The Life of Reiji Kageyama: Chapter 45

They listened for hours as Hinata read the diary of Reiji Kageyama, each bloody deed and unholy act filling them with new feelings of awe and terror. It was like finding a video of your parents screwing the night they conceived you, but the tape ends with mom killing dad. Harry called a break as they neared the end of Reiji’s life, a moment he knew intimately well. As he stood on the roof of the Tokyo PD, he had one overwhelming thought.

“We’re screwed.”

The wind seemed to pick up upon hearing his words, blowing hard at him as he stared out into the painted late afternoon sky above the city. It looked beautiful. Too beautiful to be filled with monsters.

Someone had done D Day. Not any someone, either. Reiji Kageyama, the bastard who brought him so much misery eight years earlier. Harry knew the man was a cruel creature, but never once did he think he was capable of a global genocide. Yet his own words proudly stated the fact. D Day wasn’t an accident, a cosmic joke which affected people at random. Reiji did it. He held a cosmic gun and pulled the trigger.

He murdered Lisa.

It all seemed too big for him. Harry wasn’t a hero like Reo, nor a fantastical beast like Hinata. He had never wanted this sort of complicated life. His greatest fantasy had always been to be a detective like the old noir movies and books his dad loved. His feet up on a desk, a dame walking in, taking cases and punching mugs in the face. All of this, though? It was save the world bullshit. Not the responsibility of a former brick layer.

“Knew you were up here,” Reo said, his lanky body appearing from the stairwell doorway like a ghost. He walked over to Harry slowly, as if approaching a skittish cat. Harry simply slid over a bit along the ledge, an unnecessary motion considering the space they had but one which said he welcomed the company.

“How did you know I was up here?” Harry asked.

“You’re a brute, but a poetic brute,” Reo said. Harry grinned at Reo’s saccharine comment.

Reo didn’t bother leaning on the wall with Harry. He stood there, arms crossed, a weary look on his face. “They about ready to finish this up?” Harry asked. Reo nodded, looking back to the stairs.

“Hinata is ready. She held on longer than I thought she would after learning about where her demon came from,” Reo said, the words coming out slower than they should. Harry could hear the hurt in his voice, the bone weary ache of learning where the origins of their news lives. Hinata couldn’t hide from the fact of her demon, the thing which had saved her life, being part of a madman’s plan to destroy the world.

It struck Harry as ironic. All of this, the personal and global, began with the Kageyamas. He had only been in Japan a short time when he stumbled upon the shinigami in the warehouse as Gouki took them to war against a rival gang. It was on the day he naively jumped into the fight, not knowing anything about Japan or its demons, he met Reo. As the two exorcists grew closer, the Kageyamas kept coming into their lives. Missing people, demon rampages, businesses using demon staff before the UN started handing out the red arm bands, everywhere Harry went seemed to have the stench of Reiji and Gouki. He used to laugh at those exorcist drinking nights about Gouki shouting yet again “Why is the asshole American here?!”

“You’re thinking about then,” Reo said.

“God damn right I am. Reiji freaked me out whenever I saw him back then. Ugly little troll. But it was weird. I always thought he was…” Harry shook his head as Reo took over the rest of the thought.

“Watching you?” Reo asked.

Harry was silent as the sun slipped past the edge of the horizon. It was officially night. One more day had passed with Gouki free to terrorize innocent people. Wordlessly Harry pushed away from the ledge and walked to the stairs. He wanted to put Reiji Kageyama and his ghosts to bed once and for all.

*

And now we reached the end. Or rather, my end. I know my time is coming. I am an old man, even beyond the stresses of navigating my family post D Day.

My family…

I have failed to address my son, Shiro, for much of this diary, focusing instead on my grandson Gouki. There is a good reason for it. I killed him shortly before D Day. As I’ve made clear, whatever magic powering the disks which allowed us to break down the barriers between our world and theirs is fueled by belief. Or, more accurately, faith. The more committed to an idea one is, the more powerful it is. Thus, the sacrifices. Staining our hands in blood showed our faith in the ritual working. But a supreme sacrifice from each of the Eight was necessary. My son unknowingly volunteered himself when he discovered my plans and exploded in rage.

“It’s monstrous!” Shiro screamed. I had shared everything with him in my study, showing him proof, the details of the sacrifices, and even helped him glimpse the other place, hoping to include him in the new world which would soon come to pass. He had none of it. “We’re businessmen! You’ve taught me all my life the difference between murder and necessity! But this…this slaughter…”

I sat silently, letting him rant. When he had finished calling me murderer, monster, an inhuman creature, I calmly walked to my desk and pulled out a gun. I threw it to my son, the boy who had worshiped me for all his life who had grown into a man, criminal yes, but noble. The man who acted as the anchor for my troubled grandson Gouki, whose impulsiveness and violence had far surpassed ours. The man who I loved with all of my being.

“If you kill me, you can stop it all,” I said.

To this day I don’t know if his arm raised to shoot or to throw the gun down. The bullet from my pistol pierced his heart all the same. I believed I had my answer. Even if he wouldn’t kill me, I saw his eyes. He would never be my son again.

What happened next is the reason this book is being written. Gouki did not accept his father’s disappearance well. I hid the truth, wanting to see how he would react, only confirming his father’s death after D Day. Gouki went insane from grief, his paranoia and rage leading him to slaughter multiple demons, many of whom worked for us. Since demons cannot truly die, he imprisoned them while they healed, killing them again and again in a twisted kind of therapy.

“We need them, Gouki,” I told him when I discovered his torture dungeon.

“Need?! Grandfather, we NEED to kill each inhuman bastard on the planet!” he roared in the same room I had killed his father in.

He couldn’t understand. I knew then any words I said would be useless. His father had been idealistic. He was the opposite. A mad dog lashing out, unable to see the plan. His grief blinded him. For the first time in decades, I did not know what to do.

And then we encountered Harry Vickers.

The American exorcist had the same look in his eyes as Gouki. They were opposite, fighting for different reasons, yet still embracing their rage against demons. Our first meeting was through accident, yet I was determined to see him again. To see them interact again. I kept planning incidents which would draw the two together, forcing Gouki to embrace demons, forcing him to see his mirror image in the exorcist, and through these interactions I saw both creating for themselves a new sense of purpose.

It was then when I knew the plan I had been considering must move forward. A second ritual. The demons had come through, but they were wild, random. We needed control. I found a new set of Eight, chosen from those I had observed post D Day with severe trauma, with Gouki as the new Controller. Faith will not be the catalyst with these new Eight. This new ritual will be based around control, their rage at the world growing over time until their disks fill. It will begin tonight. I will start it with a sacrifice. I will bring a group of girls to the ocean who will draw the heroic Harry to us.

They are not the sacrifice.

I am.

My life will end so theirs may begin. Gouki and Harry. I will begin another gamble, as I had with the Voice. I will give them ten years. I will give them room to grow. I will give Gouki a new Eight, all ignorant to their purpose and bound to demons from the sites of the temples, with Gouki not even knowing they are to be eight in total. I will hide the words of this diary behind powerful magic, rendering it readable only to demons as to force them to put their trust in what they hate. I will hide it where the American lives, ensuring he and Gouki will be forced to confront each other again. And in ten years the test will begin.

Gouki.

Harry.

One of you is reading this.

One of you decoded it in time.

To you I give the instructions to conduct the ritual. You will be able to control all demons with it. You can remake the world.

Whichever one of you wins, I wish you good luck.

Take care of my world.

-Reiji Kageyama