Shinji Ikari Goes to New York
Chapter Six - The Thing in the Woods
Down at the base of the hillock, Shinji could just make out a person-shaped interruption in the chaotic swirl of tree trunks and branches thinly illuminated from above.
The words had come in English, brief but short. He repeated it in his head, settled on a translation.
"Yes," Shinji said in Japanese. He switched over the English. "Sorry, just talking with…" he rolled a hand, working through a quasiliminal matrix of Japanese and English idioms.
ReiRabbitMan
"…talking with the girl in the moon."
"Used to be a man," the figure said, approaching. Shinji held his ground with what he hoped would appear to be indifference. A pale face emerged from the darkness, flanked closely by twin serifs of white. As the figure approached, and Shinji's perspective leveled out, that broken ring of white resolved into a broad, flat collar cinched tight.
The figure's clothes, collar excluded, seemed to eat moonlight, and even as it drew level with Shinji, he couldn't seem to make out any details. The face turned away at the moment it might have come into focus.
"But now that the moon bleeds, it has to be a woman, right?" the figure said, and Shinji was pretty sure it was a girl talking. The voice was pitched low, and Shinji not being fluent in English might have confused things a bit, but a girl? Probably a girl. Sounded like a girl's joke.
"Sorry," he ducked his head curtly, plowing right through the barb. "Just talking to a friend."
"Some friend," the figure said, looking up at the moon. "Bright, bloody, silent." The face looked back, to Shinji. "Awful."
Yes, definitely a girl. Thin neck, small chin, large but shadowed eyes, hair pulled back tight against the scalp.
She circled him, a ghost. A floating face leering in out of the dark.
And the stars twinkled overhead, all out of sorts.
And the air was attic hot. Stale. It smelled sour.
And.
And.
And Shinji was back on Angel time. A hostile world that could stretch and twist to form needle points and slicing edges.
It had been quite a while. The spiral of paranoid anxiety that New York had sent him down was thrown into sharp relief as a meaningless nothing. A way to distract him from the prospect of seeing Asuka again.
Because here was the feeling of true unknown. The texture of existential threat, all over everything.
"Katsuragi, Shinji," he said, reaching out a hand. Trying to make contact. Trying to feel warm damp skin that would confirm this was real.
The face sharpened up, his eyes adjusting to the wincing contrast. She seemed to be looking at his hand. She looked up at him, the moonlight finally catching the whites of her eyes.
"No." She said, moving past and down the hillock, away from the path, toward the deeper woods.
Shinji straightened up, sirens screaming. Had she just declined to shake his hand, or disagreed with the name he had given her?
"Can you show me to the house?" He called after her.
"No." She said, her inflection linking this to her previous answer, promising only repetition going forward.
He looked back to the path. The dim white trees that lined it might have been bone. He was suddenly certain that if he just sat down where he was, made himself small, waited quietly as the moon sank from the sky, with everything illuminated only in throbbing, drifting starlight, that some pale shape would emerge from the direction he had come from, shrouded in white the color of the girl's collar, though without any moonlight to explain that lambent glow. It would drift down the path in a weightless glide.
Shinji did something with his mouth that wasn't a smile. Angel time meant terror, but ghosts? He'd spent Akari time praying for ghosts. There had been a few times when he'd try to coax them out, walking in the hills on moonless nights, desecrating old-style Shinto sites and making bonfires inside the shrines from holy rope and crumbing prayer notes and rotting planks. He had given the devils every opportunity to snatch him up, and sinned hard enough to earn the wrath of all extant guardian spirits.
And there had been nothing. Not ever. Just Ayanami's face on all horizons, and dreams about becoming breakfast food that might have been some form of spiritual sanction, but probably had more to do with his psyche decaying down into something subhuman.
And yet here he was, years and years later, worried about ghosts.
He turned away, headed down to where the girl stood at the edge of the bone-colored forest. Something inside him unclenched, having the path out of sight and separated from him by a solid mass of earth.
He slid in alongside the girl, who was staring out into the trees. "How do I get to the house?" He said. No more yes-no questions.
"Be quiet," the girl responded. Then, in a whisper. "You're on family territory, just at the edge."
And Shinji took a step back, because in between the words 'family' and 'territory', the girl produced a massive device that must have been resting against the small of her back the whole time, sighted it, and fired into the darkness.
She looked at him, and out of the moonlight all he could make out was a pale blank plate where her face would be. The device, something like a crossbow, Shinji guessed, had vanished, but two pale, collared hands remained briefly visible, before weaving in among crossing arms as the girl regarded him with a half-seen posture of what Shinji assumed was contempt.
"Guests bring gifts," she said, low voice no longer a whisper.
Shinji gestured to his travel pack. "I got a list. It's all here."
"Not a gift," she started into the forest, in the direction she had fired. "That's a delivery."
"I have some Hersheys and a bottle of raspberry bootlace," he said, following her into the forest like it was no big deal. "Had a bottle of vodka, but traded it for lodging. Still easier than bond paper."
"Not everyone can eat sugar," the girl said, as she crouched onto the ground and came up with a mass of something, speared through by a slender shaft. An arrow. "And no one would have wanted your potato wine anyway."
"Well," he said, "I still have bond paper, a couple challenge coins for the VLF, the uh, Vietnamese military. Some gold."
"That's a bribe, not a gift," the girl said, her even, low tone growing harsher.
Down at his side, out of sight of the girl even if there'd been light to see it, Shinji twisted his hand up in an arcane symbol, pinky shooting off at an obtuse angle, middle finger pinched down one knuckle up and folded as far down as it would go, all other fingers straight and reaching, to keep the tendons tight. The pressure and pain focused him up, deferred the frustration that was starting to build. It was a trick he'd come up when being delicate with a difficult Asuka.
"So what is a gift, then?" He managed.
They had walked back to the hillock, and the girl thrust her kill into the pool of moonlight. It was a very large goose. The kind that looked like it was wearing a little helmet.
She pulled the arrow free and tossed the dead goose to Shinji, who managed to catch it in exactly the wrong way, one finger sliding into the puncture wound at the side of its bulbous head.
"Carry it," the girl said, her voice back to bland and matter-of-fact. She headed back into the deeper forest.
Uncritically accepting this direction as a response to his question, Shinji tucked the animal beneath one arm, leaving its long neck to hang, semi-rigid, along behind, leaking gray jelly. The feathers were too smooth, and kept sliding free. Eventually he wrapped some of the travel pack's webbing around one black foot and let it hang off his side.
"You aren't supposed to be here," the girl said in a whisper, apparently on the prowl for more kills.
"I was invited," he said. Surely he'd already mentioned that.
"To deliver something to the house." The girl said. Her voice was not expressive, but it seemed like she was being… was it skeptical? He couldn't parse her without being able to see her face.
She killed a mallard duck, collected it, and when she gave it to Shinji, asked him how he had come in.
"East gate," he said in response.
"Did my brothers send you?"
"My friend asked me to come."
The girl started moving through the forest again, the blocky mass of her device just visible.
"You are going to take me to the house, right?" He asked, returning to a whisper.
The girl didn't respond. She led them through the woods, advancing in what Shinji supposed might be called a 'casual stalk.' After maybe 15 minutes, the device snapped up and she let fly. Something in the near distance hit the ground.
"Depends on what I can get," the girl responded as they walked up to the kill.
"Gold or bond paper." Shinji offered quickly, trying to cram as much conversation in before she went back in to hunt mode.
The girl turned toward him. "You aren't keeping up. You are a guest, I am family. A prodigal. I will not return to that place without a boon."
She gathered up another duck. And handed it to Shinji.
"What does prodigal mean?" He asked, as he worked the bird into the webbing.
"It means that I have been away for a very long time," the girl said. She had paused to face him. "But now you come here, wanting me to guide you to them."
No time for confusion on Angel time. It was a joke, or an exaggeration, or he was really losing the thread of her English. Or something culturally obscure was happening. Had she been hesitantly returning at the same time he arrived? Or did she live here, somewhere, within hiking distance of a family she had not seen in years?
He pushed all that aside, focused on the next move.
"You don't have to…" he started, but she was already moving away at stalk speed.
It took thirty minutes for her to make another kill. This time it was a huge, ash gray goose.
Rather than pulling the arrow free and handing the dead thing to Shinji, the girl sat beside the kill. Resting against it. Shinji remained standing. Too many animals wrapped up in the travel pack's webbing to make sitting easy.
"Boon means big gift, right?" Shinji asked, after the girl had been on the ground for a minute or so.
She didn't respond.
"Because I've got a lot of stuff in here. A lot. And no one… I'm not just delivering it, I went out and I got it."
A faint blur as the girl inclined her head. Shinji hurried on.
"I was on Yggdrasil. Got this letter, had to escape. Took months to get to Vietnam, took months to get everything on the list, took months to get to America. Last step." He swayed a little. The pack had been too heavy before the dead things had been added to it. He could keep the weakness at bay, but maybe not do that and talk English. Too much attention inward. Harder to ignore the hurt.
"I am boon," he said, staring up at the stars, past the reaching canopy. Clear as the first night he'd crawled up on that beach. Past the dissolving scarlet ring, twinkling diamonds on a splash of luminous purple. He didn't notice the pain recede, but that was part of the trick.
Something flickered at the edge of his vision. The girl, facing away from him, had something glowing in her hands. He got just a hint of the texture of the material her clothes were made of, or at least the cloth across the top of her shoulders.
There was a quiet click, and the light dimmed away. The girl's arms shifted down, and she stood and turned. The cell phone had vanished by the time she was facing him.
"You will have to do," she said, the words sounding empty, tone even flatter than before. She pulled the monstrous goose up and draped it along her narrow shoulders.
"But you still need a gift."
She offered the device out and Shinji took it, a little surprised at its heft. He tugged the bar sticking out of one side down along the channel worked into the side until it snapped into place, and sighted down the strange weapon, awkward in his travel pack, but barely feeling the weight anymore. A new goal. One step closer.
The thing lacked iron sights, and only had an open scope with a cross of twisted wire as a reticle.
"How does it fire?" He asked.
"Hair tall and just on the right side," the girl responded.
He led the way through the forest, looking for something to shoot. Trying to gain the meaning of 'hair tall.'
He still couldn't see much of anything, and had never really seen the girl's targets before she hit them. Maybe a suggestion of motion, that was all.
After several minutes of purposeful but fruitless rambling the girl stepped up, grabbed the device, and roughly drew it up so it pointed at a particular patch of sky which, when Shinji concentrated, seemed to be occupied by a shade of space slightly different from its surroundings. As he sighted along the wire the thing gained definition. He could see an outline. Could almost make out details.
He split the shape along the vertical wire, just over the horizontal, and pulled the lever.
No recoil, but the arrow shot out, and something hit the ground a moment later.
"Sloppy," the girl commented, as she pulled the device from his hands. He didn't see her coming, and reflexively resisted being disarmed, but the weapon slipped from his grip all the same.
"I hit it," he countered. In near darkness with an unknown weapon. His hand crooked up into it's painful shape.
They came to the thing he had shot. It's feathered body was mostly black, with a pool of white around the head and orange smeared around its eyes. It had a long, hooked beak, yellow and red and green.
The arrow had taken the thing across its middle, pinning one wing against its chest. It was still making weak sounds, bill shuddering in a low rattle. Shinji crouched down heavily and got it the rest of the way gone. His hands tingled with destrudo as he pulled them free, the feeling of sand mites eating into his skin, seeking out bones to drill into, so they could lay eggs in his marrow.
He pulled the arrow free, handed it over, and hefted the strange thing, smearing the sensation of death impulse off on the feathers attached to this bird-shaped lump of meat he had found.
"…parrot." He speculated, making a show of examining it.
"Toucan." The girl said, which was not a word Shinji knew. Maybe it was a type of parrot.
"Gift," he amended, with weary enthusiasm.
The girl seemed to regard him for a long moment. Then she lifted the giant ashy goose from her shoulders and thrust it into his grip. Waited as he fumbled and finally got a grip on it.
Then she cocked the device.
"We are going to the house of my family," she said, in that extra-empty voice. "I don't know the way. You will stay close."
"How…" he had been going to ask how far it was, but the girl had jerked toward him. The device appeared to be pointed at him.
"Be quiet." Her voice came lower than before, louder, and in a wet, emotional register. He shut his mouth. A point just over his heart itched, probably right where the arrow was pointed.
The girl turned away. He gave her a head start, waiting until the serif of white collar was only just visible, and then started after her.
They went roughly perpendicular to Shinji's original path, the one he hadn't seen for the better part of an hour but had been keeping very precise track of since it had slid from sight.
So long, Path of Conquest.
They travelled for some time.
Shinji worked the toucan in among the webbing of his pack, and held the giant goose by its body, with head lolling out to one side, his fingers kinked into claws that hooked into the feathers, giving him just enough purchase to hold the massive creature in place.
The girl seemed to be moving in an odd way. Deliberate. Almost ceremonial. Proceeding forward serpentine, as though she simply couldn't bear a direct route.
He followed after, in a straight line.
The temperature began to drop.
They lost the sky, the canopy overhead blotting out even the faintest rumor of stars. Light was coming from somewhere, though. Shinji could just make out the silvery plume of his breath, and he had a general sense of the girl's location. That was important, because they had left the leaf mulch behind for hard packed earth. The girl wasn't making any sound, and seemed to glide from one side of the path to the other.
Branches brushed against his face, now and again.
The cold was… reassuring. It reminded him of that tomb he had built, back on Akari time. The frigid sand pressing in all around had been a comfort, a promise. He had gone under looking at the sandstone plug next to him. At the place where he had stopped digging.
The path felt familiar. The whole situation, in fact.
Up ahead, the girl's movement had gotten stranger. Was she… dancing? Bits of her came into focus, hints of arms or legs, a brief fan of what might have been seining hair. But all were positioned… disjointedly. Not like a person walking, or, he decided, after a few minutes of careful observation, not much like a person at all. Arms appearing low, legs flashing high, collars at neck and wrists putting on scant and incoherent appearances. She became a sketchy, spidery shape, a messy dim spiral.
He put one foot in front of the other. Angel time. He was following her. Or it. Because that might get him to the house. Maybe it would surge back toward him, a heap of disarticulated limps wrapped in chalk white skin stretched so taught it was nearly transparent, fingers bursting with sucking stingers or needle-tapered claws, face filled with eyes like dying embers and a black maw large enough to swallow the world. Expecting that was part of the mission.
But it was also becoming clear that something was following him. When he focused, he could hear a whispersoft, four-legged tread back there, but that wasn't what had alerted him. The warning had arrive on some more subtle, atavistic band. And now his arms were itching, and he found himself moving toward the thing the girl had become, favoring a contemplated nightmare over some fresh and undreamt of horror. That was Angel time for you.
And suddenly the girl was in front of him. Well, she had been in front of him the whole time, of course, but suddenly he could see her. One moment nothing but that faint impression of location, a swirling of half-seen, boneless limbs, the next her whole body was awash in cool white light. It took him a moment to react to all this, and then he was right there with her, thrust forward from some benighted channel and onto a flagstone path bathed in what he first took for the eye-searing winter sunlight that could only be produced when there was a carpet of snow all over everything.
He looked around and saw a color-sapped landscape of grass and stone. No snow.
Then his gaze drifted up into the sky and, for the first time in a very, very, very long time, Shinji wished to be inside an entry plug, drowned in LCL, his synch rate just high enough for feel the weight of the layered armor that was wrapped around him.
The sky was filled with moon.
Back when he had lived with his teacher, back before Tokyo 3, Shinji had been in the astronomy club. Once, he and some other members of club had gone up the mountain to view what the club sponsor had enthusiastically called a 'supermoon' -- a full moon traveling unusually close to Earth.
The effect had not been as dramatic as the name implied or the sponsor's enthusiasm had suggested. While the view of the lunar surface through the club's tripod mounted telescope had been of unusual clarity, without the scope the moon had gone from the size of a bottle cap to something just a bit smaller than a pre-teen Shinji's fist.
The moon that hung over Shinji now? It filled the sky. White craters edged in silver, four billion years of layered damage, and cutting over and through that the continent-sized wreckage of divine arterial spray, gouging a mass of narrow interwoven canyons in the surface that normally looked like a single massive splash.
"L1," he said without meaning to, without really understanding what he was saying. "Has to be L1."
"No," the girl replied. "Cemetery Ridge." He tore his gaze from the sky. Seeing her entirely was its own kind of shock. Even in this harsh light, darkness seemed to cling to her wherever it could, and she looked… like a painting. Like a very competent representation of something that was real, but not present. Chalk-white skin, a heart shaped face, black hair pulled back tight into a single long braid. Her clothing had the vague look of a riding uniform to it, a long black tight-fitting outfit made of a rough and vaguely primitive-looking material. The device was a hump of dark work and worked metal at the small of her back, like he had figured, and a dark gray pack of modern design on a diagonal band crossing her chest.
The girl gestured downward, and at first everything made sense, because he was seeing a bunch of markers. Cenotaphs. Because he was in New York. He had just wandered out of a small copse of trees adjacent to a memorial site. So of course that was what he was seeing, just from a higher angle.
Except there were buildings down there, made of the same gray stone. Crude, slab construction, small, but covered in… figures. There were lots of the figures, he saw. Statues. And the markers were not the memorial site's slender stone needles. No, these were all shapes and sizes. Not the memorial site. Which made sense, because New York was nowhere to be seen.
The girl walked up beside him, arms crossed.
"The place used to be so lively."