Outcast: A Portal Fantasy Adventure (Shinobi Rising Book 1) Read online

  Andy walked over to the nearest of the wild beasts—Rajah the tiger—and put his hands through the fence to scratch her behind her ears.

  If anyone but Andy or the Tanakas stuck their hand into her enclosure, the unlucky person would draw back a bloody stump, but Rajah knew Andy well, and like a very overgrown pussycat, she enjoyed a good scratch behind her ears.

  Today, though, she didn’t let out her usual rumbling purr, as deep as the booming of a Harley. Instead, she simply stared with wonder at the box, completely ignoring Andy’s scratches behind her ears.

  “What is it about this box, girl?” he asked. He moved it around, watching as her eyes followed it as if it were a tasty morsel of food. The look in the tiger’s eyes, however, was not one of hunger. It was one of wonder.

  He went over to each of the animals, and they all reacted in exactly the same way, staring with fascination at the box, their attention absolutely locked on it. When he’d been to each of them, he turned around to head back to the house.

  Mrs. Tanaka came stumbling out, weeping. He dropped the box and ran over to her, wrapping his arms around her as she wept.

  “He’s gone, Andy,” she gasped as she sobbed. “He’s gone…”

  The rest of the day was a blur, and Andy moved through it like a lost phantom. Eventually, he found himself back in his apartment, slugging on a bottle of cheap whisky. He wasn’t usually one to drink, but this day required it. As he sat on his sofa, sipping on the fiery liquid, he got his phone out. There were a number of angry messages from Ted, which he ignored. He needed to talk to someone, and the only person he could have a real heart to heart with was his friend Frank. They had been best friends all through high school, but Frank, who came from a wealthy family, and whose background was very different to Andy’s, had gone off to MIT after high school and now had a prestigious, high-paying job in software development on the East Coast. Even though they were now on opposite sides of the continent, and living very different lives, Frank and Andy stayed in touch and were still good friends.

  Andy dialed his old friend.

  “What’s up dude, how’s everything back home?” Frank said cheerfully when he picked up. “You ready to have another gaming session? It’s almost the weekend, bro, almost! I can’t wait! I’ve been handling this huge contract for a finance firm here, man. I mean, yeah, it’ll net me six figures at the end of the month, but these long hours are killing me dude, killing me. I need a good ten-hour gaming session with you to relax.”

  “I’m not doing so well, buddy,” Andy said softly.

  “What’s the matter? Girl trouble?”

  “No, no… it’s Mr. Tanaka. He died today.”

  “Ahh. Well that sucks, I’m sorry to hear that,” Frank said. “He was a good dude, from what I remember. And, like, your second dad, sort of. I’m sure you must be feeling down, man.”

  “Yeah, to put it mildly,” Andy muttered, swigging on his whisky.

  They talked for a while, reminiscing about the old days. The mysterious box was on the sofa next to Andy, but for some reason, he felt as if he shouldn’t tell Frank about it, so when talking about what had happened that day, he omitted that he’d inherited the box.

  “So what’s Mrs. Tanaka gonna do with the property?” Frank asked when they got onto this topic.

  “She’s going to stay there, and keep running the sanctuary on her own.”

  “Sheesh, the Tanakas just can’t stop making bad financial decisions, can they?” Frank remarked. “She should just put all those mangy old critters down, sell the property to a developer, and invest the profits in crypto. She can live in a nice condo on the beach and retire on fat stacks of money in a few years.”

  Andy shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Uh, yeah, I don’t think that Mrs. Tanaka really cares about money very much, Frank. Those animals are her world, and they’re not ‘mangy’. They live very good lives out there.”

  “Meh. Still a giant waste of money if you ask me,” Frank said.

  Andy changed topics, as Frank’s callousness was making his blood boil. After talking about some of the wacky teachers they’d had back in the day, though, he was smiling again. They chatted for another hour before ending the conversation.

  After that, Andy figured he should probably take a listen to one of the messages Ted had sent him. He opened up the last message, tensing up as he listened to it.

  “This is the last time you’ll ever hear my voice, you ungrateful, incompetent, selfish son of a bitch!” Ted yelled. “Don’t ever come to the store again! You’re fired! You understand me, Andy Knight! Fired! If I see you around the store ever again, I’m calling the cops. You’re officially banned from the premises too! Stupid jerk, you’re—”

  Andy sighed and stopped playing the message. “So that’s it,” he said. “I’ve lost my godfather and my job today. What the hell else am I going to lose next?”

  He tossed his phone aside and hung his head in his hands. However, Andy was never one to wallow in despair, no matter how dire the circumstances. After a few moments, he shook himself out of this feeling of self-pity, and instead focused his attention on the box again. With the whirlwind of the day’s events, Andy hadn’t even tried to open it yet. And Mr. Tanaka hadn’t gotten the chance to tell him how to open it, or what was inside it.

  “It can’t be that hard to figure out,” Andy murmured as he turned the box over in his hands. “There’s gotta be a catch on here somewhere.”

  Surprisingly, though, there didn’t seem to be a catch or opening mechanism anywhere on the box. In fact, Andy could even find a seam where the device might open. It was hollow; he could feel that from its weight. But how on earth could it be opened?

  He got a magnifying glass to examine it in more detail. Even the most masterful craftsmen couldn’t create an absolutely undetectable seam, especially working hundreds of years ago without laser precision technology. Despite scrutinizing every square inch of the box under his magnifying glass, however, the seam remained frustratingly elusive. As unbelievable as it appeared to be, the box seemed to be completely sealed and unopenable.

  A burning desire was growing with increasing potency within Andy. He had to open this box. He simply couldn’t leave it alone—every time he put it down it seemed to call out to him, with a yearning like a junkie’s for a fix.

  He picked up a hammer from his work desk. “Alright, box,” he said, setting it down on his desk. “You wanna play hardball, cool, let’s play hardball.” He raised the hammer above his head, but paused before bringing it down. “What the hell am I doing?” he murmured, frowning deeply. “This thing is making me lose my mind!”

  He set the hammer down and let out a long sigh, staring at the box. He couldn’t believe he’d been seconds away from smashing an immensely valuable and precious historical relic. The box, he reasoned, might be worth more than everything else in his apartment combined. However, even though he had had it for less than a day, he knew he could never sell it. It was something Mr. Tanaka had owned his whole life, and something that the old man had only decided to leave to him after many years of deep thought. He couldn’t sell it, and nor could he smash it open like a brute. There was a way to get it open without force … and Andy was determined to figure it out.

  He spent a few hours examining every square inch of it with magnifying glass, and put in a few hours on Google too, searching for old Japanese boxes. There was plenty of information, but nothing related to this specific box. It appeared to be the only one of its kind in the world, at least if Google search results meant anything. None of the other hundreds, even thousands of images of antique Japanese boxes looked anything like this one. It was almost as if it came from out of this world.

  Eventually, the combination of whisky and weariness became too potent to overcome, and Andy gave up on trying to work out the secret to opening the box. He flopped down on his bed and once again, his dreams were of the mysterious yet vividly real fantasy realm he visited so often.

  The
next morning, Andy woke up to a message on his phone from his landlord. He knew it would be about the overdue rent, so he didn’t bother opening it. He had no idea what he would do about the fact that his rent was due in a few days and he had absolutely no way of paying it, now that he’d been fired, but that was a problem that could wait.

  First and foremost, he had to get the box open. Thoughts of the mysterious secrets that lay concealed in its innards consumed him. He chugged a glass of water after getting up, but didn’t bother with breakfast; instead, he went straight to the box.

  “There’s gotta be evidence of how to open this thing somewhere on it,” he murmured to himself as he stared intently at the box. “No matter how well crafted it is, there’s a seam somewhere. It may be invisible to human eyes, but so were bacteria and cells until microscopes came along.”

  He had a few magnifying glasses of various sizes lying around his apartment, as well as some cheap microscopes. “Should be easy enough to jerry-rig a little examination tool with all these lenses,” Andy said, gathering these items together.

  A few hours later, he’d managed to put together a franken-scope, with which he could examine the surface of the box in greatly magnified detail. With a mounting sense of excitement and anticipation, he started to examine the box, its intricate carvings now magnified fiftyfold.

  The detail was even more extraordinary under the microscope. Whatever tools the artist had used had barely left any marks; it was almost as if the wood itself had somehow grown organically into this work of art, which featured a dozen wild animals and birds.

  But now, magnifying the details to this degree, Andy was finally able to make out a seam. It was immensely jagged, following the contours of the animals’ bodies, right down to individual strands of fur and whiskers. Andy was utterly astounded at the level of detail the cut followed—not even modern laser cutting techniques could attain this kind of precision.

  Because the line was so jagged and fine, there was no way Andy could slip anything in to pry the box open. Not even a scalpel blade would fit into even the broadest area of the seam. However, another thing he soon noticed was that the animals’ eyes had seams of their own around them. “They’re buttons,” he murmured. “Each eye is a button. It’s a code lock—that’s how it opens!”

  Buoyed with fresh inspiration, Andy started pressing each of the animals’ eyes. Sure enough, each eyeball sunk slightly into the wood and emitted a soft click when he pressed it. He pressed each of the animals’ eyes until all twelve were done, but the box still didn’t open.

  He let out a sigh. With only one correct sequence, the number of possible combinations with twelve animals was staggering. It could take weeks—no, years—to attempt to guess the combination, if he was lucky. There must be a way to figure it out, he thought.

  “Alright, let’s see,” he said, narrowing his eyes as he stared at the box. “Tiger, elephant, rhino, bear, lion, deer, eagle, fox, bat, orangutan, wolf, and wild horse. Why does this list of animals seem kinda familiar to me?”

  Wondering if these animals could be the characters of a specific Japanese folktale, Andy did some googling. Nothing came up, though. He couldn’t shake the feeling that these animals did feature in a Japanese folktale though. Then he remembered. Long ago, when he’d been a young boy, Mr. Tanaka had given him an old book of Japanese folktales. It had all been in Japanese, so he hadn’t been able to read it as a child, but he’d enjoyed looking at the pictures.

  “I’ve still got it,” he gasped, jumping up from his desk. “I’ve still got the book!”

  He dashed out of his apartment and raced down to his garage. Wading through the half-stripped motors and piles of engine parts, he dug frantically through the stack of old, dusty boxes at the back of the small garage—the last remnants of the life he’d once had when his parents had been alive. In the boxes were a couple old toys and action figures, a few of his parents’ items, like his father’s Vietnam War medals and his mother’s cheap but pretty jewelry… and a few musty children’s books. One of them was that old book of Japanese folktales.

  Andy flipped breathlessly through the pages, buzzing with a sense of excitement and eager anticipation. Sure enough, there was a folktale in the book featuring the animals depicted on the box. Andy had learned some Japanese by self-studying second-hand textbooks, and by watching YouTube videos and using free apps on his phone, but he couldn’t read the language fluently. Nonetheless, he was able to make out enough to get the gist of the folktale, which was about the twelve animals figuring out a way to cross a flooded river.

  “This is it,” he whispered as he read through the story. “This has to be the correct order.”

  He sprinted back to his apartment, clutching the book. In the story, the animals finally figured out how to cross the river, and they went one by one. Holding his breath, Andy pressed the animals’ eyes on the box in the order that they crossed the river in the folktale.

  When Andy got to the final animal—the bat—he hovered his forefinger a sliver of an inch above its eye before pressing it. “Come on,” he said. “Please be correct, please…”

  With a swift tap, he pressed on the bat’s eye. It clicked into place, and for a moment nothing happened. But then there were a series of clicks somewhere inside the box, and the lid popped open.

  Punching a triumphant fist into the air, Andy sprang up from his chair. “Yes! Hell yeah!”

  Buzzing with anticipation, he sat back down and peered into the open box. His exuberant joy, however, quickly collapsed into morose disappointment. “No,” he groaned. “No, no, no…”

  Aside from some sort of cigar-cutter mechanism built into the inside of the box, there was nothing in it.

  It was empty—completely empty.

  Chapter 2

  Andy couldn’t believe it. All this effort, all this time, for nothing. For an empty box—a cigar box, judging by the look of the mechanism built into it. For a few moments, all Andy could do was sit and stare in disbelief at the empty box. He hadn’t been sure what he’d been expecting to find inside the box, but it certainly wasn’t this.

  Even in the face of this initial disappointment, Andy quickly recovered. He remained tenacious and hopeful.

  This box was no mere ornament; he knew this and understood it with every fiber of his being. This item was, somehow, the key to his future, a ticket out of the Mariana Trench-sized rut he’d been stuck in for years. He just had to figure out the secret. Getting the box open had simply been the first piece of the puzzle.

  He picked up the box, and that was when he noticed that, aside from the cutting mechanism, it wasn’t entirely empty. The smooth interior walls were covered in Japanese kanji script that was only visible when the box was held at certain angles.

  Andy’s pulse began to race.

  As he examined the script, he realized that he recognized very few of the characters. They seemed to be archaic or obscure ones that he’d never seen in any Japanese dictionary. Although he couldn’t figure out anything of what was written in the box, he remained hopeful and optimistic about unlocking its secrets.

  The buzz of his phone ringing on the coffee table snapped him out of his trance of deep thought. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now, but when he saw it was Mayumi calling, he picked it up.

  “Hi Andy,” she said, and the sadness and weariness was plain to hear in her voice. “I hope you’re okay.”

  “I’m doing alright,” he replied. “I hope you’re holding up okay. Remember what I said yesterday—if you need anything, and I do mean anything at all, I’m here for you.”

  “I’m… surviving,” she said with a sad sigh. “Listen, we’re having a small wake for Haruki this evening at the house—”

  “Say no more, just tell me what time I need to be there. You need any help setting things up or anything?”

  “No, I’m okay with that. My sister and her family have come out to stay with me for a few days to help out. Just come at seven o’clock this even
ing.”

  “Sure thing,” Andy said. “I’ll see you then.”

  At this point, Andy’s stomach grumbled. He realized that he’d been so preoccupied with the enigmatic box that he’d completely forgotten to eat anything. A quick rummage through his fridge and kitchen revealed that there wasn’t anything to eat anyway. As reluctant as he was to waste precious time that could be spent on solving the box’s puzzle, his body needed fuel. He grabbed his motorcycle gear and a backpack—into which he tossed the box, for he had a powerful urge to keep it close to him—and headed out to grab a quick breakfast of cheap coffee and donuts from a place a couple miles away.

  When he returned home an hour later, he was greeted by Mr. Stavros glaring at him. Shit, Andy thought. He had no idea how he was going to get enough money to pay all the rent he owed.

  “Rent, Mr. Knight,” Mr. Stavros said. “End of the week.”

  “Mr. Stavros, I just need—”

  “I just need my rent,” Mr. Stavros said. “End. Of. The. Week. Got it?”

  Andy sighed. “Got it.”

  Everything seemed to be collapsing. His entire life felt as if it were imploding: he was about to be evicted, he’d just blown up his job, and Mr. Tanaka…. Even so, however, he simply felt more compelled to unravel the secrets of the box. Now, he felt, his very life depended on solving it. If he could solve the box, it felt as if all his other problems would simply melt away.

  That evening, he rode up to the Tanakas’ wildlife sanctuary, wearing the only suit he possessed—a ratty old charcoal gray suit Mr. Tanaka had given him to wear to his prom. Surprisingly, it still fit, but it was a little tight around the arms and shoulders. He took the box with him, not only because he didn’t want to leave it unattended in his apartment, but also because he wanted to ask Mrs. Tanaka about it. Perhaps, Andy thought, her husband had told her something about it.