Free Man with No Name: A Nanashi Novella by Laird Barron Page A

salt and kelp stench and bits of sand. His hair fell across his face. Muzaki grasped his elbow and guided him down the wooden ramp to the beach.
    “What are you?” Nanashi said.
    “An eater of carrion.”
    “Will you tell me something? I saved your wife. I kept my bargain.”
    “I do not recall any bargain.”
    “Tell me something. Please.”
    “I’ve told you of mazes and curses and damned souls. Yet you speak of nightmares and lunacy. I tell you that the dead and the undead may travel freely within the static maze of reality, indeed, I have shown you the truth of the maze. You choose blindness, deafness. Human primates do so treasure their ignorance. Would that I could reclaim my own innocence of the howling wilderness that goes on forever.”
    “None of this makes sense,” Nanashi said.
    “Don’t you feel how cold my hand is, Nanashi?”
    Nanashi did not answer.
    “If your future happiness depends upon my revelations, then you are doomed to an existence of abject misery.” Muzaki’s odd smile spread across his broad features, warping them into something alien. “There are planets and stars and mountains and forests. There are great, hungry fishes in the sea. There is you and I, Hell and Not Hell. There is the simple fact that knowing doesn’t equal enlightenment. You are a bit of cotton dipped in the blood of the cosmos. That which is seen seeps inside and stains you. You have been stained, Nanashi-san. But, there is always more. Corruption is never finished with us.”
    Pieces of skeletal driftwood and seashells crunched underfoot. The tide rolled in, green and black and thunderous. Farther along the shore was the dark spot Nanashi half-recalled from the phantasms he’d suffered while battling to protect the gaijin woman back at the house. As the true nature of the aberration crystallized in his mind, he gave a hoarse cry and threw himself prostrate and refused to move. Muzaki tenderly leaned down and clutched a fistful of hair and effortlessly dragged him over the hard-packed sand and toward the crashing waves.
    Nanashi struggled like a baby. Vertigo returned with a vengeance. Sea and sky folded around them in origami fashion and drew them forward at tremendous velocity. A rocky isle materialized from the void and then Nanashi was cast sprawling. He spat dirt. Pebbles gouged his elbows and knees. Nothing of the world existed beyond the beach shelf and surrounding rocks except for the sea and the clouds that reflected the sea.
    Jiki and Mizo’s Honda sat on a tilt, buried to the axles, where the beach curved. It had changed from how it had appeared in the parking lot. Blotchy handprints marred the window glass, doors, and hood.
    Koma and his gangsters had dragged a mangled corpse nearby to a depression among the roots of a driftwood stump gone gray with age. The corpse bore a terrible resemblance to Muzaki. The men squatted in their ragged suits, but for Jiki and Mizo who’d stripped naked and now languished in the unnatural light. Their flesh gleamed as gray as the driftwood, and they preened, supremely unaffected by the chill wind or the salty spray that occasionally lashed them. The wretched creatures savaged the corpse, clawing into crevices and cavities for the choicest morsels. Koma, his fine jacket saturated to a deep maroon, snapped a rib free and wrapped his pointed tongue around it and slurped.
    The gang hesitated when they spied Nanashi, chunks of meat held close to their gaping jaws. Each regarded him with the bright-placidity of lazing crocodiles. Muzaki snarled, a bestial utterance fit to freeze a man’s heart, and the unholy things cowered and grinned.
    “Brother,” croaked Amida, ashen visage smeared in fresh gore, collar undone. His left arm dangled. He didn’t seem to mind. His eyes were pure black, his sneer sharp and ravenous.
    “Brother!” said the rest, happy.
    Muzaki said, “Lo, the feast of the ghouls. This rock is the banquet table of their ilk and I, the master of