An unexpectedly wise Hyottoko once said that it takes but one very bad day to turn a sane man mad, and after the death of his only son, Seimei was having quite a bad day indeed.
All that day and into the next morning, Seimei sat at the edge of Yoshihira’s futon, clutching the wooden cat. “An eye for a spider, and a son for a lacquered toy... what a foolish merchant I have become,” he thought, over and over. That is, when he was thinking anything at all.
When the spider awoke the next day, she crept out from her sleeping sac and perched atop his brow, eight eyes peering down with a sadness her anatomy could not properly convey. She waited for him to move. He did not. Not until the sun was once again setting and the deeds of darkness could properly be done.
When Seimei did finally rise, his face had resumed its usual composure. You might have even thought his period of mourning was over, if you didn’t notice his hollow eyes and violently shaking hands.
The next task, as Seimei saw it, was simple. Yoshihira’s soul would need a new vessel. The cat figurine was always meant to be a temporary measure after all. Yoshihira’s body had failed, so he would simply need a new one, something that could hold all of the boy’s laughter and his cleverness and, most importantly, his love.
However, it is, I’m sad to say, quite impossible to build a flesh golem out of nothing but sadness and good intentions. You can’t just stick a soul into any old body, no matter what you may have heard in stories. This would be a very delicate operation, and to survive it, the body would have to be perfect in every way.
A body, you see, is made up of many parts, and the ancients believed each part belonged not only to itself but also to a system that governed all things in the universe. They called this system gogyō: the Five Elements.
“Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water,” Seimei murmured as he laid Yoshihira down on the table where he once had shared meals with his family. “The spirit is safe, nothing left now but parts,” he added, the words sounding like an apology.
The first thing to do was separate each part into its individual element: Wood, the liver, Yoshihira’s curiosity, his boundless enthusiasm. The parts that flex and reach and crave the sun. Next came Fire, the heart, his joy, his unconditional love. The beautiful engine of the body. Metal, the lungs, his sadness, but also his shield, the delicate parts that distribute life. Water, the kidneys, his wisdom, his patience. The framework and the root from which all others spring. Then, finally, Earth, the meat, his memories, his caring nature. The ordinary flesh that fills and forms.
Seimei’s hands, so practiced in the medical arts and so steady with a brush, trembled just once as he made the first cut. After that, they did not tremble again. The spider in his eye socket recoiled at the bright shock of blood.
The body parts of each element were placed carefully together inside five individual circles drawn on the floor in red ochre, the boundaries exact and clean. Every circle was accompanied by a paper talisman, a charm to protect against rot, written in Seimei’s finest hand.
Throughout the surgery Seimei wept, not loud or uncontrolled, but steadily for the entirety of the long night. He was driven by a faint, persistent hope that if only he completed the work to satisfaction, his world would return to what it once was. Denial is truly a most deceptive liar, my children, beguiling the wise just as often as the foolish. Take great care, lest you should fall into its clutches as well.
Hours later, as the sun peeked over the mountains, Seimei finished reducing what was once his son into its base components.
He stood back and surveyed his work.
Five neat circles, five perfect labels, five tidy stacks where Yoshihira used to be.
But his work was far from over. Now each part would need to be carefully measured, weighed, and tested. He would need to solve dense mathematical equations, reference astrological charts, and pore through his collection of ancient scrolls.
It is a wonderful diversion to think of magic as some otherworldly force that can lead to great adventures and instantly solve or indeed cause any number of problems. However, the unfortunate truth is that magic, like most things in life, is often quite boring and not the kind of stuff that makes for a great story at all. So I will spare you the details of the onmyoji sciences and simply say that as the sun retreated in disgust at the end of the following day, Seimei found himself quite irate.
What was left of poor Yoshihira, it turned out, was completely elementally unbalanced. There was not nearly enough metal qi, and far too much fire and wood. The proportions, as dictated by the Five Phases, were entirely, horrifically wrong.
Seimei stared at the table, blinking very slowly. The spider, sensing a change, crept forward and laid one foreleg gently against his temple.
“It’s not enough,” Seimei said. “I took everything, everything! I tore apart my sweet, precious…” He broke down into fresh sobs. “It’s still not enough,” he finally managed.
He stood for a long while, staring at the circles and the bloody table, then turned, walked downstairs, and fetched a shovel from the basement.
That night, and every night for the next month, Seimei left his tower after the village had gone to sleep, returning, always, before dawn, his robes damp with rain or river mist, his hands caked with black mud and worse.
Each night he brought back a bundle, something small, sometimes heartbreakingly small, wrapped in oilcloth. Each day the five circles were filled, the neat stacks becoming piles, and the piles becoming heaps. The spider did her best to stop it, but no matter how much she bound the shovel in her webs, Seimei would simply rip it free the moment the moon rose.
At some point, Seimei stopped sleeping altogether. On mornings when the effort finally overcame him, Seimei would simply collapse on the floor, sometimes mid-surgery, and endure terrible dreams with his one eye still open.
The once immaculate tower devolved into chaos. Anything unnecessary for the flesh golem was shoved into corners or tossed aside. Equations covered every wall, and the tatami flooring could hardly be seen for the mud and stains that covered it.
The only place untouched by the madness was the bedroom Seimei once shared with his wife and Yoshihira. Sometimes, children, the more a heart breaks, the more carefully it tiptoes around what remains.
If any neighbors noticed the flicker of candles late at night, or the strange, not-quite-human sounds drifting from the upper floors, they kept their observations to themselves. Seimei’s reputation as a man of power had always made people wary. Now it filled them with dread.
Forty-nine days after Yoshihira’s death and forty-seven bundles later, Seimei set down the femur he had been testing. His latest calculations were complete. The math undeniable. The element of water in the leg bone was perfectly proportioned. At long last all parts of the body he would build for his son were accounted for, and each perfectly balanced. The red circles on the floor had been overfilled and expanded a dozen times with parts that had been deemed unworthy, but at last he had everything he needed.
He sat down and placed his head in his hands, almost falling asleep for the first time that week. If he had, our story might have turned out quite differently. But he did not. Instead, Seimei shook himself awake and reached for the stitching kit.
It was time for the final phase of the project. Seimei rolled up his sleeves… Well, to be perfectly accurate, I should mention that by this point his sleeves were so stiff with blood and various tinctures that they were quite impossible to roll up. Therefore, it was in a purely figurative sense that Seimei rolled up his sleeves, gathered his tools, and got to work.
The dining table had been cleared of sentimental debris weeks ago. All that remained of its former function was the ghost of a water ring near the end of the table, where Seimei’s wife had once knocked over her sake with a peal of laughter that left her in a fit of hiccups for an hour. The ring was pale now, barely visible, but Seimei could see it perfectly in his memory, and so he placed the golem’s head at that exact spot.
The work of assembly was not as gruesome as you might expect, all blood and detritus having long since been siphoned away from the body parts. To Seimei, it was an act of devotion in its highest form, a marriage of sculpture and science, mathematics and magic, love and self-loathing.
With each stitch he whispered the elemental cycle, “Wood feeds Fire, Fire creates Earth, Earth bears Metal, Metal collects Water, Water nourishes Wood.” He mended flesh to flesh, bone to bone, sometimes pausing to inspect the fit, or to smooth a wayward vein, or simply to rest his trembling hands against the still-cold cheek and hope some spark of warmth would pass between them.
When at last the stitches were closed, and the new body lay complete, Seimei stepped back to admire his work. The golem had been carefully designed to resemble Yoshihira, even though very little of the original Yoshihira remained in it. Still, it had his nose, quite literally his actual nose, as well as the shape of his chin and the scar beside one eye, earned the summer he’d decided he wanted to be an acrobat. The body was not beautiful, not in any traditional sense. It was pale, gaunt, and crisscrossed with myriad stitches, though the stitches themselves were of the highest quality. It was not perfect; how could it be? But it was as close as a man with Seimei’s considerable skill could make it. It was a child’s body, real enough to fool the world, or at least, to fool a father who had grown desperate enough.
Seimei set a hand upon the golem’s brow and let it rest there. The skin, cool beneath his touch. He pressed his palm flat, as if to calm a fever, and stood that way for a long time.
Then he dipped his calligraphy brush into a bowl filled with blood.
The actual ritual was quite simple. He began with a single red line drawn down the sternum towards the toy cat, still grinning from its place at the foot of the table, followed by a series of symbols representing names of power across the golem’s face, arms, and legs. As he worked, he gathered a measured flow of necromantic energy with each chanting breath.
The candles burning around the room began bending inward as if drawn by the gravity of Seimei’s intent, the power he cultivated gathering above him like storm clouds. Necromantic energy, like all energy, always seeks the path of least resistance. The theory was that if all the elements were in balance, the power would pass through the cat and into the golem body. Yoshihira’s soul would travel along this path, find its new home, and fuse instantly. As natural as lightning following the shortest route to ground.
What the theory did not account for was exhaustion. Nor the small but crucial mistakes that a man broken in both heart and mind might make, mistakes that the Abe no Seimei of months ago would never have committed or tolerated in others.
As the gathered energy struck the body, Seimei bent forward, his face slick with sweat, the brush wavering in his grip. His vision blurred, and his knees buckled, the price of so many sleepless nights. At that moment, the hem of his robe, heavy with dried mud and gore, dragged across the floor just once. There was a faint hiss as a single smudge marred the ochre line of the earth elemental circle. The circle that contained the mountain of leftover meat deemed unfit for the “perfect” boy.
Seimei, so obsessed with the golem before him, never saw it. But the spider did, every one of her eyes going wide as she registered the mistake.
The gathered necromantic energy instantly abandoned the complex elementally balanced golem and forked into the much simpler pile of meat. The golem on the table went rigid, its mouth stretching open, wider than any mouth should, into a hideous, silent scream. A rushing wind tore through the room, blowing out all the candles, and the body on the table withered from the inside out. The skin pulled tight over the bones, the lips crumpled inward, flesh and bone collapsing into nothing but a fine gray dust as Seimei could do nothing but watch his son die for the second time.
Seimei stared at the pile of ash now littering the tabletop. He did not breathe, did not even blink for thirty, maybe forty full seconds. Then something inside him snapped so suddenly and so violently that even the spider startled and jumped away from him, all eight legs trembling.
With a shriek that started out human and ended in the space between worlds, Seimei swept both arms across the table, sending ash and the toy cat flying. He flipped the table itself, which hit the wall with a sound like a thunderclap. A shelf of glass spirit-jars, the results of decades of careful work, was ripped from the wall and shattered on the floor. He howled again, a sound so raw and furious that his nearest neighbors abandoned their home and possessions, never to return. Seimei ripped his robes and struck his own chest with the heels of his fists until the spider, now watching from a high shelf, thought he might truly break himself apart.
He staggered, gasping, through the ruins of his own failure, kicked at the smoldering heap of what once held so much promise, and slumped against the wall. Seimei’s fury spent itself in sobs and curses. Then, as exhaustion claimed him at last, he slid to the floor, curled around his own shame, and did not move again that night.
The house was silent, save for the slow drip of something from a broken jar and the faint pitter-pat of a nervous spider’s pedipalps as she crossed the floor.
The spider, intent on reaching Seimei’s senseless form, carefully picked her way through the debris until she heard a strange sound from deeper in the room.
How can I describe the sound to you? A gurgling sucking? A sloppy squelching? The oozing, wet, slither-slap of something that never was and never should have been? Suffice to say, children, it was a rather disturbing sound and made the spider feel quite uncomfortable indeed.
The spider turned all her eyes towards the sound, unblinking.
The pile of meat in the center of the ruined ochre circle shifted. It heaved once, then twice, and then slowly rose from the ground.
Thanks for reading. This story is a work in progress which I hope to some day publish. As such I welcome all comments and constructive criticism.
If you find you enjoy my work and would like to read more, my first published novel, Grumble and Gasp, is currently available on Kindle and Amazon.
Want to know if I killed off your favorite character? I probably didn’t, but how can you be sure? Stay tuned. New chapters drop every week!
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"Denial is truly a most deceptive liar, my children, beguiling the wise just as often as the foolish." A profound line!
I am fascinated by this story. How interesting that the spider, instead of having an evil presence like in mosty stories, shows more humanity than the protagonist.
I hope to read the next chapter soon!
i absolutely CANNOT WAIT for chapter 4, I'm so invested!