Detective Yamamoto and the Oni Part 2

"We should turn off our flashlights for a moment," said Satoshi.

"Turn off the flashlights?!" echoed the detective, far louder than was likely wise with a supposed monster lurking.

"Just for a moment, just as we climb and look over the hill." Satoshi couldn't see the expression on the detective's face, but he imagined that she looked reluctant. Without any further argument, Detective Yamamoto's flashlight clicked off. Satoshi did the same. Slowly and cautiously they climbed the hill, as they approached the crest, Satoshi held out his arm again.

"Stay here," Satoshi whispered. "I'm going to look ahead." He got down on his stomach and crawled the last stretch to the top of the hill. Peering over it, he didn't see very much of anything given how dark it was. Tentatively Satoshi turned his flashlight back on and panned it around the far side of the hill. As far as he could see, there was nothing of interest. Other houses and their mailboxes, a few trees here and there, some decorative shrubbery, but nothing that had even a passing resemblance to an oni. A bit of movement attracted Satoshi's attention. Satoshi pointed his flashlight in the direction of what caught his eye and then he saw it.

True to what the client had described to Satoshi and the detective, this thing truly looked like an oni. It stood tall, certainly taller than Satoshi and by no small measure. It's craggy blue skin looked to have the texture of gravel. Atop a stout barrel-chested torso was a frightful head, whose mouth bristled with fangs and whose forehead boasted two massive, curved horns. In one mammoth hand, the oni clutched a massive iron-shod club that it dragged along the ground. The club looked like it could have been fashioned whole from a decently sized tree.

Once Satoshi had gotten a good look at the oni and realized the full magnitude of what he was looking at, he extinguished the flashlight. If that thing truly was what it appeared to him, neither he nor the detective could hope to do anything. Fortunately, despite pointing his flashlight at the oni, it didn't seem to have noticed. Satoshi scrambled back down the hill, down to where he had left the detective. 

"Detective Yamamoto!" Satoshi hissed, making an effort to keep his voice at the level of a whisper. "We have to get out of here now!" Detective Yamamoto did not need any further urging. With nary a word, she broke off into a sprint back towards her car, with only the bobbing of her flashlight's beam outlining the path she took. Satoshi followed behind her, albeit occasionally glancing over his shoulder in case the oni began to give chase or crest the hill.

As he made it halfway back to the car, Satoshi's innate sense of duty assailed him. On the one hand, even he would very much like to have nothing to do with this case any more. However, on the other hand, they did agree to help this poor woman. Satoshi slowed from a jog to a walk and approached the woman's house instead. Satoshi knocked on the door, and the woman opened the door, but only slightly.

"Excuse me, ma'am," said Satoshi. "The detective and I have seen the oni. I don't think there's anything we can do tonight. She and I will be back early tomorrow." The poor woman looked understandably unhappy about the situation, but how could she credibly complain that a scrawny guy and a frightened woman were unwilling to confront a gigantic monster?

"Thank you, detective." she whispered before shutting the door and engaging the lock. Satoshi wanted to correct her, to tell her that he wasn't the detective, but it dawned on him that it might be a trivial thing to quibble about given the present situation.

Satoshi returned to the car to find that there was no sign of the detective. The doors were unlocked, but he would have expected Detective Yamamoto to be sitting shotgun and eagerly waiting to leave. Upon closer inspection, Satoshi noticed that the blanket the detective habitually kept in her back seat was out of its usual position on the floor. Satoshi lifted up a corner of the blanket and Detective Yamamoto shrieked, causing him to jump back in fright.

"Detective? What the hell are you doing?!" Satoshi shouted indignantly. The detective sat up and shrugged off the blanket and tried to catch her breath.

"I thought you were the oni," she said as she clutched at her heart. Satoshi rolled his eyes and took a deep breath to calm down.

"Let's get out of here." Satoshi seated himself, started the car, and drove off in a manner that was more similar to the detective's style of flooring the accelerator than he would have liked.

FRIDAY

"What do you mean we're going back?" asked the detective with equal parts fear and indignation. "We went and investigated and there's nothing we can do!" Satoshi sighed. He expected some sort of arguement but he had hoped that the detective's innate sense of justice and honor would lead her to do the right thing with minimal nagging.

"We can't just abandon the woman's case. I told her we'd come back during the day." The look on Detective Yamamoto's face informed Satoshi that she would be angry if she wasn't so scared of the prospect of encountering the oni. For a moment, it seemed like she might have been willing to argue, but then she relented.

"Fine," she said with ill grace, "but I have conditions now."

"Conditions?" Satoshi asked. The detective folded her arms across her chest and nodded.

"Yes, conditions. You will not leave me alone, you will not have me investigate anything first, and if it comes down to a fight, you're protecting me." Satoshi didn't particularly agree with those rules, as they all seemed to put the onus on him for everything, but he knew well enough that if he didn't at least pay lip service to the detective in this regard, things would go nowhere.

"Of course, detective. I am the assistant after all." He tried to keep an edge of sarcasm from entering his voice and he wasn't sure if he succeeded, but the detective wasn't making an issue of it either.

"Good. Now I'll be driving today." It was Satoshi's turn to be afraid.

~~~

After an especially harrowing car journey, during which Satoshi had mercifully blacked-out, he and Detective Yamamoto arrived back at the clients house right around the middle of the morning. After a brief visit to the client, just out of courtesy and to let her know the detective had taken up the case again, Satoshi and Detective Yamamoto set out to the hill again. Neither of them had discussed it with one another, but they had both independently intuited that the hill the oni had come from probably constituted the best place to start looking.

The pair crested the hill and began walking down the slope to the far side. Satoshi noticed that unlike last night, some of the few trees that were dotted around the landscape had been felled. They were small trees, more like saplings, but they looked as though they had been smashed to flinders by something large. Satoshi, after looking around and getting his bearings, pointed out towards a point in the distance.

"The oni came from over there last night. That's probably where we should start looking," he said. Detective Yamamoto looked, following the direction of his finger. There was a look of trepidation on her face, but the fact that it was broad daylight seemed to bolster her spirits.

"We should be careful. It's gotta be sleeping right?" asked the detective. In truth, Satoshi didn't know. He would have liked to be able to say something reassuring, but he couldn't so he just nodded noncommittally. As they continued walking in the direction the oni had emerged from, it started to dawn on Satoshi that they weren't really sure what they were searching for. Did onis have dwellings? He imagined a sparse forest like this wouldn't suit an oni. At any rate, both he and the detective kept a sharp eye out for anything that might be suspicious.

Eventually, as they continued walking, the foliage and flora became thicker and more abundant. It wasn't so dense that Satoshi and the detective had to change how they were walking, but something about it seemed to have percolated into the detective's mind, as evidenced by her pensive expression and thousand-yard stare, as though she was deep in thought. Slightly off in the distance, perhaps fifty feet away, Satoshi noticed that there was a pocket where there was no foliage, almost as if it had been cleared out. He nearly said something to the detective, but stopped for fear of interrupting her delicate thought process. He figured that her keen observational abilities would eventually clue her in to the anomoly.

Satoshi was wrong. The detective kept walking forwards, heedless of anything that might have been amiss. Satoshi noticed, only too late, that the ground also appeared to have been disturbed. When Detective Yamamoto set foot on the suspicious looking ground, her foot immediately sunk into it and she promptly fell with a startled shriek.

"Detective Yamamoto!" Satoshi hollered. The detective's scream was truncated by hitting the ground, but after a beat, she started screaming again in sustained wails. Satoshi peered over the edge of what was apparently a pit and he quickly divined the reason for her discomfort. Inside the pit was the oni, or after closer inspection something that resembled the oni Satoshi had seen. Detective Yamamoto seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion as her screaming died down.

"Are you alright, detective?" Satoshi called.

"I think so," replied the detective. She sounded pensive. "Assistant, what do you make of this?" Satoshi stooped down and took a closer look at the contents of the pit. It became abundantly clear after Detective Yamamoto rummaged around that the thing that resembled the oni was in fact some sort of elaborate costume. Likewise, the oni's big iron-shod club also sat in the pit, and Detective Yamamoto managed to heft it with incongruous ease. Satoshi was very nearly dumb-founded until the detective struck the edge of the pit with it, where it made a resonant clunk sound.

"You might be disappointed to hear this, assistant, but I don't think there's a real oni," said the detective. She emphasized her point by striking the costume with the club. Satoshi now hopped down into the pit with the detective. It wasn't especially spacious with two people inside, but Satoshi rationalized that they would look through its contents faster this way. Hidden underneath the costume and club were mechanical components and tools. Detective Yamamoto reckoned that the metal frame-like device was intended to make the oni appear larger than the person that wore the suit. Detective Yamamoto also surmised that the sledgehammer and saw were used for vandalism and destruction of property. "No matter how you look at it, it's looks like this oni is a hoax," said the detective.

"I think you might be right, but what do we do now?" The detective rhythmically tapped a finger on her chin while tapping the club on the ground.

 "I think I've got an idea," she said, "but this time, you'll need to do the heavy lifting."