There is a story from when the world was young. When two monstrous elementals did battle for supremacy, they were so fearsome Buddha made them guardians of humankind. They became devout and across Japan shrines are built to them as Temple Guardians. Raijin is depicted as a drummer, creating storms with his mighty songs. Fujin, equally fierce hold a sack over his shoulders containing the worlds winds. You cannot have one with out the other. They do battle and the result is thunder storms. Demons who are worshiped as holy personalities in Shinto is a concept unique to Asia. Their depiction changes along the Silk Road, but there is some form of these entities from Japan to India.
Furyo feels a cold shiver down his spine. He is naked on an autopsy table, a sheet is covering his face and in an adjacent room he can hear a bone saw buzzing into a human skull. Tearing off the white sheet, the light pounds into his eyes. Seeing angelic beings floating in the light, he remembers the story of the sun goddess Amaterasu. He wishes more than any thing her warm embrace would lift his broken body from his cold and dismal place. Tears come to his eyes and before he can stop him self he is wailing to the point of choking. Rolling off the table he hurts his toes on the ice cold tile floor. Walking out of the room, he comes to a changing room with a full length mirror.
What he sees is awful. Flashes of his smashed skull, open chest cavity and legs turned like a propeller laying on black asphalt shimmering in the rain glance through his mind. One of his eyes is totally purple except for a blueish grey cornea, his other eye yellowish. His skin is a color they don’t teach in school, silver-puce like a white peach with indigo veins and lavender bruises. His chest has a Y incision on the top, but a portion of his torso is blue medical plastic with bolts to attach to his pelvis. Something you would only see if you had a friend in a horrific traffic accident where the chest was unsalvageable but the head and arms were still useable for an open casket. Only tell tale signs of braces and brackets showing from a subtly caved in chest and pvc pipe making limbs into a stick figure of lipstick and morticians wax to fill out the face.
What’s left of Furyo is held together by aluminum, plastic and screws like the rubber band in a GI Joe. He isn’t even a corpse, his stomach is gone. Whats there is more like a foldable hanger for taking suit jackets on business trips. Even in the worst B movie, Frankenstein was never this ghoulish. He looks like something from a Filipino monster movie, Beast of the Yellow Night or Curse of the Sun Demon. Totally inhuman, full of staples in his face and feeling around his mouth, he feels cheap reusable fake teeth as half his jaw and check bone aren’t there, something the constituency of a rubber glove makes up the rebuilt portion of his mouth. Unable to take it he punches the mirror and raids the lockers for medical scrubs.
Finding a surgical mask, hair cover and doctors outfit, he rushes out of the building not making eye contact. He feels like his legs are squeaking when he walks, like he is about to fall apart like crutches held together with glue and bandaids in a hurricane. Smashing a car window he comes up with nothing, no guns or car keys. Just his luck a police officer jumped off his motorcycle and ran inside. This was the opportune moment to get away clean. Riding into the rain, he tries to figure out how to turn off the flashing blue and white lights. Finally getting it off, he tries to find someone to talk to or any distraction from the terror and torment he feels.
Ending up along a cement barrier where waves are breaking and pouring over the street, he sees a barricade too late and wipes out on a row of cones and feels his body rag doll into he doesn’t sense his head is attached to more than one of his arms, getting pushed by rushing white water. He might as well be a rubber ducky as the coastal road he was speeding down is washed out by violent tide and wind. Furyo can only laugh at this. No matter the temporary reprieve the gods grant him, his overpowering urge for self destruction wins. Like a bird compelled to dart at big rig windshields or a moth drawn to the glow of an electric bug zapping lamp, he is pulled by unconquerable gravity like planets circling a black hole. Unquellable rage and powerlessness, with a hint of narcissistic anti social personality disorder comes to a predictable end.
Feeling darkness pulling him towards Hell, he surrenders to the sleep of death. Failing to blink out into the emptiness of the universe or absence of consciousness… he finds him self whole again. Sitting peacefully in a temple full of chanting monks. Seeing the Hell Priest and his rescued orange kitten now peacefully sleeping in the afterlife. Furyo is kind of shocked to see he is whole again. He has hands feet and even a saphron Buddhist monk robe clothing a spiritual body unblemished by his violent death. His astral body stands up and follows the Hell Priest with out any of the black aura, mean spirited spite or cursed luck of Fury’s miserable life. They walk into a golden morning of brilliant light in a garden with a koi pond and flowering cherry blossoms. Furyo tries to talk and is shushed by the Hell Priest. They come to a less manicured part of the grounds. Where broken stone and dry weeds poke up from ash covered ground.
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Among the toppled stones lie gnarled bones of a great fortress, among battlements covered in ivy and charred posts leaning amidst unburied bones and rusty swords. The Hell Priest points to two large statues. They are covered in ash and mostly grey with streaks of black from rain. “Raijin and Fujin, our namesake.” Furyo doesn’t think about this, he lets the words pour over him as his mind is totally blank. Not a calm blank of nirvana, but a panicked blank of ptsd as he waits for the world to take its next pound of flesh. “Did you know you had a twin? Two children who were sickly, one grew up in poverty, crime and lack of love. Too mad with endorphins and misplaced hate to realize the stupidity of his ways. The other grew up with discipline, suffering and a deep understanding of all things. Too introspective to grow much beyond the study and meditation of this place. Both died due to shortcomings of how they felt about their place in the universe and how they delt with the suffering in the world…”
Furyo starts to murmer the beginning of a question, but realizes any thing he can say is just noise with out wisdom. Ego driven, listening only to react with no understanding. Th Hell Priest continues. “I was brought here at 36 months old when our grandmother tried to murder us in the Palace of Fine Arts fountain in San Francisco. Raised to study sutras and mantras, meditation, martial arts, healing arts. There was something lacking. Despite knowing the cause of suffering, I felt no meaning, no connection to the world or family. Abandoned like you. One day I walked along these battlements on this ancient castle and I saw no reason to not let the wind take me away. I tumbled 90 feet down into darkness, a crack in the ruins and remained there for 4 days, chewed on by raccoons and finally died of exposure. My bones slipped father down the rocks into a little hole where squirrels scamper over my skeleton to store acorns. Just over there, under boulders fallen from a war no one remembers…”
Furyo looks over the place, where great 400 year old Oak trees roots break up battlements. From a distance the ruins look like a place where Hawks and Falcons nest among grass, not betraying the broken spears, ritual suicides and anguished screams of worlds in transition. Black walls once supported a great Japanese castle, twisting fortifications hide nearly 1100 bodies, where peasants from the town bellow tried to wait out a siege during the warring states period. A vast graveyard too remote and lost to time to be a world heritage site. A shunned place where modern surveyors avoid it due to unstable rocks and geothermal vents, prone to earthquakes and fires. Perfect for a monastery devoted to saving wayward spirits from eternal suffering in Hell. An invisible sanctum of spiritual travel, a secret starting point for etherial avengers of the spirit realm to stage raids on wicked souls and unjust deaths. A training ground of exorcists and barrier to the decaying flesh of life we cling to because it’s all we know in the mysteries of the universe.
“I can see you aren’t to be trusted with your physical body in it’s state of transition. I will keep your remains here in the temple, we will pray for your soul and keep a week long vigil so no perverse spirits can steal them. You will be free to move around the 3 realms in spirit form. If you can follow directions and live for something more than your self, an arrangement can be made to restore your living form. After you have helped seek out and guide home suicides and lost souls around the Kanto prefecture and neighboring areas. You will be equipped with all the knowledge you need to call forth ghosts, cleanse homes, exorcise evil spirits and give peace to the tormented souls. You must avoid our parents as they made devilish transactions that left shadows over both of our mortal bones. In moments of weakness, they both attempted to trade our lives for their own. It did not work out well for any one involved. Furyo….”
Furyo felt a sensation like pulling G force on a roller coaster as reality transferred from the misty ruins of a castle to the studio apartment of Angelina. She was washing dishes and listening to the radio when she saw Furyo’s ghost in the window. Turning and seeing the spot where he is standing empty, she shudders as the lights go out as a powerful wind slams the window. She says a prayer and lights a candle. Walking from room to room blessing the space where she instinctively knows she is not alone. Furyo doesn’t know how to react, being a vouyer to the living is not a skill he knows. Thinking of ghost movies about scaring cats or using telekinesis to communicate is not his first instinct. Maybe he could find some refrigerator letters to write something vulgar or use the shower faucet to turn the water cold. He really doesn’t know what to do other than act as a guardian as she sleeps, watch the lightning out the window and try to find some way to light a cigarette on the stove. Somewhere Mr Ghost Lantern makes crazy jokes no one can hear, cackling in the glow of his own moldy skull.