The lair was, of course, only a small, yet snug apartment room fit for a three member family. Wizman surveyed it with the neutral gaze of an army scout. The front door from which he came in was right next to the kitchen, compartmentalized with the living room. The kitchen was busy with the accoutrement and essentials for a large meal: a family supper, plus one guest. A young Japanese man with short hair in a formal white shirt and black pants worked steadily in that kitchen.
“Ah hello. You are the monk that Masaki––uh––met?” the man greeted. He stopped cooking for a second. He looked surprised and a little perturbed by Wizman.
Wizman nodded.
The man smiled. He put his hand to his chest in lieu of a formal gesture. “I am Kiyoshi. Masaki’s husband.”
Wizman observed, “You look tired.”
“Oh, I just got off from work when I had to make supper. And your name is?”
“In my occupation, it is best if you do not give out your real name,” replied Wizman.
Kiyoshi appeared even more ruffled upon hearing that. “You’re a blank. You don’t have a Universal Identification Number?”
Wizman nodded his head again. “Call me Wizman.” He wiped his bare feet on the indoor mat and walked into the living room.
Kiyoshi watched him for a long moment. Wizman believed that Kiyoshi was considering how to deal with him if things became dangerous and out of hand. If that was truly what the man was pondering, it must have been difficult thinking, for Kiyoshi posed little threat to Wizman or his endeavors.
The living room Wizman ambled into was a picturesque assemblage of bare, contemplative realism. It was a large, square room. White walls lined it with a tiny number of pictures on them. The floor was a fuzzy blue with a circular carpet in the middle. A coffee table was on the carpet. An old fashioned television on a cabinet was set on one side. On the other was a small couch. On the far side, opposite to Wizman, was a sliding window door opened to a balcony.
A dinner table sat between the living room and kitchen. Wizman wandered to the couch. He intended to sit down, but could not. For a boy stretched his entire body across the couch. He had spread out like a greedy dog lazing on something comfortable. The boy was wearing red sneakers, black pants, a white shirt, and black tie. A red jacket wrapped about the white shirt and the boy wore black, fingerless biker gloves around his small hands. Punkish earrings pierced his ears. Wizman nearly assumed the boy was Kiyoshi’s and Masaki’s son, except for the fact that the kid was Causasian. The boy’s skin was a yucky pale for a Causasian, though. His nose was pig-like and his face was like a goblin’s.
A mane of yellow hair graced around the lying boy’s head, like a lion’s or a––Leyak’s! Leyaks! The nefarious set of beings Wizman had spent all this time over, researching as best he could after encountering one of them directly. This first hand encounter was Kiyoshi’s wife, Masaki. They were demons, witches, vampires–monsters of some kind from the island of Bali in Indonesia.
Wizman chewed over the prospect of this boy being a Leyak. Could the process of the creation be performed on children of such an age as the boy? Could Leyaks be male? All the research Wizman conducted rendered Leyaks as female. Though, he had found a small mentioning of male ones. Wizman’s research was small and ill-informed, though. He merely had access to the Winnipeg city’s libraries and, of course, the web. It was only because of his mastery of the English language that he was able to gain anything on the subject of Leyaks.
However, the Western world’s understanding and knowledge of these beings was a pittance. He mostly found folklore and religious studies information about them, which was good, yet his situation was as if he had to fight a snow leopard with only the documentation of secular scholars of a country far away from any snow leopards, and who wrote only about people’s reports of snow leopard sightings.
“Oh? Is Dante hogging the couch?”
Kiyoshi’s question brought Wizman out of his pondering. Wizman turned to Kiyoshi working in the kitchen.
Kiyoshi explained, “That’s our son, Dante…he’s adopted. Just get him up and tell him to make room. It’s about time he wakes up anyhow.”
Kiyoshi went back to focus on cooking supper. Wizman squatted down and shook the boy named Dante. Immediately, he withdrew his claw-like hand with skillful quickness as Dante woke up and snapped at him with his teeth. The boy was like a dog biting. Instantly, Dante was up on all fours, stretching his head out to bite and bark at Wizman. Wizman stood up from his squat. He looked at Dante. Dante’s bark was exactly that of a rabid dog’s. Dante was near to pouncing on Wizman. He didn’t though. Dante pawed and moved back and forth on the couch, growling.
“Dante!” screamed Kiyoshi.
Dante and Wizman simultaneously shot their gazes from each other to Kiyoshi.
“That is no way to greet our guest! Make room on the couch for him this instant!” shouted Kiyoshi.
Dante turned back to Wizman and, instead of making room, jumped, on all fours, off the couch, still growling. Wizman circumvented the coffee table. The two exchanged places. Wizman seated himself on the couch, drawing his legs back into a comfy lotus position. Dante squatted down on the floor, like a guard dog, bearing his teeth and snarling.
Wizman studied him. Then he asked bluntly, “You Leyak?”
Dante stood up onto his feet. His manner and decorum switched. He now appeared and felt like a good simulacrum of a human boy.
“Uh-huh.” he replied, smiling in a smug manner. “You the magic lama from Tibet who attacked my mother?” spite deep in his voice.
“Yes.”
Dante bared his teeth again. His lips and even gums gyrating.
“The nature of the fight. Who attacked who? Depends on one’s point of view.”
Suddenly a face Wizman had been familiarized with stepped from out of the hallway between the living room and front door. It was Masaki.
If Kiyoshi’s face was tired, then Masaki’s face was exhausted. Long, black flops of hair flowed from down her head’s top, looking like the fat tentacles of an octopus. Her face, Japanese like Kiyoshi, was unearthly pale and had an uncanny contradiction of being both plain and beautiful. She was wearing a large frumpy hoodie and a long brown skirt. In her hand was a huge pad of paper with a half-drawn sketch on it.
“Ah, you’re here,” spoke Masaki in a hoarse voice, expressing no joy in Wizman’s arrival.
Wizman turned his deep, penetrative eyes to her. She was Masaki: Masaki the Haunt–– Masaki the Disembodied Head and Organs he had seen in the night–– Masaki the Leyak! The being––the thing Wizman had fought in the chilling dark across the rooftops of Winnipeg’s night. Wizman had been the only one to find her and survive seeing her in the detached shape of a nightmare, a floating head of fangs and disemboweled organs. On that night, he had discovered that the rumors of a serial killer loose in the city and surrounding country-side were far more than speculations. Yet here, in this apartment, she had a body and, in all best estimation, had the disguise of a human down perfect.
“Oh, Masaki,” said Kiyoshi, spotting Masaki. “Supper will still be five minutes. Our––um––guest is here.”
“Yeah. He is,” replied Masaki, sounding like a hurt little girl in a park. She slunk back down the hallway to wherever she had been skulking.
Wizman shifted his eyes back to Dante. The Leyak boy was sitting cross-legged on the floor, arms crossed. He stared at Wizman and scowled. His face appeared just like a canine in that moment. Evidently the fact that Wizman had attempted to kill and destroy his mother had not endeared Wizman to the boy. Wizman watched back.
Already a story was being formed about the history of Masaki’s dealings in the family. The husband had been corrupted and pacified into a breadwinning and emotional supportive slave who would have no issue with malignant crimes. Some of that wasn’t bad. Being a monk, Wizman assumed that turning their husbands into slaves was the basic purpose and function of wives––the problem was how she had depraved the man into being okay with the acts of the monstrous Leyak.
The child, Dante, was more easy to figure out, obviously adopted and then turned and initiated into a Leyak by his mother, Masaki. Kiyoshi moved out of the kitchen and placed a huge number of porcelain containers on the table.
“Dinner’s ready,” he said in a formal manner.
Wizman was the first to break his gaze. His legs swiveled from their lotus position and he walked to the dinner table. He sat down as Dante scampered on all fours. He seated himself on the far end of the table.
“ Masaki! Dinner is ready!” called Kiyoshi and he sat on the other far end and next to Wizman.
Masaki, like a small, thin mass of malefactor darkness, hovered over to the table. She collapsed onto the chair, pad of paper still clasped in her hand. She seemed like she was about to cry, a sound coming out from her, like from one of her native land’s ghosts. The horrible noise creaked out of her. Even though Wizman was as stalwart as he was, even he was moved to compassion at this moment.
He did not show or act on it however. Because, before he did anything, Masaki sloughed toward Kiyoshi and pawed her hands in the air. “Thank you, Kiyoshi, for making supper.”
Kiyoshi smiled and moved his arm around her. It seemed that the husband must have been the only tether at the edge of the abyss for this family.
“Mother!” exclaimed Dante. A look of worry and fearful consternation was upon the boy’s face, then a look of rage at Wizman for being here and seeing this.
Kiyoshi then spoke, “Wizman is here, Masaki. Try and put yourself together.”
“Would it be better if we reschedule this for a different date?” questioned Wizman in a monotone.
At this, almost as if this had been a taunting remark, Masaki switched, or seemed to switch, moods on a dime and grinned in a happy manner. “No. I am just really tired. Yet I can do this. I don’t want to miss or wait even longer for this meeting.”
“Ah, oh, oh, okay,” said Kiyoshi, a little bit stupified by this abrupt shift in moods. He pointed at the four platters on the table for Wizman’s sake.
“I, uh, well, had to essentially cook two meals as you will see. The white containers are for us. Vegetables, brown rice, and fake meats.”
“Good. Good.” recited Wizman.
“And the brown containers are for Masaki and Dante. They - - -”
“Contain the human flesh, organs, and blood which we eat!” interrupted Masaki, grabbing one brown container, lifting its lid, and thrusting it into Wizman’s face.
A steaming satay of human meat and blood assaulted Wizman’s eyes as Dante’s laughter bombarded the air. Dante’s laugh did not decorate the night for long; for the next thing to happen was Wizman grabbing his claw-like hands into the steam container and devouring a large piece of human flesh.
Masaki gwaked.
Dante was silenced.
Kiyoshi sputtered as Wizman, open-mouthed, chewed like a monster, “But, but you’re a Buddhist monk. Aren’t you!?”
Wizman shrugged, “Ah. Yes. But this meat is dead anyway.” He paused for a small moment. “You were the one who killed whoever this was.” He stared at the bugged-eyed Masaki.
Masaki chagrined, and gave a subdued humph! as this shock tactic had not worked. They could not shock him with that strategy. In some way, he had outdone them, because, though Dante and Masaki were eating human meat, he was a monk eating human meat.
Dante exclaimed, “We didn’t kill them. My father found them dead already and picked them up.”
“Dante!” cried Kiyoshi. He was suddenly panicking.
Yet Kiyoshi did not need to be panicked. Wizman replied, “You expect that I will believe that?”
Dante grimaced and ground his teeth.
Wizman turned his head from the boy and asked, “Do you want to talk while eating the meal or would you like to have our discussion afterwards?”
“Talking right now is for the best. Prolonging things will just make things worse.” answered Masaki.
“Uhh, excuse me,” broke in Kiyoshi, “I know that you two talking together is the whole point of this meal, yet I am hazy on the specifics. What are we going to discuss? I know that you two got into a fight with one another, then made arrangements––for this, so––if you don’t mind me asking, what is this about?”
“That is part of what I am trying to figure out,” answered Wizman.
“I am not sure what we are going to discuss. I think that is going to be part of the conversation. Figure out what is going on and where we stand,” replied Masaki to her husband’s question.
As they had been talking, Dante had been heaping and grabbing a huge pile of human meat onto his plate. Apparently, it seemed he was trying to get it before Wizman tried something else.Because of the boy’s greedy exploits, Wizman, Kiyoshi, and Masaki began eating with Kiyoshi dishing up. Wizman munched, raising gigantic mouthfuls into his jaws.
Masaki remarked, “I don’t know why you suddenly stopped trying to destroy me.” She stuck a full chopstick of flesh down her throat. “But now I believe you know who I target and devour. I only eat those who bring my Leyak curse on themselves. It’s not easy to prey upon the strong instead of the weak.”
“Conjecture,” said Wizman, drinking from a glass of water. “Honestly. I am torn.” Then Wizman bit into a huge chunk of fake meat.
“On what?”
Wizman chewed his food and then quietly gulped it down. “Letting you live.”
A pregnant silence engulfed the proceeding. Then Wizman continued on, “Because on one hand, you are accurate. You are something that devours upon the ones who spread evil and make things difficult for people––and there are many of those in these lands. You have a family, such as it is, in an unholy, corrupting manner. However, on the other hand, that is exactly the matter. You are an unholy thing. An abomination of harmful forces which feasts upon human babies.”
“I don’t do that all the time!” cried Masaki. She pointed her thumb toward Kiyoshi. “Besides, we mostly do that only when Kiyoshi sneaks me into abortion operations.”
Kiyoshi made a face that was both funny, embarrassed, and panicked.
Wizman waved his hand high at the remark. “The truth of the matter is that you eat upon humans, and that is dangerous, even if you eat the right ones.”
“How?”
“Suppose there comes a day when you have devoured all the ones who merit your feeding on their intestines and there are no evil persons left. What do you do then? Hmm? What if you start hunting innocent people in your addiction to blood and flesh?”
Masaki barbed and her eyeballs flashed. “There will never be a day without human garbage!” she shouted, quivering with both despair and desiring hunger.
“What if that is not the case? I can trust you then? Even if so, what about your son, can I trust him? What if I cannot trust your son?”
Dante looked alarmed. He stopped eating his food which he had been doing all while observing the conversation.
“Suppose I find him enacting something and I have to kill him to prevent a terrible catastrophe from occurring.”
Masaki slammed her hands on the table and launched upright. She towered over the entire scene of the dinner table. It was very dark now. The shadows behind her seemed to increase. She looked in all appearances like a painting of a witch at the crescendo triumph of her power. The very air seemed to warp and weave. It seemed as if at any moment, Masaki’s human shape would disappear and the Leyak’s true form would cascade.
“What if I kill you before that happens!?” she screamed.
Wizman drank from his glass of water. “Perhaps,” he replied, expressionless, like a hero admitting that his virtuous gambit might fail, and he would die trying. Masaki’s tenebrous emananation appeared to die then. She sat back down.
“I wouldn’t do that!” cried Dante, looking at Wizman.
Wizman glanced at the Leyak boy.
“I’m like my mother,” Dante said. He returned to his eating.
Kiyoshi breathed deeply, having nothing to say, feeling useless between the two mountains of supernatural power. At least, he thought the monk had supernatural power. Kiyoshi had never seen Wizman perform any miracle.
“What about our fellow Tantrikism?” asked Masaki.
“Hmm?” uttered Wizman, finishing up half of his plate.
“You’re Tibetan, obviously. And Tibetan Buddhism is Tantrik Buddhsim. Leyaks are Tantriks. I have heard from the ancient Leyaks that they met Tantrik Buddhists who trained in the islands now known as Indonesia, and even the Tantrik education and learning from those islands reached Tibet itself. I am sure we can have some commonality where we can find friendship.”
Wizman nodded. “It is true I follow Tantra, but Leyaks are Balinese, from Bali. Bali is Hindu.”
Masaki smiled. “Yes, but Buddhism and Hinduism united there.”
“Mule Dharma!” shouted Wizman, the loudest he ever been in the apartment.
There was a long pause. Then Wizman continued, “The horse Dharma of the Buddha mated with the donkey Dharma of Hindus which produced the mule Dharma that the Balinese follow.” He finished up his meal quickly, the first one finishing, finishing even before Dante. He went on, “Of which the Leyaks, it appears, are the most deviant and despicable strain. Must be similar to the Buddhist Dharma I encounter in Japan.”
He looked at Kiyoshi.
“Though, there, the stallion of the Buddha’s Dharma fornicated with the tiny does of Japan.”
Kiyoshi was slack-jawed. Masaki agap.
“Now about friendship and commonality,” proclaimed Wizman as he turned his gaze to Masaki. “I am sure I can possibly transform you back into a human and holy form. Get you off the deviant inbred mule of Leyak witchcraft and place you high on the horse of true Buddha Dharma. I’ve never had an apprentice or student before in this life, let alone female, but––,” he lifted one of his claw-like hands. “What do you say, Masaki?”
Almost immediately, Masaki smacked his hand away in a slap that attempted to deliver the most pain. Wizman’s horrendous hand was flung a long way. Wizman broke his expressionless demeanor. He looked shocked, actually.
“Disrespect my traditions that I have chosen and insult my homeland!” Masaki spat out.
Wizman, meanwhile, brought his hand back and placed both hands in his lap. He regained composure spontaneously. “I apologize. I was arrogant. I know that I am arrogant. It is hard not to be when one is right. Yet, I have disrespected you, and I am sorry.”
Masaki then brought her sleeve to her face. Stifled, muffled chuckling came out of her. Meanwhile, Dante was laughing uproariously.
Masaki could not take it any longer and burst out, joining her adopted son in cacophonous cackling. Masaki swore in Japanese and exclaimed, ‘Wizman! Oh! I should hate you. Really hate you. You’re so hard to love, but you’re harder to hate. So I have to be lazy and just love ya.”
Kiyoshi smiled both mellow and melancholy. His face turned to Wizman. “Have you made up your mind about us yet?”
Wizman shook his head. “Truthfully, I do not know. I just do not know.”
He looked at his plate and noticed that he had finished his meal.
“I am done,” he said. “Although I do not want to be rude or impolite, I think I should go. We have nothing else to discuss. Though we have reached no conclusions, I think I should go, because I do not think I will be an enjoyment to this family as company.”
Masaki smiled at him, almost silently refuting the idea that he would not make enjoyable company.
Dante cried, “I like you. It’s your personality. Even though I want to see your spine punched out of your back!”
At that, Masaki said, “Yes. I think you should go––I mean––I think that would be best.” She brought herself out of her chair and walked Wizman to the front door.
Wizman, when arriving at the front door, turned around. The motion conveyed: ‘Well, this is me,’ as if he and the family were on a first date––even though the small family knew almost nothing about the mysterious, tiny monk.
The night was indeed like a first date, though neither Wizman nor Masaki had ever actually been on a date in their lives–– Masaki had married Kiyoshi in complicated and convoluted circumstances. Had ‘the date’ been to see whether the other was their friend? Or was the date to figure out the other as their mortal enemy?
The front door opened to the apartment complex hallway, low-lit and mesmeric as if Wizman were about to walk into another world. He turned again at the threshold, more of a glance than a full body turn. “There is a saying here in this country,” he said. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
Yes,” replied Masaki. She knew the phrase.
“We should do that. Let us do that.”
The front door closed and the man called Wizman was gone. Masaki returned to the dinner table, only for the family to realize that through the entire course Masaki and Kiyoshi had barely touched their food.
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