2001 The Children of Bottle

by Ryohgo Narita

  “You could never know how we suffer at his hands. And even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “What kind of monster is it?”

  “I’ve got nothing more to say to you! Get out!” the man named Dez spat with fogged breath. His face was flushed.

  After a short silence, Maiza murmured, as if confirming something:

  “Elmer…Elmer C. Albatross.”

  Rustle.

  The air writhed.

  The moment the name left Maiza’s lips, the attitude of the people around him changed dramatically. The hostility, which had nearly faded, rebounded as if by magic. The men bewitched by Sylvie turned back to Maiza so quickly that they might have been spring-loaded dolls.

  Even the village head, whose face had rarely even twitched, opened both eyes wide and looked Maiza and the others over again.

  “Why, you…”

  “We’re looking for that man. If he isn’t in this village, we’ll leave immedia—”

  “Get them!”

  The headman’s roar echoed over the village’s main road, cutting Maiza’s words short.

  The villagers, faces and bodies tense, burst into action. They moved with the force of wild animals mobbing their prey, but it seemed as though there was another emotion mixed with the hostility in their eyes.

  Fear?

  Maiza realized the true shape of the feeling that lurked behind their expressions, but the men’s arms closed in on him before he had time to confirm it.

  However, he was as calm as if he’d expected all this. Repeatedly sidestepping without shifting his gaze, Maiza kept evading the men’s arms at the last second.

  “Wait, please, we aren’t really—”

  When he looked at the village headman, the young man beside him was pointing a long gun his way.

  “I take it there’s no use in arguing?”

  A gunshot echoed through the quiet village, and Maiza’s body rocked with the impact.

  “Maiza!”

  In spite of herself, Sylvie screamed at the sight. Unlike Maiza, she didn’t seem to really understand what was happening; she had her back to the car and hadn’t moved a step. Czes had gotten a handle on the situation a bit more quickly and slipped under the car early on.

  The bullet grazed Maiza, gouging his thigh. His thick trousers ripped, and a spray of blood misted the air.

  Sensing an opportunity, the villagers surrounded him. Only the village headman was looking at something else: the drops of blood from Maiza’s leg.

  Dez stared at the red spots that had spread across the stone flags, a fierce uneasiness filling his heart.

  His anxiety was right on the mark.

  The blood that should have stuck to the pavement suddenly began to slide over the ground.

  As if they had a will of their own, the red spots gathered, making for Maiza’s feet.

  Like dancing shadows, they collided with one another, mingled…and finally climbed up Maiza’s leg to disappear through the rip in his trousers, into the wound.

  The villagers who’d been attempting to immobilize Maiza registered the abnormal sight while it was happening. First they stopped dead, and then, turning pale, they gradually retreated.

  “The same…”

  “Demon.”

  “He’s like that guy…!”

  “He’ll kill us.”

  “Defile us.”

  “Don’t meet his eyes…”

  The villagers muttered in low voices to one another.

  “Hmm?”

  Seeing this, Maiza felt a slight uncertainty.

  He’d regenerated in front of people who didn’t know the circumstances before. Quite naturally, those who saw it were terrified, and most of them distanced themselves from him immediately. One of the few exceptions was an individual who ran a small crime syndicate in New York: his one and only boss.

  However, the villagers’ response had been a little different from what he’d seen before. Ordinarily, when Maiza’s body healed, people feared him as something unknowable… But this group seemed to be frightened because they recognized this distressing phenomenon. This wasn’t fear of the unknown. They already held a concept of beings that regenerated, and that concept held some sort of terror for them.

  I see. For the most part, I understand.

  Nodding to himself, Maiza took another look at the situation around him.

  When he did, he saw that several of the people who’d distanced themselves from him were edging toward Sylvie. From the way they kept stealing glances at him as they closed in on her, they were probably planning to use her as a hostage.

  “Hey, don’t you dare!”

  With her back against the car door, Sylvie tried to slap away the hand of the first man who reached for her.

  However, the villager moved just a little bit faster, and he trapped Sylvie’s slim wrist easily.

  Maiza turned, preparing to go rescue her, but then he saw something and stopped in his tracks. Behind Sylvie, with the faint hum of a motor, the window in the car’s rear door had begun to roll down.

  The villager who had hold of Sylvie’s arm was desperate to subdue her, and he didn’t seem to have noticed.

  Through the window, a brown palm reached for him—

  Clamp.

  The hand at the end of the long arm stretching from the window wrapped around the villager’s wrist as he tried to immobilize Sylvie.

  “Yeek?!”

  The young villager screamed, involuntarily distancing himself from his prey.

  As if in response, the arm hanging from the window zipped back into the car.

  The villager’s trapped wrist was hauled along with it by force.

  “Waaaaaaaaaugh!”

  Before he had time to struggle, the villager’s arm was halfway into the car, and the motor noise echoed again. Someone inside was shutting the window, with the man’s arm in it.

  “Aaaaaaaaaah!”

  Pressure assailed the young man’s arm. It wasn’t severed, of course—the glass stopped closing once his arm was firmly pinched—and yet the window didn’t open either. It compressed the man’s flesh and bone with an unsettling creaking noise.

  At this sudden, unfathomable development, the villagers near Sylvie froze. Meanwhile, Sylvie peeked into the car through the window—only to hastily leap away from the door.

  Just as Sylvie made it to the front of the vehicle, there was a click. The car’s rear door was kicked open, hard—with the poor villager’s arm still stuck in the window.

  “Waaaugh!”

  The force lifted the villager’s body into the air and very nearly sent him flying, but his trapped arm wouldn’t allow it. Something gave an even bigger creak, but the people nearby weren’t able to tell whether the noise had come from the window or the bone.

  What emerged from the door, which had been flung open as the man screamed, was…

  “A mon…ster?”

  Unlike their reaction to Maiza a few moments ago, the villagers’ voices held a fear of something they didn’t understand. The figure of the man exiting the car was just that peculiar.

  He was clothed in white fabric from head to toe, and the sleeves that ended halfway down his arms revealed brown skin. His outfit certainly wasn’t lightweight, but considering the surrounding temperature, the lack of cloth was enough to make people feel cold just by looking at it.

  If that had been all, it wouldn’t have qualified as “peculiar.” The problem was what was above his neck.

  The first thing to catch the eye was the strange mask fixed to his face. It was the sort worn at festivals in Southeast Asia or Hong Kong, with a complicated shape and a light background decorated with garish primary colors.

  In addition, all that was visible under that mask was not skin but the pure white of bandages. In other words, this man had bandaged his head and face, and was wearing a mask on top of that. Through the holes where the mask’s eyes should have been, they could see glowering eyes that gleamed sharply.

>   At the incredibly incongruous appearance of this man, the villagers glanced at one another, and a small murmur rippled through them.

  Paying no particular attention to them, the masked man spoke dispassionately, watching Maiza.

  “Your driving is too rough. I’ll say it again. In fact, allow me to say it one more time: Do you intend to kill me?”

  The man’s expression was invisible behind the mask, but from his tone, it was clear that he was considerably annoyed.

  “Ordinarily, I would either punch or kick you, but considering the situation, I will overlook it. I venture to overlook it.”

  “That’s terribly generous of you, Nile.”

  Maiza responded to the grandiose speech with a light shrug. Then he turned and addressed the wide-eyed villagers.

  “Ah, this man was less a passenger than he was being transported in the backseat, so I didn’t make him get out earlier… In any case, we had no intention of hiding him, so please don’t get the wrong idea.”

  However, the village headman and the others weren’t listening. They were looking at the man who’d appeared before them with the expression of a person trapped in a nightmare.

  Possibly because he’d noticed the gazes, Nile, the masked man, folded his arms and said to Maiza, “I do not fully understand the situation, but for the moment, things seem to have calmed down. However, permit me to ask: What should I do, Maiza?”

  “Erm, I’d like to settle this as peaceably as possible, so no violence, please.”

  When Maiza told him this, surveying the villagers as if he was concerned for their safety, Nile nodded with a grunt, then circled around behind the car.

  Setting a foot on the spare tire fixed to the back of the car, the masked man began climbing up to the roof with admirable agility. When he’d reached his destination, he folded his arms and looked down on the villagers imposingly.

  As the locals stared at him, wondering what on earth was about to happen, Nile slowly opened his mouth:

  “Very well. First, you kneel. Then we talk.”

  His voice was quiet, but it carried well. What he was saying was absurd, but perhaps Maiza and Sylvie were used to him, because neither of them called him on it. However…

  “Nile. These people don’t speak English.”

  …It was probably fortunate that they hadn’t understood.

  When Maiza mentioned this, silence ran through the area for a moment, and then—

  “What?!”

  A slightly flustered voice issued from beneath the mask.

  “You tricked me, you scoundrel!”

  “Nobody’s tricked you. Neither I nor these people have used English this entire time. Weren’t you listening?”

  “…Rrgh. Then it was my mistake, hmm? Yes, I will acknowledge that. I acknowledge it without covering my own embarrassment! However, in addition to Berber, I speak only English, Chinese, and Indonesian. What would you have me do?”

  “Please don’t do anything. Or, actually, you’ll scratch up the roof of the car, so I’d rather you got down at once,” Maiza said tiredly, and Sylvie finally opened her mouth.

  “The villagers are terribly frightened. You’ve been screaming words they don’t understand at them.”

  “Oho.”

  Without diminishing his arrogant attitude, Nile examined the villagers again through his mask. Every villager had widened the ring that encircled them, deliberately trying to put some distance between themselves and the newcomers. The guy whose arm had been trapped in the window seemed to have managed to wrench it out on his own and, slightly teary-eyed, retreated to the very back of the group.

  If they’d understood the conversation, its sheer ridiculousness might have lessened their hostility, but apparently Nile’s words reached them only as incomprehensible alien sounds.

  “I see… Maiza. Let me just say this.”

  “What is it?”

  “It will not be possible to settle this peacefully.”

  “So it would seem.”

  Maiza looked around, too, and replied to Nile immediately.

  In the midst of the frightened villagers, the only calm ones were the young people standing around the headman. At some point, the number of individuals with rifles at the ready had grown, and all the barrels were pointed at Maiza, Sylvie, and Nile.

  “Aim for their heads.”

  Following the chief’s instructions, the men, who seemed as if they might be hunters, took aim with no hesitation.

  “If they’re like him, they should stop moving for a while when their heads are blown off. If we manage to catch even one of them, we can use them to bargain with him.”

  By normal logic, the villagers had the advantage in this situation, but not a single person in the group thought their victory was assured. Even the ones calmly leveling their guns had palms damp with sweat.

  As if sneering at the tension, the man on top of the car snorted.

  “Go ahead and shoot. The instant you pull the trigger, I will consider you my enemies. Let me just say this: There will be a massacre!”

  “Look, I told you, they don’t understand English.”

  Even as he sighed, Maiza never let his attention stray from the weapons.

  All right: What should we do? We could technically let ourselves be caught on purpose, but…

  As he considered, hostility was beginning to build among his adversaries again.

  A sky so blue it seemed to mock them spread over their heads, and, as he quietly looked up at it, Maiza made a resolution.

  A plan had occurred to him: For now, he would go with the villagers on his own and have the other three run, at least temporarily. They could all run away in the end, but before that, no matter what, he wanted to find some sort of clue regarding Elmer.

  The Martillo Family was a New York crime group that was affiliated with the Camorra, an underworld organization. Maiza, who had spent his days as an executive of that group, had left it temporarily to travel around the world.

  He wasn’t doing it simply to have fun playing tourist. He was searching for the immortals scattered across the globe.

  Together, he and Czes had spent thirty years searching for these alchemists, their old companions. It had taken considerable time and effort just to find Sylvie and Nile, but they had all of eternity, and it hadn’t seemed very long to them. But even so, just when they’d thought they’d never find the remaining two and nearly given up…Maiza had received information on one of them: Elmer C. Albatross.

  The news about his companion had come from an information broker he frequented. The perfectly unambiguous report clearly indicated this village as the place. However, aside from its existence and location, there had been nothing specific about the village, and the source of the information had disappeared behind the phrase company secret. Still, Maiza had been grasping at straws, and to him, it had seemed like more than enough.

  He couldn’t let this chance escape him. He had eight months until he had to return to New York. If he missed this chance, in terms of time, he’d miss his window to find Elmer.

  He felt slightly anxious and impatient. That was why he’d said the name, even though he’d picked up on the possibility that the villagers’ “demon” might in fact be Elmer himself from their conversation.

  However, Maiza had clearly set himself in opposition to the villagers, and (although Nile would only have brought it on himself) he couldn’t pull Czes and Sylvie in. They might be immortal, but they weren’t immune to pain or suffering.

  Just as he turned back to Sylvie and the others, signaling his intent to become a decoy with his eyes—he saw something in his periphery.

  The something was on the road, outside the village, far beyond the car from Maiza’s perspective. Three horses were approaching them from opposite the forest they’d just left. A small figure sat atop each one, and all of them seemed to be dressed in red.

  Still facing back, Maiza stopped moving. The villagers trying to restrain him also noticed the three hor
ses and their riders, and they gulped.

  “Hey… The messengers are here.”

  “Lower your weapons!”

  “Dammit, they weren’t supposed to come today…”

  “These people must really be the demon’s…”

  As they muttered, some lowered their guns, while others rushed into their houses in a panic and slammed the doors. The many presences that had been watching from the corners of the road vanished as if by magic. In the midst of the clamor that had descended over the area, only the village leader and his henchmen stood their ground, glaring at the figures in red.

  “What? What happened?”

  “Hmm?”

  Sylvie and Nile didn’t seem to understand what was going on, but at the sound of hooves behind them, they turned around as well.

  The three horses came to a halt at the same time, about ten yards beyond the car on which Nile was standing. The horses’ riders were women; from their appearance, they were still of an age where they could be called young girls. Their faces were similar, and Maiza’s group decided that they must be sisters or something similar.

  All three of them wore clothes made from bright red fabric with accents of pure white cloth around the sleeve cuffs. The outfits looked almost as if they’d been based on Santa Claus’s costume, clashing terribly with the villagers’ old-fashioned clothes.

  “Master Dez.”

  One of the riders dismounted, gazing back rather uneasily at the village headman glaring at her.

  “These individuals are Master Elmer’s honored guests. We’ll escort them to the castle.”

  “You little…”

  In response, the headman watched the three girls resentfully.

  It wasn’t the terror he’d shown toward Maiza and Nile. The expression on his face was simple annoyance.

  “Please withdraw. These instructions come from Master Elmer.”

  “……”

  For a short while, the village headman kept glaring at the girl. Then he clicked his tongue in such a way that she was sure to hear it and signaled to those around him with his chin.

  Obediently, the young people—who’d stayed until the very end—also turned and started down the road.