The Life of Reiji Kageyama

My name is Reiji Kageyama, and this is the story of how I lived, how I died, and how I changed the world.

I was born in the waning days of the second world war. My birth allowed me to witness the destruction of Nagasaki, and though all rational thought dictates I as a baby should not remember the event, I thoroughly believe my life was baptized in the powerful nuclear fire of the bomb. The world changed then, and it was a sign I would change it yet again before my death.

As I believe my life truly began when I discovered the existence of what the people of the world now call demons, I will keep the discussion of my early years relatively brief. I was raised in wealth and privilege, a member of the Kageyama family. I was taught by my father and grandfather the ways of business, both legal and otherwise. They ensured I understood when another human being was worthwhile, when they needed to be eliminated and when to command others to do the deeds for me. The first time I killed was when I was twelve. My older sister was assaulted by a boy. I found him and offered him a choice. I would kill him, or kill his parents in front of him.

Wiping his mother and father’s blood off my knife taught me much about humanity.

What truly fascinated me, though, wasn’t the mere physicality of the flesh. I was overjoyed I had been born in Japan, as it had such a rich history of folklore and stories of the supernatural. I poured over old books, looking for evidence of the otherworldly in our reality time and time again. It wasn’t until my late 20s when I met a similar man from India, a gentleman slightly older than me. As he became one of our clandestine group, I shall not use his full name, as his life is his story to tell. I shall refer to him by his position in our group, as shall I do for all the members as they become relevant to my life.

“What’s this, Smiler?” I asked the little man, his suit neat, his bald head shiny and his grin wide. I had been corresponding with him for several months, meeting him through our mutual business interests and discovering a shared love of the supernatural. I met him at the riverside hotel he was staying in the day everything changed for me. He held in his hand a flat stone disk with strange symbols and a picture of a grinning creature on it.

“This is what you seek,” he said, his voice resembling the purr of a large jungle cat.

“I want the supernatural, not ancient junk,” I had scoffed, pushing him away. Smiler, however, kept his grin as he pulled out a knife, held it to his hand and slit it right in the middle of the lobby. Blood oozed over the disk, and I felt a wave of disgust. Not at the blood, as I was used to seeing it. It was the waste, the unnecessary shedding of it which I loathed.

Then the disk began to glow.

The carving of the smiling figure illuminated and a shimmering veil seemed to expand from it. Nobody but Smiler and myself appeared to notice it, and as the veil enveloped me I felt my senses grow sharper. Smiler looked to be waiting for something, though what I could not guess. It was then I noticed the woman approached me. She held an ornate fan over her face and walked in a sensual way which immediately caught my attention. Her eyes held me, and she soon stood before me.

“Am I beautiful?” she asked me.

“I…how could I know if you are beautiful?” I asked. The woman seemed to growl at my response, and her fan lowered.

She was not beautiful.

Her jaw unhinged, a massive slit bisecting her face, and the void within was filled with too many teeth, jagged and crooked, and a whip like tongue snaked out of her throat. I nearly vomited in terror as I turned to run. Pushing past people, knocking them over, I made my way to the door.

Outside was worse.

Creatures from the mythologies I had spent my childhood studying roamed around me. A giant oni walked by, its third eye glaring at me. A group of kappa leapt from a bridge and into the river. Endless creatures swarmed me, and I was moments away from screaming, crying, losing my mind, when Smiler put his hand on my shoulder.

“Breathe,” he said.

The shimmering veil which had surrounded me began to vanish. The creatures shimmered, as if they weren’t real, like I hadn’t viewed them with my own eyes. “Those…those were…” I sputtered. The kuchisake-onna, the oni, the kappa, I had to know if he had seen them.

“They were real. Your lady friend, the other monsters. Most can’t see them, even with the disk,” Smiler said.

“What was it? How did you do…” I began to demand. The creatures were gone. My fear had been replaced by rabid eagerness and curiosity.

“Before I tell you, I need a promise,” Smiler said, his grin expanding.

“Anything!” I bellowed.

“Well then, promise me you’ll help me find the rest,” Smiler said, holding up the disk.

The rest.

There were more.

“Of course I will,” I said, feeling the obsession beginning in me.

The tale he told me in his room was fantastical, horrifying and utterly captivating. The disk he held was from an archeological expedition deep into the jungles of India. They had hoped to find ancient treasures from India's past. What they found was a bizarre temple which matched no culture known from India's past. In fact, as Smiler eagerly explained, the temple matched no known culture at all. It was thousands of years old, filled with statues of strange gods covered in teeth and claws and tentacles, and the centerpiece was a raised pedestal where Smiler’s disk had sat. Above the pedestal was a map of the world, perfectly accurate, an impossibility for such an ancient chart. The position on the map where the Indian temple sat was marked with a deep X, and seven more X’s were spread across the globe.

Upon discovering the disk and the temple, Smiler had everyone who knew about it besides himself killed. The knowledge was secured, he assured me.

It was shortly afterwards he had discovered the power of the disk when he had cut himself by accident, bleeding upon it. He nearly went mad in the streets of Kolkata as ancient creatures from Indian mythology spread out before him. I will never forget how Smiler looked as he told me of it, of the only words he could utter in his glorious madness.

“They’re real…”

What we had discovered was a way to see another plane of existence. The weeks we spent studying the disk and its effects showed us many things. These creatures were not real in the way we think of things as real. They faded in and out of existence, as if our belief willed them into being. But whenever we could communicate with them, one strikingly similar thought was echoed over and over.

They wanted out.

They wanted to be real.

They would reward those who helped them.

Thus, the true life of Reiji Kageyama began.