Evening. I've wanted to call about this for a long time. Thirteen years I've been sitting on this, and I figure if I don't tell someone now, I never will. Back in 1982, I was living in Japan. Kyoto, specifically. I'd gone over there after my divorce came through, needed to get as far away from everything as I could, if that makes sense. Had a buddy from the service who'd settled there, married a Japanese woman, and he helped me get set up with work. Nothing glamorous. Night security at a Buddhist temple in the Higashiyama district. One of the old ones, fourteenth century, famous for its gardens. I won't say which temple. I signed papers when I left, and even now, I don't want to cause problems for anyone still there. But it was one of the big ones. Tourists during the day, completely empty at night. My job was walking the grounds from sundown to sunrise, making sure nobody hopped the walls, checking the locks on the buildings. Easy work. Lonely, but I wanted lonely back then.
The temple grounds were maybe six or seven acres. Mostly gardens, raked gravel, these perfectly shaped pine trees, stone lanterns older than my country. And ponds. Three of them, connected by little streams that ran under wooden bridges. The biggest pond was in the back, near the eastern wall. That's where they kept the koi. Must have been fifty or sixty of them, some as long as my forearm. Orange and white, red and black. During the day, tourists would buy food pellets and feed them. At night, the fish would drift around in the dark, these pale shapes moving under the water. I got to know those grounds pretty well over the months I worked there. Every path, every gate, every shadow. You walk the same circuit enough times, you learn what belongs and what doesn't. You learn the sounds, the bamboo creaking, the water moving, the way the gravel crunches different when it's wet. I knew that place better than I'd known my own backyard growing up. That's why I knew, the night it happened, that something was wrong. Because I heard a sound I'd never heard before. And I saw something that shouldn't have been there.
This was late October. The twenty-third, I think, or the twenty-fourth. I remember because it had just turned cold, that sharp autumn cold that cuts right through you. My partner for the shift had called in sick, stomach thing going around, so I was working alone that night. Just me and six acres of temple grounds and nothing but my flashlight and a two-way radio that barely worked. No moon that night. I remember that clearly. Completely overcast, not a star visible, dark enough that I couldn't see my hand in front of my face once I got away from the main buildings. I'd done my first circuit around ten, checked all the gates, everything locked up tight. Went back to the guard station for some tea. The eleven o'clock bell from Chion-in temple rang out across the district, bells across Kyoto are so peaceful - Imogen' the way it always did, and I figured I'd do another walk before midnight. That's when I heard it. This sound, coming from somewhere near the back of the grounds. Near the koi pond. It was like... paper. Like someone shuffling a deck of cards, but slower. More deliberate. A dry, rasping, rustling sound. It would start, stop, start again. Rhythmic, almost.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]