Part 2 || 5 | Emma
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A Tale of a Wayward Fox II
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Before this narrative goes any further, let the clock rewind itself a few hours back, and let the mind’s eye move to another location along a desolate stretch of highway somewhere in the desert. On the shoulder of this highway, an eight-pointed seal of daffodils appeared glowing on the pavement, and then there appeared a fist-sized specimen of a chubby bunny in a sack suit, a trilby hat atop its bunny-eared head, and a big handlebar mustache hanging from its face down the middle of his waistcoat. It was Taiso Takagi, the Muse Bureau Chief, backtracking to where the case concerning Emma Vasari began in the 1980s with a hungry little fox by the road.
He had returned to the place he found her on the roadside, where he had the fox read her own name with his mirror and drink from his thermos all those years ago. Now he manifested another eight-pointed seal of daffodils, this time with a glowing compass needle pointing to magnetic north, and said, “Direct me to Emma Vasari’s current location.”
And the glowing needle’s point spun around like a top before dissipating from view.
Taiso let out a sigh, for hungry ghosts were hard to track even with the magical accouterments of a bureau chief. This world alone was a strange one full of reclusive oddities, so in lieu of the obvious method, he manifested another eight-pointed seal with the compass needle and said, “Direct me to Emma Vasari’s point of origin along this road.”
And again the glowing needle’s point spun around, but instead of dissipating like before, it slowed down and pointed in the opposite direction that he and Emma had taken on their way to the Nine Shards all those years ago. When the glowing seal blinked out of sight, Taiso took out his magic map from his bag and unfolded it.
And lo and behold! On the map glowed a miniature eight-pointed seal of daffodils close to its right edge, which was about 355 miles due east of his current location along the highway. It was a start, at least, so he folded the map, put it back in his bag, and teleported—
To where the driver of the semi-trailer truck had run over the previous incarnation of Emma Vasari, the eight-pointed seal of daffodils glowing over a portion of the road that used to hold the fox’s corpse. Upon entering the seal, dissipating it below his feet, he saw no sign of dried blood, as the corpse had been disposed of long ago and this section of the highway had been repaved many times since then. Yet the feeling of loss was still heavy in this unhallowed liminal space, so he broke into tears and cried deep painful ones he hadn’t shed since he last came here to track Emma’s whereabouts after finding her letter forty years ago: a lifetime ago.
After wiping away tears, Taiso braced himself with bated breath, bent down, placed his hand over the spot Emma’s past self got run over, closed his eyes, and waited: nothing emerged from the darkness for a time.
But upon open his eyes, he saw the blurry afterimage of a girl fitting Jane’s description at The Cake Fairy: brown hair just above shoulder-length, glasses, a short-sleeved hooded blouse, a buttoned undershirt, a pleated skirt, socks, and shoe-laced sneakers. For sure, it was Judy Windermere, but how and why was she here of all places?
Closing his eyes again from the glare of high noon under a clear sky, he bent down, touched the hot pavement, and waited. And after a time, he stood up and looked around him at the nighttime silence under starry skies, sometime after nightfall. Then he looked behind himself and the image of Judy’s dreaming self emerging from the darkness, walking up to him without seeing or interacting with him. He stepped back for Judy and noticed something metallic on the pavement where the corpse should have been, then saw Judy bending over, picking it up in her hand, and saying the name, “Vasari,” under her breath, and then saw Judy stalking off into the night . . .
Opening his eyes again, Taiso thought of contacting Inspector Colebrook but reconsidered in light of his findings: if he could find that dog tag, he’d have something concrete that could tie Emma and Judy together, maybe even narrow down Emma’s current whereabouts.
So he manifested his eight-pointed seal and compass on the ground again, glowing beneath his feet, and said, “Direct me to the ‘Vasari’ dog tag Judy took with her.”
At once, the glowing needle’s point spun for a bit before slowing down and pointing southwest of his location in the direction of the city of Malgrand, specifically the Markham district of Malgrand. And like before, when the glowing seal blinked out of sight, Taiso took out his magic map from his bag again and unfolded it.
There glowed the same miniature eight-pointed seal just above the lower left corner of the map, which was about 466 miles due southwest of his current location. Now with the ball rolling, he folded the map again, put it back in his bag, and teleported himself from the highway.
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A Tale of a Treasure Hunt
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An eight-pointed seal of daffodils manifested on the sidewalk, along with Taiso appearing moments later on top of it, only for the seal to dissipate upon his appearance. When he looked up at the house looming over him in the daylight, he heard the black dachshund barking at him from its kennel on the neighboring yard, so he doffed his hat at it, saying, “Ah, see, boy? I said I’d be around, and here I am!”
The dachshund barked, prancing out of its kennel with its tail wagging and its tongue lolling out of its panting maws, jumping in glee at Taiso’s presence. Upon noticing the half-empty doggie bowl of dog food pellets, Taiso reached into his bag, pulled out another cold-cut of ham, and tossed it into the lawn near the kennel. Then the dog rushed out, snatched the morsel in its maws, and barked once again, its tail wagging as it pranced again like it wanted to play fetch.
“Keep watch for me, will you, boy?” Taiso said.
The dog barked again.
“Good, boy,” he said. “I’ll be going now.”
So the dog barked yet again.
As such, Taiso bent down, placed his hand over the spot where the eight-pointed seal of daffodils had once been, and closed his eyes: he saw a continuation of the vision he had at the highway moments before. In this vision, Judy’s dream-self appeared on the sidewalk next to Taiso, cutting across the sidewalk, heading up the driveway, up the entrance path, and towards the front door of her house. Judy fished her key ring from a pocket in her hooded blouse, opened the door, and went inside before shutting the door behind her . . .
After that, Taiso opened his eyes and followed the afterimage of Judy’s path across the driveway, up the entrance path, and towards the front door, still left ajar from when Judy had left it in a rush this morning. When he invited himself in, passing the threshold into the foyer, he saw a living room that doubled as a library with several bookcases lining the walls from the wall adjacent to foyer window by entrance door to the edge of the hallway, where a china cabinet would have been in any other household. After gawking at the contents of the living room, he looked back and noticed the afterimage of Judy heading towards the stairs and going up them. As such, he followed Judy’s path, hopping up the stairs after the ghost of Judy’s dream-self, clearing the top step, and heading through the door to the left that was Judy’s bedroom at the end of the upper hallway. So he hopped over the top step, nudged past the open door of Judy’s bedroom, and saw Judy’s afterimage approaching the credenza beside her bed and putting the dog tag underneath the covered hollow of the lamp.
So Taiso grew to about half his full size, so that the small bunny ears of his head cleared the ceiling fan above his head and his girth took up only about the space between the posts of the door jamb inside the house. He then headed towards the lamp atop the credenza and lifted it up, but the dog tag wasn’t there. After putting it back, he turned and saw the afterimage of Judy taking the tag into a door inside the bedroom that led into a walk-in closet. So he followed Judy’s steps, opened the door, and saw Judy crouching over a corner of the closet beneath the hems of hanging dresses, shirts, and pants.
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Taiso headed towards that spot and pushed back the hems of all those clothes, only to see a small tin container lying there. He reached down, opened it, and saw various coins and old bills: a two dollar bill; a few bogus 1,000,000-dollar bills; a U.S. Kona dollar coin; a Susan B. Anthony coin; a steel Lincoln penny from 1943; a few old wheat pennies from the 1950s; an old Canadian penny; and an old unreimbursed token from a casino. Yet of these items, the tag wasn’t in here, either.
He closed the metal container, put it back where he found it, and said, “Where did she put that blasted tag?”
He looked behind him to see if the afterimage of Judy was taking the item to another location in the house, for Judy seemed to be moving the tag around for some reason. But why move the tag around like that? There had to be a reason, he surmised, and sure enough, lo and behold! There Judy was taking the tag with her to God knows where within the house.
And so, he followed Judy’s afterimage out of the walk-in closet and towards the low bookshelf below the window sill of her bedroom, where she placed the tag inside the hollow of the spine of one of the bigger volumes on the top shelf. Then he went to the exact spot where Judy had placed the object yet found the volume and the ‘blasted tag’ missing.
“This case has become a treasure hunt,” Taiso said under his breath to himself.
He couldn’t get a good look at the volume that Judy handled, but judging on first impressions, he guessed it was a big omnibus and fixed the impression in his mind. As such, Taiso spent the next hour and a half scouring through the rooms on the upper floor, two of which were small libraries with bookshelves along the walls, stuffed with more books, yet none of the books there resembled the one Judy had picked out in her bedroom. So he went downstairs into the living room, where he scanned across the bookcases along the walls and the seating areas therein, then found the volume he was looking for atop the console table by the wall next to the stairs.
He went over, snatched it up, felt the heft of it in his hands, and decided that this was the volume he was looking for, so he read the title: The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Then he checked the hollow of the spine for the tag, but the ‘blasted tag’ wasn’t there.
“Where is it this time?” he said, wondering why Judy would go through the effort of moving an item that didn’t even belong to her over and over in her own house. Something was amiss here, something he couldn’t pinpoint beyond the fact that Judy’s efforts to hide the tag pointed in a direction he had yet to consider. Now, faced with the possibility that Judy might have known something about the tag or even about Emma’s influence connected with it, he began to weigh his options: either to continue the search via Judy’s many afterimages, as he had been doing, or to redo the searching method he had used on the highway inside of Judy’s house.
Choosing the latter, Taiso manifested his eight-pointed seal and compass beneath his feet in the living room, and said, “Direct me to the ‘Vasari’ dog tag that Judy had hidden within the premises of this house.”
At once, the glowing needle’s point spun for a bit before slowing down and pointing northeast back up the stairs. Then, when the eight-pointed seal and compass dissipated below his feet, Taiso fished out his map from his bag, unfolded it, and saw a floor plan of the first floor of the house, where he saw a glowing line of dashes going back up the stairs on the map. As Taiso followed the line up the stairs, checking the map as he did so, he found it leading into an L-shaped upper hallway. As he cleared the top step, he turned the corner and saw Judy’s dream-self turning the corner and followed after her, where he found her pushing past the door at the end of the hall. So he approached the door and passed the threshold into another room lined along its walls with bookcases full of encyclopedias, dictionaries, reference works, and other nonfiction titles, along with a swivel chair and a roll-top desk with its tambour closed at the center of the room. And there at that desk, he found Judy’s afterimage lifting open the tambour, opening one of the smaller drawers over the desktop, putting the tag inside it, and closing it back in place.
So he approached the roll-top desk, praying that the ‘blasted tag’ was still there, and lifted up the tambour, revealing a stack of paper, a cup full of pens, and a small figurine of a nine-tailed fox sitting by a corner of the desktop. Taiso blinked at the cutesy figurine, wondering if Judy had a thing for nine-tailed foxes (at least of the anime variety), then opened the drawer that Judy had opened—
But found no tag inside.
Breathing out a sigh, Taiso shook his head, saying to himself, “Judy’s quite eccentric, isn’t she?”
Failing that, Taiso inspected the other drawers, pulling them open and inspecting their contents: stamps, envelopes, more pens, letterheads, bills paid and unpaid, a checkbook, a planner, extra calendars, sharpened pencils of varying lengths, a pencil sharpener, erasers, an old calculator, etc. And after observing Judy hiding the tag in various places, he even moved the desk to check if she had hidden it underneath the hollows of the side drawers. Yet in the end, there was no sign of that ‘blasted tag’ in or around the desk.
Then he looked up at the bookcases lining the walls, hoping that the afterimage of Judy wouldn’t manifest there to plague him with another wild goose chase. Yet when he looked over his shoulder, he saw Judy’s afterimage heading back outside the door, so he followed her out into the hallway, where he saw her enter another door at the bend of the hall.
Pushing past the door into another room lined with bookcases, this time full of notebooks and folders on the lower shelves and more novel titles on the upper shelves, he caught sight of Judy heading to another desk pushed up against the window in between two low bookcases, one of which had a printer and a few packets of printer paper on top of it. And right next to that low bookshelf was the desk, on top of which was a desktop computer, a landline phone, and a small desk lamp, as well as a mouse and keyboard on the keyboard tray. Here Judy moved the swivel chair out of the way, pulled out the keyboard tray, removed the keyboard, and placed the tag underneath the keyboard for safekeeping.
So Taiso approached the desk, slid the chair out of the way, pulled open the keyboard tray, and removed the keyboard, only to find the ‘blasted tag’ missing yet again. He almost flung the keyboard against the carpeted floor, yet he contained himself and breathed in and out, in and out, to calm himself. Then he peered over his shoulder again and saw the afterimage of Judy taking the tag with her towards the closet behind her, opening one of the sliding doors, and pulling out several boxes before crouching down and dissipating from view.
At once Taiso followed after Judy, opening the closet as she had and removing the boxes as she had, but there was no sign of that tag anywhere on the floor. So he did the next best thing: he spent about a half hour opening up the boxes and finding several volumes of yuri manga. After closing and replacing them as he had found them, he spent the next few minutes waiting for Judy’s afterimage to manifest and guide him to the next turn in this weird treasure hunt, yet no afterimage appeared. As such, faced with no other options, he spent another hour and a half looking through the closets of the two other rooms he had been in looking through boxes and other containers, but he came away empty-handed. By 4:45 p.m., he had exhausted every investigative means he could think of after exiting the Judy’s bedroom and heading for the stairs—
When he caught sight of Judy’s afterimage going down the stairs. So he followed after her and just managed to catch Judy’s afterimage dissipating down the steps into the floorboards at the foot of the stairs.
Then the chime of his phone rang through the air, attracting barks from the dachshund outside. So he manifested his rotary phone, which rang yet again, and picked up the receiver, saying, “This is the Chief. What is it?”
“Just talked with Momo,” Nathaniel said.
“Ah, I see,” Taiso said. “Did she find out anything?”
“More than we expected,” the Muse Inspector said. “Momo said that Sakura’s at Grace Ransom’s house, and judging from what she’s heard through Sakura’s talk with Judy, Momo’s on the same track we’re on.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Judy’s made contact with Emma,” Nathaniel said.
“I see,” Taiso said.
“What about on your end, Chief?”
“I’ve been on a little treasure hunt at Judy’s house all afternoon,” Taiso said, “and I think I’ve found a little detour down the stairs.”
“Any idea where it goes?”
“I’ll tell you once I find out,” Taiso said.
“Be careful, Chief,” Nathaniel said.
“I will,” he said, hung up, dissipated his rotary phone, and wondered about Judy’s anomalous efforts to hide the tag in various parts of the house. If she had been hiding it over and over, she must have been hiding it from someone, perhaps even someone like Emma, who had gained access to the house. But how? To answer this question, he manifested his eight-pointed seal and compass at the head of the stairs and said, “Direct me to the ‘Vasari’ dog tag that had been taken from the premises of this house.”
At once, the glowing needle’s point spun again before slowing down and pointing to the L-shaped hallway to his left, where he saw a small nine-tailed fox entering the room at the bend in the hallway.
He dashed after the fox, catching sight of a glint of the ‘blasted tag’ in its maws as it passed the threshold into the room. On reaching the threshold, he saw a nine-tailed fox woman in a kimono, sporting a long fringe of bangs covering her eyes and flowing down the sides of her face and longer flowing locks of hair tied behind her head in a ponytail. Forty years have passed since he had last seen the small fox that was Emma Vasari, and she had gained eight more tails since then, a feat he wouldn’t have thought possible if her afterimage wasn’t right there before him. Then, with one hand clutching the dog tag, Emma opened the closet with her other hand, so Taiso followed her example and pushed aside one of the sliding doors, but now he saw a doorway in the closet’s back wall and a set of stairs descending into God knows where. At first, he thought of contacting Nathaniel to tell him what he found but reneged on it: he needed to know.
And so, after breathing in and exhaling, Taiso descended the stairs into another realm, feeling the gentle warmth of a summer night against his face, wondering how deep this rabbit hole went, wondering if he’ll find the tag somewhere, and wondering how much Emma had changed . . .
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TBC