned that he had been charged by the state police – who had discovered his car – with numerous violations, including driving too fast for conditions and leaving the scene of an accident.
When he went in to see the chief of police the following Monday, a part of his normal duties as chief editor of the local newspaper, the chief got up from behind his desk and closed the door.
“Now this is strictly off the record, Tom,” he said, sitting back down. “But my man told me he drove down that road, got to the intersection outside of town, turned around and drove back. And between that time, which he said couldn’t have been more than a minute or two, your car was not there and then it was there but you were not. And he doesn’t like you, and he looked for you for the rest of his shift, in the cruiser and on foot, but he still couldn’t find you.
“Now, what I want to know is… How in the hell did you do that?”
Tom took a sip of the bitter black coffee from the Styrofoam cup.
“Well Dana…” The police chief’s name was Dana Scouten and the two were on a first name basis. “What happened was this; I knew your man was on the lookout for me, so when I slid off the roadway like that I just turned myself into a coyote and skinned up along the creek bed toward home. I knew he’d be looking for a man and not a dog.”
For a minute the police chief stared blankly, but then he began to laugh. He laughed uproariously.
“I’m gonna miss you when you go, Tom,” he said, wiping his eye and sighing.
It had all happened so long ago, and Tom had bent his mind in so many different ways during the intervening years, that now tvhe story of a drinking buddy just happening along some lonely country road at 2 o’clock in the morning that night seemed just as unlikely as the one about him turning himself into a coyote.
“Like a string of rosary beads, my mind cannot be severed from angry thoughts,” he read.
He poured a belt of Glenlivet into the glass on the nightstand and drank. The book, Elizabeth Lillehoj’s “Transfiguration: Man-made Objects as Demons in Japanese Scrolls,” a book that he had sitting on his shelves for years but was somehow just now getting around to reading, fell down on his covered belly.
He remembered Kyoto and looked over at the 16th century sword blade, his souvenir from that trip, and he thought of the shape shifters and that time back in Pennsylvania.
Like the great thief, Dao Zhi, who followed the five cardinal Confucian virtues, the evil and violent specters believed that piety would outweigh their malevolent transgressions. And so did Tom, sometimes.
The dog Rowena slept on the thick red comforter beside him, breathing in and out, dreaming the dreams of an old soul. With his fingertips he stroked the top of her skull, where the dark hairs were turning white much like his own.
Outside in the night, beneath what they were calling the “Super Moon of 2012” because of its close proximity to earth, it began to rain, and then the rain turned into a torrential downpour.
The mated ravens, who had built their shambling five-foot nest into a gutter between the roofs of two of the soundstages at the old Vitagraph Studios right behind his house watched helplessly as the runoff carried their nest and their young flightless chicks off and into a sewer that ran into the open cistern they called the Los Angeles River.
Everything for nothing.
Yin and yang. Life, death, the same. He scratched Rowena’s head and closed his eyes. He wondered about Angie, who was on the other side of the river, exhausted and sleeping herself.
The overhead light was on, and he was too tired to get up and turn it off. He made a mental note to get himself a lamp for the nightstand, maybe something vintage, with a shade made from panes of colored glass.
He hated sleeping alone and was glad for the dog. He thought of the ravens crying their raven cries over the deaths of their children.