[L'Oiseau Noir]

Here's the re-edited first part (the one I posted above) with an additional few hundred words. Again, this story is just for entertainment. I don't expect critiques on how bad you think it is.




It had been another sucky day for Gabriel, the young yōkai hunter.

But all the days had sucked since Gabriel arrived in Kyūshū. Firstly, he didn’t know a soul, but he supposed that was the sad reality (almost) every American tourist faced when overseas; and secondly, the charcoal-colored clouds amassing overhead promised a nice, big storm, possibly a monsoon, was headed his way. Great, he thought, I don’t even have a room.

With nowhere to go, Gabriel plopped on a wrought-iron park bench and waited for some sort of godsend to appear. But nothing, as expected, happened. With a sigh, Gabriel stretched out on the bench. A few raindrops pelted his forehead, followed by a dozen, then a hundred, more. He lowered the rim of his top hat over his eyes and grunted.

A Japanese couple nearby, huddled beneath a large black umbrella, eyed him as if he was the ugliest (and probably the creepiest) hobo they’d ever seen. But Gabriel supposed the sight of a slim, gothic-victorian boy sleeping on a park bench, in the midst of a storm, would unnerve most people. He barked at them, and they ran.

“Irritating people,” Gabriel growled. “It’s not like I’m gonna attack ‘em or anything.” He rolled on to his side, now perfectly drenched.

The pedestrians had started to thin in numbers, and a lot of the small shops and restaurants had shuttered for the night. Only the faint polychromatic twinkle of bar signs, streetlights, and strips joints dispelled the darkness. Then Gabriel, slowly, felt sleep creep over him.

He was halfway asleep, when he noticed a strange floating orb of light drifting across the shadowy waterfront. Oddly, it was coming toward him.

Gabriel squinted, trying to figure out what the queer little ball of light was. He sat up--an uncomfortable feat because his clothes stuck to him like dry industrial-strength glue--and tentatively reached for the sphere of fire, like a child would for cookies they weren’t allowed to have.

The ball twinkled and disappeared--Gabriel wondered if he’d scared it--but soon it was back, dancing on the tips of his pale, quivering fingers like a small ballerina who‘d caught fire. It was teasing him; Gabriel swore he could hear it giggle as it bounced along his knuckles.



“You‘re a will-o‘-the-wisp,” Gabriel said at length, grinning. “And you can understand me, can’t you? Er, well, you can at least feel my emotions, right?”

The will-o’-the-wisp flickered, which Gabriel took as a yes. It started to float away from him, undulating through the shadows like a lantern a lame drunk was carrying.

“Wait a moment!” Gabriel chased after it. It pulled farther away from him, zigzagging through the camphor thickets and shrubbery like a bumblebee. Somehow though, he always managed to catch up, no matter how far away the queer orb strayed.



After a harum-scarum dash through Kagoshima, Gabriel followed the will-o’-the-wisp to a strange cathedral nestled among a clump of tall, leafy trees. It was an ornate architecture with mint green trim, and high, domed towers dotted with narrow, white-framed windows.

This was St. Xavier’s Cathedral--he recognized it from a photograph his grandfather had had--which was one of the first Roman-Catholic churches established in Japan. It was here the Nameless One, an ancient demon, had recently shattered the four-hundred-sixty-year-old seal his ancestor, Airas, had created during the sixteenth century, and escaped into the human realm.

Gabriel turned to the will-o’-the-wisp, which was hovering over a bed of white camellias. He smiled, and said, “Thanks, until now I had no idea where this place was. I owe ya.”

The will-o’-the-wisp squeaked, then vanished.

Gabriel, though feeling quite lonely now that his little friend had gone, went to work. He kneeled and unslung the leather knapsack from his back, which was stuffed with an odd assortment of spiritual relics: crucifixes, garlic bulbs, silver trinkets, stakes and hammers, a pistol, hand bibles; and dozens of other strange religious baubles whose use even Gabriel didn‘t know. Finally, he found what he’d been looking for at the bottom of his knapsack: a thick stack of wrinkled and yellowed ofuda, bound together by a skinny rubber band.

“Hope these damn things still work…”

“Are you kidding me?” An unfamiliar voice asked. “Those won’t bind an Akuma.”

Gabriel froze, his face blanched, and his blood ran cold. He glanced up from beneath his fringe of blood red hair, and saw a girl dressed in a white iromuji (if he remembered correctly, that’s what that kind of kimono was called) walking toward him. She had a neat fringe of white-gold hair that extended to her brow, tied back with a ribbon. Her face was as pale as the petals of a snowdrop, and her eyes glowed a bright golden-orange.

She also--Gabriel’s eyes bulged--had a foxtail. And a pair of ears to match.

“You look surprised,” she said casually. It was obvious she was used to being ogled and gawked at. “My name is Amaya, a Kitsune. I was sent by Lord Inari, and”--she rolled her brilliant golden eyes-- “ I’m supposed to take you into the Spirit Realm and help you find the Nameless One. Or something like that, at least.”

“B-but… wait, a Kitsune?” Gabriel’s face went blank. He hadn’t even heard the latter of what Amaya said.

“A fox spirit, stupid!” Amaya bellowed, clenching her fists. Her long, burnt-orange ears flattened against her head. “And I’ll have you know you’re damned lucky Inari sent me, otherwise I’d just sit back and laugh while you tried to seal the Akuma with those stupid Ofuda!”

“Okay, and”-- Gabriel was completely ignoring Amaya, as he was too busy piecing things together in his mind--“the Nameless One is in the Spirit Realm? But, that can’t be. It was here, wasn’t it? And nobody told me about some weird fox chick, either.”

Amaya wrenched Gabriel to his feet. “Enough! To make a long story short, the Nameless One caught wind of you coming and fled back into the spirit realm, where it figured you couldn’t reach it”--as she was saying this, Amaya was dragging poor Gabriel by the heels across the well-manicured church grounds-- “and you need to kill it. Any questions?”

Gabriel shook his head.

“Good, ‘cause I don’t want to explain any further.” Amaya mumbled something about the incompetence of humans, and threw open the oaken church doors.

The most brilliant flash of light burst out from the doorway, and seemed to weasel its way behind Gabriel’s eyes, strumming his optic nerves like the strings of a guitar. He squeezed his eyes shut. A pleasant springtide warmth enveloped him, but it was quickly replaced by a bitter, bone-numbing chill. And when Gabriel opened his eyes again, his stomach dropped somewhere near his testicles, and his face went ten shades paler (which was quite a sight to Amaya, considering the poor guy already resembled a corpse).

A medieval Japanese metropolis, much like Gabriel imagined Tokyo to have looked like during the Kamakura period, phased through thick tendrils of snowy mist. But what was even stranger than the city, and most incredulous, were its inhabitants. All manner of yōkai that ranged from shapeshifting badgers, to raccoons with silk purses, and even as outlandish ( and frightening) as ghostly women who had two mouths, strolled down the cobbled thoroughfare, sampling the many delights the bustling marketplace had to offer.

There were stalls ladened with bushels of foxgloves, bluebells, camellias, and lotus flowers; stalls steaming with yakitori, udon, ramen, and soba dishes; and stalls completely covered with omamori and ofuda. But what Gabriel found, even more interesting than the merchandise, were the myriad species of yōkai. He and Amaya even passed a stall run by a white dragon in a fuchsia kimono, who was passing out free omamori to a crowd of ghost children.

As they neared the market’s midpoint, Amaya suddenly flinched and froze as a tawny dog, dressed in a black kimono, walked by. Gabriel stared at her, puzzled. Once the creature had disappeared into the pedestrian masses (and after Amaya did a double take to be sure it was gone), the Kitsune turned to Gabriel, sheepishly, and said, “Foxes don’t like dogs, y‘see.”